‘It is surely not a region of France that lacks visitors,’ said Sarah.
‘No, that is true. But Belles Rivières is just a little town. It has nothing else, only Julie. There will be new hotels and restaurants—they are being planned already. And this will affect all the towns of the area.’
‘You haven’t said anything about the language,’ said Stephen. Of all of them, he must be the most affected by the news of the destruction of the original Julie Vairon—but only Sarah could know that.
‘Of course that was discussed. For a while we decided to go back to the French, but we changed our minds. This will sound absurd, but we thought it might even bring bad luck. Julie has been so lucky. To change her completely…but there was the other reason, and that is more important. Most of the tourists in our part of France in summer are English-speaking. And that decided it.’
He waited, but no one said anything.
‘And now I must leave you all. I must catch my plane.’
‘Next year in Belles Rivières,’ said Roy, for this joke seemed likely to stay, and Mary and Jean-Pierre looked at each other, and Sarah was reminded of Henry’s wretched face that morning as she left.
‘Oh no, we must discuss it all before that. I hope to see you all…Sarah…Stephen…and you, Mary…’ He nodded at Patrick, and it occurred to them that since Patrick had scarcely been in Belle-Rivières, that nod, with a special smile, was carrying more meaning than they knew the reason for. And Patrick was in fact looking guilty. ‘All of you, we will fix a meeting and we will go through everything. I shall telephone Benjamin when I get to my office. Stephen—it would be a sadness for us if you decided to withdraw.’ That meant that if Stephen did, there would be other willing angels.
Jean-Pierre left an atmosphere of mourning. The audiences filling the new stadium next year and—presumably—succeeding years would be enjoying successful, fashionable theatre, but only those people who had been there the first year—still this year—would know how rare a bird Julie had been, a magically perfect event that had seemed at its beginnings no more promising than a hundred others, had gathered substance and shape in what it was easy to believe was a series of mere lucky chances, one after the other, blown together by the winds of heaven, and then…but there is only one thing to do at the vanishing away of a wonder: put a clamp on your heart.
And it was only the theatre, after all.
‘It’s only the theatre,’ said Mary, ending their silence and sounding miserable.
Now, finally, they had to decide whether to put Julie Vairon on in London. But it seemed this decision had already been made, for they hardly discussed it.
‘Now,’ said Sarah to Patrick, ‘let’s have it.’
Patrick stood before them, grinning. Full of affection, yes, but fuller of a cheeky guiltiness.
‘Sarah…guess what…you’ll never guess…you’ll have to shoot yourself…well, shoot me, then…. We can’t have victim heroines any more—remember? Do you remember? Well…’ And here he hesitated on the brink, gave Sonia a look of comic despair, plunged on, ‘How do you like the idea of a musical?’
‘A musical!’ protested Stephen.
‘Oh, don’t tell me,’ said Roy, in a fury. ‘There’s this pathetic little half-caste from Martinique who falls in love with the handsome lieutenant. He ditches her. She earns her living doing the can-can in Cannes. There she is seen by the patrician Rémy—’
‘Too complicated,’ said Patrick airily.
‘No Rémy?’ said Stephen.
‘No Rémy. She has a child by Paul. She puts her in a convent with the nuns. Julie earns her living as a singer. The master printer wants to make an honest woman of her—’
‘But she commits suicide because of…?’ enquired Sarah.
‘Because she knows the townspeople will never forgive her, or forgive him for marrying her. If he marries her she will ruin his life. There’s a great scene where the citizens sing they will boycott his business and bring him to bankruptcy. They won’t have that whore Julie. She leaves a suicide note: Remember my Minou! She flings herself under a train. Just like you know who. Last scene: the master printer and Minou, already a nubile nymph sought in marriage by a handsome young lieutenant.’
‘You’re joking,’ said Stephen.
‘He’s not joking,’ said Sonia, sounding huffy. From this it could be seen she was involved with this musical.
‘I’m not joking,’ said Patrick. ‘The libretto is written.’
‘You’ve written it?’
‘I’ve written it.’
‘Is she allowed any intelligence?’ asked Roy.
‘Of course not,’ said Sarah.
‘I expected you and Stephen to be much more cross than you are,’ said Patrick, obviously disappointed.
‘Well,’ said Stephen, ‘I’m off.’
‘Well,’ said Sarah, also getting up, ‘when is this masterpiece going to be put on?’
‘We have to get the music written,’ said Sonia.
‘Not Julie’s?’ asked Mary.
‘We are thinking of using one of the troubadour songs as a theme song. Not the words, of course. You know. “If this song of mine is a sad one…” It’s a torch song, really.’
‘So what words?’ enquired Sarah.
Mary said, ‘I love you, I love you.’
‘Very good,’ said Patrick. ‘Brilliant. All right. Sneer if you like. It’s possible they’ll première it in Belles Rivières the year after next.’
‘The bad will drive out the good,’ remarked Stephen. ‘It always does.’
‘Oh thanks, thanks a lot,’ said Patrick.
‘Let’s wait and see,’ said Mary. ‘They aren’t going to let our Julie go if it’s successful next year.’
‘Honestly,’ said Sonia, ‘I don’t think you people should start panicking. It hasn’t happened yet.’
‘No, but it’s going to,’ said Patrick. ‘And there’s something else. My Julie’s going to be called The Lucky Piece…no, wait—I found it by chance. The lucky piece is early-nineteenth-century slang. It means the child of a mistress who has been left well set up by her boyfriends. Well, no one could say that Julie’s mother wasn’t living in clover.’
The meeting ended early, and a long sunlit evening lay ahead. Stephen and Sarah walked for a while in Regent’s Park. Stephen said he was going to visit his brother in Shropshire. After that he might visit friends in Wales. She recognized his need to move. If it were not that she had so much to do in the theatre, she would be buying an aeroplane ticket to almost anywhere.
There was no way of putting off what faced her. She sat and thought how already the family would be speeding along French roads that were dusty and burned by this summer’s sun. As soon as the car stopped, the little boy would be in his father’s arms. In fact one could be sure that during the three weeks they were in France, whenever the car was not actually in motion, Joseph would be held by Henry. Meanwhile her body sent inconsistent messages. For instance, that sensation of need in the hollow of her left shoulder demanded that a head should lie there…was it Henry’s head? Often it seemed to her it was an infant newly born, and naked, a soft hot nakedness, and her hand pressing it close protected a helplessness much greater than could be encompassed by this one small creature. An infinite vulnerability lay there: Sarah herself, who was both infant and what sheltered the infant. When a hot wanting woke Sarah from a dream she knew had been about Henry, the face that dazzled behind her lids was Joseph’s, a bright cheeky greedy smile announcing that it would grab everything it could. And then, an intimate and loving smile—Henry’s, and both of these wraiths disappeared as her hand went to the soft hollow, and she was filled with a wild and cherishing love.
In her diary, page after page was filled with entries like ‘Emptiness.’ ‘Pain.’ ‘It is such a weight—I can’t carry it.’ ‘Wild grief.’ ‘Storms of longing.’ ‘When will it end?’ ‘I can’t stand this pain.’ ‘My heart hurts so much.’ ‘It hurts.’
; To whom was she writing these messages like letters in bottles entrusted to the sea? No one would read them. And if someone did, the words would make sense only if this someone had experienced this pain, this grief. For as she herself looked at the words pain, grief, anguish, and so forth, they were words on a page and she had to fill them with the emotions they represented. Why then put them on a page at all? It occurred to her she was engaged in that occupation common to (even diagnostic of?) our times: she was bearing witness.
She stopped writing ‘I did not know this degree of misery could exist,’ and her diary reverted to: ‘Worked with Sonia and Patrick all day on the costumes.’ ‘Worked with Mary.’ ‘Mary says she saw Sonia and Roger Stent having dinner together in The Pelican. Sonia doesn’t know we know.’ ‘Patrick has gone to visit Jean-Pierre about The Lucky Piece.’ ‘Sonia and I worked all day on…’
In fact she was doing half the work she usually did. She woke in the morning with a groan and often sank back into…if it was a landscape of grief, then at least it was not the same as the one she inhabited awake. If at home, she might sleep all afternoon, work a little, be asleep by ten. Sometimes she dragged herself out of bed in the morning and got back into it by mid-morning. Normally she slept lightly, with pleasure, her dreams an entertainment and often a source of information. Now she crawled into sleep which was both a refuge and a threat, to get rid of the pain—a physical anguish—in her heart.
She was also observing her symptoms with curiosity, none of them—surely?—necessarily a symptom of love.
Worst of all, she was bad-tempered, might snap and snarl suddenly, without warning, as if she only just managed an even keel, but the slightest demand, or even a too-loud voice, was enough to tip her over. She wanted to make unkind and sarcastic remarks. Normally not particularly critical, she was critical of everything.
Unpleasant characteristics she believed long outgrown came back. She spoke loudly in public places in a boastful way, for the benefit of strangers whose opinions did not matter to her.
She actually had to stop herself boasting of past loves to Mary, but had said enough to embarrass both: Mary, whose acute, quick look told Sarah that her condition was being understood. One day Mary remarked, apparently about Roy, who was having a difficult time with his wife and was bad-tempered and morose, ‘What we forget is, people know much more about us than we like, and forgive us much more.’ Was this a plea for herself?
Music still affected Sarah too strongly. She found herself switching off music on the radio, going out of the theatre when they were doing rehearsals and there was music, closing a window if music floated towards her down the street, because even a banal and silly tune could make her cry, or double up in pain. A workman reslating the roof of the house next to hers burst into the torch song from Julie, or, rather, The Lucky Piece—the song had taken wings because of a radio programme. He was sending it up, straddling the house ridge, arms extended, like an opera singer accepting applause, while his mate, leaning against a chimney, clapped—and Sarah’s hands flew of their own accord to cover her ears. She felt the sounds were poisoning her.
From the moment she woke, daydreams had to be pushed away, dreams like drugs. Then, at last succumbing, she could spend hours in day-dreams, like an adolescent.
She was greedy for sweet things, wanted to eat, had to stop herself if she didn’t want to buy a complete new wardrobe.
Words that had the remotest connection with love, romance, passion, she believed twisted the same nerve as that weakened by music, so that phrases or words or stories she normally would have found stupid brought tears to her eyes. When she was able to read at all—for it was hard to concentrate—she nervously watched for them, these places on the page, able to see them coming half a page before, and she skipped them, forcing her eyes to bypass or neutralize them.
She bought beauty products which a sense of the ridiculous forbade her to use. She even thought of having her face lifted—an idea that in her normal condition could only make her smile.
She began to make a blouse, of a kind she had not worn for years, but left it unfinished.
Sometimes a conversation, apparently without any intention by her, acquired sexual undertones, so that every word of an exchange could be interpreted obscenely.
But worst of all was her irritability; she knew if she could not outlive it, she was heading straight towards the paranoia, the rages, the bitterness, of disappointed old age.
Stephen cut short his visits and came to London to see Sarah. They walked about and around streets and parks and even went to the theatre. They left some comedy at the first interval, saying that normally they would have enjoyed it.
Susan had written to him. It was a love letter that offered everything. ‘I shall never love anyone as I love you.’
‘I swear it’s that damned music,’ said Sarah.
‘I was hoping it was because of my intrinsic qualities. But I suppose it does make things easier to stick a label on them.’
This was the same need to snap and snarl that so often possessed Sarah.
‘Sorry,’ said Stephen, ‘I simply don’t recognize myself.’
A week later she telephoned him at his home and at first thought she had got the wrong number and had reached someone whom she had awakened. She could hear breathing, and then a mumbling or muttering which could be his voice, and she said, ‘Stephen?’ Silence, and more difficult breathing, and he said, or rather slurred, her name. ‘Sarah…Sarah?’ ‘Stephen, are you ill? Shall I come?’ He did not answer. She went on talking, even pleading, urging, for a long time, but while he did not put down the receiver, he did not answer. She was talking into silence, and her own voice was sounding ridiculous, because she was making the reassuring optimistic remarks that always need an interlocutor similarly cheerful to carry conviction. At last she felt he was not listening. Perhaps he had even gone to sleep, or walked away. Now she was full of panic, like a bird trapped in a room. She had the number of the telephone in the kitchen at Queen’s Gift, used for domestic matters, but there was no reply. She sat for a while in indecision, feeling that she ought to go to him at once, but telling herself that if he had wanted her to come he would have said so. Besides, why did she always assume he had no one else to turn to? In the end she took a taxi to Paddington, then the first possible train, then a taxi to the house. She asked to be put down outside the gates, for her sudden uninvited appearance at the house itself would seem too dramatic. The great gates had been newly painted glossy black with gold touches, like the ‘highlights’ hairdressers use to enliven a hair-do. She went in through an unobtrusive little door in a brick arch at the side. This was like an allegory of something, but she could not think what. In her present condition, signs and symbols, portents and presages and omens, comparisons apt and silly, formed themselves out of a voice overheard in the street, a dog barking, a glass slipping out of her hand and smashing loudly on a hard surface. Her irritation at this unwanted and insipid commentary on everything she did contributed to her bad temper. Now her heart was racing, for she was possessed with the need to hurry, while she felt her trip here to be absurd. There seemed to be no one about. Posters for Ariadne on Naxos were everywhere, and Julie’s face was nowhere. Of course: they were trying out this opera. A small cast and delicious music, Elizabeth said. Where was Elizabeth? Not in the vegetable garden, nor with the horses, nor anywhere near the house. And what would Sarah say when she did find her? ‘Look, Elizabeth, I had to come, I was worried about Stephen.’ (I am worried about your husband.) Elizabeth must at least have noticed that Stephen was—well, what was he at this moment? Worse: he was much worse. After wandering about for some minutes, feeling like a thief or at least an intruder, she saw Stephen sitting on a bench by himself, in full sunlight. He sat hunched, legs apart, hands loosely dangling and folded between them, like tools he had forgotten to put away. His head was lowered, and his face was dripping sweat. A hundred yards away stood the great ash tree, James’s friend. Under it was a bench,
in deep shade. She sat down by him and said, ‘Stephen…’ No response at all. Right, she thought, this is it: I know this one, I’ve seen it before. This is the real thing, the Big D (as its victims jocularly call it when not in its power), it is the authentic hallmarked one-hundred-percent depression: he’s gone over the edge. ‘Stephen, it’s Sarah.’ After a long time, at least a minute, he lifted his head, and she found herself the object of—no, not an inspection, or even a recognition. It was a defensive look. ‘Stephen, I’ve come because I’m worried about you.’ His eyes lowered themselves, and he sat staring at the ground. After another interval, he said, or mumbled, in a hurried swallowing way, ‘No use, Sarah, no good.’ He was occupied deep within himself, he was busy with an inner landscape, and did not have the energy for the outside world. She knew this because she sometimes underwent a much less total version of this condition. She was absent-minded, heard words long after they were spoken, felt them as an intrusion, had to force herself to pay attention, and then spoke hurriedly to get the irrelevance over with. At meetings at The Green Bird, in conversations with colleagues, she had to make herself come up out of depths of an inner preoccupation with pain actually to hear what they said, then frame words appropriate for an answer. But at least she could do it, and she was getting better. Stephen’s state was worse by far than anything she herself had known, and the panic she felt deepened.
What should she do? As a beginning, get him into the shade. She said, ‘Stephen, get up, you must get out of the sun.’ He seemed surprised, but her hand at his elbow prompted him up and then, slowly, to the cool under the ash tree. His clothes were soaked with sweat.
What he needed was someone to sit by him all day and all night, bring him cups of this and that, cool drinks, tea, a sandwich of which he might perhaps eat one mouthful, while she—or someone—talked, saying anything to remind him he was in a world with other people in it, and these people did not all live in a world of suffering. No one performed this service for her, but then she was not and never had been anything like as ill as he was now. Her mind approached carefully, and in controlled terror, the thought that if the pain she felt was a minor thing compared to what he felt, then what he felt must be unendurable. For she had often thought she could not bear what she felt.