by Lee, Tanith
Why should they disapprove? Georgina’s voice was at its most beautiful, clear and silver-strong. It filled the air, needing neither a microphone nor any accompaniment.
She has never heard me sing. Now she hears. She hears the best of me, the truth of me, the soul of me. What I am or might be. What I could be if she could only see me as I am. But – she will. Now she will.
Georgina raised her face upward into the golden sun, the emerald shadow of the tree. She too was beautiful, here. Her beauty, like her beautiful voice, spread its wings wide open.
She felt in those moments, there in the square inside the room inside the house inside the dream, the unimaginable strength and validity of her own self and her life. She had not lost them, never could. Could never lose.
And then the glass doors parted and Sula was on the balcony, gazing down at Georgina, her face alight with admiring fascination and love, like a mirror of Georgina’s own.
Georgina’s song finished. (She would not, woken, recapture it ever. It had been a wonderful melody, and the words – they had been both simple and profound. But the lyric did not come back to her either. It was no song she had ever heard, or learned to sing, in the real world.)
All around the square the crowd, vast by now, was applauding her. And on the balcony Sula too, laughing and clapping, and then holding out her hand, calling, beckoning – Come up to me, darling. Come to me—
And Georgina, weightless, levitated towards her through the air itself, and then the dream, every fragment, floated from her.
She lay some while not moving, her face pressed into the pillow.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Georgina never dreamed this dream again, not even when she dreamed of the house. But it would become an element of certain wakeful fantasies she had thereafter. In those, of course, Sula always ran down to let her in. There was always a happy, rational, explicable ending.
It was an attractive restaurant. A flight of stone stairs led up into a wide and well-lit dining room; tall marigold lamps by night and shining windows by day. Fifteen years ago the tablecloths at l’Anchois had been snow white, and the china bore the symbol of the restaurant’s quirky name. By now the cloths were blue and the plates blue also, and plain. Always change.
She had started to come here now and then, in her late thirties, firstly with an American friend who seemed to have visited all the other places to eat, and asked her to recommend a special one.
When there she had never been so fey as to think Sula might all at once appear. Nor did she. But the atmosphere and food were infallibly choice.
Now, entering, Georgina glanced uneasily about. She had realized she did not really know who she was looking for. Or rather what. But as far as she could tell, Sula had not yet arrived. A few people were already at their tables, sipping wine or water, some peering through spectacles at the menus. Georgina had required glasses for reading since she was forty-seven, and would have to do this too. Would Sula?
How much had Sula changed, in fact – entirely, like the tablecloths?
Georgina had seen Sula last on film, fifty years old, in the French movie. She would be about sixty now. But the Sula Dale website had remained as uninformative as ever, with no more recent photograph than a publicity shot from the nineties.
She would not, Georgina was certain, ever have grown overweight. Sula had had that sort of body-type whose strong slimness is integral and usually lasts.
In any case, her fitness for Winter Sun must mean she was still, as they said, in good nick.
Georgina had written Winter Sun as a short story, the only short story she ever had written. Then someone at the BBC suggested it would make another play. And therefore a play it became. Finally its tangled path took it into TV, one in a new season of experimental drama. Georgina had been pleased enough, not least with the money. And then she had been shown the proposed cast list. “We thought she’d be perfect for Julia. Her agent seems to think she’s free.” “I thought she was in France,” said Georgina, sitting in the wine bar that had suddenly been emptied of all oxygen. “Really? Oh, yes, but it’s not like it’s the moon, is it. I mean, the old girl won’t have to go into quarantine or anything. At least one hopes not.” Old girl. The old girl. Georgina supposed she too was approaching Old Girl status.
She made no objections to Sula Dale’s playing Julia O’Connor in Winter Sun for Drama at Ten. And of course, anyway, Sula had played Julia for Georgina already, all the time Georgina wrote it. It was, the part, written for Sula. Just like all the others.
The time was, by now, a quarter past one.
Georgina had gained her table and sat before the mass of blue, which included a tall blue iris in an indigo vase, and a sky-blue glass of white wine. She had arrived a little early deliberately. She would prefer to be seated when Sula walked in, when she saw Sula first. Not be herself walking towards Sula, over this slippery sea of icy crystal, which was the restaurant’s smoothly carpeted floor.
How long had it really been?
Only twenty-four – twenty-five years? A little less since the unique phone conversation.
How had it been possible – no, permissible – to remain in love, obsessively and committedly, for such a period of time, without a single contact? Not even to see the object of obsessive love save on a screen, in a photograph, in the enormous inner world of the alter-brain, the selective memory, the id, the dreamscape.
This is what happened, certainly, to the bereaved lover. Think of little squat fat Victoria Regina, mummified forever in mourning. But then, she had had her Albert. She had not had to invent every minute of their idyll. It had existed.
Yet perhaps an invented life also existed, came to exist in some aberrant way. As unreal recollections sometimes become a real past in the minds of the damaged and the mad.
But I am neither. And I know it is untrue.
But the love affair that has never lived, has also never died.
Apparently the audition was a great success. They had all been thrilled with Sula. Thrilled with themselves for thinking of her.
This had been relayed to Georgina. “Oh, Ginny, we’re thrilled. We think you will be too.”
There was going to be a group dinner, cast, production, writer, at some grandish carvery; Georgina cried off. Then the read-through, and again Georgina, who was definitely expected to be there, had avoided it. Food poisoning was her excuse. She could not face it. Would not.
Sula herself would not want Georgina to be there. But it was more than that. Obviously Georgina too had aged. She had got thinner, and only tinted her grey hair – but she was perfectly presentable. It was not that either. She was – unloved. She was redundant. Sula actually would not even recall her name. The whole thing would be disagreeable. I am too old to deal with this. Surely I have grown up and do not have to.
Georgina would see Sula in the accustomed way, on the screen when the play was recorded and complete. Was this the reason? Sula had become a phantom, a filmic ghost? It would not be feasible, or bearable, to encounter her now in the flesh. Sula would be different. Georgina would enter the crowded room and find another total stranger. Heart and loins would not melt, brain would not race and fire. Death would at last occur. The death of love. And after this – there would, once and for all, be nothing.
Near midnight the telephone rang, out in the hall of the flat at the Oval.
Georgina was sitting up in bed reading. She thought of ignoring the noise, letting the phone take the message. But now and then a friend might call from the US, or elsewhere, mislaying the time zones. She was wide awake.
She got up and as she did so, the answer-phone kicked in.
“Hello. Hope I have the right number. For Ginny Kendry? If not, my apologies.”
Georgina stood, waiting. She did not recognize the woman’s casual voice, though unmistakably it was an actor’s.
“This is,” the voice said, unfazed, “Sula Dale. Bar gave me your number, Ginny. I love your pl
ay. Julia’s a wonderful role. Thought maybe we could meet up sometime this week? If you’re free. My number is—”
After the voice was gone, Georgina still stood in the hall, still somehow waiting. For what on earth?
To know what she should do. But oh, she knew. Not now. She must not do it now. She would do it tomorrow. Or she would not. (Bar Smithwood should not have passed on the number without checking with Georgina, but Bar was like that.) Does Sula even recollect she once met me? Why is she calling me? Eye on the main chance, maybe. I am a playwright with TV connections now. Does she remember? Do I care if she remembers or if she has an eye on the main chance – charm me, get another part to play—
Exhausted, Georgina went to bed, and lay down in the dark. She approached warily, and from a vast distance, the former fantasy from her thirties, singing in the square to Sula’s windows. It came to her with great vividness, stinging-fresh and shaking with hope and joy.
I am nearly fifty-six. I must not indulge this fantasy. Something I would never have done in the real world, even back then. Let alone, God forbid, now. But even to fantasize about it is, at my age, mentally – unseemly. See, in the dream I’m still quite young. And so would she be. And all that is gone.
I can still sing though. That recording last month for Peter. “Wow,” he said, “you still sound like thirty.” Not quite. But I can still sing.
Oh, what would Sula have done if Georgina had wooed her like that? Flamboyant, an actor’s modus operandi? Lazy, careless, uninterested, exquisite Sula, with her hair like sunlit rain and her eyes like amber jade. Would the gesture, its crazy chivalry, its element of offering, Georgina’s voice, have disturbed Sula’s own complacent world, lured her out to look at another and see her, see Georgina as what she could be? What I could have been – for her?
She did not sleep, or only for minutes at a time, floating in and out of the fantasy she had tried to resist, and which however, now, would not pursue her back into the cloudy jungles of unconsciousness.
At nine-thirty the following morning, Georgina called the given number. But then put down the receiver. Then she called again and at once the slightly – not so very much – altered voice of Sula answered her. “Hi.” It was only a touch darker, deeper. That was all. Like mine, when I sing.
Businesslike and cordial, Georgina said, “You called me last night. I’m afraid I was out.”
“Oh – is that Ginny?”
“Yes. It’s Ginny.”
“So how about lunch? I want to ask you some things about your fantastic play, a couple of slants on Julia...what you think of my take on it all.”
She sounds like a young woman. Full of life. Interest. Not bored at all.
“Yes. Why not. That would be,” Ginny hesitates. “Nice.”
“When are you free? Today? How about—”
“Not till tomorrow, I’m afraid. I can make it for one-thirty then.”
“Sounds fine,” said Sula. “Where?”
“Maybe l’Anchois,” said Georgina. Or rather the person she had temporarily become, the one so busy today, as she was not, that one said it. So sensibly and quietly too.
“Do you still go there? God, I haven’t been there in years, not even when I’m over.”
“It’s still a good place.”
“Yes, of course. No, it’ll be fun to see it again. All that comfortable old-fashioned white, and silver service – and the picture on the plates of the anchovy—”
“It’s all blue now. The anchovy has gone.”
“I expect all the plates got broken in some accident,” frivolously said Sula.
Yes, Sula was acting also. Trying a little too hard, perhaps. Because Georgina might be so useful. That must be why. It could be nothing else.
“Well,” said Georgina, “it was good to talk to you.”
“You too – how are you, by the way?” said Sula, making Georgina jump. What does it mean? Am I well enough to go on writing plays for you? Or you’re just showing me a concerned friend from way back.
“I’m very well. You too, I hope.”
Yes, Sula was. A few more flutters then of mutual politeness and farewell, like a pair of pigeons fencing with their beaks inside a cage of boughs, striking the leaves with their wings.
In the silence after: Had the conversation happened?
But Georgina knew she was not insane, did not hallucinate. It had happened; a meeting was agreed.
As she was drinking very strong coffee, her mind ranged into the past and, curiously, detached itself obliquely from any memories, past meditations on or dreams and fantasies of Sula Dale.
She had thought of Marc Henser. Sitting there in the pub one night, when she was in her twenties, he, presumably, his late fifties, and the others, all of them alive, and burning bright. And he told them all the story about the nightingale.
When someone remarked it was like something from Hans Andersen, Marc had replied he believed it came from the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey conceivably, but that its roots most likely lay in China.
“Once upon a time,” Marc said to them, with unashamed narrative effect, “there was a princess, outside whose high bedroom window a nightingale sang every night from a tree; a pomegranate, or perhaps a blossoming plum.”
While the nightingale sang, the princess slept deeply and well, dreaming of wondrous and beautiful things. However there came a night when the nightingale, for reasons of its own, did not sing but flew far away. In the morning the princess summoned a gardener and commanded that the tree be cut down. He protested, saying the tree was young, healthy and fruitful. But the princess would have none of that. She told him that all that one previous night a nightingale had perched in the tree, and her sleep had been very much disturbed by its song.
One of the more innocent students had said, “But that night the nightingale hadn’t sung. So how did it disturb her?”
Some of the others groaned. “That’s the point, Keith. When it sang she didn’t hear it. When it didn’t sing she did, and it woke her up.”
“So how was that, then?” said Keith. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s a riddle,” said Marc, tucking slowly into his second half – he never drank more than two halves. “What do you think it means?”
“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”
“In a way,” said Marc. He gave them space to elaborate. But beyond a scatter of jokey suggestions (“She’d recorded it and left the tape on—” “She fancied the gardener and was lying so she could watch him sweat with the axe below her window—” “Too many Turkish Delights?”), no one claimed themselves able to solve the mystery.
“Analyze what the story tells you. When the nightingale sang the princess is reported to have had wondrous and beautiful dreams. When the nightingale flies away, and there is no song, the princess herself reports – not that she was kept awake – but that her sleep had been much disturbed by the nightingale’s song.” Marc once more waited. Then smiled. He had had a lovely smile, kind and wise and without duplicity. You had never had to think, What is he trying to do? He simply did it, and all of it was entirely benign. He was happy. He made them happy. A blissful contagion.
“When the nightingale sang, her song – although the princess never consciously registered a note of it – permeated her sleep and her dreams, and guided her slumbering mind into tranquil and enlightening avenues of adventure and self-knowledge. Like those people, for example, who can’t sleep well or pleasantly without a tape of Mozart playing, or the sound of the sea.
“But when the nightingale was gone there was only utter silence.
“Think about those ancient cities and gardens. Not a sound. Today we can hear traffic, or emergency roadworks, or human hubbub, most if not all night. We get used to it. But in those sequestered palaces and times, the night might well have been an utter void. Like a cellar in the ear when the light bulb goes out.”
He looked around at them. He said, “In that void then, the princess had no gu
idance for her dreams. They must have turned on her like a pack of wild dogs. It wasn’t that she lay awake all night. She slept, and no doubt would have preferred to be awake, such were the nightmares and horrors that hunted her down and tore her mind in bits. And over it all, the echo of the nightingale’s glorious song, the melody of rescue that never came, distorted and soulless, frightening – as some echoes can be – like the tinnitus-ringing in the ears you might experience after an explosion, or even, dare I say, a particularly loud concert. That then, was what she heard. That then which she wanted to render homeless by the axing of the unfortunate tree. But obviously, this would only be a psychological solution. Very likely it made no difference to her. Poor thing, she might never sleep sweetly again. And she wouldn’t even know why not.”
Was it fifteen minutes to two? Georgina’s watch told her that it was. L’Anchois had filled up cozily. Just three other tables, seeming reserved and not yet occupied. Then a group of six arriving, couthly noisy and jolly. Over there now. The leaden feeling in Georgina’s gut could be an awareness that Sula had stood her up after all. Or relief. Or hunger.
It had never been clear to Georgina why Sula had stood her up that first time years ago. Sula had not fathomed who ‘Justine’ really was, surely. There could well therefore have been a legitimate reason for Sula’s withdrawal. Especially given the warm and willing mode of her original acquiescence. Or else she had just decided it was a date she did not need. Something more compelling, more worthwhile, had taken its place.
What to do now, then. Oh. Just pay for the drink and leave. To keep things civilized perhaps pretend to a message on her mobile, calling her unavoidably away.
She might as well finish her wine before she left.
Georgina turned and glanced from the window, down into the rainy summer street. Her pulse stopped. A taxi had drawn up below. A woman was getting out, was bending to the cab window. Slim, dressed in dark red, her shoulder-length, hair-dressed blonde hair falling forward – Sula. It was Sula. She was here, imminent.