He advanced towards her, seeming out of place in his formally elegant white. His face had warmed as he looked at her, but almost at once his eyes had moved on behind her to the great trees enclosing the circle of emerald lawn, where the musicians in their pale floaty dresses were drifting towards shrubs that hid the rehearsal rooms. Now his face was that of a young boy listening to a magic tale. Benjamin had fallen in love with the theatre, with the arts. Having determined to take advantage of casual theatre manners and mores, he kissed her heartily on both cheeks, and seemed pleased with himself for achieving this freedom. As for her she was envying him his state of pleasurable intoxication. Yet such were the influences of recent experience, she was examining the handsome face for signs of grief or even of anxiety. There were none. Was she sure about that? No. Should she not at least be wondering why this man ensconced in his so satisfactory and—surely?—satisfying life had succumbed to the theatre and its intoxications? (O, for the life of a Gypsy, O!) What lacks might there be in that life of his? She did not know. How little we do know about what goes on inside our nearest friends, let alone agreeable acquaintances—she was damned if she was going to give the name friend to Benjamin and call Stephen a friend. Roy Strether, her good friend, a friend of fifteen years, was going through hell, and she knew it and he knew that she knew it, but apart from Mary, who else in the company had any idea of what went on inside that so friendly and competent fellow? Who of the people in this house had any idea about Stephen? Certainly not his wife. Sally would probably say later of this time that it had been one of the worst in her life. She had hinted something of the kind, half laughing, to Sarah. But of the people who had worked with her every day for weeks, who gave Sally’s loss much thought? Mary looked terrible: much more than was due to worry over her mother.
They walked slowly to the house, while she told him about this new production here, and the new members of the cast. She listened, or tried to, for her thoughts would go straying off, while he told her about the Edinburgh Festival. Thus they reached the house, and it was time for the early buffet supper, for soon the play would begin.
The two young women from the town, Alison and Shirley, were there that evening, large, calm, blonde, with red cheeks, as healthy as apples, shedding pleased and maternal smiles on the hectic scene. First nights were not new to them. As for Elizabeth, she might as well have been saying aloud, This sort of thing is to be expected; it is the theatre after all…and she smiled at Susan while handing her a plate of summer pudding. ‘You really are so good, Susan,’ everyone heard her say. ‘You’re such a wonderful Julie.’ This to remind her of what she was doing here, in this house—Elizabeth’s house.
Benjamin left Sarah to talk to Stephen, and the two men stood side by side conversing, holding glasses of wine and waving away food. They were for that time inside their roles as patrons of the arts, for if they were not thinking this, were too modest, even feeling privileged to assist all these talented beings, then others, watching them, had to think: the money men—and we are all dependent on their decisions.
Henry came to Sarah and said in a low voice, ‘Sarah, I’ve had a fax from Millicent. She is coming tomorrow. With Joseph. She’ll see tomorrow night’s performance, and then we’ll both be off.’
‘A change of plan?’
‘Yes. Elizabeth very kindly invited her to stay a few days, and we said we would, but—well, we’re leaving the day after tomorrow, and then we’re going to drive around France for a couple of weeks.’
She said nothing and could not look at him.
‘So that’s how it is, Sarah,’ he said, putting down an untouched plate of food. ‘And now I’m going out to see how the audience is coming along.’
He went. Soon the players followed him.
Stephen, Sarah, and Benjamin stood on the steps to watch the audience leave their cars and wandered over the grass towards the theatre. It was a perfect evening. Wispy gold clouds floated high in the west, and quiet trees were outlined against them. Birds robustly quarrelled in the shrubs. With nearly an hour to go, the seats were already nearly full.
Sarah saw her brother Hal, Anne, Briony and Nell get out of their car. She had not expected them. He had come from work and wore the dark suit he used for his afternoons in Harley Street. His women wore floral dresses, their fair hair glittered with this evening’s sun. For all of them an excursion into Sarah’s life was a holiday: for the parents, from hard work; and the girls after all did spend a good part of their lives in an office and a laboratory. Where was Joyce?
Sarah waved at her brother, who granted her an allowance of his confident self in a measured palm-forward salute, like royalty, but because he didn’t flutter his fingers he seemed to bestow blessings: light could easily be streaming from that palm towards the three on the steps. Through a gap in the hedge she watched him advance to the front row. She saw a large light black ball being borne shorewards on the frothy crest of a slow wave. He stepped lightly, his head level, his eyes staring straight ahead, and the look on his face was one Sarah had been studying all her life, though it was not a look, in fact, that repaid study: with his full cheeks, his slightly pouting mouth, his protuberant eyeballs, he was like a ship’s figurehead. She had often thought he was like a drugged or a hypnotized man. It was his body that expressed absolute assurance, an impervious self-satisfaction. A mystery: he had always been a mystery to her. Where had he got it from, this self-assurance? Where in him was it located? Having reached the front row, he removed the Reserved signs on some chairs—he had not reserved seats—and sat down, assuming his women would arrange themselves. There he sat, the large soft black ball beached, while around him frothed the flowery wave.
In the front row, critics from London were taking their seats, some with a characteristic look of doing the occasion a favour by being there at all, others sliding furtively along the rows, in case they were observed and someone might come to talk to them, thus compromising their integrity. The audience softly chatted, admiring the sky, the gardens, the house.
Henry escorted Stephen, Sarah, and Benjamin to wish the players well. They took with them goodwill faxes from Bill in New York and from Molly in Oregon. ‘Thinking of you all tonight.’ ‘I wish I was with you.’ The new, raw building was crammed with people now and already filled with…it is a matter of opinion with what. But the place was no longer an echoing vacuum.
The four took their places, right at the back.
Experienced eyes assessed the critics. Only two of the first-rank ones were here. Elizabeth had been heard thanking them in ringing tones for being so very kind. The others were second-rank, or apprentices, among them Roger Stent, who, having looked cautiously for Sonia and found her, gave her a severe and unsmiling nod, like a judge before opening the day’s case. She gave him an ‘up yours’ sign back, meant to be noticed. The critics were all one of two kinds: theatre critics, who would judge from that point of view, or music critics, here because Queen’s Gift had a reputation for its music and its Entertainments, who knew nothing about stage production. None was equipped to judge this hybrid. The audience was another matter, for they at once showed they liked the piece and understood, and when the troubadour music began they applauded, to show they did not find it strange. For one thing, the programme devoted a full page to this kind of music: its history, its origins in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, its Arab influences, its instruments, adapted from Arab originals, its unexpected emergence so many centuries later in the music of Julie Vairon, who—it was safe to assume—could never have heard it.
But that music was in the second act, and the two main theatre critics left after the first, because of driving back to London or catching their train. They both had the affronted put-upon look of critics who have wasted their time. Sarah joked that their pieces would certainly include the phrase ‘an insipid piece,’ and Mary added, ‘“Faux exotica,”’ and Roy, ‘“Unfortunately an exotic background will not save this banal play from failure.”’
T
he rest of the theatre critics left at the end of the second act, so they would not know about the limpid other-worldly music of the third act, which transcended, even repudiated, the personal. ‘Do you know what?’ said Mary. ‘I bet every one of their pieces will be headed: “She Was Poor but She Was Honest.”’ ‘Or,’ suggested Roy, ‘“I can’t get away to marry you today—my wife won’t let me.”’ The music critics all stayed to the end.
But the audience stood to applaud, and for them, at least, Julie Vairon was a success, if not as much as it had been in France.
Meanwhile Sarah’s attention was being distracted, because during the second act she saw Joyce with her friend Betty and an unknown youth standing near the gap in the hibiscus hedge which was the entrance to the theatre. They had the look of children listening outside a door to the grown-ups talking. Easy to reconstruct what must have happened. Joyce had been invited—no, begged—with the exasperated end-of-tether voices she did hear from her family, to accompany them on their jaunt to Aunt Sarah’s play, had refused, but had told Betty, who had said they might as well go. The three had hitchhiked. Even now, when hitching was so risky, Joyce begged lifts, usually from lorry drivers accosted in the forecourts of petrol stations. Joyce had recounted tales of near-disaster, with the timid smile she did offer to adults, partly to find out what the world of authority thought. Sarah had not previously had more than a glimpse of Betty, but now here she was, in full view. The three young people made their way around the back of the seated crowd, Joyce on tiptoe, Betty with bravado, the young man expecting to be accosted and thrown out. Betty plumped herself down on a grassy slope, the two sat by her and Joyce sent frantic waves and smiles to her aunt.
Betty was a large girl, and she sat with fat blue-jeaned thighs spread in front of her, arms crossed on great unsupported breasts. On her face was a look of sour scepticism: you aren’t going to put anything across me. The face was large and plain and coarse. Her black hair straggled greasily. Joyce seemed even more of a sad waif beside her, for it was at once evident that Betty mothered her. The young man, who sat apart from the women, was very thin, pallid, limp, with a long bony neck. His hands were thin enough to see through, and his face was covered in red blotches.
During the applause when the play ended, the three disappeared.
An informal party for the company and neighbours had been arranged on the side of the house away from the theatre. Long tables held wine and cakes. Behind these the two pretty blonde girls, Shirley and Alison, served while Elizabeth and Norah, with Stephen, welcomed guests. The audience streamed away to the cars and coaches that would take them to the town or to London, but about two hundred people stood about on the lawn. Hal appeared and went straight up to Stephen, introducing himself not as Sarah’s brother but as Dr Millgreen. Stephen did not know who he was but behaved as if this was a great honour for him. Hal refused a glass of wine, saying he had to return to London because he must be at his hospital early, said in a kindly way to his sister, ‘Very nice, Sarah,’ and went off, not looking to see if Anne, Briony, and Nell followed, or if they might perhaps like a glass of wine. From the other side of the lawn he did look back, apparently to approve the house, for he was wearing his professional look of a generalized benevolence. Various people hastened up to him and to Anne. For a moment he stood in a group of colleagues, or patients, or friends, a figure of kindly authority. It occurred to Sarah that just as she had never seen much more of Stephen than his Julie side (his dark and concealed side), so she saw nothing of the social life of her brother and her sister-in-law. Formal parties were not in her line, and their friends were not in her line either. But possibly there were a good many people who knew this eminent Dr Millgreen, and his clever doctor wife, Anne, and their two pretty daughters, as a likeable family. They might perhaps remark if they remembered, ‘A pity about that girl of theirs. A bit of a handful apparently.’
Just as Sarah was thinking that she should ask Hal and Anne about Joyce, the family got into their car and drove off. So she went on talking, as it was her part to do, with anyone who wished to talk to her. Yes, she had found it rewarding to work on this play—if you could call it that—but there were two authors, and Stephen Ellington-Smith, their host, would have a lot to say about it too. This went on for an hour or so, and the dusk had settled in the trees and shrubs when she heard a young man say with a laugh that he had been accosted after the performance as he came out of the new building by a couple of girls who were offering the male members of the cast a blow-job for ten pounds a time. It was Sandy Grears, talking to George White. Sarah at once went up to them and said, ‘I’m afraid one of the girls was probably my niece. I suppose you don’t know where they went?’ She was finding it hard to appear calm, because the thought of Henry—who would have been in the new building with the others—anywhere near a paid-for blow-job was too painful almost to bear, like a grotesque sexual joke directed at oneself. The two young men at once adjusted their manner, from one appropriate to laughing at a couple of slags to one sympathizing with the relative of a problem child. George said he thought it was likely the girls were in The Old Fox in the town, for it was the only place open in the evenings. He offered to take Sarah there. Sandy went off, and this enabled Sarah to ask if there had been a young man with the girls. Yes, there had. George hesitated; he could have said more, but Sarah decided not to ask. She found it hard to believe that Sandy went in for blow-jobs offered by unhealthy youths, but one never knew. She was surprised she felt a genuine pang—an aesthetic one—that anyone who had enjoyed (for once an absolutely accurate word) the beautiful Bill Collins could even think of a blow-job with that poor derelict.
On the way to town she told George about Joyce, and he was suitably sympathetic. His own sister was a problem. She was anorexic, sometimes suicidal, and it had all been going on for years. Once again, here was the unwelcome shift of perspective when a colleague’s private life (never more than the backdrop to the life you know them in, their working life, their real life, so you prefer to think) comes forward and you are made to know with what difficulty and how precariously this friend maintains independence from that matrix the family. George for a time had had this sister living with him and his wife, but then it all got too much when the children were born. Now, unfortunately, she was in and out of hospital. Sarah and George then exchanged the lines of that conversation which takes place more and more often, to the effect that for every whole, competent, earning person are every day more of the people who cannot cope with life and have to be supported, financially or emotionally. The two went on to wonder if there were really more, or perhaps it was only that they were more visible because of our (after all quite recently adopted) view that disadvantaged people are infinitely redeemable. And what about those people who are seen as whole, healthy, independent, ‘viable’, but in fact are dependent on others? Sarah of course was thinking here of her brother, for what would he be without that drained-of-blood person his wife?
The Old Fox called itself a wine bar, but it was a restaurant with a bar and loud music, and so full they could not see the other side of the room. Then, suddenly, there Joyce was. A group of young people squeezed themselves around a table, drinking. This was a far from disreputable place, and Joyce’s group was the only doubtful element in it. Sarah, who was now faced with the necessity of doing something, but not knowing what, was saved by Joyce, who was pushing her way through the crowd with cries of ‘It’s my Auntie Sarah.’ She was holding a tumbler of whisky above her head for safety. Standing in front of her aunt and reeking of whisky, Joyce chattered about the lovely play. She did not look at George White. It had not been more than a mild twilight when the play ended, but perhaps she did not look, on principle, at possible customers.
‘How are you going to get home?’ asked Sarah.
‘Oh, we’ll manage. We got ourselves here, didn’t we?’
The two adults stood listening while the poor child offered the smart phrases that were obligatory when she was near her
friends. ‘No dis, Auntie, but you’re right out, we’ve nuff carn, we’re safe.’ Translated: No disrespect, but you’re worrying about nothing, we’ve got lots of money, we’re okay. Meanwhile her gaze moved continually to the door as new people came in. Clearly she knew this place well. Her smile, as always, seemed fixed. Her eyes were all pupil. Drugs enlarge pupils. Like the dark. Or like love.
George caught sight of someone he knew. He moved off. After all, the company had been here for three days and this was the place for the youth of the town. At once he was surrounded: he was amiable, good-looking, always popular.
‘Joyce,’ said Sarah, lowering her voice. ‘Are you remembering all the things we tell you?’
Joyce’s eyes moved about evasively, and she said brightly, ‘Oh, Sarah, of course we do; you’re right out.’
‘What’s this about your offering blow-jobs to all and sundry?’
At this the beautiful eyes swivelled desperately. ‘Who told you? I didn’t…I never…please, Auntie…’ Then, recovering herself, she quoted (who—Betty?), ‘But that’s what men are like. That’s all they care about; give them a good blow-job and they are satisfied.’ And she looked proudly at Sarah to see how this bit of worldly wisdom was going down.
Sarah watched those pretty lips struggle to offer her a smile and said, ‘Oh Joyce, do have some common sense.’
‘Oh we do, I promise. But it’s brass, you see. The trouble is, brass.’ Then, unable to bear it another minute, she waved her thin and grubby hand not six inches from Sarah’s face, saw she was misjudging distances, squinted, and retreated backwards, crying, ‘Later on…later on…’ Meaning goodbye, goodbye. She wriggled off into the crowd to rejoin her friends.