but by her brother’s youngest girl, Joyce. Hal and Anne had three daughters, the older two ordinary and just like everybody else’s children. Joyce had been a problem since birth. Why? Who knows? She was a screaming baby, a grizzling toddler, a disagreeable child. Sent to school, she at once fell ill and had to come home. She simply could not manage school and other children. Her parents both being doctors, her condition never lacked diagnoses. Her records were voluminous and in several hospitals. A psychiatrist recommended that she be allowed to stay at home. Sarah was appealed to, and Joyce spent her days with her, in the room that had been the children’s room. In those days Sarah often worked at home, and when she did go out for appointments Joyce stayed happily by herself. What did she do? Nothing at all. She made herself cups of tea, watched television, and sometimes rang telephone numbers at random until someone was willing to talk to her, when she would chat away sometimes for an hour or two hours. The telephone bills were enormous, and Hal and Anne did not offer to pay for them.
Joyce became anorexic and was again in hospital. She was ‘stabilized’ and despatched back to Sarah, who protested it was not fair, she could not deal any longer with Joyce. Hal had said in his kindly judicious way that it must be nice for Sarah to have Joyce around when her own children were so far away. But when the unsure and suffering Pierrot, now the efficient mother of two children in California, or the arrogantly beautiful boy, now a marine biologist with two sons, came bringing grandchildren to visit their grandmother, Joyce went home and there was no argument about it. As Joyce became fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, things went from bad to very bad. Suicide attempts, crises, cries for help. It was Sarah who took her to hospital and talked with the doctors, who had been briefed, of course, by the parents. It was always Aunt Sarah who was summoned. Back home, Joyce went to bed. Sarah fought with her and often succumbed to the low painful state threatening those who take on the psychic burden of those – as we put it – who cannot cope with ordinary life. There were times when she felt that she too would take to her bed and stay there, but her colleagues sustained her. And then all at once everything changed. One of the people, a girl, who chatted with Joyce on the telephone suggested they should meet. Sarah rang her brother, saying she had not seen Joyce for days, and now it was for him, for Joyce’s parents, to make decisions. When Hal said he was afraid Joyce looked on her – Sarah – as her effective parent (‘You are her effective parent, Sarah, surely you must know that’), Sarah said she was sorry, she had done her bit. Of course that was not the end of it. She worried quite dreadfully about Joyce: it had always been a waste of time worrying about Joyce. As the result of a television programme about people living rough, she went to the police, who suggested a certain café in King’s Cross. Joyce’s name was known to these addicts, pushers, and prostitutes. Sarah again rang her brother, who said, ‘She’s old enough now to take responsibility for herself,’ and then added with cheerful spite, in his way that said since he took pleasure in malice then his interlocutor must too, ‘We’ve been meaning to tell you. You should do something about yourself. You could do with a lick of paint.’
Postponing the lick, she went to the psychiatrist most often consulted about Joyce, where she heard that Joyce’s flight into the great world could be seen as a step into maturity. An interesting notion, that a loony girl’s development might be better furthered by joining drug users, pushers, and prostitutes than by taking refuge in her family. But there was nothing she, Sarah, could do. She would at last lead her own life. No, she did not expect to feel immediately better without the interminable drag and drudge of Joyce. Then she did take herself in hand, at last. She examined herself in the dim mirrors, switching on all the lights. Not bad, she supposed. She looked a handsome middle-aged matron. A hairdresser had improved her hair-do: a small smooth head went well with clothes more expensive than anything she had bought for years. At the theatre, her colleagues commended her. They also allowed her to know she had let herself be put upon and she should stand up for herself.
Besides, they all needed undivided energies. They were all working on a production more ambitious than anything they had done. Only a year ago, Julie Vairon had been on a list of possibilities, and now it was a big co-production, with American, French, and English money. They knew they would have to engage more people, expand, but they put off doing this. They confessed there was something disturbing about Julie Vairon’s irresistible sweep, and Mary Ford wondered aloud if they would have taken on Julie if they had known what an upheaval would result, but Patrick said it was not Julie Vairon but Julie Vairon who was the trouble; and he spoke with the whimsical self-satisfaction which is, because of a secret identification, felt as flattering.
In the eighties of the last century, in Martinique, a beautiful girl – a quadroon, like Napoleon’s Josephine – fascinated a young French officer. This is where Julie Vairon, the play – or, as it was later billed, An Entertainment – began. She was the daughter of a mulatto woman who had been the mistress of a white plantation owner’s son. When he inherited the plantation he married suitably, a poor but aristocratic girl from France, but remained Sylvie Vairon’s protector, while gossip claimed he was much more. He agreed the girl should be educated, at least to the level of the daughters of the neighbouring rich family, also landowners. Perhaps his conscience troubled him, but it was said, too, that he had enlightened ideas and these were expressed only here, in Julie’s education. She had music lessons and drawing lessons and read quantities of books recommended by tutors who fitted in her lessons between the more formal lessons they gave the rich girls in their big house five miles away. The tutors were fiery young men who regretted they had not been born in time for the Revolution, or at least to fight in Napoleon’s armies, just as in our time young men or women mourn because they were not in Paris in ’68. ‘But ’68 was a failure,’ a practical elder may protest, only to be demolished by passionately scornful eyes. ‘What of it! Think how exciting it must have been!’
One of the young ladies, more enterprising than her sisters, decided to satisfy her curiosity about the mysterious Julie and contrived to visit her secretly in the house in the forest where Julie lived with her mother. She boasted about her exploit, which was evidence of her brave indifference to convention, and added to the already noisy rumours. The visit was invaluable to Julie, for she had had nothing to measure herself against. She learned from it that she was more intelligent than these respectable girls – her visitor was supposed to be the cleverest of them – but learned too how socially disadvantaged she herself was, for she was educated above her prospects and even her possibilities. Also, she knew why the tutors were all so ready to teach her. They might all be in love with her, but they could also talk to her.
Of herself at that time she wrote less than ten years later, Inside that pretty little head what an olla podrida of incompatible ideas. But I envy that girl her innocence. She had read the Encyclopedists, was devoted to Voltaire, while Rousseau, so appealing to anyone dependent on natural justice, had to hold sway. She could debate (and did, endlessly, with her tutors) about the acts and speeches of every personage on the great stage of the Revolution as if she had lived through it. She knew as much about the heroes of the American War of Independence. She adored Tom Paine, worshipped Benjamin Franklin, was convinced she and Jefferson were made for each other. She knew that had she been old enough she would have got on a ship to America to nurse the victims of the Civil War. But in fact she was living on her father’s banana estate, the illegitimate part-black (she was a light brown colour, like a southern French or Italian) daughter of a black lady whose house in the sultry forest was where successive waves of young officers, all bored out of their minds in this beautiful but dull island, went for entertainment, dancing, drinking, food, and the delightful singing of beautiful Julie. A very young officer, Paul Imbert, fell in love with her. He adored her, but did he adore her enough to marry her or even take her with him to France? Probably not, if she had not refused to see difficulties and insisted they should run away together. His parents were respectable people living not far from Marseilles, his father a magistrate. They refused to receive Julie. Paul found for her a little stone house in hilly and romantic country, and there he visited his love daily for a year, riding through aromatic pines, poplars, and olive trees. Then his parents pulled strings, the army forgave his young man’s lapse, and he was sent on duty to French IndoChina. And now Julie was alone in the woods, with no means of support. The magistrate sent her
