Love Again

  They might talk for an hour or more, while he looked from his window over darkening fields. He could hear the horses moving about, he said. As for her, she had a plane tree outside her window, its middle regions at eye level, and through it she watched the lights of the windows opposite.

  He came to town and they went to Regent’s Park on a sunny afternoon, when sky, flowers, trees, and sun seemed determined to make a festival for them. They walked through scenes of pleasure, people strolling about, and children and happy dogs, but his eyes were heavy and abstracted. He kept putting his hand into a pocket where there was a book, as people touch talismans, and she asked what it was. He handed her The Dynamics and Contexts of Grief. She glanced into it and was about to hand it back, but he insisted, ‘No, it’s useful. For instance, I know now I’ve “internalized” Julie. That explains what happens when you hear God knows what he sees in her.’

  ‘And therefore is Love painted blind…but I’m afraid I find literature more useful than the…psychological recipe books.’

  ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t finding literature useful. But it’s come down to Proust. He’s the only one I can keep my attention on. At least now, when I feel like this. Funny thing is, I used to find him self-indulgent.’

  ‘And I’ve been rereading Stendhal. Love. And he’s much shorter than Proust.’

  ‘But is it any better?’

  ‘Both could combine being romantically in love with a very cold intelligence.’

  ‘Like Julie.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have said that when we first met.’

  ‘No.’ And he sighed. It was almost a groan. He had come to a stop, apparently in contemplation of swans floating whitely among their reflections. A silence. It went on far too long.

  ‘Stephen?’ No reply. ‘Shall I lend you Love?’

  ‘Why not?’ he said, but after quite an interval. He was very far away.

  And now she deliberately made conversation. ‘Have you read The Sorrows of Werther recently?’ No response. ‘Now, that’s an interesting case. Goethe was first in love with Lotte and then with Maximiliane Von La Roche. He said himself of Lotte that she was a woman more likely to inspire contentment than violent passions, but it was Lotte he made the heroine.’ Stephen was still staring at the same patch of water. Moorhens had replaced the swans. They were energetically propelling themselves about. He sighed again. Hard to tell whether he was listening. ‘Obviously it was Maximiliane who inspired the violent passion, but that is not what he wrote.’

  She thought he had not heard, but after a time he said, ‘Are you saying he was dishonest?’

  ‘It was a novel, after all. I would say he was circumspect. Suppose he had written a novel where young Werther was madly in love with Lotte and then passionately in love with Maximiliane. I don’t think the readers would have liked it.’

  She found herself counting, waiting for his response. It seemed to take him fifteen seconds to hear, or at least to frame a response.

  ‘I dare say they wouldn’t like it now.’

  ‘But Romeo was madly in love with Rosalind and then with Juliet.’

  One, two, three…she reached twenty. ‘I suppose we’ve got used to that.’

  She was wondering, Am I like this too? In the theatre, are they having to wait half a minute to get some kind of response from me?

  ‘Stephen, I want to ask you something…no, wait.’ He was beginning to walk away from her, his face clenched up. ‘You said you were in love with someone before you were in love with Julie. Do you see that now as a sort of trial run for the real thing?’

  She thought he was not going to answer, but at last he said, ‘But that was quite different.’

  ‘Suppose Goethe had described two passions, both strong, one after another, the first for the maternal woman, a mother figure, and the second the real thing, the grown-up passion? He didn’t, so now one of the European archetypes for romantic love is an insipid Anglo-Saxon hausfrau, but the real truth was a fiery passion with Maximiliane. After all, we’ve all had the experience of saying, I’m in love with So-and-so, because we don’t want anyone to know we are in love with someone else.’

  It would be easy to believe he had not been listening, but now he said, without an interval, ‘They were ready to kill themselves for Lotte. Young Germans. Dozens of them. They threw themselves over cliffs and under horses’ hoofs.’

  ‘Was that because Lotte was a mother figure?’

  ‘I wonder if my lady was a mother figure,’ he remarked, at once, looking straight at her and as if he really wanted her to say yes, or no. As she said neither, he remarked, and he sounded almost cheerful, ‘Well, I suppose she was, now I come to think of it. Well, what’s the matter with that? She was…Sarah, you’d have liked her, she was…If she had married me then…’ And now he actually laughed, if gruffly, and said, ‘I wouldn’t have been boring you with all my nonsense all this time.’ He put a hand on her arm and began directing her towards the rose garden. He was a man strolling with a friend on a path between rose beds on a sunny afternoon. He was even smiling. She realized just how worried she was about him by the way a weight had lifted off her heart, leaving her feeling positively buoyant.

  ‘I wonder what the Goethe buffs would make of your theory?’

  ‘But he said himself, “It’s very pleasant if a new passion awakes with us before the old one has quite faded way.” In this case the old faded and the new one arose in a matter of days.’

  ‘Pleasant,’ he said.

  ‘He also said, “The greatest happiness is to be found in longing.”’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘And Stendhal would not have disagreed. A pleasure for superior souls, he thought.’

  ‘Barmy,’ said Stephen. He came to a stop in the middle of Queen Mary’s rose garden, with people all around them admiring the roses. He took his book from his pocket and read to her: ‘“The self-image of the sufferer becomes identified with the image of the beloved. Previous failures in love, common in this psychological type, reinforce the present condition because each surrender to the illness adds all past hopes to the present. The sufferer values pain as a guarantee of success this time. And remember that Cupid directs arrows and not roses to his victims.”’ They walked on, he holding the book in his hand like a priest with a breviary or a schoolboy swotting for an exam. ‘And that isn’t so far from Proust,’ he added.

  ‘I think Proust’s pleasure in self-analysis was stronger than his sufferings over love. As for Stendhal, I think the analysis was a way of surviving the suffering.’

  ‘Like Julie,’ he said, and at once, not after fifteen or twenty seconds’ delay.

  ‘Whereas Goethe was thoroughly enjoying the drama of it all.’

  ‘Well, he was very young.’

  ‘I wasn’t capable of all that when I was very young. Being young was bad enough.’ But Sarah was thinking of herself as a child, not as a young woman.

  ‘I do my best never to think of being young. I have a feeling I wouldn’t like what I’d remember if I did.’

  ‘Did you know you never mention your parents?’

  ‘Don’t I? Well…I don’t think I saw much of them. Anyway, they broke up when I was fifteen. I get along with all four of them. When we meet, that is. My father and his wife live in Italy. She’s a bit of a lightweight. I’ve often thought he must regret swapping my mother for her. But I don’t think my mother has had regrets. She and her—he’s a good chap, actually. They’re in Scotland. He’s a farmer. He’s younger than she is a good bit. By fifteen years or so. They get along all right.’

  They were at the gates. When she said she would walk with him to his club, it turned out he was not in his club but at a hotel.

  ‘Can’t cope,’ he said. ‘Conversations, you know. No one expects anything of one at a hotel. The only person I want to talk to is you. You know, Sarah, it’s a funny thing: I used to talk a lot to Julie, but now I seem to talk to you.’

  A week later he was in town again. He ran
g from the hotel. She thought the line was bad, then understood he was fumbling with words. ‘I’d like to see you,’ he got out at last, making it sound as if there was something particular he wanted to say.

  ‘All right—where?’

  A long silence.

  ‘Stephen?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Shall I come to the hotel?’

  ‘Oh no, no. There are so many people here.’

  ‘Shall we meet in the park again?’

  ‘Yes, yes, the park…’

  She walked, through a brilliant afternoon, from the great formal gilded gates towards a hunched man sitting motionless on a bench. She sat beside him. He nodded, without looking at her. Then he roused himself—she watched him doing it—to make conversation. Things were going along nicely with plans for Julie at Queen’s Gift, he said. Sarah contributed by chatting about The Green Bird. Sonia was taking the new girl, Virginia, in hand. There had been a picture of Virginia Woolf by Virginia’s bed, but Sonia had made her replace it with a photograph of Rebecca West. There had been a great improvement: Virginia no longer had a wispy chignon and droopy clothes but had cut her hair and was as bright and as pretty as a parakeet, like Sonia.

  After a bit Stephen smiled, so she went on. Everyone was working hard on the new play, Sweet Freedom’s Children. She expected him to react to the title, but he did not. She suggested they walk around a bit, and he nodded. He got up to walk as if only an act of will made him, walked as if an act of will kept him in motion.

  ‘I want to ask you something,’ she said.

  Because of her tone, he came out of his preoccupation enough to give her a nervous look: ‘I’ve been waiting for you to honour me with your confidence.’ Meaning, for God’s sake, don’t.

  ‘No, no,’ she reassured him. ‘No, it’s something about you, not me…it’s important to me. You know how we go along on the surface of everything—’

  ‘The surface! I wouldn’t exactly use that word. That’s why I’m so grateful to you. Don’t imagine I’m not grateful.’

  ‘No, wait…I’ve been having a dream…something like that anyway. Suddenly you open a door you didn’t know was there, and you see something that sums it all up.’

  ‘All?’ he challenged.

  They stood by the edge of the fountain, looking through rods and sprays of water to a display of massed fuchsias. Fishes and mermaids and water. And fuchsias.

  ‘Nice fuchsias,’ he remarked. ‘They’ve never done well with us. Though we are pretty successful with azaleas.’

  ‘All of a situation. The hidden truth of something. If you unexpectedly opened a door, what would you see there that…?’

  At once he said, ‘I would see Elizabeth and Norah naked in each other’s arms, and they are laughing at me.’ She had not expected anything like this. It was too much of a daylight truth. ‘And what is behind your closed door?’

  She said gratefully, knowing from a surge of emotion how much she would have liked to talk about her situation, ‘There’s a small girl stabbing a doll with scissors. The doll is bleeding.’

  He went pale. Then, slowly, he nodded. ‘And who is the doll?’

  ‘Well…it could be my baby brother. But I don’t really know.’

  ‘Probably just as well.’

  She did not speak again. Once he was actually brought to a standstill, as he walked, by some thought or memory. His whole body seemed to wince away from whatever it was. She set him in motion with a hand at his elbow.

  They reached the gates, he to walk one way, she another. Unexpectedly he put his arms round her and kissed her. This was a chilled and chilling embrace. As he turned away she saw the mask take possession of his face, as if a hand—with the same action used for closing the eyes of a just-dead person, a downwards stroking movement that shuts out the light forever—had put weights on his lids and pulled down the corners of his mouth.

  Sarah was in the office every day from nine in the morning till eight at night. She was doing not only her work but Mary’s, Patrick’s, and Sonia’s. Patrick kept ringing to say he was ill—no, no, they mustn’t think bad thoughts, he needed a rest. They knew he was lying. Sonia valiantly did not say what she knew, but they guessed. He felt guilty because of some plan or other for Julie they did not approve of. Well, they would deal with it. Mary was with Sonia at various provincial theatres to see if there was anything suitable for The Green Bird. In Birmingham they had run into Roger Stent. ‘Ah, Barbarossa,’ Sonia had said. ‘Slumming?’ It was Oedipus Rex. ‘Bitch,’ he had said. ‘Quite so,’ she had said.

  ‘Presumably this is a courtship,’ Mary had remarked on the telephone.

  Sarah sat at one desk and Roy at another. They worked agreeably, as they had for years. They spent whole days together, bringing each other coffee, sharing quick meals at the café across the road. This undemanding friendship kept Sarah safe, and, she believed, it was doing the same for him. He was probably going to be divorced, but did not want a divorce. His wife had a lover. The child was unhappy.

  She knew that this was what he often thought about while he worked there with her, just as her world of fevers and fantasy threatened to fill her head. It seemed to her she had become someone else. Not long ago she would have been ashamed to give room to such idiot dreams. The scenes she was being compelled to imagine were feeble, contemptible. Her lovers of long ago—or perhaps not really so long ago, but anything in the past was in another dimension—returned to say she had been the only woman in their life, the most remarkable, satisfying, and so on. These scenes always took place in the presence of others. Interesting that it was usually Bill: she would have been ashamed to inflict them on Henry. It was Bill who in these fantasies was struck into envy and desire by past charms that he could never enjoy. Or love scenes—memories she had not bothered to dust off for years. They presented themselves endowed with emotions of a trance-like intensity—emotions appropriate to the out-of-reach. These had not accompanied the actual event, and as each enhanced memory—where she was as romantic as in a very young man’s fantasy, or in a sentimental novel—took possession of her, she forced herself to remember, in slow detail, what had really happened in this or that love, so that her memoirs en rose had to accept the stamp of truth. These exercises in correctives to false or flattering memory were exhausting and hard to achieve, because her present weakened state of mind kept returning her to adolescence, which cannot admit ordinariness.

  And, too, she continued to marvel, with the histrionic part of her mind, that for years and years she had refused so much; yet in sane moments knew that it had been for the same reason she was refusing even to think of…Guess who? Single, extravagantly wrapped flowers kept arriving, roses, orchids, lilies, but having looked to see who they were not from (Henry), she forgot about them. Yet the state she was now in made past refusals seem like a wilful rejection of all-happiness. She had walked, a sexually desirable woman, through years of being courted and nearly always saying no. Because there would have been no conviction in it. One or two she had enjoyed. A good word, that, like love, meaning what you will or as you like it. But enjoyment does not carry with it that other dimension of…what? The word enchantment would have to do. A dimension where she had now become lost. Well, almost lost. Not entirely. Was she getting better? She noted that as the day approached when rehearsals would begin again—when Henry would arrive—the weight of grief lessened. Not much, though.

  There is absolutely nothing like love for showing how many different people can live inside one skin. The woman (the girl, rather) who dreamed of past loves thought adult Sarah a fool for being content with so little. The ordinary and quotidian Sarah, with whom after all she would be living (she did so hope) for the rest of her life, would not have spent half an hour with that daydreaming girl. But the Sarah she was most often, sodden with grief, was not one who had much energy to care about the others, all subsidiary players. She simply felt, suffered, endured, in a hell of pain.

  She wrote:

  A
season in hell. I don’t think I can live through this.

  She wrote:

  A depth charge. What depths?

  On the night before rehearsals began again, at the end of the first week in August, Henry walked into the office, and her misery went away, and she was at once in an atmosphere of charm, ease, comradeship. She was now entirely in love with Henry. She was in love with him because he was in love with her, and this enabled her to like herself.

  When she entered the old church hall next morning and saw all the faces from Belle-Rivières among the new ones, it was as if she had taken a turn on a familiar road and found herself in a landscape where light fell like a blessing. The dark of her grief had quite gone. Yet they were again in the ugly hall, which seemed even worse after Belle-Rivières. The pillar of light they had joked about had withdrawn itself to a blurred rectangle of dirty yellow near a high window, reminding them how the earth had sped in its ellipse towards the equinox. By which time Julie would have been blown away, gone, and everyone here scattered across the world.

  Outside, sunlight filled all London, all England, slowing people’s movements and making them smile, and the company escaped at every possible moment to walk along the near canal, or sit by it eating sandwiches and drinking juices. Besides, these new rehearsals were a bit of a slog, because most of them knew the play by heart, and it was not only because of the heat that they all walked through their parts while Susan Craig and David Boles became Julie and Paul. The new Paul was nothing like as seductive a young lieutenant as Bill. He was a pleasant-looking, efficient actor, who, when he put on the uniform, would be convincing enough. Sally remarked, ‘This one isn’t going to keep us poor women awake at nights,’ as she walked forward to speak her line as Julie’s mother: ‘Well, my girl, you must watch yourself if you do not mean to be a fool.’