Lewis Percy

by Anita Brookner

  ‘I only walked home, you know. I’m going to do it regularly, so don’t worry if I’m later than usual, darling. I should have telephoned, I suppose. I’m sorry. But there was no need to disturb your mother. Or the doctor,’ he added, seeing that the doctor, lying supine in an armchair, was all set to remain for the evening. He had removed his hat and coat, which now lay on the sofa. His creased grey eye was focused on Tissy and came only briefly to rest on Lewis.

  ‘We don’t want our girl upset,’ he said judiciously, removing a fleck of something from his tongue. ‘We don’t want her under a strain.’ He heaved himself out of his chair and took Tissy’s wrist between his fingers.

  ‘She’s not under a strain,’ said Lewis, deeply annoyed. ‘She’s perfectly well. Good Lord, I should know. She never complains about her health.’

  ‘Ah, but she wouldn’t,’ sighed the doctor, replacing a lock of hair which had fallen over Tissy’s forehead and fondling her cheek. ‘Come on, Thea. They don’t want us hanging around. They want to be on their own.’

  Lewis smiled grimly, determined to say nothing. But, seeing them about to leave, he relented, pressed Mrs Harper’s arm, and said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of her.’

  Mrs Harper’s voluptuously lipsticked mouth trembled a little, but she looked at him with disdain. She must be very lonely, he thought, while Tissy helped the doctor on with his coat. She would never forgive him for taking her daughter away. And yet he felt sorry for her, in her sad middle age, with only the doctor to care for her. For the doctor himself he felt hatred, steady and mounting.

  ‘Tissy,’ he said, later in the evening, when they were washing the dishes. ‘What was your father’s name?’

  ‘William,’ she said without hesitating, but her eyes rolled round like a doll’s.

  He let her go to bed first and sat in his old place, staring at the unlit fire. Not her fault, he thought; not her fault. He resolved to make it up to her. But in the corner of his mind, along with that surprising, even shocking gesture of the doctor tucking away Tissy’s wayward lock of hair and taking her face in his obstreperous hand, came the sensation of freedom that he had rediscovered on his long walk. Again, with that unwelcome lucidity that was the curse of this particular evening, he thought that this might be the only freedom he was in future to be permitted to enjoy.

  8

  Tissy allowed her fashionable hair to grow long again. Within a remarkably short space of time she had reverted to her original appearance. Her virginal gentility, which had mysteriously survived marriage, disconcerted Lewis but left him without a valid reason for questioning its persistence: he supposed it to be innate, something akin to the odour of sanctity. Sometimes, despite her rigorous exertions and her still watchful housekeeping, she seemed like a ghost around the house. He said nothing. The only sign of his own evolution was to be sought in the breaks and tremors in his hitherto regular handwriting, which now ran faintly but persistently down towards the corner of his catalogue cards. In the library the silence was intense, broken only by the unconscious sigh of a student oppressed by a particularly weighty volume, or the rattle of Goldsborough’s tin of blackcurrant pastilles as he moved bulkily towards the index: his progress, despite his hushed step, reminded Lewis of an animal in a dry watercourse. Across the greenish expanse he could see Pen, elegant even in shirtsleeves, head bent over the booksellers’ catalogues he was marking up for Goldsborough’s final inspection. Hours passed slowly, the clock, like God, sometimes an ally, sometimes, more frequently, an enemy.

  He always walked home now. It would not have occurred to him to make an excuse for this stratagem, which was one of delay, and yet he could not bring himself to give the true reason for it. Tissy had ceased complaining; he sensed a withdrawal in her. Her earlier timidity had hardened into a kind of refusal to engage which was in fact a sign of strength rather than weakness. Her silences were loaded with criticism, yet they were maintained as silences, and they became more eloquent than the words they suppressed. There was no open disagreement between them. Their routines were so established that they moved with an automatic accord through their daily lives. Sometimes it seemed to Lewis that their value to each other was as a foil for what was essentially an individual experience of solitude, which, borne alone, might strike either one of them down with intolerable perplexity: with the other there neither could feel totally abandoned. Yet for each of them a peculiar loneliness was an older, perhaps a more natural experience than companionship, and perhaps there was a recognition of the inevitable, even a rapture, in succumbing once again to this experience, which was felt to be archaic, predestined. Down they sank, through all the pretences, through the eager assumption of otherness that each had sought in marriage, down to that original feeling of unreality, unfamiliarity, with which they had first embraced the world. With this, a recognition of strangeness between them, as if each were puzzled by the continued presence of the other. From time to time there was a coming together; afterwards they took leave of each other, like partners at the end of a dance. Neither blamed the other, for there was no specific cause. But Lewis began to feel that his life was a dream from which he would presently awaken to reality.

  Even this state he found useful, predetermined, necessary, for it was powerfully conducive to the elaboration, and even the justification of his book, which was now recognizably a book, and no longer the raw vehicle of his youthful enthusiasms. He seemed to be writing it in a life parallel to the real life he lived with his wife, yet he found them both to be profoundly mysterious, even enthralling, and occasionally antithetical. Sometimes he felt himself to be more truly authentic when contemplating a shift in the fortunes of a fictional character than when talking to Tissy, or attempting to talk to her, for when he got home in the evenings she was usually watching television, and, not considering himself entitled to disturb her, he would go to the kitchen and there eat the dinner which had been left for him on a plate in the oven, like a message in a tomb.

  He thought that it was nobody’s fault that they had become so imperceptibly estranged, although Tissy, in one of her rare moments of eloquence, blamed his work, towards which she entertained feelings of hostility. At first this reaction seemed to Lewis so primitive that he refused to take it seriously. Her mother, he knew, shared it and even encouraged it, as if The Hero as Archetype were the equivalent of an infidelity. Mrs Harper was openly censorious and assumed an air of pinched indifference whenever the work was mentioned. He had noticed something of this on the occasion of their first meeting, at the tea party which had seen the launch of his marital plans: as to who had launched them he was still unclear, and preferred to remain so. But the mulishness of his wife whenever it was a question of his authorship or his ambitions was quite clear, overwhelmingly so. She saw his book as an insult to herself, and little by little he learned not to mention it. He felt guiltily aware that she was right, that it was an infidelity, for when he was writing it he no longer thought of her, and if he had it would have been to consider her as an unrealized character whom the author had failed to develop. The writer in him would have tried to devise for her some enlightening experience which would cause all the inhibitions to disappear, yet the husband knew that he had intended this all along, hoping that marriage itself would perform the miracle.

  It now seemed to Lewis as if his wife would remain for ever within the tight small circle of her limitations, and even that it was policy on her part to reject anything or anyone outside the circle. Her disability had left her suspicious: what he had originally seen as pure timidity was in effect an act of retrenchment. She proclaimed to the world, ‘You may come so close and no closer.’ Therefore the wider world, and all that pertained to it, was viewed as disruptive, annoying, unnecessary. Lewis’s refusal to accept her standards, her parameters, she regarded as threatening. Even his desire to walk home was perceived as a kind of insult, an action personally and potentially damaging to herself.

  She saw no need for him to write a book. She had a
n idea that this not only excluded her but cancelled her, and in this she was right. Lewis could see no way of convincing her that she occupied one part of his life and his book another. He was not comfortable about this but he was genuinely unable to see what he was supposed to do about it. He still had desires for greatness, openness, some kind of apotheosis: sometimes, even walking the city streets, his heart would expand with joy at the beauty of the world and its possibilities. He had learned to see eternity in a grain of sand, or rather in the simplicity and the beauty of a tree in a suburban garden. He still hoped for some kind of transforming experience, of translation to another place, even another country, where nature was more beneficent, more prodigal than even he could imagine. His little book was to him part of this upward progress. And Tissy would come with him. He had never thought of leaving her behind. She would come with him and he would teach her to be happy. Or rather he would try again, hoping that this time she would shake off her restraints and her apprenticeship. It did not even occur to him to wonder why this process was taking so long, for he had patience enough for both of them. Occasionally he might feel melancholy, but he told himself that this was tiredness, or that he was getting a little dull, and once more, mentally, he promised them both a holiday, just before remembering how impossible it was to dislodge Tissy from her iron habits and from the boundaries which she drew around their lives.

  He bought her flowers, chocolates, not in an attempt to win her favour or her approval, but rather as symbols of the more rewarding life he would have liked her to enjoy. He was still fascinated by her, although now it was as a stranger that she exerted her fascination. He loved to watch her as, pensively, she allowed the taste of the chocolate to melt in her mouth, her long tapering fingers poised over the box, descending slowly but without hesitation. She appeared to derive no active physical enjoyment from this appetite, but rather a calm sense of replenishment, as if sugar were her natural and only diet. It was her unaltered and abstract expression as she ate her fill that struck him as singular; it went with her pale face and her large eyes and her glistening, very slightly protruding, teeth; it went above all with her assumption of virtue. If he thought of her at any point during the day his thoughts presented him with an image of Tissy, sitting in the sunlight, beside the big window of the drawing-room, and slowly but purposefully filling her mouth with chocolate. Sometimes, when he kissed her in the evening, her breath was as sweet as honey. She began to put on weight.

  It was a different matter when he purchased and brought home the typewriter and installed it in his old room. This she regarded as an affront, seeing, quite correctly, that he would spend less time with her, not physically, but mentally, once the means of typing the final draft of his book were actually present in the house. By an enormous mischance Mrs Harper was paying her daughter a visit when Lewis came home with his new Olivetti.

  ‘I’m surprised you want to bring your work home, Lewis,’ she said. ‘I should have thought you’d want to spend your spare time with Tissy.’

  ‘But this is my book,’ he attempted to explain. ‘I told you all about it. And the sooner I get it finished the happier I’ll be.’

  ‘I wonder you don’t do it in the office,’ she said.

  ‘I work in a library. They don’t use typewriters in libraries. Look,’ he said, turning to Tissy with some impatience. ‘If it’s going to upset you I could apply for a carrel in the university library. But that means using it at the weekends and in the evenings. Would you prefer that? I know I wouldn’t.’

  Tissy, who usually let her mother speak for her, merely said, ‘I wonder you can’t give it to somebody else to do. Leave it here if you like, but don’t expect me to dust that room.’

  ‘Good God, no,’ he said, alarmed. ‘Don’t even go in there. Just leave it entirely to me.’

  Mrs Harper brought her prodigious gaze back from her contemplation of her daughter and observed, ‘I would never have allowed separate areas in my house.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Lewis. ‘But, you see, this is my house.’ And was immediately aware that he had said a fatal thing.

  Thereafter he was eternally nervous that they might disturb, even tamper with, his work. The tension became so great that he took his typewriter to the library with him, borrowed the secretary’s office, and typed through the lunch hour when she was out. Pen complained that he never saw him any more.

  ‘Come to dinner,’ said Lewis recklessly. And then, even more recklessly, ‘Bring George.’ He had no love for George Cheveley, a rascally-looking antique dealer whom he had met with Pen in the Burlington Arcade, and, subsequently, at Pen’s house in Notting Hill. He had disliked the man’s tight smiling face, his longish fair hair, his too correct tailoring. He always greeted him cheerfully, but he was aware of Pen’s discomfort at seeing one side of his life intrude into his altogether innocent friendship with Lewis, which was doubly valued precisely because it was innocent. But Lewis, who had infinite love and tolerance for Pen, merely wanted him to be at ease, whatever he did, and if that meant accepting George, whom he suspected of being a bully, he was perfectly willing to do so. At the same time he was aware that he might have a hard job persuading Tissy to be equally tolerant. But the die was cast and on the whole he was glad of it. Pen was his friend, and it was time that Tissy learned to be more forbearing. Her views sometimes shocked him by their languid ruthlessness; he derived a perverse thrill of annoyance when Tissy and her mother discussed anything of wider import than their immediate concerns. Calmly, even judiciously, they condemned out of hand any moment of untoward sympathy. ‘Hanging’s too good for them,’ was Mrs Harper’s usual comment on a wide range of people, from Communists to drunk drivers. Unfortunately, in her eyes, quite a lot of men fell into one or the other category. Lewis was pretty sure that George would rank very high on her list. Nor did he doubt that George, who was a cruelly excellent mimic, might have something to say on the matter himself.

  Pen’s smile was swept away by a slight frown.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, settling himself on the edge of the desk. ‘George is not with me at the moment. My sister’s staying in the house. She’s all set to stay indefinitely, or rather until she finds a flat of her own. Well, she can’t keep coming up from Wales, can she?’

  ‘What does she do?’ asked Lewis.

  ‘She’s an actress. She gets tiny parts on television. Actually, she’s too lazy to do any real work. But she’s a great girl, you’d like her. Quite mad, of course.’

  ‘Bring her,’ said Lewis. ‘Tissy would be thrilled. She watches television all the time.’

  ‘She’d have to, to catch a glimpse of Emmy. Emmy’s always the painfully upper class woman in a queue complaining about something. Or some mogul’s snooty secretary. She only does it for a laugh; nobody at home bothers to watch her. But she’s an entertaining sort of character, and we’ve always been close. She’s the only one who knows about George.’

  ‘Come on Saturday,’ said Lewis. ‘I’ll tell Tissy.’

  He prepared himself for the further indoctrination of Tissy, who expressed great anxiety whenever he proposed to bring someone to the house. This had reduced their social life to nothing, or rather to the visits of Mrs Harper and the doctor, both of whom preferred to come when Lewis was absent. Susan and Andrew, at the beginning of their marriage, had been invited as a matter of course, and had been, on the whole, a success. Susan and Tissy had not so much looked each other over as taken tiny sideways glances at each other. Evidently reassured by this examination, they had nevertheless not fallen into a friendship, as Lewis had hoped. Equally, at the outset of their marriage, Professor Armitage had been invited. He had been tolerated, but Lewis had not felt comfortable; as Tissy’s cooking had never progressed beyond little girl accomplishments he had been aware of the inadequacy of the entertainment. And when Professor Armitage had taken up the subject of Lewis’s work Tissy had abruptly risen and begun to clear the table. Lewis had felt deeply hurt, both for himself and for his guest, al
though Professor Armitage had talked on, seemingly unaware that anything was amiss. Now he was going to require of her something more difficult, since Pen and this Emmy presumably had a run of sophisticated entertainments at their disposal and would be disconcerted if Tissy betrayed incompetence, thus plunging her into further confusion. Walking home, Lewis shook his head at his own folly. But it was done, and he had known that it had to be done.

  Tissy took the news of his invitation – already given and accepted – as if her husband were announcing something conceived solely as a personal threat to herself. He could hardly believe his eyes when she shrank back in dismay. Taking refuge beside the cooker, she busied herself with the knife drawer, her whole back registering grievance and panic. Hanging, he reflected, would be too good for him when the news reached Mrs Harper. The dreadful embarrassment to which this marriage was subject almost overwhelmed him, until he realized that Tissy, in her frailty, was even more susceptible to its insufficiencies than he was.

  ‘Darling, darling,’ he said, putting his arms round her and cajoling her into the centre of the room. ‘You must stop being frightened. There’s a great big beautiful world out there, and sooner or later you’ll have to discover it. I’m not asking you to do anything exorbitant. I’ve simply asked a couple of friends to dinner. We can’t go on living as we are. At least, I can’t. It makes me sad sometimes to just sit here in the evenings and wait for it to be time to go to bed. And you’re not really happy, are you?’

  ‘I’m perfectly happy,’ she said, startled.

  ‘But you could be even happier if you’d only open out a bit. If only you’d let me take you away somewhere, anywhere. We could go to Paris.’ He felt a nostalgia for those grey mornings and for his earlier self, free as a bird, savouring his solitude as he walked the broad avenues that would take him to his daily task. He saw it all now as blameless, innocent. With what zeal he had lived his poor little life, and how he recognized its benefits, yes, even now. He felt eternal gratitude for his own apprenticeship. But as a married man, and a householder, he felt nothing but dryness, interspersed with spasms of desire. He longed for one real upward flight. He longed for his wife to join him. He could hardly believe that she was perfectly happy, as she claimed to be. He was beginning to see that she confused happiness with respectability, and was ready to believe that it was the duty of the married woman to express happiness, for how else could she feel superior to the unmarried?