Undue Influence

by Anita Brookner

  I was a little piqued that Martin Gibson had not presented himself to tell me how rapturously our visit had been received. In fact, I now realized, it had been a failure. I had been mistaken: the onus was not on the Gibsons to express appreciation. It was on myself. His continued silence implied that some sort of offence had been taken. Cynthia was the sort of woman to take offence, displaying hurt feelings, but not deigning to explain them. So one-sided were her preoccupations that explanations were deemed to be unnecessary. She would consider herself to be tragically let down, by everyone, including her husband. Indeed I wondered whether he were not the source of her discontent. His tacit assumption of responsibility for her condition would be held against him, the diversions he planned for her perceived as the makeshift arrangements they truly were.

  But it went deeper than that. Did she expect him to make love to her? She was still a good-looking woman; in her own eyes she would be ravishing. She would have been demanding as a wife, scornful of his weakness, though it served her well enough now. Any other man in the same position would have found a discreet alternative; she may even have despised him for not doing so. There would have been taunts … Yet that mixture of exceptional good looks and exceptional hesitation, which I myself had found so challenging, must have concentrated her attention in the first place. I did not know her background, but I had no difficulty in inventing it: money, comfort, ostentation, philistinism. She would have had an uncertain temper, which others would rush to anticipate and to turn aside. The parents would have been in some superior branch of commerce, manufacturers of something useful, aristocrats of the middle class. She would have been Daddy’s girl, although it would have been Mummy who would have seen to her appearance. I was sure that she would refer to her parents as Mummy and Daddy even now. Presumably they featured in those wedding photographs she was so anxious for us to see. ‘Such a pretty day,’ she had said, as though it were an episode in fairyland. The honeymoon would have revealed a different woman. Presumably Martin had never got over the shock.

  I was anxious to know if I were right, but clearly our acquaintance was too slight for me to make any overtures. There was no earthly reason why such an acquaintance should be prolonged. But just as irrational people do involve one in their concerns I found myself thinking about them quite a lot. They were somehow a better subject of study than the virtuous Colliers. My feelings modulated between distaste and excitement, which should have been a warning to me. When I realized that I had some stake in their relationship I repudiated the notion. It had nothing to do with me nor I with it. I would hold on to my status as an acceptable person. Not a good one, but at least not underhand, not so far.

  Therefore, when he did appear, on the Thursday, I was rather annoyed. Ten large black notebooks sat next to my typewriter; I was looking forward to my day’s work.

  ‘I’m sorry to have left you without news,’ he said, by way of a greeting. ‘I’m afraid Cynthia has had a slight setback.’

  ‘Was our visit too much for her?’

  I inquired. He looked startled. ‘Oh, no, not that. It was just that Sue announced that she wanted to take a fortnight’s holiday.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Yes, well, I managed to persuade her not to.’

  ‘You would have had to be at home all day,’ I observed. ‘Of course the agency could have sent someone else.’

  ‘But Cynthia might not have taken to her.’

  ‘But you managed to persuade Sue …’

  ‘Yes. She saw the state Cynthia was in.’

  ‘She’s all right now?’

  ‘Yes, but it left her awfully tired, you know.’

  It had clearly left him exhausted. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, yes, if it’s not too much trouble. It’s very kind of you.’

  He blushed slightly, as if he were not used to accepting even a token kindness from a stranger. What demons did he exorcize by constant service to others? What self-denial, what self-abnegation did he consider to be required of him? I handed him a mug. He looked round vaguely. ‘There is no saucer,’ I said. I suspected that he had had no breakfast. Beware of men who come to you hungry for nothing more than sustenance. After a moment I opened the drawer of my desk and extracted one of Hester’s rock cakes which I offered to him on a sheet of A4 typing paper. He ate it meekly.

  ‘Is there no one else who could give you a break?’ I asked. ‘Family?’

  ‘Not really. Cynthia was an only child. Her parents are both dead.’

  ‘And on your side?’

  ‘Only my mother. She lives rather far away. In Norfolk.’

  ‘Whereabouts in Norfolk?’

  ‘Blakeney.’

  ‘I know it.’ Our last family holiday had been in Blakeney, shortly before my father had got ill. It was perhaps the only memory of unity, of normal family life, that had stayed with me. I remembered the sea, barely sea at all, just an illusory expanse at the far rim of the marshes, the birds, and my mother’s unhappiness.

  ‘Perhaps your mother …’

  He grimaced. ‘My mother and Cynthia don’t get on. They are both strong-willed women. In fact my mother doesn’t get on with me, particularly.’

  ‘Oh, that’s very sad.’

  ‘She married again, you see. I didn’t care for my stepfather. He took me out in his boat once, to make friends, you know, and I was frightfully sick. My mother was furious. She thought I had let her down.’

  ‘And it didn’t get any better?’

  ‘No, it didn’t. I moved to London after Cambridge. We didn’t keep in touch. They came to our wedding, of course, but they didn’t take to Cynthia’s parents. My mother, I’m afraid, is a snob.’

  ‘You must have been relieved to be married,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it was the happiest day of Cynthia’s life. She implied as much. And of yours?’

  ‘No,’ he said. I looked at him, surprised.

  ‘I would have been a good bachelor,’ he said apologetically. ‘I loved my work, got on well with my students. I knew Cynthia was used to a more opulent way of life than I was. She wanted all these things, tables, curtains, and so on. My bachelor flat had suited me well enough. And then there was the question of the students whom she insisted on advising. I knew that was wrong.’

  ‘Not necessarily, surely?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he sighed.

  ‘But you love her?’

  ‘She is my life,’ he said. That was manifestly true.

  ‘You gave up your job?’

  ‘It probably took up too much of my time. And when Cynthia got ill…’

  This illness appeared to me to be complicated. Oh, I did not doubt that there was an underlying weakness. But that the will was involved somewhere along the line I did not doubt either. Cynthia was used to being unique, the family princess, destined to live happily ever after. Since that was her fate she had embraced it in the only way available to her. She disliked women, that much was clear. Wiggy and I had simply proved to her that we were no competition. That was why she had insisted on seeing us.

  ‘So if you could bear to come again?’ he said. ‘It breaks up the day for her. And she does talk about your visits, you know. It would be a great kindness …’

  I made a decision. ‘Wiggy said she’d like to sketch her,’ I said. ‘She’s a professional artist, you know.’

  His face lit up. ‘She’d love that. She still cares for her appearance. Well, you saw that.’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ I said, quite sincerely. That air of a full-blown rose just going to seed was one I could appreciate. It went with ample forms, still visible beneath the elaborate negligées, anxious eyes, and a mouth that implied that no quarter would be given. She looked like what she was: a hardened coquette.

  ‘Not this Saturday, perhaps,’ he was saying. After the brief and no doubt regretted burst of candour he had reverted to his worried state. ‘Perhaps in a week’s time?’

  ‘Saturday is a good day for us,’ I reminded him. �
��It’s when we go out to dinner.’

  ‘That would be so kind …’

  ‘Why don’t you give me a ring? We left our telephone numbers.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that would be best. I’ll get her over this business of Sue first. She took it rather badly.’

  ‘I’ll wait to hear from you,’ I said. ‘Or if you’d prefer to drop in to the shop …’

  ‘No, I mustn’t take up any more of your time.’ He gave me the first direct look of our acquaintance. I looked back, pleasantly. This was evidently too much for him. Within seconds, it seemed, he was gone.

  Seven

  I thought a lot about Martin Gibson in the days that followed. The potent irritation that he inspired in me, and no doubt in others, faded into a sort of reluctant sympathy. He now appeared as a man who had always been subject to coercion, and who had not known how to deal with it. I thought about that scene on his stepfather’s boat and of its aftermath, the mother’s anger. I could even see her point of view. The awkwardness of introducing her son to her future husband had been compounded by her son’s lamentable performance, which she would have felt bound to laugh off, to dismiss, while all the time the boy, shivering and miserable, had a higher claim on her sympathy. She would have been in the full flush of excitement at the prospect of a new marriage, while the man would have been exasperated at the puniness of his future stepson. I saw this man as the sort of man who habitually arouses feelings of fear in those less opaque than himself. I saw him as red-faced and athletic, well set up, hearty, the sort of man to appeal to a widow still of an age to marry again. I saw the boy’s infinite distress at the prospect of having to share his mother with this man. He had said that they did not get on, which implied that some sort of showdown had taken place after this incident. I reconstructed his life carefully: Cambridge, he had said, then a bachelor flat in London, where he had been perfectly content. He would have been mildly popular with colleagues, immensely popular with students, who would have been beguiled by his handsome looks into seeking opportunities for further interviews, with in fact further intimacy in mind.

  I doubt that this had ever taken place. He would have been careful, scrupulous, and beyond that genuinely wary. He would have seen his work as a safe haven, but one which could be ambushed. In order to gain total possession of such a man it would be necessary to remove him from his work, from those loyalties to dead writers which few could share. A woman like Cynthia, all instinct, would have known this. The daily presence of young people, all so much younger than herself, would have been a preoccupation. She had retaliated by annexing them. Those afternoons when she had probed for their confidences seemed to me another form of coercion. She would have claimed that she was helping him, when in fact she was undermining his authority. Besides, it is extremely underhand to extract a confidence. The intimacy that the students sought from Martin was in fact imposed by his wife. This would have seemed dubious to anyone who had the interests of the young people at heart. He would have known this, as would certain of his colleagues. A mild difficulty with the work prescribed would have been turned into a drama of divided loyalty. Confession is addictive: in addition, some of these young people would have been far from home. A sympathetic ear was not to be foregone, particularly a sympathetic ear into which it was possible to own up to a mild crush on the husband of the woman who professed complete understanding of the predicament.

  Cynthia’s suspicions would have been justified by such artless outpourings. Her antennae were so finely adjusted that she could see how the land lay. She could see temptation where none existed. She would have known by then that her husband was afraid of women, and would therefore have been extremely circumspect. She would have told him repeatedly that he was working too hard, would have interrupted his reading with all manner of winsome requests, would have made much of tiredness, retiring to bed, but hailing him from the bedroom. By a process of erosion she would have divested him of many pleasant evening duties … Had her famous illness dated from here? And since her splendid body harboured a genuine weakness had it not seemed more urgent to take care of Cynthia rather than of those healthy young people, and all those dead authors?

  But why had he married her in the first place? I could see that he must have been woefully inexperienced, easily impressed, and fatally subject to wills other than his own. How had they met? Here my imagination supplied the details. Cynthia’s father, in his capacity of benefactor of the college, would have attended an official dinner, one of those dinners which are a form of flattery, in the pious hope of receiving further donations. Financial difficulties would have been invoked in the President’s speech. Everything would have been made perfectly clear. In America, I believe, such donations are sometimes rewarded with an honorary doctorate. But Cynthia’s father—what was his name?—would not have been after a doctorate but after a husband for his daughter, whose volatile temperament was beginning to generate tiresome fusses at home. The young lecturer would have seemed to him to fit the bill. It would have been easy enough to strike up an acquaintance, to seek his advice on what was needed for the Romance Language department, child’s play to invite him home (one of those flats in Orchard Street, I decided). From that point his wife could take over. And his daughter, of course.

  That was my construction, and it pleased me. But what if he had genuinely fallen in love? Cynthia was a capricious woman, her caprices visited on women as well as men. What if she had genuinely fallen in love? I had observed the remnants of a certain passion there, the imperiousness on her side, his sombre commitment to her well-being. Was there an incompatibility which still tormented them? What I thought I had picked up from her signals was a heartfelt disappointment that had turned to rancour, and on his side an awareness of his own incapacity. He would have felt impotent, as he had under his mother’s scolding, unable to rectify a fault which stretched back into childhood. He would have persuaded himself that he must strive mightily in order to be readmitted into favour.

  Normally I sympathize with women. I know from my admirable mother how lowering it is to tolerate—and to have to tolerate—an inadequate man. Yet Cynthia did not appear to me to be entirely exonerated from blame herself. I disliked what I thought of as her frivolity, which seems a strange charge when she was confined to bed with an illness about which I was sceptical. I felt that she should have made more of an effort, rather than display herself to her own advantage in a pathetic situation. I felt indignant that her husband had lost his freedom. I suspected that he still worked, surreptitiously, that he spent his days in some library, wondering if he could confide to paper those ideas he had once had, when he had thought that his life would be a life of study. A book, perhaps, which would vindicate his ruined present. He would know that it had been ruined. Yet that knowledge would goad him into further zealousness, so that the path that had been chosen for him, or rather that he had chosen to follow, for better or worse, now had the force of a duty, or rather a commandment. And whatever disappointment he now felt would be as nothing to the disappointment of his wife, that disappointment he was now bound to palliate by his devotion, even by his love. It would be an affair of honour. And I could see that he was an honourable man.

  All the same I felt a distaste for the situation which was entirely on my own account. Why had I been tricked into a show of niceness which was not in my nature? What business did I have with these people who, I reminded myself, knew nothing about my circumstances, and worse, showed no desire to know? I had been privy to Cynthia’s allusions and to Martin’s guarded confession, yet at no point had any information been sought in return. This bewildered me; it seemed a kind of wilful obtuseness, the kind that should be disclaimed. Either that or a genuine indifference. But I did not think it was indifference. What it was, I decided, was a terrible kind of urgency, as if the Gibsons’ case was so strong that it must be put at all times. This was their secret, I decided: they had both decreed, with some justification, that they were tragic figures, whose pleas must be heard at a
higher court. They were not simply solipsists, they were soliloquists, drawn together in a fateful bond which demanded witnesses. There was no room, there was no place, for outsiders, for third parties. My role was to register their predicament, in which they were so far gone that nobody but themselves could understand it. They had attained to a higher collusion than that which I imagined existed between married couples. This was truly a remarkable union.

  I said some of this to Wiggy, who merely remarked, ‘You find him attractive, don’t you?’ This irritated me. Of course I found him attractive; his attractiveness was not in doubt. But in an awful way neither was Cynthia’s. I could not see her, as Wiggy saw her, as a simple unfortunate, whom we were bound to visit in the spirit of nineteenth-century ladies visiting stricken cottagers. To begin with the Gibsons were too rich, or rather Cynthia was. It was for them, for people in their position, to extend patronage. It was their determined refusal to perform this task that I found both rebarbative and exciting. I was determined to extract some sign of reciprocity before I was done with them. It would be hard, I knew; their monumental selfishness, which I saw as a tragic selfishness, like King Lear’s, would be difficult to crack. Lear, of course, was fully persuaded of his rectitude; he absolved himself throughout. I loathed the play, had done so ever since I had seen it on a cultural outing from school. But I had to admit that it made for good stagecraft.