'I mean, that he came back after three years and they hadn't forgotten each other.'
'You say that as if you think it is impossible.'
'It isn't really our style.'
'Isn't it?'
'I haven't experienced anything like that.'
'You sound as if you wish you could.'
'Perhaps I do.'
'Shall I read you what she wrote about that parting?
'I'm glad you didn't make a song out of that.'
'What do you suppose that late music is saying?'
'Then I'm glad it hasn't got words.'
They discussed possible rearrangements of certain lines and in the end decided to leave them as they were. This conversation went on for over an hour.
Joyce turned up next morning. Evidently she had been sleeping rough. In the bathroom Sarah picked the grimy clothes off the floor as Joyce stepped out of them. She was as thin as an asparagus shoot, and like one she was dead white, but with bluish marks on her arms and thighs. Censoring every word of advice or criticism as it arrived on her lips, Sarah put the clothes in the washing machine, put Joyce in the bath, made tea, made toast, cut up an orange.
Joyce wore her aunt's best white silk dressing gown and sat drinking tea. She did not eat. When asked what she had been doing, she replied, 'This and that.' Then, after a silence, she seemed to remind herself that conversation was expected, and asked Sarah like a little child, 'And what are you doing, Auntie?' Heartened by this evidence of an interest in other people, Sarah described the play and told the story. Joyce sat listening, obviously with difficulty. Then, putting on a dozen years in a moment, she jeered, 'I think they were all nuts.'
'I wouldn't argue with that.'
'You said it was
Somewhere about middle age, it occurs to most people that a century is only their own lifetime twice. On that thought, all of history rushes together, and now they live inside the story of time, instead of looking at it from outside, as observers. Only ten or twelve of their lifetimes ago, Shakespeare was alive. The French Revolution was just the other day. A hundred years ago, not much more, was the American Civil War. It had seemed in another epoch, almost another dimension of time or of space. But once you have said, A hundred years is my lifetime twice, you feel as if you could have been on those battlefields, or nursing those soldiers. With Walt Whitman perhaps.
'It wasn't very long ago,' said Sarah.
Joyce was about to protest but decided to behave tactfully, as her aunt so often did with her.
'You said it was going to be in France?'
'Yes. Next week.'
'And how long will you be away?'
'About three weeks.'
At once Joyce showed all the symptoms of panic. '
'But Joyce, you disappear for months at a time.'
'But I know where you are, you see?'
'You never think that we worry about you?'
'But I'm all right, really.'
The InterCity train interrupted its impetuous progress, one felt as a favour, at the country station where she was to get off, instead of at Oxford, because Stephen wanted to show her a different road. She descended onto a deserted platform in a burst of birdsong. 'Adlestrop… it was late June… all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire… 'Well, what else? And did it matter that her head (like most people of her kind) was always full of rags and tags of verse, that she knew the first lines of a hundred popular songs? Her mind resembled one of those self-consciously decorative maps that have little scrolls saying, The Battle of Bannockburn, or Queen Elizabeth Hunted Here. Sometimes, though, the interventions were apt enough. This morning she had woken with 'Oh who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus?'
She walked out of the station while a cuckoo, inspired by several hundred years of literature, commented invisibly from a vast oak. Stephen was waiting in the station wagon. She realized that in town he shed a dimension, was less than himself, while here, in his setting, he was immediately full of authority. They were hardly inside the car when he said, 'Sarah, I cannot begin to say how sorry I am for inflicting so much nonsense on you. Let me try and make it up to you.' He began by driving her for an hour or so through countryside that was the distillation of poetry, on charming little roads. England in late June on a sunny day, two people who knew they liked each other… 'My soul, there is a country far beyond the stars.
Stephen amused her with an account of what had happened at last week's Entertainment ('We call them Entertainments because it has an Elizabethan ring'), when, instead of the expected three hundred people, there arrived a thousand. There was not room for more than half of them. When some young people had turned up their transistors and began dancing, Elizabeth suggested that this field rather than that (too near the horses) would be best, and the dancing and singing went on until dawn. 'We couldn't help feeling that what went on in that field was even more to the point than the Entertainment itself. After all, the Tudors were a pretty savage lot.' 'And the field?' 'Oh, it was due to be resown anyway.' He didn't sound put out. 'Extraordinary! Why is it? I wonder. This is a theatrical time again. That's how we seem to have to express ourselves. There must be a reason for it. From one end of the country to the other, everyone is acting, singing, dancing, staging mock battles, what is it all about?' While they talked, she occasionally stole a look, she hoped unnoticed. He was not finding it easy. His determination did him credit, but there was a tightness about his face like headache strain. When she asked, he said he had never felt better. She wanted to believe this. It was so pleasant to be with the real Stephen again — so she felt it: 'He is himself again' — that it was easy to ignore anxiety.
At the house it was lunchtime. Elizabeth and Norah were off for the day to attend a music festival in Bath. He asked Sarah what she would like to do, and she said she would enjoy seeing something of his life.
'Then I hope you are not going to find me too much of an eccentric.'
'But it's part of your role to be an eccentric.'
A new building, which would turn these semi-amateur Entertainments into so much more, was nearly finished. It stood near the great lawn — the theatre — and was concealed by shrubs and trees. The plans had become even grander in the weeks since she had been here: they were thinking of doing operas. Until now more ambitious spectacles had been impossible, with the big house a couple of hundred yards away, too far for actors, singers, dancers, to make costume changes. Now there was going to be plenty of room for costumes, lighting equipment, and musical instruments, and ample rehearsal space. The place had been designed by an architect to take its place unnoticed among these historic buildings. It would look similar in style without making any claims for itself.
Two workmen were laying bricks on an internal wall. One straddled the wall, the other was handing bricks to him. Stephen spoke to them and came away: 'I'm not needed. Sometimes I can be useful. But these are not our people; they are a firm in town.'
They walked slowly through trees, away from the house. She was thinking, for she could not stop herself, of that young man who was with his 'mate' in France: Bill had said he would use the opportunity to be a tourist for a week. No, she certainly did not see a girlfriend. 'Perhaps my girlfriend will get over for a few days.' She wondered if Stephen was thinking of Molly, who was also there somewhere. After they had been silent for some minutes, he said unexpectedly, 'It occurred to me, thinking it all out, you know, that I must be lonely. It seems improbable, but there it is. No, no, believe me, Sarah, I'm not trying for sympathy. I'm trying to understand it all, you see.'
'Did you know Elizabeth loved women when you married her?'
'She didn't, not then.' Taking her silence for criticism, he defended himself, with a stubbornness, a determination, she could see was because he had made a decision to tell her all this. Because he needed to hear
