Love Again

329 Pages·2011·1.13 MB·English

by  Lessing Doris

Love, Again
A Novel
Doris Lessing
With respectful salaams to the great cartographers of this region, particularly
Stendhal, in Love, and Marcel Proust. And with friendly but perhaps abashed
waves at some of the famous travellers in it: Goethe, Richardson in Clarissa,
Henry Handel Richardson (a woman) in Maurice Guest, Christina Stead in For
Love Alone, and the incomparable Colette in Chéri.
Memory
One had a lovely face
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.
W. B. Yeats
Contents
Epigraph
Begin Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Doris Lessing
Copyright
About the Publisher
I’m falling in love again,
Never wanted to…
Begin Reading
E
asy to think this was a junkroom, silent and airless in a warm dusk, but
then a shadow moved, someone emerged from it to pull back curtains and throw
open windows. It was a woman, who now stepped quickly to a door and went
out, leaving it open. The room thus revealed was certainly over-full. Along one
wall were all the evidences of technical evolution—a fax machine, a copy
machine, a word processor, telephones—but as for the rest, the place could
easily be some kind of theatrical storeroom, with a gold bust of some Roman
female, much larger than life, masks, a crimson velvet curtain, posters, and piles
of sheet music, or rather photocopies that had faithfully reproduced yellowing
and crumbling originals.
On the wall over the word processor was a large reproduction of Cézanne’s
Mardi Gras, also the worse for wear: it had been torn across and put together
with cellotape.
The woman next door was energetically attending to something: objects
were being moved about. Then she reappeared and stood looking in at the room.
Not a young woman, as it had been easy to imagine from the vigour of her
movements when still half seen in the shadows. A woman of a certain age, as the
French put it, or even a bit older, and not dressed to present herself, but wearing
old trousers and shirt.
This woman was alert, full of energy, yet she did not seem pleased with what
she looked at. However, she shook all that off and went to her processor, sat
she looked at. However, she shook all that off and went to her processor, sat
down, put out a hand to switch on a tape. At once the room was filled with the
voice of the Countess Dié, from eight centuries ago (or a voice able to persuade
the listener she was the Countess), singing her timeless plaints:
I must sing, whether I will or not:
I feel so much pain over him whose friend I hold myself,
For I love him more than anything that is…
The modern woman, sitting with her hands ready to attack the keys, was
conscious she felt superior to this long-ago sister, not to say condemning. She
did not like this in herself. Was she getting intolerant?
Yesterday Mary had rung from the theatre to say that Patrick was in
emotional disarray because he had fallen in love again, and she had responded
with a sharp comment.
‘Now, come on, Sarah,’ Mary had rebuked her.
Then Sarah had agreed, and laughed at herself.
Feeling disquiet, however. There seems to be a rule that what you condemn
will turn up sooner or later, to be lived through. Forced to eat your vomit—yes,
Sarah knew this well enough. Somewhere in her past she had made a note:
Beware of condemning other people, or watch out for yourself.
The Countess Dié was too disturbing, and Sarah switched the plaint off.
Silence. She sat breathing it in. She was altogether too much affected by this
old troubadour and trouvère music. She had been listening to little else for days,
to set the tone of what she had to write. Not only the Countess, but Bernard de
Ventadour, Pierre Vidal, Giraut de Bornelh, and other old singers, had put her
into a state of…she was restless, and she was feverish. When had music affected
her like this before? She did not think it had. Wait, though. Once she had
listened to jazz, particularly the blues, it seemed day and night, for months. But
that was when her husband died, and the music had fed her melancholy. But she
did not remember…yes, first she had been grief-ridden, and then she had chosen
music to fit her state. But this was a different matter altogether.
Her task this evening was not a difficult one. The programme notes were too
stiff in tone: this was because, writing them, she had been afraid of being over-
charmed by the subject. And she was being charmed by the sensuous voice of
the Countess—or the young woman Alicia de la Haye.
She did not have to do the programme notes now. In fact she had made a
rule for herself not to work in the evenings at home: a rule she had not been
keeping recently. To spell it out, she had not been keeping her own prescriptions
for balance and good mental health.
She sat listening to silence. A sparrow chirped.
She thought, I’ll look up that Provençal poem by Pound; that’s hardly work
after all.
The desk was stacked with reference books, files of cuttings, and on one side
of it bookshelves rose to the ceiling. A book lay open on one side of the word
processor.
Growing old gracefully…the way has been signposted. One might
say the instructions are in an invisible script which becomes
slowly legible as life exposes it. Then the appropriate words only
have to be spoken. On the whole the old don’t do badly. Pride is a
great thing, and the necessary stances and stoicisms are made easy
because the young do not know—it is hidden from them—that the
flesh withers around an unchanged core. The old share with each
other ironies appropriate to ghosts at a feast, seen by each other but
not by the guests whose antics and posturings they watch, smiling,
remembering.
To this set of placid sentences full of self-respect most people getting old
would subscribe, feeling well presented and even defended by them.
Yes, I’ll go along with that, thought Sarah. Sarah Durham. A good sensible
name for a sensible woman.
The book where she had found these sentences had been on a trestle in a
street market, the memoirs of a society woman once known for her beauty,
written in old age and published when she was nearly a hundred, twenty years
ago. A strange thing, Sarah thought, that she had picked the book up. Once, she
ago. A strange thing, Sarah thought, that she had picked the book up. Once, she
would never have even opened a book by an old person: nothing to do with her,
she would have felt. But what could be odder than the way that books which
chime with one’s condition or stage in life insinuate themselves into one’s hand?
She pushed away that book, thought Pound’s verses could wait, and decided
to enjoy an evening when nothing at all would be expected of her. An evening in
April, and it was still light. This room was calm, usually calming, and like the
other three rooms in this flat held thirty years of memories. Rooms a long time
lived in can be like littered sea shores; hard to know where this or that bit of
debris has come from.
She knew exactly where the bits of theatrical junk had originated: which
play, or what actor. But on the window sill was a bowl of coloured pebbles she
had picked up outside a village in Provence where she had gone walking with
her two children, then aged twelve and thirteen. What was the name of that
village? She had been several times to that region, and she had always picked up
stones to take home. Strings of beads in all shades of red were pinned in a fan
shape on a board that filled a good part of a wall. Why had she kept the thing?
Piles of books on the theatre climbed the walls: she had not opened some of
them for years. And there was the poster of Mardi Gras. He had been eye to eye
with her for decades, that arrogantly sexy youth in the red and black diamond
pattern costume with his touch-me-not look. He was like her own son—well,
yes, that had been a long time ago, and George was now an almost middle-aged
scientist. These days, when she did look at it (after all, one doesn’t much look at
what is on one’s walls), her eyes went to the uncertain youth with his dark
thoughtful eyes in the ill-fitting Pierrot dress. Her daughter, aged fifteen, had
demanded a Pierrot costume, and she, Cathie’s mother, had known it was a
statement. I am like him. I need a disguise. I wish I were not unsure but like the
Harlequin, who knows how beautiful he is. There was nothing unsure about
Cathie these days, a successful matron, with children, a job, a satisfactory
husband.
Sarah knew she saw the picture as portraits of her own children. Why did
she keep it there? Parents often secretly cherish photographs of their offspring
that have nothing to do with their present ages, and these are not always
appealingly helpless infants.
She should get rid of all this rubbish…and now, suddenly, she sat up straight
in her chair and then stood and began a prowl around the room. This was not the