Look at Me

by Anita Brookner

  I set out for Miss Morpeth’s flat on that Sunday afternoon in a mixed mood of deep exasperation and unpleasant clear-sightedness. The exasperation was merely the ultimate manifestation of my feeling for, or rather against, Miss Morpeth, and the perpetuation of this ridiculous duty for which I had not volunteered. As one sometimes tries harder with people whom one heartily dislikes, if only in order to hide that dislike from the other person and from oneself, I tried exceptionally hard with Miss Morpeth. I sacrificed one Sunday afternoon a month to her, and I answered the same questions every time I saw her. I heard the same observations about Dr Leventhal’s ultimate unreliability and what Miss Morpeth had said to the Director when she had been invited to sit on the board which had appointed him. I ate the same cake, which I did not like; I spent the same amount of time in the same frowsty room in which the windows were never opened. I washed up the same cups and saucers at the same moment of the day and waited while Miss Morpeth put them away; I heard the same bolts and chains being secured, in the same order, before I felt free to decamp and run down the stairs. As against all this strain and endurance on my part, I did not see that Miss Morpeth was making much of an effort. She clearly found me unsatisfactory, both as a librarian and as a human being, and her resentment of the duties she had to perform for my benefit, such as making the tea, showed in the very stiffness of her walk and the jerkiness of her speech. Besides, I felt, it was time she went to Australia. Somehow I could not bear to go through that particular conversation again.

  The unpleasant clear-sightedness of which I spoke came from my determination to make Miss Morpeth and indeed everyone else - pay for the penalties they exacted from me. If Miss Morpeth was going to bore me stiff, then Miss Morpeth was going to be used as material. I would write Miss Morpeth into my system of things: she would become a ‘character’, and in due course I would, by virtue of this very process, gain the upper hand. As I tramped through the park, turning a hard, bright stare on the few passers-by, I was busy writing in my head a deadpan but devastating account of getting Miss Morpeth on to the aeroplane for Melbourne, starting with the purchase of the lightweight luggage, the alerting of Nick (of Nick? I had almost forgotten him), the drive to the airport, with conversation verging on the farcical on both sides (at this point I realized that I would have to go along with them), and then what? I would have to arrange for something unexpected to happen to Miss Morpeth. A romance? Difficult to imagine, given the elastic stocking and the sad green skirt. But if she were to meet someone equally unprepossessing, someone, yes, like Dr Leventhal, I thought I could bring off some kind of rapprochement, since I knew them both so well. The fact that they disliked each other so much in real life would give my authorial tone an extra piquancy. Then, I suppose, having brought them together, I could send them out to a sunny if tentative future together in the Antipodes.

  At this point my new sourness curdled in my throat and I had to stop and take a deep breath before I could go on. I found that I could not contemplate the union of two people, even in fiction, without the ground threatening to give way beneath me. Were I to think of two living human beings, ideally matched, and were I to catch sight of them, looking at each other with love, I think I should have died of it. I stood there in the park, on a grey Sunday afternoon, and I fought for control as the tears filled my eyes. That world, in which I was to have no part, how it hurt me! How it reminded me! And how great were the dangers to which I was now exposed, since that defection… But my vision was so blurred that I took a pull at myself and stared steadily through my tears until they disappeared, and remembered that I could, if I so willed it, gain some sort of a position, lending myself to events in order to control them at a later date. It was, in fact, the only tactic left open to me, and I had better start practising it straight away. All in all, I told myself briskly, this visit to Miss Morpeth was an excellent opportunity. And most timely. For on the following evening I was due to dine with the Frasers, and no doubt with James, and my defences were to be impregnable.

  So as I stood in the slightly dingy beige and green hallway of Miss Morpeth’s block of flats I performed some sort of surgery on myself and eliminated all feelings save those of mockery and judgment. I registered somewhere, but far away in my mind, that this was a terrible and decisive moment, and that I might never again recover my wholeness. But that wholeness now seemed to me so damaged that it was simply a question of safety, of survival, to protect the ruins, much as certain areas of faulty pavement are cordoned off while workmen heat and melt tar for resurfacing. If I could not ordain what went on below the surface, I would see that what was presented to the public gaze was unmarked. I seemed to have to go through this whole cycle of despair and resolution on an average of once every five minutes, and as I fished Miss Morpeth’s Christmas present - an expensive silk scarf - out of my bag, I had to will the weakness away yet again. But by the time I rang the bell I was on the look-out once more, and I was prepared to be deadly.

  In my harshness the steps that dragged along the corridor to meet me seemed slower than usual, the hands that unlocked the chains and bolts more torpid. There was even a palpable hesitation before the door was opened, as if the springs that animated Miss Morpeth were wearing out. Determined to chronicle her waning energy with all vigour, I composed my expression into one of smiling ease and found myself gazing at a face I had not seen before. It was certainly Miss Morpeth’s face, but so antagonistic that I felt a certain confusion, as if my new initiative, made known to no one but myself, had in fact been taken from me and appropriated by someone else. I was so startled by the sight of Miss Morpeth’s face, which had been enlivened with two roughly circular dabs of red on the cheekbones and a crooked smear of red on the lips, and which, tilted upwards, bore a look of weary resolution more suitable, I thought, to my own position than to hers, that I said, instinctively, ‘Are you all right?’

  She said, ‘Perfectly all right, thank you, Frances’, and relented, or so it seemed to me, and opened the door fully, and motioned me to go in. I heard her padding along behind me, although she was usually in front of me, and as the kettle whistled in the kitchen she left me to see to the tea, and for once I had to go and sit down alone in her pale green sitting room, and to wait for her as a child waits for its tea. At that moment it struck me that that was exactly how Miss Morpeth saw me, as a spoilt child, who takes its ease of movement for granted, and who sulks when bored, and who, when released from a tiresome duty, will run away and play all the more strenuously because its energy has been momentarily checked. As Miss Morpeth wheeled in the trolley, I rose to help her, but she said, quite curtly, ‘There’s no need,’ and so I sat down again.

  That some change had taken place was quite evident, not only from the colour applied haphazardly to Miss Morpeth’s face, but from the rough edges to the usually immaculately cut bread and butter and from the fact that the cellophane paper which had wrapped up the Battenberg cake was folded by the side of the plate, waiting to envelop the cake again immediately I had taken my ritual slice. Into an increasingly dense silence I found myself offering items of information for Miss Morpeth’s attention. In this way I told her at very great length about the epidemic of ‘flu and the toll it had taken at the Library. I told her about Dr Leventhal’s cold, about Dr Simek’s cold, and about the little party we had had, and how Mrs Halloran had enjoyed it rather too much. There was no reaction from Miss Morpeth. Then I told her that Nick had had an article published in a learned journal, to which she said, ‘Have you brought it?’ and I had to confess that I had not. After that there was another silence. Rather desperately I told her about my short story, and this was a measure of my disarray, for I had intended her for the same fate as the fictional Dr Leventhal. Predictably, she was not much interested in this either. I think she regarded it as she might have a child starting to show off .1, in my turn, and no doubt perversely, felt as if she were not pulling her weight in the new mode of existence that I had devised for myself.

  It was b
y now quite dark and conversation had come to a dead halt. In desperation, I said, ‘I suppose you will be going to Australia shortly after Christmas? You must be longing to get away from this dreary winter. And it must be high summer in Melbourne. I do envy you!’

  At this point Miss Morpeth, who had been staring straight in front of her, brought her head round and said, dully, ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘Oh, but why?’ I cried. ‘You’ve been looking forward to it for so long. And your niece..

  ‘I can’t fly,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, but you must,’ I urged her. ‘Everyone is scared. I am myself. Every time. And anyway, there are pills…, She flapped her hand wearily, in order to shut me up. ‘I can’t fly because the doctor says my heart won’t stand it. I have left it too late.’

  These words frightened me, although Miss Morpeth herself was quite composed, having lived alone with this knowledge and this disappointment, in her pale green room, long before I had arrived on my errand of perverted self-interest. I stared at her and I saw that the colour applied so indifferently to her face covered skin that was more greyish-yellow than I had seen it before, that the loose flesh of her throat was more pronounced, and the rope-like blue veins on the backs of her hands darker and more prominent. Then my eyes fell to her ankles, which I saw to be rigid and swollen, and then back to her face, which was drawn. Her eyelids were drooping over her dull eyes; there were purplish marks on her face. Her hand, which was holding the lighter we had given her when she left, was trembling.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ I said, slowly. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Why should you?’ She flashed me a look of contempt. ‘We never talked about such things. We always, talked about the Library. And I tried to be interested, because I knew that was what you came for. You meant to be kind, I know.’

  ‘I had no idea..

  ‘Frankly, Frances, I am sick of the Library. I do not care what Dr Leventhal gets up to. I never cared for the man. And as for Nick… Well, he has never been to see me. Nor has his wife. I asked them both to tea more than once, but they were always too busy. Do you imagine I find all this amusing? Ill-mannered people.’ She was beginning to shake.

  I said, ‘Oh, I think they are…’

  ‘I know what they are,’ she said angrily. ‘Do you think I don’t understand them? I am simply not interesting enough for them to bother about, or that is what they have given me to understand. They look on me as a boring old woman. Nothing to do with them. Nothing,’ she repeated, as two tears were suddenly released from the corners of her eyes and fell on to her sand-coloured cardigan.

  ‘I don’t care about them,’ she went on, her voice grating, ‘but I shall never see Angela again,’ and her mouth quivered. ‘She was the one I wanted to see. The rest of you meant nothing to me. Nothing.’ She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and applied it to the corners of her mouth. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated.

  How odd, I reflected, while searching for something to say, that it should be Miss Morpeth of all people to speak the truth about her feelings, while the rest of us, more fortunate, less impeded, never seemed to find the occasion to do so, or perhaps avoided such occasions lest we should hear something too damaging for our selfesteem to bear. I looked at Miss Morpeth, now tearing angrily at the corner of her handkerchief, her mouth making small gobbling movements, and I saw that maybe the instinct to avoid the truth was a healthy one, for if one were to give way to such a display of naked need how could one ever recover any semblance of adulthood? To have the world see one in such a state of disorder seemed to me at that moment so terrible that I began once again to revise my estimate of human behaviour and to see new virtues in civilized dissimulation. One must, at all events, keep up appearances. And as Miss Morpeth slowly righted herself, and I sat there warily, waiting for it to be safe to leave, I made a vow that I must never draw attention to myself in that way, must never cry my need. Dry-eyed, I wondered how I might divert attention from my emptiness. And at that moment I knew that I must see the Frasers at once, that very evening, for they had the ability to bring these unmanageable emotions down to a level of curiosity, of gratification, that might, even yet, include me.

  As Miss Morpeth gave a sigh and tucked her handkerchief away up her sleeve, I stood up, for it was clear that my presence was no longer required, and also that this would be my last visit. Rather shamefaced, I handed over the little parcel containing the scarf that I had bought for her, for I could find no Christmas wishes with which to accompany it. She nodded her head in acknowledgment, then gave a brief and quite mirthless laugh, which rather startled me, but which I understood when she went to the drawer of a tallboy and produced from it a parcel roughly the same shape and consistency as my own and evidently containing the same sort of silk scarf. In our choice of Christmas presents, we had evidently thought of each other in exactly the same way. The thought chilled me to the bone.

  I ran down the stairs, to escape the sound of the bolts and chains being secured, and flew out of the fusty hallway into a chilly but dry and slightly hazy night. It was only half-past five, but it felt like bedtime. In my anxiety to reconnect myself with some sort of existence that might allow me a different fate from the one which Miss Morpeth evidently foresaw for me, I stopped a taxi and told the driver to take me to the King’s Road.

  As I ran up the stairs to the Frasers’ flat, I only knew, very imprecisely, that I wanted to be with them, that I wanted their friendship. More than that, I needed their viability, their selfishness - no, that was not it: their self-interest, their appetite; these were natural and desirable qualities, and I must learn to cultivate them. Or, rather, I must learn to acquire them. I must be near these people, I must be like them. They had everything to teach me. And as for James, I must try to be what was acceptable to him. To them. My heart was bursting with all these intentions when I reached their front door.

  There was a muffled noise of melodramatic American voices, and when the door was opened it was by Nick, his face quite blank, and his attention still held by whatever he had been watching on television.

  ‘Fanny,’ he said, in belated recognition, as his face momentarily cleared. ‘Come in. Quickly.’

  I sank down on to the sofa, behind Alix and Nick, who had drawn their chairs up to the television. Between them, on a small table, was an extremely large box of chocolates, and their hands dipped into this as if quite detached from their conscious minds. The throbbing American voices were partially obscured for me by the sound of chocolate papers being scrunched and discarded, nuts being bitten into, and the occasional shorthand remark - ‘Ginger. Do you want it?’ - which signified to me a state of enjoyment I could only contemplate. Between their heads, past their rapidly moving jaws, I could see fragments of a film in black and white. A beautiful woman in a strapless evening dress was saying goodbye to someone on the terrace of a building. Her lover’s kiss reached me in a mutilated version as Nick swivelled round, handed me something, and said,’Almond cluster.’Then, as he swivelled back again, I could see the beautiful woman, obviously heartbroken, running out of the restaurant or hotel or whatever it was and towards a car with a very long bonnet. The chauffeur, dressed in what looked like a field-marshal’s uniform, opened the door and then leaned in to wrap the passenger in a fur rug. As the car drove away I could see the beautiful woman’s face, mirroring several sorrowful emotions, staring out of the window. This was apparently the end of the film, although I very much wanted to know what happened next.

  Nick and Alix stirred like sleepers. Nick switched off the set, switched on the light, and pushed his chair back. Alix said, ‘H’m’, and lit a cigarette. Both looked bloated with a sort of Sunday lethargy that never seemed to be available to me. Being with them, and watching their repleteness, was the next best thing to being replete myself.

  ‘What was it about?’ I asked, cautiously, for they seemed quite silent with emotion. It was curious how they always reacted to the spectacle of rich people in distress.

  �
��Crap, really,’ said Nick, clearing his throat.

  ‘How can you say that?’ Alix protested. ‘She loved him and she gave him up. That’s a pretty serious matter in my book. Hello, Fanny. You look cold. Shall we have a cup of coffee? Nick? Put the kettle on, darling.’

  In her contemplation of that fictional renunciation that she had just witnessed, Alix seemed quite luminous with understanding, with compassion. I stared at her, wondering what on earth was going on inside her head, what personal feelings and desires were being given their due. What alibi would she have, I wondered. But when I thought back to Miss Morpeth tearing at her handkerchief, with that tiny regressive movement of her fingers, I shuddered inwardly and allowed Alix all the leeway she would have claimed for herself.

  As Nick brought in the coffee, I watched him unobtrusively, taking quick oblique glances, wondering how in the world he fitted into this scheme of things. My earlier understanding of him, as an embodiment of that ideal and fearless male principle, roaming the earth, mentally exacting or enacting his droit de seigneur, had undergone some sort of modification. Nick now seemed to me to be more passive, his strength subsumed into that of his wife. Certainly his attitude towards my supposed physical innocence had been paternalistic, even voyeuristic, perhaps, exciting enough to add an edge to my more general pleasure at that time,- now lost, alas… His attitude towards James had always been quite calm, as if, having introduced him into the household, brought him into the circle of his friends, he might now take a rest from active intervention and simply watch the results. I had noticed that although he made the greater effort to charm at the beginning of an acquaintance, he was quite content to leave the rest to Alix. After the initial moves had been made, he was almost absentminded. What his present position was I simply could not comprehend. Perhaps this ideal couple was so superhuman in its arrangements and its understandings that whatever had taken place would have been beyond my comprehension in any event. I envied them. I felt once more my emptiness, my fear, but mentally I saluted them. Simply for doing what they wanted to do. Whatever that was. Whomever they used. I wanted to be like them. When I felt otherwise, I remembered the silk scarf in its Christmas paper, a present from Miss Morpeth, and, pondering the dread significance of our exchange of gifts, I resolved to go forward, no matter what the consequences might be.