Stephen was disturbed. ‘I wonder what she’d think of so many people in her forest. Her house.’
‘Didn’t we tell you we were going to use her house for the French run? Didn’t you see the promotional material?’
‘I suppose I hadn’t really taken it in.’ He seemed to be debating whether to trust her. ‘I even felt bad about writing that play—invading her privacy, you know.’ Then, as she found herself unable to reply to this, for it was a new note, and unexpected, he added abruptly, thrusting out his chin small-boy style, ‘You have understood, I am sure, that I am hopelessly in love with Julie?’ Then gave a helpless, painful grimace, flung himself back in his chair, pushed away his plate, and looked at her, awaiting a verdict.
She attempted a quizzical look, but his gesture was impatient. ‘Yes, I am besotted with her. I have been since I first heard her music at that festival. In Belles Rivières, you know. She’s the woman for me. I knew that at once.’
He was trying to sound whimsical but was failing.
‘I see,’ she said.
‘I hope you do. Because that’s the whole point.’
‘You aren’t expecting me to say anything boring, like, She’s been dead for over eighty years?’
‘You can say it if you like.’
The silence that followed had to accommodate a good deal. It was not that his passion was ‘crazy’—that portmanteau word, but that he was sitting there four-square and formidable, determined that she should not find it so. He waited, apparently at his ease because he had made his ultimatum, and he even glanced about at this familiar scene of other eaters, waiters, and so on, but she knew that here, at this very point, was what he was demanding in return for his very sizeable investment. She had to accept him, his need.
After a time she heard herself remark, ‘You don’t like her journals very much, do you?’
At this he let out a breath. It would have been a sigh if he had not been measuring it, checking it, even, for too much self-revelation. He shifted his legs abruptly. He looked away, as if he might very well get up and escape—and then made himself face her again. She liked him very much then. She liked him more and more. It was because she felt at ease with him, absolutely able to say anything.
‘You’ve put your finger on…no, I don’t. No, when I read her journals I feel—shut out. She slams a door in my face. It’s not what I…’
‘What you are in love with?’
‘I don’t think I’d like that cold intelligence of hers directed at me.’
‘But when one is in love one’s intelligence does go on, doesn’t it? Commenting on—’
‘On what?’ he cut in. ‘No, if she’d been happy she’d never have written all that. All that was just…self-defence.’
At this she had to laugh, because of the enormity of his dismissal of—as far as she was concerned—the most interesting aspect of Julie.
‘Oh all right, laugh,’ he said grumpily, but with a smile. She could see he did not mind her laughing. Perhaps he even liked it. There was something about him of a spreading, a relaxation, as if he had held a breath for too long and was at last able to let it go. ‘But you don’t understand, Sarah—I may call you Sarah? Those journals are such an accusation.’
‘But not of you.’
‘I wonder. Yes, I do, often. What would I have done? Perhaps she would have written of me as she did about Rémy. I represented to him everything he had ever dreamed about when he hoped to be larger than his family, but in the end he was not more than the sum of his family.’
‘And is that what she represents to you? An escape from your background?’
‘Oh no,’ he said at once. ‘To me she represents—well, everything.’
She could feel her whole self rejecting this mad exaggeration. Her body, even her face, was composing itself into critical lines, without any directing intention from her intelligence. She lowered her eyes. But he was watching her—yes, she already knew that close, intelligent look—and he knew what she was feeling, for he said, ‘Please don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said cautiously, ‘I have decided to forget it.’
‘Why?’ he enquired, not intending flattery. ‘You are a good-looking woman.’
‘I am a good-looking woman still,’ said she. ‘I am still a good-looking woman. Quite so. That’s it. I haven’t been in love for twenty years. Recently I’ve been thinking about that—twenty years.’ As she spoke she was amazed that she was saying to this stranger (but she knew he was not that) things she had never said to dear and good friends, her family—that is what they were—at the theatre. She put on the humour and maternal style that seemed more and more her style: ‘And what was it all about, I wonder now, all that…absurdity?’
‘Absurdity?’ And he let out that grunt of laughter that means isolation in the face of wilful misunderstanding.
‘All that anguish and lying awake at night,’ she insisted, forcing herself to remember that indeed she had done all that. (It occurred to her she had not even acknowledged, for years, that she had done all that.) ‘Thank God it can never happen to me again. I tell you, getting old has its compensations.’ Here she stopped. It was because of his acute examination of her. She felt at once that her voice had rung false. She was blushing—she felt hot, at any rate. He was, there was no doubt, a handsome man, or had been. He was a pretty good proposition even now. Twenty years ago perhaps…and here she smiled ironically at him, for she knew her hot cheeks were making confessions. She went on, however, actually thinking that if he could be so brave, then so could she. ‘What I think now is, I was in love too often.’
‘I’m not talking about the little inflammations.’
Again she had to laugh. ‘Well, perhaps you are right.’ Right about what?—and she could see he was finding the phrase, as she did the moment it was out, a bromide, dishonest. ‘But why do we assume it always means the same thing to everyone—being in love? Perhaps “little inflammations” is accurate enough, for a lot of people. Sometimes when I see someone in love I think that a good screw would settle it.’ Here she took from him, as she had expected to, a surprised and even hard look at the ugly term, which she had used deliberately. Women who are ‘getting on’ often have to do this. One minute (so it feels) they are using the language of our time (ugly, crude, honest), and in the next, they have become, or feel they soon will if they don’t do something about it, ‘little old ladies’, because the younger generation have begun to censor their speech, as if to children. But, she thought, critical of herself, there is no need to take up stances with this man.
He said, after a long pause, while he examined her, ‘You’ve simply decided to forget, that’s all it is.’
She conceded, ‘Very well, then, I have. Perhaps I don’t want to remember. If a man had ever been everything to me—that’s what you said, everything…but I did have a very good marriage. But everything…let’s talk about your play, Stephen.’ And she deliberately (dishonestly) let this look as if she didn’t want to talk about her dead husband.
‘All right,’ he agreed, after a pause. ‘But it’s not important. I don’t really mind about it. Scrap it.’
‘Wait. I’m going to keep a good bit of it. The dialogue is good.’ This was not tact. His dialogue in parts was better than hers. Now she knew why. ‘Do you realize you have made Rémy the focus of everything? The real love? What about Paul? After all, she did run away to France with him.’
‘Rémy was the love of her life. She said so herself. It’s in her journals.’
‘But she didn’t get into her stride with the journals until after Paul ditched her. Suppose we had a day-by-day record of her feelings for Paul, as we have for Rémy?’ He definitely did not like this. ‘You identify with Rémy—and it is your own background. Minor aristocracy?’
‘Well, perhaps.’
‘And you’ve hardly mentioned the son of her worthy printer. Julie and Robert took one look at each other and, quote, If you have a ta
lent for the impossible, then at least recognize it. After that, she killed herself. It seems to me the printer’s son could easily have been as important as Rémy.’
‘It seems to me you want to make her a kind of tart, falling in love with one man after another.’
She couldn’t believe her ears. ‘How many women have you been in love with?’
Obviously he couldn’t believe his. ‘I don’t really see the point of discussing the double standard.’
They were looking at each other with dislike. There was nothing for it but to laugh.
Then he insisted, ‘I have been in love, seriously, with one woman.’
She waited for him to say ‘my wife’—he was married—or someone else, but he meant Julie. She said, ‘It’s my turn to say that you have decided to forget. But that isn’t the point. At the risk of being boring, art is one thing and life another. You don’t seem to see the problem. In your version, her main occupation was being in love.’
‘Wasn’t being in love her main occupation?’
‘She was in love a lot of her time. It wasn’t her main occupation. But these days we cannot have a play about a woman ditched by two lovers who then commits suicide. We can’t have a romantic heroine.’
Clearly she could not avoid this conversation: she reflected it was probably the tenth time in a month.
‘I don’t see why not. Girls are going through this kind of thing all the time. They always have.’
‘Look. Couldn’t we leave it to people who write theses? It’s an aesthetic question. I am simply telling you what I know. Out of theatre experience. After all, even the Victorians made a comic song out of “She Was Poor but She Was Honest”. But I think I know how to solve it.’ Her duplicity with him would be limited to not telling him she had solved it already. ‘We can leave the story exactly as you have it. But what will put the edge on it…there is something; I hope you are going to ask what.’
‘Very well,’ he said, and she could see that this was the moment when he finally gave up his play. With good grace. As one would expect from someone like him.
‘We will use what she thought about it all…’
‘Her journals!’
‘Partly. Her journals. But even more, her music. There are her songs, and a lot of her music lends itself—we can use words from the journals and fit them to the music. Her story will have a commentary—her own.’
He thought about this an uncomfortably long time. ‘It is astonishing—it is really extraordinary—the way Julie is always being taken away from me.’ Here he looked embarrassed and said, ‘All right, I know that sounds mad.’
She said, ‘Oh well, we are all mad,’ but, hearing her comfortable maternal voice, knew at once she was not going to be allowed to get away with it. Again she was finding his acute look hard to bear. ‘I do wonder what it is you are mad about,’ he remarked, with more than a flick of malice.
‘Ah, but I’ve reached those heights of common sense. You know, the evenly lit unproblematical uplands where there are no surprises.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
You could say their smiles at each other, companionable but satiric, marked a stage.
The restaurant was emptying. They had come to the end of what they had to say to each other, at least for now. Both were making the small movements that indicate a need to separate.
‘You don’t want to hear any more of my ideas for the play?’
‘No, I shall leave it to you.’
‘But your name will be on it, with mine, as co-authors.’
‘That would be more than generous.’
They left the restaurant, slowly. At this very last moment, it seemed they did not want to part. They said goodbye and walked away from each other. Only then did they remember they had been together for nearly three hours, talking like intimates, had told each other things seldom said even to intimates. This idea stopped them both, and turned them around at the same moment on the pavement of St Martin’s Lane. They stood examining each other’s faces with curiosity, just as if they had not been sitting a few feet apart, for so long, talking. Their smiles confessed surprise, pleasure, and a certain disbelief, which latter emotion—or refusal of it—was confirmed when he shrugged and she made a spreading gesture with her hands which said, Well, it’s all too much for me! At which they actually laughed, at the way they echoed, or mirrored, each other. Then they turned and walked energetically away, he to his life, she to hers.
In the office, Sarah found Mary Ford making a collage of photographs for publicity, while Sonia stood over her, hands on her hips, in fact learning, but making it look as if she was casually interested.
Sarah told Mary that Stephen Ellington-Smith was a country gentleman, old style. That he was too magnanimous to be petty about his play. That he was, in fact, a poppet. Mary said, ‘Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ Sonia took in this exchange with her little air of detachment.
Sarah sat with her back to the two young women, pretending to work, listening…no, one young woman and a middle-aged one: she had to accept that about Mary, even if it did hurt. They had all become so used to each other…. Sonia was there in that office—not strictly her territory—not only to learn but to stake a claim. She wanted to be made responsible for the next production, Hedda Gabler. ‘You people will be busy with your Julie,’ she said. There was no need for the two senior officials to confer: they knew what each other thought. And why not? They were not likely to find anyone sharper, cleverer—and more ambitious—than Sonia. ‘Why not?’ said Mary, and without turning around, Sarah said, ‘Why not?’ In this way confirming Sonia’s position, and a much larger salary. Sonia left. ‘Why not?’ said Mary again, quietly, and Sarah turned herself about and smiled confirmation of Mary’s real message, which was that there really was no doubt of it—an epoch was indeed over.
Sarah did not need a week to use Stephen’s dialogue where it fitted, but decided to pretend she had needed that time, so he would not feel his contribution was inconsiderable. But when she was actually seated there, in her room, the mess of papers she was already calling the script spread about, a week did not seem too much. For one thing, she was unhappy with the existing translation of the journals. She had made her own of some of the passages, those that would accompany the music. She had had to get permission from the Rostands. ‘After all,’ she had written, ‘it is only a question of a few pages. It is not as if I were proposing to make a new translation of all Julie’s writings.’ In fact she wished she could. She privately believed that people loving literature who chanced to read her translations would at once see how much better, more vivacious, her language was, how much closer to Julie’s self. Perhaps one day she would make a new translation, choosing different passages: she did not necessarily agree with the English translator’s choices. She understood Julie much better than…Sitting there, the word processor pushed to one side, for she was still at the stage of words scribbled on loose sheets with a Biro—yes, pretty old-fashioned, she knew—she thought, That’s something of a claim I’m making…conceited? Perhaps. But I think it’s true. This young woman hasn’t understood the first thing about Julie…I care very much that her translation is flat, no effervescence. I care too much. I am altogether too much involved in this business. Yes, of course you have to be totally submerged in what you are working on, even if a week after it’s finished you’ve forgotten it…. What is it about that bloody Julie: she gets under people’s skin; she’s under mine. Look how this thing takes off, spreads itself about—she’s blowing us all apart, and we know it. I really am intoxicated—probably all these months of listening to the music. Well, I have to listen to it this week…I’m making everything too complicated: I’ve spent years and years weighted with Duty, working like a madwoman, and if I don’t watch out I’ll go sailing off into the sky like a hydrogen balloon.
She sat, hour after hour, choosing words, hearing them: seductive. Like music, particularly when choosing words that will be congruous with music.
The words, which she was already hearing sung, were running in her head. This is an affliction of words’ users and makers. Words appear in your mind and dance there to rhythms you consciously know nothing about. Tags and rags of words: they can be an indication of a hidden state of mind. They can jiggle or sing for days, driving you mad. They can be like invisible film, like cling film, between you and reality. She was hardly the first person to have noted this. D. H. Lawrence, for instance: ‘She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno’s eyelids, and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life out of living things.’ Yes, this was an illustration of exactly what she complained of: there was the quotation, pat and patented, colonizing her mind. Well, when she had finished this task, Julie’s words, not to mention the Countess Dié’s, would linger and then sink back into that vast invisible Book of Great Quotations, leaving her in peace…she had long ago created a saving mental image, to be used at moments when her brain was so abuzz with words she seemed to prickle all over with their energy.
She imagined a shepherd boy from a long time ago—hundreds of years, for it was more restful if this scene lived in an antique air, as if it had come off a wall or the side of a vase. This young creature was illiterate, had never seen words on a page, or on a parchment. There were tales in his head, for there has never been a country or a culture without them. But when he sat on his dry hillside, under his tree, watching—what? sheep, probably—his mind was empty, and memories or thoughts came to him in the shape of pictures. Sarah did not allow this poor youth even the traditional shepherd’s pipe. Silence it had to be. Only a breeze moving through the tree he sat under. A cricket. The sheep cropping the grass. This figure had to be a boy. A girl—no. She would almost certainly be wondering whom she would be married off to. Girls were seldom allowed to be alone, but it did not matter, a girl or a boy—and silence. Sarah tried to imagine what it would be like not to have a brain set by the printed word. Not easy.