Dolly

by Anita Brookner

  ‘I really loved him,’ she said, bending her head and fishing a handkerchief out of the sleeve which slipped loosely down her arm.

  ‘And you gave him money,’ I said, in order to get the worst out of the way.

  ‘I put money into the business, yes. Why not? There was nothing wrong with it; it was a going concern. And then one day, out of the blue, he said he was going abroad. I knew that was an excuse. I saw him in the Edgware Road the following day and taxed him with it.’ (After having waited for him, I thought, but said nothing.) ‘ “When shall I be seeing you?” I asked him. “Oh, I’ll see you around. I’ll see you at the girls’, perhaps.” Because he knew I still went to Phyllis and Rose. “I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment,” he said. “Business is picking up. I’m putting in extra time. Buck up, darling. No need to look like that, is there?” He called me darling,’ she said, with some return of pride. ‘It makes a woman feel special, somehow.’

  I could see him, the monster, bluffing it out, jovial to the end. And he would no doubt wave a modest hand, when teased by Phyllis or Rose, thereby adding further to his lustre as a man loved by women. I could see him now, in their ever more welcoming drawing-rooms, his foot wagging in time to his own invisible orchestra.

  ‘So I stopped going to the girls,’ Dolly went on. ‘Then, a few months back I went to Rose’s, just for a chance of seeing him. Just casually, you know.’

  But he would have made quite sure that she did not see him, I thought.

  ‘I still go occasionally. I’m sure we’ll get together again one of these days. But it won’t be the same. Something died in me, Jane. Not that you would understand—you were always so cold. Funny little thing,’ she said, putting away her handkerchief. The reproach was familiar, but her heart was not in it. That was the only time during the whole of the afternoon that I was mentioned. Of my own concerns not a word was broached, for which I was grateful.

  ‘There’s a quiche in the fridge, if you fancy a little supper,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t eat anything after all those cakes. Are you going? I’ll change my shoes and walk down to the corner with you. Come into the bedroom with me.’

  She seemed unwilling for me to leave her alone. The bedroom was if anything dustier, the coverlet on the narrow bed faded. Where had Harry slept, I wondered? Or had he just left and gone home to his own comfortable house? Adjusting his clothing, was the thought that entered my mind, and once there would not be dislodged. The wardrobe opened with a creak onto a smell of faded scent. Dolly bent down and eased her feet out of her tight shoes, replacing them with a black flat-heeled pair that suddenly made her seem much shorter. She tidied her navy blue hair in the tarnished mirror of her dressing-table. By her bed, just as I had pictured it, was a small pile of novels by Delly and Gyp, their covers faded, one or two loose pages testifying to long use.

  In the street she took my arm, as if she had not been out for a long while. She may even have been exaggerating her weakness, but I think not. I intended to walk to the main road to get the tube, but she led me down a quiet side street, and then stopped outside a small block of flats, where lights blazed cheerfully in most of the windows.

  ‘Doesn’t it look nice there?’ she said. ‘I wish I lived there.’

  Her voice was so wistful that I asked her if she knew anyone who did live there.

  ‘One or two ladies,’ she answered. ‘Just to say good-morning to. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Harry lives in Belsize Park, or did when I knew him. I don’t know where he is now. I hate my flat, Jane. I hate going back to it, when it’s empty. And it’s always empty now. If I could live there,’ she added, with none of her original slyness, ‘I think I could be more settled, more comfortable.’ She gazed up at the cheerful windows, as if willing herself inside those lighted rooms. Then of course I knew what I had to do.

  I left her on the corner, looking oddly diminished in her flat shoes. I waited until I saw her turn and wander back. The sight was painful to me. When I got home I rang John Pickering and invited him for a drink.

  ‘I’m thinking of buying a flat,’ I said. ‘As an investment.’

  His expression changed from alarm to cautious approval.

  ‘Always a good way to place extra funds. If you like I will look around for you.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve found something,’ I told him. ‘Here’s the address. If you could just make enquiries?’ For I had seen a set of unlighted windows on the first floor and had an idea that that flat would be empty.

  My manner must have been rather dismissive, for he left shortly afterwards. He was always remarkably intuitive to atmosphere.

  My charity felt cold to me, as it was perhaps supposed to feel, as it had felt to my mother, to my grandmother. The saving grace was that the beneficiary would have no such misgivings. And yet even though I thought I knew all about Dolly’s conscience, given that it existed, it was impossible for me not to feel her pathos, which I perceived for the first time. Her words had been banal, certainly not chosen to excite my sympathy. She had spoken of her lover in terms so devoid of interest that I might have been forgiven for thinking that she was a woman of no distinction, who could not put her passion into words, and who was perhaps as little skilled emotionally as she was in any other way. She had referred to her nights of love, such as they were, as if I would grasp all her meaning, yet a few moments later had denied me even that faculty, saying that I was cold, though she had no way of verifying this. No doubt what she felt was a generalised contempt for my kind, in which she included my parents, my grandmother, certainly her husband, with our correct manners and impassive faces. Again she lacked the skill to discern the temperament underneath, lacked the curiosity to enquire into our lives, lacked the fellow feeling to appreciate that we ourselves might have difficulties, might be frustrated, might feel loss or doubt, or even need.

  The appeal of Harry had been his obviousness: his signals could not be mistaken. He was lazy, greedy, a sexual speculator, and a self-made man, comfortably off but a vulgarian, not burdened with too many refinements, a lover of rich food, fast cars, dance music, and the sort of luxury which could be paid for in ready cash. The appeal of such blatant accessibility had been profound. No need, here, to give one’s usual performance, or if one did one could at least relax and enjoy it. Thus the bridge parties had taken on a new meaning, since the presence of her women friends, so tolerated, so detested, would be offset by the presence of Harry, and the meaningful glance with which he occasionally favoured her would repay her for numerous social humiliations suffered over the years.

  His lovemaking would no doubt be expert, but he would enjoy the spectacle of a woman losing her dignity in bed. His instincts were perhaps very slightly criminal, for he would have seen that he was dealing with a woman who was, despite appearances to the contrary, unsophisticated. And the part of Harry that was itself unsophisticated would appreciate the comforting inconsequential feminine atmosphere of those gambling afternoons, would enjoy being spoilt, being cajoled, being tempted with plates of delicious food. It was when Dolly was at her worldliest that he would be tempted to stay behind, to linger in her company; it was then that it would amuse him to cut her down to size. And the more he did so, the more successfully he made her plead and beg, the less he thought of her.

  If she had remained true to type, and exploited him as she exploited everyone else, he might have shaken his head in admiration; he might even have married her, thinking it better by far to have her as an ally than as an enemy. Instead she had grown tearful, lamenting his more and more frequent absences, and had finally been forced to track him down in the Edgware Road, perhaps peering through the glass window of his office, and waiting until he had finally consented to emerge, although with an excuse that he was short of time, that he was ‘going for a quick coffee’ (in which he did not invite her to join him), and had seen him, dapper as ever, cross the road on his glossy feet, and had known that she would only see him again if she engaged in the same humili
ating stratagems, perhaps to the delight of former friends to whom she had considered herself superior, thinking them too stupid to notice her contempt.

  Thus had Dolly’s final education been inaugurated. Always needy, always greedy, she had at last to conclude that her methods had failed, that this time gratification was to be withheld, and withheld for ever. And this realisation had effected a profound change in her, one which manifested itself in a complete alteration of her physical appearance. I could not rid myself of the sight of her in her flat shoes, which made her walk seem awkward, quite different from her normal dancer’s step. When she had accompanied me to the tube—holding my arm, as if made cautious by the bustle of evening—she had worn an ordinary cloth coat in a rather sour ginger colour, in any event unbecoming, and a world removed from the fur coat scented with Joy which dated from my childhood and which had been remodelled at great expense several times since then. The wardrobe door had creaked open on to the ghost of that scent, and on to the familiar collection of impractical silk dresses (‘C’est fait à la main, tout ça’) now crammed indifferently together. She had worn one of those dresses, and it no longer fitted her. She had lost weight; her figure had fallen and flattened, so that the dress, designed for a plumper woman, looked merely clumsy. And the high-heeled patent shoes were far from new, as could be judged by the height and slenderness of those heels, which had once flattered her strikingly arched foot but now merely caused discomfort.

  In her face, that face newly devoid of colour, could be read the first intimation that Dolly had been overtaken by that long resignation which marks the true onset of old age. That she was not technically old—a bare sixty-eight—made her new patience seem all the more shocking. I could see that she had been beautiful, could see traces of beauty still in the wide dreaming eyes which strayed continually to the window, in the finely arched brows, now sparse, in the tilt of the head, but that was only because I had known her before. Anyone meeting her now for the first time would simply register her as an elderly person, for this was her new card of identity, the one she proffered when she went to afternoon performances at the cinema or ate her lonely lunch at the Italian restaurant round the corner. The completeness of the change in her could be read in the wistful way she had referred to the ‘ladies’ from the small block of flats in which she longed to live, and to whom she occasionally said good-morning. What she wanted now, and wanted with all the ardour of her lost youth, was to be one of those ladies, in whose company she might revive, and whom she might eventually entertain, modestly and discreetly, with none of her former flourish, in her flat, which she would strive to make as close in style as possible to theirs.

  Dolly was not domesticated; she could not cook. But she could learn. ‘I’ll never be a proud housewife’, I remember her saying—and not without some complacency—to my mother. She had never become an ordinary woman, had never intended to; her eagerness had persisted throughout her life, as if she were eternally in search of the next pleasure, the next diversion. But some evil genius, from one of my fairy stories, perhaps, had seen to it that pleasure would be her downfall, that it would be pleasure, to use another fairy-tale locution, that would eventually stab her to the heart. The barb thus released, Harry’s barb, would turn her overnight into an old woman. He had taught her a truth so unbearable that many women cannot face it, simply that a man does not care to be friends with a woman after their affair is over, that he will in future treat her to a vague smile of reminiscence, or a hasty wave of the hand if they meet, but that he will never, at the onset of a lonely evening, telephone to see whether she is all right, whether she needs anything, whether he might drop by. This callousness, which is in fact a complete emotional ineptitude, brings curious results: shame is felt not by the man but by the woman, who feels newly conspicuous, becomes fearful of public occasions, and avoids even the company of her friends. ‘Harry left me,’ Dolly had said, and the pain of separation was multiplied a thousandfold by the fact that she knew it, and that therefore everyone else must know it.

  I had been brooding over this at my desk, and got up feeling physically cramped and mentally troubled. What troubled me most of all was the fact that I felt myself to be in some way inferior to Dolly. This was obscure, but uncomfortable. It seemed to me that for all her humiliation she had acquired a dimension that I still lacked. What I had hastily and no doubt superficially dismissed as a tragedy was not that at all, or rather to accept it as such would be to miss the point. What Dolly had lost was all too obvious: what she had gained was dignity. If Harry were to encounter her now he would be appalled at her appearance, but he would also instinctively mind his manners. It might even occur to him that her opinion of him had changed: it might even be that this was the case, though I doubted it. I suspected that she would love him for ever, or else consign the loving heart she had so lately discovered herself to possess, to a metaphorical grave. She would thus learn to live with a death that would come daily nearer, and in that way fulfill her earthly span.

  I knew all this: somehow I knew it. What I had not learned before I learned now. I looked at the clock and saw with a start that it was half-past eleven. I had spent the entire evening brooding, but perhaps to some purpose. I bestirred myself to answer a few letters and to write others. With what I could arrange on paper Dolly’s affair was cut and dried: the bank would raise no objections. I sent a birthday card to Miss Lawlor, whose present I would take round to her on an evening later in the week. I turned down an invitation to read a paper on Sleeping Beauty to a feminist seminar at a college for further education. I was not ready, perhaps for reasons which had to do with myself as much as with Dolly, to bring light to bear on this subject. Perhaps I never would be. Perhaps I would choose to remain asleep rather than be woken like Beauty. (And yet, I told myself, Beauty had only awoken because her prince had tried so hard to reach her; difficult to ignore the evidence of this. And she had been wounded in the first place by a spindle, the symbolism of which was easy to discern. Were we dealing here with a highly moral tale, which was in more ways than one an allegory of true love and a warning against mere physical curiosity? I promised myself that I would examine this matter further, when I was not so fearful of its implications.) Then I took another pen and began what was to be my second book, my second success. It was much harsher than the first, but I did not think that this mattered. Children need harsh lessons sometimes, if they are learned in an atmosphere of affection. What they learn then may save them from being duped in later life.

  9

  On my last visit to America, where I gave my talk on Sleeping Beauty and other related topics to two women’s colleges, I was interested to note the variety of female responses. The older members of the faculty regarded it politely as a feminist entertainment, while the younger ones debated it fervently. I found to my surprise that I was more impressed by the former than by the latter. These placid dignified women, mostly in their fifties, mostly long divorced or else widowed, pursued a life of study in an all female atmosphere as if they were nuns in a mediaeval abbey. All had children or stepchildren, all taught a full syllabus, all had made their homes in the charming small towns and suburbs of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. They were all extremely gracious, in the American fashion, and manifested none of the recklessness, the combative vivacity of their younger counterparts.

  Walking with one of these older women through the idyllic streets surrounding the campus I was not questioned on whether I had endured much sexual harassment in England but was shown the garden, invited to admire the dogwood, or indeed ‘Janet’s copper beech. I confess to a little envy: I haven’t one of my own. But I can always look at hers. We have tea together at her house, when it’s at its best, in October. Have you noticed that when the leaves fall they turn a dark ox-blood red? I dare say you have a fine garden at home.’

  In the face of such magnificence I hardly care to tell her that I live in a small flat and that when I look out of the window all I see is the dirty river and the dis
tant dull green of the park, no longer familiar to me. These days my walks no longer take me to the park, but only along streets increasingly choked with traffic. For this reason I am always glad, when I am on campus, to accept an invitation to walk round the lake from one of the younger women, perhaps a full professor at the age of thirty-two. They are so convivial that it would be churlish to refuse. But I find them exhausting, these women of goodwill, with their agenda of wrongs to be righted, of injustices to be eliminated. I want to stand still in the dusk and contemplate the lake, seeing only mist, hearing only a brief ripple where the wing of a bird disturbs the surface of the water, but I must respond intelligently, employ a certain kind of feminised argument, feel myself to be the victim of a monstrous wrong which has been passed down to me from generation to generation.

  I am invited to share my experience in the workplace, and, remembering ABC Enterprises, reply truthfully that I was never happier. This seems to disappoint them, until I tell them that my colleagues were all women, when their faces clear. Then in all conscience I describe to them the later months, when the business was run by James Hemmings and his friends, and they become alert again. Any discrimination? I am demanded. Only being taken out to dinner by the boss, I reply, by which time I am regarded with the purest suspicion.

  I am then questioned much more closely, and almost as a hostile witness, on my views on the position of women today. This is a key question, the answer to which will furnish material for seminar after seminar of feminist studies. These young women are painfully preoccupied with questions of gender. Yet most of them are married or in a relationship with some man. I have been introduced to one or two of the husbands and partners. They seemed nice enough, perhaps a little too conscious of sharing, as they put it. And yet their small children, where they exist, seem oddly anxious, as if this sharing were an alien concept, fit only for emancipated adults, who could discuss the matter until late into the night.