The Rules of Engagement

by Anita Brookner

  ‘I couldn’t live without them. They are all the world to me.’

  ‘You must remember that. They matter more than Constance does. Than your marriage, as you so pompously put it.’

  ‘I know.’

  It seemed that there was to be no parting, or at least not one camouflaged by vague assurances that we would meet again. I accepted this. Edmund was too sunk in his own reverie to register that I had opened the car door and was on the point of leaving him to his thoughts. I doubt if he knew the exact moment at which he was alone. I, on the other hand, registered my every footfall as I walked away. There was a finality here with which I could not argue. One always recognizes the irreparable, in whatever shape it takes. Though there were now pretexts on which I could act if I wanted to bring myself once more within his orbit I knew that they would not be employed. This was not a moral decision. It lay in the evidence of the sadness we had both felt, a sadness proportionately different in both cases, and yet a humbling mutual acceptance of inevitability. I still knew nothing about him, had not made appropriate light conversation, asked about the new house. None of that applied. Nor was Betsy uppermost in my mind. The working out of the plot, devised by the Fates or the Furies, would take place without our consent, as it always does. I did not even think of myself. I thought of Edmund, showing signs of age, and beginning to perceive that he was no longer the favourite of the gods. I found that I loved him all the more for this, and I mourned him as if he had recently died.

  13

  SINCE OUR LIVES ARE RULED BY CHANCE IT CAME AS no surprise to me to encounter Betsy outside Peter Jones shortly afterwards. Nevertheless I had not expected to see her, nor did I want to: I had decided, or it had been decided for me, to have nothing further to do with a situation which cast me in a role so marginal and so ambiguous that the outcome was somehow liberating. If I were to meet Edmund again I thought that my feeling would be one of cordial dislike, and I imagined that he would feel the same. As a child, long ago, I had had to be the peacemaker between disaffected parents. This I managed by dint of an uncritical muteness which they were forced to respect. As long as I was in the room, and apparently attributing no blame to either of them, they lowered their voices, assumed pacific expressions, and looked on me with favour. I knew no better at the time than to be grateful for this, and it was only much later, on my own in Paris, and chronically uncomfortable in my meagre surroundings, that I began to question not only their behaviour but my own. I was not, I realized, a naturally servile person, rather the opposite. Indeed it was that unexpended opposition to the role decreed for me that led indirectly to my brief period of lawlessness in later life. And though that had once seemed so natural I saw now, at the moment of that meeting with Betsy, on a humdrum morning, in fitful sunshine, that I need never again play either of these parts, that it was perhaps preferable to be free of them and to live the sort of life that involved no collusion with others, to become known for this, and to have it acknowledged, and thus for the first time in my life to achieve a sort of dignity.

  Nevertheless, and again in that first sighting of Betsy, I regretted that I was not able to greet her more warmly, or with something of the spontaneity that I had misplaced. I missed a female friend, though I could no longer trust anyone, friend or lover. I remembered with a genuine sadness those early days, when we had known not only each other but each other’s circumstances. I still had, in my sewing-box at home, a little empty perfume bottle that Betsy had given me for some forgotten birthday: we may have been thirteen or fourteen at the time. I had thought it naïve of her, sentimental, and yet I had cherished it. Now more than ever it had come to symbolize the sort of early friendship which is so difficult to recapture in more complex days, and I looked back on that period of my life, largely unsatisfactory in most respects, as emblematic of what I had lost. I wanted to pick up the telephone unthinkingly, as I had done then, to ask her some idle question, about homework, perhaps, and hear her reply in the same tone of voice, and ask me questions in return. There would be no art in this conversation, no contrivance: that would be the beauty of it. I wanted everything to be once more understood between us, as if we had never let each other down.

  Instead, there must be a certain mistrust, a withholding, for there were secrets that were never to be mentioned, conversations with others in which we were implicated, whether we liked it or not. Betsy, despite her oddly immovable naïveté, would surely have realized that Edmund had played a part in my life, may even have questioned him about this, and would have reacted to the perhaps unwelcome knowledge in the only way she knew, with redoubled assurances of affection. This would be so different in quality from those uncensored conversations of younger days that I should feel a genuine nostalgia for that lost time. The friends of one’s youth are perhaps the only people who know one properly, know the background and the context as well as the presenting characteristics. More than extravagant love my overwhelming wish now was to be known in that way once more, before it was too late. The intimate support—the nurture—that two such friends instinctively supply was now denied to me, to both of us. And the little scent bottle, almost hidden by the scissors and the needles in my sewing-box, would serve to remind me of a time before prudence, before artifice, had come to rule my life, and to a lesser degree that of my erstwhile friend.

  For I had seen a slight shadow pass across her joyous expressions, the merest suggestion of reluctance. It would not take long for that reluctance to blossom into mistrust, yet she too wanted me for a friend, the friend I had once been. It would have taken one far less solitary than myself to ignore that very slight alteration in her sighting of me: it was my predilection for noting small everyday accidents that made me alive to that momentary clouding of her welcome. My face, habitually under control, gave no hint, I am persuaded, that this was anything more than an accidental meeting shorn of other associations. At one level we were genuinely pleased to see each other; at another we were calculating how much information could be disclosed, how much concealed. To do us some sort of credit we both knew this, and were determined to go about the matter as best we could. For those childhood codes still obtained. Once we would have taken up the conversation where we had last left it. Now we had to negotiate a way of dealing with a situation that neither of us wanted to acknowledge, aware that it might divide us, and determined to let none of this appear.

  She made the adjustment quickly, although the process was apparent to me. She was both pleased and not pleased to see me; for once I was the more assiduous friend. Although I feared her revelations (for I did not doubt that at some point they would break through) I was willing to meet her in the spirit of our now lost friendship, was even looking for some sign of recognition of the person I was once, or perhaps as we both had been. As a girl she had made up for poor resources by an anxious attention to detail, her shining appearance more than compensating for undistinguished clothes and unfashionable shoes. Now, in that lightning first glance, I saw that this arrangement had been turned on its head. She was attractively dressed in a grey trouser suit, yet her hair was slightly disarranged, as if creeping out of her control. She looked like the other women going into the store, looked, I dare say, like myself, but with a difference. She seemed to have changed her status for one less modest than previously endured without complaint. Indeed she had the preoccupied, slightly important expression of a woman with a domestic burden to maintain, with appetites to satisfy, with a family to care for. I had often questioned this look on other women’s faces, thinking them superior to myself, newly conscious of my lost culinary expertise, my idle ruminative hours. These women seemed to be characterized by a look of achievement, of accomplishment, as if they had passed some test of all-round competence. It was a competence that was somehow linked with a quality of desirability, and I knew myself unlikely to qualify ever again for such a badge of caste. Now I was convinced that Betsy was so qualified, knowing her as few others did. There was about her a trace of that complacent haste that
was a more than adequate disguise for her true feelings, whatever these might have been, and which she seemed disposed to enjoy, even to cultivate.

  ‘What a lovely surprise,’ she said. ‘We seem doomed to meet here, don’t we? Have you time for coffee? You’re looking well.’

  I followed her meekly into the restaurant, where she now took her place as of right, summoning a waitress with an uplifted hand, a gesture she would not normally have permitted herself.

  ‘Let me look at you,’ she said, with the same proprietorial air. ‘Yes, you do look well. What have you been doing with yourself?’

  This was so like the questions I was used to being asked by my genuinely busy friends that I dealt with it in the way I had devised after several humiliating episodes: I ignored it.

  ‘You’re not working today, then?’ I enquired, hoping to get on to firmer conversational ground. Only distaste for the artifice that had overtaken our relationship had made me venture such a question.

  ‘No, they can do without me today,’ she laughed. ‘Actually Constance’s car was gone when I got there. She must have left early.’

  ‘Do you ever wonder whether she needs you there any more?’

  ‘Oh, I think I’ve proved my usefulness. I may have to do so again, if they can’t settle down. Constance has really taken against that house. Amazing how easily some people give up.’

  ‘I should leave them to get on with it. Moving house can be very traumatic.’

  ‘Well, of course. That’s where I come in. Helping to get them settled.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Well, Constance. I’m worried about her. She seems quite neurotic.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve outstayed your welcome.’

  Her face hardened. ‘I like to see the girls,’ she said. ‘They’re used to my being around.’

  But in fact the girls were largely absent, as no doubt she knew and as I surmised. The reason for her assiduity was imperfectly disguised: she was in love with Edmund and was willing to court humiliation, if that were the price to be paid for those unedited glimpses of him in his domestic setting that would otherwise be denied to her. I was profoundly shocked. No woman of my generation is allowed to behave so slavishly. Women’s liberation had surely been designed to free us from such masochistic impulses. But in Betsy’s case such a liberation might not have taken place. She seemed to proclaim the sort of fidelity that most societies other than tribal have done their best to shed. I was in two minds about this, as, I dare say, are most women. I admired the ideal, but had observed that it could lead one into extravagances of behaviour no less deleterious than the wildest licence. Proof of this was being supplied by Betsy, whose unfortunate attachment might sooner or later achieve the hitherto unthinkable work of dismantling her character altogether. For I knew, or thought I knew, of Edmund’s obsidian self-regard, so like his wife’s. At some level they would unite in distaste for this eager acolyte, and though nothing might be acknowledged between them, some attitude would result from their shared impatience, some manoeuvre be initiated that would safeguard their original alliance. This would not be easy; they might be brought face to face with an awkward need to avoid embarrassment in a situation that was already sufficiently embarrassing. And Edmund was affected by her, may even have been in love with her. For Edmund love was about an initial attraction that might profit both partners. Nowhere did it imply duration. For duration, or durability, he could rely on his adamantine wife whose most notable attribute was a sort of inscrutability, so much more acceptable than the bizarre sincerity, the sheer incomprehension of a woman whom experience had taught so little as to make her seem anomalous, even threatening, like a dysfunctional infant who persists in courting one’s approval.

  Though animated she looked tired. She had that aura of contained excitement which is exhausting in the long run. Although she was deluded, her condition was enviable, enviable to me in my newly restored respectability, enviable perhaps to those other women in the restaurant, with their shopping bags at the sides of their chairs. A woman senses the level of sexual activity in other women and instinctively resents it, particularly if she is bereft of male company. All thoughts of innocent, long-ago friendship were erased from my mind as I was treated to a display, perhaps conscious, perhaps unconscious, of determined insouciance that failed to mask a single overriding preoccupation. I noticed new busy feminine gestures that sent out their own semaphore—a sweeping back of the hair, a turning of the cuff to check the time on her watch— and saw myself reduced to the level of an onlooker. Outwardly peaceable, I was engaged in a struggle to defeat my baser self. I may even have succeeded, but the struggle had left a victim, or perhaps two victims. We could no longer lay claim to the friendship which had survived earlier vicissitudes. Lucidity had brought in its train a revision of previous attitudes. Without examining these more closely—for what good would it have done?—I saw that she too had recognized the change that had taken place. The display, the determined gladness were no doubt consequent upon closer understanding of my relations with Edmund. There was no need to acknowledge this. It stood out a mile.

  A sudden shower of rain peppered the windows; below us in the street umbrellas bloomed. ‘Be careful,’ I said quietly. ‘They are much cleverer than you.’

  She laughed angrily. ‘I think I know that, thank you. I’m not completely stupid.’

  ‘Then why persist? Surely it would be better to leave them to their own devices. Be discreet, retain some dignity. Finir en beauté. Such a useful phrase, I always thought, though there is nothing really fine about endings. They have to be managed as best one can. The saving grace is to be in control.’

  As if I were spelling out her fate, the bravado left her. ‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘They have become my family.’

  ‘You mean he has.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what do you hope for? Even if he were in love with you . . .’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Has he said so?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t need a declaration, if that is what you mean. I just know. And for the first time in my life I’ve something of my own. A secret. Something that excludes everyone else. Even you, though you think you know all about it.’

  It was important to me not to join in this mutual confession. My one thought, and an imperative one, was that I must go away, away from the tedium of the English weather, away from the more menacing tedium of female soul-searching. I would go back to Venice, where the light was stronger; I would even go back to Paris, which haunted me, as a lost opportunity often does. With careful management I could be away for six months, or even longer. Digby had left me comfortably off; I should not even need to let the flat. There was in fact no reason why I should not spend the greater part of the year abroad, returning to London only in the brightest days of the summer, and then only briefly. I should be one of those odd English women who could be counted on to haunt the Riviera in the low season, taking advantage of reduced rates, not minding the discomfort of a small pension, and badly dressed in a way that would not be noticed at home. The vision appealed to me, its sheer sexlessness an added attraction. I should read novels over dinner in restaurants which would soon accept me as a regular patron, and wander back to bed along some notional promenade which I had not yet quite located. I was, I thought, entitled to spare myself any further involvement in this affair which might yet intensify on my part as it would on Betsy’s. I was, it seemed, not quite free of it. That was not to say that I had to relive it by proxy. A long absence would also remove me from Betsy, who was now on the defensive, within a hair’s breadth of disliking me. I busied myself in gathering up my purchases, preparatory to leaving. I was aware that she was looking at me fixedly, as if trying to read my thoughts. I should have to keep my Mediterranean fantasy to myself, leaving suddenly, without warning, after only the briefest of telephone calls. Acting out of character was permitted to a woman of my age, though I was probably being optimistic in imagining that this would arouse co
mment. I knew few people who would be interested. Betsy, oddly enough, was closest to me, by her reckoning, if not by mine. I saw her once more as someone in need of protection, even patronage, still longing to be sheltered, more perhaps now than ever before.

  ‘You say you’ve never had anyone of your own,’ I said, fishing in my handbag. ‘But in fact it’s folly to think you can lay claim to another person. I know how lonely it can be without someone close to you, but it becomes quite difficult to work out why. Probably status is involved. A woman with a partner feels superior to a woman who has none. But this is illusory. All one ever possesses is free will, and even that has to be safeguarded. Handing over one’s life to another person is not really to be recommended.’

  ‘You didn’t love your husband, did you?’ she said. ‘If you had you wouldn’t say what you’ve just said.’

  I was deeply shocked. This seemed a far more dangerous intrusion than the one I had originally feared, the one I had done my utmost to deflect. It seemed to me that it was Digby who was under attack, and that he needed me to defend him. I would not dignify the conversation by responding, but I must have gone slightly pale, for she reached out a hand to grasp mine. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That was not what I meant to say. What I meant to say was . . .’

  ‘Shall we go?’ I stood up, glanced out of the window on to the rain.

  ‘Will you ring me?’ she said, disconcerted, awkward. Unprotected, as I now saw all too clearly.