Brief Lives

by Anita Brookner

  I was about to do something prestigious, something I had never done before, and I felt a very slight return of energy. Professional pride had never meant anything to me: it was as natural for me to sing as it was to breathe. It had never occurred to me to think of singing as an heroic enterprise, whereas breaking off a love affair seemed to demand of me a certain prowess. It called for style, and I doubted that I should be equal to the occasion. It was my lack of style that had made me fear Julia. Still she came into my mind, had in fact never left it. We could never be friends; the idea was abusive, perverse. Acquaintances perhaps, whose acquaintanceship was dwindling. I should in effect be taking my leave of Julia, as well as of Charlie. It was strange how they now appeared to me to be indivisible, as if I could not know one without partaking of the other. That had been the position and I had ignored it, and had paid the price of ignoring it. If I had been discreet, uncomplaining, it was out of shame as well as a sense of what was fitting. And I was not really qualified for the task. It seems to me now that a mistress is a kind of prodigy, that this particular calling is not within the reach of all. The young can manage it, but such is their innocence that they do not even use the word, which is lurid, old-fashioned, with connotations of little black dresses and scarlet nails and evil ways. The young can manage anything, and perhaps they should: it is their prerogative. But a woman like myself, conventional, a widow, which somehow makes it worse, has no business to be engaging in these matters. Yet to say goodbye to someone—anyone—is such a terrible thing that it should not be undertaken lightly. One shrinks from such finality, and if one does not there is something wrong. Nature gives the warning here. But then Nature has also provided an unwelcome commentary: tiredness, a wrinkled skin. These are harsh verdicts on what is unsuitable, inappropriate. My weakness was to wish for consolation, when, properly speaking, there could be none.

  I was not quite prepared to act on my great decision, and so I did something that I had thought of doing for a long time: I telephoned Millie and asked if I could come down for a day or two. She was delighted, and her pleasure moved me, made me think of simple days to come, or at least of simple days in the past when I seemed to have achieved the wholeness I now desired. It perturbed me slightly that I was not able to let Charlie know that I should be away; I had never done this before, and had always been there to speak to him, to greet him, to serve him his coffee. I thought of the telephone ringing in the empty flat and felt a disappointment that I should not be there. For some reason it reminded me of the telephone ringing in Gertrude Street and my not being there to pick it up, my preferring to be absent in the sunny streets. There was no lightheartedness in my present projected absence, no sense of escape, as there had been that last time. There was no summer to beckon me away from my duties, for now I had no duties to abandon. I had difficult work to do, preparations to make for a new life, one for which I suddenly had little taste.

  I felt weak and incapable of getting to Paddington, so I ordered a car to take me down to Millie’s, or at least to Moreton-in-Marsh, where she would meet me. From the back seat of the car London frightened me as it never did when I was on foot; I seemed to enter a world of traffic from which there was no exit and all I saw was ugliness, thundering lorries, overpasses, meek houses, seedy private hotels, factories apparently sited in vacant lots, and everywhere noise, confusion, urgency. England seemed to have turned into one huge road system while I had been living my sleeping life. Reading passed me in a flash, then Oxford, and then the sounds diminished and we were in the open country. Charlbury, Kingham, Moreton. I told the driver to drop me outside the station, where Millie was to collect me. I had an hour in hand. On weakish legs I wandered down the handsome high street, found a café and went in. I sat at a table in the window and drank excellent hot coffee. I wondered what it would be like to live in such a place. There could be no life more circumscribed than the one I had devised for myself, and it might be better for me to have a change, or rather make one. Shops here sold the same products, the same newspapers. And the place was handsome. Pale buildings faced each other across a carriage road; there was a porticoed hotel, and a couple of estate agents, and a particularly fine bank building. There were souvenir shops for the visitors, and discreet pubs with an air of reserve about them. There was nothing to stop me living here, near to Millie, but already I felt the ache of the town dweller displaced into an atmosphere which will never become familiar. I should never become a native of this place, never accept it as my own or myself as part of it. Yet it was beautiful. As I walked back to the station I noticed a lightness in the air, a powdery hazy quality and a colour somewhere between grey and blond, a trembling of leaves waiting to emerge, a watery lightness to the clouds, a white brilliance held in check. Spring, so much more noticeable than in London, where only the cut flowers changed and where one made special detours to view flowering trees. Spring was also unsatisfactory in London, pale mornings leading to long pale days in which nothing seemed to happen, and bird-song sounding forlorn in the long late twilight. In the country spring seemed sturdier, more an affair of men and cultivation than of women and girls, and their vapours. Distractedly I scanned the pleasant street, and at last I glimpsed Millie, waving. I waved back and ran towards her, as fast as my newly fledged condition would allow.

  She had aged too. The skin of her face was shiny and seamed and her hair was now pepper and salt and tied back carelessly with a velvet ribbon. She had worn it like that when she was a girl, when we were both girls, and were slim-waisted in the pretty cotton frocks of the day. Now she wore an olive green waterproof jacket and a tweed skirt, thickish stockings and flat shoes. Her legs, which had been magnificent, were still beautiful, as were her hands, white, straight, without loose flesh. The full body, sloping down into those beautiful legs, had been Millie’s greatest attraction, and even now that the body bent a little forward at the waist I could see her as she had been when she was a girl. We had never quarrelled, had never shocked or disturbed each other with unwonted confessions or unwise accusations. Some instinct had kept us true friends. We had preserved each other’s modesty. That was how we came to greet each other with such a rush of feeling; we knew that there were no spoiled memories behind us. Each saw in the other, perfectly preserved, a picture of her own girlhood, and with it all the Edenic simplicity of a life which can never be prolonged or duplicated. Growing up means growing away, and everyone is eager to begin the work. It is only halfway that one begins to look back, and by then it is already too late.

  Her house was small and dark and smelt of apples stored for the winter. The windows of her long low sitting-room looked out on to the single street of a small village. I was glad to see that she still had her piano. We bumped out through the kitchen with my overnight bag and into a garden bounded on one side by a miniature wing, just one room on top of another, which was where she housed her guests. ‘We’ve had both children staying here, and their families,’ she boasted, but it looked too small for me, used as I was to the flat where I could roam all night on bare feet if sleep deserted me. I sat down on my bed and gazed at the white sky out of the window. It was colder here and silent, yet I was not unduly dismayed. Rather I was bemused, in abeyance. How much so I saw when I looked in the silvery mirror of the little dressing-table. A pale wary face looked back at me, with a drained lifeless appearance, the expression watchful, stunned, as if at the receipt of bad news.

  Over tea Millie asked me all about myself, but what I longed to tell her I could not, out of a sort of respect, both for her and for myself. But when she said, ‘You must miss Owen,’ I started, and said hurriedly that I did not, that it had been a mistake in so many ways, not to marry him, but to imagine that he could be happy with a woman like myself. ‘I am so dull,’ I said to her with a smile.

  ‘Dull?’ she said indignantly. ‘I never heard such nonsense. Why, you could marry again tomorrow if you wanted to.’

  ‘Why no,’ I said, bending down to fondle a little white cat. ‘No, I s
hall never marry again.’

  ‘Fay. I hate to think of you on your own. You were so gifted, so happy. Do you ever sing these days?’

  ‘Never.’ I smiled.

  ‘Well, you’re going to sing now,’ she said, going over to the piano, which was open.

  ‘I couldn’t possibly,’ I said, feeling a forbidden ache in my throat.

  ‘I’ll start.’ She played a few bars, hummed a few notes, then began to sing, and stopped. ‘You see?’ she said. Her voice had become thinner, whispery, like an old record. ‘I’ve lost it. All over. Fortunately I’m so happy in other ways that it doesn’t matter. I can still carry a tune, but I haven’t the breath. And do you know, Donald still boasts about me, as if I were in my heyday. “My wife’s the musician,” he says, when anyone asks him to play—and he’s a good pianist, you know. And his wife can’t sing a note these days. But I’m sure you can, Fay. Won’t you try? For me?’

  So I sang. I sang ‘Only Make-Believe’, and ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’, and ‘I’ll Be Loving You Always’, and, of course, ‘Arcady’. Sometimes my voice broke on a high note but I sang on, for those songs said better than I could the emptiness and longing of my life. Singing reminded me, weakened my resolve. Why end what was there, why cancel it? What right had I to think it the correct course of action? Those songs were somehow too much for me. When I was young they did not move me so much: I sang them unaffectedly then, unshadowed by knowledge. Now, even the words seemed unbearable. But I sang on as if I were giving my final performance, as if all that mattered was to get through the programme, and then to say goodbye. My breathing was still good, and I sounded quite well, even to myself, although by now there were tears in my eyes.

  Millie closed the piano with a bang. ‘You can still do it,’ she said, but she eyed me sadly, aware that something was wrong and that I would not tell her. ‘If you would only come down here more often,’ she said, walking me through to the kitchen with an arm round my waist. ‘I could introduce you to so many nice men. You’d never be lonely. And who knows? You might fall in love again. It’s never too late.’

  Smiling, I shook my head. When we were girls we had often introduced each other to nice men; there were so many of them then. There had never been any jealousy between us.

  Donald came home to dinner. He had come home specially, for he had to be back in London the following day. He was an easy happy man, rather plain, rather large, pleased with his life and charming to others, all of whom were outside the close communion he had with Millie. The evening passed pleasantly. I drank a couple of glasses of wine, and all at once felt tired and ready for bed. At ten-thirty Millie said, ‘Shall I put the kettle on, Fay?’ for we always used to drink a late cup of tea. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said, as I always did, and we both laughed. We drank our tea, while Donald looked on indulgently, and then I left them and went to bed, and slept.

  I woke early, too early. With nothing to do until the rest of the household was awake I stuck my head out of the window. Still that white light, that impression of brilliance withheld, immanent. A misty hazy morning, with sudden fitful brightenings, as if spring might really break if only one could hold one’s breath for a while and not interrupt it. Attentiveness seemed to be called for, the strangest kind of caution. But suddenly it was all too much for me to wait, and on impulse I bundled my clothes into my bag and determined to ask Donald if I could drive up with him. I wanted so desperately to be at home that I almost overlooked my rudeness to Millie. Almost, not quite; I knew she would be hurt. But I felt beyond help, beyond courtesy, beyond normal exchange. All I wanted was to be back where I had been for the last six years, back where I—however mistakenly—belonged. To belong is a state of mind, not a state of possession.

  I was ashamed, yet I was driven. Now, looking back, I feel the same. I had failed Millie, and I had failed myself: my freedom had proved illusory. Yet at the same time I knew I was in the wrong place. Whether I would have felt this had I not been unwell, had I not been unhappy, and unhappily aware of what was to come, I do not know. In a sense I was tragically disappointed, without knowing exactly why. I had been in search of some completeness and I had failed to find it. Ordinary life, real life did not seem to contain it, although Millie remained my dearest friend, her husband the kindest of men, their welcome as warm as could have been desired. Perhaps I was really ill, as Millie seemed to think. At least she accepted my excuses, although she looked concerned. I had sung for Millie, yet I was conscious of lacking a voice, or perhaps my own words. It seemed to me that I had something to say, or rather that something was left unsaid, and yet I did not quite know what it was. The image of that white empty sky stayed with me, and the mute garden down below, in which nothing stirred. I was conscious of the lengthening days ahead and of the need to fill them before I completely lost what little identity I had left. I felt a sense of danger, and yet I am really a very unimaginative woman. I chattered away to Donald in the car in what I heard as a rather high voice, conscious of extreme anxiety, and the need to get home.

  Yet when I reached Drayton Gardens everything was normal. I put my key in the lock, went inside, unpacked my bag, and made myself some coffee. Here too the light seemed different. Of course it was darker in the flat than it had been at Millie’s but I was strangely conscious of that whiteness, that absence that I had previously noted. Crocuses had been out in the park. I had pointed them out to Donald, acutely aware that I was taking him out of his way, that I was making him late, that I was being a nuisance. Yet the crocuses had made it seem less odious of me to force this detour on him: I offered them up. It was a fine morning, sun struggling through mist: it would struggle until about three o’clock and then gradually begin to fade. That fading would be the most characteristic part of the day. Now, when I look back, the English spring seems to me heartbreaking. I dread it every year, although nothing more can happen to me. I associate it, still, with a certain panic, as if events are moving at their own pace, not at mine. I think of spring as the most impervious of the seasons. Nothing in me responds to it: I simply bow my head and wait for it to be over, wait for it to deliver me into summer, when, for a little while, I can relax.

  There was nothing to do, no one to telephone. I was so jumpy that I nearly called Julia, but decided, on reflection, that this was unseemly. I was in fact waiting for Charlie’s call and was eager to explain to him why I had been absent, and to tell him that I was back for good. My eagerness was such that all thoughts of renunciation had left me, or rather I had postponed them. I could not give him up without his full attention, and I needed his presence, and more than his presence, I needed him to concentrate on my situation, something which I doubt that he had ever done. I needed to know, from him, how fatally he would miss me when I was gone; I needed him to plead with me, since he had never done that either, had had no need to do so. The grudge that women feel against their lovers is really a desire to be taken seriously, and a suspicion that they have passed into the realm of familiar things, on which no great thoughts need be expended. The yeasty drama that rises in a woman about to end it all may simply be a desire to be talked out of it, but in the same high-flown terms. This desire is rarely satisfied and should probably be resisted at all costs. I most urgently needed Charlie’s presence so that I could say various unpalatable things to him. It was no longer a matter of doing what I wanted, but of obeying some compulsion. To make him listen to me was my overriding concern; what I had to say was somehow of lesser importance. Indeed, I hardly knew what it was.

  It was therefore frustrating when he failed to telephone that evening. When I calculated that the time for a call was past: I took my coat and went out, walked in the still light streets, looked in shop windows, bought an evening paper. I had a few sleeping pills left out of the small number the doctor had given me, and I intended to take one, so that there should be no trace of tiredness on my face the following day. I walked on, in order to tire myself further, still conscious of a tremor of the nerves. In the event I s
lept badly. I put this down to anticipation.

  I was thus unprepared for the fact that he did not call the next day, Friday. I was irritated rather than concerned, for he would surely be with me on Saturday, which seemed to me appropriate for what we had to discuss. In order to make sure of this I did something that I had vowed I would never do again: I rang him at the office. When Gaynor, his secretary, said, ‘I’m afraid he’s not here at the moment. Can I take a message?’ I said, as lightly as I could, ‘No, thank you, no message,’ telling myself that there was no reason why she should recognize my voice. I sat looking at the humming telephone, and then, very quietly, put it down. Another sleeping pill would get me through to Saturday, but I thought I might not make my great speech until we had re-established some sort of continuity. I was faint-hearted suddenly, and like many about to commit themselves desired only not to do so. Time seemed to be in abeyance until Charlie manifested himself. I gave up trying to distract myself and surrendered to the business of waiting for him. It was something I had learned how to do.

  Looking back from my present vantage point, I feel pity and distaste. What certain self-made characters feel about their humble beginnings I feel about my prosperous and secret middle age. I refuse to blame anyone: I alone am to blame. If there is any profit in it I fail to see how it has come about. The opinion of my friends (for now I have them) and of the ladies at the WVS is that I am delightfully sympathetic: I refuse to believe it. I have no sympathy for women who make fools of themselves, boast of their sexual prowess, or inquire into that of others. Sex now seems to me a book so firmly closed that I am taken, I believe, for a faithful widow. ‘Such a pity,’ I heard one woman say to another. ‘I’m sure she could have married again. But she just didn’t seem to have the heart for it.’ I accept all this as part of my punishment, for it is quite right that I should pay a price. For not being sufficiently loved, perhaps. For knowing this. Yet how does one close the door on feeling, when there is still time to use it? I can do it now, of course, but it was truly impossible for me to do it then. And although I now look back with sorrow I really had no qualms, no scruples. I behaved, I think, naturally, and to outwit nature would take a stronger character than mine. I never pretended to be anything out of the ordinary.