'Never heard of it.' She noted that he had been able to say, apparently easily, that Julie was dead.
'I would say there is a pretty narrow dividing line between sanity and lunacy.'
'A grey area perhaps?'
This exchange had cheered them both up — her dispro- portionately. She was wildly happy. Soon she left him to go to Jean-Pierre's office. She had not been there half an hour before Stephen rang from the hotel to say he was getting on an afternoon flight from Marseilles and he would ring her from home.
She was busy all day. The performance that night drew an even larger crowd. At the end of the first act — that is, the end of Bill being Paul for that evening, he came to sit by her, but she found herself wanting only to get away. She was missing Henry. Bill's attentive sympathy cloyed. She preferred the raw, unscrupulously sexual and vital young man she had glimpsed that morning. In fact she could truthfully say that this winning young man bored her, so things were looking up.
She left farewell notes for Bill and Molly and went to her room. She sat by the window and watched the crowd on the pavement thin. This being the second night, and the tension fast diminishing, people went off to bed early. Soon there was no one down there, and the cafe's doors were locked. It was very hot in her room. Airless. Sultry. A dark night, for that acid little moon was blacked out behind what everyone must be hoping was a rain cloud. She would go down and sit on the pavement, alone. She crept down through the hotel, feeling it to be empty because Stephen was gone, and Henry too. As she was about to pull a chair out from under a table, she heard voices and retreated to sit under the plane tree. She would not be seen in the deep shadow.
A group of young people. American voices. Bill's, Jack's. Some girls. They sat down, complaining that the cafe had shut.
'I just love it, love it… it's… you know… ' A girl's voice.
'Er… er… you know, yah, it's right on.' Bill. This articulate young man's tongue had been struck by paralysis?
'It's just beautiful, know what I mean? It's sort of… mmm, yeah, I mean to say… '
'Sort of… kinda… actually, you know, as I saw it… very… 'Jack.
Another girl. To me it was… er… yeah, it was just… it was actually.
'Just wonderful, yeah.'
'It makes me feel like… I don't know… '
They all went on like this, the educated and infinitely privileged young of their great country, for some minutes. Then there was a clap of thunder, and some drops. They rose in a flock and scattered into the hotels.
Bill went last, with his pal Jack. Bill said, just as if he had not been conversing in Neanderthal, 'Yes, I do think we have the last act in balance now.'
Jack: 'I still think there should be another four or five minutes of Philippe. It's slightly underplayed there, for me.'
Rain swept across the square. She ran through it to her hotel, up the stairs, into her room, and to her window, which was blanked out by a flash flood, gravelly streams that silted up in heaps along the sill and were washed off and piled up again, showing greyish white when the lightning flickered, like the dirty heaps of snow along wintry roads. She sat approaching — cautiously — depths in herself she did not often choose to remember. Few people can reach even middle age without knowing there are doors they might have opened and could open still. Even that sensible marriage of hers had begun sensually enough, and there had been a moment when they had decided not to open these doors. What had since been christened S-M, a jaunty little name for a fashionable pastime (sado-masochism sounded, and was, real, something to be taken seriously), had appeared as a possibility. Her husband had in fact gone in for it with an earlier lover but found that love became hate… rather sooner, he joked, than it might otherwise have done: the two were not suited. She, Sarah, had noticed that women friends 'enjoying' S-M had come to grief. People might claim these practices were all as harmless as a game of golf, but it was not what the couple had observed separately. Together, the smallest approaches had aroused in both strong reactions, as if a door were being opened onto a pornographic hell. Enthusiastic practitioners presented a picture something like this: A couple 'respecting each other' — this was important — permitted carefully regulated cruelties, to the pleasure of both, but these were never permitted to go beyond limits. A likely story. Was it possible that the emotions of two people in any case always on the verge of exaggeration, in sex, or in love, never got out of control in S-M? (Or sado-masochism?) And surely these were not practices for parents? One could too easily imagine scenes of a rosy little bottom (mama's) and her cries of pleasure, or lethal black shiny straps and her cries of pain, while the children listened. Or papa, trussed like a roasting chicken. 'Just a minute, dear, I just want to see if Penelope is awake.' Or, 'Oh damn it, there's the baby.' Or even a childless couple. She has taken the washing out of the drier, he has parked the car, they eat a supper cooked by microwave. 'How about a little S-M darling?' No, surely these delights could only be for houses of pleasure, or for brief affairs. Too dangerous — even in sexual relationships of the ordinary kind (boring, so it was suggested by the proselytiz- ers), hidden depths so easily up welled and flooded both partners with every kind of dark emotion. It was at the time when she and her husband had actually played with the idea (not the practice) that she had found within herself, at first appearing in a dream and then presenting itself as a probable memory, the image of a small girl sitting alone in a room locked from the outside, a small girl with a doll she held between her knees and stabbed again and again with scissors while blood spurted from it… no, the spurting blood was the dream, but the little girl stabbing the doll, that was memory. The child went on and on stabbing the doll, her face lifted, eyes shut, mouth open in a dismal hopeless wail.
It was from this level in her that she could respond to the equivocal Bill. One knows what a man is like from the images and fantasies he evokes. This level, this 'somewhere', was to do (she thought) with babyhood. Earlier than childhood. Again and again during this sojourn in Julie's country, in sleep or in half-sleep she had seen that proud beautiful young head, its slow turn, the mocking smile that was androgynous and perverse, with a slow dissolve to the other sex, young woman to young man, young man to girl, young boy to girl-child, small girl to baby boy. Somewhere, somewhere back there, probably before the small girl sat stabbing the doll with scissors, there was something… So Sarah talked to herself, half aloud, sitting at the window where the streaming rain made the room dark, so that she could see only the black mass of the bed. I'm afraid. I am right to be afraid, though I don't know what I am afraid of. I know something terrible waits there… passing the stages of my age and youth, entering the whirlpool, yes, the whirlpool, that is what waits, and I know it.
Sarah's flat was full of sunlight and flowers sent by Benjamin, now in Scotland, and from Stephen, thanking her for putting up with him. There was also the single passionate red rose of tradition from 'Guess who?' She put this in a glass beside Stephen's flowers and Benjamin's, grateful she had not confessed her state to Stephen, because otherwise by now she would be thanking him for putting up with her. She knew that one word along the confessional path would have her weeping bitterly. Oh no, a stiff upper lip was much to be recommended. She did not feel herself appropriately surrounded by all this sunny cheerfulness.