Love Again Read online

  She stood at the window and looked down through naïvely pretty curtains at a table where Bill sat with Molly. Opposite them were Sally and Richard. She yearned to be with them. Group life is a drug.

  Sandy the lighting man came past, paused by Bill, and handed him something that looked like a photograph. Bill took it from Sandy and laughed, a young loud laugh that heard itself and approved. Sarah would never know what the photograph was, or why Bill found it so funny, but the scene was so strongly impressed on her, because of her state, that she felt she could not forget it. Henry went past the tables, stopping briefly to greet them all before directing himself to the end of the square where in a side street was the Musée Julie Vairon. He had said last night he would visit it this morning. Sarah watched Benjamin and Jean-Pierre emerge from a shop and walk briskly after Henry. Stephen came from the bathroom and stood by her, looking down—of course—at Molly. Sarah and Stephen stood side by side and watched Molly and Bill, who were now pretending to tussle for possession of the photograph.

  ‘Cruel,’ remarked Stephen, with affectation of dispassion.

  ‘Cruel if not so common,’ she agreed.

  ‘Cruel, anyway. And I don’t care a tinker’s cuss about Molly, not really.’

  She quoted,

  Do you imagine it is because of you, conceited youth,

  That I lie awake weeping?

  Rather it’s because how often I’ve said,

  No, no, no, just like you now,

  Thinking that all my life

  There would be sweet hot dawns and kisses.

  ‘Who? A minor Roman? But she hasn’t said no. I daren’t ask her. Meanwhile I go from bad to worse. Last night I actually had to stop myself writing poetry.’

  Sarah decided not to say that the verse was a result of wakefulness.

  The town authorities, or perhaps it was the café, chose this moment to switch on their canned music. It came from the pine tree, and must be disconcerting the cicadas. Julie’s troubadour music, that is to say, love songs, filled the town and vibrated every molecule in Sarah’s body.

  ‘Extraordinary stuff,’ said Stephen. ‘It takes you over.’

  ‘Music is the food of love.’

  ‘Is that what it is the food of?’ said he, with exactly the same mix of irritation and yearning she felt.

  Groups of people were moving across the square to the museum. Among them went Molly and Bill, Richard and Sally. Henry was with them. He had reappeared and was talking to Jean-Pierre. And where was Benjamin? Sarah explained to Stephen it was essential to keep Benjamin here for at least one performance, and Stephen said he couldn’t see why the American chap should be made to stay here against his will. ‘Ah, but it won’t be against his will. And you don’t understand. You rich patrons must be kept sweet and happy because we will need you next year. Not to mention the year after.’

  ‘Happy!’

  ‘Happiness is no laughing matter,’ quoted Sarah.

  They went downstairs and into the hot morning, the stinks and perfume of the south, the din of traffic, and Julie’s music. They strolled, laughing from bravado, across the square, both high on these compounded stimulants, and watched Henry and Benjamin approach. Under the plane tree, Bill and Molly stood together.

  Stephen stopped, unable to go on. He looked this morning like a miserable old man. Worse, there was something frivolous, or fatuous, about him. She could hardly believe this was the strong and impressive man she had seen in his own setting. And probably she had something silly and pathetic about her too.

  She took his arm and moved him on.

  ‘Even a god falling in love could not be wise,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Who? I pass. But, Who loves, raves.’

  ‘Byron,’ he said at once.

  ‘Oh lyric love, half angel and half bird and all a wonder and a wild desire,’ said Sarah, watching the two men come towards them, Henry visibly slowing his pace to the measured pace of Benjamin.

  ‘Browning,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Browning it is.’

  ‘And most of all would I flee from the cruel madness of love, the honey of poison flowers and all the measureless ills…, but in my case that is far from true.’

  ‘Who else but?’ Now Bill and Molly were approaching. She began to laugh. ‘He is coming, my own, my sweet,’ she mocked herself, and looked at Stephen to go on.

  He said, not laughing, ‘Were it ever so airy a tread…’

  ‘My heart would hear it and beat…’

  While Sarah and Stephen exchanged lines, Henry and Benjamin stood in front of them, listening.

  Stephen: ‘Were it earth in an earthly bed…’

  Sarah: ‘My dust would hear it and beat…’

  Bill and Molly had arrived. Now the four stood confronting Stephen and Sarah. It was Bill whose face showed a rich and irreverent appreciation. ‘Tennyson,’ he breathed, like a boy in class.

  ‘Tennyson it most certainly is,’ said Stephen. ‘Had I lain for a century dead…’

  Bill cut in, looking straight at Sarah: ‘Would start and tremble under my feet And blossom in purple and red.’

  ‘What glorious, marvellous nonsense,’ said Sarah, laughing fit to be sick, while Bill gave her a charming and intimate smile, saying he knew why she laughed so excessively and he could not sympathize more.

  Benjamin remarked judiciously, ‘I suppose it is nonsense according to whether you are in love or not.’

  ‘That, I would say, is an accurate summing up of the situation,’ said Stephen. His look at Molly caused her to blush, then laugh, and turn away. He insisted, ‘Time was away and somewhere else.’

  ‘It’s no go, my honey love, it’s no go, my poppet,’ said Sarah, too harshly.

  Benjamin took Sarah’s arm and said, ‘Sarah, your accomplice Jean-Pierre has talked me into not going to the technical rehearsal this afternoon. He is very kindly driving me to visit the château of Julie’s possible in-laws. But he threw her over, I hear? Not a very honourable young man.’

  ‘The Rostand place,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s charming. And that means you will be with us tomorrow.’

  He hesitated. He had decided to leave but could not resist the moment, her mock-command of him, and, no doubt, the music, pleading love throughout the town. ‘Yes, I’ll stay for the dress rehearsal tomorrow. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘That is what I want,’ said Sarah, laughing straight up at him, reckless with the excess of everything and knowing she was behaving like a girl. Inappropriately. Ridiculously. At this moment she did not care about Bill, who stood to one side, enjoying how she was being so ruthlessly charming to the banker.

  Then Stephen and Sarah went slowly on, and the others stood listening as the two played their game.

  ‘It’s good to love in a moderate degree, but it is not good to love to distraction.’

  ‘God knows. Who?’

  ‘Plautus.’

  ‘Plautus!’

  ‘I had an excellent education, Sarah.’

  ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me,’ said Sarah, sure that no one had said these words from such a desert of desolation.

  ‘But they are singing to me, that’s the point,’ said Stephen.

  They had reached the little street where the museum was. The houses were in all shades of a chalk cliff, grey, pale, bleached, their shutters, which had once been glossy dark brown, faded to a scabby and patchy beige, like stale milk chocolate. Their tiled roofs—the same pattern of tiles the Romans used, interlocking in stiff waves—were the colours of the soil of this region, rust and ox-blood and dull orange. Against this restrained background blazed the balconies, loaded with pots crammed full of pelargoniums and jasmine and oleanders, and under them, along one side of the street, was a line of pots of every size and shape, dressed with blossom. Rue Julie Vairon seemed decorated for a festival in honour of Julie.

  The museum, only a year old, was a house where it was believed Juli
e had given lessons, though the house next to it was just as likely. Never mind. On either side of the entrance stood shiny lemon trees in newly painted green tubs. On the inside of the entrance door, a hand was reversing a notice to say open. Henry and the others had returned to the square because they had found the place closed. It was a large door, a mere slice of glass and steel in the yard-thick stone wall, and it led into the ground floor of the old house. A dozen or so glass cabinets accommodated carefully grouped objects. One held paint brushes and crayons, half-finished drawings, a metronome, sheet music. In another was a yellow silk scarf, and beside it shabby black cloth gloves. The gloves seemed that moment to have slid off Julie’s small hands, and Sarah heard Stephen draw in his breath. His face had gone white. The gloves were alive; here was Julie, her poverty, her attempts to conform, her courage. Her journals lay behind glass, together with letters mostly to clients about copying music, or appointments for portraits. No letters to her mother had survived: was it possible that Madame Vairon had carried them with her, and they died too in the lava from Mount Pelée? None of Julie’s letters to Paul or to Rémy, though it was unlikely these letters had been destroyed. Letters from Paul and from Rémy were collected into books and were there, in stacks, ready to be consulted by biographers. Paul’s were long and desperate and incoherent with love, and Rémy’s were long, thoughtful, and passionate. It seemed Philippe did not write her letters. But then, he saw her most days.

  The walls were covered with her drawings and her pictures, many of herself and of her house. The self-portraits were by no means all flattering. In some she had caricatured herself as a respectable young lady, dressed to give lessons in houses like this one. A few showed her glossy black, in the clothes worn by her father’s house servants, abundant colourful skirts, frilled blouses, bandannas. She had tried herself out as an Arab girl, the transparent veil over her lower face, with inviting eyes—the picture on the poster at Queen’s Gift which had overthrown Stephen. Older, at the time of Rémy, her self-portraits show her as a woman capable of taking her place at that table, bare shoulders and bosom tamed by lace, passive folded hands—a biddable femininity. The drawing of the nude bacchante had a place on a side wall, not at once or even easily seen, as if the authorities had decided that it had to be somewhere, but let’s not draw attention to it. But the Julie she and posterity had agreed she was she had drawn and painted endlessly, in water colours and in pastels, in charcoal and in pencil: the fiery prickly critical girl and the independent woman not only were on the walls but could be bought as postcards.

  Her little girl was there too, a tiny creature with Julie’s black eyes, but then, just as if she had not died, Julie had pictured her at various ages in childhood and even grown up, for there were double portraits of Julie as a young woman with her daughter, a charming girl—but they were like sisters; and of Julie, middle-aged, with a girl like her own young self.

  And there, beside a drawing of a wispy baby girl, all eyes, and by itself under glass, was a doll, with a card pinned to it, and on it, in Julie’s writing, Sa poupée. It was not much more than a doll suggested, only a stump of white kid, its head bald and stitched across the crown, as if sutured. It was eyeless. But this wretched doll had been loved to death, for the kid was worn and the rough rag of a red dress was torn.

  Stephen and Sarah stood side by side and wept, not able to conceal it and not even trying to.

  ‘I never cry,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s this damned, damnable music.’

  ‘A time to weep and a time to laugh,’ said Stephen. ‘I can’t wait for the time to laugh. For God’s sake, let’s get out of here.’

  They went out into the street, made loud by music and the roar of motor bikes. The company sat around the café tables, under sunshades. They were playing a game, in emulation or mockery of Sarah and Stephen.

  ‘All you need is love,’ said Bill gravely.

  ‘All I have to do is dream,’ said Sally, and Richard, beside her, sang ‘Dream, dream, dream.’

  ‘Hey, you’ve got a voice,’ she said.

  ‘Let the heartache begin,’ said Mary Ford, delivering this line to the air, with a smile.

  ‘This is the right time, the right place,’ said Molly to Bill.

  ‘Another day in Paradise,’ sang Bill.

  ‘You are my one temptation,’ remarked Andrew to no one in particular, and added, ‘I love you, love.’ He raised a glass towards Sarah and then, as an afterthought, to Stephen.

  ‘Tossing and turning,’ said Molly, to Bill.

  ‘Ob-la-di, ob-la-da,’ said Bill seductively to Molly.

  ‘I only want to be with you,’ said Sally to Richard, then sang it, and he sang, ‘Too late, my time has come…shivers down my spine.’ Sally sang at him, ‘Manchild, look at the state you’re in…Manchild, will you ever win…’ Richard took her hand and kissed it, then held it. She removed her hand and sighed. Both had tears in their eyes.

  ‘You said you loved me, you were just feeling kind,’ said Molly, and enquired of Bill, ‘What do you want to make those eyes at me for?’

  Bill exclaimed, ‘Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!’ went bright red, so that he looked like a ten-year-old, jumped up, and said, ‘I am going for a swim.’

  Molly sang, as the first line of a song, ‘I am going for a swim because I’m so in love with him.’ She laughed loudly, seeing Bill angry. Bill lingered, expecting the women to join him, but they sat tight. It was Sandy who got up, saying, ‘I’ll come.’ The two young men went off, and the women sat in fits of laughter, sounding angry and even spiteful. Themselves hearing it, they stopped. A silence, while everyone listened to the multilayered din of the little town.

  Henry had been watching and not taking part. Now he stood and said, ‘Enough. Sarah, Stephen—you can see we don’t come up to your level.’ Clowning it, he sang, rather well, ‘Escape from reality, open your eyes, look up to the skies.’ They all clapped. He bowed. ‘Stephen, I’ve been lying in wait for you, to say we think you should go with our American sponsor to lunch. Jean-Pierre is inviting you.’

  ‘An order?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Very well. And Sarah must come too.’

  ‘I think I’ll leave you to it,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Insubordination,’ said Stephen. He took Sarah’s arm, while Henry insisted, ‘But I need Sarah, I need her at the rehearsal.’ He took her arm on the other side. Stephen let Sarah go and said, ‘Very well, where do I find my co-Croesus?’

  ‘Inside the café. He said it’s too hot out here.’

  Stephen went into the café, where a jukebox howled and pounded. He came out again at once with Benjamin, shaking his head like a dog freeing its ears of water, smiling but actually looking rather sick.

  ‘That’s the real generation gap,’ said Sally. ‘Noise. They have cast-iron eardrums, the kids.’

  ‘They’ll be deaf,’ said Stephen. He and Benjamin took themselves off into the quiet of an hotel.

  Then, after all, most of the company went off to swim. Where Julie had walked with her master printer in the town gardens was now a car park, swimming pool, tennis courts, café. A couple of remaining acacias shaded the boules game that was usually being played under them.

  Sarah sat with Henry under an umbrella and they conferred over the words that were to be spoken by the locals, supplied by Jean-Pierre. They had sent him a deputation, complaining that they did not believe their grandparents would have been so unkind as to say the things written for them by Sarah. Which were all in the journals. ‘We must tone it down,’ ordered Henry. ‘Otherwise we’ll lose them. They aren’t being paid. They’re doing it all for the glory of Belles Rivières.’

  Then they went up by car to the theatre, having decided to forgo lunch. There the French sound technicians were at work with Sandy, fixing cables and loudspeakers to the trees and, too, the little house, which was as frail as an eggshell. Rows of wooden chairs had been set out in a space near the house. Had this space been here before?
No, trees had been cut down, chestnuts and a couple of olive trees. Cicadas shrilled from everywhere in the forest.

  ‘A stage effect we didn’t foresee in London,’ said Henry.

  ‘But she must have composed, listening to cicadas.’

  ‘Perhaps the cicadas suggested the music? That would certainly account for some of it.’

  Here Sandy came to demand Henry’s directions, and the two went off. Sarah sat on a bank of gritty earth under a turkey oak, that tree which is a poor relation of its magnificent northern cousins. Soon Henry came to join her. He sat leaning back on his hands and stared moodily at the scene which tomorrow would have come to life. Without adequate rehearsal, though, for the townspeople—or the mob—would assemble for an hour in the square tomorrow morning to be instructed how to watch George White and follow what he did. Henry was in an itch of anxiety. She soothed him with jokes and, ‘A ton of worry does not pay even an ounce of debt.’

  He returned the words of a current song hit. ‘Don’t worry, be happy…as my son told me last night on the telephone. My wife and my son, both. Don’t worry, be happy.’ He compressed his lips in a non-laugh.

  ‘Now I shall say, It’s going to be all right, and then you’ll feel better.’

  ‘Odd enough I do when you do.’

  Soon a coach brought the whole cast up to the theatre. Sarah would have gone back with it, but Henry said, ‘Are you going to leave me?’—so she remained under the dry little tree in a mottled shade, through an interminable rehearsal that began and stopped, and repeated, while the lighting and sound technicians and Henry worked. The singers were not singing, only speaking, and the actors spoke their lines with all emotion withdrawn from them. A lot of joking went on, to relieve boredom. At one point, when the sound apparatus had squawked and gone dead, so that singers and actors could be seen mouthing words, only just audible, Bill addressed the words from earlier that day to Molly: