Love Again (21 page)

‘But they are singing to me, that’s the point,’ said Stephen.

They had reached the little street where the museum was. The houses were in all shades of a chalk cliff, grey, pale, bleached, their shutters, which had once been glossy dark brown, faded to a scabby and patchy beige, like stale milk chocolate. Their tiled roofs—the same pattern of tiles the Romans used, interlocking in stiff waves—were the colours of the soil of this region, rust and ox-blood and dull orange. Against this restrained background blazed the balconies, loaded with pots crammed full of pelargoniums and jasmine and oleanders, and under them, along one side of the street, was a line of pots of every size and shape, dressed with blossom. Rue Julie Vairon seemed decorated for a festival in honour of Julie.

The museum, only a year old, was a house where it was believed Julie had given lessons, though the house next to it was just as likely. Never mind. On either side of the entrance stood shiny lemon trees in newly painted green tubs. On the inside of the entrance door, a hand was reversing a notice to say open. Henry and the others had returned to the square because they had found the place closed. It was a large door, a mere slice of glass and steel in the yard-thick stone wall, and it led into the ground floor of the old house. A dozen or so glass cabinets accommodated carefully grouped objects. One held paint brushes and crayons, half-finished drawings, a metronome, sheet music. In another was a yellow silk scarf, and beside it shabby black cloth gloves. The gloves seemed that moment to have slid off Julie’s small hands, and Sarah heard Stephen draw in his breath. His face had gone white. The gloves were alive; here was
Julie, her poverty, her attempts to conform, her courage. Her journals lay behind glass, together with letters mostly to clients about copying music, or appointments for portraits. No letters to her mother had survived: was it possible that Madame Vairon had carried them with her, and they died too in the lava from Mount Pelée? None of Julie’s letters to Paul or to Rémy, though it was unlikely these letters had been destroyed. Letters from Paul and from Rémy were collected into books and were there, in stacks, ready to be consulted by biographers. Paul’s were long and desperate and incoherent with love, and Rémy’s were long, thoughtful, and passionate. It seemed Philippe did not write her letters. But then, he saw her most days.

The walls were covered with her drawings and her pictures, many of herself and of her house. The self-portraits were by no means all flattering. In some she had caricatured herself as a respectable young lady, dressed to give lessons in houses like this one. A few showed her glossy black, in the clothes worn by her father’s house servants, abundant colourful skirts, frilled blouses, bandannas. She had tried herself out as an Arab girl, the transparent veil over her lower face, with inviting eyes—the picture on the poster at Queen’s Gift which had overthrown Stephen. Older, at the time of Rémy, her self-portraits show her as a woman capable of taking her place at that table, bare shoulders and bosom tamed by lace, passive folded hands—a biddable femininity. The drawing of the nude bacchante had a place on a side wall, not at once or even easily seen, as if the authorities had decided that it had to be somewhere, but let’s not draw attention to it. But the Julie she and posterity had agreed she was she had drawn and painted endlessly, in water colours and in pastels, in charcoal and in pencil: the fiery prickly critical girl and the independent woman not only were on the walls but could be bought as postcards.

Her little girl was there too, a tiny creature with Julie’s black eyes, but then, just as if she had not died, Julie had pictured her at
various ages in childhood and even grown up, for there were double portraits of Julie as a young woman with her daughter, a charming girl—but they were like sisters; and of Julie, middle-aged, with a girl like her own young self.

And there, beside a drawing of a wispy baby girl, all eyes, and by itself under glass, was a doll, with a card pinned to it, and on it, in Julie’s writing,
Sa poupée
. It was not much more than a doll suggested, only a stump of white kid, its head bald and stitched across the crown, as if sutured. It was eyeless. But this wretched doll had been loved to death, for the kid was worn and the rough rag of a red dress was torn.

Stephen and Sarah stood side by side and wept, not able to conceal it and not even trying to.

‘I
never
cry,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s this damned, damnable music.’

‘A time to weep and a time to laugh,’ said Stephen. ‘I can’t wait for the time to laugh. For God’s sake, let’s get out of here.’

They went out into the street, made loud by music and the roar of motor bikes. The company sat around the café tables, under sunshades. They were playing a game, in emulation or mockery of Sarah and Stephen.

‘All you need is love,’ said Bill gravely.

‘All I have to do is dream,’ said Sally, and Richard, beside her, sang ‘Dream, dream, dream.’

‘Hey, you’ve got a voice,’ she said.

‘Let the heartache begin,’ said Mary Ford, delivering this line to the air, with a smile.

‘This is the right time, the right place,’ said Molly to Bill.

‘Another day in Paradise,’ sang Bill.

‘You are my one temptation,’ remarked Andrew to no one in particular, and added, ‘I love you, love.’ He raised a glass towards Sarah and then, as an afterthought, to Stephen.

‘Tossing and turning,’ said Molly, to Bill.

‘Ob-la-di, ob-la-da,’ said Bill seductively to Molly.

‘I only want to be with you,’ said Sally to Richard, then sang it, and he sang, ‘Too late, my time has come…shivers down my spine.’ Sally sang at him, ‘Manchild, look at the state you’re in…Manchild, will you ever win…’ Richard took her hand and kissed it, then held it. She removed her hand and sighed. Both had tears in their eyes.

‘You said you loved me, you were just feeling kind,’ said Molly, and enquired of Bill, ‘What do you want to make those eyes at me for?’

Bill exclaimed, ‘Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!’ went bright red, so that he looked like a ten-year-old, jumped up, and said, ‘I am going for a swim.’

Molly sang, as the first line of a song, ‘I am going for a swim because I’m so in love with him.’ She laughed loudly, seeing Bill angry. Bill lingered, expecting the women to join him, but they sat tight. It was Sandy who got up, saying, ‘I’ll come.’ The two young men went off, and the women sat in fits of laughter, sounding angry and even spiteful. Themselves hearing it, they stopped. A silence, while everyone listened to the multilayered din of the little town.

Henry had been watching and not taking part. Now he stood and said, ‘Enough. Sarah, Stephen—you can see we don’t come up to your level.’ Clowning it, he sang, rather well, ‘Escape from reality, open your eyes, look up to the skies.’ They all clapped. He bowed. ‘Stephen, I’ve been lying in wait for you, to say we think you should go with our American sponsor to lunch. Jean-Pierre is inviting you.’

‘An order?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Very well. And Sarah must come too.’

‘I think I’ll leave you to it,’ said Sarah.

‘Insubordination,’ said Stephen. He took Sarah’s arm, while Henry insisted, ‘But I need Sarah, I need her at the rehearsal.’ He took her arm on the other side. Stephen let Sarah go and said, ‘Very well, where do I find my co-Croesus?’

‘Inside the café. He said it’s too hot out here.’

Stephen went into the café, where a jukebox howled and pounded. He came out again at once with Benjamin, shaking his head like a dog freeing its ears of water, smiling but actually looking rather sick.

‘That’s the real generation gap,’ said Sally. ‘Noise. They have cast-iron eardrums, the kids.’

‘They’ll be deaf,’ said Stephen. He and Benjamin took themselves off into the quiet of an hotel.

Then, after all, most of the company went off to swim. Where Julie had walked with her master printer in the town gardens was now a car park, swimming pool, tennis courts, café. A couple of remaining acacias shaded the boules game that was usually being played under them.

Sarah sat with Henry under an umbrella and they conferred over the words that were to be spoken by the locals, supplied by Jean-Pierre. They had sent him a deputation, complaining that they did not believe their grandparents would have been so unkind as to say the things written for them by Sarah. Which were all in the journals. ‘We must tone it down,’ ordered Henry. ‘Otherwise we’ll lose them. They aren’t being paid. They’re doing it all for the glory of Belles Rivières.’

Then they went up by car to the theatre, having decided to forgo lunch. There the French sound technicians were at work with Sandy, fixing cables and loudspeakers to the trees and, too, the little house, which was as frail as an eggshell. Rows of wooden chairs had been set out in a space near the house. Had this space been here before? No, trees had been cut down, chestnuts and a couple of olive trees. Cicadas shrilled from everywhere in the forest.

‘A stage effect we didn’t foresee in London,’ said Henry.

‘But she must have composed, listening to cicadas.’

‘Perhaps the cicadas suggested the music? That would certainly account for some of it.’

Here Sandy came to demand Henry’s directions, and the two went off. Sarah sat on a bank of gritty earth under a turkey oak, that tree which is a poor relation of its magnificent northern cousins. Soon Henry came to join her. He sat leaning back on his hands and stared moodily at the scene which tomorrow would have come to life. Without adequate rehearsal, though, for the townspeople—or the mob—would assemble for an hour in the square tomorrow morning to be instructed how to watch George White and follow what he did. Henry was in an itch of anxiety. She soothed him with jokes and, ‘A ton of worry does not pay even an ounce of debt.’

He returned the words of a current song hit. ‘Don’t worry, be happy…as my son told me last night on the telephone. My wife and my son, both. Don’t worry, be happy.’ He compressed his lips in a non-laugh.

‘Now I shall say, It’s going to be all right, and then you’ll feel better.’

‘Odd enough I do when you do.’

Soon a coach brought the whole cast up to the theatre. Sarah would have gone back with it, but Henry said, ‘Are you going to leave me?’—so she remained under the dry little tree in a mottled shade, through an interminable rehearsal that began and stopped, and repeated, while the lighting and sound technicians and Henry worked. The singers were not singing, only speaking, and the actors spoke their lines with all emotion withdrawn from them. A lot of joking went on, to relieve boredom. At one point, when the sound apparatus had squawked and gone dead, so that singers and actors could be seen mouthing words, only just audible, Bill addressed the words from earlier that day to Molly:

He clowned and postured, bending over Molly, who stood limp, wiping off dust and perspiration and fanning herself, trying to smile. Suddenly, instead of the grave and handsome young lieutenant upright in his invisible uniform there was a hooligan, and he ended by shouting the last two lines again up at Sandy, who was standing on the broken wall of the house, but leaning out from it to loop thick black cable over a branch. The young man’s body was like an acrobat’s, and outlined in tight blue cotton. Knowing exactly how he looked, he let out a loud and equally anarchic laugh, in a moment that had the power to make everyone present, and all morality and decency, ridiculous. All of them, the players actually on the stage—rather the space in front of the ruined house—the actors in ‘the wings’ (the trees), musicians, singers, laughed nervously but they were shocked. Bill glanced quickly around. He had not meant to betray himself, though he had meant to shock. He saw that everyone stared at him and at Sandy, who was now balanced on the wall, arms extended, just about to jump off and down to the earth. Henry came forward, and called out, making a joke of it, but with authority, ‘So you’ve decided to do another play Bill, is that it?’ Bill called back prettily, ‘Sorry, don’t know what got into me.’ And he matily hugged Molly. She stepped back, not looking at him.

Bill then directed beseeching looks at Sarah. What she felt then was unexpected, compassion that was not tenderness but as dry and as abstract as the eye of Time. His face, in full mid-afternoon sunlight, was a mask of fine lines. Anxiety. On that handsome face, if you looked at it not as a lover but with the eyes she had earned by having lived through so many years, was always imminent a faint web of suffering. Conflict. It was costing him a good deal, it was costing him too much, the poor young man, his decision to appear a lover of women, only women. A lover of women as men love women. He loved women, all right, with that instant sympathetic sexiness natural to him; but he knew nothing of the great enjoyable combats, antagonisms, and balances of sex, of the great game. She
found on her tongue Julie’s
You do not even know the alphabet. Only those new lines under your eyes know how to talk to me
. But that sudden, rare, heartbreaking crumpling of his face at moments when he felt threatened—they were no new lines. Compassion of a certain kind is the beginning of a cure for love. That is, love as desire. The compassion she felt was out of all proportion, like all these emotions washing around and about
Julie Vairon
. And not unmixed either, at least at moments, with cruelty: dote and antidote together. A picture of cruelty, staining pity: you are causing me all this pain, you are as careless as an inexperienced boy with explosives, allowing all the sexuality you do not admit feeling for your mother to slop about over older women—oh yes, I watched you this morning with Sally, and I watched her respond to you. You not only let it happen, but you make sure the fires are well stoked. Well then, I’m glad for the pain that put those lines on that pretty face of yours…. This was ugly, a million miles from the dispassionate eye of compassion. She knew it was ugly but could not help it, any more than she could hold off the compassion that balanced with it, like a need to put one’s arms around a child that for some reason is fated to stand always on the edge of a playground, watching the other children play.