A Start in Life

by Anita Brookner

  Wandering through the light spring rain, which misted and thickened her hair, she tried to work out once more whether she was committing a gross crime or merely being sensible and taking what life offered. Certainly she was far from Anthea’s norm; she did not plan ahead or calculate her moves. She knew that she was capable of being alone and doing her work – that that might in fact be her true path in life, or perhaps the one for which she was best fitted – but was she not allowed to have a little more? Must she only do one thing and do it all the time? Or was the random factor, the chance disposition, so often enjoyed by Balzac, nearer to reality? She was aware that writing her dissertation on vice and virtue was an easier proposition than working it out in real life. Such matters can more easily be appraised when they are dead and gone. Dead in life and dead on the page. She had learned much from Balzac. Above all she had learned that she did not wish to live as virtuously as Henriette de Mortsauf or as Eugénie Grandet; she did not wish to be as courageous and ridiculous as Dinah de la Baudraye, who is nevertheless a great woman; she did not wish to be the Duchesse de Langeais, who has many lovers but who ends in a nunnery. She would rather be like the lady who spells death to Eugénie Grandet’s hopes, a beauty glimpsed at a ball in Paris with feathers in her hair. Better a bad winner than a good loser. Balzac had taught her that too.

  17

  So, training herself to be a winner, she rang Jill every day to ask how she was and bought Hugh lunch and smiled at him constantly while trying to extract a date of departure from him. Finally, it was settled. The last week in March. Her room in the rue des Marronniers began to be cluttered with little purchases: tea towels, pretty cups and saucers, extra coat hangers. She was tired but excited; her work suffered somewhat for she could not endure the forced immobility of the library and went out to meet Hugh or just to walk. Sometimes Duplessis would find her place empty at five o’clock; he would shrug his shoulders, half disappointed, half relieved. She was taking it all so seriously that he feared for her. No one could measure up to her expectations; no one would care to try. He himself would be forced to abdicate at some point. But not yet.

  On the last Saturday in March Ruth said goodbye to Rhoda and Humphrey, who seemed sorry to see her go, inserted herself and her belongings with some difficulty into the van belonging to the concierge’s son-in-law, and rattled off to the rue Marboeuf. She found Hugh and Jill having an impromptu farewell party. A glass of champagne was pressed into her hand, but she seemed to have interrupted some private joke. Both were so helpless with laughter that she said she would leave her things and come back later. She made a note to buy dusters and scouring powder; as she turned to go down the stairs they burst out laughing again and she felt prim and rather hurt. It was the first warm day of the year. Women in this small fashionable street trod delicately, careful of their appearance. Ruth sat in a café and watched them, feeling the sun strong and bright through the plate glass of the window. She became drowsy; only expectation kept her awake for she had had little sleep the night before. She ought, she knew, to let her parents have her new address but she had so many more urgent matters to attend to, and they never wrote anyway. As the afternoon was drawing to its close she did her shopping at the grocery and climbed the stairs once more. This time expensive pigskin suitcases were standing outside the front door. When she rang the bell, Hugh answered, without his tie on. Jill was sitting on the bed fastening her dress. There was an empty champagne bottle rolling around on the floor and a great deal of scent had been upset in the tiny bathroom; the place smelt overpoweringly of lilac. They seemed unwilling to leave and proposed dinner and a later plane. Ruth sat impatiently, aware of all the tasks that awaited her before she could go to bed. But it was Sunday tomorrow, she reflected, and although she was hot and tired, the evening was lovely, with a high grey dusk and a faintly greenish cast to the skyline. The next day would be fine again. Hugh surprised her by paying the bill for dinner. He had sold a little Max Ernst drawing for cash that very morning. The omens were good.

  She got to bed at two, for there was much to clear up, so much scrubbing to be done, the sheets to be changed, the bottles to be put in a bag to be taken down to the dustbin, the smell of lilac to be flapped out of the window with her duster. Even at such a late hour she could hear the traffic in the nearby Champs Elysées and imagine the moving river of brilliance. Only at dawn would the wan light illumine an empty high road which seemed to be awaiting the tramp of an exhausted returning army. She did not sleep well, tired though she was. But in the morning she eased her aching back against the pillow and realized that for the first time in her life she would shortly be drinking coffee from her own cup. No more kitchen china. No more landlords’ rejects. She was a householder at last.

  The next few days stayed fine and she was well content with her lot. She dusted and shopped and cooked; she walked down the Champs Elysées to the library and after the day’s work she took a string bag out of her briefcase and studied the prices at the greengrocers’ stalls. Duplessis smiled at her, a little sadly, for he had less of her attention these days, and said so.

  ‘But it is all for you!’ she said in astonishment. ‘I am getting things ready.’

  And she bought flour and sugar and a vanilla pod and many eggs. Balzac stayed in her briefcase for whole evenings at a stretch.

  She could no longer identify with her favourite heroine, Eugénie Grandet. She felt she was in control of her life, that it was no longer at the mercy of others, that she could not be disposed of against her will or in ignorance of her fate. Eugénie, waiting for her handsome cousin Charles to come home to Saumur and marry her, sits dreamily in her garden, on a wormeaten bench, under a walnut tree. For relief and diversion, she looks at the miniature of her aunt, his mother, that he has given her and sees his features there. She herself, she thinks, has little to offer for she is not beautiful, although Balzac stoutly defends what looks she has and compares her kind face and large brow to those of a Madonna. But Eugénie humbly recognizes her lack of beauty as an almost fatal flaw. ‘Je suis trop laide; il ne fera pas attention à moi.’ Eugénie’s mother learns with dismay of her attachment; her nurse tries to inject some character into her; but her obdurate and miserly father is quite content to have her at home for that way he can control her fortune. Grandet is a byword in Saumur for cunning and cheek. Eugénie is a good catch, but she is so listless, so absent, so mild. Her cousin Charles, of whom someone reports that fateful glimpse at a ball in Paris when Eugénie supposes him to be on the high seas, never returns to claim her. Eugénie, her parents dead, herself an heiress, makes a loveless match which is never consummated. She, in her turn, becomes a byword in Saumur.

  Ruth, her eyes bright, her string bag filled with vegetables and fruit, felt more like Renée de l’Estorade, who is an expert on sensible arrangements. What she tended to ignore these days (and her work suffered because of it) was Balzac’s strange sense of the unfinished, the sudden unforeseen deaths, the endless and unexpected remorse, the mutation of one grand lady into someone else’s grander wife, the ruthless pursuit of ambition. She did not understand, and few women do, that Balzac’s rascally heroes are in fact consumed with a sense of vocation, in which love only plays an evanescent if passionate part, that they will go on and on and on and never rest until death cuts them down. What she did understand, and this is not difficult, is Balzac’s sense of cosmic energy, in which all the characters are submerged, until thrown up again, like atoms, to dance on the surface of one particular story, to disappear, to reappear in another guise, in another novel. No, really, Eugénie was an anomaly, so biddable, so inert on her bench in the garden, while her mother wasted away and her father grew more angry. Ruth could not remember why she had ever liked the novel in the first place.

  It was arranged that Duplessis would come to the flat after his lecture at the Sorbonne, on the Thursday of a week that began fine and sunny. Tourists were already present in force in the Champs Elysées; café tables were full. Ruth, in her tarta
n skirt and beige pullover, felt formal and French in comparison. She would have to stay here, of that there was no doubt. She could not go home. Perhaps if she explained matters to her father he would agree to make over a little money to her. She had no thoughts beyond the completion of her dissertation, no desire for a career now, although she supposed that eventually she would teach or write or both. But she could do all that when she was thirty or so, and with much greater authority and experience. No, she would have to stay in France.

  She bought a bottle of wine, and, after only one rehearsal, made for Duplessis the beautiful cake called ‘la Reine de Saba’. She sat down to wait for him. Once more, as on that other occasion, which she could now recall with a smile, a shaft of sunlight illuminated the dusty carpet. By peering upward, through the window which looked on to a well, she could see an irregular patch of Parisian grey-white sky. Resting her arms on the sill, she watched the concierge make her spidery and suspicious way into the opposite staircase, and saw the youngest girl from the architect’s office next door cross the courtyard with a cone-shaped parcel of cakes on her upstretched palm. She would be able to see Duplessis as he took the same path. But perhaps he would not want to be watched. She withdrew her head and closed the window.

  When she heard his steps, she smiled to herself, glad that she could not now be seen. Now her waiting was over. With a sigh, which she thought was happiness, but may in fact have been a by-product of all the waiting she had done in her life, she rose to open the door and let him in.

  They ate their cake and drank their wine, not talking much, a little formal. He took her hand and kissed it, careful of her dignity. When she got up to make their coffee it was quite late and she was surprised to hear the telephone, for apart from Duplessis only Rhoda had her number.

  ‘But what is it?’ said Duplessis, trying to take her stricken face in his hands. She resisted him, biting her lips to regain control.

  ‘My mother,’ she said finally. ‘I think she has had a heart attack.’ She wept then, and gave a long sigh. ‘That was my father. He said I should go home straight away.’

  In fact it was Mrs Cutler, sounding frightened, who had taken the telephone away from George and whispered into it at some length.

  ‘They had a hell of a barney,’ she confided. ‘I was in my room so I don’t know what it was about. I heard them shouting so I got up and there was your mother, in the drawing room, for some reason, bent double in a chair. She looked awful. So did he. He looks worse than she does, if you ask me.’

  ‘Is she dying?’ asked Ruth fearfully.

  Mrs Cutler released a cackle of reassuring laughter. ‘Not likely,’ she said, although she was not too sure herself. ‘Bit of chest pain. Wind, I should say. You know how she eats.’ She meant drinks. ‘Doctor’s been. Gave them both something to make them sleep. I’m just going to heat them some milk.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Try and come home soon, Ruth. It’s him I’m worried about, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘Of course, I will come straight away.’

  Duplessis took her to the station. As she cleared away their coffee cups and threw away the remains of the cake, she wept again and he said nothing. He knew that she was very frightened and eventually told her that she would soon be back, that chest pains were quite common, and even a mild heart attack not fatal. And her mother was not old. Not old at all. He would see her very soon, he said encouragingly. He would telephone her at home and come to meet her train. She smiled sadly at the thought and also at the thought of the clean sheets on the bed that would not now be used. Would she ever sleep in it again?

  He got her on to the Night Ferry and tipped the steward to give her a berth to herself. She struggled to raise the stiff brown blind at the window and saw him standing far below her, the brim of his hat turned up all the way round, his expression patient and contained, his hand raised. The train drew out and very soon she could no longer see him. All she could remember was a long curved platform beside a shining rail, a deserted baggage trolley, and a single figure watching the train disappear.

  18

  The following morning Dover looked grey, rough, and unwelcoming. Ruth, to her surprise, had slept soundly and on awakening had been haunted by a strange dream. In the dream she had been on a luxurious international train, with walnut doors and pink lamps, and was sitting down to a meal in the dining car. ‘Contrefilet à la sauce ravigote,’ she ordered, then, looking sideways through the window, saw her mother, complete with denim cap, waiting patiently in some sort of siding. Helen looked thin, sardonic and helpless. Ruth struggled with the window for she wanted to get a message to her mother; she wanted to explain to her the impossibility of her leaving the train until it stopped at a proper station. But the window would not budge and Helen continued to stare, amused but implacable, through to the place where Ruth was sitting.

  Ruth awoke with a start, realized where she was and why she was there, and immediately fell into a protective lethargy, her eyes dull, her limbs heavy. She ate a lot of breakfast, half fearful that the dream might come true, but a sideways glance through the window revealed only neat bungaloid hamlets, toy milk floats cruising through high streets, and acres of sodden fruit trees. As the train approached London, Ruth began to shake; the lethargy wore off, and the combined anguish of renunciation and fear of the future took her in its grip.

  Yet at Oakwood Court all was surprisingly calm. Mrs Cutler had opened the door, wearing the overall she normally only donned by request, and immediately took her cigarettes and lighter from the pocket and started smoking. She drew Ruth into the kitchen and briefed her.

  ‘He’s gone to Mount Street. Too ashamed to stay here, I shouldn’t wonder. Seems he’s got another woman and that’s what the fight was about. I doubt if it was worth an argument really, but you know what she’s like, anything for a bit of drama. Only this time it backfired, didn’t it?’

  She made them both a cup of instant coffee. Ruth, who was unused to the taste, felt a lurch of nausea which was compounded by the sight of a stained saucer serving as an ashtray on the kitchen table and the pan containing last night’s milk drink lying in the sink, its thick skin regularly punctured by drips from the tap.

  Mrs Cutler, glad of Ruth’s company, stretched out a knobbly left hand on which was displayed a ring with a very small opaque blue stone. Ruth looked at it uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Slow as ever, aren’t you?’ chided Mrs Cutler. ‘My engagement ring, you funny girl. I’m getting married, aren’t I? I’m going to be Mrs Dunlop.’

  She made the gesture all betrothed women make, holding up her hand in front of her, trying to see the ring as a part of it that she would soon take for granted.

  ‘That’s why we had to get you home, see. Apart from the worry about her. I’m leaving at the end of the week. You’ll be able to move into my room. Be nice and large for you. Used to be your grandma’s, I understand.’

  ‘Where is my mother?’ said Ruth restlessly.

  Mrs Cutler became serious.

  ‘You’ll find her in a funny mood,’ she warned. ‘She’s got some idea that she’s not going to stay here with your father. Under the same roof, she says. He had to sleep on the couch last night. Load of nonsense.’ She sniffed. ‘As if there was anything in it at their age. Carrying on like a couple of youngsters.’ Mrs Cutler had not forgotten Helen’s expression of disdain when she had announced her forthcoming marriage, and, once her uneasiness had passed, could not wait to abandon Oakwood Court and head for Folkestone.

  Ruth found herself pausing fearfully outside the closed door of her mother’s bedroom. She knew that something monstrous waited for her on the other side. The fact of her father’s absence seemed conclusive and it did not occur to her to telephone him: she felt too frightened. He had not wanted to see her, which proved that she too was at fault. She should never have gone away. And now she would see her mother, dying, in her bed.

  But when she knocked and opened the door and peered in, she found Helen not in bed but
seated, fully clothed, in her trouser suit and denim cap, calmly smoking and looking surprisingly well. The only odd thing about her appearance was that she was wearing shoes and was clutching a stout handbag which had once belonged to the elder Mrs Weiss and had been pronounced ‘too good’ to give away, although it was hopelessly old-fashioned and very heavy.

  ‘Mother,’ said Ruth, in a voice already rusty with disuse. Helen turned her head slowly and surveyed her daughter with eyes as impassive as those of an animal long in captivity. She was wearing, Ruth could see, full stage make-up and she looked ruined but beautiful. She had removed her wedding ring but had put on whatever other jewelry she possessed: the string of pearls given to her by her father on her twenty-first birthday, her mother’s garnet brooch, and her silver bracelets. She had not been, in that sense, a greedy woman.

  ‘Mother,’ said Ruth again. There seemed little more to say.

  At length Helen smiled, but very slightly, just like the Helen in Ruth’s dream. She seemed almost amused by her daughter’s predicament and refused to offer any assistance whatsoever.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’ asked Ruth helplessly, although she preferred to see her mother up. ‘What did the doctor say?’

  Mrs Cutler now appeared in the doorway with an official-looking orange duster in her hand.

  ‘Said she was to take it easy,’ she supplied. ‘And no more arguments. He was the one who nearly bought it, if you ask me. With his blood pressure. And the weight he’s put on.’

  Helen cut into this. ‘Ruth,’ she said, in the very deep voice Ruth had only heard her use when she was exhausted. ‘We are going away. I cannot stay here.’ She remembered to say cannot, Ruth noted automatically.

  Ruth and Mrs Cutler both advanced on her and started talking at once. Helen again ignored them.