Undue Influence

by Anita Brookner

  ‘Poor little girl,’ I said. ‘She has been introduced to family dissension. She has learned that one must love all equally, but some more equally than others.’

  ‘I shall do my very best for her,’ said Wiggy. ‘For them both. Tea?’

  ‘Thanks. I feel even more sorry for Mrs. Corbett than for Arabella,’ I remarked. ‘Anyone could see that that dress would be dead wrong. She will probably go on buying her unsuitable clothes and unsuitable presents until the girl goes to school, to university, gets a job. These gifts will be acknowledged, but no more. All this will be laid at the mother’s feet; the original dislike will be intensified. And the child will throw off this inconvenient love; she will have to if she’s not to be a family hostage. In time she will train as a psychotherapist, simply in order to explain all this to herself.’

  ‘Oh, really, Claire. I doubt if it’s as bad as that. She’s only three, remember. You don’t look all that well, if I may say so, despite your afternoons in the park.’

  ‘Or possibly because of them. I feel at one with all the pensioners and the unemployed who probably spend the same sort of day as I do now.’

  ‘It’s the shop, isn’t it?’

  I agreed that it was the shop that was making me downcast. Arabella’s hopeful face, all teeth showing, gazed insistently into mine until Wiggy removed the photograph and set down two cups of tea and a plate of chocolate biscuits.

  ‘I’m sure the situation can be retrieved, particularly if you time it right. If you go in looking carefree and capable they’ll jump at the chance of having you back. Just don’t plead. Be offhand, as if you might be in a position to do them a favour. Look as if you don’t need the money, as if the last thing you want is a job.’

  ‘Easy to say.’

  ‘But it works, Claire. Indifference puts people on their mettle. People who set out to please don’t know this. One must put on an act. And you don’t even have to, which should make it easier. After all …’

  ‘Yes, I know all that. How anyone would jump at the chance of having me.’ I managed to smile as I said this, and hoped that my smile was convincing. ‘I probably need a break,’ I said. ‘Although I don’t really want to go away. My place is here, with all the other unemployed. Very few children in the park, incidentally. I suppose they’re on holiday. And yet you’d think that some children would love the freedom of the park, boys, probably, living in flats. Their mothers could send them out in the morning with a packet of sandwiches and their bus fare, and they’d probably do as well as children transported to Italian villas, like all those politicians’ kids, and look just as healthy when it was time to go back to school.’

  ‘You need a proper holiday, Claire. You’re not exactly down and out, even if you pretend to be.’

  ‘Have you still got Eileen’s archive?’

  ‘Certainly.’ She went to the drawer and produced Eileen’s travel leaflets. ‘Take your pick.’

  One could trace Eileen’s trajectory through the diminishing claims of the brochures, as Shakespeare’s country (by coach) replaced Biarritz and Budapest. Both were wrong for her, but she had not gone there anyway. Instead a valetudinarian preoccupation had crept in, as if her health must be catered for should anything go wrong, as she may have suspected. That was how Vichy came to be there, either because it promised an almost nursing-home regime, with plenty of doctors in attendance, or because the brochure contained recommendations from English visitors who had come back rejuvenated. ‘Hotel Victoria, rue des Carmes,’ ran one comment: ‘a haven of tranquillity. English spoken. Evening meal not provided, but café next door. Hire of bicycle possible.’

  ‘That’s probably what attracted her,’ I told Wiggy. ‘I feel I know the Hotel Victoria already. And the rue des Carmes, which is considerably off the beaten track. The haven of tranquillity is disturbed in the early morning by the rattle of the shutters going up at the café next door, and no doubt by the motorbike of the owner’s son. The room itself will be a distillation of all the hotel rooms one has ever stayed in, that is to say that the last occupant will have left his imprint on the atmosphere. There will be an adjoining bathroom, but no soap. And the owners, so happy to welcome English visitors, will no doubt manage to convey a wish that those visitors do not loiter in their rooms but get out into the town or in fact anywhere where they will immediately become invisible. Walks by the river, the Allier, will be recommended. And of course the waters may be taken.’

  The sheer tedium of such a visit exerted a perverse appeal. ‘I’ll go there,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Claire. Go to Paris, buy yourself some clothes.’

  ‘No, I mean it. I feel too provincial for Paris. Not outgoing enough. I should appreciate some sort of backwater.’

  ‘You’re depressed about the shop. Don’t be. I’m sure it’ll all work out.’

  I stopped only because I sensed Wiggy’s impatience. I swept the leaflets and brochures together and said, ‘You might as well get rid of these. Nobody is going to use them.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll go to Paris and get the first train out, it hardly matters which. I’ll go wherever it takes me. That way I’ll have done something positive.’

  She brightened. ‘You’ll let me know what you decide?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t I always?’

  But I was conscious of a lack of candour, although Wiggy, I think, did not perceive this. I did not tell her about Martin, for reasons that had more to do with instinct than pride, or its converse, shame. As far as Wiggy was concerned Martin was an acquaintance whom we had once encountered in bizarre circumstances and with whom we had not kept in touch. I did not want to unburden myself to her, as if we were fellow conspirators in the mating game. I did not even want to talk to a woman, however close. I thought that only a man could explain me to myself. I wanted one of those conversations that women like to initiate and which men tend to dismiss. Such conversations are usually unwise, but one embarks on them with a dreadful eagerness, regardless of the other’s closed expression. With Martin, of course, one would have to battle with his own self-absorption before such a conversation could take place. He would feel that his dignity was impugned by the mere fact of listening. He had established that his feelings were paramount, whatever they were. He had issued a policy statement to that effect. I did not want to tell Wiggy that I was bewildered, and in any event I doubt if I could have found the words to describe my condition, which was basically regretful, as if I had been found out in a fault. The fault was undoubtedly mine, but I wanted to have it explained to me by the only person in a position to do so. I should have listened respectfully; probably the words once spoken would be fatal, terminal. Silence, maybe years of silence, must follow such an exchange. But if it does not take place the alternative is worse. One may ask oneself questions for the rest of one’s life, and still receive no answers.

  I felt a sense of disloyalty to Wiggy, for I knew that this was a friendship that would last, whereas others might fail, might indeed already have failed, but the instinct that makes a woman want to attach herself to a man was uppermost. I wanted to explore that instinct, to embrace it, until it was time to face the world, triumphantly partnered. This is where women part company; friendships are never quite the same when affections have been redistributed. I wandered home rather regretting my visit. I should have stayed in the park, where no one suspected me of duplicity. And then it went against my nature to be indifferently honest, not to present an open mind, which meant a mind open to all. Candour is a primordial virtue, though it can lead one into difficulties, as I well knew. I felt physically uncomfortable with anything less, which was why I made so many disastrous mistakes. Strange how what is recommended by all the authorities can prove to be one’s undoing. Different values should no doubt be taught, for if they are not one learns them too late to be of any use to one. Those gods of Olympus, with their enviable lack of conscience, are probably the ones to emulate. Their reputation has not noticeably suffer
ed from their unashamed preoccupation with sex and influence. We who have been taught to love our enemies, sometimes to the detriment of our friends, will always be sunk in a morass of self-questioning, timorous restraint taking the place of robust self-interest. Wiggy had thought that I was depressed about the shop. Indeed I was, but I had other concerns. She may have sensed this, but had had the grace not to probe. In time I should probably tell her everything; the time might come when I should need to. For the time being, however, I preferred concealment. Perhaps for the first time in my life I did not understand myself. Nor did I altogether want to.

  The air in the streets seemed heavy, stale, as if everyone had breathed out at once. Maybe it would not be a bad idea to go away, to catch that first train standing at the station, to end up in Venice or in Barcelona, carefree and unprejudiced, as I had once been. A few days’ absence could hardly affect my chances, my ultimate goal. And then I could write to Martin—I still avoided the telephone—and tell him that I was going on holiday, like everyone else. This would provoke some response or other. Eventually my traveller’s tales would match his, put me on a new footing. This seemed so obvious that I wondered why I had not thought of it before. On the following morning I would consult my continental timetables. The pain of leaving, which I always suffered, was already slightly mitigated by the anticipation of arriving. I was on my way once more.

  Nineteen

  Every day that elusive sun stood lower in the sky, in the brief interval before it disappeared altogether. Every day the trees in the park appeared more immobile, solid blocks of dark green, as if they were not subject to change, despite the evidence of leaves fallen onto the ground beneath them. The summer was over, and as if to demonstrate the fact familiar faces began to reappear in my neighbourhood. I thought that I should tell some of these people that I was going away, knocked on a few doors in Montagu Mansions, and announced my imminent departure. This information was more or less kindly received, although as I was habitually out all day there was a slight air of surprise that told me that my absence would not be remarked upon. This exercise was undertaken mainly to convince myself. I went about my preparations as if for the benefit of a whole army of observers. I collected foreign currency of all denominations—who knew where that phantom train would be taking me?—and half-heartedly put a few garments aside to take to the cleaners. I was not concerned with my appearance. I knew that in that foreign city, wherever it turned out to be, I should pass unnoticed. I did not really wish it otherwise, for this was a calculated absence, undertaken merely in relation to a convincing return. What plans I made were for that return, rather than for days in which I should wander among crowds like an ordinary holidaymaker, not even sightseeing, but attaching myself to any group of people who seemed to know where they were going.

  None of this mattered, for it was being done for a purpose. Fixed firmly in my mind was the notion that this was necessary apprenticeship for a kind of reinstatement. I could do nothing with the time at my disposal, but in the darker days to come I should somehow have recovered a sense of purpose, of busyness, and above all of pleasure. I calculated that within a few months—or weeks if I were particularly fortunate—I should have secured my old job. This did not seem impossible. Rather more problematic was the question of Martin, from whom I had not heard. I accepted this: I knew somehow that the pattern had been set, that he would recognize my overtures as coming from myself alone, leaving him utterly free of calculation. His conscience demanded this, whereas my own conscience was troubled only slightly by the conviction that such precautions were totally unnecessary, were in fact aberrant, and that affection (I used that word even to myself) had no need of such artifice but should spring from a natural desire for company, for conversation, and finally for closeness. I put it no higher than that, not even to myself.

  But one night I had a disquieting dream. I was in a wide street which I could not identify. Some paces in front of me was Martin, but a Martin whom I did not know, Martin as a much younger man, with dishevelled hair and a livelier step. I could see him quite clearly: he wore an open-necked shirt, which was out of character, and he appeared to be skipping along and humming to himself. I managed to catch up with him and put my hand on his arm; he shook it off, but I took no notice. I was trying to engage him in some sort of colloquy. Do you remember so-an-so? I said, but he looked at me as if I were a stranger, before taking off again, with that curiously insouciant step. He soon outdistanced me but I kept him within my sights, so that we both made our discordant way down that broad street, Martin ahead, myself following vainly behind. From time to time I flung out a question, but received no response. I was as impressed as if he were some exotic stranger whose presence I had been appointed to monitor; he meanwhile appeared to be in genuine ignorance of the fact that I was in the vicinity, as he made his curiously youthful way along the edge of the pavement, like a boy playing a game. A wind ruffled both his hair and his shirt but left my own hair untouched, as if I had no corporeal body, or at least not one like his. We were both invisible to other passers-by, from which I concluded that this was indeed a dream. Yet when I finally awoke it was in a state of some agitation, as if I could still see that untroubled skipping figure in front of me, his fair looks quite familiar and unmistakable, but somehow translated into a past to which I had no access, as if he were a boy again, while I had grown older, older than the age I was now, in the present, and obliged to keep a watch on him and to work out the enormous conundrum of his good humour, as revealed by his carelessness, a physical carelessness which in fact was against his nature, and his self-absorption, so great that it prevented him from responding to my overtures.

  Somehow, as I bathed and dressed, I knew that this lack of response had a cause, and that cause was even more worrying than the dream itself. I saw that his preoccupation occluded my presence altogether. Even my hand on his arm had had no weight; he did not so much shrug it off as cause it to disappear, and my questions met with no response because he quite naturally could not hear them. My conscious mind furnished the dream with more detail, as if it contained evidence that I had only to examine in order to arrive at a full explanation. Thus to the open-necked shirt and disordered hair were added grey flannel trousers and brown leather sandals, such as schoolboys used to wear, so that I knew that this was a genuine survival of his younger self. I had seen no signs of this in the straitlaced and immaculately presented person I thought I knew, but I recognized this younger self as somehow authentic. As was his deafness to my questions. This I did recognize as coming within the realm of fact, although in real life my questions had been anodyne enough, if not particularly well received. My final impression was that Martin in the dream had proved untouchable, since his thoughts eluded me, were in fact his own, jealously guarded, and therefore unknowable.

  But this explanation did not fully convince me, since the figure in the dream had had a vague smile of pleasure on his lips, so that whatever took place in his untouchable head had to do with anticipation rather than with recollection. I had no reason for arriving at this conclusion. It was simply that, throughout the morning, I remembered my hand being shrugged from his arm, and my feeling of surprise that this was so easily accomplished, not so much from a lack of scruple or delicacy, as entirely naturally, as one might brush a hair from one’s face. There was no human importunity in that gesture of mine, nor was there any motive behind his rejection of it. And indeed the whole dream had been so brief, resolving itself into an image of disconnected progress along a street which was unknown to me, that I had no clue as to its final significance. And yet when I had woken I had moved my head uneasily from side to side on my pillow, as if to eradicate it. It proved difficult to dislodge. Yet in the daytime, with the assistance of that brief shaft of sunlight, I castigated myself. If I were now to become superstitious, in addition to all my other preoccupations, I was in a bad way. The hour and a half it somehow took to book my ticket put paid to this. Reality, it seemed, still had enough power to
put fantasy to flight. A woman trod heavily on my foot as I was leaving the travel agency. On that sort of reality one could always rely.

  The letter that I wrote to Martin was brief, airy, and nonspecific. It merely stated that I should be away for a few days, but that I hoped to see him before I left. For a few moments this letter seemed to resolve various problems: it set the seal on my departure, and it signified a forthcoming meeting with Martin, not the boyish contented Martin of the dream but the fearfully divided man whose mentality now began to trouble me. I should almost have preferred him to have the characteristics of the early dreamed figure, although I knew that this was impossible, and that the earlier Martin would not have known me anyway. Posting the letter gave me an access of energy, as if I could now start anticipating a future which would bring him once again into my orbit.

  I had planned to leave on the Wednesday of the following week. If I had heard nothing by Saturday I should overcome my reluctance and telephone him. There was no good reason why I had not done this before, apart from my suspicion that he would do his best to avoid anything like direct confrontation, that he was a man who was at a disadvantage when interrupted, and that he genuinely disliked the privacy of his home being disturbed. With this last I could sympathize: the flat was only truly mine when it was silent and preferably empty, ready to receive me when I returned in the early evening and maintaining its own mysterious integrity while I was absent. Also it seemed entirely in keeping that this cautious and exploratory approach should suit both of us, for I had become more tentative since knowing him, while he would, for reasons of his own, prefer to exert control in the matter of accepting or refusing an invitation. It occurred to me to wonder whether his other friends—those Fosters, for example—observed such restrictions. I rather thought not. He had come to them with a clean record, whereas his association with me was unwise. At least that was how he saw it; I found such behaviour absurd. I was unhappy that my calculations outran his, that was all. I had hoped that we might meet at the weekend, spend time as other people spent time, although I was not quite clear on this point. I might have envisaged a holiday together had I not foreseen the utter impossibility of this ever taking place. I castigated my imagination for misleading me, as it sometimes did. My mind, like most people’s minds, was a mixture of instinct, information, and ignorance, all entirely characteristic. And in addition there was that intriguing area of detritus that came to the fore in sleep. Such dreams as I had, and I had very few, proved surprisingly difficult to dislodge, though this did not persuade me that they were in any way meaningful. I marvelled rather at the images than at what they signified. I myself had only a shadow existence in these dreams, whereas those of whom I was dreaming were endowed with an alarming distinction, as if enjoying another life of which I knew nothing but on which I had somehow gained an unnerving insight. Thus the characters who people one’s dreams are revealed as strangers, and strangers, moreover, who have no interest in oneself, even though one is the agent behind all their movements. In the act of dreaming it is impossible to consider oneself the prime mover. More often one is the victim of circumstance, unsuitably dressed, missing the train, enrolled in the wrong examination, vainly requesting help that is not forthcoming, whereas those who make a randorn appearance seem to enjoy a more substantial existence. I tried in vain to repeat my dream but was not able to do so. Again reality proved too strong: I had received no answer to my letter and I had not made my telephone call. I told myself that the following day, Sunday, would be more propitious, since time is different, more permissive, on a Sunday. Perhaps I was even enjoying the anticipation. In any event I held back.