Love, Again. Doris Lessing
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found oneself wondering what the next surprise would be. She said this sort of thing in good faith, and while observing the emotional tumults of those even a decade younger than herself even indulged private shudders at the thought of going through all that again – a formula which included love. As for being in love, it had occurred to her it was twenty years since she had been in love, she who had once fallen in love easily and – she had to admit it – even eagerly. She could not believe she would be in love again. She said this too with complacency, forgetting the hard law that says you must suffer what you despise.
She was not going to sit down and work…it occurred to her that one reason for this exaggerated no to another evening spent doing what she did all day was her – well, yes, the word had to be – fear of that music. Those plaints from long ago were a drug. Had jazz really taken her over as the Countess Dié and Bernard, Pierre and Giraut, had done? And what about the woman who was, these days, her occupation – Julie Vairon, whose music stood in yellowing stacks on a table? No, she distrusted music. She was in good company after all; many of the great and the wise had thought music a dubious friend. She had always listened in the spirit of: You’re not going to take me over, don’t you think it!
No: no work, and no music. She was restless enough to…climb a mountain, to walk twenty miles. Sarah found she was tidying this room, which certainly needed it. She might as well vacuum the floor…why not all four rooms? The kitchen. The bathroom. By twelve her flat was a paragon. You would think this woman took pride in her housewifely skills. Instead she had a cleaner in once a week, and that was it.
Surely she wasn’t nervous of meeting – as she had to do tomorrow – Stephen Ellington-Smith, known jokingly in the company as Our Angel. She could not remember being nervous ever before about this kind of encounter. After all, it was her job to meet and soothe patrons, benefactors, and angels, she did it all the time.
Sarah’s memories divided her life into two eras, or different landscapes, one sunny and unproblematical, and then all effort and difficulty. (Yet the war with its anxieties was somehow accommodated in the first sunlit stretch. How could that be? And all those family money difficulties? Nonsense, mere trifles, compared to what followed.) Her husband’s death, that was when this Sarah Durham had begun, poor and desperate. Her parents did not have much money. There had been no insurance. She could not really afford to stay in this flat but decided she would, preserving continuity for the already traumatized children. She earned her living and theirs by all kinds of badly paid freelance work for newspapers and magazines, publishers and the theatre, one theatre in particular, The Green Bird, then not more than a group putting on plays with small casts where they could, sometimes in pubs. In the seventies there were many brave small companies, chancing their luck. A certain Italian play which she had translated for them, and which they thought they had the rights to, became unavailable, and to fill the gap she adapted from a novel some sketches of contemporary life. These were a success, and she found herself one of the people running the theatre: first there was the fact that she was there all day, casting and then directing; then a regular salary. A regular theatre too. She was one of the four who decided to risk a long lease. These three were her closest friends, for surely the people you spend all day and most evenings with must be that. For ten years they had precariously survived, and then five years ago a play transferred to the West End, did well, and seemed likely to run forever. The Green Bird was now established as one of the best of the fringe theatres, and critics came to their first nights. From being an almost amateur, badly-paid hanger-on to the edges of real theatre, she was now known in the theatre world as the influential manager of The Green Bird and, sometimes, as the director of a play. The fact is, the four all did everything, and had from the beginning. Their success had brought them concomitant envy, and they were known – inevitably – as The Gang of Four. These changes had taken years, and at no point had she made claims for herself. She sometimes privately marvelled that hard work and – of course – good luck had added up to so much: it will be seen that she was not a self-admiring woman, nor even an ambitious one.
Who were these colleagues with whom she had shared so much? Mary Ford had been a pretty wisp of a thing with vast hazy blue eyes and a tremulous stubborn little face, but the years had made of the waif a solid calm competent woman of about forty, whose main job in the theatre was publicity and promotion. Roy Strether, another paradigm of competence, was formally stage manager. He was a solid, apparently slow man, who never allowed himself excitement, no matter what the crisis. He joked of himself that he looked like a footballer gone to seed. He was large, untidy, even clumsy. They remembered him as young, a sixties drop-out, who had earned his living as so many future successes did, painting houses. The fourth member of the permanent staff was Patrick Steele. They would joke, in front of him or not, that it was as well they three were so boringly stolid and reliable, for he was volatile, shrill, and moody; a slight, bird-like boy (he remained a boy while the years changed them) with soft black hair like plumage and black excitable eyes. He was homosexual and, these days, pretty scared. He would not go and be tested, saying that if he was HIV positive he did not want to know, but meanwhile he was being responsible and no danger to anyone. He often wept, for his emotional life gave him frequent cause for tears. He was brilliant, a magician: he could create moonlight, a lake, a mountain, with light and silver paper and shadows. Other theatres tried to lure him away but failed, for these four shared a belief that their talents together were larger than they could ever be apart. Patrick was as versatile as them all. He had written a libretto for a musical that had been so near a success they jested that next time he would soar off away into fame and be forever lost to them.
These were their public personas, their ‘images’ – how people from outside saw them, perhaps while they sat in their daily get-together for discussion, in a small office they might liken to a cockpit or an engine room. It was the usual mix of elegant technology, each machine already obsolete almost before it was installed, and old chairs and tables they felt disinclined to get rid of.
Four people, energized by their competence and success. Behind each there was that hinterland called personal life, which here was very far from being separated from working hours.
Mary was unmarried – without a man – because she had to look after her mother, who had multiple sclerosis and was pretty helpless. When she had been unable to organize other help, sometimes an old woman with shaking hands sat in a wheelchair in an aisle and watched the rehearsals.
Roy Strether was married, with a child. The marriage was unsuccessful. Sometimes the little boy would be inserted into a seat near his father’s at a rehearsal and was commended by everybody for behaving well. Tired or demanding attention, he might sit on the old woman’s lap, she delighted that at least she had some limited usefulness.
Sarah’s responsibilities were self-imposed. For ten years now her vital energies – emotional – had been engaged, not by her own children and grandchildren, established successfully in other continents (India and America) but by her brother’s youngest girl, Joyce. Hal and Anne had three daughters, the older two ordinary and just like everybody else’s children. Joyce had been a problem since birth. Why? Who knows? She was a screaming baby, a grizzling toddler, a disagreeable child. Sent to school, she at once fell ill and had to come home. She simply could not manage school and other children. Her parents both being doctors, her condition never lacked diagnoses. Her records were voluminous and in several hospitals. A psychiatrist recommended that she be allowed to stay at home. Sarah was appealed to, and Joyce spent her days with her, in the room that had been the children’s room. In those days Sarah often worked at home, and when she did go out for appointments Joyce stayed happily by herself. What did she do? Nothing at all. She made herself cups of tea, watched television, and sometimes rang telephone numbers at random until someone was willing to talk to her, when she would chat away sometimes for an hour or two hours. The telephone bills were enormous, and Hal and Anne did not offer to pay for them.
Joyce became anorexic and was again in hospital. She was ‘stabilized’ and despatched back to Sarah, who protested it was not fair, she could not deal any longer with Joyce. Hal had said in his kindly judicious way that it must be nice for Sarah to have Joyce around when her own children were so far away. But when the unsure and suffering Pierrot, now the efficient mother of two children in California, or the arrogantly beautiful boy, now a marine