Doris Lessing - Love, Again

'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.'