Love, Again

A long silence.

'Stephen?'

'Yes?'

'Shall I come to the hotel?'

'Oh no, no. There are so many people here.'

'Shall we meet in the park again?'

'Yes, yes, the park… '

She walked, through a brilliant afternoon, from the great formal gilded gates towards a hunched man sitting motionless on a bench. She sat beside him. He nodded, without looking at her. Then he roused himself — she watched him doing it — to make conversation. Things were going along nicely with plans for Julie at Queen's Gift, he said. Sarah contributed by chatting about The Green Bird. Sonia was taking the new girl, Virginia, in hand. There had been a picture of Virginia Woolf by Virginia's bed, but Sonia had made her replace it with a photograph of Rebecca West. There had been a great improvement: Virginia no longer had a wispy chignon and droopy clothes but had cut her hair and was as bright and as pretty as a parakeet, like Sonia.

After a bit Stephen smiled, so she went on. Everyone was working hard on the new play, Sweet Freedom's Children. She expected him to react to the title, but he did not. She suggested they walk around a bit, and he nodded. He got up to walk as if only an act of will made him, walked as if an act of will kept him in motion.

'I want to ask you something,' she said.

Because of her tone, he came out of his preoccupation enough to give her a nervous look: 'I've been waiting for you to honour me with your confidence.' Meaning, for God's sake, don't.

'No, no,' she reassured him. 'No, it's something about you, not me… it's important to me. You know how we go along on the surface of everything — '

'The surface! I wouldn't exactly use that word. That's why I'm so grateful to you. Don't imagine I'm not grateful.'

'No, wait… I've been having a dream… something like that anyway. Suddenly you open a door you didn't know was there, and you see something that sums it all up.'

'All?' he challenged.

They stood by the edge of the fountain, looking through rods and sprays of water to a display of massed fuchsias. Fishes and mermaids and water. And fuchsias.

'Nice fuchsias,' he remarked. 'They've never done well with us. Though we are pretty successful with azaleas.'

'All of a situation. The hidden truth of something. If you unexpectedly opened a door, what would you see there that…?'

At once he said, 'I would see Elizabeth and Norah naked in each other's arms, and they are laughing at me.' She had not expected anything like this. It was too much of a daylight truth. 'And what is behind your closed door?'

She said gratefully, knowing from a surge of emotion how much she would have liked to talk about her situation, 'There's a small girl stabbing a doll with scissors. The doll is bleeding.'

He went pale. Then, slowly, he nodded. 'And who is the doll?'

'Well… it could be my baby brother. But I don't really know.'

'Probably just as well.'

She did not speak again. Once he was actually brought to a standstill, as he walked, by some thought or memory. His whole body seemed to wince away from whatever it was. She set him in motion with a hand at his elbow.

They reached the gates, he to walk one way, she another. Unexpectedly he put his arms round her and kissed her. This was a chilled and chilling embrace. As he turned away she saw the mask take possession of his face, as if a hand — with the same action used for closing the eyes of a just-dead person, a downwards stroking movement that shuts out the light forever — had put weights on his lids and pulled down the corners of his mouth.

Sarah was in the office every day from nine in the morning till eight at night. She was doing not only her work but Mary's, Patrick's, and Sonia's. Patrick kept ringing to say he was ill — no, no, they mustn't think bad thoughts, he needed a rest. They knew he was lying. Sonia valiantly did not say what she knew, but they guessed. He felt guilty because of some plan or other for Julie they did not approve of. Well, they would deal with it. Mary was with Sonia at various provincial theatres to see if there was anything suitable for The Green Bird. In Birmingham they had run into Roger Stent. 'Ah, Barbarossa,' Sonia had said. 'Slumming?' It was Oedipus Rex. 'Bitch,' he had said. 'Quite so,' she had said.

'Presumably this is a courtship,' Mary had remarked on the telephone.

Sarah sat at one desk and Roy at another. They worked agreeably, as they had for years. They spent whole days together, bringing each other coffee, sharing quick meals at the caf? across the road. This undemanding friendship kept Sarah safe, and, she believed, it was doing the same for him. He was probably going to be divorced, but did not want a divorce. His wife had a lover. The child was unhappy.

She knew that this was what he often thought about while he worked there with her, just as her world of fevers and fantasy threatened to fill her head. It seemed to her she had become someone else. Not long ago she would have been ashamed to give room to such idiot dreams. The scenes she was being compelled to imagine were feeble, contemptible. Her lovers of long ago — or perhaps not really so long ago, but anything in the past was in another dimension — returned to say she had been the only woman in their life, the most remarkable, satisfying, and so on. These scenes always took place in the presence of others. Interesting that it was usually Bill: she would have been ashamed to inflict them on Henry. It was Bill who in these fantasies was struck into envy and desire by past charms that he could never enjoy. Or love scenes — memories she had not bothered to dust off for years. They presented themselves endowed with emotions of a trance-like intensity — emotions appropriate to the out-of-reach. These had not accompanied the actual event, and as each enhanced memory — where she was as romantic as in a very young man's fantasy, or in a sentimental novel — took possession of her, she forced herself to remember, in slow detail, what had really happened in this or that love, so that her memoirs en rose had to accept the stamp of truth. These exercises in correctives to false or flattering memory were exhausting and hard to achieve, because her present weakened state of mind kept returning her to adolescence, which cannot admit ordinariness.

And, too, she continued to marvel, with the histrionic part of her mind, that for years and years she had refused so much; yet in sane moments knew that it had been for the same reason she was refusing even to think of… Guess who? Single, extravagantly wrapped flowers kept arriving, roses, orchids, lilies, but having looked to see who they were not from (Henry), she forgot about them. Yet the state she was now in made past refusals seem like a wilful rejection of all-happiness. She had walked, a sexually desirable woman, through years of being courted and nearly always saying no. Because there would have been no conviction in it. One or two she had enjoyed. A good word, that, like love, meaning what you will or as you like it. But enjoyment does not carry with it that other dimension of… what? The word enchantment would have to do. A dimension where she had now become lost. Well, almost lost. Not entirely. Was she getting better? She noted that as the day approached when rehearsals would begin again — when Henry would arrive — the weight of grief lessened. Not much, though.

There is absolutely nothing like love For showing how many different people can live inside one skin. The woman (the girl, rather) who dreamed of past loves thought adult Sarah a fool for being content with so little. The ordinary and quotidian Sarah, with whom after all she would be living (she did so hope) for the rest of her life, would not have spent half an hour with that daydreaming girl. But the Sarah she was most often, sodden with grief, was not one who had much energy to care about the others, all subsidiary players. She simply felt, suffered, endured, in a hell of pain.

She wrote: