The Grandmothers

by Doris Lessing

  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 English 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.

  So it was decided. And what about the money? For The Green Bird could not finance the French run. No problem, cried Jean-Pierre; the town would provide the site, using Julie’s own little house in the woods – or what was left of it. But Belles Rivières did not have the resources to pay for the whole company for a run of two weeks. It was at this point that an American patron came in, to add his support. How had he heard of this, after all, pretty dicey proposition? Someone in the Arts Council had recommended it and this was because of Stephen’s reputation.

  At this point, mutual support and helpfulness was being expressed mostly in photographs back and forth, London to Belles Rivières, London to California, Belles Rivières to California. It turned out that there was already a Musée Julie Vairon in Belles Rivières. Her house was visited by pilgrims.

  Stephen was disturbed. ‘I wonder what she’d think of so many people in her forest. Her house.’

  ‘Didn’t we tell you we were going to use her house for the French run? Didn’t you see the promotional material?’

  ‘I suppose I hadn’t really taken it in.’ He seemed to be debating whether to trust her. ‘I even felt bad about writing that play – invading her privacy, you know.’ Then, as she found herself unable to reply to this, for it was a new note, and unexpected, he added abruptly, thrusting out his chin small-boy style, ‘You have understood, I am sure, that I am hopelessly in love with Julie?’ Then gave a helpless, painful grimace, flung himself back in his chair, pushed away his plate, and looked at her, awaiting a verdict.

  She attempted a quizzical look, but his gesture was impatient. ‘Yes, I am besotted with her. I have been since I first heard her music at that festival. In Belles Rivières, you know. She’s the woman for me. I knew that at once.’

  He was trying to sound whimsical but was failing.

  ‘I see,’ she said.

  ‘I hope you do. Because that’s the whole point.’

  ‘You aren’t expecting me to say anything boring, like, She’s been dead for over eighty years?’

  ‘You can say it if you like.’

  The silence that followed had to accommodate a good deal. It was not that his passion was ‘crazy’ – that portmanteau word, but that he was sitting there four-square and formidable, determined that she should not find it so. He waited, apparently at his ease because he had made his ultimatum, and he even glanced about at this familiar scene of other eaters, waiters, and so on, but she knew that here, at this very point, was what he was demanding in return for his very sizeable investment. She had to accept him, his need.

  After a time she heard herself remark, ‘You don’t like her journals very much, do you?’

  At this he let out a breath. It would have been a sigh if he had not been measuring it, checking it, even, for too much self-revelation. He shifted his legs abruptly. He looked away, as if he might very well get up and escape and then made himself face her again. She liked him very much then. She liked him more and more. It was because she felt at ease with him, absolutely able to say anything.

  ‘You’ve put your finger on…no, I don’t. No, when I read her journals I feel – shut out. She slams a door in my face. It’s not what I…’

  ‘What you are in love with?’

  ‘I don’t think I’d like that cold intelligence of hers directed at me.’

  ‘But when one is in love one’s intelligence does go on, doesn’t it? Commenting on –’

  ‘On what?’ he cut in. ‘No, if she’d been happy she’d never have written all that. All that was just…self-defence.’

  At this she had to laugh, because of the enormity of his dismissal of – as far as she was concerned – the most interesting aspect of Julie.

  ‘Oh all right, laugh,’ he said grumpily, but with a smile. She could see he did not mind her laughing. Perhaps he even liked it. There was something about him of a spreading, a relaxation, as if he had held a breath for too long and was at last able to let it go. ‘But you don’t understand, Sarah – I may call you Sarah? Those journals are such an accusation.’

  ‘But not of you.’
>
  ‘I wonder. Yes, I do, often. What would I have done? Perhaps she would have written of me as she did about Rémy. I represented to him everything he had ever dreamed about when he hoped to be larger than his family, but in the end he was not more than the sum of his family.’

  ‘And is that what she represents to you? An escape from your background?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said at once. ‘To me she represents – well, everything.’

  She could feel her whole self rejecting this mad exaggeration. Her body, even her face, was composing itself into critical lines, without any directing intention from her intelligence. She lowered her eyes. But he was watching her – yes, she already knew that close, intelligent look – and he knew what she was feeling, for he said, ‘Please don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said cautiously, ‘I have decided to forget it.’

  ‘Why?’ he enquired, not intending flattery. ‘You are a good-looking woman.’

  ‘I am a good-looking woman still,’ said she. ‘I am still a good-looking woman. Quite so. That’s it. I haven’t been in love for twenty years. Recently I’ve been thinking about that – twenty years.’ As she spoke she was amazed that she was saying to this stranger (but she knew he was not that) things she had never said to dear and good friends, her family – that is what they were – at the theatre. She put on the humour and maternal style that seemed more and more her style: ‘And what was it all about, I wonder now, all that…absurdity?’

  ‘Absurdity?’ And he let out that grunt of laughter that means isolation in the face of wilful misunderstanding.

  ‘All that anguish and lying awake at night,’ she insisted, forcing herself to remember that indeed she had done all that. (It occurred to her she had not even acknowledged, for years, that she had done all that.) ‘Thank God it can never happen to me again. I tell you, getting old has its compensations.’ Here she stopped. It was because of his acute examination of her. She felt at once that her voice had rung false. She was blushing – she felt hot, at any rate. He was, there was no doubt, a handsome man, or had been. He was a pretty good proposition even now. Twenty years ago perhaps…and here she smiled ironically at him, for she knew her hot cheeks were making confessions. She went on, however, actually thinking that if he could be so brave, then so could she. ‘What I think now is, I was in love too often.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the little inflammations.’

  Again she had to laugh. ‘Well, perhaps you are right.’ Right about what? – and she could see he was finding the phrase, as she did the moment it was out, a bromide, dishonest. ‘But why do we assume it always means the same thing to everyone – being in love? Perhaps “little inflammations” is accurate enough, for a lot of people. Sometimes when I see someone in love I think that a good screw would settle it.’ Here she took from him, as she had expected to, a surprised and even hard look at the ugly term, which she had used deliberately. Women who are ‘getting on’ often have to do this. One minute (so it feels) they are using the language of our time (ugly, crude, honest), and in the next, they have become, or feel they soon will if they don’t do something about it, ‘little old ladies’, because the younger generation have begun to censor their speech, as if to children. But, she thought, critical of herself, there is no need to take up stances with this man.

  He said, after a long pause, while he examined her, ‘You’ve simply decided to forget, that’s all it is.’

  She conceded, ‘Very well, then, I have. Perhaps I don’t want to remember. If a man had ever been everything to me – that’s what you said, everything…but I did have a very good marriage. But everything…let’s talk about your play, Stephen.’ And she deliberately (dishonestly) let this look as if she didn’t want to talk about her dead husband.

  ‘All right,’ he agreed, after a pause. ‘But it’s not important. I don’t really mind about it. Scrap it.’

  ‘Wait. I’m going to keep a good bit of it. The dialogue is good.’ This was not tact. His dialogue in parts was better than hers. Now she knew why. ‘Do you realize you have made Rémy the focus of everything? The real love? What about Paul? After all, she did run away to France with him.’

  ‘Rémy was the love of her life. She said so herself. It’s in her journals.’

  ‘But she didn’t get into her stride with the journals until after Paul ditched her. Suppose we had a day-by-day record of her feelings for Paul, as we have for Rémy?’ He definitely did not like this. ‘You identify with Rémy – and it is your own background. Minor aristocracy?’

  ‘Well, perhaps.’

  ‘And you’ve hardly mentioned the son of her worthy printer. Julie and Robert took one look at each other and, quote, If you have a talent for the impossible, then at least recognize it. After that, she killed herself. It seems to me the printer’s son could easily have been as important as Rémy.’

  ‘It seems to me you want to make her a kind of tart, falling in love with one man after another.’

  She couldn’t believe her ears. ‘How many women have you been in love with?’

  Obviously he couldn’t believe his. ‘I don’t really see the point of discussing the double standard.’

  They were looking at each other with dislike. There was nothing for it but to laugh.

  Then he insisted, ‘I have been in love, seriously, with one woman.’

  She waited for him to say ‘my wife’ – he was married – or someone else, but he meant Julie. She said, ‘It’s my turn to say that you have decided to forget. But that isn’t the point. At the risk of being boring, art is one thing and life another. You don’t seem to see the problem. In your version, her main occupation was being in love.’

  ‘Wasn’t being in love her main occupation?’

  ‘She was in love a lot of her time. It wasn’t her main occupation. But these days we cannot have a play about a woman ditched by two lovers who then commits suicide. We can’t have a romantic heroine.’

  Clearly she could not avoid this conversation: she reflected it was probably the tenth time in a month.

  ‘I don’t see why not. Girls are going through this kind of thing all the time. They always have.’

  ‘Look. Couldn’t we leave it to people who write theses? It’s an aesthetic question. I am simply telling you what I know. Out of theatre experience. After all, even the Victorians made a comic song out of “She Was Poor but She Was Honest”. But I think I know how to solve it.’ Her duplicity with him would be limited to not telling him she had solved it already. ‘We can leave the story exactly as you have it. But what will put the edge on it…there is something; I hope you are going to ask what.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said, and she could see that this was the moment when he finally gave up his play. With good grace. As one would expect from someone like him.

  ‘We will use what she thought about it all…’

  ‘Her journals!’

  ‘Partly. Her journals. But even more, her music. There are her songs, and a lot of her music lends itself – we can use words from the journals and fit them to the music. Her story will have a commentary – her own.’

  He thought about this an uncomfortably long time. ‘It is astonishing – it is really extraordinary – the way Julie is always being taken away from me.’ Here he looked embarrassed and said, ‘All right, I know that sounds mad.’

  She said, ‘Oh well, we are all mad,’ but, hearing her comfortable maternal voice, knew at once she was not going to be allowed to get away with it. Again she was finding his acute look hard to bear. ‘I do wonder what it is you are mad about,’ he remarked, with more than a flick of malice.

  ‘Ah, but I’ve reached those heights of common sense. You know, the evenly lit unproblematical uplands where there are no surprises.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  You could say their smiles at each other, companionable but satiric, marked a stage.

  The restaurant was emptying. They had come to the end of what t
hey had to say to each other, at least for now. Both were making the small movements that indicate a need to separate.

  ‘You don’t want to hear any more of my ideas for the play?’

  ‘No, I shall leave it to you.’

  ‘But your name will be on it, with mine, as co-authors.’

  ‘That would be more than generous.’

  They left the restaurant, slowly. At this very last moment, it seemed they did not want to part. They said goodbye and walked away from each other. Only then did they remember they had been together for nearly three hours, talking like intimates, had told each other things seldom said even to intimates. This idea stopped them both, and turned them around at the same moment on the pavement of St Martin’s Lane. They stood examining each other’s faces with curiosity, just as if they had not been sitting a few feet apart, for so long, talking. Their smiles confessed surprise, pleasure, and a certain disbelief, which latter emotion – or refusal of it – was confirmed when he shrugged and she made a spreading gesture with her hands which said, Well, it’s all too much for me! At which they actually laughed, at the way they echoed, or mirrored, each other. Then they turned and walked energetically away, he to his life, she to hers.

  In the office, Sarah found Mary Ford making a collage of photographs for publicity, while Sonia stood over her, hands on her hips, in fact learning, but making it look as if she was casually interested.

  Sarah told Mary that Stephen Ellington-Smith was a country gentleman, old style. That he was too magnanimous to be petty about his play. That he was, in fact, a poppet. Mary said, ‘Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ Sonia took in this exchange with her little air of detachment.

  Sarah sat with her back to the two young women, pretending to work, listening…no, one young woman and a middle-aged one: she had to accept that about Mary, even if it did hurt. They had all become so used to each other…Sonia was there in that office – not strictly her territory – not only to learn but to stake a claim. She wanted to be made responsible for the next production, Hedda Gabler. ‘You people will be busy with your Julie,’ she said. There was no need for the two senior officials to confer: they knew what each other thought. And why not? They were not likely to find anyone sharper, cleverer – and more ambitious – than Sonia. ‘Why not?’ said Mary, and without turning around, Sarah said, ‘Why not?’ In this way confirming Sonia’s position, and a much larger salary. Sonia left. ‘Why not?’ said Mary again, quietly, and Sarah turned herself about and smiled confirmation of Mary’s real message, which was that there really was no doubt of it – an epoch was indeed over.