And there, beside a drawing of a wispy baby girl, all eyes, and by itself under glass, was a doll, with a card pinned to it, and on it, in Julie's writing, Sa poupée. It was not much more than a doll suggested, only a stump of white kid, its head bald and stitched across the crown, as if sutured. It was eyeless. But this wretched doll had been loved to death, for the kid was worn and the rough rag of a red dress was torn.
Stephen and Sarah stood side by side and wept, not able to conceal it and not even trying to.
'I never cry,' said Sarah. 'It's this damned, damnable music.'
'A time to weep and a time to laugh,' said Stephen. 'I can't wait for the time to laugh. For God's sake, let's get out of here.'
They went out into the street, made loud by music and the roar of motor bikes. The company sat around the café tables, under sunshades. They were playing a game, in emulation or mockery of Sarah and Stephen.
'All you need is love,' said Bill gravely.
'All I have to do is dream,' said Sally, and Richard, beside her, sang 'Dream, dream, dream.'
'Hey, you've got a voice,' she said.
'Let the heartache begin,' said Mary Ford, delivering this line to the air, with a smile.
'This is the right time, the right place,' said Molly to Bill.
'Another day in Paradise,' sang Bill.
'You are my one temptation,' remarked Andrew to no one in particular, and added, 'I love you, love.' He raised a glass towards Sarah and then, as an afterthought, to Stephen.
'Tossing and turning,' said Molly, to Bill.
'Ob-la-di, ob-la-da,' said Bill seductively to Molly.
'I only want to be with you,' said Sally to Richard, then sang it, and he sang, 'Too late, my time has come… shivers down my spine.' Sally sang at him, 'Manchild, look at the state you're in… Manchild, will you ever win… ' Richard took her hand and kissed it, then held it. She removed her hand and sighed. Both had tears in their eyes.
'You said you loved me, you were just feeling kind,' said Molly, and enquired of Bill, 'What do you want to make those eyes at me for?'
Bill exclaimed, 'Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!' went bright red, so that he looked like a ten-year-old, jumped up, and said, 'I am going for a swim.'
Molly sang, as the first line of a song, 'I am going for a swim because I'm so in love with him.' She laughed loudly, seeing Bill angry. Bill lingered, expecting the women to join him, but they sat tight. It was Sandy who got up, saying, 'I'll come.' The two young men went off, and the women sat in fits of laughter, sounding angry and even spiteful. Themselves hearing it, they stopped. A silence, while everyone listened to the multilayered din of the little town.
Henry had been watching and not taking part. Now he stood and said, 'Enough. Sarah, Stephen — you can see we don't come up to your level.' Clowning it, he sang, rather well, 'Escape from reality, open your eyes, look up to the skies.' They all clapped. He bowed. 'Stephen, I've been lying in wait for you, to say we think you should go with our American sponsor to lunch. Jean-Pierre is inviting you.'
'An order?'
'Yes, please.'
'Very well. And Sarah must come too.'
'I think I'll leave you to it,' said Sarah.
'Insubordination,' said Stephen. He took Sarah's arm, while Henry insisted, 'But I need Sarah, I need her at the rehearsal.' He took her arm on the other side. Stephen let Sarah go and said, 'Very well, where do I find my co-Croesus?'
'Inside the café. He said it's too hot out here.'
Stephen went into the café, where a jukebox howled and pounded. He came out again at once with Benjamin, shaking his head like a dog freeing its ears of water, smiling but actually looking rather sick.
'That's the real generation gap,' said Sally. 'Noise. They have cast-iron eardrums, the kids.'
'They'll be deaf,' said Stephen. He and Benjamin took themselves off into the quiet of a hotel.
Then, after all, most of the company went off to swim. Where Julie had walked with her master printer in the town gardens was now a car park, swimming pool, tennis courts, café. A couple of remaining acacias shaded the boules game that was usually being played under them.
Sarah sat with Henry under an umbrella and they conferred over the words that were to be spoken by the locals, supplied by Jean-Pierre. They had sent him a deputation, complaining that they did not believe their grandparents would have been so unkind as to say the things written for them by Sarah. Which were all in the journals. 'We must tone it down,' ordered Henry. 'Otherwise we'll lose them. They aren't being paid. They're doing it all for the glory of Belles Rivieres.'
Then they went up by car to the theatre, having decided to forgo lunch. There the French sound technicians were at work with Sandy, fixing cables and loudspeakers to the trees and, too, the little house, which was as frail as an eggshell. Rows of wooden chairs had been set out in a space near the house. Had this space been here before? No, trees had been cut down, chestnuts and a couple of olive trees. Cicadas shrilled from everywhere in the forest.
'A stage effect we didn't foresee in London,' said Henry.
'But she must have composed, listening to cicadas.'
'Perhaps the cicadas suggested the music? That would certainly account for some of it.'
Here Sandy came to demand Henry's directions, and the two went off. Sarah sat on a bank of gritty earth under a turkey oak, that tree which is a poor relation of its magnificent northern cousins. Soon Henry came to join her. He sat leaning back on his hands and stared moodily at the scene which tomorrow would have come to life. Without adequate rehearsal, though, for the townspeople — or the mob — would assemble for an hour in the square tomorrow morning to be instructed how to watch George White and follow what he did. Henry was in an itch of anxiety. She soothed him with jokes and, 'A ton of worry does not pay even an ounce of debt.'
He returned the words of a current song hit. 'Don't worry, be happy… as my son told me last night on the telephone. My wife and my son, both. Don't worry, be happy.' He compressed his lips in a non-laugh.
'Now I shall say, It's going to be all right, and then you'll feel better.'
'Odd enough I do when you do.'
Soon a coach brought the whole cast up to the theatre. Sarah would have gone back with it, but Henry said, 'Are you going to leave me?' — so she remained under the dry little tree in a mottled shade, through an interminable rehearsal that began and stopped, and repeated, while the lighting and sound technicians and Henry worked. The singers were not singing, only speaking, and the actors spoke their lines with all emotion withdrawn from them. A lot of joking went on, to relieve boredom. At one point, when the sound apparatus had squawked and gone dead, so that singers and actors could be seen mouthing words, only just audible, Bill addressed the words from earlier that day to Molly:
He clowned and postured, bending over Molly, who stood limp, wiping off dust and perspiration and fanning herself, trying to smile. Suddenly, instead of the grave and handsome young lieutenant upright in his invisible uniform there was a hooligan, and he ended by shouting the last two lines again up at Sandy, who was standing on the broken wall of the house, but leaning out from it to loop thick black cable over a branch. The young man's body was like an acrobat's, and outlined in tight blue cotton. Knowing exactly how he looked, he let out a loud and equally anarchic laugh, in a moment that had the power to make everyone present, and all morality and decency, ridiculous. All of them, the players actually on the stage — rather the space in front of the ruined house — the actors in 'the wings' (the trees), musicians, singers, laughed nervously but they were shocked. Bill glanced quickly around. He had not meant to betray himself, though he had meant to shock. He saw that everyone stared at him and at Sandy, who was now balanced on the wall, arms extended, just about to jump off and down to the earth. Henry came forward, and called out, making a joke of it, but with authority, 'So you've decided to do another play, Bill, is that it?' Bill called back prettily, 'Sorry, don't know what got into me.' And he matily hugged Molly. She stepped back, not looking at him.