Seeing one another in frames or poses was certainly a feature of that week. Mary was taking pictures of Act Three: she had already taken everything possible of Acts One and Two. The cast was photographed together and separately, inside the building and out of it, in restaurants and by the canal. Hundreds, thousands of photographs. Perhaps thirty or forty of them would be used. The prodigality, the waste, was taken for granted.
A difficulty was that neither Andrew Stead nor Richard Service photographed as well as Bill, who dominated every picture he was in. Mary took pictures where she 'phased Bill out,' as she put it. 'Go on, tone yourself down,' she said to him, and he went red and lost composure, as he so often did.
'Photogenic,' sighed Molly, and Mary echoed, 'The camera loves him.' 'The camera can't help loving him,' said Molly. And Mary, 'It can't help loving that man.'
Sarah saw the two women clowning and singing, 'Mad About the Boy' — not caring that Bill had just come into the hall and must see them: he was certainly not stupid. Watching the young women was Sandy Grears, grinning. Every line of his body shouted that he had to stop himself from joining in. Bill hesitated, then stepped lightly across to become part of 'Mad About the Boy'. This enabled Sandy to become a fourth. There was a wild flinging about of limbs and hair, most inappropriate for the drawling syllables of' Mad About the Boy'.
Bill came fast across the hall to where Sarah was sedately in her chair, and dropped into Stephen's, with a direct laughing look that had nothing to do with the dear little boy who sent pretty Bambi cards but was the satirical dancing and singing he had just been involved with, was the swift slither of a brutally cynical caress.
She was raging with desire. (Rage: a good word, like bum.) But why describe it, since there is no one who has not felt the mix of anguish, incredulity, and — at the height of the illness — a sick sweet submersion in pain because it is inconceivable that anything so terribly desired cannot be given, and if you relinquish the pain, then the hope of bliss is abandoned too.
Sarah could not remember suffering as she did now. Yet she knew she had, for the 'snapshots' from her childhood told her so. She could not match this particular degree of being in love with anything in her adult life, only with childhood loves. After the little boy who had been tempted not by her but by the tree house, she had been in love a good part of the time with one boy after another. Adolescent, she fantasized kisses: she could not believe that this happiness would be hers soon, 'when she was grown up'. (This was the euphemism everyone used then for 'when you have breasts.') The point was, no matter how wonderful, apt, satisfying, kisses had been when she was grown up, none had had the magic ascribed to them in her imagination when too young for kisses. And so, now, 'If you kissed me, it would be my first time ever… ' said Sarah to herself. Satirically: and told herself that if she could still laugh she must be all right. Poor Stephen could not laugh. The Green Bird was laughing its head off, and so was the company rehearsing Julie Vairon. Roger Stent had sent Sonia a fax: 'I take it you are not going to bar me from Hedda Gabler? If you do I'll make sure everyone knows your theatre bars critics on the strength of one bad review.'
Sonia to Roger Stent: 'You've never written a good review, or even a halfhearted one, in your life. You don't like the theatre. You know nothing about it. Get something into your little head: The Green Bird doesn't need you or New Talents. Fuck off.'
The rehearsals in the fourth week were run-throughs of the whole play, but still without musicians, who would arrive on the Friday.
In this last week something new happened. The main characters — Julie and her mother, Sylvie, the three lovers and the two fathers — were not starkly set in scene after scene showing confrontations, mostly two by two, but were absorbed into a setting of minor characters who, hardly noticed during the first weeks of rehearsals, now showed how much they determined destinies. As in life. In Madame Sylvie Vairon's house had been many young officers, suggested here by one, George White. In the programme notes — already with them in draft — it was said that the two women every evening entertained a crowd of young officers. This gave George White an importance that showed in how he carried himself and in an exaggeration of his attitude towards the two women, for the correct young officer did not approve of Paul's romantic love. Later there was not only Paul's father to contend with (George White again) but his mother, who, though never an actual presence, was always just offstage, a rock of rectitude and disapproval. When it came to Act Two, there was Rémy's mother (she spoke precisely two words, No — twice), Rémy's father (Oscar Friend, who, however forceful he was onstage, in life was a shy man, usually in a corner with a book), and also Rémy's brother, George White. In life there were four brothers, all older than Rémy, and very likely it was that weight of seniority crushing him down that made loving Julie essential to him. Theatre economics dictated one brother. This meant that Rémy's love seemed less determined by Destiny (the family) than in life, more of a romantic choice (the puppet strings invisible), though since George White had read the journals and knew about the four brothers, he did try to suggest forceful sibling pressure. In Philippe's establishment there had been twenty or so printers, apprentices, and sales people, and it was not possible that their various reactions did not affect Julie. The interior of the print shop was only mentioned in the programme notes. Philippe and Julie conducted their courtship in the public square (a park bench). Once only was the attitude of Philippe's employees shown, and that was when his manager (George White) came with a message from the shop, which enabled his frigid attitude to Julie, and her correct politeness to him, to suggest all the rest.
It was when it came to the townspeople that the audience would have to use their imaginations most. Julie's life had been cursed by the suspicious surveillance of the citizens. They stared at her in the streets and muttered imprecations if they came on her by chance (or design) in the forest. George White represented these invisible people. (He complained that all his parts were of disapproving people, but he adored Julie.) It would all go better in France, because Jean-Pierre had promised a crowd of extras.
On Friday the music arrived, in the shape of a countertenor and three girls and the musicians. The instruments were a guitar, a flute, a lute, a shawm, and a viola — the vielle of other times. The play, which without the music had been 'too much', 'over the top', 'pastiche', and 'a weepy' — this last was Bill, when thoughtfully passing Kleenex to Molly — changed, distancing itself from tears. The story told on this stage, or rather in this dull church hall, where the thick beam of sunlight picked out a scene or a character, became an aspect of the music. In the drawing room in Martinique, the conventional ballad, whose function was to show off Julie's charms to the young officers, when accompanied by the music which had in counterpoint phrases from Julie's 'second period', now commented, and even cruelly, on the period itself and made it as remote as Elizabethan players dancing the minuet at Queen's Gift. The company was disconcerted by this shift from the personal, and even dismayed. Molly McGuire — as Molly — actually burst into tears. 'What was it all for, then?' she demanded. 'What was the point of them going through all that? What for?'
'A good question,' said Bill quietly, showing — as he often did — how far he could be from the 'young jay' of Stephen's criticism. And he put his arm around Molly to comfort her, nicely, like a brother.
As the story moved on, more and more did it seem that the sufferings and heartbreaks were a rather conventional accompaniment to her troubadour songs and, then, the late music, when angels or devils chanted of impermanence.