Doris Lessing - Love, Again

An evening light was being sifted through a high thin cloud, and the bleached colours of the buildings, flint and chalk and ash and the crumbling white of old bone, made their case strongly, like a full palette. The end wall of La Belle Julie was no longer a blank stare but showed its history in modulations of plaster, creamy hollows and slopes where a glisten of river sand lay in the folds of joins between two areas of work separated perhaps by decades. A milky gleam strengthened — and the sun was back and the wall again an undifferentiated glare.

The dress rehearsal was set for seven-thirty, which was still daylight. The lighting of the piece had always been a difficulty. The first scenes were by lamplight in the sitting room in Martinique, but the late sun was glowing on the wires of a harp that stood on boards laid over pink dust. The programme said: Martinique. 1882. Evening.

There was a worse difficulty. Three hundred chairs were disposed in the audience space, and these were expected to be part filled by invited guests, mostly from the French side of the production. There could not be the customary audience for a dress rehearsal, the friends of performers and management, for they were not French. Yet all the seats were occupied an hour before the play began, and crowds of onlookers had made their way up from the town and now stood among the trees, waiting. These were French and, too, many tourists, mostly English and American. No one had expected this kind of success for Julie Vairon, except Mary Ford, who could be observed not saying, I told you so! — and yet now that it was happening, nothing could be more plain than that it had to happen. Jean-Pierre kissed Mary's hand, and then her cheeks, many times. They went waltzing around together among the rocks, a victory dance, while Henry and Stephen and Sarah and the cast applauded them. There were no seats left for Sarah and the two Croesuses. Chairs were brought up from the town and fitted in among the trees.

There were discontented murmurs from the crowd. How could the authorities — that is to say, themselves — have been so shortsighted as not to allow for the inevitable interest? Three hundred seats — absurd! Affreux… stupide… une absurdité… lamentable… and so it went on. Then and there a meeting to discuss the popularity of Julie Vairon was arranged for breakfast time tomorrow. Meanwhile the curtain, so to speak, was due to rise. Sitting where she did, next to Henry, Sarah felt his anguish vibrate from him to her. He had confessed he had been sick all night and that was why she had found him sitting by the waterfall. He told her this in a theatrical mutter, a parody of gloom, but his eyes were darkened by the anguish of it all. He attempted a smile, failed, grabbed her hand, and kissed it. His lips left a burning place.

The musicians, who stood with the singers on their little stone platform, began a conventional introduction, for the music was a drawing-room ballad brought to Martinique with the sheet music and the pretty dresses and the fashion magazines on the insistence of Sylvie Vairon, who had made it clear from the beginning, that is to say, from Julie's conception, that if the girl was not going to be legitimate, then at least she must be equipped to get a good husband.

Molly appeared out of the trees. Her white gown left shoulders and neck bare, and her black tresses were braided, coiled, looped, and held with a white frangipani flower. She sat by the harp and played. Or pretended to: the viola made appropriate sounds. She was in fact singing: she had a pretty light voice, just right for a drawing-room young lady. Madame Vairon stepped forward to stand by her daughter, the large black woman magnificent in scarlet velvet. Then a group of young officers — George White and four young men supplied by Jean-Pierre, who did not have to say anything, had only to stand about and react — all dazzling in their uniforms, came forward one by one to bend over Madame Vairon's hand. Paul came last. He straightened, turned, saw Julie — the piece had begun.

Unable to bear it, Henry sprang up and off through the crowd and into the trees. He could be observed — Sarah observed him — striding up and down, and then he whirled about to return to his seat, but he was too late, for it was occupied by Benjamin, who had come back from a quick tour of the region accompanied by Bill's friend Jack Greene.

The sentimental ballad ended, and now the music that accompanied the love scenes between Paul and Julie was without words. Haunting… yes, you could call this music haunting, a word as trite as the love scenes that were being enacted, where not one movement, one phrase, one glance, was new or could be new. Everyone here — there were a good thousand people now, and more were pressing in to watch — had seen similar scenes or taken part in them. It was the music that struck straight to the heart, or the senses. The crowd was silent. They watched Julie as intently as the citizens of Belles Rivieres had watched her a hundred years ago. As for the townspeople rehearsed that morning by Roy, they were unnecessary, for nothing could be more powerful than this silent staring crowd. Then, as the light slowly went, a twenty-foot high projection of Julie the young woman appeared on a screen behind and above her house. It was at first a faint image, for the light had not gone, but it gathered substance, and changed: Julie aged on that screen, until she was the comfortable lady Philippe had wooed, and then she was a small child, her own daughter, or herself. Stephen said into Sarah's ear, 'I'm off. I'll walk. Do me good. I'm going to telephone Elizabeth and tell her what is happening here and ask her what chance there is of a decent run. We have been thinking of three or four days — but just look.' For people still approached through the trees, coming to a dead stop when the music enveloped them. As Stephen left his chair (Sarah thought that he showed all the signs of a man escaping), Henry took it. He put his lips to her ear and said, 'Sarah, Sarah, life's a bitch, Sarah… it's a bitch, I love you.' He said this in time with the music, so he was theatrical and absurd, they both had to laugh. But his lips were tremulous. All the appropriate thoughts clicked through her mind: But this is obviously nonsense, it's all the fault of the theatre, of show business, so don't take any notice. But at the same time she thought, This is Julie's country: anything can happen. Old women can seem like young ones, and a blue-eyed Irish girl with plump freckled shoulders can become a girl as slender and bright and tigerish as a bee, just like the fairy tales. She was shaken, oh yes, but managed to offer Henry, who was leaning as close as he could, a gently amused smile. What a hypocrite.

The scenes in Martinique were coming to an end. The sun had gone, but reflected rays arbitrarily picked out a buckle on Paul's belt, or the handkerchief Madame Vairon was sobbing into, while the golden hair of one of the singers seemed to be on fire. Julie and Paul walked away from weeping Maman into patterns of dusky forest light and shade, appropriately, since the next scene was in the forest, was in fact here. A large window frame stood up behind the actors, to show that the scene was inside the house and not — as it must appear to the literal eye — outside it. And now here was a tiny living room, where there was not only the harp but a lute, a recorder, a viola, while flutes and a clarinet lay on a rack. An easel, on which was a large self-portrait in pastels, and a table where Julie wrote her journals were carried on by the four youths who a moment ago had been officers.

The end with Paul, inevitable and perhaps not the most interesting part of the tale, came quickly, while the singers sang, most hauntingly, words that were all Julie's, if from different years and about two different men, but arranged by Sarah, who, just like Julie, half believed she heard the music of those musicians of nearly a thousand years ago and knew the words they might have sung.