To me you act the part of the fond, indulgent, celebrated mother.
You don’t exist, you’re only the innumerable parts you’ve played.
I’ve often wondered if there was ever a you or if you were never anything more than a vehicle for all these other people that you’ve pretended to be.
When I’ve seen you go into an empty room I’ve sometimes wanted to open the door suddenly, but I’ve been afraid to in case I found nobody there.’
She looked up at him quickly.
She shivered, for what he said gave her an eerie sensation.
She listened to him attentively, with a certain anxiety, for he was so serious that she felt he was expressing something that had burdened him for years.
She had never in his whole life heard him talk so much.
‘D’you think I’m only sham?’
‘Not quite.
Because sham is all you are.
Sham is your truth.
Just as margarine is butter to people who don’t know what butter is.’
She had a vague feeling of guilt.
The Queen in Hamlet:
‘And let me wring your heart; for so I shall, if be made of penetrable stuff.’
Her thoughts wandered. (‘I wonder if I’m too old to play Hamlet.
Siddons and Sarah Bernhardt played him.
I’ve got better legs than any of the men I’ve seen in the part.
I’ll ask Charles what he thinks.
Of course there’s that bloody blank verse.
Stupid of him not to write it in prose.
Of course I might do it in French at the Francaise.
God, what a stunt that would be.’) She saw herself in a black doublet, with long silk hose.
‘Alas, poor Yorick.’
But she bethought herself.
‘You can hardly say that your father doesn’t exist.
Why, he’s been playing himself for the last twenty years.’ (‘Michael could play the King, not in French, of course, but if we decided to have a shot at it in London.’)
‘Poor father, I suppose he’s good at his job, but he’s not very intelligent, is he?
He’s so busy being the handsomest man in England.’
‘I don’t think it’s very nice of you to speak of your father like that.’
‘Have I told you anything you don’t know?’ he asked coolly.
Julia wanted to smile, but would not allow the look of somewhat pained dignity to leave her face.
‘It’s our weakness, not our strength, that endears us to those who love us,’ she replied.
‘In what play did you say that?’
She repressed a gesture of annoyance.
The words had come naturally to her lips, but as she said them she remembered that they were out of a play.
Little brute!
But they came in very appositely.
‘You’re hard,’ she said plaintively.
She was beginning to feel more and more like Hamlet’s mother.
‘Don’t you love me?’
‘I might if I could find you.
But where are you?
If one stripped you of your exhibitionism, if one took your technique away from you, if one peeled you as one peels an onion of skin after skin of pretence and insincerity, of tags of old parts and shreds of faked emotions, would one come upon a soul at last?’
He looked at her with his grave sad eyes and then he smiled a little,
‘I like you all right.’
‘Do you believe I love you?’
‘In your way.’
Julia’s face was suddenly discomposed.