Leaving Home

by Anita Brookner

  Also I had acquired a new companion, Michael, who had the room next to mine and who, like me, was observing the sort of respite that cautious people allow themselves before returning to the duties assigned to them by others.

  ‘At last!’ exclaimed Françoise, thinking her efforts well rewarded, her pastoral duties at an end.

  She could not have been more wrong, and for that reason it was as well that she knew little about him, apart from the cardinal fact that he was male. He was a shy, taciturn man, or rather boy, a couple of years older than myself but even more innocent, more wary. Half English, half French, he made some sort of living teaching English conversation to French businessmen, whom he visited in the early evening at their homes. He would then come loping silently back to the hotel, where our paths crossed, I going out for my meal, he returning from his. ‘Pardon,’ he said in the doorway. ‘De rien,’ I replied, and we both essayed a hasty smile. From the copy of The Times I had under my arm he deduced that I was English, and on that very first evening he accompanied me, or rather followed me, to the café. After that it was inevitable that we should become friends.

  Like most friendless people he was awkward with friendship, yet I could not see that he was in any way disqualified from closer ties. On that first evening he questioned me relentlessly, as if this were the way to establish a relationship. I did not object to this: it was a long time since I had been an object of such fierce scrutiny. In fact it was the first time. I could see that he was something of a misfit, and put this down to a faulty upbringing, which I was careful not to disturb. His poetic looks— the fine-boned face, the lock of hair which he did not attempt to smooth back—were largely misleading, for there was no romance in him. Having decided from my answers to his questions that I was no threat to his peace of mind, he accepted me as someone with whom he might spend a certain amount of time. I learned nothing about him that he was not anxious to divulge: he was as reticent as I was, and we met, not disagreeably, as distant members of the same family might meet, having acquired knowledge of each other’s habits from the same source, though that source was left vague and undisturbed.

  ‘Will you go home? Eventually, I mean?’ This was the only direct question I ever put to him, for his life seemed to me as tentative as my own.

  ‘Might hang on here for a bit,’ was the reply, from which I deduced that money was no problem. Indeed he had the indifference to the future that only a moneyed background can provide, the attitude to discomfort that only the rich can display. He did a certain amount of writing in his room, and I assumed that he was an aspirant novelist or poet, although this he kept to himself. He explained to me, in a rare moment of confidence, never to be repeated, that if he told me what he was writing it would escape him, being too evanescent to be shared. I thought it better to respect this, which he took to be a mark in my favour. Nor did I tell him about my dwindling interest in gardens. We spent time together, ruminatively, without much conversation but with the assurance of automatic if unsought company. We went for long walks in the light evenings, and on the occasional Sunday we went to Malmaison or Saint-Cloud and sat in the gardens like a very old couple.

  ‘And your amoureux?’ queried Françoise.

  I could not tell her that after an initial exchange our relationship was platonic, even celibate. I replied with a smile to her questions, knowing that they would soon cease. Françoise was not interested in anything that was not immediate. I had confirmed her original estimate of me, that I was timid, inhibited, backward, and altogether harmless. It was the last quality, which was authentic, that appealed to her, even if it made her attitude towards me one of curiosity. I was another species, one she had not formerly encountered; there was even a kind of wariness, which was expressed in a tolerant smile with which she covered her exasperation. For she was genuinely puzzled by my lack of boldness, as perhaps I was myself. It suited me to sit quietly on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps to eat an ice cream at a rickety iron table, as if I were still a child, by no means anxious to exchange this condition for a maturity that I sensed was not quite within my reach.

  For myself, and perhaps for Michael as well, this was a blessed interval. Neither of us had a clearly defined future; neither of us wanted to return to what we had left. All I knew of his background was that his parents lived in Oxford, where his father was a don: all I knew of his parents was that he called them by their Christian names, which I thought sophisticated. He knew even less about me. For what was there to tell? I regretted, not for the first time, my meagre family, and even felt slightly resentful that so little had been done to prepare me for life in the real world. True, my mother had disbursed the money on which I was currently living but the worldly instructions that I had perhaps expected had never materialized. I knew, hazily, that she wanted me to marry, to find someone who would be responsible for me so that she might regard her task as complete and spend the rest of her life peacefully reading. As for my uncle . . . There was genuine dislike there, and at this distance I could see that it was mutual. I preferred Michael and his blessed silences to the overt masculinity exuded by my uncle, who, I saw, had something of the same attitude as Françoise: from his point of view (and he was not wrong) I was unawakened, asexual: therefore I might just as well find an occupation for myself by attending to my mother, whom he saw as lacking in protection. I looked askance at their lack of concern for me, though this was precisely the attitude I appreciated in Michael. Perhaps I was aware of an absence of excitement, but considered this a sacrifice worth making. I had a genuine appreciation of his absentmindedness. When, after a few seconds of inattention, he would put a hand under my elbow as we walked up the stairs at the Métro station I felt privileged. Here was someone who did not think me in any way at fault. His belated courtesies were to me more enjoyable than the most extravagant of compliments.

  From this I deduced that my inclinations were fraternal rather than romantic, that I preferred this kind of stasis to the rapid conquests practised by those women who had been liberated into behaving like men, and of whom Françoise was perhaps the ideal representative, although her instincts were so primal that she needed no indoctrination from outside agencies. And it has to be said that I had retrieved something in the way of caste from the presence of a man in my life. I loved him in the least restricted sense of the word: I valued him, respected him, respected his separateness. He in his turn was grateful for mine. Our gift to each other was simple companionship, wordless acceptance. We had delivered each other from a solitude that would eventually have saddened us. The memory of our brief physical closeness had left a trace, had reassured us, had persuaded us that we had no further need of it to make us friends. One daring Saturday afternoon we went shopping together but this was not a success. The red pullover I urged him to buy was politely rejected. My arm was seized and we left the conspiratorial atmosphere of the shop with something like relief. The experiment was not repeated.

  Without his company I should have been not only lonely but purposeless. I had almost enough garden material for my dissertation and could now think about putting it together. All I had to do was establish certain general points and work out connections between them. Fortunately no conclusion was required. The raw materials were there for my successors to attempt the same worthy analysis. I imagined pale students, like myself, confined to the same exiguous lodgings, and shuddered. My past seemed unenviable, but then so did my future. Perhaps for this reason I found it easy to live in the present. I devoted my best energies to this pursuit, and was determined to be happy. The returning sun invested my efforts with a protective aura. I recognized this interval for what it was, a pause between various duties. That, if anything, made it more precious.

  Some of this attitude commended itself to Françoise, who ascribed it to sexual satisfaction. I took care not to enlighten her, and my reticence confirmed her suspicions. Instead I diverted her by taking an interest in her own affairs which she found equally commendable. I knew she took risks, but they
appeared not to harm her. She was a hunter, who took pleasure where it was offered, never truly knowing her partners, affecting a gaiety which, although genuine, provided little in the way of intimacy. I persisted in thinking friendship the greater good; this too I kept to myself. There was no dishonesty in this, or none that I could see. When she asked me what Michael did I answered, ‘He is writing a novel.’ I somehow knew this to be true. She, in her turn, regarded me with a new respect. I had established my credentials, and at the same time invested my previously drab position with a certain lustre.

  ‘Did you have a good weekend?’ I would ask her, thinking back to my own.

  She was too well-bred, too French, to pull a face, but a grimace was implicit in her answer.

  ‘My weekends are all the same,’ she said. ‘They follow a pattern established by my mother when I was old enough to be paraded before her friends.’

  ‘You never mention your father.’

  ‘Dead, but not regretted. He was largely absent, and I suppose unfaithful. My mother never speaks of him unless she is referring to the house, which was of course his. She says I take after him. She dislikes that in me. She is determined that I marry advantageously, as she did. Never mind love: advantage is what counts in a marriage.’

  ‘But I thought . . .’

  ‘You thought I had escaped all that? To a certain extent I have. But every weekend I conform. She is brave, my mother; I owe her that. But she’s relentless. An advantageous marriage for me will also supply her with the funds for the upkeep of the house. She loves the house.’

  ‘As you do.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a brief silence as we contemplated her destiny. ‘You must come out with me one weekend,’ she said. ‘My mother wouldn’t mind. In fact she might approve of you. You’d like the house.’

  ‘Describe it to me.’

  ‘Well, you’ve seen the photograph.’

  I had indeed and had been impressed. The house was of fine stone, not quite a cube, a truncated part of what had once been something bigger, not quite a château, rather what would have been a manor house had the same style obtained in England. In the corner of the photograph I could see a ruin. ‘The chapel,’ she explained. ‘Sacked in 1789.’ Despite herself she was proud.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Near Sucy-en-Brie. Completely isolated. One hears nothing.’

  ‘A lost domain.’

  She smiled. ‘I see you’ve read your Alain-Fournier.’

  ‘I understand your attachment to it.’

  ‘It’s the life inside it I’m not happy with. My mother has these strange friends. I say strange, although I’m used to them. But sometimes when I arrive from Paris I see how strange they are. A couple of elderly married people, and a widow with her son. This is all for the benefit of the son. And for me, of course.’

  ‘Why are they strange?’

  ‘They are all old. Older than my mother, who is not an old woman. Yet in their presence she acts like a dowager. She exaggerates. I think they see through it. They regard her as a bit of an actress, not quite up to their standard. And yet they turn up every weekend. It’s become a tradition.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, there’s not much to do in the country.’

  ‘Where do you fit in?’

  ‘Well, I play my part. In a way I accept that I have to, although I have different plans, as you can imagine.’

  ‘Your private life?’

  ‘My truly private life.’

  ‘Will you do what your mother wants you to do?’

  ‘Not if I can help it. It would be like becoming her. And she’s a difficult, complicated woman. You’ll see, when you come down.’

  Her mother—Mme Desnoyers—did not sound complicated to me. On the contrary, she sounded all too monstrously simple, one of those classic matriarchs one reads about, or like the mothers of Roman emperors, determined to drive their sons, or in this case daughters, on to destinies they might not have envisaged for themselves. And with a will capable of outwitting the world. Why else did those hardened visitors turn up every Saturday evening? No doubt she was an equally hardened hostess, with worldly manners which they could not fault. They might, however, have perceived some flaw in her makeup, wondered about her ancestry, to which no reference was made. They may have felt the same way about Françoise: her boldness would have been apparent to those elderly visitors, as if their seniority gave them the insights they may have been denied in their earlier days. I was not anxious to meet such a mother. My own emancipation was all too precarious: I was living a makeshift life, not unlike that of Françoise in her dingy flat, determined to live her own makeshift life away from that controlling desire to force her to conform. I looked at my friend’s handsome face, and saw, for the first time, an underlying sadness, as if she knew that age would take care of her destiny, even more than her mother could. Even she would succumb to seriousness, and realize that liberty has its limits, and that those limits become apparent however much one desires to ignore them.

  Besides, apart from my genuine inability to fit into such a setting, of which I was well aware, I did not want to forgo my Sundays with Michael for the problematic crosscurrents of which I should be aware. Those Sundays would have seemed anodyne to an onlooker: an almost silent perambulation around a chosen site, in the company of other petit bourgeois couples out with their children on the one day of the week that they could call their own, with the treat of an ice cream a gesture made towards those same children who had perhaps been reluctant to accompany their parents and who were not mollified by such an inadequate reward for the boredom they had endured. Yet such pastimes suited me: I derived pleasure from the presence at my side of my so undemanding companion, aware that he too valued a presence as silent as my own. I was alive to Françoise and her friendship for me. But Michael was more than a friend; he was my brother. I knew that we should spend that evening, as we usually did, going round bookshops, reading a few pages in each, before walking home again through the festive night. So anxious was I for the sound of his knock on my door that I made signs of departure, leaving Françoise to finish her coffee alone. Her wry smile told me that she misread the reason for my haste. Impossible to explain to her that I was evading involvement and not running to meet it.

  6

  MY FIRST SIGHT OF FRANÇOISE’S HOUSE, L’ERMITAGE, constituted the first coup de foudre I had ever experienced. Others were to follow, but few could compare with that first sighting, when it emerged from thickly wooded country as on to an open stage, in a clearing which later proved to be extensive, part of the land it had once owned and to which it still had a claim. Sweetly situated on an east/west axis which prolonged the hours of daylight, its large windows were flooded with the sun of an advanced spring when I awoke on the morning after our late arrival the previous evening. Then I had registered only silence, absence, a dying fall of birdsong, perhaps the sound of a distant car, but once the door opened I became aware of black and white tiles, and then polished wood, and then above all the smell of an aromatic substance which I did not recognize. Françoise saw my expression and smiled. ‘We make our own,’ she said. ‘It preserves the wood.’ To the shadowy figure who had opened the door, ‘Madame est de retour?’ At that moment Mme Desnoyers herself appeared from what I later knew to be the salon. ‘Ah, te voilà,’ she said, and kissed her daughter briskly. Turning to me she held out a hand. ‘Emma Roberts,’ I offered. ‘Fernand!’ she called to the person who had opened the door. He picked up my bag and gestured me to follow him up a staircase at the end of a long corridor. All this had taken only a few minutes and was perfectly and wordlessly enacted. Such behaviour, such physical ease seemed to me to belong to a different sphere from what I had previously known. Here was space, lightness, beauty; more than any of these, here was authority. It was an authority that existed independently of its owners, and I understood instinctively how essential it was that such a house should be preserved, by the meanest calculation, if necessary, by a loveless marriage, by a financial under
standing. I understood the full implications of Françoise’s ‘advantage’ and endorsed them completely.

  I was clearly expected to make myself scarce, since Françoise and her mother appeared to be having an argument downstairs in one of the rooms I had barely had time to examine as I followed Fernand to a small bedroom in which he placed my bag, indicated a cupboard containing a washbasin, and left. I had somehow failed to establish myself as a proper guest, of a kind to which the house was accustomed. I was keenly aware of this and wondered how I should fare with the owner of the house, whose very summary welcome I now had time to evaluate. Clearly I would fail to impress. I could only hope to be agreeable and inconspicuous, well-meaning and accommodating, useful in any way consigned to me. In fact I did not have a chance to be any of these things until the following day, when I was more closely examined by Mme Desnoyers in the brief moments of attention she could spare from activities which seemed to take her all over the house, her heels on the wooden floors heralding her appearances which were rapid and unexpected, but which seemed sufficient for her to inspect my appearance and perhaps to witness my dreamy look of admiration and the obedient smile which was apparently all she required by way of a greeting. ‘Françoise will show you round,’ she said, in excellent English. ‘Then I suggest you go out. The woods are beautiful at this time of the year. And I hear you are interested in gardens. Françoise!’ she snapped out, and again I was removed from any possible conversation by her original engagement with her daughter, which was sufficiently embattled to convince me that the utmost tact would be required in my dealings with this woman, together with politeness, deference, flattery, and admiration.