Or did not want. Neither of us said anything.
‘So when are you moving?’
‘He’s buying the house, of course. He said it was to spare me any further worry. I confess I was quite pleased when he made the offer. Now I’m not so sure. I acquiesced because it seemed simpler to fall in with his plans. Hester! Leave that food, if you don’t want it. In any case it must be quite cold by now. You can watch television for half an hour. Claire will come and say goodbye to you when she leaves.’
Slowly Hester negotiated her way from behind the table, looked at the napkin in her hand, then dropped it. We both watched her snail’s progress out of the room. ‘I’ll just switch on the television for her,’ said Muriel. ‘She’ll fall asleep as soon as she sits down.’ She smiled painfully. ‘Don’t look so concerned, Claire. It’s what happens to old people.’
Left alone I could hear only Muriel’s voice, and then a burst of canned laughter. That sounded even more sinister than Hester’s silence. When Muriel came back I realized that I no longer knew what to say. I was anxious to leave, even more anxious not to let this show, though it was clearly what she wanted.
‘You see how things are, Claire,’ she said. ‘There was nothing else I could do.’
‘If I can help …’ I suggested.
‘You’ve been very good, Claire. You could have been quite angry with me.’
‘Oh, no, I could never be that.’ There was a pause. ‘Do keep in touch.’
‘Oh, I will.’ We both knew that this was untrue. ‘I’ll tell Hester that you said goodbye. I’m afraid she must have dozed off.’
‘Of course. Goodbye, Muriel. I hope it all …’ All what? Goes well? How could it? They were finished, that was manifest. And they had done so well! Such spotless lives, shipwrecked at the last, when they had not expected it! Even Muriel had now given in, or rather given up. Applause erupted from the television. ‘Don’t see me out, Muriel. You must be rather tired.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am tired. Thank you, Claire. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said. But she had already turned away.
Sixteen
I had a problem: how to deal with the time at my disposal. Ordinary time is spent working, but I had no work, and therefore this was not ordinary time. Exceptional weather—a heat wave, say—would have made such leisure acceptable by others, but this summer was not conforming to normal standards. It remained dull, except for that promising show of sunlight in the early morning which soon faded behind cloud, so that the effect was always of a slight mist or even of impending rain. I still left the flat purposefully, as if I had engagements, appointments, only to return an hour or two later, at a time when the ladies of the neighbourhood, some of them from Montagu Mansions, emerged with their wheeled baskets to do their shopping. They expressed no surprise at seeing me, or perhaps they were too polite to inquire what I was doing at home. They may have assumed that I was on holiday, or sorting out my mother’s affairs. In a sense I was doing both, but I should have made a bad job of explaining this. I felt in a sense illegitimate, even shameful, though I had committed no fault. Yet I could not have stood up to the kindly interrogation that these women would not deny themselves, no matter how it would have been received. I knew that excuses had been made for me when I had been constrained by my parents’ poor health, even more when my mother began her long slow descent into illness. Now I began to see even that illness as a way of occupying time. I was healthy: I had no use for this. But I saw that despair, which my mother must have felt, can eat up the hours, with all the little routines one devises to distract one. I did not feel despair, only a slow bewilderment, with which I suppose despair is associated.
I went to the bank and discovered that I had been left nine thousand pounds which was in a reserve account accumulating interest. This money seemed not only unreal but somehow unavailable, as if it did nothing to fulfil my everyday needs. Those had been served by my own personal salary, which seemed to me infinitely more respectable. There was, however, in that unreal account, an assurance that I could continue as I was until some other form of work presented itself. At the back of my mind I suspected that in a month or two I should go back to the shop, ostensibly to see how Peter was getting on, and if I were desperate enough, which I reckoned I should be by then, would ask if he needed any help, offering to cover for him at the weekends, if necessary, or at any other time. This should not be too difficult, although the prospect was humiliating. But I, who had always sidestepped humiliation, now began to make its acquaintance. And in the coming winter (for personal disorientation always makes one dread the winter) I should be glad of some occupation, however much of a comedown it represented. And the shop was in a sense my true home, now that the empty flat seemed so alien. Brought to this pass I made an inventory of my advantages: solvency, for the time being, headed my list. I was perfectly entitled to waste a few days, at least until I saw Wiggy again. And Martin, who had not replied to my letter. When I thought of him in Italy I grew both indignant and wistful, but there was nothing I could do to prevent him from enjoying his liberty, of which I told myself I was a part. It was just that my surroundings were the opposite of picturesque: Baker Street, at all times of day, is noisy and clogged with traffic, and I could not summon the energy to go far afield. In fact a lethargy was beginning to envelop me. At least I still got up very early and began vigorously enough to prepare my day. It was just that the preparations seemed to peter out at about nine o’clock, by which time that early sun had disappeared, so that the time in front of me stretched out endlessly, as if both the day and I were under a cloud.
I felt older, as if I had recently qualified for adult concerns. I shopped conscientiously, thus gaining the tacit approval of the other shoppers, my neighbours, who smiled kindly when they saw me with my basket over my arm. If I were not very careful I should become one of them, and spend days like theirs. I had no idea what they did with themselves, but I could dimly foresee hours spent on trivial pastimes, on telephone calls, on library books, on family visits. None of these were available to me: I became newly aware of my isolated position. What had seemed like my own liberty was now an illusion of sorts; perhaps it always had been. Liberty is defined by constraints, and when these are removed liberty is always a little disappointing. It does not coincide with freedom, which is what everyone craves; rather it is a guarantee of a certain social position, which I did in fact enjoy. I was a householder; I had money in the bank. What I lacked was a consciousness of my own entitlements, which I took to be an endowment conferred by liberty. I should have preferred a wild surge of possibilities, of desires, no doubt anarchic, which would have convinced me that I was free. I could not understand how, if I were free, I was not free to envisage an alternative to the life I was living. I seemed to be in abeyance until that alternative presented itself. In that way I was not free, was in fact subject to circumstance. I was too wary to examine this, knowing that danger lay in that direction. My enemy was fantasy. The rest I could just about deal with.
On one of my shopping expeditions I caught sight of Sue on the opposite side of the street, just going into Selfridges. I hesitated, then went in search of her. I did not particularly want to see her, but I was in need of conversation, however anodyne. Out of uniform she looked healthy and banal, as I had always seen her. It was the white coat that lent her distinction.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Do you remember me?’
She looked doubtful, standing there with two mangoes in her hands. The doubt was absolutely genuine, although it seemed exaggerated. She was in a hurry, I told myself, with my new lack of confidence: she was due at the hospital, had bought these two mangoes for a patient perhaps.
‘We met at the Gibsons,’ I reminded her. ‘I was so sorry for them both. I’m sure you were the most marvellous help.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. Her tone of voice did not encourage further reminiscence. In fact her previous boldness seemed to have vanished, as if she too were under the same edict of dullness as
I was myself.
‘What are you doing now?’ I asked. ‘Still private nursing?’
‘No, I’m at the hospital. I’ve been seconded.’
‘And do you prefer it?’ I persisted. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got time for coffee? I’m on holiday,’ I explained. ‘I shan’t be going away just yet, though. What about you?’
I was having to make extraordinary efforts to detain her. She volunteered nothing, still seemed anxious to move on. Yet she examined me with a curiosity which I assumed was purely professional. I wondered if she could detect some hidden morbidity of which I was not yet aware, but my face obviously revealed nothing. She seemed uneasy, as if she would rather not have seen me, as if I had interrupted her day, much as I had hoped that someone would interrupt mine. Yet she was not grateful for this interruption, as I should have been. This puzzled me, and finally made me a little indignant: surely this girl had no right to make me feel an intruder? She had not replied to my suggestion of a cup of coffee, but looked down at the mangoes as if they might answer for her.
‘Those look delicious,’ I said tamely.
‘I’d better get on,’ was her reply. Yet this was reluctant, dragged out of her. ‘I’m on duty in half an hour.’
‘Nice seeing you,’ I said. ‘Maybe we’ll bump into each other again. Next time we really will have coffee.’
She smiled, with relief, it seemed, but perhaps she was just not used to dealing with impromptu conversations, as I had learnt to be in the shop, and before that in the encounters I cultivated, and even in my odd habit of making up people’s lives for them. I had had no success here. I told myself that the girl’s awkwardness had nothing to do with me, that she felt divested of an authority when not in her uniform, that she was no doubt performing a kindness for someone who was in her care, that she genuinely found it difficult to remember who I was. Yet her scrutiny had been intense. Was this due to the half-light in the hallway in Weymouth Street, in which it had been difficult to see anything except her white coat and in which conversations had been conducted in a whisper? And yet she had seemed to know me, in a way that precluded any intimacy between us. This saddened me, not because I desired to make a friend of her, but because it seemed symptomatic of my new condition. It was only natural that I seemed uninteresting; I was even uninteresting to myself. The proof of this was my new inability to speculate. This had always been such a resource, an endowment, even a gift, that its disappearance, however temporary, however ephemeral, however rationally explained—my change of circumstances—left me desolate. I could no more penetrate this girl’s defences, as I once could have done, than if those defences did in fact exist. Yet I had no reason to suppose that there was any personal dislike involved, only that curious scrutiny, and as its accompaniment, a certain reluctance to engage, even in such a conversation as I was having to provide.
‘I’ll let you get on,’ I said, aware of being something of a failure where I had once felt myself to be an expert. ‘Goodbye. Have a nice day.’ As I heard myself utter this formula, which had never passed my lips on any previous occasion, I registered the depths to which I was sinking. I watched her make her way to the till, pay for her mangoes, and leave. By the door she looked back, saw me, and gave a brief wave of farewell. That cheered me a little. Sometimes a gesture is more eloquent than words.
The odd incident disconcerted me, as though I were responsible for the other’s wordlessness, her stare, her lingering indifference that was not quite oxymoronic: she was indifferent, and she had lingered, considering me as if she knew that we had met yet did not remember me. It was her opacity that shocked me; her eyes had searched my face, but without interest, and if she hesitated it was because I was blocking her path. She volunteered no information apart from the fact that she was shortly on duty, and all the time she weighed the mangoes in her hands, as if they, and only they, explained her presence in that place. I realized that I had not told her my name, and that I would not expect her to remember it, if in fact I had ever given it. We had met in circumstances that were extraordinary to me but no doubt not to her. I wanted to ask her how Cynthia had died; this became a matter of supreme interest to me, particularly as I had never heard an explanation. Again I was back in Weymouth Street, in the darkness of the vestibule, while beyond, in the bedroom, that strange drama was taking place. I worried about those missing details, which to her must have been without mystery. If I had been the nurse, witnessing those terminal events, I should have been willing to unburden myself, indeed anxious to. And I was not in one sense an outsider; I had been something of a friend. Yet those events remained a secret. Something prevented me from asking a direct question: I did not want to offend her professional discretion. It was for her to offer information, and this she refused to do. Indeed I wondered whether Cynthia was to be distinguished from any of her other patients, whether she had in fact remembered her with any exactitude. Certainly she did not remember me. And yet she had waved her hand at the door, as if some memory had struck her, too late for any exchange. This worried me, together with my inability to imagine her out in the street, the mangoes now in a bag, no doubt to be presented to a grateful patient. An ordinary girl, attractive in her no-nonsense way, with whom it had been demonstrated that I had so little in common that I felt a disconnectedness that had something uncanny about it, as if I were deprived all at once of the ability to sympathize, to comprehend, to invent, even to feel anything over and above a generalized confusion, as if I had committed an offence.
I dismissed the incident once I was out in the street, although this offered little in the way of diversion. Crowds moved slowly, in search of bargains. I had a sudden longing to get away, to some more noble place, even thought respectfully of those French cathedrals that I had once got to know so well, in particular of Rouen, which was perhaps my favourite of them all. But, stranded as I was in Baker Street, France now seemed unreachable, and worse, alien. I remembered Eileen Bateman, and how she had left bravely on her summer holiday for as long as there was a context into which she could be re-absorbed, and how she had given up once she was on her own and had no one to whom she could recount her adventures. This had now happened to me, although I knew that the comparison was false. And my surroundings were so mundane that I would willingly have embraced another cathedral. But I also knew that an effort of will would be needed if I were to make the journey. I also knew that the journey was necessary.
In this way I formulated a half-hearted plan. I would go away, and when I returned I would drop into the shop, just to see how they were getting on. I should by then have found the right form of words—they escaped me now—which would let Peter know that I was willing to return. If he did not respond then that chapter was closed. Somehow between now and then I should have worked out the formula that would have him rise gratefully from behind the desk and ask me to stay. There was no reason why this should not be entirely possible. Reason also told me that he was not ready for me to offer my services. Let him pass a few boring weeks in the shop, staring longingly through the door at the outside world, and he would be only too eager for a break. Strange how the shop had never struck me as a place of constraint; rather the opposite. If anything it emphasized the freedom I possessed to walk out at six o’clock and resume my own life. In that way it was like school, which I had enjoyed, particularly the last hour of the day, when my movements would reassert their independence. I had had the same feeling of physical optimism when Muriel, and latterly I, had locked up for the day, no matter what my plans were for the evening. It was enough to be out in the air, the darkness left behind me, but within that darkness the assurance of a familiar welcome on the following morning. I had thought it would last, against all the evidence to the contrary. I had grown so used to it that I regarded it as my normal setting, rather more so than the flat, which I no longer saw. Yet it was the flat that was waiting for me now and would continue to do so. The flat was now my only home. I was not easy with this thought; the flat seemed less mine than th
e shop had done. In the flat I was alone; that was why it seemed inimical.
The second post brought a card from Wiggy but no letter from Martin. The card showed a view of the cousins’ house in Scotland; it looked imposing. Wiggy was due back on the 12th, when the house emptied to receive another lot of guests for the shoot; I should see her on the Saturday. I longed for this, as if she were my only contact with the world. Also Wiggy, who spent her days alone, painting her rather good miniatures, would understand my new isolation, and also the reasons for it. These reasons were not confined to my fortunes at the shop but had more to do with Martin’s absence. It was difficult for me to accommodate a sensible view of his holiday, for I knew that he would be a favoured guest, and that his hosts, who seemed to have his well-being at heart, would do their utmost to rehabilitate him, having no doubt discussed his unfortunate condition between themselves. He would represent an interesting problem, one with which they would sympathize, having kept away tactfully while Cynthia was alive. Perhaps they had originally earmarked him for one of their friends; perhaps friends of that type were already gathering. These friends too would be sympathetic; in fact he would be in receipt of much sympathy and attention. He would be perceived as dignified, worthy of discreet indulgence. The contrast between his status and my own was difficult to understand. I could only judge this matter from afar, using my well-worn and suddenly offensive powers of visualization. This was more like envy, or perhaps the contrast between a house party and an empty flat was too strong. Predictably the weather had clouded over again, and the flat was filled with a dull white light far removed from the Italian sun. It was the peak of the holiday season, when families decamped, no doubt to other families, in resorts of their choice. It was a season for easy companionship. I even envied Wiggy, who had a family of sorts, and whose relations, those cousins, remained faithful to their obligations. I seemed to be the only person I knew who was not similarly endowed, as if my antecedents had failed in some genetic task. Thus I was doubly deprived, of a family, preferably not my own—for my own family seemed too sad, even tragic—and of Martin, who might provide me with a family in the future.
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