508
DORIS LESSING
when she Illust decide whether to Illarry him or not. On the whole
she felt not. At any rate, it was not at all that either could look
forward, after a day of rehearsing passions not their own to loving
tranquillity. Far from it, and on the contrary, both returned to scenes,
reproaches and torments not very different - and they even said
so, with that appropriate good trouper's laugh used by actors to
dismiss their private lives when engaged on their real business - to
those they were developing during rehearsals. Well, one night Mary
found
herself when everybody had left the darkened theatre, baek
stage and by the great bed which was such a feature of the play.
It was made up, but for economy's sake not more than was essential.
She sat by the bed on the little stool which was also part of the set
and found herself shedding a tear though for what she could not
have said - her words when describing the experience. Through
blurred vision she saw a figure approaching from the dressing rooms:
no ghost or burglar, but the handsome John, whose feet, or at least,
some impulse, had brought him here, also in the belief that the
building was deserted. No need, she said, for words. He sat on the
companion stool on the other side of the bed. He offered her a
cigarette. Between them stretched the crumpled sheet on which they
had spent at least four hours that day of steady, grindingly repetitive
rehearsal locked in each other's arms, apparently in the extremes
of passion. They left half an hour later, without even the casual
theatre kiss that by custom they would have offered each other on
parting. Next evening, and without arranging it, they met again.
For a week these two rolled, morning and afternoon and some eve–
nings, in torments of simulated lust and its associated emotions, and
at night met, chaste and tender, for a half hour before returning to
their tumultuous private lives. They were too shy, as she explained,
to touch each other.
As
in a first love, the lighting of a cigarette, the
accidental meeting of a hand, were exquisitely painful - indeed,
more than enough. That nightly half hour was filled with restoring
breaths of air from lost horizons. Finally their
affaire
(so she always
pronounced it) culminated in a kiss so delicate, so exquisite, that its
poetry was enough to decide her not to marry her possible husband,
and him to leave his wife. No, that kiss was not on the
first night,
but after the dress rehearsal. The first night being successfully ac–
complished in the usual ritual crescendo of shared tension, flowers,
champagne, congratulations and the theatre emptying backstage into
