the Friday of Rémy’s week, Stephen came to sit in his chair by Sarah, to watch a run-through of Act Two. Molly had put on a long skirt to help her, and she seemed as if by magic to have become thinner, lithe, wild, vulnerable. It broke the heart to watch her, the brave one, battling with such a destiny. The young aristocrat, son of the Rostand château, was touching in his love for the girl he would never be allowed to marry.
Meanwhile there was still no music, and Molly was speaking the words of her song, which would be sung later by the counter-tenor.
If this song of mine is a sad one,Love, who I hold in my arms,Our joy as wild as a hawk circling,Think that when summer comesThey will send you far from me,Then you will remember these daysAnd my sad song tonight.With you gone I am forever exiled from myself.
Stephen said, ‘I don’t remember that. I suppose you made it up?’
‘I thought it was in the style of a troubadour song.’ She put in front of him what Julie had actually written, in her translation.
It’s all very well! Love, love, love, we say, weeping for joy all night. Next summer we’ll be singing a different tune. I saw how your father looked at me today. Time’s up, that look said.
‘Fair enough,’ he said. He was sitting with his head bowed, not looking at the players. Far from laughing, or even smiling – for she did believe the transmutation of one mode into another merited at least a mild smile – he seemed like a miserable old man. Yet once (once! it was a few weeks ago) the humour they shared had been the best part of their friendship. She was telling herself that she must accept it – must – that a phase of their friendship was over. This was not the man with whom she had those weeks of companionship. And as she thought this, the leaden glove she associated with Joyce threatened to enclose her heart, and she snapped at herself, No, stop it, stop it at once. And she went off and away from the chair by Stephen, to stand with her back to the players, pretending to examine some props, as it happened, brilliant flowers and fruit from Martinique, there to give the ‘feel’ of the place. She was muttering, ‘“No, I’ll not, carrion comfort Despair, not feast on thee; not untwist, slack they may be…”’ And was furious with herself. Melodramatic bloody rubbish! she shouted silently to that part of her memory that had so patly come up with these words, feeding them to her tongue, while her mind refused them. Feeling someone behind her, she composed her face to turn, smiling, at Henry, but she had not composed it sufficiently, for he was thrown back at the sight of her. ‘What’s wrong, Sarah, don’t you like it?’ he half stammered, and she had to remind herself that the most confident of directors needed reassurance, and this was a far from confident one. Over his shoulder she saw Sonia (her successor at The Green Bird – she could not remember seeing this so clearly before) go up to Bill with some letter, or telegram that had come for him. He took it, making a joke, and they stood laughing, the attractive redhead, the handsome boy – no, no, not a boy, he was a man…She said to Henry, ‘Yes, I do like it, very much,’ and saw how his body relaxed out of the tension of anxiety. The traitor memory was offering to her tongue, as she watched Sonia and Bill stroll down the hall, in perfect step, ‘“…keep back beauty, beauty, beauty, from vanishing away…O no, there’s none, there’s none, O no, there’s none…”’ and she put her hand in Henry’s elbow and turned him about with a laugh, out of his posture as a suppliant, for she did not want to feel maternal, and together they stood to watch as Rémy and Julie held each other in an embrace that had in it all the sorrows and disciplines of valediction.
‘I thought, when you went off like that…And Stephen doesn’t like it, does he?’
‘Yes, he does. He likes it very much.’
‘He really does?’
‘Yes, really.’ And she discarded various sets of words, all to the effect that the play touched Stephen too nearly.
When the time came to go for lunch, she went with Stephen to a restaurant not the same as the company’s usual choice. It was obvious he did not want to be with them. There he said he was not hungry. He sat, all dejection, while she trifled with her own food. His breathing wasn’t right: he sighed and then sat as if he had forgotten to breathe. He kept shifting his position, leaned forward, leaned back, even unconsciously putting his hand to his forehead in a gesture that was pure theatre: I am suffering. His look at her, when he did at last become conscious of her being there, was a close inspection, apparently hoping to find something in her face, but failing. And there was shame in it, as if he wanted to observe her, though without being observed.
As he parted he said to her, ‘All right, but if I’m mad I’m not the only one. I overheard that young jay tell Andrew Stead he was in love with a woman old enough to be his grandmother. Well, you, obviously.’ And he gave an angry laugh, the first that day. And it was not an accusation of her, but rather on behalf of the lunacy of the world. He went off to catch his train and she went home, dissolved in love. Well, yes, she had known Bill was in love with her. ‘In love’ – a phrase as you take it, all things to all men. And women. There are as many shades of being in love as there are graduations of colour on cards in the paint shops. All right, then, he had a crush on her. Why not? People had been having crushes on her all her life – or so she seemed to remember. (She added the rider hastily, defensively.) But the interesting thing was her bursting into flame because of hearing it said. Bill had said it knowing it would get back to her. Her body had filled at once with a most horrible desire. A reckless desire. All through that weekend she sat down and jumped up, flung herself on her bed and out of it again, because she would not, would not, succumb, walked around her room for hours, in such a daze and a dream she would not have been able to say at any moment what she had just been dreaming, yet no matter how far gone she was in dreaming, she was stopped again and again by that word impossible. Meaning just that. She was thinking of Aschenbach’s passion as an elderly man for the boy in Venice. Is it that we all have to suffer the fate of falling in love, when old, with someone young and beautiful, and if so, why? What was it all about? One falls in love with one’s own young self – yes, that was likely: narcissists, all of us, mirror people – but certainly it can have nothing to do with any biological function or need. Then what need? What renewal, what exercise in remembering, is Nature demanding of us?… And so she exclaimed and protested, and quite soon found herself murmuring – tranced, or hypnotized – speaking words she did not take responsibility for, since she did not know what they meant. ‘Who? Who is it?’ Accepting that she had in fact said or muttered these words, she commented on them that it was not possible she was in love with a handsome youth she had nothing at all in common with except the instant sympathy she owed to his love for his mother. Perhaps when he was seventy, well pickled by life, they might mean the same thing when they used words – yes, possibly then, but she would be dead. He was as innocent as a kitten. What could she possibly mean when she said that? He was horribly calculating. Yes, innocent, for only a man unsure of himself, like an adolescent or someone inexperienced, would need the kind of tricks and seductions he used. (That long, slithering, seductive, calculated caress, innocent?)
Memories she had refused to admit for years now stood around her in beguiling or accusing postures, forcing her to attend to them. She was being forced to remember past loves. And she was remembering her husband. But her memories of him had been put into a series of frames, like photographs, or scenes in a novel – a short novel, since he had died so young, at forty. (Once, and not long ago, to live to be forty in Europe was a great thing, an achievement.) Not a sad novel, not sad photographs. No, for she could scarcely remember the pitiful ending, young widow left with two small children, and those tears – surely she must have shed plenty? – might have been wept by someone else, for all she felt now. And had she ever loved him, her great love, with this burning, craving love? No, that had been a gradual love, leading to the satisfactory marriage that followed. And as a girl, before her husband? More pictures in an album? No, this love was forcing her to feel old loves, making her remember, bringing her face to face with loves
