Who was it? Because of what she had heard last night but had at once said to herself was impossible — 'How about it, Sarah?' — she had to admit it must be Andrew. To whom she had never given a thought not strictly professional.
She carefully put this letter away, to be read later when not intoxicated. To be accurate, when no longer sick. Bill's letter she did tear up and she dropped the pieces neatly one by one in the basket as if finally ridding herself of something poisonous.
It was now eight in the morning. She chose a sensible dress in dark blue cotton, partly because she thought, I will not be accused of mutton dressed as lamb, partly because a dull dress might sober her. The noise outside was already so loud she sat for a few minutes, eyes closed, thinking of that long-ago youth on his hillside — absolute silence, solace, peace. But suddenly into this restoring dream the three war planes from yesterday inserted themselves, streaking across the antique sky and vibrating the air. The boy lifted his dreaming head and stared but did not believe what he saw. His ears were hurting. Sarah went quietly downstairs. She did not want to have to talk. In a side street was a little cafe she believed was not used by the company. The tables outside Les Collines Rouges were all empty except for Stephen, who sat with his head bent, the picture of a man struck down. He did not see her, and she walked past him to the Rue Daniel Autram. Whoever Daniel Autram was or had been, he did not merit pots of flowers all along his street, though on either side of the cafe door were tubs of marguerites. This cafe had a window on the street and, presumably, something like a window seat, for she saw two young sunburned arms, as emphatically male as those of Michelangelo's young men, lying along the back of it. The forearms rested side by side, hands grasping the elbows of the other. The arms being bare, there was a suggestion of naked bodies. This was as strong a sexual statement as Sarah could remember, out of bed. She was stopped dead there, in the Rue Daniel Autram, as noisy children raced past to a bus waiting for them in the square. I have to go back, go back, breathed Sarah, but she could not move, for the sight had struck her to the heart, as if she had been dealt lies and treachery. (Which was nonsense, because she had not.) Then one young man leaned forward to say something to the other, as the other leaned forward to hear it. Bill and Sandy. This was a Bill Sarah had never seen, nor, she was sure, had any female member of the company. Certainly his first mother had never been allowed a glimpse of this exultantly, triumphantly alive young man, full of a mocking and reckless sexuality. And the charming, winning, affectionate, sympathetic young man they all knew? Well, for one thing, that person had little of the energy she was now looking at: his energy was in bond to caution.
She forced herself to take two steps back, out of the danger of being seen, and walked like a mechanical toy to the table where Stephen still sat. Now he did lift his head, and stared at Sarah from some place a long way off. He reminded himself that he should smile, and did so. Then he remembered there was something else, and said, 'Thanks for your letter, I'm glad you wrote it.' And he was glad, she could see that. 'I did get it wrong, actually.'
She sat by him. There was nobody else on the pavement yet. She signalled for coffee, since Stephen had not thought of it.
'I got another letter this morning,' he said. 'A day for letters.'
'So it would seem.'
He did not hear this, and then he did and came to himself, saying, 'I'm sorry, Sarah. I do know I'm selfish. Actually I think I must be ill. I said that before, didn't I?' 'Yes, you did.'
'The thing is… I'm simply not this kind of person. Do you understand that?' 'Perfectly.'
He produced a letter, written on the paper of l'Hôtel Julie, in a large no-nonsense hand.
Dear Stephen,
I was so flattered when I read your letter and realized you were kindly asking me to spend a weekend with you in Nice. Of course I did know you were fond of me, but this! I do not feel this could be an ongoing committed relationship where two people could grow together on a basis of shared give-and-take and spiritual growth.
I do believe I can look forward to this kind of relationship with someone I got to know in Baltimore in spring when we were both working on The Lady with a Little Dog.
So wish me luck!
I shall never forget you and the days we have all spent together. I can only say I profoundly regret the commitments which make it impossible for me to be Julie in Oxfordshire. Because there is something special about this piece. We all feel it.
With sincere good wishes,
Molly McGuire
Sarah tried not to laugh, but had to. Stephen sat with lowered head, looking across at her, sombre and even sullen. 'I suppose it is funny,' he conceded. Then he did, unexpectedly, sit up and laugh. A real laugh. 'Well, all right,' he said. 'A culture clash.'
'Don't forget they have to divorce and remarry every time they fall in love.'
'Yes, with the Yanks there is always an invisible contract somewhere.' As she shrugged: 'Am I being unfair?' 'Of course you're being unfair.'
'I don't care if I am. But they must go to bed sometimes just for love's sake. Of course, I do keep forgetting, she was writing to the old man, didn't want to hurt his feelings.'
'I believe she might easily have gone with you to Nice… all things being equal.'
'You mean, if she hadn't been in love with that… I wonder? But if she had gone to bed with Bill — or rather if Bill had kindly gone to bed with her' — here she noted an altogether disproportionate spurt of malice in herself, to match his — 'then she would have been hinting about weddings by the morning. Anyway, one has really to be in love to think that kind of thing is worth it. I mean, Nice and all that. So I was a fool to ask. Otherwise it is just a dirty weekend.'
She remembered Andrew's letter and wondered if he was in love. Because to imagine him suffering from lust, that was one thing, and fair enough — but in love, oh no, she wouldn't wish it on anyone. And she didn't want to think about it. Too much of everything: she was drowning in too-muchness.
The coffee arrived. As Stephen lifted his cup, he — and she — noted that his hand shook. No joke, love, she attempted to joke, to herself. He set the cup down again, looking with critical dislike at his hand.
'Believe it or not, a good many women fall for me.'
'Why shouldn't I believe it? Anyway, you don't have to make a final assessment of your attractiveness or lack of it just because one girl turns you down.'
'Yes, and she's only a stand-in after all,' he remarked, in one of his moments of calm throw-away callousness. 'Perhaps she feels that.'
'As you said, that it was as if two different Stephens slid together and one said something the other could never say. Oh, don't worry, I know the condition well.'
'Obviously people fall in love with you. I'm not exactly blind, though I'm sure you think I am.' He hesitated, and his reluctance to go on made him sound grumpy. 'I wanted to say something… If it's the gaucho you're… ' He could not make himself say it. 'I should watch it, if I were you. He's a pretty tough customer.' As she did not reply, not knowing how to, he went on. 'Anyway, it's not my business. And I don't really care. That's what is intolerable. I don't care about anything but myself. Perhaps I will go to a psychiatrist after all. But what can they tell me I don't know already? I know what I'm suffering from — De Cleremont's syndrome. I found it described in an article. It means you are convinced the person is in love with you, even when she is not. The article didn't say anything about being convinced she would be in love with you if she wasn't dead.'
'Never heard of it.' She noted that he had been able to say, apparently easily, that Julie was dead.
'I would say there is a pretty narrow dividing line between sanity and lunacy.'
'A grey area perhaps?'
This exchange had cheered them both up — her dispro- portionately. She was wildly happy. Soon she left him to go to Jean-Pierre's office. She had not been there half an hour before Stephen rang from the hotel to say he was getting on an afternoon flight from Marseilles
and he would ring her from home.
She was busy all day. The performance that night drew an even larger crowd. At the end of the first act — that is, the end of Bill being Paul for that evening, he came to sit by her, but she found herself wanting only to get away. She was missing Henry. Bill's attentive sympathy cloyed. She preferred the raw, unscrupulously sexual and vital young man she had glimpsed that morning. In fact she could truthfully say that this winning young man bored her, so things were looking up.
She left farewell notes for Bill and Molly and went to her room. She sat by the window and watched the crowd on the pavement thin. This being the second night, and the tension fast diminishing, people went off to bed early. Soon there was no one down there, and the cafe's doors were locked. It was very hot in her room. Airless. Sultry. A dark night, for that acid little moon was blacked out behind what everyone must be hoping was a rain cloud. She would go down and sit on the pavement, alone. She crept down through the hotel, feeling it to be empty because Stephen was gone, and Henry too. As she was about to pull a chair out from under a table, she heard voices and retreated to sit under the plane tree. She would not be seen in the deep shadow.
A group of young people. American voices. Bill's, Jack's. Some girls. They sat down, complaining that the cafe had shut.
'I just love it, love it… it's… you know… ' A girl's voice.
'Er… er… you know, yah, it's right on.' Bill. This articulate young man's tongue had been struck by paralysis?
'It's just beautiful, know what I mean? It's sort of… mmm, yeah, I mean to say… '
'Sort of… kinda… actually, you know, as I saw it… very… 'Jack.
Another girl. To me it was… er… yeah, it was just… it was actually.
'Just wonderful, yeah.'
'It makes me feel like… I don't know… '
They all went on like this, the educated and infinitely privileged young of their great country, for some minutes. Then there was a clap of thunder, and some drops. They rose in a flock and scattered into the hotels.
Bill went last, with his pal Jack. Bill said, just as if he had not been conversing in Neanderthal, 'Yes, I do think we have the last act in balance now.'
Jack: 'I still think there should be another four or five minutes of Philippe. It's slightly underplayed there, for me.'
Rain swept across the square. She ran through it to her hotel, up the stairs, into her room, and to her window, which was blanked out by a flash flood, gravelly streams that silted up in heaps along the sill and were washed off and piled up again, showing greyish white when the lightning flickered, like the dirty heaps of snow along wintry roads. She sat approaching — cautiously — depths in herself she did not often choose to remember. Few people can reach even middle age without knowing there are doors they might have opened and could open still. Even that sensible marriage of hers had begun sensually enough, and there had been a moment when they had decided not to open these doors. What had since been christened S-M, a jaunty little name for a fashionable pastime (sado-masochism sounded, and was, real, something to be taken seriously), had appeared as a possibility. Her husband had in fact gone in for it with an earlier lover but found that love became hate… rather sooner, he joked, than it might otherwise have done: the two were not suited. She, Sarah, had noticed that women friends 'enjoying' S-M had come to grief. People might claim these practices were all as harmless as a game of golf, but it was not what the couple had observed separately. Together, the smallest approaches had aroused in both strong reactions, as if a door were being opened onto a pornographic hell. Enthusiastic practitioners presented a picture something like this: A couple 'respecting each other' — this was important — permitted carefully regulated cruelties, to the pleasure of both, but these were never permitted to go beyond limits. A likely story. Was it possible that the emotions of two people in any case always on the verge of exaggeration, in sex, or in love, never got out of control in S-M? (Or sado-masochism?) And surely these were not practices for parents? One could too easily imagine scenes of a rosy little bottom (mama's) and her cries of pleasure, or lethal black shiny straps and her cries of pain, while the children listened. Or papa, trussed like a roasting chicken. 'Just a minute, dear, I just want to see if Penelope is awake.' Or, 'Oh damn it, there's the baby.' Or even a childless couple. She has taken the washing out of the drier, he has parked the car, they eat a supper cooked by microwave. 'How about a little S-M darling?' No, surely these delights could only be for houses of pleasure, or for brief affairs. Too dangerous — even in sexual relationships of the ordinary kind (boring, so it was suggested by the proselytiz- ers), hidden depths so easily up welled and flooded both partners with every kind of dark emotion. It was at the time when she and her husband had actually played with the idea (not the practice) that she had found within herself, at first appearing in a dream and then presenting itself as a probable memory, the image of a small girl sitting alone in a room locked from the outside, a small girl with a doll she held between her knees and stabbed again and again with scissors while blood spurted from it… no, the spurting blood was the dream, but the little girl stabbing the doll, that was memory. The child went on and on stabbing the doll, her face lifted, eyes shut, mouth open in a dismal hopeless wail.
It was from this level in her that she could respond to the equivocal Bill. One knows what a man is like from the images and fantasies he evokes. This level, this 'somewhere', was to do (she thought) with babyhood. Earlier than childhood. Again and again during this sojourn in Julie's country, in sleep or in half-sleep she had seen that proud beautiful young head, its slow turn, the mocking smile that was androgynous and perverse, with a slow dissolve to the other sex, young woman to young man, young man to girl, young boy to girl-child, small girl to baby boy. Somewhere, somewhere back there, probably before the small girl sat stabbing the doll with scissors, there was something… So Sarah talked to herself, half aloud, sitting at the window where the streaming rain made the room dark, so that she could see only the black mass of the bed. I'm afraid. I am right to be afraid, though I don't know what I am afraid of. I know something terrible waits there… passing the stages of my age and youth, entering the whirlpool, yes, the whirlpool, that is what waits, and I know it.
Sarah's flat was full of sunlight and flowers sent by Benjamin, now in Scotland, and from Stephen, thanking her for putting up with him. There was also the single passionate red rose of tradition from 'Guess who?' She put this in a glass beside Stephen's flowers and Benjamin's, grateful she had not confessed her state to Stephen, because otherwise by now she would be thanking him for putting up with her. She knew that one word along the confessional path would have her weeping bitterly. Oh no, a stiff upper lip was much to be recommended. She did not feel herself appropriately surrounded by all this sunny cheerfulness.
She sat herself down to get her diary up to date, for in France she had neglected it, but after a couple of hours of restless attempts at attention, found she had written only:
Just imagine, I was joking that I could never fall in love again. Now I feel I should have been making signs to ward off some listening little devil, or a spiteful ghost.
And trying again later rewarded her only with:
Stupid dreams. All longing and wanting.
She went to the theatre, where she found Sonia, vibrant with success and so busy she could hardly find half an hour to spend with Sarah in the office. Where was Patrick? Sonia replied that he was off on some new plan — he'd tell Sarah himself. She sounded a mite embarrassed, hardly Sonia's style. 'But he shouldn't have gone off,' said Sarah. 'Not with the three of us in France — no, no, I don't mean you haven't been coping perfectly well.'
'You do realize, don't you, that you lot are workaholics? You're truly, truly crazy,' said Sonia. 'Have you four always coped with everything?'
'Well, yes, it all seemed to work pretty well.'
'Obviously it has, but for God's sake!'
'And who's talking?' said Sarah, lau
ghing at her.
'Yes, all right.' Sonia's mobile telephone chirped at her, and up she got and rushed out, saying, 'You haven't seen my Hedda yet, Sarah. I want to know what you think.'
The reviews of Hedda were excellent. The sets and lighting were particularly commended: Patrick's work. A couple of days in The Green Bird put Sarah sufficiently in the picture to know that Sonia's initial dislike of Patrick had evaporated: she valued him too much. They were now great friends. But what everyone was talking about was the latest instalment of the skirmish with Roger Stent.
On press night, he had arrived five minutes before the curtain went up, wearing a large curly red beard. He had bought a seat, under a false name, in the front row of the stalls and sat himself down in it, folding his arms and staring belligerently around. Clearly he expected to be evicted. No one took any notice until the first interval, when Sonia, with one of the stagehands, sauntered along to stand just in front of him.
'Auditioning, do you think?' enquired Sonia.
The well-briefed stagehand solemnly played his part: 'Looks like it, doesn't it?'
'I don't really see what we could use him for.' And she proceeded to describe his attributes as if he were being sold in a slave market, ending by pinching his thigh with a look of distaste. 'Quite meaty, though. Perhaps we could use him as a stagehand?' And she strolled on and out, followed by her accomplice. Roger Stent had not moved a muscle under this attack. People who had stayed during the interval spread the tale, and it earned a spiteful (and of course inaccurate) paragraph in the Evening Standard. The young man was in what he felt to be a quite tragic dilemma. He had enjoyed Hedda Gabler. The fact was, he had hardly ever seen a play in his life, and now he was secretly reading plays, was fascinated by this new world. Meanwhile the group of Young Turks continued to claim, as a main article of faith, that the theatre was ridiculous and, in any case, dead in Britain. What had begun as the spiteful, casual impulse of the young editor of New Talents had become a dogma not to be questioned. Roger was still accepted in the group only because of his willingness to despise the theatre. Like all cowardly reviewers, who for one reason or another do not want to commit themselves by saying that a play — or a book — is either good or bad, he used up his five hundred words with a description of the plot, ending 'This tedious play about a bored housewife whose symptoms would be cured by a good work-out was well enough presented, but why put it on at all?'
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