Strangers

by Anita Brookner

  He bought a couple of paperbacks, which he suspected he would not read. They were more in the nature of a token, a memento of his life in this so familiar country, which, to his surprise, he seemed to be leaving. Again he reminded himself that he could always come back, that he might even envisage a life with Sarah, if her thought processes echoed his own, which he suspected might be the case. But even so the sun might beckon, and would continue to do so. That the sun was a metaphor he did not doubt, but that merely gave it more power. And she was right, as she had always been right: to be reduced to the same arguments, the same irritations, would merely spell tedium, unwanted reminiscence, a dread knowledge of time wasted. Surely a rash decision, such as he seemed to have taken, was in every way to be preferred.

  Yet the familiar streets held a promise of safety, however illusory. He could live here almost unthinkingly, free to indulge his every inclination. He was solvent, housed, not obliged to invent his life, as he would be in another setting. All that notion of making it new, as he had tried to explain his uncharacteristic impulse to Sarah, now seemed pure fantasy. Although imagination was highly desirable, reason was safer. And it was reason which now reasserted itself as potential dangers took shape, dangers multiplied by distance.

  Once more in the flat he went through the motions of packing a bag, then sat down, bewildered, as if the whole adventure, still to be undertaken, were some sort of madness. The days before him were empty, and the emptiness was as much of a burden as it always had been. Yet his mind had still to be made up, and without some sort of outside agency he was doomed to remain in this divided state, apparently without any form of resolution.

  When the telephone rang he sprang to answer it, thinking Sarah must have been subject to the same sort of paralysis. But it was another voice that roused him.

  ‘Hello, hello. I’m back. Just landed. I was wondering if I could just…’

  Quietly he replaced the receiver. Just as quietly he picked up his bag, closed the door behind him, and set out for France, beginning his journey to another life. Making it new.