Love, Again

'To drown herself there must have needed a real strength of mind,' said Sarah.

'She was probably stoned.'

'She never mentioned drinking or drugs in her journals.'

'Did she say everything in her journals?'

'I think so.'

'Then I'll go back to my first interpretation. When I read the script I didn't believe in the suicide.'

'You mean, you agree with the townspeople? They thought she was murdered.'

'Perhaps they murdered her.'

'But she was just about to become a respectable woman.'

'That's just the point. Suppose they didn't like the idea of this witch becoming Madame Master Printer.'

'A witch, you keep saying.'

'Do you know what, Sarah? I dream about her. If I dreamed of some sugarplum all tits and bum, then that would be something, but I don't. I dream of her when she's — well, getting over the hill. Well over.'

She turned her head to see his smile, sour, a bit angry, and close to her face.

'Sex appeal isn't all bum and tits,' said she, returning his vulgarity to him.

He sat back, gave her an appreciative but still angry smile, and said, 'Well, yes, I'd say there was some truth in that. Of course, as a good American boy, I should only be admitting to nymphets, but yes, you're right.' He sprang to his feet, grabbed up her hand, kissed it. Her hand was wet with spray. 'Sarah… what can I say? I'm off to get some sleep. If I can. I've got a technical rehearsal at eleven. Roy is rehearsing the townspeople. And I've got the singers this afternoon. Will you be there? But why should you be?'

'If you want me to be.'

'Lazing on a sunny afternoon,' he sang to her. Then he pushed the plugs back into his ears and walked or, rather, ran off back towards Julie's house.

She went to the edge of the pool below the falls. The whirlpool, in fact. Here Julie must have stood, looking down at the dangerous waters, and then she jumped. Not much of a jump, perhaps six feet. The stony bottom of the pool could be glimpsed through eddies. She could easily have landed on her feet, then fallen forward, perhaps onto that rock, a smooth round one, and allowed herself to be sucked past the rock to the deeper pool. Allowed herself? She could swim, she said, like an otter.

Sarah felt she should turn her head, and did so. There was Stephen, staring at her from where he stood by the bench a few feet away. She went to the bench and sat down. He sat beside her.

'We are all up early,' she remarked.

'I haven't been to bed. I suppose I look it.' His clothes were crumpled, he smelled stale, and he wore his tragic mask. Again Sarah thought, I've never, never in my life felt anything like this — this is the grief you see on the faces of survivors of catastrophes, staring back at you from the television screens. 'I went walking with Molly last night,' he said. 'She very kindly agreed to come walking with me. We walked along some road or other. It was pretty dark under the trees.'

She could imagine it. A dark road. He could hardly see the girl who walked beside him under the trees. There had been that niggardly little moon. They had walked from one patch of dim light to another. Molly had been wearing a white cotton skirt and a tight white T-shirt. Patterns in black and white.

Sarah watched the racing water, for she could not bear to look at his face.

'Extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, what happens to one's pride. She kissed me. Well, I kissed her.' He waited. Then, 'Thanks for not saying it, Sarah.' Now she did cautiously turn her head. Tears ran down cheeks dragging with grief. 'I don't understand any of it. What can you say about a man of fifty who knows that nothing more magical ever happened to him than a kiss in the dark with…?'

Sarah suppressed, At least you had a kiss. At that moment anything she felt seemed a selfish impertinence.

'I've missed out on all that,' she heard, but faintly. A breeze off the water was blowing his words away. 'I've had a dry life. I didn't know it until… Of course I've been in love. I don't mean that.' The wind, changing again, flung his words at her: 'What does it mean, saying that to hold one girl in your arms makes everything that ever happened to you dust and ashes?'

'Julie said something of the sort. About Remy.' A silence, filled with the sound of water. For the second time that morning, she said, 'To drown herself must have taken some strength of mind.'

'Yes. If I'd been there

'You, or Remy?'

'You don't understand. I am Remy. I understand everything about him.'

'Were you a younger brother? I mean you, Stephen.'

'I have two older brothers. Not four, like Remy. I don't know how important that is. What's important is… well, what could I have said to her to stop her killing herself?'

'Will you marry me?' suggested Sarah.

'Ah, you don't understand. That is the impossibility. He couldn't marry her. Not with all that pressure. Don't forget, he was French. It is a thousand times worse for the French than for us. The French have this family thing. We have it, but nothing like as bad. We can marry chorus girls and models — and a jolly good thing too. Good for the gene pool. But have you ever seen an aristocratic French family close ranks? And it was a hundred years ago. No, it was all inevitable. It was impossible for Remy not to fall in love with her. And until death. Because he would have loved her all his life.'

'Yes,' she shouted, since the wind had changed again.

'But impossible to marry her.'

'Funny how we don't mention the glamorous lieutenant,' said Sarah, thinking of Bill and of how ashamed she was.

'But that was just… falling in love,' he shouted. A silence. He said, 'But with Remy, it was life and death.'

He sat with his eyes shut. Tears seeped out under his lids. Depressed. But the word means a hundred different shades of sadness. There are different qualities of 'depression', as there are of love. A really depressed person, she knew, having seen the condition in a friend, was nothing like Stephen now. The depressed one could sit in the same position in a chair, or on the floor in a corner of a room, curled like a foetus for hours at a time. Depression was not tears. It was deadness, immobility. A black hole. At least, so it seemed to an onlooker. But Stephen was alive and suffering. He was grief- stricken. She cautiously examined him, now that she could, because he had his eyes shut, and thought suddenly that she ought to be afraid for herself. She, Sarah, had most unexpectedly stopped a bolt from the blue, an arrow from an invisible world: she had fallen in love when she thought she never could again. And so what was to stop her from being afflicted, as Stephen was — from coming to grief?

She took his hand, that sensible, useful, practical hand, and felt it tighten around hers. 'Bless you, Sarah. I don't know why you put up with me. I know I must seem… ' He got up, and so did she. 'I think I ought to get some sleep.'

They walked to the edge of the dangerous pool and stood looking down. The water that spattered Sarah's cheek was partly tears blown off Stephen's.

'She must have taken a pretty strong dose of something.'

'That's what Henry said.'

'Did he? A good chap, Henry. Perhaps he's in love with her too. The way I feel now, I can't imagine why the whole world isn't. That's a sign of insanity in itself.'

The sun was burning down, though it was still early. Hot, quiet, and still. No wind. Sarah's dress, so recently put on, needed changing, for it was soaked with spray and clung to her thighs. She shut her eyes as she was absorbed into a memory of a small hot damp body filled with craving.

'Just as well we don't remember our childhoods,' she said.

'What? Why did you say that?'

'Let alone being a baby. My God, it's as well we forget it all.' Stephen was looking at her in a way he never had before. It was because he had not heard that voice from her — angry, and rough with emotion. He did not like it: if she was not careful he would stop liking her. Yet she felt on a slippery slope and did not know how to save herself. She was clenched up like a fist to stop herself crying. 'I never cry,' she