‘Solid enough to climb up,’ said Henry, actually making a pantomime of climbing up, defusing possible complaints with a laugh. And they all laughed again at the unexpected effect when the column of light, moving as the earth turned, reached the actors at exactly that moment when Paul and Julie stole away from Maman’s house on a dark night, though she was not deceived, and knew they were going, while the bright column pointed at them like the finger of God.
After the read-through Sarah and Stephen were going off to lunch with Henry Bisley, for they had to know one another better, but as they stood at the exit into the outside world, Paul the handsome lieutenant, or rather Bill Collins, was there with them, though he had not been invited. They climbed the stairs together, and when they went to the little local restaurant, Bill was the fourth. In the restaurant, the rest of the cast sat at one table, but Bill was at theirs. Sarah did not take much notice of him, because of getting to know Henry. This was going to be a satisfactory director, she was thinking, and could feel Stephen thinking too. He was sharp, competent, knew the material inside out, and, as a bonus, was very funny. Anywhere near him, people laughed. Sarah was laughing, and Stephen too, though when he did, it sounded as if he was surprised at himself for doing it. Halfway through the meal, Stephen left them. Elizabeth was preparing another recital of Tudor music, but this time with dancing, modern dancing, athletic and vigorous. Apparently it ‘worked’, though one could tell he did not much care for the combination. He said to Sarah, ‘You see, it’s my part of the bargain. She would never say anything if I was not there, but if I didn’t turn up, she’d feel let down. And rightly.’ He did not want to go. She did not want him to go. She was surprised at the strength of the pang she felt. Henry was called over to the other table: Andrew Stead wanted advice. That left her and Bill. He was eating heartily—Henry had eaten a little salad; Stephen had left most of his food. She thought that this is how a very young man ate, even a schoolboy—or a young wolf. Well, he was very young. Twenty-six, and she guessed much younger than that in himself. All those winning smiles and sympathetic glances—he kept them up although, clearly, he was famished and that was his first consideration. Behind her she heard laughter at the other table, and turned her head to listen. Bill at once saw this and said, ‘I simply have to tell you, Sarah, what it means to me, getting this part—I mean, a real part. I’m afraid I’ve had to take quite a few parts that—well, we have to eat, don’t we?’
Laughter again. Mary was telling a tale which concerned Sonia, and it ended: ‘Two knives, on his seat.’ ‘Knives?’ said Richard. ‘Surgical knives,’ said Mary. The laughter was now loud, and nervous, and Richard said, ‘You can’t expect a man to laugh at that,’ and laughed. ‘All the same…serves the little creep right.’
‘Sarah,’ said Bill, leaning forward to claim her, his beautiful eyes on her eyes. ‘I do feel so at home with you. I felt that so much, at the casting session, but now…’ She smiled at him and said, ‘But I have to go.’ He was genuinely disconcerted, rejected. Like a small boy. Sarah went past the other table, smiling generally and said to Mary, who was about to return to the theatre, ‘Ring me tonight?’
Bill was already settling himself beside Mary. Sarah paid her bill and looked back. Bill sat straight up, head slightly back. He looked like an arrogantly sulky adolescent, touch me not at war with oh yes, please. Henry was reaching out with a pencil in his hand to mark a passage in Richard’s script. He was looking over it at her, eyes sombre.
That evening she sat thinking about brother Hal, because of her feelings about Stephen. There were no new thoughts in her head. Hal had been her mother’s favourite, she had always known and accepted that. Or at least she could not remember ever having not accepted it. He was the much wanted and loved boy, and she had taken second place from the moment he was born. Well, unfair preferences are hardly unusual in families. She had never liked Hal, let alone loved him. And now, for the first time, she was understanding how much she had missed in her life. Instead of something like a black hole—all right, then, a grey hole—there would have been all her life…what? A warmth, a sweetness. Instead of always having to brace herself when she had to meet Hal, she could have smiled, as she did when thinking of Stephen. She knew she did, for she had caught the smile on her face.
Late that night Mary rang. First she said her mother was in a bad patch, with a leg that was paralysed, perhaps temporarily. One had to expect this kind of thing with multiple sclerosis. She was going to have to pay someone to come in twice a day when she, Mary, was working so intensively. She did not say this was going to be financially difficult. Sarah did not say that extra money would be found. All their salaries were due to go up: the four had always accepted less than they could have claimed. But now, with Julie Vairon, there was suddenly much more money…if none of this was said, it was understood.
Then Mary told Sarah about Sonia and the knives.
From time to time, in London, some young man desiring to attract attention announces that Shakespeare had no talent. This guarantees a few weeks of indignation. (Usually it is the perpetrator who has no talent—but Bernard Shaw, who had, made this particular way of shocking the bourgeoisie permissible.) Shakespeare had been announced as having no talent quite recently, and a new ploy was needed. What better than to say, in a country with a genius for the theatre, that theatre itself is stupid and unnecessary? A certain young man who had created for himself and his cronies a style of sneering attack on nearly everything not themselves, had become editor of a well-known periodical. A school friend, Roger Stent, meeting his suddenly well-known chum, asked if there was a job for him on New Talents. ‘Do you like theatre?’ ‘I don’t know anything about it.’ ‘Perfect,’ cried this editor. ‘Just what I want. I want someone who is not part of that old gang.’ (Newcomers to a literary scene always imagine cabals, gangs, and cliques.) Roger Stent went on his first visit to the theatre, the National, and in fact rather enjoyed himself. His review would have been favourable, but he put in some criticisms. The editor said he was disappointed. ‘Really my ideal theatre critic would be someone who loathed the theatre.’ ‘Let me have another try,’ said Roger Stent. His reviews became notorious for their vindictiveness—but this was the style of this new addition, the Young Turks, to the literary scene in the early eighties. He perfected a sneering, almost lazy contempt for everything he reviewed.
Abélard and Héloïse had opened, and his review began, ‘This is a turgid piece about a sex-crazed nun and her life-long pursuit of a Paris savant. Not content with being the cause of his castration, she felt no shame about boring him with wittering letters about her emotions….’
The policy of The Green Bird was to rise above unpleasant or even malicious reviews, but Sonia said, ‘Why? I’m not going to let him get away with it.’ She wrote a letter to him, with a copy to the editor, beginning, ‘You ignorant and illiterate little shit, if you ever come anywhere near The Green Bird again, you’d better watch it.’
He wrote her a graceful, almost languid letter, saying that perhaps he had been mistaken and he was ready to see the piece again and he ‘trusted there would be a ticket for him at the box office’ on such and such a night. This last bit of impertinence was very much in the style of this latent incarnation of Young Turks.
She left a message that there would be a ticket for him, as requested. When he reached his seat, he found two surgical knives lying crossed on it. They were so sharp that he cut his fingers picking them up and had to leave the theatre, bleeding profusely. Sonia supplied full details to a gossip columnist.
Sarah laughed and said she hoped this was not how Sonia was going to react to every unfavourable review.
Mary, laughing, said that Sonia had explained that bullies only understand the boot. ‘The new brutalism, that’s what she says it is. She says we lot are all living in a dream world.’
‘She said, “you lot”?’
‘Well, she did say “we” the other day.’
‘So she did. We must
hope.’
At rehearsals that week she missed Stephen, but she rang him or he rang her to find out how they were going. Meanwhile she sat by Henry, or rather by his chair while he was working with the actors. If Henry did actually arrive back to sit down for a moment, he was off again after whispering a word or two, usually a joke. This was becoming their style: they jested. Yet he felt threatened. For he must: she could see herself, that watchful (that maternal) presence, making notes. And she was still at work on the lyrics, if that was the word for them, for often the actors said something, improvised, suggested changes. She was needed here: she had to reassure herself because she knew how very much she did not want to leave. Julie had her in thrall. A sweet insidious deceptiveness seemed now to be the air she breathed, and if it was a poison, she did not care.
The actors all came to sit by her, in Henry’s empty chair, or in Stephen’s, but she soon saw that Bill was there oftener than any of them. This gift of his for establishing instant intimacy—she felt she had known the young man for years. But she was not the only one being offered his charm. He seemed to be making a gift of himself to everyone. During this first week, which was devoted to the first act, the handsome lieutenant Paul had to dominate: he was in nearly every scene. And his part was so sympathetic, for he was so innocently as well as so madly in love with Julie. From the moment he first saw Julie standing by her harp, he was in a fever, not only of love, but the intoxication of the discovery of his own tenderness. The apprentice loves of young men tend to be brutal. He was truly convinced of their happiness once they reached France, and did not know it was an idyll possible only in Martinique, in this artificial and romantic setting, with its outsize butterflies, its brilliant birds, its languorous flowers and insinuating breezes. He forgot that it had been not his but Julie’s idea to run away, taking their idyll with them. The young man simply shone with the confidence of love, its triumphs, its discoveries, and this was not only during Paul’s scenes with Molly, where the two were entirely professional, making the jokes about their passion necessary to defuse those stormy love scenes. And yet, more than once, Sarah had caught him glancing at herself while he was making love to Molly, a quick hard calculating look from a world far from the simplicities of sympathy they enjoyed when he sat chatting in a chair beside her. He wanted to know if she was affected by him. Well, she was. But so was everybody else. Sally, that handsome black lady, who always wore an air of sceptical worldly wisdom and a sweet derisive worldly smile, a woman who commanded attention even when she sat knitting in a chair offstage (not one to waste time, she knitted not only for her family but for sale to a certain very expensive shop)—Sally watched Bill Collins with exactly the same fatalistic short laugh and shrug that, as Julie’s mother, she allowed herself when first observing her daughter’s passion for Paul. She and Sarah exchanged glances of female appreciation for the young man, but they were critical too, because he was so conscious of his looks and so skilled at using them. Well, good luck to him, those looks said. The other females present were the same. Mary Ford and Molly (as Molly) caught each other’s eyes and grimaced: no, he is really altogether too much.
He continued to pay Sarah a much more than professional attention. Several times, Henry, returning to his station to check notes or even to rest for a moment, had smilingly to ask him to vacate his chair. Then Bill gracefully and modestly got up, and brought Stephen’s chair closer to Sarah and sat in it.
There was no doubt he genuinely liked her. Perhaps a little more? He looked at her, when she was not looking at him, in ways she remembered (had to make herself remember, for she had so thoroughly put all that behind her). He made excuses to touch her. She was flattered, amused, and curious. If she wanted to be cynical, then her possibilities for doing him good professionally were not large. The Green Bird was not such a big deal for an actor who—he allowed them to know, but without boasting—was in demand. Though not always for parts he respected.
At the end of the first week this incident occurred: Bill had been sitting by Sarah, and they had been chatting in their way of easy intimacy, when he was summoned by Henry to go through a certain scene again. Sarah watched how he positioned himself by Molly in order to rehearse the moment when they finally decided to run away. They had—naturally—to embrace. First they looked long into each other’s eyes, braving the future. Then Paul ran his hand from Julie’s shoulders to her buttocks. Rather, Bill ran his hand from Molly’s shoulder to her buttocks. For this quick movement was absolutely not impersonal and professional, but intimate and sexual, with something brutal about it. This slithering insinuating caress was calculated. Sarah saw how he sent her, Sarah, a swift diagnostic glance to see if she had been watching, had seen, had been affected. She had, and so had Molly, who went stiff under that skilled caress, took a step backwards, and then, as Julie, moved forward into an embrace that had again become professional. But Molly’s look at Bill had been everything that was not professional. She had fallen in love, or in lust, instantly, because of that infinitely skilled and promising caress. Her body had burst into flames, had filled with need, and as she stepped back out of the embrace, her face, turned up to the triumphant (he could not hide it) young man, confessed to him, Yes, here I am.
Sarah did not like what she herself had felt.
She did not waste time saying it was absurd, for that went without saying. That weekend she was forced to acknowledge she had fallen a little in love with the young man. He had certainly taken enough trouble to make sure that she did. This was probably his way of dealing with life. By now she knew his story well. His mother was the centre of his life, they were close. The father was…‘Well, he’s a coper,’ Bill had said, laughing. ‘’E’s a coper, aren’t we all, just a coper, after all,’ sang Bill, to the tune of ‘I’m a Dreamer’, inside his cockney persona, which apparently went with moments when he felt threatened. And then, seeing she had comprehended more than he had wanted, he said, sardonic, intimate, reckless, ‘Yes, tha’s i’, inni, tha’s ’ow i’ is, awlri’.’ And he danced a few steps, his long legs, in pale blue jeans, and his whole body as satirical as his face. But for one flash of a moment he had a crumpled look, and she could see where, in thirty or forty years’ time (but probably sooner if the signs were there already), that beautiful face would crease and wrinkle. American Molly, American Henry, intrigued with this little cockney act, had clapped and demanded more, and Bill obliged with a repertoire of cockney songs, first—of course—‘She Was Poor but She Was Honest’, making Molly sing it with him, so that the two clowned together.
It seemed to Sarah certain that this young man had had to survive a childhood—but then, who does not?—and had found very young that he had this lucky gift of good looks and—even more potent—instant sympathy. Self-doubt, weakness, discouragements, could be silenced because he could make people fall in love with him.
Perhaps the pleasure of any new company of people, particularly in the theatre, is simply this, that the families, the mothers and fathers, the wives and husbands and girlfriends and boyfriends, the siblings and the children, are somewhere else, are in another life. Each individual is sharply herself, himself, is simply there. That leech, that web, that box of distorting mirrors, is out of sight. The strings we dance to are invisible. But already—and it had only been a few days—two of the men here were no longer magnificently themselves. She could see the puppet strings only too clearly, though she did not want to. And Stephen? It occurred to her that she had known Stephen for weeks, could call him friend, could say they were intimates, yet while she observed how he was pulled and tugged by something deadly, she could not see the strings.
Joyce arrived on the Saturday night, and Sarah was pleased to see her, because it would take her mind off being in love and the outrage she felt about it. Joyce offered Sarah her sweet, weak smile but did not ask for anything. She said she had been with Betty. Who was Betty? ‘Oh, just someone.’ The girl was clearly in need of food, sleep, and probably medicine. She did not eat the
food Sarah put in front of her, though she was pleased to have a bath and to put her filthy clothes in the washing machine. Sarah was happy that Joyce was connected with ordinary life enough to want to keep herself clean. She lay in bed knowing that Joyce sat up watching television and probably would not go to bed at all. She was thinking that in Joyce’s case it was not easy to say, Here are the puppet strings. Her father was hardly ideal, but one could think of many worse. She had an adequate home and family, proved by the fact that her two sisters were, as it is put, ‘viable’. Joyce was not viable. Perhaps one day soon ‘they’ (meaning, this time, the scientists) would come up with an explanation. Joyce had an ‘I cannot cope’ gene, or lacked an ‘I can cope’ gene, or had one in the wrong place, and her life had been governed by this. The puppet strings do not have to be psychological, though it is our inclination to think they are.
What Sarah was thinking of mostly, though, was Stephen. She was beginning to have for him an entirely unwelcome fellow feeling. She attempted humour, with ‘At least I am not in love with somebody dead.’ She tried comfort, with ‘And anyway it isn’t serious, just a crush.’ She also reflected that in her attitude towards Stephen and his affliction had been a condescension she was now ashamed of, though until she could make the comparison she had not been aware of this.
Joyce stayed until Sunday night. At some point she took a dose of something. Injected, probably, for she was a good while in the bathroom, which afterwards had a chemical smell. Her eyes stared dolefully, the pupils were enormous, she tittered inconsequentially and then wept. When Sarah was in the bathroom, she again walked out of the flat.
When one’s heart aches, this is seldom for a single reason, particularly when one is getting on a bit, for any sorrow can call up reserves from the past. Again Sarah decided she would refuse heartache. Yet she had only to think of Joyce, let alone sit in the same room with her, for her heart to feel it had slipped on a leaden glove.