Fraud

by Anita Brookner

  She raised the window and leaned out, trying in vain to catch the smell of turned earth, to sense an emergent spring, but it was too early in the year: the air was sour, lightless. Yet with the prison of her bedroom behind her her spirits rose a little. She was free, she was well, she could still feel a vestigial enthusiasm for the day. Mrs Marsh might need her again, and again she would strive to please her, knowing that her efforts would somehow always fall short of the mark. She knew, she was sure she knew, that there was goodwill on both sides, but that each thought the other strange, too foreign to the life they had always known to be entirely trustworthy. Each was solitary: that should have been a bond. But Mrs Marsh preferred her solitude, which she filled with the reminiscences of old age, not used to sharing the time with others, having fallen out of the habit, or perhaps having relinquished it with gratitude. Anna could see why this way of life should make Mrs Marsh brusque in manner, but could not devise a set of responses which Mrs Marsh would think in any way appropriate. All that was required of her was a telephone call, to see whether Mrs Marsh needed any more shopping, and in due course she would make that call. It was just that she herself felt so tired, so stale after her bad night that she felt no desire to leave the flat. She told herself that she would feel better once dressed, chose a white silk shirt, a brown cashmere pullover, a narrow brown and white tweed skirt. Surveying herself in the glass she felt mildly restored.

  Mrs Marsh, on the telephone, sounded more or less like her old self. It was possible to detect in her tone something of her habitual annoyance.

  ‘Aunt Vera?’

  ‘Oh, Anna.’

  ‘Was there anything you wanted? You sound better than you did yesterday.’

  ‘Nothing, thank you. Philippa is coming up today. She wants me to go back with her, but I’d rather stay here. So difficult to make people understand that.’

  Anna laughed. ‘People do tend to worry if you’re on your own. I’m glad Philippa’s coming. Do give her my regards, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh, and Anna, thank you so much for being so kind yesterday. I was most grateful. You must come to lunch one day soon, when I’m on my feet again.’

  ‘Of course. I’d love to. But in fact I may be going to Paris in a week or two’s time, to see my friend Marie-France. I usually try to go for her birthday. We’ve been friends for years, ever since I left school.’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Mrs Marsh, losing interest. ‘Well, I won’t keep you, Anna. You must have a lot to do. Perhaps we’ll see each other when you return.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll telephone you. And you’re sure there’s nothing you need? Oh, no, Philippa’s coming. Well, goodbye for now, Aunt Vera.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Mrs Marsh.

  So that was all right. The day was hers. She might go out, book a ticket for Paris, although she did not intend to leave for over a fortnight. She might have one of those days of which she had occasionally dreamed in the dark sanctuary of Albert Hall Mansions: a morning looking through her notes, and an afternoon of art galleries and a visit to the London Library. Yet the grey air repelled her, and the sad sound of cars passing mournfully on wet roads. There was something which prevented her from leaving the flat, something which had nothing to do with the dimness of the January day and the silence of this street. She stood at the window for a moment longer than was necessary to survey the weather, then turned and sat down, leaning her head back in her chair. She was still oppressed by the fragments of her dream, now fading, going to join all the other dreams in which her mother appeared to her, sometimes admonishing, sometimes cajoling, always young and pretty. There had been a remark she could not quite recapture, something to do with that same youth and prettiness of which her mother had always boasted. Even when she was quite old a compliment on her prettiness would bring a smile to her face. Yet she had known only two men in her life, one fleetingly, the other disastrously. Perhaps she had missed her true vocation, which was to be cherished by a strong man throughout her lifetime. She had never quite lost her look of expectation, as if that strong man might still appear.

  In the dreams she was different, bolder, less scrupulous, perhaps. She had alluded to her prowess, which Amy Durrant had never done, would never do. ‘I was very attractive to men,’ her mother had said. And then something else. Of course, that was it. ‘Even the doctor …’ How strangely the mind works, she thought. I had no idea that I would telephone Lawrence today, and yet that is what I am going to do. What could be more obvious? I need a prescription; I can no longer waste my life dreaming of my mother. And yet it was she who prompted me, as she would have liked to do had all been as she wished it to be.

  It is all quite innocent—I may not even see him. Mrs Marsh said there was a woman doctor joining him. But perhaps it would be nice to see him, to re-establish contact, to show him that there is no ill-feeling. After all, what harm could I possibly do? He is a married man, and I am a spinster whom no-one would think to compliment, as they so dutifully complimented my mother. Sleep is what I need, not Lawrence Halliday. But when the receptionist gave her an appointment for that afternoon she was not in the least surprised. The whole episode had the smoothness of a dream, which was where it had had its origins.

  Memory now played its part, together with an ambience of shuttered rooms, of lowered voices, of hands fleetingly held. He had been concerned for her, curious about the life she led. Perhaps his concern had been professional, but she had never thought so. In any event the attraction had been kept in check. It was the attraction of the strong for the weak, and she had been the strong one. His dilemma had been quite clear to her: whether to surrender to the comfortable and comforting atmosphere of the flat and its endowments, or to continue to make his way in the world unfettered. He had chosen the world, or perhaps the world had chosen him. Yet his expression, when she had last seen him, had been preoccupied, almost listless, as if the world, in the shape of his wife, were too much with him, as if he missed his original home, with its simplicity and its loving mother.

  He was betrayed by his looks, as she was by hers. If life had typecast her as a wise virgin, he was destined, by his irresolute blond handsomeness, to be the prey of women who would be excited by the prospect of appropriating him, not necessarily for his own good. She knew that she was unbending, that in some respects she intimidated him, knew too that when he was away from her he would revolt against the respect he all too obviously felt for her, and would assume a brutality, a boisterousness, which would just as suddenly desert him. Part of him wished nothing more than to be taken in and cared for, as he had once been cared for, in the days before he had embarked upon his arduous upward climb away from his origins, away from earlier simplicities. At other times he felt like a man, with a man’s appetites and impatience.

  She had known all this, but had not known how to resolve his difficulties for him, or how to bring him to a decision. She had been courteous, gentle. It had even crossed her mind that her apparent sexlessness stood her in good stead, denoting as it did absolute lack of pressure on him. For the decision was his: her own mind was made up. Because of this mistaken attitude the move was never made, and she had subsequently wondered whether she had imagined that he felt for her anything other than admiration. For she had his admiration, that was never in any doubt: she thought that she had his tenderness as well. He felt regret for her, as if at some time in the future, when he had made all his decisions, decisions in which she no longer figured, he might miss her.

  She had not changed. The two dramas that had consumed her life had left her intact, as if they had conferred as much as they had taken away. The idea that she might have discarded them, discounted them, seemed to her impossible. She saw that the whole purpose of her existence was to keep affection alive, even at the risk of living imperfectly in the present. She looked forward whole-heartedly to her meeting with Lawrence Halliday. She would say nothing other than what the situation required. Yet she hoped to see in his eyes that look of admiration and of tendern
ess—now quite legitimate, no longer dangerous—which had once been there, and which she might take home with her, to link her life now as it had been in earlier more hopeful days.

  She felt a moment’s coldness. I am ridiculous, she thought. Women no longer live like this. They live like Vickie Gibson, or Halliday as she is now, decisively, avidly, indignantly even: they go down into the marketplace, whereas I pay the price of staying out of it. Her exalted mood evaporated, and once again she felt tired and uncertain. She regretted her appointment, and only the prospect of uninterrupted sleep prevented her from cancelling it. In a moment of discouragement she felt her affections slip from her, for which she immediately reproached herself. It occurred to her that her major failing might be an absence of anger: she could not remember ever feeling anything so simple as anger in her life. It is only a visit to an old friend, she told herself, as she pulled on her raincoat. No harm can come of it. But it was a feeling of sadness which accompanied her along the street.

  11

  HALLIDAY FLUSHED SLIGHTLY when his secretary showed him his appointment book, with Anna’s name in it. This rapid and elusive colouring was a habit he had retained from adolescence, one which signified uneasiness rather than embarrassment. He had flushed when he was introduced to his future wife at a party, this time from a mixture of confusion and dread, for he knew in an instant that he was violently attracted to her, and sensed that she was shallow and more problematic than she appeared at first sight. In a word he knew that he might marry her, for he was lonely and tired of inventing his own amusements when he came home in the evening. He hoped naively that a woman might comfort him. Vickie Gibson also flushed when she was introduced to him, but this signified very little, as he came to discover: her emotions were hectic and unreliable, although she possessed in her calmer moments a suave common sense which continued to disconcert him.

  After five years of marriage his own emotions had cooled, and he felt lonely again. His physical life was still violent; he sometimes wondered if his wife intended that it should be so for ever. He himself was finding it somewhat of a strain to meet the challenge of his wife’s conscientious provocation, her insistence on experiment, her publicly demonstrated assiduity. Privately he put this down to the onset of an early menopause, and wondered whether he would have the patience to deal with it when the time came. He was used, by now, to her juvenility, which caused her to fall into extreme emotional attitudes. If anyone disagreed with her with any degree of firmness, she would flush ominously and bite her lip. Later, in their bedroom, there would be tears, and the familiar query, ‘Why does everyone hate me?’ For she desired to be loved by everyone, but above all by men, as she had been by her father, whom she in her turn adored. Halliday had learned to deal with her emotions, but was still unprepared for her apparently effortless transition to hard-eyed practicality. It was not quite what he had desired. Anna Durrant’s name in his appointment book reminded him that he had once had a choice, and the memory caused him to flush uneasily, aware of distant embarrassments and their ability to catch him out.

  Embarrassment had been with him for as long as he could remember, with the exception of a few brief early years spent in loving communion with his mother and father. The only son of a Leicester newsagent, he had grown up in perfect happiness, or so it now seemed to him, a happiness which was threatened by the death of his father when the boy was ten years old. He remembered his mother, scrubbing her face with a rolled-up handkerchief, which she thrust resolutely into the pocket of her cardigan. She had taken his hand into her damp one.

  ‘We shall just have to carry on, shan’t we, son? Daddy would have wanted it that way.’

  So he delivered the papers before he went to school, getting up at five in the frozen winter mornings, before it was light, and going home again to the fuggy warmth of the shop, with its cloying gas heater, and warming himself in the back room while his mother in the kitchen cooked him a huge fried breakfast. He was quite willing to serve in the shop, although his mother was against it: she would come running in from the back room or the kitchen whenever the bell rang, and was annoyed if she saw him chatting to a customer. She had plans for him: he was not to spend his life as she had done, tied to the shop and knowing nothing more extensive than the street in which the shop was situated, going no further than the baker or the greengrocer a few yards away, and enjoying a brief rest only on a Sunday afternoon, when she lay down in her dark bedroom for an hour and allowed her son to make her a cup of tea. Then she was up again, washing, cooking a joint of meat which they ate ceremoniously on Sunday evenings, the morning having been too crowded with Sunday newspapers to give them time for lunch. When she heard Lawrence’s bicycle approaching, she would change the sign from OPEN to CLOSED: later she would come downstairs and clean up a bit, but for the time being she could devote a few hours to herself and to the son whom she adored. She counted herself a lucky woman, for the boy was a good boy, fond, docile, clever, and with the promise of exceptional looks. Tall, fair, and serious, he had long eyelashes, of which he was ashamed, and a thin mobile mouth which retained the attention of many girls. Already, in early adolescence, he was attracting the glances of women as well as of girls.

  His mother was determined that he should stay on at school, and if possible go to university, although she did not look forward to his absence. But she was brave, had been high-spirited in youth, and still enjoyed a good laugh with her friend June Seager, who liked to keep her company in the room at the back of the shop. ‘May and June, made for each other,’ June would laugh, and indeed they got on exceptionally well. Lawrence would hear the sound of their laughter even before he wheeled his bicycle into the passage. ‘Here’s Laurie,’ one of them would say, it did not matter which, for they both doted on him, and tea would be poured out, and his favourite jam tarts would be lifted carefully out of the tin into which his mother had put them, still warm, after her late baking session on the previous Sunday night, when he was already in bed and asleep. They loved to see him eat, would follow the progress of every mouthful, and then, when he had wiped his lips with his handkerchief, would ask him about school, and how he was getting on. Fortunately he was able to repay their loving care with satisfactory progress: it was important to him to do well for his mother’s sake. He did not worry about her, knowing that June was there to keep an eye on her, but he longed to make her happy. Her happiness, it seemed, was to be his responsibility, and one which he had no wish to shirk.

  May and June: sometimes he could visualize them even now, laughing together over one of their endless cups of tea in the shabby all-purpose room at the back of the shop, neither of them attractive or confident, usually dressed in an accumulation of cardigans, scarves and fleece-lined boots, but always beaming with love for him. They were like no other women he was ever to know: by the same token no other woman ever entirely matched up to them. He did not notice them growing older, although his mother occasionally complained of tiredness, but she was always prompt to put before him a plate of deliciously cooked food, and therefore he did not see that her tiredness was in any way incapacitating. The shop was getting shabby and needed modernizing, but they had their regular customers and they were not ambitious. For years, it seemed, nothing changed, nor did it seem likely to change.

  He was a clever but not a brilliant boy, the kind who develops slowly and on whom teachers look approvingly but without great expectations. He surprised them all by putting on a great turn of speed in the sixth form and carrying off six prizes, including the prize for Latin, together with the offer of a place at Cambridge. His mind was made up: he would read medicine. In the years that remained to him before he went up to Cambridge he helped his mother in the shop and put himself through an advanced course in physics and biology. He also secured the appointment of a part-time manager to help his mother when he himself was away. Fred was a lugubrious man, past the age of retirement, who had previously sold his own ironmongery business and who could not bear to be idle. May Halliday w
as doubtful, but her son was firm. She let him have his way, as she had always done. Her grief at losing him was enormous. The night before he was due to leave she shed a few tears, then wiped them away, and set before him three beautiful lemon pancakes, his absolute favourite.

  ‘You will take care, won’t you, dear?’