A Private View

by Anita Brookner

  He was back in Kendal Street by a quarter to ten. In the hallway of the building Hipwood was decorating a discreet Christmas tree. Bland was thankful that he was occupied: he was not quite sure how to repair his recent lapse. All these matters must be resolved, but perhaps not quite yet, on the morning of his departure, perhaps, when money could be handed over and farewells exchanged. He had just made it to the lift, behind Hipwood’s back, when he was called to order.

  ‘Your letters, sir,’ said Hipwood. ‘Late again. New man on the job. Well, I say man, more of a boy, really, with one of those fancy haircuts, if you follow me. Cost a bomb, they do. Still, that’s modern youth, isn’t it? Three for you, sir, and I had to sign for this one.’

  ‘Very kind, Mr Hipwood. Do I owe you anything?’

  ‘Perhaps you might give this to the young lady,’ said Hipwood pleasantly. ‘Since you’re more likely to see her than I am.’

  Bland reckoned that this placed them once more on an equal footing. Hipwood, however, could not resist pressing his advantage.

  ‘Bit of a mystery, don’t you think, sir? You’d have thought she’d introduce herself, wouldn’t you? And yet before this letter came I didn’t even know her name.’

  ‘Gibb,’ he said shortly. ‘Miss Gibb.’

  ‘Well, not quite, sir. It appears she’s a married woman. Bit of a mystery all round, wouldn’t you say?’

  He turned triumphantly back to his tree. Bland glanced at the envelope, which was addressed to Mrs Kathleen Palmer-Harris, c/o Dunlop. The handwriting was small and difficult, as if the sender were afflicted with cramp, or in the grip of some terrible mental torment. Bland favoured the latter. There was something costive and effortful about the formation of the letters: studying them gave him some sort of respite from the creeping realisation that Katy’s life was more crowded than he had recently supposed. Unless ‘Palmer-Harris’ was another subterfuge, a nom de guerre adopted for reasons he could not fathom, although he would be surprised if they were completely straightforward. He was obliged to exercise his brain on every facet of her life, an exercise which gave him no small pleasure. The aristocratic surname was in character, all of a piece with her intermittently high-handed locutions, so disconcertingly introduced when they were least expected, and always, unfailingly, denoting anger.

  As for Mr Palmer-Harris, if he existed, Bland imagined him to be a minor personage in this particular drama, a mere spear-carrier. Katy was no more married than he was. Her whole demeanour was that of a huntress, a fauve, literally taking her food and her sustenance from others. In all the time he had known her (three and a half weeks, he thought with a pang) she had not eaten a single meal at her own expense. Rather than shop and cook as others did she preferred not to eat at all, until a suitable invitation came along. On that first evening in the restaurant he had thought it curious that she had chosen the most expensive items on the menu: now he understood. The food had to be rich, excessively calorific, so that if necessary two days could be spent digesting it. And then, with a little luck, there would be another restaurant, and another, similar meal. He marvelled once again at her resilience.

  In the same way she imposed herself on her friends, moving into their flats and houses whether it were convenient or not. Because she was personable, or perhaps plausible would be a more accurate description, she would always be initially welcome: she could offer gossip, information, the all-purpose enthusiasm of the encounter group. Only her short attention span would let her down. He was willing to bet that, with the exception of Howard Singer’s set-up, she had never stayed anywhere for as long as she had been in the Dunlops’ flat. How would she greet them when they returned? Perhaps this was not in her plan. Perhaps she had seen in him a last chance, just as he had seen the same thing in her. In which case, he thought, we are probably both mistaken, but because we have no choice we will make do with one another. And perhaps we are both clever enough to get away with it.

  Mrs Palmer-Harris, indeed. Undoubtedly a nom de guerre. The Kathleen part of it he believed. It went with the army camp and the father in braces. He added a waif-like Irish mother, hardly older than a girl. In which case, what had become of her? The father was dead, she had said. He supposed that the mother had married again and had more children. It was reasonable to conclude that Katy had nothing to do with her. Of all the people Bland had ever known she was the most unmothered.

  He ran up the stairs, glad of an opportunity to interrupt her at whatever she was doing. He was also curious as to the state of the flat, for which, he realised, he would have to account. The doorbell seemed to echo into a tense silence. He rang again.

  ‘Who is it?’ a voice called.

  ‘It’s George. I’ve got a letter for you.’

  ‘Can’t you leave it? I’m washing my hair.’

  ‘I think you’d better look at it, Katy. I’m not really sure it’s for you.’

  ‘I’m expecting something. It’s probably for me. Just leave it, George.’

  ‘Can’t you open the door?’

  There was another silence. Then the door opened on to a clearly annoyed Katy, clad in what must be Tim Dunlop’s white towelling bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a towelling turban.

  He handed her the letter and glanced past her. The atmosphere was disturbed; he sensed the trace of another presence, another odour. The windows, he noted, were steamed up, yet the flat was as cold as his own.

  ‘Is your heating working?’ he asked. ‘Mine seems to have packed up.’

  ‘Oh, I never have the heating on,’ she said. ‘It’s so bad for the skin.’ She put the letter in her pocket without looking at it. She was clearly impatient, waiting for him to leave.

  ‘The letter’s addressed to a Mrs Palmer-Harris,’ he said. ‘I wondered if it were really for you.’

  ‘Of course it’s for me.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ he said weakly.

  ‘I’m terribly busy,’ she said. The vowels were in place this morning, he noted. She might have been dismissing a tradesman.

  ‘Too busy for a cup of coffee? I was just going to make one.’

  ‘Just for a moment,’ she said, crossing the hall after him on her bare feet. In his flat she sat down impatiently, crossing and re-crossing her legs.

  ‘I admit I’m intrigued,’ he shouted from the kitchen, spooning out the coffee. ‘Is there a Mr Palmer-Harris?’

  ‘Of course there is. My husband.’ She seemed disinclined to say more, clearly angered by his questions.

  ‘You’re married, then?’ He set the tray down carefully in front of her, marvelling at the steadiness of his hands.

  ‘I was. I suppose I still am, in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘How did he know you were here?’

  ‘I wrote to him, of course. Told him I needed money. Don’t look so shocked, George. What did you think I was living on?’

  ‘You don’t live together, then?’

  ‘Hardly. I divorced him years ago.’

  He felt an absurd sense of relief. ‘You must have married very young,’ he said.

  ‘Very.’ He noticed that she never referred to her age at any stage of her life, as if this were to remain a mystery to herself as well as to the outside world. ‘I married him to get away from home. And he was crazy about me. Still is, I dare say.’

  ‘What sort of a man is he?’

  She made a face. ‘Wet. Oh, very pukka, public school and so on. He’s regular army, very conventional. I took one look at his mother …!’ She cast up her eyes. ‘I bowled him over. But no, thank you very much. Still, he was good about the divorce.’

  ‘You mean you divorced him?’

  ‘As soon as I saw what life would be like if I stayed with him.’ She gave a short laugh. ‘Funny guy. I did him a favour, leaving him, not that he agreed with me.’

  ‘Do you still see him?’

  ‘No way. I let him make himself useful occasionally.’ She waved the letter at him.

  ‘What is his name?’
r />   ‘Simon.’

  ‘And you haven’t seen him for some time?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  She had caught his drift, he thought. She knew that he was aware there had been someone with her, and that that someone was not the discarded husband. His heart went out to the poor fellow, who had no doubt been as disarmed as he was now himself. Except that Palmer-Harris had been young, and no doubt innocent, his background and advantages strangely ineffective. He shook his head and studied her. She was conscious of him, rolled down the sleeves of Tim Dunlop’s bathrobe and pulled the sash tight, as if to protect herself from his gaze. He remembered Hipwood’s knowing eye, ignored the faint warning in his head, then told himself it was too late for ordinary prudence.

  ‘Well, I must be off,’ she said. ‘Are you going to be here all day?’

  ‘I have some business to see to, but I dare say I shall be in later. Would you like a cup of tea this afternoon?’

  For it is to be all cups of tea, he thought tiredly, and no real truths, beyond the one he had learned that morning. Even that was an edited version, which she no doubt thought favourable to herself. The omissions were glaring. What had been left out was the mockery of the man’s decent behaviour, her continuing power over him. None of this need be true, he thought, but what is the truth? The truth was that he was in danger of approaching some sort of precipice, and of going over the edge, that the transformation that he sought was somehow linked with this girl, who was until recently a total stranger, and that he was excited—excited as he had never been—by the contest of wills that was being played out between them. He had never been in a more ridiculous position in his life. But knowing, as he now perceived, that his life had been lived without his active participation, without daring, without heat, he was, or seemed to be, committed to this one final act of folly, for which, no doubt, he was overprepared.

  ‘Until later, then,’ he called to her retreating back, and shut the door.

  The need to get out had become pressing. Because of the wretchedness which had suddenly descended on him he decided to begin the business of clearing Putnam’s flat, a task which he had been unwilling to face. In any event, he could not stay at home: he wondered if he could ever bear to endure his habitual claustration again. He went into the bedroom and felt the radiator: still cold. At which point would it be appropriate to mention this to Hipwood, his doppelgänger? This was almost a political decision. Yet the sheer added nonsense of this predicament made him impatient. If his will was to be in question, why not exercise it in this useful circumstance? Nevertheless he said nothing to Hipwood, who was arranging tinsel round his tree. His desire to leave the building was too strong, and he almost fled into the street.

  Ten minutes’ walk amid the Friday crowds, in the damp grey weather, brought him to George Street. Putnam had lived in a subdued, gloomy but respectable building, which, having existed since the 1930s, had acquired a patina of age and sooner or later would without a doubt be appropriated by enthusiasts for late Art Deco. Certain features already possessed a quasi-historical value, such as the lift, which appeared to be composed of bronze glass and sunray ironwork, and the jazz age carpet, in fawn, orange, and brown, which lined the corridors. Putnam had appreciated these details, not only for their ugliness, but out of some ancient loyalty to the home of his youth. Bland suspected that this hallowed place had been more humble, yet more dignified, than his own petit bourgeois surroundings: he imagined polished linoleum and a brass gong in the hall, possibly the presence of a lodger in a small back bedroom. This had been confirmed, in due course, unapologetically, even with enthusiasm. Such innocence was rare, Bland knew: he thought it a superior quality, superior in any event to his own guarded aspirations.

  Putnam had managed to turn his nostalgia into an art form, but never a handicap, or even a joke, and had remained an unashamed populist all his life. The expensive suits, the membership of the Reform Club, had not altered or in any way affected his inalienable simplicity. Putnam would enter a pub, bright eyed, in the sure expectation of an hour’s entertainment, although he never drank more than a half of bitter. Bland had accompanied him, protesting, to pubs in the Caledonian Road, in Shaftesbury Avenue, in Pimlico, for Putnam, who came from Birmingham, was an inveterate Londoner. Whereas Bland had sought out the mournful secretive suburbs, Putnam would not move far from the cockneyfied inner regions, and had frequently appropriated Bland for a long walk after work, during which, under the lights of Piccadilly Circus, or Victoria Station, his strange hilarious face would glow with enthusiasm, and with the excitement of the city.

  He struck up odd alliances, with paper-sellers, with men and women brooding in cafés, with publicans: he distributed largesse to alcoholics and panhandlers, his vitality increasing with every encounter. Yet in spite of these random friendships, in spite of the women who entered his flat, for however brief a period, he remained prudent, oddly chaste, transparently honest. Every Sunday afternoon he would seat himself in front of his outsize television and watch the film. ‘You’re sure you won’t come out?’ Bland would say. ‘It’s Alice Faye!’ Putnam would reply. Or Barbara Stanwyck. Or, treat of treats, Joan Crawford. ‘Come back afterwards. I’ve got some Gentleman’s Relish. Now fuck off.’

  So they would have their tea, and smoke a couple of cigarettes, and discuss what to do when they retired. Together they were able to disregard their age, holding it, as it were, in common. Within each other’s company they had kept mortality at bay. Putnam’s slight gangling figure had never shown any signs of fatigue, of wear and tear, which made the rapid onset of his last illness a calculated cruelty. A strange, endearing character, mathematically gifted, yet apparently disrespectful of his gift. After Birmingham University he had been encouraged to stay on and do research, but for reasons which were never fully explained—Bland suspected the poverty of a widowed mother, a suspicion which Putnam later confirmed, in one of those elliptical confidences which, out of a shared modesty, they both prized—had elected to enter the firm in which Bland was already employed and work in accounts. Over the years he had risen to a more exalted position, and was given a pompous title, yet, like Bland, he retained the memory of his apprentice years. It had made their maturity, their shared maturity, all the more secure.

  Bland knew what he would find in Putnam’s flat, which was complacently hideous. Putnam had maintained, with some pride, that he had no taste: like all his observations this was the simple truth. But this was more than bad taste: this was a courageous stand against beauty, and the obligation to aspire to it. That beauty was truth, and truth beauty, was not apparent to Putnam, who was ever ready to appreciate humbler, not to say crass forms of decoration. He possessed in abundance a variety of objects in inlaid brass—tables, vases, cache-pots—which his grandfather had claimed to have brought back from India, but which were in fact the ne plus ultra in Birmingham in the 1930s. These occupied many corners in his sitting-room, which was otherwise furnished with two elephantine sofas covered in rust-coloured tweed, a couple of glass-fronted bookcases, inherited from that same grandfather, and Putnam’s own chair, beside which stood one of the brass tables, on crooked ebony legs, bearing an ashtray, a cigar box, and a lighter in the form of a Georgian teapot. In the kitchen Bland knew that he would find a complete range of Fornasetti plates. This proved to be correct. A tea towel, spread over the red plastic washing-up bowl, bore the toasts of several nations under gaily tilted cocktail glasses and beer steins. An ivory-handled knife, bluntly rounded at the tip—another heirloom, no doubt—had been left on the draining board.

  The bedroom was more austere, although all the furniture had the streamlined corners, the ovoid ellipses, of Putnam’s beloved Hollywood. A low dressing-table, in a pale fudge-coloured material, resembled an illustration of a flying saucer that might have figured in a boy’s comic of the 1950s. In one of its three mirrors, Bland knew, he would see reflected a green smoked-glass statuette of a lady with a tiny marcel-haired head, holding up the he
m of her skirt in one dainty hand. Bland grinned: Putnam’s flat always had this effect on him. He supposed that this stuff, most of which Putnam had bought from a friend who was going out of business, rather hurriedly, it seemed, might be of interest to a collector. It would have to go to auction: he would see to it after Christmas. If I’m here, he thought with a start. He looked round. The rooms returned his glance without adding any comment of their own. If he had hoped for a message, none came through. On impulse he appropriated one of the more hideous vases, put it into a carrier bag marked Augustus Barnett, and took it home.

  Closing the door of his own flat behind him he trod on something shiny, a postcard which Hipwood had declined to give him earlier, having no doubt retained it for his own instruction. Bland dismissed the fact; none of these details mattered any more. He turned over the postcard, which showed a turquoise blue swimming pool with an improbably white hotel in the background, and read the message: ‘Returning 22nd. Would you please turn on our heating, which we switched off before leaving? Kind regards, Sharon and Tim.’ Bland sank slowly into a chair, his Augustus Barnett bag at his feet. So the coming confrontation would be the final one, he supposed, the endgame towards which all this speculation had been leading. If all went well they could take flight together, for now it seemed inconceivable that she should leave without him, or rather that he should let her go. He now ran the risk of her escaping him, for her husband had sent money, a cheque, no doubt, which she would be unable to cash before Monday. He looked again at the card. ‘Returning 22nd.’ That was next Tuesday. Today was the eighteenth, Friday. That gave him a very small margin in which to conclude this venture. They must be gone by Monday at the latest. He ignored the doubts that were slowly filtering into his mind. Why doubt now? Even if they got no further than Rome it would constitute a victory of some sort, a wager won.