Disturbed by Her Song

by Lee, Tanith

  Now I’ll have to buy this rubbish.

  She bought it.

  As Sula handed it to her, with the very small amount of change from the ten pound note, Georgina wanted to say, Let’s meet for a drink later, shall we? She did not utter a word, naturally. Her fantasies, until then, were all interior, and she was well practiced in their action, and their inapplicable rules.

  She subsequently gave the scent to a charity shop. She hoped it would make someone happy, but by then it would be about a year out of date. Perhaps it would not.

  Georgina knew that Sula Dale was gay. At the very least bisexual.

  The actor who played Dionysos in the Coachhouse production had been incredibly handsome, and very taken with Sula. Members of the chorus standing at the bar after the show – Georgina being one of them – had plainly heard Sula tell him, “Sorry, darling. I’m like you. I prefer the girls.” Sula had also flirted a little with the wardrobe woman, and one night a stocky but elegant brunette whirled Sula off to a late meal somewhere. Georgina was told they had been seen “snogging in the carpark.”

  So, it was not anything to do with that.

  Sula simply had not noticed Georgina. And still did not notice.

  All her life, then just over three decades, Georgina had found those who did notice her noticed quickly. And those who did not...did not. At the time of The Bacchae she had paid scant personal attention herself. And yet, seeing Sula again, bereft like that, enslaved behind the counter, Georgina changed as a ship’s sail does before a suddenly altering wind.

  Possibly it was connective sympathy. Georgina had been without ‘real’ work for several months. (Her meeting with Dollington demonstrated her desperation.) And then the image of talented, beautiful Sula, unchosen, wrenched at Georgina. What was wrong with everyone? Beleaguered against a foolish world—

  The night after meeting Sula in Liberty, Georgina dreamed of the house. In this dream, just as in London, it was a very hot summer. There were masses of jade-green leaves on the trees of the stunted little garden. They made the green of the house into almost a plastic blue, while the ripening color high above became a sort of purple.

  This time the main door stood ajar. Georgina went in, and swung it nearly closed behind her.

  Her immediate feelings on doing this did not remain with Georgina, whatever they had been. She only later recollected, and retained, a vivid sense of energy, and of racing up the stairway to the second floor. And there, for once, an internal door had been flung wide open.

  Georgina went forward, and looked into the room so revealed.

  It was, you might say, furnished.

  But what furnished it was this: a winding street led in and quietly downward in a steep slope. Buildings had begun to amass about the street approximately (as Georgina later calculated) some half mile along and down. What surrounded the upper part of the road where it commenced at the doorway, and the lower region midway along, she would not on waking remember. Nothing, she thought. Maybe just a type of localized mist, that in the dream seemed perfectly adequate.

  The additionally odd element, which then she never questioned either, as usually one does not, unconscious, was that though the summer night she fell asleep in had been stifling, even eighty-five degrees in the tiny flat – which felt like ninety-five – in the dream, the vista through the door was wintry. She might have questioned that, surely. For the dreamscape too outside the house was full summer. But up here, in here, down there, snow lapped and capped the shops and tower blocks, and even the sheer blue sky was transparently icy, like an aquamarine left for hours in a freezer.

  Georgina stepped out on to the road. Afterwards she had a skewed notion it had been cobbled, despite the drab comparative modernity of the ’60’s-’70’s architecture below.

  She did not go very far. It was not treacherous or icy underfoot, little snow there, only the faintest dusting (icing- sugar) between the cobblestones, or whatever. It was simply that – in sleep she knew it – to go farther was to become detached from even the dream-reality (the house); conceivably to be lost.

  Which was quite crazy. For there was no menace in the view. If anything it was...boring. Like Jack Dollington, like Georgina to Sula Dale.

  Georgina woke soon after this with an awareness of return, but no imperative memory of having escaped.

  There was nothing to escape.

  It was not a nightmare.

  A week later Georgina had an audition for a new ‘experimental’ play due to be put on at the Figurehead in Richmond. If she got the job she would be the only singer. The music was atonal and – to Georgina – unpleasant. But it was within her soprano range. She had a good voice, which now and then could sound wonderful. Not among the greats, she was definitely gifted, certainly enough, she thought, for this solo role. She never thought she would get it though. But she did. They told her five minutes after she sang.

  In a glow she rode the rattling train back into central London, and decided, with some proper pay impending, to give herself lunch at the restaurant where she had been driven mad by boozy, woozy not-wisely-choosy Jack Dollington.

  In her own mind she did, presently, think she selected this treat because of the vicinity. And no doubt she walked along Oxford Street beforehand, glancing into shops after extra things she might now buy; new towels, some CDs of Handel, Rachmaninov, Joan Sutherland and Judy Collins, with this subconscious urge in the mental driver’s seat. Naturally such an excursion was not bound to guarantee a result. But, just like the audition, it did.

  Reflected in a shop window, there among the mannequins with their celluloid hair and hard patented skins, walked Sula Dale, a Dianic nymph in a grove of androids.

  Georgina spun round (as they said).

  “Oh – hi!” Georgina exclaimed. And then, fearing the quarry (was Sula by then prey?) might not hear, she added clearly, “Sula!”

  At her name, as most humans do, particularly when they possess rather unusual names, Sula turned to see who uttered it.

  What an odd expression. Sula looked shy. She lowered her green sherry eyes, lashes like dark mascaraed curtain fringe, as if embarrassed. Then raised them and looked at Georgina, full at her. And Georgina felt that virtually indescribable physical – or is it? – dissolvement of the pelvis, viscera and bones, which is presumably sexual, but which feels more as if that one part of the body has abruptly realigned itself with the non-physical Infinite Powers of gods and eternity and The All. And which, therefore, can be mentioned in any detail, generally, only in the most trite and ridiculous muddle of terms. All that thought, in a split second.

  And how ingenious the lover – the hunter:

  “I’ve just got some real work,” blurted Georgina, feeling instantly a tactless bitch, for Sula worked in Liberty and not where she should, on a stage or before a camera.

  Yet curiously, almost as if pre-programmed, Sula at once rejoined, “Oh good. So have I. A radio play. I’ve just been at the Beeb.”

  And then Sula’s own relief instantly opened up the beautiful face into a smile. “What’s yours?”

  Georgina smiled tensely back. But lightly she added, “Singing at the Figurehead. A play with a crazy title...shall we celebrate? Can I buy you a drink – or lunch?”

  Sula veiled her eyes. “Well—”

  “There’s a good place just along the road—”

  “OK. Yes, why not. Thanks. Only I haven’t got time for anything much.”

  So instead of the appealing restaurant they went to a sort of licensed sandwich bar, and sat on the type of back-punishing tall stools sadistic storks would have invented if they were so inclined. But there was Georgina in love (definitely now in love), and salad and ham in bread, and wine, and Sula beside her, and the sandwich bar became Paradise enough.

  The talk was a bit sporadic to start with, but they improved it through discussing the merits of current Work. Sula’s BBC play sounded interesting, and it was for the evening slot. She had the role of a woman still obsessed by the de
ath of her husband in a car crash several years previously, who was then approached by a young man who appeared to be the husband’s doppelgänger – an exact likeness and exactly the same age as her husband when he was killed – who next claimed he was the husband’s son by another woman. Georgina meanwhile admitted her play was called Evil Evening. It was a five-hander that seemed to take place in an unnamed city, sinisterly and mysteriously deserted through reasons never explained. “The music,” she added, “matches up just fine.” At which Sula laughed. And Georgina felt a heady rush of joy at having, for a moment, apparently genuinely amused her.

  All through the lunch, which lasted despite Sula’s initial proviso, nearly a hundred and twenty-seven minutes, Georgina studied Sula, more or less without subterfuge. And every so often Sula would look directly into Georgina’s eyes for a few seconds. During which it went without saying time stopped, and London grew motionless and silent and mysteriously, if not sinisterly, deserted.

  Sula’s hair had remained red, but it was more a strawberry shade by now, the henna washing out. If she wore any make-up aside from that on her eyelids Georgina was unsure. By about the end of the first hour, the worst and most devastating thing was happening to Georgina. She was beginning to see that Sula was merely ordinary. Even her grace, and certainly her pronounced beauty and extravagant eyes – were ordinary. She was mortal, finite. She was flesh and blood, had been born and would one day die. At this point a sizably smoldering passion can also die. Or else it will ignite. This one ignited. It noiselessly exploded. Georgina went up in invisible flames and a column of unseeable smoke, and lay spattered in bright embers against the eatery ceiling, staring down, lost. But she had been in love, even almost in this sort of love, before. And, like Sula, she had occupied a theatre stage. Georgina maintained her self-control.

  In the hundred and twenty-third minute, when Sula said she thought she had better take off now, and insisted on going fifty-fifty on the bill, Georgina said, in a nice off-hand way, “Let me know how the play goes. Look,” scribbling on the mentally prepared piece of paper, “that’s my mobile number. Do let me know when the show goes out.” “Oh sure,” said Sula, not too non-committal. She might even mean it. Georgina added, “I’d offer you a free ticket to Evil Evening but really, I don’t think it’ll be worth your while. Probably not worth anyone’s while, I’m afraid.” “Oh,” said Sula, surprising Georgina into almost stunning elation, “I might drop by. The Figurehead? Yeah. I once did a Hedda Gabler there. Not as Hedda. Mrs Elvy-whatever.” “I wish I’d seen you. But well, if you do drop in – I’d love to know what you think of it all. It won’t be Ibsen.”

  After Sula’s departure, Georgina sat at the table drinking the last dregs of her coffee, unable for some while to trust her legs to stand her up. She was high, and cast down. She could see nothing but Sula Dale, yet everything else gleamed in a nearly radioactive light.

  Fool, she thought, dancing over Waterloo Bridge, while the sun-starred silver foil Thames crackled and blazed below, somehow not burning up the river traffic. Fool. And it would have been quicker, would it not, to have gone via Charing Cross? But no. Let me stay in London. London where love is, just a fraction longer.

  And Georgina wondered too if Sula had ever picked out Georgina’s individual voice, there among the maenad chorus of The Bacchae, ever heard Georgina singing. And if she did come to Richmond, she would hear Georgina sing – solo – of course. My voice is the best of me, she thought, as sober with exhaustion she let herself into the miniature flat at Lee. I want her to hear it. Georgina stood still for a little space, watching the sunlight of late afternoon careen her small front room towards the west. Georgina remembered lovers who had liked, loved her singing. Two lovers who had often asked her to sing to them. And one who had dreamily said, “Angels will sing like that.”

  Then: “Oh, I’m glad you’re not an angel though, Ginny”

  I want to sing to her. I want to put my hands on her.

  I want her under me and on top of me and her hair blonde again and in my mouth. I want her to smother me. I want—

  But the phone rang, the mobile, and Georgina in her haste to answer it, because it would be Sula, dropped it, and so before she could answer it heard the voice speak and leave its message.

  It was inevitably not Sula, but the director’s assistant from Evil Evening, giving her a first rehearsal date.

  To say Georgina Kendry never saw Sula Dale again would be to lie. Through the twenty-four odd years that followed their lunch, she probably saw Sula roughly about forty-nine times. She saw her six times in live theatre. And at the cinema in various movies, also watching these when repeated on her small TV. Later, when there was more regular income, the TV too enlarged and grew technical, and videos and later DVDs of some of the films (a few of which were very good, and one outstanding) came to inhabit Georgina’s private store. Once Georgina was startled to find she had simply switched on the set late at night to behold Sula acting in a TV film from well over a decade before. How young she had looked when young. Sula also, during the nineties, had an important if short-haired role in two series of a detective drama, fourteen episodes in all. For a while Wednesday nights had always discovered Georgina home alone, and in her viewing seat by ten or ten thirty.

  As the years progressed, the young Sula witnessed in the show from 1976, and the more mature Sula observed in the last episodes of the series in the ‘90s, aged attractively. She stayed slim and lithe, and her hair, though varying in length and style, remained a natural blonde that, by then, most likely was no longer natural at all.

  But after this Sula vanished from the screens both televisual and cinematic; also apparently from the theatres of London. She disappeared entirely, and only in the early twenty-first century did a Sula Dale website manifest on the web, and so on Georgina’s latest computer. The site was not particularly informative, in no sort a blog, or self-promotion beyond the most basic – a few stills and publicity photographs, a sparse list of appearances. She seemed to have moved to France. A pair of obscure French movies had her in supporting roles. Only one of these films did Georgina, after much searching, manage to buy secondhand. The quality was poor. It gave her a headache to watch; nevertheless she did watch it about five times, until the images utterly disintegrated. Sula must have been fifty by then. Despite the poor picture, you could see she was still beautiful, and still retained a serpentine body. But her face had become deeply lined beside the mouth and about the eyes. The marks of age on her, to Georgina (absurdly) seemed saddening and unfair. The similar marks on Georgina’s own face did not bother her. Indeed, in her own case, she thought she looked rather better, older. But following the first viewing of the French film, she had to watch all the recorded TV and movies again, especially the art-house one, and look at Sula in her prime. Georgina never tried to analyze why. Perhaps there was actually no truly deep hidden motive. Just the fact that the lines cut into Sula’s lucent skin made Georgina unhappy, troubled her.

  However, at variance with all these second-hand, third-hand sightings, Georgina and Sula had spoken once, for almost an hour, on the telephone, about two years after the sandwich lunch in Paradise.

  Throughout two subsequent decades, Georgina led her own life, and it was quite lucky, in its own muted fashion.

  She kept her voice in trim with regular practice, and professional lessons wherever she could afford them, and it not only lasted, it strengthened, and extended somewhat in the lower register, as she moved into her fifties. She was still getting the odd gig even then, but as she aged almost always off stage, or in low budget films or TV background vocals.

  Her mainstay employment had instead become, from about the age of thirty-eight, backstage work. She did not disenjoy it, and liked both the production responsibilities and remaining in the theatre world. She even wrote a few plays and TV scripts, originally in collaboration – to ‘help out’ – then independently. By her mid forties she had established a minor name for herself. She was solvent
and had moved into a decent flat at the Oval.

  Of course, there had been lovers, too. Not that many. Nor any of them incredibly significant for very long, but fun, or sexually or emotionally inspiring. In one instance all three.

  Georgina had lived with Liz for seventeen months before a mounting acrimony, which seemed to grow worse the more the fun and sexual and emotional rapport increased (like a strangling ivy attaching itself to the challenge of a well-built wall) axed them apart.

  Liz had been a jealous woman. She seemed to nurture this insecurity in herself. From the very beginning she was jealous of Georgina’s interest in Sula Dale, evidenced only at that time by the stock of recordings. “Why have you got all these DVDs of her rubbish? God, she’s pretty stale now, isn’t she?” “Oh, I knew her briefly.” “In the Biblical sense, I take it.” “No.” “You’d have liked too though, I bet. Go on, tell me. You fancied her rotten.” “Yes,” said Georgina in truthful annoyance. Near the end of the seventeen-month partnership, she came back from a stint in Wales to find Liz had cleaned and repainted the flat (then still in Lee) and thrown out all the Sula material. Or rather, was pretending she had: “To see what you’d do. And you’ve done it. Christ, no need to have a conniption fit. I’ve just packed them in a box and put them in the meter cupboard. They got on my nerves. I should be enough for you! I should!” roared Liz, having her own conniption fit. Georgina told her that the paint was too stark a white on the walls, she did not like it, and went to fetch the box. A handful of weeks after, Liz slung a glass sauce bottle at Georgina. Georgina ducked and the bottle livened up the deadly white decor no end. By three a.m. that morning they had permanently parted.

  From then on Georgina was never tempted to live with anyone again. She thought she had not really been tempted to with Liz, only seduced and suborned into giving in. She had lived alone from her late teens, when she took a single room near the Academy during her training. She liked living alone. It was just the now and then company and the sex she wanted, loving sex if that was available, but honest friendly sex would more than do. Because since Sula Dale, even where Georgina still fell in love, it was never like the love that had grown up round Sula, and Georgina’s loss of Sula. That love was like pearl round a piece of grit, or like rust around a blade left out constantly in the rain of unshed tears. What a flimsy context though, to have so overdressed itself. A few hours spent together in the most everyday fashion, one phone call, a host of fantasies. Why? Had the paucity of the liaison demanded this accretion – love, too, abhorring a vacuum...