The Rules of Engagement

by Anita Brookner

  I hoped that he would not take too long to do this, as the warmer days presented me with a problem. There was no patch of grass that I could call my own, and I could not bear to sit in the flat entertaining busy and no doubt reckless calculations. My fantasy of a little house, with a kitchen table and a back door, soon faded; I did not have the money for such an enterprise. What I had was the flat, in which I was condemned to remain. Yet every morning I had an impulse to leave it, and as soon as I could I went round to a modest local café for breakfast. This place, thronged at that time of the morning with young men in tin hats and baggy shorts, took no notice of me: I could sit there for a couple of hours with a cup of coffee in front of me and read the paper. When the owner seemed to find this acceptable I had no further qualms about doing so, and would spend the morning being anonymous and untroubled. One good result of this regime was that I started reading again, with the hunger of one long deprived. I wondered how I could have borne to be without the printed page for so long, although what I read hardly corresponded to the thoughts chasing each other in my mind. I read Villette, and marvelled with something like despair at the noble heroine, yet I was convinced, as I once had been, of the superiority of such trusting behaviour. This opened up a whole range of role models, and they seemed so natural that I wondered how I could have left them behind. Dickens I would avoid; his characters were virtuous beyond my reach, perhaps beyond anybody’s reach, and the archaic part of me was still trying to calculate what was and was not permitted. One comes back to nineteenth-century novels again and again, largely because of the sheer beauty of the reasoning: happiness at last, achieved through the exercise of faithfulness and right thinking. That this was still possible if one were a lesser, even a fallen being, I doubted; nevertheless it continued to make a forceful impression. And there was always a marriage, seen as the right true end, and this I did not doubt. The fragmentation of present-day society had meant a loss of hope, so that those who harboured traditional leanings were largely disappointed. My love affair, in which I still believed passionately, was in truth largely a matter of bad faith for all concerned, and its unexpected aftermath, in which I had become unwillingly involved, even worse.

  In the café, among the young men in their work clothes, I felt temporarily restored to a mild version of hopefulness. No one knew where to find me, and I read on until an influx of people alerted me to the fact that it was nearly lunchtime. Then, reluctantly, I drained my third cup of coffee, waved to the proprietor, and made my way home. The afternoon would present a problem, as it usually did. I felt shy of imposing my presence on the café once again and tried to continue reading in the flat, until discontent or merely claustrophobia drove me out again. That was when I walked—anywhere, it hardly mattered—buying the food I should be obliged to eat alone, and returning to the flat only when this pretext seemed too futile. In any event I was not hungry; I had not experienced a keen appetite for a very long time. I suppose that I languished. That too seemed a consequence of poor behaviour; it was impossible to think of Lucy Snowe languishing. I concluded that I was simply not good enough to gain re-admission to the high standards of fiction and must make do with the sorry business of real life. There had been no telephone call from Nigel Ward, a fact which was becoming increasingly relevant.

  After Villette I decided on The Portrait of a Lady, which I took with me when I joined the tin hats in the café on subsequent mornings. This was far more instructive, I found. It was a story I had once rejected, thinking it too sad for my purpose. I must have been very young when I first read it, and still hopeful, but the prospect of a woman living up to the task of being or becoming a lady had seemed onerous, too harsh to contemplate. Yes, there was a marriage, but when I was young I could not believe that a marriage could be so hateful, although I had the example of my parents to convince me. It was simply that I expected art to furnish me with better examples, as I suppose most people do, and I could not abandon my belief that in a certain favourable context one would behave as well as one had been programmed to do. One’s subsequent behaviour was bound to represent a fall from grace, and this no doubt was the universal experience. Mine had not been an abrupt expulsion from Eden, rather a slow recognition that life is subject to accidents, that these are too beguiling to ignore, and that one was bound to make one’s peace with them, if one could. Nevertheless Isabel Archer’s choices filled me with sympathetic horror. Behaving well seemed to me too high a price to pay.

  I was perhaps a third of the way through it, and sitting in the flat waiting for the afternoon to end, when the telephone at last rang. I no longer knew whether I had been waiting for this call or not; I had occupied a not altogether unpleasant limbo of reading and wandering, alternating between acceptance and bewilderment. This, I dare say, is the essence of languor, if that was what I was suffering; I had lost my earlier purposefulness, and with it my decisive thoughts. I still knew what I should do to gain my chance of companionship but I wished the matter to be someone else’s responsibility. The earlier scenario, in which I guided events to my satisfaction, now seemed to me utterly unconvincing; no doubt my reading, or rather the examples I had chosen, had undermined my resolve and revealed my thinking as erroneous. I wanted the impetus to be in other hands, though I saw this as unlikely. Indeed I felt it might be better to forgo the whole relationship rather than make a false move which might be fatal for both of us. Though the price might still be worth paying I doubted my expertise, as, strangely, I had not done previously. No doubt I was now nearer the truth of the matter, which no longer had anything to do with expertise, life once again revealing its ability to teach one unwelcome lessons. It took a certain amount of courage to answer the telephone, although I knew instinctively who was calling.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, my voice rusty, as if I had recently returned from afar.

  A clearing of the throat. ‘Nigel Ward here.’

  ‘How nice to hear from you. Did you have a good holiday?’

  ‘Very pleasant, thank you.’

  I calculated that he had been silent for something like six weeks, and I felt a spurt of annoyance that he had not been more assiduous. It was already May; soon he might disappear again, probably when the students began to disperse for the summer, and I decided that matters must be moved on. Thus, without willing it, I reverted to my earlier resolution. This, after all, had initially felt appropriate. Now that my mind was made up I felt almost careless, the belle indi férence of the manic or the deluded.

  ‘You must tell me all about it,’ I said smoothly. ‘Why don’t you come to dinner? This evening, if you’ve nothing better to do.’

  ‘That would be delightful.’ After a few seconds’ silence he rang off. From this I calculated that he may have been in the same state of mind, but with less conviction.

  There was little food in the house, but I made a large salade niçoise; that, followed by cheese and fruit, would have to do. In any case I doubted that we should be spending the evening at the table. I showered hastily and dressed in a manner that would not frighten him. I wished that I had told him to take a cab; I was not up to a long wait. Evidently he had thought along the same lines, for within half an hour I heard the whine of the lift. I walked slowly to the door, opened it, and held out my hand.

  ‘How nice to see you,’ I said. ‘Do come in. What a beautiful evening. A glass of wine?’

  He settled himself cautiously in Digby’s chair, and drank his wine with some speed, as I did.

  ‘You had a good walk?’ I said. ‘Where were you? Did you visit your friends?’

  ‘Well, no. They decided to go to Greece. I shall no doubt see them in the summer.’

  ‘Where did you go, then?’

  ‘The Loire Valley. I’m particularly fond of that part of France. Beautiful air. Pleasant towns. Tours. Angers. The châteaux, of course.’

  ‘Digby and I did that, also at Easter. Blois. Amboise.’

  ‘Yes.’

  That seemed all there was to say about the Lo
ire, since he was not willing to expand.

  ‘Shall we eat?’ I said. ‘It’s a very simple meal. I hope it will be enough for you.’

  ‘It looks delicious.’

  He was nervous. I was impatient. He applied himself to his food, though the hand that held his fork trembled slightly. He was aware of the rite of passage to come, and saw that escape was no longer an option.

  ‘Are you busy?’ I asked, to put him at his ease.

  ‘Not very, no.’

  ‘I suppose the students are preparing for their exams?’

  ‘Yes.’

  This was going to be more difficult than I expected.

  ‘That was delightful,’ he said, laying down his fork. Most of my meal was still on my plate. ‘Can I help?’

  I was exasperated. This was not how a man should behave. It seemed that I should have to take the initiative. With a sigh I stood up and collected the plates.

  ‘Leave everything,’ I said. ‘Bring your wine.’

  ‘Elizabeth, have you thought this through?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. My clothes were coming off even before we reached the bedroom.

  I was kind and patient, as I might have known I should have to be. He was clearly not a good judge of his own performance, for he appeared dazed with relief. Maybe that was what he felt, after a period of abstinence, but I also suspected gratitude, and I had little use for that. If anything I preferred him stern and judgmental, thinking this a proper basis for an honest evaluation of the facts. It is not true that one man drives out the memory of another, but it was good to recover that illusion of intimacy, and when I saw him in Digby’s towelling bathrobe I was unexpectedly touched. This was a sign of the domesticity for which I still retained a longing. Without his clothes he had seemed infinitely more attractive, had made no attempt to cover his nakedness. In the bathrobe, which reached only to his calves, he was gaining authority by the minute.

  ‘Did you know that that was going to happen?’ he said.

  ‘It is what most people do. It is even mandatory. You didn’t object.’

  ‘You are a very attractive woman.’

  ‘I’ll make some coffee. Or perhaps tea. Tea seems more appropriate. You sit down.’

  Covered but not dressed, we drank the tea thirstily. I had no further fears for the summer. The Portrait of a Lady could be left for another day.

  ‘Shall we watch the news?’ I asked him.

  With the benign accoutrements of the tea and the television we both relaxed in the almost normal atmosphere, almost normal apart from our disarray. Yet there was much that was still undecided. I could see that he was slightly disturbed by the rapidity with which events had taken place. There was no poetry in it; that was what disturbed him. In that he was more romantic than I had ever been. Yet I had willed this, had brought it about. I was no more sure of my own feelings than he was of his. With the television finally switched off an awkwardness, which had not been there at the beginning of the evening, descended on us both. He disappeared to dress, and I began to clear away the remnants of our supper. When he came back, once again restored to his formal persona, I could see that he was anxious to be gone. I did not attempt to delay his departure. Future arrangements were not discussed, such was the state of our separate preoccupations. He would be back, of that there was no doubt. But his overriding wish was to think things through, as he would have put it. There was no way in which I could enter into this process.

  When the door closed behind him I found that I too was a little disturbed. The flat was redolent with the trace of another person. That was what disturbed me. I even regretted my normally inviolate bed. It was when I finally settled, in the dark, on my own again, that I allowed my mind to wander freely. And what came back to me, in that semi-conscious state, was nothing more significant than the memory of certain streets, or certain odd townscapes once visited, and, intermittently, the image of a bright garden to which I no longer had access.

  16

  NIGEL OVERWHELMED ME WITH KINDLY SUGGESTIONS as to how I might improve my life, which he saw as lacking in one important dimension, that of duty, stern daughter of the voice of God. Not that God came into it, I was relieved to see: this was sheer conscience, an uneasy suspicion that I was lacking in moral purpose. This was entirely true, but I could not quite bring myself to acquaint him with my fundamental nature, let alone my history. He urged me to find work, although I did manage to convince him that I was completely unskilled. This, however, was no barrier to his ingenuity. I could do voluntary work, he suggested, at the local hospital’s League of Friends. I responded that I should rather read than walk round with a tea trolley, cheering up patients with good-natured questions about their families. This, I could see, shocked him; had he been a woman of some means, as I was, this was the sort of thing he might have done himself. Or I could in some way interest myself in the lives of his students, with well-placed comments, or even invitations, on those Sunday walks which continued well into the summer. He saw us engaging in some form of supervision which would benefit both parties. I had been able to observe the benefit to him, but also to divine the students’ unwillingness to participate in this form of missionary activity. He might have seen this for himself, for he made no further attempt to pursue this particular line of argument. Or I could hire out my culinary skills once again and provide dinner parties for the sort of people he was convinced I knew. I pointed out that if I did this I could no longer cook dinner on the evenings when he indicated willingness to join me. Lunches, then, he said; there were, he was sure, firms who would be glad to have something served in the staff dining-room. I pointed out, as tactfully as I could, that he knew as little about this business world as I did. He at last conceded that this was an impractical suggestion, but did not entirely relinquish the idea. He seemed determined to launch me on a new way of life, one of service, though after a time he came to accept that it was perhaps preferable that I should always be on the end of a telephone should he want to reach me.

  This he did fairly often, and then at last regularly. I came to rely on his telephone calls on the occasions when I did not see him. I sensed that he wished to be left entirely free, and that this freedom to do as he pleased was my only possible gift to him. I had always enjoyed the sensation of a man’s freedom, as if it were appropriate that a woman should to a certain extent refrain from taking the initiative. This, of course, was not in keeping with the new raised consciousness of women, but I was correct in supposing that it suited him very well. He was an old-fashioned character, rather like one of those upright heroes in my favourite nineteenth-century novels, the ones whose virility resides in their strength of purpose. I had never stopped to wonder whether this was an adequate endowment: now I did. The better part of our relationship was one of solidarity; our affection was fraternal. It comforted me to be in bed at night, alone, and to know that he would telephone to assure himself that I was all right, that I was completely well, not wailing and gnashing my teeth, as he supposed I might be doing out of disappointment at his absence. His absence, in fact, caused me no great distress, although his company was pleasant and undemanding. It was too undemanding for my tastes, which remained lawless. I should have been happier if he had been more inventive, more singular, more urgent. I schooled myself to accept him as he was, always with the knowledge that I had known what I was doing when I had sought him out. For that was how I thought of it, although the facts were slightly different. The slight but persistent boredom that I felt in his presence was the price I had to pay, for those late-night telephone calls, for the knowledge that there was someone to whom I could apply in any difficulty. That was his gift to me, and that was the other part of the bargain.

  My gift to him was slightly different. My house, though not my life, was open to him. He could choose to drop in, to visit, and not go home whenever he wanted to. When he sat in Digby’s chair and recounted his day I could see that he was comfortable, even happy. His anecdotes were always about other people, who
m I did not know; he was a solitary who had the grace to occupy himself with other lives. His brief burst of truth-telling, on the occasion of our first real encounter, had served the purpose he had intended for it: his life story, as it were, had been offered, had been accepted without criticism, and now need never be re-examined. I never found out whether he had been seeing an analyst, for the moment for that kind of explanation had passed, and I sensed that it was an immense relief to him not to have to discuss it. As far as he was concerned I was a friend, his friend, even his particular friend. My chief virtue was that I never queried the exact nature of this friendship.