It was from this level in her that she could respond to the equivocal Bill. One knows what a man is like from the images and fantasies he evokes. This level, this ‘somewhere’, was to do (she thought) with babyhood. Earlier than childhood. Again and again during this sojourn in Julie’s country, in sleep or in half-sleep she had seen that proud beautiful young head, its slow turn, the mocking smile that was androgynous and perverse, with a slow dissolve to the other sex, young woman to young man, young man to girl, young boy to girl-child, small girl to baby boy. Somewhere, somewhere back there, probably before the small girl sat stabbing the doll with scissors, there was something…So Sarah talked to herself, half aloud, sitting at the window where the streaming rain made the room dark, so that she could see only the black mass of the bed. I’m afraid. I am right to be afraid, though I don’t know what I am afraid of. I know something terrible waits there…passing the stages of my age and youth, entering the whirlpool, yes, the whirlpool, that is what waits, and I know it.
Sarah’s flat was full of sunlight and flowers sent by Benjamin, now in Scotland, and from Stephen, thanking her for putting up with him. There was also the single passionate red rose of tradition from ‘Guess who?’ She put this in a glass beside Stephen’s flowers and Benjamin’s, grateful she had not confessed her state to Stephen, because otherwise by now she would be thanking him for putting up with her. She knew that one word along the confessional path would have her weeping bitterly. Oh no, a stiff upper lip was much to be recommended. She did not feel herself appropriately surrounded by all this sunny cheerfulness.
She sat herself down to get her diary up to date, for in France she had neglected it, but after a couple of hours of restless attempts at attention, found she had written only:
Just imagine, I was joking that I could never fall in love again. Now I feel I should have been making signs to ward off some listening little devil, or a spiteful ghost.
And trying again later rewarded her only with:
Stupid dreams. All longing and wanting.
She went to the theatre, where she found Sonia, vibrant with success and so busy she could hardly find half an hour to spend with Sarah in the office. Where was Patrick? Sonia replied that he was off on some new plan—he’d tell Sarah himself. She sounded a mite embarrassed, hardly Sonia’s style. ‘But he shouldn’t have gone off,’ said Sarah. ‘Not with the three of us in France—no, no, I don’t mean you haven’t been coping perfectly well.’
‘You do realize, don’t you, that you lot are workaholics? You’re truly, truly crazy,’ said Sonia. ‘Have you four always coped with everything?’
‘Well, yes, it all seemed to work pretty well.’
‘Obviously it has, but for God’s sake!’
‘And who’s talking?’ said Sarah, laughing at her.
‘Yes, all right.’ Sonia’s mobile telephone chirped at her, and up she got and rushed out, saying, ‘You haven’t seen my Hedda yet, Sarah. I want to know what you think.’
The reviews of Hedda were excellent. The sets and lighting were particularly commended: Patrick’s work. A couple of days in The Green Bird put Sarah sufficiently in the picture to know that Sonia’s initial dislike of Patrick had evaporated: she valued him too much. They were now great friends. But what everyone was talking about was the latest instalment of the skirmish with Roger Stent.
On press night, he had arrived five minutes before the curtain went up, wearing a large curly red beard. He had bought a seat, under a false name, in the front row of the stalls and sat himself down in it, folding his arms and staring belligerently around. Clearly he expected to be evicted. No one took any notice until the first interval, when Sonia, with one of the stagehands, sauntered along to stand just in front of him.
‘Auditioning, do you think?’ enquired Sonia.
The well-briefed stagehand solemnly played his part: ‘Looks like it, doesn’t it?’
‘I don’t really see what we could use him for.’ And she proceeded to describe his attributes as if he were being sold in a slave market, ending by pinching his thigh with a look of distaste. ‘Quite meaty, though. Perhaps we could use him as a stagehand?’ And she strolled on and out, followed by her accomplice. Roger Stent had not moved a muscle under this attack. People who had stayed during the interval spread the tale, and it earned a spiteful (and of course inaccurate) paragraph in the Evening Standard. The young man was in what he felt to be a quite tragic dilemma. He had enjoyed Hedda Gabler. The fact was, he had hardly ever seen a play in his life, and now he was secretly reading plays, was fascinated by this new world. Meanwhile the group of Young Turks continued to claim, as a main article of faith, that the theatre was ridiculous and, in any case, dead in Britain. What had begun as the spiteful, casual impulse of the young editor of New Talents had become a dogma not to be questioned. Roger was still accepted in the group only because of his willingness to despise the theatre. Like all cowardly reviewers, who for one reason or another do not want to commit themselves by saying that a play—or a book—is either good or bad, he used up his five hundred words with a description of the plot, ending ‘This tedious play about a bored housewife whose symptoms would be cured by a good workout was well enough presented, but why put it on at all?’
He was secretly trying to get himself another job, but the world of newspapers and periodicals is a small one. He had booked himself in for two weeks of the Edinburgh Festival, where he could indulge this new interest, so he believed, without his cronies knowing about it.
Sarah was overwhelmed with work, and just as she had decided to telephone Mary Ford and beg her to come home, Mary rang her to say she was on her way.
‘What am I doing here, Sarah? No, don’t bother to answer that.’
When she got back she reported that Julie Vairon continued her triumphant progress, and there were already enquiries about tickets for next year.
The two women worked like demons all day, and in the evenings Mary was with her mother, who was pretty ill now, and Sarah found herself buying beauty creams, trying to find in her mirror comfort in this aspect of her face or that, and buying clothes too young for her.
I don’t want to know what I was dreaming last night. I woke this morning flooded with tears. I could weep and weep. For what?
I have to come back to the same question: how is it I lived comfortably for years and years and then suddenly am made ill with longing—for what? By deprivation—of what? Who is it that lies awake in the dark body and heart and mind, sick with yearning for warmth, a kiss, comfort?
Sarah, who had not for years thought of marrying, or even of living with a man, had believed herself to be happily solitary, now watched long submerged fantasies surface. She would be on the lookout for a man with whom to share this love she was carrying about with her like a load she had to put into someone’s arms. (But the fevers she suffered from had nothing to do with the affections and satisfactions of connubial living.) Forgotten selves kept appearing like bubbles in boiling liquid, exploding in words: Here I am—remember me? She told herself she was like one of those chrysalides attached to a branch, outwardly dry and dead, but inside the case the substance loses form, seethes and churns, without apparent aim, yet this formless soup will shape itself into an insect: a butterfly. She was obviously dissolving into some kind of boiling soup, but presumably would reshape at some point. Never mind about butterfly-hood: she would settle for as-you-were.
Henry flew in from Pittsburgh and Salomé for a weekend of auditions for a new Paul and a new Julie.
Meeting Henry again was like that deep involuntary sigh of a child finding itself lifted into longed-for arms. Henry greeted Sarah with his cry of Sarah! and a smile both passionate and ironical, and she fell in love there and then. An interesting moment, when you observe one man sliding out of your heart while another slides in. But did it matter? The sufferings she was going through obviously had nothing to do with Bill, or Henry. People carry around with them this weight of longing, usually, thank heavens, well ou
t of sight and ‘latent’—like an internal bruise?—and then, for no obvious reason, just like that, there he was (who?), and onto him is projected this longing, with love. If the patterns don’t match, don’t fit, they slide apart, and the burden finds its way to someone else. If it doesn’t go underground again—become ‘latent’.
It was sweet to be with Henry. There was an innocence about it, a gaiety. Innocent, when sex burned in the air, invisible flames?
Throughout all of a Saturday and a Sunday morning, Henry, herself, and Stephen, with Mary and Roy at their separate table, sat in the dusty church hall and watched Julie and Paul incarnated in a variety of young men and women, all wearing bright sporty clothes and athletes’ shoes and speaking the words that Molly McGuire and Bill Collins had made their own. A girl musician, with a flute, provided enough music to suggest the rest. But while Julie’s music came and went in fragments and snatches, matching the scenes chosen by Henry to try out these players, Sarah could hardly bear it, for every run of notes, or even a single note, was like that piano chord played to indicate a change of key, setting off a song, or a melody, which repeated in Sarah’s head, one that had nothing at all to do with Julie. She was compelled to listen to it, had to hum it: it had taken her mind over. Had she dreamed this song? If you wake with a tune in your head or words on your tongue then you have to let tune, words, wear themselves out, you can’t simply say no to them, or push them away.
‘What’s that you keep humming?’ asked Stephen.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I simply cannot get it out of my head.’
But Henry knew, and had known all the time. He sang, not looking at her:
‘She takes just like a woman, yes, she does,
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does,
She aches just like a woman,
But she breaks just like a little girl.’
‘Bob Dylan,’ he said, and knowing that she must wish herself invisible, he jumped up and went over to the players.
Stephen said, ‘I’ve got Julie’s music ringing in my head all the time, and I’m surprised you’ve room in yours for anything else.’
His reaction to the Julie chosen by Henry surprised Sarah. The girl was typecast, unlike Molly, who did not look anything like the template. Sarah thought that for Stephen it must be as if Julie had walked into his life, but he only remarked, ‘Well, let’s wait and see.’
And then Henry went off, the bonds of that insidious intimacy the theatre going snap, snap, goodbye—until early August, three weeks away.
Sarah had decided to take three weeks’ leave but changed her mind. She was afraid of her demons. Besides, there was so much work. Julie Vairon might come into the West End, if successful at Queen’s Gift: there were already enquiries. There was talk of a musical based on Tom Jones, but this was much more ambitious even than Julie Vairon; would Sarah like to try her hand at the script? She thought not. She had no energy, though she wasn’t going to say so to her colleagues. Did they not already have enough on their plates? Hedda was going to transfer to the West End, and Sonia would occupy herself with that. The rehearsals would soon begin for Sweet Freedom’s Children, a play based on the last days in Italy of Shelley, Mary, and their circle.
Again Sonia accused them of being workaholics, and this led to a family discussion about work. Could they be classified thus if they enjoyed working and never thought of it as work? Sonia said this was just like them, sitting around in the office and chatting theoretically about something when there was a crisis. But what crisis? protested Sarah, Mary, and Roy—Patrick was still away. Sonia said she had a friend, trained in theatre management. Virginia, named after Virginia Woolf. Very well, said they, let’s try her out.
‘Well,’ said Mary, ‘it was all too good to be true, wasn’t it? The four of us working for years and years without so much as a cross word?’
Sarah got herself to the theatre every day. She was able to do this, and it meant everything: meant, specifically, that she was not ‘clinically’ depressed. She was grading her condition according to a private scale. Although grief seemed to get worse every day, she was not anything like as bad as Stephen’s face had told her he was, for instance when he saw the poster of Julie as an Arab girl in his garden, or at the waterfall in France. I’ve never experienced anything like that, she still thought. At least, not as far as I can remember. Of course in a long life there had been miseries…
She wrote:
Something else is going on, something I don’t understand. I could not be more bereft if I had lost someone by death, been separated from someone I love absolutely.
She wrote:
I think I am really ill. I am sick—with love. I know this has nothing to do with Henry or that boy.
She thought, If I had been in an earthquake or a fire and every one of my family had been killed, if as a young woman my husband and children had been killed in a car crash, I would have felt something like this. Absolute loss. As if she had been dependent on some emotional food, like impalpable milk, and it had been withdrawn. Her heart ached: she was carrying a ton weight in her chest.
She wrote:
Physical longing. I have been poisoned, I swear it. In Stendhal’s Love a young woman unexpectedly in love believes she is poisoned. But she was. I am. A doctor in the States will cure you of being in love. It is chemical, he says.
She wrote:
If a doctor said to me, You have an illness, and you will have to live for the rest of your life with a pain in your chest, I would get on with it. I would say, Very well, I will have to put up with a pain in my chest. People live with withered arms or crippled from the waist down. So why am I making such a fuss about heartache?
She wrote:
I could easily jump off a cliff or the top of a block of flats to end it. People killing themselves for love do it because they can’t stand the pain. Physical pain. I have never understood that before. The broken heart. But why should an emotional hurt manifest itself as a physical anguish? Surely that is a very strange thing.
But she was still not in as bad a state as Stephen’s. He rang her most evenings, as the day ended. As the light went—a melancholy time. The hours before dinner were hard for him, he said. It was hard for the animals too: he could swear the horses and the dogs had a bad few minutes when it got dark. ‘Our dog Flossie—you know, the red setter—she always comes to me when it gets dark so I can make a bit of a fuss over her. We forget that for millions of years every creature on earth was afraid when night came.’
‘And now we don’t feel frightened, we feel sad.’
‘We feel both.’
He would ask her what she had done that day, and tell her what he had, in the careful, meticulous way that she recognized—though she did not want to—as a prophylactic against the absentmindedness of grief. He asked what she had been reading, and told her what books were piled up on his night table, for he was not sleeping much.