Latecomers

by Anita Brookner

  ‘Has anything happened at the office?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no. As long as Hartmann is there nothing will ever happen that you don’t already know about.’

  This reply gave Christine pause. She had never known him to express or even to feel the slightest envy of Hartmann’s easy-going and dictatorial ways.

  ‘Surely you don’t resent him?’ she asked. ‘I thought you worked so well together.’

  ‘Resent him?’ said Fibich, appalled. ‘He is my dearest friend. Why should I resent him? Because he is different from me? Because he finds life easier? But, don’t you see, I love him for those very reasons. He saved my life, not once, but many times. If it weren’t for him I shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t have met if it hadn’t been for Hartmann’s aunt. How could I resent him? I love him.’

  Yet her question had been a fatal one. Fibich was forced to examine his tender conscience, his labouring memory, to find out whether he felt that Hartmann had in fact taken over the direction of his life, had always done so. He found no evidence of this, but the exercise bothered him deeply, driving the matter of his possible return to Berlin temporarily from his mind. Deeply troubled by this, and by the image of his dead self that he had seen in the dream, he began to retreat from his wife, whom he perceived as the agent of this new pain. Some higher consciousness told him that this recent difficulty could be overcome, that he did in truth love Hartmann, that his wife had been uncharacteristically tactless rather than ill-intentioned. Nevertheless he began to crave solitude and to avoid Christine’s company. Until I get over this, he promised himself. Christine looked at him sorrowfully but forebore to intervene. Until he gets over this, she thought.

  One Sunday, when an iron cold and stillness had settled over London, when the false early spring was less than a distant memory, Fibich took his hat, told Christine he would be back in an hour or two, and went out for a solitary walk. He was profoundly uneasy. He walked round a deserted Victoria, the cold white mist blurring the tiny milky disk of the sun. The exercise of reviewing his life was proving monstrous in so far as it revealed the places in which it had gone irredeemably wrong. He felt alienation from his son, from his wife whom he would like to think of as his mother, without sexual overtones. He walked unseeingly round the wide pavement of Westminster Cathedral, although his lack of faith was so extreme that he could not, unlike his wife, go inside the building. He walked into Buckingham Palace Road, where listless snack bars were open for business, where Indian-owned supermarkets displayed the cruel green and oranges of winter fruit. A tourist bus disgorged a party of bleak but stoical Scandinavians outside the Queen’s Gallery. In anguish he turned towards Belgravia, walked up Elizabeth Street, turned into Chester Square. All was deserted, as deserted as he felt himself to be. The thought of retracing his steps was intolerable to him, yet he was shivering and longed for hot coffee. In an effort to prolong his absence he turned into a workmen’s café, inexplicable in this area, although it was near the bus station, inexplicably open, two men in donkey jackets sitting silently at the only occupied table, steam covering the windows, condensing into trickles. His hands round a mug of tea, Fibich felt sorrowfully that he was returned to his days of poverty. He stumbled to his feet, instinctively raised his hat to the company, and plunged through the door into the street. Cold mist was thickening into grey fog. The milky sun had turned blood red, the red of an apocalypse. Darkness seemed to envelop him in the short distance between Elizabeth Street and Ashley Gardens. When he entered the flat the dull heat went to his head, making him dizzy. His vision seemed to blur into the pink and blue haze of Christine’s drawing-room. In this room, which seemed to him, on first entering it, deserted, he finally discerned the upright figure of his wife.

  ‘Fibich,’ said Christine gently. ‘Won’t you sit down and get warm? I have made you a honey cake. Your favourite.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said. ‘But I had a cup of tea out.’

  If she was disappointed she was practised enough not to show it.

  ‘Yvette telephoned,’ she said. ‘She would like us to go up for dinner tonight.’

  In fact it was she who had telephoned Yvette, as she always did when Fibich was troubled. It was Yvette’s contention that they both worried too much. ‘Life is too short,’ she would say, although to her life was immeasurably and enjoyably long.

  ‘Just a light meal,’ said Christine. ‘Some leek and potato soup and a spinach and mushroom roulade. And a pear in wine. Nothing to upset you.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said, again distractedly. ‘I should like that.’

  Then he subsided into silence. Christine, watching him over the edge of the Sunday paper, said nothing.

  With Toto absent they spent too many weekends in this manner. Their evenings were easier: Fibich would return from the office, the usual enquiries about the day would be made, dinner would be eaten, and after dinner they would either watch television or read. Their silence on these occasions was companionable, although there was resignation in it for both of them. Each, too late, wanted some other quality in the partner. For Christine this dull alliance stimulated thoughts of flight, to that place in the sun which she was sure she would find if only she were free to seek it, if she were not retained, in this semi-curatorial capacity, by a husband who had yet to effect his emancipation from the curious thraldom in which she had first found him. For Fibich, the companion of his life, without whom life itself would be intolerable, was nevertheless a burden. He knew he had not made her happy. He blamed himself entirely for this incapacity of his, his need to proceed with caution, his desire to sink back into himself, his fearfulness. These qualities, he knew, were not the qualities for which a woman looked in a husband. And yet, on those quiet Sunday afternoons, in the dim hazy light of Christine’s drawing-room, he could not resist the temptation to sink back into his reverie, the eternal reverie that was the very climate of his mind and from which he could no more detach himself than he could from the colour of his eyes or the texture of his skin. And Christine, on these occasions, had to learn to be silent, to proffer a wordless cup of tea, even to move noiselessly about the room, as if she were merely a personage in one of Fibich’s dreams.

  With Toto there the problem was different but equally complex. The problem was not only how to accommodate him but to hide from him the fact that the lives of his parents were enacted against a background that was essentially tragic. Toto turned them into conspirators in their effort to behave like ordinary people, but even here their collusion was painful, for they knew that in Toto’s eyes they had failed to be the parents he wanted. They were either too old or too joyless or too easily shocked to please him: whatever their faults, they knew that he found them reprehensible. Fibich’s hysterical fears for his son’s well-being, and Christine’s abstraction and restraint, were, they knew, not good for a young man who had rapidly become more emancipated than either of them. They felt that they could only be themselves when he was not there, and the thought was distressing to them both, for they remembered the joy of his birth, so easy, so pleasurable, and their pride in his robustness, his great beauty. He had overwhelmed them with gratitude merely by being viable, when they themselves had proved hesitant, latent. Nevertheless, he had grown up restless, disruptive, and thus their very opposite. Sometimes they felt that his brutality would explode the fallacy that their marriage had become. They saw in him no evidence of tolerance, and were too proud to ask of him understanding.

  The Hartmanns were their best resource in these moments of doubt, indeed their only resource. The Hartmanns absorbed anxiety by not noticing it: they accepted that Christine and Fibich were ‘nervy’, as Yvette put it, without being unrealistic enough to try to change them. Yvette, in particular, liked the opportunity to scold and advise them, and they in their turn found it easy to sink passively beneath the weight of her benign reproaches. Indeed, they were grateful to her for assuming, as she always did, that they were making a fuss o
ver nothing. Being entirely incurious, she was not conscious of undercurrents; on the other hand, she always had the grace to be kind. Christine and Fibich found her wholesome. Her self-generating activities, her bustle, even her egotism were reassuring to them; her very opacity seemed to promise them safety. Hartmann, becoming more of a dilettante with the passing years, found her exquisitely amusing and had come to value her profoundly. Who else, apart from Fibich, would pay such serious attention to the home that he had created out of nothing, out of thin air? Who else could have made it so real to him? And who else would so love his friends, making a home for them as well as for himself?

  This evening found him sitting in front of an outsize television, watching the conclusion of an American hospital drama. He held up a hand to impose silence.

  ‘One moment, my dears. The operation is about to be a success.’

  They sat politely, as the young and handsome American surgeon reassured the parents of the girl whose life had recently hung in the balance. The episode ended with soaring celestial music. Hartmann wiped his eyes and blew his nose loudly.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m crying,’ he said. ‘There is an operation every week, and they are always successful. America! Such optimism! So. How are we?’

  Fibich smiled. ‘Thank you. Ask Christine. I’m afraid I haven’t been very good company for her today.’

  ‘She didn’t marry you for your sense of fun,’ said Hartmann, getting up and giving Christine a kiss. ‘Any more than I married Yvette for her mind.’ He knew that Yvette would take this as a compliment. Her faith in her appearance was still intact, and indeed time had if anything improved her, making her both more substantial and more elegant. Defiantly blonde and more than a little overweight, she nevertheless presented an appealing picture of a woman who repaid the infinite consideration she invested in herself.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my mind,’ she said. ‘At least I exercise it instead of watching that rubbish.’ She indicated a copy of Madame Bovary on a side table. ‘You should come to my class with me, Christine. It’s really very satisfying. We’re doing Flaubert,’ she said proudly. ‘And I think a woman owes it to herself to get out of the house and have an interest.’

  ‘Speaking of interests,’ said Hartmann. ‘I am extremely interested in getting my grey suit back from the cleaners. Did you, by any chance, find an opportunity to pick it up?’

  Yvette gave him a look in which superiority mingled with forbearance.

  ‘All in good time,’ she said. ‘After all, I can’t be expected to do everything.’

  Hartmann shrugged and ventured an imperceptible wink in Fibich’s direction. Thus had he behaved when Yvette was queen of the office in the Farringdon Road. Fibich nodded gratefully, his immediate problem put to flight. Fingerspitzengefühl: Hartmann still had it, he reflected.

  They passed a pleasantly inconsequential evening, like so many they had passed before. Praises rang loudly enough to satisfy Yvette that her immaculate cooking had once again passed the test. Fibich even drank coffee: as he took his cup Christine smiled and mimed permission. Night enfolded them, in the warm room. How could I leave them, thought Fibich. What would become of them if I were not to return, if something were to happen to me? Hartmann takes no interest in the business these days, and if I am not there, where will the money come from? Money for Toto, for Christine, for Yvette, even for Marianne and Roger? No, no, it is not to be thought of.

  The decision brought relief, and increased gratitude. When the moment for leavetaking arrived he kissed Yvette, pinched Hartmann’s cheek, as he occasionally did in moments of exceptional effervescence, and taking his wife’s hand in his, led her home to bed.

  11

  Hartmann sighed. A discomfort which he could neither locate nor analyse had kept him inactive for the first hours of the working day and seemed set fair to paralyse him for some hours to come. ‘Go, go,’ Fibich had said to him. ‘You are no good here. Go out. Buy something. Eat lunch. I’ll telephone you later, and we’ll talk then.’ So Hartmann had walked out of the office into chill spring sunshine, and wondered what to do with himself, knowing only that he could not have tolerated the mild routines of Spanish Place, could not, above all, have tolerated the presence of his son-in-law, Roger Myers.

  His uncharacteristic and thus to him awful downheartedness had deprived him of initiative. This had not happened to him in living memory and depressed him even further. He treated himself carefully, as if he might be seriously ill. For a long time he sat in a patisserie in Marylebone High Street, at a small table with a false marble top, his coat hung on the coat-stand by the door, his hat on a chair beside him. Carefully, tenderly, he drank his coffee, as if it might contain life-giving properties. He tried to observe the patrons of the establishment – dentists, he supposed, rich widows from St John’s Wood – but the fact of being temporarily without resource made him feel timorous, as if he were guilty of some major defection. The disruption of the day’s activities was to him a momentous act, to be dealt with cautiously, whereas in truth nothing had occurred that would change his own life, which tomorrow, after this interval (‘sick leave’, he thought) would go on its way undisturbed. He was well, Yvette was well, and Fibich had been diverted from his plan to go to Berlin. What was more, he, Hartmann, was now a grandfather, surely an occasion for rejoicing. Mouse-like Henry Myers, sleeping in his carry-cot, had already been presented at his grandparents’ flat on three occasions, and on all of them he had slept obediently, too obediently, throughout the afternoon. Hartmann, who would have welcomed a show of vivacity, of charm, on the part of the infant, had, when no one was looking, extended a cautious finger to the sleeping baby’s cheek and had been rewarded by nothing more than a slow and experimental flexing of the tiny star-shaped hands. Hartmann had longed to hold the child, to dance him up and down, to put a drop of champagne on his tongue, to accustom him to the conviviality of the tea-table, the smell of a fine cigar. Whereas he had been all tenderness when Marianne was a baby, age and impatience now made him long for the response of an active child: he wished to enjoy him before it was too late, for sometimes, these days, he felt a trifle old. But Yvette had drawn him away from the carry-cot, which Roger had soon taken into Marianne’s old bedroom. Hartmann had hated him, hated the important way he had ushered Marianne in front of him, hated the idea of Roger watching Marianne feeding the baby, hated his production manager’s air of competence. Hartmann and Yvette had instinctively raised an eyebrow at each other when contemplating this low scenario. And later, when the child was left to sleep in the bedroom, and Hartmann had stolen back for another look, he had noticed a smell of sicked-up milk on the air, and, bending over the carry-cot and peering into its depths, he had detected, on Henry’s unprotected head, the unmistakable fuzz of Roger’s sandy hair.

  He was a pale inert baby, with none of the beauty that Marianne had shown from her earliest weeks. He lay in his mother’s arms with the tip of his tongue protruding from his mouth: his eyes were a lashless navy blue, and his cheeks a chilly white. In vain they tried to see in him traces of his mother, but it was clear from his birth that he was his father’s child. He would, in due course, grow up to be tall, colourless, and thick-limbed, like Roger, and whereas Roger had, briefly, been considered to be suitable, or perhaps appropriate, as a husband, they were not at all sure that they were prepared to accept him as a father. He was not one of them: that was becoming very clear. For although his quietness, his reticence, his obedience, his all too blameless decency, had previously recommended themselves, those qualities had now taken on a more positive emphasis. Roger, now, was uxorious to the point of suffocation. His possession of Marianne translated itself into laborious care for her, for her habits, her clothes, her movements. An altogether defensible pride in her motherhood made him hover over her when she was changing or feeding her child in a way that made Hartmann feel positively ill. He could remember none of this tactlessness when Marianne was a baby. Yvette would never have dreamed of inv
olving him as a witness to procedures which they both felt should be accomplished in private, with modesty, and without trace. There had never been around Marianne that aroma of soiled garments: the child had always been as fresh as a flower, while Yvette herself had been anxious to put the whole business of pregnancy and lactation as far behind her as possible, and had consequently regained both her figure and her autonomy in record time. Her deportment throughout those first few weeks of Marianne’s babyhood had been excellent. But now Marianne, under the intrusive guardianship of her husband, seemed content to sit back, overweight and wordless, aggressively full of milk, or so it seemed to Hartmann. He felt, for the first time in his life, uncomfortable in her presence.

  He had never particularly liked Roger but was wise enough to know that nobody would have met with his approval. It was quite simply that no one would have been good enough. He knew that. And knowing that he had thought that the soft-voiced, soft-footed Roger would be as good as any other man: he would take care of Marianne, would never be unfaithful, would be patient and scrupulous and kind; he would look after Yvette if anything happened to Hartmann, discharge the firm’s responsibilities, remain loyal to Fibich… He was even good-looking in a well-built, broad-shouldered way.

  So what was wrong with him? He was too quiet, for one thing, too slow, too immovable. Hartmann, after half an hour in his company, would find himself seething with restlessness. He longed to madden Roger with an uncensored response or even a graceful unconsidered movement: he longed to displace those heavy careful limbs which had about them a terrible solidity; he longed to bring a flare of anger to the nostrils, a flush of red to the cheek. Hartmann loved impetuosity in a man, an ability to amuse, a capacity for entertainment, both given and received, a festiveness, and although initially he would have felt sorrow, even jealousy, to see Marianne in the thrall of such a man, he would have got over these shameful but inevitable (and fortunately fleeting) emotions, if only he could have looked forward to enjoying his son-in-law’s company. But it seemed as though this were not on the cards. In the office they got on as well as they had always got on: well, but distantly. In the course of his duties Myers had more to do with Fibich than with Hartmann. But at home, or rather in Hartmann’s home, there was something proprietorial about him that irritated Hartmann. It was not that he begrudged Roger the joys of fatherhood: it was just that the man’s participation, his exemplary co-operation, as if preparing for a houseful of children, unnerved Hartmann. More; it gave him a thrill of revulsion. Yvette too was out of her depth. Faced with the peasant-like immobility of their daughter and son-in-law, Yvette and Hartmann felt like survivors from another era: nervous, fastidious, modest, and secret.