Love, Again

'And I've been rereading Stendhal. Love. And he's much shorter than Proust.'

'But is it any better?'

'Both could combine being romantically in love with a very cold intelligence.'

'Like Julie.'

'You wouldn't have said that when we first met.'

'No.' And he sighed. It was almost a groan. He had come to a stop, apparently in contemplation of swans floating whitely among their reflections. A silence. It went on far too long.

'Stephen?' No reply. 'Shall I lend you Love?'

'Why not?' he said, but after quite an interval. He was very far away.

And now she deliberately made conversation. 'Have you read The Sorrows of Werther recently?' No response. 'Now, that's an interesting case. Goethe was first in love with Lotte and then with Maximiliane Von La Roche. He said himself of Lotte that she was a woman more likely to inspire contentment than violent passions, but it was Lotte he made the heroine.' Stephen was still staring at the same patch of water. Moorhens had replaced the swans. They were energetically propelling themselves about. He sighed again. Hard to tell whether he was listening. 'Obviously it was Maximiliane who inspired the violent passion, but that is not what he wrote.'

She thought he had not heard, but after a time he said, 'Are you saying he was dishonest?'

'It was a novel, after all. I would say he was circumspect. Suppose he had written a novel where young Werther was madly in love with Lotte and then passionately in love with Maximiliane. I don't think the readers would have liked it.'

She found herself counting, waiting for his response. It seemed to take him fifteen seconds to hear, or at least to frame a response.

'I dare say they wouldn't like it now.'

'But Romeo was madly in love with Rosalind and then with Juliet.'

One, two, three… she reached twenty. 'I suppose we've got used to that.'

She was wondering, Am I like this too? In the theatre, are they having to wait half a minute to get some kind of response from me?

'Stephen, I want to ask you something… no, wait.' He was beginning to walk away from her, his face clenched up. 'You said you were in love with someone before you were in love with Julie. Do you see that now as a sort of trial run for the real thing?'

She thought he was not going to answer, but at last he said, 'But that was quite different.'

'Suppose Goethe had described two passions, both strong, one after another, the first for the maternal woman, a mother figure, and the second the real thing, the grown-up passion? He didn't, so now one of the European archetypes for romantic love is an insipid Anglo-Saxon hausfrau, but the real truth was a fiery passion with Maximiliane. After all, we've all had the experience of saying, I'm in love with So-and-so, because we don't want anyone to know we are in love with someone else.'

It would be easy to believe he had not been listening, but now he said, without an interval, 'They were ready to kill themselves for Lotte. Young Germans. Dozens of them. They threw themselves over cliffs and under horses' hooves.'

'Was that because Lotte was a mother figure?'

'I wonder if my lady was a mother figure,' he remarked, at once, looking straight at her and as if he really wanted her to say yes, or no. As she said neither, he remarked, and he sounded almost cheerful, 'Well, I suppose she was, now I come to think of it. Well, what's the matter with that? She was… Sarah, you'd have liked her, she was… If she had married me then… ' And now he actually laughed, if gruffly, and said, 'I wouldn't have been boring you with all my nonsense all this time.' He put a hand on her arm and began directing her towards the rose garden. He was a man strolling with a friend on a path between rose beds on a sunny afternoon. He was even smiling. She realized just how worried she was about him by the way a weight had lifted off her heart, leaving her feeling positively buoyant.

'I wonder what the Goethe buffs would make of your theory?'

'But he said himself, "It's very pleasant if a new passion awakes with us before the old one has quite faded way." In this case the old faded and the new one arose in a matter of days.'

'Pleasant,' he said.

'He also said, "The greatest happiness is to be found in longing.'"

'Good Lord.'

'And Stendhal would not have disagreed. A pleasure for superior souls, he thought.'

'Barmy,' said Stephen. He came to a stop in the middle of Queen Mary's rose garden, with people all around them admiring the roses. He took his book from his pocket and read to her: ' "The self-image of the sufferer becomes identified with the image of the beloved. Previous failures in love, common in this psychological type, reinforce the present condition because each surrender to the illness adds all past hopes to the present. The sufferer values pain as a guarantee of success this time. And remember that Cupid directs arrows and not roses to his victims.'" They walked on, he holding the book in his hand like a priest with a breviary or a schoolboy swotting for an exam. 'And that isn't so far from Proust,' he added.

'I think Proust's pleasure in self-analysis was stronger than his sufferings over love. As for Stendhal, I think the analysis was a way of surviving the suffering.'

'Like Julie,' he said, and at once, not after fifteen or twenty seconds' delay.

'Whereas Goethe was thoroughly enjoying the drama of it all.'

'Well, he was very young.'

'I wasn't capable of all that when I was very young. Being young was bad enough.' But Sarah was thinking of herself as a child, not as a young woman.

'I do my best never to think of being young. I have a feeling I wouldn't like what I'd remember if I did.'

'Did you know you never mention your parents?'

'Don't I? Well… I don't think I saw much of them. Anyway, they broke up when I was fifteen. I get along with all four of them. When we meet, that is. My father and his wife live in Italy. She's a bit of a lightweight. I've often thought he must regret swapping my mother for her. But I don't think my mother has had regrets. She and her — he's a good chap, actually. They're in Scotland. He's a farmer. He's younger than she is a good bit. By fifteen years or so. They get along all right.'

They were at the gates. When she said she would walk with him to his club, it turned out he was not in his club but at a hotel.

'Can't cope,' he said. 'Conversations, you know. No one expects anything of one at a hotel. The only person I want to talk to is you. You know, Sarah, it's a funny thing: I used to talk a lot to Julie, but now I seem to talk to you.'

A week later he was in town again. He rang from the hotel. She thought the line was bad, then understood he was fumbling with words. 'I'd like to see you,' he got out at last, making it sound as if there was something particular he wanted to say.

'All right — where?'

A long silence.

'Stephen?'

'Yes?'

'Shall I come to the hotel?'

'Oh no, no. There are so many people here.'

'Shall we meet in the park again?'

'Yes, yes, the park… '

She walked, through a brilliant afternoon, from the great formal gilded gates towards a hunched man sitting motionless on a bench. She sat beside him. He nodded, without looking at her. Then he roused himself — she watched him doing it — to make conversation. Things were going along nicely with plans for Julie at Queen's Gift, he said. Sarah contributed by chatting about The Green Bird. Sonia was taking the new girl, Virginia, in hand. There had been a picture of Virginia Woolf by Virginia's bed, but Sonia had made her replace it with a photograph of Rebecca West. There had been a great improvement: Virginia no longer had a wispy chignon and droopy clothes but had cut her hair and was as bright and as pretty as a parakeet, like Sonia.