Look at Me

by Anita Brookner

  ‘That’, says Mrs Halloran heavily, after every other one of Nick’s disruptive visits to the Library, ‘is one hell of a man’, at which point Olivia asks her to be quiet and observe the rule of silence, and Mrs Halloran says,’Miss Benedict, why don’t you get hold of that sodding offprint I’ve been asking for every day for the last month instead of telling me what to do? I don’t tell you what to do, do IF ‘You just have,’ says Olivia, who is never less than totally composed, and after that they subside for an hour or two, until dissension breaks out again over the matter of whether Mrs Halloran gets a cup of tea or not. Oddly enough, Olivia quite likes her, although I suspect that she finds her life in the Library rather painful at times. But she never says anything. How could she? Apart from her unspoken love for Nick, there is her unspoken dislike of his behaviour. Neither, of course, will ever register with him. It is when I think about this that I congratulate myself on not being in love with anyone. I am not in love with Nick. I am not in love with Dr Leventhal (difficult to imagine) or Dr Simek (even more difficult) or even with James Anstey, even though he is tall and ferocious-looking and presentable and not married and undoubtedly what Mrs Halloran would call a bit of a handful.

  I used to make my mother laugh when I went home in the evenings and described the characters who came into the Library. ‘My darling Fan,’ she used to say, her eyes widening, ‘I think you have a gift.’ She knew all their habits, and where they lived; it was like a serial story to her. She encouraged me to write it all down, and so I bought the usual large exercise book and kept a sort of diary, and I like to think that one day I will use this material and write a comic novel, one of those droll and piquant chronicles enjoyed by dons at Oxford and Cambridge colleges. I could do it, I know. Since my mother died, I have had no one to talk to about these things, no one who is so interested, who knows the characters, who wants to find out what happens next, who responds with such delight. So I tend to write a bit more, these days, when I get home in the evenings, although it is not the same, and I have to struggle to keep a note of despondency out of what gets put down, In fact sometimes I have to struggle quite hard, because I do hate lowspirited people. I would even say I hate unfortunate people, which is why I do not enquire too closely about Dr Simek. I have put all that sort of thing behind me.

  And it seems that I am right to do so, because a short story I wrote - actually about the Library, although heavily disguised, of course - was once published. I was not on the whole as pleased with it as everyone else seemed to be, but I’m glad that my mother knew about it before she died. It was one I hadn’t read to her, which in an odd way may have been just as well. She always took people more seriously than I try to do.

  So the days go by in an orderly fashion. I get up, I come to work, I have lunch with Olivia, I stick on the photographs, I even try to work out some of the pictures for myself. I find the power of images very strong, even when I do not understand them. Sometimes an image stands for something that will only be understood in due course. It is a mnemonic, a cryptogram, very occasionally a token of precognition. I pay very great attention to images, both at the Library and away from it. I spend a lot of time on my own, and the contents of my mind, which is nothing out of the ordinary, amaze me with their random significance. That is why I like the Library, not only for the task of classification which is its main purpose, but for the potency of its images, like the Fool on the Tarot card, or Melancholia with her torn book, or Goya with his doctor.

  The day goes on very peacefully, and eventually it gets dark and we start to tidy up. The light goes out in Dr Leventhal’s office, and we ask Dr Simek which photographs he wants kept out for the following day. After a time he puts on his old tight foreign overcoat and his astrakhan hat, ties his grey muffler, smoothes his heavy brown gloves over those permanently shaking hands, bows slightly to both of us, and leaves. Mrs Halloran asks if either of us is coming round to the Feathers, which she patronizes in the evenings, and when we say that we are expected for dinner somewhere, she tugs a comb through her wiry hair, flings on her tweed cape, says, ‘All right, be like that’, and sweeps out of the room. She is a noisy woman. I once tried to find out why she came here; she does not really need our resources for those articles she writes in psychic magazines, but Olivia says that she lives in a private hotel in South Kensington and has to get out in the daytime, and besides, she hates to be alone. And I imagine she gets paid more if she includes an illustration or two in her articles. She certainly stays here until the bitter end, and I have seen her face droop into a quite hopeless expression by the end of the day, the inside of her lower lip, which protrudes, looking empty and babyish.

  I walk with Olivia to her car, and then I buy a newspaper and read it over a cup of coffee somewhere. I never want to go home and I put it off for as long as I can. I usually walk, from Manchester Square, where the Institute is situated, through to the Edgware Road and past all those horrible shops, full of corsets and nurses’ uniforms and video cassettes and Indian food. I tramp past the launderettes and the cheap hairdressers with the mauve neon illuminations until I reach the more salubrious uplands. I always walk, whatever the weather. And when I have got rid of my restlessness and my tendency to brood, I let myself into the flat and I am in for the rest of the evening. I have something to eat and then I usually try to write. In that way I manage to get rid of the rest of the day.

  I encounter resistance in myself, of course. That is only natural. I am quite young and I am aware that this is a dull life. Sometimes it seems like a physical effort simply to sit down at my desk and pull out the notebook. Sometimes I find myself heaving a sigh when I read through what I have already written. Sometimes the effort of putting pen to paper is so great that I literally feel a pain in my head, as if all the furniture of my mind were being rearranged, as if it were being lined up, being got ready for delivery from the storehouse. And yet when I start to write, all this heaviness vanishes, and I feel charged with a kind of electricity, not unpleasant in itself, but leading, inevitably, to greater restlessness.

  Fortunately, I am not a hysterical person. I am used to being on my own and sometimes I doubt whether I could endure a lot of excitement. This remains an academic question, for I have never yet been tempted in this way. I am very orderly, and Spartan in my habits. I am famous for my control, which has seen me through many crises. By a supreme irony, my control is so great that these crises remain unknown to the rest of the world, and so I am thought to be unfeeling. And of course I never speak of them. That would be intolerable. if I ever suffer loneliness it is because I have settled for the harsh destiny of dealing with these matters by myself.

  Sometimes I wish it were different. I wish I were beautiful and lazy and spoiled and not to be trusted. I wish, in short, that I had it easier. Sometimes I find myself lying awake in bed, after one of these silent evenings, wondering if this is to be my lot, if this solitude is to last for the rest of my days. Such thoughts sweep me to the edge of panic. For I want more, and I even think that I deserve it. I have something to offer. I am no beauty but I am quite pleasant-looking. In fact people tell me that I am ‘attractive’, which always depresses me. It is like being told that you are ‘brilliant’, which means precisely nothing. But apart from that, I am in good health and have ample private means. I have few bad habits, apart from my sharp tongue. I have no religion, but I observe certain rules of conduct with considerable piety. I feel quite deeply, I think. If I am not very careful, I shall grow into the most awful old battle-axe.

  That is why I write, and why I have to. When I feel swamped in my solitude and hidden by it, physically obscured by it, rendered invisible, in fact, writing is my way of piping up. Of reminding people that I am here. And when I have ordered my characters, plundered my store of images, removed from them all the sadness that I might feel in myself, then I can switch on that current that allows me to write so easily, once I get started, and to make people laugh. That, it seems, is what they like to do. And if I manag
e this well enough and beguile all the dons and the critics, they will fail to register my real message, which is a simple one. If my looks and my manner were of greater assistance to me I could deliver this message in person. ‘Look at me,’ I would say. ‘Look at me.’ But since I am on my own in this matter, I must use subterfuge and guile, and with a bit of luck and good management this particular message will never be deciphered, and my reasons for delivering it in this manner remain obscure.

  Two

  These odd feelings of isolation may have something to do with my immediate environment, which is, I suppose, anachronistic. Maida Vale is a very strange neighbourhood, I always think, full of huge blocks of flats which in their turn seem to be full of small elderly people. Very few of these people seem to be about in the streets, which are always deserted, and those who venture out for a spot of shopping wear enormous fur coats and have dogs and sticks. When I come home in the evenings I see no one, although I can smell enticing cooking smells behind the closed double doors on each landing. I imagine dinner parties being prepared; I imagine hostesses with silver hair and small diamond earrings leaning heavily forward to light candles on walnut tables. Their guests will probably have travelled no farther than next door or the floor below, but they will have dressed up for the occasion, the ladies in old but good black chiffon dresses, the gentlemen in velvet jackets and bow ties. They will all be in slight physical distress, appropriate to their age, but they will be very gallant and good-humoured, and they will exclaim in delight at the strength of the sherry in the consomme, and compliment their hostess profusely. These excellent people attend lectures at the Victoria and Albert Museum and occasionally team up to go to the National Theatre, which they do not enjoy. ‘My dear, I found it difficult to breathe,’ they will say to each other. They usually make up a four for bridge, or sometimes two fours, and there will be a cup of tea for the ladies and a whisky and soda for the gentlemen at eleven-thirty. They will kiss each other affectionately as they leave, and insist, ‘You must come to us next time.’ I don’t know any of these people, of course. I can simply smell their food, which is very good. Various ladies sent flowers when my mother died, but after I had written to thank them I threw away the cards. I am aware of a nod and a smile from behind a door, should it happen to be open when I pass, but as I am out all day, and as they apparently play bridge all night, or at least until eleven-thirty, there is hardly much chance for us to meet. Besides, they are all so much older than I am.

  I am very much aware that this is a building for old people, with its red stair carpet and the heavy lift with the iron gates and the polished brass letter boxes and the small corpulent porter. The residents belong to that class and generation which was never told to lower its voice, so that cries of ‘Phyllis! My dear!’ ring out from floor to floor until the door shuts behind the fur-coated visitor. I have seen small grandchildren appear at Christmas, in coats with velvet collars; they are excessively well-behaved and hold their mother’s hands. Their cheeks are quite flushed when they re-emerge) either from the Christmas cake so proudly produced (‘Your great-grandmother’s recipe, my darlings!’) or at the prospect of opening the crackling parcels which they cradle in their arms. Things are even quieter in the summer. Then it is the turn of the old people to pay their children a visit, and from my window I hear the voices rise from the pavement and the sticks tap, and should I happen to look out I might see Mrs Hunt or Lady Cohen negotiating the difficult business of getting into the car. ‘Goodbye, Mr Reardon, and thank you so much,’ they cry as they rearrange their old legs in the narrow space. ‘Goodbye, Madam,’ says the porter, and he waits on the pavement until the car has moved safely on its way.

  I am hardly aware of this place as home, although I have always lived here, and, as the flat now belongs to me there is no real reason for me to move, particularly as prices are so high at the moment. Indeed I am so excessively comfortable, and my life is so regulated, that the question only rarely crosses my mind. But that restlessness of which I spoke is in part caused by boredom and in part by lack of company. I sometimes have fantasies of a life in which I would spend evenings sitting on somebody’s bed, exchanging confidences, keeping up with each other’s love affairs, comparing clothes, trying out new hairstyles… Although all that is hardly to my taste. But it is very difficult to invite anyone here. If life were suddenly to change and I were to make a completely new circle of friends I should have to do some radical rearranging. I am hardly likely to give dinner parties for ten or soir? es for fifty people, although the rooms are big enough. And I can see that I should have a hard time disowning the furniture, of which I have grown inexplicably fond, although I spent some of my most critical years grumbling about it. The wind of change would have to blow very hard indeed for me to feel that I had at last taken possession of this place and was entitled to make it my own.

  For in my mind it still belongs to my parents. My mother and father moved here during the war, when my father’s job necessitated their being in London. They moved in very quickly, as one did in those days; within a week they had got rid of their house in Surrey, which my mother was finding too difficult to manage. They took over the flat lock, stock and barrel as the owner was anxious to sell before she went to join her sister in America. That is how they came to inherit this extremely peculiar &cor, which looks like something sprung direct from the brain of an ambitious provincial tart. Times being what they were, my parents did nothing to change it; they were in any case too wrapped up in each other, too fearful for the safety of each other, to care for their surroundings, so long as these were safe, warm, comfortable, and could keep danger at bay. Even when life settled down and became more normal than they ever dared to hope, they changed nothing, perhaps out of superstition. That is how I came to grow up with all manner of terrible cut-glass mirrors with bevelled edges hanging from chains over tiled fireplaces, shaggy off-white fitted carpets, zig-zag patterned rugs, nests of walnut tables, semicircular armchairs upholstered in pale creaking hide, standard lamps with polygonal ivory satin shades, white wrought-iron trellises over the radiators, a dining table massive enough to overshadow the ten dining room chairs whose seats are composed of beige brocade secured with brass studs, divan beds with headboards which sweep round to accommodate bedside cabinets, dressing tables with sheets of glass covering the surfaces and triple mirrors, and, piice de risistance, a collection of china and glass birds, some rather large, which march along the shelves of highly polished pale wood bookcases with sliding doors made of yet more glass.

  My mother domesticated this interior by inserting her many photographs of my father, and later of myself, under the topmost surface of her dressing table. She did not much care for her surroundings but she liked the solidity of the flat, which is in a reassuring stone building on top of the Westminster Bank on the corner of Maida Vale and one of those quiet streets which go off in the direction of St John’s Wood. A whining lift, with polished brass fittings, is presided over by the porter, Mr Reardon, who otherwise lives in a cubby-hole on the ground floor. My mother grew to love the solemn clash of the lift gates, for she felt protected and enclosed by them, and this was a need which grew in her with the years.

  The flat is very large, much too large for me. In my parents’ day this problem was solved by their finding Nancy, quite by accident. Nancy is from Ireland and they found her crying in a doorway after an air-raid which had flattened the house in which she had a room. They brought her home; she became their devoted maid and she has been here ever since. As these flats were built to accommodate servants, she has her own room and bathroom beyond the kitchen, which is large enough to serve as a sitting room for her. She is now pretty old and she will undoubtedly live here until she dies. She gets up very early and goes to Mass every day. She comes back and has her breakfast, by which time I have already gone to work. She goes out later to do the shopping and then she is in until the following morning. Her routine never varies. Every evening she used to serve my parents’ dinne
r, so that my mother never had to do a lot, which was just as well, for her heart was weak and the doctor had warned her not to lift or carry anything. After my father’s death, by which time my mother was so much more frail, Nancy would prepare her evening meal and give it to her on a tray. It came to be the same meal every evening: a cup of soup, a little chicken, some stewed fruit, all in tiny portions. As my mother grew weaker, the meal got smaller and more bland: the soup, which my mother barely touched, a few buttered crackers, a dish of custard or semolina.

  Nowadays, if I am in, she serves the same meal to me, and however much I dislike it, I know that I cannot stop her doing this. ‘Madam always liked it this way’, she says, and her small but surprisingly flower-like blue eyes look at me in reproach and disappointment.

  I have never known anyone grieve and mourn like Nancy. After my mother’s death I was dry-eyed and stony-faced, glad that the ordeal was over. As I moved stiffly about the bedroom, opening curtains, sweeping all the useless pills into a plastic bag, stripping that terrible bed, Nancy sat in my mother’s chair, like a frightened child, small tears creeping down her cheeks, wisps of grey hair sticking to her wet face. She thought me ruthless and snatched up my mother’s slippers, just as I was about to throw them away, holding them to her, cradling them… She had been fearless in her nursing. She would hold my mother’s head, during those spasms of which I cannot bear to think, while I would fly in terror to the door. She would settle her for the night, smoothing her forehead on the pillow, taking her hand and patting it on the sheet. Or she would hold that hand and stroke it, the hand that had become so thin that the rings were stuck on with sellotape. But it was for me that my mother stayed awake, for my goodnight kiss, which I came to dread, like all the rest. ‘My darling Fan’, she would murmur, and Nancy would stay with her until she fell asleep.