Brief Lives

by Anita Brookner

  I mourned the death of my love for my husband, much as I think he mourned the death of his love for me. In that we were faithful to each other, and well matched. Neither of us, I am convinced, looked outside marriage for consolation; at least I never did, and I think Owen too was innocent in this respect. I considered this rather splendid of him, a badge of his original excellence, for he had many opportunities and was a fine-looking man to whom women were naturally attracted. As time wore on, and his permanently tanned face grew a little redder, and his body a little thicker, I would catch an occasionally puzzled look in his dark blue eyes as if age had surprised him, had taken advantage of his absence on other matters to install itself so insidiously. He did not care for my tender sorrowful approaches to him, and so I learned to suppress them. I think he loved me as much as he was capable of loving a woman, in conditions of intimacy, and for life. I am certain that he trusted me, and that the money left so ostentatiously in his sock drawer, where I should be sure to find it, was his way of confessing to me what was being enacted between himself and his so jovial and hospitable clients. I said nothing, not only because I was frightened and alienated, but because I knew that he would wish me to say nothing. I had by now realized that Owen was emotionally inarticulate—always had been—that the handsome and brazen personage with whom I had fallen in love was in fact in need of my acceptance, and more than that, of my care and protection, which I fully and freely gave.

  Although we never recaptured the strange closeness—the almost uncharacteristic closeness—that Nice had previously bestowed on us, we did manage an evening walk or two, when Owen would catch my hand in his, or lay his arm around my shoulders, and when the middle years fell away from us and we felt that we had not done too badly after all. Now that I am old I like to remember that, and am proud to do so.

  To Julia the holiday was a disappointment, loudly and freely admitted, and therefore Charlie felt distressed on her behalf. Julia deplored the money being spent, although none of it was hers, and Charlie, who seemed to be a wealthy man, would have spent more, unstintingly, to make her happy. Julia, I now see, and saw even then, was in the throes of such late middle age that it counts as middle age only as a matter of courtesy, and feared the onset of the time when she would have to acknowledge the fact that she was an old lady. I could see that this was a crisis for a woman as beautiful and as prestigious as Julia, a woman, moreover, who had had a gallant past, but as I was ten years younger myself I simply thought that she was making an unholy fuss and could feel little genuine sympathy. I noted her irritability, promising mentally to do better when my own decline set in. Everything annoyed her, although a genuine expression of annoyance was foreign to her languid nature. If anything, she became more watchful, more acute, more dangerous. She referred more to her previous lovers, knowing that Charlie hated this; she became quite vulgar in her allusions to Owen and myself, when we announced that we were going to take an evening walk. Our wistful, almost elegiac closeness—a closeness which admitted its own lack of mutual understanding—gave her particular offence. She could not see how delicate, how fragile our contact was, or she did not believe in any closeness that was not of a sexual nature. She was a lewd woman, I think, and a cold one. At the same time she could not bear to be left alone, and would only be quiescent when the four of us were together in the bar of the hotel, which had become her salon. Even then she would express soulfulness, disillusionment. She would flap her hand in front of her eyes as if to chase away flies. There are few flies in Nice in December, but Julia managed to make one believe that she was beset by a small colony of them. She was not an actress for nothing. And her particular performances, relying as they did on pause and insinuation, could be used as an excellent instrument in any social game she chose to play.

  I could see that she was forlorn, uncomfortable, unhappy even, but my own growing impatience with the boundaries that had been set to my life made me less than indulgent. Indeed, in my own mind I was scornful, convinced that I could do better. I felt what I can only describe as an urchin’s irritation at the sight of all this upper-class distress. I had read the story of the princess and the pea, when I was little, and had felt no sympathy at all for the princess. ‘But why didn’t she just remake the bed?’ I had asked my mother. ‘Because she was too grand,’ my mother had replied, ‘and so she didn’t know how beds are made.’ This had turned into a lesson on how to make my own bed, which I learned very quickly, as I learned all domestic tasks: there was no servant in our house. Whereas Julia, who had never looked after herself, who would not even enter a room unless there were someone in attendance, began to strike me as importunate, faint-hearted, immature. I felt in myself a burgeoning scorn, not only for Julia, but for the acquiescent and mild-mannered Charlie, even for my own husband with his slipshod standards, which had become the standards by which we lived. I would, I thought, give them the slip for a couple of days: all it needed was a little courage. I would put on my walking shoes and tie a scarf round my hair and make for the hills, where we had been happy before. Of course this was a fantasy, destined never to be enacted, but it remained potent and served me well for many years to come.

  What condemned me to inaction was my own desire to be liked, or if possible loved—lifelong, this, and hitherto unproblematic—and the attention I wished to give to Owen, to whom I felt myself bound in an entirely new fashion. It was as if I had set my former feelings aside, as if they were out of date, juvenile, even, in some vague way reprehensible. They had, in any event, died a long time ago. What I intended to be now was something more practicable, which was what Owen would have preferred all along. I faced the fact that he would rarely if ever make love to me in the years ahead, and that all I could hope for was his hand, in an unguarded moment, catching hold of mine, or his arm laid about my shoulders. The strange thing was that this realization did not frighten me or even make me indignant, for what was coming into being was a sort of pity. Owen seemed to me pitiable, unshriven. I thought, incongruous though this may seem, of medieval peasants, sinful and fearful, waiting eternally for God’s judgment. Owen, all unconscious of this dilemma, nevertheless appeared to me in the guise of one who requires sanctuary, pardon. The occasional look of puzzlement in his eye, as if needing help from some unknown source, reminded me of a picture I had seen in the same museum through whose little garden I walked every day: naked souls, their hands joined, the same look of discomfiture on their large-nosed faces, slipping out of the reach of God and His angels into the flames of hell. I had thought the picture naïve, applicable only to the century in which it was painted; now I was not so sure. I found myself going back to see it day after day, but after my first visit it seemed to rebut me. I tried to find out more about it, but even the information on the label seemed deliberately scanty, as if not available to one of so little faith. Ecole française, XVe. siècle, it said. And that was Owen to me, slipping away from good to bad, and the only role I was henceforth to play was as guardian, as curator. With this difference now: I could see the need for care. For vigilance, even. I would be Owen’s keeper. I would see that he was not cast out.

  The pity and sadness that I felt for my husband installed in me a detachment from him that was perhaps long overdue. Our frail closeness was a form of leave-taking: it was commemorative, valedictory. It held compassion for both of us. My task, as I saw it, was to cleave to Owen for the rest of my life, or of his, while acknowledging the fact that I no longer loved him as I would have wished to love him. In this way fate, which had denied me children, would see that my maternal instincts did not go entirely unused. I perceived the irony of this, but I did not appreciate it. There was no doubt in my mind that I could accomplish the task thus set before me but I felt a coldness descend on my spirit, the coldness which marks the recognition that equality in love will never be attained. I knew I was growing older, although I was only in my middle forties—forty-five, to be exact—and I remember that as the thought of my age struck me I got up and went to the mirr
or. To myself I was unchanged, merely a little heavier, but in the cruel light of the hotel bathroom I could see that my hair was duller than it had been, while my eyes looked strained and anxious. I could see no great alteration until I looked at my hands, which were now freckled with the marks called grave spots; the hands seemed larger, uglier than they had been, as if they had grown old while I was not paying attention. I was still active, still in good health, and it seemed absurd to think in terms of any kind of climacteric, but I knew that it had to come, and for a moment or two I sat in horror, knowing that love had gone and would never return. For I was not as ready to sacrifice myself as I had supposed, or rather I was ready in all conscience, but not with all my instincts: the body still retained its own longing, and I could see that with all the resolution in the world there might be sad times ahead.

  We had been away for a fortnight, and it seemed longer. Christmas had come and gone, and New Year’s Eve had been spent in a strange bedroom, with alien lights passing over the ceiling and cars hooting outside. On the morning of New Year’s Day the hotel bar smelt of whisky and cigarettes, and porters were removing streamers from the lobby, where a party of revellers had come in from the street and had had to be removed. Outside, the sky was a pale blue and the sun shone, but it was colder at last, and I was aware of the immense and unbearable longing I still felt for gratification, plenitude, abundance. The prospect of going home to Gertrude Street almost frightened me into asking Owen if we might stay on for a while. I did not do so, because if Charlie returned Owen would have to go too, and Julia, whose complaints were now louder, had insisted that we leave almost immediately. So that on the morning of the day of our departure—our plane left at four-thirty in the afternoon—I really did give them the slip and went out on my own, not really caring that I had not explained to anyone where I was going or how long I should be. In any case I did not know the answer to either of these questions. I longed for company of an uncomplicated nature, and felt a sudden sharp distaste for the trickiness and compromise that had been our common language for the last two weeks, the dodging of Julia’s criticisms, the finely judged reception of her tantrums, my own murderous desire for Charlie to display a little less fortitude and patience, and my longing for Owen to take me by the arm and say to the others, ‘You won’t mind will you, if Fay and I escape for a while? We’ll see you at the airport on the 8th. Or perhaps we could all have dinner together on our last evening here?’ None of this had taken place. Instead there had been an aimlessness, of a kind to ruffle my practical nature, and I wanted, with all the spirit of the girl I had been, to enjoy myself just once, so that the entire fortnight need not have been wasted.

  My wants were simple, and were timidly satisfied. I sat in the open air near the market stalls and drank a cup of coffee and listened to the market women greeting each other. How happy, how busy they sounded, and how I envied them! My unhappiness was slowly coming into higher relief now that I contrasted myself with these women, with their red hands and their coarse hair and their splendid teeth. I sat there neatly in my pale blue suit and my fine calf shoes, my bag and gloves on the rough wooden table beside my empty cup of coffee. Then, as I felt time running out, I got up with a sigh, and wandered lingeringly down the streets and back to the hotel. I bought some flower scents for Mother and some yellow hyacinth bulbs for myself. It was, of course, either too early or too late for bulbs, but I would plant them anyway. They would remind me of the South, to which I intended to return some day. I did not see how this could be accomplished, but, like the bulbs, the promise comforted me.

  On the plane coming home Owen held my hand, which was unusual. When I looked at his face it was entirely self-absorbed, as if it had nothing to do with the hand that held mine. He had a look of wistfulness and constraint, as if he were waiting for bad news, or as if he were a patient in a hosptial. He smiled at me briefly when he felt me looking at him, then turned away to the window. As the light passed over his face I saw a blankness in his eyes. It was gone in an instant, but I saw it, and it shocked me. I somehow knew that nothing in the past few days had happened to reassure him or to cheer him up, and I held his hand more firmly. Darkness filled the space outside the window. When it was complete I knew that we were nearly home.

  SEVEN

  MY MOTHER DIED in the spring of that same year, three months after I had made my decision to resign myself to a life for which I no longer had any taste. This death, on the morning of a cold day in late March, filled me with such despair that I suffered in a very real physical sense, and when I looked around the house in Gertrude Street I felt threatened by an overwhelming panic, as if I had been forcibly put down in alien territory, removed from home against my will, and left alone for ever and ever. This was ridiculous, because I was a middle-aged woman, and, as far as I knew, of sound mind. On the day of her death, after Joan Barber had telephoned me to say that she had found my mother when she went in at her usual time, I rushed out into the silent street, hoping that someone would come to my rescue, throwing myself onto the kindness of strangers. But there was no one about, only the sound of a distant car, which grew briefly louder and then quieter, until it disappeared altogether. I stood in the greyish silence, unable to believe that I should never hear my mother’s voice again. After a while a 31 bus turned round the corner and stopped outside the café: the driver climbed down from the cab and went inside. That was the only human presence I encountered that morning, yet I stood there shivering, unable to face the journey and the house that awaited me.

  Mother never got to live in the flat of her dreams, with the fitted carpet and the wall lights, and perhaps a few flowerbeds outside tended by a contract gardener. I found her more than one such flat, but she refused to move from the house in which we had all lived when I was young. By the end of her life it had grown very shabby, and although Joan Barber was good about clearing up she was not enterprising enough to see to things like getting the windows cleaned, which I had done, on a step ladder, on my now more frequent visits. I had performed many sad tasks, sad because they spoke of decay. When I went into the kitchen with the food I took over, I could smell stale dusters and dishcloths, hear the tap dripping into the new red plastic basin I had bought her, see that the clock had stopped, that she had not replaced last year’s calendar, which still showed September, under a reproduction of Canaletto’s Warwick Castle. Before taking off my coat I would note what had to be done. The little parcels of cold salmon, of tongue, of fruit tart, the hothouse peach and the madeira cake, would be put into the larder to replace the little parcels left over from my last visit, which had not been touched. Mother refused to eat, either out of genuine incapacity or of languor. I mentioned this to Joan Barber, who said, ‘Oh, I see that she has a milky drink every morning. And she likes those biscuits I bring her.’ The biscuits were the sort of chocolate and synthetic marshmallow confections that were designed to appeal to children. Thus my mother subsisted on what was not real food, or perhaps the sort of food that an impatient parent would hand out to stop a toddler from grizzling. The sight of an abandoned plate containing a biscuit from which a minute bite had been taken, as if by a child, and which my mother had felt unable to finish, affected me inordinately. It was the first thing I found when I entered the house after her death. It was her last meal.

  I think we both knew that she was dying, although I was better at hiding the knowledge from myself than she was. I went on filling the house with factitious business and conversation, hoping to bring at least a faint smile to her face. My basket of morsels small enough to tempt her was unwrapped for her inspection and put away; I would at least be able to persuade her to eat some lunch, and I knew I should be with her every day to perform this little ceremony, although I also knew that the battle was already lost. My mother was not frightened. The discovery of her devotion to my father and his memory had made me jumpy, irritable, as if this were somehow a dangerous path to pursue. She wanted to join him, but I wanted her to live. That was not surprising:
I wanted everyone to live—I wanted to live myself. But while I talked to my mother in a brisk voice, mentally noting that the kitchen floor needed cleaning and that I could just manage to do it, as well as washing the tea-towels, before it was time for me to go back to Gertrude Street, she would smile at me, as if in forebearance, as if to humour me, and go off for her rest.

  While Mother slept, in her dark bedroom, with the looming old-fashioned furniture and the blue patterned carpet that my father had laid so badly, I scrubbed the floor and did the washing, trying to dispel the sad odours which had built up in that silent kitchen. Soon I was taking over bottles of bleach and disinfectant and going through the house, the whole house, which seemed to me redolent of desertion and neglect. I was like the sorcerer’s apprentice, sweeping and polishing under some terrible compulsion, not because my mother wanted me to, but rather because she was now utterly indifferent to her surroundings, did not notice those sad odours, had become an old lady who wore thick stockings and wide shoes, she who had been so fastidious, so critical, so elegant in her modest way. I would make her a cup of tea and take it to her bedroom to wake her: I was anxious to get home before Owen, even anxious to get away from Mother. But she would awaken from her sleep with a slightly renewed sense of—what was it? Energy? Conviction?—and she would ask me about myself. I was too frightened to tell her. I kept up a bright chatter, which sounded too loud in my ears, and so she learned all the unimportant things about my life: what I cooked, what Owen was doing, who was coming to dinner. None of this was of any interest, either to my mother or to myself. Her eyes would be fixed on my face, although her expression indicated absence. ‘Do you still sing?’ she once interrupted me, as I was telling her about Owen’s last trip. ‘Sing to me, Fay.’ So I held her hand and sang her some of my old songs. It was then that we both knew that she would die very soon.