Making Things Better

by Anita Brookner

He seized his letters, wound his scarf round his throat, and prepared to leave the flat. On the stairs he heard the surprisingly noisy footsteps of Sophie Clay. ‘Ah, Sophie,’ he said, without prevarication, as they came face-to-face. ‘Just the person I wanted to see. I’m thinking of letting my flat. Do you know anyone who might want to rent it?’

  Her eyes widened appreciably. ‘Sure, no problem. I know one or two people who might be interested. Are you going away, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said genially. ‘I’m going away for a bit. The flat had better be let on a monthly basis, renewable, of course. Tell your people to get in touch with me. I’ll need references, of course. And I’ll give you the address of my solicitor. He’ll take care of everything.’

  ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘Oh, that’s quite undecided at the moment.’ For some reason he preferred to keep his intentions secret, and with them his destination. In a moment of dizziness, both mental and physical, he saw himself moving on, the Beau Rivage another home to which he might or might not return. ‘It might be nice for you to have a friend here.’

  ‘Yes, right. I’ll get going on it tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said absently. ‘I’ll wait to hear from you.’

  ‘It’s raining,’ she warned him.

  ‘Just the post office,’ he said. ‘These letters must go this evening.’ He would have kissed her goodbye had reality not intervened in the shape of a blast of music from one of the televisions in the shop. A late customer, he thought. Poor boys; they must be longing to get away.

  In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit. The sky was already darkening; signs of spring were absent, and yet the chilly damp held a promise of greenness, of new life only just in abeyance. It was even possible to appreciate that sky; its opaque blue reminded him of certain pictures, though no picture could compete with this strange sense of imminence, with the crust of the earth ready to break into life, the roots expanding to disclose flowers, the trees graciously putting forth leaves. The impassivity of nature never ceased to amaze him. This awakening process was surely superior to anything captured on canvas, yet art made all phenomena its province. In its unceasing war with the effort of capturing moments of time art won this unequal contest, but only just. The majestic indifference of nature was there to remind one of one’s place, and no doubt to serve as a corrective to the artist’s ambition. When the canvas was finished it was already a relic, outside change. And surely change was primordial; all must obey it. To ignore the process was to ignore the evidence of one’s own evolutionary cycle.

  Herz wondered how he had ever imagined a state of permanence. Renewal was an altogether wider prospect, one that affected his future rather than his timid present. He thought of himself in new surroundings, without a history, benign, gentlemanly, an agreeable acquaintance. This ideal condition, though it had lost, and indeed was losing, some of its sharpness of contour, contained the rapt enchantment of a dream, and like a dream was infinitely more persuasive than what reality had to offer. Logic had transferred itself to another realm, and he knew the fleeting satisfaction of the artist: this was his creation, brought into being by a process that was almost entirely involuntary. It was this unknown faculty and its promptings that impressed him most. The speed with which the day had taken shape was almost frightening.

  He lost a little of his confidence in the course of his walk. The walk itself was valedictory, round the little public garden before it closed for the night. He would not sit there again, would not spend his time brooding over the past. The past would be, if not dismissed, then at least resolved into this almost unknown woman, this unreal landscape, this undreamed-of future. Already the prospect was inducing a sort of languor; he felt his steps becoming slower, was reminded of the weight of his body. And yet he did not want to go home. Home was in a sense irrelevant to the day’s events. He remembered, almost with impatience, the humble gratitude he had felt when he first took possession of the flat, the amazed delight with which he had furnished it, added to it, his timid pride at being a householder. Now that very timidity saddened him. He saw that he had lived his life as if it were under threat, as if he still bore the marks of that original menace and of the enormity of the fate that might have been his. This, he was convinced, made transience the only option, exile, impermanence, the route indicated for him so long ago. And it had taken a lifetime for him to understand this! At last he would take his place in history. In making his home in a country famed for its neutrality he would be obeying ancestral impulses. In that direction lay the safety he might yet come to desire.

  He reached the flat at six, unwound his damp scarf from his throat, and sank down heavily into one of the chairs he was soon to abandon. He ran his fingers over the little table that had come down to him indirectly from Ostrovski’s mother, and reflected that this was the hardest of all the challenges he had to face, this disjunction between rash optimism and the pessimism that was his natural condition. His euphoria had ebbed away in the course of his walk, during which he had been beguiled, in spite of himself, by the cold streets, by the dim poetry of familiar surroundings. To abandon one life for another, and that other quite unknown, seemed to him suddenly an impossibility, the burden of Fanny a task that he had brought on himself almost unawares. The illusion of a past love, constructed almost entirely from memory, had paled in comparison with the unlikely alliance he had forged with Josie, whose brisk cheerfulness had kept him afloat for the duration of his brief marriage, and which even now he missed, most of all since he knew he would never see her again. Had he been brave enough to telephone her he knew that she would have rallied him, dispelled his fears (for now he knew a certain fear), but instinct told him to avoid the contact. He might have caught her at an unguarded moment, when her own fears had turned into a melancholy not unlike his own. He wanted her to be unchanged, once again compared her honesty with Fanny’s complaints, knew which of the two women was worthy of his respect. And yet worth and respect had so little to do with love. One loved in spite of one’s judgement, one’s better nature, and even now, though more fitfully, the image of Fanny as she had been was sufficient to displace the all too probable reality of Fanny as he might find her again, in a baroque setting which might not, in the long run, be to his taste, the idle company soon to be his, an ironic footnote to his strenuous thoughtful days.

  But those days too were past. He sat at his desk to write his last letter, after which there would be none more to write. ‘Dear Bernard, I am going away for a while and should be grateful if you would look after my affairs during an absence which might be prolonged. You have my will and the lease of my flat; please execute both when necessary, and draw the appropriate fees and expenses from my bank account, of which you will find the details in my will. My movements are still uncertain; it is entirely possible that I may take up residence abroad. Today’s Europe is not the Europe I once left: the natives are now quite friendly. Truth to tell this is quite an unsettling decision, but as you implied the time has come for decisions to be made. You will find all necessary details in the enclosed paper, which also gives you power of attorney. I am grateful to you for our past friendship; you were always a delightful companion. My thanks to you too for carrying out these somewhat nebulous instructions. I expect to be gone within a week or two, and will let you have an address when I have one myself. With every possible good wish, and my thanks for your kindness. Ever yours, Julius Herz.’

  He went into the kitchen and made a cup of tea, stood at the window while he drank it. He had forgotten to buy food; tea would have to do. Suddenly, shockingly, he choked, fought for breath, felt his heart surge up into his throat. When the attack subsided he was limp and gasping. He made his way back to his chair, and, al
most as an experiment, retrieved his pills from his breast pocket, slipped one under his tongue, and within minutes felt his chest expand, and with it his head. So the pills did work. That was good to know. The tiny rattle of the enamel box in which they were kept, and which he was so used to ignoring, might prove to be a comfort. Breathing now steadily but carefully, he undressed and got into bed. His last conscious thought was that he must recover sufficiently for his plans to work themselves out. Then he let his mind slip its moorings, had a memory, for some reason, of his mother, and abandoned himself to sleep.

  15

  Instinct had told him to act swiftly, even precipitately, to leave with a flourish, letting others resolve the details. Rational consideration, to which he still had occasional access, dictated an interval before plans could be implemented. This proved once again that instinct was the better, if easier guide. Arrangements still had to be made for the disposal of the flat, and he had yet to hear from Fanny. Fanny, however, in the cooling light of reason, was proving as evanescent as she had always been. He discovered, with something like genuine interest, that if Fanny were not moved to be as impulsive as he had originally been, she was of less interest, certainly of less value. He remembered the startling dream he had had in which she commanded his actions, had been her old wilful self, had deprived him of his coat and in so doing had somehow denuded him. This had stimulated a whole spectrum of sensations, chief among which had been the perverse gratification he had always experienced in waiting for her, indeed waiting on her, never really disappointed when she failed to meet his expectations, always postponing some hoped-for fulfilment to a future in which, finally, he would be accepted as her equal.

  He now saw this process as a disastrous waste of energy. Fulfilment was more important than anticipation. That was the reason why he had recognized his instinctive haste and insistence as correct, as the engine which might have resulted in his own immediate gratification. It was his ego which had sought some acknowledgement, his own will which must be obeyed. He also saw that there was no one to obey his will but himself. This opened up a more tragic perspective, that of his past life, in which his will had been too effectively suppressed, leading to a sadness that was lifelong. But if this explanation satisfied him, the realization that he had failed the one important test that a man must pass was terrible. His will had been at the service of others, to use as they thought fit, and in allowing this, in the fallacious enterprise of making things better, he had surrendered the part of himself that others could not and would not supply, and in so doing had forgone his right to respect. He saw that the instinct that had prompted him to surrender his life, if only for a sequence of fantasies that might prove incapable of realization, had been the entirely correct prompting of an under-used faculty which might have saved that life, or turned it into something more forceful, more inventive, certainly more successful. Yet by dint of good behaviour, by attention to duty, and entirely in the interests of conformity, he had ended up respectable, but not respected. That was the lesson he had learned in the course of an uneasy night, in which the image of that final retirement on the lake shore had retreated into that same lake’s mists, leaving him still hungry for another life, for other company, and no more iconoclastic than he had ever been.

  He had had a brief dream, all too brief, which teased him like an enigma. He had dreamed that he was on the pavement of a busy thoroughfare in the middle of an ordinary day, feeling some slight anticipation of a meeting. On the other side of the street, on the opposite pavement, he had seen the person whom he hoped to meet. It was a woman, dressed formally in a coat and skirt and a wide-brimmed hat. From these clothes he had deduced that this woman was middle-aged, or perhaps a throwback to an earlier time. She had raised her arm in greeting and he had done the same, yet he had known that he should do no more, should not cross the road, now busy with traffic, to join her. The dream ended on this note, not of hesitation but of caution, as if in going to join her he might lose all dignity, all discretion. He had known that if he had made that move he would have relinquished authority, that the severest prudence had held his raised arm in check. Thus might two mild acquaintances greet each other, yet more had been at stake. It was as if love had been involved at some stage, a love he was determined to keep within recognizable bounds. The woman had appeared to be waiting for him, but that had not quickened his actions, stimulated him into some kind of activity. The entire dream thus consisted of this one image, of his own raised arm, and, less distinctly, of hers, and with it the awareness of a prohibition that he had adopted, even fostered, in the interest of not losing face.

  From this he gradually deduced that his relations with women were still inchoate, that good manners had, time and time again, disguised desire, and in disguising it, or in keeping it in its place, had denatured it. Whatever had arrested his movements in the dream turned out, in the light of morning, to have another explanation: instinct had been corrected by a need to avoid confrontation. He now saw this as a grave loss, just as his love of women had been tempered by a wish not to harm them. As a lover he had been too kind. Those afternoons waiting for Fanny had been wasted; even now he was prepared to wait for her. Some dim knowledge of this had propelled him on a course of action that had argued the superior wisdom of unilateral action, of speed, careless of the consequences, pure instinct reacting to years of considerate behaviour. Selfishness, even brutality, might have procured him delights other than those he had known in marriage, though those had been appreciable, but that there was liberation to be experienced above and beyond such delights was now quite clear. So that his flight, elaborated in the course of a few hours, was in fact no more than a metaphor, one so beautifully envisaged as to hide the darker truth.

  He regretted the letter to Fanny he had torn up, for in writing it he had expressed something of that darker truth. Once again he had shielded her from that darker truth, and by his very action of destroying the letter had failed to come to terms with it himself. For the letter had revealed bitterness for a failed love affair, in which she was not entirely at fault, in fact not at all at fault by his present reckoning. Certainly her scornful manners had been unattractive, but no doubt women felt scorn for men who respected them to the point at which self-sacrifice became inanition. His fantasies concerning her had been so beguiling that he had not seen them to be a substitute, an inferior product which would, in the long run, prove deceptive. The great advantage of his so practical wife consisted in her being the sort of woman about whom no man could possibly fantasize; hence his unequivocal enjoyment of her, and also his acceptance of their incompatibility. The rest was poetry, art, but with art came artifice, contrivance, a willed ignorance of things as they are. He had built the greater part of his life on the artist’s assumptions: as a lover, and specifically as a lover of Fanny, he had thought to offer nothing less than a poet’s homage. And she, an all too ordinary woman, had looked on it as something that could be endlessly renewed, a resource of which she might avail herself when other resources were lacking. Hence his restraint, in the dream. Quite literally, with these thoughts now coming into the forefront of his mind, he would not cross the street for her.

  Yet somehow, hazily, he had accepted her presence in his life yet again. Her letters, together with her complaints, had disclosed another truth: she was friendless. And he was lonely. In no sense could these be compelling reasons for seeking each other’s company. As against this they were eminently sensible. Her letter had suggested a course of action which, on the surface, had a good deal to recommend it, chiefly an alternative to their isolated lives. He had no doubt that the plan had been hers. He, as ever, had responded with some of that eagerness which had always characterized his dealings with her.

  The main attraction of that plan, for him, had been escape, flight, his will recklessly seeking its own satisfaction, if only in the destruction of his so careful life. For that was how the plan had appeared to him. Overwhelmingly sensible though it might seem, indeed was, it took s
econd place to that glimpsed abandonment of all caution, all good and careful continuation of things as they stood in his so respectable present state. The fact that his life gave him no pleasure was indictment enough. Here he began to look more kindly on his brief but authentic passion for Sophie Clay. That, he saw, had been love: he had fallen in love with her. And he had no need to point out to himself how ludicrous a late love would always be. He had watched for her, studied her movements, listened for her footsteps like a lunatic; he had felt for her like a young man. That was his tragedy. He had survived it in the only way he knew, by further confinement. This had been partly successful; he was now able to speak to her quite naturally. He had not then been tempted to run away, had once again had recourse to good behaviour. Yet the ardour that would once have gone into the conquest of such a woman (of any woman) had taken the not quite logical shape of a late idyll with yet another woman, to whom, he now discovered, he was almost indifferent. This would be like an arranged marriage, of the kind that used to be endured in closed societies. It would be detached, unimpassioned: each would remain conscious of the other’s defects, would strive humorously to excuse them, and in so doing act as an example to all other right-thinking and unhappily married spectators. And he—and she—had brought this into being! For it was such a rational proposition that there could be no possible reason to turn it down. They were two lonely people who had been given a chance of companionship at an age when companionship was largely in default. Nevertheless he regretted that he had not gone ahead, all guns blazing, regardless of whether Fanny joined him or not. He would have had the brief satisfaction of acting on impulse, whatever the result. Not ever to have done so cast his past life into a history of failure that made him so breathless, constricted his chest. It was this sense of failure that had moved him to slip a pill under his tongue every night since his plans had degenerated into confusion. The momentary ease that it produced went some way to deceiving him that all was not lost, that it might be possible to contrive a delay, to proceed, certainly, but at his own pace, and in accordance with his own wishes. Those wishes would, alas, be appropriate to one whose will had always proved defective. He might, in the end, be as dependent on Fanny as she promised to be on himself.