Love, Again

Stephen came in on Wednesday for the run-through. On Thursday the company were all going up to Queen's Gift. There would be a dress rehearsal on Thursday night, then the traditional day of rest on Friday. The first night would be on Saturday.

The run-through went well, though to see Julie here, in this dull hall, after the colours and variety of the forest in France, was to diminish the piece so much that everyone was acknowledging it could never be anything but second-best away from Julie's own country. And this raised questions about a possible run in London. Every time the subject came up, all kinds of difficulties seemed insuperable, and soon they were already talking of how to improve the production next year in Belles Rivieres.

Stephen and Sarah sat together. At the first opportunity Susan came to sit by him. She chattered about her part and sent him glances that were curious and troubled, for his face was not encouraging. Yet when she was being Julie, Stephen watched her closely. He was sitting, as usual, with his weight evenly distributed, every bit of him knowing its worth, while he gave full attention to each word and move. But it was a heavy attention, giving the effect of a concentration under threat. The girl — everyone thought — could not be more right for Julie. A little-girl quality, something winsome and self-flattering, disappeared the moment she became Julie. She came to Stephen to be approved, and he said she was a wonderful Julie, wonderful, but in a way that left her doubtful.

Then he and Sarah went out and stood on the canal bank in heavy sunlight. Some ducks were energetically propelling themselves out of the way of a passing pleasure boat, but the ripples rocked them about so that they looked like toy ducks in a child's bath. The ripples settled, and so did the ducks. They upended themselves, pink feet dabbling in air. 'Well, Sarah,' said he at last. 'I really don't know. I think I just give up. Really, that's about it.' And with a smile that was all ironic apology, he went off to find a cab to take him to Paddington.

Henry saw her standing alone on the canal bank and came to propose lunch.

'You don't understand about my little boy,' he said.

'Of course I understand. You are giving him everything you didn't get yourself.'

'And that's all it is?'

'All these terrible things we feel, they are usually… that's all it is.'

'Terrible? Terrible?'

'Terrible. What makes us dance.'

'Then at least let's have lunch.'

Bliss encompassed them, like breathing cool fresh air after stale. After lunch he went off, and as she walked to the bus stop she found Andrew beside her.

'You are not even moderately interested to know why I am pursuing you?'

'I suppose one might surmise.'

'One might surmise the aim, but not the reason.'

They had fallen into the pleasant sexual antagonism that goes with this kind of exchange. Sarah felt quite revitalized by it. She was even thinking, Well, why not? But it would have no conviction in it.

'The best experience I ever had was with my stepmother. And I am always trying to repeat it.'

'You being six and she being twenty-six?'

'I being fifteen and she forty.'

'Ah, I see.'

'No, you don't. It went on for ten years.'

'And then she was an old woman and you said thank you and left?'

'She died of cancer,' he said. His voice broke. The hard gaucho face was bleak as an orphan's.

She said, 'Oh, don't… ' and her own voice was uneven.

'Well, Sarah Durham,' he said, exultant. 'Who'd believe it? Yes, do cry, do.'

The bus arrived. She shook her head, meaning she couldn't speak because she would cry if she did, but he took it differently. The look on his face, as he stood there, disappointed, while the bus bore her away, was not one she could easily fit into her view of him, or wanted to.

If the erotic or romantic fantasies one has about a man can tell what he is like, then she had to conclude that with Henry it was the kind of love that, had she been in her thirties and not — well, better not think about that — would have led (to coin a phrase) to an ongoing committed relationship. For better or worse. She sat at her desk, her eyes on the two young men in Cezanne's picture, hardly knowing whether it was her daughter or Henry she saw in the thoughtful clown, and she steadily reviewed past relationships, ongoing or not. The fact is, there are not so many 'real' relationships in a life, few love affairs. That one was fit for a flirt, this for a weekend, another for — but she had not opened the door into perversity, she was glad to say — and yet another for a steamy eroticism. Butconviction? Henry had conviction. (Would have had conviction?) Why did he? All one could know so early in the 'relationship' (which would never be one) was that there were no checks or knots, as there had been with Bill, reversals of feeling like cold water in her face or a bad taste in her mouth. The invisible weavers threw their shuttles, knitting memories and wants, match on match, strand on strand, colour to colour. A month or so ago, she had been 'in love' with Bill (she could not bring herself to leave off the quote marks, dishonest though that was). To the point of- well, yes, the whirlpool. But now she found that improbable and embarrassing, even if she was determined not to hate the poor young man and herself, as was prescribed. She would not find it shameful to have loved Henry when it was all over. A smiling memory? Hardly, with so much anguish in it, but then, the anguish, the grief, had nothing to do with Henry.

The real, the serious, the mature love. Rather, one of the inhabitants of this body, somewhat arbitrarily labelled Sarah Durham, was ready for kind love. She was in that state, had been for weeks, a girl is in when ready for marriage and falling in love with one man after another. But afterwards she first tones down and then forgets the men she has, as it were, sniffed at before the match was made.

Sarah imagined a couple, let's say in their thirties, early forties. They sit at a dinner table in… India — well, why not? — and it is the penultimate days of the Raj. Sarah was back, then, at least seventy years. Sarah had a photograph of her grandmother in a lacy formal dress, with ropes of crystals sloping over a full bosom. She set that woman as hostess at one end of a dinner table; at the other was a gentleman in uniform. Behind both stood uniformed Indian servants. One of the dinner guests, a woman, has just said, 'Oh, Mabs, you used to know Reggie, didn't you? I met him in Bognor Regis last week.'

The eyes of husband and wife meet in a hard look.

'Yes, I knew Reggie quite well,' says the wife. 'We played tennis together a lot in… let me see… '

'Nineteen twelve,' says her husband promptly. His tone is such that the guests exchange glances.

In the bedroom afterwards, the wife steps out of her trailing dove grey skirt and stands in her underclothes, knowing her husband is watching her. She turns to him with a smile. Sees his face. Stops smiling. Ten years before — no, it must be more than that, time does fly so — she imagined she was in love with Reggie, but something or other wasn't right, she could hardly remember what now, though it didn't matter, because she hadn't really loved Reggie, it wasn't the real thing, for that was proved by her being here with Jack.

For a long minute the eyes of husband and wife, neither conceding an inch, exchange memories of that summer when he proved himself more potent and persuasive — convincing — than the vanished Reggie. He is still fully dressed, she in her triple ninon pink camiknickers, her dark hair loosening over her half-naked breasts. Reggie actually lives there in that hot bedroom in Delhi, and then — pouf- he is gone. The husband takes her in his arms, and his embraces that night have a most satisfactory conviction. She forgets she was ever in that condition so ably described by Proust when he did not know which of the garland of seaside girls he was going to fall in love with. It might easily have been Andree, but she turned out to be his friend and confidante, while a sequence of chance psychological events made it Albertine he was fated to suffer over so atrociously.

As for Sarah, that diabolical music had tumbled her into love with the dangerous boy, but her needs, her nature (the hidden agenda), had moved her on to Henry. And so it would be Henry she would remember as the 'real' one. And he was.

For her, Sarah, Henry was likely to be the last love. She did most sincerely hope so. Henry would remember an inexplicable passion for a woman in her sixties. That is, if he did not make a decision not to remember — which would be understandable. And Andrew? She did not believe the invisible weavers were up to anything much. There was something hard and what? — willed — about his — what? — certainly not a passion. (Here she allowed herself to ignore the look on his face as she was carried away from him by the bus.) The truth was, she could not keep her mind on Andrew.

She sat smiling at the thought of Henry. It was that smile put on a woman's face by delightful thoughts of past lovers. Let it stay for a while, she was praying — to her own inner psychological obscurities, presumably? — for when Henry was gone, a black pit was waiting for her; she could feel it there, waiting for the very moment that smile left her face.

And then there would be Stephen. That would remain. That was for life. But while she sat smiling, in his house at that very moment it was likely that an unhappy man sat at a window, thinking, I cannot endure this life, I cannot endure this desert. It was ten o'clock. Dinner would be over. Probably Elizabeth and Norah would have gone off somewhere, as they usually did.

She telephoned and got Elizabeth.

'Oh, it's you. I'm so glad you rang. I was just going to ring you. I do hope you approve of the arrangements. Of course, we can't put up the whole cast in the house. But the hotel is pretty comfortable. We thought that you and Henry and the new girl — Stephen says she's very good — and we have room for a couple more. Perhaps that young woman who can't keep her hands off her camera? How does it sound to you?'

'We are very lucky to be staying in your lovely house.'

'I don't know if we shall always be able to put people up.

I mean, when we do real operas. But it is fun having you people around. And it will cheer up Stephen.' And now a pause, while Sarah waited for the real communication. 'Poor Stephen does seem most awfully glum.'

'Yes, I think he seems to be worried about something.'

'Yes.' Since Sarah did not seem inclined to offer anything more, Elizabeth said, 'It's probably his liver. Well, that's what I tell him.' And she gave her jolly laugh, which was like a notice saying Keep Out. Then, having behaved exactly according to expectation, typecast as a no-nonsense sensible ex-schoolgirl, she rang off with 'See you tomorrow, Sarah. How nice. I do look forward to it all so much. And the garden is pretty good too, seeing that it's August.'

A woman of a certain age stands in front of her looking- glass naked, examining this or that part of her body. She has not done this for… twenty years? Thirty? Her left shoulder, which she pushes forward, to see it better — not bad at all. She always did have good shoulders. And a very good back, compared — long ago, of course — to the Rokeby Venus. (There are probably few young women of the educated classes whose backs have not been compared, by lovers blinded by love, with the Rokeby Venus.) Hard to see her back, though: it was not a big mirror. Her breasts? A good many young women would be pleased to have them. But wait… what had happened to them? A woman can have had breasts like Aphrodite's (after all, at least one woman must have done), and the last thing anyone thought of, looking at them, was nourishment, but they have become comfortable paps, and their owners wonder, What for? To cradle the heads of grandchildren? Surely the right time for these paps was when she was a mother. (What is Nature up to?) Legs. Well, they weren't too bad now, never mind what they were. In fact her body had been a pretty good one, and it held its shape (more or less) till she moved, when a subtle disintegration set in, and areas shapely enough were surfaced with the fine velvety wrinkles of an elderly peach. But all this was irrelevant. What she could not face (had to keep bringing herself face to face with) was that any girl at all, no matter how ill-favoured, had one thing she had not. And would never have again. It was the irrevocableness of it. There was nothing to be done. She had lived her way into this, and to say, 'Well, and so does everyone,' did not help. She had lived her way into it, full of philosophy, as one is supposed to do, and then the depth charge, and she was like one of those landscapes where subterranean upheavals had tumbled to the surface a dozen strata, each created in vastly different epochs and kept separate until now, revealing mountains made up of rocks red, olive green, turquoise, lemon, pink, and dark blue, all in a single range. She could sincerely say that one of the strata, or several, did not care about this ageing carcass, but there was another as vulnerable as the flesh of roses.

'I tore my body that its wine could cover Whatever could recall the lip of lover… ' well, what else?

Yet Henry was in love with her. And Andrew. Bill had been, in his way. What were they in love with? And here she could not suppress the thought: In a group of chimps, the senior female is sexually very popular. Better look at it like that.

In the — fortunately — dimmish light into which she moved this or that part of her anatomy, her body looked tender, comfortable, her arms of the kind that go easily round those in need of arms. Joyce, for instance. That poor little grub, before she had grown into a young woman, was ready at the hint of an invitation to curl up inside arms that were nearly always Sarah's. Where she at once put her thumb in her mouth. Even now, anyone with eyes had to see that invisible thumb forever in her mouth. The world is full of people, invisible to anyone but their own kind (it takes one to know one), who live with their thumbs in their mouths. Sarah knew what had knocked the thumb out of her own mouth: the need to bring up two young children with little money and no father for them.

Henry? A father if there ever was one. Perhaps to Henry she was the good mother. Everything about him proclaimed that what he had had to fight his way out of was something as focused as a demented female cat (driven mad, of course, by circumstances and therefore in no way to blame), who is capable of biting her kittens to death, or walking finally away from them, or killing them with kindness. Something obdurately hostile had set him in a trajectory away, until he had turned to face it at last, taking into his arms the child — himself — like a shield… thoughts of Henry shuttled in her head, mixing and matching likenesses, coincidences, memories, creating the invisible web that is love, visible — sometimes for years — only in glances like caresses or silences like hands touching.

Sarah looked in the mirror.

It was time for:

There are two phases in this illness. The first is when a woman looks, looks closer: yes, that shoulder; yes, that wrist; yes, that arm. The second is when she makes herself stand in front of a truthful glass, to stare hard and cold at an ageing woman, makes herself return to the glass, again, again, because the person who is doing the looking feels herself to be exactly the same (when away from the glass) as she was at twenty, thirty, forty. She is exactly the same as the girl and the young woman who looked into the glass and counted her attractions. She has to insist that this is so, this is the truth: not what I remember — this is what I am seeing, this is what I am. This. This.

But the second stage was still some weeks away.

Sarah looked in the mirror, flattering what she saw, censoring out what could not be flattered, and she thought of Henry and allowed herself to melt with tenderness. But the tenderness was a tightrope, with gulfs under it. She might allow herself to dream of Henry's embraces, but at once her mind put her situation into words, and it was the stuff of farce and merited only a raucous laugh. A woman in her mid-sixties, in love with a man half her age… imagine how she would have described that aged twenty. Or even thirty. (She could see her own young face, derisive, cruel, arrogant.) No use to say, But he is in love with me. He wanted to be in bed with her, certainly, and if he did come into her bed it would be passion, most certainly, but — she faced this steadily, though it hurt quite horribly — with him there would be, too, curiosity. What is it like having sex with a woman twice my age? And was she going to say to this lover, 'I haven't slept with a man for not far off twenty years? A space of time which seems nothing at all to me (you will have heard, of course, how time accelerates with the years, and might even have experienced the beginnings of this process), but to you it will seem very long, almost two- thirds of your life.' Not even she — whose careless frankness in matters of love had more than once done her harm — would say that to a man. Yet she would be thinking it: It is twenty years since I held a man in my arms. For the first time in her life she would ask to have the light off, while knowing there would be that moment — this went with his character, which was impulsive, impetuous, and sensual — when he would switch on the light to see this body he wanted. And — who knew? — perhaps the ageing body would turn him on. (What turned people on was, obviously, not easily predicted.) But did she want that? Really? She, who had been (she now saw, with astonishment at what she had taken for granted) so confident that she had never felt a second's anxiety about what a man might see as he caressed, kissed, held… where was her pride? But the thought of his arms banished pride; she had only to think of the look in his eyes, the immediate sweetness of their intimacy… she wanted him, all right, everything she could imagine, even if the experience was bound to include the moment when the light went oh and that quick — because tactful — and curious stare encompassed her body. And even now she could not prevent herself muttering: It's a damn sight better than most bodies you see around… these violent exchanges with herself were wearing her out. She kept almost dropping off to sleep from the excessive dragging fatigue of conflict, and yet she was as afraid of going to sleep as she had been in Belles Rivieres, because of what she would find in her sleep.