had been intense and terrible, with exactly the same quality of impossibility as this one. And before that? What nonsense that children did not love, did not suffer: it was as bad for them as for their elders. No, she would not think about that, she refused to. She would force herself to recover from this illness. For that is what it was.
She sent Stephen a fax:
‘Love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves as well the dark house and whip as madmen do, and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippets are in love too.’
He sent her one:
‘Who so loves believes in the impossible.’ Faxes are all very well, but I’d rather hear your voice.
Early on Sunday evening a card was pushed through her door. It was the most charming and guileless card, of a frieze of pink deer, Bambis, rather, nose to nose – kissing. It could not have been in worse taste – for anyone but a small child. The person who sent this card (had asked someone to drop it in?) was a child. (What had he in common with the brutal youth who had slithered that insinuating caress down Molly’s back and buttocks?) The card made the statement, I am a little boy. A shock of cold water, but only to her mind. Her emotions were not affected. Her body burned more fiercely, if this were possible. (‘I have to tell you how much it means to me, getting to know you. All my love, Bill.’) Burn, the word we use, shorthand for such shameful, such agonizing physical symptoms. Quite poetic, really, the word burn.
She had his telephone number, in her capacity as administrator of the theatre. His hotel was not far away. She waited half an hour and telephoned. Exactly as she would have done when ‘sexually viable’ – a phrase she had found in a sociological article, making her laugh, a dry safe phrase, putting everything in its proper place. (Like burn.) She thanked him for his card and suggested he should come over. It seemed impossible that he would not come over at once, and into her bed. Such are the side products of the physical swellings, wettings, and aches shorthanded in the word burn. She could hear how his voice put guards on itself. She was not too far gone to judge the voice (hearing it like this, without the benefit of his presence) as a trifle vulgar, because of its self-satisfaction, its complacency. She was furious: she had not persuaded him! She had never once gone to sit by him, gone to talk to him, initiated anything. And what did he mean by saying All my love? (Her mind did inform her that she had done this a thousand years ago, finding everything she felt in a phrase or a word: one did this, when in love.) He would drop in, in about an hour. Her body rioted, but her mind, as much under threat as a candle flame in a strong draught, made derisive comments.
She remembered an incident from her childhood, one she had put into a frame long ago, with an appropriate smile. She was six years old. A small boy – he seemed to her a small boy, for he was a year younger than she was – stood with her under a great tree that had in it a tree house and told her that he loved Mary Templeton. He had just embraced her, fat little arms around her neck, a fat wet kiss on her cheek, and an impulsive ‘I love you’. Because of the kiss and the arms and the ‘I love you’ she told him – outraged, self-righteous, dissolved in love for him – that he couldn’t love Mary, for she was too old; he must love her. And when he said stubbornly that he really loved Mary, she was full of a conviction of his unfairness. He had kissed her, he had said he loved her, and she could still feel the warm little arms around her. Mary Templeton was the most glamorous of the small girls, because she went every week to ballet school and was nine years old. (Surely as a female creature she – Sarah – should have known that it was inevitable he must love Mary, because she was out of reach.) Sarah told him that he and she together should set up life in the tree house just above their heads, an arboreal paradise, for she had already in imagination planned the cheese and tinned ham she would take from the pantry, and the old eiderdown from the understairs cupboard. The small boy hesitated, for he did like the tree house, but repeated that he loved Mary.
This incident frozen all those years ago, a baby mammoth in ice, was filling her with the emotions of then. She had adored the plump little boy with his soft dark locks and his wide blue eyes. His wet kiss on her cheek and his ‘I love you’ had utterly melted her. It was inconceivable he did not adore her. But he had decided to dream of Mary Templeton instead. Long ago, under that tree in a garden since bulldozed to make a housing estate, a desolation of grief had swallowed her. A little child’s love. So she had filed it away: a childish love, not to be taken seriously.
When Bill arrived he had with him Molly, Mary Ford, and Sandy Grears, the lighting man. Sarah thought, while hot knives sliced her back, Of course, Bill and Molly are in the same hotel. And Sandy? He was a strong young man, capable, with the good looks of health, a recent addition because of the demands of Julie Vairon, and she had not had time to notice him much. It seemed he had invited the actors to his flat for lunch, and they had all accepted, and some had afterwards gone to Bill’s room, and then Sarah had so kindly rung Bill to ask him over. Sarah looked quietly (she hoped) at Bill while he came out with this, but he was only smiling, not looking at her. The four young people were smiling as they came in. In this context Mary Ford was one of them. They were a group she was excluded from as absolutely as if she were dreaming them, and they would vanish when she woke. Meanwhile, in a moment that was short for them but frozen for her in the intensity of observation, she saw them in a frame: Bill standing there in her living room, laughing, his hand on his hip, and the two young women’s bodies turned towards him and passive with desire. Their faces were all a hopeful waiting. (Mary Ford too? Interesting.) Sandy broke it, by flinging himself into a chair, saying as he saw Julie’s picture pinned there, ‘A home from home.’
And now they were all in the camaraderie of the theatre. But only in appearance, for Sarah was on that other shore, excluded, watching. She saw how Bill was dispensing himself in looks and smiles, and how the women suffered. They could not take their eyes off him, any more than she could. He was like a young glossy animal, a deer perhaps? She thought of the biblical scene where all the women, entranced by Joseph, cut their hands with their fruit knives, not knowing what they did, a scene reinterpreted by Thomas Mann – bound to be reset, always, in a thousand contexts, by life. The scene had the same slowed-down underwater quality as an erotic fantasy or an erotic dream.
A lot of chat went on, badinage. Messages were being sent out in that other language that so often accompanies the ostensible exchange. Bill was telling a long humorous tale of how in New York there had been a goodish interval between one engagement and another. ‘I was weeks out of work. The telephone didn’t ring for me once. Then, suddenly, it didn’t stop. I was offered four parts in a week. I didn’t know myself.’ He was looking not at the women but at Sandy as he spoke. Switching into cockney: ‘Reely I di’n’t, oo’d’v thort it, me, Bill Collins.’ And then in BBC standard, ‘The cynosure of all eyes.’ Mary Ford murmured, ‘Oh dear, I do wonder why.’ At once he despatched her a genuinely wounded glance, went red, laughed with pleasure, and at once recovered himself with ‘Four! All at once! Too much!’ And who was the fourth, Sonia? He tilted back his head and laughed, exposing his strong and perhaps too full throat, and from that position – arrogant, touch-me-not – defended himself with a diagnostic inspection of them all. ‘I chose this one, of course. I chose Julie. I couldn’t resist her. Besides, I’ve never been in France, let alone worked there. From dearth to plenty,’ he drawled, an American, malicious, and very far from the dear little boy. Molly listened to the real message here, and smiled. It was a small, tight smile. Mary Ford even nodded as she smiled. Sarah could feel that same smile on her own face. Then Bill smiled at Sandy and understanding sliced into Sarah and at the same time – surely? – into the other two women. Of course. This excessively beautiful young man…the theatre…New York. And yes, he had a girlfriend, he had said so. All young men have girlfriends and even wives, if feeling sufficiently threatened. These thoughts careered through Sarah’s head while she shouted silently at herself, For God’s sake, stop it!
The telephone rang. It was Stephen. He had been crying. He probably still was, for his voice was unsteady. ‘I
