The Rules of Engagement

by Anita Brookner

  At other times I felt distressed when pierced by a shaft of unwelcome insight, for I knew that Digby was in many ways superior to Edmund, even knew that Edmund was a worldly character, aware of his entitlements and indifferent to any form of censure. His handsome appearance and attributes had in some fashion secured him permission to act as he pleased; this too seemed to me to be a law of nature. And he had after all not put anyone in jeopardy: his children were healthy, his position in life assured, his wife apparently complaisant. On this last point I chose not to ask questions, either of myself or of Edmund, who would, I knew, frown at what he would consider a breach of etiquette. At that same moral tribunal I would be obliged to acknowledge that her cynicism, her disabused indolence, might have been earned the hard way, that it was entirely possible that she knew everything, that the two of them were parties to an arrangement that I could hardly understand. I was relatively inexperienced, and remarkably stupid for my age. I was in fact older than those girls I passed in the street, but too young to identify with those other women with their shopping baskets and their no doubt spotless consciences. I was too busy living in the present, making my own calculations of occupation and urgency before setting out for Britten Street and the exalted time I was able to spend in the garden, as a prelude to the evening’s fulfilment.

  Therefore it was with a feeling of supreme annoyance, as if my movements had been unnaturally checked, that I was waylaid on the stairs to my own flat by Mrs Crook, whose invitation to coffee I could hardly refuse. It was after all eleven o’clock in the morning, and I had time to roast the chicken which I would leave for Digby. Yet I felt hampered and distracted by the invitation, and followed her unwillingly into her flat, which was a mirror image of our own. I felt that my safety depended on my keeping my distance from this kind of woman, from the species of which Mrs Crook was an outstanding representative.

  ‘One hardly sees you these days,’ she said. ‘Not that one ever saw much of you. Such a private little person.’ This last remark was faintly disparaging, as if she had decided that private little persons were not qualified to provide much in the way of interest for persons such as herself, whose company she thought worthy of greater deference than I was likely to offer. Meekly I took my seat in her overstuffed drawing-room, while she occupied herself with the coffee (which I knew would be too weak) in the kitchen. I calculated that I had half an hour before I could be back at home to take Edmund’s telephone call informing me of his own movements and of his availability that evening. He was not always free; demands on his time were numerous, and he sometimes had to see a client after work. This hardly mattered; though I was disappointed when we were not able to meet, the call reassured me that the connection was still secure, and I knew that his voice would power me for the rest of the day. I might go to the flat in any case: those afternoons in the garden were now a part of my life, perhaps the part I most treasured. They had an enchantment, a stillness of their own after the adjustments of the morning. They constituted a time in which I was free to contemplate my emerging and authentic self, a self which had been obscured by the years of careful living which I could now see for what they had been: erroneous, fallacious, and with a stifling quality I was ready to condemn unreservedly.

  Mrs Crook settled herself in her chair and prepared to give me her full attention, or rather prepared to let me give my full attention to the honour of this summons. She was eighty years old, an age which I was not inclined to contemplate. Large, slow, and formidable, she was something of a presence in the building. Few people found her sympathetic but all paid her a certain amount of respect, owing largely to her unshakeable conviction of her own importance. She was, like most of her kind, a widow, who probably spent lonely days but was careful to disguise any loneliness she might have felt and to dismiss the activities of others as unimportant. She had travelled widely with the second of her two husbands, and for a time, in the early days of my marriage, had queried me about our holiday arrangements: had we managed to find the hotel she had recommended, and if so had we remembered to give her best wishes to the proprietor? Remarks such as these had furnished what conversation we were obliged to have. My husband thought her admirable, as he did anything of a settled and recognizable nature, but I perceived a curiosity in her that I did little to encourage. My reluctance had been noted. She was not disposed in my favour.

  ‘And how are you getting on?’ she now said. ‘Still going to those classes of yours?’ This was dangerous ground. ‘Not that I suppose I should understand a word of them,’ she continued. ‘I don’t understand much of what is going on these days. The world has changed so much.’

  I agreed. I recognized this for the rhetorical performance it was likely to be, and prepared to give her twenty minutes at the outside before making my escape.

  ‘What has happened to manners?’ she demanded, without waiting for an answer. ‘Tradition? Standards? All those dreadful women clamouring to be heard, making fools of themselves. What has happened to morality?’

  ‘I suppose certain changes are inevitable,’ I felt emboldened to reply. ‘More women working . . .’

  ‘That’s another thing. In my day women were looked after by men. I never saw any reason to quarrel with that. My mind was as good as my husbands’. Yet I would never have dreamed of protesting, of arguing with them, of demanding more than my due.’

  ‘I think that women want more than that,’ I said. I was playing into her hands.

  ‘And what good will that do them? They will find out too late, when all the men have deserted them. I despair of my sex,’ she said, with a complacent little laugh. ‘Not that I have anything in common with this new breed. Women knew how to behave when I was young. Oh, do you take sugar? It’s in the kitchen, would you be kind enough . . .? You know where it is.’

  On the kitchen table I saw the pitiable results of her morning’s purchases: biscuits, a sponge cake, a small loaf, tea bags, instant coffee, a packet of ham, and a small oozing bag of tomatoes. Not enough there to give one an appetite for life, and yet she seemed vigorous enough, with a monstrous vigour that enabled her to condemn anything of which she did not approve. I could envisage her frugal lunch: a slice of ham and a tomato, washed down with more of the horrible coffee. She probably still had a few cronies, would venture out again in the afternoon to see one or other of them, would rely on an invitation to dinner which would satisfy her nutritional requirements until the following day. She retired early; we could hear her radio booming through the bedroom wall. At some point she would fall asleep until the sound roused her. Then we would hear her make her way to the kitchen for a cup of tea. Her irregular progress was audible until she settled down again, round about midnight. The thought of her life filled me with horror. I did not intend ever to become like her.

  ‘At least you look after Digby properly,’ she said, as I returned with the sugar. She took a proprietorial interest in my husband, as she would do with all men, asserting her rights as an unreconstructed woman of the old school. ‘I dare say your mother brought you up properly. One can always tell. These women [that is to say, all women unlike herself] don’t seem to have had that advantage. As for the young . . .’ She lifted both hands in a helpless little gesture which nevertheless implied a wealth of condemnation. ‘Not that you’re all that young. But you seem to have settled down quite well.’

  This was calculated to bring me out, as she would no doubt have put it. But it seemed that I was not of sufficient interest to engage her attention further. Either that or she was bored. She was certainly disappointed. My reticence was a sign that I was of negligible quality, unworthy of any sort of husband, let alone the one with whom she had exchanged playful comments before I had been imported onto the scene. Though I had occupied that scene for some time she seemed to view me as temporary, rather like a servant who might not shape up to the job. She was unaware that her dislike of me was quite plain. I was equally aware that she must never discover the reasons for it. For somewhere, at some undis
turbed level of her brain, she recognized sexual activity on my part, though she might not identify it as the most significant of the differences between us. And I was not paying her homage. At a very deep level, even deeper than the first, she made the connection between the presence of the one and the absence of the other.

  ‘Mrs Crook, you must excuse me,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘This has been delightful.’ I did not return the invitation. Instead I offered to shop for her on my morning outings. This may have been a kind offer, but it was not a genuine one. I was anxious to leave, but was aware that I should have to make some concessions to the spirit of the occasion. She viewed me with a marked lack of indulgence. In my imagination I could hear my telephone ringing unanswered.

  The incident had unsettled me. I had been brought face to face with an unwelcome phenomenon, the prospect of a woman from whom emotional sustenance had been removed and who had settled for viciousness as a comforting substitute. Her flat had been filled with that particular miasma, and everything in it—the wheezing cushions into which she had sunk, the uncared-for kitchen, deemed fit occupation for a notional domestic, even the lowly shopping—had all signified an absence which she had tried to fill with her lofty observations about the decline of standards. That these were somehow directed against myself, still technically blameless, had not deceived me, though they may have deceived Mrs Crook. Sooner or later my secret would be uncovered, not by my husband but by the likes of Mrs Crook and her jealous perceptions. I feared the power of women, though I was one myself. The only harmless woman I knew was Betsy, whom I suddenly, acutely missed. Not that it would have done to have Betsy as a witness; she would not have understood the dreadful attraction that bound me to Edmund. For Betsy, love was only admissible if it were poetic, a redeeming feature informed by the highest emotion. Her own love affair was, like all her endeavours, largely a matter of aspiration. There was no possibility of my sharing my thoughts with Betsy, although I should have liked to discuss my situation with another woman, a woman essentially uncorrupted, who might not understand but whose sympathy would be guaranteed by that very transparency which would honour my confession (for confession it would be), with all the natural simplicity she had managed to retain. She would no doubt do her best to dignify it with the appropriate classical quotation, out of loyalty, out of a desire to reconnect with matters so evidently absent from my own preoccupations. Or would my preoccupations more properly be identified as obsessions? My own nature must have held dark secrets, which were dark only because they were not shared. In the course of those evenings with Edmund all conscience dissolved and I possessed a conviction that I was acting in accordance with my true nature. In the intervals I was conscious of a fall from grace which I was obliged to register, though to condemn it seemed not to be within my power.

  In the kitchen the air vibrated as if the phone had just stopped ringing. I had missed his call, and it was Thursday; on Friday he would join his family in the country and I should not see him until the following week. I dreaded the weekends, which were filled with subterfuges of the kind designed to uphold my stance as a loyal wife. I should be deprived of my afternoons in the garden, watching the children until they went home for their tea, waiting—and this was the only circumstance in which waiting could be counted a pleasure—for the time when I would slip my key in the door and will my waiting to end. The arrangement no longer seemed questionable to me, nor did the fact that Edmund had designed it, initially, for others, for anyone who might willingly join him there, become a partner in the kind of deception I had embraced. I had a moment of fear: was he therefore entirely cynical in his approach to me? This I dismissed: I had met his glance and sustained it, besides which there could be no other truth. Before I knew him I would no doubt have expressed disapproval of a man who kept such an establishment. Now in an odd way I approved of it as an indication of a man’s sexual entrepreneurship. And the benefit was all mine. Nevertheless I was obliged to recognize the changes it had brought about in my own nature. For instance I no longer dreamed. My dream life, which had been vivid, had been cancelled by the vividness of events. If I dreamed at all it was in the daytime, sitting in that garden. Nor did I read as much as formerly, though my mind was still obstinately stuffed with Victorian prototypes. This had been kindly looked upon by my husband as a harmless quirk which did me credit. My attempts to introduce such subjects as I thought interesting at our dinner parties must have made me seem awkward, tiresome. I blushed now in retrospect at what must have been tolerance on the part of our guests.

  I surveyed the flat, which had been Digby’s flat, and therefore part of my mother’s plan for my future when our house in Bourne Street was put on the market. Despite her worldly opinions she was as unreconstructed as Mrs Crook, believing that a woman’s principal need was to be looked after by a man. I accepted the dull flat for what it was, a no doubt enviable property to which, in some unimaginable future, I should not lay claim. At that time, and that could only be when Digby died, I should leave and go somewhere else, perhaps back to Paris, where my former morose habits would reassert themselves. This prospect no longer frightened me. I had been given a certificate of viability, and it would guarantee my future. I knew that, in comparison with Edmund, I had few assets of my own. This was the one factor that seriously divided us. Sometimes I felt poor when I was with him, and this was a genuine shadow on my happiness. I doubted whether this aspect of the affair was apparent to him, or, if it was, whether it would have made any difference to my status.

  I could not spend the rest of this disappointing day indoors. I decided to take a book and go to the garden, out of loyalty, out of longing, not out of exasperation. Instead I went to a café round the corner and ate a full English breakfast in the guise of lunch, swallowing every greasy mouthful with something like genuine enthusiasm. This was another change in my behaviour, a preference for gross and speedy satisfactions. Uncomfortably full, I walked to the garden and chose a seat from which I could no longer see the windows of the flat. But I was restless; without the prospect of seeing Edmund I was reduced to pure vagrancy. Finally I went home, roasted the chicken, peeled the potatoes, washed the salad, and sat down to wait not for my lover but for my husband. That husband was agreeably surprised to find me sitting in my usual chair, with an open book in my hands.

  ‘No class tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘Cancelled,’ I replied.

  After we had eaten he went into the other room as usual, and switched on the television. When I joined him I found him asleep, a scene of passion beaming out unnoticed. When two characters joined in a violent embrace I switched it off.

  ‘I was watching that,’ Digby protested mildly.

  ‘No, you weren’t. Your eyes were closed.’

  ‘Oh, I knew what was going on anyway. One always does.’

  I looked at him uncertainly. But there was nothing in his mild gaze to give me pause, and after a few minutes I went to bed, his remark dying quietly on the night air.

  5

  IF I HAD LEARNED ANYTHING IT WAS THAT THE HIGHEST virtue—honour, dignity—can be subverted or negated in an instant, given the right stimulus. Sublime behaviour exists now only in the pages of Betsy’s beloved Racine. I also learned that nature, that great benefactor, exacts its punishment for all the bounties hitherto enjoyed, without a thought of worth or entitlement, and that all life ends badly. ‘Peacefully, in his sleep,’ one reads, but what of the preceding hours or minutes? Shakespeare has it over Racine here, and Hamlet’s doubts and fears speak for all of us. It is these rather than the statecraft that the seventeenth-century classicists brought to the consideration of these matters that resonate in the mind. I also learned that it is the gods who are in control, and that their pagan indifference can be visited on any life, no matter how correctly that life has been lived. I have come to believe that there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that comes at the end, the sheer regret that one’s life is finished, that one’s failures remain indelible
and one’s successes illusory. I also believe that there occurs a moment of renunciation, when one is visited by the knowledge that time is up, that there is to be no more time, or that if a little time remains it will be lived posthumously, and with a sense of pure loss. This is also, conversely, an invitation to play Russian roulette with one’s life and affections while one has the time, to take chances, to defy safety. But of course one no longer has the time to do that. The ability—the capacity—to take chances has been lost. All is subject henceforth to the iron decree of mortality.

  The first of these propositions I had been able to verify for myself. The second came to me by way of information relayed by my mother during one of her brief visits to London from the villa in Spain she had bought with a further injection of money from my father and which she shared with a woman friend. I looked at her, perplexed, unwilling to accede to these morbid matters which she seemed to have embraced without prior warning. It was true that I no longer saw her on a regular basis; had I done so I should have been prepared for the change in her appearance, which I could not quite analyse. Her face seemed to have changed its shape, to be hollowed out on one side, and her lips were slightly puckered, like the lips of a very old woman. But she was not old, or rather she was old by my standards, in her late fifties, and still, as far as I knew, unimpaired. Yet the altered shape of her features, so different from the carefully nurtured appearance with which I had grown up, together with her doleful pronouncements, brought an unwelcome sense of danger, of further changes still to come, which I found unwelcome.