Dolly

by Anita Brookner

  My other grandmother I knew even less, a fact which I did not regret since she seemed, from what I heard of her, to be slightly mad, and may even have been so, for all I know. She was a widow living in South Kensington with two small wire-haired terriers to whom she devoted all her leisure hours. She really should have been a dog breeder rather than a mother, for she felt for her son a mild affection only one degree warmer than indifference, whereas she would actually play games with the dogs, for whom she also bought expensive rubber toys. The dogs were taken out morning and afternoon for an extensive run in Hyde Park, where my tireless grandmother, dressed winter and summer in trousers, a short-sleeved blouse, and an old tweed jacket belonging to her dead husband, threw balls and sticks, shouted instructions and encouragements, and scarcely noticed the seasons changing all around her. The only thing my father seemed to have inherited from her was her love of exercise: he too was impatient unless he had the prospect of a long walk before him.

  My Manning grandmother wore an eager religious expression which it was possible to mistake for friendliness. In fact she was meditating on the universal Oneness of things and attended some institution devoted to psychic research and spiritual growth conveniently near her in Queensberry Place. Her religious exercises, which she was fortunately able to pursue while romping with the dogs, consisted of exerting the power of love, a gospel which she never ceased to proclaim. To love everyone is a noble enterprise; unfortunately it denies one a certain faculty of discrimination. My grandmother loved everyone, whether they liked it or not. In fact very few people were aware of this love since she had very little time for friendship, and in due course knew only the people at the psychic research place, all of them as eager as herself on the occasions on which they were gathered together, and all of them putting in claims for the distinction of total transforming conviction. Very few people visited her, although she was invited out to tea by the more sociable of the believers. On such afternoons she dressed in an archaic navy blue suit, with hard shoulders and box-pleated skirt, which transformed her appearance but did not flatter it. This was a pity for she was quite an attractive woman, with a fluff of gingery hair above a small sharp-featured face. She was the natural version of which my grandmother Toni was the work of art: the same reddish hair, the same blue eyes, the same fine skin which she had allowed to fall into a dozen tiny cracks, like an apple which has been stored too long. The daunting fervour of her expression, allied to her almost total absentmindedness, made her a somewhat enigmatic parent, and indeed she seems to have expected my father to fend for himself from a very young age. There was no other parent in the house; my father liked to say that his father had died in childbirth. In fact Richard Manning had been run over by a car outside South Kensington tube station. My father suffered no damage from this dereliction, and was philosophical about his mother’s shortcomings. Her indifference may even have served him rather well. She provided him with a satchel when he went to school, with a briefcase when he went to university, and with several items of unwanted furniture when he left home. These pieces of furniture, of uncanny size, were a feature of our life in Prince of Wales Drive, since there was no prospect of anyone paying good money to take them away. One could see why she had found them to be superfluous.

  When my mother went to meet her for the first time she was nervous and suffering from a cold. To Eileen Manning, who never suffered from anything, this was a sinister affliction. She surveyed my mother with narrowed eyes.

  ‘You don’t look very strong,’ she said. ‘You look chesty. Are you chesty?’

  ‘I’m very fit,’ said my mother, coughing slightly. She had taken a mouthful of scalding tea in her eagerness to please and had swallowed it too quickly.

  Eileen Manning’s suspicious look was replaced by her habitual expression of enthusiasm as she tried to expound her psychic gospel. My mother, I am sure, listened politely, her eyes occasionally straying to the man she was to marry as if to reassure herself as to his sanity. Later, when he had taken my mother home, he returned to South Kensington and announced his intention to become engaged.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s wise, Paul. Not if there’s lung trouble in the family.’

  ‘Henrietta is perfectly well, Mother.’

  ‘I doubt that, dear. But you must please yourself, of course.’

  She was in absent-minded attendance at the small reception Toni gave after the wedding, no doubt in her box-pleated suit, but after that was content to receive a weekly telephone call, in the course of which she would enquire, ‘And how’s that poor girl of yours?’

  Once a month my father would undertake to visit his mother, combining the visit with one of the long walks he so loved. He would go round Battersea Park, along Cheyne Walk to Pimlico Road, across to Sloane Square, along Sloane Street and into Hyde Park, where he might linger to watch the dogs, and, in winter, the red globe of the setting sun. Then he would leave the park, perhaps regretfully, and present himself at his mother’s flat in Ennismore Gardens for a cup of tea. He doubted whether his mother got much pleasure from these visits, but she received him placidly and reached up to kiss him when he left. I think she was an entirely contented woman, but I have to admit that I never consciously knew her. I think she broke the habit of a lifetime and visited us when I was a baby, but if I registered her presence at all it was only as another face bending over to examine me. These, with an infant’s privilege, I ignored.

  By mutual consent she and my mother rarely met; had they done so my mother would have been interrogated on what Eileen Manning was convinced was her progressive deterioration. When Violet Lawlor—part old acquaintance, part domestic relic of her early married life—sent her usual Christmas card in the winter of my parents’ marriage, Eileen Manning, as usual, sent back a card with a postal order tucked inside it. She then performed the one good deed for which my mother knew her, and despatched Violet to Prince of Wales Drive ‘to look after poor Henrietta’. Having thus disposed of nearly everyone she knew she then took the dogs out for a run. Yet at a mere sixty-five, after a lifetime of healthy exercise, she suffered a fatal heart attack, appropriately enough in the park. It was the barking of the dogs which alerted passers-by, rare at that hour, for it was getting dark. My father was very subdued for a while, yet when my mother pointed out how fitting this death was, how painless the manner of her leaving this life, he cheered up. Death is arbitrary, after all. No one is safe.

  Against these fairly unusual backgrounds my parents stand out emblematically, like pale creatures newly liberated from engulfing darkness, slender pillars of English virtue advancing, hand in hand, towards the light of common day. Having effectively divorced themselves from home and family, they felt free to invent their lives, as if they were characters in Dickens. This meant doing the opposite of what they had been brought up to do, living lives of the utmost orderliness and decorum. I felt a painful love for these mild and conscientious parents, whose moderate voices unfitted me for the realities of the world I was to inhabit.

  ‘The snail’s on the thorn,’ my father would announce, his signal that he was about to go for a walk. And then, politely, ‘Would Jane like to come, do you think?’

  I was too young or too small to accompany him, but the formalities had to be observed.

  ‘I’m afraid I shall need Jane to help me make pastry,’ my mother would inevitably reply.

  ‘Very well. Then I shall look forward to eating it.’

  I never felt excluded from their lives, never witnessed any primal scene, was not encouraged to formulate any family romance, although I was to do this later in the books I wrote for children and for which I became quite well known. As far as I was concerned my parents were two grown-up children, rather like myself. I longed to preserve their innocence, while my own innocence was as yet unformulated. I resented on their behalf any gross intrusion, any shadow of louche adult concerns. Into this category I put both debt and sexuality. I reckoned myself the ideal company for my mother, with the possi
ble addition of my friend Marigold Chance: anything more worldly, I suspected, might damage her. In this conviction I was remarkably prescient. As I say, and try to explain in my stories, children are alive to adult feelings. I mounted guard on my mother, keen to protect her, for no one knew her vulnerability better than I did. My grandmother Ferber I could just allow, for she seemed to keep a respectful, even a mournful, distance. My first misgivings about the impermeability of our world came during that first visit of Dolly and Hugo to our flat. Since Hugo was to die shortly afterwards my feelings of caution, of anxiety, of guardedness, became focused upon Dolly. Yet at that stage Dolly too was innocent, or as innocent as she ever managed to be. I rather think that innocence was not in her nature, yet that this was not entirely her fault. Or maybe it was. I had reason, in later life, to be impressed by the simplicity of her motives, and at the end, of course, she was as disarmed as the rest of us.

  At that stage, however, at the moment of our first meeting, I merely registered her as an unusually taut presence, conveniently symbolised for me by the tautness of her silk dress, which, as she took care to point out, had been made by hand. Her enthusiasm, which was her normal mode on social occasions, nevertheless had something fitful about it, as if she longed to be somewhere else, as of course she did. Yet I could not quite forgive her impatience, since it seemed to make my mother anxious, while my father’s politeness became even more pronounced. I lingered in the room long after the time at which I was expected to leave it, for Dolly had the gift of arresting and detaining one’s attention, a gift which she was never to lose.

  I have mentioned the primal scene, that imaginary sexual encounter which children reconstruct for their parents and which some believe that they have actually witnessed. This primal scene I unhesitatingly ascribe to Dolly and Hugo. Her angry smiles, her sidelong glances at her husband, her brightening of expression as the day drew towards evening, all put one in mind of a sexual life lived not too far out of sight. At the time of our first meeting Dolly was in her middle forties: was it the anguish of ageing that had brought these matters to the surface? Yet I do not believe that she thought of her substantial attractions as waning, rather the opposite. Her impatience, as I now see, had to do with frustration, as if the amiable Hugo had failed to come up to the mark. In this respect, as in so many others, she might have been the natural daughter of my grandmother Toni. Toni too had been embroiled in a primal scene, although of a more authentically Viennese stamp. Toni too had had expectations of men and had been disappointed. Both Toni and Dolly had the same restless imperious turn of the head, the same beautiful predatory hands. I see those hands now, stretched out to take the cards, beringed, vainly admired. Their initial ardour, which was succeeded by the most virulent antagonism, also indicates a closeness of relationship which was always denied to my mother. For this reason my mother became involved as a witness to their drama, from which she always considered herself to be slightly removed. In this, as in most other matters, she felt apologetic. I upheld her, of course, as I always did, even when such feelings were still a mystery to me. But then, for as long as I can remember, our particular closeness had no need of explanations.

  3

  Marie-Jeanne Schiff, who was always to be known as Dolly, was born in Paris, in the rue Saint-Denis, in March 1922. Her parents, Jacob and Fanny Schiff, had arrived in Paris from Frankfurt two years earlier, a surprising move given the anti-German feeling of the time, but they were politically ignorant, as they were in most worldly matters. They migrated partly in order to better their prospects: they were poor at home, they would be rich abroad. They were naïve, hopeful, and a little unrealistic, as if one place were as good as another, so long as it held the possibility of wealth. Jacob Schiff was congenitally restless and was always ready to try a new town or city where he could exercise his not very advanced skills as a watchmaker. It was probably his wife who chose Paris: she was a dressmaker, in an extremely small way of business, but already more determined than her husband was ever to be. She knew him to be indecisive, unstable, and unreliable as a breadwinner. He had already left her and returned to her three or four times, not for another woman but from a simple desire to be elsewhere. On his return he was eager for her welcome, as if nothing were amiss, but was unapologetic, wide-eyed, smiling, and indefinably dilapidated. A Luftmensch: the type is less common today, or if it exists is to be found among the young, a left-over from the hippie years and therefore slightly different in character.

  They settled in the rue Saint-Denis, fifth floor, no lift. The flat was tolerable and more than they could afford: there were two main rooms opening out of one another, a bedroom, a kitchen, and a cabinet de toilette When their child Marie-Jeanne was born, Fanny Schiff slept with her in the bedroom, while her husband lay on a couch in the living-room under a mock tigerskin rug. Shortly afterwards he decamped, this time for good. Fanny received a postcard from Colmar, but otherwise never saw or heard from him again. She moved herself into the living-room, together with the dressmaker’s dummy she had bought: the child, whom she called Dolly, had the bedroom to herself. Soup simmered all day in the kitchen. Dolly was always to remember this as the smell of childhood. The memory was alternately resented and cherished.

  In the street Fanny Schiff greeted the ladies who walked up and down with a timid ‘Bonjour, Madame’. I think she hardly knew that they were prostitutes: she thought of them as young girls in search of a husband, as she had once been. Now all that was over: she only wanted the child to grow up beautiful and healthy. She also wanted her business to prosper, as it had begun to do. Her sore eyes, her few hours of sleep on the couch in the workroom, and the eternal smell of soup were a small price to pay for solvency, a solvency she had never previously known.

  She soon had a clientele among the girls, cheerful, stoical, good-natured creatures who petted the baby and took to spending their off-duty moments in the workroom with Fanny. There was nothing downtrodden about these girls; they regarded ordinary married women with scorn and pity. All were actively saving up for their retirement. Those who had a man were planning to open a bar or a small restaurant, somewhere in the south. Nice, they said, Saint-Raphaël, Fréjus. Fanny listened as she stitched away. The child Dolly, of whom they made a great fuss, also listened. Another life! A better life! She loved her mother, could see her tired eyes at the end of the day. As soon as she was old enough she was sent downstairs to buy mille-feuilles and éclairs: one of the girls, Lucette or Michèle, always brought a present of good coffee. They were kind and generous, felt sorry for Fanny and Dolly, knew that there would be no time for them to have more than soup for their supper, as the machine whirred on late into the night. Their diet was irregular: a great deal of coffee, cakes when the girls came, on Sunday a couple of slices of ham with potatoes in oil, sometimes a cutlet followed by a spoonful of preserves. Nevertheless Dolly grew up beautiful.

  She was dark haired, with a taut faintly gleaming French complexion. She held her head high, even as a child: her dark eyes, her direct gaze challenged all who came within her field of vision. She went to school, where she made no friends; in any case she preferred the company of Lucette and Michèle and others like them. Sometimes she dropped into a church on her way home but left again discontented; there was nothing there to feed her solitude and her longings. Moreover she resented the atmosphere of self-denial she encountered among the shabby women in the pews, and took her resentment to the highest authority. Who was Jesus to say that she must not lay up treasures on earth? Where else could she enjoy them? Even at a young age she had strong desires, impulses, movements; she had nothing in common with those women in headscarves, their knotted hands patiently joined. She felt murderously towards them, as if they were undermining her own existence. Jesus she held directly responsible for her mother’s uncomplaining nature and also for her hard life, the one being a consequence of the other. She resolved to be different, not knowing, or if suspecting not believing, that her slender resources might not take her as fa
r as she wished to go.

  She had more ambition than her mother, but less application, knew only that she did not want to work as her mother continued to work, did not as yet connect her idea of a better life with a man. The men she saw passing up and down the street she considered far less important than the women. When she was sixteen, seventeen, she began to attract attention, but the word went out that she was not to be touched. She already considered her future to lie elsewhere, away from the rue Saint-Denis. She was determined, but dreamy: she wanted to live in a better house, with better food, and for her mother not to work so hard. Her heart was rudimentary. She was only prepared to love one or two people, one of whom would almost certainly be her mother, and the other probably herself.

  Her mother kept her at home, for her business had picked up and she was busy. Lucette and Michèle had brought other girls, for whom she made short swinging skirts and beautiful crêpe de Chine blouses. Dolly was sent out to buy buttons, passementerie, perhaps a length of fabric. The rest of the time she sat brooding in the workroom. With the rumours of war one or two of the girls spoke of leaving Paris, but most of them stayed. If France were invaded business was bound to be good. It might not be what they were used to, but there was an officer class in every army, and after the war, which would surely end quickly one way or another, there was that bar in Saint-Raphaël to be thought of, that bright reward for their many days and nights of hard work. If they worried about anything they worried about the fate of Fanny and Dolly Schiff, for ‘Schiff’ denoted a suspect foreignness. Fanny, who had learned a certain amount of worldly wisdom, gave it out that she came from Alsace, although Schiff is not the most common of Alsatian names. Remembering her husband, of whom she never thought, she said that she was from Colmar. The disappearing husband had also been Jewish, but that was easy to overlook. These days she sometimes went to church if she were not too tired, but, like her daughter, in matters of faith she was entirely uninvolved. She did not need to learn patience, judged her fortitude to be equal to the task, and felt only discomfort when asked to contemplate Christ’s wounds.