A Start in Life

by Anita Brookner

  Helen’s outrage was profound. She who had never been upstaged! Her heart beating uncomfortably fast, she poured herself another drink and drained it. After a short pause she uttered a fierce little laugh. ‘They were right when they said how sharper than a servant’s tooth is man’s ingratitude.’

  ‘Serpent’s,’ corrected George. He was very tired.

  ‘My version is better,’ said Helen. ‘Well, we had better get Ruth home, I suppose.’

  ‘That might be difficult. I tried her this afternoon, but she seems to have moved.’

  ‘Nonsense, let me try.’

  George plugged the telephone in by the bed. He would not be able to call Sally tonight, that much was clear.

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ Helen was saying to the operator, in a rich French accent assumed for the occasion. ‘I am trying to get Auteuil 1047. C’est très urgent.’

  There was but a minute’s delay. ‘Merci,’ said Helen, ‘vous êtes bien aimable. Hello, Rhoda, is that you? What have you done with my naughty girl?’

  Still acting, thought George. Any excuse is good enough. The real worrying is left to me. He went into the kitchen to get himself a small snack, although he had eaten at Sally’s, and found Mrs Cutler sitting miserably at the table with her copy of Woman’s Own unheeded in front of her. This day, more than any other, had convinced her that a woman needs a man. They turn on you the minute they can, she thought, meaning other women. I’ll never put myself in such a position again. She consented to make George a cheese sandwich, glad to have something to do, and added a sprig of parsley to the plate.

  ‘What about her?’ she sniffed, jerking her head in the direction of the bedroom.

  ‘Better make another one,’ George replied. ‘She’s trying to get hold of Ruth.’

  While they were talking the telephone rang and it was Mr Dunlop to say that he had secured the posts of manager and manageress at the Clarence Nursing Home, just outside Folkestone, to start within the month. A real bit of luck, he said. Nice little flat. Beautiful grounds. And the incontinent were sent to the local geriatric ward, so no trouble there. Mrs Cutler cheered up. ‘Goodnight, love,’ she said, for the benefit of Helen who was listening with an expression of immense patrician calm on her face. ‘Wrap up warm. And ring me tomorrow,’ she added. After that, she went to bed appeased.

  ‘I am waiting to get through to Ruth,’ said Helen. ‘Apparently she has moved into a small flat somewhere. Rhoda didn’t like the sound of it at all. No more do I. Well, she can move out again, that’s all. She’s had long enough to do as she pleases.’

  ‘Eat your sandwich, darling. I’ll just go and look at the news. Oh, I’ll take the telephone next door and ring Mrs Jacobs about tomorrow.’

  Turning the volume of the television up to its fullest extent, George dialled the Bayswater number. He was reeling with fatigue, his shoes hurt him, and he wanted to hear Sally’s voice. It was quite clear that Helen would not rest until she had tracked Ruth down, whatever time that was. There would be little peace that night.

  Helen, after having picked the cheese out of her sandwich and eaten it, realized that Mrs Cutler had failed to provide her with her usual hot milk drink, and wandered into the kitchen to see if it had been left there. On her way down the corridor she was beguiled by the sight of George’s ample back crouched over the television set through the open door of the drawing room. How old he is getting, she thought. He looked heavy and vulnerable and she felt something like a surge of overpowering affection for him. How old! And his face, so red and tired. Maybe she had neglected him a little. Maybe he needed her more than she knew. Her lips curved once more in their beautiful smile and she crept forward on her bare feet towards him. As he was using his good ear for the telephone George did not immediately hear her turn down the volume, and by the time he had said, ‘Goodnight, my darling, sleep well’, and made his usual kissing noise, the damage was done.

  16

  Ruth wrote down for her own edification a maxim attributed to Louis XIV: ‘Do not assess the justice of a claim by the vigour with which it is pressed.’ Then she closed her notebook and packed it carefully in the corner of her suitcase. All that remained to be done was to settle up with Rhoda and bid a suitably elegiac farewell to Humphrey. Then it would be time to leave the rue des Marronniers and proceed to her new quarters and her new life. The impossible had turned out to be possible. Hugh and Jill were going back to London; Jill was expecting a baby and Ruth was to have their flat.

  Strange things had happened to her over the last few weeks. January had been icy and her journeys into the Balzac heartland uncomfortable. Sometimes, after spending the day alone in an unfamiliar town, she would sit in a café, with a cup of coffee in front of her, attracting attention from the bar because a solitary woman was an unusual sight and because such Parisian looseness was not customary; sometimes she was asked rather insistently for her money. She stayed in small hotels which seemed to have no other guests, and wandered about in the fine mist, trying to kill the day, living a reduced life, speaking to no one. The evenings were a problem which she solved, or perhaps failed to solve, by going to bed very early and reading her Balzac. She fell into a heavy sleep quite soon and sometimes in the morning she would find her book on the floor.

  Once, as she leaned over the parapet bordering a river, a strange man spoke to her. She did not understand what he was saying until she realized that he was deaf and dumb. In his desire to make her hear he gesticulated violently, his arms jerking up and down in their shiny blue sleeves, Frightened, she went into a church and made for a small chapel which contained a statue of the Virgin; all around were dedicatory plaques, and her eye fell on one which read, ‘Notre Dame la Grande, fais que j’entende’. After having spoken to no one for so long, she began to feel that she herself had been cut off from the realm of speech. She made her way back to the river. The man was gone, the white mist thicker. Her uneasiness deepened and she decided to go back to Paris.

  Waiting at the station, she thought of Duplessis and wondered how she might get in touch with him to let him know that she was back. She could of course see him on those days when he worked at the Bibliothèque Nationale; in fact there was no other way of seeing him. The chill of the weather, her numbness and dumbness, induced a great and sudden despair. She was alone, in Angers, as it happened, although it could have been Sancerre or Alençon or Saumur, waiting on a platform for an inconvenient train; she was going back to a small dark room, and she must make her way to a public place for a chance of seeing the man who was her only source of real emotion. She, who must wait on accident, could not otherwise arrange to meet him. For all their closeness, they were denied intimacy: cafés, libraries, museums were the only places where they could be together, and she must always wait for a telephone call, for she could not telephone him, even at his office at the Sorbonne. It seemed to her that they could not continue like this, or rather that she could not. For her recent experience of spending the silent days in alien streets, of eating alone, of sleeping too much, had shaken her rather than confirmed her in her elected life. To escape from disorder into a discipline was not enough. Now she wanted an escape from the discipline into something sweeter.

  If only she could sit with him in a room, quietly, talking. If only she could wait for him in some place of her own, hear his footsteps approaching. If she could cook for him, make him comfortable, make him laugh. More than that, she knew, she could not expect. Can anyone? She still measured her efforts and her experience against her disastrous failure with Richard, remembering her expectations and the reality that had destroyed them. That reality had made her wary. Disappointment was now built into any hope she might have had left. But so far Duplessis had not disappointed her.

  Rain began to fall and she was glad when the train approached. Not so glad to find that it was full, mostly of young soldiers, their thick graceless uniforms and heavy boots still constructed for the trenches of the First World War. She sat unhappily on the edge of her seat, try
ing not to breathe in the exhaled breath of her neighbours, both asleep, their heads lolling with the motion of the train and sometimes coming to rest on her shoulders. Those who were not asleep yawned uninhibitedly. Steam whitened the windows. During the long journey her features again became blurred with the anxiety that she had laid aside a few months previously. Her hair needed cutting and she was back in her heavy coat. She felt unkempt, furtive, and without a future. All she could calculate was that her money would soon run out and that she would have to return to London. This, however, was so much of a last resort that she refused to give it any serious thought.

  Montparnasse. As she struggled along the platform, the soldiers jostling all around her, her suitcase banging against her leg, she thought that she might even be glad to see Rhoda and Humphrey again. Certainly, in her present state, she could face no one else. It was mid-February and dark, the time of year she found most difficult. Tonight the lumpy double bed of the rue des Marronniers. Tomorrow the singing radiators of the Bibliothèque Nationale. But first a bath, even if it did mean Humphrey and his little games. Through the taxi windows, each street light was blurred into a nimbus by the damp. She had a feeling that it was the middle of the night, although it was barely half past five. Once in her own room she sank for a moment on to the bed, feeling waterlogged and weak-eyed, then sighed, and picked up her towel, and went downstairs.

  In the bathroom she found messages from Rhoda, propped up against the taps. ‘Professor Duplessis telephoned. Hugh Dixon telephoned. Urgent.’ And there was a letter, in a tiny handwriting she did not know. She looked for a signature. ‘Love, Richard.’ She sat down on the edge of the bath, trembling. Could this still happen? Could this abortive, unfinished business disturb her so profoundly? Would she always react in the same way to those who did not want her, trying ever more hopelessly to please, while others, better disposed, went off unregarded? She read the letter. He was sorry not to have been in touch earlier, but she would understand how busy he had been. And on top of everything, he was getting married. Did she remember Joanna? Maybe not. Anyway, there it was; he was blissfully happy and he hoped that she was too. The cheque had been most useful and he was happy to return her loan at last. He hoped she would have dinner with them both when she got back to London.

  Slowly, she bent down and retrieved the cheque from the floor. Slowly, she put it in her bag. She must be sensible about this. The extra money had come just in time. She would be able to stay a little longer. That was the whole point: the money. She would have her hair done in the morning, call Hugh, see Duplessis. She would take up where she had left off. Yet she felt nothing but a burning dismay as the image of Richard’s wedding bit into her. Again she thought of Phèdre. ‘Hippolyte est sensible et ne sent rien pour moi’. Lucky Joanna, whoever she was. She did not doubt that they would be happy. She crept upstairs to her room, diminished. During the evening she read the letter several times, and wept for a moment before she fell asleep.

  The following weeks were a little hesitant, a little unenthusiastic. The routine resumed. She took Hugh and Jill out for lunch on Sundays, but Jill was feeling unwell and could not eat much. Hugh supervised her appearance until she was presentable again. And Duplessis was there. Gradually things returned to normal. Her pile of notes was now so thick that she decided to begin writing and in writing found some measure of equilibrium. Bright is the ring of words. She would write all day, and at five o’clock Duplessis would come for her and take her out and sit with her and then drive her home.

  But as the light strengthened and the days grew longer she began to walk again, feeling a restlessness and a desire for change that she could not, within the terms of her own existence, justify. On her birthday, otherwise unrecorded, cards came from George – with a message scribbled by Helen – from Mrs Cutler, and from Anthea: ‘Pregnant! Just my luck!’ Ruth lost some of the weight she had put on, and walked more fiercely. After her evening meal, she would go over her notes, under the weak bulb in the jelly-mould shade judged adequate by Rhoda for a virgin scholar. She had less time for Hugh and his excursions, unwilling as she was to leave the library where she wrote and waited to be found. Her industry and application gained her the respect of the custodians and the man at the desk. She thought this might go on for ever, and sometimes hoped that it might. She was twenty-two years old.

  One evening Hugh, downcast and in need of nourishment and encouragement, appeared in the rue des Marronniers.

  ‘Where’s Jill?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘Being sick at home,’ he replied. ‘I think she’s going to have a baby.’

  ‘But that’s marvellous!’ She hesitated. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

  He sat down on her bed. ‘If it’s mine,’ he said.

  She was astounded. ‘But of course it’s yours! Jill adores you.’

  He shook his head. ‘There’s usually another man around. She’s always been the same. So beautiful, you see.’ Ruth saw. ‘And normally it doesn’t matter. Now it does. I want a child. She doesn’t.’

  Ruth looked at him, sitting like a convict with his head in his hands, his normally bluff face creased with misery. She sat down beside him and put her arm around him.

  ‘It’s yours, I’m sure it’s yours. And if it isn’t, I don’t think you should care so much. You will be its father. And when you see it and it looks like you, it will be an added bonus.’

  They were both silent, in the dingy room.

  She thought, it doesn’t matter who the father is. The purpose has been served. You are no longer important. Even her importance will soon be diminished. But she said nothing, pretending not to notice his distress, not recognizing her own. They sat together, side by side, warily. She could hear the seconds ticking by on his watch. Then he gave a great sigh and polished his face with his handkerchief.

  ‘We might as well eat, I suppose,’ he said.

  The immediate pleasure of the food restored him, as it always did. That was his main attraction, his supreme enjoyment of life. She watched him as he severed his steak, refilled his glass. By the time he lit his cheroot he was quite revived.

  ‘If we go ahead with it,’ he pronounced, ‘we’d be better off in London. Jill’s family lives there and I imagine they’ll be quite keen.’

  Warmth suddenly surged into Ruth’s face.

  ‘Hugh,’ she murmured, hardly daring to hope, ‘can I have the flat?’

  ‘Why not? Of course, I can’t really say; it’s in Jill’s name. She lived there before we got married. And I suppose we’d want a nominal sum as repayment for what she had to put down to get it. You know what a business it is to get a flat here.’

  Ruth thought of Richard’s cheque.

  ‘Would a hundred pounds be enough?’ she asked. Her eyes were bright and beseeching, her pretty hair disarranged. Hugh looked at her and thought of his beautiful wife, of whom he had such doubts. Ruth, in so many and such surprising ways the better woman, would not measure up, he thought. In that moment he threw in his lot with Jill and the baby she would have. He could not do without her. But he smiled kindly at Ruth, grateful to her for making up his mind.

  ‘Of course it would,’ he said. ‘It will take us a couple of weeks to get things arranged. Can you wait?’

  A flat of her own. In the rue Marboeuf. She could work at home and cook her own meals and not go out after her bath in the chilly spring nights. There would be a place for her books and a writing table and a telephone, and she could see Duplessis there. Even if he had to leave her to go home, they could sit and talk like reasonable people without pinball machines crashing round her ears or lights changing or libraries closing. The winter months are not kind to a love affair, and the lighter evenings are frustrating. What starts well, in the autumn, may become less through fatigue, or the desire of one partner to be safely at home, or through sheer discomfort. All that would now be resolved. She would nurture him until summer took hold, and then, somehow, they would go away together. She would, if necessary, ask George for a little
money to tide her over. The audacity of her imaginings, unthinkable less than two hours ago, no longer surprised her. It would soon be her turn to be happy.

  She told Duplessis the next day, smiling at him with a new confidence. She needed his approval for he had become both mother and father to her. He pushed back his hat and stirred his coffee, and at length smiled in his turn.

  ‘Perhaps you will invite me to tea,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will make me a cake. The English always do that.’

  ‘More,’ she confirmed happily.

  He looked at her. He, an old married man, would soon be doing what everyone else already suspected him of doing. The obviousness of it all displeased, even disgusted him. His elegant wife would sit innocently in the rue de la Pompe, his daughters rushing in and out with unsuitable young men; he and Noémi would grimace in tired complicity over their appearance. He had been married for twenty-five years, longer than this child had been in the world. But she was not a child, he reminded himself. She was a scholar, a young woman of means, a person of some dignity and courage. He would deny her nothing. He would try to be kind. He was wise enough to know that the kindest way to treat a scholar and a person of some dignity and courage is to pretend that she is none of these things and to accord her the nurture and protection expected by less independent women. Ruth was unaware of such heroic sentiments. She was, indeed, already thinking like the ordinary woman invented by Duplessis. Plates, she thought, knives and forks; find the nearest butcher. I will learn to cook, better this time. I will leave my blue dress behind at Rhoda’s or give it to Marianne.

  They went out into the pale cool evening and he took her hand. She was grateful and smiled at him. Her smile moved him and strengthened his resolve. Love imposes obligations and these are constant. An intermittent lover is no use to a person of dignity and courage. He was wise enough to know this too. But he allowed her to walk home, not caring to be seen in his district with another woman in his car. She realized and respected this. She was becoming less foolish herself.