Latecomers

by Anita Brookner

  He liked and admired Hartmann who had given him his first glass of champagne and wafted a cigar under his nose, urging him to appreciate the aroma. Hartmann took him out to lunch, during his first Oxford vacation. Hartmann had the gift, which Fibich never had, of finding life entertaining: his bonhomie rarely faltered. Therefore he saw in Toto a man who might become like himself, with a light touch and few ambitions that could not be realized. And he admired unreservedly the physical ease that would launch Toto on his career. But what career Toto was to follow was perhaps more of a problem. Fibich hoped that Toto would go into the business, although Hartmann could have told him there was little chance of that. They both retained a happy memory of a time when Toto, aged twelve, had ‘helped’ in the office in one of his school holidays and had been rewarded with a substantial wage. It had been near Christmas, and, in addition to the handsome bonuses that they always paid their staff, Hartmann and Fibich had succumbed to the unusual agitation for a Christmas party. Toto’s work, therefore, came to consist of ordering supplies for this party; he was already sophisticated for his age, and he contacted a school-friend whose sister cooked directors’ lunches in a private dining-room in the City. Great was the expenditure and equally great the appreciation. Hartmann and Fibich, proud of the boy’s conviviality, had not counted the cost; that task was left to the accountant, Roger Myers. Wives and husbands were invited, and all were charmed by Toto’s high spirits. Left at last amid the wreckage of the feast, Fibich, for once a happy man, made as if to embrace his son.

  ‘Do you mind, Dad?’ said Toto. ‘That sort of thing is bad for my image.’

  Later that evening he allowed his father to congratulate him once more, although he was already bored with the whole affair. He was good-natured enough to tolerate Fibich’s excessive appreciation, but shortly afterwards he went off to another party, given by that same friend whose sister had done the catering.

  ‘I thought he would be tired,’ said Fibich, disconcerted. ‘Isn’t one party a day enough?’

  ‘Apparently not for a boy like that,’ said his mother. ‘Anyway I told him to be home early.’

  He returned just after midnight, having been dropped off in somebody’s car. Fibich and Christine, in dressing-gowns, instinctively eclipsed themselves before he could find them.

  The question of Toto’s career was thought to be a matter best left to Hartmann, who arranged lunch in order to broach the subject. This was not entirely to Hartmann’s taste: he preferred to lunch alone. Lunch to him was a serene interval in which no serious matters were to be raised; indeed, he lunched alone for that very reason. And Toto, now at Oxford, seemed to have grown away from him; he was not sure of his ground. As ever, though, he was delighted with his first sight of the boy, so vital, so talismanic, in what suddenly seemed to be a fusty and middle-aged setting. Toto discomposed him by ordering a whisky and soda, which Hartmann cancelled. ‘Orange juice,’ he said severely to the barman, waiting with his tray. Toto, studying the menu, ignored him. ‘I’ll have the fillet of beef with mushrooms, broccoli, and fried potatoes,’ he said, reaching unconcernedly for his glass. ‘One fillet of beef and one sole,’ said Hartmann. He watched the boy eating, his composure recovered. No serious aberrations could come from one possessed of so splendid an appetite, he thought. Youth, he mused wistfully, although he had never paid much attention to his own. It was not until they were both drinking coffee that he asked Toto if he had anything in mind for the future.

  ‘Your father and I would like you to come into the firm,’ he said. ‘After all, we have no one else to leave it to.’

  ‘I thought of the theatre,’ said Toto, exhaling smoke. ‘Or journalism. I haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘Both are difficult professions,’ said Hartmann gently. ‘How would you start?’

  ‘I already have started. I’m producing the college play this summer. You must all come down and see it.’

  This, for Toto, was promising. And he has asked us all to be with him. That was nice. And who knows? Perhaps he has a gift after all. If he has it will come out sooner or later, sooner if we are lucky. No harm in waiting a while.

  ‘Give him time to settle down,’ he said later to Fibich. ‘Let him enjoy himself. He deserves it.’

  This seemed to be the consensus, that Toto deserved to enjoy himself. His high spirits depended on this assumption. If he were not enjoying himself the household tended to hold its breath, prepare for the worst. Once Fibich came home to find Christine flushed and obviously concerned. It transpired that she had had a telephone call from his tutor, asking her if their doctor had authorized Toto to take sleeping pills. It appeared that Toto had missed several tutorials by virtue of still being asleep at ten o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Pills?’ shouted Fibich, clutching his head. ‘He’s taking pills? Why is he taking them? Who gave them to him?’

  And he got straight back into the car and drove to Oxford, arriving at nine-thirty in the evening. He found his son stretched out, like Chatterton, on a window-seat in his rooms.

  ‘Calm down, Dad,’ said Toto wearily. ‘I’m under enough pressure as it is, with this play and everything.’

  ‘You look pale,’ said Fibich anxiously. ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘I’ll have something later,’ replied Toto, again wearily.

  There was a knock on the door. In response to Toto’s call a girl sidled in.

  ‘Hi, Jane,’ said Toto, sitting up alertly, the colour coming back into his cheeks. ‘My father,’ he added. ‘Jane.’

  ‘How do you do, Mr Fibich,’ said the girl politely, anxious to make a good impression. ‘Are you joining us? We’re meeting some people for drinks.’

  ‘I thought perhaps dinner…’ Fibich felt helpless, but was reassured by the girl’s pleasant manners. A little lady, he thought.

  ‘Oh, yes, we’ll eat later,’ the girl assured him. She was a pretty girl, and she looked healthy enough, as did his son, now risen from his fallen posture.

  ‘Then I had better be getting back. Perhaps I could just wash my hands?’

  In the bathroom he appropriated the bottle of pink pills and felt that he had done all he could. He drove, foodless, back to London. Christine had retired for the night by the time he got home. In the kitchen she had left chicken sandwiches between two plates. Fibich wolfed them down and suffered indigestion all night.

  ‘You are making a fuss about nothing,’ said Hartmann. ‘What are a few pills? I take pills every night. They’ve never done me any harm. Leave him alone, Fibich. He will settle down in his own good time, believe me.’

  But to Fibich Toto’s young manhood was so unlike his own had been that it seemed to present untold difficulties and hazards. At least, he thought, with depression one knew where one was: it was a state in which nothing was possible, and therefore every action performed, every inch of territory gained, was a victory. It was life unadorned, unidealized, and therefore based on realistic premises, or rather on the lack of them. To Fibich Toto seemed encompassed about with clouds of unknowing, and what was unknown made Fibich fearful. He revered the life he now led, thinking it hardly won and even now precarious. Sometimes he thought he would have been content with less, a little shop somewhere, one of the photocopying parlours, perhaps. He had often watched young assistants shuffling and lining-up paper, and he realized, with a certain disloyalty, that he would have been content to do that all day, returning home in the evenings to a small house in the suburbs. He somehow knew that Christine would have liked this too. Instead of which he was harnessed to Hartmann’s juggernaut, and to the opulence it brought with it, ill-at-ease in Hartmann’s user-friendly universe.

  For Christine the boy was an unacknowledged source of dissatisfaction which she experienced in the form of a pervasive lowering of her spirits, never high at the best of times. She was ashamed to find that he offended her dignity, for he so obviously found her too shadowy a presence in his life to bother with. It was her son, rather than her husband, who made her feel
inadequate as a woman. He, in his turn, hated to see her sitting on her blue velvet sofa, a book neglected in her lap, her brilliant eyes clouded and gazing into space. There was discomfort between them, for it was clear, even to Toto, that if the occasion arose she might indeed be formidable, although she had as yet given no sign of this. He sensed her disapproval, yet could not bring himself to court her approval. It was against his code to solicit attention in this way, for he was used to attention being accorded to him automatically. Whereas he knew that he could treat his father lightly, yet still retain his agonized love, he was not too sure about his mother. He called her ‘Ma’, which irritated her.

  ‘You are too old to call me Ma. Call me Mother.’

  ‘All right, Ma. I mean Mother.’

  After that admonition, he consciously or unconsciously called her Ma. ‘I mean Mother,’ he would correct himself. He avoided her whenever possible, sensing in her a sadness or perhaps a disappointment which, he thought, had nothing to do with him. He was not altogether wrong.

  Christine, having successfully taken upon herself the burden of Fibich’s melancholy, found her own emerging stealthily from the depths which she had willed to remain obscure. Whereas Fibich, beguiled by her steadiness, had married her for the steadiness she could bring to his own troubled life, she herself longed for his rare moments of self-forgetfulness, when some motive power would briefly animate him into being a man like other men. And since the birth of her son those moments had become rare and had finally ceased altogether, as if the outcome, once reached, precluded the need for repetition. She herself was saddened by the care he took to avoid such moments. For Fibich the past was too strong. For herself it was too weak. She thought with impatient pity of her early days, her prayerful impulses, her gratitude. On some days she sat upright in her dim blue room, her eyes focused on an imaginary sun, and thought how she would like to disappear and run away to lead a truly solitary life somewhere in the light of the south, where no one would ever find her. She would leave behind her not simply her failed expectations, for she had never had any to speak of, but the effortful simulacrum of a person into which she had so arduously fashioned herself. She longed for abandonment, for a conduct that would cancel all she had ever been. She brought intense study to these imaginings, which somehow never reached a concrete form. She only knew that some fire must burn, to release her, like the phoenix, from its ashes. Fire and the sun became one in her mind, as the day darkened beyond the windows. When Toto came in, carelessly with some girl or other in tow, she would stir as if from a long sleep. Toto, irritated by such evidence of his mother’s withdrawal, would laughingly dismiss her to his girl-friend once they were out of earshot. ‘Don’t take any notice of Ma,’ he would say. ‘I sometimes think she’s half gone.’ Sometimes Christine overheard him, but she could not get angry. For how else could she tolerably describe the increasing distance between her son and herself?

  It was Toto’s attitude to the young women he brought home that most agitated her, for she sensed in it something of which she would rather have remained in ignorance. She should have been glad, she knew, that he brought them into his home so freely, but she was not, for there seemed to her to be an element of display in his behaviour of which she could not approve. After the briefest of introductions, conducted in the neutral area of the drawing-room, he would whisk the girl off to his own quarters, where, he told his mother, they were going to rehearse. The girl’s rising colour betrayed her, and after their disappearance, and in the dead silence that followed, Christine found herself uncertain of the role she was to play. Was she to prepare coffee and knock carefully at the door? Or to go out, leave the flat, as instinct propelled her to do? She felt uneasy, as if Toto’s lack of inhibition constrained her to a walk-on part in which an unsympathetic onlooker might have detected complicity. She knew, without being told, that Toto’s behaviour was the result of what he considered to be his parents’ sexual feebleness: there was rage and disgust in it. She knew this even before he did. She suspected that he would never respect or obey those parents, simply because he considered them to be burntout cases, having relinquished the power that sexuality confers, having perhaps never properly enjoyed it, certainly not have used it. That he could be fascinated by Yvette, to whom he laughingly and readily deferred, was, to Christine, something that had to be suffered in silence. She knew of Yvette’s reluctance in the marital role, for Yvette, thinking all women like herself, or if not like her then automatically of low degree and therefore not to be taken seriously, had confided in Christine, or rather had dropped complacent hints about Hartmann’s importunity and her various refusals. These, as Christine well knew, she permitted herself more frequently now that the presence of her daughter in the house imposed a certain restraint. Yet Toto seemed to appreciate her frivolousness more than his mother’s depth.

  Toto could have explained this, had it been nearer the surface of his mind. But it was to remain locked away for many years, until time and circumstances forced him to acknowledge it. Toto, had he been able, might have said that he abhorred depth, although in truth he was conscious of it as a matter that must at some time claim his attention. He might have said, at this stage in his life, that he adored the surface of things, and by the same token, appearance, effectiveness, easily won satisfaction, projection and impact. He appreciated self-love, the love that never fails, and in Yvette’s narcissism saw the ratification of his own. At twenty, at twenty-one, Toto saw the world as a vast medley of surfaces on which he might imprint his mark.

  By the beginning of his last year at Oxford he was the possessor of a proud reputation. His attendance at lectures and tutorials was negligible, and for all his real feelings for the poetry of the English language his tutors predicted that he would be lucky to get a third. It was on the strength of his performances in various theatrical productions, mostly of a semi-professional nature, that he had made his name, and of course on his reputation as what Yvette had once referred to as a tombeur de femmes. He had liked the phrase, had liked the image it conjured up of women falling, one after another. In truth, his part in these seductions was slight, even lazy; he had only to make the first move for the falling to take place. That first move, however, could be rough, giving a misleading impression of intent or desire. For Toto that was all that was required. The rest would follow as the night the day, and invariably did.

  At twenty, at twenty-one, Toto’s appearance broadcast messages of vigour and satisfaction. At over six feet he was slender but not thin. The hair was worn a little longer than Fibich thought proper these days; the look that resulted had something romantic and chivalrous about it that was found touching. He still lived at home for part of his vacations, although they knew that they could not expect to keep him much longer. Indeed, the prospect of his inevitable departure somewhat softened Christine’s attitude towards her son, while Fibich hoped daily that the whole matter might be forgotten. There was still no decision about a future career, for Toto was inclined to think that there was no need to worry, that his contacts would see him through. It was true that he seemed to have made a lot of friends. He was away with them, staying in their houses so often that Christine put fresh flowers in his room each time to welcome him home. For there was something about Toto that made women, even his mother, strive for his affection, the accolade of his approval. His mother, who still had her reservations concerning his character, was forced to acknowledge that he might in time be fatally easy to love.

  7

  There was a nestling quality to Marianne’s demeanour that seemed to predestine her for a man’s indulgence and protection: she was a blank sheet on which a man might write his name. At eighteen, she was like one of the young ladies in Trollope, her favourite author, modest, decent, obedient. She was even a little pious, seeming to find peace and ease in the complicated precepts of that old religion that was not even a memory for Hartmann and Fibich. There seemed little to be done with her, for she lacked all worldly ambition and curiosity and appea
red to be content to stay in the company of her mother and of Christine, ignoring the young men her father brought to the house. Quiet, self-effacing – unnaturally so for such a well-endowed young woman – she occasionally exasperated Yvette by virtue of her passivity, yet she was not lacking in confidence. This confidence came, as Yvette’s had once done, from her appearance. She was an attractive girl, although she had not quite fulfilled the promise of beauty that had been hers as a child. The blue eyes and the dark hair were still the same, but the nose had broadened a little, and the shape of the mouth was full, blunt, a trifle protuberant. The expression was usually withdrawn, concentrated, disconcertingly distrait and unreachable. It was the face of a female cat, oddly powerful in its very refusal to claim power. Beneath this head, so full of information for a discerning man to read, was a slender body which Yvette kept immaculately dressed. Her insistence on presentation had taken root early in her daughter. Now both women were at one in their fastidiousness and in a formality which sat a little incongruously on Marianne, from whom one might have expected a greater show of independence, a greater vivacity, even a certain degree of opposition. Indeed, she was the very model of an old-fashioned daughter, happy to stay in her mother’s drawing-room, waiting to be transferred from the parental home to the home of her eventual husband, destined to be protected, to be secure, and to marry young.