Latecomers

by Anita Brookner

  Squeezing through the narrow door to which the queue had been inching its way was so like a symbolic birth that he laughed, and, once more in the open air, under the mild sun, straightened up and headed for the Unter den Linden, to which, mysteriously, he knew the way. Here was a street even wider than those which had gone before, but again overlaid with that unpeaceful quietness, that absence of some vital ingredient, some metropolitan effervescence that was intensified in the Eastern zone, where few people sauntered for pleasure, where flat square buildings faced each other across the great avenue, and where no buds broke on the famous trees. In the distance, in a faint mild haze of sunshine, Fibich could see the Brandenberg Gate. That recognized, he decided that he had passed whatever test he had set himself. He found a modest glassed-in café, and went inside. The coffee that they brought him was dark and strong. Delicious! He looked around him, feeling suddenly well-disposed, like a student released from his final examinations. A young man in a corner was eating fried eggs. Subdued conversation, of an unusually orderly nature, rose from adjoining tables. No music: a provincial calm. He paid his bill, raised his hat to the company, and went out into the sunshine, back to the Friedrichstrasse station.

  And, once back on the Kurfürstendamm, he felt free, free of his curious life-long obligation, free, even, of his fear. Sun glinted on the chrome of cars: the tables outside the Kempinski were full. He wondered whether it had been his own blindness to the matters of ordinary life and the way in which this blindness had been lifted that made the city now seem populated, businesslike, good-humoured. He thought not, for he had never been mad, simply troubled to his depths by that last vision of his fainting mother and his father, bent to succour her, their faces turned away from him. Had she recovered? Had they survived? Or rather, how long had they survived? What had happened to the house (for now he knew it was a house), the house with the chair in it, the Voltaire? And how much was he to blame for any of this? Ah, that was getting nearer to the source of his anguish. His adult self, the adult he had so unexpectedly become, almost in spite of himself, knew that all children blame themselves for their parents’ unhappiness, and even for what becomes of them. That was what he must have been doing all these years. What was to deliver him was the thought of his own death, which he somehow knew was not far off, and he brushed aside the past – remote now, dully coloured, almost dark – in the interest of seeing to whatever future remained to him, leaving matters in good order for those who came after him. Time the regulator, he thought, bringer of philosophical awareness. Looking back now, from this distance, even his own life seemed precious to him, blessed with a wife and son, with a friend like Hartmann, living always in amity.

  He thought of Christine, as he had first known her, a shy, timid girl, awkward, self-effacing, not happy, but too modest even to register the fact. Denied much, almost as much as he had been, in the way of family relationships, trying so very hard to belong to Aunt Marie Jessop, who was not, despite her natural kindness, any sort of a mother. Christine had not changed much, he thought: behind her odd and appealing face there still lurked the timorous girl. The only time he had ever known her to shed her reserve was with those friends that Toto had brought home: with Toto himself she was still shy. He thought of Hartmann, his valiant friend, and of Yvette, another little girl who had never shed her former self. How he understood them suddenly; how dear they were! And Marianne, who had been his darling, and who even now might be in the hospital, having another baby of her own, yet, to him still a child. Ah, he thought, the truth bursting on him suddenly, nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one’s embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one’s home.

  This thought brought him to his son. His boy, his dearest boy! How could he ever have thought his own life more precious, more interesting, than this great achievement, this Toto, this marvellous stranger, who had been given to him to show him that stable edifices can be built on ruins, that honey might indeed come from the rock? So unlike him as to seem to belong to a different species, and yet not entirely rejecting him, his poor father, coming round, in fact, after his turbulent boyhood, to their own quiet ways, reconciled at last to loving them in his own fashion, keeping in touch, however infrequently, dropping in to see them, bringing no news but apt to sit quietly at his mother’s side until another impulse took him away again. Fibich, sitting in the sun outside the Kranzler, watching the crowd, felt a great peace come upon him, recognizing at last that his purpose in life had been not to find his own father but to be a father himself.

  Yet, he thought, was it to be as easy as that? The part of him that was and always had been an adult warned him against the euphoria, the sense of revelation that was overtaking him, but so anxious was he to sustain the feeling that he brushed aside his misgivings. He was, after all, still on dangerous ground, and his purpose was to get home safely: he could not afford to be riven by doubt. He looked up and saw the ugly ruin of the church, the obscure blackened stump of the tower, an outrageous reminder of a past he was now anxious to forget. At the next table a woman, dressed in a white satin blouse, a full black skirt, a black hat, and wearing a gold bracelet round her ankle, smiled at him, revealing long white teeth between grotesquely exaggerated vermilion lips. He raised his hat to her, and left hurriedly, uneasily aware that she may have been, probably was, a man. Only three days left, he told himself. He was already finished with Berlin.

  But the revivifying sleep continued to reclaim him and to cast him up safely on to the shores of the following day. He began to treat himself more kindly, dropped his guidebook into the wastepaper basket, stayed for long hours in his quiet room, emerging only for meals, for a gentle stroll to the shop that sold English newspapers, to the Kranzler, or, for lunch, to the Paris Bar. He alternated between feeling stranded and feeling becalmed, a state of mind common, he supposed, to most travellers. For now he felt himself to be just that, a traveller. It was a dispensation he could not have foreseen. Still the obscure voice warned him, but he silenced it. He felt well, unexpectedly restored: the slower pace of life he had allowed himself must suit him. And he began to think, luxuriously, that when he got home he would talk to Hartmann again about buying homes for them all in the South, where their wives could shop for olives and melons in the market and he and Hartmann could relax in the sun. Their work was over, he saw that now. It was time to go, time to make arrangements for them all – and for Toto, and Myers, and poor Goodman, who would perish without the office to go to each morning – and to leave, say goodbye, harvest a few years before the end. Nothing to wait for now, he thought: I have done what I meant to do, tied up what loose ends there were. And if certain things remained puzzling, what of it? Not everything is capable of being resolved in this life. And since, as he was almost certain, there was no other, and that therefore he would never see his mother and father again, what of it? It was the fate of all children. He frowned. And I am no longer a child, he reminded himself. Nevertheless, he would feel safer once he was on the plane.

  He left early for the airport, allowing too much time, which he spent drinking more coffee. When it became time for him to board he felt an enormous surge of joy. In the plane sunshine flooded the cabin, signalling to him his release from stress. He saw, quite clearly, the evening ahead of him, the reunion of the four of them, the telephone call to Toto. He had bought scent for Christine and Yvette, quite unnecessary, he knew, a bottle of apricot brandy for Hartmann who liked sweet drinks, and for Toto a black crocodile belt. Marianne would have, for Henry, the little piped jacket just like the one he had seen on a boy with his mother in a café. Despite the droning of the plane he felt cocooned in silence.

  The journey passed with dream-like efficiency and
speed. Standing up to leave, he raised his hat to the stewardess, and shuffled with all his bags and packages through the tunnel, stepped on to firm ground, and looked around him with disbelief. He was unprepared, after the orderly little airport in Berlin, for the crowds and the noise, which was tremendous. Searching for Hartmann, and suddenly unaware of his direction, he was buffeted, stopped to rearrange his packages, and was nearly swept off his feet. After Berlin it felt warm, even hot, and stuffy. Children cried: a baby, slung over its mother’s shoulder, was in the deep sleep of exhaustion. He inched slowly ahead in a queue, longing to be free, to be home. The crowd grew denser, and he was aware of a commotion behind him. ‘Keep still,’ cried a voice. ‘Don’t push. A woman has fainted.’ Fibich, hampered by his parcels, felt the stirrings of the old panic. As he knew he must, he turned, in time to see the figure of a woman collapse into the arms of her husband, who bent over her to lay her on the ground. Together they formed a mourning group, ageless, timeless, without nationality. His mouth dry, his heart beating, Fibich pushed on, stumbling now, his peace and calm destroyed, on and on, somehow, until he reached Hartmann and fell into his arms.

  14

  At sixty-one Fibich grew old, perceptibly. No longer interested in his work, he put all his efforts into doing it, with fewer results. Because of his inherent meticulousness no one noticed this, but it seemed to him that the major exercise of the day was getting to the office, and then, after an aching interval, which he measured minute by minute, getting home again. He felt endangered by his absence from home, and, once home, was not much reassured. He begged Christine not to bother to devise meals for him; he would concentrate on trying to eat a little fish, which he would dismember with a tremulous knife and fork. He would discard his city clothes with a sigh of relief and put on his dressing-gown. Christine, trying to make a ceremony of this habit, which she saw as alarming, bought him a velvet smoking jacket. He wore it once or twice to please her, and then relapsed into the dressing-gown. Once she saw him shuffling along from the bathroom, the cord tied loosely round his waist, and was thankful that Toto no longer lived at home to see his father in this condition. She wondered whether it was the prospect of Toto’s imminent departure to Morocco, to make a film, and his absence for a projected six months, that had brought about this change. She even discussed this with Hartmann, since Fibich would say nothing. Hartmann, for once, was devoid of resource. ‘The trip may have tired him,’ said Hartmann. ‘Let him rest. He’ll be all right. We’ll plan a holiday, take a house somewhere this summer. He will come round.’

  So they let him rest. He slept voraciously, and sometimes dreamed. His dreams were not clear to him. In one he was being very kindly introduced by a companion to an aristocratic tailor who was to measure him for a suit. The fitting was to take place in Brighton, near the station. While he waited for the tailor to attend to him, which he never did, the scene abruptly changed to Copenhagen on a winter’s morning. This was somehow significant. In the dream Fibich took photographs of Copenhagen which he later studied with the same companion who had introduced him to the tailor. But in one of the photographs the companion figured quite prominently, standing in front of a cottage in the grounds of a large mansion or hotel. There had been a displacement of some kind, a fobbing off, a lack of explanation. Fibich awoke from this dream with a sense of alarm, relieved to find himself in his own bed. The relief gave him a little energy with which to start the day, which he did with a factitious enthusiasm that he was forced to substitute for the real thing. At the office, where he still appeared to be effective, he sat for long periods at his desk, staring at his hands. ‘He’s a little tired,’ explained Hartmann, who was thereby forced into regular attendance. Goodman, ever sympathetic, took most of the work off his shoulders.

  It was Yvette’s turn to appear with covered dishes. Turning bad into good, as was her habit, she regarded Fibich’s malaise as a challenge to her psychological powers and excellent household management. Luxurious foods appeared, were discarded by Fibich as too elaborate, and were hastily eaten by Christine in order that feelings should not be hurt. ‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ said Christine to Yvette, as a concoction of sole with mushrooms in a cream sauce was handed in. ‘He has no appetite.’ ‘Then he needs building up,’ said Yvette firmly. Her reassurance, though of a hollow nature, was balm to Christine’s anxious spirit.

  To Hartmann Yvette said, ‘I don’t think he eats enough. Does he have a proper lunch?’ ‘He never has,’ Hartmann informed her. ‘Then you’d better see that he does. Take him to that place of yours. He’ll eat if you’re with him. After all, he is no longer young.’ Hartmann was disgruntled, disturbed. He was the elder by five years, sixty-six to Fibich’s sixty-one. Nobody remarked that he was no longer young. Of course he did not feel old. That, essentially, was the difference between Fibich and himself.

  For the first time Hartmann was obliged to think about age, and about the future. He was not particularly inclined to make changes. Since his mother-in-law’s revelations he no longer felt that France was a country to which he might wish to retire. This, he knew, was irrational. Nevertheless, he would wait a bit and see if the feeling passed. And if not, well, there were other places: Spain, Switzerland. And yet he had to confess that he had little taste for uprooting himself. Now that he was forced to acknowledge that he too got tired, that he was no longer eager to leave home in the mornings, that he always felt a sense of deliverance as the weekend approached, he thought it might be time to sell up, settle affairs, make arrangements, and then, perhaps, wait a little to see what everyone wanted to do. He would miss his little indulgences, his routines, but he was not without resource. By nature he was a man of pleasure, and he could see that there might be a voluptuous charm in simply filling the empty days as only he knew how: a morning of delicate shopping, a stroll, a decent lunch somewhere. Could it be that he was at last on the verge of that real, that ineluctable old age, in which he had never truly believed? If so, he thought, it had come suddenly and quickly. He pondered a moment in disbelief, looked around at Yvette’s apricot walls, looked at Yvette herself, dressed in the bright colours she still loved, the hair an ever more ambitious gold, saw her, unconscious of his gaze, vigorously and importantly moving about her drawing-room, saw, in a flash, that he must stay alive for her sake, for she would never fare well as a widow. He felt an unaccustomed pang in the heart as he looked at her, never still, in her royal blue blouse and her black skirt, humming a little under her breath, beautifully concerned for his comfort and the perfection of his home. He sighed. Perhaps they would quietly remain here, and somehow carry on as they were. Perhaps Fibich would come out of his depression, if that was what it was, and resume his duties, bring his attention once more to bear on the present. Suddenly all that Hartmann required was to see smiles on the faces around him. It was, after all, what he had always required. In his own eyes he had changed very little, had always, even as a young man, had an adult sense of responsibility. He had always had the insight that if he organized the main structures of his life – work, home, marriage – in a satisfactory manner, then he was fully entitled to enjoy his liberty outside them. He had had an easy attitude to fidelity when first married, but now he realized that he had been faithful to his wife for so long that he would find anything else intolerable. He became aware that Yvette had made him happy. He looked at her, sitting at her little desk, making out her shopping list, her mouth firm with attention. She would never understand either La Princesse de Clèves or Madame Bovary, and he was glad of it. He went over to her and kissed her hair, put an arm around her thickening shoulders.

  ‘You know,’ he said gently. ‘I think you have put on a little weight.’

  ‘I may have filled out a bit,’ she admitted. ‘But no one could say that I haven’t kept my figure.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘No one could say that.’

  He patted her arm, was suddenly reluctant to leave her. She was, however, as always, sublimely unconscious of his moods.


  ‘Are you off?’ she asked. ‘Don’t be late this evening. I might want to see Marianne.’

  ‘What will you do today?’ he asked her in his turn.

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘Oh, I have plenty to do, don’t you worry about me. Are you all right, Hartmann? You’re usually on your way by this time.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m all right. I’ll see you later. Have a good day.’

  But he hesitated by the door, looked back at her unrealistically golden head, bent once more over her list, and wondered suddenly what it would be like not to see her there. He shivered. But this was ridiculous! They were still young! This was the malaise that was afflicting Fibich: he must have caught it from him. He straightened his shoulders and left the room, took his hat and the cane he sometimes affected, decided to walk to the office to demonstrate how young and active he was. It was a clear day, mild but sunless: rain was forecast. The white sky reflected his mood, in which he detected a certain anxiety, and absence of joy. He put this down to the strain of Marianne’s second pregnancy, which had worried him, but he was aware that this was not the only cause. If Fibich went… Again, he told himself, this was ridiculous. Because the man had had the absurd idea of going to Berlin and had understandably been shaken up by the experience, there was no need to regard him as endangered. He had always been nervous, and now he was just a little more nervous than he had been: it was as simple as that. And even if it were not simple, they had reached the stage in life in which matters had to be made simple if they themselves were to last out the course. How could Fibich have put them all at risk with his insane journey? And what had he proved? Striding up the tree-arching avenue in the park, Hartmann felt his heart expand with anger, and also with joy, as he recovered his normal equilibrium. Fibich must pull himself together. He must be told that he owed it to Christine, to his son, and to himself, Hartmann, to behave like a grown-up for once in his life. For that was the trouble with Fibich, he thought. Although recognizable as elderly, he had never grown up. Well now, he, Hartmann, would have to talk with Fibich, as man to man, not as the boys they had once been, would tell him about the sudden recognition of old age that he had had that morning, would remind him that they must make plans, settle affairs, and, most of all, preserve themselves so as to enjoy whatever future remained to them. Hartmann, gazing up proprietorially at the arching branches, the trees now in full leaf, felt his troubled thoughts leave him, and also his ill humour. This had always been his strength, he thought, his endless tolerance of idiosyncrasy in others. Nevertheless, he was determined to speak to Fibich quite firmly. He strode on, proud of his ability to cover the distance from Ashley Gardens to Spanish Place, at a steady pace, on this dull but cloudless May morning. And not even out of breath, he remarked to himself.