Doris Lessing - Love, Again

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.