Making Things Better

by Anita Brookner

  These dangers now threatened him on all sides. A lifetime of good behaviour had precipitated him into a folly from which he might not recover. His strongest suit was the ability to perceive it for what it was, an aberration, a departure from good sense. His greatest vulnerability was to lack the means with which to combat it. Why else would he have timed his movements to coincide with those of Sophie Clay, deriving a masochistic pleasure from his calculated absences, his even more calculated attentiveness, his hideous disguise of uncalled-for gallantry, behind which lurked a sad sense of betrayal, of decline, of loss of innocence? His days had been given a shape by his very obsession (for he accepted that it was nothing less than that); whereas previously he had pursued a more or less dignified path, he was now ludicrous. Even if his life had lacked overwhelming satisfactions, his lack of the more obvious triumphs had not left him resentful. Now he was conscious of one thing, and one thing only: pleasure, and its lack. In its narrowest sense it made inroads into his every preoccupation, so that his hand would go out involuntarily as if to grasp another, his arm curve round an imaginary shoulder. The absence of reciprocity did not even greatly trouble him. What was of greater importance was the instinct that impelled his own hand, his own arm, as if even now, at this late stage, he might liberate desires that should have dwindled into inanition along with his youth, his looks, even his health. Such signs, such frustrated gestures, were surely evidence of a cruel joke, perpetrated on him by his own unlived life.

  Back in Chiltern Street he switched on lights, saw them come on in the houses opposite, prepared some food, half-listened to the news, became aware that no book, no spectacle could breach this mood which, in the course of the day, had somehow reached critical mass. At eight he picked up the telephone. ‘Sophie?’ he said. ‘There’s a parcel for you. Do you want to collect it or shall I bring it down?’

  ‘Could you bring it down? I’m just out of the shower.’

  She no longer used his name. That had hurt him almost more than anything, increasing his perception of himself as a mere factotum. He picked up the parcel and made his way cautiously, sideways, down the stairs. The door to her flat was open, a radio was playing, smells of coffee and bath essence wafting out onto the small landing where he stood awkwardly, trying to balance the heavy parcel onto one uplifted knee. ‘Sophie?’ he called. ‘I’ll leave it just inside your door.’ He was suddenly sick of the whole enterprise. She appeared from the bathroom in a white towelling robe with loose sleeves, her hair newly washed, her face given some unaccustomed animation from the heat of the shower. She looked as he had never seen her before: naked. His eyes penetrated the ample folds of the bathrobe to what he imagined he knew was underneath.

  ‘Sorry to come at an inconvenient time,’ he said, still with that twinkling note of insincerity.

  ‘Tomorrow would have done,’ she said. ‘But thanks, anyway.’

  With the towel she carried she rubbed her hair. Her sleeve fell away from a wrist which he perceived as unusually fine. Without thought, without volition, his hand reached out to grasp it, then slid up her arm to the soft crook of her elbow where it lingered. She stared at him, unsmiling; shamefaced, he removed his hand, prepared to make some small joke to cover his confusion, but could think of none. ‘Such soft skin,’ he mumbled, making things worse. Her expression was stony. ‘I’ve seen you looking at me,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen you at the window. You want to be careful. I could put in a word, you know.’

  Nothing now could be worse. He did not know how he managed to get himself out of the door and back into his own flat. His heart filled his chest, moved into his throat. He sat immobile, waiting for it to subside, yet wishing for annihilation. He must have sat like this for some time, without the power to move. He did not see how he could ever recover from this humiliation. At a late hour, or what would have been a late hour in his well-regulated existence, his doorbell rang. ‘Sophie’s keys, if you don’t mind,’ said Jamie. Wordlessly he handed them over. Then, but only as if from memory, he went to bed.

  The brief illness that overtook him was almost welcome. He did not account it a physical malaise, although it produced the physical symptoms associated with an infection. He diagnosed it as psychic shock, beyond the reach of doctors. Desire had imploded, sending him into a state of crisis. This he accepted. In intervals of lucidity he reflected that his amorous inheritance had been shaped by the past: it had no relevance in the present. It was as absurd to improvise love as to improvise learning. He had made a significant error which could only attract contempt. But anger? But the cold distaste that still made him wince? At the same time he experienced some anger on his own behalf. A mature woman, such as he supposed her to be, would have known how to deal with an unwanted advance. Such knowledge should have been part of her repertoire. A mature woman would simply have smiled and moved away, would have behaved as if the incident had not taken place, would certainly not have threatened reprisals. For that was what she had done, had so meaningfully mentioned that she would ‘put in a word’. He saw himself arraigned before some sort of moral tribunal, consisting no doubt of potential landlords to whom he might apply in vain for an extension of his lease. This seemed to him entirely probable. He did not doubt that she had had dealings with such people in acquiring her own flat; for all he knew they (a still nebulous ‘they’) were on the best of terms. In such a context her word would be inevitably preferred to his own. No man could summon a defence against an accusation of sexual harassment. For the gesture, his poor gesture, would be amplified, would attain considerable weight in the telling, at best would be deemed undesirable. His blameless record would count for nothing, his activities be dismissed as worthless. He did indeed consider them to be worthless. Had he led a more reprehensible life he would have known how to deal with such counter-harassment, for that surely was what it was? She had the right to despise him, however crudely she did so, but not to dispossess him. She must know as well as he did that no further imprudence would be forthcoming. He would take care never to encounter her in the future, would once more calculate his exits and entrances on her comings and goings, but this time to avoid her. If he were so unlucky as to meet her on the stairs he would merely nod and smile. There would be no need for words. He would remain urbane, fearsomely urbane, as if deprecating her youth from the summit of his experience. This, in fact, he was prepared to do. He had no difficulty thinking himself into the part. It already felt authentic.

  But something even more serious must be taken into account: his desire had gone, leaving behind only a taste of bitter weariness. He would no longer look at a woman with appreciation, with approval. He did not adduce blame here, merely knew that he had persistently, and so mistakenly, cast the present, and indeed the future, in terms of the past, when he had been young and viable. He was now paying the price for being an anomaly, an old man in love. For it had been love of a sort, though self-generating and unrequited. Perhaps that was love in its pure state. He had never envisaged any sort of recognition: that must, he thought, exonerate him to some degree. What he had done wrong was to expect the kind of courtesy he had always observed in such situations, but that, evidently, was to expect too much. Having never met with hostility in his relations with women he must now accept the facts of a changed situation, even of a changed historical situation. Although he still burned with shame, it was shame for his ignorance rather than for his impropriety. He had not understood how guilty he must appear when facing that tribunal, which, he knew, would be composed of women. He imagined the courtroom: rows of women with briefcases, and in the public gallery a solitary man, ostentatiously tearing up his lease.

  On the Wednesday Ted Bishop, always at his best when faced with decrepitude, brought him a cup of tea. There was a biscuit in the saucer. This small token moved Herz to tears, which he managed to conceal until he was alone. On the Thursday he got up, albeit shakily, bathed and dressed. He was aware, from the evidence of his clothes, that he had lost weight. He did not feel well. He suppos
ed that he did not look well, but this was difficult to evaluate, for glancing in the mirror he saw only his mother’s disdain, his father’s bitter mouth.

  12

  The relative silence that followed this episode was very welcome to Herz, although he knew it to be fallacious. There had been no reprisals. When he encountered Sophie Clay on the stairs he merely made the gesture of tipping a non-existent hat and passed on without a word. She pretended not to see him, which suited him well enough, though he thought he detected the vestige of a response in her inexpressive eyes. He felt for her now a coldness, a disaffection, although in fact she had done him a service: she had separated him from his softer feelings and turned him into what he should have been, a man in whom the main life-giving impulses had died, so that he was now the ghost of himself. Consciously, conscientiously, he played his part, smiling, harmless, an obedient good citizen. He no longer feared any kind of exposure, for the man he was now had no connection with the man he had so briefly been.

  Yet he knew that a fundamental change had taken place. He was distanced, estranged from his former affections. He no longer sought companions, accepting his solitude as the reality he had tried to escape. But he knew that this was not the sort of stasis to which all old people were subject. This was more radical, more fundamental. This was a state over which irony ruled, a mocking acquiescence totally divorced from the reality of desire. At the same time he knew he must cultivate this posthumous condition, and within its confines he was sometimes lucky enough to find a distant contempt, which enabled him to view the eventless present with something like grim amusement. So it has come to this, he told himself: a life of misplaced enthusiasms petering out into indifference, women who turned out to be the wrong women, duties which were always unsought, a conformity which passed unnoticed because the gigantic efforts to conform were of interest to no one but himself. That audience he had once longed for had been persistently absent. Even now he knew few people, yet this was something of a relief to him. Acquaintances were acknowledged by simple gestures of recognition, so that a code governed his relations with the rest of the world: a smile, a raised hand, a nod, were all that were now required of him.

  The winter was mild, so mild that people shook their heads and predicted floods, a cold spring, a summer even more intemperate than the previous one. He was able to spend his days in the public garden, well wrapped up in coat and scarf, immobile on his bench, with an unread newspaper beside him. Frequently he had the place to himself, except for a few children at lunchtime whom he was careful not to watch. They would, he knew, afflict him with a revival of feeling. Their appearance was his signal to repair to a café in Paddington Street, where the other customers, some known, some unknown, made the same gestures of recognition. Even this simulacrum of company was burdensome to him, and when he judged that the children would have returned to school he went back to his seat and renewed his concentration on phenomena near at hand: a crumpled leaf shifting sluggishly across the path, or, more welcome because a sign of spring, the imprint on damp ground of a crushed petal from one of the municipal flowerbeds, now almost denuded. In a habitually misty milky November it did not strike him as unbearably eccentric to spend his time in this way: this was after all a sort of holiday, quite in line with the holidays he had taken in the past, holidays mainly given over to the sort of passivity he now enjoyed, or, if not enjoyed, accepted.

  He did not even regret those wider horizons, although he would have welcomed some kind of prospect other than the sparse vegetation he was obliged to contemplate. Ideally there should have been a broad path filled with strolling couples, for whose intimacy he would have felt affection. These passed across his inner eye in some sort of resort, an entirely notional place filled with figures from the past, none of whom he knew but all familiar from his reading. Instead of this November haze he envisaged a mild sun, not the sun of the south but something that softened the edges of a reality which bore little resemblance to this small permitted space with its wooden seats and its rubbish bins and its silence, uninterrupted apart from the children and the occasional young man with a briefcase who sat on an opposite seat, made a few indistinct calls on his mobile phone, then got up again, presumably to go to an office. Herz would have liked to ask him what work he did, but realized that this interest too belonged to the obedient past. The answer would reach him now only through a miasma of indifference. Much better to return his attention to that last fluttering leaf hanging forlornly from a spindly nearby tree, or those damp footprints left by a person who was no longer there. Nature he loved now, and no longer art. The signs of life that were presented to him impressed him by their isolated discrete character: the leaf had no connection with the footprints, and yet in their very humility both were utterly absorbing.

  Dusk came early, and in its benevolence compensated him for the absent sun. It was then that he rose stiffly, picked up his now humid newspaper, and, summoning his courage, turned towards home. A light rain usually fell at about this time, and he was able to appreciate certain urban signs: the fall of lamplight onto damp pavements or its reflection in shallow puddles, the animation of the supermarket, where he was obliged to buy the elements of a simple meal, the distant splash of a car manoeuvring too close to a wet gutter. His street, still empty, impressed him with its abstract red-brick strangeness, its absence of curves, its remorseless symmetry. As he fitted his key into the lock he gestured to the young men in the shop, Mike and Tony, one of whom held up a mug as an invitation to join them for tea: with an equivalent gesture he smiled and refused. He was fond of these young men, and so was careful not to embarrass them with his company. He performed small services for them, taking in their milk and storing it until they arrived to open the shop, keeping a set of spare keys, as he had once kept a set for Sophie Clay. It was a peculiar blessing—unhoped for in the present circumstances—that the shop troubled him so little. Television sets were switched on as soon as Mike and Tony arrived, but the sound reached him only as a distant booming, rather like the sea, and was only distinguishable in brief bursts when a customer asked for a demonstration. He appreciated the young men as workers, even as fellow workers, remembering his days in the record shop, and understanding how unwelcome was the advent of a customer too close to five o’clock, how familiar the sound of locking up . . . Back in the flat he drank his own tea in fellow feeling, often standing at the window to ease his back after the long day spent sitting in the damp garden. He would stand there until he saw Mike and Tony leave. Sometimes one of them looked up and waved. As soon as he heard the clip of familiar heels he retreated into the further dusk of his sitting-room. He took care to be nowhere near either the front or back windows when his lights went on, drew curtains, as he had never done before, completing his concealment, signalling his unapproachability. Then the evening would begin, lengthy prelude to a night which might or might not usher in sleep. Rarely did the nights bring dreams, a cause of particular disappointment. He, who had once dreamed so vividly, took this absence as a sign of vanished life.

  There was one more ritual to be observed before he could count the day as finished. His lease, removed from the second drawer of his desk, where it kept company with an outline of the will he intended to hand over to Bernard Simmonds, had to be re-examined, in case the word ‘Renewable’ had previously escaped his notice. It had not. Both documents, the lease and the will, were deceptive, since he had nowhere to go and nothing to leave. He would have willed the flat to Josie if it promised to belong to him, but he felt it slipping away from him, as if his hold on it were physically weakening. There had been no reminders, no signs of activity, but he knew from the young men in the shop that the building had changed hands, had been put in the charge of managing agents, and that these people were even now gathering their strength for an all-out assault. This no longer frightened him as it had once done: the flat had lost its virtue for him as soon as he understood that all places were henceforth to be more or less alien. Yet his income was restr
icted; the flat was his only asset. Only if he sold the flat would he have more capital. He had almost come to the conclusion that he might pay rent rather than buy, but it was by no means certain that he would be given the choice. Only by disappearing altogether would there be anything left for Josie; only if he sold the flat and died promptly afterwards would she inherit any money that was left. These reflections moved in on him at roughly the same time every evening and were still unresolved several hours later. Only in the damp silence of the garden did he feel physically removed from them; the relief was limited by the amount of time he spent there, and dwindled progressively as he reached Chiltern Street. Inside the flat it vanished altogether.

  On the evening of what he dimly remembered was his birthday he telephoned Bernard Simmonds and invited him to dinner. It always gratified him that this invitation was cordially welcomed. This cordiality, this geniality was no doubt a semi-professional attribute, much appreciated by Simmonds’s clients, although Herz suspected that the younger man felt something a little more personal, had fashioned Herz into the sort of elderly friend who might offer sage advice and yet so tactfully refrained from doing so. And then their money flowed from the same source, to which each obscurely felt he had no right, though profiting from it without further regard to the donor. This was rarely alluded to but acted like something of a common legacy. In the absence of anything more straightforward it constituted a link, one of those mysterious links which was felt rather than explicitly acknowledged. The shadowy godfather, having brought them together, functioned as an ancestor, without whom their relations would have remained more formal. They arranged to meet in town, at the restaurant to which Herz habitually invited Josie. Herz had warned Simmonds that this would be in the nature of a consultation, indicating that he would expect to be charged for it. Simmonds’s fee, enormous as it usually was, would not be referred to in the course of dinner, a small civility which Herz appreciated. The bill would arrive in due course without comment, and without comment, be wordlessly paid.