The Rules of Engagement

by Anita Brookner

  At first I thought she meant a lover, until I realized that there was no love left in her make-up either for herself or for anyone else. This demonstrated to me the extreme dislocation of my own family life. I did not wish my parents back—my fear was that my mother would suggest moving in with me— but I should have welcomed the opportunity of moving in with someone else’s family. There was no family I knew who could perform this function for me. Nor was I willing to take on my mother. My father had sent a letter, to which I should eventually have to reply. I had no wish to see him either. Nor had his present wife any wish to see me. My mother’s disaffection had apparently been handed on to her. Either that, or he had the knack of marrying the wrong sort of woman. I felt immensely distanced from both of them. What I did notice, unwillingly, was my mother’s increasing solipsism. She seemed more anxious to talk about her own plight than of mine. I took this to be emblematic of my new reduced status. Either that or she was succumbing to the distress of advancing age, which was not yet my affair.

  ‘So look after yourself,’ I heard her say. ‘Don’t neglect your appearance. Take care of your teeth. Nobody could say I’ve let myself go. Not that there’s anyone here to take a blind bit of notice. Still, I have my pride, or what’s left of it. Best foot forward, and all that. Lots of love, and I’ll see you soon.’

  This was Wednesday. I had somehow to get myself through to Friday, the day of the funeral. I had never been to a funeral before: at my age, still young by any reasonable standard, I did not know anyone who had died. I assumed that after the brief ceremony people would come back to the flat, that I should have to acknowledge their good wishes and express a gratitude which would put the final seal on Digby’s death. In the mirror I looked haggard and unkempt, the result not only of my vagrancy but of my recent obsession. I felt genuine shame on my own behalf, as if I had woken up after a period of madness. I saw that I had behaved badly, and also that I had behaved out of character. For surely I was not a bad person? I had accepted what had been offered; now I saw that what had been offered had been insufficient, and worse, that I had over-invested in something that was intrinsically worthless, or at best of no consequence.

  My feeling of shame extended even to Edmund, who had no use for it. The excuses I had made for him were, I saw, unnecessary, for I had no way of knowing how he felt. His initial enthusiasm, born of speculation, was now exhausted, and my all too eager response was, for the moment, extinguished. I viewed my behaviour with horror, a horror that extended to my nightly wanderings. In truth these had only occupied the few days when nothing appeared to be happening, but they had felt enormous, as if establishing a pattern that I should be obliged to follow for the rest of my life. Now, in this brief interlude of lucidity, I saw that I must behave differently, that my safety, and indeed my sanity, depended on a change of course. I should have to obey the rules, observe the social norms, not those whose pleasure it was to defy them. I saw the rules as safeguards. If one obeyed them one would be entitled to ask for help; if not, not. I even saw that Edmund should obey the rules, that he was a fortunate man who had never doubted his good fortune. There was no need for me to make allowances, either for Edmund or for myself. I thought in terms of transgression, an idea I had not previously entertained. Self-indulgence, such as we both had felt, was perhaps a weakness, and not, as I had thought, a strength. A distant contempt was beginning to make itself felt. I went into the bedroom, put clean linen on the bed, removed Digby’s glasses from his bedside table, and took them into the study. His place was there now. He would not haunt me, but I had learned about goodness from him, and that, I hoped, would be his legacy to me. The memory of his benevolence would surely protect me in the days to come.

  I tidied the flat, prepared it to receive visitors, checked to see whether I had enough coffee, sherry, funeral baked meats. What were these exactly? I resolved to do some shopping, issue into the streets at a normal hour, behave like a woman of my class and type, almost old enough to conform to the pattern set for me. I had grown thin and pale, strange considering all the fresh air I had had. But the air of those nights had seemed mephitic compared with the light of this new day. The sun that bathed the restored prospect was beneficent, as beneficent as the new order I was meant to observe. The only aberrant thought that occurred to me was that Edmund might be at the funeral, might even come back to the flat. He had been associated with Digby’s business, which would now, I supposed, have to be sold. He knew the extent of Digby’s investments, held his portfolio, if that was what stockbrokers did. I supposed I might be quite comfortably off, another legacy from Digby. All this could be dealt with by a solicitor. Nevertheless I did not want to be seen in my present distressed state. I made an appointment with the hairdresser, took my keys, and with a feeling almost of curiosity went out into the normal day.

  It was a radiant autumn, one that inspired kind thoughts, I am sure, certainly kind smiles on the faces I encountered. The early mists that had shrouded me on recent mornings had dispersed; the sun now had a certain warmth. There was abundant colour, in the trees, in the dahlias and asters at the corner flower stall, yet one knew that all this was brief, subject to the iron rule of the coming winter. These now were my surroundings, and I should never leave them. I was light-headed, with hunger, I supposed, yet I did not like to stop at a café, was in fact not quite ready to do so. I was enveloped in something like modesty, viewed my notion of going back to Paris with trepidation, almost with alarm. Such adventures were appropriate to the very young, just as my love affair, I supposed, was appropriate to early middle age. I was after all no longer a girl, and the day would come when I might be glad not to have to be subjected to strenuous activities such as those which had taken place in Britten Street. I felt that I had suffered two losses, that of Digby and that of Edmund, for I did not see how the example of the one could fail to affect my opinion of the other. Digby had always obeyed the rules, and I saw the virtue of this. Integrity, consistency—qualities I had once doubted—were now uppermost in my mind. I had thought the pagan gods of antiquity were protecting me: I should have remembered their carelessness, their fecklessness. While still untouched by any alternative mythology I was obliged to rethink my earlier attempt to be worthy of those careless feckless deities. I was human, fallible, yet I did not intend to do penance. The memory of my emancipation was still too vivid in my mind for me to disallow it. The memory might fade, had, perhaps, already faded, but it would not disappear. These two ideologies, goodness and freedom, were difficult to reconcile. The conundrum had never been resolved. Certainly I could not resolve it. Yet, strangely, both imposed a loyalty, an obligation. It would be difficult to see how such an obligation could be met.

  At the hairdresser’s, women nodded and smiled at me, as if re-admitting me to the company of the righteous. Sylvia, the receptionist, came out from behind her desk, clasped my hand, and murmured, ‘I’m so sorry.’ This, from a virtual stranger, was so affecting that tears filled my eyes, the first since Digby’s death. ‘I’ll bring you a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘I know how you like it.’ She was a woman of about my own age, unmarried, to judge from her ringless finger, and yet in comparison with myself she seemed mature, dedicated to her sexless profession, for no man ever came here, unless to collect his wife. I did not want to be drawn into any female conspiracy of the sort I had often witnessed in this place, women discussing minor ailments or telling of laughable mishaps which were somehow reassuring. For this was an establishment not favoured by the young; I liked it because it was so close to home, and because Alex, who did my hair, was so soothing and deferential. In my normal state of mind I found this irksome; in my reduced condition it felt like balm.

  ‘Even when you expect it, it’s a shock,’ he said, smoothing the hair back from my face.

  ‘I didn’t expect it,’ I said. ‘I thought he was perfectly well.’

  This was so sad that I felt the tears threaten again. A glass of water was tactfully placed at my elbow. ‘It’s jus
t that I’m rather tired,’ I tried to explain. It was true that the exertions of the last few days were beginning to tell on me. The thought that I could sleep in my bed again comforted me. A long night, one in which I would remain safely indoors, looked like normality restored. I could hardly believe that I had felt so little, wandering in the dark. With the threatened return of sorrow, and with that other, less legitimate sense of loss, I would be obliged to conceal myself at home until I had shaped the new character I should be obliged to inhabit.

  These kind people had done something to reconcile me to the daytime world, which was now my world. I thought with distaste, even bewilderment, of my recent nights and early mornings, in which I had fancied myself as some sort of exile, or a character in one of those foreign films I used to devour when on my own in Paris. And those glimpses of other lives that I had imagined . . . These daytime streets, through which I moved almost naturally, impressed me by their very neutrality; there was no danger, no sense of exile, rather an impressive ordinariness in which I might attempt to immerse myself. Life must now be invented, with no nostalgia for a past which at last seemed truly past. Almost without emotion I went to the shops, bought the sort of provisions that would be appropriate, acceptable to the unnatural gathering that would take place after the funeral. I would make tiny sandwiches, like the ones my mother used to serve to her guests after their afternoon bridge game. I never went back in my mind to those early days, as I dare say most people do: they had been so uncomfortable that I had been glad to exchange them for everything that came later, though that too had been uncomfortable. I should spend days in my flat, comfortable at last, but comfortable only in the sense that there would be nothing further to disturb my peace.

  The worst had happened, or had it? Apart from the almost welcome blankness of the future, I did not foresee any incident that would bring back the memory of those night walks. Of my other life, the life that had almost threatened my real life, I thought less. My main feeling was one of gratitude that Digby had known nothing of it, and that I had been with him at the end. For that reason some fragment of decency had been maintained. It was that fragment, minimal though it might have been, to which I clung. It would have to sustain me through the days to come.

  In the flat the mild sun bathed the unobtrusive chairs, tables, lamps that appeared newly dear to me. I sat down and wondered how to fill the rest of the day. I could read, of course, but I realized, with a further sense of loss, that I no longer wanted to, and, worse, that I might have no further use for those romances that had so absorbed me in the past. For surely they were romances? My definition of a romance was a story that proceeded to a satisfactory conclusion. This, rather than a happy end, was what made literature so compulsive. Those heroes, those heroines, even the most benighted, had weathered the storm and had been brought safely home. Novels, the sort of nineteenth-century novels I had loved, had conferred a sense of order, of justice, that was surely a moral gift. Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, had survived their time of trial, and even if that time had been grievous their authors had seen fit to reward them. Therefore one participated in that reward, since it seemed so natural, so merited. Now it seemed to me that such endings were fanciful, that in fact there were no endings to human affairs, particularly not to affairs of the heart. One’s sad longings might be, and usually were, unsatisfied, so that if one were lucky they merely receded, but remained subject to conjecture. One returned time and again to memories, or fantasized alternative endings, in which the triumph of the moralist, or of the novelist, prevailed. But I had been expelled from that sequence and should now have to live with doubt. I did not wish to read novels that drove this message home. Therefore I might not be able to read at all, or not until a time when I could draw the line under my own life with a feeling of gratitude that I had done no real harm. This might be the most conclusive loss of all. I put the books back tidily on the shelves. Madame Bovary was the last to be cancelled in this way.

  If I felt unhappiness on the day preceding the funeral it showed itself in symptoms which I recognized for what they were: fear, above all fear, and a sort of childish distress. The headaches, the nausea I was able to overcome because their origins were so obvious. The greatest dread was of the ceremony itself, when I should have to show a courage I no longer possessed. I saw, in a detached sort of way, that mild illness could provide an alibi for a day that was bound to be dreadful, that one could treat oneself gently, take remedies, abandon any kind of initiative, even sleep. In the end I went to bed and did indeed sleep. But it was a sleep from which I woke with the feeling of dread intensified, as if only now coming into its own. The ordeal ahead of me seemed impossible for one of my meagre accomplishments. I willed myself to imagine the time when it would all be over, and saw, with a flash of something like hope, that there might yet be room for the sort of energy that must have left a trace, and even for pleasure. This did not strike me as disloyal. I too should have to die, and it was incumbent on me to live for as long as I could, in the circumstances that the gods had devised for me. I reminded myself that these gods were not jealous, like the fearful God of the Old Testament. They were indifferent, malicious, even, but their concerns mirrored one’s own. With such an arrangement one could come to terms, however hard the process might be.

  As it happened I was hardly conscious of the actual funeral. I was aware of Betsy’s hand under my elbow, but I felt so faint that I had to close my eyes; had it not been for Betsy I might have fallen. My strength returned as soon as the doors of the small chapel were opened and the light flooded in. In the flat I was glad of the company of about thirty people, few of whom I knew. I thanked everyone profusely, urged them to eat, to drink. I did not look forward to being alone again. I saw Edmund, standing in a corner, saw him detach himself from the wall against which he had been leaning as Betsy approached with a plate of smoked salmon sandwiches. I saw his polite smile warm into something more appreciative; I saw Betsy’s eyes widen, a slight flush spread over her cheeks. I was distracted by the guests who were leaving. When I searched for them again it was too late. They were already gone.

  The following morning I went to Britten Street, let myself into the flat, and left my key on the table. In that way there would be no need for explanations on either side.

  9

  ‘YOU GOT HOME ALL RIGHT?’ I ASKED, IN AS NEUTRAL a tone as possible.

  ‘Oh, yes. That nice Mr Fairlie gave me a lift.’

  I felt there was nothing else I needed to know. What was to follow I knew already. Besides, I was finding it difficult to maintain my side of the conversation. I felt curiously abstracted, as if I were taking in too little oxygen. I was sitting in Betsy’s flat, without altogether remembering how I had got there. She had invited me for coffee, and I had gone, though I had had a strong impulse to refuse her invitation. Yet I had no reason for doing so. What I really wanted was to stay at home, in bed, if possible. I wanted the coming winter to enclose me, so that I could not be seen. That was my instinctive wish: that no one should see me.

  ‘He’s very nice, isn’t he?’ said Betsy. ‘Very easy to talk to.’

  I had never found him easy to talk to. To listen to, perhaps, or rather to tease out what he was not saying, matters I could supply for myself, in the shape of those domestic details for which I was hungry. It was those basement kitchens which now formed naturally in my mind, those imagined lives which were, I was sure, rich in the kind of detail I had previously found in books, and which I embraced in a way that seemed to have persisted for a long time and to have survived my own routine attempts, some of them successful, to create a domesticity for Digby and myself. Those other lives seemed more fulfilling than my own, as if they had been composed in another dimension to which I had only intermediate access.

  ‘What did you talk about?’ I said idly.

  ‘Well, he asked me how I knew you, and I told him we had been at school together. Then he asked me what I had done since, and we got on to Paris.’

 
‘Did you tell him about Daniel?’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t.’ She looked puzzled. ‘Do you think I should have done?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘It’s just that the whole episode seems slightly unreal now. As if it happened a very long time ago. As if we were both children. I felt rather badly about that. And I don’t fully understand how I could have let myself in for that sort of . . . adventure. I’m not really a romantic. I think I always wanted to settle down. Yet sometimes I should like to discuss this with a man. To get a man’s point of view, you know?’

  I did not at that moment see that I was in any danger from Betsy. Someone so artless, so sincere, could not possibly appeal to a man like Edmund, who was surely expert at deflecting that sort of desire for full disclosure. There had certainly been true feeling between Daniel and herself, but it would have been the feeling between two adolescents, children, even. In that sense it would have been authentic, but in that sense only.

  ‘He asked me what my plans were,’ she went on happily. ‘I told him I was looking for a part-time job, even something voluntary, and he said he might be able to help me. Apparently his wife is looking for an assistant.’