Undue Influence

by Anita Brookner

  ‘You’re still here, then?’ I asked the nurse.

  She made a face. ‘Looks like it,’ she said. There was no further explanation.

  ‘Who is it?’ came a voice from the bedroom. A woman’s voice. We were still standing in the hall.

  The nurse sighed, more at the sound of the voice than at the necessity of explaining our presence. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said.

  In the drawing-room the opaline lamps were lit, although it was broad daylight outside. But these rooms had always seemed intolerably dark, which may have accounted for Martin’s low spirits. It occurred to me that he must have loathed the flat, which had no doubt been a wedding present from Cynthia’s parents, whom I remembered locating in Orchard Street. The dog had had to go, she said. No wonder: there was no room for an animal in the midst of all these appointments. And maybe even Martin had rebelled at walking a small dog up and down Harley Street. He was hardly a man for a run in the park. No doubt Cynthia had been much affected. She was the sort of woman who would have whispered confidences into the dog’s ear. I thought of both Martin and the dog, imprisoned. And yet Martin had the freedom of the streets, at least in the daytime; she had allowed him that. No doubt I was wrong in imputing lack of feeling to Cynthia. It was not feeling she lacked but sympathy, or rather empathy. She simply could not see what it was like to be another person.

  ‘Who is it?’ said the voice again, rudely, I thought.

  A woman who bore a ghostly resemblance to Martin himself entered the room. We introduced ourselves, explained our visit.

  ‘Good of you,’ the woman said dismissively.

  ‘If you could just tell Martin we called …?’

  An eyebrow was raised. ‘You know my son?’

  This then was the famous or infamous mother, the perpetrator of the original injury, and no doubt of others before and since.

  ‘You must be Mrs Gibson,’ I said. ‘I see the resemblance.’

  ‘Hayter. Elizabeth Hayter.’

  ‘Mrs Hayter. I’m sorry we’ve called at an awkward moment.’

  She gave in, collapsed into a chair, passed a worn hand over her careful silver-blond hair. ‘It’s all awkward,’ she said. ‘I really shouldn’t be here myself. I certainly can’t stay any longer. My husband won’t stand for it.’

  ‘We just wondered if there was anything we could do,’ said Wiggy, although we had not thought anything of the kind.

  ‘If only you could,’ said Mrs Hayter, who seemed all at once to accept our presence. ‘Martin has completely collapsed. At least I think that is what he has done. Naturally he won’t speak to me. It seems he won’t speak to anyone. He’s in bed. I think he must be having some sort of breakdown. Get us some tea, would you?’ she said to the nurse.

  ‘I can’t really say I ever got on with my, with his wife,’ she went on. ‘She struck me as silly and selfish. And she made no effort.’ This was rather what I had thought but in view of the woman’s death the thought was now inappropriate. ‘Not that Martin knew how to deal with that sort of woman.’ She gave a brief laugh. ‘With any sort of woman. He belongs in a book-lined study.’ She made it sound like padded cell. ‘And I really can’t spend any more time here. My husband gets upset when I’m away.’

  ‘But if he’s not well …’ said Wiggy.

  ‘He’s not ill,’ she said, smoothing her hair again. ‘He’s sulking. To tell the truth there’s no love lost …’ She sighed. ‘I’ve told the girl to stay on for a few days,’ she said, as Sue entered the room with a tea tray ‘You’ll stay for tea?’ she asked.

  ‘I think we should be going. You’ll let Martin know we called?’

  ‘I’ll tell him, of course. I’m afraid I didn’t catch your names.’

  ‘Claire Pitt. And Caroline Wilson.’

  ‘If you could just write them down. My memory is not what it was. It has all been a strain, as you can imagine. And I’m afraid I must get home. Just see if he needs anything, would you?’ she said to the nurse. ‘I’ll get on to the agency in the morning, no, on Monday. I firmly intend to be at home by then. They can go on sending someone until he pulls himself together. Send the bill to me, of course, though my husband won’t be best pleased. I’ll leave you my address.’ Pen and paper were produced miraculously from her bag, though there had been none to receive our names. ‘Of course I’ll be in touch. I just don’t see that there’s anything more I can do.’

  I did not merely object to Mrs Hayter’s manners. Her appearance also struck me as monstrously, inexcusably wrong. She looked like Cardinal Richelieu, or at least that portrait of him in the National Gallery, but a Cardinal Richelieu who had removed his beard and exchanged his crimson robes for a smart grey trouser suit. Yet the trouser suit itself seemed wrong, clashing as it did with the carved minatory features and the authoritative mouth. Here was a woman who would not hesitate to pronounce an anathema, who had no doubt pronounced many in her time. I did not wonder that she had objected to her poor self-indulgent daughter-in-law. Martin had said she was a snob. The scene at the wedding presented itself inexorably to my imagination: county brought face to face with trade. Mrs Hayter would have been discreetly overdressed, Cynthia’s mother indiscreetly over the top. Both would have been wrong, and a lingering but insistent sense of this would have made them react to each other more sharply than was wise.

  Cynthia herself would not have noticed this; Martin certainly would have done. He would have felt, perhaps for the first time, that his wife needed his protection. Seeing her there, laughing and crying, in her extravagant white dress, he would have felt the dawning of a knightly quest. He would also have been conscious of a need to change sides, his own for that of Cynthia, with whom, he was beginning to realize, he did not have a great deal in common. Everyone except Cynthia would have felt ruffled. Complaints would have been voiced to the relevant husbands on the way home. I did not know any of this, of course, but Mrs Hayter’s ecclesiastical features reminded me of the collapsing softness of Cynthia’s face; both revealed social class, and the privations and indulgences that stem from antagonistic backgrounds. To Mrs Hayter’s disdain Cynthia would oppose advanced hurt feelings. Neither would ever forgive the other.

  Yet this adamantine woman was evidently in thrall to her husband—her second husband—who ‘would not stand’ for her being away from him, even to offer her son the meagre resources of her assistance. It was clear that this thrilled her. It occurred to me that what I particularly disliked about her was an unmistakable aura of sexiness. No wonder that there had been no room for Martin in that household. A boy, or a young man, whatever he had been, would have received disagreeable messages from this union, would have resolved to get away as soon as possible, would have made good his escape, and no doubt have been attracted in time to a woman who promised him the softness, the indulgence that his mother had denied him. It had not quite worked out like that. But then it seldom does.

  What he had gained was excessive material comfort, which seemed part and parcel of his wife’s attributes. He had replaced austerity with luxury, had exchanged his mother’s neglect for his wife’s affectionate mockery. He was the loser on both counts, as far as I could see. But he was a masochist; perhaps he felt at home in this new situation. Certainly, to judge from his behaviour, he was passionately committed to it. And he had demonstrated a devotion that was not in doubt. His inhibited utterances had been supported by a set of attitudes that were all ardour. Desire, that was it. He expressed desire, but it was desire for admittance to a world from which he felt excluded. Cynthia would have expected something more decisive in the way of manly behaviour. His yearning would have found no favour with her. Hence the bullying note apparent in some of her observations. It became more easy to sympathize with her once one became conscious of the background. Or the probable background, I reminded myself. In fact it became easier to sympathize with Cynthia than with her husband. What frustrations there must have been for that capricious woman, bewildered by her inability to impose herself i
n the only way that had any value for her! Yet all the time she would have been aware that his feelings for her were profound, as profound as any woman could wish, but inappropriate. What he felt for her was in fact pity. And fear.

  ‘Who is it, Mother?’ came a voice from the bedroom.

  ‘It’s all right, darling.’ She might just as well have said ‘Nobody’, for that was evidently what she thought. I felt Wiggy stiffen beside me, and Wiggy is much nicer than I am. I was rather too fascinated by the contrast, the conflict even, between Mrs Hayter’s impatience to be gone and her glacial manner. Even then I thought it about time that we were taken for granted as bona fide visitors. There had been no sign of welcome. The tea remained untouched on the tray. Maybe this was a hint that we should make ourselves scarce. It was clear that we were not to be offered any.

  Martin materialized in the doorway, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost. He was wearing a dressing-gown over pyjamas. I knew he was the sort of man who would wear pyjamas. He looked thinner, older, but his face lightened briefly when he saw us.

  ‘Claire! And Wiggy!’

  ‘Wiggy?’ queried Mrs Hayter.

  ‘Caroline is called Wiggy,’ I said firmly.

  ‘We’re so sorry, Martin.’

  ‘How good of you to come,’ he said.

  ‘Now that you’re up,’ said his mother, ‘you might as well get dressed. There’s tea if you want it.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’ll go back to bed, if you don’t mind.’

  Mrs Hayter remained seated. Be a man, was her unspoken command. It went unheeded.

  ‘So good of you,’ he repeated, clearly keen to remove himself from his mother’s presence. ‘I’ll let you know …’ But what it was he would let us know remained obscure. He shook both our hands and went out of the room. His stance was leisurely, self-contained. There was a definite hint of assurance there, if one cared to see it.

  We took our leave of Cardinal Richelieu, who made no effort to detain us, or even to find out why we had come, although I suppose that was obvious. No degree of affinity had been established between the Gibsons and ourselves, as I should have thought natural on such an occasion. Mrs Hayter evidently possessed the same sort of imperviousness to others as her former daughter-in-law had done. Sue accompanied us to the door. We stood in the dark hall, wondering who would speak first. We felt uncomfortably reduced to strangers, even to children.

  ‘That woman!’ said Sue, in a burst of indignation that set up a ghostly tinkle amid the milk-glass vases. ‘You know she didn’t even go out shopping? Sent me off to Selfridges with a list. As if I’m here for that!’

  ‘Is he really ill?’ I asked her.

  ‘When I think of my mum! My mum would have been round here cooking things for the freezer. My mum would have been baking!’

  She had an irritating voice, more noticeable when it was not interrupted by her habitual laugh. I was glad she was there, although I did not find it easy to take to her. I suppose it is difficult for women of my generation to trust other women, now that a certain loucheness of behaviour has become de rigueur. Loucheness involves betrayal, but that no longer seems to matter; we are all merry adventurers now. I was one myself. This rarely caused me discomfort, though I knew it worried Wiggy. She is alarmed for me; her own life is a model of loyalty and consistency compared to mine. For that reason we are rarely confessional about our intimate lives, though there is no one I trust more. She did not quite know how unsatisfactory I found my untenanted life, with only an aberrant imagination for company. Nor did she know how I hankered after simplicity, transparency. She found it safer to treat me as the joker I had become, but she is concerned for me, as if she knew that I was in danger, that I deliberately, from time to time, courted danger. Part of her could not see the reason for this. Indeed there was no reason, apart from a certain emptiness. I did not come up to her standards, that was all. Yet I regarded her dreary love affair as equally erroneous. Women could probably get on very well if it weren’t for men. And men are jealous of women’s friendships, which suffer as a result. That is why it is better to draw a veil sometimes. But it is a sorry business, and one’s friendships never quite recover.

  I put out a hand to steady the vases. ‘How long will you stay?’ I asked.

  ‘Not long. Not at all, if she’s coming back.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any danger of that. She seemed very keen to leave. Has he really had a breakdown?’

  She shrugged. ‘He’s okay. Needs some time to himself, if you want my opinion. Cynthia was all right but she took up a lot of time and attention. Pity he hasn’t got any friends.’

  ‘I wondered about that. Has nobody been round?’

  ‘You two are the first people I’ve seen,’ she said, making it seem like a personal privation, which I suppose it was.

  ‘We left our phone numbers. If there’s anything …’

  All at once she recovered her professional manner. ‘We’ll be fine,’ she said, with a smile that revealed all of her teeth. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me …’

  We were outside once again, yet it did not seem like a true escape. ‘Better leave it alone now,’ said Wiggy. ‘I doubt we’ll hear any more.’

  ‘Right,’ I replied. But I remembered our telephone numbers, hoped that they had been transferred to a diary, that we would be remembered. That, for the moment, was what I hoped. It did not seem too nefarious.

  Nine

  Two more unfortunate incidents took place in what seemed to me rapid succession, although in fact they were fairly widely separated. The first had to do with St John Collier, whose notebooks, alas, were still proving a disappointment. I had been worried by his increasing wordlessness, or decreasing wordiness; his pleasant philosophy seemed to have deserted him, and it was as much as he could do to consign to the page unrevealing comments such as ‘Syringa. White petals scattered by rain,’ or ‘Elderflower. Stale nostalgic smell.’ These were left undeveloped. Even more disconcerting was the fact that his walks seemed to take him no farther than Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens, which I thought very banal. There was no reason given for this abandonment of the greater project. For a few weeks this mechanical joyless perambulation replaced earlier more hopeful excursions, hinting perhaps at boredom, disillusionment, hopelessness. I did not see how a walk in the park could satisfy one of his speculative disposition. I felt, with an odd tremor of sympathy, that perhaps he had had a sense of endings, or seen the futility of keeping up a pretence of which he had recently become aware.

  It must have seemed as if he were no longer taken seriously, or indeed could take himself seriously. Times had changed; his grateful readership of modest persons trying to lead quiet decent lives had given way to the pressures of the post-war era. Adults were replaced by teenagers, for whom ‘Trust and hope’ was a message addressed to the disappointed, the defeated. It struck me that this message had always made me slightly impatient, although it chimed in with whatever immemorial aspirations I might have had. These, however, I had discarded, as I thought appropriate. I lived in a millennial age; I had no need of faith. Catastrophes would be revealed without mediation, as they always had been. Trust would seem awkward in these circumstances, hope proved to have been misplaced. I could deal with this state of affairs, but what about those humble people whose one desire was to be soothed into acceptance? Besides, his former readers would be getting old, would have discovered that trust and hope were inadequate consolation for the inevitable ailments, the even greater afflictions that arrive in the fullness of time. St John Collier himself, with his tweed suit and his walking-stick, an old gentleman in the park on a Sunday afternoon, would have felt as out of date as he looked. I believe the old are lonely. If so he must have been lonelier than most, with only his girls and their invariable tea waiting for him at home.

  And Kensington, where he seems, from the dateline, to have lingered! Who could find spiritual sustenance in Kensington? I had tried it myself, on empty Sunday afternoons, and had found the exp
erience lowering. Only habit would have made him take a notebook out with him, for he had nothing to impart. He must have used these afternoons for rumination, and found his reflections, his memories not to his taste. His marriage was a distant memory, his daughters a responsibility. Some sort of belief had kept him buoyant, belief in the modest lives of others, and also their belief in him. These had done duty for a life which he had been denied. Therefore to be forgotten at an age when he himself had need of sustenance was doubly hard. And some iron must have entered his soul at the sight of those blank pages, with only the date and the place noted. And the weather: he was always scrupulous about that. That weather was not always benign: there were testy references to cloud, humidity, or alternately chill, rain, thunder. There was little I could do with any of this. It pained me that my work was ending. What would I do if I were to be banished from my basement? And would Muriel’s filial piety be proof against the obvious sterility of her father’s last years?

  In fact the book which she envisaged—privately printed, and sold for a token sum in the shop—would be bought, if at all, as a curiosity, something to give to an unmarried aunt, suitable for a guest room, or worse. It was not necessarily to my credit that I took it seriously: it contained valid reflections that were not without an authentic appeal, a sweetness of intent. I would tell Muriel that the notebooks were incomplete (they were worse than that) and that the finished volume, in effect little more than a brochure, should contain only a judicious mixture of nature notes and such articles which had found so appropriate an outlet in the days when magazines were thought a suitable vehicle for uplifting thoughts.

  It was not all bad news, I reflected: some of this stuff might strike a chord. On the other hand it was very bad news for myself. Without the shop to walk to every morning I should be left without a purpose. The prospect of looking for another job did not thrill me. Besides, I had little experience of normal work. In comparison with what films and television had shown me of office life Ex Libris belonged to another age, one in which I had spent contented days, and which had buttressed me against loneliness and a sense of futility. Life processes seemed to be speeding up: what St John Collier must have felt at the end I was feeling at an age he would have envied. It was only panic, I told myself. I could still attempt something in the way of an introduction. And that would take a month at most if I worked conscientiously, i.e. very slowly. Then I should be on my own.