Undue Influence

by Anita Brookner

  I was waiting for Martin to materialize in my basement, as he had done before. I did not really expect him to telephone: the telephone was far too direct, too confrontational an instrument for him to use. I had given him my home number, but for several days there was no message on my machine. This meant that I passed my days in a state of semi-alertness, listening for his steps on the stairs. This also meant that I could not quite give full attention to my work. In this I was aided by St John Collier, whose notebooks were proving a bit of a let-down. I could detect no real enthusiasm for the passing scene in his wanderings; he probably just wanted to get out of the house. Yet having decided that he would walk on Sunday afternoons he found himself bound to do so. He would have been aware of the girls at home, waiting for the wanderer to return and perhaps to reward them with a choice of anecdote. In fact he had nothing to say, and the notebooks merely recycled his earlier material. Thus he would note: ‘Parsons Green. Dead squirrel by side of road; closed eyes, thin downturned mouth.” And then, with an effort, ‘How often do we reflect on those who have gone before, and to whom we feel indebted!’ This seemed to me to be a failure of nerve; St John was the victim of his own mellifluous method. That Walks with Myself would never amount to anything must have been obvious to him. It certainly was to me.

  And yet the project had my full backing. This seemed to me the sort of book anyone could write, and therefore should write. But at the end of his life, and these fragments struck a valedictory note, St John Collier must have registered the melancholy fact that he had amounted to very little, that his daughters were his most fervent admirers, and—who knows?—that he was a little tired of their reverence and might have preferred something more robust in the way of appreciation. He would have been tired in every sense, tired of his loneliness and his life of duty, tired even of his Sunday walks, tired especially of the obligation to maintain a professional persona, when he had nothing, or very little more to deliver. There was one note of enthusiasm: he had seen a rainbow when he was walking on Primrose Hill. Naturally he had taken this as a sign of benevolence, that same benevolence that he now ascribed to Nature rather than to God, unless, as was likely, he saw the two of them in collusion. Only a very sweet disposition can square that particular circle.

  I therefore vowed to do my best for St John Collier, although this might involve creative editing on my part. In all conscience I thought of myself as his humble biographer. I would ask Muriel more about her father’s life and interpolate some details between the passages of his own writing. I had been impressed by Muriel’s still verdant devotion, by her account of those solemn Sundays, the fruit cake, the tap dripping into the enamel bowl (although this last was my own invention). I thought of them as a family of saintly celibates, the flesh subdued by the spirit. Yet there must have been moments of regret, perhaps of curiosity, which would have been instantly repressed. That was why I detected a heavy-heartedness somewhere in the notebooks. I felt disturbed that such a good man should have known unhappiness, or perhaps only stirrings of unhappiness, at the end of his life. ‘Hampstead Pond,’ he wrote. ‘Skein of geese. Winter coming.’

  The temptation to take a walk on my own account was very great. It was now high summer, and the basement, of which I was fond, had come to seem intolerably confining. I took to going out at lunchtime, not to eat—a sandwich would do—so much as to stroll and satisfy my hunger for faces. The city was now filling up with tourists, who reminded me that I could soon be a tourist myself, if I chose to. But there seemed to be no future in this idea, at least not one that I could see. It was on my return from one of these lunchtime excursions that I found a note propped up on my typewriter. ‘We should be very happy to see you both on Saturday, if convenient. Kind regards. M. G. Please forgive note.’

  I informed Wiggy of this. Her enthusiasm seemed to have diminished, as had her sympathy. My own sympathy had never been very active in the first place. I therefore decided to be as pleasant as possible in these strange circumstances. This proved to be a wise decision. ‘It’s my birthday!’ was her greeting to us as we were admitted to the bedroom. This was all but shouted, as a champagne glass was waved in our direction. ‘And my silly husband says I shouldn’t be drinking. I always have champagne on my birthday. What have you brought me?’ she said, as Wiggy withdrew her sketch pad from its plastic bag.

  ‘I thought I’d do a drawing of you.’

  ‘Wiggy is a professional artist,’ I supplied.

  ‘Oh, not now. This is a celebration! Martin, give the girls a glass of champagne. Did he tell you that that silly girl wanted to go off on holiday? The idea! As if either of us could take a holiday! Still, we talked her out of it, didn’t we, darling? Now, what have you two been up to?’

  As usual she did not wait for an answer. Our lame recitals seemed to die on the scented air. They were interrupted from time to time by a repeated, ‘It’s my birthday!’ These threatened to dwindle in conviction but were quickly resuscitated. All we could do was smile and congratulate her all over again. But then that was what she wanted us to do.

  I have always felt slightly embarrassed by birthday celebrations, because the onus is always on the bringer of gifts. We had brought nothing, not even flowers. But even flowers can go wrong, arrive on the wrong day, or find no one in to receive them. I remember my mother telling me of her confusion on going into a shop to order some birthday flowers to be sent to an acquaintance, to be told that her credit card had expired. Although she had her chequebook in her bag she had felt rebuffed. ‘And Janet would have been so disappointed,’ she told me as if the shop had refused to serve her. The incident had seemed so redolent of failure that she was quite surprised when her friend telephoned on the following day to thank her. The uncertainty seemed stronger than the relief. Of course we had not known that Cynthia was celebrating her birthday. What am I saying? We hardly knew Cynthia, who was now reminiscing about birthdays gone by. There had always been parties, she observed. She was the sort of woman who marked all rites of passage in an exceedingly public manner. Two spots of colour burned in her cheeks, yet the atmosphere in the room was glum.

  All at once she stopped in mid-sentence and her face froze in a puzzled expression. ‘Martin?’ she said. He bounded from his corner. ‘I think perhaps …’ he said.

  ‘Yes, of course. We must have tired you, Cynthia. You must rest now and many more happy returns,’ we wished heartily, as if to cover the uneasiness of the moment with the fervour of our goodbyes. ‘We’ll see ourselves out,’ we told Martin, anxious now only to leave. ‘Thank you so much,’ he said. He looked up from the bed, his eyes haggard. ‘So nice to have seen you. We enjoyed your visit, didn’t we, darling?’ But Cynthia, looking bewildered, did not reply.

  ‘What did you make of that?’ asked Wiggy, when we were safely out in the street.

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Poor old thing,’ said Wiggy. ‘I don’t think I feel like dinner, do you?’

  We were both shaken by the impropriety of the episode, myself more than Wiggy. Until then I had not really considered Cynthia to be ill, ill that is as my father, my mother had been ill. Her illness had seemed essentially decorative, tricked out as it was by her soft pillows and her immaculate appearance. Now I saw these accessories as a last resort, a form of dandyish wilfulness, of defiance. She was no stoic, but she had perfected a stoic’s defences. This again was evidence of the power of her instincts. Had she used her mind to perfect the same strategy she would have been admirable. As it was she was profoundly pathetic.

  By unspoken common consent we walked in silence, up Harley Street to the edge of the park, before turning back again in the direction of Cavendish Square. But this area was irritatingly devoid of passers-by. Life was what we wanted. More life! ‘We should have some coffee, at least,’ said Wiggy, and we walked the length of Wigmore Street in search of it. In the café where I remembered eating a toasted sandwich we sat d
own gratefully at the back, away from the door, Wiggy with her unopened sketch pad, still in its plastic bag, on her knees. ‘How awful if I’d forgotten it,’ she said. ‘We could never have gone back.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘We can’t go back.’

  That this had now been decided by what seemed like an outside force was something of a relief. We relaxed, ordered more coffee, eventually a Danish pastry. All round us the evening was merely beginning. Two girls at the next table seemed to be discussing a colleague. ‘She tried to talk her way out of it,’ said one. ‘She didn’t know I’d caught on.’

  ‘I never liked her,’ said her friend. ‘Still, you have to make allowances, don’t you?’ ‘Not me,’ said the first one virtuously. ‘I never make allowances.’ She lit a king-size cigarette, and sat back, challenging anyone who might conceivably suggest that she should. I was impressed. Wiggy, aware of my growing interest in their conversation, brought me back to the matter in hand with a discreet warning look.

  ‘We might send her some flowers,’ she said.

  ‘Good idea. I’ll get on to it.’

  ‘Roses, I think, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, she’d like that.’

  We were both disturbed by the evening’s events. Even the girl at the next table seemed threatening. Embarrassment, I knew, would come later. We should not have intruded into the Gibsons’ private drama, and yet we had been invited to do so. Their need for an audience—or perhaps for help—had made itself felt throughout. It occurred to me that for all their uninviting, even forbidding manners they wanted some sort of encouragement that neither of them was equipped to provide. Perhaps anyone would have done. But in the end we had let them down. It was probable that at this stage no one could have helped. I thought with some irritation of Martin’s mother in Norfolk. Surely she might have put in an appearance? But she ‘didn’t get on’ with Cynthia, and this I translated as a total breach. And tomorrow was Sunday, when the nurse would not be there. I longed to eliminate Sunday, thinking of the two of them, polite and terrified, in their dark flat.

  Suddenly the noise of the café seemed unbearable. I wanted to be out in the beautiful air, savouring the last of the evening. The following day would be Sunday for me as well, a day on which nothing happened, or could be expected to happen. There was another complication: when would Martin get in touch? He had left his telephone number on the note posted on my typewriter, but given his temperament, his agonized sensibility, I knew that he would not welcome an inquiry. We had indeed been witnesses, but to something we could not talk about. This would prevent him from appearing in the basement again, and no doubt from telling me more about himself. The emphasis had shifted once more back to Cynthia. (The weak exert a tyranny denied to the more robust.) At least that was how I now saw it. Irritation, so ready to surface, was curiously absent. My imagination failed me, put to flight by a more insistent reality.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Wiggy.

  I collected myself. ‘I’m fine.’

  Wigmore Street was blue with the last of the evening. We both breathed in deeply.

  ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow,’ said Wiggy. But in fact we were both anxious to be alone.

  As it turned out Sunday was not so bad. It was enough just to be intact. I took a long walk round Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens in the afternoon, and like the Colliers ate a substantial meal when I returned home. I felt guiltily safe. I went to bed early and slept deeply. On the Monday morning I went to Selfridges and ordered some pink roses. On the card I wrote, ‘With love from Claire and Wiggy’. This seemed adequate until I remembered that if Cynthia were somehow restored to relative health, as I hoped, she would have already forgotten who we were.

  Eight

  I waited uneasily for something to happen. Was it in order for me to telephone and inquire? Or was the situation so embarrassing that it was better to revert to my status as occasional, even random visitor? I thought that there might have been some acknowledgement of the flowers, until, like my mother, I reflected that flowers often fail to arrive, or arrive on the wrong day, at the wrong address. Indeed, given these potential mishaps, I wondered whether the flowers had not been a mistake, or that they had not in fact been delivered. In which case no acknowledgement could be expected. In retrospect it seemed to me that the flowers had struck a false note, that it would have been better for all of us, Martin and Cynthia included, that that particular visit had not taken place. Nevertheless the onus seemed to be on the Gibsons, or at least on Martin, to get in touch. If he did not it was because there was no reason for him to do so. We were, after all, completely marginal. I concluded that the Gibsons had retreated into their peculiarly watertight relationship. Either that or the flowers (which may not after all have arrived) had been registered as some sort of error, both formal and over-eager. In any event there was no indication that either Wiggy or I was needed, even remembered. This was both a relief and a puzzle. Yet try as I might—and I did try quite hard—I did not see that there was any further role for me to play.

  One evening I got home from the shop to find a message on my machine. ‘Hi! This is Sue? Mrs Gibson’s nurse? I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mrs Gibson passed away last Wednesday. Mr Gibson asked me to let you know. He can’t come to the phone right now. Bye.’

  I was enormously, even disproportionately shocked. That a woman whom I had suspected of the direst stratagems had actually died seemed to me an outrage. In fact any death is an outrage. The death even of a stranger connects one with one’s own losses. My hands were shaking as I dialled Wiggy’s number. Interestingly, she was as shocked as I was, though she had less stake in the matter.

  ‘What should we do?’ she asked, genuinely at a loss.

  ‘We ought to offer sympathy. Pay our respects, or whatever people say in these circumstances.’

  ‘Yes, but they’ll have had the funeral, won’t they?’

  ‘I certainly hope so. And anyway it would have been private. After all they didn’t seem to know anyone.’

  ‘Strange, that. She never mentioned anyone else.’

  ‘We may have answered a passing need.’

  ‘No more than that, surely. I don’t see any reason why we should get in touch any more. We’ll have to write, of course.’

  ‘I think we should go round. Show our faces.’

  ‘Claire …’

  ‘A brief visit, of course. I thought Saturday. Just to be tactful.’

  And to see that everything is in order, I thought. Or not.

  We agreed that we would go to Weymouth Street on the following Saturday afternoon, when Martin would presumably have composed himself. What would it signify for him, this death, annihilation or freedom? I imagined him emerging from the gloom of that flat like Lazarus from the tomb, a free man, but a man with no experience of freedom. How would he use it? Or would it simply take him the rest of his life to get used to the idea? What did one do with freedom anyway, when it was unacceptable, as it undoubtedly was in this instance? Freedom requires courage, and he had none. Without courage freedom declines into existential anxiety, the panic that had briefly afflicted me when I had stood alone in the flat on hearing of my mother’s death. I had recovered, or so I thought. But Martin, I suspected, would not manage so easily. His propensity for guilt, and his obvious loneliness, would stand in the way. Particularly the loneliness. That was why my instinct for turning up in person seemed to me to be the right one. I did not speculate further on my motives. Indeed in that moment of awe at the malign workings of fate I did not speculate at all.

  On the Saturday afternoon the door was opened to us by the nurse, still in her white coat. Apart from the coat she looked vaguely dishevelled, or rather less composed. Her face was paler than I remembered it, and the earrings had gone. It occurred to me that she might be genuinely upset by Cynthia’s death. In essence they were the same sort of women, flirtatious, frivolous, flippant. Their camaraderie may have been authentic, although the tone of their exchanges would have drive
n a serious person mad. But perhaps it is essential to keep up a pretence of recovery just around the corner when someone is ill. This necessitates falsity, all manner of lies, draws patient and nurse together in a terrible complicity, or rather one that seems terrible to outsiders. Apart from the necessary subterfuge this girl struck me as innocent. She would simply have followed the rules that Cynthia had set down. These would have involved above all monstrous flattery, which would have been quite in order, given the circumstances. That the nurse could manage this gave some indication, I thought, of her own character. Both she and her patient were in some sense female and more female than I was. They were female in a rather old-fashioned way, arch, teasing, happy to be deploying those obsolete instinctive skills even when there was no man around on whom to practise them.

  I could never manage that, which explained why I had failed to come up to Cynthia’s standards. Wiggy too is entirely unpretentious. And yet our faces had ached with the effort of supplying some of the hysterical appreciation on which the sick woman had come to rely. Quite simply, we were not part of the conspiracy. She must have considered us intolerably slow-witted. No wonder she had expressed disappointment, justifiably so in her own estimation. And the flowers would have been another awkward touch, funereal. I felt ashamed, slightly disgraced, felt wrong in being present on this Saturday afternoon, when ordinary people were at leisure, when Wiggy and I would soon be at leisure ourselves. In the dark hallway, where we stood uncertainly, there was no indication how we were to proceed. I even thought it better if we simply left a message and made our thankful way home. But this thought was ridiculous. And besides it looked furtive. Already our whispered conversation seemed out of place, like the gossip of servants. Apart from ourselves there was no sign of anyone else being present.