Making Things Better

by Anita Brookner

  His past holidays would hardly pass muster in this dialogue. Those quiet days in small towns, even in suburbs at the end of a bus route, did not make for interesting anecdotes. In Amboise he had listened to a family party discussing a relative’s will; in Auteuil he had quietly sympathized with an elderly man on his way to a doctor’s appointment, but he was outside of all this, not a participant, and what was a holiday without fervent participation? And he was newly aware of frailties when faced with a major undertaking: again the vision of himself on the ground looking up to a circle of attentive faces presented itself and grew ever more compelling. He clung to his routine, although it bored him, and the days seemed long. Nor did he appreciate what others might see as an altogether enviable leisure. He had too much time at his disposal, and frequently found himself standing at the window, scanning Chiltern Street for a sign of life. He had no appetite for anything, tried to sleep in the afternoon without great success. Such brief dozes merely served to bring back the past, so that when he emerged, with a stale taste in his mouth, his grasp on the present seemed diminished and his resolve significantly weaker. Yet in the long silent afternoons it was hard not to succumb, and although this conclusion of the day’s preoccupations was ill-advised it seemed to be a habit that was growing on him, without his encouragement. And if it was easy to slip into sleep in the sunny days of summer, how would he fare in the winter when darkness came early and the outside world retreated?

  To counter this all too symbolic descent into the shadows of his mind he took to walking in the evenings in order to tire himself out and to make his rest more appropriate, more excusable. After his supper (it could hardly be called dinner) he emerged into Chiltern Street and began a rambling peregrination of his immediate neighbourhood, hoping to catch life on the wing, and to make himself into a semblance of gentlemanly old age which others might find acceptable. But there were no spectators, only young people drinking and laughing outside pubs or eating pizzas with a crowd of friends. No one expressed any interest as he walked up Gloucester Place and down Baker Street, or even went as far as Oxford Circus in the vain hope of urban company. The park beckoned but it would take him too far from home and darkness would catch him out. Besides, he was unsure when the park gates closed, and imagined, with dread, being locked in, forced to spend the night on a bench, his hair awry, like any other vagrant.

  These evening walks fulfilled a purpose, which was to exhaust him, but were accomplished without pleasure. For this reason, as much as for any other, he began to envisage wider excursions, yet these seemed pointless without the prospect of company. Patience had worn him out, yet he knew that his solitary way of life was the only one that suited his temperament. He could, with a little courage, take himself abroad again and sit in the odd unfashionable church or discover the upper floor, usually deserted, of a largely unattended museum, and if he did so, as he had done so many times, he would undoubtedly derive some mild satisfaction from the experience. But then he would have to return to the small hotel, where a hard-faced proprietress would hand him his key without the sort of greeting that he craved, would not question him about his day or enquire about his prospects for the evening, and he would be obliged to go out again, to seek a solitary meal, and to apply himself once more to observing others. And always in the knots of people strolling past him in the streets he would hear snatches of conversation that would intrigue him, make him anxious to know more, even to interrogate those passers-by who had momentarily distracted him; he might then register an unfamiliar reaction—frustration? anger?—not at his inability to participate but distress at the impermeability of others, of all those who did not wish to hear his plans, know his preferences, his tastes, so absorbed were they with their own.

  If he were honest with himself he would admit that he had truly enjoyed only one holiday in his life, and that was when he was eight years old. He had the photograph to prove it. He was with his family in a fiacre in Baden-Baden, being driven down the Lichtenthalerallee towards the Casino, where they would drink coffee to the sound of a small orchestra. He could still remember the sun shining through the branches of tall trees, and the amazing size— amazing to him at that age—of the rhododendrons that bordered the road. He could remember the stately creak of the fiacre as they made their way, in the company of similar families, towards the Casino and the enactment of the leisurely morning ritual. The photograph, which he had scrutinized exhaustively, showed a laughing child’s face and a hand clasping that of his mother. He could see, as he could hardly remember, that they were comfortably off, secure and harmonious; there was a nursemaid in discreet attendance, probably in charge of his brother, and he remembered her name: Marie. He knew, though this lacked the immediacy of the photograph, that other activities awaited them: walks in the Schwarzwald, with polite greetings to other strolling couples, the heavy appointments of the expensive hotel which so delighted him, the sentimental tunes played by the Casino orchestra, his father’s cigar, the lavish meals which would now be frowned upon by today’s dietitians, the multiplicity of doctors devoted to one’s health and well-being, and who prescribed spa water instead of pills.

  That world no longer existed, or if it did would have undergone a change; it had indeed come to an end as his own childhood ended. A braver man might go back to measure these changes, but he was no sociologist; the world he wanted was the world reflected in the photograph, and the laughing face that, for as long as he could remember, only ever now relaxed into a mild smile. Even the smile had become modified with age. The smiling boy had become a polite adult; the smile now had something dutiful about it, as if it were expected of him; he would continue to offer it but without conviction. It was a smile that no longer expressed eagerness but was a suitable feature in his dealings with others. Preparing to listen, to sympathize, he would acknowledge the return of his habitual smile, while all the time registering his lack of joy. That, it seemed, was now in default, was even inconceivable. He accepted this, as he accepted the distance between past and present, wondered whether this feeling was unusual, regretted that there was no way of conducting an enquiry. After examining the photograph he had the fleeting feeling that he was in the wrong country. This was not a welcome reflection. His situation was commonplace. But that occasionally made it extraordinarily difficult to recognize as natural.

  He dreaded becoming like the man he saw in the supermarket every day (and who saw him) and who, though respectable, was somehow to be avoided. He seemed always to be seated on a chair near the checkout, his stick planted between his knees, his expression disapproving. He was given to expressing his views on the government to anyone who would listen, and, in a raised voice, to those who would not. Attempts had been made to move him on, but as there was no reason why he should not be in the place these were largely unsuccessful. He was given a wide berth, although what he had to say, or rather to proclaim, was attractive, inasmuch as it was vigorous. He was a fount of moral criticism, with accusations of hypocrisy, of mendacity, delivered with some authority, as if he were in the streets of ancient Athens and had a coterie of impressionable young men. Women took no notice of him, although the girls at the checkout, who, Herz noted, frequently changed places with each other, either wearily assented to his denunciations or laughed without constraint, depending on their degree of kindness or complicity with each other.

  For this man there was no complicity; there was none in Herz either, although the man’s madness was such as to excite pity and terror, as tragedy was supposed to do. Herz turned his head aside when passing the man, aware that he had been singled out as a confidant. But in fact everyone had been singled out as a confidant, but without success. The extent of this man’s solitude was perhaps not particularly obvious except to those who turned away from him, unable to bear the reflection of their own. And yet the man was smartly, even foppishly dressed, which implied that someone was in charge of him. And no doubt one would pass him in the street without a second glance. It was only in the supermarket,
with the prospect of a captive audience, that he launched on his accusations. No one seemed safe from his disapproval: all came in for scathing commentary. The most frightening feature of his diatribes was the sensation that they were somehow merited. Even those with a clear conscience felt uneasy, not perhaps on their own behalf but on that of all those government ministers who were being castigated. Why was there no one to rebut his accusations? Where, in fact, were those government ministers, who might be called upon to shed a kindlier light on the issues of the day? A sense of wrongs not righted pervaded the immediate vicinity of this man whose stick seemed ready to strike out, though this had never happened. One reached the street with a relief which had little to do with a chore successfully accomplished. One reached the street willing to embrace the mass, to subside into a comforting mutuality, to dismiss the disconcerting spectacle of the unassimilated, of the unsleeping moral conscience, which, if not checked, might lead to acts one was not anxious to witness.

  It was encounters like these, minuscule in themselves but repeated on an almost daily basis, that made Herz feel in need of some protection. Again he invoked that imaginary chorus of encouraging relatives, or, more satisfyingly, because verifiably real, that doctor in Baden-Baden to whom his parents had taken him because he was underweight and who had questioned his eight-year-old self with grave professionalism, with what had seemed like magisterial competence, weighing, percussing, listening, and finally pronouncing a completely reassuring verdict. To be given a bill of health by such a sage was more curative than any regime, although he had had to endure the spa waters, which had no discernible effect but at least did no harm. In Baden-Baden, and even in Berlin, the sun shone, and he might be sitting in his aunt Anna’s drawing-room in a haze of excitement, waiting for his cousin Fanny to appear, although when she did she was usually bored and dismissive. In the absence of those strong sensations he was without compensation, and also without purpose. It seemed childish, at the age he was now, to seek rewards for fidelity to those early impressions, yet his life as a grown man had been fashioned by the need to cherish the sensations which had formed at least some part of his character, and to regret, to the point of pain, that they could never come again. Now his sensations were muted, and it was wiser that they should be, in case he turned into the man in the supermarket and railed against his fate, or perhaps fate in general, and recognized the despair he was so anxious to conquer.

  He would have liked to discuss these matters with just such a sage as the German doctor, or with an ideal interlocutor, unfortunately unavailable. People went in for such things on television these days, or in the Sunday papers. Television would be the ideal medium. He would be questioned by a sympathetic interviewer, in what circumstances he could not imagine. What he could imagine would be himself discoursing on the persistence of early memory, of images that had stayed with him throughout his life. He would be seen, on the success of such a performance, to be worth consulting in the interests of general enlightenment, would go on—always with encouragement—to describe the Casino at Baden-Baden, its rich debased rococo decoration, so perfectly suited to the spirit of the place, or, more ambitious this, to give an account of his travels, of his artistic delights, Schloss Bruhl, near Cologne, or the house that Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna. Asked back yet again he would be memorable on the Claudes and Turners in the National Gallery, on which his opinion would prove invaluable. These were matters on which he had reflected in the course of his evening walks, but on which he was obliged to remain mute. The existence of such an audience remained his most persistent temptation. His real audience became as strange to him as the people in the supermarket who ignored the man with the stick. Such indifference, with which he was obliged to conform, remained the order of the day.

  Instead of which he discussed holiday plans with Bernard Simmonds, whom he met for dinner once a month. Or rather he discussed Bernard Simmonds’s holiday plans, which were expansive: he had rented a house near Cortona, to which he had invited different friends, at weekly intervals, to ensure the maximum of variety. This sounded punishing to Herz, who could only tolerate one person at a time, and that at well-spaced intervals. He marvelled at Simmonds’s capacity, which seemed an integral part of his youthfulness. He was in his mid-fifties, and looked it, but had the tastes of a much younger man, as these holiday arrangements bore witness. He had a girlfriend who stayed at Hilltop Road in the time she could spare from her various business assignments, which took her to Hong Kong a great deal. Simmonds was proud of her, but in fact just as pleased when she was not there as when she was in residence. He was gregarious, spoke of parties, weekends, plans for the holiday after next. Astonishingly, he had no objection to Herz’s company, rather evinced a liking for it, but always consulted his watch to make sure that he was not late for another entertainment, which might have been scheduled for what Herz thought of as an advanced hour. He was not an interesting companion, but he gave the impression of being affectionate. In his smiling demeanour Herz could see something of Ostrovski’s odd loyalty to his lame-dog protégés. The association was made comfortable by the fact that neither required anything of the other. Simmonds was his solicitor, and charged hugely. That way there could be no hint of patronage.

  Herz could have wished their relationship were more sustaining, more speculative, rather more like those television interviews in which his opinion was sought on a variety of subjects. He was mollified by the impression that he fulfilled some sort of function for Simmonds, some quasi-parental function, simply by virtue of being older. He was a surrogate elder towards whom Simmonds felt an old-fashioned, almost naïve respect. Herz had little experience of dealing with younger people but understood instinctively that one kept out of their lives as much as possible but was curious and indulgent towards them. Hence the exhaustive questioning on his part—the holiday plans were an example—and Simmonds’s equally exhaustive replies. It was a matter of discretion not to talk about oneself. To do so would be to shock Simmonds with the prospect of what awaited him.

  It did not, of course, have to turn out that way: he would not make the mistake of supposing that Simmonds resembled himself, or that decline was the common lot, the destiny in which all were united. In that prospect at least there might be a degree of compensation. Instead of which all were cast adrift on their own, could barely signal to one another their knowledge of what was overtaking them. The only resource in such circumstances would be the young, their children, if they were fortunate enough to have them, or, if they were not, those like Simmonds who were kind enough to tolerate their company. Here too circumspection was called for: one painted a picture that would not disturb, gave an edited view of oneself that would prove acceptable. In that way one could pass muster. The confession that fought its way out, the inevitable complaints and regrets, must be stifled so as not to inspire distaste, or more frequently boredom or impatience. The trick was to remain separate and restrained.

  ‘So when do you leave for Italy?’ he queried, picking up his fork.

  ‘End of next week. If you want anything get in touch with Deakin. He knows all about your affairs.’

  ‘The will . . .’ said Herz. ‘Ostrovski’s will. How can I ever forget that? I feel unworthy, ashamed, even.’

  ‘The money he left you? No need. I benefited too, remember. We were the only legatees. Well, he had no family living.’

  ‘He referred to you as his nephew.’

  ‘Nothing like. A second cousin only, and one I hardly knew. He used to blow in from time to time to see my parents.’

  ‘He did the same to mine.’

  ‘He was lonely, of course, although he had all those businesses he was juggling. In a way he liked to be unattached, or rather unobserved. Nobody ever knew his real circumstances.’

  ‘What was his background?’

  ‘Nothing he was very proud of. Ostrovski wasn’t his name, of course.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Abramsky. I did some res
earch. He was a self-made man in every sense of the word. Yet he liked to keep up some sort of fiction that he had friends: my parents, your parents. That was all he had. And nobody had much time for him. His manner was fairly off-putting. He looked up to your parents, by the way, thought they were aristocratic.’

  ‘They weren’t,’ said Herz.

  ‘They were to him. You’ve no one left, I take it?’

  ‘No one, no. My marriage, as I think you know, ended in divorce.’

  ‘I won’t make that mistake. I’ve seen too much of it. Helen and I agree on that point. No marriage, no children, no divorce.’

  ‘I wonder if you’re quite right about that.’

  Simmonds shrugged, looking suddenly weary. ‘I won’t say there hasn’t been the odd discussion. But she likes her freedom. Women do these days; they don’t seem to suffer. I sometimes wonder if men don’t suffer more. But we’re together, we have fun.’

  ‘Fun?’

  ‘Distractions are easy to find. We travel a lot. And because we’re not together the whole time we’re always pleased to see each other.’ He looked wistful, as if foreseeing a time when he might miss her. But, thought Herz, there would be those distractions. Perhaps eternal restlessness was the answer, just as eternal vigilance was the price of liberty. Rest would not only descend on one too soon; it would be unwelcome when it did.

  ‘Your generation is quite different from mine,’ he smiled. ‘You seem to have everything mapped out.’

  ‘It’s all a matter of communication these days. You need never really be apart: e-mail, mobile phones, and so on.’