Brief Lives

by Anita Brookner

  Millie, on the contrary, was not. And neither was my mother, when she met Owen at Foubert’s Place. That was a little cowardice of mine. I knew that Owen would be shocked if I were to take him to Camberwell Grove, where my mother sat in dark rooms all day, and the only sound was the dripping of the tap in the stone sink in the scullery. Evidently she felt the same, which was good of her—but she was always good. I sent a car for her, and although she was pretty silent throughout the afternoon she did not appear to be frightened or dismayed, as I had feared. She did not like him, that was clear, but she was such a reticent woman that only I knew this. Owen was charming to her. Superficially all went well. I got on with Vinnie; Owen got on with Mother. But we all met together exceedingly rarely. There was no love among the four of us, only passion between Owen and myself, which we tried to impose on the others. They shrank back from this, sensing its promiscuity, its impropriety. After our marriage I visited my mother and Owen visited his. The only times I saw Vinnie were when someone gave her a lift to Gertrude Street and she ate whatever she could find in the kitchen. I continued to spend a day with Mother once a week.

  I wore blue, with a matching pillbox hat and a short blue veil for my wedding, which took place at Caxton Hall at the end of a beautiful spring, with the promise of a beautiful summer. I had known Owen for a year, which I thought was the equivalent of a lifetime. Mrs Savage had taken Mother out and made her buy a new dress, grey silk with white spots, very pretty. Millie was in pink, and not at her best. Her face was troubled. ‘Are you sure?’ she had said to me while I was dressing. ‘He’s not the sort to settle down, you know.’ But I thought that he might, and did not much care if I was wrong. I shall never forget how he appeared to me on my wedding day, impossibly handsome, too good for me. I thought that I had been granted my heart’s desire, and was almost frightened. Now I realize that I had been frightened almost from the beginning, frightened of losing him, frightened of boring him, frightened of my own feelings, even of his. Since knowing Owen a certain degree of fear was so natural to me that I no longer even noticed it.

  FOUR

  OWEN WAS AWAY a lot on business. The senior partners in the firm of solicitors for which he worked entrusted him with those clients who wanted to acquire property abroad and did not understand—or even wish to understand—the laws pertaining to the places in which they intended to have a second home. Monaco and southern Spain seemed to be the favourites: few English people had as yet invaded the Dordogne. Switzerland was for the super-rich, and Owen hoped to extend this market. He used to fly to Spain or the south of France on an average of once every two or three weeks, leaving me with a list of things to do in his absence. Since he had to entertain clients, or be entertained by them, his wardrobe, which was extensive, had to be kept in good repair, and he liked me to be at home so that his secretary could telephone me with the latest news of his movements. Sometimes I relied on her to tell me which flight he was catching, for he rang the office at the end of every afternoon and myself only first thing in the morning, before he went off for the day.

  I accepted this routine without demur. I felt no indignation that he should give priority to the office; I doubt if many wives did in those days, or at least the sort of wife who came from my background, which I began to perceive was a little too simple for a man like Owen. He was used to complexity, trickiness, ambivalence; he would rather, I thought, be intrigued by a woman than disarmed by her. He hated those moments of unavoidable truth-telling which occasionally passed between us. I really think that he hated desire. He wanted a wife who would cause him no anguish, yet at the same time he wanted to hold her at arm’s length. He never seemed to sense the incompatibility of these two needs, the one for trust, the other for distance, even for a sort of formality, and I soon learned not to draw his attention to what was, to me, faintly alarming, his abrupt cancellation of intimacy as soon as the occasion for that intimacy had passed. My fault was precisely this, that I would seek to prolong our moments of closeness when I could see that he was already restless with the wish to do something else. My mistake was to lie in his arms moist-eyed with tenderness and gratitude, when the correct stance would have been a certain detachment, an irony, as if to imply that he would have to love me to a much higher standard to convince me that I had to take him seriously. I should have found such a tactic odious, but now I see that it is sometimes necessary to meet withdrawal with withdrawal, dismissal with dismissal. I did not know this then, and because of what has happened since I remain unconvinced of it even now, but I see that if a woman has it in mind to bring a man to heel she may have to play a part which runs counter to her own instincts, unless her instincts are those of an aggressor, which mine certainly were not.

  Contrary to Millie’s prognostications Owen did settle down, but in a way that surprised me. From being bored by, or at least indifferent to, his profession he became keenly ambitious. Mixing as he did with people who were wealthy, some of them shamelessly so, he began to have aspirations himself: the reluctant young man that he had once been was fascinated by the open-handedness, even the coarseness, of some of his clients. Men did not yet wear a chestful of gold medallions, but they were beginning to acquire them. The medallions, I later learned, were not for decoration but for hard currency in a tight spot. It was not the swimming-pools and the girlfriends that attracted Owen, not the luncheon parties on terraces that went on for a whole afternoon and to which itinerant film actresses were invited—it was none of these things. It was, rather, a kind of thoughtless enthusiasm and well-being, an absence of reflection combined with a keen appetite for profit and speculation, effects without causes, as if all of life could be contained in the sort of conversation that would take place between two men, stripped to the waist, smoking cigars after lunch in the Mediterranean sun, champagne glass to hand. My husband, who had always struck me as complicated, and whose complexities I had promised myself to study and to understand, now yearned to be simple, with the sort of simplicity that only the very rich can command. Straight deals mixed with fabulous entertainment, the one indistinguishable from the other: that was what Owen liked. I met some of his clients, for it fell to my lot to entertain them when they were in London, although Owen in fact preferred to meet them on their own home ground. I could see why: the house in Gertrude Street, commodious as it was, was not really fashionable, as it was soon to become, and those terrible brooding colours of Hermione’s were far from welcoming. Even in summer the house was dark, and my cold salmon, on which I had spent the entire afternoon arranging cucumber slices in the form of scales, seemed chilly even in June, while the pale wine, in Hermione’s engraved glasses, seared my mouth. The guests—Owen’s guests—ate well but absent-mindedly, smoked between courses, and after greeting me ignored me completely. They had not become rich by being charming to unimportant people like myself.

  I was a stranger to the guests in my house, the Harrisons, the Smiths, Sir Victor and Lady Eberlin, the Sandford-Roches, and they were eternally strangers to me. It was not yet seemly to be rich, and the girth and laughter of the men, and the deep brown faces and long red nails of the women made me feel a little uncomfortable. I did not know how these people spent their time, nor did I see how I could ever spend time with them. I resented their hold over my husband, and I suspected that they made him presents of money that the partners knew nothing about. He was their man of business and therefore a licensed hanger-on; he was to be there when they needed him and could be telephoned in the middle of the night if necessary. When I suggested, mildly, as a respectful wife should, that some of these people were perhaps not very nice, Owen laughed at me and said I was a prig. ‘You don’t think I take them seriously, do you? But they’re not so bad when you get to know them. Old Jack’s a very amusing character. And Molly’s quite a sweet girl really. You got on all right with Molly, didn’t you?’ Old Jack was one of the first property tycoons, and Molly, his third wife, was his junior by twenty-six years. When Owen had brought them to the house for the
first time she had struck me as rather drunk, and I had taken her upstairs to tidy up, at her own request. Once in my bedroom she had become tearful, and told me that her life was not as easy as it looked. Downstairs again she placed a loaded hand on Jack’s thigh, squeezed it, and said, ‘She has the most darling bed.’ She made it sound like a cot. ‘Take a look at it before you leave. Jack loves beds,’ she told us, with a trouperish but still tearful smile. ‘All kinds. All the time.’ Jack, to his credit, remained impassive throughout this announcement. I did not think that Molly was in for a very long run.

  Although these people were strangers to me, and although Owen’s appreciation of them appeared misplaced, what really frightened me was the fact that his work had become the centre of his affectivity. His entire emotional life seemed to consist of an enthusiasm for people, for places, even for activities far removed from the home I had tried to make for him, far, too, from my own settled expectations. In this he was ahead of his time. Having lived so much longer than he was able to do I now see young men, and young women too, whose working lives represent and contain all their aspirations, their desires, almost. Nowadays I read that in New York work has replaced love as the highest priority. I also read that the women who make what they call a commitment to their careers are likely to confess to being lonely and desolate and to lament the shortage of men. Given this fact, of course, men in the same position are not likely to lament the shortage of women, but they will tend to treat them differently. Owen’s behaviour towards me became perfunctory, as I suppose it always does when a man’s work is more important than his wife’s peace of mind. Orders would be given for the week’s entertaining, telephone calls would be made and received all the time, when we were eating, frequently when we were in bed, and love became purely functional. The strangest thing was that this kept him perfectly happy. The house ran smoothly, I offered no objection to his way of life, I was docile and malleable still, but best of all, from his point of view, there was no longer any real intimacy between us. Intimacy, I see now, was what he feared the most; intimacy made him uneasy, as if he had forfeited or lost part of himself in the process, as if it had made him vulnerable to criticism, to attack. I had seen his face after I had once, in the early days, prevailed on him to love me; it was fretful, pained, resentful. All this I saw in one terrible moment, as he turned away from me. He sat on the edge of the bed, naked, his clasped hands hanging between his knees. Poor Tom’s a-cold, I thought. I was so frightened then that I vowed I would keep my distance. For that was what he wanted, and I still loved him enough to try to please him.

  Vinnie would turn up from time to time, and say, ‘And how’s that naughty boy of mine?’ She almost never asked me the same question. I remember on one occasion I had put a careful casserole of chicken and peppers on the kitchen table to cool and she began to dip into it with a teaspoon. The teaspoon was supposed to indicate that she was not really interested in eating it, but had merely come into the kitchen to keep me company, since that was where I inexplicably chose to spend my time. I remember reacting rather sharply. ‘Please, Vinnie! That casserole is for this evening!’ She looked surprised and annoyed; I had never scolded her before. ‘I was only tasting it,’ she protested. ‘But you keep using the spoon,’ I said. ‘And it’s got your lipstick on it.’ I felt the tears of exasperation and hopelessness rising to my eyes, took the spoon, and dropped it in the sink. She immediately lit a cigarette, and said, ‘Bad time of the month, is it? I used to be the same. Just find me an ashtray, would you?’ I quickly put the lemon mousse away in case it got a flake of ash on it. I wanted her to go away; I wanted to cry my eyes out. When I took my head out of the fridge I caught sight of the face she was putting to rights with the aid of a mirror and a lipstick-stained handkerchief which she kept in her bag for the purpose of adjusting the contours of her mouth. This disgusting habit repelled me, but now I caught sight of her eyes, those uncensored eyes which were always lonelier than the rest of her face. ‘I’m sorry, Vinnie,’ I said. ‘Let me make you some coffee. Is someone coming to collect you?’ She smiled frostily. ‘As you may have noticed, I’m on my own today. Just get me a taxi, would you?’ There was usually a taxi on the corner, but it meant my going out into the street. I switched off the oven, reflecting that in doing so I had probably ruined the batch of coconut tuiles that I had intended to accompany the mousse, went out into the street without removing my apron, in time to see a taxi driving off. ‘There’s going to be a slight delay,’ I said, back in the kitchen. ‘You’d better have that coffee after all.’ I was aware of the need to appease her, but she had decided to take the incident seriously. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to telephone Godfrey Burton for me,’ she said. This was a neighbour of hers in Swan Court, much in demand as a squire to various ladies, whose colours he was then obliged to fly. ‘I’m sure he would not mind bringing the car round,’ she said with awful majesty. She was, of course, perfectly capable of catching a bus, but liked to boast that she had never been on a bus in her life.

  When Godfrey Burton turned up I had to offer him coffee, to which he assented enthusiastically. ‘Tell Owen to telephone me, would you?’ were her distant words to me as she left on Godfrey’s arm. I had no doubt that complaints were to be made. This did not bother me unduly—it had, after all, been a squalid little incident—but the fact that Vinnie hated me, had probably always hated me, hurt me suddenly. It was as if she had bequeathed to her son the same propensity, a decision to dispense with emotions once they had served their purpose. She had been pleasant enough until I had shown real exasperation over the spoilt casserole, and what she had, quite rightly, intuited as some kind of watershed. The exasperation had been so real, so charged, that it was an unmistakable emotional fact. This was distasteful to her, as was any emotion, and so she decided to punish me for it. And in that moment I began to wonder if Owen would eventually do the same.

  It should have been clear to me then that there was a great deal wrong with my marriage, but these things only become clear in retrospect. And it was a matter of pride to me not to believe that anything was wrong, or that I was not entirely happy. On the surface Owen was an excellent husband, more handsome than ever, bronzed from frequent Mediterranean business trips, successful, hardworking, and extremely popular. To look at him, to be in his company, one would have thought that he was a man in love with life. But in fact he was only in love with a certain sort of life—a tycoon’s life—and it was a life in which I was cast for quite a minor role. I began to feel like the poor girl I had once been, before I started earning my own money. Now I no longer had that resource, and although Owen gave me a handsome housekeeping allowance we entertained so much, and he insisted on such elaborate meals, that there was little left over at the end of the week. I longed to go up to town and take Millie to lunch and out shopping for the afternoon, but in fact I did not want to meet her penetrating eye. And I was aware that my own clothes, for which allowance was also made in the budget, were far more expensive than hers could ever be, although I thought they looked too old for me and longed to buy something cheap and pretty. So the sad thing was that I occasionally made excuses when she telephoned me or I telephoned her—I was always theoretically preparing for a dinner party—and when she asked me, as she always did, what I was going to wear, and I said, ‘My green silk,’ she would say, with surprise in her voice, ‘I don’t know that, do I? I don’t know half your clothes now. Do let’s get together soon. I’ll come over and bring a cake, and we’ll have a really good talk.’ ‘Lovely,’ I would say, but when we met there was a tiny constraint between us. ‘Are you happy?’ she would say. ‘That’s all that counts.’ ‘Of course,’ I would reply. But there was too much heartiness, too much airiness, too much flippancy in my attitude for Millie’s taste. She knew otherwise, and she was never wrong. She knew before I did.

  I would escape from the house, which I hated, and take long walks, but Gertrude Street, which is a handsome street, filled with handsome houses, merely feeds into
other streets exactly like itself. It is also treeless and sees practically no traffic since it is closed at one end by a long low building the purpose of which I never discovered. Every time I left the house my spirits, already low, would be further lowered by the emptiness and the silence, and I would hurry round the corner to the place where the buses stopped to change drivers and look longingly at the small café with the steamy windows where the crews went for their tea. In memory I see those walks of mine as eternally overcast, under a white sky. The meagre light and the occasional whine of a car on its way to somewhere more interesting oppressed me almost as much as the house had done, and after a half-hearted excursion to the shops to buy something that was not really needed I would hear my footsteps ringing out as I turned back into Gertrude Street. Those eternal winter afternoons, when Owen was away in the sun, stretched before me in an endless progression; there was something implacable about their changelessness, and about my own despair. I had always been so lighthearted, but now I seemed to sigh a lot, and even to feel unwell. The headaches, announced so dramatically that first day in Vinnie’s flat, had become a regular feature of my life, and I had frequently to sit at my own dinner table unobtrusively pushing food about my plate and smiling at Jack or Molly or their equivalent with a pulse beating behind my eyes and a feeling of nausea in my throat.

  When Mother, whom I still visited regularly, asked me if I were happy I replied instantly and warmly that of course I was. She knew the truth of the matter, as did Millie. But I did not. That was another strange thing. As far as I was concerned I still loved my husband, and I think, even at this distance, that I really did. Owen never failed me, in his limited fashion, but his requirements were too formal, too impersonal, to satisfy my hopes. He wanted me to remain the devoted and humble girl that I had been when he first married me, and in my heart I was. But I was older now, old enough to be tired, and while I had been getting older and more tired. (I who had never been tired before) the world seemed to be getting younger. We were told that we had never had it so good, and the greater part of the nation seemed to think that this was the simple truth. But I noticed that the new frenetic music had put an end to the pretty songs which I used to sing and which only old people now seemed to remember. I suppose I had always sung for a staid and settled population, modest people for whom listening to the wireless was treat enough at the end of a working day, or housewives and mothers at home. They were songs of love and longing, all kept in decorous perspective and proportion. I did not understand the shouting and enthusiasm of the new music or its lack of charm. I had no piano in Gertrude Street, and when I tried a few scales unaccompanied I noticed how my voice had darkened. The voice deepens as one gets older. The change was infinitesimal to anyone who was not trained, but I knew, as I sang those scales, that my singing days were over. ‘Arcady,’ I sang fearfully, in the cruel indigo room. ‘Arcady, Arcady is always young.’ My voice cracked very slightly on the high note, and I blushed, a deep suffusing blush that ebbed away slowly, leaving me quite weak.