Dolly

by Anita Brookner

  They greeted me kindly, enquired after my health, which had never given cause for concern, and from time to time flourished an exquisite lawn handkerchief, drenched in some conservative cologne, as if to imply sorrow for my orphaned state.

  ‘Doesn’t she look lovely?’ whispered Kate to me. ‘We were so excited at the news. Of course we turned to straight away. We found a lovely red pullover for Alan, but Nell said to wait until they were married before setting them up. They’ll have nowhere to live, of course. Poor wee Marigold.’

  But although I knew that Marigold and Alan were already living together in Alan’s flat in Lambeth I said nothing, for it seemed imperative to preserve the aunts in their innocence. They ate their dinner with dainty enthusiasm, visibly regretting the fact that they could not be at Selfridges.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ I asked.

  ‘Just till tomorrow, dear. Then we’re off home to our garden. We’ve had a lovely show this past year. Even the apples were good. Could you take a few home with you, Jane? I know Mary has sufficient. If you come by tomorrow, dear, we can let you have a couple of pounds with pleasure.’

  Across the table Marigold flickered an eyelid in a minute wink. The engagement party was a bit of a joke to her, knowing Alan as well as she already did. It was organised mainly for the benefit of Alan’s parents, a couple of doctors from Northampton.

  ‘Will you take a little more coffee, Kate?’ asked Nell solicitously.

  ‘Not if I want to sleep tonight,’ replied Kate. ‘And don’t you take any more either.’

  While this exchange was taking place I managed to return Marigold’s wink. Our friendship was too strong and too sincere to change, even though she would marry and I might not. As far as I was concerned we were still those children who crossed the bridge to one another’s houses and were taken home again by Marigold’s brother, Oliver. I remembered those days with unusual clarity in the unlikely setting of this Chelsea restaurant, and knew that they would stay with me for ever.

  On alternate Sundays I had lunch with Miss Lawlor, who had settled down as happily in her solitary life as I had in mine. Because she now could not stand much interruption into her meditative days I left her at three o’clock, always with a large piece of cake for my tea in a paper bag, and walked the long way home, round the park, over the bridge, along Cheyne Walk and back to Dolphin Square. I was more aware of solitude on those Sunday afternoons, as I believe most people are, and I would sit by the window, neglecting my studies, almost frozen into old reveries.

  I felt alternately very old and very young. I had not yet learned how best to deal with my freedom, and for a time stayed close to home, fearful of venturing abroad, reluctant sometimes even to go into the street and lose myself in crowds. To break free of this enchantment I knew that I must undertake some drastic action. It was nearly Christmas again, and I resolved to go away. This decision enabled me to make plans, as I had never made them before. I chose Vienna, my grandmother’s city, and stayed at a small hotel which suited me very well. I wandered, as solitary travellers do, or looked at the world from behind the windows of Demel’s. I ate Sachertorte, which I found disappointing. When I returned home I congratulated myself on a difficult mission successfully carried out.

  Thereafter, in vacations, I took off. The trip to Vienna had taught me something about my own resourcefulness, but had not answered my obscure purpose, a purpose too obscure for me to identify but which manifested itself as a steady discomfort. Vienna had been too beautiful, too distracting. I chose out of the way places, out of season: almost any town in France or Germany, however devoid of scenic interest, provided the sort of ruminative space which I seemed to require. One day, seated at a rickety metal table in a side street café in Dijon, I stealthily began to write. Then I knew that it was time to go home.

  My first children’s book, as this became, was published to some acclaim and was hailed as a great success. I was unimpressed by the small whirl of publicity to which I was subjected, and extremely embarrassed to be photographed for the newspapers. As it was a quiet period in the publishing year the critics gave my book almost more space than it could stand, but this did not bother me either, for I knew that I should write others. I was working hard for my Finals, although I regarded the examinations as something of a formality. Fortunately the problem of what to do afterwards was solved by an offer by not one but two newspapers to review books for children, and other related subjects. There was a great deal of research going on at this time into the meaning of fairy stories and the pattern of children’s rhymes and games. Some of this research was feminist; some of it was good. I was happy with these offers, since they meant that I could stay at home with a good conscience, which I would need to do if I were going to write. And so the pattern of my life was set and has remained the same ever since.

  As my photograph had appeared in the papers I at last expected to hear from Dolly. This did not happen, and I was puzzled and a little hurt, until I remembered that she never read a newspaper. Her drawing-room was conceived as a salon, in which she welcomed guests and callers; it was not designed as a room in which to relax, where one could read or sew. I suspected that Dolly read only in the privacy of her bedroom at night: I also suspected that she liked the kind of old-fashioned sentimental stories that she had read as a girl, or had read to her mother. These would have been by Paul Bourget or Victor Marguerite. I did not know what the contemporary equivalents of these might be, but did not doubt that these existed. I also felt oddly sure that Dolly had discovered some kind of refined romance suited to her taste, perhaps of the order of Georgette Heyer, although she had none of the English attachment to a sanitised Regency period which makes that author so perennially successful.

  Indeed, if I imagined Dolly reading at all it was from a small hoard of books brought with her to England long ago. I thought I knew what she would like, chaste stories about love, and the marriage which crowns a difficult courtship. There were French writers who specialised in this sort of thing, writers whom no self-respecting Frenchwoman would own up to reading, although most of them did. If I were right in my suppositions, and I thought that I might be, then it was only a small step to picturing Dolly sitting up in bed, restored to the dreams and desires of her distant girlhood, as she followed the spirited and well-born heroine to her fate, which inevitably encompassed a spirited and well-born (but honourable) suitor and a considerable amount of property.

  What Dolly wanted was access to a life which girls of her generation cherished as a fantasy and which they never entirely relinquished: a life in which love became marriage as of right. This was what one was taught; this was what one desired, so that chastity need never be entirely abandoned. Smart Dolly, worldly wise as she undoubtedly was, no doubt partook of these fantasies, undistinguished though they might be. This image of Dolly sitting up in bed and reading her sentimental novel was very different from the bustling predatory figure who entertained her guests in her all too formal drawing-room, and was oddly touching. I found it hurt me to picture Dolly in her moments of solitude. It was three years since our last encounter, and my humiliation at her hands, a humiliation which still made me wince. It seemed longer than that, for so much had happened to me in the intervening time. I did what I always knew I was going to do, picked up the telephone, and dialled her number.

  She answered immediately, as if she had been waiting for the call, for any call.

  ‘It’s Jane,’ I said.

  ‘Jane? Well, you took your time.’ Her voice was distant, as if nourished by ancient grudges, rather than by present acrimony.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch,’ I said, helplessly falling into old patterns of believing myself in the wrong, particularly with regard to Dolly. In any case it was easier to do her bidding than not, for the reproaches she heaped on one’s head were tempestuous and out of all proportion to the original offence. They betrayed her impatience with life, with ordinary life, her desire for grander emotions, more extraordin
ary destinies than those which had come her way or were likely to come her way, as she sat in her rented flat, eternally calculating her expenses. Now, however, she sounded toneless, very different from the usual dispenser of advice, the impassioned advocate of singing and dancing.

  ‘Are you coming over?’ she asked, in the same almost disembodied manner.

  ‘Of course, I’d love to,’ I said, rather taken aback. ‘When are you free?’

  ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Now’s as good a time as any. Come as soon as you like.’ And the receiver was replaced.

  Obeying some ancestral impulse I took a taxi to a cake shop in Swiss Cottage and bought a few delicacies. I remembered that Dolly had always had a sweet tooth, and I doubted whether Annie made her marvellous confections when no guests were expected. As I hardly counted as a guest there might conceivably be nothing to eat: I remembered how Annie had never provided any food when I called on Dolly in the old days. Besides, the heavenly smell of sugar and cream that I would bring with me would surely make our first difficult moments together less difficult. On impulse, and not knowing quite what made me do it, I added an asparagus quiche and some frozen vegetables to my purchases, and thus burdened with two bags took another taxi to Dolly’s flat off the Edgware Road of evil memory, where she had met her own fate in the person of the owner of a minicab firm, patronised in all innocence before that innocence betrayed her, and was betrayed by her.

  ‘You took your time,’ she repeated, as she opened the door on to a hallway which seemed duskier than I remembered it. She had not bothered to switch on the light, economising, no doubt, once the friends had departed. Again I assumed that I was at fault.

  ‘I’ve telephoned more than once,’ I told her, following her indifferent back into the drawing-room. She motioned me to a chair, sat down herself, and looked pensive, abstracted, as if little could come of this interview. When I scrutinised her it took me some time to work out what was different. It was not the hair, now entirely grey, or rather navy blue, for an enthusiastic hairdresser had been at work; it was not the very slightly swollen ankles, or the ancient patent leather court shoes into which she must have recently thrust her plump feet; it was not the familiar black and white silk dress, which now fitted her rather loosely. Rather it was the fact that she was wearing no make-up, that she had completely abandoned colour, even to the smear of lipstick which had always glistened on her eager mouth, and now presented me with a totally expressionless mask, on which the only tones were the tones of age, a heavier shadow under the eyes, the faintest possible adumbration of hair above the upper lip, a thinning of the brows, beneath which her gaze wandered away from mine in an apparently genuine lack of interest. The beautiful olivine complexion, still fine, now had the opaque sheen of candle wax.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about your mother,’ I said awkwardly.

  At this she stirred. ‘Ah, Jane, Jane,’ she sighed. ‘My mother. She was all I had, ever. And I let her go away from me, when I should have kept her here, looked after her. But I couldn’t have done that, do you see? Living as I did. And she wanted to go back to France. She was happy there in the sun, she was looked after, but when I saw her little room, and her little balcony, where she fed the birds, my heart broke.’

  Indeed it did seem to me that Dolly’s heart was broken, or that some mainspring had been dismantled. Her hands were primly clasped in her lap, her ankles crossed. She looked as though she were in some ante-room to death, some hospital waiting-room, or prison cell, so strong was the impression I had that Dolly was finally without resource, as I had never seen her before.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. There was a silence, as though she could no longer be bothered to reply. I looked round the room. It was getting dark, but only one lamp was lit, its shade tipped up to produce an uncomfortable glare from a bulb which was nevertheless weak. Dust lay quite thickly on the cross-bars of the chairs, although it had been perfunctorily removed from the many small tables which had previously supported the Porthault cups and saucers when Dolly was entertaining. It seemed astonishingly quiet without her guests. I reflected that I should not much like to live here on my own. There was always Annie, of course, but she did not seem to be in evidence.

  ‘Where is Annie?’ I asked.

  Here a look of pain crossed Dolly’s face. ‘Annie has left me,’ she said. ‘Gone back to Belgium. Retired, she says. As if women like us could retire! Always on the go, always on duty.’

  It interested me that she classed herself with Annie, however unconsciously. ‘How will you manage without her?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I’ve had to cut down on entertaining, of course.’ Here a dark red flush seeped into her cheeks. ‘I knew what would happen. Those spoilt selfish women refused to take pot luck. Oh, no, they liked Annie’s coffee, her little sandwiches, her réductions. They began to make excuses. I still go to them occasionally, but it’s not the same. I can’t return the hospitality. And I haven’t got the energy I once had. This flat is too big; I never liked it. Annie retiring!’ she repeated, her flush deepening. ‘Did you ever hear such nonsense?’ But I suspected that she had been humiliated by her erstwhile friends, whom she now saw more rarely than she had done in the past, and who had abandoned her, like the instinctive but stupid creatures that they were, when they saw her reduced to a badly dusted drawing-room, the usual refreshments only a distant memory.

  ‘I brought something for our tea,’ I said cheerfully. And for your dinner, I added silently. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’

  She came after me into the kitchen, her hands still clasped, as if to release them would be tantamount to revealing a capacity for work. The kitchen was illuminated by a weak trembling neon tube, which would be difficult to replace when it finally expired. The kettle was an ancient model, with a high straight handle. I opened a cupboard and found some ordinary white cups with a plain gold rim and some glass plates on which I arranged my cakes. I felt immensely sad. I would have given anything to have seen Dolly in her old combative mood.

  ‘What do you do with yourself all day?’ I asked, as lightly as possible.

  ‘I go out,’ she said, brightening slightly. ‘I go to the cinema. I love the cinema. I can get in for half-price.’

  ‘Come now, Dolly, you can’t be short of money.’

  ‘Yes I am,’ she said, raising her head and glaring at me. ‘And it’s none of your business why.’

  This brief burst of temper surprised me, but I said nothing. I carried the tray to the drawing-room; again she followed me, content for me to take matters in hand.

  She ate thoughtfully but greedily, as if there were an intimate connection between her lack of sugar and her downcast demeanour. Strawberry tart followed éclair which in turn followed meringue. And yet she had lost weight, I reflected.

  ‘Do you feed yourself properly, now that Annie’s not here?’

  At this she looked annoyed. ‘Of course I do! I go round the corner, to the Italian, for lunch. Do I feed myself! Impertinence!’

  ‘And for dinner?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t bother with dinner,’ she replied, her eyes once more sliding away from mine. ‘I open a tin of soup. We always had soup, Mother and I. Then I go to bed. You needn’t worry about me.’ When she looked at me again I saw that her eyes were full of tears.

  ‘Dolly,’ I asked gently. ‘What is wrong? Is it your mother?’

  ‘Mother? No, it’s not Mother. She was happy enough, in the sun. She had friends. In a way she was lucky, luckier than I shall be. We understood each other, Mother and I; everything was done for the best. I try to think of her there in the sun, and then I think of the old days, when we were together. My life hasn’t been easy, Jane.’

  ‘And Harry?’ I ventured, with some trepidation, for the answer to this question was all too clear.

  ‘Harry’s gone,’ she said. ‘Harry left me.’ Two tears slipped down her face, which she wiped negligently with her hand. ‘He meant a great deal to me, Jane. I know you never liked him, but
you never got to know him like I did. We were two of a kind; we understood each other. Nobody else did, and that’s the truth. That’s why I miss him so much. Two years we had, two wonderful years.’

  I noticed that she remarked on the understanding between Harry and herself, much as she had assured me—and it was undoubtedly true—that she and her mother had understood each other. It was as if everyone else she had known had failed her, and now she saw by how much.

  ‘I know he was company for you.’

  ‘Company? Oh, yes, he was company. But he was more than that. I’m talking about something you wouldn’t understand, Jane: love, attraction, sex, if that’s what you want to call it.’ She blushed slightly as she uttered the word, but once it was out in the open went on to make herself clear. ‘Sometimes he stayed on after the others had left. Oh, I made him comfortable, all right. He liked a game of cards; my little parties amused him. And when I saw him looking at me and knew what he was thinking … My heart, Jane!’ Here she put her hand to her heart. ‘He made me feel what I’d never felt before, not even when I was married. I knew he didn’t love me. I knew I was making a fool of myself. But it’s not easy for a woman of my age, for a woman of any age. And living the way I did, with all those other women … He understood me,’ she repeated. ‘Oh, you’ve all been kind enough, I dare say, but I felt more at home with Harry. More than I ever did with Hugo. Harry was my type; do you understand? I don’t suppose you do, really.’

  ‘You loved him,’ I said, making the statement she was still too awkward to make herself.