The man in the basement, of whose presence I had become uncomfortably aware, as he had of mine, smelled discreetly of some subtle scent which was far removed from the blasts of aftershave one was likely to encounter in the early morning. He gave an impression of almost futile luxury, which was implemented when he drew a snowy handkerchief from his pocket and flicked a small speck of dust from his fingers. He implied an army of servants, either that or a lonely and obsessive drive towards perfection, probably the latter. He was probably rich, certainly idle. I imagined his empty day, every gesture aiming at sublimity. He had an iconic presence, and yet I was able to observe the occasional involuntary grimace which creased his fair thin-skinned face. He was a man torn between achievement and frustration, the balance tilted towards the latter. When I sneezed he gave a violent start, as if recalled to familiarity with greater upheavals.
I offered to make him a cup of coffee but he refused effusively. I was beginning to find his continued presence rather tiresome. At the same time he impressed me as attractive. I wanted to know his story, which I was quite capable of inventing for myself. Perhaps because I had been thinking of my father I thought I detected an unhappy home background, an invalid sister to whom he was deeply attached. This selfless sister—for she would be all virtue, as in one of St John Collier’s scenarios—would urge him to go out and enjoy himself. But the poor fellow would be halfhearted in this pursuit, would seek refuge, indeed basements, where his presence would impress but would remain unchallenged. This same sister would oversee his appearance, which would always be faultless, this being a subject on which they would naturally concur. I had no way of knowing how accurate or inaccurate this picture was, but I did not doubt that I was intrigued. I looked at my watch and realized that he had been silently reading for thirty-five minutes. By this time he could have had one or two of Heine’s poems off by heart. Either that or he was translating them. Perhaps he too was a man of letters. But he looked too ineffable, and also too unhappy, for that. I altered my estimate of him. He was a dilettante, a caste I had always admired.
‘Can I help you?’ I said finally, slightly irritated by the lack of effect my presence was having on him. Besides, I wanted to get on with my work. I was aware that before my enforced absence I had come across an article boldly entitled ‘Emphasize your good points!’ (nowadays it would be called ‘Maximize your assets!’, in deference to the market economy) which suggested that St John Collier’s favoured publications were emerging from their post-war obedience, and were exchanging austerity for a certain tentative assertiveness. This in turn, but the thought must have been lying dormant, alerted me to the unpleasant fact that St John Collier was running out of time and myself with him. The pile of magazines had shrunk dramatically: my task was almost completed. I had no doubt that Muriel would keep me on for a bit, but she did not really need a full-time assistant. My task had been to devote my attention to St John Collier, and this I had done; editorial work simply amounted to putting the articles in chronological order. Changes of an unwelcome kind seemed to be inevitable. I resolved to ask Muriel whether it might be interesting to write some sort of Foreword, an account of St John’s early life, perhaps. She could tell me the facts and I could string them out into some sort of narrative. The idea appealed to me. I had got used to him; he was safe in my hands. Besides, his philosophy was so user-friendly, the best of the best of all possible worlds, as someone or other had said. Trust and hope would never let you down, he seemed to imply. I should have liked to believe that he was right.
‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ I asked, rather more sharply than I intended.
‘Jenny Treibel,’ he replied. ‘You don’t seem to have a copy.’
‘We have Effi Briest,’ I said. ‘Are you particularly interested in Fontane?’
‘Oh, I have several copies of Effi Briest,’ he replied. ‘It was some of the other stories I was after. They are rather hard to come by, you know. You are my last hope.’ He gave a heartbreaking smile. ‘I have tried almost everywhere I can think of.’
‘The London Library?’
‘Oh, but you see I must have my own copy.’
He looked worried, distressed, more distressed than one should look in the face of a slight contretemps.
‘Most people come in for the French,’ I remarked chattily, anxious for some reason to put him at his ease.
‘I prefer the German writers,’ he said, with the same heartbreaking smile, as of one confessing to a weakness. A man who was not quite a man, I reflected. The idea had a perverse appeal.
In my mind’s eye I had an image of a book with a red and white cover brought in, with a job-lot of texts, by a university student after graduating. (We get plenty of these.) This book was entitled The German Library and was in good condition. Muriel had put it on one side, on one of the tables, with the intention of reading it herself As far as I knew it was still there. The name Fontane, which was certainly there, came to me distantly but with a sense of certainty. I have an excellent photographic memory. I remembered something like ‘Shorter Fiction’, also on the cover.
‘I think I can find you a copy,’ I said. ‘But not straight away. If you’d like to give me your name and address I’ll let you know.’
He looked even more worried, as if this were classified information, but divulged an address in Weymouth Street. I knew it well, of course, for it was on the route of my evening walks. I promised to be in touch and accompanied him back up the stairs. By now he seemed anxious to leave. With a pleasant expression, or so I hoped, I watched as he wrestled with the door.
‘Give it a good tug,’ said Muriel, raising her eyes from her book. ‘It needs seeing to, but we haven’t the right instruments. We need a man.’
At this he looked alarmed, as if she had expected him to take off his coat and get down to it straight away. (She probably had.) We both watched as he extricated himself. Then Muriel went back to her book, and I lingered for a few minutes in the shop. I found the red and white volume under a pile of others on the table, waiting to be shelved. I took it downstairs with me, as if I were going to put it away.
At six o’clock that evening I telephoned the number he had given me. ‘Mr Gibson?’ I inquired. ‘It’s Claire Pitt, from the bookshop. I’ve found a copy of Jenny Treibel for you, but it’s in English. Would you like me to keep it for you?’
‘Could you perhaps send it?’ he said.
‘Oh, I’ll drop it in,’ I assured him. I was anxious to verify my theory about the invalid sister. ‘I’m often in the area.’ This at least was true.
‘Claire!’ came Muriel’s voice. ‘I’m locking up.’
He was quite likely to have forgotten my name already. ‘Claire Pitt,’ I repeated, then suddenly wondered what on earth I was doing. His voice had sounded thin and melodious, as if he were on his best behaviour, anxious to reassure. Definitely the invalid sister, I thought.
I picked up the book, said goodnight to Muriel, and went home. In the course of the evening I glanced through it, beguiled by some of the names (‘Victoire’, ‘Lisette’). I would ask him to lend it to me, I decided. Just for a few days. That way I could deliver it to him all over again.
I have no interest in the German Romantics, or indeed in any other kind of romantic, with or without a literary status, but the stories seemed limpid, accessible, but at the same time remote in time, rather like the man who had been looking for them. I did not go so far as to read Jenny Treibel so as to seem more knowledgeable than I really was; such stratagems were not in my nature. I really do not know what I had in mind at that stage. Sometimes an attractive appearance is enough, so that one is inclined to endow the person who possesses such an appearance with other gifts, grace, intelligence, some sort of accomplishment. And this tall fair stranger had seemed so incongruous in our dusty basement, as if he were visiting from another world where everyone was well dressed. The wincing nervousness seemed out of character but it was easy for me to excuse it. It was the reason
for this that I was determined to examine. The man had either suffered some sort of psychic injury that had left him otherwise intact or he was under great strain. There may have been, probably was, illness somewhere in the background, and with this I could sympathize all too readily, as my experience had taught me to. I had frequently felt shame at my own resistance to my father’s tragedy, but I believe my instinct was correct. It is sometimes necessary to keep one’s distance from misfortune, however harsh this may seem to others.
The man in the shop seemed more affected by this dilemma (if it existed) than I had ever been; he was far gone, if not in suffering, then no doubt in awareness. I should have liked to discuss this matter with someone, or even to have put the man on his guard. Your sympathy is quite adequate, I should have said; do not allow it to become excessive. Vulnerability is commendable; masochism is not. There was no possibility of my ever saying this. But I believe that my desire to say it was present even on that first day. I felt both pity and impatience, as if enormous efforts would be needed to impose the realities of life once more before it proved too late. In this I may have been prescient. Spotless heroes (I did not doubt that he would be spotless) often owe their survival to agencies more worldly than themselves. It was something to think about, something to remind me of the fairy stories I had read so obsessively as a child. I put it no higher than that.
Four
It was not his sister who was the invalid. It was his wife. This I learned the following evening when I delivered the book. ‘Martin? Who is it, darling?’ came a voice from another part of the flat.
‘Would you excuse me a minute,’ he said. ‘My wife …’
I was left standing in the middle of a room which was the complete antithesis of our plain-living high-thinking rooms at home. This room was an unironic tribute to the nineteenth century. Looped curtains of dark blue chenille obscured most of the light from the two tall windows that looked out over Weymouth Street. The floor was covered by a large red and blue carpet which someone other than myself could no doubt have identified and dated. On a marble chimneypiece stood a gilt clock under a glass dome and two glass candelabra dripping with glass lustres. In the middle of the room stood a round walnut table on a single pedestal; a smaller version of this was placed between the windows. Two enormous wing chairs, covered in blue and green damask, further obscured the light. These chairs, it seemed to me, were not designed to be occupied. My parents’ chairs at home were upholstered in a vague orange and brown tapestry; they had high backs and wooden arms and were functional and austere. Surrounded by this opulence, which I was left alone to admire, I felt a vague residual distaste. I did not know how long I was supposed to stand there (for it seemed to me impossible to sit down) and the muted conversation which I could hear coming from another room activated some primitive memory of earlier overheard intimacies.
The light was dim. A couple of opaline lamps supplied what there was; there was no ceiling rose. At home we had been lit by a plain chandelier, for which the word was if anything complimentary: three unadorned wooden arms supported bulbs in parchment shades. This too had given a bad light; my mother’s and father’s reading lamps had supplied the rest. Here I was conscious of light being deliberately excluded. Everything had a high finish. It was warm and silent. I searched for the source of this warmth but could see no radiators. The marble fireplace held a steel grate filled with dyed blue hydrangeas. This struck me as the only artificial element in this nightmare interior in which everything was designed in relation to everything else.
I began to wish that I were out in the street, enjoying, if that is the word, one of my solitary walks. I reckoned that Martin Gibson had no business to leave me standing there while he pursued some conversation in another room. From what I could overhear this conversation was muted but enthusiastic, the sort of tone adopted in a sickroom. So I was not wrong about the illness, I thought. There was a sense of a conspiracy that left me attending vaguely on the sidelines, a mere spectator, or rather auditor. And yet I had no other role. The role that was assigned to me I had devised for myself. Martin Gibson, whom I had admired in the shop, seemed now to be reduced to a sort of servant, emptied of substance by a wife who was somehow impotent, laid up; his manhood, such as it was, would be subsumed by her needs. I felt sorry for him, but my pity was edged with irritation; this was the kind of call I was bound to answer. I saw myself as Potiphar’s wife, embracing a reluctant Joseph, and felt the sort of reprehensible excitement to which I was prone. I knew my character was poor, that I could lay claim to few moral qualities. In these moments I thought of my mother, her artlessness, her careful days in the belted smock, copying from the model, and the sadness that her friend’s wedding had occasioned. I knew that such simplicity was beyond my reach, let alone my grasp. That was why, at the age of twenty-nine, I stood in a stranger’s room calculating my chances.
When Martin Gibson returned his face showed a certain animation. ‘Cynthia, my wife, would like to meet you,’ he said. ‘If you are not in a hurry do come and say hello.’ He lowered his voice. ‘She sees so few people these days. She says her illness has driven all her friends away. So when she hears a strange voice …’
‘I’m sorry your wife is ill,’ I said. ‘What is the matter with her?’
When I looked back on this remark I found it intolerably crude. Though plain it was evidently unanswerable, for Martin Gibson, who was, I noted, still wearing his chalk-striped suit, looked as if this were the one question that no one in their right mind would have thought appropriate.
‘Her heart,’ he said. ‘And her nerves, of course. Poor darling.’
I wanted to hear more, but little more was to be vouchsafed. I thought of one of the books my mother had insisted I read, about a man with an ailing wife. My mother had thought it a masterpiece; I had not. This had disappointed her. ‘It’s not the saddest story ever told,’ I protested. ‘Why was he so helpless?’ She had smiled. ‘It is circumstances that make us helpless,’ she replied, and I saw that she was looking back to her own past years of incarceration. I said nothing after that, but my dislike for the story increased, and has remained.
I followed Martin Gibson along a corridor and into a bedroom lit by more opaline lamps, but more brightly. I hardly had time to register more than the fact that the wife lay in a large bed, or rather lay back against a multitude of pillows, with manicure implements on a small tray on her knees. I had an impression of blondeness, of a round face, of anxious eyes. She was immaculately made up, and did not look in the least ill, yet when she spoke her voice was hoarse, and the hand she held out to me, and which I took, was hot and moist. She was wearing some sort of peignoir, coral pink, with a certain amount of lace, and she smelt of the kind of scent which should be reserved for decisive women executives looking forward to a career in the boardroom. I imagined, though I could hardly turn round and look, a whole armoury of such scents, indulgences brought to the sickroom by the devoted husband who would naturally be at a loss in such a situation and who would seek the advice of the sales assistants behind the beauty counter. My mother had never used more than a simple cologne. But this was no time to think of my mother.
‘How do you do?’ I said. ‘Claire Pitt. I brought your husband’s book. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘My dear,’ said the hoarse voice. ‘If you only knew how eager I am to see new faces. My life, as you can see,’ she gestured around the room, upsetting the tray with the manicure instruments which her husband bent eagerly to retrieve, ‘is confined to this one room now.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘Of course Martin could have collected the book,’ she said sharply. ‘He is quite free in the daytime. In fact I make him go out; I know he likes to walk. I insist that he does so, though I suspect he doesn’t always enjoy it.’ She flashed him a smile which revealed another, earlier woman, mischievous, not entirely kind. She would have been lovely, I reckoned. She was still good-looking in a ruined way, although I was tou
ched to see that her cheeks had taken on a little colour since I had entered the room. Her hand still held mine, as if to prevent me from leaving.
‘Who looks after you in the daytime?’ I asked, since it was clear to me that she had no interest in myself.
‘Oh, Sue is here in the daytime,’ was the reply.
‘Your daughter?’
She laughed. ‘Did you hear that, Martin?’ she said. Her tone was not quite friendly.
‘The nurse,’ said Martin Gibson, not registering the implied insult. At least I thought it was an insult. If these people did not sleep together that was hardly the husband’s fault. Nor was it entirely hers. She did seem ill; the heat of her hand was disagreeable. Yet it would have been rude to have disengaged my own. My eyes strayed to the bedside table, on which stood a flowered china candlestick, and a photograph, in an Art Nouveau silver frame, of a white Scotch terrier sitting in a basket. Her eyes followed mine, and she smiled slightly, as if she had discerned my curiosity but was not disposed to satisfy it. ‘Yes, my poor dog had to go,’ she said. ‘Along with all the rest.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said again, since this seemed to be expected of me. ‘If there’s anything I can do …’ I still do not know why I said this.
‘Of course, it broke my heart when Martin had to give up his teaching,’ she went on.
‘Oh?’ I looked at him inquiringly, but he seemed resigned to being a mere attendant.
‘European literature, at that place in Hampstead. What was it called, darling? I can never remember.’
‘But that must have been terrible for you,’ I said, turning to him.
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