The Debut

by Anita Brookner

  Apparently there was not. For Mrs. Cutler, at the other end of the telephone, announced that George was in hospital for a few days but that it was not serious. “A bit of a turn,” said Mrs. Cutler, quite accurately. As she herself was leaving at the end of the following week, she thought it might be better if Ruth and her mother came home. George would no doubt need a bit of looking after once he came out of hospital. And she didn’t like to leave without saying goodbye to them. After all this time.

  Ruth told Helen the news, making it sound less important than it really was, but Helen lost her composure and screamed and wept, and Ruth had to sit up most of the night with her arms round her mother. When she eventually climbed into her bed, she could not sleep, for Helen, though sedated with the sleeping pills Ruth had found in her bag, was still agitated and moaned and muttered, streaking her rosy makeup as she moved her face compulsively on the pillow. “My darling,” sighed Helen. “Darling heart.” Lying so close to her mother, hearing the words of love, and knowing, in the course of that long night, that she would hear no others, Ruth covered her face and wept.

  * * *

  IN the morning it was still teeming with rain. Ruth got up and made tea for Molly, who smiled at her lovingly, and for Helen, who looked blankly ahead. Helen was shaky now, and Ruth had to steady the cup in her hand.

  “We had better make a start,” she said. “When you’re ready, go and use the bathroom.”

  But an hour later, washed and dressed herself, she had to rouse her mother out of a daydream and repeat her recommendations.

  This morning Helen moved stiffly, like an old woman. When she emerged from the bathroom, Ruth saw that she had not washed her face, which was now less rosy, less aquiline, and more than a little blurred. Again Ruth brushed her mother’s hair and helped her into her clothes. Helen said nothing. She pointed to Mrs. Weiss’s heavy bag, which Ruth handed to her. Helen opened it, pulled out her makeup box, which was sizable, and proceeded to ring her eyes with blue and restore her mouth. She blended rouge into her forehead, cheeks, and chin, put on her denim cap, and looked at Ruth as if to say, “I am ready.”

  Ruth packed the case, stripped the beds, restored the furniture to its rightful place, Molly thanking her repeatedly all the while. Ruth went to the shops and got Molly some more tea, and Molly in her turn insisted on presenting Ruth with at least two pounds of wizened apples to take home. “They are unsprayed,” she announced proudly. Ruth did not know what she meant, but did not intend to ask. “Perhaps,” she suggested, “you could let me have a carrier bag?” A bare seven minutes later Molly was back with a plastic bag imprinted with a cornucopia and the legend, “Here’s health!”; she handed it to Ruth, trying to hide her monstrous knuckles.

  Molly was not sorry they were leaving. She had not slept well and she had not liked the sounds that Helen was making in her sleep. She felt too ill herself to be of much use, and Helen was as uncompromising as ever, although Ruth was a dear, a real dear. Molly would have liked to ask Ruth to stay on but obviously the girl was going to have to look after her father until she got another housekeeper. Helen, of course, would be quite useless. And it was Saturday, and they would be expecting her down at the health-food shop. She was quite anxious for them to leave, really. Strange, when she was so lonely most of the time.

  She kissed Helen, who gave a sigh and kissed her back. She kissed Ruth, who tried not to pull her face away. But she was too slow in getting back to the drawing room to see them drive off in the taxi and to wave goodbye.

  * * *

  THE journey, again, was not too bad. They had a carriage to themselves, and Ruth had bought her mother a magazine. Helen glanced at the cover, then looked out of the streaming window; raindrops trembled and quivered in long diagonal streaks, and she could not see what lay beyond.

  At Victoria, things began to go wrong. They had to join a queue for taxis, Ruth struggling with the suitcase, the umbrella, the carrier bag, and her mother. Helen shivered. Ruth realized with alarm that she had very little money left and wondered if she dared change some travelers checks. But she was uneasy about her mother and did not like to leave her alone. The people in the queue were surly; there was no one she would have cared to trust. Taxis were infrequent, and small arguments broke out. When the taxis arrived, they did not always want to go where the passengers wanted them to, and some even drove off empty.

  Ruth put her packages down and took her mother in her arms, fearing for her in this damp and cold and acrimonious place. Helen rested lightly against her daughter, her head quite empty of thought. She had never been a maternal woman, had never felt that hunger that makes a mother reach to caress and stroke a child’s flesh and is never assuaged. Helen had been too beautiful, too happy, too successful, ever to feel premonitory loss. Now all she knew was that she was cold and uncomfortable, that she was lightheaded from the train and the unaccustomed noise, and that she could not quite concentrate on where she was or why she was there. Or why George was not there. Ruth, glancing at her mother, felt a pang of alarm. She would not be able to deal with this much longer.

  It was perhaps unfortunate that the taxi which arrived after three quarters of an hour was driven by a man with severe back pain and a delinquent son. Both were preying on his mind. He brooded as Ruth opened the door, pushed in the suitcase, the carrier bag, the umbrella, and finally Helen.

  “Oakwood Court?” he said. “That’s Kensington way, isn’t it? Sorry, love, can’t do it. I’m going back to the garage. Clapham.”

  Helen gave a moan and raised her fingers to her mouth. Ruth looked at her and panicked.

  “I think my mother is ill,” she said, kneeling on the floor with her mouth to the taxi driver’s window, as if in a confessional. “Please, do be kind, and take us home. We have no other way of getting there and I can’t put her back in the queue.”

  He looked around. “No thanks,” he said swiftly, for he did not like sick passengers and had enough troubles of his own. “Can’t be done,” he added.

  Ruth had one pound in her purse. “I will give you double the money,” she urged, though she had no hope of even paying the full fare. The magazine slid off Helen’s lap and Helen made no effort to retain it. Ruth glanced at her mother. Helen’s eyes were closed, her hand spread on her chest.

  Ruth screamed. “Take me home. Take me home. Take me home.” Tears spurted from her eyes, and her mouth opened wide, like a child’s. “Take me home,” she chanted. “Take me home.”

  People looked curiously in at the windows of the cab. A policeman approached from the back of the queue. Cursing, the driver fumbled with the gears and the cab moved off. Ruth continued to sob and for a long time stayed kneeling on the floor, with her head against the glass. She did not dare look back. She knew what she would find.

  By the time they reached Oakwood Court, Helen had died.

  Twenty-One

  * * *

  WHEN George came out of the hospital he was very quiet and very slow, although the doctor had assured him that he could and should lead a normal life. It was difficult to assess how the news of Helen’s death had affected him. When Ruth broke it to him, he was lying in a small cheerful ward, in strange striped pajamas; Mrs. Jacobs, with Roddy as chaperone, was unpacking small quantities of food and placing them in his locker, against all the regulations. The little parcels and dishes would be removed later by the nurses, but George had given up trying to tell her. He was afraid she would stop cooking for him.

  When he heard of Helen’s death he had pursed his lips in the old absent fashion which used to denote deep thought. Then he had sighed and reached for Sally’s hand, and clutching it, had slept for a bit. One tear slid down his cheek. They stood rigidly round his bed, as if he were going to die. A nurse came round with the tea trolley and woke him up, and then they knew he wasn’t.

  On the way out Mrs. Jacobs laid a tremulous and restraining hand on Ruth’s arm. “You won’t leave him now, will you, dear? You won’t go back to Paris?” Ruth, who found
the other woman’s kindness and anxiety rather affecting, said nothing. She had hoped to be able to return to Paris within the month, having found George a suitable housekeeper or else leaving the matter in Mrs. Jacobs’ hands. But it seemed that this was not to be. Yet she would have to go back, if only to get her notes on Balzac. The rest of her things—her cups and saucers, towels, knives and forks—she would have to leave behind.

  She explained this to Mrs. Jacobs, whose eyes widened with alarm. “Go now,” urged Mrs. Jacobs, “while he’s still in the hospital. But come back soon. He’s going to feel very lonely.” So she went to Paris for the inside of a day, collected her notes, tried to ring Duplessis at the Sorbonne, failed to reach him, had to leave, and came back on the Night Ferry with her briefcase in her hand. She arrived back in London just in time to collect George, who was being discharged from the hospital on that day. Roddy very handsomely offered to drive him back to Oakwood Court. Mrs. Jacobs hovered in attendance.

  When Ruth opened the door of the flat the air struck her as particularly musty. Mrs. Cutler had gone without washing up the fatal milk saucepan or removing the stained saucer from the kitchen table. There was a note by the telephone: “All the best! Keep your chin up!” Mrs. Jacobs, her nose wrinkling with distaste, opened the door of the refrigerator which had not been defrosted for some weeks and cleared out the shiny cheese and the wilting lettuce on which Ruth had been living. George moved slowly into Helen’s bedroom, took off his jacket and left it on the bed, and got into his dressing gown. Then he went into the drawing room and sat down in front of the television set and was soon fast asleep.

  Mrs. Jacobs did not like what she saw: neglect, decay, staleness. Nobody had cleaned this place out for weeks, even months. She opened as many windows as she dared, not caring to go into the bedrooms, and shook her head slowly when she saw the state of the dining room, the handsome table scarred with rings from hot dishes, and now piled high with Ruth’s books. She could get no sense out of George, whose pills made him very drowsy, and Ruth seemed oddly absent, as if she did not care to dwell on their present predicament. She had not even put an advertisement for a new housekeeper in The Lady. And, for once, Mrs. Jacobs did not dare offer to do it for her.

  A routine was slowly established. Ruth would get up and dust the flat and make her father’s breakfast and serve it to him in bed. She found it difficult to break into his inertia, which she attributed to the shock of his wife’s death, and after a time she came to accept it. She would tidy his bedroom while he had his bath, wait until he got dressed, although he would not put on a tie or a jacket, and, sitting him down in the drawing room with the newspaper, she would go out and do the shopping. After lunch George would rest and Ruth could get on with her work. In the late afternoon Mrs. Jacobs, escorted by Roddy, would call round with a casserole wrapped in a snowy napkin, or a plate of apple cake, which they would eat in the evening. George lived for her visits and tried to hold her hand, thus putting her into a state of acute embarassment. With her hand imprisoned, her eyes would wander uneasily to the faded wallpaper, the frayed carpet, the uncleaned windows. Roddy and Ruth would watch impassively, each disapproving of the other. Ruth was thinner and her hair had grown long. She did not pay much attention to what she wore these days. Roddy, on the other hand, was putting on weight; his new pin-striped suit was already a little too tight for him. He had more or less taken over the shop, for his aunt pronounced that her nerves were too bad to allow her to cope. He resented the time he had to spend ferrying her back and forth to Oakwood Court and wished that George would shove off so that he could be rid of the lot of them. He disliked Ruth but was hurt that she didn’t appear to be more friendly. It was, he thought, the least she could do.

  After Mrs. Jacobs and Roddy had left—earlier every day, Ruth noted—George extolled Sally’s virtues. Such a cook, he enthused, such a homemaker. And how Roddy had improved! He was really a man with a future. “A very nice boy,” said George in his new reedy voice. “You might do worse, Ruth. . . .” His voice trailed away as he saw in Ruth’s eye the sardonic gleam he had often noticed in Helen’s. In any case, he did not wish to consider the future. As long as Ruth was there and Sally came every day, he had no worries.

  But the next day Mrs. Jacobs took Ruth to one side and explained to her, a little tearfully, that she was going to stay with her sister Phyllis in Manchester because her nerves were so bad that she did not care to be alone. She promised to telephone when she got back to London although she could not say when that would be. She knew that Ruth would understand. “I’ve made him a meat loaf,” she said, her voice shaking, “and an almond pudding. Warm the pudding up a little in the oven, dear, but don’t give him too much. He’s putting on weight again and it’s so bad for him.”

  “But what about your flat?” asked Ruth, who fully expected to have to act as caretaker. Mrs. Jacobs said that Roddy would be staying there while she was away. At that moment Roddy loomed in the doorway with a carton in his arms. He was well pleased with things as they stood. He had urged his mother in Manchester to get his aunt away from London, and he had every hope of taking over the business completely for he knew his aunt would not come back. He was delighted to exchange his almost but not quite chic basement in Notting Hill for the greater comforts of the Bayswater flat, which he planned to improve considerably. And although he had promised his aunt that he would keep in touch with George and Ruth, he had no intention of doing so. They had his telephone number if they wanted him.

  He placed the carton, which contained George’s sunlamp and his portable grill, on the kitchen table, and prepared to be very nice to them all for the very last time. Mrs. Jacobs wept openly when she saw George’s things, like abandoned toys, in this untidy place. It was Roddy who had urged her to get rid of them. He was quite keen on the record player and said she could keep that. She did not like to argue with him; he had been so good. But she hid George’s favorite record of Viennese waltzes in a drawer in her bedroom so that Roddy could not throw it away. She knew him well enough. As the car drew away from Oakwood Court she sighed and was silent. Roddy, stealing a glance at her, thought she looked much older. He would not be sorry to put her on the train. His mother would have to cope.

  * * *

  GEORGE remained mercifully unaware of his infirmities. “Is Sally coming today?” he would ask, and Ruth would say, “Not today.” “Tomorrow perhaps,” he would assure her, as if she needed the assurance. He would wander back to the drawing room and to the television set and wait for the next meal. Nobody visited now. Nobody telephoned. It would not do much good if they did. Once the telephone had rung and a voice had said, “Alain Duplessis.” This was repeated several times, but George, who had been trained to put the receiver to his good ear, knew no one of that name and so assumed it was a wrong number and thought no more about it.

  * * *

  THERE was no question of Ruth’s going back to France. After a while she got in touch with Anthea, and Anthea came swooping into Oakwood Court, cheeks aflame, to tell Ruth what to do. Or rather what not to do. George was delighted to see her. “Ruth’s pretty friend,” he murmured, and tried to take her hand. Anthea was marvelous with him, and cheered him up and teased him and gave every appearance of enjoying it as much as he did. George was almost normal by the time she left.

  In the hall Anthea hissed, “For God’s sake get out before he’s bedridden. Find a housekeeper. Do something. Have you any idea what you look like? What about the flat in Paris? Is it still there? Have you got a lease?”

  Ruth thought of her flat and the sunlight and the cake she had made. The clean sheets were still on the bed. She hoped that the food she had left in the larder was not attracting mice.

  “I can’t go back,” she said. “I’ve got to stay here. I can’t leave him. Besides, I’ve got a job. Professor Wyatt has offered me an assistant lectureship. I’m very lucky really.”

  They looked at each other. Anthea’s eyes filled with tears.

  “You s
houldn’t be alone,” she murmured. “Is there no one?”

  Ruth laughed. “Only Roddy,” she said.

  They kissed. Anthea tried to comfort Ruth, but Ruth was bony and unyielding and in the end Anthea rested her head on Ruth’s shoulder and had a good cry, and then wiped her eyes and put on some more lipstick and left, and went back to Weybridge, and Brian, and her twin sons, Edward and Martin.

  * * *

  IN the country of the old and sick there are environmental hazards. Cautious days. Early nights. A silent, aging life in which the anxiety of the invalid overrides the vitality of the untouched. A wariness, in case the untoward might go undetected. Sudden gratitude that turns bitterness into self-reproach. George fretted more over Ruth now than he had ever done during her childhood. If she went out, she would look back and see him at the window, watching her. When she returned he would still be there. He had time to think of the meals that might tempt him, but no appetite to eat much of them. He resisted attempts to get him out of his dressing gown. He refused to walk far. Above all, he required constant reassurance that she would not leave him.

  After a couple of years it became clear that he would make no further progress, nor any less. Ruth, after a telephone call from Anthea, now pregnant with her third child, went back to the house in Edith Grove and found Miss Howe, much diminished, still in her basement. Miss Mackendrick had been dead for three months and her rooms, cluttered and musty, had not been cleared out or relet. Ruth contacted her former landlord and took Miss Mackendrick’s rooms on a temporary basis. Her old flat was occupied by a couple who played the guitar and made rather a lot of noise, yelling to each other on the stairs. Ruth spent one evening, at the most two, a week in Edith Grove. Sometimes on these evenings she would baby-sit for Hugh and Jill in Beaufort Street. But most of the time she wrote her book. When she went back to Oakwood Court, George would be at the window in his dressing gown, waiting for her.