Altered States

by Anita Brookner

  ‘Your programme must be starting, Humphrey.’

  ‘Didn’t someone say you were a solicitor?’

  ‘I am a solicitor, yes.’

  ‘I’ll give you my will. You can look after it.’ He looked crafty. ‘Can’t trust her, you know.’

  ‘I hardly think …’

  ‘Why? Haven’t been struck off, have you?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Well, come and see me before you go. Don’t forget.’

  I stood up and steered him out of the room. When I had lowered him into his chair, I went back to Jenny, my napkin still in my hand. Her colour was high, her expression hard.

  ‘You see how I’m placed, Alan. Entirely alone.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I had a long talk with Sarah, well, not long, while Humphrey was out of the way. Make sure some man takes care of you, I said. Make that man marry you, I told her.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘The man she’s living with, of course. In Paris. De Leuze, his name is.’

  ‘I’m out of touch, I’m afraid.’

  ‘A very respectable sort of man, I’m told. Older than she is, which is all right now, although later on … But she could be a young widow, if things turn out …’ She left the sentence unfinished. ‘It’s the money that’s important.’

  ‘Why won’t she marry him?’

  ‘She says she doesn’t love him.’ She laughed, with what seemed like genuine amusement. ‘As if love had anything to do with it.’

  ‘Does she love someone else, then?’ I asked, my mouth dry.

  ‘You’d have to ask her that yourself, wouldn’t you?’ she said harshly. ‘I talked some sense into her, I hope.’

  ‘I thought you were fond of her.’

  ‘Well, of course I am.’

  ‘Well, then, why give her such bad advice? At least, it seems bad to me.’

  She put down the dish she was holding. ‘Listen to me, Alan. Sarah is like me, neither daughter nor mother. There’s only one way for her to earn respect. If necessary she must make the best of a bad job.’ As I have, were the unspoken words. ‘Respect is what a woman needs in this world.’ Oddly enough I remembered my mother saying something like the same thing.

  ‘But surely, these days …’

  ‘Oh, no, make no mistake. Women get older. For men it’s different. I’m sure you still have your diversions.’ She regarded me without amenity. ‘Men can bury their past. An unmarried woman is her past. Whereas a wife has a social position. A spinster has none.’

  ‘But this is ridiculous. She’s still young. There’s nothing to stop her doing what she wants to. She could even have a child …’

  She flashed me a look of triumph. ‘She can’t have children. She’s a barren fig tree, like me. The same reason in both our cases. An early abortion …’

  ‘I don’t want to hear this.’

  ‘The wrong women have the children, Alan. And even then some of them don’t know how.’

  It seemed as though all the bitterness of her life had suddenly risen to the surface. That bitterness was sufficient to obliterate all her affections, together with the efforts she had made to secure them. From the other room came a burst of laughter from the television, together with Humphrey’s hoarse chuckle.

  ‘And that’s what I’ve come to,’ she said, as though we had been talking about her all along.

  ‘And Sarah?’

  ‘I’ve given her my advice. I could do no more.’

  ‘You used to be so loving,’ I said. ‘So warm-hearted. I hardly recognise you.’

  She sat down again, smoothing the tablecloth with the flat of both hands. ‘I’ve had a hard life,’ she said quietly. ‘You didn’t know me when I was a girl, in Paris. Or earlier than that, with my uncle and aunt. There was no love lost in my childhood, unlike yours. I used to look at families, wondering what it was like, to belong to them. I was young, I had my love affairs, I thought they would last. They lasted as long as I was with someone who could pay the bills. Then that stopped. I always worked. And I got tired, more and more tired. Then I met Humphrey. I was overjoyed, but overjoyed because he needed me. Do you understand that? What I thought was love was gratitude. We were grateful to each other. And even that was good enough for a while. But you’ve seen him; he has no use for a woman. Probably never had. And I had to do without. And now he doesn’t even like me. And I’m still on my own, after everything.’

  ‘You seemed so happy.’

  ‘I was happy as long as I was respected. As long as I had a social position. Alice made me feel, well, appreciated, normal, like every other woman with a family. I thought I could be a mother to Sarah. But neither really wanted me. No one did. Not even …’

  ‘Don’t,’ I said quickly. ‘Don’t even mention her name.’

  ‘Even she …’

  ‘Please.’

  We were silent. ‘Sarah lives abroad now,’ she said. ‘She has no need of this place. Humphrey can’t see that. Rather than leave it to me he’d rather leave it to those two old women of his. But no, it’s got to go to Sarah. As if this were any place for her.’

  ‘Is she in need of money?’

  Jenny laughed. ‘She doesn’t even work. She never has. Not like me. She’s dependent on that man she’s living with. That’s why I told her to see that he marries her.’

  ‘Do you have an address for her?’

  She looked vague. ‘Humphrey’s got it somewhere, but I don’t know where. He hides everything from me. Her face when she took the clock! “Uncle would want me to have it,” she said. I could have told her not to rely on him. I did, and look where it got me.’

  At this point, and as if to refute her, or any hopes she still may have cherished, Humphrey shuffled in with an envelope. ‘My will,’ he said. ‘You look after it for me. It’s all in order.’ He looked at Jenny. ‘What did you say his name was?’

  With a pop another of the bulbs in the chandelier expired. It seemed a fitting end to our conversation. But I was not yet to be released. At the door, with Humphrey in abeyance, she plucked my sleeve, anxious to retain me. Her breath was sour in my face, as she once again launched into her accusations and justifications.

  ‘You see how it is, Alan. I can’t leave him. I hardly ever get out these days, and I do so long to look round the shops. You can see how shabby I am.’

  Indeed I had noticed that her blue dress was slightly faded, her obstinately high-heeled shoes eased out of shape by her painful feet.

  ‘Sometimes I think I should have been better off had I stayed in Paris. At least there I could lead a cultured life, even on very little money. But here he keeps me short. I should have known that he’d just sit back and ignore me. I should have looked at those two sisters of his.’

  ‘Sisters-in-law.’

  ‘And have they been in touch with me? Not a word. Oh, he telephones them. What he tells them I don’t know.’

  ‘Perhaps it might be wise to let Sybil know that he is, well, under the weather.’

  ‘Not I! I was willing to be friendly, but one look told me that we had nothing in common.’ She sighed. ‘I’ll tell you the truth of it, Alan. I had no family, and when you have no family you rely too much on your friends. And they let you down.’

  Rather, I reflected, they could not take the weight of the deprived soul’s dependence, could not bear the reproaches when a telephone call was not returned, could not fail to notice the desperation and the barely disguised aggression when a difference of opinion made itself known, could not bear to be seen through the distorting mirror of the other’s needs, and would finally exchange that other for the comforting normality of a casual acquaintance.

  ‘What do you want me to do about this will?’ I asked. ‘I’m bound to execute it.’

  ‘Then that’s the end of me, I suppose. I might as well go back to Paris. Of course, I’ll fight it. I won’t leave without a struggle.’

  ‘Sarah might be persuaded …’

  ‘I’m the last pers
on she’ll bother about.’

  As this was probably true I was silent.

  ‘You might tell Alice how I’m placed,’ she said.

  I picked up my bag, felt the weight of it, and drew out the dish I had bought for her in the market at Cagnes.

  ‘She sent you this,’ I said.

  She looked at it with contempt. ‘These things are two a penny in the south of France.’

  It had in fact been rather expensive. ‘Don’t you want it?’

  ‘You keep it,’ she said. ‘Thank you for the flowers.’

  ‘I’ll need Sarah’s address,’ I told her.

  ‘I told you, I haven’t got it. He’s got it, only he won’t let me see it. Care of de Leuze, I suppose. Although I gathered that they were moving to Geneva. He’s an industrial chemist, very well placed. Not that she says much. She wrote something down for Humphrey, and now I can’t get it out of him. No, Sarah doesn’t have much use for me. A hard girl. No sympathy, no sentiment. And I was so willing to be friendly with her. I loved her, Alan.’

  She waited for me to say that I had loved her too, but I remained obstinately silent.

  ‘I wanted a daughter,’ she said; again I remained silent.

  She sighed. ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you. It was good of you to come, a young man like you. And still good-looking. I always liked a handsome man.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said, although I was not sure how true this was. I kissed her, at which her face brightened. She was still a woman who responded to a man’s attentions, I noted, and she was cursed with a senile husband whose initial need of her had been based solely on the panic of someone adrift in a foreign city and unable to speak the language. No wonder she despised him.

  I hastened down the fawn-carpeted corridors, under the dim light of various low-watt bulbs. Ancient cooking smells drifted from behind closed doors. The melancholy of London flats at nightfall! It was only Thursday, but it felt like Sunday. I did not have the courage to walk, and my taxi was enlivened by a powerful floral deodorant. I wanted a bath: I wanted to walk naked through my flat. I wanted to remind myself that I was still intact, that I had not yet succumbed to rancour and recrimination. If I wanted more than that I repressed the knowledge. That would come later. My chief feeling, the feeling uppermost in my tired mind, was one that a certain chapter of my life, the one I prized the most, had ended. I was aware that certain steps could not be retraced, however heady the impulse. I placed the dish on my desk and went to bed. That night I was wakeful, yet I did not mind. Unwillingly I glimpsed possibilities, stratagems. One speaks these days of a window of opportunity. I resolved to wait and see if even now one would open for me.

  14

  Towards the end of the following month I received two telephone calls, one from Mother, one from Jenny. Both told me the same thing, that Humphrey had died. Jenny had found him on the bathroom floor early one morning, and was all the more shocked in that she had heard nothing. Apparently he had taken to wandering about before she was up; he slept little, although the legend was that he slept all the time. Towards the end of his life he began to resent Jenny’s presence in the flat, and liked to reassert his ownership by means of a stealthy inspection of his former domain in the early hours. This tired him so much that by the time that Jenny was making the coffee he was back in bed, and had to be coaxed into sitting up, and even later into getting up. On this particular morning he must have had a malaise and collapsed, blocking the bathroom door. It was only after considerable efforts that Jenny gained access. I imagined the graceless scene: the old man, unwashed, bundled into his camel-hair dressing-gown, and his bewildered wife, herself dishevelled, trying to drag the body out of that confined space. She had tidied her hair and run to a neighbour, who rang for an ambulance and then made Jenny a cup of tea. Jenny was apparently so overwhelmed by this act of kindness that she burst into tears. The neighbour took this to be an entirely commendable sign of grief and promised any further help should it be needed. Thus Jenny began her first day as a widow somewhat restored to the dignity she had long ceased to enjoy as a wife.

  The story of the neighbour was told to me by Jenny herself: the rest was my interpretation. On the telephone she sounded if anything almost excited by this turn of events, a fact commented upon by my mother, to whom I recounted the gist of her confession to me on the last and disastrous evening I had spent with them both.

  ‘Well, of course, it was hardly a love match, though they seemed happy enough, at least to begin with. Let her enjoy this little bit of attention while she can; she certainly won’t enjoy being on her own. That’s what drove her into the marriage in the first place. Poor dear. She has no gift for solitude. She’ll stay on in the flat, I suppose?’

  I told my mother about the will, which I had had time to examine. It was quite in order: the property was to go to Sarah, while Jenny had a right to the contents of the flat. Apart from three or four clocks, whose value I had no means of estimating, these were negligible, consisting as they did of worn turkey carpets, antiquated sofas and armchairs covered in faded green velvet, a heavy oval dining-table which would be difficult to move, eight massive leather dining-chairs decorated with brass studs, and a chest of drawers in the hall which effectively blocked one’s passage in and out. The contents of the bedrooms, which it would also be my duty to examine, could hardly be more refined, and it would take some temerity on my part to go through Humphrey’s possessions. I imagined a cobweb-strewn camphor-smelling hideout in which daylight never entered and all the mirrors were tarnished; I imagined malodorous carpet slippers, unravelled pullovers, antique overcoats in creaking wardrobes, and all the dusty remains of a man whose final decrepitude seemed to me far more shocking than his actual demise. My task, on the occasion on which I should have to conduct my inventory, seemed to loom far more depressingly than the funeral; I thought it unfair that Humphrey should linger on in his effects while Jenny faced the prospect of being dispossessed.

  Mother was shocked but not surprised by the will. ‘He was always very family-minded, of course. He kept in touch with Sybil, and he was on good terms with Marjorie. Indeed we always thought that Marjorie had her eye on him. He could have done worse; she knew his ways. It was only the accident of his losing his way in Paris that led him to Jenny. Poor darling, she never really fitted in.’

  ‘That, Mother, is entirely to her credit.’

  ‘I agree, but where does that leave her now? And it seems so unfair when she tried so hard. And she was happy at first, so delighted to be married. She was a very good companion in those early days, and she was so eager to make friends, to have a family. I think she would even have taken on Sybil and Marjorie, had they shown the slightest sign of welcoming her, but you know how odd they are …’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘And it was her attitude to Sarah that was so sad. She had this fantasy—and it was a fantasy—that the two of them would become close.’

  ‘That attitude may have changed by now.’

  ‘It had to, of course; it would have done so in any case, but now that Sarah’s got the flat …’

  ‘She may not want it.’

  My mother sighed. ‘My poor Alan, you don’t know Sarah very well.’

  I could not bring myself to discuss Sarah with my mother, so I asked her if she were coming over for the funeral.

  ‘Of course, dear. Aubrey is not too pleased about it, but I’ve been quite firm. Golders Green, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. And I’ve put a notice in The Times. This means quite a bit of extra work for me.’

  ‘It will be a comfort to Jenny to know that you’re taking care of things. I’ll see you on the twenty-fourth then, dear. Look after yourself. Aubrey sends love.’

  I doubted this, though I did not doubt Aubrey’s unwillingness to attend the funeral. He had scant sympathy with other people’s illnesses, and as death was the logical outcome of certain illnesses he preferred not to hear about it. But he would be there, in one of his beautiful suits, to escort
Mother, and I was grateful for his promised attendance, since it seemed that without him I should be the only man at the funeral and something in the nature of an unwilling host at whatever baked meats Jenny had had time to prepare. In fact I did not see who would want to be present, since Humphrey had lived out of the world so long. That was why I had put a notice in The Times, in an effort to drum up support. For some odd reason, though it had nothing, or very little, to do with me, I wanted no suggestion that this was a death of no consequence.

  In fact, for a recluse, he had quite a turn-out. There were about eighteen people in the chapel, most of them elderly, none of whom I had ever seen before. I presumed that they were neighbours, for whom a funeral of someone they hardly knew was something of a social occasion, an opportunity to get out and meet their friends, a welcome break in the daily routine. The three frail-looking men of some distinction I took to be colleagues of Humphrey’s in the jewellery trade, and I had to remind myself that at one point in his life he had been well regarded, a man among equals, rather than the faded and suspicious character I had known. Sybil and Marjorie made a late entrance, Marjorie being pushed down the aisle in a wheelchair; otherwise they seemed not to have aged by a single day. I offered Jenny my arm, since it seemed to have fallen to my lot to be her protector. She looked dignified in her black coat and spotted veil, but she was trembling, as if the full impact of the occasion had only just been revealed to her. This ugly ceremony, among strangers, reinforced her knowledge of herself as an exile, unable to summon up the brave smile, the worldly composure that the English manage to manifest even in these circumstances. She was very pale, but I thought that any grief she must be feeling was for herself and her new situation, a situation in which an outward show of tears would be misplaced. I led her to the front pew, on the other side of the aisle from Sybil and Marjorie. Then, when the service was about to begin, there was a clatter of heels, a whiff of Guerlain, and the empty space next to Sybil was taken by Sarah.

  I sensed her rather than saw her; when I was able to turn my head I had an impression of modish drooping black garments, and something else, something different. Keeping my eyes rigidly to the front, I tried to decipher what I had glimpsed. There was a hat, certainly, one of those dire felt hats favoured by her mother; indeed she may have, probably had, borrowed one of her mother’s hats. In the rustle that signified the end of the short service I was able to take a second look, and then I saw what had initially struck me as discordant. She had cut off her marvellous hair, which now stuck out from under the unbecoming hat in a bulky bob. Her face, pale and sulky, was as intriguing as ever. But although she had lost her initial bloom, had in fact put on weight, so that she looked older, rather more like her mother, the effect on me was unfortunate. I longed to take her in my arms, to comfort her for her lost beauty, to let her know that she was now more accessible to me, that my previous anxieties were in abeyance, that we could perhaps at last meet on equal terms. Had it been up to me I would have crossed the aisle and greeted her, but Jenny was now trembling violently, dreading the moment when she would have to go forward and touch the coffin, fearful of what lay inside it. It was a primitive fear, or rather it was the fear of a primitive person. Around her faces which had been composed were beginning to relax, while through the open doors could be seen the suburban-looking lawns, perfect setting for a largely unlamented death.