Fraud

by Anita Brookner

  And indeed Mrs Marsh was built on an heroic scale, and dressed as if for some healthy outdoor pursuit, in a flannel blouse and a tweed skirt, her long feet encased in brown lace-up shoes.

  ‘If you’re sure you won’t drink,’ she said repressively, gesturing briefly with the whisky bottle. She poured herself another glass.

  ‘A good woman. Unselfish. Probably missed her mother. But no backbone. I asked her to lunch when my daughter was here from Norwich, and the contrast! Anna was younger, of course.’

  ‘What age would that be, Madam?’

  ‘Forty-five? Fifty? Nearer fifty. Philippa is fifty-five. But Philippa lives in the real world. She has to: she’s a widow, with grown-up children, and a mature student.’ Thus she referred to her daughter’s weekly classes in art appreciation. ‘ “Why don’t you do something like that?” I asked Anna. She gave me that smile of hers. “It’s not what I’m looking for,” she said. I even introduced her to my son,’ she added angrily. ‘Well, I was sorry for her. And my son’s a very attractive man. Divorced, no children. I wouldn’t have minded if he’d taken her out. But she was hopeless around a man.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘She seemed alarmed, dashed about washing up cups and glasses. I told her to sit still, but she merely gave me that smile of hers and told me to rest. My son hardly noticed her, I’m glad to say. Although she was always beautifully turned out. Made all her own clothes, beautiful little tweed suits and so on. And that remarkable hair. Quite a presentable woman, although one thinks of her as a girl.’ She sighed. ‘She was too good a daughter, I suppose.’

  They stood up. ‘Thank you for your help, Madam. You wouldn’t happen to have the name of her friend in Paris?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Marie something. Marie-France, I believe. My daughter might know. Anna spoke of her that day when they were both here. She spoke about her most affectionately, although I don’t think she saw her all that often. She wrote, I know. That’s what she sometimes did on a Sunday afternoon. Marie-France, I’m sure that was her name. That’s where she’ll be. With Marie-France.’

  She saw them to the door. ‘I’d be grateful if you’d let me know about her. There’s not much point in my going round to Cranley Gardens if she’s not there. I don’t know whom else to ask.’

  The elder of the two policemen, Butterworth, noticed that she had said ‘whom’ and decided that she was a reliable witness. Which was useful, for there were apparently no others.

  Outside, on the pavement—and no trees visible now in the mist and dark of the evening—Butterworth said, ‘That appears to be that. No close friends. No relations. You might go back to that neighbour of hers tomorrow, try him again. Try to get the name of the cleaning woman. They usually know something.’

  ‘Sounds a funny type. Old fashioned. Looking after the mother, and so on. Unmarried. Typical spinster, I suppose.’

  ‘Except that there aren’t any spinsters any more, Barry. They’re all up there at the cutting edge. I blame Joan Collins.’

  ‘Any chance of finding her, do you think? What if she doesn’t turn up?’

  Butterworth shrugged. ‘Oh, she’ll turn up all right. Somewhere or other. Trouble is, we won’t know where to look.’

  2

  MRS MARSH, perturbed in spite of the irrational anger which Anna Durrant always aroused in her, resolved to telephone her daughter in Norwich, although it was not Friday, the day on which she usually called. It was Wednesday, the dead centre of the week, and she was suddenly chilled and lonely. She saw no reason to upset herself on Anna’s account, and yet Anna, she had to acknowledge, was an upsetting person. All that forbearance! Such saintliness would have been admirable had it not been administered with that smile, a smile that signalled merriment, yet was underlined by something desperate. And who would not be desperate, thought Mrs Marsh, living through her youth and middle age with poor Amy Durrant in that terrible flat in Albert Hall Mansions. Mrs Marsh sighed. Poor silly Amy, who had felt faint at the hairdresser’s one day and had been driven home in Mrs Marsh’s car. She had been alarmed at the woman’s pallor and her apparent frailty, and was relieved to see her regain her colour as soon as she sank into what was evidently her habitual chair, one of two placed on either side of the fire in that muted faded rose-coloured room. It was the room of an intensely feminine woman, with no sign of a masculine presence. A sofa under a window with leaded panes which made the room seem dark, a piano with some sheet music on the stand, the two armchairs covered with brown and pink chintz, and on either side of the door jardinières filled with evil-looking green plants, darkened from their original freshness by too little air and too much water. The only item of note in the room was a fine imitation Savonnerie carpet in blue and pink, the effect of which was marred by the addition of a white sheepskin rug before the hearth. The gas fire, ineptly disguised as a real fire, was accompanied by a set of superfluous fire tongs in the bleak blackish grate.

  The air felt heavy, sweetish, as if the rooms were permanently inhabited by genteel women, and the windows never opened. And Mrs Durrant herself gave the same impression, of exhausted but cherished womanhood. Instinctively Mrs Marsh, who had had a vigorous marriage, looked around for signs, even relics, of a man, but found none. Her eye met only a rack containing fashion magazines, and library books, which, from their covers, looked as if they had been written by women. Yet Mrs Durrant was still attractive and must once have been a beauty. She had an intimate way of talking, was fulsome in her gratitude, was, in fact, pleasing, even intriguing. She had a soft voice, beautifully tended hands, with rosy polished nails. One of those hands had been laid upon Mrs Marsh’s much larger rougher one, with its plain gold band. ‘Don’t go,’ said Mrs Durrant. ‘My daughter will make us some tea.’ She padded over the pink and blue carpet to the door. ‘Anna! Anna darling! Will you make us some tea, dear? I want you to meet Mrs Marsh.’ The sound of a sewing machine, so faint that it hardly registered as such, stopped abruptly. Ten minutes later Anna Durrant had come in with tea things on a black japanned tray. Mrs Marsh noted her kingfisher-blue suit, in fine tweed, which she admired. ‘Anna makes all her own clothes,’ said Mrs Durrant proudly. Then the two women fell greedily into exchanging the stories of their lives, for such an encounter was not to be wasted. In fact Mrs Marsh was adept at dealing out the few facts she was willing to make public—the dead husband, one daughter, one son—knowing that this was the appropriate currency for a person of her age and type, but actually too curious about this affecting woman with her old-fashioned flowery elegance and her general air of bewilderment to waste time on herself.

  Poor silly Amy Durrant! Visited many times, though not regularly, when Amy became too frail to leave the flat. A heart complaint, she gathered, one that made her gasp from time to time and lay a hand to the base of her throat, as if her heart had risen up and were choking her. But always glad to see a friend, particularly one as roughhewn and sensible as Mrs Marsh, who in her turn was fascinated, almost against her better judgement, by the flower-like Amy Durrant, with her pleading periwinkle-blue eyes. Her story was charmingly and easily told, not without a certain narrative talent: in any event it beguiled Mrs Marsh. She had married beneath her, Amy laughed, or so her parents had told her. She had fallen in love with someone unsuitable and had simply gone ahead and married him. He was a violinist in the pit at Drury Lane, and they had met at a wedding. Mrs Marsh, who privately thought her hostess rather common, thought this a most sensible arrangement, and saw no trace of a mésalliance, although she had been invited to think along these lines. What money there was—and there appeared to be no shortage—had come from Mrs Durrant’s parents, who had provided the flat in Albert Hall Mansions, together with the piano, the carpet, the brass jardinières, and a small but comfortable portfolio of stocks and shares. ‘Anna will be well provided for, when I go,’ said Mrs Durrant. ‘But, my dear, I never thought I’d be left on my own like this! My husband worshipped me! I thought he’d always be there to look after me.
And yet he died when Anna was only five—a heart attack. He’d just got home from the theatre one night. He collapsed without a murmur. But then he never complained.’ Her eyes moistened; a small white handkerchief was produced from her sleeve. ‘I did love him,’ she said, this time without affectation. ‘He was my first love. Dear David. We were so happy.’

  And since then, Mrs Marsh had wondered, would you not have liked to be happy again? Widowhood had made her sturdy, self-reliant, but she could see that this woman was a romantic, not the sort of woman to be left on her own while still attractive and relatively young. ‘You have Anna,’ she said, almost briskly, as if to break the spell, as if to vanquish her own suspicion that this story was a little too pathetic. ‘Indeed I have,’ Amy Durrant had said. ‘Anna is my life.’ And there was the same authentic note in her voice as when she had said how much she loved her husband. ‘What will you do when she marries?’ Mrs Marsh queried, although she felt the question was rather mean. ‘Oh, she won’t leave me yet awhile,’ was the answer. ‘Of course, I long for it for her. I’m not a possessive mother. I urge her to go out, meet people, enjoy herself. “It’s not what I’m looking for,” she says.’

  ‘What is she looking for?’ asked Mrs Marsh bluntly.

  ‘Her destiny, she says. Her fate.’ Mrs Durrant suddenly looked tired, old. ‘I don’t always understand her. But she is so happy, so cheerful. And if the worst comes to the worst, well, she’ll have all this. She’ll be comfortable. And of course it’s wonderful for me to have her with me all the time.’

  ‘I wonder she doesn’t want a career,’ said Mrs Marsh, struck by the idleness of these two women, the anachronism of their existence in the felt-lined quiet and obscurity of Albert Hall Mansions. Apart from herself she knew almost no-one with independent means; at the same time she was struck by Amy Durrant’s lack of curiosity, which she supposed she had handed on to her daughter.

  ‘I wanted her to go into the fashion business,’ said Mrs Durrant, who clearly thought in terms of the dress shops of the 1950s, if not of the 1930s. ‘But she said no. She went to university, and then she had a year abroad and she’s been working on her research on and off ever since. It’s convenient, really. We’re so near the V. and A., and she can work in the library there.’

  ‘What is she working on?’

  ‘Something to do with the Paris salons of the nineteenth century.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Mrs Marsh, who had read her Proust.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? You must get her to tell you all about it.’

  But Anna, who appeared regularly with the tea-tray at 4.30, sometimes in her kingfisher-blue suit, sometimes in one of the same pattern in dark ruby red, simply laughed away the suggestion that she was any kind of intellectual and went on laughing as she handed Mrs Marsh her cup. Mrs Marsh, watching her keenly, could not decide whether she was very stupid or rather clever. She had patience, that was clear, and fortitude: she would need both if she was to waste her life in her mother’s company, however good the mother (and there was nothing to indicate that she was anything else), and, yes, she had something more, she had a plain girl’s faith in a happy ending, and Mrs Marsh saw that this was both her salvation and her undoing.

  No man in either of their lives, she had thought impatiently, for she had had two proposals herself since being widowed. But what man would venture in here, into this faded and claustrophobic bower? Gone were the days when men preferred women to be compliant and passive, born to flatter and to praise. At least they might still want these rewards, but they were being trained not to expect them. And these two women—Mrs Durrant and her unfortunate daughter—were too hopelessly old-fashioned to compete in the market-place with other more hard-headed and enlightened members of their sex. They were handicapped, and although this might not matter for Amy Durrant it mattered terribly for the daughter, who had, past infancy, never known a father, and was thus eternally unprepared for the rules of engagement between the sexes in the least predictable and sentimental of games.

  ‘I suppose you have to go abroad sometimes, for your research,’ she said.

  ‘I manage to do most of it here,’ said Anna calmly, as if rebuking her for an untoward curiosity. She usually left them after tea, but reappeared when Mrs Marsh made her way to the front door. She kissed her goodbye, as if to obliterate the impression given by what she wrongly perceived as her own taciturnity. This was not a good tactic, for Mrs Marsh prized taciturnity as a virtue and thought too few women possessed it. The girl’s soft lips, and flat, almost unseeing eyes struck her as unnatural. At the same time she forced herself not to be brusque. There was something eerily emollient about this household. Outside, in the air, she was amazed to see normal rush-hour traffic, for inside the flat she had had no impression of real time, or of real time passing. She was aware of a faint antagonism towards Anna, for which she had the grace to feel ashamed.

  On one visit she was surprised to see the tea-tray already in place, although it was only half-past three, and a casual looking arrangement of biscuits on a plate instead of the elegant knives and forks and napkins which she had come to expect. ‘Anna is not here,’ explained her hostess. ‘She has gone to visit her friend in Paris. I urged her to go, although to tell you the truth I hate being left alone now. But it’s good for her to get away. I can’t do much for her here—my silly heart. But she never complains. She’s such a good girl.’ Mrs Marsh, who was greedy, and who always enjoyed Anna’s scones and teacakes, felt disappointed. Apart from her own pity for Amy Durrant, so obviously full of fear at being left alone, so tiresomely brave at trying to conceal it, she saw little advantage in Anna’s going to Paris at this stage, for she was not of a nature to enjoy the city—too girlish, too spinsterish, too trusting—and in any event judged it too late for Anna to have made a bid for freedom, if that was indeed what she was doing. Like all of Anna’s actions it was somehow mismanaged, mistimed, for Mrs Marsh could see that Amy Durrant’s colour was bad and her breath occasionally caught in her throat, like those shuddering gasps with which one sometimes awakens from a dream. How tiresome of the girl—woman—to go and visit a friend at this stage, when her mother was so obviously in decline! ‘She goes once a year,’ explained Mrs Durrant. ‘She didn’t want to leave me, but I made her go. To tell you the truth I wanted to see you on my own.’ Mrs Marsh felt unwanted responsibilities being marshalled in her direction. ‘I wanted you to have this,’ she murmured, with obvious pain in her voice. She handed over a tooled red leather box, of the kind sold in Florence, to hold jewellery or sewing silk. ‘You have been so kind. And I feel I have imposed on you.’

  ‘But, my dear …’ said Mrs Marsh.

  ‘And I want you to take this,’ said Amy Durrant, now in some distress, holding out a manila envelope stiff with paper. ‘If anything happens to me—and it will shortly—I want you to keep this for Anna. It’s a kind of letter I have written her.’

  ‘But why don’t you give it to her yourself?’ protested Mrs Marsh, who had sensed obscurely that Amy Durrant had brought this odd friendship to the stage at which she wished to leave it.

  Mrs Durrant smiled sadly. ‘The minute I go she will throw everything away. I know her, you see. She loves me, but I’ve taken away her life. She will want to put me behind her, as I should have let her do years ago. But I clung to her, I admit. She was so strong, so good, just when …’ She paused. ‘I have ruined her life,’ she said. ‘I want her to know how much I have loved her. Although she may not want to know that. She may even hate me for it.’

  ‘Surely not,’ Mrs Marsh had said, alarmed at this nakedness of feeling. She had always observed an amicable distance from her own daughter, whom she felt had inherited all her own stalwartness. She had never felt this visceral tenderness for Philippa once the girl was past babyhood. Her son … Her son was a different matter. She thought with shame of the relief she had felt when he had announced that he was seeking a divorce, as if at last she would have him to herself again. It had not been so, but sh
e saw him more frequently these days, sometimes for lunch on a Sunday. She dressed up for him on these occasions, rubbed a little powder into her worn red cheeks, pressed both lips together over a thread of lipstick. He never noticed, of course, although he ate up his meal, over which she had taken so much trouble. For Philippa she bothered less, served up a small roast, omitted the powder and lipstick. But even with Nick she observed a certain reticence, would never have dreamed of leaving him posthumous messages, particularly of a sentimental nature.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, as gently as she could. ‘Do you think it is wise? Anna is a grown woman, after all.’

  Indeed she was, reflected Mrs Marsh. Anna must be fifty or more, old enough to know that she would never have children, old enough to reflect bitterly that nature had no further use for her. But in fact she had no reason to doubt Anna’s good faith. All she had to go on was Anna’s eye sliding past her vacantly as she bestowed her apparently affectionate valedictory kiss. For all she knew, Mrs Marsh reflected uneasily, Anna was as good as she seemed to be, a devoted daughter, in the manner of those daughters of a bygone age who sacrificed their lives unthinkingly, the way their brothers had done in the trenches. It was only because such sacrifice was now irrelevant, even faintly repellent, that one looked askance at it, knowing oneself to be unworthy by comparison. Mrs Marsh felt a sudden sharp unhappiness as she sought inspiration from the darkening sky beyond the diamond panes of the window and found none. It had been a November day, mild but overcast, never really getting light. Yellow leaves had floated down on the windless air. Two more weeks—less, perhaps—and the trees will be bare, she thought. She took the envelope and stowed it away in her bag. She had not meant to keep in close touch with Anna after what she now perceived as Amy Durrant’s inevitable death. She sensed a coolness there. But in fact the handing over of the letter—that last missive—might be a way of putting an end to a relationship which she had not chosen. A telephone call or two throughout the period of mourning, and then a good wish at Christmas. For her part she would be quite glad to put the oddly disquieting couple out of her mind.