Authors: Anita Brookner
Her mother was all for Patrick, with his finicky airs and his excellent prospects. Her mother was only too keen for her to avoid entanglements of a distressingly physical nature, which she saw as a direct insult to herself. After all, if Mrs Moore could manage so well without that kind of thing, why should her daughter not do the same? While singing Patrick’s praises, which she did constantly, as a form of primitive magic or behavioural engineering, she was aware of Bertie eyeing her thoughtfully, and, it seemed to her, as if he were calculating her performance as a woman. Bertie was, she was forced to admit, appallingly straightforward. This quality, Blanche found, annihilated all others. Bertie’s attitude towards her was one of simple acquisition. He saw no need to indulge in any form of mating ritual, did not tell her all about himself, did not want to know everything about her, did not create instant memories, anniversaries, landmarks in their friendship. He simply took her wherever he happened to be going himself. Blanche, hearing her friends becoming solemn and arch about their men, had often wondered whether they made things up or why they needed the reassurance of other women in order fully to enjoy them. She humbly supposed herself to be lacking in the sort of allure which she heard tell about on all sides. ‘I know he finds me physically irresistible,’ she heard one friend assuring another, and saw them both lift an eyebrow at each other as she came into view. On reflection she found it so much easier and more pleasant to be put in Bertie’s car,
driven to a site which was not always picturesque, and left on her own to moon around a farmyard while Bertie discussed his, to her, always mysterious business with someone to whom she was rarely introduced. He was the head of a firm of prosperous estate agents. Sometimes, on the way home, they would talk, but not always. She found this supremely restful. Whereas Patrick, with his enormous respect for women and his irreproachable concern for her, she found rather exhausting.
What she had not noticed, since she had no reason to believe that it extended to herself, was Bertie’s great social curiosity. His interest in his work and in the world of business seemed to her so active that she supposed that he saw her simply as an area of relaxation, and she found no reason to quarrel with this. But he was always going out to dinner and when he took her with him she was quite surprised that he knew and liked so many people. Her own passivity did not seem to be an obstacle to his enjoyment but she began to become aware of it. After the early weeks of marriage, when she would run to meet him and tell him about the inconsequential activities of her day, she began to edit herself into a more worldly version of herself. And so, stealing her quiet hours away from his friends, she would prepare for them as she knew he would like her to. That was when she saw that she must pay her dues. She took a simple pleasure in pleasing him. But imperceptibly she became rather quaint and lost a good deal of her spontaneity. In this way she struck others as mildly alarming, whereas she was in fact on the lookout for his, and their, approval. This came in good measure for a time. Then, as she became less sure of herself, she sought information in books, works of fiction which would teach her a little more about society than she was able to work out for herself. Thus she knew both more and less, and sometimes had the feeling that she was ahead but more often that she was behind. Basing herself on what seemed to
be unalterable authorities, she was unable to see that life had moved on, or that plans to which she had no access were being laid. She could see that Bertie was an avid social animal but not how far his animality would take him. It came as a complete surprise to her to learn that Bertie was fascinated by Mousie, because Mousie simply did not figure in her list of characters. Men who fell in love with their secretaries, even if they had the decency or the prudence to move those secretaries to another position, were, to her, characters from another kind of fiction, the kind she did not read. She supposed this secondary kind of fiction to be as powerful and as pervasive as folklore because everyone apart from herself seemed to know about it.
And, after the event, thinking that she had not learned the right lessons, she mournfully set herself to learning more. But she did not quite trust the books, which had left her unprepared, and tried a different discipline. The pictures told her another story. There were moralities here too, but of a more unsettling nature; she could see, as she now began to see in life, the discrepancy between duty and pleasure. On the one side the obedient, and on the other the free. It seemed, and much against her better judgment she was forced to think about this, a straight division between the Christian and pagan worlds, and she had supposed that the one had merely superseded the other. Thus she constantly sought, and found, analogues in the real world, even in the little world of her diminished acquaintance, and she wondered if it were too late to learn the most important lesson of all: how to make it come out right in the end. So far she had found no reassurance.
Bringing her mind back to Patrick, she reflected that if she had married him she would certainly still be married to him, since he tended to read the same kind of fiction as she did. But she also saw that those evenings with the harpsichords had exacted their forfeit: Patrick was now immovably
a bachelor and would remain one whatever his marital status turned out to be. She doubted that he would ever marry or that he would ever want to. ‘I loved you, Blanche,’ he had said briefly when she told him of her forthcoming marriage. But she questioned whether his feelings were at all compatible with the sheer pragmatism of marriage, or whether he saw it, inaccurately, as a reflection of the divine harmony. She had never seen it that way herself: to her, marriage was a form of higher education, the kind that other women gained at universities. And she supposed that on her better days she would have got quite a good degree. Patrick, however, would expect her to get a First every day of the year. And knowing, as she knew now, the full extent of her ignorance, she was doubly relieved that she had not been put to the test.
‘How lovely to see you,’ she said. ‘You must tell me all your news.’
And, he’s gone, she thought. Bertie has gone. And felt a great grief before summoning up her most worldly smile.
Patrick, cautiously, saw that on the whole Blanche had not changed all that much, apart from an insubstantial loss of vitality: the same erect figure, the same distant air. He told himself that he must be wary of getting mixed up with her again. She meant no harm, having never been a calculating woman, but she must surely be lonely. He accepted a glass of wine from a bottle rather less than half full, thinking it odd that she did not offer him a glass of that very good sherry that he always remembered in this house. He noticed that the fringe of the rug was matted but that otherwise all was in order.
‘But you look so well,’ said Blanche vivaciously. ‘Have you been away?’
‘A few days in the Lake District, as usual,’ he replied. ‘Climbing.’
For even his holidays were strenuous and austere. Blanche saw in her mind’s eye the dusty leaves of a palm tree in the public gardens in Nice, and herself, sitting on a bench, her face lifted blissfully to the sun. The sun is God, she thought, but she said, ‘I need your advice, Patrick, about a young friend of mine.’ So she is not in trouble, he thought, and prepared to listen.
In the telling, Sally’s story seemed quite a straightforward affair, a simple matter of furnishing the right documents. She left out details such as Elinor’s resistance to the situation but mentioned that the child had to stay with her grandmother because there was no money at home.
‘Why don’t they both do that?’ asked Patrick.
Blanche said she thought this rather beside the point.
‘It could be seen to be rather a valid point,’ replied Patrick.
This was not going well. Perhaps if she let Sally tell her story in her own way the outcome might be more successful. In any event she had done all she could and was now beginning to feel a certain weariness: she would rather Patrick and Sally settled matters between them, leaving her free to call on Sally occasionally but not to be bound to almost daily attendance. It has all been rather sad, she thought. And it is because I thought I could help the little girl. And perhaps thought she could help me.
‘If you don’t mind, Patrick, I’m going to telephone this friend right now, since I’m lucky enough to steal some of your time this evening.’
Patrick glanced at his watch.
‘Now don’t say you must be going. You would be doing me, I mean doing Sally, the most immense favour if you could just give her a word of advice. Face to face. And then I shall ask no more of you.
‘Sally,’ she said into the receiver. ‘I’ve got a friend here who might be able to advise you. I think I mentioned him. Patrick Fox. I wonder, could you come round for a few
minutes? I’m sure it would be worth your while. And then we can get it all sorted out.’
She hated the governessy sound of her own voice, hated the slight prickle of irritation she felt as she put down the telephone, hated what seemed to her to be the immensely difficult movement of social forces needed to bring together such unlikely conversationalists as Patrick Fox and Sally Beamish. She felt quite exhausted at the prospect of steering them through the evening. But she need not have worried. After half an hour, Sally came in lightly, wearing a strange dress of bitter green linen almost down to her ankles and held up by shoulder straps. She was unencumbered by the sort of paraphernalia that most women carry around with them, and although she must have had a key in her pocket – or had she simply left the door ajar? – her hands were empty. She trod noiselessly on her Roman sandals. Her vaguely unrealistic appearance was enhanced by her apparent weightlessness and by the familiarity with which she negotiated the obstacles of Blanche’s drawing-room, which she had never previously visited. As Patrick rose slowly to his feet, with an expression of something like incredulity, Sally’s face widened into an archaic smile. She sat down easily in a large chair and, still smiling, prepared to give him her full attention, as if he had to present his case to her rather than she to him. Blanche felt the beginnings of a slight headache.
Two hours later, when she was in the kitchen making sandwiches and coffee for the three of them, for the conversation had been terribly oblique and it seemed as if she could count on them both being there for hours yet, she wondered at the novelty of this populated evening, congratulating herself on the success of her enterprise. But much later she stole into her bedroom, while they were still talking, and, resting her head against the cold glass of the window, she strained her eyes to see out into the dark garden. It seemed to her then that there was something inalienable
about these night hours, these unseen musings. It was as though this essence of her being, this lonely child within her, this stolen solitude, this darkness, were all she had left, that the world of the day was for others, that she herself was a creature of the night, and that when she opened her curtains on to the cold purity of the sleeping earth she was performing an essential rite, or rather a rite essential to herself, and asserting her silence against the wilful authority of their sleepless babble.
Blanche’s mother’s other maxim had been, ‘Do it now!’ Why this figured so largely in her entirely uneventful life was difficult to say. But Blanche, marooned in even greater idleness, had found it salutary. Unlike her mother, who rarely got up before ten-thirty and changed her clothes two or even three times a day, Blanche was ready, her strenuous plans already laid, by nine-fifteen. By that time she had performed the stoic task of getting up and was fully dressed, her housework done, her newspaper briefly read, and even her second cup of coffee a thing of the past. She felt vaguely guilty at not having to have plans such as she supposed other women to have: she would have had a quieter conscience if she had had to go to work on a crowded bus, and to shop for a family on the way home. She envied such women and sometimes read recipe books to find out what she imagined they were having for dinner. She herself ate without pleasure or interest these days, and even the memory of the beautiful meals she used to cook now seemed insubstantial, as if divorce had cancelled them or reckoned them to be of dwindling significance, like a lost reputation. The things she ate these days – a single chop, an isolated Dover sole – seemed to her rather more suitable subjects for still-life painting than for consumption. They could be bought negligently, distastefully, and cooked in the same absent way. She thought of titanic roasts of beef, hecatombs of vegetables,
puddings stuffed with fruit, trembling custards. For a brief period she had wondered whether, under pretext of helping out the mother, she could take Elinor home and cook her lunch, as she had done on two occasions, with varying success, but this plan had soon to be discarded. When together, Sally and Elinor appeared to live on spaghetti, toast, and green apples. Her offers of help had been laughed away; it seemed that she constantly misread the situation. If indigence required relief, it seemed that desire required satisfaction, and the two states were radically different, if not opposed. Blanche wished to contribute everything, including, if necessary, money. Sally’s desire was for the restoration of luxury, ease, and entertainment. Unlike Blanche, who thought in terms of the present (‘Do it now!’), Sally lived entirely in the past, a past which she wished to see reproduced, in identical form, in the future.
Sitting now in Sally’s basement, with Patrick, and listening yet again to those stories of the past, embellished with reminiscent laughter, she wondered when Elinor would come home. As far as she could see, money was no longer the problem that it had been, since, in view of the fact that the situation was soon to be regularized, Blanche felt that it was only a matter of form to tide Sally over, as they both chose to think about it. It occurred to Blanche to wonder if Patrick did the same thing; being a man, she supposed he had a larger attitude to such matters, and he seemed to be taking a considerable measure of responsibility for the whole affair. ‘Patrick said he might look in this evening,’ Sally had said to her in a negligent far-away voice one afternoon, and Blanche had taken that to mean that her presence was not required. Yet it seemed that she was essential to Patrick’s sense of propriety and he sometimes telephoned from his office and asked her to meet him there.