Latecomers

by Anita Brookner

  They felt thrown back on themselves. Whereas, with the birth of Marianne’s baby, they had thought to see their lives extended into an unknown future, they had in fact seen that door closed in their faces, for there was something about the breeding capacity, and willingness, of Marianne and Roger that was quite alien to them. Old now, or almost, they saw that when the time came Marianne would look after them in an extremity, but that some deep conspiracy would draw her back to Roger. It did not even seem that this conspiracy was sexual: it seemed to be purely reproductive, as if reproduction were the only honourable way of conquering sex. Hartmann saw this and it made him uneasy. Yvette saw nothing but her daughter’s fading looks, her fading appeal. These days Marianne tended to appear in trousers, even dungarees, and her swollen figure, which had not retained its earlier narrow elegance, gave her a mildly embarrassing appearance, too fecund, too exaggerated. Yvette put her discontent down to Marianne’s poor looks: she scolded her, or would have done, had Roger not been there. His presence inhibited her slightly, for she thought he did not like her. This was the first time in Yvette’s life that she had been aware of someone else’s dislike; she was generally thought too frivolous to be taken seriously.

  There was something about Roger’s censorious interventions that made her see herself in another light: as trivial, as lightweight, as negligible. She became aware of the make-up on her face, the artless vanity of the bright colours that she wore, her gilded hair, as if they were suddenly shameful, the follies of an ageing woman. This was strange, for normally she felt quite young. But when she had said to her daughter, ‘Why, Marianne! You have let your hair get quite out of shape. And you could do with a rinse of some sort: I can see a grey hair. I’ll make an appointment for you tomorrow, dear. I’ll have a word with Jean-Louis myself’, Roger replied, ‘She doesn’t need to resort to dyeing her hair, you know. I prefer women to look natural.’ Yvette had felt quite foolish, and had cast her eyes down. Soon Hartmann’s hand had taken hers, the hand he knew so well, with its rosy nails, and the gold bracelets still on the wrists. The hand was trembling slightly, and he stroked it, feeling with melancholy the loose skin on the back, seeing in his mind’s eye the veins that now stood out, and the occasional brown spot. She was a silly woman, he knew that; but her silliness was a private, not a public affair. He did not like to see her reprimanded. And Marianne had not risen to her mother’s defence. Indeed, there was no real position to defend; it was a matter of opinion. But they were both hurt. Yvette had returned his clasp, had smiled determinedly, and had stood up to clear the tea-table. ‘Darling, you shouldn’t eat so much cake,’ she could not quite resist saying. ‘You have put on quite a bit of weight you know.’ ‘I like her as she is,’ said Roger, and as Yvette turned to carry the tray into the kitchen Hartmann had seen on her face a look of frightened smiling incomprehension which he guessed she had worn as a very small child in that train travelling down to Bordeaux.

  Later, in their bedroom, Yvette had wept. As he had feared, her instinctive response to trouble had been to turn younger. ‘I want to see Maman,’ she had said. ‘She is an old lady now, and so far away. I want to go to Nice.’ He had comforted her, knowing that that was not what she wanted. What she wanted was what had been lost, her own youth, and her still beautiful daughter, and the comfort and security that Hartmann had given her, and which she now felt slipping away. She was no longer young, although she had retained a naïveté, a capacity for self-deception, that had long given her an air of youth. And sometimes she was quite stiff in the mornings: he feared arthritis for her later. He said nothing. What was wrong with her was Torschlusspanik: the panic of the shutting of the door. For not only was the future closed to them, for reasons which were all too natural, but it seemed as if they had lost their daughter, lost her to this curatorial stranger who had made her fat and plain and kept her in Richmond so that she could not visit her parents unless he drove her over in the car. And the poor little baby, smelling of sick. The smell had offended Yvette, but now she wept when she thought of it and said that she wanted her mother.

  So he had taken her to Nice for a weekend. It was October, and the warm air greeted them as they descended the steps of the plane. ‘Ah,’ they breathed gratefully, as if coming home. Ostensibly they had come to visit Yvette’s mother, but both knew that Hartmann would be looking for a little property. He wanted flats for Yvette and himself and for Fibich and Christine: dare he also buy one for Marianne and Roger? He would see. He had felt his optimism returning as he had contemplated the blue blue sea, and the ceaseless rushing traffic, but Yvette had hurried him out of his contemplation, was anxious to reach her mother, as if her mother were in some kind of danger, had only relaxed when in sight of the modest apartment block a few miles out of Nice, on the sea front, where Martine Cazenove now lived all the year round since her husband’s stroke. The flat was hers: Hartmann had given it to her. Martine and Cazenove were an old couple now, but both looked fit. Martine had that hardy appearance of French women past the age of pleasure, still flushed, thin-lipped, the head held high, dour, unsmiling, a natural recluse now that her husband was so diminished. But every morning at nine o’clock she was at the market, with her wheeled shopping basket. After her return she would settle Cazenove on the balcony, and join him there with her knitting and the magazine she had bought. They said little; they were not discontented. Cazenove, now slow in his words and movements, nevertheless bore testament to her lifelong care. With a crimson sheen on his cheeks, he would sit, in his panama hat, his stick between his legs, gazing for hours at the passing cars. They would spend whole days on their balcony, largely wordless, turning in at night to sleep in the old walnut bed that dominated their small bedroom. It was not a bad life, lived manageably within the confines of a small routine. They said little to each other, but their thoughts were occupied, and the weather was kind.

  Yvette had telephoned them from the hotel, professing herself anxious to see them. From this Mrs Cazenove deduced that her daughter was unhappy for reasons which had nothing to do with the situation in Nice. She had made coffee and wheeled Cazenove in from the balcony. He had greeted Hartmann with an appearance of rapture. She had noticed how much more vivid his facial expressions were now that he was old: joy seemed to brim from his largely wordless mouth. And she had gone downstairs and bought a glazed mirabelle tart; they murmured how good it was, eating it with their teaspoons. When they had drunk their coffee, Cazenove was returned to the balcony, this time with a rug over his knees, and a promise that they would bring him in when Martine was preparing dinner. ‘Oh, we won’t stay,’ said Yvette. ‘But we’ll come back tomorrow.’ A complicated series of grimaces animated Cazenove’s face. ‘Dear girl,’ he finally brought out.

  Seated at the round dining-table, Hartmann and Yvette watched Martine, as she smoothed the plush cloth with steady hands, moved the vase of carnations, bought that morning in the market, so that she could see them both, and waited for her to tell them what to do. Sun washed through the balcony windows, with their looped-back tulle curtains: a plane droned overhead. It was all quite ugly, and they felt entirely comfortable there. Hartmann, requesting Martine’s permission and receiving it, lit a small cigar and sat back, for this was not his conversation and he knew it. In a little while he discovered the reason. ‘Maman,’ said Yvette, her hands, like her mother’s, folded on the blue plush cloth. ‘Tell me about my father.’

  The older woman sighed. ‘He was handsome,’ she said.

  ‘Is that all?’ Yvette protested.

  ‘All you need to know.’

  ‘But I know nothing about him! I don’t even know his name!’

  ‘His name was Daniel. Daniel Besnard. He died young,’ said Martine slowly. ‘You don’t remember him.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Yvette. ‘That’s why I asked. What did he die of?’

  ‘He was shot,’ said Martine.

  Shock hung in the air. Hartmann felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

 
; ‘He liked Germans,’ Martine went on inexorably. ‘And he didn’t like Jews. Many Frenchmen didn’t. When the Germans came, Daniel made himself very useful to them. That was when I left him. I was living in one room, starving, while he was entertaining them at the gallery. His family were art dealers. They didn’t get on well, and they didn’t like me. And he didn’t like work. So he lived by selling the odd picture. To the Germans, of course. Selling information, too.’

  ‘Did you love him?’ Yvette faltered.

  Martine smiled grimly. ‘Oh, yes, I loved him. I hated him too. That can happen, you know. He died just in time. It was a private act of revenge, nothing official. His German friends couldn’t save him. Or wouldn’t have bothered to. He was not important to them, and they despised him. I was allowed to get away. And we were lucky, we caught the last train out. After that, things closed down. We spent the rest of the war in Bordeaux.’

  She remembered leaving the rue Washington, the child’s hand in hers, a suitcase banging against her leg. She had gone to the gallery, taken up the floorboard, only to find the stock of money greatly diminished, had taken what little was left, and fled, with the child, to the station.

  ‘How old was I?’ asked Yvette.

  ‘You were two,’ said her mother. ‘And I was thirty.’ She glanced across at Hartmann. He smiled at her, though he was shaken. But it was what he had always suspected.

  She sighed again. ‘He was no good, you see. Some people are like that: it is their nature. It was not that he didn’t know the difference. He didn’t care. I don’t suppose you understand. I didn’t understand myself.’

  ‘Then I…’ said Yvette slowly, ‘am I like that?’

  They both moved towards her. ‘Why no, ma fille,’ said Martine. ‘You were brought up by Papa.’ She nodded towards the immobile figure on the balcony. ‘Your father was only a silly boy. Not even a man.’

  Hartmann kissed his wife and held her hand. She should not have told her, he thought. He was sick and angry. But Hartmann was not as old as his mother-in-law, did not yet know the relentlessness of old age, anxious to unburden itself of its secrets, its growing indifference to the sensibilities of others, its sudden carelessness of other lives. Hartmann dreaded the effect on his wife of Martine’s revelations.

  ‘Handsome, you say?’ said Yvette. ‘An art dealer? That must be where I get my taste from.’

  After that he thought she must be all right. But he hurried her away as soon as he decently could, said he was tired, must get back to the hotel to telephone London. Martine indicated her own telephone, then let her hand fall, defeated. She understood. She hoped that he would get over it, knew that she must leave him alone to do so. For Yvette she was not worried: she understood her daughter, measured her self-concern. Was it not her own creation? For herself she did not care. Her task now was to ensure as peaceful an old age as possible. She hoped that Hartmann, nearer to her own age than to Yvette’s, would understand. If not, not. There was no more that she could do, or would care to do. She had made good the original damage to the best of her ability. Yvette was Hartmann’s responsibility now.

  ‘And Marianne?’ she asked, as they stood at the door. ‘Well and happy?’

  ‘Well and happy,’ they answered, knowing that there would be no help from this quarter, and took their leave.

  ‘Will you wear your blue tonight?’ Hartmann asked tenderly in the taxi. ‘It is my favourite.’

  ‘Mine too,’ said Yvette, but she sighed a little. ‘I think Maman looked older,’ she said.

  ‘But quite well,’ said Hartmann. ‘Telephone her tomorrow. Tell her we will be busy. We deserve a day to ourselves.’

  And so they had spent the following day quite companionably, sitting on the terrace of the hotel, reading newspapers, talking little. The plan to settle in Nice was dropped: at least, Hartmann did nothing in the way of looking at flats. Later, he thought. Then, he thought, perhaps not. There are other places. There is no hurry. But he changed their tickets for a late flight on the same evening, and they both felt relief when the plane touched down at Heathrow.

  ‘Back already?’ said Fibich, startled, when, alerted by footsteps, he went up to the flat. ‘Anything wrong?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Hartmann, embracing him. ‘We missed Marianne, that’s all.’

  For they missed her, not as she was now, plump, silent, submissive and plain, but as she had been, a young girl like any other, but so much better, prettier, quieter, and more lady-like. Better than her friend Belinda, for example, whose hedonism Yvette had hoped Marianne might emulate: superior. And how had the change come about? Surely the insipid Roger had not changed her? For there was no harm in him, only a rather too rigid puritanism that had led to this almost biblical eschewal of adornment, this irksome insistence on the solemnity of marriage and procreation.

  ‘Women have had babies before, you know,’ Hartmann had said to his daughter, viewing with mounting dismay her surrender to her condition. When pregnant she had sat with her stomach out, Roger beside her. And as there was little conversation on those afternoons when they drove themselves over to Richmond, they began to wonder if they were expected to keep their distance. The idea was unthinkable! With the excitement of the birth they had felt entitled to take Marianne over again, but Hartmann, calling at the hospital one evening (Yvette had been there all the afternoon) had found his daughter with her nightdress negligently disarrayed, her enlarged breasts in evidence. She did not bother to cover herself, and he was profoundly shocked. He had kept away after that for a little while, until Marianne was home again and he could trust her to be properly dressed. And he preferred the children, as he called them, to visit Ashley Gardens, where he felt his own authority to be stronger, rather than to go to them in their own home, the home that had been Roger’s, and which still bore the faintly depressing imprint of Roger’s self-effacing but nevertheless rigorous personality. Green, it was, pale green, with a large desk rather too prominent in the half of the long room that was the drawing-room, and a table and chairs in the half that was the dining-room. There was space at that table, Hartmann gloomily reflected, for quite a large family. Dusty displays of dried flowers fanned out in the empty grates. It was never quite warm enough in that house.

  ‘I must find them somewhere to live,’ thought Hartmann, as he had often thought before. He knew that Roger liked the house, which had been left to him by his mother: he knew too that he planned to fill it with children.

  In comparison with the irritating solemnity of Roger and now of Marianne, Hartmann found himself to be weightless, soaring like a bird, and, like a bird, not serious. ‘And yet we tried harder,’ he thought. He included Fibich and Yvette in his thought, and even Christine, although she was in a different category, having known not hardship but only loneliness. He had a feeling that Myers would take over the business when he and Fibich were gone, and he meant to change his will, leaving it in trust for poor little Henry. Toto would have shares in it: Fibich could see to that. For it was unlikely that Toto would settle down in Fibich’s lifetime, although Hartmann still had hopes for him. He liked the boy’s beauty, his way with women: he shook his head, laughed, and admired him. He saw in Toto the grace that had been so singularly denied to Roger. Marianne should have had a man like that, he thought, someone to tease her out of her shyness, make her laugh. But that could not be: there were too few men like Toto. And her mother had wanted to see her married. And he had let it happen, giving in to faint fears of having protected the girl too much. Wanting grandchildren.

  Fibich managed better with the children, he thought, although he was far too frightened of his own son. Fibich liked Roger, and had always loved Marianne. Fibich did not mind when Henry dribbled over him, laughed at his perpetual dampness. Hartmann could see the larva-like Henry, his uncertain head propped on Fibich’s shoulder, a string of saliva hanging endlessly from his mouth. There was no one like Fibich with a shy and woeful baby, whereas Hartmann would have liked to see the boy more active, more
colourful, more strongly committed to subversive acts which he would, in the fullness of time, perform. At least Fibich was no longer a problem, thought Hartmann. That reckless plan of going back to Berlin had been shelved, and Fibich seemed at ease, relieved by his decision. There was still the matter of Toto’s future, of course. But in comparison with Marianne, Toto somehow seemed less of a problem, less heavy on the heart. He would ruin them all, given half a chance: Hartmann could see that. But at least he would engage their attention, keep them absorbed, horrified, necessary. Hartmann felt quite grateful to Toto for being so impossible.

  Hartmann sighed again. The well-preserved widow who had dropped in for a light lunch on her way from St John’s Wood to the Royal Academy, where she was to meet her daughter, glanced at him discreetly.

  ‘Would you mind if I sat here?’ she asked. ‘It always fills up so quickly.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ he said, removing his hat from the chair. Getting on, he thought, the same age as Yvette, or thereabouts, but looking older, discontented, bored, nicely turned out. He noticed the pearls, the large diamond on the wedding finger. No husband, he adduced: used to making these little overtures. There was, after all, an empty seat at the table by the door. But what did it all matter? Those days were gone. Once he would have paid attention, delighting in the game. Now his thoughts were all with his wife, his fatherless, and apparently childless wife. Yvette had rallied, of course. She always did, and he thought she always would. Her days were not as empty as this one was proving to be for him. But he feared the look of abandonment on her face, the look which she had in fact never seen herself. He feared the day when she would become a widow. Fibich, of course, would look after her, for as long as Fibich was still there. He knew that. It was just that, suddenly, he could not bear the thought of her on her own. He wanted to be at home, safe, away from this awful day. He wanted it to be night, and to take the pill that always put him so beautifully to sleep. And it was only half-past twelve, he saw, resigning himself to an endless afternoon. He did not have the heart for his usual ceremonious lunch. He would eat here, peck at an omelette, eat one of those little meals designed for women. He groaned inwardly at the thought of his dereliction, his temporary fall from grace. But his manners did not desert him. Inclining his head courteously in the widow’s direction, he smiled and offered her the menu.