Look at Me

by Anita Brookner

  Seven

  I worried that James might no longer want to see me home, but in that I was wrong. Everything went on just as before. Everything, that is, as far as I was concerned.

  In fact it was better. We were always four at dinner, or sometimes five, when Maria joined us, but James seemed more anxious to be alone with me, and we began to leave earlier than before, and sometimes lingered by the Serpentine in that frosty park, before striding on towards Marble Arch and the Edgware Road, and my home. I began to wish that I had asked James to live with us, for Nancy would have made him very comfortable. I had not realized how difficult he found it living at home with his mother, and I felt vaguely guilty, vaguely at fault, for not thinking about him in that protective way that Alix had. Their spare room was very small, and I did not see how he could get all his large austere clothes into that tiny cupboard, but I supposed he could always go back to Markham Street for his laundry or for a change of suit. And I supposed that it was more fun for him, being with the Frasers. I remembered how I had once looked forward to living with them myself, and had so nearly moved in for good. It was only the writing that had stopped me. And then James, of course.

  I think he began to love me properly then. He smiled less, looked at me almost angrily, never wanted to leave. Once, I insisted that he stay, something I would never have done had I not felt that change was in the air. ‘Better not,’ he said. ‘They always wait up for me. The flat’s so small that they hear me come in anyway. It disturbs them.’ This seemed so stupid that I told him that he might just as well have stayed with his mother. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘she waited until the morning to tell me off. At least Alix gets it off her chest straight away.’ It occurred to me to wonder why such a strong, severe man let himself be bossed around so much, by women who could not, when you came down to it, claim his attention with as much right as I did. Knowing that I had this right, I never abused it. I did not want to be the sort of futile woman who complains, in public, over trivialities. I wanted him to feel free. And so, when his timing became a little erratic, when he sometimes failed to get to the Library as early in the mornings as he had formerly done, when I sometimes missed him altogether, I said nothing. I smiled when I next saw him, and said nothing. I see no virtue in making a man feel guilty. Although I believe it sometimes works.

  I began to miss him in the mornings. My exuberant walk to the Library became overlaid with anxiety as to whether I should see him or not. I imagined the three of them having breakfast together, half dressed, in the sort of delightful squalor that I have never been able to manage. I could quite see that he might not want to break away from this new and exciting intimacy in order to drink coffee from a Mickey Mouse mug with someone whom he would probably see later that evening anyway. So strong was my sense that he was enjoying his life with Nick and Alix that I had an image of them, which was worrying on two counts. In the first place I thought I had done with these projections of mine, which never did me any good. I had been living in the present and I liked it there. In the second place, the image, coming from some basement area of my personality and imagination, presented itself as extremely disturbing. Collusive. I saw the three of them talking together, laughing. I was particularly alarmed by this, the laughter. I could find no clue to it.

  As if to chase this image, which kept recurring, I walked more briskly, performed my duties in the Library more energetically than ever. I made preparations for Christmas quite as optimistically as I would have wished to see myself doing. If I did not meet James in the morning, I dismissed my disappointment as trivial, as indeed it was, for I should surely see him that evening. What was a little sad was that the pattern had shifted slightly. I still made my way across the park to Chelsea in the cold dusk, but it was now to find Nick and Alix and James all together in the warmth and already deep in conversation when I got there. Sometimes I would not catch up with their allusions until halfway through the evening, and I would not entirely relax until James and I were on our own, although this was sometimes so late that my spirits were a little subdued by fatigue. Even then I found that I could not always match my mood to his. He seemed to be somehow ahead of me, more cheerful, smiling when he remembered something, and saying, ‘No, it’s nothing’, when I asked him about it. I schooled myself not to feel excluded, although sometimes on his face I saw a secret, almost savage, grin which alarmed me. It alarmed me because it seemed to have nothing to do with me. And because I had no idea what could have brought it about.

  Fortunately I am very strong and my looks never alter, so that James did not notice anything. But ca- sionally I felt weary and longed for our earlier instinctive simplicity. I longed, too, for us to know some sort of comfort, for all these arrangements suddenly began to seem to me makeshift, transitory. I began to see why Nick and Alix made fun of our long walks together, why they thought us so childish. It seemed to have been turned into a joke which everybody found amusing but myself. Alix, of course, could only see it as a joke, and Nick, who was not much interested, would occasionally cast his eyes heavenwards in dismay. I suppose it had its ludicrous aspect, but I found that I could no longer get it in perspective. What preoccupied me was the fact that I could no longer describe it. Having dismissed the merciless interrogator, the note-taker, that I once had been, I seemed to have precluded the possibility that I might quite simply have told James that I was not happy. Quite literally, I had no voice in the matter. And at times like these I would look at those laughing faces and try very hard to join in. I laughed my way across whole chasms of dismay.

  When I looked at James I saw some of the same anxiety. He was not as happy as he had been; I could see that. But our gazes were more serious now; we each measured the other’s discomfort. Because we were so like-minded, with grave, correct, and expectant ghosts in the background, we felt surrounded by an atmosphere of bad behaviour from which we could not disengage ourselves and which had its perverse attractions. ‘Surely, you must be awfully uncomfortable in that room?’ I once asked him, but he only laughed and said that he enjoyed camping out for a bit. It was a change from his mother’s spare bedroom, which was pink and white and made him feel like King Kong. And, he added, the Frasers were so enormously entertaining. He laughed reminiscently as he said this. I could understand him, because after all I had experienced the same sort of violent attachment myself. There was no earthly reason for me to grudge that excitement and pleasure to James. Their sort of life was a new experience for him, probably as liberating for him as it had been for me, and I must simply let him enjoy it. There was no reason why it should impinge on our own quieter, but deeper, pleasures.

  It was a point of honour with me not to ask him what they said when they were together, without me. I could never, ever, contemplate asking him what they did, for with that odd image in my memory I could never believe that my question would be entirely innocent. I learned not to notice certain things, how he would stifle a yawn, how he would linger with Nick and Alix when I had already left them and walked to the door of the restaurant, how his hair was longer, how his handkerchiefs were now never so spotless as they had been when he lived at home, and how he did not seem to mind all these changes. I learned not to notice his occasional roughness with me when we said goodnight, or his opaque look when I took his hands and said, ‘Try to be early tomorrow morning.’ I learned not to notice his bad moods, which had never been there for me to notice before, and I thought that maybe he was not getting enough sleep, that he needed a holiday, that I needed one too. And I mentioned this to him, and he turned to me with a look of expectation on his face, of pleasure, and, I thought, of hope, and it was then that I decided that I must get us away somehow, just the two of us. And the plans for Christmas became unimportant and insignificant, as I began to think ahead to the holiday we would take immediately afterwards.

  So with this plan in my head I became calmer, and so did he, and although it refused to be anything but nebulous, it was also symbolic and it united us again. ‘Don’t say anything
about it yet,’ I told him, and he nodded agreement. This curious need for secrecy was a further bond, but it also altered our plans. We could do nothing elaborate, requiring tickets or visas or hotel bookings, for all of this could easily become public telephone calls overheard, checking of timetables, arrangements how and when to meet - and it was essential to both of us to pretend that nothing unusual was afoot and to slip away all unnoticed while others were yawning or complaining of boredom or resolving to go on a diet or whatever people do after Christmas. We would go where no mocking remarks would reach us, away from that heightened and hectic atmosphere, so censorious of our innocence.

  So I asked Olivia if her family were going to be using their house in Kent over the holidays. She has always told me that I could stay there whenever I wanted to. In fact I know the house well, for I usually spend summer weekends there with the Benedicts. It seemed strange to be asking Olivia if I could go there with James. That is how she came to know about us. I could not tell Olivia a lie.

  She looked at me and said, ‘Is it what you want?’

  I looked back at her, and because I could never tell Olivia a lie, I said, ‘I don’t know.’

  My state of doubt was curious. I knew that James loved me and yet I felt that he was in danger. Or that I was in danger. This was not quite clear to me. I felt that I was being hurried along a path that I had not originally wanted to take, or at least not with so much dispatch, so much secrecy. I had wanted the company of my friends to sustain my golden enjoyment and my new future, but those friends had turned into spectators, demanding their money’s worth, urging their right to be entertained. And I no longer wanted to be available for that particular function.

  I may have been presumptuous but it seemed to me that unless we were to differentiate between love and friendship we were going to run into all sorts of difficulties. It irked me that I was still supposed to give a full account of my movements and motives to Alix and Nick, whose avid interest, so much welcomed by me in the earlier weeks of our acquaintance, now began to appear in the light of an obligation I might not wish to fulfil. I had no experience of this sort of friendship, although I had observed that it was habitual with Alix: Nick, somehow, was always less involved, leaving the emotional complexities to his wife, who claimed the greater expertise in the matter. Indeed, it was this claim, this expertise, that made her so proprietorial. I did not see how I was to indicate to her that some of her comments were too exaggerated, her questions too provocative, or that in any case I might not wish to answer them. I did not know how to disengage myself from the intimacies that I had found so welcome when she proposed to take me in hand. I assumed, unrealistically, I suppose, that she would view the mature product I had suddenly become and treat it accordingly.

  I could of course see that she might be attracted to James, but I dismissed the possibility of this becoming a serious problem. Alix was, as she constantly told us, totally fulfilled in her marriage, and in any case I did not see how she could expect me to defer to her on this point. It was also probable that she was attracted by James’s innocence, by the piquancy of a masculinity that had not been squandered. But I, who knew the depths of that innocence, and also its strength when it was shared, doubted her ability to break a bond which in fact she could not understand. It was her genuine bewilderment at our blamelessness that caused her to ask so many questions. And when deprived of answers, she had decided, quite logically, to resort to closer methods of observation. Yet I knew that ou’r. implicity would always escape her. I knew that James and I had recognized this quality in each other, that it was our common knowledge, and that, so long as it remained so, we were safe.

  I was perplexed but by no means in despair. If I wanted additional proof of James’s love for me, this was provided by Alix.

  It was about this time that Alix started to telephone me at the Library, a highly inconvenient move for me because I did not have a telephone of my own and had to trail into Dr Leventhal’s office and stand before his desk like a penitent while he waited with massive but pointed politeness for me to go away again. At first the calls were quite inconsequential. How was I? She was feeling particularly dreary, particularly chilled. The winter seemed endless and she was fed up with the flat. She didn’t feel much like going out that evening; did I mind if we put off our dinner until Friday? As I had already decided to give no hint of my own distress I replied calmly that, of course, that would be perfectly all right and that I would see her on Friday. I was encouraged to do this by the sound of her voice, which was unusually flat and toneless. It was then that I realized that Alix was not happy.

  We were very busy in the Library round about that time., so that I did not have too much time to think. Everybody seemed to have a cold or ‘flu, and although Olivia and I remained stalwart at our desks, our task was not lightened by the fact that Dr Leventhal insisted on coming to work, although he had a high temperature and was unable to do much, so that we had to do a great deal more. Mrs Halloran, her face periodically empurpled by a hacking cough, took rather more sustenance at lunchtime than was good for her or indeed for the Library, and would come back at three o’clock quite unfit for further study, although she was still able to cover sheets of paper with her dashing royal blue handwriting.

  These sheets of paper tended to get swept off the table by the energetic movements of her batwing sleeves; she would then lower herself to the floor to retrieve them, and on one occasion had difficulty in getting up again. Fortunately Dr Simek was not there, and I helped her to her feet, and, at a nod from Olivia, made her a cup of very strong coffee in one of our mugs. ‘Thanks, darling,’ she said loudly. ‘I’m not quite the thing today. This bug, you know. There’s a lot of it going around.’

  ‘Perhaps you should go home early,’ suggested Olivia. ‘You look a little tired.’

  ‘All right, all right, Miss Benedict. I know when I’m tired, thank you very much. Impudence. Nobody tells me whether I’m tired or not. I know you want to get rid of me,’ she shouted. ‘I’ve got eyes in my head, you know.’

  ‘Mrs Halloran,’ I said, ‘nobody wants to get rid of you. But you must make less noise.’

  ‘God Almighty,’ she said, but rather more quietly. ‘Am I bored. Are you bored, Miss Benedict? Are you bored, Miss Hinton? No. you wouldn’t be, I suppose. Plenty to keep you on your toes, isn’t there?’

  I made no answer to this, although I saw the light of desperation dawning in her eye, and she might have gone on, had not Dr Leventhal appeared wearily in the doorway and said, ‘Telephone, Miss Hinton.’

  I went into his room and picked up the telephone and it was Alix.

  ‘Just checking,’ she said. ‘I don’t seem to have seen you for ages. What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s a bit difficult just now,’ I replied. ‘Can I ring you when I get home? We’re frightfully busy, and I can’t talk at the moment.’

  There was a pause, and I could hear her drawing on her cigarette.

  ‘You know, you’ve changed.,’ she said. ‘What’s happened to you? You used to be more amusing. More forthcoming. I feel there’s a barrier these days. You say one thing, and you mean another.’ She paused again. ‘Deceitful, really,’ she pronounced.

  ‘Alix,’ I said slowly, ‘there’s nothing like that. There’s nothing to tell.’

  She went on, in a very reasonable tone of voice, ‘Well, if that’s the way you want it. But it’s a bit disappointing, Fanny. I had hopes of you. I thought you might really turn into something. And this business with James… Well, it’s not really fair on him, is it? You think of yourself a bit too much, you know.’

  There was a little silence, and a slow exhalation of smoke, and she murmured,’… dragging it out like this.’ I made no answer to this, although I wondered if she was right. Dr Leventhal was clearly waiting for me to go away and get on with my work, but all I could think of saying was, ‘Let me ring you back when I get home.’

  ‘Do you love him?’ she asked me suddenly.

 
; Instinct, wariness, caution, or all three, dictated my reply.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  For I think that this was the truth. My confidence that my pleasure would increase and become love had been checked. The easy future that I had imagined had somehow disappeared, and been replaced by the need to be complicated, slightly underhand, pretending that all was well, pretending it to James, and, in a slightly different version, pretending it to Alix. I should not, I felt, have been put in this position. I should have been defended. James should have defended me. And then I thought that she was perhaps right, that I had not considered him sufficiently in the matter. I did not quite know what he wanted. I was not sufficiently experienced to guess. There was, perhaps, a miscalculation in my hopes. I would revise the position after our holiday together, and then I would be able to tell Alix. Who must not, however, know about the holiday until after we were safely together in Kent.

  When I walked back, slowly, into the Library, I saw Olivia’s eyes on me, a little sorrowful, and I smiled reassuringly at her and went back to work.

  That afternoon Alix. telephoned again, and this time she was much more cheerful.

  ‘The thing is,’ she announced, without preamble, ‘Jack and Barbara have invited us to lunch on Sunday, and I thought the four of us might go down in the car. It’s somewhere near Bray. We might as well go; it’ll save cooking. And I could do with a break.’

  ‘I was going to the Benedicts’,’ I murmured, wretchedly aware that Olivia could hear me.

  ‘Oh, come on, Fanny. You can get away for once in a while. Don’t be such a bore. It’s frightfully ungracious.’ Quite suddenly she was antagonistic, which frightened me, and I felt it necessary to placate her.

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ I said.

  ‘That’s better,’ she replied. ‘Why don’t you come round to us about elevenish? That way James can have a lie-in. His poor feet must be worn out.’