Doris Lessing - Love, Again

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?