About Stephen’s death he spoke angrily and disapprovingly. He could not understand why anyone who had so much could be willing to leave this world. She tried the word depression but saw that for him it was only a word, not more than when someone exclaims, ‘Oh hell, I’m depressed today.’ Suppose she told him, ‘Stephen was living in despair for years’ or ‘He was in love with a dead woman’? These accurate statements would not leave her tongue. She could not say them to this sane, sensible, and serious man. Did that mean she did not see Stephen as sensible and serious? Yes, but sane, no. She contemplated the word serious. Whatever Benjamin was or was not, he was certainly serious. To be precise, humour, or the ambiguous, was not his gift. With him she was never on that frontier where attitudes can change themselves into their opposites, good and bad reversing themselves with a laugh. More than once she made the kind of joking remark she could share with Stephen, but had to say quickly, ‘Sorry, I was only joking; no, I didn’t mean it.’
Benjamin thought over—as was his way—what she had said about Stephen, and next day came back with ‘But why did Stephen do that awful thing?’
Suddenly impatient, she said, ‘Stephen died of a broken heart. There is such a thing, you know. Why it was broken in the first place—well, that is for the psychiatrists. But not everything is curable. The point is, he had been living with a broken heart and he couldn’t stand it any longer.’
He could positively be heard thinking that broken hearts were not for serious people. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t accept that.’
‘That’s only because you’ve never had a broken heart.’ She knew he was hearing this as a flippant or frivolous remark.
After a while he said, stumbling over it, ‘I believed that you and he…I think I told you I envied him.’
‘No. We were friends.’ She heard her voice shake. But went on, ‘Believe me, that was all.’
All.
An acute look: he did not believe her. He thought it was a plucky lie. He put his arms around her. ‘Poor Sarah,’ he murmured into her hair. He laid his cheek against it and then kissed her cheek. She remembered another kiss and stood back, smiling. Smiling, he let her go. They were standing on a pavement. Early afternoon, but lights were coming on in the houses and talked directly to her heart of intimacy, of love. The trees in the square they stood in were wild and full of noisy wind, and underfoot was a thick layer of sycamore leaves, black-webbed and slippery, like cut-off ducks’ feet. She thought, If I were to tell this man, even try to tell him, watering it down, making it less, what I’ve been feeling all the time since I first met him, he would walk quickly away from the lunatic.
They said goodbye, and she said, ‘Next year in Belles Rivières.’ When he did not react, she asked, ‘Did you ever see the film Last Year at Marienbad? It was about people who remembered different things about what happened the year before, and they were remembering possibilities, different parallel possibilities, too.’
He at once said, ‘Believe me, Sarah, I shall never forget one single minute of anything that has happened when I’ve been with you—with you all.’ He added, ‘It’s certainly an interesting idea. I’ll get the video.’
‘It’s the same idea as the song ‘I remember it well.”’
Here she was relieved when he laughed and said that he remembered it well.
It was about then that she got a letter from Andrew.
Dear Sarah,
I am in Arizona, making a film about a screwed-up cop but he has a heart of gold. What screwed him up? His childhood. I never told you about my childhood. It would be taking unfair advantage. Do I have a heart of gold? I have a heart.
I am living with my sister Sandra. She is my real sister from my real mother. She has left her husband, my good friend Hank. She says they have nothing in common. That’s after twenty years. She is nearly fifty. She is starting life again. I like her kids. She’s got three. We are in a house twelve miles from Tucson among all the sand and the cactuses. Coyotes howl at night. If the TV goes wrong a man arrives from Tucson to mend it within the hour. I did not think this strange until my girlfriend Helen from Wiltshire England said we take too much for granted. But she thinks it’s cute. Rather, fascinating. When I said girlfriend, she’s one of the women I lay. My sister wants me to marry one of them. Why is it people who were unhappily married are so keen on others doing it? I’d rather marry her. I say this and she laughs at the jest.
I do not think I will achieve marriage. It took me far too long to understand that a man with a childhood screwed up as badly as mine (see above) will not be able to achieve the necessary suspension of disbelief.
I heard Stephen died. He was one hell of a good guy. Belles Rivières and Queen’s Gift seem a long long way off. In time. But most of all in probability. Do you understand that? Yes you do.
Here comes my date for the evening. Her name is Bella. Have you ever wondered why if it’s lust it’s easy but if it’s love, then…something there is that does not love love, sweet love. Are you surprised I said that, Sarah Durham? Yes, I thought you would be. Which proves my point.
If you ever have a moment in your busy and responsible life, I would value a letter.
Andrew
He enclosed two photographs. One was of your authentic skinny little kid, freckles, crew cut, and a scowl. He held a ferocious-looking gun, presumably a toy, since he was about six. The other was of a man about twenty, lean, handsome, bow-legged, with his arm around the shoulders of a rangy blonde, older than he by a good bit. His stepmother? The hand on her shoulder was protective. She had her arm around his waist and gripped his belt.
At Christmas, trouble with Joyce. Hal liked to take the family to a certain famous hotel in Scotland for Christmas. They persuaded Joyce to go with them. After two nights she ran away and hitched south. ‘It really is so unfair of her,’ said Anne, as Hal’s wife; but as herself: ‘Good for her. I loathe all that dressing up and having sherry with so-called important people.’
Joyce turned up at Sarah’s a week later. What had she been doing in the meantime? Better not ask. She was bedraggled, smelled bad, and her hair was actually muddy. She looked yellow. Jaundice? Hepatitis? If a test were to be done, would she be HIV positive? Pregnant? Sarah made efficient enquiries.
With her usual smiling casuistry, which is how Sarah experienced it, though Joyce would not know what she meant, Joyce assured Sarah that she could not be pregnant. ‘I don’t like sex,’ she confided.
Should Sarah then say, ‘Oh good’? Or, ‘Never mind, you’ll get the hang of it’? What she actually did was cry, wild tears that took her by surprise. They certainly took Joyce by surprise. ‘Why, Sarah,’ she murmured, and patted Sarah’s heaving shoulders. ‘What’s the matter?’ she enquired dolefully. Like Stephen, she did not like to see Sarah overthrown: one should know one’s place on the psychological graph and stick to it.
‘Can’t you really see that we get worried about you?’ howled Sarah, furious.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Joyce. She hung about while Sarah wept. Then, in order to do something to please her aunt, she had a bath. When she came back, her hair was washed, and she sat (for the hundredth time?) in Sarah’s dressing gown, drying her hair with the hair dryer. Sarah was no longer crying. She watched that hair lose its heavy wetness and, as Joyce combed and combed, become soft sheaves of glittering gold. There sat Sarah, as so often these days, eye to eye with Nature. ‘What for? Why? Why bother to give her that hair when you’ve done her in from the start?’ A pretty basic question, really, an all-purpose multidirectional question. An ur-question.
Spring.
Sarah realized that instead of being in pain for every moment of her waking time, instead of coming out of sleep several times a night in tears, instead of the drudge of grief, she was experiencing periods of pain, very bad in the late afternoon and early evening for two to three hours, less in the hours after waking, though they were bad enough. Twice a day, like a tide rolling in. She was actually taking aspirin for the
physical pain of grief. In between were long grey flat times when she felt nothing at all. A dead, dry world. At least she was not in pain then, her heart did not feel so heavy that she had to keep moving, or shifting her position to ease the weight of it. In these bleak and empty times she behaved towards herself as people do who suffer from a disability or a disease that causes them sudden attacks of pain: she was wary of anything that might ‘bring it on’: lines of emotional verse, a glimpse of a black tree against a starry sky, a sentimental tune—she could not bear to listen to the theme song from The Lucky Piece—or, worst of all, turning unexpectedly into a street where she had been with Henry or with Stephen. When the yearning returned, it was impossible to believe that Henry would not walk into her room or telephone her, because he must be needing her as much as she did him. She no longer bothered to tell herself this was lunacy. Anyway, it was passing. Through attacks of pain she held on to that. In the flat calm times, it was not possible to imagine the intensity of grief she had just experienced and would feel again. She knew that quite soon she would not remember, except as a fact, how terrible a time it had been. The pains of childbirth cannot be imagined in between pangs, let alone an hour, a day, a year afterward. Once could see that there might be a reason for Nature not wanting the pains of childbirth to be remembered, but why grief pains? Why grief at all? What is it for?
She went back to visit her mother, in another attempt to get answers to questions, but failed. When her daughter—that is, Sarah’s—telephoned from California, Sarah asked, ‘Were you homesick as a child? When you went off for your summer holidays?’ ‘I don’t remember. Yes, I think I was a bit.’ ‘Please try to remember.’ ‘Mother, it wasn’t your fault you had to work, was it? Sometimes I did feel sorry for myself because I had a mother who worked. But now I work, don’t I?’
In April, Sarah and Mary Ford flew to Montpellier, were met by Jean-Pierre and driven to Belle-Rivières. The weather was not good, that is, it was not good compared to the expectations we unreasonably have for the south of France, where in our imaginations Cézanne’s and Van Gogh’s suns forever pour down an incomparable light. The sky was a cool pale blue, and a wind flung random cold drops against their faces as they stepped from the car into the new town car park, which was large enough for several coaches and a thousand cars. The charming old market had been demolished to make room for the car park. They had a meal inside Les Collines Rouges, for it was too chilly to sit on the pavement, and drove slowly up through the woods on a new wide road that had been built for the lorries transporting wood for the stadium and would turn out useful for the new hotel to be built half-way up the road, with its car park. This hotel had been, was still, controversial. Jean-Pierre was nervous, with a morose tension gripping his forehead, and he had not been comfortable meeting their eyes since greeting them in the airport building. He had a headache, he said, and joked that everything to do with Julie was a headache now. The town authorities had created a committee to deal with these problems, and his—Jean-Pierre’s—wishes seldom coincided with those of the majority. He thought the new big hotel—visible now only as a devastated place full of lorries, cranes, cement slabs, excavators, and the wreckage of oaks and olives and pines—was a mistake, and the car park was a mistake too, for it would be enormous, destined not only for the hotel’s visitors. As for the stadium, they would see for themselves. They could already see it as a raw yellow-red wood structure towering enormously above the trees. They murmured that it would look better when it had weathered, but he did not reply, only led them through a gap in the structure to the centre of the amphitheatre. Julie’s house had gone, and there was a great round of dull red concrete. No trees were visible over the top of the stadium. A cold wind that made them wish they had on warmer clothes shook the boughs outside.
‘It is not what I wished,’ said Jean-Pierre, almost in tears. ‘Believe me, it is not.’
The path to the waterfall had a notice: JULIE—SON FLEUVE. The three of them took the path. The river was running fast and furious because of rain in the hills. The pool was so full of white water and spray the rocks could hardly be seen. They stood by the railing that guarded the drop where Sarah had stood with Henry and with Stephen. Well, it was a place well suited to ghosts, or at least it was today, so dismal and cold. Was it really ten months ago? No, that was another region of time, seductive and deceiving, and if she turned her head she would see Stephen sitting on the bench, see Henry smiling and hear his low ‘It’s Sarah’. She cautiously turned her head, assured herself the bench was empty, and walked back past it, talking to Jean-Pierre about the musical. She had to raise the subject, for he was too embarrassed. Yes, he said, the committee did like the musical. Speaking for himself, he thought it was deplorable. But he could assure them that this year at least the authentic Julie would be played here for a full three months. Here he took Mary’s hand and kissed it. ‘With your help.’ The musical would be tried out next year. He was confident everyone would see the musical was inferior. Yes, Patrick had been clever, he had incorporated some of Julie’s musical ideas, but in a very ordinary and commonplace way.
But there was good news too, said Jean-Pierre. The Rostand family wanted to take Sarah’s and Stephen’s version and put it on as part of a fête they planned for the summer. In French, of course, but they liked the shape of Julie Vairon and what Sarah had done. Would Sarah mind? She assured him from the heart that she was delighted, and any help that she could…‘Perfect,’ said Jean-Pierre. ‘So this summer will be interesting. There will be Julie Vairon in French, as she should be, and there will be Julie Vairon in English. For the tourists. No, we shall make sure that they will not overlap.’
Mary took pictures of Sarah and of Jean-Pierre, separately and together, while they stood in the middle of the stadium, then sitting on the lower tier of the seats, and then on the highest seats, where—if the camera was positioned just so—Jean-Pierre’s and Sarah’s heads would be seen against a flying scroll, a metal banner that stretched from one umbrella pine to another: JULIE VAIRON. 1865—1912. Jean-Pierre said it was a pity Stephen’s face would not be with Sarah’s near the banner, but Mary said it was no problem: she could blow up a picture of Stephen and superimpose his face beside Sarah’s on the banner.
Then Sarah told the two she would walk down by herself to the town, for old times’ sake, for she could see they wanted to be alone.
On the plane going home, Mary said, ‘I thought I had come to terms with everything, but I hadn’t, really. So I have to do it all over again.’
This was shorthand for: I thought I had accepted that I would not marry or have a serious lover to live with, because my mother is ill and is getting worse and anyway I am getting old, my hair is going grey, and I was very unhappy, but I came to terms with it, but now…
‘I understand perfectly,’ said Sarah.
Sometimes women remembering past follies can exchange Rabelaisian laughter, but it was too recent. Later, no doubt.
‘And there’s another thing,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t care about Julie any more. They’ve done her in.’
‘Yes, she’s well and truly dead now, isn’t she.’
And that was the moment, frequent in the theatre, when, after months or even years of total immersion in a story—an Entertainment—the people who made it simply turn their backs and stroll away.
Sarah returned from France to find Joyce in her flat. This time it seemed she intended to stay. Again something had happened but Joyce was not going to talk about it. She had gone home, saying that she was going to stay there because ‘they aren’t nice people’—meaning Betty and the gang. Her father had heckled and shouted, and found himself confronted by Anne, who announced that if he was ever ‘nasty’ to Joyce again she would leave him. Hal said Anne was being silly. Anne began packing. Hal said, ‘What are you doing?’ Anne said, ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ She had seen a lawyer. At that, hell was let loose. Sarah heard all this from Briony and then Nell on the telephone. The two grabb
ed the receiver from each other in turn. They were full of the awe appropriate to reporting a major hurricane. ‘But when Daddy stopped shouting, Mummy said, “Goodbye, Hal,” and started to leave,’ said Briony. ‘Yes; she got to the door before he realized she meant it,’ said Nell.
He made promises. He apologized. The trouble was, Hal had never believed he was anything less than adorable. Worse, he had probably never wondered what he was like. He did not know what his wife meant by ‘behaving nicely’, but his manners did change, for whatever he said to Briony or Nell or his wife came out as short incredulous exclamations: ‘I suppose if I ask you to pass the butter you are going to threaten me with a lawyer?’ ‘If I get your meaning rightly you’re going to the theatre without me.’ ‘I suppose you’ll fly off into a rage if I ask you to take my suit to the cleaners.’
Joyce removed herself to Sarah’s. Anne said she was absolutely fed up with him and was going to leave him anyway. ‘But I’m going to retire soon,’ said Hal. ‘Do you expect me to spend my last years alone?’
He came to see Sarah. He did not telephone first. Standing in the middle of her living room, he asked, or announced, ‘Sarah, have you thought of us spending our last years together?’