Brief Lives

by Anita Brookner

  It was all a long time ago. She was nearly eighty when she died, and I am getting on for seventy. She never came to terms with age: in a sense she never had to, for she never lost her power. For myself things have been different. I was always hapless, timid. Yet age has dealt with me kindly so far. I keep well, and although I have put on a little weight my figure is still quite trim. I make the most of my appearance, follow the fashions, abide by my mother’s rule: brown in the autumn, navy in the spring. One or two people still remember me from the time when I sang on the wireless. I was Fay Dodworth, quite a favourite in those early days. I did the lighter sort of ballad, the serious spot on various comedy shows, before they all became too sophisticated. I had a pretty voice. Some said I was a pretty girl, although standards were lower then: one could be admired for such things as wavy hair or high cheekbones or a small waist or even a straight back. I was not sorry when it all came to an end; I never had the temperament for a performer. But I made a little comeback when I read the serial on ‘Woman’s Hour’: my voice was still musical, and my diction had always been good. That brought me quite a few letters from people who had listened to me in the early days. I felt quite bucked. Nothing of note has happened since then, but I keep busy, and cheerful. I have been complimented on my high standards. I do try to keep them up.

  Of course, I know the truth of how I really look, at night, with my hair down. I watched, almost objectively, the emergence of the asexual body, the body that must be treated with care, until it finally takes over, at the end. As my figure lost its definition, became subject to greater gravity, I knew that love was gone for ever. But it is the same for everyone, I told myself; everyone is bound by the law of change. One evening, I remember, I looked in puzzlement at my long hair, from which nearly all the colour had gone, and felt the softness at my waist. I wept then, briefly. But I slept that night as usual, and in the morning I woke and thought how foolish I had been. I am always light-hearted in the mornings. The late afternoon is my bad time, when the light goes. I get nervous then, and long for someone to come. At those times I feel fatally like my mother, waiting in the dusk for me to wave to her as I approached the house. But after a while I get up and make a cup of coffee and switch on for the news. There is absolutely no point in giving way to melancholy. There is always another day, or so I like to think.

  ‘Arcady’ was my song. ‘Arcady, Arcady is always young.’ I sang it at the end of the programme, sometimes as an encore. Such a pretty song. And I sang ‘Only Make-Believe’, and ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’, and ‘I’ll Be Loving You Always’. Beautiful songs, all of them. Sometimes the words come back to me, even now, but I try not to think about the melodies, which, since I have grown older, strike me as unbearably sad, plaintive, modest, wistful, redolent of everyday disappointments, even tragedies. I try not to brood, although I suppose I have as much to brood over as anyone else. So much gone. So much lost. But then I rally again, somehow or other. I have been lucky, really: nothing drove me off balance, which is so important if one at least tries to keep one’s dignity. On the whole my life has been very easy, very pleasant. I was a pretty girl, I married well … It all seems a long time ago. But what most women want I once had. I try to remember that.

  TWO

  MY FATHER, JIMMY DODWORTH, was a cinema manager, in the days when cinema managers stood in the foyer every evening in dinner jackets, dress shirts and bow ties. We lived in Camberwell, in one of those narrow Georgian houses now sought after by the sons and daughters of merchant bankers. We thought the house was just an ordinary house, rather dark, with too many stairs, and not much of a garden. My mother, who was highly strung and tired easily, disliked it: she dreamed of a modern flat, in a suburb like Ealing or Golders Green, with a fitted kitchen and central heating. I loved the house, which was the only one I had ever known. I played quite happily, as a child, on the landings or in my small bedroom, bounced a ball against the wall in the garden, which also contained a coal shed and an outhouse. There was an elderberry tree at the end, where the garden overlooked a narrow alley which ran out into the main road, and I would take my chair and sit underneath the tree, pretending I was in the country. I had no notion of what the country was like, for I rather think we never took a holiday: Father made a point of being on duty, as he called it, and Mother was a nervous traveller. Although restless and over-imaginative, it suited her to stay at home, to leave the house only when necessary, to do her shopping or to see a film. The cinema satisfied her cravings for a better life, revealing to her a world of possibilities, of luxury and extravagance, in which all one needed was a pair of dancing feet, a pretty face, or a singing voice which would captivate the man of one’s dreams and secure one’s heart’s desire. My mother believed in these things, and I did too.

  Our lives were shaped by the cinema, both in a physical and a moral sense. The appeal of the cinema in those days was its classlessness. The heroine was, more often than not, a plucky orphan, at most a modest dancer on a chorus line, or a shop-girl with blonde curls and a gift for repartee. The convention was that the hero should be of more elevated rank, that he should be astonished, beguiled, and finally swept off his feet by this spirited little nobody, who nevertheless was always impeccably turned out, spruce and provocative in her puffed sleeves and her silk stockings, as very few real working girls had the energy or the resources to be in those hard times. In virtually every Hollywood comedy there would be a villainous comic chorus of snobs, with cigarette holders and archaic hats—usually the hero’s mother and a discarded fiancée or two—all of whom would be vanquished by the heroine’s pertness and the hero’s sincerity. There would, inevitably, be an offer of marriage, for they were very moral tales. A girl won through by charm, or personality, not by influence, while if the hero ever had any base idea of seduction he was soon reformed by the virtue demonstrated by the object of his fascination—it was never, ever, passion—until such time as the knot was tied, to the accompaniment of a full-blown song and dance extravaganza.

  Those innocent films of the late 30s and early 40s influenced the outlook and the behaviour of a generation or two of young men and women. Girls with no experience whatever learned to be provocative, and boys, with even less experience, to be dashing. In reality they were fledglings, playing at desire, and finding the game delightful, arguably more delightful than the real thing, which they learned about much later, sometimes with bitterness, sometimes for life—for divorce was thought to be a disgrace, something not even to be contemplated—and without any sign of singing or dancing. Women with small children always appeared to me to be middle-aged when I was a child, while the cinema was the world of eternal youth. I learned, when I grew older, that eternal youth is too precious a delusion ever to be relinquished: it has to find a place somewhere, be enshrined in a myth, an ideal, even a fantasy. In those days before the war we lived a dream of innocence that the war years did not entirely shatter, even when we had seen sights which should never be seen by anyone, man or woman. It seems to me now, looking back, that one’s chances of happiness pertained only to youth, that one avoided adulthood for as long as possible. Adulthood came abruptly with marriage, and middle age with children. People rarely seemed to be as happy as they had hoped to be, before they grew up.

  I dare say it is all different now. The young people I meet, the daughters and sons of friends, seem incredibly experienced, although their faces are still tender. Studying these sons and daughters, all hard work and practical endeavour, all high standards and high achievement, and thinking back to my own young days I see myself, when I was their age, as totally unawakened, and not only unawakened but protected. I had no conception of worldliness other than what I saw on the screen or read about in Mother’s library books. Worldliness was quite simply for other people. Except that in the cinema one could gain one’s heart’s desire (without losing one’s head, of course) simply by possessing a pair of dancing feet or a pretty singing voice. Mother’s ambition for me was born in those early day
s, and although I should have been happier sitting under the elderberry tree, dreaming, or bouncing a ball against the side of the house, I was made to learn the piano, to take dancing lessons, and, when, to my mother’s disappointment, I revealed myself to be lacking in the sort of petulance and spirit then thought necessary in a dancer, to learn to sing, under the direction of Mme Mojeska, who was a real Polish lady, of some distinction, living on a small pension of mysterious origin and the fees of a few stolid little English girls, and probably the greatest stroke of luck I ever had in my young life. She taught me to sing, and not only to sing but to breathe and to hold myself properly: I learned to walk tall and to strengthen my chest and diaphragm, which is probably why I kept my figure for so long.

  In addition to being a cinema manager, my father was a Freemason and a poker player, which I thought enormously sophisticated of him. Throughout my childhood my father was a hero to me: did he not wear evening dress? I see now that he was an easy-going sort of man, indulgent, cheery, probably undistinguished. He had a sort of bonhomie that I have always appreciated in a man, an ability to put himself and others at ease, to impart a feeling of goodwill and whole-heartedness. Amiability: too few men possess the gift. I realize now that this amiability compensated for a certain weakness of character, and then I remind myself that even his weaknesses were amiable. No women in his life except my mother; only cards, and a certain amount of drink. Mother grew agitated when she saw him sitting in his shirt sleeves and braces, a glass of beer to hand, the dinner jacket discarded until the following evening. She always had more ambition than he had, more desire, I should now say, although it was a desire that was never satisfied. Father was too amiable to feel desire: what he wanted was an easy life, without challenges or impossible dreams, and with a certain provision of popularity and entertainment. Standing in the foyer, greeting patrons with a dignified and welcoming smile, he was a far more impressive figure than the man who later sat in his shirt sleeves and braces, wiping the froth of the beer from his brown moustache. Mother would hiss at him to put his jacket back on: he would simply pour himself another glass of beer. Sometimes Mother would leave the room in a huff; sometimes there would be tears as she saw the prospect of the modern flat in Finchley or Acton receding, saw herself condemned to pressing her husband’s evening trousers at the ironing board in the dark scullery for the rest of her life. And no lift, no jazzy carpet, no landscaped forecourt to compensate her for her labours. She grew haggard even in my lifetime as a child. But always dutiful, always obedient, a good wife. This was all the more remarkable since they were not very well matched. My mother should have had a chance at a more glamorous existence, not the harassed timid routines she repeated in our house. She was a fine looking woman, with great dark eyes, but she lost her looks too soon, when she was still young, although I never thought of her as young. She was simply my mother, who needed my protection when she went to the cinema, in case anyone should grow bold enough to speak to her; she was the woman who scolded my father, whose side, of course, I took; the woman who walked me to my singing lessons and waited for me so that she could walk me home after them. Something in her was appeased by those lessons. She seemed softer, quieter, as we strolled back, through the modest streets, looking at the modest shops. ‘Stop a minute, Fay,’ she would say. ‘I’ll just get one of those brown loaves for Father. He does so enjoy fresh bread.’ I loved her all the more at those times.

  I wanted my parents to love each other, as I dare say all children do, but really I loved my father best. I wanted him to go out and enjoy himself, even when Mother raised objections. The Freemasons were just about all right, although she felt nothing but contempt for the mysteries men got up to among themselves. I think she felt that men had no business to exclude or ignore women. But the Freemasons did good work, supported hospitals and schools, which in part satisfied her sense of propriety. What she could not stand were the all-night card games, which was why they never took place in our house. My father had a number of cronies who were keen poker players, and on a Saturday night he would change his evening clothes for a pair of grey flannels, a clean shirt, and a pullover, kiss my mother goodnight and go to the pub, where, because one of his partners was the publican, and because the publican’s wife was an easy-going sort of woman, he would join up with Harry and Joe and Paddy in a back room and stay there after hours, playing poker and drinking beer, until about three o’clock in the morning. On Sundays he rarely got up before noon. But he was a careful man, and I never saw him neglected or shabby, and he was always good-humoured. He loved my mother without ever understanding her, while I was the pride of his life. And whatever Mother had against his card-playing friends it was through the good offices of one of them, Harry, a small-time theatrical agent, that I got my first engagement. But this is to look into the future, and to the times that were beginning to be more grown-up, when what I like to remember is the golden days when we were a family, and, despite everything, loved each other so much.

  I grew up thinking that the world could be won with a pair of dancing feet or a pretty singing voice, and that all one had to do was to keep one’s white collars fresh and one’s hair regularly shampooed. And so it proved for me. But that came later; later too came information of a more unwelcome kind. What I remember, and what influenced me for so long, was the ritual that was enacted on Sunday afternoons in that narrow house, which now, I suppose, belongs to someone far wealthier than my parents ever dreamed of being. On Sundays, in the dying afternoon, we were at peace. Mother would have changed into one of her nice dresses—she was always well-dressed—and Father would fold up his newspaper and lay it aside with a sigh of contentment. ‘My girls,’ he would say. ‘My two beauties.’ Mother would briefly smile, her irritations forgotten. When I went to Paris on my honeymoon I saw that Mother was one of nature’s Frenchwomen, restless and active, with high social aspirations and a sense of style, both available and potential, and not much given to relaxation. But on Sunday afternoons we seemed to blend into one another, to form one dreaming unit, while the light faded outside and the fire shifted in the grate. I would sit on a stool at Father’s feet: Mother would be knitting. Or we would be reading, the simple honest stories which Mother brought home from Boots Lending Library and which were for us a source of endless pleasure, an integral part of Sunday, with nothing harsh or disturbing to tell us, and always a happy ending. Few people nowadays would be content with such diversions, yet that interval before it got too dark to read seemed to me—still seems to me—magical. I could not recreate it now, no matter how hard I tried, and part of the desolation of my last days will stem from the knowledge that I have never managed to replace it with anything of equal weight. But I was never destined for a happy ending, although I was so very happy at the beginning. I still wonder how this came about, although I am now in full possession of the facts.

  They wanted me to be happy, to be admired, to be a success. And I suppose they wanted me to be married, although they hoped that this would be in the far distant future. They never spoke of grandchildren: I was enough for them. And they were so good to me. There was no fuss when I moved out, into the little flat in Foubert’s Place which I shared with a girl I met when I was working with the orchestra. We broadcast in the mornings at eleven o’clock: Millie was the mezzo and I was the lyric soprano, and we sang on alternate programmes. I’ve kept in touch with her, although we see each other only rarely; she lives in the country now, a widow like myself. She comes to town to do her Christmas shopping and we meet for lunch. She is much heavier now, but still sweet-natured, still smiling. She was a lovely girl, older and more experienced than I was, and very kind. The kindness of Millie prolonged my innocence for even longer than was natural, I suppose, although it seemed natural to me. She was out nearly every night, and I was happy to wake her the following morning with a cup of tea. Mother was pleased for me: she felt that her ambitions had been fulfilled when she had a daughter living in the West End, sharing a flat as bachelor girls w
ere supposed to do, and being busy and bonny and hopeful. She never missed one of our programmes. And Father would forgo his Sunday morning rest to bring over some of the good china that Mother never used and some new pots and pans. Which was silly, when I come to think of it, because I always went home on Sunday afternoons and could have brought them back myself. But really he wanted to see how we were living and whether we were keeping the flat clean and tidy. Mother came too, but not on the same day. This was an enormous adventure for her; she hated to go out. She would bring a cake and I would make tea for her, and afterwards I would show her the shops in Regent Street and walk her to the bus stop. ‘Wait a bit, Fay,’ she would say. ‘Is there a shop where I could buy something for Father? A little loaf, perhaps?’

  My father collapsed in the foyer of his cinema one night in early December. An ambulance was called, although it was quite obvious that he was dead: it was unthinkable that he should be found on the premises. Mother had him brought home, and the following day I was sent for. I remember standing at the window, looking out at the black skeletal trees, and wondering how such sadness was to be borne. My grief was literally painful to me: I could hardly breathe. I have had other sorrows since then, and maybe the virtue of growing older is that one is more stoical; one accepts the burden of life, knowing that the alternative is simply death, non-existence, non-feeling. And it is inherent in the organism to want to endure for as long as possible, even for ever, so that one becomes willing to take on all the mishaps, all the tragedies, if they are the price to be paid. But I only learned this much later, and even now I have to learn the lesson every day. At that time, looking out of the window at the bare frightening leafless trees, I simply wondered if life could ever be the same again. And it never was; time had passed over it, and change was now the rule.