To Room Nineteen

by Doris Lessing

  This was just before the First World War, which so rapidly and drastically changed the lives of women. Supposing she had not jumped, decided to live?

  Before jumping she put her pictures, her music, her journals, into tidy heaps. She did not seem to have destroyed anything, probably thought: Take it or leave it. She did write a helpful note for the police, telling them where to look for her body.

  Oblivion, for three-quarters of the century. Then the summer recital in Belles Rivières where her music was played for the first time. Shortly after that, her work was included in an exhibition of women artists in Paris, which came successfully to London. A television documentary was made. A romantic biography was written by someone who had either not read the journals or decided to take no notice of them.

  This was where Sarah Durham had entered the story. She read the English version of the journals, thought it unsatisfactory, sent to Paris for the French edition, and found herself captivated by Julie to the extent that she was actually making a draft of a play before discussing it with the other three. They were as intrigued as she was. Afterwards no one could remember who had suggested using Julie’s music; this kind of creative talk among people who work together is very much more than the sum of its parts. They could not stop talking about Julie. She had taken over The Green Bird. Sarah did another draft, with music. This was shown to potential backers, and at once Julie Vairon began to escalate. Then another play arrived, written by Stephen Ellington-Smith, who had done so much to ‘discover’ and then ‘promote’ Julie Vairon: ‘Julie’s Angel’.

  They all read this new play, which was romantic, not to say sentimental, and no one would have given it another thought had Patrick not demanded a special meeting. Present were Sarah, Mary Ford, Roy Strether, Patrick Steele – the Founding Four. And, too, Sonia Rogers, an energetic redhead who was being ‘tried out’. They were still saying that she was being tried out when it was evident she was a fixture, because no one wanted to admit an era was over. Why Sonia? Why none of the other hopefuls who worked in and around the theatre, sometimes without payment or for very little? Well, it was because she was there. She was everywhere, in fact. ‘Turn the stone and there you find her,’ jested Patrick. She had come in as a ‘temp’ and had at once become indispensable. Simple. She was at this meeting because she had come into the office for something and was invited to stay. She perched on the top of a filing cabinet as if ready to fly away at one cross word.

  Patrick opened fire with ‘What’s the matter with Stephen Whatsit’s play? It just needs a bit of tightening, that’s all.’

  Mary sang, ‘ “She was poor but she was honest, victim of a rich man’s whim”.’

  Roy said, ‘Two rich men, to be accurate.’

  Sarah said, ‘Patrick, these days you simply can’t have a play with a woman as a victim – and that’s all.’

  Patrick said, sounding, as he did so often, trapped, betrayed, isolated, ‘Why not? That’s what she was. Like poor Judy. Like poor Marilyn.’

  ‘I agree with Sarah,’ said Sonia. ‘We couldn’t have a play about Judy. We couldn’t do Marilyn – not just victims and nothing else. It’s not on.’

  There was a considerable pause, of the kind when invisible currents and balances shift. Sonia had spoken with authority. She had said We. She wasn’t thinking of herself as temporary, on trial. Right, the Founding Four were thinking. And now that’s it. We have to accept it.

  They all knew what each of the others was thinking. How could they not? They did not need even to exchange glances, or grimaces. They were feeling, were being made to feel, faded, shabby – past it. There sat this Sonia, as bright and glossy as a lion cub, and they were seeing themselves through her eyes.

  ‘I agree absolutely,’ said Mary, finally, assuming responsibility for the moment. And her smile at Sonia was such that the young woman showed her pleasure with a short triumphant laugh, tossing her fiery head. ‘They wouldn’t do an opera about Madame Butterfly now.’ Mary went on.

  ‘Everyone goes to see Madame Butterfly,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Everyone?’ said Sonia, making a point they were meant to see was a political one.

  ‘How about Miss Saigon?’ said Patrick. ‘I’ve read the script.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ asked Sonia.

  ‘The same plot as Madame Butterfly,’ said Patrick. ‘You talk your way out of that one, Sarah Durham.’

  ‘It’s a musical,’ said Sarah. ‘Not our audience.’

  ‘Disgraceful,’ said Sonia. ‘Are you sure, Patrick?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Patrick pressed his attack. ‘Then how about the Zimbabwe play? I don’t remember anyone saying it should be a musical.’

  The Zimbabwe play, by black feminists, was about a village girl who longed to live in town, just like everyone else in Zimbabwe, but there is unemployment. Her aunt in Harare says no, her house is already over-full. This precipitates a moral storm in the village, because the aunt’s refusal is a break with the old ways, when the more fortunate members of a family had to keep any poor relation who asked. But the aunt says, I have already got twenty people in my house, with my children and my parents and I’m feeding everyone. She is a nurse. The village girl catches the eye of a local rich man, the owner of a lorry service. She gets pregnant. She kills the child. Everyone knows, but she is not prosecuted. She becomes an amateur prostitute. She never thinks of herself as one: ‘This time the man will love me and marry me.’ Another baby is left on the doorstep of the Catholic mission. She gets AIDS. She dies.

  ‘I saw it,’ said Sonia. ‘It was good.’

  ‘But that was all right, because she was black?’ said Patrick, and laughed aloud at the political minefield he had invited them into.

  ‘Let’s not start,’ said Mary. ‘We’ll be here all night.’

  ‘Right,’ said Patrick, having made his point.

  ‘It’s too late anyway,’ said Roy, summing up, as he generally did. Calm, large, unflappable, one of the world’s natural arbiters. ‘We’ve already agreed on Sarah’s play.’

  ‘But,’ Sonia directed them, ‘I do think we should at least remember that it is the story of girls all over the world. As we sit here. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.’

  ‘But it’s too late,’ said Roy.

  Mary remarked. ‘I don’t think the French are in on it because they like the idea of a good cry. They don’t see it as a weepy. When I talked to Jean-Pierre on the phone yesterday about the publicity, he said Julie was born out of her time.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Jean-Pierre says they see her as an intellectual, in their tradition of female bluestockings.’

  ‘In other words,’ said Roy, ending the meeting by standing up, ‘we shouldn’t be having this conversation at all.’

  ‘What about the American sponsors?’ demanded Patrick. ‘What have they agreed to? I bet not a French bluestocking.’

  ‘They bought the package,’ said Sarah.

  ‘I can tell you this,’ said Patrick. ‘If you did Stephen Whatsit’s play there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.’

  As Mary and Roy went banging off down the wooden stairs, they sang, ‘“She Was Poor but She Was Honest”,’ and Patrick actually had tears in his eyes. ‘For goodness sake!’ said Sarah, and put her arms around him. As people did so often: There there! He complained they patronized him, and they said, But you need it, with your wounded heart always on view. All this had been going on for years. But things had changed…Sonia wasn’t going to spoil him. Now, at the foot of the stairs, she looked critically at Patrick who – always ornamental, and even bizarre – was today like a beetle, in a shiny green jacket, his black hair in spikes. But Sonia, in the height of fashion, wore black full Dutch-boy trousers, a camouflage T-shirt from army surplus and over it a black lace bolero from some flea market, desert boots, a jet Victorian choker necklace, many rings and earrings. Her hair, in a variation of a 1920s shingle, was in a tight point at the back, and
in front in deeply curving lobes, like a spaniel’s ears. But her hair was seldom the same for more than a day or two. Her get-up did not please Patrick. He had already been heard shrilly criticizing her for lack of chic. ‘Being a freak isn’t smart, love,’ he had said. To which she had replied, ‘And who’s talking?’

  Sarah did not go to bed on the night before she was due to meet Stephen Ellington-Smith. For one thing, she had not finished cleaning until three in the morning. Then she decided to do the programme notes after all. Then she reread Julie’s journals, preparing herself for what she believed would be a fight with Julie’s Angel.

  ‘Look,’ she imagined herself saying, ‘Julie never saw herself as a victim. She saw herself as having choice. Until 1902 and her mother’s death, she could have gone home to Martinique. Her mother actually wrote saying she was welcome any time. There’s even a rather silly letter from her half-brother, who took over the estate when the father died, making jokes about their relationship; it was insulting in a sort of schoolboy way. He said the father had told him to “look after” Julie. But she didn’t reply. She wondered whether she should be a prostitute – don’t forget this was the time of les grandes horizontales. But she said she had no taste for luxury, and that did seem to be essential for a highclass tart. She was offered a job as a chanteuse in a nightclub in Marseilles, but she said it would be too emotionally demanding, she would have no time for her music and her painting. Anyway, she hated provincial towns. She did actually have the chance of going to Paris in a touring company as a singer. But this was nothing like her dreams of Paris. She said in her journal, If Rémy asked me to go to Paris and live with him there…we could live quietly, we could have real friends…The underline there says everything, I think. She goes on. Of course it is out of the question, though I saw him with his wife at the fête. It is clear they do not love each other. She was invited to go as governess in a lawyer’s household in Avignon: he was a widower. Several men wanted to set her up in Nice or Marseilles as a mistress. These offers were merely recorded, as she might have written, It was hot today, or, It was cold.

  ‘We could easily present Julie in terms of what she refused. And what did she actually choose? A little stone house in the forest. “The cow-byre”, as the citizens contemptuously called it. She chose to live alone, paint and draw and compose her music and, every night of her life, write a commentary on it.

  ‘Yes, I agree it is not easy to make of this a riveting drama. Not easy even if we keep the form you have chosen. Act One: Paul. Act Two: Rémy. Act Three: Philippe. Yes, you could argue that she did write, I don’t think I could bear to move away from my little house where everything speaks to me of love. As George Sand might have written. But don’t forget she went on, I live here exactly as my mother did in her house. The difference is that she has been kept all her life. By one man – my father. She always loved him and never had choice. She could not leave his estate because if she did she could have earned her living only as a brothel-keeper (like her mother and her grandmother, or so she hinted). Or as an ordinary prostitute, or perhaps as a housekeeper. What were her accomplishments? She could cook. She could dress. She knew about plants and herbs. Presumably she knew about love but we never discussed love, that is, the making of it, because she destined me to be a young lady and she didn’t want to raise thoughts in my mind about her, about what she is really like (and that is in itself so touching it could almost break my heart, because how else could I have defined myself, what I am, if not by understanding her?). But I am very much afraid, if we sat alone and talked like women, I would hear her say, I live here in this house because everything in it and near it reminds me of love. And included in this love would be memories of shadows of great trees on her walls, and in the mirror of her sitting room and on the ceilings of her bedroom, and the damp, the everlasting humidity, and the heavy smell of flowers and of wet vegetation, and a smell something like the wet fur of animals that filled the house when it rained. But the fact is, my mother could not have left her house and her life even if she wanted to, but I can leave here at any time.

  ‘Where in all this do we see the victim?’

  It was not that she was afraid of any financial consequences of refusing his play, because he had written, ‘I am sure it goes without saying that my support for the play will not be in any way affected if you all decide my little attempt is not good enough.’

  He was already at a table in a restaurant she was relieved to find was not one of the currently fashionable ones. A large, rather dark, old-fashioned room, and quiet. He was at first glance a country gentleman. As she advanced towards him she reflected that it was surely remarkable that when she returned to the office and answered Mary Ford’s query, ‘What’s he like?’ with ‘He’s a country gentleman, old style’ – then Mary would at once know what she meant. Her parents, or Mary Ford’s, her grandparents or Mary’s, would not at once be able to ‘place’ many people in today’s Britain, but they would know Stephen Ellington-Smith at a glance. He was a man of about fifty, large but not fat. He was big-framed and, authoritatively but casually, seemed to take up a lot of space. His face was blond and open: green-eyed, sandy-lashed; and his hair, once fair, was greying. His clothes were as you’d expect: but Sarah found herself automatically making notes for the next time they needed to fit out such a character in a play. Their essence, she decided, was that they would be unnoticeable if he was stalking a deer. His mildly checked brownish-yellow jacket was like a zebra’s coat in that it was designed to merge.

  He watched her come towards him, rose, pulled out a chair. His inspection, she knew, was acute, but not defensive. She felt he liked her, but then, people on the whole tended to.

  ‘There you are,’ said he. ‘I must say you are a relief. I don’t know quite what I expected, though.’ Then, before they had even settled themselves, he said, ‘I really do have to make it clear that I’m not going to mind if you people have decided against my play. I’m not a playwright. It was a labour of love.’

  He was saying this as one does to clear the ground before another – the real problem is faced. And she was thinking of a conversation in the office. Mary had remarked, ‘All the same, it’s a funny business. He’s been involved with Julie Vairon for a good ten years one way or another. What’s in it for him?’ Quite so. Why should this man, ‘A regular amateur of the arts, old style, you know’ – so he had been described by the Arts Council official who had suggested approaching him as a patron – have been involved with that problematical Frenchwoman for a decade or more? The reason was almost certainly the irrational and quirky thing that is so often the real force behind people and events, and often not mentioned, or even noticed. This was what Mary Ford had been hinting at. More than hinting. She had said, ‘If we’re going to have problems with him, let’s have them out in the open right from the beginning.’ ‘What sort of problems do you expect?’ Sarah had asked, for she respected Mary’s intuition. ‘I don’t know.’ Then she sang, to the tune of ‘Who Is Sylvia’, ‘Who is Julie, what is she…’

  They began by talking practicalities. There was the difficulty that began Julie Vairon’s career. The play was to have gone on in London at The Green Bird, one of three planned for the summer season. By chance, Jean-Pierre le Brun, an official from Belles Rivières, heard from the Rostand family, which had been very co-operative, that a play was imminent, and he flew to London to protest. How was it that Belles Rivières had not been consulted? The truth was, the Founding Four had not thought of it, but that was because they had not seen the piece as ambitious enough to involve the French. Besides, Belles Rivières did not have a theatre. And, as well, Julie Vairon was in English. Jean-Pierre had accepted that the English had been quicker to see the possibilities of Julie, and no one wanted to deny them that honour. There was no question of taking Julie Vairon away from The Green Bird. That was hardly possible, at this stage. But he was genuinely and bitterly hurt that Belles Rivières had been excluded. What was to be done? Very well, the Eng
lish version could be used for a run in France. Yes, unfortunately it had to be admitted that if tourists were attracted, then they would be more likely to speak English than French. And besides, so many of the English themselves were settled in the area…he shrugged, leaving them to decide what he thought of this state of affairs.