Her only error, and she may have perceived this at the time, was to believe, or to make herself believe, that this partnership would make my mother happy. She would have been too happy herself to make a balanced assessment. She may even have thought that my mother was in any case too unawakened to be able to seek her own happiness for herself. Yet even in those prelapsarian days when nothing was supposed to occur after marriage, at least to the girls they were then, she must have felt some misgivings. The man in question was clumsy, inhibited, well-behaved; no doubt she told herself that he would be kind, as if this fact would cancel out all the others, in particular his physical dullness, not caring in that moment of joy that she herself would never settle for anything less than perfection, which, to her mind, she had found in the subject of her choice.
The desire and pursuit of the whole was what my mother cherished, had always cherished, and had never known. This ideal, which went with her vaguely Arthurian beliefs in chivalry, in knightly quests, had remained unrealized. She had told me that a man’s major quality was courtesy. No doubt at that distant wedding she had been relieved to have been rescued from her faintly embarrassing position. I imagined them both, my father and my mother, standing a little straighter, discarding their champagne, and joining in the festivities, the congratulations, in slightly better heart. And she would have appreciated the fact that he had taken her arm to guide her away from the garden as the guests were leaving, for if a man did not know these gestures what virtue did he possess? She had probably thought that he would serve as a companion, and she was newly deprived of company. And he, a widower, would have embraced the possibility of a second chance, particularly with one so untouched, so obviously inexperienced. He had escorted her home, had asked if he might be in touch, and after various decorous diversions they had become engaged. The long engagement was no doubt in consideration of his sad bereavement. But this was the part that had always remained unclear. Why was the engagement so protracted? I see now that although events were moving inexorably to their foregone conclusion that my mother knew, no doubt in the course of his embraces, that this was not what she wanted. Thereafter she issued this vague—to me—ideal as if it should contain not her own disillusionment but rather the illusion to which she still clung, a life’s journey with the perfect partner, a union so complete that it left no room for doubt or regret or dashed hopes. This last she was not to know.
Maybe I am wrong in this (but misgivings of this kind would open the way to all sorts of reflections). Maybe this was simply a maxim that fitted in with her art school studies, with her taste for plain furniture, her slightly bewildered sympathy with my unexpected antipathy to the man to whom she was still indebted. In any event she had, in her oblique way, instructed me, or rather given me permission to seek something different, and in so doing had confused me forever, as it seemed. My own desires, once I became aware of them, were easily satisfied. I did not think beyond them. But now I did. Now I began to see some virtue in the life my mother had lived, whereas before I had avoided dwelling on it. There is something horrifying in speculations about one’s parents’ intimate life, which should always remain discreet. Yet now I saw something correct in my parents’ union which seemed out of reach for one of my disposition. They had behaved faithfully, even through the long years which I had experienced as frustrating, even shocking. They remained courteous: even my father’s complaints were easily appeased. What was unmistakable was his disappointment in me, not simply because I was more rebellious than he thought fitting but because he saw that I would never be as fine a creature as my mother.
In my defence I could assert that I had no wish to be. I was aware that I had grown up with something less than perfect in my background. However well they behaved, and they did behave well, I knew that they were both disillusioned. My mother in particular had attained adult status without ever knowing romantic ardour, would have schooled herself to believe that companionship was a worthy substitute for love. Her hopes for me would no doubt have remained unformulated. Of my own rash behaviour I am still convinced that she knew nothing. Thinking me to be intellectually curious, and entitled to legitimate diversion, she gently urged me to spread my wings, knowing instinctively that I would always return to her. As I had done. And that maybe was the flaw that united us. There is no rule which says that a daughter should be faithful to her own mother, yet we loved each other and our closeness was no hardship. No doubt my mother believed that her own ideals would instruct me to pursue that whole which remained mysterious. But I was impatient of ideals, and besides I did not know how to identify that particular one. Who does?
Now I think it is simply a metaphor for love. Desire and pursuit I could understand; there was no problem there. But anything abstract defeated me, or had until now Now I saw it as the miracle that removes one from lifelong loneliness, that puts an end to expectation. If it formed an image in my mind it was a vaguely pre-Raphaelite one, like the Burne-Jones I had seen with Wiggy at the Tate. I had not understood the picture, which was dreamy but explicit: a procession of girls descending a staircase. They had low foreheads, wore white dresses and garlands in their hair; one carried a flute. What they were doing, whether they were virgins or some kind of enclosed order, was not made clear, but I had known, for all of a split second, that I wanted to be of that company, surrounded by others of my kind, all of us with the same level of unknowingness but confident that our strange beauty would bring us within reach of our goal. It was not the painter’s intention to show that goal; I thought him something of a virgin himself. But the picture put my mother into context for me, and I was grateful to it. Looking around the other pictures in the same room I saw that the men were exactly the same as the girls descending the staircase. They had the same high-nosed features, the same inviolable innocence. A union between the two would produce no offspring, would probably never even be consummated. Yet there would have been total compatibility. In this way I understood my mother’s maxim, which was, as I thought, delivered for my benefit. Now I see that like Burne-Jones’s maidens it was the ideal she had once embraced, but betrayed, that she was not entirely guilty in having done so because it had taken her a lifetime to understand it. It was to remain an ideal—that was its function—but it would gain in desirability from having secret adherents. They would never be any kind of elect, but they would remain true to themselves. It had always struck me as odd that my mother preferred the Tate to other museums. Now, retrospectively, I understood.
The man sitting opposite me in my own kitchen surely belonged in the Arthurian or Burne-Jones category. His unusual fairness—the hair and skin having the same blond tint—relegated him to some distant age before cosmetic embellishment, of which he was all too obviously unaware, as if he had just left school. Yet here was a man of forty or perhaps a little older, I thought, as I noted the fine lines that bracketed the mouth, who could hardly have spent his life in ignorance of worldly matters. No one can do that, however aspirational they may remain. There are women who have a singular faculty, who are unthinkingly, unstintingly kind, as if in ignorance of the world’s cruelty, as though no other form of behaviour existed. Even I had been the recipient of such random kindness, from the owner of the café near the shop, who always smiled and asked eagerly, ‘All right, love?’ whenever I looked in, as if she genuinely wished me well. I think of this faculty as being in the gift of women. I had never yet experienced it from a man. Besides, kindness, of the same undiscriminating sort, is not what one is looking for in a man, though perhaps it should be. One rather looks for its opposite, a certain combative excitement. Now I had captive in my own home a man who had probably never understood this. He had probably accepted this invitation as coming into the approved category, that of ‘entertaining’, and therefore legitimized. He was in fact ‘entertaining’ me with an account of his bird-watching activities in Dorset, an old hobby of his, he said, one that he had practised as a boy in Norfolk, where the birds were quite different. I made noises expressing
interest, while serving the fine pineapple I had bought earlier at Selfridges. I had let it get warm on the windowsill; the scent hung over our plates, bringing illusions of southern warmth, though there was none of that here. He was at one with the virtuous austerity of our furnishings, as if he had been designed by the same hand. I watched his fastidious gestures with fruit knife and fork and wondered whether he had any idea of what was passing through my mind. He was talking rather a lot, as a guest is supposed to do. I even caught sight of an ordinary male response in his eyes, but that too was part of the procedure, the appreciation due to the hostess, permitted, even expected, in the absence of other guests.
There was something chaste about the man that excited my worst instincts, the ones I had formerly ascribed to Cynthia, with whom, now that I found myself in the same position, I was entirely in sympathy. I saw that in order to arouse his interest, or rather to dispel his lack of interest, one would have to … What, exactly? A normal approach seemed unthinkable. At the same time his obvious good behaviour, with its fussy formulae, his refusal to see a woman as anything but an appropriate dinner companion, aroused a certain respect. Here was someone outside my experience, dull-witted and fine, who would never discern an ulterior motive, a man so sexless that he took me entirely at face value. I got up to make coffee, asking him if he would like a cigarette. But smoking was apparently another thing he never did.
‘I went back to the college,’ he said. ‘Of course I can always use the library there.’
‘And will you?’
‘Yes, I think so. It’s a way of filling the days, you know.’
‘I envy you.’
He looked surprised. ‘But your days are full, Claire.’
‘Not quite. The shop is my way of filling the days. Most people are conscious that there is a gap to be filled, you know.’
‘But in your case … I should have thought that you were quite content.’
‘Why would you have thought that?’
‘Well, you’re young, attractive … You always seem to be in such good spirits.’
‘The one doesn’t preclude the other.’
‘The other?’
‘The gap to be filled.’ I got up. ‘Shall we go into the other room? It seems quite a nice evening. And there’s a better light in there.’
My earlier mood had shaded into a sort of resignation. I was well aware of the undercurrents of my remarks, yet he knew no better than to adopt a tone of bluff reassurance, as if I were a child. There was nothing to be done about any of this. I must consign him to the German Romantics, whom he intended to pursue, and with whom, I dare say, he had a lot in common. He would have been quite at home in a neckcloth and a tailcoat, standing on a bluff, one foot braced on a rock, giving birth to a small but perfect verse. I told him this and he laughed, the first sign of spontaneity of the entire evening.
‘I’m much too spoiled to be a romantic,’ he said.
‘I can’t see how.’
‘To begin with I like my creature comforts. That was an excellent dinner, by the way. Thank you so much. You must be my guest next time.’
‘What else disqualifies you?’
‘I’m wary of causes. And I’m not young enough to be an idealist.’
‘To be an idealist you don’t have to be young. You have to be passionate.’
‘Well, those days are over for me.’
‘Are you lonely, then?’
‘Yes. Yes, I am, of course. Once I liked living alone. Now I can hardly bear it. When the telephone rings it almost shocks me. And yet people are kind, the Fosters and so on. Even Sue. Unfortunately I can only tell them that I’m all right. That’s what they want to know.’
‘And are you all right?’
‘That’s it. I don’t know. My whole life has collapsed, and yet I appear to be in excellent health. I enjoyed looking at those birds, breathing a fresher air. Yet when I got home I could hardly bring myself to put my key in the door. Every morning I wake up believing that I’ll hear Cynthia’s voice. Then when I don’t I get up and make tea and behave as though I were in one piece.’
‘Maybe you are.’
He looked at me then. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I’m marked for life.’
His words hung in the air. They seemed entirely believable.
‘People ask me out,’ he went on. ‘Kind people. Like you, Claire. They even invite a woman friend of theirs, as if I might be interested. As if I could go through the motions again. Dinner. Polite conversation.’
‘You haven’t done too badly this evening,’ I said. ‘Was it awful?’
He smiled sadly. ‘No, it wasn’t. But then you knew Cynthia. It’s different with you. She was awfully fond of you, you know, you and Wiggy. We never had children, you see.’
‘Did you want them?’
‘I did, yes. I wanted a daughter.’
‘You could still have one.’
‘I know,’ he said, surprising me. ‘But I shan’t.’
‘You could marry again,’ I suggested. I thought immediately that this was a fatal thing to have said, but no doubt others had said it before me, in a clumsy attempt to cheer him up. But he took it as a kindness on my part, though still without a thought for myself. ‘If you’re lonely,’ I supplied. ‘It seems the obvious step to take.’
‘One doesn’t marry simply because one is lonely,’ he said.
‘I’m quite sure some people do. That’s why they go to dating agencies. It seems easier to take a chance, trust a stranger, anything to avoid confessing that one is lonely.’
‘I can’t imagine that.’
‘Yes, some men do it. And rather a lot of women.’
‘I’ve been boring you with my troubles, I see.’
I was startled. ‘No, not at all. Why did you say that?’
‘I thought you looked sad,’ he replied.
I was in fact sad, yet I hardly knew why. I wanted to be comforted, made up to. Attention should be paid! I felt like many a woman after an unsuccessful evening, anticipating the tired exchange of thanks and protestations. I hardly had the energy to proffer another kindly suggestion, as if I no longer had any kindness in my nature. I could have been kind in another context, hardly in this one. In fact all at once my loneliness seemed greater than his, with these Fosters on the phone to him all the time.
My face must have reflected my passing distress, for he said, ‘I’ve been very selfish, talking about myself. Now, what about you? I know hardly anything about you.’
This was a little failing he had shared with Cynthia, but now was hardly the time to tell him so. In fact it was the one thing I should never remark upon, although I am sure he would have taken it as a compliment to their closeness. I should phrase it differently, of course. ‘You are very like her,’ I should have said. ‘You share the same characteristics.’ Instead I tried manfully to give an account of myself, aware of all that must be left out. I made it as amusing as possible, knowing that that was what was required, although I did not require it myself. I served up my life in the dusty second-hand bookshop as if it were a genuine calling, rather than a temporary assignment that might soon come to an end. I was aware of the light fading, but did not move to switch on the lamps. Soon, I thought childishly, it will be too dark for him to go home.
‘I had assumed you were a partner,’ he said, of the shop.
I then told him about St John Collier, feeling no sense now of betrayal. They were both part of me, I reckoned. It was time they got to know each other. I felt sombre, and some of this may have shown on my face, for he leaned over and took my hand.
‘You know that you can always call on me for advice,’ he said.
We sat for a while in the dusk. Then, with a sigh, he straightened himself and looked at his watch. ‘I mustn’t keep you up any longer,’ he said. ‘As always you’ve been more than kind.’
That was what brought me out of myself, or perhaps restored me to normal. I no longer had any desire to be patient, or, as he would say, kind. I did
not feel kind. I felt as if I had briefly succumbed to a mode of feeling that was entirely foreign to me. Now that I had engaged his interest, or what he was willing to spare of it, I was reluctant to let him return to his own way of life, which was in fact entirely opposed to mine.
‘Don’t go home, Martin,’ I said. ‘You can stay here tonight.’
He looked shocked, as I knew he would. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ he protested. ‘I couldn’t possibly take advantage. Besides, I must get over this sadness about going home. Think about what you’re saying, Claire …’
Once more I felt the predator’s instinct. With the shock still mirrored on his face he let me guide him into the bedroom. I took off my clothes and watched his eyes narrow. He did not disappoint me. Later that night he uttered a single rueful laugh. That contained matter for further reflection. I promised myself that I should examine this, together with his very slight look of aversion before he kissed me and left.
Somehow, at the back of my mind, there lurked an awareness that I had done something quite serious: I had interfered with his image of himself as a righteous, even a self-righteous person. But at the same time I knew he would be back.
Fourteen
‘Sit down, Claire,’ said Muriel. ‘We need to talk.’
It was what they said in television sitcoms. Even Muriel, I reflected, was becoming susceptible to contemporary influences.
She was wearing her off-duty uniform of trousers and an unconvincing blouse. Instead of making her look more up to date these garments showed her for what she was: a gaunt old woman. Not even a lady: dignity had been shed with the suits she habitually wore in the shop. She looked thinner, more disturbed than I had ever seen her. She pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the corners of her mouth.
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