Latecomers

by Anita Brookner

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well, he is a man now.’

  And they had been so happy, Christine and he, visiting the flat, where they seemed to be entirely welcome. This tolerance on the part of the young people had charmed him. Toto had painted his room himself, and the dark green walls were, they had to admit, quite handsome. The green and white striped curtains supplied by Christine had gone down very well. ‘Thanks, Ma,’ said Toto. ‘Brilliant.’ He had already lost interest. Soon Christine was conspiring to decorate Isabel’s room: the outwardly subversive girl turned out to have surprisingly conventional taste, as Christine feared she might. Archie was indifferent to his surroundings and kept his magnolia walls. Christine ordered plain cream linen curtains for them both: she was suddenly exhausted. They gave a party when the flat was declared officially finished.

  ‘This will cost you something,’ said Hartmann, above the noise of the sound system that Toto had set up. ‘What’s he going to do now?’

  ‘He says he has contacts in the film business,’ said Fibich, he hoped with conviction. He was enjoying himself so much, and Toto’s many friends seemed so nice to him, that he did not much mind what his son did at the moment.

  ‘Such pretty girls,’ he murmured, gesturing with an asparagus-filled tube of brown bread.

  ‘And so many of them,’ said Hartmann.

  In the two years that ensued it was mainly Isabel who kept in touch. Christine grew to expect her plaintive voice on the telephone, to be followed by her attendance at dinner. Once Fibich came home to find her asleep on the sofa. This led, in a certain measure, to a return of his original worries.

  ‘How are they living?’ he asked Christine. ‘Why is she so tired?’

  ‘She is very young,’ said Christine sadly. ‘We must remember that.’

  Toto, they learned, had acquired an agent and was waiting for offers.

  ‘He may wait a long time,’ protested Fibich. ‘It will do him no harm to put in a few months at the office while he waits.’

  And when he drove Isabel back to the Fulham Road that evening he presented his son with an alternative. As this had never happened before Toto was surprised into accepting. He hated solitude and was privately bored. In any event he needed information about the world, and none seemed to be coming his way. As an amateur he rather favoured thinking his way into a part for which he was naturally wrongly cast. He consented with some amusement to Fibich’s proposal.

  He turned up at the office in a faultless grey suit, a Burberry over his arm, and in one hand an expensive briefcase with cruel corners, effects he had observed in others of the kind he was supposed to be imitating.

  ‘Let me get back to you on this,’ he would say on the telephone. And, ‘Can you pencil it in for the 12th? I’ll have a word with my partners.’

  Secretaries and typists were charmed: Goodman looked at him admiringly. Only Myers was unimpressed, but then Myers had never seemed enthusiastic about him. Toto was in fact capable of quite considerable work, but once he had mastered the idiom his usual subversive indifference took over. As a worker he was one of the naturally disruptive kind. He would arrive very early, surprising them all by being there ahead of them, and then be out for most of the rest of the day. ‘I have to see my agent,’ he would explain airily.

  ‘His agent seems to be a woman,’ Hartmann observed to Fibich. ‘I saw them lunching together in my restaurant.’

  He regarded this as a bit of an imposition – it was, after all, his restaurant – but had the grace to laugh at himself for this. I am getting old, he thought wonderingly, and felt none of his usual satisfaction. It was an awkward moment. He had waved his hand in a discreet greeting to Toto, who had nodded back. The agent was very pretty, though he did not mention this to Fibich, and one strand of her fair hair had slipped from its swept back moorings and lay attractively across her brow and cheek. She was talking so hard, and concentrating so entirely on Toto that she did not notice Hartmann. She had a beseeching expression. Hartmann had always supposed the transaction to be conducted on rather different lines. Well, never mind, he thought. What was clear to him was that the woman did not stand a chance. It occurred to him, quite surprisingly, that Toto might never marry.

  The thought had also occurred to Christine. There was something hard, high and distant about Toto which seemed to intensify as time went on. His adult personality, built as it was on a form of accurate self-regard, also emerged in due season, and by the time he was twenty-six he was his own man. It appeared to Christine that he was gradually removing himself from the sphere of childlike affections, hasty friendships, innocent love affairs, liaisons based on simple taste and need, all those dangerous areas of human vulnerability in which a false move or a disappointment can lead at worst to suffering, at best to boredom. Toto had no time for any of this. Time that was not spent perfecting himself was so strictly rationed that it was almost non-existent. He had, for example, to keep himself fit. This involved hours of swimming, a long run before breakfast, another at night, no cigarettes, no alcohol, and a strictly supervised diet. The result was an almost inhuman burnish to his already impressive looks. As he withdrew from others he practised an extreme form of courtesy which did duty for emotion and saved him a certain mental investment. This courtesy was maddening to the girl-friends he continued to attach to himself and who were amazed, after a night of love, to be addressed as formally as if they had just been introduced.

  It was reassuring to his mother to be telephoned from time to time, and then more regularly, by this prodigy who had become almost a stranger but in whom she could detect the faint tracings of the melancholy that had so overwhelmed his father at the same age. This lofty and beautiful stranger also came to dinner with his parents, ate carefully, thanked his mother, and delighted his father by asking about the family background. Toto’s interest in this background related entirely to himself, but was none the less genuine. He had a curious empathy, which made him try out for roles which had not yet been assigned to him. Thus for a whole week following one of his visits, he loped down the Fulham Road with a shopping bag, his hair carefully combed the wrong way, pretending to be Fibich. He was so successful that the chemist said to him, ‘We usually get your young brother in for these.’ Isabel found him increasingly frightening.

  Christine did not think he would marry because, in Tolstoy’s words, he lacked the necessary weakness. But, by the same token, he was nostalgic for some kind of safety, the safety that is provided by two people rather than by one. For this reason she saw that she and Fibich must remain in readiness, discreet, uncritical, and always welcoming; that they must stand back, ask no questions that could not be answered with the minimum of travail, and always be prepared for a return of the prodigal to the fold. For Toto was both prodigy and prodigal, as perhaps he had always been, and their initial failure to understand him could, in the light of this truth, be more easily explained and understood. They feared for him, largely on account of his inner solitariness, his gifts: what would happen to him when they were no longer there? Would he live alone, spending his evenings with other couples, couples perhaps less well-intentioned, less self-effacing than themselves, more ready to back this dark horse in a variety of sexual speculations, seeing in him an object of baffling fascination? She wished for him a calm wise older woman, a woman experienced enough to leave him alone, delicate in her attention, all-forgiving. She feared to die while he was still, as she saw it, unprotected.

  When Archie finished his thesis and Isabel abandoned hers, having devoted her best energies to the task of getting Toto to love her and failing, there came a parting of the ways that was not entirely harmonious. Archie blamed Toto for his indifference: he blamed his sister for her endless delusion. He had watched their liaison with increasing distaste, had seen Isabel reduced to pure longing, and, worse, to pure waiting, when Toto, mysteriously absent for several days, would return and appear to wonder what Isabel was doing in his bed.

  ‘We’re going home,’ said Archie, seein
g his sister in tears for the hundredth time. ‘I’ve had enough of this. Go and pack. There’s no need to explain.’

  There was apparently so little need to explain that Toto seemed to them to have anticipated this development all along.

  ‘Goodbye, then, old thing,’ he said to Isabel and patted her on the head.

  His goodbyes were pitiful: he was never to master the art of dismissing a woman gracefully. After that Archie did not feel that he could shake hands with him. They clattered down the stairs with their bags and cases as if in a sudden hurry to be gone. When the door had finally closed on them Toto sat listening to the silence and wondering whether or not he was happy. He sat in his room while the pattern of the sunlight shifted round the walls, and when the light began to fade he got up, went out into the little entrance hall, and carefully closed the doors to Archie’s and Isabel’s rooms, leaving only the door to his own room open. Then, curiously anxious to make no sound, he picked up his keys and tip-toed out of the flat.

  By this stage, at twenty-six, he was working one day a week at the office, still in his young executive’s outfit, and pursuing his own affairs for the rest of the time. Occasionally, he would drop in on his mother for lunch. These visits, though largely uncommunicative, brought joy to Christine’s heart. Fibich, returning from the office, would say, ‘Any news today? Did Toto come?’ and though Christine would too often reply, ‘No, nothing today,’ they both had the warm and comforting feeling that something had been restored. They floated in a calm which they had thought would never be theirs, and, strange to say, Toto began to match them in mood. He was discovering that intense quiet and solitude brought him his best effects, and he, who had been so exuberant as a child, began to take on a more silent presence as a result of his self-communing. He often sat in his room, willing himself to immobility, the only object of his attention the pattern of the sunlit window on his green wall. These descents into concentration he found laborious though rewarding. He could not have said what he discovered in their depths; he simply knew that they led him on, from chasm to chasm, to a sort of revelation that he could not define. He would emerge with a sigh, yet a profound feeling of peace, of something stored for future use. When the light went, the sound of ‘The Archers’ on a neighbour’s radio brought him back to the present. This was a sign to resume normal living.

  In this curious state, which a mystic might have recognized, work became an irrelevance. Yet it was about this time, and possibly as a result of sheer indifference, of a general cessation of the will, that he landed his first part, on the strength of only two television commercials, in which his presence had been obscured by busy lighting effects, and through the dedicated efforts by that very agent whom Hartmann had mistaken for quite another sort of woman. He was to play a waiter, in a story of love and treachery in high places, just such a production as he had always imagined, or rather foreseen. His role was small, indeed minimal, but he was on camera throughout a long and crucial passage. The black and white of his costume showed up his fine looks to advantage, and he was clever enough and assured enough to be pure background, not to add his modicum to the thrust of the scene. Nevertheless, his presence was so unmistakable that one newspaper, the following morning, was to report, ‘the ambiguity of the scene showing Prescott trading with his superior was underlined by the enigmatic figure of the waiter, whose rigorously neutral presence threw the deceptions of the main characters into high relief.’

  ‘But they haven’t given him any lines,’ protested Yvette.

  ‘Quiet,’ ordered Hartmann, his handkerchief at the ready.

  The four of them were seated on chairs pulled round the Hartmanns’ television. Fibich and Christine, alternately blushing and paling, sought each other’s hands. They examined their son’s image with something like curiosity: did he still belong to them? Or was he already on his way to a thousand hearts? Was he really to act, or merely be a seductive presence, a fantasy for housewives? They could not judge. They leaned closer to the screen, hardly daring to believe that he had grown so serious. Whatever strange property was there already seemed to belong to others, not to them at all. The very slowness of his development, this unexpected reversal of all the signs by which they had thought to know him, this very belatedness, amazed them. It was as if their own characters, their own mysterious and even dolorous inheritance, were receiving some strange and dignified form of recognition. They did not know this new adult son who had emerged from his unruly boyhood like a legendary princeling attaining his majority. What they did recognize was a quality of inwardness bordering on enchantment, a quality not remote from melancholy but with a strength about it that they had never known. He was theirs, and yet not theirs. He was their apotheosis.

  They switched off the television and ran to the telephone. Christine spoke first, trying, and almost succeeding, in keeping her voice steady. Then Yvette spoke, then Hartmann. Fibich was content to wait until last. After the praises which were Toto’s due, Fibich said, ‘When will we see you, my dear? We miss you. And now that you are famous we are afraid that you might forget us.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll see you soon,’ said Toto. Even his voice was calm.

  ‘I’ll make coffee,’ said Yvette, as they trooped back to the drawing-room.

  ‘No, tea,’ Hartmann called after her, blowing his nose. ‘Tea is better for the nerves. The strain was terrible. Are we to go through this every time he appears? My heart was beating so hard I thought I would have an attack.’

  He laid a reverent hand on his left breast, as if to solicit further news, then sighed, and put his handkerchief back into his pocket.

  ‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘Marvellous. Well, Fibich? Latecomer? Feel better?’

  ‘I wonder if Marianne was watching,’ Yvette said some time in the course of the evening. ‘I must ring her in the morning.’

  Toto’s next part was in a romantic serial for children which went out at five o’clock. In this he acted very well, for he had come to take children seriously. This was to remain Christine’s favourite, a moment of innocence in a career that already held promise. Then he got a part in a film on Channel Four. The part was small, but at one point he was required to take off his shirt. It was an event that was to open up the future to him, although Christine never liked it. She foresaw a conflict for her son, in which his extreme physical attractiveness would war with his new-found seriousness. She dreaded for him the vulgarities that the publicity would bring. For a moment she longed to have him back as he was, even as he had been, inordinate, unmanageable. Then she was led to reflect on the marvellous power that had brought him to this moment. She hoped he was strong enough to withstand the temptations, the corruptions of his new career.

  Toto was not surprised by being famous. He had always known that he would be, and therefore took it all as a matter of course. The only difference was that now he had less time to practise those strange descents into the abyss of himself. Now that the telephone rang all the time, and that there were suddenly so many more women in his life, it was all he could do to make excuses and retreat to his green room: nobody would believe that he was really alone. But he was, and he continued to be. On his green walls the outline of the sunny window glided steadily with the hours. In the entrance hall the doors to Archie’s and Isabel’s rooms remained closed.

  13

  At the end of another spring Fibich made up his mind. His decision, when it came, was dream-like in its simplicity. He walked into a travel agent’s office and announced that he wanted to go to Berlin. He was to remember that very walk, and the sight of the golden forsythia frothing in the London gardens. It had been a cold year, and by the beginning of April the daffodils were only just out in the park: their frail heads trembled in a keen wind. But there was a lightness in the sky that promised a change of season: it was as if a wheel had turned, cancelling the hesitations of the past and promising a quicker pace, a new effectiveness. He said, mildly, to Christine, ‘I have to go to Berlin next week. Just for a few days.�
�� So mildly did he say it, with so little anxiety, that she was not suspicious. ‘What a pity that it has to be Berlin,’ she answered him. ‘If it were somewhere warmer I might have come with you.’ He had smiled at her. ‘I will take you away later,’ he promised her. ‘We will go to the sun.’

  She had never known the extent, the depth, and the location of his fears, only that he was troubled, hesitant, by nature. Having so little desire to review or revive her own childhood she could not quite understand why he should want to recapture his. In this, oddly, he was coming round to her point of view. He regarded those who rhapsodized about their childhoods with amusement and some impatience; Hartmann was the same. In the office both Myers and Goodman were apt to be stimulated to unusual loquacity on the subject of past days, days from the beginnings of their lives, and their anecdotes struck Hartmann and Fibich as uninteresting, insignificant. Both felt cut off from such attachments, and also from the need to sentimentalize them, knowing instinctively how endangered they were in this respect. Nostalgia is only for the securely based. When Goodman relayed news of his mother, or Myers recounted what merry games had taken place in what Hartmann privately considered to be his appalling house in Richmond – and which accounted for his reluctance to move from it – he and Fibich would look at each other with perfect understanding. Of the two of them Hartmann was the more impatient. ‘Why do they go on about it?’ he would ask. ‘It is not polite. After all, no one can join in.’ Fibich was more indulgent. ‘It is not their fault that you were grown-up at twelve,’ he would say. They both regarded childhood reminiscence on the part of other people as at best an embarrassment, almost in the same category as public discussion of one’s amorous preoccupations, an imprudence, an imposition, an error of taste, as if the whole purpose of growing older had been mislaid. Such reminiscences excluded them, reminded them of their uncertainty of status. Only Yvette was to be indulged in this way, and even in Yvette’s case there was a certain uneasiness to be evoked. Both Hartmann and Fibich now knew the nature of the subterfuge that surrounded her famous story of the train to Bordeaux. Certain things they could only share between the two of them. When Fibich told Hartmann that he had bought a ticket to Berlin, had booked a room at the Kempinski, would be leaving in three days’ time, they entered a conspiracy, unmentioned but understood by both of them, to say nothing of the purpose of Fibich’s visit to their wives. They recognized it as too grave, too historic a matter even to be explained.