The Bay of Angels

by Anita Brookner

  This suited me well, or well enough, for I too had reason to feel embarrassment. Adam had a new friend. ‘This time it’s serious,’ he said, with that charming carelessness which had drawn me to him in the first place. I shut the door of Langton Street behind me for the last time and wandered back to the flat in the early hours, suffused with a blush which I thought would never fade. Again I blamed myself. So deep was my shame that I was grateful to the unsuspecting streets for sheltering me from the public gaze. I registered failure in the one area of my life in which success meant most to me, and I knew that I could never speak of it, least of all to my mother. Simon, I knew, would be delighted, for she would certainly tell him. What else did they have to talk about? For a time indignation on my behalf would wipe out the memory of his conduct. He could be, and would be, self-righteous, producing as justification his distrust of Adam, his fear lest I be hurt. It would be a useful way of defusing a situation which had made them both uncomfortable. My mother would have been shocked out of a complacent acceptance of their apparent harmony. I should be performing a service if I played the part of a heartbroken girl who looked to them for support. Perversely, perhaps, I refused this role. My own feelings were so overwhelming that I could not consider those of my nearest and dearest. Besides, they had ceased to be the people I considered closest to me. Their compromises, their adjustments removed them from the tragic single-mindedness which was to be my lot. They retreated into the background of my life, where I desired that they should stay.

  Within a few weeks, it seemed, the fixed points of my existence had revealed themselves to be untrustworthy. My reaction was to withdraw from those who knew me, to sit at home in the flat with my dictionaries and my thesaurus, to ignore the sun outside my kitchen window, and to work as though I intended work to fill my existence. The unworthiness that a rejection confers on the one who has been rejected was almost palpable. I preferred not to be seen. In the late afternoon I would go out to the park, and walk, my head bent, seeing nothing. Friends telephoned and suggested a drink, a meal. Sometimes I accepted, but such occasions were not a success. I had little to say for myself, could hardly talk about my dull work when such details were supposed to furnish conversation. And in comparison with real work—or what I thought of as real work—my efforts seemed nugatory. In that way, surprised, they began to think me uninteresting, for I had nothing to offer them, no confession of a broken heart which they perhaps suspected I was harbouring. They too would have been lovingly indignant on my behalf, and sometimes I wished that I could be entirely honest, but not for long. Uncensored behaviour seemed to me unbelievably dangerous, and like the Spartan boy with the fox under his shirt I preferred to suffer. I suffered so well, both for my unhappiness and for my silence, that I felt reduced to wordlessness, and relied more and more on my dictionaries to supply those words to which I felt I had no right.

  Of course I could have behaved differently. I could have acted the part of a friend, even to Adam, whom I would have questioned delightedly, as if I were on his side. But I could not be on his side in this of all matters. I could have joked about him with my other friends, who were surely aware of the situation and who were too kind or too tactful to ask me how I felt. I had the disagreeable suspicion that everyone knew my business, for surely everything was out in the open? My silence was, if anything, held against me as a form of abstention that was not natural. Thus I failed to pay my dues to friendship, persuading myself that in time I should do what was expected of me and offer up my broken hopes for their scrutiny. I refused this role, just as I refused the daughterly role of confiding in my mother. The time for confidences had passed, belonged to the relative innocence of schooldays. The elaborate exchanges between women which were supposed to be a hallmark of my generation had never appealed to me. I thought that the details of a love affair should be secret; all the more reason, then, for no allusion to be made to the fact that the affair no longer existed. The appetite for such details struck me as unwholesome, although I knew that they were normal currency.

  Behind my back—terrible phrase that sums up the whole situation—I knew that speculation was rife. My friends stood by, loyal but disappointed, waiting for some kind of breakdown. Alone in my bed I too waited, for it seemed as though this sadness must have some violent outcome. Yet by the morning I was subdued again. The most terrible thing about my dilemma was my acceptance of it. I told myself that in this way I should somehow regain my independence, and perhaps I was right. But I also knew what it was to be unconsoled, to go through days which were somehow not on record because they were not witnessed. Work was both my alibi and my disguise. Concealment was imperative, and my excuse was my work. I did work, conscientiously and well, and was thanked. More work materialized, and it seemed as though my course was set. ‘I can assign you a researcher,’ I had heard Dr Blackburn say on the telephone, in response to some academic inquiry. I was the researcher, it appeared. I accepted this and tried even harder in an attempt to appease the fates. The fates had now taken over from those earlier agencies from whom I had confidently awaited a good outcome. Even the gods had lost some of their power. That power, which was the power to make mischief, now appeared to me all too human.

  Gradually I grew less constrained, but never really felt at ease in my own life. In the last warm days of a remarkable autumn I spent more time in the park, occasionally ate lunch at a nearby café. It was quiet, the children had gone back to school after half-term, and students were once more in their libraries. I was unsettled by the fact that there was no real need for me to leave the flat, for I had no office to go to. My time was no longer articulated by the academic year, and this made a considerable difference to my perceptions. I felt rootless and invisible, and the invisibility, which had initially suited my purpose, was no longer an advantage. I began to leave the flat more often, but at unusual times of day, the very early morning, or the late evening. I rehearsed the welcome I would give to Adam if I met him in the neighbourhood, the genuine friendliness I would feel if such a meeting were to take place. In a strange way such imaginary conversations became something of a comfort. I would return home just as my neighbour, Mr Taft, was going out with his dog. ‘Nice to see a smiling face,’ he once said. This too I should have to watch.

  It was after all a banal disappointment. My unhappiness became routine, my secret dialogues with an absent Adam ceased to ramify. In other words I managed. I even thought that I managed rather well. I knew the extent of the damage, but I also knew how to hide it. I went out again, saw my friends, ‘circulated’, ‘socialized’, as those two eager visitors had once urged my mother to do, and was assimilated once again into a group of men and women of my own age, all of whom seemed glad to see me. In this way I could call on a little company if and when I felt the need of it. But I never entirely lowered my defences, and was thought of as something of an enigma. Men found this intriguing, women less so.

  The news from Nice grew more animated the longer we were apart. Since the ritual of the weekly telephone call was so firmly established, and since there had been something of a breach of trust, we relied on gossip, on current affairs, to fill out our news bulletins, which were becoming a little threadbare. My mother in particular played her part as valiantly as she had played all her other parts. Thus I got to know about Dr Thibaudet’s retirement, and the splendid dinner Simon had given them all at Le Chantecler. Armelle, I was told, was thrilled to have ‘the doctor’, as she called him, at home all day. Even more thrilling was their projected visit to their married daughter in Philadelphia, long planned, and, unlike my mother’s putative holiday in Venice (still a subject for discussion), likely to take place in the near future. This talk of retirement was locally unsettling, for Mme Delgado was giving advance warning of her own. My mother, in a parody of genteel concern, wondered how they would manage without her. Maybe you’ll come home, I suggested. Maybe, she agreed. This wish seemed to me sincere. The adventure in Nice was over, for my mother as well as for myself.


  ‘Of course, I haven’t said anything to Simon. Not yet, anyway. I have to be tactful about this. After all, the house is his. And you know how he loves it.’

  I did indeed know this. He was rarely out of it. Those visits to the Thibaudets seemed to me his only excursions. The trip to Venice was thus in the realm of unexplored possibilities. This was a matter we were not anxious to disturb.

  I remembered how she had said, ‘I have to take his part.’ She had little choice but to do so. What in fact did she know of him? She had responded to his kindness as only a lonely woman could, feeling a timid wellbeing that cast the world in a rosier light. Simon’s first visit to our flat in Edith Grove had created such an excellent impression that it would have seemed churlish and impolite to question it. He had seemed not only prosperous but open, indeed the acme of accountability. We never elucidated those ‘business interests’ to which he had alluded: my mother had simply said, ‘Property, I believe. He has tenants, or so I understand.’ There was the nephew with whom he had lost touch, but on the other hand there were the respectable bank accounts which he had opened for my mother and myself, and without which the modest sums I earned would have been inadequate. He was, and always had been, extremely good-humoured, yet the single incident of his voyeurism made me question his secret life. The incident may have affected my mother rather more than it had affected me. It would not have been mentioned, but it would have had a witness. Simon was an old man, and the old are undignified. Had he really been inspired by care for me, or did that unconscious humming outside the door signify some sort of excitement?

  There was now no doubt in my mind that Adam’s defection was in some way connected with this incident. He may have been more wakeful than I knew, may even have noticed signs which had escaped me. Adam had not even pretended to like Simon, had felt sorry for my mother. I now had ample time to ponder these matters, and my horror grew. The little family I had thought to exhibit was in any event as nothing to set against his own endowment of natural parents, of brothers and sisters, of relatives all firmly settled on ancestral acres. I was modestly proud of Les Mouettes, which I accepted as my own birthright, whereas in fact it was merely an unusual house to which my mother had acceded by accident and in which she was not quite at home. The care with which she had set down dishes before Adam’s place at table was the care of a visitor, not of a hostess. She was unused to dealing with guests, was intimidated by more confident personalities. Long years of reclusion had made her diffident, and she was alert to her husband’s disfavour. The dislike he so clearly felt for Adam, and which he hardly bothered to disguise, had affected her. At the same time she wished Adam out of the house, so that he could cause no further disruption. No wonder he preferred Mme Delgado, with her reluctant smiles, her responses to his teasing, to his strong arm around her waist.

  In contrast my mother had been kind, polite, but clearly not at ease, not only on Simon’s account but on her own. Life had not prepared her for the introduction of her daughter’s lover. I think she envisaged my life as closely resembling her own: years of pious simplicity crowned by a gift from the gods. But gifts from the gods are usually qualified; conditions are attached, the gods’ indulgence never to be taken for granted. Adam’s presence, which no one could ignore, struck her as boastful, whereas it was merely confident. But without his being in any way at fault he had introduced into their settled lives the subversive notion of sex, and, worse, sex which knew no formal boundaries. In their world, certainly in my mother’s, such behaviour had no place in other people’s houses. The difference was that she would have felt not indignation at a breach of good manners, but sadness that I was being seduced away from those standards of modesty and propriety which she had upheld with such difficulty for so many years.

  Simon would have needed no such pretext for denouncing Adam, but he would also have been fascinated. For here was a man whom Simon could never have resembled, a man who took his own facility for granted, and who pleased himself in all circumstances. Simon clearly had a right to criticize Adam’s manners; in objecting to his youth and beauty he was on shakier ground. It was clear from his generosity, his fussy care, his desire to maintain the fiction that we were all devoted, and happy to be so, that Simon had never enjoyed licence. Adam’s liberty of behaviour was an affront to his whole way of life, for he too, it seemed, had been lonely and virtuous. He was old, he had grown heavy: it was impossible to ignore the contrast between them. And Simon was also rather vain, took a pride in his appearance, which was nevertheless that of a man ‘almost on the wrong side of seventy’. Faced with the sight of Adam every morning he found it easy to imagine the preceding night. All of Adam’s nights, whether known or unknown, would have offended him. And now there was no cure for the years of good behaviour, for age had dealt with them in a fashion against which there was no redress.

  Adam’s fault was to understand this long before I did, so that I was concerned merely to smooth over difficulties which had to do with incompatibility, or so I thought. I was more worried about Adam’s feelings than about Simon’s, although I realized that it was a matter of some urgency to separate them. I had not, I realized, made sufficient allowance for Adam’s distaste, the distaste one might feel at having a deviant in the family. My mother’s position would have been undermined by both of them, for, left to themselves, virtuous women can entertain harmless fantasies about young men, whom they see as the sons they never had. But she was obliged to ally herself with her husband, whose elderly habits were not perhaps entirely to her taste. While Adam and I were in Paris reproaches were probably mildly voiced on either side. My mother would not have been surprised by Simon’s vehemence, for her instinct had supplied explanations not consciously taken into account. The detail of his voyeurism would be remembered when the cause of it had moved on to more accommodating prospects.

  I was too sad at the irreparable effects of this on my own life to feel much sympathy for Simon, or even for my mother. Both were ill equipped to deal with modern behaviour, because they still obeyed harsher and more rigid rules. They were now beginning to understand that they too might have enjoyed their youth had they been differently taught, or less frightened of their own wishes. It was as if the Bible had been spreading false doctrines, and although neither of them was in the least religious they bore the marks of a sententious upbringing, in an era when obligations were more important than entitlements. Their incomprehension had something pitiable about it as well as ludicrous. And the embodiment of their confusion was so sincerely unapologetic that he made nonsense of their careful constraints and of who knew what disappointments they might have kept concealed.

  What was clear was that they had been made unhappy, that my mother, in particular, was less happy now than she had been in the past. In the course of my next telephone call I asked if I might come to Nice for Christmas, professed a longing to see them which was sincere, for it seemed to me to be up to me to persuade them that nothing had come between the three of us. My mother’s response was so eager that I was glad of my impulse to gratify them. Other irreconcilables I would deal with on my own. If the way ahead for all of us was to be through reconciliation I was ready to play my part. My austere way of life had given me a longing for some kind of comfort, wherever it was to be found. I resolved to reserve my pity for others. For I was not altogether unfamiliar with the harsh imperatives of a doctrine which was in many ways not negotiable. I smiled with exasperation at my earlier version of a happy ending, saw belatedly that some form of ordeal was inflicted on every character in literature, and that even the gods had to make do with fairly limited powers, and were allowed only the satisfactions of caprice and rarely those of reciprocity.

  The people whom I knew to be good somehow remained good in spite of themselves. Such were my mother, and possibly Simon, who gave money when he could give nothing else. The harm he had caused me had proceeded from a dreadful, because forbidden, curiosity, and from the unbearable presence in his house of someone whose
behaviour he could only imagine. He too must have experienced shame, but I had little sympathy with him on that account. What made me genuinely sad was the knowledge that with the best will in the world one can still fail the test that the world sets, a test easily surmounted by those with more variable standards. I still wanted life to be conducted justly, honestly. But what if honesty brought into the open unpalatable truths, tendencies, compulsions? Honesty could hardly be its own reward in those circumstances. How strongly should one condemn a curiosity which had, perhaps, never been satisfied? The well-behaved may have many regrets, have realized too late that they might have had a more amusing time had they only seized other opportunities, precisely the opportunities from which they had obediently averted their eyes.

  I now felt pity for those two people, whose moral education had been so rigid, even absurd. I considered myself to be wiser than they were in many respects, though I was in a position to measure the danger of complete enlightenment. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner; I beg to differ. Total forgiveness in all circumstances seemed to me to be nothing less than hazardous, for I understood both Simon and Adam and could forgive neither of them. I understood them, that was all. This did not automatically confer indulgence but was directly responsible for my pity. One feels pity for those who are unprotected, at risk, those whose high ideals have not been met. Therefore, in some strange way, I was bound to cherish Simon and my mother, not because they were my family, or what passed for one, but because they relied on me to cement their partnership, to bring them joy. They longed to be restored to themselves, after the irruption into their lives of a person whom they saw as lawless. That this could only come about by virtue of a fantasy was of course regrettable, but it would do no harm, and possibly some good, to be lenient.