Altered States

by Anita Brookner

  It was on my return from one of these visits that Mother telephoned to say that Jenny, who had been staying with them, had suffered a slight stroke. She had recovered well, but they were driving her back to London, where she would presumably stay for the foreseeable future. They hoped I would join them as soon as possible. On the appointed day I picked up my briefcase once again and left for the Edgware Road. There were three people in the flat when I arrived: Mother, Aubrey, and a neighbour, presumably the neighbour who had come to Jenny’s assistance on the morning of Humphrey’s death. Jenny herself was lying on the sofa with her eyes closed. I have never seen anyone so obstinately waiting to be waited upon. Aubrey took me on one side. ‘She’s perfectly all right. Ate like a horse on the way over. I don’t want your mother involved any further. Leave that, Alice,’ he said sharply, as my mother began to gather up teacups. ‘Perhaps Mrs …’ he paused.

  ‘North,’ supplied the neighbour. ‘Beatrice North.’

  ‘Perhaps Mrs North could suggest some sort of help. On a daily basis, preferably.’

  Mrs North looked doubtful. ‘I could ask my cleaner to look in,’ she said. ‘She’s usually with me until about twelve.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Aubrey. ‘There you are, Jenny,’ he added, bending over the figure on the sofa. ‘Mrs North has very kindly arranged for someone to come in every day.’

  ‘I want Alice to stay.’

  I’m afraid that’s not possible. We plan to return to France tomorrow.’

  A slight shake of the head from my mother told me that this was not quite true. I had to admire Aubrey’s sense of command, though my admiration went into sharp decline when he said, ‘Alan will look after things. He’s not far away. He’ll no doubt look in on you from time to time.’ To this Jenny made no acknowledgement; in fact her eyes, which had been briefly open, closed again, as if to repudiate the puny help that had been summoned on her behalf.

  At the time I was oddly distracted by a curious dream I had had the previous night, or perhaps in the early morning, when I was close to waking. A young man had come to me, pitifully dirty and unkempt, wearing greasy blackened clothes. He explained that he was a student, and that he lived in a tower block which had no bathrooms. This seemed to me perfectly plausible, as was the fact that he required my help. I took him in, removed his clothes, and ordered him to take a bath and wash his hair. Several times, I added. I then cut his long black finger nails. All this was accomplished without a suggestion of sexual excitement or religious fervour. Nor had I any idea what the dream, which was unfinished, signified. I knew no young men, apart from the exceedingly well dressed and excessively self-assured young crook who was currently consulting me about bringing a charge of entrapment against the police. (I turned him down.) I hesitated to read any warning or portent into this dream. Yet when Mother and Aubrey had left, Jenny sprang into something like life, which indicated that she had suffered no permanent damage.

  ‘You won’t leave me, will you, Alan? If you do I shall be all alone. What will happen to me?’

  Far more alarming than the dream, which in retrospect was alarming enough, was the prospect of having to coax Jenny from her sofa, as I had once tried to coax Angela from her bed. The memory was so overwhelming that I pleaded an urgent appointment, and with a fervent smile asked the neighbour if she would not mind staying, adding that I should be most grateful for her help.

  ‘You’ll be back?’ she insisted.

  ‘Not before the weekend,’ I said firmly.

  Let others work this out, I thought. In the hall I heard Mrs North say, ‘What a charming man! Is he a relative?’

  ‘In a way,’ said Jenny, in her normal voice. ‘I have known him all my life.’ This was the only indication I received that something irrevocable had happened to her, and that I must prepare myself for mental as well as physical deterioration.

  In fact she made good physical progress, and was able to go out each morning, walking with the aid of a stick, yet whenever I called she was lying on the sofa, with the shawl over her legs. She was well cared for, by Mrs North’s cleaner, who came every afternoon, and by a nun from the local convent who visited occasionally. Doing God’s work, no doubt. My own visits were held against me. Like many lonely people she complained of solitude the minute she had a visitor, pouring her complaint into complaisant but guilty ears. And one was always guilty, if only for not having been present before the complaint had had time to form.

  ‘You’re so hard, Alan,’ she would say. ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’ At this point two tears would form in her eyes. It was true: she was lonely. No one cared for her. And still she longed for company, for closeness. And no one could trick her out of that longing with false words of encouragement.

  One evening I found her slightly more animated than usual, with a dangerous febrility that seemed to promise a further stroke. She grasped my arm as I bent to kiss her, her breath, now clean as a child’s, in my nostrils.

  ‘I want Sarah,’ she said. ‘Sarah will look after me. Sarah always loved me.’

  This was so complete a misreading of the situation that it seemed to me that there was nothing more to be said.

  ‘I don’t know where she is,’ I told her.

  ‘You can find her. You’re a lawyer.’ Her hand tightened on my arm. ‘Find Sarah for me.’

  When, on future visits, I repeated that I did not know where Sarah was, she did not believe me. Until the Sunday—and it was always a Sunday—when she triumphantly presented me with a piece of paper on which she had copied two addresses, one in Paris, one in Geneva. ‘In Humphrey’s diary,’ she said, and I noticed that she was becoming short of breath. ‘Now you can find her for me.’

  I left her with the usual kind vague words one uses on such occasions, put the paper in my pocket, and went home. At the kitchen table, with a cup of tea in front of me, I scrutinised the paper, noting the tumble-down nature of Jenny’s handwriting. Dropping, as if exhausted, to the lower right-hand corner, a pencil had inscribed Berthe Rigaud’s address in the rue de Rennes, and a number in the rue des Bains in Geneva. Out of conscience, or curiosity, I telephoned the rue de Rennes, to be told by a sharp young voice that Monsieur and Madame Rigaud were now living on their property in the Sologne, and that Berthe Rigaud, whom the speaker had known slightly, had married some years earlier. She believed that her married name was Chapuis, but she had lost touch with her, and could not help me any further.

  I thanked her, oddly grateful to her for putting Berthe Rigaud out of reach. I got up, made more tea, and sat down again. My discovery of that moment, but in fact fully formed for some time, was that I would make no attempt to find Sarah, who was now lost to me, and that Jenny, who had come to rely on me to perform this task, might transfer—would transfer—her final disillusionment from Sarah to myself. This seemed to me as much of a solution as I could achieve.

  But it has not been easy, to watch the rage, the obstinacy, dissolve into sadness and a kind of trust. These last few bleak winters have been particularly hard. I do not speak of my own boredom and pity, though both are acute. As Jenny grows weaker she believes more and more hopefully in my quest, which I invent for her every Sunday. So far I have told her of my (fictitious) visit to the rue de Rennes, a story which she followed attentively, longing for the next instalment. From her point of view it is the best kind of saga, for there is—there must be—fulfilment at the end of it: the very form dictates it. I am aware of deceit, dissimulation, all kinds of treachery, not only to Jenny but to myself. But I have reached a stage of life which finds me unwilling to compromise my own peace of mind, and the hours I spend in that dark flat, spinning my tale, amount to the lie I am willing to commit in exchange for that elusive peace.

  Soon I shall have to start the story again, but it will not greatly matter. I take her hand, and as I start to talk, her faded eyes look into mine for comfort. ‘Not long now,’ I tell her, and indeed it has often seemed to me that it will not be long. But she is tough: she does not d
ie. I have also told her that I shall be going away shortly, but the news does not alarm her, for she knows that I will be back, if only to finish the story. I leave the flat disheartened by the ease with which I have brought off this trickery, and with the even more disheartening conviction that at the end I too will be told kindly lies by those who know me well enough to spare me the truth.

  17

  ‘Are you eating?’ asks my mother wistfully on the telephone, although she is now over eighty, and I am in advancing middle age, have indeed advanced beyond it. I accept the fact that we lead separate lives; I also accept the fact that one day, perhaps not too far off, she will leave me, and that I shall then be alone as I have never been before, albeit in a relatively solitary life. Perhaps I am well qualified for solitude. My discipline rarely lets me down, except perhaps when I am on holiday, as I am now, and find the days long. Even their numbing calm is acceptable; it corresponds to something settled in my nature. In any event I know that no further change can be expected. That too I accept.

  It is that difficult hour between five and six, when the light begins to alter and presages a long dusky evening. At home I should be bidding the girls in the office good-night and welcoming as familiars the surge of home-going traffic and the lights of the new supermarket in Baker Street. If I am not going out again I pick up something to eat and am in the flat in time to watch the seven o’clock news. I find it convenient to work in the evenings, now that I am so seldom interrupted; the invitations still arrive, but I rarely accept them. I spend week-ends at the cottage, at least when Brian and Felicity are not using it. Sometimes they drive down for the day, with the children, and I particularly look forward to these occasions, since the children are an object of fascination to me, a fascination quite devoid of covetousness or regret. That is one of the blessings of my becalmed state: I no longer have the capacity for desire or envy, and although I know that this condition has not been arrived at without renunciation (I do not say sacrifice), I find it acceptable, strangely so in view of the ambitions I once had for myself, and the confidence I also had that those ambitions could be satisfied.

  Acceptance may well be the only reward I have been able to recognise, but also the price I have had to pay. It is just that at this particular hour, in Vif, it seems a little inadequate, a falling short, although I have heard highly successful men (and women) bemoaning their lot, as if success had endowed them with an almost existential anxiety to examine their achievements and to measure the distance to be travelled—still—before they experience that satisfaction that so eludes them. I have no such illusions. I am what I was always programmed to be, a well-regarded man of some substance, with an uninteresting private life. I am aware that this is an almost anomalous position, well below current norms, but perhaps there is still room for dull people such as myself, if only to throw into higher relief the exploits of those whose lives are more vivid than my own. I read about such people in the newspapers every morning. By the time I leave for the office I am more or less convinced that behind Wigmore Street there stretches a hinterland of scandalous happenings, many of which will come in for my professional scrutiny in the course of my working day.

  Here in Vif I am allowed to be as dull as I know myself to be. Dullness is appreciated here, and my days have a dullness I am not able to achieve anywhere else. After breakfast I take my long walk, either to Chelles or down into the town. Coffee is taken at the Grand Café de la Place, or, if in Chelles, at a little bar called Le Papillon. I lunch at one of the two open-air restaurants, for it is still mild enough in October to sit outside. Then there is the walk to the station for the English papers, and sometimes a cup of tea at the English Tea Rooms. This takes up most of the late afternoon, so that I arrive back at the hotel with plenty of time to take my bath and change before dinner. Unfortunately, as on this particular evening, there is rather too much time, and the news from England is not sufficiently interesting to claim all my attention. I get up and walk to my window, which overlooks the terrace, and watch the sky darken. There are few people staying here, although the hotel is open all the year round. I dare say some arrive for Christmas, and I learn from Monsieur Pach that it is getting difficult to book a room in the summer months. October usually sends people to the sun before the winter closes in, and I have the hotel more or less to myself. Indeed I am something of a favoured guest, one who will never make inconvenient demands or disrupt the discreet calm of the dining-room. This suits me well enough. It touches me to be received with deference, as I am here, for I feel myself to have a poor record in those matters which usually attract a good opinion. Certainly I am under no illusion that the deference of Monsieur Pach and his staff is anything other than a professional obligation which they honour, perhaps a little more than usual in my case, since I give them so little trouble and return so faithfully every year.

  The accident of that woman at the station, the woman whose highly respectable back I contemplated, disturbed me, although I have got into the way of dealing with disturbing reminiscences, and on the whole manage to master them. There was something so familiar about her stance, her movement from one foot to the other, that I very nearly broke my self-imposed rule and tapped her on the shoulder, if only to see her face. I count my inability to do so part of my new wisdom, although that wisdom is frequently indistinguishable from a kind of willed impotence. If it had been Sarah I should not have known what to say. The story I tell to Jenny on my visits to her treat Sarah as the unattainable goal that we nevertheless pursue. It is the essence of the story that one day she will be found, or rather that she will come to us of her own free will. The woman on the platform was too unremarkable to fulfil such a mythic function. Sarah Miller, or Sarah de Leuze, is now a woman with a domestic history and appointments, having dispensed with her undomestic youth as I have with mine. I could no more follow her now than I could shed the years since I last saw her, in my office, as if she were an ordinary client, and I simply her man of business. That woman’s highly polished shoes had no connection with my Sarah, who disdained such conventions. In those days I thought of her as mine, though she continually escaped me. There was no way in which I could lay claim to that matron, with her hat and her handbag, not even to tell her that her memory still held some fascination for me, that I returned to it for further information, as if to understand it better, although any fool, myself excepted, could have made sense of it in the days that I so signally wasted.

  That is why I never go to Paddington Street these days. I am sure that the flat has long been sold, but the street, for me, still resonates with a kind of desperation, with that everlasting attempt to take possession. Together with this memory there is the memory of Angela running after me, her white blouse glimmering in the light cast by a street lamp. Attention of another kind was being sought, or was it the same? My wife does not haunt me, except as an image: footsteps behind me, windblown hair, confusion. Strangely, I welcome this image, which seems to me now an emblem of our mutual innocence. My regret is that this innocence was so short-lived, that Angela became wise and knowing after her fashion, and that her knowledge darkened her features and clouded her fragile prettiness. She would not have aged well. I have done rather better, if only because I am more adept at concealment.

  Sometimes I measure the time left to me and wonder how I shall fill it. It may of course surprise me by being dramatically circumscribed—by illness, by disability, by accident, by default. I suppose I shall continue as I have begun, for I see no prospect of change. These days in Vif are consoling, inasmuch as they are the outward symbol of contented mediocrity, whereas if I were to return to Paris I should re-awaken every sort of desire, largely for my youth, when desire could be so easily satisfied and so easily renewed. Yet even youth can be overshadowed or compromised. My father, whom I knew so little, had a younger sister to whom he was devoted, and whose early death was surrounded by mystery. What was the cause? A fever disregarded, an illness mismanaged by the family doctor, whose reputation never f
ully recovered? In any event there had to be a post mortem, something quite shocking in my father’s respectable family, and references to ‘poor Prue’ were always accompanied by pursed lips and sighs of regret. One grows up with such mysteries, and respects them, although a voice in one’s head longs for a simple explanation. As one grows older it becomes clear that there are fewer and fewer simple explanations; that is why family piety, which keeps the mysteries intact, is of such value to all who continue to venerate such phenomena. Their transformation into myth is also of some value. To this day I have failed to discover the reason for poor Prue’s death. Even my mother’s voice is lowered when I question her about it. For Prue is unfinished business, like most of the more disturbing events of our lives. That is how they retain their power, since no conclusion can be drawn. I understand this now that the events of my life come under this heading. If I can take any credit in the matter of my own affairs it is that so far I have managed to look facts in the face. So far, that is, although sometimes I experience a kind of failure of nerve, a weakness which I have done my best to resist.