Love, Again. Doris Lessing

Sarah. A large comfortable man, with an affable manner; everything about him must give his patients confidence. He was a success in his professional life, and his family life wasn’t so bad either, though he had always been unfaithful to Anne. She forgave him. Rather, one deduced that she must, since she did not go in for confidences. Probably she did not care, or perhaps it was that one could not imagine him unforgiven. Now Hal was sitting on the stiff chair, his arms folded high on his chest, legs apart and braced, as if he might otherwise bounce as he sat. He looked like a great delightful baby, with his little wisps of black hair, his fat little tummy, his little chins. He had small black eyes like large raisins.

      Sarah offered them drinks, tea, coffee, and so forth, and her brother’s impatient shake of the head made it clear he was pressed for time.

      ‘Now look here,’ he said. ‘We do realize you have always been amazingly good with Joyce.’

      There are occasions, when it becomes evident they are bound to develop in a certain way, that have a quite intoxicating momentum.

      ‘Yes, I think I have too.’

      ‘Oh, really, Sarah,’ he exclaimed hotly, his wells of patience already overdrawn.

      And now he began on the rhetorical statements (the counterpart of her prepared reasonings to him) rehearsed and polished on the way here. They had the theatrical ring which goes with a thoroughly false position. ‘You must see that Joyce looks on you as a mother,’ he said. ‘You have been a mother to her, we both know that.’ Here he looked at Joyce’s mother, wanting her agreement, but she was smoking furiously, her back turned. ‘It really isn’t on for you to drop her like this.’

      ‘But I haven’t dropped her, any more than you have.’

      He registered this shaft with a hostile look and a quiver of his lips which said he felt he was unfairly treated. ‘You know very well what I am saying.’

      ‘What you are saying is that I should give up my job and sit here for when she does turn up, even if it is only once in six months for an evening. Because that is what it amounts to.’

      ‘Exactly,’ said Anne angrily.

      Hal sat puffing his lips out, hugging himself with both arms: he was a threatened man; he had two women against him. ‘Why can’t you take her with you to rehearsals, that kind of thing?’

      ‘Why don’t you take her to your hospital and to Harley Street? Why doesn’t Anne give up her job and sit at home waiting for Joyce?’

      At this Anne let out a loud theatrical titter. ‘Exactly,’ she said again, through swirls of smoke. She swatted her hand at the smoke, to show how she deplored her weakness.

      ‘Look, Hal,’ said Sarah, keeping her voice down. ‘You’re talking as if nothing has changed. Well, they have. Joyce is a young woman. She’s not a little girl any longer.’

      ‘No,’ said Anne, ‘he can’t see it. Or won’t.’

      ‘Oh really,’ exploded Hal, and then he collapsed. He let his arms fall, and stared, his face all disconsolate lines.

      This man who had all his life been lucky and successful had met something intractable. But the point was, this had happened not this week but years ago. It was as if he had never taken the truth in. ‘It is really quite appalling,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do about it? She runs around with drop-outs and layabouts and all sorts of people.’

      ‘Alcoholics and drug pushers and prostitutes,’ said Anne, and at last turned herself around. Her face was flushed, and brave with the determination to have her say. ‘Hal, at some point you have to face up to it. There’s nothing we can do about Joyce. Short of chaining her down and locking her up. All we can do is to take her in when she does turn up and not lecture her. Why do you always shout at her? No wonder she comes here to Sarah.’

      Some people are the moral equivalent of those who have never, ever, been ill in their lives and, when they are at last ill, might even die from the shock. Hal could not face up to it: if he admitted one defeat, what might then follow? He sat silent, breathing heavily, arms hanging, not looking at them. His little pink mouth stood slightly open – like Joyce’s, in fact. ‘It’s awful, awful,’ he sighed at last, and got up. He had inwardly shelved the problem, and that was that.

      ‘Yes, dear, it is awful,’ said his wife firmly. ‘It has always been awful and it will probably go on being awful.’

      ‘Something has to be done about it,’ he said, just as if beginning the conversation, and Sarah breathed, ‘Good God!’ while Anne said, with a tight and derisive smile, ‘You two are so funny.’

      Sarah felt all the indignation due when one is in the right but being classed with someone in the wrong.

      Anne explained apologetically, ‘You both seem to think that if you just come up with something, then Joyce will become normal.’ She shrugged, gave Sarah an apologetic grimace. Husband and wife went to the door, the big man drifting along beside Anne, his eyes abstracted. He had inwardly removed himself. Sarah was able to visualize furious scenes between these two, when Anne tackled Hal, and Hal simply repeated, ‘Yes, we must do something.’ For years. Meanwhile good old Sarah looked after Joyce. Nothing at all would change as a result of this talk. Well, something had. Sarah had not before seen that somewhere or other she did believe that Joyce would suddenly become normal, if only they could come up with the right recipe.

      The door was shut, and she listened to their feet on the stairs, their voices raised in connubial disagreement.

      Sarah sat at her desk and stared into the watery depths of the mirror. She had to do more work on the songs, fitting Julie’s words to music and even making some words up. I don’t know why it is, Julie had written, and this was when she had just agreed to marry Philippe the master printer, but every scene I am part of, when there are people in it, rejects me. If someone were to reach out a hand to me and I stretched out my hand to him, I know my hand would go into a cloud or a mist, like the spray that lies over my pool when there has been heavy rain in the hills. But suppose in spite of everything my fingers closed over warm fingers? She called the music she wrote that spring ‘Songs from a Shore of Ice’.

      Sarah began, ‘If I reached my hand into cloud or river spray…’ She, Sarah, had found a hand in a cloud or mist – for Stephen had certainly been an unknown – a warm hand, kindly by habit, a strong one, but holding it, she had felt its grasp become desperate. Help me, help me, said that hand.

      

      The rehearsals were to be in London, in a church hall, a utilitarian place that managed to be dim enough to need some lights on, in spite of the sunlight outside. Fewer than the full company arrived for the first rehearsal. The musicians and singers would come later. Henry Bisley was in New Orleans for the opening of his production of La Dame aux Camélias, set in the brothels of that town at the turn of the century. Roy Strether, Patrick Steele, and Sandy Grears, the lighting and effects man, were all busy on the final rehearsals for the opening in The Green Bird of Abélard and Héloïse, which would precede Hedda Gabler. Patrick had announced that he was glad Julie Vairon would need so little in the way of scenery. He was so disappointed: Sarah had turned his Julie into a bluestocking, he explained, and he did not think he could ever forgive her.

      Julie had arrived, a strong healthy girl with the misty blue eyes that can only be Irish. She was Molly McGuire, from Boston. Philippe the master printer was Richard Service, from Reading, a quiet middle-aged man of the observing non-commenting kind: probably similar to Philippe Angers. Paul, or Bill Collins, was a handsome, in fact beautiful, young man, who at once claimed he was all cockney, and proved it by singing ‘She Was Poor but She Was Honest’ – a song which by now they had all understood would be the theme song of the rehearsals. Actually he was from a prosperous London suburb, or at least partly, for he had lived half his life in the States, because of the complicated marriages of his parents. In impeccable English, he said, ‘I’m all things to all men, that’s it, mate, that’s me, Bill, the all-purpose all-weather dancing and singing cockney actor from Brixton.’ The