Strangers

by Anita Brookner

  In that somnolescent visitation, half memory, half fantasy, he recovered something of his youth, and indeed saw himself as confident, unquestioning, possessing for a brief spell a present and a future. ‘You’re so well situated here,’ people said of the flat, which had once represented what he thought of as an appropriate solution to the problem of where to be, how to be. When invited out to dinner he would surreptitiously assess the comforts of other people’s appointments, would long to move a lamp a little closer to a certain chair, replace the blinds with curtains. Whereas his flat, with its minimal advantages, its undeniable convenience, always struck him as alien. There was, he thought, not for the first time, an excellent Freudian term for his flat: unheimlich. That described it utterly. Quite simply it was not home.

  Now the known world was fragmented, and he was displaced to this neighbourhood of strangers. His dreams were not so much romantic as territorial, a retracing of old paths. The same went for friendships, which, like that old house, were faintly anachronistic, like those lost friends of his youth, amicable witnesses to each other’s progress, knowing without judging, humble, artless, literally so for those tastes came later. In that company, in those surroundings, he had once felt entirely safe, so safe that he was able to indulge plans of escape, and in due course to act on them. And by a circuitous route, which some might call destiny, found himself in this small space, his suitcase at his feet, as if his journey had been no more physical than yet another dream, almost a metaphor.

  A card, which he picked up from the doormat, invited him to New Year drinks in the chairman’s office at the bank as it had done ever since he had retired. He would accept, of course, and, as ever, leave before vague suggestions about dinner began to circulate. He would be home before the real celebrations started. He never regretted his early departure, which had come to be expected. It was assumed that he had other invitations, a matter he did nothing to clarify. On such occasions he was his own best and worst company.

  He had the impression that something in the flat had been moved, and spent a fruitless half hour searching for what it might be, until he realized that it was his own recent displacement that had lent his arrangements this air of unfamiliarity. He heard his young neighbour, who was something in the City, come crashing down the stairs on his way to work. Work! That was what was missing. At the age of seventeen he had heard his father repeatedly impressing on him the importance of work and had resented it. It was not perhaps the most benevolent advice to give to a school leaver. Moreover, he knew it was inspired by his father’s disappointment with his own life. Now he was aware that the advice had been sensible; work had saved him, although he had secretly hoped that something more interesting would give his life colour and meaning. Love, he thought, and still thought, would do it, but in this respect he had been no more successful than his father. Sturgis loved women wistfully, and would make no distinction between them: all held the promise of fulfilment, and if this had proved illusory he still appreciated their confident worldliness, their apparent expertise in the matter of day-to-day living. The women he had chosen, and who had, in one way or another, decided against him, had been more far-sighted than himself, and had discerned in his unremarkable courtship the prospect of a lifetime of boredom, though he had thought to provide them with everything that they desired. But they had desired an excitement which he could not provide. Now he recognized that they had been right to do so. He kept no mementoes of the two associations that had meant most to him, understood that his own emotional legacy had been inadequate for the knightly quest that he had somehow set himself. Yet he remained curious, fascinated almost, by the minds of women, which, he reminded himself, even Freud had failed to penetrate, their combination of frivolity and determination, their absolute otherness. It was a pity that he had known so few women. A sister might have explained these matters to him, but there had been no sister, and the women he had loved had declined to play a sisterly role. For this he blamed himself, although it had occurred to him more than once that other men might secretly feel the same.

  He thought briefly of the woman on the plane and hoped that she would not get in touch. His final impression was one of irritation, his own, and no doubt hers as well. By the time they had finished lunch he had decided that she would not do. She had no doubt arrived at the same conclusion. How could she not? She was still quite young and he was old; he hoped that his fatigue had not been too apparent, though she herself had looked disheartened. He had felt pity, but also some impatience. Her story of divorce, of homelessness, had been unconvincing: rather than sorrow he had been aware of a desire for revenge. He suspected that she was rather more in the wrong than she allowed, but was determined to play for sympathy as the more winning card. She was clearly not the sort of woman to live modestly; she wanted more, much more than she was allowed. If they were to meet again she would doubtless divulge more information about herself and her current dilemma, which came across as dissatisfaction, certainly, but also boredom. He did not intend to be kind. Some sort of reluctant sympathy had been drawn out of him, but he recognized this for what it was, the residue of unused feelings from earlier times.

  The other person from whom he hoped not to hear was Helena, the pseudo-relative whose company he sought not for his own sake but, as he imagined, for hers. It was his duty, as a family relic, to make sure that she was still alive, and to do so with a show of cordiality. He knew that there was no sentiment in this; unfortunately the habit had been established and was now difficult to break, the cheerfulness with which he managed to greet her on those mournful Sunday afternoons steadily dulled by her own indifference. His task was to enquire, also steadily, about her own activities. His own were ignored. And yet he served some sort of purpose, enabling her to parade her self-sufficiency, and even to reflect, to her own advantage, on his assiduity. He was expert at disguising his own indifference, perhaps more expert than she was, and all the friends referred to must have assured her of her own success. The most searching question she had ever asked him was, ‘What do you do with yourself all day?’ With the best will in the world he could not ignore the fact that this was mildly offensive. To avoid answering he had looked at his watch, had given a start of surprise, had apologized for the brevity of his visit, and left, giving his well-practised impression of having people to see, appointments to keep. It was this question, if he were honest, which had motivated his excursion to Venice. Whatever indignation he might have felt quickly transmuted into sadness for them both. When he telephoned to wish her a happy New Year, as he was bound to do, he hoped that the call would not be answered, so that he could leave a message of fulsome good wishes which involved no loss of face. This call could be composed some time into what he still thought of as the working week, and his own activities, such as they were, could be resumed.

  He decided to eat out, to behave like a tourist, which he felt himself to be, rootless, obliged to endure temporary accommodation. In that way his return to the flat might appear less weighty. He wondered what it would be like to live in an hotel, an occasional fantasy entirely at odds with the onerous reality of homes past and present. There could be a lightness to life if one declined to take it seriously, and what could be less serious than handing in one’s key every morning before leaving for the day? This fantasy, by dint of being familiar, became the private life he had been denied. The hotel would, of course, be somewhere abroad, Paris to start with, and then Rome or Naples, always in the south, himself young, filled with energy and desire, and free, with a future of achievement still before him. Although he had never had the courage to envisage this as a possibility, he knew that a modified version of this strategem was not entirely unrealistic. What had once been a romance – a younger version of himself, with choices still to be made – could be turned into some sort of practicality, but there would be fatal shortcomings: he was no longer the young eager figure whose tireless ardour would send him out into the fascinating city, whichever it happened to be, but old, cautious,
with a lifetime’s deliberation built into him, easily, too easily, tired, still formally dressed, and with the same formality informing his thinking. His outlook now was irreversibly that of an ageing man, weighed down with the responsibility of being a paid-up citizen, obliged to care for his health in the absence of those who might once have cared for it in his place. That fantasy self, the one who lived without constraints, had no place in his thinking, and yet he sometimes liked to think of himself as a young man living only in the present, in romantic surroundings, with his desire to guide him. He knew no young men apart from this upstairs neighbour, whose pin-striped seriousness was destroyed every morning by his tempestuous descent of the stairs and his banging of the street door behind him, certainly not an artist, as Sturgis had once wanted to be before serving his life sentence in the bank. And now it was all too late, and perhaps always had been. Nevertheless he decided to eat out, as if there were some vestige of that rootless young man, the one who had never been, still in command.

  During the dark months of the year this fantasy, on which he was free to elaborate, investing it with details of his own choosing, took on an autonomy, as if it were a work of art. It became as familiar to him as that old house. The two were somehow connected. This puzzled him until he realized that the life he had lived in the house and the unlived life he had created were antithetical simply because the unlived version was so superior to the reality. Paris, he decided; it would have to be Paris. And he could almost experience that uplifting moment of walking out into the sunlit street, his key left behind at the desk. The beauty of the imagined moment moved him almost to tears, so much so that he could, quite objectively, decide to put it aside in favour (but it was hardly a favour) of the familiar peregrination of old rooms and staircases, and wary of imparting this ideal to others, though that was hardly likely. He kept it secret, and when others spoke of holidays he felt no envy, sensing that his youth had not been wasted, because, had he the courage, he would have gained an experience denied to those holidaymakers, an experience that would have enabled him to enact further fantasies and to regain everything that he had lost, through inertia, through disappointment, and through a sadness that had become the very climate of his life.

  None of this was relevant to his immediate purpose, which was to sustain such life as he unalterably possessed. This would involve buying food and making his depleted surroundings more engaging. But he felt a distaste at the prospect of tempting his own appetite, and it was with relief that he left the building and breathed a lungful of damp air. He would walk to Victoria, buy his newspapers, and find a comfortable restaurant. He settled on the Goring Hotel, largely because it was an hotel, though nothing like the hotel of his imaginings. He took a seat resignedly, ordered food for which he had no desire, and as ever, set himself the task of observing his fellow diners. These did not look promising. Two youngish men at an adjacent table had a brusque dismissive air, even when talking to each other; colleagues, he decided, rather than friends. They ate severely, intent on the reason for their meeting, which was obviously a meeting rather than a social occasion.

  ‘Seddon will have to go,’ said the older of the two.

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘Incompetence.’

  ‘You can’t sack anyone for incompetence these days. They invoke their human rights.’

  ‘I’m prepared for that.’

  ‘He can drag it out, you know, noise it abroad, become a professional victim…’

  Good luck to him, thought Sturgis. He felt for the absent Seddon who was being plotted against in this well-fed and self-satisfied manner. He asked for the bill, having no desire to hear more. Something like this might have been at work in his own case had he not made his graceful exit. Although far from incompetent, he had been steady, all too reliable, and therefore boring. Institutions got as bored as people, he thought, and nodded pleasantly to the waiter as he was thanked for his usual large tip. Maybe it was not such a bad thing to be retired, he mused. The afternoon had lightened and he decided to walk home. After all, he had nothing else to do.

  There was a message on his answering machine.

  ‘Hello. It’s Vicky Gardner – we met in Venice. I’ll be at this number for the next few days. It would be nice to hear from you. I enjoyed our chat.’

  6

  At first he was annoyed at the interruption. He had been immersed in a reverie which must have had its origins in that familiar dream which took him by surprise with the sharpness of its detail. He had been back in the old house, although this time the house had a wider context, was grounded in the neighbourhood of his childhood, that unpretentious middleclass suburb with its row of shops that he could see from his bedroom window. The shops too were modest: a greengrocer, a chemist, a hairdresser, a dairy – not a supermarket in sight: they had not yet made their mark. He particularly remembered the proprietor of the chemist’s shop, a portly, dignified man in a white coat, who never failed to enquire after his mother’s health, and who had eventually been succeeded by his daughter. As a boy he had known this daughter. They had originally met on their way to school at an even younger age, and thereafter to different schools as they grew older. In time she herself had graduated into a white coat, and served her customers with something of the gravitas she had inherited from her father. They still used each other’s Christian names – hers was Patricia – but the original intimacy had had to be abandoned, for they were by now working, and therefore counted as adults, deemed to have acquired an adult demeanour. But he was surprised to realize that he remembered her vividly, both in appearance and in character, and for a while was acutely sorry to have lost touch with such a natural companion.

  The innocence of those days! One grew to resemble one’s parents, taking on the lineaments of their features, imitating their gestures. Now, when he looked in the bathroom mirror, he was startled to see his mother’s face looking back at him. But now the face was old, careworn, stamped with disappointment. That disappointment had come upon his parents naturally, with time, as it had in his own case. The interval of true innocence was, he knew, that brief moment before the onset of disappointment, which in his parents’ case was compounded by loneliness. Why were they so lonely? They had few friends, and his mother suffered by comparison with her more substantial relations, in particular her married cousins. There was no apparent justification for this but it became an established fact: she was the object of their pity, for they judged that she had made a poor marriage, and it became clear that she had at times thought this to be the case. But now Sturgis thought that they had been happy enough, until they realized that they were alone in the world, without sustaining company. This was now how he himself felt. That was why he was drawn back to that remote time when, for all its growing sadness, he had known his place, when he was still able to raise his hand to Patricia as he passed the shop on his way to work, when she raised her hand to him in response, so that he could take his place at the bus stop with a residual sense of sweetness that derived purely and simply from the fact that it had its origins in the past. But it was a past that was shared, and that alone made it precious.

  They should have married, he now thought. It would have been a marriage undertaken in all innocence, the same innocence that pertained to those early customs and surroundings. But just as the idea had entered his mind she had announced her engagement to the local doctor’s son. Her father was delighted, and indeed it made a kind of sense. As for himself, he had not been heartbroken. Even at that stage she had begun to acquire some of her father’s corpulence, and looked older than her years. Older, indeed, than he felt, with so many possibilities on offer. And they had lost touch, had lost sight of each other, and would never meet again, never raise their hands in acknowledgement as they passed each other on the street. That was what growing up did to some friendships, and growing older failed to redeem them. But somehow the memory persisted, in the strangest of ways, and she would appear to him in dreams, unaltered, much as she had been whe
n first encountered, on her way to school.

  This particular reverie, and others like it, left in its wake a residue of sadness, and not just sadness but distaste for his present arrangements – the dark little flat with its unknown, and, more often than not, transient neighbours, the slight panic that greeted him on waking to face another day, a day of conscientious goodwill towards people whom he would never entirely know, and for whom he did not entirely care. He was free, with a freedom he did not value, free to take holidays, and on a more mundane level to go anywhere at will, to take his meals away from home, without any forethought. But these freedoms were unattractive, and, he found, involved intense effort, in comparison with which going to do a day’s work was simplicity itself. He had never quite admitted to himself that he too was lonely – he left that complaint to the truly derelict – but he longed for conversation, for some sort of exchange, for the sort of questioning he was able to lavish on others, not out of need but out of sheer curiosity. His careful appearance, his good manners, he was puzzled to discover, somehow acted against him, as if he were suspected of an unattractive intrusiveness. In the end this reduced him to resignation, as if he could no longer expect any further human warmth other than the small amount he had received in his early life and with which he must now make his peace, the peace that very occasionally descended on him in the night, when he was fortunate enough to entertain some sort of company, and that mostly from the past. When the phone rang he had difficulty reconnecting with the present.