It was when it came to the townspeople that the audience would have to use their imaginations most. Julie’s life had been cursed by the suspicious surveillance of the citizens. They stared at her in the streets and muttered imprecations if they came on her by chance (or design) in the forest. George White represented these invisible people. (He complained that all his parts were of disapproving people, but he adored Julie.) It would all go better in France, because Jean-Pierre had promised a crowd of extras.
On Friday the music arrived, in the shape of a counter-tenor and three girls and the musicians. The instruments were a guitar, a flute, a lute, a shawm, and a viola—the vielle of other times. The play, which without the music had been ‘too much’, ‘over the top’, ‘pastiche,’ and ‘a weepy’—this last was Bill, when thoughtfully passing Kleenex to Molly—changed, distancing itself from tears. The story told on this stage, or rather in this dull church hall, where the thick beam of sunlight picked out a scene or a character, became an aspect of the music. In the drawing room in Martinique, the conventional ballad, whose function was to show off Julie’s charms to the young officers, when accompanied by the music which had in counterpoint phrases from Julie’s ‘second period’, now commented, and even cruelly, on the period itself and made it as remote as Elizabethan players dancing the minuet at Queen’s Gift. The company was disconcerted by this shift from the personal, and even dismayed. Molly McGuire—as Molly—actually burst into tears. ‘What was it all for, then?’ she demanded. ‘What was the point of them going through all that? What for?’
‘A good question,’ said Bill quietly, showing—as he often did—how far he could be from the ‘young jay’ of Stephen’s criticism. And he put his arm around Molly to comfort her, nicely, like a brother.
As the story moved on, more and more did it seem that the sufferings and heartbreaks were a rather conventional accompaniment to her troubadour songs and, then, the late music, when angels or devils chanted of impermanence.
‘A very good question,’ said Henry to Sarah, at the end of the rehearsal, as if Molly had only just that moment wept and questioned. ‘Well, did you know all that was going to happen?’
‘Yes, but not that it would happen so well.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He was sitting, for once, in the chair near hers, leaning back, conditionally at rest, and he regarded her with those intelligent dark eyes that so often seemed prepared to see much worse than what in fact they were seeing. Now, however, they were wet.
‘I didn’t write the music,’ said Sarah.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he said lightly, jumping up and away. ‘I don’t know about that at all. All I know is, the old black magic’s got me by the throat.’
On the Saturday there was a dress rehearsal. And now, at last, Julie Vairon was all there. Particularly was Julie present. Molly’s long dark smooth hair, looped up and braided, spoke of unwelcome social disciplines. Her eyes behind long dark lashes seemed black, with a gleam of Africa. She had a feral air, for her formal movements had in them, only just controlled, the impatience which said she found propriety all but impossible. Julie had come to life, and Sarah heard Stephen, who had forced himself to come, let out a breath. ‘Good God, it isn’t possible.’
It was all going to be a success. It ‘worked’.
‘It all works, it’s great, just fantastic,’ said Henry, striding about. ‘Bless you, Sarah,’—and they embraced, theatre fashion.
When Bill came to embrace her—an absolute dream in his uniform—with ‘Sarah, it’s lovely, I had no idea,’ she found herself muttering, Little bitch, and she moved away from the embrace. She watched the young man go from woman to woman, kiss, kiss, kiss, and then how he moved off and stood aloof, as if he drew an invisible circle around himself: keep off.
They were now all parting, until they met again in France.
There was the usual reluctance to part. They had become a family, they said. ‘All the good things about a family, none of the heartaches,’ said Sally. She had insisted her own situation was not all that different from Sylvie’s. ‘No, I am not a mother hoping to marry my daughter off to a rich man, but my daughter, she could give Julie points.’ She was desperate, though she laughed, and Richard Service, standing by her, put his arm around her. These two were friends—real friends, sitting together whenever they could, talking for hours. An unlikely couple, though.
Unable to bring themselves to part, they all went out to supper after the dress rehearsal. Stephen sat next to Molly, who had shed Julie with her clothes. He was trying to find in her the girl who had enchanted him for three hours that afternoon, and she knew it, and was sweet to him, while her eyes seldom left Bill. As for Sarah, she was determined not to look at Bill at all, and more or less succeeded. This had the effect of making him nervous, and he tried to get her attention by sending her winning looks.
As they stood on the pavement saying goodbye, kisses all around (but Sarah well out of reach of Bill’s), Stephen said to Sarah that he wanted her to come and stay for a couple of days, before France. ‘If you haven’t got anything better to do.’ This was so much like him she had to laugh, though he did not see why. As if it were likely that an invitation to his house (or perhaps she should say Elizabeth’s) would not seem to nearly everyone in the world like drawing a lucky ticket.
That night Bill telephoned her for advice about the delivery of one of his lines. He must know he did it well, and know that she knew he did. Her heart thumped, making her even more angry than she was. She sat hugging the receiver and giving professional advice. That she was more angry with herself than with him goes without saying.
The other person who telephoned her was Henry. They now enjoyed the pleasantest relationship in the world, easy, joky, intimate. He sent himself up, saying, ‘Sarah, I have a problem—yes, a problem…I can’t deal with it. I’m not as happy as I might be—yes, you could put it like that…about what Julie writes about Rémy. You know, they’d only met a couple of days ago, for Christ’s sake.’
‘You mean, Why is it when I see your face?—and so on?’
‘Particularly and so on. You’d expect her to be singing her little heart out about the guy, but what she sings is, Why is it when I see your face, I see it sad, alone. You look back at me across the years and you are quite alone…well, Sarah?’
‘It’s all in her journals.’
‘They’ve just fallen in love.’
‘Wait, I’ve got them here.’ She read aloud: ‘Why is it when we have only just begun to love each other and he is talking of how we will live together for the rest of our lives I pick up my pencil to draw his face and I can’t draw it full of happiness, as I’ve seen it, but sad, so terribly sad. It is the face of a lonely man, he is alone, this man. No matter how hard I try to draw him the way he is when he looks at me, I can’t do it, that other face puts itself on the page.’
‘What did happen to Rémy? No, I haven’t read the journals. I decided not to. I didn’t want to mix it.’
‘Three years after he was sent off to the Ivory Coast as a soldier by his family, he came back to marry the daughter of a local landowner. He came secretly to see Julie. They wept together all night. Then he married and had a family.’
‘Did they meet after that?’
‘If so, it isn’t recorded. She did see him at public occasions, though. She said he wasn’t happy.’
‘A sad story,’ said Henry, apparently trying out the phrase.
‘I thought it was agreed it is a sad story.’
‘I mean, that he came back after three years and they hadn’t forgotten each other.’
‘You say that as if you think it is impossible.’
‘It isn’t really our style.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘I haven’t experienced anything like that.’
‘You sound as if you wish you could.’
‘Perhaps I do.’
‘Shall I read you what she wrote about that parting? Together we poured hot salt o
n what was left of our love, and where it was is brackish sand.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t make a song out of that.’
‘What do you suppose that late music is saying?’
‘Then I’m glad it hasn’t got words.’
They discussed possible rearrangements of certain lines and in the end decided to leave them as they were. This conversation went on for over an hour.
Joyce turned up next morning. Evidently she had been sleeping rough. In the bathroom Sarah picked the grimy clothes off the floor as Joyce stepped out of them. She was as thin as an asparagus shoot, and like one she was dead white, but with bluish marks on her arms and thighs. Censoring every word of advice or criticism as it arrived on her lips, Sarah put the clothes in the washing machine, put Joyce in the bath, made tea, made toast, cut up an orange.
Joyce wore her aunt’s best white silk dressing gown and sat drinking tea. She did not eat. When asked what she had been doing, she replied, ‘This and that.’ Then, after a silence, she seemed to remind herself that conversation was expected, and asked Sarah like a little child, ‘And what are you doing, Auntie?’ Heartened by this evidence of an interest in other people, Sarah described the play and told the story. Joyce sat listening, obviously with difficulty. Then, putting on a dozen years in a moment, she jeered, ‘I think they were all nuts.’
‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’
‘You said it was recent?’
Somewhere about middle age, it occurs to most people that a century is only their own lifetime twice. On that thought, all of history rushes together, and now they live inside the story of time, instead of looking at it from outside, as observers. Only ten or twelve of their lifetimes ago, Shakespeare was alive. The French Revolution was just the other day. A hundred years ago, not much more, was the American Civil War. It had seemed in another epoch, almost another dimension of time or of space. But once you have said, A hundred years is my lifetime twice, you feel as if you could have been on those battlefields, or nursing those soldiers. With Walt Whitman perhaps.
‘It wasn’t very long ago,’ said Sarah.
Joyce was about to protest but decided to behave tactfully, as her aunt so often did with her.
‘You said it was going to be in France?’
‘Yes. Next week.’
‘And how long will you be away?’
‘About three weeks.’
At once Joyce showed all the symptoms of panic. ‘Three weeks.’
‘But Joyce, you disappear for months at a time.’
‘But I know where you are, you see?’
‘You never think that we worry about you?’
‘But I’m all right, really.’
The InterCity train interrupted its impetuous progress, one felt as a favour, at the country station where she was to get off, instead of at Oxford, because Stephen wanted to show her a different road. She descended onto a deserted platform in a burst of birdsong. ‘Adlestrop…it was late June…all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire…’ Well, what else? And did it matter that her head (like most people of her kind) was always full of rags and tags of verse, that she knew the first lines of a hundred popular songs? Her mind resembled one of those self-consciously decorative maps that have little scrolls saying, The Battle of Bannockburn, or Queen Elizabeth Hunted Here. Sometimes, though, the interventions were apt enough. This morning she had woken with ‘Oh who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus?’
She walked out of the station while a cuckoo, inspired by several hundred years of literature, commented invisibly from a vast oak. Stephen was waiting in the station wagon. She realized that in town he shed a dimension, was less than himself, while here, in his setting, he was immediately full of authority. They were hardly inside the car when he said, ‘Sarah, I cannot begin to say how sorry I am for inflicting so much nonsense on you. Let me try and make it up to you.’ He began by driving her for an hour or so through countryside that was the distillation of poetry, on charming little roads. England in late June on a sunny day, two people who knew they liked each other…‘My soul, there is a country far beyond the stars…’
Stephen amused her with an account of what had happened at last week’s Entertainment (‘We call them Entertainments because it has an Elizabethan ring’), when, instead of the expected three hundred people, there arrived a thousand. There was not room for more than half of them. When some young people had turned up their transistors and began dancing, Elizabeth suggested that this field rather than that (too near the horses) would be best, and the dancing and singing went on until dawn. ‘We couldn’t help feeling that what went on in that field was even more to the point than the Entertainment itself. After all, the Tudors were a pretty savage lot.’ ‘And the field?’ ‘Oh, it was due to be resown anyway.’ He didn’t sound put out. ‘Extraordinary! Why is it? I wonder. This is a theatrical time again. That’s how we seem to have to express ourselves. There must be a reason for it. From one end of the country to the other, everyone is acting, singing, dancing, staging mock battles, what is it all about?’ While they talked, she occasionally stole a look, she hoped unnoticed. He was not finding it easy. His determination did him credit, but there was a tightness about his face like headache strain. When she asked, he said he had never felt better. She wanted to believe this. It was so pleasant to be with the real Stephen again—so she felt it: ‘He is himself again’—that it was easy to ignore anxiety.
At the house it was lunchtime. Elizabeth and Norah were off for the day to attend a music festival in Bath. He asked Sarah what she would like to do, and she said she would enjoy seeing something of his life.
‘Then I hope you are not going to find me too much of an eccentric.’
‘But it’s part of your role to be an eccentric.’
A new building, which would turn these semi-amateur Entertainments into so much more, was nearly finished. It stood near the great lawn—the theatre—and was concealed by shrubs and trees. The plans had become even grander in the weeks since she had been here: they were thinking of doing operas. Until now more ambitious spectacles had been impossible, with the big house a couple of hundred yards away, too far for actors, singers, dancers, to make costume changes. Now there was going to be plenty of room for costumes, lighting equipment, and musical instruments, and ample rehearsal space. The place had been designed by an architect to take its place unnoticed among these historic buildings. It would look similar in style without making any claims for itself.
Two workmen were laying bricks on an internal wall. One straddled the wall, the other was handing bricks to him. Stephen spoke to them and came away: ‘I’m not needed. Sometimes I can be useful. But these are not our people; they are a firm in town.’
They walked slowly through trees, away from the house. She was thinking, for she could not stop herself, of that young man who was with his ‘mate’ in France: Bill had said he would use the opportunity to be a tourist for a week. No, she certainly did not see a girlfriend. ‘Perhaps my girlfriend will get over for a few days.’ She wondered if Stephen was thinking of Molly, who was also there somewhere. After they had been silent for some minutes, he said unexpectedly, ‘It occurred to me, thinking it all out, you know, that I must be lonely. It seems improbable, but there it is. No, no, believe me, Sarah, I’m not trying for sympathy. I’m trying to understand it all, you see.’
‘Did you know Elizabeth loved women when you married her?’
‘She didn’t, not then.’ Taking her silence for criticism, he defended himself, with a stubbornness, a determination, she could see was because he had made a decision to tell her all this. Because he needed to hear how it sounded? ‘No, you see, we have known each other all our lives. We really married because…you see, we both of us came to grief at the same time.’
‘A good phrase, that, came to grief.’
‘Yes, it is. Not that I understood it until…you see, something I hoped for didn’t happen.’
‘You were in lov
e—impossibly?’
‘I didn’t think it was impossible. It wasn’t impossible. She was married, but I hoped she would leave her husband and marry me. But she changed her mind. And Elizabeth was hoping to marry someone…he’s a good chap. He’s a friend of mine. Well, in fact he’s on the next estate. But he was engaged to be married, and it was all too difficult. And there we both were, the two of us, Elizabeth and I.’
They sat on a log in a hot dry shade. At least fifty feet above them, on the other side of the beech canopy, burned an un-English sun.