Brief Lives

by Anita Brookner

  Dr Carter took my arm and strode off at an athlete’s pace. After a moment I unhooked my arm and stood still. ‘Are you unwell?’ he asked, walking back to me.

  ‘I’m perfectly well, but I’m wearing rather frail shoes,’ I said, ‘and I can’t keep up with you. And anyway, it’s such a pleasant evening. Why hurry? Oh, of course, your piano playing. I’m so sorry; I don’t want to hold you up. Would you like to race on ahead?’

  ‘I’ll see you home, of course,’ he said. ‘I dare say I need not play the piano tonight. I’m not a slave to habit.’

  ‘It is so nice and mild that I’m enjoying this breath of air. Indeed, I enjoyed the whole evening.’

  ‘Pleasant people, yes. And here we are, Drayton Gardens. I am further on, Lowndes Square. Well, I’ll be in touch. By the way, are you comfortably off?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said firmly.

  ‘That’s good, so am I. Well, good night.’

  No dreams that night, not much sleep either. Louisa Cope and Alison Finlay would have been perturbed and not a little disconcerted to learn that pleasurable anticipation can persist even in a woman of my age. It did not worry me, but it did make me laugh. I felt scandalous again, seeking an age-old remedy for a wounded heart, and finding it. I had no illusions about Dr Carter’s desirability.

  In truth, I thought he was impossible, but he amused me into thinking fresh thoughts. An original man is a rare and valuable thing, and as I get older I appreciate humour more than the kind of seriousness that usually attends these affairs. It now strikes me that seriousness is misplaced, that it is all a joke, a sport of the gods, that eventually wears out and fades away. Sometimes not even a memory is left. That is what I saw in the course of my sleepless dreamless night, that I had been granted one more touch of humour in my life, one last joke, before the dark. The best of it was that I had no designs on Dr Carter, none at all. I simply warmed to the idea of having him as a friend, of cooking him the odd meal, of claiming him as a person of my acquaintance, of occasionally being his partner at some kind of social function (this last was vague to me). My long loneliness disappeared in the course of that night, and when I got up to make my tea the following morning I felt as fresh as if I had slept for ten hours.

  I watched the sun come up, bathed and dressed carefully. I had already decided to do something that I had been thinking about for a long time. It seemed appropriate to expend some of the energy that had been restored to me, and to cancel the last remnants of my idle life. I had passed the little headquarters of the WVS on one of my evening walks and my intention must have been fixed even then, for I remembered where it was. It was a brilliant morning, good for a new beginning. In the WVS office, which was really the front part of a shop, the sun streamed through dusty windows on to a desk covered with papers. Beside the desk, and occupying a large area of the carpet was a huge dog covered in very long hair. A striking white-haired woman in a heather mixture suit appeared from the back room, carrying a cup of coffee. ‘Harding,’ she said. ‘Letty Harding. Can I help you?’

  I explained that I wanted to do some voluntary work and she seemed delighted, although when I explained that I could not drive a car she looked a little more dubious. ‘I’m afraid that means office work,’ she said. ‘Not what you’re used to, I’m sure. How do you feel about sitting here answering the telephone?’ I said that would be fine. We arranged that I should work from one-thirty to four-thirty on four afternoons a week, sitting at that desk, in the dusty sunlight, in the shop window.

  ‘By the way,’ said Mrs Harding. ‘You won’t mind if I leave Doggie with you? I called him Doggie because I couldn’t think of another name. He’s very old, and he sleeps all the time, but he hates being left at home.’ I said that I should be quite happy with Doggie, who already had a dish of water and a tin plate beside him. So many new things seemed to have come into my life so suddenly that I hardly recognized myself. Perhaps it was all a mirage and I should end up like Maureen with her rotas. Either way, it seemed to me, my fate had been decided.

  As it turned out, office life suited me wonderfully. There was very little to do, which may be the case even in real offices among unskilled women like myself, but one has the complacency of belonging and the excuse for dressing up and the tremendous cordiality of one’s own kind. It strikes me that women in offices find the same sort of peace as men do in clubs. I took a book along with me, made coffee as soon as I got there, gave Doggie some fresh water, and prepared to answer queries about Meals on Wheels. Women like Mrs Harding did marvellous work, taking old people to hospital for their appointments, seeing that the housebound got properly fed, arranging for the visit of the chiropodist or even the hairdresser. I learnt there about being old, and how terrible it is. I determined to work for these people for as long as I could, until I was old myself. With a little grace I should be better prepared to deal with my own decrepitude, when it came.

  I felt well, I felt buoyant, but there was no doubt that I was ageing, and quite comprehensively. I was stiff in the mornings and getting more shortsighted; my once pretty hands were now quite gnarled, and, of course, the hair was silver. I looked attractive for my age, but I looked my age: there was no danger of my being mistaken for somebody younger. I was glad that Dr Carter had seen me at my best. Behind the daytime mask the cruel body goes its way, breeding its own destruction, signalling—blatantly—its own decay. I knew all this. That was an additional reason for my gratitude to Mrs Harding, for giving me a little work to do, and a reason to think of others, and an agreeable way of passing the unforgiving time. ‘You’ve fitted in so well,’ she said. ‘We’re really very grateful. And Doggie is devoted to you. Quite devoted.’

  With my afternoons taken up in this way I could no longer put in time at Onslow Square, a fact for which I felt the purest gratitude. I had never been in any doubt that Julia was an obligation, and one that I had come to shoulder with distasteful feelings of guilt and shame, but the truth now burst upon me that I need no longer bear the burden. Naturally, I should have to sign off, as it were, go to see her to explain my new circumstances, but although I could imagine her staring at me, the eyelids fully raised, and then going into one of her pantomimes of incomprehension, the spectacles on their silken cord slowly raised and adjusted on the nose, I could also see that I should have to talk my way out of it, be bluff, reasonable, if necessary unforthcoming. She would resent it, as if I were slipping out of the theatre before the house lights went up, but really, was there not something unseemly, something masochistic in continuing to visit a woman who at best was bored by one and at worst antagonistic? It was just that I had always had what seemed to me good reasons for doing so, and not only that, because I pitied and admired the woman, difficult though she was. Antagonism was the climate of her chilly nature; she found it hard, perhaps impossible, to love, whereas I found it all too easy. For that reason I lost caste, while she consistently gained it. On no account must Dr Carter’s name be brought into this, although I felt dangerously tempted to share my delight. This was another of my lower-class attributes, this silly and unwarranted trustingness, in promises which were not promises at all, but only forms of words, or even of leavetaking. That was why Charlie had distorted my life, or, to be fair, why I had distorted my life for Charlie. I now looked back on him with impatience, uneasiness, something like despair. It is nearly always a fatal mistake to go against one’s nature, however unsatisfactory that nature proves to be. One must be authentic if one is to be anything at all.

  In the end my dilemma was solved by a call from Pearl Chesney. It was in the nature of a farewell, she said: she did hope to see me at Julia’s, where Maureen was arranging a little tea party, on the following day, but she wanted to wish me luck, because, apparently, I had always been so kind. My heart ached: why is the affection of people like Pearl so shaming? Because it reminds us how straightforward affection can, and should, be? I promised that I should be there to see her off, and on my way home from the office I bought a pretty blouse tha
t I thought might suit her, and the paper and the satin ribbon with which to wrap it. For it would be a melancholy day for her when she left London, and Julia, whom she had allowed herself to think the tiniest bit selfish, for an unknown flat in a dormitory suburb, with all the small routines that women on their own devise for themselves to fill the day, poor substitutes for the company she had once so enjoyed.

  I was right; her eyes were humid, her darkly rouged cheeks slightly smudged. I put my little parcel in her basket and said, ‘Open it later, Pearl. It comes with my love.’ ‘Oh, do sit down,’ said Julia. ‘Why all the fuss? She’s not leaving the country. I can’t believe,’ she went on, ‘that Pearl would ever desert me. She’ll be back here in no time, won’t you, darling?’ And she even got up and extended her hand to Pearl, who was still seated and who had to scramble awkwardly to her feet. It was as if Julia were taking a curtain call with her accompanist, summoned gracefully from her obscure position behind the piano. But there was something wrong with Julia, or so it seemed to me. Her voice seemed to have dropped half an octave, to become the bass voice of old women, and the features were slightly drawn. There was a glass of whisky at her elbow, but it was untouched. It was entirely possible that she found Pearl’s departure a strain, was reminded of how long they had known each other. If she felt sorrow it expressed itself, characteristically, as an almost malevolent divination of one’s thoughts.

  ‘You’re looking very pleased with yourself. Anyone would think you’d found a man.’

  I felt myself blushing. Contrary to expectations Dr Carter had not telephoned and I had begun to reproach myself for aberrant fantasies. And yet I had been almost sure … I was just beginning to consider my own foolishness when Julia took it into her head to torment me.

  ‘Good heavens,’ she said, raising her glasses like binoculars and surveying me through them. ‘Wonders will never cease. Well, who is he? What’s he like? Have you been to bed with him yet?’

  I felt horror, as she supposed I would, at the idea of one elderly woman interrogating another in this manner.

  ‘Behave yourself, Julia,’ I said, but I could feel the blush gathering again. ‘Don’t you want to hear about my job?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ she replied. ‘This is far more exciting than any job. Maureen, are we going to have tea or not?’

  ‘I’ve brought a cake, Maureen,’ I said desperately. Maureen now had my full attention. ‘I’d love to drink Pearl’s health in a cup of tea, and then I must fly.’

  ‘Why?’ said Julia. ‘Is he coming to dinner?’

  ‘Yes,’ I burst out. ‘Yes, he is.’ It was the worst thing I could possibly have done. In my boiling discomfort I resolved to go straight home, ring Carter, and invite him to dinner. I was not happy about this; it was all wrong. But I had to escape Julia, to defeat Julia, even if I defeated myself in the process. That, of course, is exactly what I did, although I did not yet know it. She never forgave me for that incident, which I soon forgot, particularly as Dr Carter appeared to appreciate my call and did in fact drop in for a drink that very evening. But that I should have found companionship, of a kind which she insisted was obscene, grotesque, forbidden, while she remained alone she was never to forget. It was as if from that moment on she decided to take me seriously, at no cost to herself. The cost, she determined, would be all mine.

  FOURTEEN

  THE BRIGHT DAYS of spring gave way to a spell of unsettled weather, dark skies, and rain chuckling in the gutters. I was quite glad to get home after my stint in the office: undemanding as my work was, it gave me a feeling that I had done something unselfish, which was a great relief to me, although no doubt based on illusion. I found the illusion necessary because I now longed to perceive myself as a person of worth. I wanted to be found likeable, even eligible. I was in no doubt that this had something to do with the mirage of Dr Carter and his presence in my life, even if that presence was in fact more of an absence, for Dr Carter remained unbiddable, unpredictable. His rare visits to my flat (and I had hoped for more) had not been all that I had wished, had not revealed him as the ideal companion with whom I might at last enjoy a serene friendship. He was too rude, too fearless, too inattentive, when not in his surgery, for a person of my anxious temperament to find entirely beguiling. Old as I was, I was not defunct, and still hoped, as women will, to be gathered in by someone responsible, given leave to practise those comfortable talents which are so meaningless when there is no one to benefit by them.

  What he did, and this may have been beneficial, was to shock me into speaking my mind occasionally, so that without knowing each other at all well we soon became intimates of a sort. I wondered if his solitary life, without a companion, had fostered his eccentricity, or whether he was actually as impossible as his wife had obviously found him. He had a way of mocking my attentiveness which warned me, in a no doubt salutary manner, not to sink back into old and hopeful ways. I was not to be a wife again, it seemed. And yet, once I had got over my deference towards him, and experienced and expressed a certain amount of annoyance and disappointment, he was, I could see, pleased with me; he laughed and applauded, became appreciative, and relatively content. Yet I suspected that having found me so malleable he was inclined to keep his distance, and that if he were to start again it would be with a woman more noble and demanding than I could ever be.

  Perhaps he was defending himself, as he had had to defend himself from so many predatory women. He was an attractive man, without the slightest vanity, which made him a rarity. Brisk and immaculate, he had that medical aura that commands respect; his attention, though initially hard to arouse, was, on occasion, swift and total. I say ‘on occasion’ for he was aloof and not expansive. After he had paid his initial compliment, as he had done to me at Caroline’s party, he retired into himself, as if there were no further need for him to waste his time. His busy, active life supplied him with all his requirements, although in his own reclusive way I think he appreciated my company. To my disappointment, he was rather like a brother, whom I need not try to please. He himself, I think, whatever his own personal arrangements, preferred to think of me as someone whom he had always known but with whom he had recently resumed acquaintance.

  He criticized me a lot, as a brother might, or perhaps as a boy might. He criticized my attempts to please him, mocked my domestic fussiness, but accepted its effects without a murmur, and with a hint of pleasure. Sometimes he gazed at me with an eye from which all speculation was absent. ‘You’re an attractive woman,’ he said again, at our second meeting, when I had persuaded him to come for a drink. ‘Why did you never marry again?’ ‘Perhaps I am not as attractive as all that,’ I said sadly. ‘Or perhaps I lack some basic instinct. I never thought that I could make that sort of decision, the decision that some women make so successfully. I always waited to be found, to be discovered. That seemed to be the honourable way of going about it. And now I see that it is quite wrong.’ I was brave enough to speak my mind to him on these matters; he had that effect on me. I was genuinely interested to know what he thought. But he said nothing, merely nodded imperceptibly, as if I were confirming his diagnosis.

  Although it was of some value to me to examine my own feelings in this way I found the process disturbing. No aspect of my history failed to disappoint me, or perhaps I was at an age at which it is more logical to look back than to look forward. And yet without Dr Carter I doubt whether I should have dragged these matters to the surface. I should have been sad but settled, whereas with him I was unsettled and not always sad. I was not at all sure that I wanted to marry again, but, like the girl I had been, I longed once more to be appropriated. Dr Carter’s resolute failure to perform this service was, in a sense, a disappointment. However, I was still in two minds as to whether he might eventually condescend in my direction, which kept me active and alert, put off the prospect of old age until such time as I might finally renounce everything and succumb, and gave me, on waking, a sense of expectation which I found agreeable. I dressed as
if I might meet him unexpectedly round every corner. I shopped carefully and more lavishly than usual. I always had the makings of a good meal in the house, in case he should invite himself. In fact he very seldom did, although he liked to turn up unannounced, sometimes on a Sunday afternoon, when I could think of nothing nicer than settling down with the papers. He was always unpredictable. I think his fear of intimacy kept him out of my flat. Anything of a domestic nature, such as I loved, found him at his most impenetrable.

  He liked me, but had spent a lifetime trying to avoid what I represented. Whereas it cost him nothing to appear fraternal, a truth I was eventually obliged to admit. If forced into a confession he would have said that he admired me, yet I was never allowed to expend any care on him. He even disliked my unguarded look of pleasure when I opened the door to him. None the less he kept in touch, may even have thought of me as a special kind of friend, if only that were not to involve him in an expenditure of attention. Of emotion there was little trace. Emotion and its quagmires he could do without. Thus there came to be a ban on my own emotion, so that we conversed in the unguarded tones of the nursery, rude and honest in one way, quite dishonest in another. ‘I’m tired,’ I could say, or, ‘I’m hungry,’ he could say. But never ‘I want’, or ‘I long for’, or ‘I am sick at heart’.

  I got used to it, of course. One pays the price quite happily for an attachment. At least, women of my kind do. And I have to confess to a certain pride in it. I walked to work more briskly, greeted acquaintances with enthusiasm, was able to disregard the bad weather, which, had I been in a normal state, would have oppressed me. Whatever his shortcomings he was a factor in my life. He telephoned frequently, much to my surprise, although he never had much to say, and appeared to be talking to his nurse or receptionist at the same time. It was as if he were not averse to advertising my existence in the presence of another. It was acknowledgment of a sort. I found this alternately exhilarating and very worrying, as I was unable to determine my place in his list of priorities. What if the nurse or receptionist were my rival, and I were to be in ignorance of the fact? But in the end I shrugged and put up with it. Given the terms we were on I could always ask him. But I never did. I liked the illusion of belonging too much. That had always been my problem, and now it seemed too late to expect any improvement.