Love, Again

The town's three hotels had been called Hôtel des Clercs, Hôtel des Pins, and Hôtel Rostand. Now there were l'Hôtel Julie, Hôtel la Belle Julie, and Hôtel Julie Vairon. Any muddles about bookings, letters, and telephone calls were considered by the proprietors unimportant put against the benefits of being associated with the town's illustrious daughter. The hotels had been booked out a month before the opening of Julie Vairon. To avoid ill-feeling, the company had been disposed equally among the three.

Sarah's window overlooked a main square composed of houses left to merge into a palette of pastel colours, chalky white and cream, gentle greys, and the palest of terracottas, so sympathetically worked on by time (from the look of things, many decades) that only a freshly painted wall, the end wall of Hôtel la Belle Julie, glared white, explanation enough why the town authorities preferred this graceful fading. Sarah's room was on the corner of l'Hôtel Julie, and from it she could see the windows of a room in Hôtel la Belle Julie, also on the second floor, which had a balcony, with white and pink oleanders in pots. There Bill Collins lay in bathing trunks all Sunday, and from there he had waved to Sarah before sinking back, arms behind his head, in his chair. His eyes hid themselves behind dark glasses. Between Sarah and the young man stood an umbrella pine with a rough reddish bark, and this thick trunk absorbed into itself such a charge of erotic longing she could not bear to look at it, but directed her eyes at an ancient plane tree, with a bench under it, where children were playing. She tried not to look at all at that dangerous balcony once she saw that Bill had been joined by Molly, who lay on a parallel chair. She was not half nude, for her milky Irish skin could not be safely submitted to this sunlight. She lolled in loose blue pyjamas, her arms behind her head. Her eyes were invisible, like his. The two had the luxurious show-off charm of young cats who know they are being admired. Sarah admired them with abandon, while pain sliced through her. Knives had nothing on this: red-hot skewers were more like it, or waves of fire. She had not felt physical jealousy for so long, she had had at first to wonder, What is wrong with me? Have I got a temperature?

She was poisoned. A fierce poison ate her up, wrapped her in a garment of fire, like the robes used in antiquity to enwrap rivals, who were then unable to pull the cloth from their flesh. Not only the sight of Molly — Bill's equal, being young — and the hot rough trunk of the tree, but the grainy texture of her curtain, which held hairy light like sunlight on skin, the solid curves of cloud shot with golden evening light, the sound of a young laugh — all or any of these squeezed air from her, leaving her eyes dark and her head dizzy. Certainly she was ill; if this was not illness, then what could you call it? She felt, in fact, that she was dying, but she must put a good face on everything and pretend nothing was happening. No use to pretend to Bill himself, though. When they met that evening as the company assembled outside Les Collines Rouges, his close hold of her did not lack information that he was responding to her condition and wanted her to know it. He let his mouth brush her cheek and murmured, 'Sarah… '

They all sat in a crowd on the pavement, tables pushed close, while the sky lost colour and the sound of the cicadas became loud when the roar and grind of the cars and motorcycles abated because there was not one inch left anywhere to park. Thirty or so of the company, English, French, American, and combinations of these peoples, they were united by Julie, and did not want to separate. They ordered food to be served there, on the pavement, and when that was consumed, sat on drinking in the southern dusk that smelled of petrol, dust, urine, perfumed sun-oil and cosmetics, garlic, and the oil used for frites. A hundred years ago, the smell would have been made up of the aromatics released by sun from foliage, and dust and food being cooked in these houses. This evening there was, too, a smell of freshly watered dust: a hose-pipe had begun to spin out arcs of spray under the plane tree.

It was entertaining to see how they had all disposed themselves: she was sharing with Mary Ford glances that were the equivalent of gossip. She, Mary Ford, had next to her Jean-Pierre, not only because so much was depending on her publicity, but because he fancied her. Opposite Bill sat Patrick. There was nothing for him to do in France, and he was at work on Hedda Gabler, but he had insisted he wanted to see what they were all up to. He sat dramatically sulking because of Bill's popularity, and because Sandy Grears had no eye for Patrick himself. These three made a triangle drawn in invisible ink on this map of the emotions. On the edge of the crowd sat Sally and Richard, the handsome black woman, the quiet and diffident Englishman, quietly conversing. Sarah had been careful to sit not near Bill but beside Stephen, who was where he could watch Molly. That he had not sat near Molly was an acceptance of his situation that brought tears to Sarah's eyes, but she knew she was weeping for herself. Tears stood far too often in eyes that until Julie Vairon had seldom to accommodate them. Stephen was gazing at the solid, creamy-fleshed, lightly freckled girl with her hazy Irish eyes, no doubt trying to understand the secret that would transform her — had on occasions already transformed her — into the lithe and fiery Julie. As for Molly, she could hardly be unaware he was attracted to her, but had no idea of the dark lunacies possessing him. When for some reason his eyes were not on her, she stole thoughtful looks at him. Well, Stephen was an attractive man. Handsome. Only when sitting here among so many vivid young people did he have to suffer comparisons. In fact Molly did rather fancy Stephen, or would if she were not besotted by Bill. Probably in his ordinary life Bill was a young man no more conceited than was inevitable, with such looks. Tonight he was absorbing hot rays of desire like a solar panel and was positively shining with complacent self-consciousness, intolerable if underneath had not lived an anxious small boy who sometimes peeped out through those lovely eyes. Meanwhile the company were aware that people strolling past on the pavement looked twice to make sure the young man was as handsome as their eyes told them he was.

Sarah sat observing her anger growing like a fat and unstoppable cancer. She did not know if she was more angry or more desirous. She was thinking that if this young man did not come to her that night she would very likely die, and this did not seem an exaggeration in her feverish state. She knew he would not do this. Not because she was old enough to be his grandmother, but because of the invisible line drawn around him: Don't touch — that sexually haughty look that goes with a much younger state, the late teens, and says, 'I'm not for you, you shameless people, but if you knew what I could do to you if I chose, then… ' a look that is accompanied by the (silent) raucous jeer of the adolescent, full of sexual aggression, desire and self-doubt. An impure chastity. Was this (his unavailability) why she had put him not in her own hotel but in the one next door? She had decided this was out of pride or even a sense of honour. But she had put Molly in the same hotel as Stephen, murmuring to herself something like Fair's fair, meaning that Stephen should have the benefit of this sojourn in Julie's country even if she, Sarah, could not. But if she had done what Molly obviously wanted, the girl would have been put in Bill's hotel. (She, Sarah, had not allotted rooms, only handed lists of names to the hotels.) Was it out of jealousy she had done this? She believed not. For one thing, there was nothing to stop Molly (or Bill — a likely story!) walking a few yards to the other's hotel. After all, she had spent the day on his balcony. But Sarah's ruling thought had been, Stephen wants her a thousand times more than Bill ever could.

While these amorous calculations went on, Sarah chatted and laughed and generally contributed to this amiable occasion, and she watched Stephen, her heart aching for him and for herself, and she knew that she was housing separate blocks or associations of emotions that were contradictory to the point it seemed impossible they could live together inside one skin. Or head. Or heart.

First of all was the fact she was in love. There seems to be a general agreement that being in love is a condition unimportant, and even comic. Yet there are few more painful for the body, the heart, and — worse — the mind, which observes the person it (the mind) is supposed to be governing behaving in a foolish and even shameful way. The fact is, she thought, while she refused to allow her eyes to be drawn to Bill but sat talking to Stephen, who was happy to have this distraction, there is an area of life too terrible even to be acknowledged. For people are often in love, and they are usually not in love equally, or even at the same time. They fall in love with people not in love with them as if there were a law about it, and this leads to… if the condition she was in were not tagged with the innocuous 'in love', then her symptoms would be those of a real illness.

From this central thought or area led several paths, and one of them was to the fact that the fate of us all, to get old, or even to grow older, is one so cruel that while we spend every energy in trying to avert or postpone it, we in fact seldom allow the realization to strike home sharp and cold: from being this — and she looked around at the young people — one becomes this, a husk without colour, above all without the lustre, the shine. And I, Sarah Durham, sitting here tonight surrounded mostly by the young (or people who seem young to me), am in exactly the same situation as the innumerable people of the world who are ugly, deformed, or crippled, or who have horrible skin disorders. Or who lack that mysterious thing sex appeal. Millions spend their lives behind ugly masks, longing for the simplicities of love known to attractive people. There is now no difference between me and those people barred from love, but this is the first time it has been brought home to me that all my youth I was in a privileged class sexually but never thought about it or what it must mean not to be. Yet no matter how unfeeling or callous one is when young, everyone, but everyone, will learn what it is to be in a desert of deprivation, and it is just as well, travelling so fast towards old age, that we don't know it.

And yet, if it really is so terrible, so painful, that sitting here I feel like a miserable old ghost at a feast, why is it that for two decades, more, I lived content with a deprivation I only now feel is intolerable? Most of the time I hardly noticed that I was ageing. I did not care. I was too busy. My life is too interesting. With better luck (meaning, if I had not entered Julie's territory), I could have lived comfortably with something like a light dimming, or a fire dying down almost unnoticed, and arrived at being really old, hardly feeling the transition. And I suppose I can expect soon to be cured of this affliction, when I will look back and laugh. Though at the moment laughing is certainly something hard to imagine. I couldn't forget how I am suffering now — could I?

How could I have been so callous? When I was young — and not so young — men were always falling in love with me and I took it for granted, exactly like Mary Ford sitting smiling kindly at Jean-Pierre, exactly like Molly being sweet to Stephen, and like Bill, sitting there with his hands behind his head and looking up at those stars (not as bright as they might be, with so much pollution — Julie's stars were certainly much brighter), knowing that we are looking at him, our eyes dragged towards him while he is (apparently) unaware of it. When a man looked at me in that particular way, the burning accusing eyes, the aggression, the body that made the single flagrant assertion, I want you, did I then give him a single compassionate thought? Yet I knew what a terrible thing love is, and there is no excuse. There is a terrible arrogance that goes with physical attractiveness, and far from criticizing it, we even admire it.

It was late. The square's load of cars was dispersing. It actually seemed, as the vehicles left, that the pavements and cafés and hotels stood higher in relation to the hills, the stars, the trees. People were dispersing, if reluctantly, saying they must go to bed, they must get their beauty sleep.

From a hotel car, arriving late from the airport, there alighted on an empty pavement Henry, with Benjamin Greenfield, the American who had flown in to take a look at his, or his bank's, investment. Sarah was already on her way to her hotel (her beauty sleep) when Henry came fast up to her, saying, 'I'm starving. The plane was late. I've got to eat. Will you join me?' She was saying she had eaten, as Benjamin Greenfield came to join them. He and she had spoken often and at length over the telephone, and now felt they knew each other. He too invited her for a late supper, but she converted the supper into a possible breakfast. Henry stood by while this went on, and then she found Bill beside her. He embraced her with 'Goodnight, Sarah. I do so want to talk over a problem with my uniform tomorrow.' She introduced him, as he had intended, to Benjamin. 'Our American sponsor, and this is one of the stars of Julie Vairon.' Benjamin was led back to the pavement outside the café and its spread of tables, now mostly empty. Sarah watched how Bill deferentially pulled out a chair for the older man and sat down, leaning forward. Sarah did not allow her eyes to meet Henry's: she knew that he was thinking, as she was, Well, it's a cruel profession. Henry now decided that after all he would do without supper. Stephen came up with Molly. The four walked together to the hotel. There Sarah stood in the foyer with Henry and they watched Stephen take Molly by the arm and lead her to a display case showing photographs of the real Julie, who could now be bought not only as her own self-portraits but as scarves, lockets, and various types of T-shirt. Stephen and Molly had their backs to them. Henry smiled, ironic, at Sarah. She smiled, ironic, back. This exchange was balm and butter on open wounds. 'Show business,' said Henry briskly, and then, 'And now I'm going to telephone my wife. An exercise in relativity, this time business. She is just putting my son to bed.' With another smile at Sarah, he ran lightly up the stairs, disdaining the lift, while Sarah chose the lift, not looking back down at the foyer, where she knew Stephen made excuses to stretch his moment alone with Molly.

It was a night of truly atrocious suffering. To be in love — always bad enough, unless kisses match imagined kisses. But to hate oneself for it: she kept seeing Bill come modestly up, then embracing her, with one eye on 'our American Croesus'.

Suppose Bill did turn up at her door now. He would not. But… patience. Years ago, left a widow, she had gone through months, years, believing that if she could not have him, her dear and familiar husband, beside her at night, there was no point in living. This soon converted to: if she could not sleep enfolded with a man, then… Soon, and expectedly, she arrived at a state where to sleep alone was a gift, and a grace, and she could not believe that so recently she had wept and suffered for the sake of a man's body companioning hers. After that — years of equanimity. Sexlessness? Well, no, for she sometimes masturbated, but not because she longed for a particular partner. She had perfected the little activity so that it was briefly accomplished, a relief from tension but without pleasure, rather with irritation because of the gracelessness of it. Self-divisive too, because the narcissism which is so much part of eroticism now could not be fed by thoughts of how she was — was now: images of her own charms could not fuel eroticism as, she only now understood, they once had, when she had been almost as much intoxicated with herself as with the male body that loved hers. Nor could she dare to admit memories of how she had been, because they had latent in them a dry anguish of loss — dangerous, for did she really want to live accompanied with multiple ghosts of herself, as old people often set around their rooms photographs of themselves when young? Now, in carefully controlled fantasies, she was voyeur, because some kind of pride, expressed as an aesthetic choice, forbade her participation in scenes of young bodies, male and female — or, at any rate, female and male bodies as central figures, the main actors, even if assisted by others in supporting roles, ambiguously sexed. The figures she imagined were never people she knew: she did not care to make use of them. This sexual landscape had about it something ritual, permitted, as part of the life of some people, or tribe, from the past (or the future?), in a place set apart for love-making. But she could almost think of this sex as impersonal, partly because of her own non-participation in it. Certainly it had as much to do with real eroticism and its multifarious submissions to pleasure, its celebration of male and female, as chewing gum has to do with eating.

Where now was the cautious woman? Her erotic self had been restored as if the door had never been slammed shut. Above all, she was no longer divided. Her fantasies were as romantic now as when she was adolescent, and as erotic as when she had been a 'love woman', and were of herself, herself now, and this was because, embraced by Bill, she had felt his desire for her so strongly announce itself. She lay mouth to mouth with Bill, and his thick red penis was inside her as far up as her throbbing heart. Lust and anger beat through her in waves, and tenderness absorbed both.

She could feel him there with her so strongly she could hardly believe he was not there, would not knock at her door. This was how the myths and legends of the incubi and succubi had emerged: born of this powerful longing. A couple of hundred years ago, she would easily have been persuaded that a sensual demon was in her bed, a demon all vitality… That animal vitality of Bill's, what did it remind her of? Of photographs of herself, young, when she had exactly this robust attractiveness, an animal and glistening physicality, arrogant and even cruel in its demands on whoever looked — and desired. If people fall in love with their own likenesses (and you can watch them doing it, every day), then she had now, at least in part, fallen in love with that girl whose calm but proud set of the head, eyes looking straight back at the photographer, had made the statement: Yes, I know, but hands off.

It goes without saying her sleep was full of erotic dreams. The alarm woke her at eight, and almost at once, his alarm having woken him, Stephen rang from the room just above hers to say he had scarcely slept but had taken a sleeping pill in the early hours and at last felt sleepy, would she wake him later, say at eleven? 'After all, I don't really have to see this American chap, do I?' 'We thought you'd like to know your fellow sponsor.' 'I am sure I would, but another time, Sarah.'

She dressed carefully. Women of a certain age (and older) have to do this. What she wore became her, certainly. In the glass she saw a handsome woman in white linen who had about her a dewy look far from the competent asperities appropriate to her real age. This was because of the elixirs romping in her blood. Her whole body ached, but this did not show. 'Amazing,' she said aloud, and descended the stairs at a brisk rate, because her condition made it impossible for her to move slowly. Henry was in the foyer. He gave her a glance, but his eyes returned to her for a slow look, all approval. They exchanged the smiles of comrades-in-arms: if thoughts of Bill were shame, anger, and poison, then Henry and the healthful complicities of being with him were their antidote. He watched her walk out: she could feel his eyes on her.

Benjamin was waiting for her at the café table. She sat, making apologies for Stephen. She was amused that everything about this agreeable man, who was good-looking in a calm and sensible way, repudiated the casual ways of the theatre, and even the holiday airs of Belles Rivieres. He wore expensive white trousers and a white linen shirt, and filled them accurately, in the way that says, This one has to watch what he eats. His hair — greying, he must be fifty — was appropriate to his sober station in life. There was not a hint about that immaculate personage of the sartorial eccentricities allowable in Europe, and particularly in Britain. He sat at his ease, aware of everything going on around them: not much yet, for there were still only a few people on the café pavement. One was Andrew, apparently contemplating the cars already creeping around the square looking for crevices to fit themselves into. His pale blue jeans and shirt were no different from what any other member of the company might wear, but on him they suggested horizons. He was a lonely and austere figure: as she thought this he was brought a great plate of ham and eggs, and he began eating with gusto. He had not seen her and Benjamin, or did not want to see them. If it is interesting, who sits next to whom in a company of people working together, then even more so are the moments when one of them chooses solitude. As she turned her attention back to Benjamin, Andrew raised his hand in greeting, without looking at her.

She was determined not to raise her eyes to the balcony where she might see Bill: even the possibility he was there was enough to exert a gravitational pull down that side of her body, while her back had become a separate sensory zone. Over Benjamin's shoulder she saw Andrew turn his chair: now he was looking straight at her. Did he want to be asked to join them? But it was unlikely that he wanted to court this rich patron. For one thing, it was not his style, which was independent to the point of bellicosity, and for another, he did not need to. Integrity is so often the fruit of success.

Benjamin was telling her that his bank, or chain of banks, was putting money into six plays or, as he put it, theatrical enterprises. 'We have undertaken to finance six theatrical enterprises. I have to confess it was our chairman's wife who suggested it. She is interested in the arts. And we did not respond at first as generously as we should. But she kept hammering away at us, and soon the idea began to take hold. At least, it did not take very much effort on my part to talk the board into it. We don't expect to make much money, but that is not the main consideration.'

'I hope you are not going to lose money on our play.'

'After all, we do sometimes lose money on a risk, so why not on a good cause? That is how we have come to see it. Anyway, I spend my time financing new enterprises, and this isn't really so very different. And it gets me to travel to pretty places and to meet pretty people.' Here he slightly but firmly nodded, in the American manner, like a conductor's baton: You come in here. In this case he was emphasizing that the compliment was for her. She acknowledged it with a smile. She was in fact enjoying the morning and able to forget her condition. She was also intrigued. This man in her own country was referred to as a 'businessman', nearly always with faint disapprobation. If he had been British, and needing to defend himself against the genteel prejudices of his nation, he would have confessed to his occupation but by now would be talking about his hobby, growing roses or collecting fine wines, insisting that was where his heart was. Having no need to feel deficient, he was talking with energy and pleasure about his work. 'I don't sit in an office, I am glad to say; I don't want you to believe that… ' Nine- tenths of his time he was involved in the day-by-day struggles of new businesses, some of them risky. 'I've been doing this for ten years now, so I can offer you quite a selection, and some of them I'm proud to have godfathered.'

'Tell me,' she invited, for as long as he talked, the splendours and miseries of her preoccupation were kept at bay.

'Well now, how do you like the notion of a glass factory making exact copies of the masterpieces of the past? Using some old techniques and some new ones? "Masterpieces of the Past", we call it. I tell you, when you see one of those things, you want to own it, but they are too expensive for anything but a glass case in a museum. Museums are buying them — colleges, schools. Millionaires… Does that strike you as too rarefied? Here's the other extreme. We have a factory making a certain component. It is about a millimetre square, but it revolutionizes a whole sequence of processes in computer technology… not as exciting, I must confess.' In fact she found it exciting, but this was not how he wanted to see her. Artists are not expected to be interested in technology. 'How do you like the idea of buying a house all furnished and complete? The garden too — everything from a cactus garden to a Japanese garden. Or French formality. An English cottage garden… you order it, and there it is. I confess you have to be pretty well-heeled for some of our gardens.' He offered her these ideas and then some more, as he sat taking quick mouthfuls of coffee from a cup held at the ready in his hand, as if getting enough caffeine into him was the most important item on his agenda. Meanwhile he watched her face and was pleased when he saw she was interested. He liked her, it was clear. Well, she liked him — banal words for mysterious processes. It became a game. He offered her descriptions of this or that idea financed by his bank, and she indicated the degree to which it appealed to her, not necessarily truthfully but to match his picture of her. If you go along with how a person sees you, then you learn a great deal about that person. Soon they were laughing much more than this factual and sober exchange warranted, partly because she was prescribing laughter for herself as a therapy, and partly because all her emotions were sloshing about like a strong tide in a small rock pool. As for him, the gaiety of the theatre, the charm, had taken him over and he was inside Julie's spell. Now all the chairs around them were filling, mostly with the company, and they were smiling at this satisfactory scene, their Croesus having such a good time with Sarah. Andrew's smile, dry, appreciative, seemed to have become stuck there, as he frankly watched the two of them.

Then just as Sarah was telling Benjamin how pleased he was going to be with what he would see tomorrow, for there was no way he could imagine the effect of the music when it fitted the action, there was a check, a snag: he had booked to fly to London that night. This meant he would not have seen Julie Vairon. He had thought there was a rehearsal that afternoon, but she explained it was a technical rehearsal and they would be merely walking through their parts. 'So you won't have seen it.'

His face indicated that he did not regard this as the total disaster it seemed she did. He even remarked that he trusted them all to get it right — a joke, but she did not laugh. It did occur to her that she might be getting things a little out of proportion. She saw Jean-Pierre on the other side of the square, going to his office. She excused herself and begged him to stay exactly where he was, for he certainly should meet the French side of the production. She walked quickly through the dust under the pine tree and then the plane tree, dry again although the square had been thoroughly watered the evening before. The trees seemed to be accommodating a hundred cicadas, all in full voice. She caught up with Jean- Pierre, to whom she explained it was out of the question that the American sponsor, who was providing so much of the money, should not experience a real performance. She begged him to think of something to keep Benjamin here. Then she walked fast, full of the energy she did not command when not in love, back to her hotel, for it was time to wake Stephen.

On the balcony above the crowd on the pavement outside Les Collines Rouges, a young god, knowing he was one, all sleek warm sun-browned flesh, with glistening dark hair, melting gaze, stood among the oleanders watching Sarah's progress and waiting for her to see him. As luck would have it, she saw him only at the last moment, and her wave was perfunctory. His hand, which had been held out to her, palm forward, bestowing sensual blessings, sank to his side, rejected. He was genuinely hurt.

She went to her room and telephoned Stephen's. He was just awake and suggested she should come up. Up she went. Stephen departed to the bathroom and she sat on a fat little sofa, covered with a country cretonne, to match the nostalgic flowered wallpaper, and ordered coffee. She was lighthearted, her miseries in another country — night country.

She stood at the window and looked down through naively 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 an 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,

'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 chateau 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 Julie 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 Pelee? 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 a 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 Rivieres.'

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:

He clowned and postured, bending over Molly, who stood limp, wiping off dust and perspiration and fanning herself, trying to smile. Suddenly, instead of the grave and handsome young lieutenant upright in his invisible uniform there was a hooligan, and he ended by shouting the last two lines again up at Sandy, who was standing on the broken wall of the house, but leaning out from it to loop thick black cable over a branch. The young man's body was like an acrobat's, and outlined in tight blue cotton. Knowing exactly how he looked, he let out a loud and equally anarchic laugh, in a moment that had the power to make everyone present, and all morality and decency, ridiculous. All of them, the players actually on the stage — rather the space in front of the ruined house — the actors in 'the wings' (the trees), musicians, singers, laughed nervously but they were shocked. Bill glanced quickly around. He had not meant to betray himself, though he had meant to shock. He saw that everyone stared at him and at Sandy, who was now balanced on the wall, arms extended, just about to jump off and down to the earth. Henry came forward, and called out, making a joke of it, but with authority, 'So you've decided to do another play, Bill, is that it?' Bill called back prettily, 'Sorry, don't know what got into me.' And he matily hugged Molly. She stepped back, not looking at him.

Bill then directed beseeching looks at Sarah. What she felt then was unexpected, compassion that was not tenderness but as dry and as abstract as the eye of Time. His face, in full mid-afternoon sunlight, was a mask of fine lines. Anxiety. On that handsome face, if you looked at it not as a lover but with the eyes she had earned by having lived through so many years, was always imminent a faint web of suffering. Conflict. It was costing him a good deal, it was costing him too much, the poor young man, his decision to appear a lover of women, only women. A lover of women as men love women. He loved women, all right, with that instant sympathetic sexiness natural to him; but he knew nothing of the great enjoyable combats, antagonisms, and balances of sex, of the great game. She found on her tongue Julie's You do not even know the alphabet. Only those new lines under your eyes know how to talk to me. But that sudden, rare, heartbreaking crumpling of his face at moments when he felt threatened — they were no new lines. Compassion of a certain kind is the beginning of a cure for love. That is, love as desire. The compassion she felt was out of all proportion, like all these emotions washing around and about Julie Vairon. And not unmixed either, at least at moments, with cruelty: dote and antidote together. A picture of cruelty, staining pity: you are causing me all this pain, you are as careless as an inexperienced boy with explosives, allowing all the sexuality you do not admit feeling for your mother to slop about over older women — oh yes, I watched you this morning with Sally, and I watched her respond to you. You not only let it happen, but you make sure the fires are well stoked. Well then, I'm glad for the pain that put those lines on that pretty face of yours… This was ugly, a million miles from the dispassionate eye of compassion. She knew it was ugly but could not help it, any more than she could hold off the compassion that balanced with it, like a need to put one's arms around a child that for some reason is fated to stand always on the edge of a playground, watching the other children play.

The coach came to take them all back to town. Then, at the tables, decisions were made about tonight's concert. Stephen said he would take Benjamin; yes, tomorrow Benjamin would see the play with its music, but Julie's music by itself was a different thing, and he shouldn't miss it. Andrew confirmed this, saying that his life had been changed by her music: everyone laughed at the incongruity of this remark from the gaucho. Henry did not have to be there, and he decided to have an early night. So did Sarah. The two sat together in the dusk outside Les Collines Rouges. He said, 'I'll tell you the story of my life, because I like making you laugh.' It was a picaresque tale of an orphan adopted by a family of gangsters. He ran away from them, determined to be poor and honest, and worked in low joints until… he was watching her face to make sure she was laughing. '… And then I was rescued by the love of a good woman, and now, hey presto, or rather voilà, I am a famous theatre director.'

'I suppose you aren't going to tell me the story of your life.'

'Well, I might at that — one day.'

'And where is your mother in all this?'

'Ah,' he said. 'Yes. There it is. How did you know?'

She smiled at him.

'There are mothers and mothers. I have a mother. And you are a witch. Like Julie.' He was actually on his feet, to escape.

'Then witches come easily. There isn't a woman in the world who wouldn't have diagnosed a mother.'

He leaned forward, his eyes on hers, and crooned, 'Ob- la-di, ob-la-da'. Then, full of aggression, 'Wouldn't you say most of us have them? How about Bill, wouldn't you say he had a mother?'

'More than anyone here, I would say.'

'And Stephen?'

She was really taken aback. 'Funny, I never until this moment thought about it.'

'Hmmm. Yes, very funny. A real laugh, that one.' And he laughed. 'It takes one to know one.'

'Why didn't I think of it? Of course. He was almost certainly sent to a boarding school when he was seven. You know, all the dormitories full of little boys calling out for mummy and crying in their sleep.'

'Strange tribal ways, a mystery to the rest of us.'

'By the time they are ten or eleven, mummy is a stranger.'

'Love with a stranger,' he sang. Then he leaped up and said, 'But I'm glad you're here. Did you know that? Yes, you did. I don't know what I'd do without you. And now I'm going to ring home.'

When the lights of the theatre coach came dazzling across the square, she went up to her room. She did not want to see Bill. Nor Stephen with Molly, for this mirror of her situation was becoming too painful. She sat unobserved at her window, her light off, and watched the comings and goings in the square, and the company sitting at the tables below, laughing, talking… young voices. Stephen and Molly were not there. Nor was Bill, or Sandy. Benjamin was being dined and wined by Jean-Pierre. She went to bed.

She woke, probably because the music had at last been switched off. Silence. Not quite; the cicadas still made their noise… no, it was not cicadas. The spray had been left to circle its rays of water all night on the dusty grass under the pine tree, and its click, click, clicking sounded like a cicada. The moon was a small yellow slice low over the town roofs. Dusty stars, the smell of watered dust. Down on the pavement outside the now closed cafe, two figures stretched out side by side in chairs brought close together. Low voices, then Bill's loud young laugh. From that laugh she knew it was not a girl with him: he would not laugh like that with Molly, with Mary — with any woman.

Sarah went back to her bed and lay awake, tormented, on the top of the sheet. The breath of the night was hot, for the water being flung about down there was not doing much to cool things off. It occurred to her she was feeling more than desire: she could easily weep. What for?

Sarah dreamed. Love is hot and wet, but it does not scald and sting. She woke as a phantom body — a body occupying the same space as hers — slid away and separated, becoming small. This baby body had been soaked in a stinging hot wetness and was filled with a longing so violent the pain of it fed back into her own body. She turned and bit the pillow. The taste of dry cotton embittered her tongue.

She lay flat on her back and saw that a street light made patterns on her ceiling. A late car's headlights plunged the ceiling into day and left it modelled with shadow. There were voices outside in the corridor. One was Stephen's, the other a girl's, very low. If that was Molly, well then, good luck to them both: this blessing, she knew, was well over the top.

Her eyes were not, it seemed, entirely bound by this room but were still attending to the dream, or to another, for a world of dreams lay around her and she was immersed in them, and yet could observe her immersion. Very close was that region where the baby in her lived. She could feel its desperation. She could feel the presence of other entities. She saw a head, young, beautiful, Bill's (or Paul's), smiling in self-love, gazing into a mirror, but it turned with a proud and seductive slowness, and the head was not a man's but a girl's, a fresh good-looking girl whose immediately striking quality was animal vitality. This girl turned away her confident smile, and she dissolved back into a young man. Sarah put her hands up to her own face, but what her fingers lingered over was her face now. Beneath that (so temporary) mask were the faces she had had as a young woman, as a girl, and as a baby. She wanted to get up and go to the glass to make certain of what was there, but felt held to the bed by a weight of phantom bodies that did not want to be flushed out and exposed. At last she did get herself out of bed and to the window. The chairs on the pavement were empty. The square was empty. The hard little moon had gone behind black roofs. The forgotten water spray swung around, click, click, click.

There were words on her tongue. She was saying, '… passing the stages of her age and youth, entering the whirlpool… yes, that's it, the whirlpool,' said Sarah, not sure whether she was awake or asleep. Was she really sitting by the window? Yes, she was fully awake, but her tongue kept offering her, '… stages of my age and youth, entering the whirlpool.'

She was dissolved in longing. She could not remember ever feeling the rage of want that possessed her now. Surely never in her times of being in love had she felt this absolute, this peremptory need, an emptiness that hollowed out her body, as if life itself was being withheld from her.

Who is it that feels this degree of need, of dependence, and who has to lie helpless waiting for the warm arms and the moment of being lifted up into love?

It was four o'clock. The light would come into the square in an hour or so. She showered. She dressed, taking her time, and, ready for her day, went back to the window. The tops of the trees went pink, and light poured over the still unpeopled town. An old woman came down Rue Julie Vairon and into the square. She wore a long-sleeved cotton dress, white, with a pattern of small mauve bouquets, and black collar and cuffs. Her white hair was in a bun. She walked slowly, careful where she put her feet. She sat herself on the bench underneath the plane tree, first brushing the dust off carefully with a large white handkerchief. She sat listening to the sound of the sprayer, and to the cicadas when they started. When the birds began, she smiled. She liked being alone in the square. She did not know Sarah watched her from her window. Her mother had probably sat there on that bench, alone in the early morning. Her grandmother too, thinking cruel thoughts about Julie.

Sarah let herself out of her room, went down the stairs. No one yet at reception. She slid back the bolt on the hotel's main door and was on the pavement. As she went past, she sent a smile to the old woman, who nodded and smiled at her. 'Bonjour, Madame.' 'Bonjour, Madame.'

Julie's house in the hills was about three miles away. Sarah took her time, because it was already hot. Pink dust lay along the edges of the tarmac, reddened the tree trunks and the foliage. Leaves drooped, made soft by a long absence of rain. The sun stood up over the hills and filled the rough pine trunks with red light and laid shadow under the bushes. Julie's landscape was an ungiving one, dry and austere, nothing like the forests of her Martinique where the flowers' perfumes were heavy, narcotic. Here there were the brisk scents of thyme and oregano and pine. The tarmac had ended. Sarah walked where Julie had, thinking of all that separated her from the woman who had died over eighty years before. By the time she reached the house, hot air was dragging at her skin. Already two young men were at work setting chairs to rights and picking up the detritus of last night's concert. This empty place, surrounded by old trees, seemed the proper stage for ancient and inexorable dramas, as if onto it would walk a masked player to announce the commencement of a tale where the Fates pursued their victims, and where gods bargained with each other over favours for their proteges. Interesting to imagine Julie's little tale being discussed by Aphrodite and Athene. Sarah walked past Julie's house, now burdened with cables and loudspeakers, thinking about why one could only imagine these two goddesses like bossy headmistresses discussing a girl with a propensity for disorder. ('She could do much better if she tried.') Yet if Julie was not a 'love woman', then what was she? She had embodied that quality, recognizable by every woman at first glance, and at once felt by men, of the seductive and ruthless femininity that at once makes arguments about morality irrelevant — surely that should be Aphrodite's argument? But the woman who had written the journals, whose daughter was she?

I tell you, Julie, had said Julie to herself, something like ninety years before Sarah walked slowly in the hot morning away from her house towards the river, if you let yourself love this man then it will be worse for you than it was with Paul. For this one is not a handsome boy who could only see himself when he was reflected in your eyes. Rémy is a man, even if he is younger than I am. With him it will be all my possibilities as a woman, for a woman's life, brought to life. And then, Julie? A broken heart is one thing, and you have lived through that. But a broken life is another, and you can choose to say no. She did not say no. And who was it, which Julie, who said to the other, Well, my dear, you must not imagine if you choose love you won't have to pay for it? But it was not Athene's daughter who said, Write your music. Paint your pictures. But if that is what you choose, you will not be living as women live. I can't endure this non-life. I can't endure this desert.

Now just ahead was the river, with its pools and its shallow falls, and the bench the town authorities had thoughtfully provided for people who wanted to contemplate Julie's sad end. Someone was already on the bench. It was Henry. The curve of his body suggested discouragement. He stared ahead of him, and it was not because he was deaf that he did not hear her approach. His ears were plugged with sound. He had a Walkman in his pocket. The music he was listening to was sure to be as far as it could be from Julie's. Sarah could hear a frantic tiny niggling, then a small savage howling, as she sat down and smiled at him. He tore off the headphones, and as the music, no longer directed into his brain, swirled about them, he switched the machine off, looking embarrassed. He sang at her, ' Tell me what love means to you before you ask me to love you' — Julie's words, but it was a tune she did not know, since she was not an inhabitant of the world he entered when he clamped his headphones on.

Then he put back his head and howled like a wolf.

She suggested, 'I am baying at the moon, for 'tis a night in June, and I'm thinking of you… of who? Of you-hoo.'

'Not bad. Not far off.'

'Have you been here all night?'

'Just about.'

'But you know it's going to be all right.'

He sang, 'Have you been here all night, but you know it's going to be all right.' He said, 'Yes, I know, but do I believe it?' He abruptly flung his legs apart, and his arms, then, finding this position intolerable, he threw the left leg over the right, then the right over the left, and folded his arms tight. A bright blowing spray set a bloom of cool damp on their faces. The river ran fast through the forest trees, past reddish and orange rocks, making baby whirlpools and eddies, leaving stains of pinkish foam on the weeds that oscillated at the river's edge. Above the fall was a wide pool where the water was dark and still, except where the main stream ran through it, betraying itself in a swift turbulence that gathered the whole body of water into itself at the rocky edge, flinging up spray as it fell into another pool, where it seethed like boiling sugar syrup among black rocks. This was not a deep pool, though it was the famous whirlpool that had drowned Julie and — so some of the townspeople said — had drowned Julie's child. (How could they have said it? Had there not been a doctor and the doctor's certificate? But if people want to believe something, they will.) Below this treacherous pool, past a mild descent among rocks, was another, large, dark, and quiet except where the water poured deeply into it. It was this pool where Julie came to swim, but only at night, when, she said, she could cheat the Peeping Toms.

'To drown herself there must have needed a real strength of mind,' said Sarah.

'She was probably stoned.'

'She never mentioned drinking or drugs in her journals.'

'Did she say everything in her journals?'

'I think so.'

'Then I'll go back to my first interpretation. When I read the script I didn't believe in the suicide.'

'You mean, you agree with the townspeople? They thought she was murdered.'

'Perhaps they murdered her.'

'But she was just about to become a respectable woman.'

'That's just the point. Suppose they didn't like the idea of this witch becoming Madame Master Printer.'

'A witch, you keep saying.'

'Do you know what, Sarah? I dream about her. If I dreamed of some sugarplum all tits and bum, then that would be something, but I don't. I dream of her when she's — well, getting over the hill. Well over.'

She turned her head to see his smile, sour, a bit angry, and close to her face.

'Sex appeal isn't all bum and tits,' said she, returning his vulgarity to him.

He sat back, gave her an appreciative but still angry smile, and said, 'Well, yes, I'd say there was some truth in that. Of course, as a good American boy, I should only be admitting to nymphets, but yes, you're right.' He sprang to his feet, grabbed up her hand, kissed it. Her hand was wet with spray. 'Sarah… what can I say? I'm off to get some sleep. If I can. I've got a technical rehearsal at eleven. Roy is rehearsing the townspeople. And I've got the singers this afternoon. Will you be there? But why should you be?'

'If you want me to be.'

'Lazing on a sunny afternoon,' he sang to her. Then he pushed the plugs back into his ears and walked or, rather, ran off back towards Julie's house.

She went to the edge of the pool below the falls. The whirlpool, in fact. Here Julie must have stood, looking down at the dangerous waters, and then she jumped. Not much of a jump, perhaps six feet. The stony bottom of the pool could be glimpsed through eddies. She could easily have landed on her feet, then fallen forward, perhaps onto that rock, a smooth round one, and allowed herself to be sucked past the rock to the deeper pool. Allowed herself? She could swim, she said, like an otter.

Sarah felt she should turn her head, and did so. There was Stephen, staring at her from where he stood by the bench a few feet away. She went to the bench and sat down. He sat beside her.

'We are all up early,' she remarked.

'I haven't been to bed. I suppose I look it.' His clothes were crumpled, he smelled stale, and he wore his tragic mask. Again Sarah thought, I've never, never in my life felt anything like this — this is the grief you see on the faces of survivors of catastrophes, staring back at you from the television screens. 'I went walking with Molly last night,' he said. 'She very kindly agreed to come walking with me. We walked along some road or other. It was pretty dark under the trees.'

She could imagine it. A dark road. He could hardly see the girl who walked beside him under the trees. There had been that niggardly little moon. They had walked from one patch of dim light to another. Molly had been wearing a white cotton skirt and a tight white T-shirt. Patterns in black and white.

Sarah watched the racing water, for she could not bear to look at his face.

'Extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, what happens to one's pride. She kissed me. Well, I kissed her.' He waited. Then, 'Thanks for not saying it, Sarah.' Now she did cautiously turn her head. Tears ran down cheeks dragging with grief. 'I don't understand any of it. What can you say about a man of fifty who knows that nothing more magical ever happened to him than a kiss in the dark with…?'

Sarah suppressed, At least you had a kiss. At that moment anything she felt seemed a selfish impertinence.

'I've missed out on all that,' she heard, but faintly. A breeze off the water was blowing his words away. 'I've had a dry life. I didn't know it until… Of course I've been in love. I don't mean that.' The wind, changing again, flung his words at her: 'What does it mean, saying that to hold one girl in your arms makes everything that ever happened to you dust and ashes?'

'Julie said something of the sort. About Rémy.' A silence, filled with the sound of water. For the second time that morning, she said, 'To drown herself must have taken some strength of mind.'

'Yes. If I'd been there

'You, or Rémy?'

'You don't understand. I am Rémy. I understand everything about him.'

'Were you a younger brother? I mean you, Stephen.'

'I have two older brothers. Not four, like Rémy. I don't know how important that is. What's important is… well, what could I have said to her to stop her killing herself?'

'Will you marry me?' suggested Sarah.

'Ah, you don't understand. That is the impossibility. He couldn't marry her. Not with all that pressure. Don't forget, he was French. It is a thousand times worse for the French than for us. The French have this family thing. We have it, but nothing like as bad. We can marry chorus girls and models — and a jolly good thing too. Good for the gene pool. But have you ever seen an aristocratic French family close ranks? And it was a hundred years ago. No, it was all inevitable. It was impossible for Rémy not to fall in love with her. And until death. Because he would have loved her all his life.'

'Yes,' she shouted, since the wind had changed again.

'But impossible to marry her.'

'Funny how we don't mention the glamorous lieutenant,' said Sarah, thinking of Bill and of how ashamed she was.

'But that was just… falling in love,' he shouted. A silence. He said, 'But with Rémy, it was life and death.'

He sat with his eyes shut. Tears seeped out under his lids. Depressed. But the word means a hundred different shades of sadness. There are different qualities of 'depression', as there are of love. A really depressed person, she knew, having seen the condition in a friend, was nothing like Stephen now. The depressed one could sit in the same position in a chair, or on the floor in a corner of a room, curled like a foetus for hours at a time. Depression was not tears. It was deadness, immobility. A black hole. At least, so it seemed to an onlooker. But Stephen was alive and suffering. He was grief- stricken. She cautiously examined him, now that she could, because he had his eyes shut, and thought suddenly that she ought to be afraid for herself. She, Sarah, had most unexpectedly stopped a bolt from the blue, an arrow from an invisible world: she had fallen in love when she thought she never could again. And so what was to stop her from being afflicted, as Stephen was — from coming to grief?

She took his hand, that sensible, useful, practical hand, and felt it tighten around hers. 'Bless you, Sarah. I don't know why you put up with me. I know I must seem… ' He got up, and so did she. 'I think I ought to get some sleep.'

They walked to the edge of the dangerous pool and stood looking down. The water that spattered Sarah's cheek was partly tears blown off Stephen's.

'She must have taken a pretty strong dose of something.'

'That's what Henry said.'

'Did he? A good chap, Henry. Perhaps he's in love with her too. The way I feel now, I can't imagine why the whole world isn't. That's a sign of insanity in itself.'

The sun was burning down, though it was still early. Hot, quiet, and still. No wind. Sarah's dress, so recently put on, needed changing, for it was soaked with spray and clung to her thighs. She shut her eyes as she was absorbed into a memory of a small hot damp body filled with craving.

'Just as well we don't remember our childhoods,' she said.

'What? Why did you say that?'

'Let alone being a baby. My God, it's as well we forget it all.' Stephen was looking at her in a way he never had before. It was because he had not heard that voice from her — angry, and rough with emotion. He did not like it: if she was not careful he would stop liking her. Yet she felt on a slippery slope and did not know how to save herself. She was clenched up like a fist to stop herself crying. 'I never cry,' she announced, and jumped to her feet, and stood wiping tears off her cheeks with the backs of her hands. He slowly handed her a handkerchief, a real one, large, white, and well laundered — slowly because of his shock. 'It's all right,' she said, 'but I do find Julie a bit of a strain. Not to anything like the extent you do, thank God.' But she could hardly get these words out, and he slowly stood up and was examining her. She found it hard to sustain that look, the one that means a man has stepped back to examine a woman in the light of remembered other women, other situations. For the first time there was embarrassment between them, and it was deepening.

And now he said, in a voice she had never heard, 'Don't tell me you are in love with… '

She said, attempting lightness, 'You mean the young jay? The pretty hero?' On the verge of confessing, of saying, Yes, I am afraid so, his face stopped her. He was so disappointed in her — as well as being shocked, and he was certainly that. She could not bear it and decided to lie, even while she was crying out to herself, But you've never lied to him, this is awful, it'll never be the same again, this friendship of ours. 'No, no,' she said, laughing and she hoped with conviction. 'Come on, it's not as bad as that.'

'After all my confessions to you, the least you can do… ' But this was a far from friendly invitation.

'Ah,' she said, 'but I'm not going to tell you.' Lightly, almost flirtatiously, and as she spoke she could have burst out weeping again instead. Never had she used this false flirtatious voice to him. He hated it, she could see.

At the same moment, they set off along the path to the house and the theatre space, now empty and waiting for the day's rehearsals. Down they went, through the trees. He was covertly examining her, and she was miserable because of what she saw on his face. She began to make conversation, saying it was interesting that while Julie was doing her drawings and paintings here, not thirty miles away Cezanne was painting. Her work would have surprised no one in the last four hundred years, but Cezanne's was so revolutionary that many of the critics of the time could see nothing in it.

She hoped he would join in, save them both from this quite terrible embarrassment, and he did, but his voice was harsh when he said, 'I hope you aren't suggesting it is a criticism of Julie's work that Dürer wouldn't have been surprised at it.'

This conversation, like so many, was only apparently about what its surface suggested.

'Unless he would have been surprised at a woman doing it.'

He gave a snort — and it was contemptuous. 'Now you're changing ground.'

'I suppose so' — and her voice was a plea. 'But I wasn't thinking of it as a criticism, actually.' He did not speak. 'But if Julie had seen Cezanne's work, do you think she'd have liked it?'

A much too long pause. He said grudgingly, 'How do we know she didn't? They were always out and about, both of them.'

'Thirty miles is nothing now. Then it was enough to make sure they'd never meet.'

They walked, much too fast for that warm morning, down the dusty track, the cicadas already at full shrill. She could not remember ever wanting a time of being with Stephen to end, but now she did. She was thinking, critically of herself, It's all right when I watch Stephen, to see how he is feeling, but I don't like it when he watches me as he is doing now.

'Do you suppose Cezanne would have liked her music?' she asked quickly.

'He would have loathed it,' he said, and his voice was like a judge delivering a sentence.

'Does that mean you loathe it, in your heart of hearts?'

'Sometimes I do.'

‘I can't endure this non-life. I can't endure this desert,' she quoted, clumsy, for she had not meant to say anything of the sort.

And now there was a pretty long silence. Stephen was asking himself if he could forgive her. He did so, with 'Now I think I've never not lived in a desert.'

She was unable to prevent herself from blurting out, spoiling everything again, 'Recently I've been thinking I was living in a desert for years.'

And, again, he was uncomfortable, and did not want to have to be with this emotional and (so he felt it) demanding Sarah. 'So you aren't in a desert now,' he enquired, wanting a real answer.

Sarah walked faster. She knew that the conversation had slipped finally into the wrong gear, but tried to sound humorous. 'I think a lot of people live in a desert. At least, what they call in the atlases "Other Desert". You know, there is sand desert, the real desert, the real thing, like the Empty Quarter, and "Other Desert". One is an absolute. But "other desert" — there are degrees of that.'

And now he did not say anything. They were walking as fast as they could, but there was a good twenty minutes of this discomfort before they reached the town square. There Stephen left her, without more than a nod and a strained smile, and he almost ran towards the hotel, where he disappeared, with a look of relief and, too, an almost furtive little movement of his buttocks, which suddenly announced to Sarah: Oh no, he thinks I am in love with him. For there is no woman in the world who has not seen, at some moment or other, a man escaping with precisely that secret little look of relief. This struck her as a complete calamity, the worst. What could she do? She was thinking, This friendship is a thousand times more precious to me than being in love, or the pretty hero. I can't bear it. And now it's all spoiled. Until this morning everything between us had been open, simple, honest. And now…

In the midst of this distress a thought that made it worse attacked her: A few weeks ago — but it seemed months, even years ago — she could have said anything to Stephen, and did. In those truly halcyon days before her first visit to his house, she might have remarked, laughing, 'I've fallen in love with a pretty boy — now, what do you have to say about that!' 'Oh, come off it, Stephen, I'm not in love with you, don't be silly.' But now… they had both of them made a long step down and away from their best.

The pavement outside the cafe was crowded. Sarah did not want to talk to anyone. But Bill was sitting with a sleek, brown, plump man, obviously American, and he was smiling and waving. She was about to smile and walk past, but he called to her in a casually proprietary way, as he would have done to his mother, 'Sarah, where did you get to?' And he said to his companion, 'She's one of my greatest friends. She's a really fun person.'

Sarah kept a smile on her face and allowed herself to rest on the very edge of a chair. She directed this smile at a man whose every surface glistened with satisfaction. He was Jack, who, Bill said, had directed the last play Bill had been in. Bill offered the morsel to Sarah as he might have done a box of chocolates. But he was uneasy too, for he knew he had struck a wrong note. Because of this, Sarah felt sorry for him: an extraordinary mix of emotions, extravagant, ridiculous emotions; and she was passionately disliking this Jack. As if it mattered whether she liked him or not.

'I'm on a trip around the south of France. I saw Bill last night in Marseilles. He talked me into it, and — voilà!' said Jack, taking possession of France with a word.

Then it must have been very late — as the thought invaded her like a tidal wave, jealousy carved her spine. Bill was still here last night after midnight, so if he drove to Marseilles — he and who? — that must mean… now, stop it, Sarah.

Bill knew she was jealous: his eyes told her so, and, too, that he was relieved because, having lost her because of his over-familiarity, he was taking possession of her again. He was back on balance but she was not. She was thinking: Stephen, what am I to do? I cannot lose Stephen.

She got off the edge of her chair and said, 'I'm sorry, I have to meet someone.' And with a smile at Jack she hoped was adequate, and ignoring Bill (at which she saw his face fall), she walked briskly into the hotel. She was having to peer through tears. What she saw was Henry, on his way out. Luckily the light was behind her.

'You'll be there after lunch?' A question, yes, but it was more of a command.

'This is a very strange role, mine,' said Sarah.

'True. Not in the contract, I know. But essential. Please?'

Determined not to sleep but to think of some way of putting things right with Stephen, she was walking around her room, or rather barging and banging around it, not seeing what she was doing. She was thinking, I couldn't have told him, 'Yes, I am in love with the pretty hero.' It's unforgivable. And yet old women by the thousand — probably by the million — are in love and keep quiet about it. They have to. Good Lord, just imagine it: for instance, an old people's home full of senior citizens, or, as they charmingly put it, wrinklies, and half of them are secretly crazy for the young jay who drives the ambulance or the pretty girl cook. A secret hell, populated with the ghosts of lost loves, former personalities… meanwhile the other half are making sniffy jokes and exchanging snide looks. Unless they succumb too.

It was no good. She crashed into sleep, and woke in tears.

A taxi took her to the sane atmosphere of people working, for she did not want to walk in that heat.

She sat under a tree. Henry came over, and Julie's late music, high and cool, shot arrows straight into their hearts.

'God,' he muttered, his eyes full of tears, 'that's so beautiful.'

She said, her eyes wet, 'Funny how we subject ourselves to music. We never ask what effect it might be having.'

He was in that position a runner uses before a race, half squatting, the knuckles of his left hand resting among fallen leaves, to steady him. His eyes were on her face. One might call them speaking eyes.

'You're talking to a man who has been listening to pop music most hours of the day since he was twelve.'

'And you're going to say, It hasn't done me any harm?'

'How do we know if it is doing us harm or not?'

'I think it might be making us over-emotional.'

'Well, you could say that. Yes.' With that, up he sprang, and said, 'Thank you for coming. Never think I don't appreciate it.' And off he went.

Then they rehearsed the early music which was far from cool and detached, and went back to the late music, both accompanied by the steady drilling of cicadas. Hearing Julie's music like this, disjointed, not in its development, with the reassurance of a progression, it unsettled, it even wounded, as if the singers had decided to be deliberately cynical. At the end they rehearsed the song

The note curved up on life, a bent note, as in a blues. An interesting question, surely: in Indian music, Arab music — Eastern music — you could say that all notes are 'bent', a 'straight' note is the rare one. But in our music, one 'bent' note can be like a hand in your heart strings.

The rehearsal ended. The four singers stood together under their tree, while the musicians covered their instruments. For a few moments, the group kept about them the atmosphere of the music, as if they stood in the hollow bluish-gold penumbra of a candle flame, the girls in their loose summer dresses, the young men's blue jeans transformed by association and sound into the cerulean of the robes in medieval religious paintings. But when they left the trees and came through sunlight making loud remarks about showers and cold drinks, they became people in a street or at a bus stop. A limousine waited for them. The driver was a young man with whom they had achieved the agreeable intimacy of the theatre. He laid a strong brown arm along the back of the driver's seat and twisted around to smile at the girls as they piled in. 'Mademoiselle… mademoiselle… mademoiselle… ' he said to each of the three singers, caressingly, as a Frenchman should, allowing tender eyes to say how much he appreciated them, and at once the gallantry- deprived Anglo-Saxon women, who are lucky to be told, by a man who is madly in love with them, You are looking Jit, radiated pleasure like stroked cats, even while they could be observed reminding themselves and each other, with small regulated grimaces, that they must not allow themselves to be carried away by such insincerity. He murmured a gallant 'Madame' to Sarah, and then, feeling unable to supply individual salutations of the same standard to everybody, contented himself with a comradely nod to Henry and the counter-tenor, and flashed his white teeth all around. He reversed with a screech. ' Voilà… allons-y… il fait chaud… très très chaud… ' he positively crooned, reminding them he had sat waiting for at least half an hour in all that heat, the rehearsal having run overtime, not that he in any way begrudged them what was his duty, but. 'Faut boire,' he announced. 'Immédiatement. Vite, vite.' And the car shot, or waltzed, down the tricky road, hooting madly. They were in the square in ten minutes.

An evening light was being sifted through a high thin cloud, and the bleached colours of the buildings, flint and chalk and ash and the crumbling white of old bone, made their case strongly, like a full palette. The end wall of La Belle Julie was no longer a blank stare but showed its history in modulations of plaster, creamy hollows and slopes where a glisten of river sand lay in the folds of joins between two areas of work separated perhaps by decades. A milky gleam strengthened — and the sun was back and the wall again an undifferentiated glare.