Latecomers

by Anita Brookner

  Her pregnancy was to him the final proof that she was in fact the ideal wife for him, despite the fact that in youth he had not exactly loved her. It was when he came home and saw her lying on a couch, her fine ankles a little swollen, her face worried and distant, that he opened his heart to her. He knew that she was frightened. She expressed a longing for his company, hated to see him leave in the mornings, looked wistfully after him when he left the room. The practical and unawakened girl who had first intrigued him now moved him, although his own spirits were so high at the prospect of a child that he could not see how she might have grounds for fear. For what could go wrong? She was a healthy woman. Her mother was there, with sage dry advice. Christine came over daily with covered dishes for Hartmann’s supper, when Yvette was too queasy to cook; Hartmann himself was bidden to dine with Christine and Fibich, and sometimes did, although his wife’s woeful face made him disconsolate. Her pregnancy was awkward but not difficult; nevertheless, she repudiated every manifestation of it with cries of alarm. She derived no excitement from the baby’s first movement, ran to the telephone to summon Christine, accused her mother of being heartless for not weeping with her. Finally her bulk depressed her so much that she took to her bed, despite their concerted encouragements. Her worries were not so much for her condition as for her silhouette. She felt a profound terror that her splendid body might never be hers to call her own again.

  The anxieties of her pregnancy resolved themselves into massive relief once the child was born, and made her into an able and even unsentimental mother. In this way she proved once more to be excellent. She seemed to set her sights on getting the baby to move on as quickly as possible, not to linger in infancy, to enjoy dependence or incapacity, but rather to grow up into a semblance of Yvette herself, a good and successful wife. Whereas Hartmann could not bear to let a day of the child’s life pass, wanting to keep her small and helpless for as long as possible. Looking at her velvet hands, the beautiful soles of her unmarked feet, he marvelled, ecstatic. When she uttered her first word, which was, rewardingly, ‘Dada’, he felt a darkness, an inner trembling: his breaking heart, perhaps. Finally enslaved, brought into submission, subjection even, he would dart up in the night, thinking he heard a cry, in reality in order to inspect her anew. ‘Go to sleep, Hartmann,’ Yvette would say. ‘You will spoil her.’ It was, of course, what he longed to do, to keep her for himself, to imprint himself on her life and to be imprinted on by hers: she was the favourite and he meant to be the same, to be singled out, for ever, to outlast the others, whenever they might come. He put down money in her name. That way, he thought, she need not marry if she did not want to.

  He grew used to her, gradually, reverted to his old hedonistic ways. The child was well-behaved, a little solemn. Sometimes he caught sight in her face of something of her mother’s expression when he had first known her: a serious absent look, waiting, waiting. Always immaculate, she had her mother’s fastidiousness, could not bear a crumpled dress, held out hands to be washed. Her grandmother examined her, pronounced herself satisfied, and went off to the South of France. This decree of viability reassured Hartmann, as did Yvette’s quite surprising expertise. Order and docility reigned. Food was not spat out, mugs were not overturned, nights were peaceful. The child’s very obedience rewarded them both. She is happy here, thought Hartmann. Maybe she will never leave us. But Yvette poured scorn on his sentimentality. Grooming her for her future fate, Yvette dressed her stylishly, in salopettes which her mother sent from France, in a smart blue jacket. When Hartmann came home in the evenings (earlier and earlier) he would sink to his heels, his arms open, for Marianne to run to him. The day when Yvette said, ‘She is too old for that now,’ was, briefly, the saddest day of his life.

  Marianne was the only one who could dispel Fibich’s melancholy. He adored her, looked on her as their ruined inheritance made good. He and Christine went to shameless lengths to be allowed to spend the evening looking after her, presenting Hartmann with theatre tickets, or capturing the child for the afternoon when Yvette once more felt the need to go shopping. Sometimes on Sundays they lunched together, Hartmann’s and Fibich’s eyes on the child as she strove with the big knife and fork on which Yvette insisted.

  ‘Uncle Fibich,’ she said to him one day. ‘I am half French.’

  ‘Are you?’ he answered gravely. ‘Which half? This half or this half?’ He lightly pinched first one cheek and then the other.

  She giggled and ran to her mother. Later she came back, slipped her hand into his, and said, ‘This half.’

  Their farewells, once Marianne had gone to bed, were wistful, abstracted, as if the important business of the day were done, as if conviviality could not profitably be resurrected until another Sunday, when the enchantment would be repeated. Fibich felt that Marianne existed by virtue of a special dispensation of fortune. When her starry blue eyes grew solemn as she sat still, gazing at something they could not see, he grew anxious. He was never entirely able to take her for granted, another bond he shared with Hartmann. But Yvette was entirely matter of fact, thereby sealing her dominance. And having no fears for her, nor wishing her to be too protected, shared her generously with the others. A good mother, all told. Unknown to them, she already had her daughter’s engagement party in mind.

  When Fibich and Christine went home on these Sunday evenings they were thoughtful. Each had a separate sadness to contemplate which crystallized around the sight of the child being carried away to bed by Hartmann. Neither of them dared to think that they might be in a similar position. They both considered themselves to be disqualified from such felicity, not by fortune but by disposition. Such energy as was necessary to create such a situation for themselves had been denied them. They blamed no one, not each other, not themselves; they were too modest for that. Each knew, instinctively, that they had been barren from birth, blighted like the fig tree in the Bible, on which no fruit could grow. With a peculiar passivity which they had in common, they saw no remedy, not even the obvious one of intention. The shadows of their early lives gathered around them like heavy clouds. Christine moved wordlessly about the kitchen, brought out sandwiches and a bottle of wine on a tray. Neither spoke of their common sorrow. Such evenings were inevitably silent.

  So that when Christine, after eight years of marriage, and sitting listlessly in her blue drawing-room, was told disapprovingly by Yvette, who had recovered her legendary figure, that she was putting on weight, she did not make the obvious connection. She was a strong woman – she had had to be – had never paid any attention to variations within her body, had thought that same body to be of little importance. It was Yvette who interrogated her, brought her triumphantly the unhoped-for message. A visit to the doctor confirmed that she was three months pregnant. When she told Fibich he was incredulous. ‘Are you sure?’ And, later, ‘That it should happen to me!’

  ‘It is happening to me,’ she told him with a smile, no longer impatient with his ingrowing preoccupations.

  Her pregnancy was uneventful; she stayed calm throughout. An inner strength, sign of the divine afflatus, possessed her. In the afternoons she walked conscientiously, dropping in occasionally to nearby Westminster Abbey to give thanks to the God in whom she had never believed. Credit where credit was due, she thought, for there was no doubt in her mind that it was a miracle. Fibich she somewhat discounted, losing some of the desire to please him that had always informed her actions; for the first time in her life she considered herself to be of some consequence. She had moved on from the importunate girl that she had known so well. Her eye was no longer drawn to children, to babies in prams; she knew that her own child would be superior. A spirit of vainglory touched her, and she was to remember this in later life, when a reckoning was in order. She was never to forgive herself for this confidence, so out of character, so positively dangerous in its implications. She tried to fashion herself on the model of Yvette, to whom no form of confidence was alien. Hartmann noticed the change in her and was approv
ing. In fact all four of them glowed with approval. Christine allowed herself the luxury of criticizing Fibich, sent him to an expensive barber to have his once romantic hair disciplined. He, a happy man, accepted this as a sign of normality, part of his transformation. He told his analyst, a woman barely older than he was, that he needed a break from her ministrations. Looking him over with a practised eye, she opened her diary to the empty months ahead, and said, ‘Shall we make another appointment? To see how we are getting on?’

  The child, a boy, was born without fuss in five hours. They called him Thomas, which soon became shortened to Toto. He too was beautiful, but what was immediately noticeable about him was his strength. ‘The infant Hercules,’ marvelled Hartmann. From the first he strained away from his mother, his cheeks flushed with effort. When he was five months old, and two teeth like tiny white seeds had emerged in his lower jaw, he banged restlessly with his spoon, squirming in his mother’s lap, perpetually in ardent motion. He responded to every form of excitement, above all to Yvette’s. She, entranced by the sight of the handsome and extravagant child, would swoop on him with high-pitched cries, which he would imitate. ‘And how is he? And how is he? And how’s our baby today, then?’ And he would reach ecstatically towards her, pushing Christine’s face aside. A grave seven-year-old Marianne would watch from the doorway, frightened by so disruptive a presence. When ordered by her mother to admire him she would resist, until Christine took her hand. When he laughed at her she would dart back. He had a way of laughing that was hurtful, obscurely insulting. His mother felt this keenly, sensing once again her own inadequacy. Only Yvette was untouched by this quality.

  From the first the roles appeared to be reversed. It would have seemed, to a stranger coming into the room for the first time, as if Marianne, the docile, the silent, were Christine’s child and Toto Yvette’s. It was in fact Christine who first noticed this. She would lift the heavy bulk of her son into Yvette’s arms with a feeling of relief and take Marianne into the kitchen to ask her help in preparing the tea. Hartmann admired the child unreservedly. Fibich was not so sure. Fibich felt him to be rough, rougher than he could ever be. Toto was occasionally raucous, testing his strength. He spurned help, seemed to have within him a fund of expletives, although he could not yet talk. Watching him struggling with sounds they felt one day a heightened anticipation of his first words. Silently, with held breath, they waited urging him on. His cheeks flushed an ominous red. ‘Dada,’ they said. ‘Mama. Baba.’

  ‘Toto,’ he burst out. They collapsed with joy and laughter.

  Every day brought him a new toy which, with a wide-armed gesture, he flung across the room. Fibich felt these rejections keenly. Told to quieten the child down for the night (for Toto hated to sleep) Fibich would pick up the toys with an air of apology for the way in which they had been treated, and try to rehabilitate them into his son’s life.

  ‘Here’s a nice bear,’ he might say awkwardly. ‘What is his name, I wonder?’

  No answer would come. He thought he could see contempt in Toto’s eye.

  ‘I think his name is Teddy,’ he ploughed gamely on.

  When still no answer was forthcoming he would sigh and make as if to retreat.

  ‘Teddy will keep you company,’ he would say, placing the bear in the cot.

  When he reached the door and looked back, to blow his son a kiss, he would see that he had set up a furious rocking.

  ‘Neddy,’ Toto would shout. ‘Neddy, Neddy, Neddy.’

  Fibich would sigh again and tell him to go to sleep. Secretly he began to envisage the time when his son was old enough to learn feelings as well as words, hoping against hope that those feelings would incline him favourably towards his mother and his father.

  Fibich was wise enough to know that desire is infinite and attainment finite, that any home, any marriage, and even any child, might fail to correspond with his initial image of such situations or events, and that even in the most auspicious circumstances a curious sense of bewilderment, even disappointment, might come to him unbidden. He therefore responded to the phenomenon of his son with a certain melancholy, as if, once again, life had baffled or deceived him. Whereas Hartmann was all joy, having left the mirage of another life far behind, or being blessed with no such mirage, Fibich felt, when he contemplated the life to which he was now committed, a resignation from which fear was not entirely absent. Is that all? This was the thought that occurred to him, and at the same time he would wordlessly confess, this is too much for me. I did not bargain for such disruption, such alienation. Just when he thought he had internalized one change, accommodated himself to a home that he could make for himself, a home that did not pre-exist him, and in addition to this had married a wife whom he had apparently chosen for himself, he was faced with a son whom he could not understand, whose very being was foreign to him. And this was even more disconcerting than the first two changes, which had, after all, been partially brought about, or at least assisted, by the will of others. Toto seemed to present him with a task for which he had no preparation and for which he found himself permanently at a loss. He himself, innocent, submissive, felt so much more of a child than Toto, in whom he discerned the rudiments of an enormous will, as yet unspecific, but striking in its authority. It was not merely that Toto possessed the rude health, the untrammelled energy that he himself had been denied: that, surely, was a matter for congratulation. What he sensed, and what perturbed him, was inaccessibility. They would never, he felt, understand one another. And without understanding, could each properly love the other?

  It was almost a relief to him to go up to Hartmann’s flat and watch Hartmann with his daughter. For here was fatherhood as he would have wished to enjoy it. As Marianne played quietly – and she was always quiet – or pretended to help her mother, Hartmann would overflow with praises and caresses. When he read to her she would listen in complete silence, even when, as Fibich could see, her attention was elsewhere. And when Hartmann pressed her cheek to his, her arm would go obediently round his neck. She went to school without protest: there were no tears, no bouts of sickness, no night terrors. Bringing a little friend home with her she would submit politely to the other child’s wishes. She was, if anything, too passive, and her mother tried in vain to galvanize her into more volatile activities. But for Hartmann she was so like his idea of a daughter that he was entirely fulfilled in contemplation of her existence. A Victorian child, thought Fibich, her eyes perpetually turned upward, desirous of the light, serious expression, devoted to her father. Daddy’s girl, destined to be a helpmate, an honourable wife. Not made for the rough and tumble of this world: unquestioning, unprotesting, preserved from danger, or so they dared to think.

  In comparison with Marianne, Toto represented something cruder, crueller: the life force, perhaps. Even in his embryonic infant form Toto seemed to reach out, beyond the confines of his existence. To Fibich’s worried eyes he had immortal longings in him. He saw that he would be unequal to the task of being Toto’s father, and through the child longed to experience his own childhood, to retreat into certainties of which he had no conscious knowledge but for which he felt a renewed longing. As he watched the child crash destructively through his early years, he winced at the implied brutality: when his protecting hands were roughly struck away he felt sadness, and a kind of perplexity. Was it for this that he had been preserved, had served his apprenticeship, so that an existence entirely unrelated to his own could come into being? He despaired of ever making sense of all or any of it. And yet he knew that his task as a man was to do just that, to bring into completion the ragged fragments of a destiny of which he felt himself to be the most lamentable, the most fallible of elements. The connections he tried to make between what had gone before and this indomitable stranger caused him pain, literally resulted in headaches. He took to watching the child sleep, feeling closer to him then than when he filled the flat with his energy, his presence. Even the sleeping face seemed replete with intention. Fibich entirely fail
ed to see what would become of him. The child took from his parents only those commodities that ensured his continuity: food, clothing, warmth. These he took roughly, purposefully, as essential ingredients for his future. The task of outgrowing his infancy seemed to preoccupy him, as if it were a task for which he was overqualified, as if he were already exasperated by the smallness of his size, his uncertain grasp.

  It was his lack of inhibition that most intimidated Fibich. Ready to shout, to scream, to impose himself, Toto lived every moment of his early years in the accepted, but least acceptable sense. He wearied them excessively. Often Fibich would return home in the evening to find Christine looking pale with exhaustion and would attempt to relieve her by putting Toto to bed, giving him his bath, reading him his story, trying, timidly, to interest him, to win his attention. It was only when he himself tired of the childish literature that was thought suitable to Toto’s age group and read him poetry that Toto would grow momentarily silent, hypnotized by the rhythm of the verses, to which he would submit with a solemn gaze, although he could not have understood a word of what was being said. ‘More,’ he would cry, ‘more’, as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was unfolded before him, and Fibich, proud at last to have found a device of his own choosing with which to bring his son into submission, would read on until he was hoarse. Still the boy showed no sign of sleepiness, but went on fixing him with his brilliant eyes, in which, now, could be discerned no light of mockery. Rather the eyes seemed fixed on some inner vision, induced by the scansion of the verses, as if, finally, he had found something worthy of his immense attention. When Christine called to him that dinner was ready, Fibich would call back. ‘Soon. In a minute,’ unwilling to relinquish that moment in which, however briefly, he might think he had gained the upper hand. His attempts to leave the room were met with a storm of tears, a writhing in the bed that seemed to bespeak despair, deprivation, as if the source of future growth had been denied. Frequently Toto would wake in the night and could only be silenced by a further reading. But now, tired out, he would listen with glazed eyes, his thumb in his mouth. They were all very soon exhausted. Fibich began to envisage a thought that he would previously never have entertained: Toto might have to be sent away to school.