A Start in Life

by Anita Brookner

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Maintained in childhood by her youthful parents and her ageing grandmother, the girl marvelled at the stability of her world. In books, to mention only the works of Charles Dickens, such great trials were undergone. Inside the flat, in Oakwood Court, there was no change. The same heavy meals were eaten at the same heavy table; the silent brooding presence of the grandmother, in her black dress, guaranteed the uninterrupted thought processes of the ruminative child. Bursts of laughter in another room signalled the presence of her parents, never to be taken for granted because of the many more attractive places they might have been. Her mother promised to buy her some pretty clothes, ‘when we get to the end of this run, darling’. Her father kindly kept her supplied with books, usually in the Everyman edition, with its comfortable assurance on the fly-leaf: ‘Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side’. She had a room of her own, now, and did not even notice that it was as dark, as silent, as heavily furnished, as that of her grandmother. ‘You’ll ruin your eyes,’ said Helen, ‘always reading.’

  But certain changes can be relied upon to take place. One hot autumn morning, the elder Mrs Weiss, placing her leather shopping bag on the kitchen table, turned a different colour, faltered, and collapsed untidily on to the floor. There was no one else in the house. When Ruth came home from school she was surprised to get no answer to her call, panicked when she entered the kitchen, and ran out to get a neighbour. The neighbour called the porter, and together they manoeuvred Mrs Weiss on to her bed. George was telephoned. Within an hour he was home, red-eyed, hapless, and smoking heavily. His first call was to a nursing agency. His second, much longer, was to the theatre. Helen was too busy to come home, and anyway she was made up for the matinée, which there was no question of cancelling. ‘Just relax, darling, and don’t worry. We’ll get a woman in tomorrow to look after things.’

  ‘There will be no dinner,’ said George dully.

  Mrs Weiss took three months to die. She lay in her massive bed, quite unconscious, ministered to by a pair of Irish nurses who took one look at Helen and decided to do their own shopping. George rallied slightly in their company and was very gallant about offering them lifts in the car. Ruth sat with her grandmother every afternoon when she came home from school. At first she tried to talk to her, but, ‘She can’t hear you, dear,’ said Nurse Imelda. After the first month, during which she had gazed fascinated at the heavy but childlike sleeping form and heard with dread the whistling breath, she let her attention wander. The room was stern, ancestral, but strange; she realized that she had never even seen the inside of that wardrobe. Her grandmother wore long white lawn nightdresses with drawn threadwork at the collar, slightly stained by the seepage from her mouth. After the second month, Ruth took a book in with her to the sickroom. When Mrs Weiss died, Helen was at the theatre, George was in the drawing room joking with Nurse Marie, and Ruth was reading. When Nurse Imelda, coming in to draw the curtains, said, ‘I think she’s gone,’ she was surprised that Ruth did not lift her eyes from her book. Not until George burst in, noisily sobbing, did Ruth look up and look away. Then, said Nurse Imelda later to Nurse Marie, she did a strange thing. She took her grandmother’s hand and kissed it, then raised the book to her cheek and held it there for a little while, as if for comfort. Finally she slipped out of the room and was later found in the kitchen, trying to prepare the evening meal. ‘Why not?’ said Helen tiredly, when she came home later, at her usual time. ‘It’s only until we can get a woman in. And she’s bound to be better at it than I am. In the meantime, we might as well keep the nurses on for a bit. These three months have worn me out. God knows it hasn’t been easy, trying to make people laugh every night, with poor Mother lying here. And you need a rest, too, darling heart. Breakfast in bed for both of us, from now on.’

  3

  So they got a woman in, Mrs Cutler, ‘our darling Maggie’, as Helen instantly called her, a wry, spry widow, quick to take offence. She served meals at unpunctual intervals, so that Ruth always found herself too late or too early, kept the radio on while she worked, and smoked all day. In the dining room the damask cloth was never cleared and changed only once a week; the purple velvet curtains began to smell of cigarettes; and in the sideboard cupboards the wine coolers were now gilt with tarnish. George, whose interest in the book trade had declined sharply with his mother’s death, was only keeping the shop on until a suitable buyer could be found. There was no real need for him to earn money. His mother had left him some, as well as a small independent legacy to her grand-daughter, and anyway, Helen was doing well. She was making films now, comedy thrillers for which her slightly old-fashioned soubrette style was perfectly suited. So George went less to the shop and to the theatre and began to help Maggie with the shopping. They did this by car, which took a long time, longer than it had ever taken Mrs Weiss with her black leather shopping bag, but after all, they had all day. When Helen came home from the studio, she would be so tired that she would go to bed for an hour or two. At seven o’clock Maggie would take in a whisky and soda for George and a gin and tonic for Helen and herself. The ashtrays filled steadily; it was just like the old days in Helen’s dressing room. Sometimes Ruth would emerge from her room, where she was doing her homework, and penetrate the smoke, interrupting her mother in the middle of an anecdote to ask if there was any supper. She was seduced and alarmed by the sight of three grown-up people behaving as if they were having a midnight feast, her mother in bed in the daytime, her father sitting astride a chair, Mrs Cutler on the edge of the bed, a cigarette in her mouth, a smear of lipstick on her chin. ‘All right, Ruth, you can be heating up some soup. Just for yourself. I’ll have something later. As for these two, they’re well away.’ They doubled up again. How delightful, how lax, how vile! So Ruth took to getting her own food, instinctively skirting the expensive made-up pies and pâtés and tinned vegetables preferred by her father and mother and above all Mrs Cutler. She made herself eggs and boiled potatoes and salads, but this spinsterish fare did not sit well on the dining room table, was not worthy of the solemn oils and her grandmother’s chair, so she took to eating in the kitchen.

  She did not like Mrs Cutler. She knew, without understanding, that Mrs Cutler was one of those louche women who thrive on the intimacy of couples, who are the cold-eyed recipients of many a confidence, who then repeat it to the other party in the interests of both, and whose main aim in life seems to be ‘to get you two to stop making fools of yourselves and each other’. To Mrs Cutler Helen revealed many secrets of her past life without actually knowing why she did so; her training was to entertain the public, and so she supplied Mrs Cutler with the information she required, playing up to her audience like the loyal and simple actress that she was. The innocent flirtations of her youth took on a more dramatic colouring in the telling. ‘That year I didn’t care what I did. I thought nothing of picking up a man at a party and taking him home. And I’m not ashamed, Maggie. I sometimes wish George would have a little fling. It would make things more equal.’

  ‘Does he still see that Miss Moss?’ asked Mrs Cutler. ‘Not that you’ve anything to worry about there.’

  ‘Miss Moss? That woman at the shop? You can’t be serious, Maggie. Throw me a ciggy, darling. I must think this over.’

  Later, Mrs Cutler said to George, ‘Don’t you ever let me find you going off the rails again, my lad. That’s a woman in a million you’ve got there, and I warn you, I won’t be a party to any deceit.’

  George laughed uneasily. He was trying to think of Mrs Cutler as his mother would have done, as a servant with an unfortunate background, but it seemed that they had slipped rather too far into intimacy for that position ever to be retrieved. And there was no doubt that she looked after Helen marvellously. It was not a bad arrangement. The flat was getting a bit shabby, but nobody was suffering. And it was good for the child to have someone constantly in the house.

  The child was now fourteen an
d with amazed delight was mastering French. She seemed to prefer to give tongue in that language and could be heard in her bedroom chanting, ‘Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! morne plaine!’ The adults paused briefly while she did this. ‘Not a bad delivery,’ said her mother, rather surprised. ‘Don’t encourage her,’ said Mrs Cutler. ‘You know what happens to girls who get too airy-fairy. Bugger all.’ They roared. Not without misgivings on George’s and Helen’s part, but because they thought it ungracious not to laugh at a joke. They were still eager to please, and more than ever assured of doing so.

  So Ruth chanted her way through Victor Hugo until she discovered Alfred de Vigny, and then La Maison du Berger seemed to express her deepest thoughts. ‘Pars courageusement,’ she ordered from the depths of her bedroom. ‘Laisse toutes les villes.’ She even thought she might do it one day. But in the meantime she was quite happy. And anyway, there was so much reading to do that she could not think of anything else. Later, perhaps.

  Adolescence? It was hardly an adolescence as other girls knew it, waking up to their temporary but so exhilarating power over men. No slow smiles, no experimental flaunting, no assumed mystery for Ruth. She was in no hurry to enter the adult world, knowing in advance, and she was not wrong, that she was badly equipped for being there. In any event it seemed unattractive and nothing to do with her. Her most persistent image of the adults was that smoky bedroom, untidiness, watchfulness, and over-insistent and over-demonstrated affection. It was not unlike the world of the more advanced girls she knew, those who had changed from cheerful children into potential antagonists. Mrs Cutler’s incomprehensible innuendos were all too like the clumsy sexual squibs of her contemporaries. She understood neither. She remained thin and childlike, a fact which suited Helen well enough, and badly dressed because Helen would not let her buy her own clothes and had no time to go with her to the shops. George felt a little sorry for her, sitting there in the evenings, watching television on her own, and vaguely discomfited when the voice boomed its lines of poetry from the bedroom. But George’s main job in life was to keep Helen happy, a task he now performed with the aid of Mrs Cutler, who seemed to have made it her purpose in life too. Meals were now eaten from trays, the three of them cosily pigging it in the bedroom.

  Ruth, except for school, was never sure where the next meal was coming from. In fact she looked on school as a sort of day nursery which could be relied upon to supply comfort in the form of baked beans and sausages, stewed prunes and custard. The work did not interest her very much for her own reading was well in advance of the syllabus. Only Miss Parker, in her pleated skirts, excited anything like interest and loyalty, but there was only one Miss Parker to go round among all the girls who had not yet set their sights on the boys wheeling round the school gates on their bicycles at four o’clock in the afternoon. Ruth was always sad when this time came. The day’s security was ended, the anonymity of the school uniform no longer a guarantee, the boys on the bicycles were not for her. Sometimes she stayed on in the library, a pleasant sunny room where she was given a little job of bringing the catalogue up to date. On her library evenings she left at five, and in this way found herself at the bus stop with Miss Parker.

  ‘What are you reading now, Ruth?’ Miss Parker would say, removing the books from under Ruth’s arm. ‘Zola? Yes, I suppose that’s no bad thing, but don’t believe it all. Balzac? No, definitely not. You are much too young. Most women are too young for Balzac.’

  ‘Tell me, Ruth,’ she said, as they emerged from the bus at the other end of their journey. ‘Do you understand everything you read? Does it ever worry you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ruth, to both questions.

  As Miss Parker saw it, Ruth’s only hope was to go to a university and become a scholar. It was her only hope because it was obvious that she needed to be taken into care. At fifteen, sixteen, she still dressed like a child, wore her extraordinary hair long, enjoyed her school dinner, and made her meticulous notes on the library cards. ‘But I should like,’ said Miss Parker to her colleague Mrs Brain, ‘to subject her to an experiment. She may become a good scholar out of sheer love of the safety net beneath her. She may grow up and throw the whole thing away. Girls who are alone too much need not suffer in this day and age. They can do research. And I believe she has a little money of her own, which is no bad thing for someone without friends.’

  ‘You’d better have a talk with the parents,’ said Mrs Brain. ‘Her mother’s that awfully amusing actress who was always on in the West End. About five years ago now. And she read some Book at Bedtime most beautifully. Such feeling. What is she doing these days?’

  Lying on her bed, Mrs Brain. Sometimes in it. Getting a little bit stiff from taking no exercise. Still apt to throw out a passionate hand to George, who is still apt to seize it and kiss it. When she had finished filming You Must be Joking, and no other work was immediately on offer, it seemed such a pity to break her delightful routine. Mrs Cutler, backing into the room with a tray in her arms and a cigarette in her mouth, insisted on her having a snack in bed. It was easy for George to fit in his visits to the shop around Mrs Cutler’s timetable, and anyway there was a new job for him: Helen wanted to return to the stage in her own play, and he, knowing her professional strengths and weaknesses, was to encourage her to write it.

  ‘Why not make it the story of your life?’ asked Mrs Cutler, after the project had hung fire for a month or two. ‘The things you’ve told me would fill a theatre twice nightly.’

  Helen turned her still beautiful but now rather more cavernous eyes to the window and considered. ‘I’m too old for the part now,’ she said finally. ‘But you’re right, I’m sure my autobiography would sell.’ She turned to George with more than enough of her old charm. ‘Darling heart, buy me some nice exercise books. And a new nightie. I can work just as well in bed, better, in fact. And you can both help me. What is it, Ruth?’

  ‘It’s Miss Parker. She wants to see you and Daddy. About my going to university.’

  ‘Who on earth is Miss Parker?’

  ‘My form mistress. She wants you to come to the school on Friday.’

  ‘Nonsense, darling. Invite her round for a drink if you must. But I warn you, I’m going to be very, very busy.’

  For once Ruth did not leave the room. For once she learned cunning. ‘They all talk about you at school,’ she said carefully. ‘They ask me lots of questions. They still talk about you in Lady Windermere’s Fan. And you’ve never been there. You or Daddy. I think you should come once. These things make a difference.’ Cunning deserted her. ‘And it is my future we’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh God, don’t let’s talk about the future. The past is so much more interesting.’

  ‘You mean yours is,’ said Mrs Cutler, who was not in the best of moods that day.

  So George and Helen met Miss Parker. It was quite a while since they had been out together in the daytime and Ruth thought they were over-acting. George tucked Helen into the car as if bringing her home from hospital after childbirth. They both looked smart, anyway. It would be all right.

  Miss Parker saw a rather uneasy couple. Why else should they hold hands? For protection? She noticed that they both smelled of cigarette smoke, that George’s hair needed barbering, that Helen’s collar had powder on it. But they were undoubtedly still attractive and seemed in no mood to disagree with her about Ruth’s future.

  ‘She’s still very young for her age,’ said Helen, considering her child whimsically. ‘When I was her age I was very much out, I can assure you.’

  ‘Now, now, darling heart,’ replied George automatically.

  They turned to Miss Parker for audience response. None came. Helen began to feel a vague but definite sense of annoyance.

  ‘She can do whatever she likes, of course. But don’t turn my baby into a blue-stocking.’ She smiled her enchanting smile. ‘You know how it puts men off.’

  Miss Parker’s determination to put Ruth into the wholesome environment of a university librar
y at this moment received tangible shape and impetus. Whether the girl proved to be good at anything was neither here nor there. Miss Parker saw, sadly, that she would become good if she had to. Ruth waited in some discomfort.

  ‘I will coach her myself,’ said Miss Parker, her colour slightly heightened. ‘Her French is excellent. Good enough for the Oxford and Cambridge Boards.’

  Helen rose to her feet, dropping her gloves, which Miss Parker, after a moment’s hesitation, retrieved. ‘We don’t want her to go to Oxford and Cambridge,’ she said, automatically registering her bad delivery of the line. ‘We don’t want to lose our baby so soon. Isn’t there a university in London?’

  ‘There are excellent French departments at several of the colleges,’ said Miss Parker, with lowered eyes. ‘And then, of course, she might go to France to do a little research. She needs to, well, to broaden her horizons.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ remarked Helen pleasantly and held out her hand for her gloves. ‘Well, darling, that’s settled. Are you pleased?’

  Was she pleased? Certainly she was that evening. For Helen pronounced herself exhausted and took to her bed when she got home, just as if she had put in a day’s work at the studio. George had not been to the shop at all. Mrs Cutler took in the drinks and the door closed behind her. Ruth felt restless and wandered about the flat. In Mrs Weiss’s bedroom she saw Mrs Cutler’s nylon peignoir on the bed, Mrs Cutler’s hair rollers filling the pretty china dish with the view of the Augustusbrücke in Dresden on the dresser; on the outside of the wardrobe hangers swayed and clattered in the draught from the door and dresses slithered off them and hung precariously. There was fluff on the carpet and a stub in the ashtray by the bedside. In the dining room the original odours of meat and dumplings had long since evaporated and the air smelt stale. In the drawing room the television set, ignored because Helen did not appear on it, took up the space originally occupied by Mrs Weiss’s piano. In the kitchen the cold tap dripped into a coated saucepan lying in the sink.