The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

by Doris Lessing

  He’s ill, she thought. She thought, That’s grief. What I am looking at – that’s grief. She felt ashamed to be a witness of it and turned her face away, thinking, I’ve never, ever, felt anything like that.

  Now he remembered she was there, and he turned his own face away and said, his voice rough, ‘You see, you have no idea at all, Sarah. You simply don’t understand…well, why should you? I hope you never will.’

  At supper that night there were seven people. The informal meal was taken in a room that had a hatch through into the kitchen, and it had been cooked and served by a pleasant motherly sort of woman not unlike an auburn-haired blue-eyed sheepdog. This was Norah Daniels, a housekeeper, or something of that sort, and she sat at the table with Stephen and Elizabeth and Sarah and the three boys, James, about twelve, George, ten or so, and Edward, seven. These children were beautifully behaved, in a style imposed on them by their parents: a light impersonal affection, and it was joky, for there was a lot of banter of the kind Sarah remembered from her school days. It was mostly Norah who played this game. Stephen was silent. He claimed he had a headache and they must forgive him. Not ask too much of him was what he meant and what they all heard. It was evident that this was a message heard often in this family, from him, and from Elizabeth, because she was so very busy. She kept saying she was, and that was why she had not done a variety of things she had promised – ring up a friend’s mother, write a letter about a visit, buy new cricket balls. But she would do all these things tomorrow. The three boys, fair, slight, blue-eyed, angelic-looking children, watched the adults’ faces carefully for signals. This was their habit. This was their necessity. They had been taught never to ask too much. Only Norah was outside this pattern, for she smiled special smiles at each of them, helped them to food in an indulgent way, remembered personal tastes, gave Edward, the smallest one, an extra helping of pudding, kissed him warmly, with a hug, and then excused herself, her own meal finished, saying she had things to do. At once the boys asked permission to leave the table, and they slid away into a warm dusk. For a time their high clear voices could be heard from the garden. Soon music sounded from the top of the house – some pop group. Elizabeth remarked that it was time the boys were asleep, and departed, but only briefly, to make sure they were in bed.

  Then Stephen and Elizabeth apologized to Sarah, saying they needed a couple of hours to discuss arrangements for tomorrow, for more people were coming than they had expected. ‘This Julie of yours is obviously a great draw,’ said Elizabeth, but it did not seem she meant anything special by it.

  Sarah walked about in the dusk for a while, until the birds stopped commenting on the affairs of the day and the moon made itself brilliantly felt. She telephoned her brother’s house. Anne answered. Yes, she had sent the girls to collect Joyce, who, on arriving home, had at once disappeared again. Anne did not suggest this was Sarah’s fault, as Hal would have done. He had said they should all have a serious talk about Joyce, and suggested Monday night. Sarah agreed, but knew her voice communicated to Anne, as Anne’s did to her, that nothing would come of this.

  Sarah’s room was full of moonlight and overlooked the great lawn and the trees beyond, the scene full of glamour and mystery, like a theatre set.

  She lay in bed and was determined she would not think about Joyce, for she did not feel strong enough to accommodate the anxiety thoughts of joyce always brought with them, when she was already anxious enough. She had expected to be disturbed by this visit, and she was. Not in the way she had been afraid of. Whatever it was that Stephen and she shared, they shared it still. No, now she felt she had been selfish, for she could not get out of her mind the look on his face that afternoon – such grief, such pain, such a degree of suffering. It was crazy. He might be sane in nine-tenths of his life, this intelligent hard-working many-sided life of his, but in one part of it he was, quite simply, not normal. Well, what of it? It did not seem to be doing much harm, and certainly not to Elizabeth. But there was something bothering Sarah, and she couldn’t put a finger on it. She went off to sleep, glad to forget it all, and woke completely and as suddenly as if there had been a clap of thunder. The moon had left her room. She was remembering a scene at the table of Norah handing Elizabeth a glass of wine, and Elizabeth’s smile at Norah. Well, yes, that was it. And she shut her eyes and replayed the scene. Stephen was at one end of the table, Elizabeth at the other, Norah beside Elizabeth. The women’s bodies had carried on a comfortable conversation with each other, as well-married bodies often do. And Stephen? Now it seemed to Sarah that he was an outsider in his own house – no, for this house had, for all those centuries, accommodated any number of eccentricities and deviations. It was certainly not the house that excluded Stephen. Was he excluded at all? He had said he and his wife were good friends, and evidently they were. But her picture of Stephen – at least tonight, as she lay half asleep – seemed to be merging with that of Joyce, the girl, or child, who was always on the fringes of life, unaccepted by it, unacceptable. And that had to be ridiculous, for Stephen was firmly set in this life of his, born to it, could not be imagined outside it.

  Sarah briskly got up, had a long bath, and watched early light come streaming through great trees. Five in the morning. She went quietly down the great central staircase, found a side door where bolts slid easily back, and went out. Two red setters came rushing around the corner of the house, silently, thank goodness, their fringed ears streaming. They put wet noses into her palm and their bodies wriggled with pleasure. She had not gone far into the woods when Stephen came through the trees. He had seen her from his bedroom window. Nothing now could seem more absurd than her earlier thoughts about Stephen. Nor could anything be more pleasant than this strolling about in the trees with cheerful dogs, listening to the raucous exchanges of the crows and the chattering of the small birds as they got their affairs together. At one point Stephen even casually mentioned Elizabeth and Norah, like this: ‘You must have noticed, I’m sure…’ He did not seem disturbed, and there was no sign of the tragic mask she had stared at yesterday. He seemed in good spirits and entertained her with a comic view of himself as a Maecenas. As a young man, he said, he had been a bit of a red, ‘but not too inappropriately extreme for my station in life,’ and had had nothing but contempt for rich patrons. ‘“We know what we are, but know not what we may be,”’ he quoted, and added – and this was the only moment that morning when there was a suggestion of something darker, ‘But the truth is, if we did know what we are, then we would know what we could be. And I wonder how many people would be able to stand that?’

  Later, after breakfast, the boys made friends with her in their easy well-mannered way and took her off on a tour around the estate. She could see they had been told to do this. ‘Not Angles, but angels’ inevitably popped into her mind.

  After lunch the theatre contingent arrived. Mary Ford, to take photographs of everything and to interview Elizabeth; Roy Strether, and, unexpectedly, Henry Bisley, the American chosen to direct because of the American money in the production. Besides, he seemed by far the best available. He was in Munich directing Die Fledermaus and had come for the weekend to hear this music. Henry was at first all defensive. There are men who carry with them, as some half-grown fishes are attached to yolk sacs, the shadow of their mothers, at once visible in an over-defensiveness and readiness for suspicion. It happened that on his arrival he walked into a room that had in it four women, Elizabeth, Norah, Mary Ford, and Sarah, and he was on the point of fleeing, when Sarah rescued him and took him out to the gardens. They had become acquainted during the casting session a month before. He was bound to be wary of her on two counts: first that she was co-author of this play, and then that as one of the four who ran The Green Bird, she had engaged him. Soon he was reassured. For one thing, he was not by temperament ever likely to remain in one place, physically or emotionally. A man of about thirty-five: his restlessness seemed appropriate for someone younger: he danced rather than walked, as if to stay still m
ight make him vulnerable to attack, and black eyes darted enquiries into a place, a person, and moved on to the next thing, which was also bound to be a challenge. She talked soothingly about this and that, noting that she was employing the murmuring maternal persona identified and rejected by Stephen. She showed him the gardens. She showed him the big lawn – the theatre area. She took him to see a half-built new block of rehearsal rooms. He was subdued by the beauty of the place, and flattered by it, being absorbed, as they all were, into a munificence like a general blessing. As they went back into the house he stopped to look up at its façade and ask why those top windows were barred. She did not know. Encountering Norah, who was pushing through the hall a trolley laden with cleaning equipment, like those used in hotels, Sarah asked about the barred windows, and Norah said they were probably for the first Mrs Rochester. ‘Well, they must have had plenty of loonies here, in all that time.’

  The afternoon went enjoyably past, while Mary Ford photographed them all. A buffet supper was served, in a much larger and grander room, Elizabeth and Norah supervising Alison and Shirley, two girls from the near town, whose healthy and wholesome prettiness reminded everyone that so recently there had indeed been country girls. Guests arrived, it seemed far too many, but these grounds could accommodate large numbers without seeming overpopulated. People went wandering about, stood on the lawn talking, sat on the grass. A company from London did Elizabethan dances. A local group sang songs composed by Tudor monarchs. Then came the main event, Julie’s music, with the words Sarah had put to it. This was the late music, and there were singers only, without accompaniment, for it had been agreed that her ‘troubadour music’ needed the old instruments to do it justice, and not all had yet been found. The singers stood on the little stage in a strong yellow evening light, four girls in white dresses with their hair loose, a style appropriate, they had decided, for this music that filled the great grassy space between the trees with shimmering uncomfortable patterns of sound continually repeating, but not exactly, for they changed by a note, or a tone, so that when you thought you were listening to the same sequence of notes, they had subtly changed, gone into a different mode, while the ear followed a little behind. The words were half heard, were cries, or even laments, but from another time, the future perhaps, or another place, for if these sounds mourned, it was not for any small personal cause. The music floated in the dusk, and the dark filled the trees and the moon lifted over them, and the singers too seemed to float in their pale dresses. Lights came on in the big house, but not here. The girls were chanting to a silent crowd.

  Sarah stood in anxiety with her colleagues. None had heard this music sung with words. Solid and sensible Mary, solid and reliable Roy, stood on either side of Sarah, reserving judgement, and then, unable to contain themselves, exclaimed that it was marvellous, it was wonderful, and Sarah herself could hardly believe it was she who had done this – though it was not her at all, it was rather Julie Vairon. The three stood close, part of their attention charmed into passivity, listening, while the other part was energetically at work on this material, imagining it in various settings and modes. Stephen came up and said, ‘Sarah, I’m hearing something I simply didn’t expect. I had no idea…’ and he strode off into the dusk. Mary Ford summed up professionally: ‘Sarah, it’s all going to work.’ And Henry Bisley materialized in front of her, his dark eyes shining in the light from the high windows of the house, and said in a voice full of surprise and gratitude, ‘Sarah, that’s so beautiful, it’s so beautiful, Sarah.’

  They all had to get back to London, and Henry to Munich. Sarah went with them. She said she had to work, but the truth was she did not want to spoil by daytime ordinariness the other-worldly charm of that evening. Charm…what is it, what can account for it? One says, charm, enchantment, and nothing has been said. But this place, and this group of people who were going to work together to make Julie Vairon, were charged with some subtle fascination, like the light that fades from a dream as you wake.

  That night at home, Sarah thought she could not remember another time in her life that had this quality of…whatever the word should be. She found herself smiling, as at a child or a lover, without meaning to, without knowing she was going to. But what was making her smile, or even laugh, she had no idea at all.

  If you find a ghost in your arms, better not look at its face.

  – Julie Vairon’s Journals, English edition, page 43

  But Sarah was choosing not to remember Stephen’s tragic mask.

  And now it was Monday night. It occurred to Sarah, as she waited for the doorbell, that her exhilaration could only be because she actually believed some sort of sensible solution would end this talk. You’re living in a dream world, she told herself, and hummed ‘Living in a dream world with me.’ All the same, she strolled about her rooms arranging sentences in her mind which would be persuasive enough to make Hal – well, make him what?

  The bell rang. Peremptory. Hal stood there, stood dramatically, apparently waiting for a formal invitation, while Anne, with glances and smiles that managed to be both apologetic and exasperated, simply came in and stood with her back to both of them, at the window.

  ‘Oh, do come in, Hal,’ said Sarah, annoyed with him already. She left him standing and went to sit down. Hal did not at once enter. He was giving her living-room a good once-over: he had not been in it for some time. The room had been variously used in this family flat’s long history. It had once been her children’s bedroom, but it had been a living room now for years. She was seldom in it. She would not have invited her brother into her study or her bedroom, where he would see photographs, piles of books, all kinds of objects that would emanate the intensely personal look of continuous use, which he would find irritating, even shameless, like underclothes left lying about. As he stood there, he sent suspicious glances to a drawing of Julie pinned on the door. Anne at the window could not be saying more clearly that she did not consider herself part of this scene. She was a tall woman, thin – too thin, a rack of bones – and her pale dry hair was tied back roughly behind her head. As usual she was surrounded by a fug of tobacco smoke, which seemed the very essence of dry exhaustion. She had lit a cigarette already, but furtively: she always smoked with guilt, as if still in her hospital, knowing she was giving a bad example to her patients. At the sight of her, Sarah’s compunctious heart reminded her that Anne’s perennial exhaustion was why she, Sarah, could never bring herself to ‘put her foot down’ over Joyce. She had never not pitied her sister-in-law.

  And now Hal did come in, letting it be understood by means of compressed lips and raised brows – useful perhaps for indicating to patients that their lifestyle did not meet with his approval? – that it was time his sister took her room in hand. He looked judiciously at a cheerful if faded chair opposite Sarah’s – would he allow himself to sit in it? He did.

  Hal was not the elder brother, as his air of command might suggest, but three years younger than Sarah. A large comfortable man, with an affable manner; everything about him must give his patients confidence. He was a success in his professional life, and his family life wasn’t so bad either, though he had always been unfaithful to Anne. She forgave him. Rather, one deduced that she must, since she did not go in for confidences. Probably she did not care, or perhaps it was that one could not imagine him unforgiven. Now Hal was sitting on the stiff chair, his arms folded high on his chest, legs apart and braced, as if he might otherwise bounce as he sat. He looked like a great delightful baby, with his little wisps of black hair, his fat little tummy, his little chins. He had small black eyes like large raisins.

  Sarah offered them drinks, tea, coffee, and so forth, and her brother’s impatient shake of the head made it clear he was pressed for time.

  ‘Now look here,’ he said. ‘We do realize you have always been amazingly good with Joyce.’

  There are occasions, when it becomes evident they are bound to develop in a certain way, that have a quite intoxicating momentum.
/>   ‘Yes, I think I have too.’

  ‘Oh, really, Sarah,’ he exclaimed hotly, his wells of patience already overdrawn.

  And now he began on the rhetorical statements (the counterpart of her prepared reasonings to him) rehearsed and polished on the way here. They had the theatrical ring which goes with a thoroughly false position. ‘You must see that Joyce looks on you as a mother,’ he said. ‘You have been a mother to her, we both know that.’ Here he looked at Joyce’s mother, wanting her agreement, but she was smoking furiously, her back turned. ‘It really isn’t on for you to drop her like this.’

  ‘But I haven’t dropped her, any more than you have.’

  He registered this shaft with a hostile look and a quiver of his lips which said he felt he was unfairly treated. ‘You know very well what I am saying.’

  ‘What you are saying is that I should give up my job and sit here for when she does turn up, even if it is only once in six months for an evening. Because that is what it amounts to.’