A Closed Eye

by Anita Brookner

  On the bottom step she met Tessa, coming towards her. A rumble of talk indicated that Freddie had already taken Jack to the drawing-room. Tessa, with the light behind her, appeared darkened, crow-like, in chic but unbecoming black. One foot on a higher step, she looked up, and then Harriet saw her face, pale, with an unfamiliar pallor, drawn, tired. ‘Oh, you’re not well,’ she said. Tessa looked at her with a certain weariness. ‘Could I just use your bathroom?’ she asked. ‘Of course. Come up. I’ll come with you. Use my bedroom as well, if you want to. Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course I’m all right. How you fuss, Harriet.’ She trailed past, a heavy musky scent following her, narrow ankles in fine black stockings turned slightly inwards.

  Harriet. Not Hattie. Something guessed at, perhaps, more than suspected. Shame brought a high colour to her cheeks and inflamed the birthmark still further. Looking at herself in the glass, she thought, the game is up, and then, how absurd, how meretricious I have become. The flush subsided, leaving behind a resigned calm, and a slight but definite indignation. I have done nothing wrong, she reminded herself. In fact, I have done nothing at all. I have simply been here all the time, running when called to, waiting when not, always grateful for the slightest, most insignificant mark of attention. She felt a bewilderment: had it come to this, a tardy realization of past inadequacies on both sides? But surely there was always our friendship? More than twenty years … That is what counts, now that we are both middle-aged, and past the time when we might have been unreasonable? Nothing has happened. ‘Of course,’ she said lightly, ‘I can see why you keep Jack to yourself. He really is most attractive.’

  Tessa, applying lipstick, glanced at her sideways.

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  She then took from her bag a small compact filled with something which looked like gold dust, and applied it with a brush to cheeks which were already heavily coloured. Gradually a misty web was drawn over features which, Harriet saw, were thin, sharply defined. The mouth was once again, very slowly, painted brick red, almost brown. She looked amazing, but entirely absent, inhabited by some thought far from the surface of her mind.

  ‘What is wrong?’ asked Harriet quietly.

  ‘Nothing more than a touch of indigestion. Eating at night doesn’t really agree with me these days—too tired, I suppose. So don’t be upset if I don’t do justice to your excellent cooking. Shall we go down?’

  Your excellent cooking? But she is behaving like a stranger, thought Harriet. And yet if anything were wrong she would surely have told me?

  Dinner was less arduous than she had expected, but possibly more disconcerting. Tessa, true to her predictions, hardly touched her food, moved it expertly about her plate, and then left it. Freddie’s prized Lynch-Bages was smilingly declined by her, but accepted with due appreciation by Jack, who, between courses, got up and roamed around the room, examining the books in the two fine pedimented bookcases. When he deigned to sit down, it was to place an arm on the back of Tessa’s chair, to gaze searchingly into her face, as if oblivious of the other two. Harriet found it disturbing, ostentatious, this flouting of the rules of hospitality, of courtesy, of seemliness. She suspected that it was habitual, this exclusivity, that they met on this level, if on no other. But Freddie seemed to see nothing wrong, seemed, if anything, exhilarated, looked for once indulgently at Tessa’s sharp and highly coloured face, hastened to pour Jack more wine.

  ‘Shall we have coffee in the drawing-room?’ asked Harriet, longing suddenly for the evening to be over.

  ‘None for me,’ said Tessa. ‘Jack, I’m sure, would love some.’

  ‘How long are you to be in London, Jack?’ asked Harriet.

  He stirred himself, seemed almost to yawn, then sat forward and nodded to Freddie, who hovered with a bottle of brandy.

  ‘I go to Paris next month,’ he said. He drank appreciatively, and then added, ‘Intermittently.’

  ‘Of course,’ Harriet said, light dawning. ‘Lizzie has inherited your way of speaking.’

  He fixed her with his disconcerting eye. ‘Which way is that?’ he asked.

  ‘Sparing,’ she said. ‘Laconic.’ Just this side of rudeness, she thought. Aloud, she said, ‘I see Lizzie’s resemblance to you now.’

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘We have to thank you for looking after Lizzie. You have been very good.’

  So that is why you condescended to come this evening, she thought. Otherwise you might not have bothered.

  ‘We love having her,’ she said, very quietly.

  He looked at her, as searchingly as she had seen him look at Tessa. She got up, removed empty coffee cups.

  ‘We must go,’ said Tessa, after a long abstracted pause. ‘Jack has to go back to Judd Street. He’s got a very early start in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll drop you off,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow night.’

  ‘Must you go? It’s barely eleven …’

  ‘Work in the morning,’ said Tessa, with a smile that was almost a grimace. ‘Can you tell Lizzie to come straight home after school?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Harriet, slightly bewildered. ‘And when shall I see you? Shall we have lunch?’

  ‘Oh, let’s.’ The reply was falsely enthusiastic; her eyes were on Jack. ‘I’ll ring you, shall I? Lovely evening, darling. Freddie, thank you so much.’

  Harriet, with pity, saw Freddie struggle to his feet. He was now quite stout, his eyes rosy, looking forward, she could see, to his bed. ‘You go up,’ she said to him, as he closed the door. ‘I’ll just clear away down here. Don’t stay awake for me.’

  ‘What did you make of that?’ she asked, removing her earrings, seeing him behind her in the glass, in maroon pyjamas, his glasses on a cord around his neck, one hand splayed on his book.

  ‘I thought it went quite well. He’s an interesting fellow. Rather glad they went early, though. Are you coming to bed? I think I’ll turn out my light, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Oh, don’t wait for me,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t feel tired. I think I’ll read for a bit.’

  She was in fact weary but alert, anxious to sort out her thoughts. She found herself vastly disappointed by what had taken place. That odd communion between Jack and Tessa, almost a seduction. Tessa’s glamorous but bedizened appearance. Herself nowhere, an anxious handmaid. Freddie had drunk too much, something that must be watched. The extraordinary level of artificiality that had prevailed, as if there were secrets, not to be divulged. Secrets with an odd sexual connotation, or merely indicating a high degree of complicity. Herself excluded.

  But surely, she thought, waking violently in the night, surely we are friends? I have known her for so long, all my adult life, the part of it that was not occupied by dreaming. I reached out to her from my childhood, and she summoned me, with a negligent hand, to join her friends. They were never really mine. Hard, I thought them, and noisy: pitiless. Tessa, however, was oddly loyal to me, though not always very interested. Perhaps I assumed too much eagerness … I remember a quickening of genuine interest only when I announced my engagement, and since my marriage—and hers—a change in her, to thoughtfulness, wistfulness, almost. But a return to her original authority when it appears to her to be indicated. Materially I raced ahead of her, although her money will always count for more than mine. But surely we were closer than all these sordid considerations might seem to imply? True friendship between women is rare, I know, but we were never disloyal. Until this evening I thought I knew everything about her, but suddenly there were secrets there, which plunged them both into abstraction. Really, they might have been anywhere. Not very polite to me, or to Freddie, come to that: odd, on the whole, that he was more indulgent than I was. He dislikes Tessa, always has, suspects her of pitying me for having to sleep with him, yet as far as I know she never has, is probably not sufficiently interested. Oh, this is awful, she thought with horror: the lucidity which comes unwanted, in the middle of the night. I might still be a schoolgirl, in the room at t
he back of the shop, feeling proud of having Tessa as a friend. Yet it hurts, that sudden distancing, even if I was a little deluded all these years. And now I am a middle-aged woman, and loneliness descends. I cannot bear my life if Freddie is to be my only friend.

  But this thought, so suddenly and completely formulated, was so shocking that she renounced sleep, got quietly out of bed, put on slippers and dressing-gown, and went down to the kitchen to make tea. Glancing at the clock under the harsh white light, she saw that it was four-thirty. She unloaded the dishwasher, put away plates and cutlery, polished glasses, cancelling the rest of the night. Then she laid the table for breakfast, crept up the stairs, had a bath in Immy’s bathroom, so as not to disturb Freddie, and appeared, brisk and smiling, with a cup of tea for him at six-thirty, trying not to notice the heavy slept-in smell of the room, or, when she pulled the curtains, the pearl-like drops of rain on windows still coated with a fine autumnal dust.

  ‘It feels wintry,’ she said. ‘Wear your blue suit.’ She shivered in the dank air, and thought, like Jane Eyre, no walk today.

  She was brisk in the days that followed, arranged for Miss Wetherby to take Immy to school and collect her afterwards, and bought herself some new clothes, trying to create a more confident image of herself, entirely for her own benefit. She felt undeniably lonely, and although longing to see Tessa—with whom at last she felt equal in experience, and not all of it good—was uncertain of Tessa’s willingness to engage with her in what now seemed like a fairly hollow friendship. She had been so cold, so distant … But she is ill, she thought, suddenly. Or she is pregnant, and for some reason doesn’t want me to know. Again she came up against the loaded and wordless communion between the two of them, which threw such a painful light on her own marriage. There were no undertones between Freddie and herself. They communicated in rational speech on matters which could be discussed objectively. Information was exchanged, nothing more. The dimension of shared thoughts was lacking, always had been. At first she had welcomed this, thinking it made for openness. As indeed it had. It was Freddie’s way of doing business, and had made him widely respected. She had adopted his manner of speaking out of a desire to please him, and now it was too late for intimacy to make inroads. Sometimes, in moments of affection, he caught her hand as she passed. On the surface, and indeed on the whole, they were moderately pleased with each other. But she knew she could not confide in him. And indeed what was there to confide, apart from various silent forms of dissatisfaction? And the occasional panic? Our old age will be like this, she thought. And I have perhaps been trained for it.

  When Tessa telephoned it was to say that Mary was still in town. Did she want to join them for lunch?

  ‘No,’ she said, on an impulse. ‘I’m rather busy at the moment. You go.’

  She drilled herself out of her unsettled mood by going on long walks, and testing her reactions to solitude. She found it on the whole enlightening, blamed herself for excessive dependence on others. That has been my weakness, she thought, and it must go.

  Tessa rang that evening, to say that Mary sent her love.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she found herself asking, in the teeth of her new resolution.

  ‘I’m fine. Let’s meet soon.’

  ‘Of course, soon.’ She put down the telephone, only partially reassured.

  The days shortened, the nights lengthened, Freddie dozed regularly after dinner, and she could only be glad that Immy never saw him in this state, his waistcoat gaping, his glasses falling off his nose. She would wake him up in time to go to bed, for she rarely went up without him. Then they would read for an hour before switching off their lights. She read Hard Times, and in her head heard the great cry, ‘Alive!’ And then, resolutely, turned off her light and composed herself for rest, if not for sleep.

  One night, one freezing night, she drifted off into a doze, listening to the patter of the rain which might, by the morning, become snow, when she was jerked awake by the metallic echo of the telephone, its rings almost visible in the icy air. She sat up with beating heart. Again it rang, and this time she intercepted it.

  ‘Hello?’ she said urgently. ‘Hello?’

  There was a silence. Then a faint voice. ‘Hattie.’ Then another silence. ‘Come to me,’ said the voice, and the telephone clattered on to a table and went dead.

  Shaking, she drew the nightgown from her body, a body that was already cringing with fear, found trousers and a sweater, and, distracted, picked up a torch, though this would not be necessary. Struggling into a raincoat, she put down the torch and picked up her keys, then, closing the front door behind her, ran up the deserted street until she reached Tessa’s flat.

  She found the door unlatched, heard noises coming from the bathroom. ‘It’s all right, darling,’ she said, wiping the poor face. ‘I won’t leave you.’ ‘Ring Jack,’ Tessa gasped. And, ‘Don’t wake Lizzie.’ But as she got through to Jack, who was miraculously—and it was truly a miracle—at home, and told him to come at once, she turned, and saw Lizzie in the doorway. She dropped the telephone and tried to shepherd Lizzie back to her own room, but not before the child had seen her mother’s empty bed, and the pillow stained with vomit.

  Jack took charge after that. ‘Time to go, Tess,’ he said, picking her up in his arms, and kissing her on the mouth.

  ‘Where are you taking her?’ said Harriet, cradling Lizzie’s head to her breast.

  He turned without answering, and said over his shoulder, ‘If you could just wait here till I get back? I don’t want to leave Lizzie here on her own.’

  ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ she said to the child. ‘Daddy is with her. She’ll be all right. But I think we’d better get you dressed, hadn’t we? In case Daddy wants you to come home with me.’ She fondled the child, who seemed unresponsive. She looked past the cradling arms into the room, which was now empty.

  An eternity passed, in which Harriet rocked the child, as though she were a baby again. They remained silent, anxious to make no sound in the silent flat. The sound of a key brought Jack back into the room.

  ‘I should like you to tell me what is wrong,’ she said, although by now she thought she knew the answer.

  ‘She is dying, of course,’ said Jack briefly, and her hands flew in horror to the child’s shoulders, to steady her.

  ‘How can you speak like that in front of Lizzie?’

  He dropped to his knees and held Lizzie at arm’s length.

  ‘Your mother is dying, Lizzie. You knew that, didn’t you? She is going to die, but you will have time to say goodbye to her. She is in bed, in the hospital. I will take you to see her tomorrow.’

  ‘She is coming home with me,’ Harriet protested.

  ‘No,’ he said, his face set in harsh lines. ‘She is coming home with me. Pack a few things for her, would you?’

  ‘But it’s easier if she comes with me,’ she insisted. ‘She can stay with my daughter.’

  He looked at her with a certain distaste.

  ‘She can’t stand your daughter,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, really …’

  ‘She can miss school for a bit,’ he went on. ‘It’s important that she miss none of this: she mustn’t be cheated out of it.’

  ‘Are you sure …?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Mrs Lytton. I’m quite sure.’

  ‘You might call me Harriet,’ she said furiously. ‘After all, your daughter does.’

  He ignored this. ‘Come along, Lizzie,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a bad night so far. I’m going to take you home to Judd Street. You’ll be staying there until we decide what’s best for us all. Are you brave?’

  She nodded, and took his hand.

  ‘Go and wait for me outside, in the hall,’ he said, giving her a little push.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ he said to Harriet, ‘or fortunately, whichever way you look at it, she’s in the same room that she had when Lizzie was born.’

  ‘What is wrong?’ she asked, her mouth dry.

  ‘What does one
usually die of these days?’ he asked, it seemed to her with appalling negligence. ‘It’s in the liver. It will be quite quick.’

  ‘You knew?’ she whispered.

  ‘She told me just before we came to dinner with you that evening. I found her … rather magnificent … There is no doubt, of course. But I think you guessed that there was something wrong.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, bowing her head with sorrow, and wiping away bitter tears. ‘Yes, I guessed there was something wrong. I shall never forgive myself.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said, picking Lizzie up and hoisting her to his shoulder. ‘Most people do, whatever their shortcomings. I think you will forgive yourself, Mrs Lytton.’ His dislike was obvious, shocking. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse us … You can find your own way home, I take it?’

  She stood on the pavement, in the black night, and watched the car drive away, standing there until the sound had quite vanished, leaving behind an inhuman emptiness. Although she had seen them both get into the car, the image that stayed with her was of Jack, his child in his arms, striding away into the night, away from her, away from them all, for ever.

  ‘THE THING IS,’ said Pamela’s voice, speaking from Northamptonshire, ‘I’ve talked it over with David, and we’re prepared to give Lizzie a home.’

  ‘I don’t know what plans Jack has made,’ said Harriet. ‘I haven’t had a chance to discuss it with him. Anyway, isn’t it a little too early to decide?’

  She was lying on the sofa, battling with a headache, the result of grief and exhaustion, and also something else. Fear? That Lizzie might be taken away? That Jack might now disappear, all contact lost? Surely she could not be so unworthy as to be thinking of Jack, in these moments when reality appeared in its severest guise? At the funeral he had been accompanied by a small blonde woman, for whom she had felt an instant distaste, the distaste, she thought, of a respectable matron for a man flaunting his mistress, for a widower demonstrating that he had already made a convenient arrangement. This happened, she knew. She had had no doubt that the woman was his mistress, had probably been so for some time. What added to the distaste and the antagonism was the fact that the woman was not particularly attractive, no more attractive than Harriet herself. She had a small round tight face, round blue eyes, a meaningless all-purpose smile, shiny skin drawn over prominent cheekbones, an equally pronounced jaw, medium-length blonde hair. She had worn a navy blue coat, with a blue, yellow, and white scarf at the throat, navy tights, and navy court shoes: a conventional outfit, thought Harriet. She seemed, on the surface, a thoroughly conventional woman, neither young nor middle-aged, about thirty-five or so, with the kind of looks that would show no major deterioration. Lines would appear round the eyes, the skin would grow shinier over the cheekbones, the jaw become more pronounced, the mouth close more purposefully … What was her attraction? She had a confident air, beautiful legs and feet, an assurance of perfect health. Was that it? But she did not think that Jack was either so sentimental or so superstitious as to choose a woman because of her general health, even if his wife had died in the teeth of all reasonable expectations.