The Bay of Angels

by Anita Brookner

  The vigil lasted all night, as I had known it would. It seemed fitting that it should do so. At no time did my mother appear conscious of where she was, yet I had the impression that she knew that I was with her. The eyes opened from time to time, but closed thankfully once more. It was clear that she would not speak: her concentration on what was taking place was too great. Yet she was not, or did not seem to be, in any sort of anguish, which I should have expected to be part of the process. She seemed to rest her head so lightly on the pillow, turned slightly towards me, as if she could see me, or would see me, once she summoned the strength to do so. Then her eyes closed for ever, and I knew that of the two of us I was the more alone.

  I must have slept briefly, for when the door opened and the nurse came in, the room was once more filled with light. Dr Lagarde was summoned to certify that death had taken place. He had the sense, or the tact, to say nothing, merely laid a hand briefly on my arm, and gave instructions in a muted voice. The nurse shocked me by opening the window, by moving noisily about the room. Beyond the door I could hear the ordinary sounds of early morning. Once more a cup of coffee was put before me. These people were never less than kind.

  Dr Balbi, I was told, was absent, but if I cared to wait in his office Dr Lagarde would come and talk to me. I sat down quite calmly in the accustomed chair, as if waiting for further news. My mother’s illness, though technically attributable to heart failure, seemed to me more than ever an affair of the spirit, of a spirit too easily broken. Dr Lagarde seemed to be of the same opinion. He was crestfallen, until I warmly expressed my gratitude, at which he was plainly relieved. He explained what arrangements had to be made, unless I wished to take her body back to England. At this point I must have changed colour, for I found him at my side with a glass of water in his hand. I assured him that I was quite composed; what I wanted was for him to go away and leave me in communion with the events of that long night. Yet I felt nothing but a deep sense of preoccupation, as if there were no end to this mystery, although the end had already come about. When I looked up again the room was empty. I was free to leave.

  And so, to borrow David Copperfield’s words, I lost her. In the street the weather was unclouded; there was a smell of coffee and washed pavements. At some point I should have to go back to the clinic, if only to pay the bill. This could be done later in the day, for I had no patience for such contingencies, no capacity for them either. The distractions of the past few days had merged into one major distraction and into one unanswerable question: how to live now? I needed no friend to whisper insidiously that life would be simpler, for I already knew that. Life would be simpler, but it would not be better. The world would be a lonelier place, and no amount of rationalization could alter this. At the same time I knew that this was a rite of passage which all must undergo, and there was even a sort of relief in acknowledging that this experience was part of the human condition. What hurt most was the realization that I must return to her room and collect her belongings, for the room was already earmarked for another. The pitifully small suitcase I had packed for her to take to the clinic was still in Dr Balbi’s office, for I could not bear to confront the fact that it would no longer be needed, could not bear to pick it up and walk out with it, as though setting the seal on the inevitable. I wanted to be empty-handed on this fine morning, to be out of touch, to be unavailable. Despite the pressing decisions that awaited me I wanted to be alone. Even now various busy persons, people in authority, were expecting me to tell them what I had in mind for the funeral. This was laughable. Any funeral would be irrelevant. Therefore any funeral would do.

  In the rue de France M. Cottin came out from behind the counter of the shop when he saw my face, sighed, and shook my hand. I found that I could not bear to be in my room, although it was recognizably an ordinary room, not the room of the dream with its gap in the wall. I needed no one to explain the meaning of the dream, the symbolism of that exit—for it was an exit rather than an entrance; I saw that now. The walls of my real room were intact; the room was shadowy, as it had always been, but it contained no hidden surprises. Its very blankness signified that it had served its purpose and would shortly be returned to anonymity. For I should have no further use for it, should take my leave of M. Cottin, and go home, the home that my mother had professed to long for, or so she said. Now I wondered. She had not been homesick; she had been displaced. This was the condition that so perplexed her and which seemed to continue to perplex her even when death itself was overtaking her. For she had known that death was near. The open eyes had looked beyond me, as if there were matters of greater interest to absorb her. That was why after speaking her name once I had said no more.

  I believe I spent the day in the garden of the Musée Masséna, as I had once loved to do. I found my usual seat, and must have stayed there for several hours. Only when I felt faint did I realize that it might be wise to eat something. I found a noisy bar with a radio playing and ate the two stale croissants that had been left over from early that morning. Instinct told me that I would need all my strength for the days ahead. I went home and washed myself thoroughly, as if preparing for some ultimate ceremony. It was evening once more when I emerged, as ready as I should ever be for what lay ahead.

  The disappearance of the sun saddened me, as it always did. The painter’s pronouncement—the sun is God—still held good. Creativity seemed called for, though I had none to offer. I had no sense of a possible future, only of the innumerable tasks that lay ahead. I now had to do caretaker’s work: there were arrangements to be made, people to be advised, explanations to be offered to those who might be kind enough to inquire. Life was hugely complicated, as it had not been when my mother was alive. Then my steps had taken me from the rue de France to the rue Droite, with very few deviations. Of my evening walks I preferred not to think, or of that strange freedom, that inevitability with which I recognized a known face. That inevitability had been an illusion. I had registered as interest what had been no more than a taciturn kindness. Wanting more I had gained less.

  Though I knew where I was going I lingered in the emptying streets, longing for any sign of life, of recognition, to help me through the night I would have to endure. I even delayed my arrival at the clinic, for the business was now finished and I knew that no one awaited me. I should have been there all day, I now realized, should have wept, have asked anxious questions to which I already knew the answer. Instead of which I had spent the afternoon like a tourist, and now, like a tourist, must take up my life again. The sight of the clinic alarmed me, so that instinctively I turned into a café and sat down at a table. I ordered coffee, though my heart was beating strongly. I put my hand to my throat, as I had seen my mother do, as if I were ready to join her in whatever malady had caused her physical death. For her spiritual death had taken place some time ago. Her removal to unfamiliar places, one after the other, had so undermined her that only a memory of home, or an illusion of home, had kept her intact for a while. That illusion had not lasted, and even the petty irritants of the Résidence Sainte Thérèse had become threatening. It had been, in its way, a death foretold, and for better or for worse we had both known it.

  When I looked up, and wiped my eyes, Dr Balbi was sitting opposite me. ‘You have heard?’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘I thought I might find you here.’ But this was the preamble to another sort of encounter, or even the beginning of a prepared speech, one that might prove to be out of place in the present circumstances. ‘Do you want to walk?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I have done all the walking I shall ever do. You will not see me on the beach again at night. Do you know that I always looked for you?’

  Now I had embarrassed him. There was no sign that this day would ever end, that I could say goodbye to sadness and confusion.

  ‘You knew that she was dying?’ I asked.

  ‘I thought so, yes. As you did.’

  ‘Did I? I suppose I did. Yet I rejected the idea so thoroughly that I managed to believ
e the opposite. Or I thought I did. Did you come looking for me? Not now, before. I wanted to believe that you did. I had no one else, you see. I’m sorry if I was a nuisance. I didn’t mean to be. I wanted to be self-confident, even a little high-handed, as if you were merely some sort of functionary, someone who was paid to carry out certain duties. I am so very sorry, sorry that I failed to be that person. It would have been so much easier to say goodbye, easier too for you to dismiss me, as you must have been yearning to do . . . ’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I just don’t want to turn into the sort of person my mother had become, dignified, but essentially helpless. And this is what I seem to be doing now, only without the dignity. I would rather be defiant and rather nasty, eager to censure, to hand out blame. But there is no one to blame, is there? You cannot be blamed for anything, not even for not taking me seriously.’

  ‘No, I cannot be blamed for that. If you are ready we will go and see your mother now. Before she is taken away. Dr Lagarde has been expecting you.’

  We walked slowly out of the café, up the steps of the clinic, and took the lift to a basement room, where my mother was lying on a small bed. The light was kept low, for which I was grateful. She looked calm, untouched.

  ‘Please do what has to be done,’ I said. I kissed her and turned away.

  In his office he opened a cupboard and took out her small suitcase and her bag. The bag contained a card giving details of her name, address, date of birth, her bank in London, and the telephone number of a firm unknown to me, but presumably known to the staff of the Résidence Sainte Thérèse: in brackets were the words Jourdain, Pompes Funèbres. There were no letters; she had received none. Nothing from home except a photograph of myself as a small child. On the back of this was written, ‘My darling girl’.

  Dr Balbi moved quietly about the room, giving me time to recover myself. This was not easy, yet I had gone through the day relatively tearless. And I would be tearless again, on the following day. I would be that managerial person I always intended to be, nodding wryly in the direction of the fates, or the furies, or whatever agencies had brought me to this pass. It was just that one’s resolve slackens at night. This worldly conclusion was my first step to becoming that other person. Yet the transformation was not yet within my grasp. As I broke into tears once again I felt two hands on my shoulders.

  ‘Dr Balbi,’ I began.

  The hands tightened on my shoulders. ‘Antoine,’ he said. ‘My name is Antoine.’

  16

  The ladies were all present in the salon when I went to the Résidence Sainte Thérèse to collect the rest of my mother’s possessions. They were formally dressed, although this was not a normal visiting day: they were observing an occasion which none of them wished to observe, for the death of one of their number was a matter on which they did not care to dwell. The tributes were led by Mme de Pass, who could not entirely manage to conceal an expression of disapproval. It appeared that my mother was at fault in some way, first by being so much younger than themselves, and second by dying in so inconclusive a manner. There may have been a third reason: she had not appeared to mourn her husband, or at least to reminisce complacently about her previous life. This they could not forgive: they had perfected the art of editing their own lives in such a way as to make them acceptable to others of their kind. My mother had offended against the prevailing code by being both heartbroken and so obviously relieved, so that the heartbreak had to be attributed to factors in the unknowable past, to which they were not privy. I doubted whether such invisible wounds were much to their taste. Their widowhood had been turned around, from bereavement to a sort of satisfaction: they had survived. Yet my mother’s survival had been so compromised that her previous marriage, of which they knew little, was either more memorable than their own or so entirely dreadful that she preferred to offer no information about it, let alone the complacent accounts which they all colluded in offering to the public gaze.

  ‘Elle n’avait pas la santé, la pauvre Anne,’ said Mme de Pass. ‘Je lui disais, mais il faut réagir! Mais elle n’avait le cœur à rien.’

  It was true that she had no heart for anything. I was impressed, against my will, by the strength these women had accumulated along the way, so that they had managed to accommodate their reduced way of life in a manner which they thought fitting. True value was placed in what remained: their own carefully monitored health, their children, their appearance, the routines they had devised for getting through the day. I suspected that they were sorry for me, not because I was an orphan, but because I was unmarried myself and would have no emotional capital on which to draw. They did not envy me my new appalling freedom, and they were right not to do so. I did not value it myself. They may even have suspected that I had once longed for such freedom, whereas they had learned the value of community, even the community of their peers. I stood more or less helplessly as, one after another, they came forward and pressed my hand. Mme Lhomond was in tears, and that too was out of order. The correct stance was one of dignity; there were forms of behaviour to be observed, and they had perfected these in the course of their long lives. Anything less temperate than dignity was to be deplored.

  I responded as best I could, though I am sure my inexperience showed. They thought I was to be pitied, as my mother had been, but for the wrong reasons. I must have struck them as being deficient in a sort of gravitas which they themselves possessed. Just as Mme Levasseur’s son had given offence by weeping so extravagantly I gave offence by not allowing them to finish their carefully prepared condolences, and also by failing to reassure them that I too was a survivor.

  I escaped to my mother’s room as hastily as I could, although I knew that this too was some sort of a lapse of dignity. I should have stayed with them until Mme de Pass had given the signal: then I should have thanked them all in turn for showing their friendship. Instead of which I had cut short the proceedings, leaving them free to discuss me and my inadequate performance for perhaps an hour or so. This would have strengthened them in their own beliefs, their own self-sufficiency. Yet I did not doubt that they were shaken. Their lives were constructed on a bedrock of determination, the sort of determination necessary if one is to weather those last years. My mother had not obeyed the general rule: she had absconded. Though they knew that she had a weak heart they did not see that this was sufficient reason for an early eclipse. If anything such a condition should have stimulated her to more vigorous efforts on her own behalf. As Mme de Pass had stated, she should have reacted. But she had, if anything, collaborated in her own decline, and this they could not allow.

  In my mother’s room the bed had been stripped. Another, larger, suitcase stood ready to receive the last of her meagre possessions. I found myself unwilling to handle her clothes, her shoes, her hairbrush, and ended by bundling them out of sight into the case, which I should have preferred to leave downstairs in the courtyard, with the other discards. This again was not to be considered, though I could not discern any clear reason for the prohibition. I had no one now to disapprove of me, for the only possible leavetaking had already taken place in the salon. They pitied my freedom, my unsought freedom, as I did. They did not see how one could live without attachments, and neither did I. They were more prescient than I was, but only just. I saw now that the sort of freedom I was obliged to embrace brings in its wake intolerable anxiety, for there are no permissions and no sanctions. I also saw why it was not quite appropriate to cite freedom as an absolute. This had been pointed out to me by Dr Balbi, when I had known him as Dr Balbi. Perhaps I always should; in my present circumstances kindness was not unusual. In any event he was absent, and I must get used to all kinds of absence. I too should be absent, for it was clear that my presence in this place was no longer required.

  The Résidence Sainte Thérèse had been a beneficent institution, and it proved strangely difficult to leave it. When I went downstairs again I looked into the salon to offer final thanks to those present, but the sa
lon was empty. The conventions had been observed, and now the incident could be consigned to the past. I did not doubt that heads would be shaken when my mother’s name was mentioned, nor did I doubt that they had been genuinely fond of her. But she had worried them, and of this they preferred not to think. I could not fault their attitude. Indeed so robust was it that I found myself in sympathy with their disapproval. My own loss was, and would be, irrevocable, yet I too had been alienated by my mother’s passivity. I should have preferred her to be more actively unhappy, more confessional, more open to persuasion. Then I could have comforted her and satisfied my own conscience. I would have wished her to be one of those complacent widows, all previous failures satisfactorily disguised, a resolute face presented to the outside world. And if she had not appreciated being a wife for the second time she should have managed to conceal the fact not only from others but from herself.

  That there was something shameful in her failure to do so I could see for myself, just as there was something about my own misgivings that I preferred not to contemplate. She had tacitly refused the life that had been offered to her, or had come to do so, whereas I should always see it as idyllic. I wondered if I had wronged her in coming to this view. It was entirely possible that she had been as happy as she had initially appeared to be, that the marriage to Simon was a success, although in her eyes a mistake. One lives uncomfortably with one’s mistakes; one never entirely comes to terms with them. Simon’s death had in some ways compounded the mistake. He had not given her enough time in which to know him. And the manner of his dying had left a permanent feeling of horror, which had come to envelop the whole episode. Her desire to go home was a desire for a place of safety, where extravagant lives and deaths were unknown. Horror had never quite been banished, as I had seen from her relief in not being allowed back to Les Mouettes. It had persisted throughout her time in the Résidence Sainte Thérèse, so that she had pursued a policy of silence in an effort to conceal her wounds. Never once had she asked me about my own life, my own activities. Maybe she thought my loyalty depended on my having none. This was in fact the case.