Love, Again

It was sweet to be with Henry. There was an innocence about it, a gaiety. Innocent, when sex burned in the air, invisible flames?

Throughout all of a Saturday and a Sunday morning, Henry, herself, and Stephen, with Mary and Roy at their separate table, sat in the dusty church hall and watched Julie and Paul incarnated in a variety of young men and women, all wearing bright sporty clothes and athletes' shoes and speaking the words that Molly McGuire and Bill Collins had made their own. A girl musician, with a flute, provided enough music to suggest the rest. But while Julie's music came and went in fragments and snatches, matching the scenes chosen by Henry to try out these players, Sarah could hardly bear it, for every run of notes, or even a single note, was like that piano chord played to indicate a change of key, setting off a song, or a melody, which repeated in Sarah's head, one that had nothing at all to do with Julie. She was compelled to listen to it, had to hum it: it had taken her mind over. Had she dreamed this song? If you wake with a tune in your head or words on your tongue then you have to let tune, words, wear themselves out, you can't simply say no to them, or push them away.

'What's that you keep humming?' asked Stephen.

'I don't know,' she said. 'I simply cannot get it out of my head.'

But Henry knew, and had known all the time. He sang, not looking at her:

She takes just like a woman, yes, she does,
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does,
She aches just like a woman,
But she breaks just like a little girl.

'Bob Dylan,' he said, and knowing that she must wish herself invisible, he jumped up and went over to the players.

Stephen said, 'I've got Julie's music ringing in my head all the time, and I'm surprised you've room in yours for anything else.'

His reaction to the Julie chosen by Henry surprised Sarah. The girl was typecast, unlike Molly, who did not look anything like the template. Sarah thought that for Stephen it must be as if Julie had walked into his life, but he only remarked, 'Well, let's wait and see.'

And then Henry went off, the bonds of that insidious intimacy the theatre going snap, snap, goodbye — until early August, three weeks away.

Sarah had decided to take three weeks' leave but changed her mind. She was afraid of her demons. Besides, there was so much work. Julie Vairon might come into the West End, if successful at Queen's Gift: there were already enquiries. There was talk of a musical based on Tom Jones, but this was much more ambitious even than Julie Vairon; would Sarah like to try her hand at the script? She thought not. She had no energy, though she wasn't going to say so to her colleagues. Did they not already have enough on their plates? Hedda was going to transfer to the West End, and Sonia would occupy herself with that. The rehearsals would soon begin for Sweet Freedom's Children, a play based on the last days in Italy of Shelley, Mary, and their circle.

Again Sonia accused them of being workaholics, and this led to a family discussion about work. Could they be classified thus if they enjoyed working and never thought of it as work? Sonia said this was just like them, sitting around in the office and chatting theoretically about something when there was a crisis. But what crisis? protested Sarah, Mary, and Roy — Patrick was still away. Sonia said she had a friend, trained in theatre management. Virginia, named after Virginia Woolf. Very well, said they, let's try her out.

'Well,' said Mary, 'it was all too good to be true, wasn't it? The four of us working for years and years without so much as a cross word?'

Sarah got herself to the theatre every day. She was able to do this, and it meant everything: meant, specifically, that she was not 'clinically' depressed. She was grading her condition according to a private scale. Although her grief seemed to get worse every day, she was not anything like as bad as Stephen's face had told her he was, for instance when he saw the poster of julie as an Arab girl in his garden, or at the waterfall in France. I've never experienced anything like that, she still thought. At least, not as far as I can remember. Of course in a long life there had been miseries… She wrote:

Something else is going on, something I don't understand. I could not be more bereft if I had lost someone by death, been separated from someone I love absolutely.

She wrote:

I think I am really ill. I am sick — with love. I know this has nothing to do with Henry or that boy.

She thought, If I had been in an earthquake or a fire and every one of my family had been killed, if as a young woman my husband and children had been killed in a car crash, I would have felt something like this. Absolute loss. As if she had been dependent on some emotional food, like impalpable milk, and it had been withdrawn. Her heart ached: she was carrying a ton weight in her chest. She wrote:

Physical longing. I have been poisoned, I swear it. In Stendhal's Love a young woman unexpectedly in love believes she is poisoned. But she was. I am. A doctor in the States will cure you of being in love. It is chemical, he says.

She wrote:

If a doctor said to me, You have an illness, and you will have to live for the rest of your life with a pain in your chest, I would get on with it. I would say, Very well, I will have to put up with a pain in my chest. People live with withered arms or crippled from the waist down. So why am I making such a fuss about heartache?

She wrote:

I could easily jump off a cliff or the top of a block of fiats to end it. People killing themselves for love do it because they can't stand the pain. Physical pain. I have never understood that before. The broken heart. But why should an emotional hurt manifest itself as a physical anguish? Surely that is a very strange thing.

But she was still not in as bad a state as Stephen's. He rang her most evenings, as the day ended. As the light went — a melancholy time. The hours before dinner were hard for him, he said. It was hard for the animals too: he could swear the horses and the dogs had a bad few minutes when it got dark. 'Our dog Flossie — you know, the red setter — she always comes to me when it gets dark so I can make a bit of a fuss over her. We forget that for millions of years every creature on earth was afraid when night came.' 'And now we don't feel frightened, we feel sad.' 'We feel both.'

He would ask her what she had done that day, and tell her what he had, in the careful, meticulous way that she recognized — though she did not want to — as a prophylactic against the absent-mindedness of grief. He asked what she had been reading, and told her what books were piled up on his night table, for he was not sleeping much.

They might talk for an hour or more, while he looked from his window over darkening fields. He could hear