Doris Lessing - Love, Again

'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.'