Love, Again

coming from the bathroom, and before he appeared, Bill had quickly stepped back from the embrace and was going out. Sarah watched the two young men depart down the stairs.

She returned to her bedroom and sat on the edge of her bed and listened to Stephen. He was talking in broken sentences. 'What is this all about, Sarah? What is it? I don't understand. If only I could understand it… ' He was on the other end of that line for perhaps half an hour. Silences. She could hear him breathe, long, sighing, almost sobbing breaths. Once she thought he had put down the telephone, but when she said, 'Stephen?' he said, 'Don't go, Sarah.'

Later he said, 'I suppose I must go and help Elizabeth. I said I would. She does need me, you know. Sometimes I think I'm just an irrelevance, but then I see she relies on me. That's something, I suppose.' Then, 'Sarah?'

'Yes, I'm here.'

'And I rely on you. I can't imagine what you're thinking. I feel as if something has come up from the depths and grabbed me by the ankle.'

'I understand, absolutely.'

'You do?' He was disquieted: solid and equable Sarah, that was her role.

Act Two ended with Julie's miscarriage of Remy's baby, theatrically so much easier than the death of a small child, which, they knew, would have take the play over, have had the audience awash with tears. Besides, a child was always a nuisance at rehearsals, and if they took her to France she would need minders and nannies. Interesting, how much discussion went on about this. Some found the decision cynical. Henry particularly did. He said, 'It's much easier to believe that this child didn't mean all that much to her, oh no, it was just one of those things, she was pregnant and then she had a miscarriage, too bad.' Henry had a small son, carried photographs of his family, American-style, showed them to everybody and rang his wife every night. Andrew Stead certainly didn't like it. He protested that his child had been callously disposed of. In life, he pointed out, Remy had gone to the house in the forest to play with the child, had begged the family to see that the child was a reason for marriage. Then Bill reminded them that Julie had had a real miscarriage, of his child. Everyone forgot that, he complained. He was sure Paul minded about that miscarriage. Julie had said he did. The journals were consulted. Everyone was reading them. Sarah took her stand on what would 'work'. The point was the effect on the townspeople. They said that Julie had killed her child. But in the play they say Julie induced a miscarriage by swimming in the forest pool's icy water. The essential thing was that she must be blamed for the loss of the child. 'And we can't have two miscarriages — two deaths.' Attempting an echo, from Oscar Wilde, she said, 'To lose one child is sad, to lose two simply careless.' She noted that the Americans did not laugh but the English did. The English in this context included Bill Collins. Sandy and Bill broke, on a single inspiration, into a recital of 'Ruthless Rhymes', an exuberant performance.

When baby's cries grew hard to bear
I popped him in the Frigidaire.
I never would have done so if
I'd known that he'd be frozen stiff.
My wife said: 'George, I'm so unhappe!
Our darling's now completely frappe!'

sang Bill.

Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven't the heart to poke poor Billy.

sang and danced Sandy, Bill joining in. The Americans seemed mildly shocked. Henry was even reproachful. Andrew's face indicated that he was well accustomed to adjusting himself to different degrees of culture clash. Sarah, Mary Ford, Sonia, Roy Strether, George White, all, as one says — accurately in this case — fell about. They needed to clown and laugh because of Julie's infants, disposed of heartlessly for theatrical reasons.

Who laughs at what is a far from simple business. All the younger people were in an uproar of laughter, both at the theatre and at rehearsals, because Roger Stent had sent a letter to Sonia: 'I hope you are proud of yourself. Those witty little knives of yours cut my fingers and I had to have two stitches.' Sonia had sent him two red roses with a card saying merely 'Diddums'. Sarah found herself a bit shocked. Mary confessed she was too. 'I am beginning to wonder,' remarked Mary, 'if I'm really in tune with the times.'

Act Three began with Julie alone in her little house, seeing nobody except when she went to the printing firm where she took her drawings and pictures to be sold, or returned the music she had finished copying. This was the trickiest part of the play, for nothing much happened for several minutes, and it was where the music came in most usefully.

Julie believed she was visited by inspiration: the music was 'given' to her: but from a very different source than the 'first period' music.

This gift… whose hand brings it, whose mouth sings it? I wake at night and hear voices in the trees, but they are not angels of God, I am sure of that. God's angels would never come to me, because they do not condone despair. According to the old ideas what I feel is a sin. This forest is full of presences from the past. Once the troubadours walked here on their way from one castle or defended hill town to another. They sang of love, and of God, for no matter how sad they were, they never forgot God. The music I am hearing now surely cannot be theirs. But perhaps it is, for where God is, the devil is too. The ideas I am writing now are not mine, not Julie Vairon's, for I am a newcomer in the forest, we are all brand new these days, with ideas that have dispensed with God and the devil. If I went back to Martinique I would find in the forest what I felt as a girl — the devil Vaval. But the devil there is different, he's primitive and full of tricks. I was never afraid of those presences, because my mother knew how to keep them quiet. Besides, in my mind I was already in Europe, I did not belong to them. I knew I would come here one day. I don't think the music I used to write would be strange to anyone in the world — everyone's heart breaks for love at some time in their lives. No, this new music that comes into my mind now is like draughts of sweet poison, but I have to drink it. I feel it running in my veins like a cold fever. At such times I cannot lift my head from my pillow and my hands and feet are lead. Perhaps it is my little girl who sings these songs to me? She was not allowed to live. She has taken her unlived life with her somewhere. Where? But we do not believe in hell, or purgatory or heaven. Why is it so easy for us not to believe in all the things people so recently believed — that they believed for thousands of years? All those books in my father's library… no, I shall not call him my father, for he did not acknowledge me, or say I was his daughter in front of the world. He gave me presents and paid for tutors. I had a mother and no father.

My mother said to me, I come from a long line of unmarried mothers, and I don't want you to be the same. (It was her idea of a joke. I refused to laugh then but I do now.) But I am the same, and my little girl too, if she hadn't died. But perhaps in her lifetime things would have changed and the choice would not be between a safe husband and being an outcast or eccentric. (Stendhal's advice to his sister Pauline.) In Paris or any big city I'd be thought a bit eccentric, a sort of vagabond, and find a place in the theatre and with artists. Why am I writing like this? I don't want anything else. I am happy with my little house among the trees and the rocks, with the waterfall and the wind singing my music to me. But this excerpt was from after she had regained an equilibrium.

For months — no, more, years, at least two years, for it is hard to mark the point where the tone of her journals changed, Julie raved. She was rather mad. This was when they sent her Remy off to the Ivory Coast as a soldier and her child had died. She was knocked clean off balance: All our balances are so precarious, a