Esther Garber & Tanith Lee
So the thought of you, remaining
Deeply folded in my brain,
Will not leave me: all things leave me:
You remain.
Arthur Symons Memory
One
All the time, when she was young, Georgina fell in love with people. Even occasionally with men; although in that case not sexually. It was around that time also that she began to dream about the green house.
The house (in her dreams) was unalterably located on a sort of rise or slight hill, where it stood alone, while other houses and various buildings lay just below and closely adjacent. These changed from dream to dream. One or two busy roads encircled or ran by the house. Sometimes it was positioned at a T junction, with three, though never a crossroads. Tall trees and a small wild garden surrounded it on every side, but the walls were low, or even in bad repair. And anyway the trees were often winter stripped, and only draped, as if for modesty, with a little ivy. She, and therefore anyone else in the dreams, could see straight over and through to the house.
Architecturally, the house was complex. It had, she thought, a sort of partly Victorian-Edwardian style. There were three (now and then four) stories, and a series of attics. Towers and long verandah-balconies ornamented everything above the ground floor, and there was – usually – a type of verandah terrace along the front of it too. Windows were of various sizes; some, on the upper floors, very long, rounded or square at the tops. Sash windows, or else the kind one threw open in two long panes like wings. At the summit, apart from towers and chimneys, a balustrade ran round corner to corner. Presumably the roof, where flat, might be walked on. The color of the house was nothing to do with paint. It was like that of a young healthy vegetable or fruit, an immature plum, perhaps, or grape, or a tuber of some denomination. The surface was luminously smooth. It looked strokable. Eatable. And over the crowns of its windows and the indecipherable ornamentation along the upper balustrade, a pale magenta showed, intermittently flowing in a definite if irregular pattern. As if ripening.
Georgina was always curious about the house during the dreams, and always recognized it as well. She did not, even so, always go in. When she did she either had a key, or the door had been left ajar. It was always her house, too. There was never any doubt. But it might be a house her dream-self had lived in, and now went to visit, or merely noticed, in passing through the (changeable) area. Or a house she had just purchased and was planning soon to move into. Yet sometimes also she knew, in the dream, it was the dream house she had only ever owned or bought or visited or noted – in other dreams.
Inside it was quite bare, but in good condition. The walls were of a creamy fawn, without faults. The floors of wooden boards were firm and clean, if not a feature, and never polished. A wide and generous staircase though, of dark wooden banisters, wound upward through the house. It had broad unsteep treads that promoted easy steps: you could run up and down it with total safety.
There seemed to be three or four large rooms on the ground floor. Above many more, but the dark wood doors were shut. Light came from somewhere. She did not ever trouble in the dreams to wonder from where. The ceilings were high. But in all her uncountable calls she had never explored any of it, (aside from running up and down stairs) except for twice, and these explorations both of a single upper room.
Nor did she ever find anyone else in the house, save only once.
That hot summer (hotter still in memory?), Georgina was meeting someone just off Oxford Street for lunch. The meetee was a boring man, a director she had known about eighteen months before, when she had been part of the singing chorus for a small theatre production of The Bacchae. The production had been quite good, however – credit where it was due. When she finally reached the restaurant, almost the first thing she would say to him would be, “I just saw Sula Dale working at the perfume counter in Liberty.” “Really? And who’s that? Shula Dade, I mean.” “Sula. Dale.” He was forgetful too: “She was in Bacchae.” “Really?” “Agave,” Georgina helpfully supplied the name of the play’s only female character, aside from the maenad chorus. The director slowly shook his head. “What a pity. A good actress.” He sighed. “Resting, I suppose. Just like us.”
In later years Georgina would give up resting, to work more in the backstage capacity. But in the era of the lunch she spent a lot of time being interviewed and overlooked for small singing parts. Often work gained meant a lot of traveling too. Her last job before the meeting had been in Scotland. The meeting in fact, she had hoped, might lead to a London job, but it did not. And maybe for that reason too, seeing Sula Dale took on a mantle of extra importance. Because after, it seemed better to have had a significant cause of coming into town, and wasting two hours with the boring director, who unluckily turned out to have a physical interest in Georgina and had to be fended off before the third bottle of wine arrived.
Sula was anyway, at least to Georgina, memorable.
She was young to be playing Agave – her stage son, Pentheus, at thirty-five only a year her junior. Yet she had done it well, acted well, and spoken the translated lines in a musical and velvet voice. The horrible last scenes she – as a minor critic had termed it – ravished.
Her hair was probably a natural blonde, light-streaked and silky, her skin clear white. She had the flexive movements of a beautiful snake, an idea her eyes accentuated. They were ‘hazel,’ where darts of green-gold electricity constantly passed through amontillado sherry.
Georgina had, of course, fancied Sula Dale, and admired her skills. But no more than that, really. Throughout the three-week production they had perhaps exchanged less than twenty words, none of them of any import.
Perfume counters tended to make Georgina’s eyes smart. By then in her early thirties, she could detect a chemical undertow to almost every one of the best scents. The same had happened to her with commercially produced chocolate. A shame. In her teens she had often lingered in both areas, inhaling these forbidden fruits. That day though, even as she was marching resolutely by, she glimpsed a slim, strong arm, lightly summer-tanned, and a flick of hair – not blonde but deep henna red. And knew, even before she knew, and turned round. And there was Sula Dale, smiling sweetly at a customer and handing her her purchase and the change, just like scores of others in the store.
There was a gap in custom then, and the other assistant was busy.
“Can I help you?” Sula asked Georgina politely. The sweet, interested smile was an act. But then Sula was an actor.
“Hello—” said Georgina hesitantly – “you’re Sula Dale, aren’t you.”
Sula did that thing some actors do, instinctively sometimes, frequently malice aforethought. She literally backed off a step and composed her features to blank coldness. “Am I?”
“I think so,” said Georgina more firmly. “We were in The Bacchae at the Coachhouse...about two years back.”
“Oh, were we?”
“Well,” said Georgina, trying to minimize the unintended temerity of a chorus member equating her status with that of the female lead, “I was one of the singers. You played Agave, of course.”
Sula loosened a little. She looked now vague rather than guarded. “Oh. Yeah. That one. With Jack – ?”
“Dollington.”
“That’s it. I remember now. God. That place! A dump. And that persistent sneezer on the last night.”
Georgina laughed. “Yes. I’m Ginny Kendry, by the way.”
“Hi. So, how are you?”
“I’m fine, thanks. You?”
“As you see,” said Sula Dale, frowning. “There was a movie deal, but it fell through. So, I’m having some work experience. “
“I’m sorry. I like your hair,” said Georgina. She did not. She had liked Sula’s stripy blondness.
“Did it for the film. They wanted to see it red. Then – zilch.”
“I am sorry. That’s foul.” “Mmm,” said Sula.
Exactly then a customer came over and wanted to ask about some new fragrance whose name Georgina caught as Stupidest – which seemed unlikely. But so many modern names then were weird or eccentric. Georgina pretended to study the scents standing along the counter front, little flagons of Benedictine gold, or opaque blue or crimson flasks. She sprayed a wisp of some tester on her wrist and then wanted to sneeze. She held it off by thinking of Sula’s caustic comment on the last night audience. This is madness, Georgina thought. Stop pretending and get out. She doesn’t give a flying fuck. She didn’t even want to know my name. Like Stupidest, however, Georgina’s name had undergone translation. (As the customer’s preferred bottle emerged, Georgina saw it was actually called Cupid’s Test. Which was also pretty weird.) ‘Georgina’ had been abbreviated endlessly, both by her succession of dire schools and the rather better musical Academy, and finally by various working acquaintances in the theatre and other venues (once even Glyndebourne) where she had, always in a slight degree, been employed. She was repackaged as Georgie, George, Gina, or even, twice, Gee-Gee.
And all that had subtly yet consistently annoyed her, until at last she always added to an intro, “Ginny, if you like.” Ginny was tolerable. Even quite fun, here and there. “Ginny as in gin? Would you like a Ginny and tonic then, baby?”
The customer had paid with a card, signed and exited left with the awful thin-pink and squirted-cream box of Cupid’s Test – what was it? Some kind of exam for gods?
Georgina or Ginny lifted her head as Sula warily glanced at her. “Sorry,” lied Georgina, who was not, but perhaps should have been, “I’m trying to find something for a friend.”
Sula regarded her with indifference. As a customer, clearly, Georgina did not count. Which must mean Sula did not believe Georgina’s pretense at all.
Nevertheless, “What sort of stuff does she like?” asked Sula.
“Sort of – heavy, musky—” Shut up, thought Georgina to herself. But oh God, too late. Here came Sula Dale with a red flask, a yellow bulb like a scoop of poisoned treacle, and a tall thin menacing shape with a bow around its neck.
One by one Georgina would have to sniff them, even spray them. Her empathic eyes began to water. Presence of mind arrived quickly. “Oh yes!” she cried in false triumph. “I recognize that one. What is it? Oh. Speechless. Yes, she likes that.”
Now I’ll have to buy this rubbish.
She bought it.
As Sula handed it to her, with the very small amount of change from the ten pound note, Georgina wanted to say, Let’s meet for a drink later, shall we? She did not utter a word, naturally. Her fantasies, until then, were all interior, and she was well practiced in their action, and their inapplicable rules.
She subsequently gave the scent to a charity shop. She hoped it would make someone happy, but by then it would be about a year out of date. Perhaps it would not.
Georgina knew that Sula Dale was gay. At the very least bisexual.
The actor who played Dionysos in the Coachhouse production had been incredibly handsome, and very taken with Sula. Members of the chorus standing at the bar after the show – Georgina being one of them – had plainly heard Sula tell him, “Sorry, darling. I’m like you. I prefer the girls.” Sula had also flirted a little with the wardrobe woman, and one night a stocky but elegant brunette whirled Sula off to a late meal somewhere. Georgina was told they had been seen “snogging in the carpark.”
So, it was not anything to do with that.
Sula simply had not noticed Georgina. And still did not notice.
All her life, then just over three decades, Georgina had found those who did notice her noticed quickly. And those who did not...did not. At the time of The Bacchae she had paid scant personal attention herself. And yet, seeing Sula again, bereft like that, enslaved behind the counter, Georgina changed as a ship’s sail does before a suddenly altering wind.
Possibly it was connective sympathy. Georgina had been without ‘real’ work for several months. (Her meeting with Dollington demonstrated her desperation.) And then the image of talented, beautiful Sula, unchosen, wrenched at Georgina. What was wrong with everyone? Beleaguered against a foolish world—
The night after meeting Sula in Liberty, Georgina dreamed of the house. In this dream, just as in London, it was a very hot summer. There were masses of jade-green leaves on the trees of the stunted little garden. They made the green of the house into almost a plastic blue, while the ripening color high above became a sort of purple.
This time the main door stood ajar. Georgina went in, and swung it nearly closed behind her.
Her immediate feelings on doing this did not remain with Georgina, whatever they had been. She only later recollected, and retained, a vivid sense of energy, and of racing up the stairway to the second floor. And there, for once, an internal door had been flung wide open.
Georgina went forward, and looked into the room so revealed.
It was, you might say, furnished.
But what furnished it was this: a winding street led in and quietly downward in a steep slope. Buildings had begun to amass about the street approximately (as Georgina later calculated) some half mile along and down. What surrounded the upper part of the road where it commenced at the doorway, and the lower region midway along, she would not on waking remember. Nothing, she thought. Maybe just a type of localized mist, that in the dream seemed perfectly adequate.
The additionally odd element, which then she never questioned either, as usually one does not, unconscious, was that though the summer night she fell asleep in had been stifling, even eighty-five degrees in the tiny flat – which felt like ninety-five – in the dream, the vista through the door was wintry. She might have questioned that, surely. For the dreamscape too outside the house was full summer. But up here, in here, down there, snow lapped and capped the shops and tower blocks, and even the sheer blue sky was transparently icy, like an aquamarine left for hours in a freezer.
Georgina stepped out on to the road. Afterwards she had a skewed notion it had been cobbled, despite the drab comparative modernity of the ’60’s-’70’s architecture below.
She did not go very far. It was not treacherous or icy underfoot, little snow there, only the faintest dusting (icing- sugar) between the cobblestones, or whatever. It was simply that – in sleep she knew it – to go farther was to become detached from even the dream-reality (the house); conceivably to be lost.
Which was quite crazy. For there was no menace in the view. If anything it was...boring. Like Jack Dollington, like Georgina to Sula Dale.
Georgina woke soon after this with an awareness of return, but no imperative memory of having escaped.
There was nothing to escape.
It was not a nightmare.
A week later Georgina had an audition for a new ‘experimental’ play due to be put on at the Figurehead in Richmond. If she got the job she would be the only singer. The music was atonal and – to Georgina – unpleasant. But it was within her soprano range. She had a good voice, which now and then could sound wonderful. Not among the greats, she was definitely gifted, certainly enough, she thought, for this solo role. She never thought she would get it though. But she did. They told her five minutes after she sang.
In a glow she rode the rattling train back into central London, and decided, with some proper pay impending, to give herself lunch at the restaurant where she had been driven mad by boozy, woozy not-wisely-choosy Jack Dollington.
In her own mind she did, presently, think she selected this treat because of the vicinity. And no doubt she walked along Oxford Street beforehand, glancing into shops after extra things she might now buy; new towels, some CDs of Handel, Rachmaninov, Joan Sutherland and Judy Collins, with this subconscious urge in the mental driver’s seat. Naturally such an excursion was not bound to guarantee a result. But, just like the audition, it did.
Reflected in a shop window, there among the mannequins with their celluloid hair and hard patented skins, walked Sula Dale, a Dianic nymph in a grove of androids.
Georgina spun round (as they said).
“Oh – hi!” Georgina exclaimed. And then, fearing the quarry (was Sula by then prey?) might not hear, she added clearly, “Sula!”
At her name, as most humans do, particularly when they possess rather unusual names, Sula turned to see who uttered it.
What an odd expression. Sula looked shy. She lowered her green sherry eyes, lashes like dark mascaraed curtain fringe, as if embarrassed. Then raised them and looked at Georgina, full at her. And Georgina felt that virtually indescribable physical – or is it? – dissolvement of the pelvis, viscera and bones, which is presumably sexual, but which feels more as if that one part of the body has abruptly realigned itself with the non-physical Infinite Powers of gods and eternity and The All. And which, therefore, can be mentioned in any detail, generally, only in the most trite and ridiculous muddle of terms. All that thought, in a split second.
And how ingenious the lover – the hunter:
“I’ve just got some real work,” blurted Georgina, feeling instantly a tactless bitch, for Sula worked in Liberty and not where she should, on a stage or before a camera.
Yet curiously, almost as if pre-programmed, Sula at once rejoined, “Oh good. So have I. A radio play. I’ve just been at the Beeb.”
And then Sula’s own relief instantly opened up the beautiful face into a smile. “What’s yours?”
Georgina smiled tensely back. But lightly she added, “Singing at the Figurehead. A play with a crazy title...shall we celebrate? Can I buy you a drink – or lunch?”
Sula veiled her eyes. “Well—”
“There’s a good place just along the road—”
“OK. Yes, why not. Thanks. Only I haven’t got time for anything much.”
So instead of the appealing restaurant they went to a sort of licensed sandwich bar, and sat on the type of back-punishing tall stools sadistic storks would have invented if they were so inclined. But there was Georgina in love (definitely now in love), and salad and ham in bread, and wine, and Sula beside her, and the sandwich bar became Paradise enough.
The talk was a bit sporadic to start with, but they improved it through discussing the merits of current Work. Sula’s BBC play sounded interesting, and it was for the evening slot. She had the role of a woman still obsessed by the death of her husband in a car crash several years previously, who was then approached by a young man who appeared to be the husband’s doppelgänger – an exact likeness and exactly the same age as her husband when he was killed – who next claimed he was the husband’s son by another woman. Georgina meanwhile admitted her play was called Evil Evening. It was a five-hander that seemed to take place in an unnamed city, sinisterly and mysteriously deserted through reasons never explained. “The music,” she added, “matches up just fine.” At which Sula laughed. And Georgina felt a heady rush of joy at having, for a moment, apparently genuinely amused her.
All through the lunch, which lasted despite Sula’s initial proviso, nearly a hundred and twenty-seven minutes, Georgina studied Sula, more or less without subterfuge. And every so often Sula would look directly into Georgina’s eyes for a few seconds. During which it went without saying time stopped, and London grew motionless and silent and mysteriously, if not sinisterly, deserted.
Sula’s hair had remained red, but it was more a strawberry shade by now, the henna washing out. If she wore any make-up aside from that on her eyelids Georgina was unsure. By about the end of the first hour, the worst and most devastating thing was happening to Georgina. She was beginning to see that Sula was merely ordinary. Even her grace, and certainly her pronounced beauty and extravagant eyes – were ordinary. She was mortal, finite. She was flesh and blood, had been born and would one day die. At this point a sizably smoldering passion can also die. Or else it will ignite. This one ignited. It noiselessly exploded. Georgina went up in invisible flames and a column of unseeable smoke, and lay spattered in bright embers against the eatery ceiling, staring down, lost. But she had been in love, even almost in this sort of love, before. And, like Sula, she had occupied a theatre stage. Georgina maintained her self-control.
In the hundred and twenty-third minute, when Sula said she thought she had better take off now, and insisted on going fifty-fifty on the bill, Georgina said, in a nice off-hand way, “Let me know how the play goes. Look,” scribbling on the mentally prepared piece of paper, “that’s my mobile number. Do let me know when the show goes out.” “Oh sure,” said Sula, not too non-committal. She might even mean it. Georgina added, “I’d offer you a free ticket to Evil Evening but really, I don’t think it’ll be worth your while. Probably not worth anyone’s while, I’m afraid.” “Oh,” said Sula, surprising Georgina into almost stunning elation, “I might drop by. The Figurehead? Yeah. I once did a Hedda Gabler there. Not as Hedda. Mrs Elvy-whatever.” “I wish I’d seen you. But well, if you do drop in – I’d love to know what you think of it all. It won’t be Ibsen.”
After Sula’s departure, Georgina sat at the table drinking the last dregs of her coffee, unable for some while to trust her legs to stand her up. She was high, and cast down. She could see nothing but Sula Dale, yet everything else gleamed in a nearly radioactive light.
Fool, she thought, dancing over Waterloo Bridge, while the sun-starred silver foil Thames crackled and blazed below, somehow not burning up the river traffic. Fool. And it would have been quicker, would it not, to have gone via Charing Cross? But no. Let me stay in London. London where love is, just a fraction longer.
And Georgina wondered too if Sula had ever picked out Georgina’s individual voice, there among the maenad chorus of The Bacchae, ever heard Georgina singing. And if she did come to Richmond, she would hear Georgina sing – solo – of course. My voice is the best of me, she thought, as sober with exhaustion she let herself into the miniature flat at Lee. I want her to hear it. Georgina stood still for a little space, watching the sunlight of late afternoon careen her small front room towards the west. Georgina remembered lovers who had liked, loved her singing. Two lovers who had often asked her to sing to them. And one who had dreamily said, “Angels will sing like that.”
Then: “Oh, I’m glad you’re not an angel though, Ginny”
I want to sing to her. I want to put my hands on her.
I want her under me and on top of me and her hair blonde again and in my mouth. I want her to smother me. I want—
But the phone rang, the mobile, and Georgina in her haste to answer it, because it would be Sula, dropped it, and so before she could answer it heard the voice speak and leave its message.
It was inevitably not Sula, but the director’s assistant from Evil Evening, giving her a first rehearsal date.
To say Georgina Kendry never saw Sula Dale again would be to lie. Through the twenty-four odd years that followed their lunch, she probably saw Sula roughly about forty-nine times. She saw her six times in live theatre. And at the cinema in various movies, also watching these when repeated on her small TV. Later, when there was more regular income, the TV too enlarged and grew technical, and videos and later DVDs of some of the films (a few of which were very good, and one outstanding) came to inhabit Georgina’s private store. Once Georgina was startled to find she had simply switched on the set late at night to behold Sula acting in a TV film from well over a decade before. How young she had looked when young. Sula also, during the nineties, had an important if short-haired role in two series of a detective drama, fourteen episodes in all. For a while Wednesday nights had always discovered Georgina home alone, and in her viewing seat by ten or ten thirty.
As the years progressed, the young Sula witnessed in the show from 1976, and the more mature Sula observed in the last episodes of the series in the ‘90s, aged attractively. She stayed slim and lithe, and her hair, though varying in length and style, remained a natural blonde that, by then, most likely was no longer natural at all.
But after this Sula vanished from the screens both televisual and cinematic; also apparently from the theatres of London. She disappeared entirely, and only in the early twenty-first century did a Sula Dale website manifest on the web, and so on Georgina’s latest computer. The site was not particularly informative, in no sort a blog, or self-promotion beyond the most basic – a few stills and publicity photographs, a sparse list of appearances. She seemed to have moved to France. A pair of obscure French movies had her in supporting roles. Only one of these films did Georgina, after much searching, manage to buy secondhand. The quality was poor. It gave her a headache to watch; nevertheless she did watch it about five times, until the images utterly disintegrated. Sula must have been fifty by then. Despite the poor picture, you could see she was still beautiful, and still retained a serpentine body. But her face had become deeply lined beside the mouth and about the eyes. The marks of age on her, to Georgina (absurdly) seemed saddening and unfair. The similar marks on Georgina’s own face did not bother her. Indeed, in her own case, she thought she looked rather better, older. But following the first viewing of the French film, she had to watch all the recorded TV and movies again, especially the art-house one, and look at Sula in her prime. Georgina never tried to analyze why. Perhaps there was actually no truly deep hidden motive. Just the fact that the lines cut into Sula’s lucent skin made Georgina unhappy, troubled her.
However, at variance with all these second-hand, third-hand sightings, Georgina and Sula had spoken once, for almost an hour, on the telephone, about two years after the sandwich lunch in Paradise.
Throughout two subsequent decades, Georgina led her own life, and it was quite lucky, in its own muted fashion.
She kept her voice in trim with regular practice, and professional lessons wherever she could afford them, and it not only lasted, it strengthened, and extended somewhat in the lower register, as she moved into her fifties. She was still getting the odd gig even then, but as she aged almost always off stage, or in low budget films or TV background vocals.
Her mainstay employment had instead become, from about the age of thirty-eight, backstage work. She did not disenjoy it, and liked both the production responsibilities and remaining in the theatre world. She even wrote a few plays and TV scripts, originally in collaboration – to ‘help out’ – then independently. By her mid forties she had established a minor name for herself. She was solvent and had moved into a decent flat at the Oval.
Of course, there had been lovers, too. Not that many. Nor any of them incredibly significant for very long, but fun, or sexually or emotionally inspiring. In one instance all three.
Georgina had lived with Liz for seventeen months before a mounting acrimony, which seemed to grow worse the more the fun and sexual and emotional rapport increased (like a strangling ivy attaching itself to the challenge of a well-built wall) axed them apart.
Liz had been a jealous woman. She seemed to nurture this insecurity in herself. From the very beginning she was jealous of Georgina’s interest in Sula Dale, evidenced only at that time by the stock of recordings. “Why have you got all these DVDs of her rubbish? God, she’s pretty stale now, isn’t she?” “Oh, I knew her briefly.” “In the Biblical sense, I take it.” “No.” “You’d have liked too though, I bet. Go on, tell me. You fancied her rotten.” “Yes,” said Georgina in truthful annoyance. Near the end of the seventeen-month partnership, she came back from a stint in Wales to find Liz had cleaned and repainted the flat (then still in Lee) and thrown out all the Sula material. Or rather, was pretending she had: “To see what you’d do. And you’ve done it. Christ, no need to have a conniption fit. I’ve just packed them in a box and put them in the meter cupboard. They got on my nerves. I should be enough for you! I should!” roared Liz, having her own conniption fit. Georgina told her that the paint was too stark a white on the walls, she did not like it, and went to fetch the box. A handful of weeks after, Liz slung a glass sauce bottle at Georgina. Georgina ducked and the bottle livened up the deadly white decor no end. By three a.m. that morning they had permanently parted.
From then on Georgina was never tempted to live with anyone again. She thought she had not really been tempted to with Liz, only seduced and suborned into giving in. She had lived alone from her late teens, when she took a single room near the Academy during her training. She liked living alone. It was just the now and then company and the sex she wanted, loving sex if that was available, but honest friendly sex would more than do. Because since Sula Dale, even where Georgina still fell in love, it was never like the love that had grown up round Sula, and Georgina’s loss of Sula. That love was like pearl round a piece of grit, or like rust around a blade left out constantly in the rain of unshed tears. What a flimsy context though, to have so overdressed itself. A few hours spent together in the most everyday fashion, one phone call, a host of fantasies. Why? Had the paucity of the liaison demanded this accretion – love, too, abhorring a vacuum...
And Sula stayed with Georgina. Really, Georgina did live with Sula. Slept with her too, wild dreams where Sula would suddenly burst through a wall and angrily shout that she would always be with Georgina. But awake, obviously, this was never so.
When Georgina sang, she sang for Sula, and to Sula, Every love song and lament, for her. Every book with a fair-haired heroine that Georgina read, was about Sula. Every piece of music listened to – Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, the moon aria from Russalka – they were all about Sula Dale, and infallibly conjured her. She drifted from the mind’s darkness and folded Georgina in her arms. She was like a haunting. She was like a second shadow.
Other (real) lovers felt her presence, even the least jealous. Even the ones Georgina carefully hid every DVD from, every inner memory. They knew. They scented Sula, they glimpsed her ghost. One of them had said sorrowfully to Georgina, “I know you loved someone once, very much. I realize she must have died.” Georgina shook her head. “It’s all right,” said the lover. “I won’t say anything again. I promise.”
But the dreams persisted. For all those twenty-four odd years. In aspect they were diverse. Sula would burst out of solid matter or through a slammed-back door, scintillant with rage. Or meet Georgina, smiling, (or mocking) on a street crowded with people or a deserted woodland track. Or at the top of a tower, where once she placed her hand quietly on Georgina’s left breast and asked, without either eroticism or aggression, “Where is your heart? Is it here?” “I suppose so,” Georgina had answered. But most frequently in these dreams there was no contact, not even a glance. Sula would pass by – or she was due to do so and never arrived. These dreams, whatever their scenario or coloring, were always of loss. What else?
Georgina never once dreamed though that she spoke to Sula Dale on the phone, as in reality she had done, two years after their last physical meeting.
Marc Henser’s death knocked the breath out of Georgina.
She had not, by then, seen him for over a decade. He had been one of her tutors at the Academy. He lectured on musical theory, but the subject was not dry or overly precise, with him. By telling stories he would illustrate the pivots of his argument. He was genuinely witty, clever, and funny; sometimes restfully abstruse. An old man, at that time – as she presently learned – only in his fifties. But in Georgina’s thirties, when Henser was seventy, he died of a stroke. Quick and clean. Or so Georgina’s erstwhile friend described it, breaking the news.
Georgina went to the funeral down at Eastbourne. She came back up and then down from London again on the last train, drained and drunk from the prolonged Burying Breakfast at a posh hotel.
She walked round the flat and sat in chairs, crying as she had not cried in the church or the graveyard. Marc Henser was one of the men she had been non-sexually in love with. She and others had spent a lot of time with him outside the curriculum. He always let his students be about him, without exploitation on either side. He would go on telling them things in the pub, as dutifully they swigged their Cokes and orange juices, or nursed their single wine or lager, too much liquor being bad for the professional voice.
Crying in the dark, lights left off, all but a single lamp, Georgina recalled his stories. How for example he had conclusively solved the riddle of what came first, the chicken or the egg.
“The egg, of course.” “How do you make that out, Marc?” “Well, Justine. We know that every species started as something quite unlike itself, crawling out of the sea aboard the land. Then gradually it evolved, in some cases over colossal amounts of time, until eventually becoming what we know today – a dog, a lion, a man...or a chicken. Which indicates that the original progenitor of chicken-kind was remarkably unlike any chicken that now bears the name of chicken. Following this premise to its natural denouement, one must assume that, every evolutionary while, one of the proto-chickens would become rather more like what is now accepted as a chicken, but that the very last of these individuals was still not quite what would pass as a chicken today.
“Nevertheless, like all its ancestors, it mated and produced some sort of egg. And when that egg, that ultimate, formative egg, broke open, out came the very first chicken of the true chicken genus. Ergo, chicken-creature-not-quite-chicken, then 1) egg, and 2) true chicken.” They had laughed and applauded him, making more uproar than all the surrounding alcohol drinkers. William had added slyly, “Egg first, then. I think he’s cracked it.”
When the sun came up out of sight from the flat, Georgina made tea, but was uncomforted either by tannin or daylight.
She found, in this unlooked-for extremity of grief, she wanted Sula. Wanted her now not in any obsessively romantic or sensual way, but as the child wants its parent. And as the child cries then for that succor and rescue, now Georgina began to cry for Sula, as never had she cried over Sula’s indifference and non-return.
For Sula, obviously, had never called Georgina. Not about the date of the radio play – Georgina found it by looking carefully through the Radio Times each week for months – not about visiting Georgina’s own venue in Richmond. If Sula ever had ‘dropped by,’ she must have been quite unimpressed by both the show and the singer. But no. Georgina was certain Sula had never been in the audience of Evil Evening. It had been easy enough to scan the meager gathering out front every night, before the house lights went down. And anyhow, the ridiculous play only lasted for ten performances.
While aside from any of that, Sula had never been, had she, welcoming. Let alone flirtatious. Sula was not tempted. Not at all.
Later Georgina was also aware why Sula so gallantly paid her half of the lunch. She had not wanted to owe Georgina, had not wanted to leave Georgina with any perceived excuse for Sula to repay the meal.
The dusty answer of Sula’s uninterest rankled and depressed, but somehow it never gained a purchase. Somehow Georgina, though accepting and obeying the unspoken law that Sula and she remained unconnected, that Sula had forgotten Georgina, found that Sula did not go away. Sula did not, in fact, leave Georgina alone. Sula was always there, just to one side, just in another room – oh yes, exactly what they said about the dead. And in the dreams, even those endlessly repeated dreams where Sula would never even glance at, or speak to Georgina, often never even appear on stage as it were, still Sula exerted her power. It was like a spell, an enchantment. And reason with herself as she had, Georgina could not get free of her.
At nine a.m. that morning, Georgina did something that surprised her own self. She picked up the London telephone directory and looked there for Sula Dale.
To Georgina’s further astonishment, she found that Sula was in the book, the full name too – not X-directory as Georgina might have expected. Many aspiring actors did this, however, to make themselves easy of access for prospective work.
Georgina sat and stared at the phone number, and the address attached to it. Decoulter Gardens – she believed she recognized where it was; somebody she had once known had lived in an adjacent street – one of those small squares in the back-pockets of the Bayswater Road.
Georgina would never diagnose if she was grieving most for Marc Henser, or for the death of her own former personality – her first youth, when so much had (erroneously) seemed possible.
That cliché.
But about nine thirty she poured herself another glass of wine, and called Sula’s number.
Singer-trained, Georgina had cleared her larynx of tears.
She anticipated the phone would signal and go unanswered. Then the signal cut off. She heard Sula’s voice. “Ye-es?” She sounded half asleep. Relaxed, sexy.
Now was the moment to ask for an invented person, apologize for a wrong number, put down the receiver.
“Is that Sula?”
“Yes,” said Sula. Still relaxed, but more cool.
And now the invented character with a borrowed name rose up after all and became Georgina herself. “Hi. This is Justine.”
“Who?” Sula’s voice was now disbelieving, startled. She must have – of course – seen through the falsehood.
“Justine,” Georgina repeated reasonably.
“That’s really odd,” said Sula.
“Is it?” Yes, naturally it is. I am lying. I am using the name of that raven-haired contralto from the Academy.
“It’s my sister’s name,” said Sula, now sounding both amused and intrigued. “I was just speaking to her in Ireland, about five minutes ago.”
Georgina laughed. A bright spontaneous laughter of relief. Such coincidences, previews, life can spring. Only six months before she had dreamed of Sula in a seventeenth century costume of scarlet silk, and some weeks after seen her in just that costume in a new film. This movie, which itself concerned the making of an historical movie, had been shot in Paris.
Sula was laughing as well.
“I’m sorry,” said Georgina, “it’s very early to call.”
“Oh, that’s OK. Sis got me up at eight. She would. Where are you speaking from?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I’m in London at the moment. Makes a change after Paris, doesn’t it. God, that was a good party. Where we met, I mean.” (There were always movie-shoot parties. A safe gambit.)
“Yeah,” said Sula. “They all just became a blur though, didn’t they.”
“I was wondering if you’d be free for lunch?”
“Not till next week,” said Sula, easy as poured syrup. “I have to go over to Dublin. Maybe after the sixteenth?”
“Oh yes,” said Georgina. “That’s fine.”
Oh yes. That’s fine. That’s – just fine.
“How about,” said Sula, “l’Anchois? Do you know that? Near Seven Dials.”
“Sure,” said Georgina. Sure, the worst pub in England, the Tube, the local sewer, absolutely fine.
She could barely stop herself laughing again, but her stage control, which anyway was holding her firm through all of this surreal extended moment, as if really everything were perfectly normal, kept her on track.
And Sula then began to talk about the Paris film, and Georgina added pertinent comments. She managed to convey the impression she had had a tiny part in the movie, without saying anything expansive. Paris Georgina knew well enough to discuss.
And when the talk moved to theatre Georgina was on home ground.
They joked about getting lost in the backstage labyrinth at the National, and the bizarre freak sound the stage sometimes made at the Lyric. They spoke as if they were old friends, but too with a hint of something more enticing. There was a kind of display from Sula, the fanned erection of a peacock’s tail – the note you might strike when you like the correspondent. She likes my voice. The sound of me. She is hearing me for the very first As if I were singing to her. She has never heard me sing.
(During all this, did any of Georgina’s grief for Marc Henser remain? Perhaps. It was the somber key signature after all to these actions, even their result. She never felt guilty that she had – if she had – used her pain at his death to propel her forward. Marc would not have judged her. Though something did.)
They parted warmly, Georgina and Sula, after nearly an hour. The conversation had flowed. Something in them had become – engaged, even if only for that miniature space of time. As, through endless eons, a love affair conducted with maximum intensity for two thirds of a century, becomes also a miniature, when the winged chariot has gone by, mashing as it passes all such spaces, such momentary loves.
“I’d better go,” said Georgina. “About one, then, at l’Anchois, on the nineteenth.”
“I’ll book,” said Sula. “They get a lot of people in on Fridays. Oh, better let me have your number, just in case.” Georgina rendered it. It was a different number by then anyway. “Well, take care.”
“You too. And again – sorry to call so early.”
“No,” said Sula. She added, softly, almost like a child, (never to be forgotten, this tone, these words, fresh as when new twenty-four years later) “No, it was nice. See you soon.”
Stars fall and cover everything with diamond dust. Dreams come true. Anything is possible. For a moment.
What on earth had been her plan? Sula would know the instant they met. Would Sula be angry – or flattered? Again amused?
Oh, Georgina would confess at once when she met Sula, to exclude all doubt. There in the restaurant, even before the first sips of wine. “Sorry. I just wanted to see you.” It was a risk, but no, not a risk. Sula had been engaged. Things were different, different, now. And Georgina would be at her best, summer tanned, extensions in her hair, extra slim and fit from that last production—
Later, long after the event, Georgina had experienced a curious pang of conscience. Had Sula actually met someone in Paris she had liked, somehow not got to know her, let alone secure her, mistaken Georgina’s fake persona of Justine for her? Yet in fact it could not have been that, not some mistake and keenness for a meeting with another. Because if it had been, Sula would not have called Georgina on the eighteenth.
Georgina, just back from having the extensions done, went immediately cold when she heard Sula’s voice. The chill of fear she supposed. She had already visualized waiting at the restaurant while Sula failed to appear. Or better things, so much better.
“Justine? I’m sorry. I can’t make lunch tomorrow.”
“Oh. That’s—”
“Yes.” Brisk now, not warm. “Something’s come up.”
“Well, perhaps...another—”
“Sorry. Can’t, not for ages. Don’t know what I’ll be doing for a month.” Dismissive.
Yet it could be true. Events, offers, let downs – in their business – anything – nothing—
“That’s a shame. But are you OK – ?”
“Yes. Fine. Look, I have to rush. Take care.”
The lifeless receiver. Georgina put its dead body back on the rest.
Come, darkness...
I never saw a night so dark. Not a star, not a moon.
As if she too had died. Suddenly shot through the brain or heart, still standing there in the black sunshine, but everything finished. The curtain already coming down forever, upon the stupid and badly-written play.
Two
The second occasion that she explored the upper room in the house-dream, occurred in those months that followed Sula’s call. Georgina was writing one of her first plays, in a disorganized manner with a friend, and had abandoned all hope in it. (It was never ultimately finished.) At this time whenever doing anything else she always felt distress. She should be singing. That was her work.
She had become aware too that Sula had got into this play. Perhaps the friend was also aware. The lead female role, twisting in the furnace of Georgina’s brain, into an attractive woman of about forty... (Eventually she would notice Sula appeared in most of her writing, as in most of the music she listened to. A role even specifically written for another actress would reshape itself, and Georgina would know it was still Sula, in the lightest disguise.)
That night, dissatisfied, she went to bed at midnight.
When she saw the green glowing house, she remembered instantly that she had been there before, and crossed the road to it. It was winter again in the garden. The ivy was thick on the trees. The door was shut. Did she have a key? Ah, she must have done, for she was already inside.
As she ran up the stair her footsteps echoed through the empty shell, but the banister had a rich polish on it.
She remembered too the room on the second floor; went straight to it. The door here was shut also, but she turned the doorknob and there, exactly as previously, lay the vista with the – cobbled? – road sloping down through a quite pleasant nothingness, and below, the buildings. They were glinting, not under snow, but in full late summer sun. It was probably about five o’clock.
Without hesitation Georgina went down the slope. She came among the buildings, an ordinary enough street. A little park ran on one side with tall (summer) green trees. Traffic went by. People, crowds of them, passing to and fro. It was a scene quite unexceptional, yet familiar, although later she knew she had never been in this particular place, awake in the outer world.
But then she turned down a side road and found herself in a pale grey square of large, tall terraced houses, most presumably now flats.
It was Decoulter Gardens. There would be the name up somewhere, on that railing, that wall over there. She thought she saw it. What did it say? De – C… Dc-ter...something. It was all right. It was the right address.
Until then the dream had been neutral. Now it became urgent and exciting. Georgina understood why she had come. She moved around the square, in the centre of which rose a single verdant tree. She stood beneath the tree and looked directly across at the building that held Sula’s flat. The architecture, like that of the green house, had something Victorian to it. There was a balcony. How apt. Behind it, long French windows glittered in the sunlight. They were closed. But only made of glass.
People passed idly up and down through the square, too. When Georgina began to sing, some turned and several paused, to listen – this was all compatible. They maintained an orderly yet magical silence. No one seemed amazed, let alone disapproving.
Why should they disapprove? Georgina’s voice was at its most beautiful, clear and silver-strong. It filled the air, needing neither a microphone nor any accompaniment.
She has never heard me sing. Now she hears. She hears the best of me, the truth of me, the soul of me. What I am or might be. What I could be if she could only see me as I am. But – she will. Now she will.
Georgina raised her face upward into the golden sun, the emerald shadow of the tree. She too was beautiful, here. Her beauty, like her beautiful voice, spread its wings wide open.
She felt in those moments, there in the square inside the room inside the house inside the dream, the unimaginable strength and validity of her own self and her life. She had not lost them, never could. Could never lose.
And then the glass doors parted and Sula was on the balcony, gazing down at Georgina, her face alight with admiring fascination and love, like a mirror of Georgina’s own.
Georgina’s song finished. (She would not, woken, recapture it ever. It had been a wonderful melody, and the words – they had been both simple and profound. But the lyric did not come back to her either. It was no song she had ever heard, or learned to sing, in the real world.)
All around the square the crowd, vast by now, was applauding her. And on the balcony Sula too, laughing and clapping, and then holding out her hand, calling, beckoning – Come up to me, darling. Come to me—
And Georgina, weightless, levitated towards her through the air itself, and then the dream, every fragment, floated from her.
She lay some while not moving, her face pressed into the pillow.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Georgina never dreamed this dream again, not even when she dreamed of the house. But it would become an element of certain wakeful fantasies she had thereafter. In those, of course, Sula always ran down to let her in. There was always a happy, rational, explicable ending.
It was an attractive restaurant. A flight of stone stairs led up into a wide and well-lit dining room; tall marigold lamps by night and shining windows by day. Fifteen years ago the tablecloths at l’Anchois had been snow white, and the china bore the symbol of the restaurant’s quirky name. By now the cloths were blue and the plates blue also, and plain. Always change.
She had started to come here now and then, in her late thirties, firstly with an American friend who seemed to have visited all the other places to eat, and asked her to recommend a special one.
When there she had never been so fey as to think Sula might all at once appear. Nor did she. But the atmosphere and food were infallibly choice.
Now, entering, Georgina glanced uneasily about. She had realized she did not really know who she was looking for. Or rather what. But as far as she could tell, Sula had not yet arrived. A few people were already at their tables, sipping wine or water, some peering through spectacles at the menus. Georgina had required glasses for reading since she was forty-seven, and would have to do this too. Would Sula?
How much had Sula changed, in fact – entirely, like the tablecloths?
Georgina had seen Sula last on film, fifty years old, in the French movie. She would be about sixty now. But the Sula Dale website had remained as uninformative as ever, with no more recent photograph than a publicity shot from the nineties.
She would not, Georgina was certain, ever have grown overweight. Sula had had that sort of body-type whose strong slimness is integral and usually lasts.
In any case, her fitness for Winter Sun must mean she was still, as they said, in good nick.
Georgina had written Winter Sun as a short story, the only short story she ever had written. Then someone at the BBC suggested it would make another play. And therefore a play it became. Finally its tangled path took it into TV, one in a new season of experimental drama. Georgina had been pleased enough, not least with the money. And then she had been shown the proposed cast list. “We thought she’d be perfect for Julia. Her agent seems to think she’s free.” “I thought she was in France,” said Georgina, sitting in the wine bar that had suddenly been emptied of all oxygen. “Really? Oh, yes, but it’s not like it’s the moon, is it. I mean, the old girl won’t have to go into quarantine or anything. At least one hopes not.” Old girl. The old girl. Georgina supposed she too was approaching Old Girl status.
She made no objections to Sula Dale’s playing Julia O’Connor in Winter Sun for Drama at Ten. And of course, anyway, Sula had played Julia for Georgina already, all the time Georgina wrote it. It was, the part, written for Sula. Just like all the others.
The time was, by now, a quarter past one.
Georgina had gained her table and sat before the mass of blue, which included a tall blue iris in an indigo vase, and a sky-blue glass of white wine. She had arrived a little early deliberately. She would prefer to be seated when Sula walked in, when she saw Sula first. Not be herself walking towards Sula, over this slippery sea of icy crystal, which was the restaurant’s smoothly carpeted floor.
How long had it really been?
Only twenty-four – twenty-five years? A little less since the unique phone conversation.
How had it been possible – no, permissible – to remain in love, obsessively and committedly, for such a period of time, without a single contact? Not even to see the object of obsessive love save on a screen, in a photograph, in the enormous inner world of the alter-brain, the selective memory, the id, the dreamscape.
This is what happened, certainly, to the bereaved lover. Think of little squat fat Victoria Regina, mummified forever in mourning. But then, she had had her Albert. She had not had to invent every minute of their idyll. It had existed.
Yet perhaps an invented life also existed, came to exist in some aberrant way. As unreal recollections sometimes become a real past in the minds of the damaged and the mad.
But I am neither. And I know it is untrue.
But the love affair that has never lived, has also never died.
Apparently the audition was a great success. They had all been thrilled with Sula. Thrilled with themselves for thinking of her.
This had been relayed to Georgina. “Oh, Ginny, we’re thrilled. We think you will be too.”
There was going to be a group dinner, cast, production, writer, at some grandish carvery; Georgina cried off. Then the read-through, and again Georgina, who was definitely expected to be there, had avoided it. Food poisoning was her excuse. She could not face it. Would not.
Sula herself would not want Georgina to be there. But it was more than that. Obviously Georgina too had aged. She had got thinner, and only tinted her grey hair – but she was perfectly presentable. It was not that either. She was – unloved. She was redundant. Sula actually would not even recall her name. The whole thing would be disagreeable. I am too old to deal with this. Surely I have grown up and do not have to.
Georgina would see Sula in the accustomed way, on the screen when the play was recorded and complete. Was this the reason? Sula had become a phantom, a filmic ghost? It would not be feasible, or bearable, to encounter her now in the flesh. Sula would be different. Georgina would enter the crowded room and find another total stranger. Heart and loins would not melt, brain would not race and fire. Death would at last occur. The death of love. And after this – there would, once and for all, be nothing.
Near midnight the telephone rang, out in the hall of the flat at the Oval.
Georgina was sitting up in bed reading. She thought of ignoring the noise, letting the phone take the message. But now and then a friend might call from the US, or elsewhere, mislaying the time zones. She was wide awake.
She got up and as she did so, the answer-phone kicked in.
“Hello. Hope I have the right number. For Ginny Kendry? If not, my apologies.”
Georgina stood, waiting. She did not recognize the woman’s casual voice, though unmistakably it was an actor’s.
“This is,” the voice said, unfazed, “Sula Dale. Bar gave me your number, Ginny. I love your play. Julia’s a wonderful role. Thought maybe we could meet up sometime this week? If you’re free. My number is—”
After the voice was gone, Georgina still stood in the hall, still somehow waiting. For what on earth?
To know what she should do. But oh, she knew. Not now. She must not do it now. She would do it tomorrow. Or she would not. (Bar Smithwood should not have passed on the number without checking with Georgina, but Bar was like that.) Does Sula even recollect she once met me? Why is she calling me? Eye on the main chance, maybe. I am a playwright with TV connections now. Does she remember? Do I care if she remembers or if she has an eye on the main chance – charm me, get another part to play—
Exhausted, Georgina went to bed, and lay down in the dark. She approached warily, and from a vast distance, the former fantasy from her thirties, singing in the square to Sula’s windows. It came to her with great vividness, stinging-fresh and shaking with hope and joy.
I am nearly fifty-six. I must not indulge this fantasy. Something I would never have done in the real world, even back then. Let alone, God forbid, now. But even to fantasize about it is, at my age, mentally – unseemly. See, in the dream I’m still quite young. And so would she be. And all that is gone.
I can still sing though. That recording last month for Peter. “Wow,” he said, “you still sound like thirty.” Not quite. But I can still sing.
Oh, what would Sula have done if Georgina had wooed her like that? Flamboyant, an actor’s modus operandi? Lazy, careless, uninterested, exquisite Sula, with her hair like sunlit rain and her eyes like amber jade. Would the gesture, its crazy chivalry, its element of offering, Georgina’s voice, have disturbed Sula’s own complacent world, lured her out to look at another and see her, see Georgina as what she could be? What I could have been – for her?
She did not sleep, or only for minutes at a time, floating in and out of the fantasy she had tried to resist, and which however, now, would not pursue her back into the cloudy jungles of unconsciousness.
At nine-thirty the following morning, Georgina called the given number. But then put down the receiver. Then she called again and at once the slightly – not so very much – altered voice of Sula answered her. “Hi.” It was only a touch darker, deeper. That was all. Like mine, when I sing.
Businesslike and cordial, Georgina said, “You called me last night. I’m afraid I was out.”
“Oh – is that Ginny?”
“Yes. It’s Ginny.”
“So how about lunch? I want to ask you some things about your fantastic play, a couple of slants on Julia...what you think of my take on it all.”
She sounds like a young woman. Full of life. Interest. Not bored at all.
“Yes. Why not. That would be,” Ginny hesitates. “Nice.”
“When are you free? Today? How about—”
“Not till tomorrow, I’m afraid. I can make it for one-thirty then.”
“Sounds fine,” said Sula. “Where?”
“Maybe l’Anchois,” said Georgina. Or rather the person she had temporarily become, the one so busy today, as she was not, that one said it. So sensibly and quietly too.
“Do you still go there? God, I haven’t been there in years, not even when I’m over.”
“It’s still a good place.”
“Yes, of course. No, it’ll be fun to see it again. All that comfortable old-fashioned white, and silver service – and the picture on the plates of the anchovy—”
“It’s all blue now. The anchovy has gone.”
“I expect all the plates got broken in some accident,” frivolously said Sula.
Yes, Sula was acting also. Trying a little too hard, perhaps. Because Georgina might be so useful. That must be why. It could be nothing else.
“Well,” said Georgina, “it was good to talk to you.”
“You too – how are you, by the way?” said Sula, making Georgina jump. What does it mean? Am I well enough to go on writing plays for you? Or you’re just showing me a concerned friend from way back.
“I’m very well. You too, I hope.”
Yes, Sula was. A few more flutters then of mutual politeness and farewell, like a pair of pigeons fencing with their beaks inside a cage of boughs, striking the leaves with their wings.
In the silence after: Had the conversation happened?
But Georgina knew she was not insane, did not hallucinate. It had happened; a meeting was agreed.
As she was drinking very strong coffee, her mind ranged into the past and, curiously, detached itself obliquely from any memories, past meditations on or dreams and fantasies of Sula Dale.
She had thought of Marc Henser. Sitting there in the pub one night, when she was in her twenties, he, presumably, his late fifties, and the others, all of them alive, and burning bright. And he told them all the story about the nightingale.
When someone remarked it was like something from Hans Andersen, Marc had replied he believed it came from the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey conceivably, but that its roots most likely lay in China.
“Once upon a time,” Marc said to them, with unashamed narrative effect, “there was a princess, outside whose high bedroom window a nightingale sang every night from a tree; a pomegranate, or perhaps a blossoming plum.”
While the nightingale sang, the princess slept deeply and well, dreaming of wondrous and beautiful things. However there came a night when the nightingale, for reasons of its own, did not sing but flew far away. In the morning the princess summoned a gardener and commanded that the tree be cut down. He protested, saying the tree was young, healthy and fruitful. But the princess would have none of that. She told him that all that one previous night a nightingale had perched in the tree, and her sleep had been very much disturbed by its song.
One of the more innocent students had said, “But that night the nightingale hadn’t sung. So how did it disturb her?”
Some of the others groaned. “That’s the point, Keith. When it sang she didn’t hear it. When it didn’t sing she did, and it woke her up.”
“So how was that, then?” said Keith. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s a riddle,” said Marc, tucking slowly into his second half – he never drank more than two halves. “What do you think it means?”
“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”
“In a way,” said Marc. He gave them space to elaborate. But beyond a scatter of jokey suggestions (“She’d recorded it and left the tape on—” “She fancied the gardener and was lying so she could watch him sweat with the axe below her window—” “Too many Turkish Delights?”), no one claimed themselves able to solve the mystery.
“Analyze what the story tells you. When the nightingale sang the princess is reported to have had wondrous and beautiful dreams. When the nightingale flies away, and there is no song, the princess herself reports – not that she was kept awake – but that her sleep had been much disturbed by the nightingale’s song.” Marc once more waited. Then smiled. He had had a lovely smile, kind and wise and without duplicity. You had never had to think, What is he trying to do? He simply did it, and all of it was entirely benign. He was happy. He made them happy. A blissful contagion.
“When the nightingale sang, her song – although the princess never consciously registered a note of it – permeated her sleep and her dreams, and guided her slumbering mind into tranquil and enlightening avenues of adventure and self-knowledge. Like those people, for example, who can’t sleep well or pleasantly without a tape of Mozart playing, or the sound of the sea.
“But when the nightingale was gone there was only utter silence.
“Think about those ancient cities and gardens. Not a sound. Today we can hear traffic, or emergency roadworks, or human hubbub, most if not all night. We get used to it. But in those sequestered palaces and times, the night might well have been an utter void. Like a cellar in the ear when the light bulb goes out.”
He looked around at them. He said, “In that void then, the princess had no guidance for her dreams. They must have turned on her like a pack of wild dogs. It wasn’t that she lay awake all night. She slept, and no doubt would have preferred to be awake, such were the nightmares and horrors that hunted her down and tore her mind in bits. And over it all, the echo of the nightingale’s glorious song, the melody of rescue that never came, distorted and soulless, frightening – as some echoes can be – like the tinnitus-ringing in the ears you might experience after an explosion, or even, dare I say, a particularly loud concert. That then, was what she heard. That then which she wanted to render homeless by the axing of the unfortunate tree. But obviously, this would only be a psychological solution. Very likely it made no difference to her. Poor thing, she might never sleep sweetly again. And she wouldn’t even know why not.”
Was it fifteen minutes to two? Georgina’s watch told her that it was. L’Anchois had filled up cozily. Just three other tables, seeming reserved and not yet occupied. Then a group of six arriving, couthly noisy and jolly. Over there now. The leaden feeling in Georgina’s gut could be an awareness that Sula had stood her up after all. Or relief. Or hunger.
It had never been clear to Georgina why Sula had stood her up that first time years ago. Sula had not fathomed who ‘Justine’ really was, surely. There could well therefore have been a legitimate reason for Sula’s withdrawal. Especially given the warm and willing mode of her original acquiescence. Or else she had just decided it was a date she did not need. Something more compelling, more worthwhile, had taken its place.
What to do now, then. Oh. Just pay for the drink and leave. To keep things civilized perhaps pretend to a message on her mobile, calling her unavoidably away.
She might as well finish her wine before she left.
Georgina turned and glanced from the window, down into the rainy summer street. Her pulse stopped. A taxi had drawn up below. A woman was getting out, was bending to the cab window. Slim, dressed in dark red, her shoulder-length, hair-dressed blonde hair falling forward – Sula. It was Sula. She was here, imminent.
Georgina drew back, not quite knowing what she did, and stared, as if to deceive Sula below – should she chance to look up at these windows – out along a narrow adjacent street.
Oddly (it seemed in those moments extremely odd), a very beautiful unknown woman was standing some way down this street, looking in at the window of a shop there, a flower shop, Georgina thought. The woman wore black, and her longish hair was the stony obdurate pure white that can only be natural, the winter frost of old age. But she was straight and elegant, and her profile, dimly, distantly noted, seemed clean and aquiline. How beautiful she was, how alluring, that woman. That woman who was not Sula Dale. How odd, odd to see someone like that, and to react like this, at such a moment, the other already on the stair—
But Georgina averted her gaze, and sat back in her chair, She too straightened up, and took a small gulp of wine. Any moment now, Sula would enter the room. Georgina fixed her eyes on the door, and held them steady, not even blinking. Like a soldier, blindfold refused, about to face the onslaught of a firing squad.
She maintained this position rigidly, until her eyes began to water. Then she did blink. Fool. Her watch showed her several more minutes had elapsed. But Sula had not appeared. Once more Georgina craned to the window. The street below was briefly empty. No taxi. No Sula. In the sidelong narrow street people went up and down. The other woman had vanished also.
A sigh escaped Georgina. Fate could always play such tricks. The woman from the taxi, evidently, had not been Sula at all. For God’s sake, it was two o’clock. Georgina downed all her drink. She looked about to catch the waiter’s eye. And then the restaurant door opened and into the restaurant walked the other woman, the old, beautiful woman she had seen outside.
The woman stood for an instant just within the doorway, posed with such poise and grace, in her slender black suit and her chestnut-colored boots. Her white hair was marvelously cut, it framed so descriptively her face. Of course – a waiter came at once to attend on her. They spoke. He had led her to one of the pair of still empty tables.
Caught in total mesmeric enthrallment, Georgina switched her stare hastily away. The woman too was gazing questingly about. But only for a second. She seemed unmoved by anything, removed. She sat down, and began to read the menu. White haired, older than Georgina, she did not require spectacles at all. Contacts, perhaps. Well...
Georgina must catch the waiter’s attention.
She did not move. She sat staring, once more without subterfuge, at the woman who did not need glasses.
The woman’s skin was lightly creased, and the lines by her mouth, above and below her eyes, cut deep. She had a beautiful mouth, softly colored. Her hands had pale oval nails. They were veined with age, but articulate, strong and delicate as a fox’s paws. Ah. She shook back her hair. A girl’s unstinted gesture. And abruptly her eyes flashed up again – truly they did flash, some effect of the bright wet day outside – and scanned the room. Georgina, who had just now fallen in love, (for the first time in over twenty-four years) saw inside the woman’s eyes the light of a green sun through lenses of bronze. The woman was Sula Dale. And even out there on the street, misted with distance and time, and sight weaker than her own, even that way, and unrecognized – oh, yes, the dissolving pelvic bones and membranes, the familiar long-ago constant, surrender and desire, noiseless tumult, world’s end. I knew her. I fell in love with her again.
But I would have known her in disguise. In a mask. In a decontamination body-suit. In a wheelchair, bald and speechless. Inside a coffin with the lid nailed shut. Even not knowing her, I knew her. In the distance, half seen. Through the rain.
Sula was turning her head again now. She was looking over at the door, with that touch of former remembered irritation.
But I’m here. You just looked at me. Or – your eyes met mine and then passed on.
What had happened? It was easy, though neither of them had thought of it, it seemed. Each had reserved a table, in her own name. So Georgina was led to the Kendry table. And Sula to the table kept for Dale.
But she does not know me. I knew her, even when I never knew her. But she does not know me. Never knew me. Never will.
Georgina rose. As she walked past Sula Dale’s chair, Sula Dale glanced up at her, a fleeting glance, coolly courteous, impartial. And away. It was obvious: Georgina was not the one she was waiting for.
The waiter stayed perfectly amenable about Georgina’s sudden departure. “I have to be in some meeting. Damn nuisance.” Georgina paid for her single expensive drink, and tipped him. After all, she might, some day, want to come back.
Outside on the street she went by the flower shop, and crossed over into the main thoroughfare. Traffic growled. People passed up and down. Rain spangled like beads along the edge of everything.
So this was growing up. This was coming of age.
She would call Bar later, explain about the rushed trip to America – her sick friend. (Such helpful lies.) The TV team could manage without the writer. She would let them do what they wanted with Winter Sun. It no longer mattered.
Georgina walked unhesitatingly on, as her fantasies fell from her, quite painless now in the great tide of Nothing that already swam inward to replace them.
She didn’t remember me. She didn’t know me. She never heard me sing.
If Georgina ever had bravely stood below Sula’s windows, in that square so contradictorily named Decoulter Gardens, and sung her heart and her soul out in a lover’s serenade, now she was well aware that Sula Dale would not have run to her balcony or her door, alight with reminding and passion. Indeed, if Georgina had ever dared such an impertinence, she understood now quite bitterly well, Sula Dale would only have been exasperatedly, embarrassedly, impatiently and angrily disturbed by her song.
And down the glittering slope of the city then, grey and silent, stripped of dreams, the nightingale flew far away.