A Closed Eye

by Anita Brookner

  The following day she telephoned Tessa at Cadogan Square, where she seemed to spend most of her time.

  ‘Will you be at the flat at about four? Could I come for a cup of tea? I’ll bring a cake. Line up something useful for me to do.’ A pause. ‘Longing to see you.’ And by then it was true.

  ‘Freddie tells me that Jack is going to Riyadh,’ she said, on that afternoon, picking her way through a jumble of boxes in the hallway of the flat in Beaufort Street. She noticed uncurtained dusty windows in a room at the far end of a cluttered corridor. The flat, what she could see of it, was large but empty of all the necessities of life. The arrangements had aborted, or had always been makeshift. She put her box of cakes down on a packing case, and followed Tessa into what she supposed would be the drawing-room. Abundant light appeared balked by the coating of grime which seemed to press in from outside; dust swirled in sharply defined cones of sunlight which spread briefly along the floor and died.

  ‘Yes, well, he’s a journalist, he’s got to go where the news is. I don’t mind. I knew all this when I met him. To tell the truth, I’m quite glad he’s not here while I’m being sick all the time. I’m not at my best.’

  ‘Where is he?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘He’s got a flat in Judd Street. He’s usually there.’

  ‘He’ll make you unhappy,’ Harriet said abruptly. ‘He may not be good for you. You may be going into something that is not necessarily in your best interest. Will you ever feel comfortable with him? Relaxed, like couples are supposed to feel?’ None of this is what I meant to say, she thought. I meant to say, he will destroy you. Or rather that you will destroy yourself for him. Already you are less than you once were, when you were my friend, and I looked up to you. I hate this.

  Tessa stared at her. ‘What’s come over you? Whatever made you say all that?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said those things. I just had a sort of feeling that you were doing the wrong thing.’

  They were both silent. Tessa, sitting on one of the two dining-room chairs, which were all that the room contained, attempted unsuccessfully, haplessly, to screw together the two halves of an electric plug.

  ‘Why did you say all that?’ she asked eventually. ‘It’s not like you. You were always so, well, pleasant. My mother always said you had nice manners. Nicer than mine, was what she meant. I got a bit sick of it, I can tell you.’

  ‘I just don’t think he’ll make you happy,’ repeated Harriet, flushing with embarrassment and shame.

  ‘Do you know what it sounded like? It sounded as if you were jealous.’

  ‘Jealous?’ said Harriet, horrified.

  ‘Well, envious, then. Because he’s young, good-looking. Because he’s the kind of man women dream of, the kind of man women like you dream of, Harriet. I can see it in your face. Because you ended up with Freddie. Perhaps even because you can’t have children, at least you don’t seem able to. Sorry to say all this, but you did rather ask for it. Is it because Freddie’s too old? Well, you knew that when you married him.’ She relented when she saw Harriet’s bent head. ‘I don’t blame you for being envious,’ she said. ‘I’d be the same in your place.’

  ‘I do envy you a little,’ said Harriet, clenching her shaking hands and praying for the moment to pass. ‘It’s the baby, you see. I do love babies, always have done. But it would disturb Freddie to have one in the flat. Otherwise I’m perfectly happy.’ After that she did not dare to mention Jack Peckham’s name again.

  Tessa pushed back untidy fair hair, got up with an effort.

  ‘Well, I’ll expect you to be godmother; you can see the baby as often as you like.’

  This, Harriet reflected, had been exactly the tenor of her friendship in the old days, gracious, graceful, with an aftertaste of protection. Or was it patronage? Yet she was lovable, and Harriet felt love for her even now, in this chastening moment. But she also felt acute sadness, as if the innocent part of their friendship had been supplanted by something more watchful. I must be circumspect, she thought; even more important, I must grow up. She saw in Tessa’s tired face a vulnerability that had not been there before. She felt no resentment, felt indeed a weary tenderness. Out loud, she said, with a certain dignity, ‘You must let me help in any way I can.’

  The moment passed; faces had been saved; the truth, on both sides, contained, if not entirely suppressed. Harriet, walking home, knew that an alteration, however slight, had taken place, felt a coldness. Freddie is my only friend, she thought. He is my husband. I should talk to him more. I should ring my parents. But they seemed to have no need of her any more, and she had little of interest to tell them. They found her dull. They had made a life for themselves that excluded her, had handed her on gratefully to her husband, with whom they were on friendly but increasingly absent-minded terms, as if he were someone they had once known, as perhaps he was. They seemed to be out a lot, particularly in the evenings. They were on good terms with a couple of neighbours, whom they met for drinks on a more or less daily, or rather, nightly, basis. It was natural to them to frequent the bars of the bigger hotels: spruced and polished, they could put the day behind them, able at last to sparkle and laugh, and conscious, as before, that they were appreciated for their looks and their easy-going ways. When Harriet had last telephoned they had referred to a host of people whom she could not place, had spoken of restaurants, had indeed expressed concern that they might be late for some function or other, a dinner dance, she thought they had said. She imagined the flat as full of smoke and scent, ashtrays repeatedly emptied, damp rings on the glass of the coffee table. No plans were made for a visit to Cornwall Gardens, no invitations to Brighton forthcoming. In the background she could hear music, pop music. They affected a jokiness which in them was more than affectation. It was as if they were on leave from the war, and their spirits were artificially high, with the added bonus that this time there was no danger to contend with. They seemed perfectly happy. When she had last seen them they had impressed her as being younger, younger than she felt herself to be.

  Freddie, on the other hand, seemed old. He had taken to addressing her as ‘old girl’, as if to minimize the difference in their ages. On the evening of her conversation with Tessa he had come home tired and exasperated.

  ‘That dinner last night was the last straw,’ he said. ‘I’m not too keen on that friend of yours, if you really want to know. And the duck was tough. I had indigestion all night.’

  ‘Well, it’s only a light meal this evening,’ she replied. ‘Roast chicken.’

  ‘Very little for me, then.’ He loosened his tie. ‘I think I’ll have my bath now. And then an early night. There’s nothing on television; I’ve looked. You seem a bit tired yourself. Pale. All right, are you?’

  ‘And what did you think of Jack?’ she asked, after a largely silent dinner, as they were peeling their pears.

  He smiled, reluctantly. ‘Amusing fellow; I rather took to him. He’ll ditch her, of course. She’s forcing his hand.’

  ‘But what could she do? With the baby coming, I mean.’

  ‘She should have thought of that earlier. That’s what got on my nerves, the pretence. Her pretence. Anyone could see he was fed up to the back teeth.’

  ‘You’re very hard on her. Women want to get married, you know.’ And they get restless, too, she thought, sometimes even when they are married.

  ‘Well, don’t get too involved. There’ll be trouble there, and I don’t want you running round every five minutes.’

  She had no desire to displease him. He was her protection, her support, her very respectability. If she was beginning to see him more objectively it was because the day had brought disaffection. She knew that she did not want to be the sort of dignified but essentially downtrodden woman who dotes on other women’s children and secretly yearns for their husbands, never letting a complaint pass her lips. Pitiable! Yet to be the wife of a man who saw her merely as a restful presence and a compliant body was equally pitiable. It was
pitiable to be discontented when one was in good health and had so little to sadden one. And yet she had never felt so bereft, as if her presence in other lives were entirely illusory, as if she herself were a kind of facsimile, pleasant but inauthentic. Before she got too old she must wrest some part of her life for herself, or she would fade, vanish, before anyone had noticed her disappearance.

  When she emerged from the bathroom Freddie was already in bed and dozing, his reading glasses still on, his book face-downward on the sheet. She looked at him steadily, and then went to the dressing-table to brush her hair. As she brushed she felt the onset of a certain useless energy, so that she brushed on, past her usual hundred strokes. She had fine thick hair, almost black; it curled and rustled around her head with electricity. Finally she turned from the dressing-table, went across to the bed, removed Freddie’s book and glasses, careless of whether she woke him or not. Later, she thought that must have been the night her daughter was conceived, for after that her husband seemed to her less familiar, less impressive, less important, as if he had come to the end of any useful function he might have had, and might now be perceived as an old acquaintance, sometimes a stranger, sometimes still a friend.

  THERE FOLLOWED weeks, months even, of a discreet excitement. Life, formerly an affair of settled and sedate order, became delightful. Activity, once decreed for her by others, was for a time her own prerogative, and feelings, no longer the residue of others’ anxieties and expectations, flowered into an energizing accompaniment to her days. She felt strong and calm, calm enough to deal with Freddie’s appalled realization that he was to become a father, wily enough to praise him for something which she regarded entirely as her own affair. She invited his friends to dinner, watched him grow flustered and finally proud under their ironic congratulations. ‘But have you room here?’ one of them thought to ask. ‘No,’ she said, across the table and in front of witnesses. ‘We shall have to look for a house.’ In fact she had found one, or rather had seen a For Sale board outside a house in Wellington Square when out on one of her afternoon walks. As soon as she saw it she knew that she must have it, that she would not bother looking for anything else. It was too big, but she thought that the basement could be made into a flat for a nanny or housekeeper, while the top floor could be turned over to the child, when it grew up and craved independence. That way there would be no separation. The house was in good order, had only just been vacated. She would even keep the long flowered damask curtains: the walls could be plain white, the carpets pale blue, with Freddie’s precious rugs relegated to a room which she designated vaguely as his.

  He raised a few objections, but she made light of them. ‘I am not made of money, you know,’ he protested. ‘We spend nothing,’ she countered. ‘And I have never liked this flat.’ Indeed she was only just beginning to realize how much she disliked it. It seemed to her elderly, the home of an elderly person, and she had no wish to be that person. She was thirty-two and had never felt so young in her life. And she discovered that she had found an appropriate attitude towards her husband: a tender but detached amusement. A dissociation had taken place which had essentially freed her from the past.

  It no longer bothered her that Freddie looked unsightly in his sleep, or that his step was heavier than her own. She felt physically in a world apart, not only from Freddie but from everybody else, unnaturally well, flushed with healthy blood, and despite her barely perceptible new weight, light, impalpable. She was tireless as she walked all afternoon, round the silent squares and terraces, no longer gazing wistfully at the park but on smiling terms with all inhabited spaces. In her inner contentment she became almost wordless, greeting Freddie in the evenings with smiles and murmured phrases, sometimes laying a hand gratefully on his own. She saw that he was disarmed, finally, not by the prospect of the child but by her own happiness. He took to settling her in her chair, as if she were very tired, very frail, whereas in truth she could have got up, gone out into the moonlight and walked, she felt, until the small hours. ‘Don’t overdo it,’ he would say, as she got up to put on a kettle for tea, and ‘All right, old thing?’ searchingly, as he departed for the day. She saw him go with relief, although she, in her turn, became anxious for him in the evening. For this reason alone—the sudden pang of separation after hours of quietude, the sense of having moved away too far from what was familiar to her—she was at the window to look for him, at the door to greet him. He was bemused, attracted again, indulgent. They got on very well.

  But she knew that she was in some way divorced from him, and dated this from the moment her hand had flown up to shield her face from Jack Peckham. There was no disloyalty in her thoughts, simply an acknowledgement that something long dormant had come to life in that instant. She saw this as secret knowledge, devoid of intention: she was not a woman who knew how to pursue her own satisfaction, particularly at the expense of someone else. She was unaware of any skills she might possess, but knew that should they ever be wanted they would be adequate to the task. She looked in the glass and saw a pleasant face, saw the red stain on the jawbone: she accepted herself, mark and all. Never again would she attempt to hide herself. All this was of very great interest to her, as if she were coming to life after a long sleep, or being allowed her freedom after long claustration. No friendship suffered, rather the contrary. Goodwill suffused her. She thought of it as the elixir of life, which she had found at last, not knowing that it had been lacking.

  In this manner she was able to call on Tessa most afternoons, in the course of her long walk, or on her way to see the house. She had never been so fond of Tessa as she was at this time: it was delightful to have steered this long course from girlhood to pregnancy, to share symptoms, remedies, advice. The sheer sexlessness of these afternoons, passed in the dusty sunlight of Tessa’s still half-furnished flat, enchanted her, for it seemed as if they were very young again, in the schoolroom, before growing up had taken place. Tessa was not enjoying her pregnancy, complained of permanent nausea, of fatigue, of lack of energy. She was grateful for Harriet’s visits, grateful for her new and apparently immovable confidence, would allow her to make the tea and unwrap and slice a cake, while she sat brooding. They both ate voluptuously, proud of their appetites. In this too they regressed slightly.

  They discussed the move to Wellington Square, which would lessen the physical distance between them, making Harriet’s afternoon walk shorter, for she did not see herself ever breaking this agreeable habit.

  ‘Simplicity itself,’ she replied to Tessa’s questions. ‘I’d have done it before if I’d known how easy it would be. Luckily the place has just been decorated; I shan’t change anything at first. It’s only a question of packing up and unpacking. I’ve told Freddie to go off to work and forget all about it, just to come home to a different address. We can eat out until I’m straight. Have you written down that new telephone number?’

  ‘You seem happy,’ said Tessa curiously. ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘I am now,’ she replied, with evident truth. ‘I may not have been before, but I am now.’

  There was silence while they drank their tea.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said Tessa, in her new fretful voice. ‘I wish I could say the same. I don’t want this baby, poor little wretch. Look at this place! It’ll never be finished. I don’t even like it. I’d far rather be sharing with those girls again in Redcliffe Square. For two pins I’d put it on the market and go back to my parents. I never realized how lonely I’d be. I’ve never been lonely before.’

  ‘Where is Jack?’ asked Harriet finally.

  ‘In the Middle East somewhere. I occasionally see him on the television news—I don’t know where he is at this precise moment.’ She laughed mournfully, got up and moved to the window, her hands easing her back, as if she were a middle-aged woman. Her body took the full force of the blazing sun and darkened the room.

  ‘But he’ll be back before the baby …?’

  ‘Oh, I dare say. But he won’t stay long. He hates thi
s flat, goes on at me for not getting it together. But I don’t like it either; I just put up with it. Not he. Very fussy is Jack, very keen on his comforts. He’d rather go back to his place and ring up some old girl friends to come and feel sorry for him. It’s not going to work out, Hattie, I can’t kid myself. Not that I’d ever admit it to him. He’s my husband, whether he likes it or not. Though it’s probably not, I have to admit.’

  ‘You were always brave,’ Harriet surprised herself by saying. She had a sudden impression of dereliction, as if Tessa, despite her essentially immature protestations, had become older, more experienced than herself, as if she had met a fate that was noxious to her, although there was no mistaking the longing in her face.