The Rules of Engagement

by Anita Brookner

  This was to be the pattern: I must protect her because she had so few people in whom to place her trust. Miss Milsom, a broken reed at the best of times, could not carry out this function. I thought that Betsy behaved superbly in accepting Miss Milsom as she was, without a hint of impatience or criticism, enduring the insipid food, the formulaic conversation, the weekend visits to the cinema, as a version of family life with which she had no quarrel. It was clear to me that when the time came she would support Miss Milsom in her declining days, which might not be far off, and not even suspect that the Miss Milsoms of this world would contribute very little to those whose care and training fall within their remit. Betsy owed her schooling to scholarships; she would undoubtedly win a scholarship to university, yet Miss Milsom and her disorder might stand in her way. Betsy’s loyalty, which extended to everyone she knew, including my parents, was no doubt the result of a truncated childhood, but it was no less impressive for that reason. In time that loyalty turned into a form of desire, as I was to witness. There was not then, and never would be, a wish on my part to damage that bright trust, even when it took on a damaged quality, or rather a dimension of longing, of distress, which at last revealed the original wound.

  Already our association was conducted along certain lines, and strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, this was how it continued. On one level we knew each other very well; on another I was obliged to keep my own counsel. I was able to sustain this because I was proud, but I now see that there is no pride without some underlying shame. I felt this shame rather more than my parents appeared to do; I felt it even more when I was with my peers, most of all when Betsy outlined her artless plans: a job that would enable her to care for Miss Milsom, whom she had no reason, as she saw it, to abandon. In comparison with such transparency I knew myself to be opaque. Although we were both quite unawakened—we were, I suppose, the last virginal generation—I knew that I had glimpsed complexities that were not available to Betsy, for whom everything was straightforward. I kept in mind my plans of escape, though the thought frightened me. I was young enough to want everything to stay as it was, even if I were to become a hostage to my parents, their one point of contact. In the King’s Road we wandered thoughtfully, making our way to our respective homes for lunch. We walked on in silence, until Betsy whispered, ‘Did you see that girl?’ I nodded. ‘Wasn’t she pretty? You could have your hair cut like that. It would look lovely. You’ve got such good bones.’ Of her own bones there was no mention. It was as if she could only envisage certain advantages for others. Herself she treated with a stoical good sense that even then I perceived as rather fine. I wished that I possessed something of that quality, yet I also knew that without it I might make rather more realistic progress through life than if I had been blessed, or rather cursed, with all the virtues.

  2

  NATURALLY I SAW LESS OF HER ONCE WE HAD LEFT school and gone our separate ways, but news reached me from time to time from other friends who were still in touch with her. As I had anticipated she had gone to university, where she read French and German. What I had not foreseen was Miss Milsom’s legacy of ten thousand pounds, making Betsy independent for the first time in her life. She was still in Pimlico Road; at some point she intended to sell the house and purchase a small flat for herself. She used Miss Milsom’s money to go to Paris to further her education. ‘Furthering her education’ meant freeing herself from the constraints of her upbringing, attending a few lectures and classes, but also getting her hair properly cut, acquiring a modest wardrobe, and generally learning how to be part of a group of young men and women who, flushed with the success of the student protests, spent their days in informal discussion groups before dispersing to one another’s lodgings to continue talking long into the night. This emancipation, modest though it was, for I did not suspect undue licence on her part, completed her progress into adulthood, on the surface at least. When I next saw her, at my wedding, I was impressed by the change in her appearance. Only her eyes, shining with happiness at what she perceived to be my good fortune, beamed forth her habitual messages of confidence and candour.

  ‘You look lovely,’ she said, pressing my hand.

  But it was she who looked lovely, as if she were in some sense fated to be blessed in the same way, the way signified by this reception in a London hotel, my parents’ last throw of the dice before they divorced and abandoned me to my new destiny.

  ‘Are you happy?’ she went on, her hand reluctant to let mine go.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘What a pity we can’t meet. We’ve got so much to tell each other, haven’t we? You’re going away, I suppose?’

  ‘Venice. Tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Lovely,’ she said again. ‘Will you get in touch when you get back? I’ll leave it to you; I expect you’ll be busy. Where will you be living?’

  ‘Melton Court. Those flats in South Kensington.’ My replies were becoming abrupt, uninformative.

  ‘Oh.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Will that be nice? I imagined you in Chelsea, somehow. Do you remember how we used to have coffee in the King’s Road?’

  I did indeed remember, almost nostalgically, as if harking back to a time before I was overtaken by adult concerns. In this hotel ballroom, with its tired waitresses who had seen it all before, I felt compromised, and, worse than that, without resource. I should have liked to have sat down with her, but my mother, whose own wedding it seemed to be, kept calling me to order, to greet another of her friends, to whom I had to repeat my mantra of Venice and Melton Court. In a way the extreme tedium of the occasion was a blessing in disguise; Betsy was not a person to whom I could give an unvarnished account of myself. And in any case she would not have believed me.

  I married Digby Wetherall because I was bored and unhappy, because my parents’ disaffection had eventually resulted in their separation, prior to divorce, because our house was to be sold, because I was drawn to anyone whose attitudes and affections were uncomplicated, and because he loved me. His size, his breadth, his expansive smile, would have drawn me to him in any circumstances; when he asked me to marry him (with tears in his eyes) I responded instinctively, although until then I had only thought of him as a family friend for whom my father acted as solicitor. And because without him, or someone like him, I had no future. I had drifted into the fatal habit of falling in with my mother’s plans, had indeed taken that cookery course, and had made a fairly good job of cooking for private dinner parties, as was the quaint custom in those days.

  I longed to be delivered from this chore, but was not trained to do anything else. The liberating climate of the recent past had not included me in any significant respect, though I was susceptible to the beauty of young men and longed to know them better. Digby was not a young man. He was twenty-seven years my senior, but for that very reason seemed to promise an extension of the parenthood and guardianship which my father appeared to have relinquished without regret. I knew that this father (no longer ‘my’ father) intended to remarry, a woman some years younger than my mother. This disparity in age seemed to me far more distasteful than the fact that Digby and I were separated by more than a generation. The divorce was to be ‘amicable’; in other words my mother would be financially recompensed. Whether this would restore her temper, as the prospect of it seemed to do, could have no bearing on my future life. I would be free of her scorn and her disparaging ways, free of what I thought of as my father’s indiscretions, and secure, if rather sad, in the knowledge that no more reasonable outcome could have been found to mark a change of status which I was convinced was necessary, both for their sakes and for my own. At the time I did not identify this instinct as fear.

  I did not love Digby. What I felt for him was the gratitude that unmarried women in Jane Austen feel for a prospect that might, if fortune favoured them, bring about the sort of resolution considered to be appropriate. At that dormant stage of my life I hardly knew what love was. Digby was an attractive man in his way: I hazily acknowledged the
fact that I would not object to his love-making. He was substantial in every respect, and this gave him authority. He was the director of an engineering firm across the river in Battersea. I might have taken note of the fact that I should be entitled to fairly uneventful days on my own when he was at his office. I could give up my job and spend my time largely as I liked. I should always be at home to greet him in the evenings. If I had had a lover I could have fitted him in without difficulty. But I had no thought of this. On the contrary, the attraction of this marriage was its utter seemliness. I was perhaps unduly influenced by my parents’ growing hostility to each other, and also by the fact that they had entered with something like grim enthusiasm into the destruction of their marriage. I viewed the flat in Melton Court as a place of sanctuary. Its lack of poetry I could easily accommodate.

  What was so nice about Digby was the energy he put into pleasing me. I did not consider the honeymoon in Venice as anything other than a rite of passage: what I liked was the fact that even if I did not wholly appreciate it there would be other holidays, other excursions, so that in time I would be agreeably broken in to a more expansive way of life. He had already suggested Christmas in Seville, a spring holiday in Sicily, anywhere, everywhere, until I was happy. That was the true quality of the man: unforced generosity. And that I did appreciate, for as long as we were married. I like to think, in retrospect, that I never let him down. Even when I compared his thickening frame with the sort of grace I occasionally glimpsed in others, young men whom I passed in the street, even, occasionally in the host of those dinner parties for which I provided the beef Wellington and the chocolate mousse most favoured in those days, it never occurred to me that sexual transgression was within my grasp, and indeed it took some time for this to become evident.

  None of this I could say to Betsy, on this or any other occasion, though even at the wedding I had it in mind to wish for a return of our early confidences. I would ask her to tea, in Melton Court, and ask her about her experiences in Paris and her plans for the future, and would not divulge any plans of my own, for I did not have any. I should describe our holidays, as rather boring people do, and see her wide eyes, which had perhaps anticipated revelations, take on a tinge of puzzlement. I would be seen to have left her far behind, as perhaps I had intended to, for I knew that I did not have her sort of courage, the courage to live alone among strangers in a foreign city. She would forgive me for this, but she would regret it. I myself would regret it, perhaps more so than she would. But I would not let her know this. It was the old dichotomy of pride and shame: to let her into my life would be to invite confidences, and that I would not allow.

  There was another reason. In that brief meeting at the wedding, when she pressed my hand so joyfully, I noticed something that gave me pause. She looked young, younger than I did in my finery. She was brimming over with all that she longed to tell me, with all the enthusiasm that I should have to eschew. The cause of this, I assumed, was a man, the sort of man I was not marrying, the sort of man one does not, perhaps should not, marry, the sort of man for whom marriage is not even a distant fantasy. I imagined that this was easily accomplished in Paris, for I was unduly influenced by foreign films at the time. I doubted if I could have managed the real thing. I had spent six months in Paris after leaving school, and had not much enjoyed the experience. I had lodged with a Mme Lemonnier in a gloomy flat in the Avenue des Ternes, in the so respectable seventeenth arrondissement, far from the excitements I thought of as taking place in the centre of town. Mme Lemonnier, an elderly widow, had no liking for me, nor I for her. She had expected a more lavish contribution than I was able to make, and consequently paid no attention to my comfort or wellbeing. I was expected to spend evenings quietly in my room and to be in bed by nine o’clock, or even earlier, after which time absolute silence would reign until the following morning. I was allowed to make myself coffee in the morning in her Stone Age kitchen, and after that I had to fend for myself. That meant eating out in the evenings, which I loved to do anyway, but rushing back to the flat shortly afterwards in order to beat the curfew. This was agreeable in that I got to know what the French liked to eat, and I made it a point of honour to order something different at every meal. This proved to be far more useful to me than any cookery course, and had the additional virtue of training me in some sort of independence.

  This was significant, for another reason. I had not expected to be mobbed by admirers, and became used to existing on my own. I supposed that I bore the rigours of Mme Lemonnier’s regime about me like some sort of aura of untouchability, but I also knew, or came to know, that I was not the kind of woman who sent out the right messages. This puzzled and saddened me, but I accepted it. I was quite nice-looking, and I thought I behaved like everybody else, but I began to suspect that women are either instantly recognizable as potential lovers or somehow fail the test in ways so subtle that there seems no possibility of adjustment. The result was that however many times I went to the same restaurant I was not greeted with any show of warmth and was left to eat my meal more or less unattended. I supposed that my habit of concealment made me seem self-sufficient, and my habitual pride enabled me to bear the solitude, to which I became accustomed. I spent my days in markets, learning to recognize what French housewives would buy, and those morning excursions were somehow companionable. ‘La carotte est en baisse aujourd’hui, ménagères,’ would shout the stall-holder in the rue de Buci, and in the rue de Passy (for I walked from one end of the city to the other) cheeses exposed their nakedness to the ambient air. In the afternoons I went to the cinema, and studied the sort of passion from which I calculated that I must be excluded by some sort of biological misunderstanding. The hurt I felt was also concealed, but came back to haunt me in moments of discouragement, and has in fact stayed with me ever since.

  This was no doubt the reason for my marrying Digby, without questioning the suitability of the arrangement. I knew that he was kind, and that I was more or less prepared to accommodate myself to him: my culinary skills and my untested propriety would, I thought, be adequate for whatever else might be required of me. But when I saw Betsy again, in that brief exchange at the wedding, I knew that she held the secret from which I was apparently disbarred. She had the sort of smile that went directly to the heart; it revealed not only her vulnerability, but her accessibility. I believed, or maybe I wanted to believe, that she was as untested as I was, yet I could see that there was a readiness about her, a propensity to trust, which I did not possess. A man would like her, as well as love her; intimacy would be no problem, for she would appeal to the tenderness, even to the remaining innocence of her partner. And I knew that she would instinctively reject the sort of arrangement I had entered into, in which the lover or husband is a sort of uncle, hearty and kind and protective, and the wife a perpetual niece or ward. Much as I longed to be taken in and sheltered I could see that the first sight of my husband caused Betsy’s eyes to widen with a sort of surprise. Pride came to my rescue once again as I waved her towards one of our other friends. I did not much care whether she knew anybody else. I was obscurely assaulted, for the moment, by some of the regret and pity she obviously felt, until I summoned a smile and drank another glass of champagne. ‘Careful, dearest,’ murmured my husband, but he pressed my hand. He too had noticed what I had noticed, and he felt for me. As I say, he was a man of the utmost generosity.

  And I could see from her untarnished gaze that she was still the girl who had declaimed Racine’s lines—‘Que le jour recommence, et que le jour finisse/Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice’ —and that she would, in the same exalted spirit, accept all love’s challenges, and remain just as faithful as if she had committed herself from the moment her eyes had met those of her lover, whoever he was, and however unsuitable he might turn out to be. I could also see that her appeal would be to young men not much older than herself, that she would not suit a man like my husband who, at his age, knew what he was prepared to settle for. Digby would no
t care to rely on ecstasy as his principal fare. He preferred, as I had come to realize, a settled relationship in a suitable environment. He had been married before, in his thirties; his wife had died giving birth to their child, who had also died. Therefore I was able to concede that he too must be indulged, protected, never again exposed to tragedy or loss. He had, as the French say, assumed, taken it upon himself: he did not refer to those events except to inform me of them. During that exchange his expression had hardened, which warned me that this matter was to remain a secret. So that for ever after we were doomed to be on our guard. He trusted me and I wanted to be worthy of his trust. Whereas the woman that Betsy was, or was destined to be, would share such a secret and would be allowed to do so.

  When I had learned that she was to be based in Paris I had given her Mme Lemonnier’s address, knowing that she was just the kind of daughterly personality to make this bitter old lady happy. That was another odd thing about Betsy: she had all the daughterly virtues, although she had never in any sense been a daughter. This had not marked her, although it may have left her vulnerable to whatever affection she was offered. She too may have longed to be taken in—perhaps all women share this archaic longing. Given the opportunity she would treasure her position in some sort of hierarchy, some sort of household. This in no way derogated from her disposition as a lover; indeed the one might have enhanced the other. And yet I could see that she would not be suited to the sort of hierarchy I should soon be part of: settled, middle-class, respectable. Her aspirations would be more poetic, her chosen co-ordinates more ideal. She would be ready to embrace a family, but only if every member of that family was beautiful, rare, exceptional, enjoying a status far above the ordinary. Whereas my taciturnity would make me more adaptable, more realistic, able to call on those reserves I had perfected while sitting in those cafés and restaurants or wandering about the city, finding some sort of peace in the indifference of passers-by and the beauty of the material world. As far as I was concerned I was being given an opportunity to share in that world, and throughout that onerous wedding reception I reminded myself rather forcefully of this fact.