Strangers

by Anita Brookner

  ‘Hello? Are you there?’

  ‘Oh, do forgive me. I was distracted. It’s Mrs Gardner, isn’t it? How nice to hear from you.’ He could hear himself becoming fulsome, remembered the arm he had eagerly raised to greet her as she came towards him outside Florian’s and which had obviously given her the wrong impression. ‘How are you?’ he repeated, a little more formally.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right. I find these days after Christmas rather depressing, you know.’

  ‘You’re not back at work?’

  ‘Oh, no, the office is closed until after the New Year, thank goodness, but it does leave one rather at a loose end, with everyone away…’

  ‘Why don’t you come round for a drink? This evening, for example. We could talk about Venice. I believe you stayed on for a few days…’

  ‘I’d like that. I’m quite near you, you know, practically on the doorstep. If you’re sure?’

  ‘Oh, quite sure. Two hundred Crescent Mansions. Top floor.’

  Somewhat agitated, he removed a newspaper from the arm of his chair, went into the kitchen and retrieved a bottle of wine and two glasses, momentarily regretting that he had no champagne, with which, he supposed, it would have been appropriate to drink a toast to the New Year. But that would have been presumptuous, he reckoned: she must have more interesting invitations. His doorbell rang before he could entertain further suppositions, or even decide whether or not he was pleased with the prospect of this visit. He had thought earlier that he would devote the evening to Henry James, one of the later novels, which would entail scrupulous attention, a plan appropriate to evenings in which there was no possibility of distraction. When he opened the door he was not entirely pleased that he had uttered his invitation.

  But she was an attractive sight, well dressed, fully made up, with the inevitable earrings in place, surrounded by an aura of scent, the same scent he had once bought for the woman who had castigated him for being nice, and which had lingered on the air long after her departure.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘How nice to see you.’

  He led her into his pristine sitting-room, noticing to his surprise that it suddenly seemed almost comfortable.

  ‘What a nice flat,’ she said. ‘Have you lived here long?’

  ‘Perhaps a little too long. Do sit down. A glass of wine?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  The wine, however, did little to break the ice. She seemed glum, and he was once more reduced to harmless assiduity.

  ‘No work at the moment, I think you said.’

  ‘I’m going to give in my notice.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t do that. Certainly it sounded rather sad, but any sort of work is valuable, at least I found it so…’

  ‘I didn’t always do my present job, far from it. I was an events organizer.’

  Events organizer. It was one of those modern occupations, he reflected, like project manager, or indeed consultant, far removed from what he considered to be proper work.

  ‘What did that entail?’

  ‘Well, you know, organizing events. Launches for record albums, and so on. Gallery openings sometimes. Meeting interesting people.’

  ‘It sounds very glamorous.’

  ‘Oh, it was. Hard work, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m thinking of trying to get back into it, although with my housing situation so undecided this might not be the right time.’

  He tried to steer her away from this subject. He had, he was surprised to note, little interest in her emotional affairs, although he could see that she was preoccupied, somewhat depressed. Instead he poured them both another glass of wine. He knew, from past experience, that she had no interest in himself and thought back with some regret to his lost evening with Henry James. But she had made the effort, and there was that reminiscent scent, which, despite its connection with past disappointments, suited her moody demeanour very well. The wine had brought a flush to her cheeks and enhanced her appearance. Anyone might have called her a good-looking woman, with her fair skin and hair, and a slender body, or what he could see of it, encased in a black pullover and longish black skirt. He was obscurely pleased that she was not wearing trousers, pleased too that she was treating this impromptu meeting as a formal occasion.

  Outside the dark window rain must be falling: he could hear cars sizzling on a wet surface. So there was little point in suggesting that they go out for a meal, which would have provided a convenient conclusion to the evening. Instead he said, ‘You’re settled here for the time being, then. Quite a pleasant part of town, I’ve always thought.’

  ‘Well, for a few months, I suppose. My friend is in New York for six months, which is quite convenient. In six months’ time I could be anywhere. Anyway, in six months’ time my husband might have seen his way to buying me a flat. Or a house. I’d prefer a house.’

  ‘Oh, so would I. A proper house.’

  ‘Only at the moment I’ve just got my allowance. He’s quite generous, really, but it’s not the same.’ She touched her earrings, as if the gesture reassured her. ‘I’d better pick up some food, I suppose. I seem to remember a shop on the corner…’

  ‘Why don’t you leave your shopping until tomorrow? It seems quite wet out. I could make us both some scrambled eggs. Would that be enough?’

  She brightened. ‘Toast?’ she said hopefully.

  ‘Certainly. And fruit to follow.’

  It was the right suggestion, enabling them both to fill their respective roles, his paternal, or rather avuncular, hers prettily independent, but with an edge of melancholy which he could not help finding attractive. As they ate their meal he felt emboldened to ask more questions, and learned, in return, that she was estranged from her parents, who lived in Norfolk, but that this was not a matter for regret on her part, nor even, she thought, on theirs. ‘I couldn’t wait to leave home,’ she said. ‘I wanted my freedom. As soon as I left school I started travelling. That’s how I met my husband, though that was much later, of course.’ She flicked back her hair. ‘Do you mind if I smoke? I know it’s forbidden…’

  ‘Do. I always found it rounded off a meal. I can’t think why I gave up. I think I’ll join you.’

  They were now perfectly at ease. They agreed that Venice had been something of a let-down, relegated it to the past. ‘Coffee?’ he enquired.

  ‘Lovely. One more cigarette and then I must go.’

  To his surprise he found that it was ten fifteen. ‘I’ll call a taxi.’

  ‘Thank you for a lovely evening,’ she said politely, now younger than her proper age, which was, he supposed, around fifty.

  ‘Thank you for coming. I’m so glad you got in touch.’ This time he meant it. ‘Perhaps you’ll get in touch again?’

  ‘If you’re sure?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ he said.

  7

  The second encounter took place in the street, on a cold misty morning that seemed to promise an indefinite prolongation of an unyielding winter. With something of the exaggerated relief he had expressed in Venice he raised his hand to her and was delighted when she did the same. This was gratifying, though he warned himself to be prudent with such gestures, knowing that they were likely to be misinterpreted.

  ‘How nice to see you. And on such a miserable morning.’

  This sounded wrong, although he did not quite see what else he could have said. Again she made a pleasant sight, her cheeks pink with the cold, a child’s woollen hat pulled down almost to her eyebrows. She looked young, younger than she had in her formal clothes. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked. This too seemed wrong, but apparently the only way to avoid social gaffes was to opt out of society altogether, and he was not quite ready to do that, although woefully out of practice.

  ‘Just off to see a friend,’ she said. ‘For coffee. I enjoyed our scrambled eggs evening.’

  ‘You must look in again when you’re not busy.’

  ‘I’d like that. Must go now. Nice to see you.’

&nb
sp; After the remark about the scrambled eggs he resolved to stock up with something more substantial, in case she did in fact visit him again, and made his way to the Italian delicatessen, where he bought supplies that would undoubtedly be out of date when this mythical visit took place, if it ever did. Yet somehow he knew that she would get in touch, even though he might never know when. He felt a certain lack of anxiety, which surprised him, and he hoped that she might feel the same. Nevertheless he went home with two bags of food, feeling as virtuous as a regular householder.

  This illusion soon faded, and once more he upbraided himself for the promptness of his assumptions. Puzzled, he sat down and contemplated this all too familiar sensation. It was not even that he found her attractive, although he could see that she would be appealing, in a rather obvious way, to many men. The fault lay not with her but with himself. The fact was that all feeling for women had left him. This, he knew, was a lamentable side-effect of growing older: one concentrated on oneself, alert to the warnings from the only body one would now know well. This was akin to the loss of hope, even of faith, not faith in the spiritual sense, but faith in one’s own ability to continue. He had enjoyed her company that evening, although he had found himself wary of the intrusion: the thought of how to end the event without seeming impatient had been at the back of his mind. And yet he had longed for an acquaintance for some time. A friend was too much to hope for, but a familiar voice, a familiar face would answer as much of a need as he was now likely to feel. And his eagerness in Venice, that urgent hand raised in greeting, and his pleasure at her answering gesture, could not quite be forgotten. He shrugged. This was all useless. He might see her in the street, but there were no indications that she might call again. Why should she? She had friends, and would soon find an occupation. Besides, as Proust’s Swann had so cruelly observed, she was not his type. Nevertheless he stowed the food he had bought in various cupboards and resolved to spend the day away from the flat, out of range of any putative telephone call.

  He walked out and turned instinctively in the direction of town, though he had little to do there. A call at the bank to check his investments and then, he supposed, lunch somewhere. The day had lightened but was still overcast: it would be dark in the evenings for another two months. He was depressed by the state of the weather, as all those who had little contact with nature (now known as the environment, he reminded himself) were bound to be. Once more the vista of a warm lighted house came to mind, but he felt he had exhausted this illusion, and did not particularly wish to revive it. The reality was so other that he could not summon his usual smile for those few shopkeepers who purported to recognize him, even to count him as a neighbour. His particular downheartedness had, he knew, something to do with Mrs Gardner, or rather with his instinctive preparations for a further visit from her. In truth he had no expectations from her company, which he would not normally have chosen. But she raised the ghost of eager preparations undertaken in the past, for other women, and for one in particular, for whom there could be no successor. This too had followed a pattern. Women, after pursuit on his part, had found him disappointing in a way he had never fully understood. His appearance, he supposed, was misleading: he was tall, and to all intents and purposes agreeable to look at, but his longing – for home, for love, for consolation – let him down. This became apparent in the course of intimacy, for which he could only blame himself. As to the source of this longing, he was still far from clear: simply he concluded that something was missing in his temperament. He no longer thought in terms of entitlement but supposed that his lovers did so, automatically, instinctively, and had decided that their entitlements were superior to his. They had not made a gracious exit from his life after the long welcome he had so lovingly prepared for them. This he had almost understood – understood their annoyance, perhaps, certainly understood their discomfiture. Although that had hardly matched his own. He had come up against a specifically female resistance which he could not hope to understand. Thereafter the idea of seeking comfort from a woman had bred in him a resistance of his own, and that in time became the essence of his disappointment. No woman now could remedy this, although a child might have done so.

  He sighed. This thinking was retrograde and quite purposeless. He wondered at the persistence of such dark memories and reckoned that they were what kept psychiatrists in business. He was aware that there were many agencies that claimed to be able to relieve one of the past. One had only to read the more populist newspapers to be made privy to the sufferings of others (‘My drink and drugs hell’), but who could believe in a cure, a fresh start? He remembered asking directions of an elderly man once in Paris, to be met with the words, ‘Monsieur, il ne faut pas partir d’ici.’ That was the nub of the matter, a false start, an unsatisfactory continuation. Yet without a past, he thought, the present remained undefined, one’s expectations frozen for all time, and random, without direction. As ever he thought he might have done better, even prospered, in another era, or even another place, where the natives, the citizens, were more helpful, more curious, and indeed more candid. He longed to have lived in one of those confessional novels he had read as a young man – The Sorrows of Young Werther, Adolphe – in which whole lives were vouchsafed to the reader, with all their shame, yet as if there were no shame in the telling. Here, now, one was consciously checked by a sort of willed opacity, a social niceness that stalled one’s attempts to make real contact. The answer might be to go in search of that other place, and eventually to find an easy republic of manners in which one could communicate and be understood. Even so he wondered if this were possible outside the confines of a novel. Such a stratagem had been envisaged more than once, when he had found himself, unprompted, gazing longingly out of a window. It seemed as though the resources he had always sought in others were no longer available, perhaps never had been, and all that was left to him was another kind of exploration.

  He found that he had reached Marylebone Lane, without having been aware of the streets he had passed through, went into a café he remembered and ordered coffee and a sandwich. He had no desire to go home, and indeed the day was now not unpleasant, had resolved itself into mildness, with a hint of better light to come in the months ahead. A walk would tire him sufficiently to ensure a good night’s sleep, or rest without further introspection. His memories were in any case outdated, and he had no desire to revive those random sensations of familiarity which were of no use to him now. He set out to walk back across the park, and indeed found a sort of energy in doing so. As he neared Old Brompton Road he was made abruptly aware of tiredness but stubbornly continued. At the sight of a bookshop he felt a desire to be in a closed space and went in, though he had little need for more books. The books he remembered had nothing to do with the life he now led, yet they promised so much in the way of revelation. This too was misleading: revelation only benefited the teller, rarely his audience. Yet such revelations that stayed with him remained his only touchstone of authenticity.

  ‘Anything I can help you with?’ enquired a young assistant.

  ‘Travel,’ he replied, and was directed to a corner.

  Vienna, he thought. Prague. Naples. And of course Venice. But he knew these places, which were in any case too famous, too important. What he was after was something smaller, a landscape, his own, from which he could view a mystical sunset, and where he might capture that fabled rayon vert, that brief streak of light before the darkness closed in. This would be entirely self-justifying, without relation to the past or indeed to the present, if that present were to consist of dull streets and closed faces, the present in which he was obliged to live his life, a life comfortable enough but without the enlightenment he had always sought. Back in the flat he surrendered to his own fatigue and would have slept, maybe even did so for a few seconds before being roused by the phone.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice he was beginning to recognize. ‘It’s Vicky Gardner. Sorry I couldn’t stop this morning. I was off to see someone who might h
elp me with some work. No luck, however.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said absently. He had forgotten all about her, so intense had been his introspection.

  There was a pause. ‘I was wondering if you were in now. I’d very much like your advice. I’m sure you’d be the person to ask. The thing is,’ she went on, but he interrupted her.

  ‘Why don’t you come over?’ he heard himself say. ‘I’m more than happy to help if I can.’

  He reckoned he had perhaps twenty minutes in which to rest his aching legs, but remembered with relief that he had bought all that food earlier in the day and that now would be a chance not to let it go to waste.

  8

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I need some financial advice. You were in finance, I think you said.’

  ‘I worked in a bank, so in a manner of speaking…’

  He was wondering at what point he should put the water on to boil for the pasta. The salami and olives seemed to have disappeared: inroads had been made into the ciabatta. Mentally he substituted grapes for the sliced oranges with cointreau he had planned. His attention was claimed in a quite other direction.

  ‘It’s the same old problem,’ she said, appropriating another olive. ‘Where to live. My friend rang last night to say she might be returning earlier. That means I’ll have to find somewhere else.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘Oh, no, not really. I’ve got friends all over the place. They’re used to me turning up. But I need to get settled. I need a permanent address. Then I can seriously get a job. I mean a serious job. It’s not as if I were not qualified. I feel I have quite a lot to offer, you know?’

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ he concurred. He decided to leave the matter of her qualifications until a little later. He could see that she might be useful in some capacity: she was friendly and direct and might be a considerable adjunct to a harassed managing director in some business or other. She would make excellent contacts, since she had so effortlessly engaged him in whatever enterprise he was now supposed to address. Besides, she was attractive, and clearly considered herself to be an asset to any man on whom she might bestow her favour. His role would be a minor one, he deduced. He decided that any involvement on his part would be limited. In any case he had nothing to offer her in the way of financial advice, knowing little of her circumstances, which appeared hazy. The travels, the apparent ease with which she moved house, the fact that she had, as she said, a lot to offer, all struck him as unusual. On the other hand he knew nothing of peripatetic lives, could not even imagine being without obstinate memories, longed even now for deeper roots, for a more settled home, as if a future bereft of these questionable attributes were unthinkable, although they pertained more to dream than to initiative. Looking at her now he felt no more drawn to her than he had done when they met on the plane. Why then, outside Florian’s, had it seemed a matter of urgency to make contact?