Love Again by Doris Lessing

Author:Doris Lessing [Lessing, Doris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061849718
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

You did not hear me when I told you I will not live

After you leave me,

When you leave me you will take my life…

The note curved up on life, a bent note, as in a blues. An interesting question, surely: in Indian music, Arab music—Eastern music—you could say that all notes are ‘bent’, a ‘straight’ note is the rare one. But in our music, one ‘bent’ note can be like a hand in your heart strings.

The rehearsal ended. The four singers stood together under their tree, while the musicians covered their instruments. For a few moments, the group kept about them the atmosphere of the music, as if they stood in the hollow bluish-gold penumbra of a candle flame, the girls in their loose summer dresses, the young men’s blue jeans transformed by association and sound into the cerulean of the robes in medieval religious paintings. But when they left the trees and came through sunlight making loud remarks about showers and cold drinks, they became people in a street or at a bus stop. A limousine waited for them. The driver was a young man with whom they had achieved the agreeable intimacy of the theatre. He laid a strong brown arm along the back of the driver’s seat and twisted around to smile at the girls as they piled in. ‘Mademoiselle…mademoiselle…mademoiselle…,’ he said to each of the three singers, caressingly, as a Frenchman should, allowing tender eyes to say how much he appreciated them, and at once the gallantry-deprived Anglo-Saxon women, who are lucky to be told, by a man who is madly in love with them, You are looking fit, radiated pleasure like stroked cats, even while they could be observed reminding themselves and each other, with small regulated grimaces, that they must not allow themselves to be carried away by such insincerity. He murmured a gallant ‘Madame’ to Sarah, and then, feeling unable to supply individual salutations of the same standard to everybody, contented himself with a comradely nod to Henry and the countertenor, and flashed his white teeth all around. He reversed with a screech. ‘Voilà…allons-y…il fait chaud…très très chaud…,’ he positively crooned, reminding them he had sat waiting for at least half an hour in all that heat, the rehearsal having run overtime, not that he in any way begrudged them what was his duty, but. ‘Faut boire,’ he announced. ‘Immédiatement. Vite, vite.’ And the car shot, or waltzed, down the tricky road, hooting madly. They were in the square in ten minutes.

An evening light was being sifted through a high thin cloud, and the bleached colours of the buildings, flint and chalk and ash and the crumbling white of old bone, made their case strongly, like a full palette. The end wall of La Belle Julie was no longer a blank stare but showed its history in modulations of plaster, creamy hollows and slopes where a glisten of river sand lay in the folds of joins between two areas of work separated perhaps by decades.

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