The Rules of Engagement

by Anita Brookner

  She smiled faintly at my inability to give her credit for her lately discovered wisdom, and put her hand to her face. ‘You’re probably wondering what brought this on,’ she said. ‘Such a minor thing, but it served as a warning of some kind. I had to have some teeth out. I’m afraid Spanish dentists aren’t very good—not that English dentists are much better—and the apparatus I have to wear doesn’t really fit. It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’ll come to terms with it,’ I said awkwardly, not willing to be conscripted into this new intimacy. My mother had always exaggerated. I had thought her brave when I was a child, making light of my colds and scratches, my minor and not so minor accidents. Now I saw that her brashness hid terror, and that her defences against that terror were no longer adequate. I was particularly concerned to eschew any form of sympathy that would lead to the sort of identification she seemed to desire, as if we were no longer mother and daughter but one old woman commiserating with another. She seemed to have forfeited a sort of propriety, to be looking to me for reassurance, and again I could not help but perceive a loss of nerve. Once again I was glad that she was not there to witness my behaviour, though that behaviour was, I thought, discreet. But I feared her instincts, which had always been sharp. She was the kind of woman whose main attention is given over to other women, as if to calculate their assets, and if possible their disadvantages, with regard to herself. She had been expert at the subtle insinuation, the laughing dismissal, as if these matters were crucial to a woman’s success with men. I now saw why my father had looked for love and comfort elsewhere. I did not exonerate him, but I understood him. Yet she had been beautiful, and was so no longer. I was able to regret that quite sincerely, while at the same time resenting the fact that it had been brought to my notice.

  ‘You’ve changed too,’ she said. ‘You’ve got more colour in your face. And you’re better dressed. Well, you can afford to be.’ She laughed, with one of her old angry laughs that always accompanied any discussion of money. Yet I knew that she expected me to express gratitude to her for having steered me into marriage with a prosperous older man. At least he had seemed prosperous at the time, although in the light of Edmund’s wealth his income was probably minimal. We lived comfortably enough, and I was happy to add my own money to his. I paid my way, as seemed only right to me, while Digby took care of the outgoing expenses. I realized that our holidays, in the early days of our marriage, must have been costly, and was glad for several reasons that these had come to an end.

  My mother’s presence was particularly onerous because I had several matters of my own to think about. The first and most important of these was Edmund, or rather his absence. He had taken his family to France, to a house they always rented in the Alpilles, and I should not see him for three or even four weeks. This enforced period of calm was unwelcome for many reasons, for I knew, or sensed, that if the momentum of a love affair falters one loses one’s confidence in a good outcome. I could not help but contrast his circumstances with my own. I spent quiet days alone or with Digby, whose own holiday it was. He preferred to spend it at home, venturing out only for a ruminative morning walk, and sometimes not even for that. It was only too easy to imagine the physical splendour of Edmund’s surroundings and activities, the lithe bodies of his children supplementing his own, as if they were a different race, and inhabited a different atmosphere to our own, to Digby’s and mine, and now, tiresomely, to my mother’s. Until she sat down, glass of whisky to hand, and started unloading her dire observations for my instruction, I had not actively minded our uneventful summer. Both Digby and I were preoccupied and did not converse much, yet there was a kind of harmony in our silence, and I had felt the faintest inkling of a distaste for Britten Street and a recognition that honourable behaviour does impress one and convince one of its validity. Yet, of course, as soon as I perceived this the counter-argument became active, and I was ready to issue hot denials of the importance of dignity and gratitude in human affairs and to claim rights that would in any case be rendered obsolete by age and infirmity. In this I was very much of my time, since women had long discovered the euphoria of protest, possibly because their own mothers, like mine, were uttering dire warnings, shaking their heads at the heedlessness of youth, willing younger people to observe their own constraints, without success. There was an envy there, which daughters perhaps intuited before their mothers did, and it served to sour relations for a time. Certainly I did not intend to compare myself with my mother, whose hand had once again crept to her sunken cheek. I willed my own hand to remain in my lap. Had I been alone I should have run to a mirror to make sure that my appearance was unchanged.

  After weeks of blank and grateful sleep I had begun to dream again, and I had had two dreams that seemed oddly baleful, as dreams do when they linger in the mind. In the first I had been persuaded that all the lights in the flat had failed, and that I must remember to ask the caretaker to check the fuses. I was aware that I was dreaming this, that it was the middle of the night, and that I must telephone the caretaker as early as possible the following morning, yet the image of the lightless flat was so convincing that I actually got out of bed and went to the bathroom, where the light worked normally. I could hardly reassure myself by switching on the lights in the other rooms, spent perhaps a couple of minutes looking out of the window on to the silent street, and then got back into bed, where I immediately, or so it seemed, had another dream. This took place in a notional daytime, on a sunny afternoon much like the afternoons I had been used to spending in the garden. This time, in the dream, I was in South Kensington, not far from Melton Court, and about to enter a café, where Edmund was already seated. He appeared not to know me, but this disturbed me less than the fact that his hair had turned white. I could make no sense of this, for Edmund seemed to be guaranteed protection from age, until I realized that it was not Edmund who had turned white but Digby.

  ‘And Digby looks terrible,’ said my mother, intruding into my mental landscape. ‘Are you sure you’re looking after him?’

  ‘He gets tired,’ I said lamely. ‘He works very hard, too hard. I think he’s quite looking forward to retirement.’ Though what I should do when he was at home all day I had not yet worked out.

  My mother’s hand was at her face again. ‘He couldn’t remember my name,’ she said, in genuine alarm. ‘He called me Helen.’

  ‘Helen was the name of his first wife,’ I told her, though this made me sad. ‘You must have reminded him of her.’

  She smiled, with her new lopsided smile, as if this were some kind of compliment. Yet some instinct moved her to get to her feet and make noises of departure. She was staying at the Basil Street Hotel, where my wedding reception had taken place, and she was anxious to be re-absorbed into its benign atmosphere, after revealing too much, and indeed learning too much, in the course of the afternoon.

  After clearing away the lunch she had been toying with from the kitchen table I went and surveyed Digby in the drawing-room, suppressing a wish (but registering one) that he would remove himself if he wished to doze unobserved and not do so in such a public space. My father had had the same unattractive habit, which he pursued as a deliberate strategy in order to defy my mother’s angry remonstrances. It was his defence against her, and although clearly willed, it was also genuine. He seemed able to plummet into unconsciousness at a moment’s notice, and this had soured the atmosphere at home and reconciled me to the various changes in my situation. Now, by an exquisite irony, I seemed to have been returned to my origins, the only difference being that my father’s place had been taken by my husband. I did not think that men should behave like this, was annoyed with Digby for being too somnolent to wish my mother a sufficiently ceremonious goodbye, although I had sensed her reluctance to engage with him for longer than was necessary. She had seemed to want to confine herself to women’s talk, largely in order to share what I now understood as her fear of the future. The woman with whom she lived, and whose contributions covered
the villa’s expenses, could not be counted upon to care for her. They had met on a cruise and had formalized their plan to retire to the sun without giving the matter much thought. Indeed my mother, who had not previously been known for her appreciation of female company, was no doubt regretting the arrangement but was unable to dismantle it. She may even have been looking to Digby as the man of the family who would know how to extricate her, cancel the friend, sell the villa, or, if not, advise her how to proceed and in a more general sense what to do.

  Her need of support, in the broadest sense of the word, had not been met by any helpful suggestion on my part. I was embarrassed for her and by her; the hand that went repeatedly to her face served only to emphasize her altered looks. And I was embarrassed for and by Digby who had clearly not wished his afternoon to be disturbed, claiming a right to the peaceful enjoyment of his home in what he viewed as his holiday. Again the thought of Edmund’s holiday intruded, not only with the inducements and embellishments that I was used to reading in the travel brochures that I had loyally brought home, thinking that by doing so I was demonstrating an enthusiasm that I knew to be acceptable, but with a clear and piercing vision of Edmund himself, enjoying the sort of intimacy to which I should never be admitted. There was nothing to be done about this, and at that moment I knew the situation to be unalterable, even irreparable. I took a book at random from off the shelves and prepared to sacrifice the afternoon to Digby’s so-called holiday and to respecting his wishes. He liked to have me sitting near him, so that he could reach out and take my hand. In this way we were both appeased, for I was newly aware at such times of his goodness of heart. I lowered my expectations to meet his own, and in so doing achieved a measure of virtue.

  The book I had taken at random, or so I thought, was unfortunately Madame Bovary, and the evidence of Emma’s adultery seemed out of place. I closed it quietly and put it aside, exerting myself, as I often did, to observing everything in the room, as if to reassure myself of its validity. Digby took my hand and asked me whether I wanted to go out; I told him that I was perfectly happy for the moment but that we might take a walk later, perhaps eat in one of the local restaurants. I thought he mumbled rather, but put that down to his recent sleep: fortunately we had both eaten earlier, before my mother’s inconvenient arrival, on which I now looked back with a sense of displacement. This, as always, I looked to Digby to disperse. But it seemed to me that his own face had become a mirror image of my mother’s, with the same slight distortion. This was surely a projection. I walked to the window and looked out, but there was little to be seen that I had not seen before. When I looked back at him, in this different light and perspective, he seemed much as normal.

  Digby had picked up my book and was leafing through it. ‘You won’t like that,’ I warned him.

  ‘I never have liked it. It’s a woman’s book, really.’

  ‘Yet it was written by a man.’

  ‘Yes, only a man would have killed her off.’

  ‘She died because she had got into debt,’ I reminded him coldly.

  ‘I suppose so.’ There was a brief silence. ‘Are you making tea?’ he asked. ‘Deborah gone?’

  ‘Ages ago. Yes, I’ll make tea.’

  I went immediately to the kitchen, suddenly anxious to avoid his presence. Yet I had warmed to him in the course of that peaceful afternoon, appreciated him, even admired him. Now my mood changed to one of weariness and incipient revolt. I played my wifely part adequately, and yet I could see it for what it was: a sham. And it was not only my married life that was a sham; my other life too did not, could not, bear active scrutiny. I saw the point of those grim days in Paris. They had been the means of preparing me for a life lived according to my own rules, rather than by rules imposed on me by other people. I had had a glimpse of the freedom available to the purely selfish, though that freedom could be limited by desire. Once again I wanted to roam the streets unobserved, my thoughts confined to myself rather than anticipating another’s movements, another’s wishes. I wanted everyone to die and leave me alone. I particularly wanted Edmund to die, for I knew that without him I should be myself again and not the person I had become once I had chosen him, or been chosen by him.

  There was another area of discomfort. When we had exchanged that meaningful glance, and the recognition of each other that was to change everything, we had been in his house, in the presence of his wife. So great was the pressure of that moment that I had managed to ignore her. Now I wondered how much she knew about her husband’s affairs, of his skilful arrangements. With increasing discomfort I could now see that she was fully aware—must be aware—of Edmund’s manoeuvres, and that she was cynical enough to be amused by them. Either that, or they were so close that full disclosure was possible on both sides, that Edmund’s adulteries were part of a marital game which engendered a sort of excitement they both found acceptable, even desirable. Maybe Constance too had lovers and could deal with them in such a way as to engender no remorse, no anguish, no soul-searching. Not every woman is an Emma Bovary.

  Constance had always made me uncomfortable. She seemed to find me amusing in several minor ways: my careful cooking, my earnest reading, my obvious—obvious to a woman like herself—boredom, my acute self-consciousness in her presence. For she had managed to instil an uneasiness even before there had been any justification for such a feeling to exist. Her sly watchfulness across the dinner table had always seemed to expose weaknesses in myself that were not obvious to anyone else. I felt transparent in her presence, and had always done so. That was why I must never see her again, never go to their house, never ask about her children, once heard innocently playing in an upstairs room. I must never ask Edmund if he loved her, though, alone in my kitchen, I could see that he must be linked to her in several ways that survived love. Her value to him was obvious, almost as great as his value to her. It was a Faustian bargain, but who was to say that Faustian bargains never worked?

  This revelation, which I had somehow managed not to confront, shocked me, as complicity, connivance, always shock one. I saw that I was merely an accessory, a minor character in a much grander plot, one I was not fully equipped to understand. I saw both of them on one side of a sexual divide and myself on the other. Now I should have to work out whether I wanted to join them in their knowingness or retain an essential part of my own ignorance. I was not clever enough to work out an independent strategy. Yet I was still not willing to forgo the experience. I even felt a certain unhealthy curiosity: what would come next? And if I did not like what came next what could save me, apart from flight?

  When the telephone rang I almost dropped a cup, thinking that it must be Edmund calling from France, telling me when he was coming home. But it was a woman’s voice, and my disappointment informed me that I was not yet ready to relinquish this adventure, however destructive it turned out to be.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Hello?’ I repeated. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Betsy.’

  ‘Betsy! Where are you? How long are you here for?’

  ‘For good, I think. Or for the time being anyway. I just rang to give you my new number.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve sold the house, then? Where will you be living? Yes, give me your number. Have you moved?’

  ‘Not quite. Not yet. I’ve bought a rather horrible flat that I haven’t had time to prepare. It was the first one I saw.’

  ‘Betsy, what is that noise? I can hear drilling. Are you still there?’

  ‘Builders. The new owners are having a lot of work done. I had to ask if I could stay on for a month, until the new place . . . until I’ve sorted myself out.’

  ‘What’s happened? Of course I’m delighted that you’re here, but . . . you don’t sound quite yourself.’

  ‘I’ve not been well.’ The voice was monotonous, uninflected. ‘I’ll tell you all about it.’

  ‘Are you alone? Daniel?’

  ‘Daniel died.’ The voice was still neutral.

  ‘I see,’ I said sl
owly. ‘Would you like to meet? I’d love to see you.’

  I did want to see her, not only because I was intrigued by the change in her voice but for more general and more admirable reasons: she was a part of my past when the past was still relatively unspotted, not yet subject to alien influences. She was the friend of my youth, and therefore an essential witness. She had looked to me for protection, yet her blitheness was in itself more protection than I could offer. She had seen me as respectable, with a proper home and proper parents, not dreaming how fallible both could be. She had admired my mother, had felt a misplaced respect for our lives, for my life, which she viewed as fortunate. Not once throughout our mismatched childhoods had she manifested envy or resentment. I remembered, with a twinge of pity, of embarrassment, her evenings at the cinema with her aunt. Her staunch spirit seemed to have withstood the blandishments of those heroes and heroines, for whom everything progresses to a foreseen conclusion. Then I reminded myself that to let her down by confessing to my current behaviour would be a major solecism, almost an offence I could not bring myself to commit. And she had found a hero of her own, a man almost as unrealistic as herself, and who was now dead. This in a sense was appropriate, yet I could hardly point this out. It was somehow in line with her classical aspirations: Titus and Bérénice doomed never to be happy together. Did she still cling to those superhuman ideals?

  ‘What about that tea?’ called my husband.

  ‘Just coming,’ I said. From the telephone came noises of banging, as if the house were collapsing on top of her. ‘Betsy,’ I shouted, as if she could hardly hear me. ‘Are you still there?’