Lewis Percy

by Anita Brookner

  ‘What is all this about, do you suppose?’

  ‘This is how it starts, Lewis. Don’t you know that by now?’

  ‘But nothing can start, we both know that. I’m a married man, and you, well, you’re Pen’s sister.’

  ‘What an ass you are,’ she said. ‘You can’t leave me now.’ She was flushed and nervous; her insistence impressed him, for it was no less than his own. He brushed aside his reasons in the surprise occasioned by her forwardness. He was not shocked, but he felt immeasurably older. As he took her hand and led her to the balustrade he knew that he was probably ruining his life, or, rather, some part of it.

  ‘Emmy,’ he said gently, as if to someone very young. ‘You don’t want me. I’m not really your type, am I? I’m dull, loyal, pedestrian – all the things you despise. I’m not even good-looking. I’m suburban man. I go to work every day and I read myself silly, and I watch Arthur Tooth and think I’ll be like that when I’m old. And then I walk home in the evening. To my wife. And we eat dinner, and perhaps watch television, and then we go to bed.’

  ‘You don’t love her, do you?’

  ‘I can’t decide,’ he said. This constituted his second infidelity. ‘Perhaps I do. I feel for her, I want to protect her, I can’t bear for her to be hurt.’

  ‘That’s not love, Lewis. That’s responsibility.’

  ‘Yes, but you see, I am responsible. And I shall go on being responsible. There’s no way out of responsibility once it has become your lot.’

  ‘Couldn’t you look on me as a sort of good conduct prize? An award for your constancy?’

  ‘Do you think I could take you as lightly as that?’

  She shrugged. ‘Most men do. Men with wives. Most of them are so famously married that they think they deserve a treat. Men who have everything. The day comes when they reckon they’ve done such a splendid job that they can take on a mistress as well. The difference being that the men have someone to go home to and the mistress is left alone.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I’ve had lovers since I was sixteen.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I’m supposed to be immoral, aren’t I? Even if things are changing. And I’m involved with somebody now, although he’s only involved to the extent of once a fortnight. I never wanted this, do you know that? I wanted to be married, like you. I wanted children, roses round the door, the whole thing. The trouble is, I don’t look the part, so I never got the offers. And now I’m typecast, I suppose.’

  She burst into tears of frustration, like a child. He kissed her again, put his arm round her waist, held her while she wept. Presently she wiped her eyes.

  ‘I hated your wife,’ she said. ‘I hated her resistance, her unpreparedness. I imagined all the wives banding together, ready to turn me out of their houses. And making no effort to please. That disgusted me. Only mistresses make that sort of effort, and they get called all sorts of names for doing so. Why don’t you come home with me, Lewis? No one will ever know. I won’t ruin your marriage. I’ve never ruined anybody’s. I’m too accommodating.’

  ‘You don’t want me, Emmy. One afternoon with me isn’t going to solve anything for either of us. And I can’t marry you, you know. That’s what you really want, isn’t it? To be married. My dear girl, you couldn’t stand me on that basis. I’d bore you to tears.’

  She said stubbornly, her tears now dry, her cheeks still flushed, ‘Come home with me now.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said sadly. ‘But, you see, you don’t love me. And I would certainly love you. And you would soon get tired of me. You don’t love me – you just hate my wife, all wives. I understand, I truly do understand. You are a marvellous girl, but I can’t come home with you. I might just be the sort of unfaithful husband whose marriage you really did break up. And you wouldn’t like that half as much as you think you would. And then you’d be stuck with me.’

  They walked in silence to the Bayswater entrance.

  ‘In fact, I have to say, I can’t be sorry for you without being sorry for myself. But it has to stop there. I should like to behave well, I really should. And if that makes me a prig, I can’t help it. Priggishness may yet make a comeback, who knows?’

  ‘It already has,’ she said.

  They both laughed, and then he kissed her goodbye, leaning into her soft strong body, which was everything he wanted a woman’s body to be. He watched her as she marched off towards Notting Hill Gate. He was immensely proud of her.

  ‘This is unlike you, Lewis,’ said Goldsborough, looking quite normal without his cap. ‘Arthur was quite concerned when you failed to return after lunch.’ One of Arthur’s less ingratiating habits was his overwhelming punctuality. ‘Nothing wrong, I hope? Not trouble at home?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Arnold,’ said Lewis. ‘I had a very pressing commitment in town.’ He could not think why he had said ‘in town’, when the image of that flat light-deflecting water would stay with him forever. ‘I’ll come in on Saturday morning to make up for it.’

  ‘Very good, Lewis. But let me know in advance if you’re going to do this sort of thing, won’t you? Dentist, was it?’

  In that moment Lewis saw Goldsborough as simple, harmless, and greedy, the sort of man who has been a lonely fat boy at school. Suddenly he felt extremely well disposed towards Goldsborough, and even towards Arthur Tooth. He felt the onset of an unfamiliar exuberance.

  ‘I’ll do the late night tonight,’ he said to Goldsborough. ‘You go off. You’re more in demand than I am.’ He longed to be alone, to examine the complexities that had been revealed to him, to wonder if Emmy were thinking of him, as he was thinking of her. He wanted time to himself, before he could decently go home.

  He sat in the library until nine o’clock, having even remembered to telephone Tissy to warn her. He felt no embarrassment, no division of loyalties, in speaking affectionately, reassuringly, to his wife. As the evening darkened, his euphoria, his feeling of having done the right thing, gradually waned, and he reviewed his behaviour with appalled misgivings. An episode, he tried telling himself; not even worth thinking about. Yet he did think about it, insistently, and the more he thought about it the more he blamed himself. He had rejected her, and nobody forgives a rejection, just as no one forgets a humiliation. But what could he have done? She was inconstant, she had told him so herself; for all he knew she did this all the time. He tried to feel sorry that any of this had happened, yet what he really felt was an awakening, a slow mobilization of all his dormant energies.

  He put his head in his hands. What I said to her was in effect true, truer than I meant it to be, he thought. Why should she care for me? Why should anyone? Even Tissy does not love me, although she assures me that she is happy. But how can I go on like this? I never wanted moderation. He nodded to the last student, checked out the last book, then wandered round, turning off the lights. He cursed the reasonable words he had spoken to her, yet could not call them back. A figure of fun, he reflected, virtuous and vacillating. And her role in all this? She was there to make trouble, and to think nothing of it. He disapproved violently, and yet he adored her boldness. The difficulty – the supreme difficulty – was that he might have loved her. If things had been different, he thought, if he had been free. But he was not free. As he locked the door behind him, he reflected that at home he would find his dinner in the oven and an unflustered Tissy watching television. The thought did not comfort him. But at least nobody got hurt, he thought, as he took the enormous burden of his disordered feelings and his cancelled expectations out with him, into the dark and now rainy street.

  10

  In the weeks that followed Lewis was extremely attentive to his wife, who suddenly appeared to him as she had done when he had first been attracted to her. He saw only her fragility, her docility, her virginal lack of independence. This gave her a legendary quality, rather as if she had stepped out of the Unicorn tapestry, or wore a metaphorical wimple. Above all, she carried about her an aura of chastity, which was, he saw, never to be entirely c
onfounded. These qualities still moved him, mixed though they were in his mind with his own impatience, exasperation, and a degree of bewilderment that began to reach epic proportions. He strove heroically to maintain in himself the requisite family piety. When he saw Tissy moving about the quiet rooms of his house, or caught her carrying, hieratically, a dish for his supper, or watched her bent head as she read her book, his heart smote him, and there was nothing in the world he would not have done to shield and protect her. He felt a very real sadness when her large unclouded eyes ranged over his face and then beyond it, when her hesitant steps told him that she needed his arm to lean on. Sometimes, walking slowly with her in the quiet streets of early summer, he would detect within himself the seeds of a quite serious longing. He could say nothing of this to her, although she was the subject of his most pitiful speculations. Silently he addressed her in his mind, willing her to be alive to his confusion. Dearest little wife, he thought, when will you be strong enough to do without me? What will quieten your fears? And on these wordless evening promenades, so staid, so undemanding, do you think of me at all? How will it be for you in the years ahead, when, contrary to expectation, life becomes more difficult? How will you age, or, rather, when will your eternal innocence yield to experience? When will you begin to learn those lessons – of concealment, of imitation, of duplicity – of which even I now have an inkling? This peaceful, even silent life came about as a result of your hesitations, the limits that had been imposed on you and which you now impose on me, for I begin to think that you are very strong, or rather that you possess a force of will that I never suspected. But that force is negative, dedicated to the preservation of a status quo that will not, cannot threaten you. As I walk with you, slowly, prudently, our eyes cast down, I feel that we have been married since the beginning of time, as if my own youth – which was as hesitant as yours – were bound to end in this becalmed state, as if old age will not surprise us, or, if it does, will be found not to differ very greatly from this strange condition. For if we still look young, it is a youth of which most young people would feel ashamed. Yet your white arm, in its short sleeve, is passed so naturally through mine that I could not now bear it to be absent. And although we are going, as usual, to visit your mother, the sun is mild, the air is kindly, the lime tree is full of scent, and there is nothing really wrong with either of us. Is there?

  At other times, when he was away from her, he felt, more maturely, a disgust at his own virtue, in itself not entirely sincere or voluntary, a disgust for the whole idea of virtue in its diminished Christian interpretation: continence. Great deeds were not always undertaken virtuously, nor were great loves blamelessly consummated. It seemed to him that since his marriage he had become debilitated, passive, that his essential self had deteriorated, and his simplicity been compromised. When he thought of Emmy he felt sour, rancorous, as if she had no right to provoke him by existing, as if she summoned up from hidden depths a furious dissatisfaction with the life he had been called on to live, and which might, if he exerted the requisite vigilance, pass for normal. Indifference faded away, leaving a new scrutiny in its wake. He was surprised by destructive impulses, which he always suppressed, ravenous yet sickly appetites, and restless nights which demoralized him. Sometimes he longed for the peace of those ruminant years before he had ever seen her. He knew that she had the power to lift him into a more heroic future, a life fit for a man, but that this would cause damage, abandonment, injury, and also loss. Beneath his half-hearted and sorrowful obedience – an obedience that brought with it a certain peace – he detected a deep unreadiness for adventure, and this was a source of dismay to him, and of mature disappointment.

  When Pen and Emmy issued an invitation to dinner it was more or less easy to decline, pleading an indisposition of Tissy’s. In any event Tissy refused to go, so his excuse was more or less honourable. How much more, how much less preoccupied him for several days.

  He began to leave home earlier in the mornings and to return home later at the end of the day, although it would never have occurred to him to go anywhere else, or even to break his journey. Filled with an unforgiving energy he walked both to and from work, hoping to exhaust himself. But his energies simply redoubled, and he slept badly, sometimes hardly at all. Tissy accepted this without criticism, ascribing it to the fact that he had finished his book and was uneasy without its physical presence in the house. Oddly enough, she was not unhelpful to him: her calm, even her silence, assured him that nothing was really amiss.

  On one such day he received a rather nasty shock. Shopping in Selfridges in his lunch hour – for he had a sentimental attachment to the place – he heard himself greeted loudly, delightedly, by a stout woman in a brilliant blue dress, with whom, as far as he knew, he had no connection.

  ‘Lewis! Lewis Percy!’

  He turned, amazed to be discovered here, and looked into the still handsome but now ageing face of someone whom he could not call to mind.

  ‘Don’t you remember me? I recognized you at once. You haven’t changed at all. It’s Roberta! You remember me now, don’t you? Roberta, from Paris! From that funny flat we all lived in.’

  ‘Roberta! Of course!’

  He took her in his arms and kissed her. But in fact he would not have known her. She had put on a great deal of weight and looked quite old. But she must be in her early fifties, he calculated, and then came the thought: it was nearly twelve years since Paris, and if the years had dealt so harshly with her what had they done to him?

  ‘So you left Paris?’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you ever would.’

  ‘Well, I got homesick for a place of my own. I’ve got a lovely little flat in St John’s Wood now. Of course, I paid the penalty financially, but I’m quite happy. I’m working for a printing firm – a bit of a comedown, but what can you expect? I reckon I’m very lucky. But I often think of those days. We had some laughs, didn’t we?’

  She surveyed him fondly. He wanted to bury his face in her neck and tell her all his troubles, but merely planted another kiss on her cheek and smiled.

  ‘And what about you? What about your work?’

  ‘I made it into a book,’ he said. He did not think he could tell her about the stunning monotony of his everyday life, for she would simply look at him with the rounded eyes of incomprehension. As it was she smiled at him fondly.

  ‘You always were a clever boy. And you’re quite handsome now, quite distinguished. You’ve filled out, grown even taller. Yet I knew you at once, didn’t I?’ She laughed delightedly.

  ‘I’m married,’ he said.

  ‘So that accounts for it. Well, dear, I’m so glad you’ve done well. Perhaps you’ll bring your wife to see me one of these days. Ring me any time: I’m in the book. Try some of this salami,’ she went on. ‘Have you still got your appetite? That’s one of the things I remember about you.’

  ‘You were always good to me, Roberta.’

  ‘Me?’ Her eyes widened. ‘We all liked you, Lewis. You were our pet. Well, I mustn’t keep you. Take care of yourself, dear. And give me a call sometime.’

  He felt inadequate to deal with such generosity of spirit, and merely watched her as she took up her position at the bread counter, still trim, still bold, despite her weight and her greying hair, still uninhibited, He loved her bright colours, so totally in character. He pictured her in her little flat, cooking exquisite meals, bossing her guests around. A contented woman, avid for the good things in life, and, no doubt, just as unnervingly direct. If he took Tissy to visit her she would sum up their marriage in a trice. He remembered how she had upbraided the virginal Cynthia. ‘Faites de la gymnastique ou faites-vous baiser!’ He smiled as he remembered, and then sighed. Much gained, much lost. Would it always be like this? Yet throughout the afternoon, in the silent library, the smile returned when he thought of Roberta, now stout, now kindly, with an innocence of goodwill that surpassed anything he had to offer. He pondered the mystery of kindliness, not very evenly distributed, appearan
ces deceiving more in this area than in any other. Curious, he looked her up in the telephone directory and saw that she lived in Hall Road. On his way home he sent her a large bunch of roses.

  For he was still seduced and beguiled by the company of women, and more by their company than by their unsettling challenges. He longed to relax, if that were possible, in their benign presence, and to begin his sentimental education all over again. He pictured a kind of seminar, where women would do the teaching, for was that not their business? Without them he had started off in different directions, possibly the wrong ones; nothing worked as he had expected it to work; even conversation had broken down. This must account for Tissy’s muteness, and for the unspoken questions that separated them. He did not in all honesty see how her present life could satisfy her, although it was clearly an improvement on the one she had known with her mother. Her very silences bespoke withdrawal, a private judgement, although he never heard her voice a single criticism. She was, in many ways, a stranger to him, a stranger whom he was duty bound to accommodate. He sometimes imagined that she felt the same way about him. Yet this marriage was by now so established that he had no choice but to continue it. There was no good reason not to do so. In comparison with Tissy, in her official role, Emmy appeared almost insubstantial, with no more authority than an outlaw. Faced with the problems they both presented he longed to be young again, immature, hopeful, comfortable, yes, comfortable, as he had not been for many years.

  But if Emmy appeared insubstantial, she was also extremely persistent. In his mind’s eye he conjured her up before him: she wore her long brown skirt, and her expression was severe, her eyes sorrowful. He could not mistake the fact that even in dreams and fantasies she appeared to be condemning him. So anxious did this make him that he was determined never to court such condemnation again. In the light of her contempt his chivalrous behaviour withered, and he realized that what he had thought of as a certain dull decency, a candidature for honest citizenship, would, by worldly standards, pass for impotence. He wanted to do the right thing, whatever that was: he was no longer sure. This thought raised certain fascinating speculations about what constituted heroic behaviour in those who lived in the real world and were not bound – or protected – by the conventions of literature. Dimly he began to perceive a second volume, an updating of his first: the hero enters the twentieth century. Or does he? As the mechanism of his mind began to function once more he felt a sensation of pure relief. This persisted in spite of his love for women in general and his wife and his putative mistress in particular. In fact the function of his work, as opposed to his imagination, was to safeguard him from such dangers as the unwary might fall into. In a new notebook he began to sketch out a plan, rejoicing as the titles of books to re-read began to multiply, and as tentative chapter headings began to take shape. It was time, he reckoned, to champion the cause of men in literature. The sympathy of the feminists was beginning to elevate women to impossibly heroic status. In realizing that both he and his subjects were bound by male conventions he felt distinctly refreshed. For the first time in many days he was able to lunch with Pen without thinking of him as Emmy’s brother. Pen’s fine ruddy face, with its agreeable air of amiability, evoked no other face in his tender memory but remained attached to Pen himself. He suspected that Pen knew something of what had passed between Emmy and himself but was too courteous to mention it. This evidence of masculine good manners cheered Lewis, making him feel less alone. Women, he reflected, would have been all over each other in similar circumstances. The idea of being invited to confide his troubles raised in him an instinctive shudder. The urge to confide was one thing: he had felt the urge to confide in Roberta. But this had been almost theoretical. The invitation to confide seemed to him to be situated on the line that divided friendship from conspiracy; women crossed it habitually, men never. So much did he admire his friend’s reticence that he wondered how he might convey this to him, then realized that to do so would have caused them both profound embarrassment.