Love Again (31 page)

The musicians had arrived. Sarah and Henry sat side by side behind their trestle table, which was loaded with prompt books, scores, polystyrene cups stained with coffee, and the faxed messages from all over the world that show business cannot do without for half a day. She was determined to feel nothing at all when the music began, but a sweet shaft winged straight to Sarah’s solar plexus, and she turned wet eyes to meet Henry’s.

‘Did you know there were philosophers who said music should be banned in a well-run society?’ she asked.

‘All music?’

‘I think so.’

‘I have spent the weekend with the headphones clamped on. Anaesthetic. Just in case I wasn’t drunk enough…when I was a kid I learned to use it as an anaesthetic…listen.’

The flute held a long note while the counter-tenor chanted against it, ‘bent’ the note up half a tone, and held it while the voice followed.

‘Do we really want to sit here crying like babies?’ said Sarah, and he said, ‘We have no alternative.’ He jumped up, ran off to adjust the players’ positions, ran back to his chair, moving it so it was nearer to Sarah’s.

‘This music-less utopia—suppose someone sings just for the hell of it?’

‘Off with their heads, I suppose.’

‘Logical.’

Suddenly Henry accused, ‘You didn’t telephone.’

‘Yes I did. You were out.’

‘I was waiting all weekend for you to turn up.’

‘But I didn’t know where you were.’

‘I left the name of the hotel at the theatre.’

‘I didn’t know. And why didn’t you ring me?’

‘I did. You were out.’

‘I was sitting waiting all weekend…’ But there were the two hours or so with Anne. She said, ‘I needed to be encouraged.’

‘But you know that—’

‘You really have no idea why I needed to be encouraged?’

‘But perhaps
I
need to be encouraged.’

‘
You
do.’ Her laugh was only for herself. She loved him because he did not know what she meant. Or pretended he didn’t.

Then he said, ‘And I was relieved you weren’t there, as well as being so…drunk.’

‘I know. Me too.’

Then he said, unexpectedly, ‘I am a very married man, Sarah.’

‘So I gathered.’

‘You did?’ He mocked her and himself. ‘And you actually do know that I have a little boy?’ And laughed at himself again.

She laughed, while all the Atlantic swirled between them.

‘Sarah, I tell you that nothing, nothing ever, has meant as much to me as my little boy.’

‘Just what has that got to do with…’

‘Everything,’ he said miserably.

Across the hall, actors and musicians wrestled, hugged, and generally played the fool, as they must, to release tension.

Sarah bent forward and kissed Henry on the lips—a valedictory kiss, but he could not know this. It told them both what they had missed that weekend.

‘My family will be coming to see
Julie
. In Queen’s Gift.’

‘I’m sure we will all have a lovely time,’ she jested, but he said miserably, ‘I don’t think so.’

Then, on the same impulse, Sarah and Henry leaned back in their chairs, giving every indication of enjoying all that jolly horseplay. Their bare arms lay side by side, touching from wrist to shoulder.

In the afternoon, Susan came to Sarah to ask if Stephen (‘you
know, Mr Ellington-Smith?’) was coming to rehearsals that week.

‘I’ll find out for you,’ said Sarah, putting on her comfortable aunt manner.

‘I do hope he comes,’ murmured the girl, with a touch of spoiled-child petulance that went well with her general style, today emphasized by lively bunches of black curls tied on either side of a pale little face.

Sarah telephoned Stephen and said that Julie was missing him.

‘Are you relaying a message?’

‘I think so.’

‘Does she fancy me?’

‘Your instincts are supposed to be telling you that.’

‘I’ll come anyway. I miss you, Sarah.’

On Tuesday Andrew walked into the hall, straight from the airport. He flung down a suitcase, saluted Henry, and then came to Sarah. He sat by her, all focused energy. For six weeks he had been in the hills of southern California, where they were shooting a film about immigrant Mexicans, he being an American small-town cop. He could not look more alien than he did in this soft, shabby, amiable English scene.

‘I suppose you are going to thank me nicely for the flowers?’

‘I suppose I would have done, at some point.’

He put a sheet of paper in front of her. ‘Hotel. Room number. Telephone number. I’m giving you this now because of course we won’t be alone for five minutes. Ring me, Sarah?’

She smiled at him.

‘Not that smile, please.’ With a salute that he made rakish—it would have done well in Restoration comedy—he was off to join the others. This was the day Act Two would be put into shape.

Stephen came in on Wednesday for the run-through. On Thursday the company were all going up to Queen’s Gift. There
would be a dress rehearsal on Thursday night, then the traditional day of rest on Friday. The first night would be on Saturday.

The run-through went well, though to see
Julie
here, in this dull hall, after the colours and variety of the forest in France, was to diminish the piece so much that everyone was acknowledging it could never be anything but second-best away from Julie’s own country. And this raised questions about a possible run in London. Every time the subject came up, all kinds of difficulties seemed insuperable, and soon they were already talking of how to improve the production next year in Belles Rivières.

Stephen and Sarah sat together. At the first opportunity Susan came to sit by him. She chattered about her part and sent him glances that were curious and troubled, for his face was not encouraging. Yet when she was being Julie, Stephen watched her closely. He was sitting, as usual, with his weight evenly distributed, every bit of him knowing its worth, while he gave full attention to each word and move. But it was a heavy attention, giving the effect of a concentration under threat. The girl—everyone thought—could not be more right for Julie. A little-girl quality, something winsome and self-flattering, disappeared the moment she became Julie. She came to Stephen to be approved, and he said she was a wonderful Julie, wonderful, but in a way that left her doubtful.

Then he and Sarah went out and stood on the canal bank in heavy sunlight. Some ducks were energetically propelling themselves out of the way of a passing pleasure boat, but the ripples rocked them about so that they looked like toy ducks in a child’s bath. The ripples settled, and so did the ducks. They upended themselves, pink feet dabbling in air. ‘Well, Sarah,’ said he at last. ‘I really don’t know. I think I just give up. Really, that’s about it.’ And with a smile that was all ironic apology, he went off to find a cab to take him to Paddington.

Henry saw her standing alone on the canal bank and came to propose lunch.

‘You don’t understand about my little boy,’ he said.

‘Of course I understand. You are giving him everything you didn’t get yourself.’

‘And that’s all it is?’

‘All these terrible things we feel, they are usually…that’s all it is.’

‘Terrible?
Terrible
?’

‘Terrible. What makes us dance.’

‘Then at least let’s have lunch.’

Bliss encompassed them, like breathing cool fresh air after stale. After lunch he went off, and as she walked to the bus stop she found Andrew beside her.

‘You are not even moderately interested to know why I am pursuing you?’

‘I suppose one might surmise.’

‘One might surmise the aim, but not the reason.’

They had fallen into the pleasant sexual antagonism that goes with this kind of exchange. Sarah felt quite revitalized by it. She was even thinking, Well, why not? But it would have no conviction in it.

‘The best experience I ever had was with my stepmother. And I am always trying to repeat it.’

‘You being six and she being twenty-six?’

‘I being fifteen and she forty.’

‘Ah, I see.’

‘No, you don’t. It went on for ten years.’

‘And then she was an old woman and you said thank you and left?’

‘She died of cancer,’ he said. His voice broke. The hard gaucho face was bleak as an orphan’s.

She said, ‘Oh,
don’t
…,’ and her own voice was uneven.

‘Well, Sarah Durham,’ he said, exultant. ‘Who’d believe it? Yes, do cry, do.’

The bus arrived. She shook her head, meaning she couldn’t
speak because she would cry if she did, but he took it differently. The look on his face, as he stood there, disappointed, while the bus bore her away, was not one she could easily fit into her view of him, or wanted to.

If the erotic or romantic fantasies one has about a man can tell what he is like, then she had to conclude that with Henry it was the kind of love that, had she been in her thirties and not—well, better not think about that—would have led (to coin a phrase) to an ongoing committed relationship. For better or worse. She sat at her desk, her eyes on the two young men in Cézanne’s picture, hardly knowing whether it was her daughter or Henry she saw in the thoughtful clown, and she steadily reviewed past relationships, ongoing or not. The fact is, there are not so many ‘real’ relationships in a life, few
love
affairs. That one was fit for a flirt, this for a weekend, another for—but she had not opened the door into perversity, she was glad to say—and yet another for a steamy eroticism. But
conviction
? Henry had conviction. (Would have had conviction?) Why did he? All one could know so early in the ‘relationship’ (which would never be one) was that there were no checks or knots, as there had been with Bill, reversals of feeling like cold water in her face or a bad taste in her mouth. The invisible weavers threw their shuttles, knitting memories and wants, match on match, strand on strand, colour to colour. A month or so ago, she had been ‘in love’ with Bill (she could not bring herself to leave off the quote marks, dishonest though that was). To the point of—well, yes, the whirlpool. But now she found that improbable and embarrassing, even if she was determined not to hate the poor young man and herself, as was prescribed. She would not find it shameful to have loved Henry when it was all over. A
smiling
memory? Hardly, with so much anguish in it, but then, the anguish, the grief, had nothing to do with Henry.

The real, the serious, the mature love. Rather, one of the inhabitants of this body, somewhat arbitrarily labelled Sarah Durham, was ready for kind love. She was in that state, had been for weeks, a girl is in when ready for marriage and falling in love with one man after another. But afterwards she first tones down and then forgets the men she has, as it were, sniffed at before the match was made.

Sarah imagined a couple, let’s say in their thirties, early forties. They sit at a dinner table in…India—well, why not?—and it is the penultimate days of the Raj. Sarah was back, then, at least seventy years. Sarah had a photograph of her grandmother in a lacy formal dress, with ropes of crystals sloping over a full bosom. She set that woman as hostess at one end of a dinner table; at the other was a gentleman in uniform. Behind both stood uniformed Indian servants. One of the dinner guests, a woman, has just said, ‘Oh, Mabs, you used to know Reggie, didn’t you? I met him in Bognor Regis last week.’

The eyes of husband and wife meet in a hard look.

‘Yes, I knew Reggie quite well,’ says the wife. ‘We played tennis together a lot in…let me see…’

‘Nineteen twelve,’ says her husband promptly. His tone is such that the guests exchange glances.

In the bedroom afterwards, the wife steps out of her trailing dove grey skirt and stands in her underclothes, knowing her husband is watching her. She turns to him with a smile. Sees his face. Stops smiling. Ten years before—no, it must be more than that; time does fly so—she imagined she was in love with Reggie, but something or other wasn’t right, she could hardly remember what now, though it didn’t matter, because she hadn’t
really
loved Reggie, it wasn’t the real thing, for that was proved by her being here with Jack.

For a long minute the eyes of husband and wife, neither conceding an inch, exchange memories of that summer when he proved himself more potent and persuasive—
convincing
—than the van
ished Reggie. He is still fully dressed, she in her triple ninon pink camiknickers, her dark hair loosening over her half-naked breasts. Reggie actually lives there in that hot bedroom in Delhi, and then—pouf—he is gone. The husband takes her in his arms, and his embraces that night have a most satisfactory conviction. She forgets she was ever in that condition so ably described by Proust when he did not know which of the garland of seaside girls he was going to fall in love with. It might easily have been Andrée, but she turned out to be his friend and confidante, while a sequence of chance psychological events made it Albertine he was fated to suffer over so atrociously.

As for Sarah, that diabolical music had tumbled her into love with the dangerous boy, but her needs, her nature (the hidden agenda), had moved her on to Henry. And so it would be Henry she would remember as the ‘real’ one. And he was.

For her, Sarah, Henry was likely to be the last love. She did most sincerely hope so. Henry would remember an inexplicable passion for a woman in her sixties. That is, if he did not make a decision not to remember—which would be understandable. And Andrew? She did not believe the invisible weavers were up to anything much. There was something hard and what?—willed—about his—what?—certainly not a passion. (Here she allowed herself to ignore the look on his face as she was carried away from him by the bus.) The truth was, she could not keep her mind on Andrew.

She sat smiling at the thought of Henry. It was that smile put on a woman’s face by delightful thoughts of
past
lovers. Let it stay for a while, she was praying—to her own inner psychological obscurities, presumably?—for when Henry was gone, a black pit was waiting for her; she could feel it there, waiting for the very moment that smile left her face.