Sarah was waiting for him. So was Susan, for while she stood chatting nicely over the plate she was eating from, her eyes sped continually to the big doors behind Norah and Elizabeth, which admitted girls bearing more dishes from the kitchens, or to the big door leading out to the garden. Not until the meal was nearly over did Stephen arrive. A small and unremarkable door to the interior of the house opened, and he stood there, an authoritative presence, though he had meant, it seemed, to appear unnoticed. Susan sped him a look over her plate and, when she was sure he had seen her, let her lids fall, with an effect of obedience. Stephen sent Sarah a glance like a wink, but then looked long and sombrely at Susan. He picked up a plate, was filling it with this and that, but absent-mindedly, and then Susan was beside him.
Sarah stood across the room, a glass of wine in her hand, and watched the scene. She was so pretty, that girl… lovely… so young… just imagine she takes it all for granted. Just look at her: she intends to shoot arrows into every part of him, and yet at the same time she is full of uncertainty and forcing herself to stand her ground, looking up at him. If he addresses one rejecting word at her she'll melt away. Well, make the most of it, my dear one, Sarah addressed Susan, or Julie, in a wash of emotion that made her want to embrace Susan and Stephen together, as if they were all here to celebrate a marriage or sing an epithalamium… what nonsense that she was so afflicted by these disproportionate emotions. She turned from watching the pair and found Henry beside her. He had been watching her watch Stephen, for now he muttered, and there was no joke about it, 'I'm getting jealous of Stephen.' Her abasement before youth was such that she at once thought, He is in love with Susan, and daggers of ice splintered in her heart, but then she saw it was not so and could have wept with delight, because it was she, Sarah, he was jealous of. And so she laughed, far too much, and he said, put out, 'I don't see why it's so funny.'
'So you don't know why it is funny, no, you don't know why it is so funny,' she derided, her face six inches from his, as Susan's was from Stephen's. He grimaced, as if from a mouthful of unexpectedly sour food, and said 'Sarah,' reproachful and low. They stood beside each other, just touching. Bliss, well mixed with every kind of regret, was making itself available in unlimited quantities. At that moment Sarah was not envying the girl who stood admiring Stephen with looks that said, whether she knew it or not, 'Take me, take me.' Well, everyone had a bedroom on the same floor. It was inconceivable to Sarah that Henry would not come to hers that night, while she knew he would not, because his wife would soon be here.
Then it was time to go into the evening sunlight for the dress rehearsal. The cast disappeared into the new building, Henry with them.
Stephen and Sarah walked together towards the chairs, now filling with the audience.
He quoted, 'When a man is really in love he looks insufferably silly.'
She said: 'But: Love is the noblest frailty of the mind.'
'How kind you are, Sarah.'
'It has not occurred to you that since I am in love, and quite appallingly, I am trying to cheer myself up?'
'I've already told you that I am so much of an egoist I only care about your being in love because I have a companion in misfortune.'
'He that loveth is devoid of all reason. But: One hour of downright love is worth a lifetime of dully living on.'
'Do you believe that, Sarah? I don't think I do. The way I feel now I'd give a good deal to be dully living on.'
'Ah, but you're forgetting: the poet was talking about love. Not grief. After all, it is possible to be in love without wishing you were dead.'
'I suppose I was forgetting that.'
He went off to see the new building in use, and she sat down discreetly at the back, keeping an empty seat for whoever would choose to sit in it. Just behind her, a pink mallow spread branches where flowers perched like silk-paper butterflies. Beside it grew a yellow rose. All around spread the lively green of the lawn. It was all so charming, so balanced, so English, this setting for the new production. But Julie could never have prospered here in this sun, on this soil. And here they could not expect what no one had planned for in France: the hundreds crowding up through the pines, and the turkey oaks and the cedars and the olives and the untamed rocks, like spies or thieves — the effect that had given Julie Vairon in France its special charm.
It began. The four young officers in their glamorous uniforms (there were three extras now, justified and paid for by success) stepped up onto the stage, where the two women waited. But these were not the mother and daughter of a few weeks before. This Julie seemed to flash and flame. Sally had not put on the flesh she needed to be the stately matron. The scarlet dress had been taken in, and she had been padded out, but she was tall, quite slender, and this gave her admonitions and exhortations to her daughter an edge of rivalry, for it was impossible to believe the young officers did not find her as attractive as her daughter. Interesting, but not what had been intended.
Otherwise it all went on as before. Paul courted Julie to the accompaniment of the insipid ballad. Sylvie Vairon wept as her plans for her daughter were swept away by passion. The cicadas were absent, but a thrush sang from a hawthorn as the lovers fled. Then, the south of France, because the programme said it was. No, there was no doubt Julie did better on that warm red soil, in the southern forest. It was not that the tale became bathos, though these sad loves had to balance on that edge, rather that the English setting itself seemed a criticism of the girl. In the south of France, Martinique was only a thought or a sea's breath away, but here it was a tropical island, with associations of Captain Cook and South Sea hedonism (never mind that it was the wrong ocean), and Julie and her mother could only have the look of misplaced Victorians, just as the sentimental ballad at once earned appreciative laughter because of associations that had nothing to do with Julie. Who in this audience had not had grandparents or great-grandparents (remembered perhaps because of yellowing sheet music in a drawer or 78 records) attentive around a piano where some young lady played the 'Indian Love Lyrics' or 'The Road to Mandalay'? In Belles Rivieres the girl was at odds with her society, certainly, but she was a not too distant cousin of Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Genlis, a daughter of George Sand; but here the passionate girl had to evoke comparisons with the Brontes, though their lives seemed for ever shrouded in grey rain. This audience was not lost in the tale like the other audience, crowding in the forests where the story had happened, the sounds of the river filling pauses in the music when the cicadas did not.
Henry slipped into the seat beside her and at once muttered, 'It's a flop.'
'Nonsense,' said reliable Sarah. 'It's different, that's all.'
'Oh yes, you can say that. My God, it's different.'
During the third act a calm northern twilight distanced the tale, the unearthly insinuations of Julie's late music filled the spaces between the trees. Somewhere close, blackbirds sang goodbye to the day. The moon, in its last quarter, rose up over the black trees on a high arc, a mildewed wafer with a decayed edge, but as they turned away from the sun, it was a golden moon, only a little asymmetrical, that shone conventionally on Julie's death. Then starlings swooped squealing about the house that held up its many chimneys dark into the sequined sky, and Henry said — but he was feeling better — that he was going to claim extra money for unforeseen stage effects. 'And danger money too,' he murmured, his lips at her ear, and for the space of a second they were in the place of sweet intimacy that knows nothing of grief. Then the applause began, enthusiastic but not wild, as in France.