Look at Me

by Anita Brookner

  They seemed to be in incessant physical union; he held her hand or put an arm round her shoulder or sought her eye, which held his quizzically, the eyebrows raised. There was an unspoken dialogue between them, which they occasionally suspended in order to range round for further topics of interest or amusement. She looked speculatively at Olivia, who blushed, and then at me., and I was heartened, at that early stage in our acquaintance, to note the raised eyebrows and the smile, as I put down my mug and stood up. I stood up instinctively, half wary, half welcoming, entirely deferential.

  ‘We were having an argument,’ she said, as if she had known me for years, or as if she thought any formalities a waste of time. ‘I think my hair would look better swept up, but Nick is dead against it. What do you think?’

  I hardly knew what to say, but there was no need for me to speak because Nick was already protesting.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you know I like it the way it is. It was like that when I first met you. You can’t want to change it.’

  She laughed. ‘I’m bored with it. Anyway, you never want anything to change. Just let me show you. No, don’t say anything yet.’

  And she slipped out of her fur coat, which she threw over the back of a chair, disarranging a pile of photographs, planted her bag on my desk, took out a handful of combs and hairpins, and piled her abundant hair on top of her head. When it was sufficiently anchored, she turned to me for my verdict.

  ‘I think it looks very nice either way,’ I said lamely, but that didn’t seem to matter either because she had already turned to Nick and posed with one hand on her hip and the other smoothing up the escaping strands at her neck. Mrs Halloran and Dr Simek had suspended their research and were looking on as if some voluptuous cabaret had been devised for their entertainment.

  ‘Darling,’ Nick protested again, ‘you must do as you like, of course, but you know how I feel about it. Couldn’t you just leave it? just to please me?’

  By this time she was gazing into a small hand mirror, turning her head from side to side to gauge the effect. I tried to look as if this were the sort of thing that usually went on in libraries. I could feel Olivia’s disapproval and I knew instinctively that I wanted to dissociate myself from it. I was surprised by Nick’s pleading tone, but supposed that it was part of some erotic understanding, an idea which intrigued me.

  ‘H’m,’ she said, when she had finished her inspection, which took rather a long time. ‘Well, I’ll work on it. As for you,’ she added, turning to Nick, ‘you like it your way all the time, don’t you? Every time, in fact,’ and she laughed at him, poking him with her finger, and saying, ‘Yes? Yes?’, at which point Dr Simek pursed his lips and returned his eyes to the folder in which he kept his notes. Mrs Halloran continued to stare unabashed. Olivia picked up a photograph and began to trim it carefully with a pair of scissors.

  As she snapped her bag shut, Alix turned to me and said, ‘Which one are you?’

  I said, ‘I’m Frances, and this is Olivia’, but she took no notice, and it was then that she invited me to taste her famous spaghetti, adding, inevitably, that she had come down in the world. I got out my diary but she waved it aside.

  “I never know what day it is,’ she said. ‘Come tomorrow. Darling, are we doing anything tomorrow?’

  Dr Simek looked up, and Nick’s face took on an exaggerated look of pain.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘We were going to have that talk, weren’t we, Joseph? But it would be better if you read my article first, you know. So what about some time next week?’

  ‘I have… ‘ began Dr Simek.

  But he was interrupted by Alix, who had put on her coat and was demanding to know where she had put her gloves. Had she left them in the restaurant? If so, he would have to go back for them.

  ‘Hopeless, my husband,’ she confided to Mrs Halloran, who, I was surprised to note, stared back at her unblinkingly, withholding the approval that I was so eager to offer.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ she said, once the gloves were found. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow. Nick will tell you the way.’ And immediately she switched her attention to Nick, looking into his eyes and dazzling him with the slow dawning of her smile.

  There was quite a silence after they left. I had remained standing all this time, and as I slowly sat down again, I could hear them laughing on the other side of the door. I could even hear her say, ‘Well, don’t tell me I don’t do my duty.’ Then Nick murmured something, and she replied, her voice unmodulated from its usual carrying resonance, ‘Yes, but darling, what a crew. The things I do for England. Frances, did you say that girl’s name was? I seem to have asked her to dinner. What’s the matter with the other one?’ And then her voice died away and after a minute or two I heard the front door close behind them. Olivia, who had kept her eyes on her work throughout this episode, said nothing. Her initial blush had faded, leaving a startling whiteness.

  ‘Well, girls,’ said Mrs Halloran, after a pause so total that we could even hear traffic noises from the opposite side of the square, ‘I hope you were paying attention. That’s how to treat a man, if you ever get one, which I doubt, in this place. You won’t get him, that’s for sure. She has him by the balls.’

  This brought us back to reality. Olivia, without raising her voice, suggested that Mrs Halloran might be happier working in the Westminster Public Library. Dr Leventhal appeared in his doorway, glasses in hand, and asked if by any chance we were finding ourselves at a loose end. If so, there was some filing to be done in the basement. Dr Simek, who had closed his eyes, during this last pronouncement of Mrs Halloran’s, succumbed to what was clearly an expensive temptation, fitted a yellow cigarette into his long old amber holder with the gold ring round it, lit it with an equally ancient lighter, and inhaled deeply. Mrs Halloran, her face mottled and moody, remained staring straight ahead, her onyx rings beating a steady tattoo on the table. ‘All right, all right,’ she said, as Dr Simek turned to her with his usual courtesy. ‘I’ve got work to do too, you know.’

  ‘I should make a start on it,’ observed Olivia pleasantly. ‘We’ve wasted enough time today already.’ And somehow the afternoon returned to normal and resumed its unhurried course. The afternoon gradually slipped over the edge that connects it with the daytime and began to offer intimations of the evening to come. I was working on Van Gogh’s self-portraits at the time, I remember, trying to disentangle the sequence that he painted when he was either becoming mad or had already gone mad. I was doing this very conscientiously, matching up extracts from the letters and typing them carefully on to slips of paper which I attached to the mounts. I tried to take a detached and efficient interest in what I was doing, but at some point I became aware of the painter’s small crafty blue eye staring back at me from its scarlet setting. I felt no sympathy. On the contrary, I felt a spurt of dislike for him, with his workman’s clothes and his silly fur hat. My feelings were all for his benighted brother, trying to be a respectable art dealer in Paris and having to cope with this nutter and his demands. I try to raise a small cheer for sanity, from time to time. We rationalists must fly the flag, you know.

  I distributed tea all round, that day, for we were all a little unsettled. But if the others were, for their various reasons, anxious to rid themselves of the impression that the Frasers had made, I was not. I went over it again and again in my mind. And when I walked Olivia to her car that evening, I did not linger. I did not stop for coffee, as I usually did, but sped home with great strides of excitement. When Nancy had locked the door behind me, as she always did unless I told her that I was going to be out, I sniffed the dull muffled air of the flat, I prepared to face the ritual tray of ritual food, I knew that all this was intolerable, and I tolerated it because I had been offered a glimpse of the world outside. I would see how the others, the free ones, conducted their lives, and then I could begin my own.

  Four

  I slipped into the routine of dining with the Frasers, scarcely believing my good fortune. I
registered with amazement the fact that Alix seemed to have taken to me, and that Nick accepted my presence in their flat without comment. In fact his face would appear round the door of the Library at about six o’clock in the evening and he would nod and I would pick up my bag and follow him out, aware of Mrs Halloran’s speculative eye on my back. I don’t think I was forcing my company on them, although I was avid for theirs. In those early days I never telephoned, except to say thank you, and these conversations would lead to another invitation, or rather to an assumption that I had nothing else to do. I was a little shy of confessing my unfilled evenings and always said that I was going to write, to which Alix always replied, ‘Oh, well, if that’s all, you might as well come round here.’ And of course I would always go. I salved my conscience by doing bits of shopping for her, and of course I insisted on paying when we went to the restaurant.

  I think they were both glad that I took such an interest in Nick’s work, Nick for obvious reasons, and Alix because she got fed up with it, regarded it with pride but also with some resentment, and occasionally behaved as if he were being unfaithful to her when he was actually engaged on it. She had the same attitude to my writing, I soon discovered, although I could not see how this constituted a menace to her peace of mind, and anyway I was only too glad to be relieved of the burden of my solitude - which was what my writing represented - to persevere with it. And yet it was an old habit, to which I returned when solitude reclaimed me, usually late at night, when I was sleepless, and when I wrote my diary these days I had so much more to record, always with a view to my nebulous novel. But I found that this novel, which was supposed to be about the Library and the characters who used it, the odd people whom I used to describe so amusingly to my mother, had been elbowed out of the way by the extraordinary quantity of new information I seemed to be acquiring. I wrote it all down, but I could not see how to use it, for it all seemed to have to do with the Frasers, and how could I possibly use that? Yet around those silent midnights, when the flat in Maida Vale had long been put to sleep, my pen raced over the pages, gaining speed and point from the increased urgency of my absorption in their lives.

  As I said, Alix did not like my writing. She regarded it as a secret which I was keeping from her. ‘But what do you write about?’ she would demand. I could never tell her, not because I was embarrassed about it but because it had as yet no definite shape. I felt that it had to be kept under lock and key until it had resolved itself, which it would do., sooner or later; I was superstitious about letting anything escape. I tried to explain this, but quite clearly I failed to convince her, and she regarded it as a sort of disloyalty. ‘Darling,’ she would call out to Nick, ‘Little Orphan Fanny’s holding out on me. “Oh, poor baby,’ a muffled voice would reply, usually from inside the clean shirt into which Nick was changing, before we all went down to the restaurant. ‘Come and make her tell me,’ Alix would call out, and she was almost serious. He would come into the sitting room, his sleeves inside his shirt but his chest bare, and I would watch as he went over to her and nuzzled his face in her hair. ‘She who must be obeyed,’ he would say, and, to me, ‘Force yourself She always gets her own way in the end.’ So I would force myself, and with the slightest feeling of betrayal (but this was somehow better than my earlier solitude) I would tell her about the characters - and in the telling they became ‘characters’

  - whom I had intended to put into my novel. I found that when I exaggerated the grotesque nature of their behaviour I could raise a momentary laugh but most of what I told her left her impassive. ‘H’m,’ she would say. ‘Sounds very odd to me. I can’t see anybody wanting to read about such a lot of deadbeats.’ She read little herself, although their flat was always cluttered with expensive magazines. I can still see Alix flicking disdainfully through the pages, as if unwilling to believe any woman better dressed or more alluring than herself, holding such women at arm’s length, and finally flinging them aside in order to renew her nail varnish or to try, once again, to perfect her new hairstyle. This always required Nick’s attention, or his final verdict, and as the three of us gathered around her dressing table, making suggestions, persuading or dissuading, the question of what I was writing faded quite naturally into the background. And after a while, when I telephoned, I ceased to use the excuse that I was writing and instead asked her if I could get her anything in town.

  She once said, ‘If you must write, find something that interests other people. You can’t expect them to be interested in a lot of nuts.’ I at once became anxious to dissociate myself from these people, although their ghosts lingered distressfully in my mind. ‘I’m the one who should be writing a novel,’ she continued. ‘If you only knew what my life was like before I came down in the world.’ And she would tell me about her schooldays in Switzerland, and the years she spent in Paris when she first came into her money, and the beautiful estate in Jamaica to which she returned each winter, to her adoring and handsome father whom she accompanied on his travels and who was so pleased to have such a colourful daughter on his arm. ‘People took us for lovers,’ she used to say, and she never really got over his death and the news about his impending bankruptcy. ‘Poor Daddy,’ she said. ‘He died just in time.’ But she could hardly bear to think of the days when the estate had had to be put up for auction, and although she had managed to salvage some of the furniture and bring it to England, she hated seeing it in its present setting.

  I examined this furniture with some respect. I don’t know exactly what I expected to see, but it was certainly not these handsome and hefty Edwardian pieces, walnut tallboys and tables, olive green button-backed armchairs and sofas, all crammed into the mournfully regular little rooms of their Chelsea flat. Although I could not admire Alix’s furniture, I registered the fact that it had a more distinguished lineage than my own, and I could see why the zig-zag rugs and the wrought-iron lampstandards of Maida Vale had inspired her to mirth. The difference between us was that she clung to her memories and allowed them to overshadow the present, whereas I tried hard to disown mine and looked forward to a time when they would not trouble me. Then I would shed my surroundings, like a butterfly sheds a chrysalis, and I would fly towards a future which was not lumbered with other people’s relics. But Alix strove to preserve a past which was not only past but also out of date, since she now had her life with Nick. Sometimes I could feel her weighing them both in the balance, as if… as if they had let her down. It was difficult for me to understand this, although I could only admire her exigence. Her eyes would narrow when she saw Nick’s books on the desk which had once belonged to her father, and she always kept the curtains half drawn because she could not stand the metal window frames, or the view of the houses across the street. Her sitting room was always half in darkness, which seemed appropriate to her tigerish nature. All this I wrote down in my diary.

  And the little details too. How her black maid, Melanie, used to wash and iron her nightgown every morning. How the houseboys always poured hot water into the fragile teacups and emptied them and dried them carefully before serving the tea. The beautiful tropical fruits they had for breakfast, on the veranda. ‘You can get mangoes in Harrods,’ I offered, trying to be consolatory, but she merely tossed her head. And I could imagine her hatred of the cold grey streets and her contempt for Nick’s depressed patients, and the impatience of the wealthy sugar planter’s daughter as the boring colourless days succeeded each other, with only colourless people like myself to visit her. She seemed to be disappointed in her friends as well, in some indefinable way. And I, who was merely a latter-day recruit, felt permanently on probation.

  Yet I was in my way necessary. I was an audience and an admirer; I relieved some of her frustration; I shared her esteem for her own superiority; and I was loyal and well-behaved and totally uncritical. Yet she found me dull, intrinsically dull, simply because I was loyal and well-behaved and uncritical. And I knew that she would always prefer people like her friend Maria, whom she could insult and scanda
lize, whom she would defame and snub, only to have it all done back to her by Maria. This provided her with a sort of excitement which I found rather tedious. Nick and I would be greeted with a furious account of what Maria had said about her to a mutual friend, one of those friends whom she telephoned every day. ‘I’ll never go near that bitch again,’ she would pronounce, usually on the evenings when I had arranged to take them to the restaurant. Then Nick would ring up Maria, and plead with her, and the telephone would be handed to Alix, who would shout, ‘You cow!’, and after a lengthy and accusatory riposte from Maria she would shut her eyes and dissolve into her secret and hedonistic internal laughter, and we would go down to the restaurant after all, about an hour and a half later than usual, and I would have my way over the bill.

  What interested me far more, although I also found it repellent, was their intimacy as a married couple. I sensed that it was in this respect that they found my company necessary: they exhibited their marriage to me, while sharing it only with each other. I soon learned to keep a pleasant noncommittal smile on my face when they looked into each other’s eyes, or even caressed each other; I felt lonely and excited. I was there because some element in that perfect marriage was deficient, because ritual demonstrations were needed to maintain a level of arousal which they were too complacent, perhaps too spoilt, even too lazy, to supply for themselves, out of their own imagination. I was the beggar at their feast, reassuring them by my very presence that they were richer than I was. Or indeed could ever hope to be.

  Alix would break from Nick’s embrace, laughing, leaving him flushed, and turn to me, and remark, ‘She’s blushing! We’ve shocked her.” And I would smile pleasantly and noncommittally, and she would throw herself into a chair and light a cigarette and say to Nick, ‘We must do something about her. Darling, you must know some men. Find her a man, or something. Can’t you find someone for Fanny? She’ll grow cobwebs just sitting here with us. She’ll get bored.’ And Nick would say, ‘I know, I know’, with his comic guilty look, the one he used when Dr Simek waylaid him, and I would smile at them, hoping, in spite of my resistance to this display, that they sincerely wanted me to share as they shared and be happy, and that somehow they would make our party of three into a party of four, that they would cause there to be two couples, and we would be equals at last. I discounted their cruelty as a by-product of their excitement. I know that euphoria, that mania, that love and carelessness breed. And because I longed to experience it again on my own account, and not just to watch it, I had to trust them.