Love, Again

It was no good. She crashed into sleep, and woke in tears.

A taxi took her to the sane atmosphere of people working, for she did not want to walk in that heat.

She sat under a tree. Henry came over, and Julie's late music, high and cool, shot arrows straight into their hearts.

'God,' he muttered, his eyes full of tears, 'that's so beautiful.'

She said, her eyes wet, 'Funny how we subject ourselves to music. We never ask what effect it might be having.'

He was in that position a runner uses before a race, half squatting, the knuckles of his left hand resting among fallen leaves, to steady him. His eyes were on her face. One might call them speaking eyes.

'You're talking to a man who has been listening to pop music most hours of the day since he was twelve.'

'And you're going to say, It hasn't done me any harm?'

'How do we know if it is doing us harm or not?'

'I think it might be making us over-emotional.'

'Well, you could say that. Yes.' With that, up he sprang, and said, 'Thank you for coming. Never think I don't appreciate it.' And off he went.

Then they rehearsed the early music which was far from cool and detached, and went back to the late music, both accompanied by the steady drilling of cicadas. Hearing Julie's music like this, disjointed, not in its development, with the reassurance of a progression, it unsettled, it even wounded, as if the singers had decided to be deliberately cynical. At the end they rehearsed the song

You did not hear me when I told you I will not live
After you leave me,
When you leave me you will take my life…

The note curved up on life, a bent note, as in a blues. An interesting question, surely: in Indian music, Arab music — Eastern music — you could say that all notes are 'bent', a 'straight' note is the rare one. But in our music, one 'bent' note can be like a hand in your heart strings.

The rehearsal ended. The four singers stood together under their tree, while the musicians covered their instruments. For a few moments, the group kept about them the atmosphere of the music, as if they stood in the hollow bluish-gold penumbra of a candle flame, the girls in their loose summer dresses, the young men's blue jeans transformed by association and sound into the cerulean of the robes in medieval religious paintings. But when they left the trees and came through sunlight making loud remarks about showers and cold drinks, they became people in a street or at a bus stop. A limousine waited for them. The driver was a young man with whom they had achieved the agreeable intimacy of the theatre. He laid a strong brown arm along the back of the driver's seat and twisted around to smile at the girls as they piled in. 'Mademoiselle… mademoiselle… mademoiselle… ' he said to each of the three singers, caressingly, as a Frenchman should, allowing tender eyes to say how much he appreciated them, and at once the gallantry- deprived Anglo-Saxon women, who are lucky to be told, by a man who is madly in love with them, You are looking Jit, radiated pleasure like stroked cats, even while they could be observed reminding themselves and each other, with small regulated grimaces, that they must not allow themselves to be carried away by such insincerity. He murmured a gallant 'Madame' to Sarah, and then, feeling unable to supply individual salutations of the same standard to everybody, contented himself with a comradely nod to Henry and the counter-tenor, and flashed his white teeth all around. He reversed with a screech. ' Voila… allons-y… il fait chaud… tres tres chaud… ' he positively crooned, reminding them he had sat waiting for at least half an hour in all that heat, the rehearsal having run overtime, not that he in any way begrudged them what was his duty, but. 'Faut boire,' he announced. 'Immediatement. Vite, vite.' And the car shot, or waltzed, down the tricky road, hooting madly. They were in the square in ten minutes.

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 absurdite… 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