A Private View

by Anita Brookner

  He took the vase out of the bag and placed it on top of one of the bookshelves. It looked every bit as ugly there as it had in what Putnam gleefully called his ‘lounge’. Bland gazed at it in some perplexity. Passing once more into Katy Gibb’s aura had made him nervous, distracted. Putnam receded, his Cheshire cat grin lingering in the room. There seemed to be nothing left for him to do until Katy came later that day. He was too tense to read, could not face composing a meal for himself: his habitual hunger had receded, replaced by a vague emptiness. He wandered into the kitchen and opened cupboards; there seemed to be a great deal of food, but all of it required sustained attention. He told himself that once he was away, safe in some hotel, he would discipline himself again, eat, take exercise, sleep without the help of the radio. Until then he was in suspension.

  He ate some bread and cheese, although a few mouthfuls were enough to check his appetite. He then went back into the sitting-room to wait for her, although it was only two o’clock. He had time in which to prepare himself, yet his mind was curiously empty of calculation. Calculation might, even now, fail him. Instead his thoughts returned to Putnam, and the strange bachelor simplicity in which they had lived their days. An atmosphere of Eden before the Fall hovered over that existence, while now the Fall beckoned, with all its dread inevitability. He marvelled that such a doubt-free existence had ever been his; even the memory of that quietude was receding by the minute. It had been replaced by this phantasmagoria which, although it was out of character, he accepted as his doom, his fate. It was enthralling, no doubt, but somehow, at this crucial juncture, he could not keep his mind on it. Instead it darted back in time, until, in a half sleeping state, he saw his past once again, saw Putnam’s grin, saw his father in his racegoer’s camel-hair coat, tracing a careful path towards the house, saw figures to whom he could hardly put names, grumbling elderly relatives, inert uncles, spiteful aunts, members of a quarrelsome family whom his parents had eventually discarded, preferring their own dystopia to the rival dystopias they had inherited. So it had gone on, down the generations, until it ended in him. It appeared to him, quite suddenly, that his desire never to marry or have children (for that surely was what it was) had to do with this paltry inheritance. By his own action, or lack of action, he had drawn the line under it, put an end to it. He understood now why he was alone.

  He saw his mother, his poor mother, he thought with a start of surprise, forced to make do with this reduced company, with his unsteady father, with his half tearful half resentful self. How unhappy they all were! And all imprisoned, all unable to escape. His own escape might never have been made, so achingly present was he once more in that original house, whose disposition he could recollect with startling clarity.

  Instinct made him try to break the spell of that half sleep, which was more like a visitation, yet when he opened his eyes he almost expected to see his old bedroom, and to smell his mother’s cigarette smoke. He sat up, panic stricken. Slowly the sight of his own room reasserted itself, but the panic persisted. He felt as he had felt on the day of his final school examination, the one that was to get him into Oxford, the one that he had failed. This had surprised his headmaster, who had encouraged him. ‘Were you unwell?’ he had asked. ‘Had anything upset you?’ It was impossible that he should confess that his parents’ arguing had kept him sleepless all the previous night. One did not confess such things to kindly liberal-minded mentors. He blamed no one, not even his parents, whose behaviour had become his secret. He had, he thought, just not been good enough. And maybe it was all for the best.

  That had been the first of the chances missed, the paths not followed. The first, and the most crucial. By dint of failing that first and last examination his liberty had been deferred for many years. And even now it was still in question.

  He padded into the bathroom and went through his usual ritual, the brushing of the teeth, the smoothing of the hair, the discreet application of a sweet-smelling lotion. He knew that all this was otiose, for she never came near him. Since that first day she had never even taken his hand, but had preferred to stand before him, on display, so that he could both admire her and measure the distance between them. No doubt she felt contempt for his grey hair, his lack of muscle. He accepted this. He knew the feeling of old. It was the feeling reserved for those outside enchantment, for those humbly precluded from the triumphs of this world. Whereas she was the scornful mocking temptress who arranges their downfall. He felt that he had foreseen this since the beginning of time.

  He was outwardly composed when he opened the door at four o’clock. She was still in her bathrobe, her feet still bare. With Palmer-Harris’s cheque in her pocket she had become lazy, like an animal with a full stomach.

  ‘Good heavens!’ she exclaimed, shading her eyes. ‘What on earth is that?’

  ‘It’s a vase,’ he said. ‘I brought it from a friend’s flat.’ It seemed pointless to explain who Putnam was, and what had happened to him, and anyway he thought it indecent to mention Putnam’s name in this context. The bathrobe, he noticed, was loosely tied, showing the cleft between her breasts, and her legs as far as the knees. He had no doubt that this was deliberate.

  ‘I had a card from the Dunlops,’ he said. ‘They will be back on Tuesday.’

  Her face closed. He contemplated the hardened downcast features. Colour had flared into her cheeks, which glowed dark red.

  ‘What will you do?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Go somewhere else, I expect. Did you say something about tea?’

  He ignored this. ‘My offer of Rome still stands,’ he said. ‘We could take off on Monday. I’m sure it wouldn’t take you long to get ready.’

  She got up and started moving round the room, humming under her breath.

  ‘Or I could move in here,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t mind putting me up, would you, George? Actually,’ this word was drawled in her most imperious manner, ‘that might be best. I could make a few calls, get a few clients together. And then in time, who knows?’

  She sat down again and let the robe fall away from her legs. ‘But you’d have to get rid of that vase first,’ she said, with a smile which set out to be amiable but had, unknown to her, become antagonistic. Again he felt a thrill of a desire which was not a true desire, or at least not for what she was offering.

  ‘I’m afraid that wouldn’t be suitable,’ he said.

  ‘Why? It’s not as if you need all this space to yourself. What do you do all day except read? Well, you only need one room for that, don’t you?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Actually I have a lot of business on hand,’ he said. ‘I have to dispose of a friend’s flat. I shall be bringing all his belongings back here.’

  This was not true; he had only just thought of it.

  ‘And what’s happening to his place?’

  ‘It’s sold,’ he said quickly. ‘I have to get the key from the agent when I want to go in.’ He went into the kitchen, a knot of constriction in his chest. He faced the terrible fact that she was stronger than he could ever be.

  ‘So I’m afraid Rome is all I can offer,’ he said, putting the tray down in front of her.

  ‘I don’t need a holiday, thank you. I need a future. You surely can’t have failed to get that into your head. I’ll come away with you, since you’re so keen, but I’ve got to make plans. Surely you can see that?’

  ‘I don’t think I can help you with those plans. I thought that was understood.’

  She regarded him without amenity, her cheeks suffused. ‘My time does not come cheap, George.’ She meant her company. She got up to go, tightening the belt of her bathrobe virtuously about her waist. ‘Perhaps you’ll think better of it tomorrow. I’ll look in then, shall I? And of course if there’s anything you want you’ll let me know. Don’t bother to see me out. I think I know my way around by now.’

  He sat for a while, a cup of cold tea and a plate of untouched mince pies in front of him. He glanced around the room, seeing it with her eyes
. The thought of marriage, once dismissed, occurred to him again, and was definitively abandoned. But the prospect of the lonely evening was unbearable. And his thinking, so recently imperative, seemed to have become paralysed. Yet even now, even in his disarray, he sensed a queer excitement. It was the excitement of a gambler, bent not on winning, but on suicide, when his last card is also his last chance, and all the odds are against him.

  10

  HE WAS BY NOW VIOLENTLY IN LOVE; OF THAT there was no doubt. Or if not in love as he had previously understood it, enthralled to the point of losing his judgment, that judgment which had kept him prudently on course for many a long year. And they had seemed long, he now thought, made bearable only by a mild conscience, by accredited pleasures, by licensed indulgences. His conception of love throughout those long years—that lifetime, he reminded himself—had been courtly, chevaleresque: only permitted thoughts had entered his head, and he had been contented, grateful to Louise, whose expectations were as modest as his own. He had grown up with a full complement of conventional images, weddings, christenings, children, grandchildren. Where these happy families had come from he had little idea, preoccupied as he was with his own particularly inharmonious home life, and later with the escape which always seemed to him to be under threat. His fantasies then had been gently old-fashioned. Had he been promoted to the rank of husband he would have played his part faithfully, valiantly, and he had no doubt, even now, that he would have made a good father.

  But if a nostalgia for that picture remained with him, he also knew that whatever happiness might have fallen to his lot would have been tinged with disappointment. And despite those primitive subconscious decisions he had made—never to marry, to bring an end to his unfortunate line—one strand of his imagination always led him to Louise. It was because Louise would have fitted in so well with the traditional idea of a wife that he had perversely put a curb on marrying her. He could imagine all too well what their lives would have been: the substantial but unpretentious house, the garden which it would be his job to tend, perhaps a weekend cottage, and his wife, in attractive yet sensible clothes, growing in authority while he sought his quietus in work. His own parents must have been like that once, before their true natures had reasserted themselves. And if Louise and he had had children he had no doubt that they would have been boys, and as unattractive as Louise’s own son had been when Bland had first encountered him at the age of six. That friendly grimy boy, with his hot adult smell, had distressed Bland then, just as the memory distressed him now.

  What he had missed was equally present to his mind: peace, company, reassurance, the comfort of knowing that he was acting in character. There would have been holidays when there was no need to make contact with strange women, however amiable, and to walk away from them afterwards with a feeling of disappointment. There would have been pleasant evenings, family occasions, the sort of occasions at which a bachelor always feels uncomfortable. There would even, dare he think it, have been regular meals, about which a bachelor has to make certain decisions. These days, unless he went to the club, he tended to forget about food, lacked the energy to prepare anything, and consequently ate very little.

  This tendency was reinforced by his unwillingness to leave the flat for the duration of Katy’s tenure, and with the thought of Katy his dilemma once again presented itself in its crudest form. Katy was the obverse of Louise, and in many ways she had brought into prominence the nature of his long affection. He was not a vain man, but when he thought of himself married to Louise he could see that he would have become self-satisfied. But why should he not have become self-satisfied? He had all the qualifications: an excellent job, a career which in those early scared days he could hardly have envisaged, the ability to provide for a family, which was no doubt why he had willed her his money. In many ways he still thought of her as his wife, the wife whom he had failed to marry. And she no doubt thought of him as one who might have been, should have been, her husband.

  There was no need to shed any tears over this situation, which had lasted so long and with so little rancour on either side. By the same token it was static, non-negotiable: there was no need to develop it or indeed examine it. Nevertheless Bland had no doubt that these days he referred to the situation rather more than did Louise, for in the long run he had lost more by it than she had, and he thought his solitude rather more unbearable than hers. Indeed, he had the proof, if proof were needed, that he had blundered more disastrously than he had ever imagined, and in a way which he could never disclose, particularly to Louise, although he knew that she would love him just the same, however much he disappointed her.

  Because always on the verge of succumbing to that love, and always drawing back, he had deprived himself of its undoubted blessings and its routine satisfactions. Instead he had been overcome with passion for a woman half his age, whom he hardly knew, and who was hard, cunning, venal, and an opportunist to her fingers’ ends. That he knew all this did not deter him. If he had once wanted to avenge himself on a life of obedience no such illusion succoured his imagination now that the hour of decisions had arrived. Perhaps he had succumbed to the charm of seeing himself in a more flattering light, as discreet and worldly, as he certainly was not, a patron rather than a lover, almost like a novelist with one of his own characters. Indissoluble from this fantasy was the image of the hotel balcony, the red sun sinking, the lightweight suit and the panama hat, perhaps a cigar, and the unhurried wait for his creation to return to him after a day given over to all those diversions which he would selflessly permit her. He had stood on just such a hotel balcony, watching just such a red sun, during his recent stay in Nice. Longing had furnished him with a companion, and brought the fantasy to life. That was how his idyll had taken shape and how it exerted power over his mind: he still, even now, saw a more ideal version of himself, in complete control, in beautiful surroundings, though these were non-specific, and somehow, mysteriously, inspiring respect. The respect was important, essential. As his own situation became more farcical he insisted to himself that once removed from present circumstances, and translated into another sphere, he would register as another character altogether, an enigma, a man of secrets, and as such make a deep impression on his entourage, the waiters, the porters, the chauffeurs, who would hasten to do his bidding. In this way he would be able, to a certain extent, to forgo the respect of his companion, who would have none, or none for him, and to accept, magnanimously, and always with that air of distinction, what little she had to offer.

  He had never been so far removed from that condition as he was now. He had reached the stage of being subjugated, as he had never been subjugated before, and not merely by this mysterious woman’s will, but by those impure and retrograde compulsions which he recognised as being more akin to a kind of exasperated dread than to any sort of spontaneous affection. Although physical love hardly entered into his calculations, he did not doubt that at some point he would consider her his creature, in an act of possession no less real for being divorced from contact. The idea was unseemly, and he did his best to banish it. He would continue to banish it, he thought, though it would remove one of his satisfactions. But all his satisfactions were now taboo, it seemed. He had opened Pandora’s box, and Discord had broken out, revealing to him a natural hunger which he had never suspected. He almost ground his teeth when he thought of the girl, her provocation, her beady-eyed passive aggression, the limitations of a mind which, in its very idleness, wrought in him that irritated frenzy which was part of his malaise. Pandora, in the myth, had been forbidden to open the box, just as Eve had been forbidden to eat the apple. Both were allegories from the beginning of the world, with the same fatal outcome, the same dubious prohibition, the promise made and then cancelled, the endowment glimpsed and then removed. He had always shuddered at the cruelty of both stories, and in so doing had lost any simple beliefs, which had not, in any case, persisted after childhood, but having thought about the matter he preferred Pandora to Eve. Pandor
a let loose Discord, but at the bottom of the box discovered Hope. There was thus the relief of something saved, essential to any story, although when hope outlasted expectation the outcome was disillusion. That he was beginning to understand.

  If he had any hope it was surely illusory. He knew that she would never love him. He did not blame her for this: he rather doubted whether she had ever loved anyone. And in his humble state he doubted whether he was lovable, even by Louise, since if he removed himself from the life he had always lived and embarked on this adventure Louise would cease to be near to him, to know him: he would be literally beyond her reach. The idea was chilling. He had never before been out of the range of Louise’s love. But her innocence was incompatible with the life of subterfuge he would be obliged to live, the removals, the squandering of money, the lonelyheartedness. He had once looked on it as a stimulus, a harmless hobby to be taken up in his retirement. Now he knew the grief contained in the myth, the disobedience, the sheer complexity of the world of consequences, when all had been so simple before.

  He tried to trace the origins of his aberration, which he now knew to be an aberration, in all its monstrosity, but could find nothing in his life which gave any indication that he might behave in this way. Did it all date back to childhood, as the pundits, and no doubt Howard Singer himself, maintained that it did? In that case, distasteful though the task would be, he might have to search his soul for motives of revenge against those negligent forebears, whose character and appearance came so vividly to mind, now that he was almost as old—older—than they themselves. Although dead, they took up a great deal of room in his mind and memory, sometimes assuming the posture and expression—sardonic, careless, negligent, uncommitted—by which he had first known them. He saw them in every physical detail: his mother’s dry brittle hair, his father’s camel-hair coat. That coat, with its exaggerated shoulders, disguised the slight paunch which was the result of too many whiskies. When not worn it was slung round his shoulders. Another snapshot: his not quite handsome father’s winning smile (crooked, because of badly fitting teeth) and his ruddy face smelling of violets. He could almost hear the transparent excuses as that same father made his escape to Folkestone, or Lingfield, or Kempton Park, where he had collapsed in the very act of raising his hip flask to his lips. A fortunate death, no doubt, but not one of which an eighteen-year-old boy could necessarily feel proud.