Falling Slowly

by Anita Brookner

  ‘Exactly what I pointed out. Then he said it wasn’t what he was used to, wished he’d kept the house in London instead of buying what sounded like a very noisy flat. He said he thought he might sell and move back.’

  Beatrice sounded pleased at this evidence of Max’s discomfiture, as well she might. ‘He seemed anxious to have news from home, even asked about you.’

  ‘He can’t stand me.’

  ‘I know. That’s what alerted me to the fact that he must be lonely.’

  With a complacent glance at her buckled tapestry, Beatrice stuck her needle into a marigold, smoothed back her hair, and said, ‘There’s a cake in the tin, if you want it. How was your walk?’

  ‘Well, an extraordinary thing happened. Picture the scene. I’m in the middle of Regent’s Park; it’s almost dark, and suddenly a figure looms out of the mist and makes straight for me.’

  Shocked, Beatrice looked up, her eyes reproving. ‘You avoided him, I hope.’

  ‘He introduced himself. Rivers. Tom Rivers. Said he was a journalist. Said he’d been on television.’

  ‘I’d have remembered. What did he say?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much.’ Miriam turned away, slightly annoyed. The life seemed to have gone out of the anecdote, which had had its value mainly as a reward for Beatrice’s lonely afternoon. Suddenly, in her mind’s eye, she saw lighted windows, heard healthy laughter, heard water running in baths and showers. She almost wished an accident on Simon, one of those comical broken legs one saw hobbling off the plane, until she reasoned that she, in fact, were this to happen, would suffer more than he did.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to make a habit of encountering strangers in remote places,’ said Beatrice. ‘Though at your age I can’t see why not.’

  ‘Quite. Anything on television this evening?’

  ‘Not a thing, as usual. Why? Were you thinking of going back to your flat?’

  She said ‘your flat’ as if it were not quite real, as if it were merely the sort of aberration over which it behoved her to maintain a tactful silence, implying that this unreal flat of Miriam’s was mainly the scene of indecent fumblings, though in fact Simon had never visited it. In Lower Sloane Street only anxious cooking took place, the results to be conveyed in plastic containers in a Selfridges bag which bumped against her briefcase. But what did this matter? What did any of the details matter? Her reward outweighed any temporary loss of dignity.

  ‘So Max is thinking of coming back?’ she said.

  ‘It looks like it.’

  When the clock struck the half-hour both instinctively looked at their watches. ‘Do you remember that story – I can’t remember who it’s by – about the man whose wife has been told to rest, and who keeps looking at his watch as if he can visualize what his mistress is doing in Paris?’

  ‘Colette. Chambre d’Hôtel.’

  ‘That’s right. And the woman who tells the story is dispatched to Paris with a note for her, but really to find out what she’s up to.’

  ‘And finds she’s gone off with a lover.’

  ‘How does it end?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I only know that Colette conies out of it best. The onlooker, I suppose, seeing most of the game.’

  ‘There must be some compensation for being an onlooker,’ said Beatrice. ‘The role is not always an enviable one.’

  They digested this in silence. Finally Miriam collected their cups, said, ‘I’ll do these, and then I’ll be off. You won’t mind?’

  ‘You look tired,’ said Beatrice sharply. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Quite all right. I’ll ring you in the morning.’

  The rain had stopped, she noticed. In the street the evening was almost pleasant, quiet, damp, windless. She looked back on her day with shame, the fantasies stronger than the reality. And she had dealt ungraciously with that man; she should have accepted his offer of a drink, but in truth he had annoyed her by breaking into her train of thought. But that train of thought had been unattractive, she now realized, based on an unwelcome comparison between the cold dark park and the scene of light and laughter she had so successfully – too successfully – conjured up. She knew that this form of primal scene would recur to torment her, cursed herself for an imagination which had never troubled her in the past, so that Beatrice had often complained of her morose realism, yet this imagination had delivered, detail perfect, an ideal image in which pain and an almost perverse delight were commingled. She knew that she would return to that scene in inconvenient moments, before sleep, in the course of other blank afternoons. The reality might be quite different, even boring. Surely she herself, with her sensible working life, her independence, and her habitual scepticism, should be proof against such imagined scenes. But that was the point: scepticism, and indeed independence, and if she were not very careful, her habits of work, had been overturned by Simon, who thus appeared in the guise of an anomaly. She shrank from the implications of this. Her real, her normal life, was something she would later resume, if necessary. It would see her into a respectable old age, at a time when the life of the body took on a different meaning. She imagined that otherwise unimaginable future, saw her future body as hollow, all sentient organs in abeyance, dematerialized. In those circumstances it might be genuinely interesting to apply herself to the latest Prix Goncourt, for what other diversions would she have?

  Across the street a lone figure was looking into the lighted windows of Peter Jones, but she could spare no more sympathy. No work tonight, she thought; the day had left her feeling unworthy, as if she had fallen below her usual standards. Tomorrow she would apply herself. Tomorrow she would be very careful. She would need to be, she reflected, for she had so nearly let disorder into her life, and it would be disorder rather than any outer agency that would destroy her.

  8

  Max Gruber raised his hat to the flight attendant, settled it more firmly on his head, and prepared to take his first grateful step back onto English soil, even if the soil were only that of Heathrow. He was, he thought, a landlocked person: that open sea had done him no good at all, had afflicted him with something like nausea, even though he was not on it. The confusion of his last days in Monaco, when he had surrendered the flat at a ridiculous price to a film producer who would only use it for three months of the year, filled him with distress and a sort of shame. The money did not matter; what had mattered was the homesickness, and a vast store of memories which had shocked and bewildered him by their persuasiveness. He had discovered the price of exile: recovered childhood. And now even the sight of the airport building disturbed him, although his panic had subsided somewhat during the flight. He would have to look for somewhere to live, but now it seemed to him that all homes were temporary in comparison with his original home. At the age of seventy-five he suddenly missed his mother and father.

  He had been born in Cologne, although rumour, which he did nothing to dispel, had him growing up in Vienna or Budapest. By the same token his father had not been a musician but a music teacher whose own instrument was the violin. His fine manners, his incessant flattery, had given Max a genuine old-style European aura, which he cultivated; few knew of the underlying cynicism which regarded his progress as nugatory, misleading. If he thought back now it was to his first home in England, a tall house over a shop in Kentish Town, which the family had acquired piecemeal as money came through from Germany, first the two upper storeys, and then the shop itself, from which his father, dispossessed of pupils, was forced to make a living. The shop sold watches and clocks, and occasional novelties such as perpetual calendars on silver mounts and silver ashtrays in the shape of hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades. These were surprisingly popular, and once they had installed a fellow refugee in the back room they could undertake repairs. They lived modestly, his parents, his sister and brother, but managed to recapture something of their original comfort. They were polite and cheerful, had few friends, but had each other.

  Beyond Kentish Town lay Cologne, their Sunday dri
ves to Bonn to contemplate the statue of Beethoven, their summer holidays in Baden Baden, sedate family walks along the Lichtenthalerallee, the cup of coffee in the Casino gardens, where the orchestra played … And his mother, with her silk dresses and lace collars, his father sporting a summer panama hat, his beautiful little sister as serious as a grown woman. Women no longer behaved like that, and their disappearance was one of the sources of his grief. His brother Michael and his sister Adela – Addie – had worked in the shop, while their mother rested upstairs in the cold rooms of this strange English house. When their father died Michael had taken over the shop, releasing Addie, who took singing lessons and hoped for a career on the stage. This had come to nothing, but Max himself had been fortunate in obtaining a job in a theatrical agency, where his excellent manners and ceaseless efficiency had earned him a good name. It helped that his immediate superior had died six months later, so that Max could offer an intimate knowledge – always respectful, always unassuming – of the business in hand. From then on it was simply a matter of waiting until everybody else died. He had never doubted that in due time the agency would be his, and in due time it was.

  He was known for his radiant bonhomie, which did something to mitigate the impression given by his extreme ugliness. His short stature and his permanently brown irregular features, his sparse hair and huge hands, marked him out as the sort of physical type which his one-time friends in Cologne were intent on eradicating. Hence the flight to England, where he was regarded with indifference and a sort of amusement. But he was observant, sharp-witted, as only those denied physical beauty learn to be. Their mother lived long enough to see him established, and died happy in the knowledge that her children were safe, Michael on hand downstairs in the shop, Addie still living at home, Max as often as not sleeping in a room above the office, but telephoning several times a day to see that she wanted nothing. By common consent they sold the building, goodwill and all, after their mother’s death; it made a surprising amount of money, which enabled them to disperse to flats of their own, Addie to Edgware Road, Michael to Bayswater, and Max, who was paying himself a decent salary, to Hampstead. They did this in the happy anticipation of love affairs, of which they never spoke, as if their mother might be listening. But every Sunday they met for lunch in Michael’s flat and talked about the old days. Addie cherished her two brothers, as their mother had done, examined their cupboards and larders to see if they were eating properly, ran over if either of them had a cold or indigestion, did them more good than any doctor, they assured her. And it was true. Such love, such beneficence, linked them with the past, with an unbroken heritage of lavish kindliness. In this they were conscious of their good fortune.

  But they never married. This was a source of bewilderment to them individually, but not of unhappiness. Such matters were not discussed; it was assumed that each had some private arrangement, as was the case. For Michael and Addie such arrangements were of long standing, a hotel manageress in one case, a retired businessman in the other. These affairs were placid, undemonstrative, heimlich, not the stuff of excited conversation. Max was different; Max was a womanizer, had a succession of unsuitable companions intrigued by his exuberance and his generosity. This suited him well enough but left his vestigial heartache untouched. He wanted a woman like his mother, his sister, but where to find her? At the same time he was sexually voracious, and shrewd enough to know that one did not have affairs with such women, only to discard them afterwards. He avoided sentimental women, although he responded to them. He knew that one slept with a sentimental woman at one’s peril. His sister treated him like a lovable boy, which was the sort of attention that he craved, but he discovered that few women I were so unselfish. He got used to parting with rather a lot of money after each affair, but did so thankfully, if ruefully. The disappointment that this created was concealed by a worldliness that was both assumed and genuine.

  And now Addie was in a nursing-home, and Michael, still in the same Bayswater flat, was a bent but fit old man who occupied his time by taking long walks and playing bridge in a nearby club. On the glass and brass table in his living-room stood two nests of those silver ashtrays in the shape of hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds that he had brought from the shop, not so much for sentimental reasons but because he liked them, thought them genuinely decorative. Max laughed, but indulgently, when he saw them; Addie scrutinized them for dust, gave them a quick polish. Michael, at seventy-eight, was the most durable of the three of them, went to visit Addie in the nursing-home every day, chatted amiably with the ex-businessman ex-lover who also looked in, then took the bus home again. He was regarded with some affection in the neighbourhood because he gave no trouble and seemed to want nothing; he had few friends apart from his bridge-playing cronies, but nodded in greeting to a fair number of people. Michael at least had grown old in the approved manner, thought Max, unlike himself. He seemed, in what he supposed was old age, to have acceded to a vast regret, the latest manifestation of which was this Monaco folly. As if he could have survived so far from home! To a lifetime of enjoyable travel he had said an almost relieved farewell. He would now live like Michael, if necessary, be an amiable crabbed bachelor, his form glory forgotten. He had enjoyed his profession until his always persuasive skills, his flattery – usually sincere – began to bore him. Then he knew it was time to go. The future was entrusted to his partner, and to the new younger man, Haggard, useful with tricky women clients, his charms there to soften the blow or to exaggerate the – rarely – good news.

  This brought him uncomfortably back to the matter of Beatrice Sharpe, who caused him some retrospective embarrassment. He had, he saw, made a grave error: he had shrugged her off as if she were one of the unimportant women with whom he had affairs, whereas, he now realized, she belonged to the alternative category. If she were to be compared with anyone it would be with those who were to be respected, like Addie, like his mother. He should have spoken gently to her, patted her hand, mentioned his age, so that she would have been instantly alight with sympathy. She was foolish, of course; that sort of protected woman invariably was. She assumed that she knew him better than he knew himself, which was not, could not be true. How could any woman appreciate his consciously deployed charm other than those women who gave in through curiosity, for a while? Poor Beatrice had deserved better, which was why he had, at the end, avoided her.

  Between the permissive and the impermissive a line was drawn, no less discernible for being invisible. All that was now changed; in matters of sex women had learned from men to take the initiative, to demand satisfaction. But like many people of his generation Max regretted the old order (although the other had served him well enough); something archaic in him desired women to be modest and protected, though experience had told him that those who were did not advance very far, unless they met and married men who were equally virginal. But what woman would want a man like that? Men, if they were to be men, had to lose their innocence, and to lose it sooner rather than later, and women had to make difficult choices, less difficult now, he supposed, when each sex knew what the other was up to. In Monaco, with nothing to do, he had pondered these questions, found himself looking out almost eargerly for the elderly couple who sat and drank coffee every morning in the café near to his flat. They looked contented, as he himself had never felt contented, not noticeably infirm, although the man offered the woman his arm as they turned to leave … What else could they be but man and wife? In that moment, every morning, as he saw them make their stately way, arm in arm, out of his range, he felt fear, as if his life, his popular, successful, crowded life, had left him bereft, had deprived him of a peaceful domestic existence, with an excellent professional reputation his only reward.

  He loved the world, loved even this grey damp crowded place, was prepared to give it his most expert backing, as he had so many times for so many ventures in the past. Except that that past was now almost out of date. He had enjoyed more friendships than his siblings, had travelled more
widely, had been possessed by more enthusiasms, genuine and otherwise, and yet after each adventure he preferred to go home alone. Home was a hallowed place, filled with ancestral memories: photographs of his parents were prominent on his bedside table. Women who visited his house were disappointed in the conventional furnishings, the thick patterned carpets, the crowded sofas, the footstools. They were not encouraged to stay. He would drive them home, and usually spend the night with them. In his mind home meant order, innocence. If his home remained inviolate he felt above board. That was perhaps why he was such an accomplished visitor, looking in after work with a compliment, a flower, delighted to be welcomed, even more delighted to be welcomed with ceremony.

  For this he had to award Beatrice Sharpe full marks. Her wide-eyed greeting, almost parodic, pleased him by its stateliness, although he perceived that she was sexually ignorant. She knew the rules; had she been older she would have been more than acceptable as one of the friends who visited on Friday evenings in Cologne, or took tea with his mother. The younger sister was a different matter, cold, shrewd, an unwelcome contrast to Beatrice’s softness and sympathy. He and she understood each other perfectly when they mimicked affection, devotion. Because he considered Beatrice unawakened he knew that he was safe, ran no risk. He was perceptive enough to know that Beatrice discounted him because of his unsatisfactory appearance, but did not hold it against her. After all, she could know nothing of his successes and excesses, may even have thought of him as disqualified by his ugliness. She was a romantic, he could see that, and therefore to be treated gently. Few men, he assured himself, would take the trouble, but at the end he had failed to take the necessary trouble himself, cynically concluding that a good-looking stranger would do the unwelcome business of easing her out of an overcrowded profession just as efficiently, while at the same time ensuring her a brief moment of gratification. The incident would have hardened her; he knew that too. Neglect is not easily forgiven. But it had not been neglect, rather a sudden mournful cessation of enthusiasm for the task in hand. He had felt his age, quite suddenly, never having been particularly conscious of it before, had decided to spare himself unnecessary difficulties, yet had run into more, in the shape of Monaco and the awful plate-glass flat that let in the sun at all times of day. It had seemed easier to go than to stay, and he knew that the only way to go was to go quickly. Few people, he thought, would be able to say with certainty what had become of him, fewer still would attempt to find out.