Making Things Better

by Anita Brookner

  ‘You’re looking well,’ he said, as both unfurled their napkins.

  ‘You, on the other hand, are not, Julius. Are you sure you’re quite all right?’

  ‘At my age no one is quite all right.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s nothing. I had some kind of flu.’

  ‘Have you seen your doctor?’

  ‘No, of course not. In any event I have no faith in doctors. No, it was Josie I wanted to talk to you about. I wrote to you about making her a small allowance.’

  ‘That has been seen to. But are you sure? You are under no obligation, you know.’

  ‘Quite sure. But that’s not all. I want to leave her some money. It’s all in this will I’ve drafted.’ He handed over his two documents. ‘As you will see there may be no money left. My lease is not, apparently, renewable. Josie’s money depends on my having any. And my money depends on my staying in the flat. If I have to buy something else—at a no doubt extortionate price—there will be nothing left.’

  ‘You could always rent when the lease expires.’

  ‘Surely that would be a problem?’

  ‘Not at all. Or you could sell now.’

  ‘Who would buy a three-year lease? Surely no one would be foolish enough.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. Firms are always looking for places for their executives. It’s all short-term contracts now, a year, two years. You’d have no difficulty at all.’

  ‘But where would I go?’

  ‘A client of mine—I shouldn’t be telling you this— faced the same problem when her husband died. She moved into an hotel in the south of France, came to an arrangement with the management, paid them a fixed sum every month, and after that was more or less independent. They—she and the manager—were on excellent terms: he appreciated the advantages of a client who occupied the suite in both the high and low seasons. When she died he even arranged the funeral.’

  ‘I see.’ A pause. ‘I’ve never been very happy in hotels. They make me feel like a fugitive.’

  ‘Or there’s residential accommodation.’

  ‘Some sort of home, you mean? An even more charming prospect.’

  ‘You could always purchase another lease on your present flat. Would you like me to make a few enquiries? I believe your building has changed hands recently. Up for development, I imagine.’

  ‘Could you do that? I really don’t want to move. The thing is, I did want to leave something for Josie.’

  ‘I’m afraid that might not be possible.’

  ‘Yes, I see that.’ He thought of his poor girl, stranded, like himself, with the future dependent solely on his resources. Then, reluctantly, he abandoned her to her fate. After all, her position would be no more perilous than his own. ‘It’s just that I should have liked to have made things better before I died. Making things better was what I always tried to do. I made a poor job of it.’

  ‘Come, come, Julius.’

  ‘Had we stayed in Germany, I should have studied, enjoyed a professional life, become a gentleman, as my father was originally. I can’t help thinking of my landlords as dispossessors: the shadow of the past, I suppose. And yet this country has been good to me. It’s just that I never quite manage to feel at home. That’s why I’m so hesitant now: the small matter of a permanent address seems immeasurably problematic. Not that anything could be really permanent at my age. And of course I should be grateful if you would take this on for me. I’d be happy to leave everything in your hands. If you’re not too busy, that is.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me immediately. I’ve got a few things on my mind at the moment.’ His face took on a look that was half-scared, half-complacent. ‘Two problems, actually. The first is that Helen wants us to get married. The second is that I’ve been seeing someone else.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ This was so heartfelt that he was obliged to add, ‘Can’t you do both?’

  ‘Not really. Both are very keen on commitment, as they call it.’

  ‘It sounds so legalistic.’

  ‘And I want a bit of freedom,’ Simmonds burst out. ‘I thought we had an understanding, Helen and I . . .’

  ‘Are you sure you want freedom? Freedom is sometimes a mixed blessing. Without obligations one frequently does less rather than more.’

  ‘I have obligations,’ protested Simmonds. ‘I’m a professional man.’

  ‘I should get married, if I were you. It’s important to have someone to go home to in the evenings.’

  ‘In fact my evenings have been well taken care of. I think I can say that without fear of contradiction.’

  Herz was alarmed by the combative tone of this last remark. ‘You are in love, of course. Love and freedom are incompatible, although freedom seems to beckon with each new enthusiasm. It is an illusion, Bernard, freedom, I mean. There is no such thing. In theory I am free. Yet if I were to change my name, move to another country—both of which I could do—I should not be free, any freer than I am now. You, on the other hand, are free to marry, as you have always been. One does not always possess the choice. And freedom, after all, consists in having a choice. I can see that falling in love has upset you, but then it always does. Sometimes it’s the emotions that go with the new person that are so enlivening. And so misleading. One’s own affections gradually take precedence. Does your new friend really care for you?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘I rather imagine loyalty counts in these matters. It is so much more important than fidelity. Sexual fidelity, that is. Perhaps you owe Helen that loyalty?’

  ‘She’s not making it easy for me.’

  ‘Why should she? Women seem to want permanence more than men do. Books are published on the subject; a whole industry has grown up in America. I picked up somebody’s discarded newspaper the other day and read an article on this very subject. “To be continued”, it said.’ (In fact he had devoured the article, as he sat, unobserved, in the public garden, and had almost determined to buy the following day’s instalment before being restored to his senses by the arrival of the children at lunchtime.) ‘There seems to be a genuine incompatibility. More coffee?’ He wondered how he could tactfully bring the discussion back to his own affairs. He was aware that he had given offence. ‘No, no, let me. I insist,’ he said, as the bill was presented.

  Simmonds brooded, then roused himself. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he promised. ‘Just be patient. My advice to you would be to take a holiday.’ (It was what everyone said.) ‘Or have a check-up. See your doctor; get yourself fighting fit. You’re looking very thin, you know.’

  ‘Only the flu. I’m quite all right, really.’ But he knew this to be untrue. He was frequently breathless these days, which was one of his reasons for spending his time so quietly. In the misty deserted garden there was no one to see him put a hand to his heart to check its rapid and sometimes irregular beat. He put this down to his recent disturbance, which had assumed a physical disguise as if to mock him further. Even now he was anxious to get home in case his mounting distress should become apparent. Calmly he paid the bill, added his usual large tip, hoped he would find a taxi without delay. ‘How will you get home?’ he asked politely.

  ‘Underground. Oh, by the way, this letter came for you. Obviously from someone who thought you were still in Hilltop Road. I should have forwarded it. You’re right, I’ve been neglecting my duties.’ He looked so crestfallen that Herz felt like embracing him. Instead he patted his arm, and said, ‘I’m so grateful, Bernard. As always. Let us meet again soon.’ He put the letter, unexamined, into his pocket. The relief of getting home was so great that he left it there, until the slight rustle, as he removed his coat, prompted him to put it on his desk. Then the far more important business of getting himself to bed took precedence. The letter could wait. In any case there was no urgency. A letter sent to Hilltop Road could have little relevance in his present, unstable situation. Not for the first time he regretted that almost ances
tral flat, so very different from the gimcrack lodgings that had succeeded their time there, and of which Chiltern Street was merely the latest avatar.

  The sound of rain woke him from a brief but profound sleep. He looked at his clock: two-thirty. He knew from experience that his night was over, and in that instant decided to go back to that unsympathetic doctor and ask him for sleeping-pills. These dark hours were too conducive to unwelcome reflections. He felt unusually wakeful, and also uneasy. This unease was the result of his dinner with Bernard Simmonds, and their conversation, principally his part in it. He had been both flippant and didactic, the very mark of an inattentive listener. Yet he had not been inattentive: he had been wary, reluctant to engage in a discussion of the other’s amorous dealings, or indeed of anyone else’s. Such matters were no longer for him, and yet he had recognized Bernard’s excited awareness of his own predicament, the slight heat that came from him as he deployed his credentials: not one woman but two! Even through the weariness and distaste he felt Herz had silently congratulated him. And this lent his pious moralizing an ambiguity. If he had been able to break through the restraint that was usually the tone set for these meetings he would have urged Simmonds to obey his instincts, relegate good behaviour to the past, and impose his will on both his long-term companion and his new lover. In so doing he might have attained that ideal freedom which Herz’s judicious reflections had done so much to spoil.

  Herz’s own notions of freedom, based on the highest precepts, had recently been undermined by that brief illumination. He recognized the signs in Simmonds but thought that he should give no authority to what was so eagerly awaiting his sympathetic response. It was sympathy that had been required of him. He should have been politely respectful of this confession; instead he had taken refuge in an old man’s farrago in which cynicism vied with irrelevance. His very expression, he thought, might have betrayed reluctance to hear more, yet he knew that he had remained as gravely attentive as always, and only a little less self-possessed than he would have wished. His main reaction had been one of impatience, an impatience that now enveloped the dark room, the clock, and all the other accoutrements of his so careful and now threatened surroundings. He would have liked to write Simmonds a note, apologizing for having been so preoccupied, but knew that he would not do so, for to do so would merely compound the offence. He would also like, in this same unwritten note, to remind Simmonds that the matter of his lease must take priority over any emotional troubles that might be brought into the discussion, but knew that he would not do this either. He would remain silent and await developments, since that was what was expected of him. He would suggest another dinner early in the New Year, during which he would remain on his guard against his own indiscretions, while allowing Simmonds full licence to indulge his own. That too was what was expected of him.

  Rain was falling when, on the following day, he set out for the surgery in Paddington Street, conveniently close to the public garden which he supposed would be out of bounds for the rest of this dark morning and no doubt the dark mornings that were to follow. Christmas would mark the nadir of the year, after which would begin the very slow ascent towards the light. Briefly he entertained fantasies of evasion: the prospect of that notional resort, populated by leisurely walkers, passed once more before his mind’s eye, although he knew that it was his own creation. He also had a brief, quite isolated memory of a fluted glass dish on which his mother used to serve a chocolate cake on Saturday afternoons. These flashes of memory, which came quite unannounced, delighted him, and diverted him from his usual monotonous broodings. They came in the daytime, in the full light, rather than at night, when his wakefulness was mysteriously given over to unremittingly rational thought. For this reason he deduced that the night hours were of some service, and decided to forgo his visit to the doctor: sleeping-pills could wait. In any event the nights were less problematic than the days, which could be ruined by bad weather. He retraced his steps, entertained by the memory of that glass dish and of those remote weekends in Berlin when friends would visit. He now realized that his mother’s attachment to Bijou Frank had been an attempt to revive that custom, of which nothing now remained. In the flat he resigned himself to a day at home, a prospect which normally filled him with dismay. On his desk he saw the letter which Simmonds had handed to him as they parted the previous evening, but instead took up his volume of Thomas Mann once more, and sank gratefully into the landscape, so well remembered, so totally familiar, of the bourgeois past.

  13

  The letter, which was inadequately stamped, had taken some time to reach Hilltop Road, longer still to reach Chiltern Street by way of Bernard Simmonds. Before settling down to read it Herz glanced at the signature: Fanny Schneider (Bauer). This he had somehow anticipated from the ladylike handwriting on the numerous sheets of flimsy paper. It was the handwriting of someone given to an expansive account of her own dealings with the world, not too attentive to the world’s responses. Having no longer waited for this letter, which would have spared him many anxieties and disappointments, Herz found himself curiously unemotional at actually reading it. Like all messages which arrive too late it had missed its mark, lost its point. He held the thin pages for several seconds, wondering why they left him so indifferent. The contents were somehow irrelevant. The reality of Fanny Bauer had been dissipated by years of absence, of separation. He could still summon up that feeling of separation, which must have lain dormant since their last meeting. That had been abortive, leaving him with a sense of shame and confusion, his marriage proposal unhesitatingly rejected, against the unlikely backdrop of the Beau Rivage. Even as she refused him Fanny had taken up her bag and reminded her mother that it was time to change for dinner. Her mother, whom he had difficulty in recognizing as his dashing aunt Anna, had followed her without a word, sparing Herz only a look which might have been approving, accepting his homage as nothing less than her daughter’s due, but informing him at the same time that such homage was no longer necessary, that he was no longer an eager boy, that he had outgrown the eagerness without gaining much in the way of worldly success. Perhaps that eagerness had surfaced in his proposal, which seemed so unsuitable in this setting, in this high-ceilinged room, in which he had suddenly felt entirely alone.

  Or perhaps the separation had lasted longer even than that, since the children’s birthday party at which he had gazed worshipfully at his cousin, admiring her haughtiness, her flightiness, wishing that they were for him alone. In time he came to recognize her behaviour as meretricious, but did not blame her for that. Quite simply she was better prepared for life in the world than he was. He saw that she would be demanding, easily bored, that she would not conceal her boredom, so that others would exert themselves to amuse her, and later to tease her in return, so that a heartfelt avowal of love or loyalty would be anomalous, as if phrased in a different language. He had known even then, at that same children’s party, that she was cruel and that he was doomed to be faithful. Had she not snubbed him dreadfully when he had not understood a game they were playing and that she had instigated? The game consisted of truths and dares and forfeits, one of those humiliating games which need to be played with a maximum of artifice so as not to lose face. He had failed miserably, and had been deemed to be so inept that Fanny had dismissed him, relegating him to a corner where he sat with a puzzled smile on his face as the game continued without him.

  That sense of exclusion had stayed with him and informed his every subsequent action. Across the years he could still recall, in sad detail, his misery, which at the time he had not understood for the adult emotion it was to become. And in Nyon he had recognized her dismissal of him as inevitable, had simply wished that she would allow him more time to contemplate her, to understand the changes that had taken place in her appearance, to discuss their lives, and if possible their feelings. That had not been allowed: the years had wrought too many changes to be described, even if there had been time to describe them, as he so vainly wished. Instead
his aunt had invited him to join them for dinner. On learning that he would be leaving on the following morning Fanny had smiled, but had confined her conversation to the most banal of remarks, most of them addressed to her mother.

  He had covertly studied the now buxom figure seated opposite him, had thought her still beautiful, though she was now paler than she had been as a girl: her eyes were as lustrous as he remembered them, her hair as dark. Only her hands were the plump hands of a woman who did no work and who spent days in pampered idleness. He had had no difficulty in remembering that she was a widow, for she had the unawakened look of one no longer troubled by her senses. He even wondered whether she had loved her husband, Claude Mellerio, or whether her marriage had been a practical arrangement on her part, brought about by her mother. Faced with her strange equanimity he had assumed her physical nature to be passive, giving pleasure by virtue of that same passivity but receiving none in return. He saw that although lacking in that one vital sexual attribute she would nevertheless continue to intrigue. Her self-possession alone would present a challenge. He doubted whether any man had or would deprive her of it.