Fraud

by Anita Brookner

  It was part of his job to keep her ignorant, he supposed, although she was so shrewd in other ways, particularly where her own interests were concerned. But how could he enlighten her without telling her that she was shallow and greedy, accusations which she would indignantly refute? How could he, at this late stage, inform her that he thought her father monstrous, and dreaded the annual holiday, part of which was always spent at the Gibsons’ large house on the Dartmouth estuary, where his father-in-law, in peaked cap, sailed his boat, and insisted that Lawrence come along as crew? He hated the water, hated his father-in-law, wanted only to walk for hours, alone, to stop at a pub for lunch—still on his own—and not to go back until nightfall, by which time he would almost be glad to see them. When he had voiced his simple desire to Vickie she had immediately assumed a look of reproach.

  ‘But Daddy would be so hurt,’ she had said. ‘And you know I don’t like your going off on your own like that. It looks so rude. After all, we are guests. We’re not at home, Lawrence.’

  ‘We could be,’ he had once said. ‘We don’t have to come here.’

  ‘But I love it here! How can you be so mean? We’ve always come here in the summer, ever since I was little: this place means everything to Daddy. And anyway, I think of it as my house. You know Daddy’s going to leave it to me.’

  ‘What about your mother? Won’t she want it?’

  She had given him one of her rare appraising looks.

  ‘You don’t want me to have it, do you? You don’t like my having more money than you.’

  For Gibson had settled a considerable amount of money on Vickie when she married.

  ‘No need for you to put your hand in your pocket,’ he had said officiously to Halliday. ‘She’ll have everything she wants.’

  He was quite surprised to realize that although his own background was humble the errors of taste were all on the other side.

  She was a poor tiresome little girl, and he was bound to her for life. He could think of no reason for divorcing her, and knew that if he ever mentioned it he would merely store up more wrath, more tears, more parental disapproval, although he got a fair measure of all these things when doing almost nothing to inspire them, as if he were always and entirely in the wrong. He supposed he must be, for his wife seemed relatively happy, although he suspected that he had initially appealed to her ambition rather than to her desire: she saw in him a husband for whom her friends might envy her, but she also saw a helplessness, a lack of resolution, which she could mould to her will. As she had done. Her friends duly envied her, and he, within a very short space of time, felt lonely. He had been lonely for years. These days he thought of his mother, and although he was glad she had not lived to be rebuffed by the woman he had made his wife, he longed for her company, and for the joyous love she had had for him. No-one would ever love him like that again. All he could hope for now was evasion, for small intervals of time snatched from his busy life in which he could indulge his own thoughts, his own memories. He longed for silence, and thought that if he ever possessed a measure of it again he would willingly forego sex, if that was the price to be paid. Sex with Vickie was violent, uninhibited: she was a conscientious and eager lover, thought out enticing scenarios, to which he always responded. Afterwards he felt something like shame, certainly impatience. This is not grown up, he had thought at one point. Yet what else was on offer? He could not find another woman, for his wife was all-enveloping. In many ways he would have preferred no woman at all. He knew that if he had married Anna he would have gained a discreet familiar, whose presence would have absorbed all hurts. While she sat on the opposite side of his desk, in the chair reserved for patients, telling him about her mother, he longed to tell her about his own. Such effusions, such confidences were now barred to him for life. Of the two of them he considered himself to be the loser. Her own pain he had thought—if she had in fact felt any pain—had been overcome by sheer strength of character. He would have liked to have had that strength of character on his side. Yet he knew that while he despised the games he played with his wife he was now their victim, simply because he did not fear her judgement. She was his partner in vice, as Anna could never be. And there the matter more or less rested.

  Anna, on the other side of his desk, thought that he was probably not listening to her, that in any event she was not saying anything that could possibly interest him. The facts of her life, as she saw it, were facts which could be ignored. But it was true that she did not feel as well as she usually did, had not felt well since returning from Paris. She had forced herself to think about the events that had taken place there as steadily and as objectively as she could. One thing was certain: the friendship with Marie-France was eroded. Even if she had taken Dunoyer’s attentions too seriously, there was always the hurt that Marie-France would feel if her lover’s eye ever so much as entertained the thought of another woman. At her age she had so much to lose! And why should Marie-France not revel in her innocent pride at having captured Dunoyer as a husband? Any woman might be forgiven this moment of vainglory, of victory. She had played her part already, that reduced part which was now required of her: she had already been an admiring audience, had drunk the champagne, and had made her unaccompanied escape into the dark night, an escape witnessed by Dunoyer, who had taken a moment’s profit from it, and perhaps enjoyed a moment’s speculation at the same time. That was all there was to it, yet instinct told her not to go back. Marie-France would now go over to the other side, and she herself would dwindle in comparison with Marie-France’s happy state.

  She had a horror of compassion, both her own and that of others. She was determined never to be perceived as a victim. All her life she had outfaced those who offered her their sympathy, for what they supposed was her hard life, bound to her mother as she was, and had simply smiled by way of an answer. Those who had expected more found her cold, unnatural. She had trained herself never to weep, since the few tears she had shed as a child had affected her mother to an inordinate degree and were wont to bring forth tears in return. Since learning that lesson her eyes had been dry. Stoically, like the Spartan boy with the fox beneath his shirt, she had pretended to feel nothing, had turned away slights with the same patient considered smile. Halliday, who was in fact paying attention, could see the stratified layers of self-control, and wondered, with professional interest, what would happen if a fault line ever developed. A breakdown? Unlikely: she was a strong character. But some kind of excess, perhaps. Maybe his role was simply to keep a watching brief. For in many ways he considered her to be at risk.

  They watched each other carefully, recognizing disappointment. While Halliday studied her still pale face, the crasser, more jovial face of his father-in-law impinged, crowned with a peaked yachting cap, the stub of an extinct cigar clamped between yellowing teeth. Were it not for his father-in-law, he thought, his marriage might not have taken place. But it had been masterminded, for whatever Vickie wanted her devoted father saw to it that she got, and got in full measure. Anna, looking past him, saw a darkening room in Albert Hall Mansions, heard her mother’s voice from the bedroom, ‘Are you there, darling? Has he gone?’ Neither of them had been strong enough to break away. They saw this, in an instant, as they had never seen it before. Dimly, they had blamed themselves. Those who love us are the most difficult to withstand. This is the first lesson to be learnt, she thought, but now it is too late.

  Aloud she said, ‘And yet I loved my mother,’ and stopped abruptly.

  ‘Yes?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Your mother is dead,’ he prompted.

  But it was important to her to reach the end of this train of thought.

  ‘It was not that my mother prevented me from marrying,’ she said. ‘She longed for me to marry. But only after her death. She thought that that might be arranged.’

  ‘There’s no pleasing mothers, is there?’ he put in quickly. Yet he had always pleased his own.

  Just as quickly she shied away
from the subject of her mother. He noted her switch of attention, but it seemed important that he give her what information she might need.

  ‘Your mother had a mitral valve lesion,’ he said. ‘For her age she did quite well. She was not ill all the time.’

  ‘I thought she had heart failure.’

  ‘Hearts go in and out of failure,’ he told her.

  But her mother’s heart had failed in other ways, Anna thought.

  In Rome, on his honeymoon (for which his father-in-law had insisted on paying) he had been particularly impressed by a picture in the Borghese Gallery, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, which shows two beautiful women sitting on the edge of a marble well-head. One is naked, the other clothed. It had puzzled him at the time, since both looked chaste. He had assumed that the naked woman represented profane love, the love that obtains at nightfall, yet she had leaned towards the other in a gesture of friendship. Sacred Love was richly dressed, but seemed indifferent. He had bought a book on Titian, and looked up this particular picture. Much to his surprise he had found that the unclothed figure was deemed to be sacred, while the other, in her brilliant dress, represented the pomps of this world. He had rejected this explanation. What he knew of love at this time had been confused with nudity, with the shedding of garments, and with them of disguises. He had acknowledged the gross disorder into which he fell when his wife removed her clothes, which she did carefully, seductively, with one eye on his reactions. He thought all this a syndrome of profane love, and was forced to accept his own untutored reaction. Anna, sitting there in her careful blue suit, seemed to him as distant, as untouchable, and as untouched, as the beautiful creature in the picture, and he was never to know whether or not his judgement was correct.

  And yet she was affecting, even disturbing. Something about that pristine remoteness attracted him, as might a temperate climate, or a serious book. He read so little these days: his work kept him occupied, and his wife was talkative. He thought, once more, that he might have made another life with her, and suspected that it might be superior to the one he currently led. When a patient telephoned him at home, and his wife answered the call, she fell into a mode of exaggerated sympathy, which caused alarm. She had proffered advice, until he had stopped her: her dignity was manifestly, and ostentatiously, offended. People admired her, he knew, and even envied him, and of course he could never be disloyal. He felt sadness on her behalf, that she could never be other than a lightweight, yet it was her lightness, her frivolity, that had initially broken down his reserve. He bore the responsibility for keeping her in a good mood, something she was not able to do for herself. He tried to suppress his irritation with the fact that despite her frequent protestations of being over-burdened she was in fact idle. ‘Why don’t you do some voluntary work?’ he had asked.

  ‘What, with all I have to do in the house?’ she had replied. ‘And all the entertaining you like me to do?’

  The house was cleaned by a stoical Portuguese woman. As for the entertaining, he knew, as she must surely do, that she insisted on it, as being good for a man in his position.

  ‘But my position doesn’t depend on my entertaining people,’ he had protested.

  She had given him one of her level looks.

  ‘If it weren’t for me I doubt if you’d have any friends,’ she had said.

  This was true. He had become secretive, and disinclined to share his life, or that part of it which she allowed him. But his irritation persisted, and now spilled over on to Anna. His own mother had impressed him with her unstinting labour. Why, then, did these healthy women not work?

  ‘What about that piece of research you were doing?’ he now asked.

  ‘A fiction,’ she replied, seeing it at last for what it was. ‘My mother liked to think of my being absorbed in something that would not take me out of the house, and I suppose I went along with this. Oh, it was an attractive project, and I was quite interested, but on a purely amateur level. I could carry on with it, and pretend to be a professional, but no one would take me seriously, least of all myself.’

  ‘So how do you spend your time?’

  ‘I doubt if I could tell you.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I think you might feel sorry for me. But it has only been a year, you know … If I said I was “adjusting” would that be more acceptable? Don’t worry, if you are worried, that is. I’ll get a job.’ She smiled. ‘There shouldn’t be any trouble. After all, I’m good with old people.’

  He ignored this.

  ‘You live alone?’

  ‘I live alone.’

  ‘And I suppose you don’t bother to cook for yourself?’

  She looked at him in surprise.

  ‘I assure you that I eat quite adequately.’

  For she was bored with this insistence on her bodily condition, and would have liked him to have asked her questions of a more philosophical nature, although she knew that this was impossible. He had disappointed her, much as he had disappointed her in the past. She had come to him for help, in hope, feeling genuinely unwell, something which rarely happened to her, and he had made pedantic noises about food, about work, whereas she had wanted something impossible—a remedy, the philosopher’s stone, some magic word or gesture which would pierce the carapace of good manners with which she had armoured herself against him on all previous occasions. He had, in some way, let her down. She caught his eye then, and saw it steadily fixed on her. She returned his look: his own eye wavered and slipped away.

  ‘I’d like you to come and see me on a regular basis, Anna. I need to monitor your weight.’

  She agreed languidly. Now that the interview was over she felt an immense desire to yawn, to lie down, to drift into sleep.

  ‘There’s nothing else you’re worried about?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  He recognized the spark of irony that he had noticed once or twice before. He had not been entirely sure that it was there: he had perceived it as a moment of discomfort for himself, and it had forced him into further deception. For deception had been forced on him by Anna in the first place: a collusion, a conspiracy into which he had fallen, half willingly, half unwittingly, and from which he had freed himself only by the violent action prompted by his impatient body. He had escaped from a dream, a spell, which had threatened to put him to sleep. And the wrench was violent. Desire had not been properly engaged, yet it had been necessary for him to escape from that shadowy room in which Anna seemed to have her being. He had been impressed by, and grateful for, her subsequent reserve, and had tried not to notice the irony in the gaze she directed at him like a beam of light into a dark corner. It had established his status as a deserter, after which only superficial conversation was possible. There was between them a failure, and not simply a failure to communicate: there should have been an accusation, a defence, followed by mutual forgiveness. A failure of nerve, perhaps. He was still able, even at this late date, to experience discomfort because of it. Her patience maddened him, made him want to handle her roughly.

  ‘You should get out more,’ he said in a suitably jovial tone. ‘We can’t have you sitting alone every evening.’

  But she had heard this sort of remark before, and turned a deaf ear. She supposed that she had taken up too much of his time, that this was his signal for her to go. She had probably bored him, she thought, and had to assume a particularly bland expression in order to meet his eyes. When she did he flushed.

  ‘You must come to dinner with us,’ he said. ‘I’ll get my wife to telephone you.’

  ‘I rarely go out in the evenings,’ she replied calmly, pulling on her gloves.

  ‘Well, I think you should. Don’t worry, I’ll take you home afterwards. And my wife would love to meet you again.’

  He knew this sounded false, even as he said it. Vickie’s friends were of an entirely different type: he found them noisy, materialistic. Many of them dated from her days as an estate agent. The men arrived with loosened ties, bottles of c
hampagne in hand, and cheerfully announced their intention of getting drunk: the girls, in very short skirts, shrieked and protested, but were exceedingly tough. He suspected that they found him provincial, although he had long spoken without the trace of an accent. His appearance was against him: his fair good looks, his height and his leanness conferred on him an assurance which he did not feel. He had a stay-at-home soul, frequently assented to opinions which he did not hold, less out of cowardice than out of a desire to absent himself from the ensuing discussion. He strove to keep a little silence for himself, had an odd vision of himself sitting by the fire, reading, yet the fire was like no fire that he could trace, unless it was the kitchen range at home. He still thought of it as home. The house in Tryon Street had no fireplaces, and the radiators were extremely hot. He went round turning them down. Vickie turned them up again.

  He hated Anna to leave him on this false note, knew that he had let her down, that he had compounded, even in so minor a way, his original fault. Seeing her sitting in front of him, attentive to his banal words, he had realized the full weight of his original desertion. He could have saved her, he knew, and then she in her turn could have saved him. And the moment when he could have made his choice had passed, or else he had given it the slip; he had pretended, entirely for his own purposes, that she did not exist, did not pose a problem, did not need to be saved. He was aware, seeing her now, that she still needed to be saved, and that all that he could legitimately offer her was care of the most routine kind, care of her body, that body which he had so singularly failed to claim for himself. He could monitor her food and see to it that she slept, knowing that all this was within the bounds prescribed by his professional conscience, knowing at the same time that it was a sham.