A Start in Life

by Anita Brookner

  In her room Ruth read of cottages blasted by northern winds, of country mansions with spacious lawns, of Parisian lodging houses teeming with intrigue and activity, of miners’ back-to-backs vibrating with the heat of banked-up coal fires, of home farms and rectories, of villas and castles, of gardens and pièces d’eau, of journeys and sojourns abroad. Was real life always so untenanted? Or was real life a distillation from ordinary mundane disappointment?

  As she prepared her meal the thought crossed her mind that she might one day have a home of her own. The thought did not, for some reason which she did not attempt to examine, seem overwhelmingly attractive. On further reflection she decided that she might be happier in an hotel.

  4

  The main advantage of being at college was that she could work in the library until nine o’clock. She thus missed the evening performance in the flat in Oakwood Court and discovered, with pleasure, that edible food was to be obtained in quite cheap restaurants. Pleasure, in fact, seemed to be on the increase. She was now able to feed and clothe herself, a fact on which she felt she ought to be congratulated, not knowing it to be quite common. She had, for the moment, no worries about money. In her own eyes she was rich, and it was known, how, she did not understand, that she was not on a grant, did not share a flat with five others, did not live in a hall of residence, and took abundant baths, hot water being the one element of life at home that Mrs Cutler could not modify.

  There was also the extreme pleasure of working in a real library, with access to the stacks. What she read was perhaps less exhilarating than what she had read at school: books about books rather than the books themselves, the authors of which were always presented as the property of the various lecturers. ‘Middleton? You mean the Voltaire man at Southampton?’ or, ‘Are you going to hear Chateaubriand today?’ this last being a reference, made in all good faith, to the eminent scholar whose life’s work the great wanderer turned out to be. Her only worry was to find a writer who was not already someone else’s property: she did not much mind who it was.

  The greed for books was still with her, although sharing them with others was not as pleasant as taking them to the table and reading through her meals. But in the library she came as close to a sense of belonging as she was ever likely to encounter. Gilded, polished, and silent, populated by noble sleepwalkers, the air quietened by a perpetual and companionable peace, whole tables set out for work, and, among the readers, an apparent cessation of vice, however temporary: these seduced her as powerfully as any more worldly scene of blandishment. Trained to keep still from earliest childhood and starved of company, she found the evening hours in the library the most satisfying of her life. When she looked up from her books, as she frequently did, it was to watch other people reading. Unaware of her gaze, they seemed innocent if a little careworn, and if they met her eye, they smiled instinctively, then dropped their eyes back to the printed page.

  She read her way round and through the Romantic Movement and became quite a favourite with the Chateaubriand man; she had an extremely retentive memory and all her reciting had kept the texts well in the forefront of her mind. She was never happier than when taking notes, rather elaborate notes in different coloured ball-point pens, for the need to be doing something while reading, or with reading, was beginning to assert itself. Her essays, which she approached as many women approach a meeting with a potential lover, were well received. She was heartbroken when one came back with the words ‘I cannot read your writing’ on the bottom.

  She bought herself a couple of pleated skirts, like those worn by Miss Parker; she bought cardigans and saddle shoes and thus found a style to which she would adhere for the rest of her life. She did not ask Helen’s advice, knowing that it would not do, but enjoyed showing her the clothes. Helen thought them dreary. ‘Strange that you should have turned out so different from me,’ she sighed, holding out a thin nude arm with silver bracelets clashing and sliding up and down. Helen’s skin was poreless, but losing its fat; she was alternately wistful and bad-tempered and tended to spurn food. George, on the other hand, was growing increasingly heavy. He was liable to wax sentimental over his daughter’s apparent maturity, not recognizing it for the makeshift it was. Ruth avoided sentiment for she had seen how easy it was to come by.

  The days were not long enough. Helen had decided that Ruth should pay rent for her room at Oakwood Court; this suited them both, putting a decent distance between the past and present tenancies. Ruth rose early, went out for a newspaper and some rolls, made coffee, and washed up, all before anybody was stirring. She was the neatest person in the house. As she opened the front door to leave, she could hear the others greeting the day from their beds with a variety of complaining noises, and escaped quickly before their blurred faces and slippered feet could spoil her morning. She was at one with the commuters at the bus stop, respectably accoutred for a day in public. There would be lectures until lunchtime, tutorials in the afternoon. In the Common Room there was an electric kettle and she took to supplying the milk and sugar. It was more of a home than home had been for a very long time. There was always someone to talk to after the seminar, and she would take a walk in the evening streets before sitting down for her meal in a sandwich bar at about six thirty. Then there was work in the library until nine, and she would reach home at about ten, by which time George and Helen would have taken their sleeping pills and Mrs Cutler would be safely corralled in the drawing room watching television in a cloud of smoke. It was a bit lonely sometimes, but it was better than it might have been.

  ‘But don’t you ever go out?’ asked her friend Anthea. For she was surprised to find that she made friends quite easily. She was of that placid appearance and benign or perhaps indifferent disposition that invites confidences, particularly from those too restless to harbour information. In many ways Anthea was like Helen: amusing, sharp-witted, lightweight and beautiful. Needing a foil or acolyte for her flirtatious popularity, she had found her way to Ruth unerringly; Ruth, needing the social protection of a glamorous friend, was grateful. Both were satisfied with the friendship although each was secretly bored by the other. Anthea’s conversation consisted either of triumphant reminiscences – how she had spurned this one, accepted that one, how she had got the last pair of boots in Harrods’ sale, how she had shed five pounds in a fortnight – or recommendations beginning ‘Why don’t you?’ Why don’t you get rid of those ghastly skirts and buy yourself some trousers? You’re thin enough to wear them. Why don’t you have your hair properly cut? Why don’t you find a flat of your own? You can’t stay at home all your life. Why don’t you stop skulking in here and come to the refectory? It’s much livelier down there. Why don’t you come to the pub with Brian and me? Why don’t you have a go at Crawford? He’s your type, always reading, and even if he weren’t you need about fifty years’ practice to bring yourself up to date.

  These questions would be followed rapidly by variants beginning ‘Why haven’t you?’ Found a flat, had your hair cut, bought some trousers. It was as if her exigent temperament required immediate results. Her insistent yet curiously uneasy physical presence inspired conflicting feelings in Ruth, who was not used to the idea that friends do not always please. She sat patiently through Anthea’s dramatic reminiscences, knowing her to be on an even keel when she was on this territory. She, on the other hand, became alarmed by the too physical manifestations of Anthea’s volatile temperament: the giddiness, the headaches, the sudden drenching blushes. She became aware, through Anthea, that she had an extreme horror of physical illness, a loathing for which she tried to compensate by urging the other to be stronger, or calmer, or, as a last resort, more self-indulgent. It was a bad stratagem, but it worked. In the presence of the quieter girl, clearly no rival, Anthea’s magnificent self-confidence revived and flourished. Ruth, concerned with her friend’s aggressive charm and repressed misgivings, felt protective, for she had absorbed, at an early age, the occasional lost look in her parents’ glances and was able to su
mmon up a sturdiness she did not know she possessed in order to reassure them. This she did with Anthea, although she never quite understood why she had to, for Anthea seemed to her in every way superior.

  Anthea had already run through the entire gamut of adult female experience, from promiscuity to dyed blonde streaks in the hair. She radiated sexual energy, had an eternal, almost professional, smile on her beautiful mouth, and turned her intense charm on man and woman alike. Ruth perceived only her desire to win people over. She had discovered that Anthea’s mother was dead, and that she was passionately attached to her father. She lived with her lover, Brian, a quiet, almost torpid, but powerfully built physicist. It was rumoured that she was to be married to him but Ruth sensed that she was frightened to commit herself and to leave her reassuring circus of conquests. Anthea occasionally referred to this difficulty, but never discussed it openly; after betraying her anxieties she was more imperious than ever. Why don’t you stop messing about with those notes and make us a cup of coffee?

  Ruth abandoned caution and invited her home to tea, since Anthea’s concern with her looks extended to an appreciation of those of other, better-known women. Helen had been urged to array herself for the occasion and had chosen a caftan, gold earrings and a great deal of scent. George, who had accepted an offer for the shop and was waiting for the contracts to be exchanged, was home most of the time now, and promised to collect a cake from Fortnum’s. The tea was ready half an hour before Anthea arrived and Helen regally drank two cups. ‘If your friend can’t be bothered to turn up on time, I’m sure I can’t be bothered to wait for her. Don’t worry; I shall say nothing. What I can’t appreciate I ignore.’

  Yet the two got on famously. Ruth had not seen her mother so animated for over a year, and Mrs Cutler, returning from a visit to the chiropodist, could hear trills of laughter from the front door. Ruth and George looked on as spectators, beaming with the success of their efforts, content to act as foil for the two protagonists. Mrs Cutler had taken one look at the intent gathering and retired in disgust to her room. With that acute sense of timing that distinguishes the accomplished woman from the mere amateur, Helen and Anthea rose to say goodbye before the jokes became too prolonged and the laughter too disturbing. Ruth and her father were taken a little by surprise. ‘Don’t go,’ said George, ‘you’ve eaten nothing. I can easily make some more tea.’

  Anthea smiled brilliantly and pressed his hand. She kissed Helen and promised to return. Ruth saw her to the door.

  ‘And how often is that little act put on?’ asked Anthea. ‘I can see why you don’t bring too many people home.’ Anthea knew everything. ‘The best thing for you to do is to find somewhere of your own. And don’t leave it too late.’

  ‘What a delightful girl,’ said George, when Ruth returned to the drawing room.

  ‘Quite pretty,’ said Helen, blowing smoke down her chiselled nostrils, ‘but not your type, darling. She has the soul of an air hostess.’

  By the end of her second year a restlessness came over Ruth, impelling her to spend most of the day walking. The work seemed to her too easy and she had already chosen the subject for her dissertation: ‘Vice and Virtue in Balzac’s Novels’. Balzac teaches the supreme effectiveness of bad behaviour, a matter which Ruth was beginning to perceive. The evenings in the library now oppressed her: she longed to break the silence. She seemed to have been eating the same food, tracing the same steps for far too long. And she was lonely. Anthea, formally engaged to Brian, no longer needed her company. Why don’t you do your postgraduate work in America? I can’t see any future for you here, apart from the one you can see yourself. At home, things had become a little disquieting. Helen was out of work. At least, she had chosen to be. She had been offered a couple of parts as the heroine’s mother and these she had spurned with hauteur. She rarely got dressed these days, preferring to lie on her bed in the caftan and her bracelets, smoking and drinking cups of instant coffee brought in by Mrs Cutler. Like early theologians or doctors of the church, the two women would debate whether she should include this or that skirmish with a director, this or that love affair, in her autobiography. This now filled half of one of the notebooks that George had bought her two years before. As neither Helen nor Mrs Cutler possessed any literary gifts or were given to reading anything more serious than, historical romances (though Helen still kept her old copy of Anna Karenina on the bedside table) the writing did not proceed. But points of content were hotly argued.

  ‘If only Ruth would give me a hand,’ moaned Helen.

  ‘I don’t know why you don’t dictate the whole thing and let her put it together,’ said Mrs Cutler.

  George did not feel happy. The presence of the two women in the bedroom, and, in the evening, their repetitive arguing of the same points, seemed to make him superfluous. The shop had been sold to a Mrs Jacobs, a sad-eyed widow whose husband had been in the trade and whose psychiatrist had urged her to do something useful with her time. George rather liked her, and spent some days going over the stock with her. She was grateful, but could not refrain from telling him that he had been undercharging for years and that he could have got more for the business had he tried. Miss Moss listened resentfully from the back room. George wondered, with a slight qualm, what his father would have made of the sale. He even wondered if he had been wise to sell at all, for with Helen not working and Mrs Cutler’s wages to pay, the money would not last all that long. He banished these thoughts to the back of his mind and promised Mrs Jacobs that he would look in from time to time to see how she was getting on.

  Even this was not so simple. With his daughter out all day, and his wife and housekeeper discussing which photographs did Helen most justice, which quotes from her album of press cuttings should be included, and from there sinking to a delightful and endless conversation about their childhoods (‘Of course, I was spoiled, and once you are you never get over it, do you?’ ‘That was my trouble. I never cleaned the bath out until I was married. Didn’t know you had to.’), George found himself doing the bulk of the dusting these days and most of the shopping as well. He was fatter and not so cheery. Sometimes he shaved only if he were going out. Helen, in her middle age, which she hated, had turned away from him slightly, as if blaming him for her advancing years. Why not? She blamed him for his own. Only Mrs Cutler, her eyes watchful, her thin frame thriving on their diet of made-up dishes and instant coffee, remained the same.

  Helen was changed. She was as beautiful as she had ever been, for thin women retain their shape. But they lose what little flesh they had as time goes on. Helen was very thin. Her long narrow hands and feet, emerging from the caftan, seemed to have assumed their ultimate skeletal shape. The bones of her shoulders were sharply outlined. Her wedding ring was loose and sometimes she took it off. Her red hair was now a secret between herself and her hairdresser, and on the days when she was due to have it done she found the atmosphere in the streets threatening. Eventually, Mrs Cutler, the Hoover abandoned in the middle of the floor, would take her, leaving George to finish whatever work she had or had not been doing. On their return, both women would pronounce themselves exhausted, and Helen would retire to bed, where she knew she looked her best. George, harassed, would join her for a drink. Helen’s blue eyes, more prominent now in their pronounced sockets, would gaze out of the window with a wistful and ardent expression, her thoughts winging to past triumphs, past travels, past love affairs. George, looking at her in these unguarded moments, would be shocked to see how quickly she had aged.

  5

  Ruth took some of Anthea’s advice, had her hair cut, won a scholarship from the British Council which entitled her to a year in France working on her thesis, and fell in love. Only the last fact mattered to her, although she would anxiously examine her hair to see if it made her look any better. ‘Je ne suis pas assez belle pour lui.’ Had she but known it, her looks were beside the point; she was attractive enough for a clever woman, but it was principally as a clever woman that she was attractive. Sh
e remained in ignorance of this, for she believed herself to be dim and unworldly and had frequently been warned by Anthea to be on her guard. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re all there,’ said Anthea, striking her own brow in disbelief.

  She did this when Ruth confessed that she was in love with Richard Hirst, who had stopped her in the corridor to congratulate her on winning the scholarship and had insisted on taking her down to the refectory for lunch. Anthea’s gesture was prompted by the fact that Richard was a prize beyond the expectations of most women and certainly beyond those of Ruth. He was one of those exceptionally beautiful men whose violent presence makes other men, however superior, look makeshift. Richard was famous on at least three counts. He had the unblemished blond good looks of his Scandinavian mother; he was a resolute Christian; and he had an ulcer. Women who had had no success with him assumed that the ulcer was a result of the Christianity, or indeed the way he professed it, for Richard, a psychologist by training, was a student counsellor, and would devote three days a week to answering the telephone and persuading anxious undergraduates that it was all right to enjoy sex with every partner, or alternatively, that it didn’t matter if you didn’t. Then Richard would wing home to his parish and stay up for two whole nights answering the telephone to teenage dropouts, battered wives, recidivists, and alcoholics. There seemed to be no end to the amount of bad news he could absorb.

  A man who did things! Her father, as far as she could see, did nothing but listen to her mother. But Richard had been known to race off on his bicycle to the scene of a domestic drama and there wrestle with the conscience of an abusive husband, wife, mother, father, brother, sister, or lover. (He had indeed let it be known that he did this.) His flat was permanently occupied by teenagers found huddled on benches at Waterloo Station, whom he took in until they either found work or escaped while he was at a lecture. The porter at the college was only too well acquainted with the distraught and usually drunk woman who appeared regularly to ask Richard to sort out an article which would redeem her whole life if published in New Psychology. He was rarely at home. He rarely slept. He never seemed to eat. His ulcer was the concern of every woman he had ever met in his adult life, and many were eager to tempt his palate with special bland dishes: no obligations entailed. Many were disappointed. His diet was a matter of speculation, as was his physique, which remained oddly splendid. His dark golden hair streamed and his dark blue eyes were clear and obdurate as he pedalled off to the next crisis.