A Closed Eye

by Anita Brookner

  ‘I always admired you,’ she went on. ‘You had no anxieties, about school, or about boys, men, I should say. I can see you now, in those kilts you wore, that your mother had made for you in Scotland. You were so fair—that lovely skin. You never had a spot! I took that as a sign of your superiority. I thought you were invincible.’

  ‘I was,’ said Tessa. ‘Until I met Jack. I knew straight away that he’d always been unfaithful, but I had to have him. I was used to having things, you see, and when I saw what I wanted I simply persisted. I ignored all the warning signs, like his going back to Judd Street instead of staying with me. Oh, yes, he did that a lot. Still does. He’ll sleep with me, and then take off. And I put up with it. I sit here all day instead of getting a move on, and I think, what can I do to make him stay? How can I make it come out right? Because that’s what I want.’

  She moved back to her chair and sat down heavily, her face drawn. Her hair, Harriet could see, was not clean. How often she had envied that fair hair, when it was held back by a velvet band, when it bounced with cleanliness on Tessa’s shoulders … How commanding she had been, how one vied for her favour, her commendation! And yet gracious, intimate when it suited her. A glamorous friend. And she had had her pick of young men, was irresistible to the easily impressed. If she had married a weak man she would always have retained the upper hand. Not perhaps have known true happiness, but on the other hand never have known doubt. She would have stayed in character, stayed safe. Instead she had lighted on a strong man, and had instantly gone under. The doom, the terrible doom of a woman like that in thrall to the wrong man! Unused to circumspection, she had been revealed as simple, obstinate, and finally without resource, disarmed. This discovery had left her with a kind of hatred, which, as surely as anything else, would militate against any kind of happiness, which concessions might just bring about. But with a man like Jack, she thought, one could not count on happiness anyway. Women would find him attractive, and he would find them convenient. He was not made for conventional alliances.

  ‘You’ll be all right once the baby is born,’ said Harriet, with a conviction she did not feel. ‘Once you’ve got a bit more energy, when you want to go out again. If you got a nanny you could go back to your old job. Are you all right for money?’ It was not a question she had ever thought to ask.

  ‘Oh, money’s no problem. The parents are very good. And Jack, to give him credit, puts quite a bit in the bank from time to time.’

  ‘Well, then. I’m sure Angie would have you back.’ For Tessa had worked for a friend who was an interior decorator, which made the dilapidation of her own flat even more worrying.

  ‘I could, I suppose. Yes, I might do that, if things work out. I need to see more people. I just don’t have the energy somehow.’

  ‘We shouldn’t eat all this cake,’ Harriet said abruptly. ‘We should eat fruit. I’ll bring some tomorrow: apricots, or something.’

  ‘I couldn’t face them. I only want stodge.’

  ‘But you’re putting on too much weight! What does the doctor say?’

  ‘He says what you’re saying. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be all right. I’m as strong as a horse. Let’s change the subject. Tell me about the house.’

  But she had felt ashamed, ashamed to talk about carpets and curtains in this dusty place. And later, standing in the clean empty rooms, she found her pleasure in the house slightly dimmed. It seemed wrong to have so much when her friend had so little. Little of what I have, perhaps, she thought: she has Jack. The thought came unbidden. Nevertheless she felt an anxiety, even a disappointment that their roles had been reversed. The point is, she thought, that she was brave and confident, and I never was, and now, I suppose, I must be brave and confident for both of us. The idea was strangely disturbing. She went home and read Little Dorrit, which intensified her feelings of anxiety. And of sadness. For a moment, in spite of everything, she felt quite sad.

  ‘And how’s my girl this evening?’ asked Freddie, giving her a kiss. As her pregnancy advanced she was his girl again, allowed to be young once more. ‘Nice day? What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ she said, for she knew that he disliked her visits to Beaufort Street. ‘I got two beautiful soles for our dinner. We should eat more fish; all the doctors say so.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ he said, although he was of a meat-eating generation; a meal was not a meal without steaks or chops.

  ‘And I thought I might go down to Brighton tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen them for quite a while.’

  ‘As long as you don’t stay out too late,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll be back in time for dinner.’

  But next day, in the train, she rather regretted her decision, regretted those afternoons in the sunny dusty flat, pouring tea out of a brown pot surrounded by cake crumbs. She felt homesick for the kind of pleasure she took in Tessa’s presence, which restored to her some semblance of the authority she was now about to forgo, had always forgone, in the company of her unrealistic parents, like no other parents she knew, with their flimsy frivolous tastes. In contrast to the weather of the past few days the morning was overcast, moist and heavy. As the train left Victoria she felt a qualm of nausea, her first, and wished that she had stayed at home. She had come to cherish her quiet days, now that their end was in sight. She felt a little wistful as she thought of the trials ahead of her, as if she had not yet fulfilled her quota of independent activity. About her baby she had no qualms; her baby would be perfect, and unmarked. But walking from the station she longed for a moment to have no one to go home to, to have no parents, no husband, no baby, just a day to herself, as if she were a girl again.

  They saw her before she saw them. They were on the little concrete balcony of their flat, tremendously dressed up, as if she were a real visitor. Merle wore a smart cream coat and skirt, Hughie a houndstooth jacket that was obviously new, perhaps donned for the occasion, to mark a day on which something happened. They had always thought that smart clothes formed part of their effectiveness, assumed in the teeth of occasional misgivings. Both were smoking. When she looked up, it was to see them both waving. She waved back, feeling love and something like relief. They had abandoned her lightheartedly to her fate, and she, perhaps unconsciously, had done the same, yet all had survived. And in the mere recognition of each other’s outlines—a gesture, an attitude—they knew that they were from the same mould. They loved her, it was now quite evident; they loved her now that she was gone. They loved her awkwardly, inexpertly, and with a certain regret. They were still lightweights, but now they were growing older. They seemed touched by a new seriousness; bored, and without resource in their limitless freedom, they had only their legend to fall back on and their evenings to look forward to. The days were uneventful; time sometimes dragged, was becoming a problem. All this she saw at a glance, in the smoker’s languid and somehow disillusioned motions, in the stiffness, unremarked before, of her father’s shoulders, as he shot the cuffs of his heartbreakingly new jacket. She remembered a line from Little Dorrit, which she had left at home, beside her bed, ‘Her father! Her father!’ as the pious heroine repeatedly refused to attend to her own interests, and Dickens himself threw up his hands in impotence. Though she felt none of this she knew that for her own father she would always retain an awful pity. Perhaps no sacrifices would be necessary—for that she had Freddie to thank—yet she knew him better than she had ever known her mother, knew him instinctively, because she had some of his own longing for childish homely ways, for soft answers, and for protection. She realized how dependent they were, and always had been, on her mother’s competence, a competence they had always taken for granted, had sometimes found too harsh. She feared for them both; saw the brittleness of the arrangement, although they did not see it themselves. She supposed that they still loved one another, although the idea seemed strange to her. The loves that lingered, that entered memory, were not the ones she would have expected. Such loves were sometimes
painful, which was why, she supposed, one moved on, moved outward. Old longings were only safe when they were submerged, allowed to escape much later in the form of memory. The figures of her parents, so smartly dressed, on their minuscule balcony, stirred depths in her, as their mere presence never did.

  They were the same age as her husband, yet Freddie still lived in the real world, was busy, prosperous, well thought of, and from time to time, when the occasion demanded it, convivial. He had, with relief, begun to assume public attitudes, in which no intimacy was demanded of him, was, in fact, at his best, in company which was largely indifferent to him. By contrast, these two struck her as unprotected, inexperienced, fatally let down by the lack of any kind of social structure. Once they could act in unison, turning smiling faces to her and holding out welcoming hands, she could see their genuine attraction. But they needed some stimulus, some little excitement to animate them. Without that, she could see, they might easily fall into disappointment. She wondered how they filled their time.

  Thus softened—by the turn of her mother’s head, her birdlike, still bright eyes, by the jauntiness of her father’s new jacket—she was further moved to see that they had gone to some lengths over the preparation of the tea. An array of cakes, none of them home-made, reminded her of days in the room at the back of the shop, and, ‘I thought a little buttered toast …’, said Hughie, getting up with alacrity as she nodded anticipation. Nobody knew quite what to say. It was clearly out of order to ask, ‘Are you happy?’ They saw her as someone more dignified than themselves, a little more staid than they would wish, or could understand, while she, quite simply, saw that they were lonely. For this reason alone she was glad that she could make them the present of her child: a new preoccupation, a new cause for the congratulation they could never quite forgo. She could see that a grandchild, however unexpected an occurrence, would absorb any tenderness, any ruefulness that might be making inroads into their lives: a grandchild might thus be an improvement, from their point of view, on a daughter. And certainly more timely.

  ‘Are you really all right?’ she asked, as her father cut her toast into strips for her.

  ‘We’re pretty good,’ said her mother, taking a fresh cigarette. ‘What about you, dear? No sickness? No, of course not. I was as fit as a fiddle with you.’ She was mildly embarrassed by this conversation, Harriet could see. ‘But you must exercise, Hattie, or you’ll never get your figure back. Your figure was always good. Sit down, darling,’ she said to her husband. ‘Don’t make her eat so much—she’ll put on too much weight.’

  ‘And yet look at all this food,’ Harriet smiled.

  ‘That’s Daddy’s doing. Normally we just have a cup of tea. But he had to go out shopping for all this—nothing less would have done. Some more hot water, darling,’ she said to him.

  ‘Some days,’ she said in a lowered tone, when he was out of the room, ‘he doesn’t feel too bright. That’s why we’re so pleased about the baby. It’ll be a new lease of life for him.’

  ‘Is he ill?’ asked Harriet, alarmed.

  ‘No, dear, not ill. Old. Or rather, older. You think back more than you should. And he’s got some unpleasant memories, don’t forget, although he’s never spoken about them. Maybe he can’t. The doctors don’t seem to have done him any good. I’ve always had a job to keep him from feeling depressed, though now he’s got the pills he’s more stable. But we’re lucky, really; we’ve got our own home, and we’ve got each other. And you, of course. Only I can’t bear to think what would happen to him if anything happened to me.’ Her face fell into a grimace of pain which straightened out into a vivid smile as Hughie came back with the teapot.

  They walked with her to the station, anxious now in her presence. As Merle fell behind to greet a neighbour on a balcony adjoining their own (‘Our daughter’, they heard her say), Hughie pressed Harriet’s arm and said, ‘Keep in touch with us, dear. It’s a little dull for her sometimes. I’m not always good company, you know. I know that. I think it’s wonderful of her to put up with me. But then she was always wonderful.’

  Don’t change, don’t change, she silently begged them. Don’t grow up, grow old. Be frivolous, as you always were meant to be; be flippant, pleasure-loving, insubstantial. Preserve yourselves until I see what is going to happen to me, if anything still can. The thought that they might ever die released panic; she surprised herself by finding tears in her eyes when she said goodbye to them.

  ‘Ring us when you get home,’ said Hughie. Cross, now, at the fuss being made, her mother told him to calm down. Harriet watched them as the train receded from the platform, knew that for all their stylishness they had taken a step along the path that led to the final decrepitude. She put her hand to her heart, surprised to find it beating so strongly, then, simultaneously, all three of them waved, until she, and they, were out of sight.

  WHEN did the feeling of dread begin? She could neither quite date it nor place it. She thought it might have been the consequence of the visit to her parents, and of the memories it aroused. Or possibly of the move to the big house, which did not seem entirely favourable. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Freddie had said on their last evening in Cornwall Gardens. ‘What we’re doing,’ she corrected him. He did not answer. This, he implied, was not why he had married her; he had not bargained for upheaval, expense. Momentarily she wondered what on earth she was doing, sitting in this denuded room with a man who seemed to her a complete stranger, like someone with whom she was forced to spend time while waiting for a train. Their first evening in Wellington Square left them similarly estranged. The room was glassily bright; not all the lampshades were yet in place. They were too tired to talk, nor could either think of anything encouraging to say. After a while she roused herself, went into the kitchen and scrambled some eggs, which they ate from unmatched plates. Then, since there was nothing more to be done, they went to bed. At least the bed was familiar. But the window was in the wrong place, and when Freddie got up in the night he walked into a wall where the door should have been.

  Her tiredness of the following days she put down to natural causes. There was so much to do, too much; she would not be able to resume her dreamy existence for some time. The activity, although unwelcome, concentrated her mind; she feared an encroaching dullness, which her ordinary life did nothing to discourage. But in her fatigue she found the house exorbitant, overwhelming. She longed for a small remote sunny room to which she alone might have access. The picture of this room was quite clear in her mind; it was the private place which she had never quite been permitted. The new house, when measured against this fantasy, alarmed her. I am not quite up to this, she thought.

  Because he had been led unwillingly to the house Freddie failed to sympathize with her fatigue, but merely carried out the obvious tasks assigned to him. He was discomposed; he did not see why they should not have stayed in Cornwall Gardens. ‘But babies need a nursery,’ Harriet had protested. ‘They have a lot of equipment. You wouldn’t have wanted it all in your bathroom, would you?’ He had not replied. He thought at this time that there was a certain dignity in silence, his usual resource when outfaced by events. His earlier pleasure in Harriet’s pregnancy (or rather the announcement to his friends of her pregnancy) had evaporated silently, leaving a certain bewilderment behind. He had bargained for none of this. His first wife had been a woman of uncertain temper, well-bred enough to be fearless; he had been criticized at every turn, frequently humiliated. Marrying a much younger woman had been the first and last romantic action in a dull but reasonable life; he did not see why he should not be allowed to relax completely once the deed was done. Harriet’s simplicity had appealed to him. With a shrewd and self-preserving instinct he knew that she would never do battle with him, betray him, make fun of him. He had appreciated all this and had come to cherish her. He would not now willingly live without her.

  But he wanted her to remain cherished, and as simple as she had been when he had first found her. Independent action on
her part, as he saw this pregnancy, and this removal, disturbed him profoundly. He also suspected that she herself was disturbed by it. She was not bred to this, he told himself silently; he was too honourable to tell her the same thing. From time to time he had seen young men in his group of companies, men with excellent qualifications, simply overreach themselves, make some error through sheer enthusiasm, mistaking enthusiasm for judgement, without the proper controls to slow them down. He usually saw to it that they were redeployed, not wanting to risk them in situations which might reveal their lack of background. He could not do this with his wife, since there was a certain logic in her behaviour. He was, in addition, ready to concede that the new house was in every way desirable. Simply, he had preferred his life as it was, with just the two of them. Harriet had allowed him to retain all or most of his bachelor habits; his house was well run, his wife was agreeable in the ways in which he thought a wife should be agreeable. In return for her docility he wanted to protect her from those who might wear away her confidence. He saw the frowns of anxiety on her face as she surveyed her domain, saw her fatigue, her thickened figure. All of which, he thought, could have been avoided. He was too kind to tell her so, except in moments of unusual exasperation. He knew, and was disarmed by the knowledge, that she wanted what all her friends had long possessed: a proper house, a proper family. He saw that she would lose some of the simplicity which had first attracted him to her in her efforts to be like everyone else. He saw that in some ways she was not qualified. He was familiar with the phenomenon, which he could never explain to her.

  She saw none of this, although she was aware of a certain disharmony. This she attributed to her condition, to which she was now obliged to make certain concessions. In the afternoons she rested, tensely, in her spacious new bedroom. In the evenings, bathed and changed, she awaited Freddie in her new and rather too grand drawing-room. Furniture looked stranded on expanses of pale blue carpet, which she now saw should have been pale green: Freddie’s Persian rugs, over which she had tripped continually during the first year of her marriage, must now be laid end to end until she plucked up the courage to change the whole room. Fortunately the white curtains, with their pattern of flowers, looked well, and the windows were wide and high. Her commitment to this house was not total; part of her retreated in her imagination to that small empty room of her own devising, in which she might read unpretentious books, think unpretentious thoughts, even eat unpretentious meals quite unlike the ones she conscientiously prepared for Freddie, although her own appetite suffered. Like her father, she craved sweetness, and was forced to make do with a healthy diet. Their evenings were a little forlorn, neither wishing the other to see disappointment. Sometimes they took a walk round the square. Leaning on his arm she felt secure, as she no longer felt secure when she was alone.