The InterCity train interrupted its impetuous progress, one felt as a favour, at the country station where she was to get off, instead of at Oxford, because Stephen wanted to show her a different road. She descended onto a deserted platform in a burst of birdsong. 'Adlestrop… it was late June… all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire… 'Well, what else? And did it matter that her head (like most people of her kind) was always full of rags and tags of verse, that she knew the first lines of a hundred popular songs? Her mind resembled one of those self-consciously decorative maps that have little scrolls saying, The Battle of Bannockburn, or Queen Elizabeth Hunted Here. Sometimes, though, the interventions were apt enough. This morning she had woken with 'Oh who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus?'
She walked out of the station while a cuckoo, inspired by several hundred years of literature, commented invisibly from a vast oak. Stephen was waiting in the station wagon. She realized that in town he shed a dimension, was less than himself, while here, in his setting, he was immediately full of authority. They were hardly inside the car when he said, 'Sarah, I cannot begin to say how sorry I am for inflicting so much nonsense on you. Let me try and make it up to you.' He began by driving her for an hour or so through countryside that was the distillation of poetry, on charming little roads. England in late June on a sunny day, two people who knew they liked each other… 'My soul, there is a country far beyond the stars.
Stephen amused her with an account of what had happened at last week's Entertainment ('We call them Entertainments because it has an Elizabethan ring'), when, instead of the expected three hundred people, there arrived a thousand. There was not room for more than half of them. When some young people had turned up their transistors and began dancing, Elizabeth suggested that this field rather than that (too near the horses) would be best, and the dancing and singing went on until dawn. 'We couldn't help feeling that what went on in that field was even more to the point than the Entertainment itself. After all, the Tudors were a pretty savage lot.' 'And the field?' 'Oh, it was due to be resown anyway.' He didn't sound put out. 'Extraordinary! Why is it? I wonder. This is a theatrical time again. That's how we seem to have to express ourselves. There must be a reason for it. From one end of the country to the other, everyone is acting, singing, dancing, staging mock battles, what is it all about?' While they talked, she occasionally stole a look, she hoped unnoticed. He was not finding it easy. His determination did him credit, but there was a tightness about his face like headache strain. When she asked, he said he had never felt better. She wanted to believe this. It was so pleasant to be with the real Stephen again — so she felt it: 'He is himself again' — that it was easy to ignore anxiety.
At the house it was lunchtime. Elizabeth and Norah were off for the day to attend a music festival in Bath. He asked Sarah what she would like to do, and she said she would enjoy seeing something of his life.
'Then I hope you are not going to find me too much of an eccentric.'
'But it's part of your role to be an eccentric.'
A new building, which would turn these semi-amateur Entertainments into so much more, was nearly finished. It stood near the great lawn — the theatre — and was concealed by shrubs and trees. The plans had become even grander in the weeks since she had been here: they were thinking of doing operas. Until now more ambitious spectacles had been impossible, with the big house a couple of hundred yards away, too far for actors, singers, dancers, to make costume changes. Now there was going to be plenty of room for costumes, lighting equipment, and musical instruments, and ample rehearsal space. The place had been designed by an architect to take its place unnoticed among these historic buildings. It would look similar in style without making any claims for itself.
Two workmen were laying bricks on an internal wall. One straddled the wall, the other was handing bricks to him. Stephen spoke to them and came away: 'I'm not needed. Sometimes I can be useful. But these are not our people; they are a firm in town.'
They walked slowly through trees, away from the house. She was thinking, for she could not stop herself, of that young man who was with his 'mate' in France: Bill had said he would use the opportunity to be a tourist for a week. No, she certainly did not see a girlfriend. 'Perhaps my girlfriend will get over for a few days.' She wondered if Stephen was thinking of Molly, who was also there somewhere. After they had been silent for some minutes, he said unexpectedly, 'It occurred to me, thinking it all out, you know, that I must be lonely. It seems improbable, but there it is. No, no, believe me, Sarah, I'm not trying for sympathy. I'm trying to understand it all, you see.'
'Did you know Elizabeth loved women when you married her?'
'She didn't, not then.' Taking her silence for criticism, he defended himself, with a stubbornness, a determination, she could see was because he had made a decision to tell her all this. Because he needed to hear how it sounded? 'No, you see, we have known each other all our lives. We really married because… you see, we both of us came to grief at the same time.'
'A good phrase, that, came to grief.'
'Yes, it is. Not that I understood it until… you see, something I hoped for didn't happen.'
'You were in love — impossibly?'
'I didn't think it was impossible. It wasn't impossible. She was married, but I hoped she would leave her husband and marry me. But she changed her mind. And Elizabeth was hoping to marry someone… he's a good chap. He's a friend of mine. Well, in fact he's on the next estate. But he was engaged to be married, and it was all too difficult. And there we both were, the two of us, Elizabeth and I.'
They sat on a log in a hot dry shade. At least fifty feet above them, on the other side of the beech canopy, burned an un-English sun.
'It all fitted in. She was in trouble with money. A complicated will — that sort of thing. And if we married, her problems would be over.'
'And you were happy?'
'We were… content.'
'That is a very big word.'
'I suppose it is. Yes, it is. And then I began to feel… ' He contemplated what he had felt, and for a pretty long time.
'Did you feel there was no conviction in it?'
'That's it, exactly. I began to feel like a ghost in my own house — no, well, it's not my house. Better say, in my own home. I tried to… earth myself. I learned to do all kinds of things. I'm a pretty good carpenter now. I can do any kind of electrical work. I can do plumbing and lay drains. I did it all deliberately — do you understand? Yes, of course you do. To make me part of the place. And to stop me… I felt as if I were floating away. Well, it has certainly made all the difference to the estate. We stopped losing money. We never have to call in workmen. Except for a big building job.'
'And all that didn't help?'
'Yes, it did. To a point. And then… I came to grief. That's it. I don't understand it. It was as if there was a hole in my life, and blood was pouring away. I know that is very melodramatic. But that's how it was.'
'So when did Julie come into it?'
'She slowly took possession. I heard her music at the festival — you know all about that. And then I went in search of everything to do with her. It was enjoyable at first, like a treasure hunt. And then… it was La Belle Dame sans Merci, all right.'
'Whatever it is, it will pass,' she quoted.
'Do you really believe that?'
'Yes. At least, I haven't experienced anything different.'
It was at this point she was tempted — and almost began on her confession — to tell him of her state. But she was in a certain role with him: someone strong, to whom he could show his weakness and not be afraid. Would their friendship survive her saying, 'I am in love to the point of insanity,' with a young man, and one he didn't have much time for? No, for him to be in love with Julie was certainly crazy, but for a woman her age to be in love with a beautiful youth… Even if the said youth was in love with her. He was, to a point. In love: there are people who keep a lock of hair or a piece of cloth in an envelope, sometimes come on it, and tenderly smile. In love: a glow of tender lost possibilities, like the light left behind in the sky at moonset. That would be appropriate to her position: in fact people would like it. Ah me, my sweetly fractured heart that aches gently like a rheumatic knee with the approach of bad weather. As for Bill, what he would like probably would be a kiss and a good cuddle. (At this a savage and forgotten sexual pride raised its head and remarked: Yes? I'd show him better!) Apart from anything else — cowardice was the word — it would be unkind to tell this suffering man who relied on her (who had put a desperate hand into hers), 'I am weaker than you are. Worse, I'm ridiculous,' and expect him to add this burden to his. He would have to overcome, for a start, some pretty orthodox reactions. Most men and more women — young women afraid for themselves — punish older women with derision, punish them with cruelty, when they show inappropriate signs of sexuality. If men, they are getting their own back for the years they have been subject to the sexual power of women. She consoled herself with: When this business with Bill is forgotten, I shall still be Stephen's friend.
He said, 'I suppose what I feel is, well, if I could spend one night with her, just one night, that's all, then everything marvellous would be given to me.'
'One night with whom?'
'Yes, all right,' he said, but he was not conceding an inch to common sense.
They sat on, for a while, in silence. Rather, in a jubilation of bird sound. Birds, disturbed by their arrival, had forgotten about them. She could actually feel the sounds, loud, shrill, sweet, soft, ringing along her nerves. Surely nothing like this had happened to her before: that sounds, even the sweetest, were dangerous, made her feel over-exposed? She got up, to escape the assault; Stephen did too, and they strolled towards the house. She was telling him, making a humorous thing of it, about the two tiny children and their tree house, about her pain, as a child. It occurred to her she was entertaining Stephen, making funny stories as one does with an acquaintance or somebody one doesn't want to come too close: the counterfeit offered to most of the people one knows. A glance showed that he was painfully listening, and he remarked, 'I think one's early experiences are mostly pretty awful. I don't like thinking about them myself.'
She had been rebuked and was glad of it: he wasn't going to put up with any second best.
Elizabeth and Norah returned very late that night, saying they had had a wonderful time: they had learned useful things about the organization of festivals. Why didn't they have a festival at Queen's Gift? They stood at the window in a drawing room, looking out into the glamorous night, which they seemed reluctant to relinquish for bed, as they chatted. Both brown with the summer, full of health and accomplishment, they were two handsome women who seemed to have dropped into that room at all only as a favour to a guest: and Sarah thought that Stephen himself looked rather like a guest. He gave his wife today's news about the Entertainment that would take place in three days' time: in French, with French music, and singers who were friends of Elizabeth's from Paris. Sarah then remarked that they could soon expect trouble from the actors' and musicians' unions if foreign performers were used. Elizabeth said that when they had expanded and the new building was in use, their Entertainments would no longer be considered amateur, she knew that. Perhaps Sarah could give them good advice? The two women went off to bed with the look of those who have done a social duty.
Stephen asked Sarah if she would enjoy a stroll, and they walked for an hour across fields, through woods, while the moon slid away and lengthened the shadows. They did not talk. It occurred to Sarah that she was enjoying the silence. More, she was submitting to it, like a cure. A bird breaking out of a tree as they came under it startled her, the noise painfully loud.
Sarah stayed three days in the house that had stood there four centuries. She was enjoying the feeling that she was one of the hundreds — thousands? — of people who had passed through it. She did any number of agreeable things in it, looked at its pictures and furniture, read its history. Elizabeth and Norah took her for energetic walks, while she advised them on theatre problems. She liked them both, and, particularly, the exuberance of their plans for the future. It appeared that they planned to invite The Green Bird to put on Julie Vairon here at the end of summer, after the run in France. The facilities might not be ready, but the workmen had been given instructions to hurry up everything. This meant Stephen felt he had a good excuse to work with them in the task of putting up a framework of rafters for the roof. On the last afternoon, observing that Sarah was watching, he came down and took her off to walk in the trees.
'I suppose you think it is pretty ridiculous?' he enquired, meaning his doing physical work. She was thinking that it suited him, for he looked so much better, the cloud gone from his face. Then he said that Elizabeth was grateful for all the advice. 'That was what we've lacked, really. What you've got — all the experience of the business side. I know that Elizabeth can seem pretty offhand, but don't imagine she isn't as pleased as she can be.'
Sarah had not thought of Elizabeth as offhand: she was familiar with this kind of woman, borne along on the energy of her competence, not impatient of others' lesser efforts so much as oblivious of them. Sonia was going to be the same.
'Do you think Elizabeth and Norah believe we are having an affair?' she made herself ask, and he at once went red. 'Well, yes, probably, I suppose so. But don't mind about it. I'm sure she doesn't. Perhaps she even likes me better for it.' And then, in a switch of mood, even of personality, for he was suddenly hard and angry: 'A very sensible woman, Elizabeth. I don't think I've ever known anyone as sensible. She doesn't have much time for weakness of any kind.' A pause. A long one. It was touch and go, she could see, whether he would go on. Then, deliberately, 'I think I find that as intolerable as anything in my life, that I can't talk to a woman I've lived with for fifteen years as I can to you.'
'Intolerable,' she said: she was not used to excessive language from him.
'Yes, that's the word, I think. Yes, intolerable. I find a good deal intolerable, and that more than anything. You see, I don't think she knows much about me. If you are thinking, But she doesn't care about you — well, that's a different issue. But there's something about a woman you've known since you played on a seesaw together not knowing a damned thing about you — yes, intolerable.'
When she left, they were separating for only a couple of days, because they would meet on Saturday at Belles Rivieres.