A Private View

by Anita Brookner

‘Well, you can have a lamp, can’t you? I’m going to try it over there, opposite the door. No, don’t bother. I can manage.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t touch it, Katy. I like it where it is.’

  ‘Now don’t say anything, just wait.’

  With unsurprising vigour she manhandled the little table across the room into the opposite corner, where it abutted on to a bookcase: a biography of Picasso slumped heavily against its fellows, precipitating a slow waterfall of paperbacks onto the carpet. Above the top shelf a lamp juddered on its base.

  ‘There! That looks better, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t really think it does, you know.’ Only a dissolution of his character could have permitted this, he thought, reminding himself that he could restore order once she had gone.

  ‘Oh, you! You’re just used to it where it was. Change is growth, you know. How can you grow unless you change?’

  ‘I don’t know that I want to. I found growing up rather painful.’

  ‘I’m not talking about growing up. I’m talking about personal growth. Good heavens, anyone can grow up! Personal growth is quite different.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone can just grow up. It’s not as easy as you make it sound.’

  She ignored this. ‘Personal growth needs assistance. It means sharing. Is there anything you want to share, George?’

  He contemplated her, sitting on the carpet on one of his immaculate cushions. He did not feel like sharing. He felt, once again, like colonising, appropriating, cannibalising. He felt like violating. The very banality of her presence, and of her remarks, released once again those murderous impulses which had troubled and invigorated him earlier. At the same time the very openness of her face, turned to him with an expression of unusual friendliness, disarmed him. But she thinks that I am the one she has disarmed, he thought: she has decided that I am in the bag. Hence her confidence. He found all this unbearably sad. The modulation of his feelings, from antagonism and hunger to melancholy and defeat, surprised him. I am no longer up to this, he thought. I am in a minefield. I am thirty, no, forty years too late. I should have felt all this as a young man, when there was less time to reflect. And now I am old, and this wretched girl is young, and for all her talk of sharing, lacks even the faintest idea of what is going through my mind.

  ‘Shall we have some more tea?’ she said. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’

  He glanced elaborately at his watch. ‘Good heavens,’ he said. ‘I had no idea it was so late. I’m afraid I’ve got to be going out.’

  ‘Anywhere interesting?’ she asked.

  He no longer thought such questions bizarre. ‘Not very,’ he said. He thought he might take a therapeutic walk, through the hurrying home-going streets. He was anxious to be alone.

  ‘Well, if you must.’ The drawl, the disdainful expression were back in place.

  ‘And I dare say you have things to do yourself,’ he said gently. If only he were not aware of her vulnerability!

  ‘Yes, well, as you know, I’ve got a business to get off the ground. In that sense I’m always busy.’

  For an instant he wondered if all this were true, whether in fact she was more straightforward than she seemed. She had a certain authority, and, although she was an intellectual lightweight, a certain power as well. He could see her exerting that authority over a team of young women, and even over susceptible young men as well. She might, if fortune smiled on her, become London’s equivalent of Howard Singer: there were surely plenty of troubled people who would be delighted to be told how great they were. Yet the auspices did not seem favourable. Her very idleness, her willingness to visit him, betrayed a time spent less in planning, in organising, than in waiting. And her visits to him were no doubt less than innocent. The time would come when she would mention once again her search for sponsors. But he was more experienced than she was. He would be equal to her there.

  He had thought of himself as a man afflicted with lucidity. For this reason he could no longer hide from himself the fact that she inspired in him an intoxicating mixture of antagonism and longing. The urge to dominate her, in some nebulous and unformulated fashion, returned to him in her absence, only to evaporate once she was actually in his presence. That presence was ambiguous, disconcerting, as disconcerting as the hitherto unknown range of feelings that surged over him when she was no longer there. Her actual, rather fleshy form, and the face that could take on many disguises, caused him to feel pity, even despair. Once the door had closed behind her, and the inevitable blankness of her absence had been registered, he reverted to the faintly lycanthropic character who had been revealed to him only that morning. He turned his mind to this character from time to time, as other men might turn to pornography. All this could be quite harmless, he thought, as long as he could keep it to himself. He had only to exercise his higher consciousness for the temptation to disappear. And the temptation, he noted thankfully, was cerebral rather than physical. Not once had he actually contemplated any kind of physical approach. He was quite safe on that score. Like Swann’s Odette, she was simply not his type.

  On the whole it might be better if she went away. Or if he did. He thought again of Rome, reviewed the arrangements to be made, and once again postponed the idea. He could always get a single flight. Louise, he thought, had not taken the plan too seriously: she would not be too disappointed. And if she were she would forgive him. He had not abused her eternal forgiveness in the past, keeping in the back of his mind the fact that he had shown magnificent forbearance in relation to her marriage. Though shocked, he had been dignified. In fact it had not been too difficult. She was dear to him, but he no longer felt for her that sharpness of desire that had lent such urgency to their early meetings. Then it would have been unbearable. But by dint of agreeing with her on nearly every subject, by dint of approving of her, and admiring her, his desire had lost its edge. She was still in many ways his ideal. His word for her was ‘decent’, and her decency had never quite lost its appeal. But by that very virtue she had banished that sensation of danger which the fact of nearing the edge of unacceptable behavior had always imparted to him. Now he appeared, for whatever reason, to be rather near it once again.

  His life, in retrospect, seemed very long and quite uneventful. Yet it had been occupied with struggle, with the no doubt modest but nevertheless taxing struggle of finding a place for himself in the world. This he had managed to do, and the result was now revealed to him as unsatisfactory. How else to account for these primitive emotions which had suddenly come to the fore? Perhaps he was merely undergoing a period of change: Howard Singer would have talked him out of it, or through it, as they seemed to like to say. He grinned as he thought of himself in a support group, although he knew that such things existed, and were even patronised by redundant executives. He isolated the word redundant, and resolved to think further along these lines. There was no reason why he could not deal with his own malaise, if that was what it was. He was not totally without understanding.

  He manoeuvred the writing-table back to its original position, trying not to notice the very small scratch on one of the legs. His possessions, his surroundings, suddenly bored him: for a moment he failed to care what would happen to them. If he were to leave they would wait patiently for his return, and if he failed to return they would not in that event disappear. The knowledge that they would survive him, outlive him, shocked him slightly. It was only just that they should suffer some infinitesimal damage, just as he seemed to be suffering, so that time passing should be equally demanding of them all.

  7

  BY THE LIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING MORNING—A lucid white winter light that seemed to banish the dark more effectively than on previous days—his state of mind seemed to him rather more puzzling. Reprehensible, certainly, but also uncharacteristic. He hoped that he was not about to deteriorate into a waggish old man, physically harmless, but given to questionable fantasies. He greeted Mrs Cardozo with more than usual warmth, made coffee for them both, then
told her that he would be out for most of the morning. Space and distance were what he needed. He decided to take a walk.

  By ‘a walk’ he meant not an obedient peregrination of the park but a sortie into a relatively foreign landscape, or what he thought of as foreign, remote streets of small houses, which enclosed lives at which he could only guess and which continued to exert a strange fascination on him. Whereas the streets of European cities were familiar, and no longer occasioned any shock of surprise, these closed silent little houses, facing each other imperviously across wide blank streets, thrilled him with a mystery of real strangeness. They were the stuff of his Sundays. In the fading light of a suburban afternoon they had often seemed to him to be deserted, uninhabited, so still were they, so undisturbed by any sign of life. He had been born in such a house, but in another town, where afternoons seemed to stretch into infinity, and where only a rare passer by had hinted at a human presence. He had never been back, but occasionally his own comfortable metropolitan life seemed to him an aberration, as if he were still a stranger, a newcomer, unused to the assumption of urban prosperity which had apparently settled on him without his quite understanding whether this was allowed, or whether he had done anything to deserve it.

  On this fine white morning he crossed the park, in a hurry to reach the alien but mysteriously familiar streets, no longer interested in the raw space which enveloped him. He came out into Queen’s Gate, yet the buildings here were too lofty, too impersonal to suit his mood, and he paid them little attention, only vaguely aware of their architectural interest. He felt still a slight vulnerability, the residue of dissipating energies. He thought he would make for Hurlingham, which he had once investigated on a particularly bleak Sunday, as if under an enchantment, his steps ringing out on the empty pavements. It must have been all of a year ago, he reckoned, for the shop windows had been full of sad decorations left over from Christmas, and now it seemed to be Christmas once again, for there was a tree outside the hospital in the Fulham Road, and more trees on forecourts and in car parks. And on florists’ stalls, among the azaleas and the poinsettias, soon destined to wither in the heat of Christmas fires, the first frail daffodils, the pots of closed green hyacinths, and, paper white, the heavenly narcissi, not yet scented, but just showing their orange hearts.

  He was soon eased and tranquillised by the steady progress of his feet, yet his mind was not quite under his control, as he liked it to be. He was still subject to strange tides of feeling, having now to do with memory rather than with his new preoccupations. For a surprisingly vivid moment he was back in the past, and inhabited by the strange complex of emotions which overtook him whenever he thought of his mother. This memory was quite specific, and though it seemed abrupt he thought there must be a connection somewhere if only he could trace it. So powerful was the memory that it seemed to him that he was a boy again, or rather a young man, living unwillingly at home, and subject to the pains of home, which now overtook him with astounding force. If life were to be lived backwards in this way, as it seemed to be, then age was to be dreaded, for reasons which had nothing to do with whatever the future had in store for him.

  His small stuffy bedroom in his parents’ house had looked out onto a patch of garden, which he now saw in almost perfect detail. An equally small top window let in a breath of mild air and a smell of grass. At some point his mother had decided that it was dangerous to leave this window open, although there could be no possible threat of an intruder, since the only way into the garden was through the house. Every morning, after he had left for work, his mother would go into his bedroom and close the window. Every evening he would open it again. ‘Mother,’ he had said. ‘Please leave my window open. The room gets so stuffy.’ But she took no notice. As she grew older, sicker, more disaffected, she would not only close the window, and keep it closed all day, but would linger in his room as if to defend her action against all comers, and in particular against her son.

  When he returned, heartsick, from the cardboard box factory in the evening, his room would be not only stuffy but filled with his mother’s stale cigarette smoke. The fact that she had been sitting there filled him with alarm. He knew that she never looked at his books, his scraps of writing, for she was genuinely uninterested in him, and this he had come to accept as normal. It was, rather, the fact that, too late, she was attempting to make contact with him, when all he desired was for her to accept that he would ultimately leave her. He pictured her, alone in the otherwise empty house, drifting dumbly into his room, shutting the window, and then sitting there for perhaps half a day, her purpose already forgotten. By that stage her speech and understanding had been slightly affected, although it took him a long time to realise that she was a little deranged. In the end, out of pity, he left the window shut, hoping to pacify her. His nostrils had retained the characteristic smell of that room, compounded of toast and cigarette smoke, the smell of an airless life which he had thought would haunt him for ever.

  It still haunted him, but in random flashes, vivid pictures of the past, visitations, when he was all unaware. For the rest of the time he was free of it, and comfortable in his latter-day transformation. But, to judge from his recent epiphany, what had not disappeared was the powerful feeling of protest against the hand which life had dealt him, and the oceanic desire for validation, for dominance over whatever resistance might be put in his way, even if it were no more than a token, a suggestion, a provocation. The most unnerving aspect of the previous day’s insights was that this excitation had surged up again, out of nowhere, out of the past, and that the feeling had attached, almost at random, to another human being, to the girl, Katy Gibb, who, as far as he could honestly see, posed no threat to him at all.

  Yet, looked at rationally, his mother, whose sly invasion of his territory had first aroused this feeling, had posed no threat either, for although she might not love him, as he thought a mother should love her son, she had certainly wished him no harm. But wait, he thought suddenly, she was in my room when I was not there, when nobody should have been there, when the room should have been empty. And in the same way, or in a reflection, the merest adumbration of the same way, Katy is frequently in my flat when I do not want her to be there. He felt a shock of horror at the thought that she might be there in his absence, or rather—and this was closer—as if she intended to be. This of course was ridiculous, impossible, yet the shock was salutary: he had traced his combative thrill, with its undercurrent of grandiosity, to its source. He was defending his territory. It even seemed permissible to defend it by aggression (if that was what he had felt), should a direct threat arise. It could not arise; of course it could not. But if it did he was prepared, again with that same relish, to oppose it.

  He had reached Eel Brook Common, and his tension was beginning to dissipate, as if he had come to grips with a hitherto insoluble problem. He raised his head and addressed himself to the tall idiosyncratic houses leading off the green. He attempted to regain an air of bracing certainty, a pantomime which had served him well in the past, but an area of vulnerability remained. Never to feel safe, never to feel free! Yet he had satisfied his conscience, had remained with his mother to the end, though the end had been as graceless as his own feelings. After her death he had felt momentarily delivered, and the moment had lasted long enough to get him to London. It was only lately that his early years had invaded him once again, as if the secret of his liberty had been discovered, and discovered to be undeserved, without foundation, illusory.

  He had it in him now, with his unfortunate sentimental education, to contemplate Katy Gibb calmly and without rancour. He saw her as infinitely disadvantaged. He was not unaware of her desire to appropriate some of his money, but he was genuinely sorry that her designs were so apparent. He was, in a sense, grateful to her for this. There was not the slightest danger that her efforts would succeed: he was hard-headed where money was concerned. He had had too little to start with, and felt that what had come to him was so excessive that it m
ust be carefully husbanded, as if it still belonged to somebody else. The idea of Putnam’s money going to some flimsy enterprise was outrageous, absurd. He had made a careful will, so careful that he had left himself few funds to play with in his lifetime. Most of the money would go to Louise, whom he hoped, indeed knew, would outlive him. By his own standards he was a wealthy man, yet he spent nothing. This continence almost amused him. His wants were few and were easily satisfied: books, modest travel, appropriate disbursements to various charities. The idea that he might squander what he possessed was profoundly shocking to him. Therefore he was well defended.

  But deprived of his money, or to put it more politely, of his help, the girl’s situation would be desperate. Her smart friends, the ones she got to invite her to lunch, would have long ago got her measure. He, if anything, had been rather slow on that score. She would move on, of course, eventually: something told him that she would not wait for the Dunlops to return. And it was winter, and she only had a few possessions in that nylon bag, presumably the vaunted Armani outfit she had worn on the night of their dinner. Everything else had been appropriated from Sharon’s wardrobe. Why could he not dismiss the thought of her? He saw her as he had first seen her, scowling and unfortunate, until she had turned that suddenly languorous gaze on himself and onto Mrs Lydiard. And from that moment on it had been an astonishing performance. He had an inkling of astonishing performances given in other settings, in other parts of the world, wherever there was an audience to be vanquished. But the performance was not quite astonishing enough, and an acute observer would always be able to see through her, as Mrs Lydiard had done. Initially charmed, Mrs Lydiard had soon seen sense, and had vanished from the scene. He supposed he should telephone her. On the other hand he did not particularly want to listen to her strictures. He did not feel able to discuss Katy with Mrs Lydiard, or indeed with anyone but himself.