Falling Slowly

by Anita Brookner

  ‘And do you know how they got to be extinct?’ At last she had his attention. ‘It was because the mice ate their eggs. I heard it on the wireless. The radio,’ she translated for him.

  He considered this, blushing deeply, bronze eyelashes lowered to suffused cheek.

  ‘There’s an exhibition at the Natural History Museum,’ she offered. ‘Dinosaurs of the Gobi desert. Would you like to see it?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Sally can take you tomorrow.’

  ‘Sally,’ said the child adoringly.

  ‘Sally?’

  ‘His nanny. They’re both staying here tonight.’

  Sally. Another name; an extra, no doubt.

  ‘Why did they eat the eggs?’

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose they did, really. My guess is that they gnawed a hole in the eggs and everything inside sort of seeped out, so that the baby dinosaurs wouldn’t have had anything to eat. I dare say you could find a book about it at the museum.’ For it seemed important to make provision for the child as well.

  Yet the encounter, for all its prettiness, somehow signified that she had lost ground. This feeling was compounded when a key turned in the lock and the door opened to reveal a young woman, Sally, presumably. She did not look like any nanny that Miriam had previously encountered. In her somewhat stereotyped imagination nanny was the generic name given to the likes of Nanny Huxtable, whom Beatrice and she had shared in their extreme infancy. She remembered a stout figure in blue cotton, a watch hanging from her bosom, a hardish hat donned when she wheeled Miriam in her pram, Beatrice walking importantly by her side. By contrast Sally was about twenty-three or twenty-four, had long blonde hair, wore a silky black trouser-suit, and gave off an unmistakable aura of privilege. Simon kissed her benevolently, the child clinging to her leg.

  ‘What time are we off tomorrow?’ she enquired.

  ‘Well, I’ll be gone about eight-thirty. You’ll leave some time after that, I take it.’

  ‘Before. We want to avoid the rush.’

  ‘I’ll drive you, if you like.’

  ‘Would you? That’d be marvellous.’

  ‘I’ll just make one or two calls, cancel one or two things.’

  To which conversation, thus debarred, Miriam judged herself to be a stranger. No longer was Simon the stranger; she had taken his place.

  ‘What about the dinosaurs?’ she put in.

  ‘Oh, he can see those another time.’

  ‘Goodnight, then, Fergus.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said indifferently. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Miriam.’

  He hesitated in front of her, anxious to retain her now that she was leaving. She willed her hand not to stroke his face, imagined it clasping his bare foot.

  ‘It was very nice to meet you,’ she said. ‘Goodnight, Simon. Goodnight …’ She could not bring herself to name Sally, emerged into the cooling night in a state of confusion. Not jealousy, no, not that, but something more sorrowful, the first intimation of unwelcome reflection. She did not doubt that there was some less formal connection than that of employer and employee between Simon and the nanny. She had always imagined him making love to countless women – it was part of his endowment. The wife was perhaps too donnish to notice, or, if she noticed, too elevated to care. And the girl, in her expensive trouser-suit, looked as if she might provide the sort of sex which could be conveniently expunged from the memory, the kind that two sporting partners might share, and hurt feelings something they imagined only with distaste. She would not see him the following day, and since the following day was a Friday he would probably stay in Oxford over the weekend, so that she would be – would have to be – resigned to staying at home, no doubt with Beatrice, whom she particularly did not want to see at close quarters while she was in this state of mind. Perhaps she could arrange something for the two of them to do, visit the appalling Suzanne, for example, for the sheer pleasure of laughing together afterwards, their old intimacy restored. Simon had behaved quite naturally with Sally, she realized, his old archaic longing for total dependency quite gone. In that case, which condition did he prefer? It was her own relative taciturnity, her wordlessness in the act of love, which permitted him to reveal himself, to want more. In the rapidly cooling night she wondered whether she would always be able to maintain that silence, understood that she had made a mistake in turning up unexpectedly, resolved never to do so again.

  There were more deserving cases than Simon, she reminded herself. There was Beatrice, deprived of her livelihood, and, perhaps more important, of Simon. He had telephoned her once, assuring her of his attention at all times, had given her his telephone number, but had not called again. No doubt Beatrice thought he might, that she might dial his number, just to ask how she stood with regard to possible bookings, but in fact she did nothing, perhaps pacified by the knowledge that she had glimpsed the unattainable, and thus justified all her imaginings. Perhaps the fantasy did duty for the real thing, that telephone number to give body to the thought that she might in fact summon him, but was not quite ready to do so … Beatrice’s name was not mentioned in Bryanston Square: to do so would have meant introducing an awkwardness, a reminder of an assassination. Besides, Beatrice was behaving with uncharacteristic discretion, or so it appeared. When the two of them met, which was infrequently now that Miriam was so occupied, Beatrice assumed a lofty smile, as if she knew everything, knew indeed more than Miriam did, and talked about herself, about the clothes she was having made, about mysterious plans for the future which she might or might not divulge. ‘And you?’ she would ask negligently, with the ineffable smile. ‘Your work going well? That’s the main thing.’ But frequently this enquiry came only as Miriam was about to leave. Therefore she was thankful for the enquiry, pretended a rush of work, telephoned each day in the early morning, to be treated to a leisurely monologue that had to do with Beatrice’s wellbeing, with the previous night’s dreams, with the fact that she was thinking inviting a few people for drinks. ‘They might amuse Simon,’ she said. ‘After all, we know the same people,’ marking a point. ‘Of course I miss Max dreadfully. It’s not the same without him. That devotion …’

  A hunger artist, thought Miriam, replacing the receiver. And if she were not very careful she would become one herself, revealing the strong connection between the two of them.

  ‘I liked Fergus,’ she said, on the following Wednesday, Tuesday having passed with only a telephone call. She was easy to disguise, to conceal: he merely mentioned a time, as he might do with any contact. She never telephoned him, fearing secretaries, all of them no doubt young and good-looking. This too must be concealed.

  He smiled. ‘Nice chap, isn’t he? A pity you can’t meet Daisy.’

  ‘Daisy? Oh, your daughter.’

  ‘Our three-year-old. We call her Daisy. Her name’s really Marguerite. And she’ll be the last, I’m afraid. We wanted more, but Mary says she’s too old to start again.’

  ‘Fergus looks like you.’

  He smiled again, easily, without yearning. Not a hunger artist, she concluded. ‘Have some more of this chicken,’ she said.

  ‘It’s very good. Did you cook it yourself?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  For he was used to the best, the most carefully prepared, having been used to it from birth, or so she assumed. It went with the loving care he must always have received, which accounted for his easy manner. She comforted herself with the knowledge of their intimacy, the only intimacy that mattered, his face buried in her neck, his quest for reassurance, for in that intimacy, although they might be momentarily separated, she knew that he had grown used to her looking after him, to her silent protection, even as he drifted into sleep.

  They had had a neighbour in Wilbraham Place, a Mrs Anstruther, who had entrusted Beatrice with her spare set of keys, claiming that she was so giddy, so girlish, that she frequently forgot her own. She had looked neither giddy nor girlish: she was a woman of indeterminate age, certainly to
o old for the amount of make-up she habitually wore. Beatrice had hoped to make a friend of this woman, although she did not like her, did not like her powerful proprietary walk, her references to her fatigue after so many late nights. ‘I’m glad I’m not paying for all those telephone calls,’ she had said with a rusty laugh. She had a follower, so called by Mrs Kinsella, a doughty senior citizen with a military moustache. It was he who had once called for the keys, Mrs Anstruther clinging to his arm. ‘I’m so lucky to have him,’ she had confided the following day, so much luckier than either of you, she had implied. It was the man who returned the keys. Beatrice said that he had eyed her speculatively, wondering whether to take a chance. This was true, but nothing came of it. Miriam had seen him some time later emerging from Peter Jones, a woman considerably younger than Mrs Anstruther by his side. She had thought it wise to mention this to Beatrice, who had looked at her in surprise. ‘Do you honestly think I found him in the least attractive?’ she had asked. ‘I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.’ From which Miriam had deduced that Mrs Anstruther had prevailed. Thereafter references to ‘my friend’ were pretty constant. The keys remained, but Beatrice had said, ‘I must give them back to her. We can’t be expected to be in all the time. I’ll tell her to leave them with the porter,’ knowing that the porter was only to be woken in an emergency. It was neatly done, or rather said, for the keys were still on a hook in the kitchen. But something must have been intuited, for Mrs Anstruther no longer troubled them, preferring no doubt to have a spare set cut for her friend. Miriam admired this strategy, but admired it ruefully. She deduced that Mrs Anstruther was a gangster, might solicit confidences, might enjoy sexy gossip. Therefore it was entirely proper to smile pleasantly and to offer no information. She did not want Beatrice’s disastrous innocence wrecked by another woman. A man would have been a different matter.

  It was true that she was busy, not only in preparing Simon’s lunch, which took up most of her evenings. The chicken to be roasted with lemons, the artichokes to be boiled, the vinaigrette to be decanted into a screwtop jar, the whole offering to be carefully stowed in the fridge … She was even busy in the London Library, covering sheets of paper, rapidly, just wanting to finish the chapter. She worked easily, perhaps only slightly aware that the words lacked depth, lacked her usual thought. She shrugged: people read novels superficially, invariably remembered the wrong parts: why should she not be superficial too? In sober moments she promised herself to revise, to tighten, at some later date. In any event she had received no complaints. Her Paris contacts were delighted with her speed. She began to think that only speed mattered. She herself was in a constant state of speediness, as if her time were directed only to one particular moment, one particular exchange. She understood that she was living some form of apotheosis, to which the rest of life was irrelevant.

  What she valued was that shared privacy, to which no one else had access and which she thought impermeable. She was glad that she had no wide circle of women friends, who would have wanted to be admitted to that privacy, who would have enjoyed talking it over, would have warned her against impermanence, would have questioned her about the wife, would have looked concerned. Women, she knew, would be there at the end, to accompany her out of this life, their mourning roles re-established. To their contemplation she would have to entrust her wasted appearance, her untended hair, as she lay in her hospital bed. They would be merciful then. But for her early middle age she desired the presence of a man, before it was almost too late. In some mysterious fashion all earlier loyalties had fallen away. Beatrice? Doing surprisingly well on her own, glad no doubt to have the flat to herself again. She thought fleetingly of Sally, who lived in Simon’s house. Astute questioning had elicited the fact that Sally was his wife’s niece, might conceivably be the enemy in the camp. But this too was irrelevant. The geographically distant set-up in Oxford was entirely in her favour. In fact everything was in her favour. She even knew that at some point Simon might tire of her, but her conviction that they shared something rare was enough to arm her against the future. Her reasons for living in the present were all in place.

  If she regretted not seeing him in the evenings it was because she would have enjoyed emerging into the growing dark, with its festive atmosphere. She would have liked to walk a little way, down Park Lane, perhaps, to watch the couples getting out of their cars, strolling towards the lighted foyers of hotels. She pitied these couples and their routine pleasures. She would prefer the dark street, only finally aware of tiredness, reluctant to stop the taxi that would take her home. Her life was powered by her own momentum, and at last she realized that that was how life was designed. Outside agencies might until now have directed her movements; she spared a compassionate thought for those who obeyed the call of duty. A great secret had been revealed to her, and she was free.

  6

  ‘You must forgive me, Jacob,’ smiled Beatrice, as she said goodbye to her guest.

  ‘You were a lovely girl,’ he said regretfully, as he turned away and went down the stairs.

  ‘Take the lift,’ she called, but he was already out of sight.

  She had detected the note of disappointment as he had remarked on her lost beauty, as if her flushed present-day appearance had presented him with a difficulty. She had known him at the Royal College of Music; they had enjoyed a pleasant friendship, and at one time more. He had never married, had gone to live in America, had come to see her because on his rare visits to England he always looked up old friends, few of whom remembered him, or if they did, still thought of him as a spindly excitable boy, though he was now grey-haired, with a spryness that hinted at old age rather than at youth.

  He thought of Beatrice as one who had kept faith with the old days; she remembered him, rather more acutely, as a companion who had given her status in the days when it was important to assert her uniqueness, or rather not to be relegated to an inquisitive gaggle of female friends. He had made her aware of the importance that men would have in a life like hers, a life that had always been threatened with loneliness, with only her sister for company. In those days she had raised worshipful eyes to any man who might adopt her, not knowing that she should be disdainful, indifferent, when she was genuinely disdainful or indifferent. She pursed her lips ruefully when she looked back at the radiant pantomimes of affection she had mustered for men who had meant nothing to her. As she closed the door she reflected that she had been guilty only in conveying more than she had felt. This had been misleading, she knew; she also knew that it had not been held against her, or not for long. If others detected a lack of straightforwardness she was only aware of a necessary politeness, which had led her into a more or less continuous masque of joyousness, of fervent welcomes and tender farewells, had led to no foreseeable conclusion, apart from the present one. She had become what she was always destined to be: superfluous.

  Nor was it true that she lived in the past. The past had no value for her, apart from the thankful realization that it was in fact past. As the older girl she had witnessed more of her parents’ disaffection than her sister had, remembered all too clearly her father’s frightening silences, her mother’s baleful glances: nothing overt, but everything clearly understood. She had escaped, or so she had thought, to the congenial company of her fellow students, but in reality she was in search of the ideal family, one which would welcome her, protect her feelings, love her. The appeal of men was that one of them might take her home, might introduce her to an affectionate totality which she had never known. At the same time, and perhaps inevitably, she began to envisage another, or rather additional, gratification. The ideal man who was to effect this introduction would have an ideal appearance. That was how she would know that he was ideal. His character, his worth, might hardly detain her, for she knew, or thought she knew, that most men behaved badly. Her life as a woman, when she had learned enough to be able to leave her tedious beginnings behind, would be spent enjoyably in making sure that he preferred her, came back to her
, surrendered to her.

  She had pictured the charm of such scenes, herself as redoubtable as a heroine in Colette, her lover or husband as rueful as a boy. She knew herself to be pleasing in an old-fashioned way, well suited to play a docile part in the loving family of her imagination, less well suited to detain an ardent or capricious lover. She knew that she lacked the ease, the assurance that a confident woman should always possess. She knew that she had always been frightened that she would be unable to seize her opportunity, if it ever came along, would be unable to make the first move, if indeed she knew what that first move should be. Therefore she smiled and was pleasant, welcomed whatever company sought her out, was surprisingly acquiescent when courted, and left behind a confused impression of accessibility and a ruinous inability to understand what was being enacted.

  She had thought that music would be her life, as it had been for a time, but had grown frightened – that fear again – of her loneliness as she sat upright at the piano, smiling in the direction of the singer whom she habitually accompanied. That this singer was a woman did not assist matters. She had grown to mistrust her stark visibility on the concert platform, which contrasted with her position as a subordinate. As a beginner she had had fantasies that a discerning member of the audience would isolate her in the only manner she was able to envisage. There would follow the miraculous recognition, the bemused introduction, the acquisition of loyal loving relations … In time she was able to dismiss this scenario, but not altogether to forget it. She knew, in the way that faint-hearted women knew, that she needed a man’s permission to be fully a woman. It was her own thoroughly undistinguished romanticism that gave this ideal man the features of a rake, an irresistible reprobate. She was not interested in honour, only in redemption.

  She had not been sorry to lay aside her musical career, although her occasionally high colour betrayed the animosity she had felt towards those who had so deprived her, principally Max, whose cynical flowery manner she detected behind the decision, and also the woman singer, whose plummy indecently Welsh voice had always got on her nerves. She excused Simon Haggard from this accusation, on account of his looks. She knew that she would never see him again, knew that Miriam and he were lovers, knew all this with the ancient clairvoyance of the defeated. ‘Have you met his wife?’ she had delicately enquired, but her heart was not in it. There was no reason why she should ruin for Miriam a love affair which would never be hers. And yet, unerringly, she bestowed on him all the gifts of which she and her sister had been deprived: unthinking good health, intelligence, general approbation. If she allowed herself to – and she was aware that this was dangerous – she could envisage him as a son, a brother, always there to protect … Her imagination shied away from his capacities as a lover. In any event she saw Miriam’s new secrecy as slavish, knew enough about the anxious cooking (Miriam had never been much of a cook) to be able to view the situation with distaste. She herself would have behaved differently, perhaps unaware that the age of adorable caprices was long past. In the books she favoured, but wistfully, women were unmasked, laid bare by a man who finally understood them. She knew that this was rubbish, but found the illusion so beguiling that she continued to embrace it as her own, did not realize, or perhaps failed fully to realize, that other women, even, perhaps, the women who wrote the novels, cherished the same illusion.