Providence

by Anita Brookner

  While he lay in the bath, she sat at the window and looked into the wet street. It was raining hard now and she could see the lights reflected in deep puddles. She lit a cigarette – the first of the day, she noticed with surprise – and sat there becalmed. She felt herself assuming a more noble shape in the chair, envisaged her head as smaller, neater, her feet more graceful than usual. She looked round the small crimson room, its ugliness now masked by the dim lamps and the sight of Maurice’s clothes on the bed. ‘Where shall we eat?’ she called out to him. She heard him step out of the bath and pad towards her. ‘Kitty,’ he protested. ‘What is the matter with you suddenly? You want to do everything at once.’

  They ate at a small obscure restaurant near the hotel, for the rain had now settled in for the night. This time it was she who was hungry and he who watched her. She was flushed and animated; she took small pieces of meat on her fork and put them on his plate. He was rather silent, had completely lost his earlier ebullience. She supposed that the afternoon in the basilica had reawakened in him thoughts of God and death and memories of his tragic time and hopes for … For what, exactly? Did Maurice have any hopes? If he did, she did not know what they could be. With confidence and the right assumptions, thought Kitty Maule, I dare say you don’t need to live on faith at all. As, oddly enough, I do.

  They parted early, earlier than she had expected. In the vestibule of her hotel he rested his arms on her shoulders and looked at her again, his face stripped of its habitual masking smile. It was a time of extreme gravity for both of them. Neither of them spoke, and the moment, prolonged, silent, seemed endless, irreversible, of momentous significance. Finally she said, in a voice that she tried to make as light as possible, ‘You are tired, my darling. Go and get some sleep.’ He leaned his forehead against hers, seemed about to say something, then stood up with a sigh. ‘Goodnight, Kitty,’ he said, and went out into the rain.

  ELEVEN

  ‘Did you enjoy France, Miss Maule?’ asked Mills politely.

  ‘Very much, thank you,’ Kitty replied. ‘By the way, I hope you managed to go yourselves?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Larter. ‘I got a job on a building site. Made a bomb.’ The others smiled. Miss Fairchild had replaced her pullover with a crumpled cotton blouse. Otherwise nothing had changed.

  They were all the better for a break, Kitty decided. They looked fitter, had lost their winter pallor, had even become quite tanned in the sun that now broke into their little room and swirled motes of dust in a shaft that plunged from the window in front of her to the bookshelves behind her, glancing off the heads of Larter and Mills and irradiating Miss Fairchild’s long crepey hair. It was their last meeting and it was unlikely that they would ever come together again.

  Kitty cleared her throat. ‘This is our last meeting, as you know,’ she said, ‘and I thought we might do two things today. We’ll take a final look at Adolphe and see if the end of the novel is consonant with the beginning. And then we might ask ourselves what it tells us about the Romantic hero as an entity, a phenomenon. Or indeed if there is such a thing as the Romantic hero, or whether it is an archetype set up by the Romantics themselves. Who would like to start?’

  ‘The thing that struck me,’ said Larter, ‘was that when I read the novel again I could visualize the end far more easily than I could the beginning.’

  Kitty smiled. ‘Would you explain?’ she asked.

  He reflected briefly. ‘It all goes on in this rather mournful manner and you can’t see why it should ever end. The descriptions …’ He nodded his head to Kitty. ‘You were right. The words give this very impression. They are absolutely colourless. They describe very violent emotions but they are absolutely colourless. Abstract.’

  ‘Do you find that this works for or against the tenor of the story?’ asked Kitty.

  ‘Against,’ said Mills.

  ‘For,’ said Larter.

  ‘You disagree with the effect as it stands, Philip?’ asked Kitty. ‘Jane?’

  ‘I don’t like the book,’ said Miss Fairchild.

  ‘That is your prerogative,’ allowed Kitty, ‘but you will have to tell us why you feel this way. Can you do that?’ There was a pause, while they waited for a pronouncement. Then Larter could be restrained no longer.

  ‘To go back to what I was saying. I visualize the end, which I would not be able to do if the beginning were not kept absolutely, rigorously neutral.’

  ‘Examples, please,’ said Kitty.

  ‘Well, after Adolphe has decided to leave Ellénore and writes to his horrible friend, telling him of his resolve, and after the letter has fallen into Ellénore’s hands, she becomes ill.’

  ‘It is a very imprecise illness,’ murmured Kitty.

  ‘Yes, it’s clearly a fictional device and not very well handled. But after that, they go for a walk. A last walk, because she’s obviously dying. And the author actually and for the first time refers to the scenery.’

  Mills searched his text. ‘He simply says it was one of those winter days with pale sunshine … no leaves on the trees … no birds. I don’t call that much of a description.’

  Kitty smiled. ‘You obviously want the author to write it differently. You want another book altogether. So does Jane.’ Miss Fairchild nodded and started to wind a long strand of hair around her finger.

  ‘The point is,’ Larter almost shouted, ‘that in the course of this walk that you find so uninteresting, there is a sound, and that is the dimension that has been missing from the words so far.’

  ‘Good,’ said Kitty. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, Adolphe, in the course of this walk, which lasts a mere paragraph, no doubt to your disappointment’ – he addressed these words to Mills – ‘hears nothing but icy grass creaking under their feet.’ He stopped dramatically.

  Mills removed his glasses. ‘I don’t see anything remarkable in that,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I think it is significant rather than remarkable,’ said Kitty. ‘For the first time we are aware of the author’s consciousness rather than his recital. The gap between the writer and the reader is closing. And in the end it breaks down altogether.’

  ‘I find the ending quite unsatisfactory,’ said Mills. ‘If only he had just let her die. But he can’t leave it alone. He has to find a posthumous letter. And then he has to pretend to be somebody else, writing to an editor and saying he has found the manuscript and would it be worth publishing. And then the editor has to write back saying yes, but he doesn’t think it will do any good.’ Mills shook his head. ‘Surely this is very clumsy?’

  ‘It is clumsy as fiction, but by this time the author is no longer writing a novel. He is trying to distance something that happened and from which he cannot recover. Can you tell me the point at which this becomes apparent?’

  Larter expelled a jet of smoke, removed his long stained finger from between the pages of his book, and imposing silence with his hand, intoned, ‘ “It was no longer the regret for love, it was a feeling both sadder and more sombre: love so identifies itself with the loved object that there is a sort of charm even in despair.” ’ He broke off. ‘Is that it?’ he asked Kitty.

  ‘Almost,’ she replied. ‘But you started too early. Go on.’

  ‘ “… I did not wish to die with Ellénore; I was going to live without her in this desert of a world that I had so often longed to inhabit independently. I had broken with the one who loved me; I had broken that heart, companion of my own, which persisted in its devotion to me, in its untiring tenderness; already isolation engulfed me.” That’s it,’ he nodded, almost to himself.

  ‘Go on,’ said Kitty.

  ‘ “Ellénore was still alive, but I could no longer confide my thoughts to her; I was already alone in the world; I no longer lived in that atmosphere of love that she diffused around me; the air that I breathed seemed harsher to me, the faces of the people that I met more indifferent; the whole of nature seemed to tell me that I should never again be loved.” ’

  ‘Psychiat
rists call this phenomenon “separation anxiety”,’ said Kitty. ‘It is more widespread than you suppose. Sociologists blame the alienating effects of modern urban life. But Adolphe is on an estate in the middle of Poland: he suffers the disorder in its pure state. Alienation is a Romantic phenomenon. Do you see what Adolphe says towards the very end of the book? Philip?’

  ‘ “How it weighed on me, that liberty I had longed for! How my heart missed that dependence which had so frequently repelled me! Formerly all my actions had an aim; with each of them I was sure either to avert pain or to give pleasure. I complained of this; I was impatient that a loving eye should watch my every move, and that the happiness of another should be of so much consequence. Now nobody watched me; I was of interest to nobody; nobody claimed my time or my attention; no voice called me back when I went out. I was free indeed, I was no longer loved; I was a stranger to the rest of the world.” ’

  “ ‘To everyone,” ’ corrected Kitty. ‘He means that he has lost that intimacy with one person that he had so resented. But it also means that he has entered into a state of alienation.’

  ‘Then I was right,’ said Larter, ‘when I talked about Existentialism.’

  ‘You were right in a certain sense,’ said Kitty. ‘But you must not project forwards. Constant is not an existentialist. The only way he can get out of his dilemma is to deliver a blanket moral condemnation of Adolphe’s conduct through the person of “the editor”.’ In her clear voice she read, ‘ “La grande question dans la vie c’est la douleur que l’on cause, et la métaphysique la plus ingénieuse ne justifie pas l’homme qui déchire le cœur qu’il aimait. Je hais, d’ailleurs, cette fatuité d’un esprit qui croit excuser ce qu’il explique; je hais cette vanité qui s’occupe d’elle-même en racontant le mal qu’elle a fait, qui a la prétention de se faire plaindre en se décrivant, et qui, planant indestructible au milieu des ruines, s’analyse au lieu de se repentir.” He is very scrupulous, you see,’ she added. ‘He allows himself no extentuating circumstances.’

  ‘Neither do the existentialists,’ said Larter.

  They paused, exhausted, even faintly disgusted, by the book. Outside in the corridor came the sound of footsteps, a cough, a burst of laughter, the footsteps dying away. It was very warm. The afternoon, Kitty realized, was not going well.

  ‘What about sex?’ demanded Larter, splitting a match with his thumbnail. ‘Are these two lovers, or what? Or is it all over between them?’

  ‘We are not meant to know that,’ said Kitty. ‘They are certainly in thrall to each other. But sometimes, you see,’ she said with an intimation of distress, ‘romantic love can lead to disastrous fidelities. Or indeed ultimately to chastity,’ she added.

  Miss Fairchild’s large and slanted eyes slid towards Kitty as if expecting her to expand on this point. Then her eyes slid round to Mills and dropped to look at his watch. She never wore one herself. Then, sweeping her hair briskly behind her neck, she pronounced that she thought Adolphe was mad.

  ‘That is very interesting,’ said Kitty, rallying. ‘In the eighteenth century his symptoms would certainly have been diagnosed as a form of madness. They knew all about morbid sensitivity then. It was an entirely negative characteristic, regarded as bad luck, the result of being unfortunately born, as Diderot put it. Why, then, does it assume such immense importance in the first third of the nineteenth century? Jane?’

  ‘Something to do with the loss of faith?’

  Suddenly, into Kitty’s mind, came an image of the interior of a Gothic church. She saw herself sitting alone in a pew, with candles burning somewhere to her right, and she heard footsteps in the background. She remembered feeling intolerable loneliness in such a situation. And yet, she thought, I should be intellectually dishonest if I represented this feeling as the one that crippled Adolphe.

  ‘I do not think that Adolphe ever lost his faith,’ she replied to Miss Fairchild. ‘Because I do not think he ever found it in the first place. I think he supposed that reason would carry him through. Although he behaves in an unreasonable manner, his actual reasoning processes work overtime.’

  ‘That is probably what is wrong with him,’ said Larter.

  ‘Yes, but it is characteristic of the Romantic to reason endlessly in unbearable situations, and yet to remain bound by such situations. Take any example you care to mention, fact or fiction. And it still obtains today. For the Romantic, the power of reason no longer operates. Or rather, it operates, but it cannot bring about change.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ conceded Mills. ‘In the eighteenth century they thought that change could only come about by the operation of reason.’

  ‘And then this awful realization,’ continued Larter, lighting up his last cigarette and fanning his spent match absently.

  Miss Fairchild closed her book and with it the whole subject of Adolphe and his distressing career.

  ‘That sort of reason doesn’t make sense,’ she said.

  The girl’s obtuseness worried Kitty who knew that she was by no means stupid. Perhaps she simply had other things on her mind, she thought. Perhaps she finds me dull, tiresome. Yet she is in no way antagonistic. She is even quite pleasant, in a detached sort of manner.

  ‘That is not quite the point,’ she replied. ‘Romantics would claim greater knowledge of the world, greater understanding of imponderables, greater power of feeling. They would claim greater vulnerability, greater loyalty, greater passion. They might be right or wrong. We are dealing with a work of fiction, and I simply want to make the point that in this period fiction, indeed all creative endeavour, becomes permeated with the author’s own autobiography. And yet I think it is important to treat only the finished work – whether it is music or painting or, as in this case, a novel – within the terms of those disciplines. Does Adolphe succeed or fail as a novel?’

  ‘Oh, it succeeds,’ Larter conceded. ‘As an essay in alienation there is nothing like it until Camus.’

  ‘And as a novel there is nothing like it ever again,’ said Kitty. ‘I am sorry to be so pedantic about words, but the potency of this particular story comes from the juxtaposition of extremely dry language and extremely heated, almost uncontrollable sentiments. If it were overstated, I think I should share Jane’s reaction. But there is a feeling that it is almost kept under lock and key, that even if the despair is total, the control remains. This is very elegant, very important. It is also atypical. That is why I chose it. Its early date – 1806 – makes it useful as a yardstick for the shift in consciousness between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Just think, Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor only two years previously. Some people thought they were living in a new age. Others, more astute, recognized it as a mere interim.’

  She paused, seeing their interest suddenly withdrawn. ‘Are there any questions?’ she asked. ‘Yes, what is it, John?’ For Larter had quite unceremoniously left the room, only to return, a few seconds later, with a bottle of white wine and four mugs abstracted from the students’ canteen.

  Mills cleared his throat. ‘We wanted to say thank you, Miss Maule. We have enjoyed these sessions very much indeed. And we look forward to your lecture.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ echoed Larter, getting busy with the bottle, while Miss Fairchild reached under the table and produced a tin of biscuits.

  ‘Why, Jane,’ said Kitty in astonishment. ‘This is really very kind. It is kind of you all,’ she corrected herself, for the idea had obviously come from Larter and Mills. Yet the fact that Miss Fairchild had lent herself to the occasion, that she had shown a sign of solidarity, that she had, not to put too fine a point on it, actually joined in, seemed to her immensely encouraging.

  The wine, which Larter had concealed in a small sink on the landing, was agreeably chilled, and the biscuits, which Kitty had assumed to be the creation of Miss Fairchild’s own hands, turned out to be ordinary digestives, but very welcome, none the less. Kitty felt extremely fond of them, although the afternoon seemed to her not to have been a s
uccess. Perhaps Adolphe was the wrong book, she thought, although she had previously been convinced that it was the right one. Perhaps they should have had something easier. Berlioz’s Memoirs, for example.

  ‘You might do a little extra reading, now that you have no more classes,’ she said. ‘I would recommend Berlioz’s Memoirs.’

  ‘Oh, terrific stuff,’ agreed Larter. ‘You haven’t got a fag, have you, Kitty? I mean Miss Maule? I’ve run out.’

  ‘Will you be staying on here?’ asked Mills. ‘I shall have to say goodbye to everyone at the end of the summer and go back to my own job. But I’d like to know where I could get in touch with you again.’

  ‘I expect I shall be here,’ said Kitty, who did not know anything of the sort and indeed did not care to think about the future in those terms.

  ‘We ought to have a reunion in about five or ten years’ time,’ said Larter, helping himself to another of Kitty’s cigarettes and stowing it away in his empty packet. ‘On the steps of St Paul’s. Carrying a copy of Adolphe so that we recognize each other.’ He brandished the bottle and tried to refill Mills’s mug. ‘Come on, you old sot, we know you get drunk every night. Jane?’

  Miss Fairchild, who had drunk the wine steadily, as though it were milk, held out her mug. Her cheeks were very faintly flushed, and the hair clung to her damp temples. Holding the bottle in an uncertain hand, Larter looked at her hopelessly. She saw his naked glance, as did the others, changed her mind and shook her head, her eyes lowered, her mouth slightly open. There was a brief silence. After a second or two, Miss Fairchild reached out a delicate hand, took a digestive biscuit, and bit into it with her small even teeth.

  Kitty drew a deep breath. Merde, alors, she thought. Larter must be protected from this. ‘If you’d like to come and see me tomorrow, John,’ she said, ‘I will give you a bibliography and you can have it photocopied for the others.’ She rose and raised her mug. ‘To you all,’ she said. ‘And thank you.’