Falling Slowly

by Anita Brookner

  During her mornings in the London Library she rarely thought about him, assuming that like all impervious innocents he would somehow be taken care of. It was in the course of those afternoons with Beatrice that she was conscious of the lack of a masculine presence, even that of her husband. She had no desire to involve him more than was necessary, secretly admiring his independence of her. Questioning on her part would be inappropriate; their marriage was hardly based on affinity. She had married not out of love but out of impatience, recognizing it as the next essential step. And even then she had had to work hard, had had to activate their long and almost lapsed friendship in order to bring him once more into their orbit, hers and Beatrice’s. Except that she was not doing this for Beatrice. He had accepted her invitations with alacrity, having, as she suspected, few friends. They quickly fell into easy conversation, for at that stage she was anxious to answer all his questions. Beatrice discounted him: the marriage occasioned enormous surprise, even outrage, largely on aesthetic grounds. Jon simply did not look heroic enough to sleep with a woman. He was small, slight, with incongruously large hands. Beatrice, measuring him against her romantic imaginings, may have seen him more clearly than Miriam did, saw how his juvenile affability might last for thirty or forty years without undergoing any appreciable alteration. It was not his lack of gravitas that she deplored so much as his expression of sophomoric harmlessness, eternally prepared for what he called a discussion but what was in reality a questionnaire.

  It was surprising, really, she thought in hindsight, that the three of them had co-existed, and had, after the initial hostilities, accepted each other so easily. Jon had had no more interest in Beatrice’s life than Beatrice had in his, her early vision of him holding up a smoking test-tube doing duty for the rest of him. It was tacitly agreed that she should make mild fun of him on the rare occasions when they met. He took no notice, having always received this kind of attention. Miriam knew that he did not like Beatrice but that he was too fundamentally indifferent to give this his attention. She sensed that he despised Beatrice for her lack of sexual realism; he himself was, on occasion, feral, thought that all women were, or should be, aware of this. It was Beatrice’s amusement, as if he were a small boy playing at being grown-up, that annoyed him. At some level he was brutally aware that he could enlighten her, but chose not to do so. Neither of them seemed attractive to the other, and so their emotional lives were hidden. Miriam kept her sister’s secrets, never once betrayed her fantasies, the comfort she greedily absorbed from those novels she read, in which it was always summer, in which there was a big house and no money to keep it up, and forbidden attractions were glimpsed across scrubbed pine tables in sunlit kitchens. Miriam had seen Beatrice lift her eyes from these rhapsodic descriptions to gaze out of the window at real weather – nothing like so beguiling – in the polluted setting of Sloane Square in mid-July. She could hardly blame her for preferring the other kind, or for thinking herself into the sort of landscape so fetchingly represented by the illustration on the jacket. Something in her own nature, which had grown sardonic after this latest disappointment, had acknowledged these attractions, had half-succumbed to their promise, but had rejected them as illusion, the sort of illusion she could no longer afford.

  Yet even now, and however reluctantly, she understood Jon’s contempt for the sort of woman Beatrice had turned into, for she no longer looked young and unprotected, seemed about to subside into increasingly bulky middle age. Her settled air irked Miriam; Beatrice was almost inactive, no longer in demand, not even sufficiently aware of Mrs Kinsella’s hasty and inadequate attentions. There were rich pickings to be had among Beatrice’s clothes; Mrs Kinsella’s zeal and her exaggerated expressions of care were never more apparent than when she was able to carry home a blouse, a jacket, for her daughter Anne Marie. She was an indifferent cleaner, left taps running, liked to listen to the radio while she worked. The atmosphere had become mildly depressing, as indeed had Beatrice’s company. Was she ill? Or was her indolence philosophical, as though she had come to terms with her diminishing prospects, no longer even cared much for music, was only rarely telephoned? Something in her smiling negation of a more energetic life alarmed Miriam, who was accustomed to do most of her thinking in the course of a five-mile walk, appreciating just those spoilt vistas of urban terraces that her sister so despised.

  ‘I’d better look for another flat,’ she announced. ‘It’s not right that we should spend so much time together like this.’

  Beatrice turned a lazy head. One thick strand of her hair had slipped over her forehead; she blew it out of the way. This negligence, entirely out of character, alarmed Miriam even more. Panic made her harsh.

  ‘And you’d better get on to Mrs Kinsella, or find someone else. This place is becoming a tip. Soon no one will want to come here.’

  ‘But that would hardly be your problem, would it?’

  ‘Don’t let’s quarrel, Beatrice. You know it makes sense.’

  There was a silence, which Beatrice showed no signs of wanting to end. She was still somehow better at their rare altercations, more female, more cunning.

  ‘I’ll start looking, then,’ said Miriam tiredly. The silence remained unbroken. ‘I expect it will take me some time to find anything,’ she offered, and then, at last, was rewarded with the ghost of a smile.

  4

  In her search for a home Miriam was confronted by several quite discrete difficulties. The first was easy enough: it was the business of looking at what the estate agents thought suitable for a single woman who earned her own living, was solvent, but without collateral in terms of other properties or – perhaps more important – a man. There seemed to be many flats on the market which the agents liked rather more than she did; they had enrolled her in a world of one-bedroom conversions, with kitchens in which it was not possible to sit down, and which transported her to a mean plucky existence of looking after herself, as if she were a business girl of times gone by, wearing a beret, perhaps, and darning her stockings. She rejected them all, only retaining the one in Lower Sloane Street for further consideration. It had only one bedroom, and the kitchen could barely accommodate a small table and chair, but the living-room contained a bay window, through which she could see the Number 11 bus grinding its way to a full stop at the lights. This comforted her somewhat; she saw herself standing at the window in the evenings and gazing out like Mariana in the moated grange. And Lower Sloane Street was near enough to Wilbraham Place, so that only a ten-minute walk separated her from Beatrice. Should there be an emergency, or should the need arise, she could offer her support with a minimum of delay, though why the idea of an emergency kept insinuating itself she could not quite understand. Indeed she was only aware of the possibility that she might be needed when she half-illicitly entertained a desire to be in a different part of London altogether, somewhere higher, greener, remote from the 11 bus, somewhere with silent spaces and small inconsequential shops: Barnsbury, Fulham, Dulwich.

  She might be able to afford something bigger if she moved farther out, and the idea was altogether attractive. But in fact such a move would be inconvenient, and she imagined Beatrice’s hurt expression, for of course this would be interpreted as a desire to get away, as indeed it may have been, not altogether consciously, but with a sense of time running out, of possibilities receding. She did not miss her husband, but missed the sense of someone happily occupied in another room. This was not possible with Beatrice, who was rarely occupied these days, and who in any case was always waiting, to be asked how she was, for instance, and who was always – but was this her imagination? – occupying the same commanding chair.

  But this image, not quite of flight, but somehow of a silent eclipse, had to do with another difficulty: the difficulty of finding a real three-dimensional home that would somehow connect with the ideal home that she had in mind. This was puzzling, for the ideal home had never existed. Home, whether in Wilbraham Place or in her parents’ suburb, had somehow signified
diminution, disappointment, yet if she were honest, was nearer to her mother’s inviting yet excluding drawing-room, with its overstuffed sofas and the optimistic flowers on the covers, than to her last view of Beatrice’s bedroom, with its discarded clothes and the slippers on their sides under a chair. Home in fact was a concept, like the grail; in both cases instant recognition would be its own reward. This home would be bathed in sunshine, the golden sunshine of evening: there would be a garden, large irregular rooms, deep colours, and a bedroom of such paradisial quiet that she could hear a late bird, or an owl, or the bell on the neck of a tame cat.

  This place would be unoccupied by anyone but herself, but at weekends members of a large loving family would visit, pleasing cousins, beautiful children, all of them graceful, courteous, changeless. What gave birth to this fantasy she could not imagine. She sought its origins in fiction, yet the novels she read for her work contained no such peaceable images. In fact such images pre-dated fiction, or rather were her own form of fiction; this must be what two people felt when they embarked on a happy future and were entitled to enact their heart’s desire. Yet she was only one person, and could not imagine ever being endowed with such a future, with such freedom to ordain, without a restraining hand or thought to check her progress.

  As for her marital home, the lugubrious flat in Bramham Gardens, she could hardly remember it, much as she could hardly remember the actual corporeal presence of her husband, who seemed to have shrunk to a small compendium of irritating habits, but whose surprisingly tuneful singing voice she still thought of with pleasure. Bramham Gardens abutted on to the Earls Court Road, which was a constant reminder of urban difficulty. Giant young men in shorts, with monstrous structures on their backs, met outside the tube station, en route for somewhere else; empty lager cans, inexpertly pitched, landed short of litter bins. This was what middle-aged disapproval must feel like, she thought, as she made her respectable apologetic way to the bus stop. And the flat had been no better, with its mournful bathroom and its exiguous dining annexe. ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Jon had enquired, genuinely puzzled, and, ‘You won’t want anything bigger, I take it?’ Beatrice had remarked, thus putting an end to her potential career as a mother. It had been a relief to get back to Wilbraham Place; by comparison the larger flat had seemed almost ancestral. The relief had not lasted, which was why she was now in search of something else, something new, regretting that she had not known and was now not to know a place to which it would always be pleasant to return.

  Returning meant returning to her real life, with its slightly shameful freedom only modified by the thought of obligations still to come, for she did not doubt that she would be called upon to succour, sustain, protect and encourage. ‘You are the sensible one,’ her father had once told her, and it had become hard to maintain an independent train of thought once this burden had been laid upon her. ‘I thought of you as the sensible one,’ said Beatrice, not displeased, when she announced her intention of getting a divorce. ‘Precisely,’ she had replied, but she had been hurt. To be sensible was to be realistic, not dull, not a failure, as was implied. She knew that she had no future with Jon, for as she grew older he would grow uncannily younger, until, in his dotage (and in hers), he would still be croaking out his requests for enlightenment, looking not much different, his hair showing no signs of grey. And she would still be in Bramham Gardens, conscious of Beatrice, now helpless, waiting for her attentions in Wilbraham Place. Instead of which she felt condemned to consider the alternative option: Lower Sloane Street, with its dusty bay window and its enthusiastic accompaniment of grinding gears.

  Tired, faced with the task of removing her personal belongings, her furniture to be reclaimed from store, she said to Beatrice, as Beatrice had once said to her, ‘You should get out more. This sitting around is no good to you. Women don’t have to decline any more. Look at all those glamorous grandmothers putting out fitness videos, or winning the battle against cancer. There are plenty of them in that rag you read.’

  ‘Women do decline, Miriam. They get tired.’

  ‘Then they do something about it! They take exercise! Buy new clothes …’

  She wondered about this, just as the words were out of her mouth. She had taken to scrutinizing the women on her bus in the mornings, wondering at their ages. There was one in particular, whom she saw every day, trim, well-dressed, her full figure artfully controlled, her hair coloured a pleasing dark blonde. She wore pleated skirts and silky jackets: Miriam grew to recognize the black and gold print with the yellow, the blue and green with the black. This she liked less; it seemed to signify austerity, and on rainy days, when the woman wore a vulgar papery blue mackintosh, she withdrew her interest, feeling vaguely affronted. She had the woman down as a Harley Street receptionist or an upmarket jeweller’s assistant. She wondered what gave this woman the courage to adorn herself every morning, to what or to whom she went home at the end of the working day. She imagined the homeward journey, the hair less immaculate, the feet trying to ease themselves in the now tight shoes, the struggle to maintain the smile, the air of interest. She followed her, in her imagination, to the end of the line, to a street so quiet and uneventful that she could hear her steps on the pavement. There might be a husband, an unruly son awaiting her, but she thought not. She imagined this woman opening a tin of soup, making herself a sandwich, changing into slippers, and settling down in front of the television. There might be a moment of defeat, a shrug in the direction of all the recipes cut out of the Sunday papers, until, flat-footed in her slippers, she made for her bedroom and the task of choosing her clothes for the following day.

  She thought of her as one of those spinsters in Gissing’s The Odd Women, a novel she had read in her adolescence, appalled by the vision it so bleakly set out. But this was ridiculous: the woman might have a houseful of teenagers, might sigh as she heard their racket. And in any event women no longer behaved like Gissing’s fearful stereotypes; indeed one hardly ever heard the word spinster nowadays. Yet those who remained unpartnered were still somehow suspect, their courage counting for nothing. And it took courage to contemplate the signs of ageing, to wonder on whose door she might knock if she were frightened, or ill. That was why such a woman rarely went out at night, unless with someone she knew at work. But such social contacts as she still enjoyed tended to take place over a drink, at lunchtime, or at six o’clock, and even one drink tended to send too much colour into her face. This must be watched. Therefore, this woman, who, she reminded herself, might even be a grandmother, would live a lonely, or if not lonely, a watchful life, devoting her energies to keeping up appearances, to being cheerful, so that her employer, her manager, whatever he was, might rather routinely lay a hand on her arm and exclaim ‘I don’t know what we’d do without you!’

  For such a woman, work, ‘going into town’, would be an adventure. For Miriam it no longer was. Work was simply something one did, presumably for the rest of one’s life. The trouble was that as one grew older it became less gratifying, something one accomplished almost as a matter of duty. She supposed that at some point it would be appropriate to stop doing it, to hand over to someone else, almost discreetly to disappear from the field. That was what her friend Suzanne, a former fellow student, had done, had exchanged her briefcase for marriage to a man she had met through a dating agency, and was now the matriarch of his house, complete with complement of three grown-up children and her husband’s mother-in-law by his first wife, and who apparently had no regrets, and a new hearty tolerant laugh to go with her situation. She got on well with the mother-in-law, drove her on shopping expeditions, had driven her over to visit Beatrice and Miriam, who had been silenced by her wealth of family references, a conversation to which they had no means of access. The visit had not been a success. They had been glad to see Suzanne, had longed for the sort of exchange to which they had been accustomed, but had been obliged to entertain the mother-in-law who had been loquacious. The visit, for there had been only one, had be
en conducted to the accompaniment of much laughter, that new laughter which had something public about it. This is my new endowment, said Suzanne’s laugh; it goes with realism, and also with status. French literature? I used to be fascinated, but now we are off to the Harrods sale; Mother loves Harrods. And they had been left with the feeling that the visit had only been possible because they were conveniently near Harrods, and because Mother might appreciate a cup of tea and a visit to the bathroom before the serious shopping began.

  They had watched politely, their expressions neutral, as the mother-in-law heaved herself out of her armchair, her legs wide apart … We are among women, her attitude seemed to say; no need to put on a show. Refurbished, ready to leave, they appeared doughty, indestructible. Suzanne, who had been so delicate, had filled out, had seemed almost to enjoy her new weight, her ability to dominate a room, had clearly felt that she had conferred a favour in coming so far from Camberwell Grove (but had been coming to Harrods anyway), had looked amused at the spinsterish seemliness of the flat, implying that there was so much life going on in her large house that there was no possibility of keeping it tidy …

  Beatrice had been subdued, politely impressed. Miriam had felt a renewed rush of love for her sister, who had behaved in so self-effacing a manner in the light of what she may have perceived as a threat to her way of thinking. They had attended Suzanne’s wedding, but had not discussed it, even with each other. The bridegroom was a man of sixty-five, his jacket buttoned tightly over a burgeoning stomach. The reception had been drowned in peals of determined laughter. Beatrice had been uncomprehending, almost stricken. Was this what happened when early fantasies were laid aside? When a mundane exchange took the place of what every woman must have secretly shaped in her mind, in her youth? Miriam could see that Beatrice was hurt, not only aesthetically, but morally as well, as if to surrender part of oneself, even the most expendable part, were an offence against nature. Miriam had merely been thankful to reach home, after all that noise, and had laid out her books with a new sense of worthiness. She had worked at home for a few days after that, aware that Beatrice might be glad of her presence. And since then work had gone on uninterrupted.