Doris Lessing - Love, Again

'Well,' said Stephen, 'I'm off.'

'Well,' said Sarah, also getting up, 'when is this masterpiece going to be put on?'

'We have to get the music written,' said Sonia.

'Not Julie's?' asked Mary.

'We are thinking of using one of the troubadour songs as a theme song. Not the words, of course. You know. "If this song of mine is a sad one…" It's a torch song, really.'

'So what words?' enquired Sarah.

Mary said, 'I love you, I love you.'

'Very good,' said Patrick. 'Brilliant. All right. Sneer if you like. It's possible they'll premiere it in Belles Rivieres the year after next.'

'The bad will drive out the good,' remarked Stephen. 'It always does.'

'Oh thanks, thanks a lot,' said Patrick.

'Let's wait and see,' said Mary. 'They aren't going to let our Julie go if it's successful next year.'

'Honestly,' said Sonia, 'I don't think you people should start panicking. It hasn't happened yet.'

'No, but it's going to,' said Patrick. 'And there's something else. My Julie's going to be called The Lucky Piece… no, wait — I found it by chance. The lucky piece is early-nineteenth-century slang. It means the child of a mistress who has been left well set up by her boyfriends. Well, no one could say that Julie's mother wasn't living in clover.'

The meeting ended early, and a long sunlit evening lay ahead. Stephen and Sarah walked for a while in Regent's Park. Stephen said he was going to visit his brother in Shropshire. After that he might visit friends in Wales. She recognized his need to move. If it were not that she had so much to do in the theatre, she would be buying an aeroplane ticket to almost anywhere.

There was no way of putting off what faced her. She sat and thought how already the family would be speeding along French roads that were dusty and burned by this summer's sun. As soon as the car stopped, the little boy would be in his father's arms. In fact one could be sure that during the three weeks they were in France, whenever the car was not actually in motion, Joseph would be held by Henry. Meanwhile her body sent inconsistent messages. For instance, that sensation of need in the hollow of her left shoulder demanded that a head should lie there… was it Henry's head? Often it seemed to her it was an infant newly born, and naked, a soft hot nakedness, and her hand pressing it close protected a helplessness much greater than could be encompassed by this one small creature. An infinite vulnerability lay there: Sarah herself, who was both infant and what sheltered the infant. When a hot wanting woke Sarah from a dream she knew had been about Henry, the face that dazzled behind her lids was Joseph's, a bright cheeky greedy smile announc- ing that it would grab everything it could. And then, an intimate and loving smile — Henry's, and both of these wraiths disappeared as her hand went to the soft hollow, and she was filled with a wild and cherishing love.

In her diary, page after page was filled with entries like 'Emptiness.' 'Pain.' 'It is such a weight — I can't carry it.' 'Wild grief.' 'Storms of longing.' 'When will it end?' 'I can't stand this pain.' 'My heart hurts so much.' 'It hurts.'

To whom was she writing these messages like letters in bottles entrusted to the sea? No one would read them. And if someone did, the words would make sense only if this someone had experienced this pain, this grief. For as she herself looked at the words pain, grief, anguish, and so forth, they were words on a page and she had to fill them with the emotions they represented. Why then put them on a page at all? It occurred to her she was engaged in that occupation common to (even diagnostic of?) our times: she was bearing witness.

She stopped writing 'I did not know this degree of misery could exist,' and her diary reverted to: 'Worked with Sonia and Patrick all day on the costumes.' 'Worked with Mary.' 'Mary says she saw Sonia and Roger Stent having dinner together in The Pelican. Sonia doesn't know we know.' 'Patrick has gone to visit Jean-Pierre about The Lucky Piece.' 'Sonia and I worked all day on… '

In fact she was doing half the work she usually did. She woke in the morning with a groan and often sank back into… if it was a landscape of grief, then at least it was not the same as the one she inhabited awake. If at home, she might sleep all afternoon, work a little, be asleep by ten. Sometimes she dragged herself out of bed in the morning and got back into it by mid-morning. Normally she slept lightly, with pleasure, her dreams an entertainment and often a source of information. Now she crawled into sleep which was both a refuge and a threat, to get rid of the pain — a physical anguish — in her heart.

She was also observing her symptoms with curiosity, none of them — surely? — necessarily a symptom of love.

Worst of all, she was bad-tempered, might snap and snarl suddenly, without warning, as if she only just managed an even keel, but the slightest demand, or even a too-loud voice, was enough to tip her over. She wanted to make unkind and sarcastic remarks. Normally not particularly critical, she was critical of everything.

Unpleasant characteristics she believed long outgrown came back. She spoke loudly in public places in a boastful way, for the benefit of strangers whose opinions did not matter to her.

She actually had to stop herself boasting of past loves to Mary, but had said enough to embarrass both: Mary, whose acute, quick look told Sarah that her condition was being understood. One day Mary remarked, apparently about Roy, who was having a difficult time with his wife and was bad- tempered and morose, 'What we forget is, people know much more about us than we like, and forgive us much more.' Was this a plea for herself?

Music still affected Sarah too strongly. She found herself switching off music on the radio, going out of the theatre when they were doing rehearsals and there was music, closing a window if music floated towards her down the street, because even a banal and silly tune could make her cry, or double up in pain. A workman reslating the roof of the house next to hers burst into the torch song from Julie, or, rather, The Lucky Piece — the song had taken wings because of a radio programme. He was sending it up, straddling the house ridge, arms extended, like an opera singer accepting applause, while his mate, leaning against a chimney, clapped — and Sarah's hands flew of their own accord to cover her ears. She felt the sounds were poisoning her.

From the moment she woke, daydreams had to be pushed away, dreams like drugs. Then, at last succumbing, she could spend hours in day-dreams, like an adolescent.

She was greedy for sweet things, wanted to eat, had to stop herself if she didn't want to buy a complete new wardrobe.

Words that had the remotest connection with love, romance, passion, she believed twisted the same nerve as that weakened by music, so that phrases or words or stories she normally would have found stupid brought tears to her eyes. When she was able to read at all — for it was hard to concentrate — she nervously watched for them, these places on the page, able to see them coming half a page before, and she skipped them, forcing her eyes to bypass or neutralize them.

She bought beauty products which a sense of the ridiculous forbade her to use. She even thought of having her face lifted — an idea that in her normal condition could only make her smile.

She began to make a blouse, of a kind she had not worn for years, but left it unfinished.

Sometimes a conversation, apparently without any intention by her, acquired sexual undertones, so that every word of an exchange could be interpreted obscenely.

But worst of all was her irritability; she knew if she could not outlive it, she was heading straight towards the paranoia, the rages, the bitterness, of disappointed old age.