Love, Again

'A very good question,' said Henry to Sarah, at the end of the rehearsal, as if Molly had only just that moment wept and questioned. 'Well, did you know all that was going to happen?'

'Yes, but not that it would happen so well.'

'Yes,' he said. He was sitting, for once, in the chair near hers, leaning back, conditionally at rest, and he regarded her with those intelligent dark eyes that so often seemed prepared to see much worse than what in fact they were seeing. Now, however, they were wet.

'I didn't write the music,' said Sarah.

'Oh, I don't know about that,' he said lightly, jumping up and away. 'I don't know about that at all. All I know is, the old black magic's got me by the throat.'

On the Saturday there was a dress rehearsal. And now, at last, Julie Vairon was all there. Particularly was Julie present. Molly's long dark smooth hair, looped up and braided, spoke of unwelcome social disciplines. Her eyes behind long dark lashes seemed black, with a gleam of Africa. She had a feral air, for her formal movements had in them, only just controlled, the impatience which said she found propriety all but impossible. Julie had come to life, and Sarah heard Stephen, who had forced himself to come, let out a breath. 'Good God, it isn't possible.'

It was all going to be a success. It 'worked'.

'It all works, it's great, just fantastic,' said Henry, striding about. 'Bless you, Sarah' — and they embraced, theatre fashion.

When Bill came to embrace her — an absolute dream in his uniform — with 'Sarah, it's lovely, I had no idea,' she found herself muttering, Little bitch, and she moved away from the embrace. She watched the young man go from woman to woman, kiss, kiss, kiss, and then how he moved off and stood aloof, as if he drew an invisible circle around himself: keep off.

They were now all parting, until they met again in France.

There was the usual reluctance to part. They had become a family, they said. 'All the good things about a family, none of the heartaches,' said Sally. She had insisted her own situation was not all that different from Sylvie's. 'No, I am not a mother hoping to marry my daughter off to a rich man, but my daughter, she could give Julie points.' She was desperate, though she laughed, and Richard Service, standing by her, put his arm around her. These two were friends — real friends, sitting together whenever they could, talking for hours. An unlikely couple, though.

Unable to bring themselves to part, they all went out to supper after the dress rehearsal. Stephen sat next to Molly, who had shed Julie with her clothes. He was trying to find in her the girl who had enchanted him for three hours that afternoon, and she knew it, and was sweet to him, while her eyes seldom left Bill. As for Sarah, she was determined not to look at Bill at all, and more or less succeeded. This had the effect of making him nervous, and he tried to get her attention by sending her winning looks.

As they stood on the pavement saying goodbye, kisses all around (but Sarah well out of reach of Bill's), Stephen said to Sarah that he wanted her to come and stay for a couple of days, before France. 'If you haven't got anything better to do.' This was so much like him she had to laugh, though he did not see why. As if it were likely that an invitation to his house (or perhaps she should say Elizabeth's) would not seem to nearly everyone in the world like drawing a lucky ticket.

That night Bill telephoned her for advice about the delivery of one of his lines. He must know he did it well, and know that she knew he did. Her heart thumped, making her even more angry than she was. She sat hugging the receiver and giving professional advice. That she was more angry with herself than with him goes without saying.

The other person who telephoned her was Henry. They now enjoyed the pleasantest relationship in the world, easy, joky, intimate. He sent himself up, saying, 'Sarah, I have a problem — yes, a problem… I can't deal with it. I'm not as happy as I might be — yes, you could put it like that… about what Julie writes about Rémy. You know, they'd only met a couple of days ago, for Christ's sake.'

'You mean, Why is it when I see your face? — and so on?'

'Particularly and so on. You'd expect her to be singing her little heart out about the guy, but what she sings is, Why is it when I see your face, I see it sad, alone. You look back at me across the years and you are quite alone… well, Sarah?'

'It's all in her journals.'

'They've just fallen in love.'

'Wait, I've got them here.' She read aloud: 'Why is it when we have only just begun to love each other and he is talking of how we will live together for the vest of our lives I pick up my pencil to draw his face and I can't draw it full of happiness, as I've seen it, but sad, so terribly sad. It is the face of a lonely man, he is alone, this man. No matter how hard I try to draw him the way he is when he looks at me, I can't do it, that other face puts itself on the page.'

'What did happen to Rémy? No, I haven't read the journals. I decided not to. I didn't want to mix it.'

'Three years after he was sent off to the Ivory Coast as a soldier by his family, he came back to marry the daughter of a local landowner. He came secretly to see Julie. They wept together all night. Then he married and had a family.'

'Did they meet after that?'

'If so, it isn't recorded. She did see him at public occasions, though. She said he wasn't happy.'

'A sad story,' said Henry, apparently trying out the phrase.

'I thought it was agreed it is a sad story.'

'I mean, that he came back after three years and they hadn't forgotten each other.'

'You say that as if you think it is impossible.'

'It isn't really our style.'

'Isn't it?'

'I haven't experienced anything like that.'

'You sound as if you wish you could.'

'Perhaps I do.'

'Shall I read you what she wrote about that parting? Together we poured hot salt on what was left of our love, and where it was is brackish sand.'

'I'm glad you didn't make a song out of that.'

'What do you suppose that late music is saying?'

'Then I'm glad it hasn't got words.'

They discussed possible rearrangements of certain lines and in the end decided to leave them as they were. This conversation went on for over an hour.

Joyce turned up next morning. Evidently she had been sleeping rough. In the bathroom Sarah picked the grimy clothes off the floor as Joyce stepped out of them. She was as thin as an asparagus shoot, and like one she was dead white, but with bluish marks on her arms and thighs. Censoring every word of advice or criticism as it arrived on her lips, Sarah put the clothes in the washing machine, put Joyce in the bath, made tea, made toast, cut up an orange.

Joyce wore her aunt's best white silk dressing gown and sat drinking tea. She did not eat. When asked what she had been doing, she replied, 'This and that.' Then, after a silence, she seemed to remind herself that conversation was expected, and asked Sarah like a little child, 'And what are you doing, Auntie?' Heartened by this evidence of an interest in other people, Sarah described the play and told the story. Joyce sat listening, obviously with difficulty. Then, putting on a dozen years in a moment, she jeered, 'I think they were all nuts.'

'I wouldn't argue with that.'

'You said it was recent?'

Somewhere about middle age, it occurs to most people that a century is only their own lifetime twice. On that thought, all of history rushes together, and now they live inside the story of time, instead of looking at it from outside, as observers. Only ten or twelve of their lifetimes ago, Shakespeare was alive. The French Revolution was just the other day. A hundred years ago, not much more, was the American Civil War. It had seemed in another epoch, almost another dimension of time or of space. But once you have said, A hundred years is my lifetime twice, you feel as if you could have been on those battlefields, or nursing those soldiers. With Walt Whitman perhaps.