Fraud

by Anita Brookner

  ‘You could go to Paris,’ said Philippa. ‘What fun. How I envy you.’

  ‘Well, I could, of course,’ said Anna. ‘I usually go every year anyway. But there’s the flat to get straight. I’ve only just moved in. There’s quite a lot to do.’

  She was pleading with them to let her be. In her extreme state she feared encroachments. Anna, thought Mrs Marsh, would be unexpectedly difficult to dislodge. Either that, or she would protect her own territory, just as she would protect her secrets, if she had any.

  ‘Tell us about the flat, Anna. I must say I was surprised to hear that you had moved so quickly. Although I can see that Albert Hall Mansions might have been too big for you.’

  Anna flashed her a determined smile. ‘I don’t believe in living in the past,’ she said, thinking back briefly to the holocaust of her mother’s clothes and possessions that had taken place in a single day of furious energy, of bags taken down to the Oxfam shop, of shoes dumped unceremoniously in the dustbin. ‘Mother wanted me to be happy.’

  ‘Indeed she did. We all want our children to be happy. As if life were that simple.’

  ‘So I went to the estate agent the day after the funeral,’ said Anna, taking no notice, ‘and found this straight away. It’s a dear little flat, Aunt Vera—you must come round and see it. Just three rooms and a nice kitchen and bathroom. On the third floor. I can see the trees from my bedroom window.’

  ‘I don’t promise, Anna. I don’t go out much these days. But leave me your telephone number.’

  Mrs Marsh felt that she should offer them coffee, but was too tired to make the effort. Perhaps when Anna had gone, and she and Philippa were left alone. But Anna showed no signs of leaving. Mrs Marsh was aware of the Sunday papers, unopened, in the sitting-room. She had planned to get through them in time to watch Songs of Praise. She liked to watch the faces, so serious and trusting, on a day which was somehow always a slight disappointment. Now, if she were to have any time with Philippa and to watch Songs of Praise she would have to put off the papers until Monday, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to read Monday’s Times until the evening. She sighed. I must be getting senile at last, she thought, worrying over these details. But no, I do not care to have my Sundays interrupted.

  ‘Such bad news,’ she said to Philippa. ‘My good lady is leaving me. Her varicose veins are too bad, she says. I was very attached to Mrs Wright. Twelve years she’s been with me. Quite serious, at my age, to be without. You don’t know anyone, do you, Anna? Two or three mornings a week are all I need.’

  ‘I could ask Mrs Duncan,’ said Anna doubtfully. ‘But it might be too far for her to come. She lives in Paddington.’

  ‘If she comes to you she could surely come to me. She could take a bus down the King’s Road. I pay very well. Top dollar,’ she added, a phrase she had picked up from her son.

  ‘I’ll ask her,’ said Anna, picking up her bag, as if the request had driven her to make her escape. ‘In any case I’ll call for you next week, shall I? It’s been lovely. And lovely to meet you too, Philippa.’

  She kissed them both. Again Mrs Marsh was aware of the soft lips, of the flat eyes sliding past, contemplating some distant fulfilment. She could hear Anna saying, ‘That’s not what I’m after,’ and applied it to herself. And yet she is assiduous, she thought. Maybe she is mad. Maybe her years of reclusion had driven her mad.

  ‘Let me telephone if I need you, Anna,’ she said. ‘I may be out next week. Of course, you are always welcome.’

  Philippa, who was more generous as well as less suspicious, returned Anna’s kiss. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, ‘and mind you book that holiday.’

  ‘Wait a minute, Anna,’ Mrs Marsh called after the retreating back. ‘Your mother gave me this letter for you when I last saw her. I expect you’ll want to read it in peace.’

  Thank goodness I remembered that, she thought, closing the door at last. Otherwise I’d have had to invite her again.

  They sat in silence for a minute or two after Anna had left, as if fearful that she might come back. Finally Mrs Marsh got up, went into the kitchen and put on the kettle. All the washing up still to do, she lamented. Next weekend I really must be free.

  ‘What did you think of her?’ she asked, coming back with a tray.

  ‘Funny little thing,’ said Philippa cheerfully. ‘I loved her suit, didn’t you? Nice for you to have her around, Mother. You’ve got her telephone number. Well, I don’t see why she shouldn’t do your shopping, when you don’t want to go out. She seems very fond of you.’

  So we are to go through life hand in hand, thought Mrs Marsh. ‘Unfortunately, I find her rather tiresome,’ she told her daughter. ‘And I have the strangest feeling that she doesn’t really like me. I get an occasional whiff of antagonism. Naturally she is far too polite to show it, or even to feel it. But there is something not quite right about her.’

  ‘You’re too censorious,’ said her daughter, helping herself to an apple. ‘I should make use of her if I were you.’

  Philippa sees a way of discharging her responsibilities, observed Mrs Marsh. Well, she has been a good girl. And there is quite obviously a man in the background: she looks different. Suddenly and acutely she wished happiness for her daughter, a second marriage, nothing too precipitate or unsuitable, of course: something appropriate to her age and station. It seemed to her, then and later, that the worst fate in the world was to grow old as Anna would grow old. She imagined Anna and her friend Marie-France imprisoned by the shades of dead and dying relatives. Mes ancêtres, dans des appartements solennels, tous idiots ou maniaques. She was always grateful to the poets for giving colour, and authenticity, to her darker intuitions.

  4

  ANNA DURRANT had a recurring dream, which seemed to have been going on for many years and which must date from some time in her adolescence, since it bore all the marks of an adolescent fantasy. But over the years it had become more solemn, more mysterious, so that now it had achieved the status of a myth or a fairy tale. In the dream she was seated tidily and expectantly before a slice of cake, but not an ordinary cake: this was a dream cake, iced and filled and crowned with crystallized grapes. She took up her fork and plunged it into the cake, which immediately fragmented and revealed a gold wedding ring. Time and time again, in her dream, she heard the ring clatter on to the plate, while the cake, uneaten, vanished into thin air, its purpose achieved. It was somehow important not to eat the cake for fear of swallowing and therefore missing the ring. Since the advent of this dream, which she could no longer date or situate, she had shied away from too avid appetites, though she still possessed them, and had approached food cautiously, sometimes renouncing it altogether. While her ideal remained food of luscious sweetness and unctuosity—jellies, puddings, custards—she trained herself to eat only what was natural, and little enough of that. Fear of missing the ring kept her teeth closed before the fork could penetrate them, kept her eyes on her plate, seeing in one rapid survey what the food might conceal, and raising her head at last, as if to say, there is nothing for me in this, knowing that the dream would go on, and more, so that she could visualize the cake and the ring even when she was awake, so that if she longed for sweet food, as she frequently did, she would immediately see the ring falling on to the plate, after which the food would be irrelevant.

  Walking home through the dark silent Sunday streets she reflected that Mrs Marsh did not really like her, did not even mean to be very kind, having no real sympathy with her situation, but remaining a decent woman, with the decent habits of a lifetime, had extended some sort of hospitality, and had thus got the upper hand of her reluctance and her uncertain temper. It was important never to mislead oneself as to the motives of other people, those who insisted on being kind, and those who, as was usual in her case, manifested a concern which was quickly tinged with irritation. ‘If only she would do something to help herself,’ was the habitual lament of those in the second category. So few people could be found who would understand or even
try to understand a woman of her age and uncertain status, with no job, no profession, and no apparent avocation apart from caring for her mother. At this stage of the twentieth century mothers were supposed to look after themselves, even if elderly and frail, and to join keep-fit and self-help classes if they were not, thus sometimes appearing more vigorous than daughters who were beset with husbands and lovers and who had not yet rid themselves of menopausal anxiety.

  A mother such as Amy Durrant had been was almost unheard of, anachronistic: plaintive, pleading, gentle, a victim of her poor heart in more than one instance. This came constantly to mind, even though Amy was dead. The envelope in her bag, given in a last despairing attempt at understanding to a woman whose mediation could be trusted, reminded Anna disagreeably of the matter in hand. She had no desire to read it, having some knowledge of what it contained. She had heard it so many times, that plea to be understood, although she understood all too well. She had only to consult her own hidden feelings in order to do so. Discretion and her own situation dictated then as now a smiling ignorance of what was intended, a determination to maintain the formalities of a relationship, even if it now had a worm at its heart. And she had done so, had repulsed the confession her mother seemed so impelled to make in the teeth of the decorum so prized by her daughter. They had loved one another despairingly: that was their undoing. And despair in love merely prolongs its intensity, as well as its duration, which is for ever. Now she must make do with mere acquaintances like Mrs Marsh, who thought her tiresome. She in her turn pitied Mrs Marsh for having avoided full knowledge of a mother’s love, a mother’s despair, for living what she saw as a limited emotional life. She saw all this, saw too Mrs Marsh’s instinctive rejection of her, yet liked Mrs Marsh none the less for it. She saw her as a decent reliable sort of woman, much as her mother had: one who could be trusted.

  But what coldness now, without that hellish and absorbing love, which had been her life for all of her life and which she now had to live without! They had lived, the two of them, in those dark rooms, as if the outside world no longer existed, as if life, in some mysterious fashion, had been renounced, although at the time of her widowhood Amy Durrant had been a young woman. Growing up with that sadly smiling mother had impressed upon Anna the duty of protecting that mother against further hurt. And she in turn had enjoyed protection, devotion, the fiercest dedication, without thought of self. It was natural for the two of them to walk arm in arm, for the daughter to hear stories of her parents’ brief happiness, and to feel respect for its completeness, rounded as it was by a painless death, and prolonged by an indefinite period of mourning. This was the sustenance of their innocent days, and even now, in the light of full knowledge, she did not regret the innocence.

  To try to explain this innocence, which had marked her fatally, was impossible. To the outside world the couple appeared touching, but heads were shaken over the outcome of such closeness, and it was confidently predicted that Anna would never marry. Was it for this reason that Amy Durrant’s heart began to falter, to accelerate its uneven rhythm, and then to drop back into a throbbing so profound that both the throat and the stomach were affected? And if this happened at a time when Anna left the university (London, of course, so that she did not have to leave home) what more natural that she should undertake a piece of not too demanding research which would serve them both as an additional alibi? And that time was not problematic, for they were bound together in love and care, and eventually thought as one. Anna, raised in innocence and ignorance, had no desire other than to love and be loved, in this instance by her mother, for whose sorrow and frailty she felt responsible. To ease that pain she would give her life, for easing her mother’s pain meant easing the pain in her own heart, bringing her cheerfulness and satisfaction. She was not unaware of the pitying glances, not from her own contemporaries, oddly enough, but from their mothers, mothers more battle-ready on their daughters’ behalf than her own mother had ever dreamt of being. At about this time she began to have the dream of the cake disintegrating to disclose the wedding ring. The dream brought her joy. In spite of everything that had happened it still did.

  Yet how was she to marry? No stranger entered that flat, where small pleasing rituals were enacted and peace reigned, because there was no discord between them. So hermetic was their existence that Anna’s childhood was curiously prolonged into her early twenties. She was aware of this, having trained her mind to observance, yet felt it almost as a virtue. She attended her friends’ weddings, although her mother was indignant that she was never asked to be a bridesmaid, still thinking in terms of a cortège of adult bridesmaids such as she had had at her own wedding to Anna’s father, still hoping that Anna might meet a wedding guest and fall in love with him, such a love affair being sanctioned by the atmosphere of romance and her own fantasy of the event. In other respects she could not see her daughter making independent plans, nor was she anxious for her to do so. She knew her to be as idealistic as she was herself, and could not bear the prospect of disappointment for either of them. And Anna, consoled and supported by the dream, did not grieve too much when friends married and deserted her, thinking her irrelevant to their new lives, and aware of experiences which she could not share, aware too of their newly discovered contempt for her virginity. They tended to be sorry for her, but she herself was full of hope. She had a belief in her destiny which verged on mysticism, and throughout the long years in the silent flat, reading and watching television with her mother, her cheerfulness was entirely natural, and she did not notice the years going by.

  It was the mother who ended all this. That was what she now had to remember, that and the years which followed, until her mother’s death put an end to the bad faith which had taken the place of the earlier trust. Feeling faint, as she so often did, outside Harrods, being brought home in a cab by a man in a camel-hair coat, with polished silver hair, whom she introduced as ‘Mr Ainsworth, darling, who very kindly looked after me when I was feeling poorly. You’ll stay to tea, of course? Anna darling, will you get us some tea?’ They were deep in conversation when she returned from the kitchen, and at once she had felt foreboding, not on her own behalf but on her mother’s. He was too glossy, too plausible, and her mother was too flushed, too pretty. She was aware of a disturbed scent in the air, as if her mother were warm and excited, just as she was to be aware, later, of Ainsworth’s brutal stink in the bathroom and the bottles of cologne he poured over himself in order to become the lover and to dispel the natural man. For he was to become her mother’s lover, and even her husband, or so they thought. Overnight their unity was lost, although it was some time before Ainsworth moved in. ‘I do wish you’d call him George, darling, her mother had said with charming insouciance, and a resolute refusal to explain herself. She seemed to have recaptured the coquetry of her youth, when she had been hardy and capricious, before the marriage to Anna’s father and the death which had changed her into a recluse. And inevitably there was a ceremony of sorts, and then Ainsworth took his rightful place in her mother’s bedroom, whereas before he had only been a whispering visitor. Often she had gone into the hall late at night, tormented by doubt and heartache, and had seen his camel-hair coat and his pigskin gloves still lying over the chair, his umbrella propped up by its side.

  He was dapper, she thought with distaste, not quite daring to think of his decisiveness which had conquered her mother. She sensed that he was a silent and energetic lover, and that he had had her mother in his sights since he had rescued her outside Harrods and brought her home to Albert Hall Mansions. Not exactly a fortune-hunter—another character from her mother’s archaic repertoire—but sizing up the situation, the pretty, flattered, defenceless woman, whose very defencelessness excited him, so that in turn he drew from her an excited response. For the daughter he immediately felt a hunter’s contempt, sensing that no-one had ever breached her defences, relegating her almost to the status of a servant, aware of her dislike. They had lived like that for two years, until A
insworth disappeared as abruptly as he had entered their lives in the first place. At first she had feared that he might return, until her mother revealed to her the circumstances of his departure. He had left the country, having extracted money for the journey from Amy Durrant: it appeared that he was already married, to a Belgian woman, with whom he was still sporadically in touch. All this they learned much later. At the time Amy had taken it on herself to disguise his disappearance. ‘Why, yes, Anna and I are on our own again,’ she said bravely to the few people to whom she still spoke. ‘One shouldn’t get married at my advanced age. But women never learn, do they?’ Of Ainsworth’s whereabouts they remained determinedly in ignorance, although living in fear that he might choose to enter their lives once more. And the fear, the shock, and above all the disappointment, the sudden withdrawal of his bodily vigour, drove Amy Durrant into a full-scale heart attack, and accelerated her long decline into invalidism.