The Bay of Angels

by Anita Brookner

  Her sadness, I thought, was brought on by the knowledge that life’s opportunities had definitively passed her by, and also by virtue of the fact that the redeeming feature, or presence, had not manifested itself. She was thus cast into the category of the unwanted, the unsought. I perceived this on certain lightless afternoons, when there was no joyous voice to greet me when I returned from a friend’s house, from noisy friendly normality. I perceived it, no doubt correctly, but it burdened me. I wanted no part of her passivity. I was young and not notably unfeeling, but I did not want to be a partner in anyone’s regrets. Had I been of an age to understand the full implications of this dereliction I should have resented it strenuously. As it was I began to see some virtue in the girls’ remonstrances, though in truth they had little but themselves to offer by way of compensation for her solitude. Therefore, when I put my key in the door one afternoon and heard Millie’s festive voice exclaiming, ‘Now, I’m counting on you, Anne. There’ll only be a few people. Nice people. I know you’ll like them,’ I was inclined to add my own encouragements to hers.

  My mother murmured something placatory.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Nancy. ‘You have to make a bit of an effort in this life if you want to get anywhere. And as far as I can make out you’re not getting anywhere.’

  ‘Six-thirty,’ said Millie. ‘I’ll send the car for you.’

  After that it would have been difficult to back down.

  My mother’s expression, after they had left, was bemused, resigned, even cynical. I took it as a good sign that she went into her bedroom and opened her creaking wardrobe door. Everything in our flat creaked, a sound I found friendly. Now I saw, perhaps for the first time, that it was rather gloomy, that my mother’s room was in perpetual shadow, too conducive to nostalgia, to introspection. On her dressing-table was the photograph of the young man in the academic gown whom I did not remember. His face was steadfast, obedient, not quite up to the task of growing up, certainly not of growing old. I regretted his absence, as I had not done when still a child, with my mother to myself. Now I had her to myself, but was no longer a child, was beginning to feel a hunger for wider experiences, for a life outside the home, even one as well ordered as ours. Perhaps precisely for that reason.

  ‘Do I look all right?’ asked my mother, on that next Friday evening.

  I thought she looked beautiful, in her simple blue dress and jacket. She was plainly agitated, and had it not been for the car being sent would have thankfully abandoned the whole adventure. When Tom, Millie’s driver, rang the bell, we were both in a state of high concern. It was almost a relief when she left, and I was thankful for the hour or two I could spend on my own before her return. I thought of her among those nice people and hoped painfully, not that she was enjoying herself—that would have been too much to expect—but that she was not feeling too lonely. For a woman as shy as my mother social occasions on which she was unaccompanied were a nightmare. That was why Millie’s pressing invitations, offered, or rather insisted upon for entirely defensible reasons, were, more often than not, gratefully refused.

  But she had not refused this one, and it was at Millie’s party, on that Friday evening, that she met her second husband, my stepfather-to-be, and thus changed both our lives.

  2

  My mother’s fate having been settled according to the archaic principles of natural justice, and the conditions for her redemption having thus been met, I was now free to cast off on my own. I was sixteen, nearly seventeen, and the timing was providential. I had no doubt that we should all be entirely happy. I loved Simon, who, at our first meeting, embraced me with Jewish cordiality, making no distinction between my mother and myself. It was my first contact with genuine expansiveness and I warmed to it. Standing in our flat in Edith Grove he revealed its shabbiness, and thus deducted much of its charm. He was a big man, who seemed to smile all the time, delighted to have found a woman as unspoilt as my mother. He later told us that he too had had to be prevailed upon to attend that epochal party, for, although naturally gregarious, he was aware of the lack of a companion in these most public of circumstances. He was a widower, who, since the death of his wife, had devoted his life to business, or rather to ‘business interests’, as he termed them. He exuded a pleasant air of health and viability, which did something to mitigate the fact that he was rather old: he was self-conscious about his age, which he dismissed as ‘nearly the wrong side of seventy’, but he was so obviously fit, and so benignly energetic, that I soon overlooked this fact.

  I knew that he could be relied upon to take care of my mother, which seemed to me our prime concern. By this stage I knew, or suspected, that she had money worries: the tenancy of our flat had only another year to run, and after that we should have to move into more restricted quarters or take out a loan from the bank. Both were problematic, but the problem was solved by the fact that Simon occupied two floors of a large house in Onslow Square, into which he was anxious to transfer my mother as soon as possible. He also possessed a house in France, which I thought much more interesting. Over dinner our fates were swiftly settled. My mother would live in Onslow Square and I would stay on in Edith Grove until the lease ran out, after which Simon would buy me a flat of my own. ‘Look on it as a wedding present,’ he smiled. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t share in my good fortune.’ This easy generosity was very difficult to resist. Besides, none of us had a desire to live under the same roof. My mother thought it would be unfair on me, even indelicate, to live at close quarters to a late marriage, particularly between two people of different ages, and Simon was naturally fastidious, anxious to hide the evidence of his years—‘my advanced years’, he joked—from critical eyes. As for myself I had no desire to see his pills in the bathroom, to witness his laundry arrangements, or be present at his intimate life with my mother. This, I thought, should be kept as secret as possible.

  Something in me shied away from the thought of his making love to her, for this was the flaw in the arrangement. Later I understood this as a primal scene, the kind infants fantasize, or even register, as taking place between their parents. If my mother had met someone more like herself, or even like the young man in the photograph—modest, trusting, steadfast—I should have had no further qualms. It was just that Simon, so obviously a good man, was foreign to our way of life, our settled habits. His bulk filled our flat whenever he visited us, as did the smell of his cologne. I could not quite get used to his habit of humming under his breath, or his restlessness, which might just have been an expression of his insistent physicality. He had the good taste to make no allusions to what was to come when my mother would live with him. As far as I was concerned he was a sort of Santa Claus, a provider, to whom giving was second nature.

  I felt a deep relief on my mother’s behalf and also on my own; I should now be able to begin my David Copperfield progress towards my own apotheosis. I never ceased to feel this with regard to Simon: he was a facilitator, an enabler, and the unlikely outcome of his attending a party, a tiresome social engagement to which he had not looked forward, and which he intended to leave early, was, I thought, beneficial in the way that only unexpected rewards are beneficial. He was, quite literally, our gift from the gods.

  Whether my mother thought this or not was another matter. I was old enough to understand that she was preoccupied with the business of having to find another flat for us both, and perhaps tired of pretending that she was entirely satisfied with her way of life. Perhaps the example of those visitors, the girls, with their talk of holidays, had made more of an impression on her than she was willing to concede. She did not envy them their entertainments, but she did envy their security, and even their unthinking acceptance of their husbands’ indulgence. Although sincerely shocked by their entirely natural delight in this state of affairs, she was made wistful by the presents that the chauffeur brought up from the car, wishing that she had it in her gift to endow others in the same manner. The fact that these presents always consisted of
things to eat merely reinforced the impression that some fundamental discrepancy existed between the sort of woman she was and all the others, who had made a better job of marriage and extracted from it satisfactions that were almost edible, certainly tangible. I now see that even the most saintly of women can ponder the difference, and although we both deplored these gifts—the cakes, the strawberries—we were forced to admit that we enjoyed them. Only we enjoyed them rather thoughtfully, as they made their incongruous appearance on our dinner-table. Some days our evening meal consisted almost entirely of these offerings, and I firmly believe that the sight of a chocolate éclair on my plate, in lieu of something more sensible, made her reflect that this would not do, that none of this was appropriate, and that if it were too late for her to start again the same need not necessarily be true for myself.

  To do the girls justice they were both delighted. ‘I must remember to thank them,’ laughed my mother. But she was almost serious. She thought herself inadequate in the light of such good fortune, and needed stronger personalities to maintain her resolve. The girls’ fretful attention was now directed towards my mother’s appearance: the car arrived punctually to bear them all off for an afternoon of shopping, and she would return home with bags from Harrods and Harvey Nichols, complaining of a splitting headache. I detested the clothes the girls made her buy, or had thrust on her as presents, and so did Simon. ‘We’ll find something in France,’ he said, his big hand pushing aside a silvery skirt which had no place in my mother’s life. ‘You can leave all this stuff here, or give it away.’

  ‘They meant well,’ said my mother.

  ‘Of course they did. Their intentions were of the best. But they wanted you to look like themselves.’

  ‘And to be like themselves,’ said my mother to me after he had left. ‘And I don’t think I can be.’

  ‘He loves you for your own sake,’ I said stoutly.

  ‘Yes, he does. He does seem to. Isn’t that extraordinary?’

  I suspected that the girls had tried to indoctrinate my mother in the ways of acquisition, paying no attention to the fact that appropriation was foreign to her nature. They may have been sincerely shocked by her attitude of modest dependency, for she almost at once, and instinctively, began to behave like a wife to Simon, thus once again earning the disapproval of the girls and furnishing them with an agreeable subject of conversation. They hated, with some reason, her life of lowered expectations, and always had, fearing the comparison. Her celibacy had been abhorrent to them, and now that this was at an end they found it difficult to come to terms with the fact of her brighter eyes, her more frequent smiles, even her rare but now occasional laughter. Feelings were disguised, but not entirely successfully. I began to dislike the girls, and was grateful that their patronage would be no longer needed. They had never had any time for me, nor I for them. I foresaw that we should shortly be separated by circumstances and was secretly relieved.

  Now that I am so much older I see that this new opportunity was not one to be missed, but embraced perhaps a little less than wholeheartedly. This was not first love, which my mother must have experienced for my father, however remote that must now have seemed. This was a prudent arrangement which had been entered upon almost by accident and which was to retain an air of absentmindedness, of not quite willed satisfaction. It was providential: all seemed to agree on that point. If it gave my mother any joy it was a joy she expected to reveal itself in the longer term, when she got used to her new life and was able to take a fuller part in it, when she would come to accept her new dignity (but never to exploit it), and when she learned to be as expansive as her new husband, a task for which she was singularly ill prepared.

  I shied away from the prospect of my mother’s physical life, for I was as contained as she was. Simon had perfected the agreeable business of kissing us both, with the same obvious affection, in the short interval my mother spent in our flat, with me, before moving into Onslow Square. Of course I missed her, but as Simon insisted that I see her every day I did not mind too badly. This was helped by the fact that I felt more at home in our old flat than in Onslow Square, and also because I had a great deal of studying to do, for I was soon to go to university. My prolonged childhood seemed to have ended rather abruptly, and I felt unsettled by this: at the same time I recognized the fact that it was over and that in future I should have to rely on my friends for company. I was momentarily in demand, as newly fortunate people are, and the fact of having my own flat added to my prestige. Simon made me an allowance, but told me not to spend it on clothes. ‘We’ll get you something in France,’ he said, as he had said to my mother. ‘You can leave your ordinary clothes here.’ Thus, once again, the transformation scene was being prepared. Truly those fairy stories had proved themselves to be prophetic.

  My mother was married at Chelsea Register Office in a ceremony that was rigorously secular. This seemed to me entirely appropriate, for, despite the almost miraculous manner in which it had come about, this union did not have the appearance of one blessed by God. It looked, unfortunately, as if advantage had been taken by both parties, of wealth being exchanged for comeliness, as in some dire Mannerist allegory. Simon wept copiously, which was something I had not anticipated; my mother, on the other hand, seemed composed, almost abstracted. Though there was undoubtedly love of a sort it was not the sort that made an appeal to one of my age, for although it satisfied the requirements of legend it made me aware of what all the stories left out, namely the facts of what happened next. The stories had ended on the highest possible note, whereas what they should have indicated was the life that followed. The nuptial arrangements made me slightly uneasy, as did the wedding itself. It was not that I objected to its sparseness: that was acceptable. Anything more elaborate would have been unwelcome. My contact with religion came mainly from services in the school chapel, and I instinctively rejected all the warnings, the penalties and restrictions, as well as the childlike petitions for forgiveness and the equally childlike promises of rewards, always postponed. If I sometimes felt unconsoled, in a strange uncomfortable way, it was because not all changes are welcome; even in the midst of our good fortune I had a feeling of loss. I knew that I would never lose my mother, but I also knew that she would not be at home to greet me in the early evenings, and that I should have to rely on my own company for a good part of the time.

  The physical emptiness of the flat I had left that morning did not frighten me, nor did I dread going back to it, but I began to see it in a new light, was struck anew by the loneliness my mother must have felt, a loneliness compounded by the silence of the street and the yawning creak of her bedroom door, when, tired of standing at the window, she would rest on her bed in the afternoons, for the sake of the relief she would feel when the interval for such matters was safely past, and she could make tea and prepare for my homecoming. Now she would have a different home and there would be a different kind of preparation. I was a little disturbed by this vision, for my mother’s previous life had been so singular, in all senses of the word, and so dedicated, that it had left its trace on my own conduct, and for a brief moment of sadness I wondered whether I should now be obliged to take my leave of a certain way of life which had hitherto seemed to me to be lacking in nothing.

  The austerity of the wedding ceremony was emphasized, even thrown into relief, by the hilarity of the girls, and even of the boys, whose acquaintance Simon was and who thus fortuitously provided the link between all the participants. The boys were hearty and extremely enthusiastic, having adopted a manner which probably served them on all social occasions, particularly those in which the protagonists were not too well known to them. The girls were, of course, splendidly turned out, but their hands brought out delicate handkerchiefs at the right moment, and all in all provided the scenic change that turned the whole thing into a rite of passage. The wedding breakfast took place in Onslow Square, where a hired butler and waiters moved suavely among the guests, obliging them all to be on their best be
haviour. Simon and my mother were to spend the night at the Ritz in Paris, a convention already out of fashion, and to go on to Venice, where they would stay for a fortnight, returning home by way of France. This would be my mother’s first introduction to his house, some miles inland from Nice: it would be a politeness to show her what would be her future home, to greet the gardienne, Mme Delgado, to give a few discreet instructions, and to keep the visit tactfully short. Two nights at the Negresco were to follow, and then they would be home.

  In some strange way I did not altogether believe in this homecoming. The champagne at the reception had left me with a headache and when I returned to Edith Grove I was newly aware of absence. We were now physically separated by more than a few streets, and soon she—they—would be out of reach. ‘My home will be yours too,’ Simon had said, but this was difficult to believe. I could not find the requisite image by which this future could be called to mind. I was landlocked, had been abroad only on school trips, had valued the fellowship of my friends rather more than my surroundings, and was indeed vaguely frightened by the prospect of a new life, however desirable. My mother had come to the door with me and said, ‘You’ve got all the telephone numbers? And the girls will look in on you to see that you are eating properly.’

  ‘I am seventeen,’ I had reassured her. By this time we were both in tears.

  ‘I know, darling, I know.’

  ‘Anne, the car is waiting,’ Simon had reminded her. ‘No more tears, now. This is a new life starting for all of us.’ A wallet of money found its way into my pocket.