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Contents
About the Author
At the Hairdresser’s
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.
At the Hairdresser’s
1
Momentous day. Waking, normally a torment, had been oddly radiant, replete with what was either a dream or a memory of an old and almost forgotten friendship, one that had not deteriorated, or dwindled into indifference. There was a distance, but the distance was benign, brought about simply by a removal that was physical and not the result of estrangement or over-familiarity.
It was a memory, I decided, but it had the accoutrements of a dream: sunshine, the approval of my peers, and at the heart of it three people who were on intimate and loving terms meeting for dinner in a restaurant where they were something of a fixture, their Friday nights an unchanging tradition. Unaffected cordiality, mutuality: three friends meeting for a meal, open and honest, with no thoughts of rivalry, nothing withheld. That had been real enough. Or had it? Despite everything the memory was pure. Now that I am old and lame such visitations are precious. But of course it was youth that was being celebrated, as it had been, unthinkingly, at the time.
In that time we were confident and ambitious. We had no doubts that we would make our mark, as writers, we thought, as journalists, as politicians. But in fact none of this happened. Looking back now I can see that we would be slightly pitied for those ambitions. Yet they seemed realistic at the time. In fact we all married and gradually lost touch with one another. Mary was the first to go. She married as she was expected to marry, to the sort of man who was almost part of her family circle. For a time she kept in touch, and then it became a matter of Christmas cards and one of those newsy accounts of her children’s progress. (Now one of those children is a fairly well-known diplomat.) Then Julie, to a man who was, and was to remain, the ideal husband, modest, protective, devoted. Of that marriage I retain the most beneficent memories: indeed that was probably the memory that triggered my euphoria on waking.
My own marriage was brief and ended in divorce, leaving us both untouched by dramatic regret. I married for old-fashioned reasons – to get away from my frail unstable family, and because I was so impressed by Julie’s obvious contentment and serene smile. She had a lavish disposition, dispensed hospitality, gifts, affection, patronage, and, as time went on, authority. It was she who urged me to marry my husband, whom she thought I could convert into something more than he could ever become. He was eccentric and secretive, and I knew, somewhat uneasily, that he would let me down in some unspecified way, and also that I would disappoint him. Julie, to whom I confessed these misgivings, laughed them away. Mary, more realistic, said I had waited too long and that it was time to make up my mind. I see now that I was the more passive of the three of us and must sometimes have made them impatient. For my part I still craved the sort of partnership that Julie enjoyed, the memory of which can still bring a smile to my face, as if her plenitude could be replicated, as if it were there for all to enjoy – as it was, for a time. It was she who kept in touch, after Mary moved to Scotland. We met frequently, then less frequently, and then perhaps once a year. All gone now, myself the unlikely and unwilling survivor, a brooding and no doubt disagreeable old woman to whom memories of youth come unbidden, and unwelcome, now that youth is out of reach.
The strange euphoria occasioned by this dream carried me through the following day, in the course of which certain obdurate facts emerged. We had been friends, not truly equals. This was not a difference of class but of caste. Mary had had all the confidence and assumptions, with few doubts to disturb her composure, while Julie was the epitome of comfortable bourgeois rectitude. Her mother was Swiss; she spoke effortless French. They were both on easy terms with their upbringing. Julie, in particular, spread her generosity freely. She befriended everyone she met, invited them to her dinner parties, which were delightfully informal, and which particularly delighted her husband, Michael, who joined in the preparations. Her guests were frequently to be found as much in the kitchen as in the dining-room. And in time our differences gained the upper hand. My family was a source of many frustrations, which was why I invested so heavily in friendship. This fault has persisted throughout my life. But in the dream we were all identical, and this, perhaps, was the reason for my benign interpretation of our friendship, and certainly the reason for the legacy of this particular dream. It must have been a dream, for only in dreams does true meaning unfold, while memory, in due course, supplies the details.
My own family, too nondescript to feature in our discussions, also accounted for my eagerness. ‘Don’t be so eager,’ Mary once said to me, but that was a feature of memory rather than dream. For in the dream we were all innocent, before the intrusion of men, who brought an end to our disclosures. Any plans we had were for our futures, more specifically for the work we would do, the shining careers that beckoned. In fact we achieved very little, although Julie put in some time at the BBC, in the French service, while Mary abandoned her studies when her husband-to-be inherited his title on his father’s death. I worked quite contentedly as a librarian in a college of further education, where I found myself far more at home than at home. None of us achieved the ‘career’ we had planned, yet I am sure we would have felt some scorn for the thrusting self-consciousness of today’s women, and their insistence on their rights. Our innocence was the innocence before The Fall. That was why both the dream and the memory seemed so singular and retained such a radiance, however illusory that may have been.
I have no friends now, only acquaintances. Mary, in Scotland, confines herself to her Christmas newsletter, while Julie became a Catholic and eventually removed herself to a Catholic retirement home near Oxford. This was the remedy she sought for her loneliness after her husband’s sudden death. I had a change-of-address card from her with the briefest of messages (‘Love, as always, Julie’). I never saw them again,
and if we were to meet our conversation would be desultory and undemanding. Even on postcards (and I still send them) I can think of little to say. It was only this dream that brought them back to me, and gave the day some semblance of significance. After long absence, when there should be more to say, there is in fact less to impart and nothing to share. But that moment of recollection was precious. And only the more reliable progress of the day made it more significant, and for that reason something to be cherished. Even if it was unreliable it brought back feelings that in truth have gone for ever.
It may have been the impression of sunlight that made the dream so emblematic, a radiance that seemed entirely natural but which symbolized our friendship, and also a stage of life which nothing had yet impaired. Now the days seem uniformly dark, but that too is emblematic. And I feel less sympathy towards women than I once did. Even in old age I prefer the company of men. But I regret the loss of innocence which darkens everything. Now I feel shame not only for my failures but for my all too modest successes. My erstwhile friendships might not please me so much now, their lustre vanquished by experience. But innocence, so present in that dream, is irreversible.
2
The nights are long but I sleep little. I do not begrudge these waking hours. I go back in my mind to all the rooms I have slept in, remember in detail the streets of my earliest perambulations: that chemist on the corner, the house where the two women doctors practised, the way to school… This is no doubt a characteristic of old age, but the result is to cast all later associations into a territory, a context, which no longer seems familiar. When I am reconciled to being awake and beginning another day my surroundings seem quite alien, and it takes me some time to remember what I am supposed to do and how to do it. The business of re-integrating myself into my present life is strange and difficult: I am no longer at home. And those latter-day acquaintances, whom I pass on my way to the shops, are now, I realize, strangers compared with long-ago companions whom I no longer know but who were once part of a life I had not yet begun to question. This gives the day an unwelcome quality which persists. I read The Times carefully but the news seems quite irrelevant, the characters too complex to comprehend. The interior life is so strong that it overwhelms the here and now. It fades once the light is strong enough to assert the primacy of the day, but even then it belongs to other people. But that almond tree that flourished near the crossing is as present now as it was then and I long to go into that little park which I have not seen for more than fifty years. I could go and see it again, of course, but the idea is inadmissible. It belongs to past time and I am condemned to live in this strange present which I find so inferior, so featureless, so indistinct.
I read the old books now, stories with a moral and a resolution. I instinctively look for modesty in women and strength in men. All very old-fashioned now, but then simplicity of purpose is so very hard to come by. The transparency of my early life yielded eventually to a strategy of obfuscation so that no one really knew me. This was perhaps defensive, for I have nothing to be proud of.
Lighted windows attract me, promising a comfortable domesticity which I have never been able to achieve for myself. The legacy of my fractious parents and my evasive husband prove much stronger than my own arrangements. My early life would have been comfortable enough had it not been compromised by the many arguments that were a feature of our life. Strangely my husband had more in common with my parents than I had; all were on a lifelong mission to deny the truth, the truth being that they were furiously disappointed. Had I confessed to an unhappiness of my own they would have been indignant, even self-righteous. This too was a poisoned legacy which I have tried to combat, possibly with some success. But the result is that I know no one in whom I can confide, or indeed to whom I can confess. Only those friends of my youth could have been sufficiently receptive to my thoughts, which in fact I never voiced. I was too careful of their contentment to want to breach it in any way. It was an ideal, but unlike the lighted windows substantial enough. I took equal care not to inflict these thoughts on my lovers, who thought of me as sensible. In time these unshared feelings confined me in a way that was better left undisturbed. I am thought of as perfectly reasonable, not in need of special treatment. I feel for others in the same category but I do not desire their company. Only children would people the void but I had none. This too was irreparable.
The dream was now gone, leaving only the consciousness that I had once been happy. That happiness had not been sustained, or indeed sustainable. The facts spoke for themselves: those friends were no longer present and replacements had never been found. My marriage had left something of a stain: my husband was not always honest, and there was something wrong about his family, or rather lack of family, for I only ever got to meet his sister, a distracted woman whom I would occasionally visit, although after my divorce it was evident that I was no longer welcome. Work at the college filled my days and inevitably my horizon. I looked to my colleagues to fill the gap left by my lack of close associates. And so they did until I retired and was left to my own devices. I tried various forms of volunteering but these were a poor substitute and I was conscious that I was not really useful. I took note of this and resolved to make the most of my new anonymity, but it is hard to live without company, let alone ideal company, and it seems as if that may have been left behind with the unquestioning faith of youth. But even that faith may not survive for very long. It may not even survive infancy.
As the day settled into its usual torpor I registered the fact that Mary and Julie had more in common than I had had with them, both individually and as a self-contained unit. I took it for granted that this was the case and did not resent it. My opacity had cast its shadow then as it does now; only at one point in those early years were we true equals. All my life I had been searching for a breakthrough, into intimacy, into acceptance. My brief marriage taught me one invaluable but unwelcome lesson: that we are all alone, that no reciprocity is to be sought between people formed by different outlooks, and not only outlooks but different environments, both mental and physical. My disappointment persists to this day, the only difference being that I no longer search for the impossible. I accept the fact that we are all atomized and there is little we can do about it. Yet the regret remains. That, however, must be kept to oneself. When I graduated from female friendships – childlike, expectant – I felt that I had at last grown up. Inevitably there was a loss of transparency but at the same time I received my first lesson in circumspection. When a man of whom I was extremely fond alluded to the differences in our make-up, which was vague enough to include everything in our relationship which he saw as inconvenient, I resolved never again to divulge any personal information that might be construed as divisive. I was up against an ingrained sense of superiority which I dismissed as futile, unbecoming. I was more than happy with my modest position in the library, which he seemed to think rebounded to his disadvantage. In time I found more congenial partners, but there was never to be total disclosure, and I decided that it was better that way. Any tenderness kept in check was lavished on the infant son of my erstwhile sister-in-law, who softened towards me when she saw how willing I was to love her infant son. Ralph, or Ralphie, delighted me by that lack of calculation that I had experienced in my early friendships. When his mother died prematurely, of pneumonia, he was taken away to live with relatives in Gloucester and I rarely saw him again. He went away to school, and the connection was broken. I mourned the loss of our meetings but I knew that my regrets were one-sided. Now of course he would be a father, even a grandfather, but I prefer to think of him as a child, just as I prefer to think of my friends as young, as in the dream. Sometimes, on the verge of sleep, I recapture that eagerness for which Mary reproved me, remember that smile of anticipation… Even half-conscious one is rarely out of character.
3
First, a few details. I live in a basement flat in Eccleston Square, near Victoria, the same flat I moved into when I married my husband, who l
ived there at the time. I saw no reason to move after his death. It suits me well enough. Of course it is dark in winter, but then so is everywhere else. I usually go out as early as is respectable in order to buy the newspapers. Proper shopping comes later and involves an excursion to Victoria Street. I take a taxi back and am home far too early, but am now tired and quite glad of my own solitude. The solitude is a burden but it is also familiar. My only other excursion is to the hairdresser, Top Chic, in Pimlico Road, for it is important to keep up appearances, even if there are few witnesses. Keeping up appearances is part of my ethos, even if it is too late now to look for reciprocity or appreciation. I rather hope I shall die at the hairdresser’s, for they are bound to know what to do. At least that is what I tell myself.
I am not lonely except in company. I accept the odd invitation but it does not go well with me: I am easily overwhelmed by insistent conversation and usually leave with a sigh of relief. At such times the night seems beautiful to me and I wish that I had the strength to walk, as I used to, through the empty streets, appreciating those lighted windows which hold such promise. But with no one to care for me I have had to become prudent, monitoring my strength, or lack of it, a process which fills me with boredom and, for some reason, with shame. I am in bed far too early and sleep little. Night terrors are common at my age and never lose their power. It is at such times that I long for a presence, even that of my former husband. Lovers have no place in my memory, which is probably as it should be. When women of my age talk roguishly about men whom they consider attractive they strike me as delusional. The presence I desire is nameless, but powerfully felt, and not easily identified. Dawn offers something of a release. I am up and dressed by seven, and after a cup of tea am free to go out for my newspapers. Although it is early some people are already going to work. How I envy them! I search their faces, which are young, and occasionally they smile. These young people, for they are all young, lift my spirits and enable me to begin the day.
At the Hairdresser's (Penguin Specials) Page 1
