Before Julie and being turned inside out, she thought the country of love was so remote from her seasoned and well- balanced self that she could be likened to someone standing outside great iron gates behind which a dog flounced its hindquarters about, not unattractively, a foolish harmless dog no one could be afraid of. But now she knew that the gates separating her from that place were flimsy, no more than hastily tacked up pieces of thin wood, and behind them was a dog of the kind they breed now for murder. She could see the dog clearly. It was the size of a calf. It wore a muzzle. Or was it a mask? — the theatre mask that changes from a laugh to the grimace of grief, and back again.
It was mid-August, and some weeks had passed since the anguish that had so crushed her had taken itself off. As she had predicted, she could not remember its intensity, proving that Nature (or whatever) does not need its children to remember pain, unproductive for its purposes, whatever they are. She was finding herself in moments of quiet enjoyment, drawing vitality as she had all her life from small physical pleasures, like the feel of a naked sole on wood, the warmth of sunlight on bare skin, the smell of coffee or of earth, the faint scent of frost on a stone. She had returned to being a woman who never wept, though the idea of a good cry for the sake of it was certainly inviting: she had forgotten how to cry, it seemed. Other people's excesses of emotion tempted her to judge them as immature. She had actually caught on her face the smile that goes with, Really, how silly — on hearing of someone foolishly in love. (Did that mean then that she had learned nothing at all?) She monitored sadness which was steadily retreating, losing strength, and kept her attention on it as if it were a dangerous animal that might attack from an unexpected place. It might worsen, might drag her back: in old people's faces, in their eyes, she often saw the dry sorrow that now she understood. Oh no, she didn't want that, she refused it! And the way to keep it off, that vulture that fed on the heart, was never to relax vigilance.
She still could not listen to Julie's music, or to the old trouvère and troubadour music. Pain, to be 'sweet' must be mild. The anguish that threatened her at even a few notes from Julie Vairon, or even the vulgar torch song from The Lucky Piece, or Julie — no, absolutely not. Sounds could still seem too loud, too much, and there seemed no safe place anywhere for her. As for that sentimental shepherd boy from long ago, in his silent landscape these days a small wind blew, the dry whine that has set humankind's nerves on edge with apprehension for thousands of years, and the sound held almost audible voices, while the high scream of a hawk was the first note of Julie's third act music. Worse, one day some sheets of paper had blown up the hill towards the boy half asleep under his tree, and he stared at them, thinking he was dreaming, and the black signs on the paper, the words grief, heart, pain, seemed to him some kind of frightful magic- making, so that he woke up completely, but by then the wind had blown the sheets away down the hill and into the grass, and he believed he had imagined an apparition. And where was the silent haven she craved? Down in the oceans, fishes clicked and squeaked, and whales sang. Up in space, debris collided and meteors rumbled. At the bottom of mine shafts or deep caves? The silence of the grave? A likely story. There would be a roar of worms and of excavating roots.
Yet fear or, if you like, caution did not prevent that process familiar to everyone submerged in the why of something. Clues accumulate and fall into place. You pick up a book apparently at random, and it falls open on a page where what you are thinking about is explored. You overhear a conversation: they are talking about what preoccupies you. You switch on the radio — there it is. Sarah's dreams were full of information, and she felt as if she were on the verge of… Know yourself, says the old admonition, but it is not easy to decide what it is you ought to be trying to know at any given moment.
Sarah sat on a park bench, looking at an empty bench almost opposite hers, across a wide path that led out of the park.
Along a path from the gate came a young woman pushing a pram, holding one side of the handle, while a little girl pushed too, using both hands. When they reached the bench nearly opposite Sarah, the young woman hauled the pram onto the grass behind the bench, lifted out a baby of about ten months, and sat down on the bench. She held the baby on her knees. The little girl, who was about four, sat very close to her mother. She was a pretty little girl, and dressed in a crisp pink cotton frock, pink socks, pink shoes, and her straight thin black hair was held with a pink plastic barrette. All this pinkness did not suit her small thin anxious face, nor eyes that seemed too knowledgeable, like a sad woman's.
The mother was well turned out too. She had tight white trousers and a white singlet that showed carefully tanned shoulders and arms. Her hair was dyed bronze and stood out in a fashionable frizz. She was hugging and kissing the infant, who laughed and tried to grab her hair. Then he reached for her nose, while she laughed and flirtatiously averted her face. She began singing the nursery rhyme, 'Rock-a-bye Baby', and when she reached 'and down falls baby and cradle and all', she pretended to let the baby fall. He shrieked in delicious false terror: they had often played this game before. The child was trying to join in, singing 'Rock-a-bye Baby', but her voice was lost in the loud full singing of the mother and the baby's gurgles of pleasure.
The little girl was sitting right against her mother, and now she put up her hand to tug her elbow down, to get her attention.
'Oh, leave me alone,' snapped the mother, in a voice so irritable and full of dislike it was hard to believe this was the same voice she used to love the baby. And now she used this voice again, rich, full, and sexual, and she kissed the baby's neck with an open mouth. 'Darling, darling, darling,' murmured the mother. 'Little Ned, my darling, darling Ned.' And then, removing her mouth from the baby's neck for this purpose, she snapped at her daughter, 'I told you, stop it, stop bothering me, don't crowd me like that.' And she went on loving the baby as if the child did not exist.
The little girl wriggled a short way from her mother, and sat watching the love scene. When the woman began another rhyme, this time 'To market, to market, to buy a fat pig', she again tried to join in, but her mother smacked her hard and said, 'Oh, do shut up, Claudine.'
The child sat frozen, a few inches from her mother, looking sombrely in front of her — looking, in fact, at Sarah, at that dull old woman there on the bench. Unable to stand the loving going on that excluded her, she carefully turned to her mother, expecting a slap, and said, 'Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,' in a desperate voice.
'Now what is it?' snapped the young woman.
'I want my orange juice, I want my orange juice.'
'You've just had orange juice.'
'I want it again,' the child said, trying to smile, looking up at the woman's angry face, hoping to make her mother see her, see her misery.
But the mother did not look at her. She leaned her arm back over the bench into the pram, took out a carton of juice, and handed it carelessly to the child, who took it with the caution that governed every movement she made, even the smallest. She tried to get the straw off the side of the carton. The mother watched her fumbling over the top of the baby's head, which was lying on her breasts, or to be precise, in the hollow under her left shoulder, his cheek on her breast. She was watching with a practised irritation that waited for an excuse to pounce. 'There,' she snapped, as the straw fell to the tarmac of the path. 'Look what you've done. You'll have to drink it through the hole, that's all.' And she laid her cheek on her baby's head and crooned, 'Neddy is my darling, my darling, my darling,' and then, 'Baby is my darling… '