Bill then directed beseeching looks at Sarah. What she felt then was unexpected, compassion that was not tenderness but as dry and as abstract as the eye of Time. His face, in full mid-afternoon sunlight, was a mask of fine lines. Anxiety. On that handsome face, if you looked at it not as a lover but with the eyes she had earned by having lived through so many years, was always imminent a faint web of suffering. Conflict. It was costing him a good deal, it was costing him too much, the poor young man, his decision to appear a lover of women, only women. A lover of women as men love women. He loved women, all right, with that instant sympathetic sexiness natural to him; but he knew nothing of the great enjoyable combats, antagonisms, and balances of sex, of the great game. She found on her tongue Julie's You do not even know the alphabet. Only those new lines under your eyes know how to talk to me. But that sudden, rare, heartbreaking crumpling of his face at moments when he felt threatened — they were no new lines. Compassion of a certain kind is the beginning of a cure for love. That is, love as desire. The compassion she felt was out of all proportion, like all these emotions washing around and about Julie Vairon. And not unmixed either, at least at moments, with cruelty: dote and antidote together. A picture of cruelty, staining pity: you are causing me all this pain, you are as careless as an inexperienced boy with explosives, allowing all the sexuality you do not admit feeling for your mother to slop about over older women — oh yes, I watched you this morning with Sally, and I watched her respond to you. You not only let it happen, but you make sure the fires are well stoked. Well then, I'm glad for the pain that put those lines on that pretty face of yours… This was ugly, a million miles from the dispassionate eye of compassion. She knew it was ugly but could not help it, any more than she could hold off the compassion that balanced with it, like a need to put one's arms around a child that for some reason is fated to stand always on the edge of a playground, watching the other children play.
The coach came to take them all back to town. Then, at the tables, decisions were made about tonight's concert. Stephen said he would take Benjamin; yes, tomorrow Benjamin would see the play with its music, but Julie's music by itself was a different thing, and he shouldn't miss it. Andrew confirmed this, saying that his life had been changed by her music: everyone laughed at the incongruity of this remark from the gaucho. Henry did not have to be there, and he decided to have an early night. So did Sarah. The two sat together in the dusk outside Les Collines Rouges. He said, 'I'll tell you the story of my life, because I like making you laugh.' It was a picaresque tale of an orphan adopted by a family of gangsters. He ran away from them, determined to be poor and honest, and worked in low joints until… he was watching her face to make sure she was laughing. '… And then I was rescued by the love of a good woman, and now, hey presto, or rather voilà, I am a famous theatre director.'
'I suppose you aren't going to tell me the story of your life.'
'Well, I might at that — one day.'
'And where is your mother in all this?'
'Ah,' he said. 'Yes. There it is. How did you know?'
She smiled at him.
'There are mothers and mothers. I have a mother. And you are a witch. Like Julie.' He was actually on his feet, to escape.
'Then witches come easily. There isn't a woman in the world who wouldn't have diagnosed a mother.'
He leaned forward, his eyes on hers, and crooned, 'Ob- la-di, ob-la-da'. Then, full of aggression, 'Wouldn't you say most of us have them? How about Bill, wouldn't you say he had a mother?'
'More than anyone here, I would say.'
'And Stephen?'
She was really taken aback. 'Funny, I never until this moment thought about it.'
'Hmmm. Yes, very funny. A real laugh, that one.' And he laughed. 'It takes one to know one.'
'Why didn't I think of it? Of course. He was almost certainly sent to a boarding school when he was seven. You know, all the dormitories full of little boys calling out for mummy and crying in their sleep.'
'Strange tribal ways, a mystery to the rest of us.'
'By the time they are ten or eleven, mummy is a stranger.'
'Love with a stranger,' he sang. Then he leaped up and said, 'But I'm glad you're here. Did you know that? Yes, you did. I don't know what I'd do without you. And now I'm going to ring home.'
When the lights of the theatre coach came dazzling across the square, she went up to her room. She did not want to see Bill. Nor Stephen with Molly, for this mirror of her situation was becoming too painful. She sat unobserved at her window, her light off, and watched the comings and goings in the square, and the company sitting at the tables below, laughing, talking… young voices. Stephen and Molly were not there. Nor was Bill, or Sandy. Benjamin was being dined and wined by Jean-Pierre. She went to bed.
She woke, probably because the music had at last been switched off. Silence. Not quite; the cicadas still made their noise… no, it was not cicadas. The spray had been left to circle its rays of water all night on the dusty grass under the pine tree, and its click, click, clicking sounded like a cicada. The moon was a small yellow slice low over the town roofs. Dusty stars, the smell of watered dust. Down on the pavement outside the now closed cafe, two figures stretched out side by side in chairs brought close together. Low voices, then Bill's loud young laugh. From that laugh she knew it was not a girl with him: he would not laugh like that with Molly, with Mary — with any woman.
Sarah went back to her bed and lay awake, tormented, on the top of the sheet. The breath of the night was hot, for the water being flung about down there was not doing much to cool things off. It occurred to her she was feeling more than desire: she could easily weep. What for?
Sarah dreamed. Love is hot and wet, but it does not scald and sting. She woke as a phantom body — a body occupying the same space as hers — slid away and separated, becoming small. This baby body had been soaked in a stinging hot wetness and was filled with a longing so violent the pain of it fed back into her own body. She turned and bit the pillow. The taste of dry cotton embittered her tongue.
She lay flat on her back and saw that a street light made patterns on her ceiling. A late car's headlights plunged the ceiling into day and left it modelled with shadow. There were voices outside in the corridor. One was Stephen's, the other a girl's, very low. If that was Molly, well then, good luck to them both: this blessing, she knew, was well over the top.
Her eyes were not, it seemed, entirely bound by this room but were still attending to the dream, or to another, for a world of dreams lay around her and she was immersed in them, and yet could observe her immersion. Very close was that region where the baby in her lived. She could feel its desperation. She could feel the presence of other entities. She saw a head, young, beautiful, Bill's (or Paul's), smiling in self-love, gazing into a mirror, but it turned with a proud and seductive slowness, and the head was not a man's but a girl's, a fresh good-looking girl whose immediately striking quality was animal vitality. This girl turned away her confident smile, and she dissolved back into a young man. Sarah put her hands up to her own face, but what her fingers lingered over was her face now. Beneath that (so temporary) mask were the faces she had had as a young woman, as a girl, and as a baby. She wanted to get up and go to the glass to make certain of what was there, but felt held to the bed by a weight of phantom bodies that did not want to be flushed out and exposed. At last she did get herself out of bed and to the window. The chairs on the pavement were empty. The square was empty. The hard little moon had gone behind black roofs. The forgotten water spray swung around, click, click, click.