‘If you want me to be.’
‘Lazing on a sunny afternoon,’ he sang to her. Then he pushed the plugs back into his ears and walked or, rather, ran off back towards Julie’s house.
She went to the edge of the pool below the falls. The whirlpool, in fact. Here Julie must have stood, looking down at the dangerous waters, and then she jumped. Not much of a jump, perhaps six feet. The stony bottom of the pool could be glimpsed through eddies. She could easily have landed on her feet, then fallen forward, perhaps onto that rock, a smooth round one, and allowed herself to be sucked past the rock to the deeper pool. Allowed herself? She could swim, she said, like an otter.
Sarah felt she should turn her head, and did so. There was Stephen, staring at her from where he stood by the bench a few feet away. She went to the bench and sat down. He sat beside her.
‘We are all up early,’ she remarked.
‘I haven’t been to bed. I suppose I look it.’ His clothes were crumpled, he smelled stale, and he wore his tragic mask. Again Sarah thought, I’ve never, never in my life felt anything like this—this is the grief you see on the faces of survivors of catastrophes, staring back at you from the television screens. ‘I went walking with Molly last night,’ he said. ‘She very kindly agreed to come walking with me. We walked along some road or other. It was pretty dark under the trees.’
She could imagine it. A dark road. He could hardly see the girl who walked beside him under the trees. There had been that niggardly little moon. They had walked from one patch of dim light to another. Molly had been wearing a white cotton skirt and a tight white T-shirt. Patterns in black and white.
Sarah watched the racing water, for she could not bear to look at his face.
‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? I mean, what happens to one’s pride. She kissed me. Well, I kissed her.’ He waited. Then, ‘Thanks for not saying it, Sarah.’ Now she did cautiously turn her head. Tears ran down cheeks dragging with grief. ‘I don’t understand any of it. What can you say about a man of fifty who knows that nothing more magical ever happened to him than a kiss in the dark with…?’
Sarah suppressed, At least you had a kiss. At that moment anything she felt seemed a selfish impertinence.
‘I’ve missed out on all that,’ she heard, but faintly. A breeze off the water was blowing his words away. ‘I’ve had a dry life. I didn’t know it until…Of course I’ve been in love. I don’t mean that.’ The wind, changing again, flung his words at her: ‘What does it mean, saying that to hold one girl in your arms makes everything that ever happened to you dust and ashes?’
‘Julie said something of the sort. About Rémy.’ A silence, filled with the sound of water. For the second time that morning, she said, ‘To drown herself must have taken some strength of mind.’
‘Yes. If I’d been there…’
‘You, or Rémy?’
‘You don’t understand. I am Rémy. I understand everything about him.’
‘Were you a younger brother? I mean you, Stephen.’
‘I have two older brothers. Not four, like Rémy. I don’t know how important that is. What’s important is…well, what could I have said to her to stop her killing herself?’
‘Will you marry me?’ suggested Sarah.
‘Ah, you don’t understand. That is the impossibility. He couldn’t marry her. Not with all that pressure. Don’t forget, he was French. It is a thousand times worse for the French than for us. The French have this family thing. We have it, but nothing like as bad. We can marry chorus girls and models—and a jolly good thing too. Good for the gene pool. But have you ever seen an aristocratic French family close ranks? And it was a hundred years ago. No, it was all inevitable. It was impossible for Rémy not to fall in love with her. And until death. Because he would have loved her all his life.’
‘Yes,’ she shouted, since the wind had changed again.
‘But impossible to marry her.’
‘Funny how we don’t mention the glamorous lieutenant,’ said Sarah, thinking of Bill and of how ashamed she was.
‘But that was just…falling in love,’ he shouted. A silence. He said, ‘But with Rémy, it was life and death.’
He sat with his eyes shut. Tears seeped out under his lids. Depressed. But the word means a hundred different shades of sadness. There are different qualities of ‘depression’, as there are of love. A really depressed person, she knew, having seen the condition in a friend, was nothing like Stephen now. The depressed one could sit in the same position in a chair, or on the floor in a corner of a room, curled like a foetus for hours at a time. Depression was not tears. It was deadness, immobility. A black hole. At least, so it seemed to an onlooker. But Stephen was alive and suffering. He was grief-stricken. She cautiously examined him, now that she could, because he had his eyes shut, and thought suddenly that she ought to be afraid for herself. She, Sarah, had most unexpectedly stopped a bolt from the blue, an arrow from an invisible world: she had fallen in love when she thought she never could again. And so what was to stop her from being afflicted, as Stephen was—from coming to grief?
She took his hand, that sensible, useful, practical hand, and felt it tighten around hers. ‘Bless you, Sarah. I don’t know why you put up with me. I know I must seem…’ He got up, and so did she. ‘I think I ought to get some sleep.’
They walked to the edge of the dangerous pool and stood looking down. The water that spattered Sarah’s cheek was partly tears blown off Stephen’s.
‘She must have taken a pretty strong dose of something.’
‘That’s what Henry said.’
‘Did he? A good chap, Henry. Perhaps he’s in love with her too. The way I feel now, I can’t imagine why the whole world isn’t. That’s a sign of insanity in itself.’
The sun was burning down, though it was still early. Hot, quiet, and still. No wind. Sarah’s dress, so recently put on, needed changing, for it was soaked with spray and clung to her thighs. She shut her eyes as she was absorbed into a memory of a small hot damp body filled with craving.
‘Just as well we don’t remember our childhoods,’ she said.
‘What? Why did you say that?’
‘Let alone being a baby. My God, it’s as well we forget it all.’ Stephen was looking at her in a way he never had before. It was because he had not heard that voice from her—angry, and rough with emotion. He did not like it: if she was not careful he would stop liking her. Yet she felt on a slippery slope and did not know how to save herself. She was clenched up like a fist to stop herself crying. ‘I never cry,’ she announced, and jumped to her feet, and stood wiping tears off her cheeks with the backs of her hands. He slowly handed her a handkerchief, a real one, large, white, and well laundered—slowly because of his shock. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘but I do find Julie a bit of a strain. Not to anything like the extent you do, thank God.’ But she could hardly get these words out, and he slowly stood up and was examining her. She found it hard to sustain that look, the one that means a man has stepped back to examine a woman in the light of remembered other women, other situations. For the first time there was embarrassment between them, and it was deepening.
And now he said, in a voice she had never heard, ‘Don’t tell me you are in love with…’
She said, attempting lightness, ‘You mean the young jay? The pretty hero?’ On the verge of confessing, of saying, Yes, I am afraid so, his face stopped her. He was so disappointed in her—as well as being shocked, and he was certainly that. She could not bear it and decided to lie, even while she was crying out to herself, But you’ve never lied to him, this is awful, it’ll never be the same again, this friendship of ours. ‘No, no,’ she said, laughing and she hoped with conviction. ‘Come on, it’s not as bad as that.’
‘After all my confessions to you, the least you can do…’ But this was a far from friendly invitation.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but I’m not going to tell you.’ Lightly, almost flirtatiously, and as she spoke she could have burst out
weeping again instead. Never had she used this false flirtatious voice to him. He hated it, she could see.
At the same moment, they set off along the path to the house and the theatre space, now empty and waiting for the day’s rehearsals. Down they went, through the trees. He was covertly examining her, and she was miserable because of what she saw on his face. She began to make conversation, saying it was interesting that while Julie was doing her drawings and paintings here, not thirty miles away Cézanne was painting. Her work would have surprised no one in the last four hundred years, but Cézanne’s was so revolutionary that many of the critics of the time could see nothing in it.
She hoped he would join in, save them both from this quite terrible embarrassment, and he did, but his voice was harsh when he said, ‘I hope you aren’t suggesting it is a criticism of Julie’s work that Dürer wouldn’t have been surprised at it.’
This conversation, like so many, was only apparently about what its surface suggested.
‘Unless he would have been surprised at a woman doing it.’
He gave a snort—and it was contemptuous. ‘Now you’re changing ground.’
‘I suppose so’—and her voice was a plea. ‘But I wasn’t thinking of it as a criticism, actually.’ He did not speak. ‘But if Julie had seen Cézanne’s work, do you think she’d have liked it?’
A much too long pause. He said grudgingly, ‘How do we know she didn’t? They were always out and about, both of them.’
‘Thirty miles is nothing now. Then it was enough to make sure they’d never meet.’
They walked, much too fast for that warm morning, down the dusty track, the cicadas already at full shrill. She could not remember ever wanting a time of being with Stephen to end, but now she did. She was thinking, critically of herself, It’s all right when I watch Stephen, to see how he is feeling, but I don’t like it when he watches me as he is doing now.
‘Do you suppose Cézanne would have liked her music?’ she asked quickly.
‘He would have loathed it,’ he said, and his voice was like a judge delivering a sentence.
‘Does that mean you loathe it, in your heart of hearts?’
‘Sometimes I do.’
‘I can’t endure this non-life. I can’t endure this desert,’ she quoted, clumsy, for she had not meant to say anything of the sort.
And now there was a pretty long silence. Stephen was asking himself if he could forgive her. He did so, with ‘Now I think I’ve never not lived in a desert.’
She was unable to prevent herself from blurting out, spoiling everything again, ‘Recently I’ve been thinking I was living in a desert for years.’
And, again, he was uncomfortable, and did not want to have to be with this emotional and (so he felt it) demanding Sarah. ‘So you aren’t in a desert now,’ he enquired, wanting a real answer.
Sarah walked faster. She knew that the conversation had slipped finally into the wrong gear, but tried to sound humorous. ‘I think a lot of people live in a desert. At least, what they call in the atlases “Other Desert”. You know, there is sand desert, the real desert, the real thing, like the Empty Quarter, and “Other Desert”. One is an absolute. But “other desert”—there are degrees of that.’
And now he did not say anything. They were walking as fast as they could, but there was a good twenty minutes of this discomfort before they reached the town square. There Stephen left her, without more than a nod and a strained smile, and he almost ran towards the hotel, where he disappeared, with a look of relief and, too, an almost furtive little movement of his buttocks, which suddenly announced to Sarah: Oh no, he thinks I am in love with him. For there is no woman in the world who has not seen, at some moment or other, a man escaping with precisely that secret little look of relief. This struck her as a complete calamity, the worst. What could she do? She was thinking, This friendship is a thousand times more precious to me than being in love, or the pretty hero. I can’t bear it. And now it’s all spoiled. Until this morning everything between us had been open, simple, honest. And now…
In the midst of this distress a thought that made it worse attacked her: A few weeks ago—but it seemed months, even years ago—she could have said anything to Stephen, and did. In those truly halcyon days before her first visit to his house, she might have remarked, laughing, ‘I’ve fallen in love with a pretty boy—now, what do you have to say about that!’ ‘Oh, come off it, Stephen, I’m not in love with you, don’t be silly.’ But now…they had both of them made a long step down and away from their best.
The pavement outside the café was crowded. Sarah did not want to talk to anyone. But Bill was sitting with a sleek, brown, plump man, obviously American, and he was smiling and waving. She was about to smile and walk past, but he called to her in a casually proprietary way, as he would have done to his mother, ‘Sarah, where did you get to?’ And he said to his companion, ‘She’s one of my greatest friends. She’s a really fun person.’
Sarah kept a smile on her face and allowed herself to rest on the very edge of a chair. She directed this smile at a man whose every surface glistened with satisfaction. He was Jack, who, Bill said, had directed the last play Bill had been in. Bill offered the morsel to Sarah as he might have done a box of chocolates. But he was uneasy too, for he knew he had struck a wrong note. Because of this, Sarah felt sorry for him: an extraordinary mix of emotions, extravagant, ridiculous emotions; and she was passionately disliking this Jack. As if it mattered whether she liked him or not.
‘I’m on a trip around the south of France. I saw Bill last night in Marseilles. He talked me into it, and—voilà!’ said Jack, taking possession of France with a word.
Then it must have been very late—as the thought invaded her like a tidal wave, jealousy carved her spine. Bill was still here last night after midnight, so if he drove to Marseilles—he and who?—that must mean…now, stop it, Sarah.
Bill knew she was jealous: his eyes told her so, and, too, that he was relieved because, having lost her because of his over-familiarity, he was taking possession of her again. He was back on balance but she was not. She was thinking: Stephen, what am I to do? I cannot lose Stephen.
She got off the edge of her chair and said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to meet someone.’ And with a smile at Jack she hoped was adequate, and ignoring Bill (at which she saw his face fall), she walked briskly into the hotel. She was having to peer through tears. What she saw was Henry, on his way out. Luckily the light was behind her.
‘You’ll be there after lunch?’ A question, yes, but it was more of a command.
‘This is a very strange role, mine,’ said Sarah.
‘True. Not in the contract, I know. But essential. Please?’
Determined not to sleep but to think of some way of putting things right with Stephen, she was walking around her room, or rather barging and banging around it, not seeing what she was doing. She was thinking, I couldn’t have told him, ‘Yes, I am in love with the pretty hero.’ It’s unforgivable. And yet old women by the thousand—probably by the million—are in love and keep quiet about it. They have to. Good Lord, just imagine it: for instance, an old people’s home full of senior citizens, or, as they charmingly put it, wrinklies, and half of them are secretly crazy for the young jay who drives the ambulance or the pretty girl cook. A secret hell, populated with the ghosts of lost loves, former personalities…meanwhile the other half are making sniffy jokes and exchanging snide looks. Unless they succumb too.
It was no good. She crashed into sleep, and woke in tears.
A taxi took her to the sane atmosphere of people working, for she did not want to walk in that heat.
She sat under a tree. Henry came over, and Julie’s late music, high and cool, shot arrows straight into their hearts.
‘God,’ he muttered, his eyes full of tears, ‘that’s so beautiful.’
She said, her eyes wet, ‘Funny how we subject ourselves to music. We never ask what effect it might be having.’
He was in
that position a runner uses before a race, half squatting, the knuckles of his left hand resting among fallen leaves, to steady him. His eyes were on her face. One might call them speaking eyes.
‘You’re talking to a man who has been listening to pop music most hours of the day since he was twelve.’
‘And you’re going to say, It hasn’t done me any harm?’
‘How do we know if it is doing us harm or not?’
‘I think it might be making us over-emotional.’
‘Well, you could say that. Yes.’ With that, up he sprang, and said, ‘Thank you for coming. Never think I don’t appreciate it.’ And off he went.
Then they rehearsed the early music which was far from cool and detached, and went back to the late music, both accompanied by the steady drilling of cicadas. Hearing Julie’s music like this, disjointed, not in its development, with the reassurance of a progression, it unsettled, it even wounded, as if the singers had decided to be deliberately cynical. At the end they rehearsed the song
You did not hear me when I told you I will not live
After you leave me,
When you leave me you will take my life…
The note curved up on life, a bent note, as in a blues. An interesting question, surely: in Indian music, Arab music—Eastern music—you could say that all notes are ‘bent’, a ‘straight’ note is the rare one. But in our music, one ‘bent’ note can be like a hand in your heart strings.
The rehearsal ended. The four singers stood together under their tree, while the musicians covered their instruments. For a few moments, the group kept about them the atmosphere of the music, as if they stood in the hollow bluish-gold penumbra of a candle flame, the girls in their loose summer dresses, the young men’s blue jeans transformed by association and sound into the cerulean of the robes in medieval religious paintings. But when they left the trees and came through sunlight making loud remarks about showers and cold drinks, they became people in a street or at a bus stop. A limousine waited for them. The driver was a young man with whom they had achieved the agreeable intimacy of the theatre. He laid a strong brown arm along the back of the driver’s seat and twisted around to smile at the girls as they piled in. ‘Mademoiselle…mademoiselle…mademoiselle…,’ he said to each of the three singers, caressingly, as a Frenchman should, allowing tender eyes to say how much he appreciated them, and at once the gallantry-deprived Anglo-Saxon women, who are lucky to be told, by a man who is madly in love with them, You are looking fit, radiated pleasure like stroked cats, even while they could be observed reminding themselves and each other, with small regulated grimaces, that they must not allow themselves to be carried away by such insincerity. He murmured a gallant ‘Madame’ to Sarah, and then, feeling unable to supply individual salutations of the same standard to everybody, contented himself with a comradely nod to Henry and the countertenor, and flashed his white teeth all around. He reversed with a screech. ‘Voilà…allons-y…il fait chaud…très très chaud…,’ he positively crooned, reminding them he had sat waiting for at least half an hour in all that heat, the rehearsal having run overtime, not that he in any way begrudged them what was his duty, but. ‘Faut boire,’ he announced. ‘Immédiatement. Vite, vite.’ And the car shot, or waltzed, down the tricky road, hooting madly. They were in the square in ten minutes.