Love, Again. Doris Lessing

all right, laugh,’ he said grumpily, but with a smile. She could see he did not mind her laughing. Perhaps he even liked it. There was something about him of a spreading, a relaxation, as if he had held a breath for too long and was at last able to let it go. ‘But you don’t understand, Sarah – I may call you Sarah? Those journals are such an accusation.’

      ‘But not of you.’

      ‘I wonder. Yes, I do, often. What would I have done? Perhaps she would have written of me as she did about Rémy. I represented to him everything he had ever dreamed about when he hoped to be larger than his family, but in the end he was not more than the sum of his family.’

      ‘And is that what she represents to you? An escape from your background?’

      ‘Oh no,’ he said at once. ‘To me she represents – well, everything.’

      She could feel her whole self rejecting this mad exaggeration. Her body, even her face, was composing itself into critical lines, without any directing intention from her intelligence. She lowered her eyes. But he was watching her – yes, she already knew that close, intelligent look – and he knew what she was feeling, for he said, ‘Please don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.’

      ‘Perhaps,’ she said cautiously, ‘I have decided to forget it.’

      ‘Why?’ he enquired, not intending flattery. ‘You are a good-looking woman.’

      ‘I am a good-looking woman still,’ said she. ‘I am still a good-looking woman. Quite so. That’s it. I haven’t been in love for twenty years. Recently I’ve been thinking about that – twenty years.’ As she spoke she was amazed that she was saying to this stranger (but she knew he was not that) things she had never said to dear and good friends, her family – that is what they were – at the theatre. She put on the humour and maternal style that seemed more and more her style: ‘And what was it all about, I wonder now, all that…absurdity?’

      ‘Absurdity?’ And he let out that grunt of laughter that means isolation in the face of wilful misunderstanding.

      ‘All that anguish and lying awake at night,’ she insisted, forcing herself to remember that indeed she had done all that. (It occurred to her she had not even acknowledged, for years, that she had done all that.) ‘Thank God it can never happen to me again. I tell you, getting old has its compensations.’ Here she stopped. It was because of his acute examination of her. She felt at once that her voice had rung false. She was blushing – she felt hot, at any rate. He was, there was no doubt, a handsome man, or had been. He was a pretty good proposition even now. Twenty years ago perhaps…and here she smiled ironically at him, for she knew her hot cheeks were making confessions. She went on, however, actually thinking that if he could be so brave, then so could she. ‘What I think now is, I was in love too often.’

      ‘I’m not talking about the little inflammations.’

      Again she had to laugh. ‘Well, perhaps you are right.’ Right about what? – and she could see he was finding the phrase, as she did the moment it was out, a bromide, dishonest. ‘But why do we assume it always means the same thing to everyone – being in love? Perhaps “little inflammations” is accurate enough, for a lot of people. Sometimes when I see someone in love I think that a good screw would settle it.’ Here she took from him, as she had expected to, a surprised and even hard look at the ugly term, which she had used deliberately. Women who are ‘getting on’ often have to do this. One minute (so it feels) they are using the language of our time (ugly, crude, honest), and in the next, they have become, or feel they soon will if they don’t do something about it, ‘little old ladies’, because the younger generation have begun to censor their speech, as if to children. But, she thought, critical of herself, there is no need to take up stances with this man.

      He said, after a long pause, while he examined her, ‘You’ve simply decided to forget, that’s all it is.’

      She conceded, ‘Very well, then, I have. Perhaps I don’t want to remember. If a man had ever been everything to me – that’s what you said, everything…but I did have a very good marriage. But everything…let’s talk about your play, Stephen.’ And she deliberately (dishonestly) let this look as if she didn’t want to talk about her dead husband.

      ‘All right,’ he agreed, after a pause. ‘But it’s not important. I don’t really mind about it. Scrap it.’

      ‘Wait. I’m going to keep a good bit of it. The dialogue is good.’ This was not tact. His dialogue in parts was better than hers. Now she knew why. ‘Do you realize you have made Rémy the focus of everything? The real love? What about Paul? After all, she did run away to France with him.’

      ‘Rémy was the love of her life. She said so herself. It’s in her journals.’

      ‘But she didn’t get into her stride with the journals until after Paul ditched her. Suppose we had a day-by-day record of her feelings for Paul, as we have for Rémy?’ He definitely did not like this. ‘You identify with Rémy – and it is your own background. Minor aristocracy?’

      ‘Well, perhaps.’

      ‘And you’ve hardly mentioned the son of her worthy printer. Julie and Robert took one look at each other and, quote, If you have a talent for the impossible, then at least recognize it. After that, she killed herself. It seems to me the printer’s son could easily have been as important as Rémy.’

      ‘It seems to me you want to make her a kind of tart, falling in love with one man after another.’

      She couldn’t believe her ears. ‘How many women have you been in love with?’

      Obviously he couldn’t believe his. ‘I don’t really see the point of discussing the double standard.’

      They were looking at each other with dislike. There was nothing for it but to laugh.

      Then he insisted, ‘I have been in love, seriously, with one woman.’

      She waited for him to say ‘my wife’ – he was married – or someone else, but he meant Julie. She said, ‘It’s my turn to say that you have decided to forget. But that isn’t the point. At the risk of being boring, art is one thing and life another. You don’t seem to see the problem. In your version, her main occupation was being in love.’

      ‘Wasn’t being in love her main occupation?’

      ‘She was in love a lot of her time. It wasn’t her main occupation. But these days we cannot have a play about a woman ditched by two lovers who then commits suicide. We can’t have a romantic heroine.’

      Clearly she could not avoid this conversation: she reflected it was probably the tenth time in a month.

      ‘I don’t see why not. Girls are going through this kind of thing all the time. They always have.’

      ‘Look. Couldn’t we leave it to people who write theses? It’s an aesthetic question. I am simply telling you what I know. Out of theatre experience. After all, even the Victorians made a comic song out of “She Was Poor but She Was Honest”. But I think I know how to solve it.’ Her duplicity with him would be limited to not telling him she had solved it already. ‘We can leave the story exactly as you have it. But what will put the edge on it…there is something; I hope you are going to ask what.’

      ‘Very well,’ he said, and she could see that this was the moment when he finally gave up his play. With good grace. As one would expect from someone like him.

      ‘We will use what she thought about it all…’

      ‘Her journals!’

      ‘Partly. Her journals. But even more, her music. There are her songs, and a lot of her music lends itself – we can use words from the journals and fit them to the music. Her story will have a commentary – her own.’

      He thought about this an uncomfortably long time. ‘It is astonishing – it is really