‘No, it’s not our American sponsor.’
Mary Ford went off down the stairs, that solid young woman like a milkmaid in jeans—her joke. Sandy asked to use the bathroom. Molly went to the door, with Bill just behind her. Sarah, returning from showing Sandy to the bathroom, saw that Bill, unable to resist the waves of longing from Molly, had bestowed himself in an embrace. Molly was dissolved in it, eyes closed. Over Molly’s head Bill saw Sarah. He put Molly away from him; she went blindly off. Bill came to Sarah, slid his hand down her back, and kissed her. On the mouth. Nothing at all brotherly about this kiss. He breathed in her ear, ‘See you, Sarah,’ and slid a hot cheek against hers. Sandy could be heard coming from the bathroom, and before he appeared, Bill had quickly stepped back from the embrace and was going out. Sarah watched the two young men depart down the stairs.
She returned to her bedroom and sat on the edge of her bed and listened to Stephen. He was talking in broken sentences. ‘What is this all about, Sarah? What is it? I don’t understand. If only I could understand it…’ He was on the other end of that line for perhaps half an hour. Silences. She could hear him breathe, long, sighing, almost sobbing breaths. Once she thought he had put down the telephone, but when she said, ‘Stephen?’ he said, ‘Don’t go, Sarah.’
Later he said, ‘I suppose I must go and help Elizabeth. I said I would. She does need me, you know. Sometimes I think I’m just an irrelevance, but then I see she relies on me. That’s something, I suppose.’ Then, ‘Sarah?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘And I rely on you. I can’t imagine what you’re thinking. I feel as if something has come up from the depths and grabbed me by the ankle.’
‘I understand, absolutely.’
‘You do?’ He was disquieted: solid and equable Sarah, that was her role.
Act Two ended with Julie’s miscarriage of Rémy’s baby, theatrically so much easier than the death of a small child, which, they knew, would have taken the play over, have had the audience awash with tears. Besides, a child was always a nuisance at rehearsals, and if they took her to France she would need minders and nannies. Interesting, how much discussion went on about this. Some found the decision cynical. Henry particularly did. He said, ‘It’s much easier to believe that this child didn’t mean all that much to her, oh no, it was just one of those things, she was pregnant and then she had a miscarriage, too bad.’ Henry had a small son, carried photographs of his family, American-style, showed them to everybody and rang his wife every night. Andrew Stead certainly didn’t like it. He protested that his child had been callously disposed of. In life, he pointed out, Rémy had gone to the house in the forest to play with the child, had begged the family to see that the child was a reason for marriage. Then Bill reminded them that Julie had had a real miscarriage, of his child. Everyone forgot that, he complained. He was sure Paul minded about that miscarriage. Julie had said he did. The journals were consulted. Everyone was reading them. Sarah took her stand on what would ‘work’. The point was the effect on the townspeople. They said that Julie had killed her child. But in the play they say Julie induced a miscarriage by swimming in the forest pool’s icy water. The essential thing was that she must be blamed for the loss of the child. ‘And we can’t have two miscarriages—two deaths.’ Attempting an echo, from Oscar Wilde, she said, ‘To lose one child is sad, to lose two simply careless.’ She noted that the Americans did not laugh but the English did. The English in this context included Bill Collins. Sandy and Bill broke, on a single inspiration, into a recital of ‘Ruthless Rhymes’, an exuberant performance.
When baby’s cries grew hard to bear
I popped him in the Frigidaire.
I never would have done so if
I’d known that he’d be frozen stiff.
My wife said: ‘George, I’m so unhappé!
Our darling’s now completely frappé!’
sang Bill.
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven’t the heart to poke poor Billy.
sang and danced Sandy, Bill joining in. The Americans seemed mildly shocked. Henry was even reproachful. Andrew’s face indicated that he was well accustomed to adjusting himself to different degrees of culture clash. Sarah, Mary Ford, Sonia, Roy Strether, George White, all, as one says—accurately in this case—fell about. They needed to clown and laugh because of Julie’s infant, disposed of heartlessly for theatrical reasons.
Who laughs at what is a far from simple business. All the younger people were in an uproar of laughter, both at the theatre and at rehearsals, because Roger Stent had sent a letter to Sonia: ‘I hope you are proud of yourself. Those witty little knives of yours cut my fingers and I had to have two stitches.’ Sonia had sent him two red roses with a card saying merely ‘Diddums’. Sarah found herself a bit shocked. Mary confessed she was too. ‘I am beginning to wonder,’ remarked Mary, ‘if I’m really in tune with the times.’
Act Three began with Julie alone in her little house, seeing nobody except when she went to the printing firm where she took her drawings and pictures to be sold, or returned the music she had finished copying. This was the trickiest part of the play, for nothing much happened for several minutes, and it was where the music came in most usefully.
Julie believed she was visited by inspiration: the music was ‘given’ to her: but from a very different source than the ‘first period’ music.
This gift…whose hand brings it, whose mouth sings it? I wake at night and hear voices in the trees, but they are not angels of God, I am sure of that. God’s angels would never come to me, because they do not condone despair. According to the old ideas what I feel is a sin. This forest is full of presences from the past. Once the troubadours walked here on their way from one castle or defended hill town to another. They sang of love, and of God, for no matter how sad they were, they never forgot God. The music I am hearing now surely cannot be theirs. But perhaps it is, for where God is, the devil is too. The ideas I am writing now are not mine, not Julie Vairon’s, for I am a newcomer in the forest, we are all brand new these days, with ideas that have dispensed with God and the devil. If I went back to Martinique I would find in the forest what I felt as a girl—the devil Vaval. But the devil there is different, he’s primitive and full of tricks. I was never afraid of those presences, because my mother knew how to keep them quiet. Besides, in my mind I was already in Europe, I did not belong to them. I knew I would come here one day. I don’t think the music I used to write would be strange to anyone in the world—everyone’s heart breaks for love at some time in their lives. No, this new music that comes into my mind now is like draughts of sweet poison, but I have to drink it. I feel it running in my veins like a cold fever. At such times I cannot lift my head from my pillow and my hands and feet are lead. Perhaps it is my little girl who sings these songs to me? She was not allowed to live. She has taken her unlived life with her somewhere. Where? But we do not believe in hell, or purgatory or heaven. Why is it so easy for us not to believe in all the things people so recently believed—that they believed for thousands of years? All those books in my father’s library…no, I shall not call him my father, for he did not acknowledge me, or say I was his daughter in front of the world. He gave me presents and paid for tutors. I had a mother and no father.
My mother said to me, I come from a long line of unmarried mothers, and I don’t want you to be the same. (It was her idea of a joke. I refused to laugh then but I do now.) But I am the same, and my little girl too, if she hadn’t died. But perhaps in her lifetime things would have changed and the choice would not be between a safe husband and being an outcast or eccentric. (Stendhal’s advice to his sister Pauline.) In Paris or any big city I’d be thought a bit eccentric, a sort of vagabond, and find a place in the theatre and with artists. Why am I writing like this? I don’t want anything else. I am happy with my little house among the trees
and the rocks, with the waterfall and the wind singing my music to me. But this excerpt was from after she had regained an equilibrium.
For months—no, more, years, at least two years, for it is hard to mark the point where the tone of her journals changed, Julie raved. She was rather mad. This was when they sent her Rémy off to the Ivory Coast as a soldier and her child had died. She was knocked clean off balance: All our balances are so precarious, a touch can do it, send us spinning, and down we go, into the whirlpool. Sometimes her pages are so scrambled and scratched only odd phrases are readable. The devil…the devil…who is the devil, if he has such sweet music? She scrawled variations of this phrase over many pages: these were clearly verbal equivalents of the music itself.
The name Rémy filled pages. Rémy, Rémy, Rémy, she wrote, blotching pages with tears. The pages she wrote about Paul are dry and her tone ironical. But she wrote retrospectively about Paul: thus do we make safe stories about the raw pain of the past. Not all the comments are self-mocking. When I think of Paul, she wrote, and this was before she loved Rémy and was still full of pain because Paul had gone, I feel a smile on my face. I hold the smile and go to the little mirror. I see an angry and even vicious curl to my lips. I don’t know myself in that smile. I remember Maman gave me a doll. It came from the ‘big house’—that is, my so-called father brought it from Paris. She was beautiful. She had long fair ringlets and blue eyes. She wore a dress like those after the Revolution when the rich people returned to Paris and fashions mocked the guillotine. She had a bright red ribbon around her neck. It was an expensive doll. I broke the doll and buried it. Maman said, What are you doing? I said, I have killed Marie. Maman gave me one of her looks. I can sometimes feel that look on my face. She was not angry. She wanted to understand. She watched me put a little cross on the grave. Then I put a gift of bananas and wine by the cross for the forest spirits and Vaval. I did not know then how in parts of the world the old spirits, and even devils, have become part of Christianity. I said to Maman, ‘I didn’t kill Marie, Vaval killed her.’ Maman didn’t say anything. She was smiling. That is the smile I have on my face when I think of Paul. But it was he who killed me. I believed I would die when they sent him away. I looked at him in his uniform when he came to say goodbye to me. He was crying and so was I. But I thought, When you are killed there will be blood on that beautiful tunic of yours. But he hasn’t been killed. He is having a distinguished career in the army in Indo-China. His father told me when he came to find out how I was getting on. He is a fine man, Paul’s father. He told me he himself had to give up the girl he loved, because his parents made him. I asked if he thought parents were compelled to make sure their children suffer as they had themselves. He said, ‘I am sorry; believe me, I’m sorry.’ He had tears in his eyes. Such tears come cheap.
In the period when Julie was off balance, the music she wrote sounded, as the Russians put it, like cats scratching the heart. And then she recovered, and wrote about God and the Devil like a true daughter of the Enlightenment. And yet she did believe that she heard voices in the river sounds and in the wind. No one calls people crazy who enjoy conjuring up faces in the fire.
Theatrically there was a difficulty, condensing the ‘scratching’ music coming between the ‘troubadour’ music and the ‘second-period’ music so that it was merely suggested. But was it honest to compress the period of rage and despair into a few bars, when she herself said it was the worst thing that ever happened to her? But art has to be a cheat and a sleight of hand, we all know that. Using time as a measure, it was honest, for there were years to come before the friendship with Philippe and his sensible proposal for her future, the years when she wrote the music that was all pure cool sound, and painted her charming pictures. There was another difficulty too. After all, the Master Printer had a son Robert, met just once but with such a potential for reviving everything she had renounced. In the play he was not mentioned at all. There was too much of everything: too many ragged ends, false starts, possibilities rejected—too much life, in short, so it all had to be tidied up. Julie’s journal, where she imagined her married life with Philippe, which would suffocate her, was not in the play. Instead her rejection of him was in a song: Good man, you are not for me, good man, you don’t know who sings to me at night among the rocks…These words were in her journals.
Act Three, then, was the Master Printer’s Act. It will be seen that the shape of this play had after all turned out to be Act One: Paul. Act Two: Rémy. Act Three: Philippe.
During Act Three, Bill Collins and Andrew Stead, Julie’s two former lovers, sat about on the edge of the action, watching. Sometimes they sat on either side of Sarah, and then she was divided. With only Bill there, she allowed herself to submerge in a bath of warm sympathy, not to mention anything else, while Andrew seemed cool and ungiving. But sitting with Andrew, when Bill was not there, seeing Bill through his eyes, then the young man was certainly too much of a good thing, and Sarah felt uneasy. ‘Pretty baby’—she had found the words of the song on her tongue when she woke, not once but several times. It never does to ignore these messages from the depths. Nor the ‘snapshots’—when people you love and have become used to are seen as if for the first time.
Seeing one another in frames or poses was certainly a feature of that week. Mary was taking pictures of Act Three: she had already taken everything possible of Acts One and Two. The cast was photographed together and separately, inside the building and out of it, in restaurants and by the canal. Hundreds, thousands of photographs. Perhaps thirty or forty of them would be used. The prodigality, the waste, was taken for granted.
A difficulty was that neither Andrew Stead nor Richard Service photographed as well as Bill, who dominated every picture he was in. Mary took pictures where she ‘phased Bill out,’ as she put it. ‘Go on, tone yourself down,’ she said to him, and he went red and lost composure, as he so often did.
‘Photogenic,’ sighed Molly, and Mary echoed, ‘The camera loves him.’ ‘The camera can’t help loving him,’ said Molly. And Mary, ‘It can’t help loving that man.’
Sarah saw the two women clowning and singing, ‘Mad About the Boy’—not caring that Bill had just come into the hall and must see them: he was certainly not stupid. Watching the young women was Sandy Grears, grinning. Every line of his body shouted that he had to stop himself from joining in. Bill hesitated, then stepped lightly across to become part of ‘Mad About the Boy’. This enabled Sandy to become a fourth. There was a wild flinging about of limbs and hair, most inappropriate for the drawling syllables of ‘Mad About the Boy’.
Bill came fast across the hall to where Sarah was sedately in her chair, and dropped into Stephen’s, with a direct laughing look that had nothing to do with the dear little boy who sent pretty Bambi cards but was the satirical dancing and singing he had just been involved with, was the swift slither of a brutally cynical caress.
She was raging with desire. (Rage: a good word, like burn.) But why describe it, since there is no one who has not felt the mix of anguish, incredulity, and—at the height of the illness—a sick sweet submersion in pain because it is inconceivable that anything so terribly desired cannot be given, and if you relinquish the pain, then the hope of bliss is abandoned too.
Sarah could not remember suffering as she did now. Yet she knew she had, for the ‘snapshots’ from her childhood told her so. She could not match this particular degree of being in love with anything in her adult life, only with childhood loves. After the little boy who had been tempted not by her but by the tree house, she had been in love a good part of the time with one boy after another. Adolescent, she fantasized kisses: she could not believe that this happiness would be hers soon, ‘when she was grown up’. (This was the euphemism everyone used then for ‘when you have breasts.’) The point was, no matter how wonderful, apt, satisfying, kisses had been when she was grown up, none had had the magic ascribed to them in her imagination when too young for kisses. And so, now, ‘If you kissed me, it would
be my first time ever…,’ said Sarah to herself. Satirically: and told herself that if she could still laugh she must be all right. Poor Stephen could not laugh. The Green Bird was laughing its head off, and so was the company rehearsing Julie Vairon. Roger Stent had sent Sonia a fax: ‘I take it you are not going to bar me from Hedda Gabler? If you do I’ll make sure everyone knows your theatre bars critics on the strength of one bad review.’
Sonia to Roger Stent: ‘You’ve never written a good review, or even a halfhearted one, in your life. You don’t like the theatre. You know nothing about it. Get something into your little head: The Green Bird doesn’t need you or New Talents. Fuck off.’
The rehearsals in the fourth week were run-throughs of the whole play, but still without musicians, who would arrive on the Friday.
In this last week something new happened. The main characters—Julie and her mother, Sylvie, the three lovers and the two fathers—were not starkly set in scene after scene showing confrontations, mostly two by two, but were absorbed into a setting of minor characters who, hardly noticed during the first weeks of rehearsals, now showed how much they determined destinies. As in life. In Madame Sylvie Vairon’s house had been many young officers, suggested here by one, George White. In the programme notes—already with them in draft—it was said that the two women every evening entertained a crowd of young officers. This gave George White an importance that showed in how he carried himself and in an exaggeration of his attitude towards the two women, for the correct young officer did not approve of Paul’s romantic love. Later there was not only Paul’s father to contend with (George White again) but his mother, who, though never an actual presence, was always just offstage, a rock of rectitude and disapproval. When it came to Act Two, there was Rémy’s mother (she spoke precisely two words, No—twice), Rémy’s father (Oscar Friend, who, however forceful he was onstage, in life was a shy man, usually in a corner with a book), and also Rémy’s brother, George White. In life there were four brothers, all older than Rémy, and very likely it was that weight of seniority crushing him down that made loving Julie essential to him. Theatre economics dictated one brother. This meant that Rémy’s love seemed less determined by Destiny (the family) than in life, more of a romantic choice (the puppet strings invisible), though since George White had read the journals and knew about the four brothers, he did try to suggest forceful sibling pressure. In Philippe’s establishment there had been twenty or so printers, apprentices, and sales people, and it was not possible that their various reactions did not affect Julie. The interior of the print shop was only mentioned in the programme notes. Philippe and Julie conducted their courtship in the public square (a park bench). Once only was the attitude of Philippe’s employees shown, and that was when his manager (George White) came with a message from the shop, which enabled his frigid attitude to Julie, and her correct politeness to him, to suggest all the rest.