Lewis Percy

by Anita Brookner

  Although the library habitually had the shaded air of winter, Lewis realized, on his journeys to and from work, that the long summer days were now established. The sky continued white until past nine o’clock, sometimes until nearly ten. Lewis and Tissy were drawn by the beautiful calm evenings to take their walks under trees in full leaf, and past front gardens full of roses. On such evening walks, which by tacit consent did not always coincide with a visit to Mrs Harper (the air being too solemn, too healthful for so short a journey) Lewis admired, as he had never done before, the tact of his natural setting. He had described himself to Emmy as suburban man, hoping thus to discourage her, for her background was markedly more aristocratic than his own. Yet now he felt that to be suburban was almost a calling in itself, involving steadiness, a certain humility in the face of temptation, social or otherwise, and a loving, almost painful attachment to home. The stamp of a suburban childhood, he reflected, probably marked one for life. It was more difficult to move either up or down if one were born and bred in a quiet street, in a large but unpretentious house whose wide windows looked across to others of the same pattern, and behind whose curtains one could, very occasionally, discern the vague pale shape of a woman, moving about her innocuous business, waiting for the breadwinner to come home. There was for him a sweetness in the absence of excitement that such a condition implied, or perhaps imposed. Arm in arm with his wife, sauntering wordlessly, almost becalmed, he knew himself to be in his natural setting, in the place where he belonged. Sometimes this saddened him, but then sadness was also inherent in those silent streets, those tranced hot afternoons. He thought of a hundred Madame Bovarys waiting for a lover, while their husbands were away plying some harmless trade. Perhaps even Tissy entertained seditious thoughts. That was the trouble with women, he told himself: on balance they were so much bolder than men. Then he realized that he would abhor in his wife behaviour that he considered natural in himself, although it might intrigue him in others. He shook his head: there was no answer to any of it.

  One evening, as they were drinking a last cup of tea, the telephone rang. Tissy answered it.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said, her lips pursed. ‘It’s that woman, Emmy. She wants to speak to you. Says it’s important.’

  Surely she would not, could not be so bold as to pursue him here? Lewis felt almost righteously shocked as he took the receiver from Tissy. Nevertheless, he allowed her to retreat into the kitchen before clearing his throat and speaking.

  ‘Emmy?’

  ‘Lewis? Could you come over to Pen’s house?’ Her voice sounded distant and tearful.

  ‘Why? Is anything wrong?’

  ‘It’s Pen,’ she went on. ‘There’s been a bit of an upset. He’s all right, but we’ve had the most tremendous row. I think he’s rather drunk. Could you possibly come over? I think he’d like you to.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ he said, his mouth suddenly dry. ’I’ll be with you in half an hour.

  ‘Something’s happened to Pen,’ he told Tissy. ‘I’m going there now. Don’t wait up for me – I may have to stay.’

  His after-image of her was of a pale form slowly backing away from the kitchen door, gathering the cups from the table and lowering them equally slowly into the sink. She seemed ghostly, marginal, insubstantial, in comparison with the prospect of seeing Emmy again, but he was too agitated to examine the implications of this. He was also aware that she was displeased, but he postponed consideration of this too until later. He was in no sense, despite his anxiety, conscious that anything untoward was afoot.

  He flew down to the main road and picked up a providential taxi. Pen’s house, a cottage by London standards, yet with the desirable chic that his own house lacked, was in Pitt Street. The sky was now dark; crowds were leaving the cinema. He had always liked this district, from whose animation his own house seemed too far removed, seemed, when seen across this distance, countrified, somnolent, provincial. Instinctively he straighted his tie before ringing the bell.

  Emmy stood there, in a long purplish skirt and a cream silk shirt half obscured by rows of tortoiseshell and amber beads. She looked at him without interest, her expression every bit as severe as he had imagined it. This, if anything, made her more attractive. He found himself longing for her indulgence.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

  She shrugged and indicated the drawing room, where Pen sat foursquare in an armchair, looking flushed but curiously abstracted, as if practising some form of higher thought. He was nursing a glass of whisky. He smiled wearily when he saw Lewis, as if Lewis’s presence merely reminded him of a circumstance which he was prepared to overlook or even forget. Lewis immediately had a sense of something suppressed, unexplained, one of those family affairs to which no outsider should be admitted.

  ‘She really shouldn’t have telephoned you,’ said Pen, unable to keep a note of irritation out of his voice. Without his normal manner and his confident smile, he had lost some of his authority. Naturally charming, by virtue of his certainties, he was at a loss, Lewis saw, when faced with certain types of confusion, which deprived him of his dignity and left him bereft of an appropriate attitude.

  ‘Are you all right, Pen?’

  ‘Of course I’m all right. A minor disagreement. Too silly, the whole thing.’

  ‘George lost his temper,’ pronounced Emmy, leaning against the jamb of the door. ‘He can’t stand me, that’s the trouble. He doesn’t like my having a key. I’m supposed to stay out of his way. I ask you!’ Her eyes rounded with indignation as she contemplated this assault on her priorities.

  ‘Emmy,’ said Pen tightly. ‘I love you dearly, but I really don’t appreciate your interfering in my affairs. If it comes to that, I really don’t want you dropping in all the time. Not without warning, that is. My domestic arrangements are no concern of yours. I’m sorry, Lewis. She had no business to telephone you. Do help yourself to a drink. Not that we’re much in the way of entertainment. But then we weren’t expecting company. At least, I wasn’t. Emmy apparently was.’ He finished what was in his glass and began to hum the overture to La Traviata.

  Lewis felt sorrow for Emmy, whose eyes had filled with tears. How quickly and easily her tears fell! Yet here was a genuine cause: the rebuke was cruel. In that moment he could see how the two of them must have been when much younger: the importunate adoring sister and the controlled and controlling older brother. At the same time he became aware of a discrepancy in their accounts: Pen did not need him, did not even want him. Why then was he here? Something regrettable had happened, that was quite clear; what was equally clear was that it was none of his business. He felt the slight impatience of one who has been called in as a witness to a matter in which he is not involved. At the same time he was anxious to justify his presence.

  ‘Will George be coming back tonight?’ he asked.

  In reply Pen poured himself more whisky. This action alerted Lewis to the irregularity of the circumstances. Pen, who had never before allowed himself to be seen in this undignified light, with the details of his life on show, had temporarily deserted his normally adult self. Yet over and above this desertion, there was, to Lewis, something questionable about the whole affair; it was not in character for Pen to have allowed it. In this he was unlike his sister, who was single-minded and demonstrative; if there were some kind of trouble in which she were involved she would require supporters, to whom she could hotly complain. Perhaps that was unfair, he thought, yet he was uneasy. He was being petitioned as a friend, although he was a friend on a wholly different basis, mild, discreet, undemanding, modest. The rules of the genre had been breached, and here he was, on a lurid pretext, which everyone would soon deplore, not knowing exactly what was required of him. This sort of incident had no precedent in his world. He felt acutely conscious of his own narrow horizons, felt ashamed of his reluctance, and castigated himself for his prudishness.

  ‘Well, George can’t expect to have everything his own way,’ said Emmy, unwilling to l
et the matter rest. ‘And you’re not to apologize. It’s none of his business whether I have a key or not.’

  ‘Emmy,’ said Pen, with enormous distaste. ‘Will you please shut up?’

  But she would not. Lewis saw her as excitable and damaging, as she strode up and down the little room, her cheeks flushing with her mounting indignation. She was also very desirable. As a spectacle she was in a class of her own: she was not an actress for nothing, he noted. He began to perceive her strange and easily mobilized anger, which settled on and clung to every pretext, as a protest against those who had so monstrously let her down. She was, he supposed, fairly monstrous herself, and yet he understood her. He understood that she would always be looking for that ideal court of appeal to which she might present her case, and that her inability to find it would simply increase her desperation. She wanted to be compensated for what he could only intuit as the disappointments that life had meted out to her. In the absence of total, immediate, and permanent gratification, or at least justification, she would react with amazed tears, incomprehension, and further bad behaviour. Lewis respected her grief, although it seemed to him trivial, much as his own did, but shook his head over her inability to see how inconvenient she was. That, of course, was what had occasioned her enormous tactlessness in dislodging him from his virtuous wife and bringing him across London to take sides in a private quarrel. He saw that Pen’s status, too, had very slightly shifted as a result of his presence. There must, he thought, have been many occasions when Emmy had made the sort of undignified intervention that she was making now. She spread about her an air of folly, to which even Pen was not immune. If he had been he would have stopped her.

  Lewis cleared his throat. ‘It’s getting late,’ he said. ‘I must be getting back. Why don’t you go to bed, Pen?’

  ‘Lewis,’ said Pen, with application. ‘Good of you to come. All nonsense, of course. Emmy … Well, never mind. I have the feeling,’ he went on, ‘that I might not be in tomorrow. Tell Goldsborough, would you?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lewis, hoisting Pen to his feet. He noticed the reality of Pen’s condition, which gave a certain validity to Emmy’s appeal. This was something of a relief to him. ‘I’ll see you upstairs, shall I? Then I’ll put Emmy in a cab. Don’t worry about tomorrow.’

  He shepherded Pen up the stairs to his bedroom, picked up a book and read it while Pen was in the bathroom, and then waited until he could safely put out the light.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said. There was no reply. He closed the door quietly behind him.

  ‘What was that about?’ he asked Emmy in the kitchen.

  She shrugged. ‘George has a nasty temper. They had a row, obviously about me – I don’t know the details. Pen is going to be furious that I sent for you: he’s terribly secretive as a rule. It’s difficult for him, you see. Our parents don’t know. I’ve always known, of course. Unfortunately, I can’t stand George. It’s mutual, I may say.’

  ‘Why exactly did you send for me?’ asked Lewis. ‘You could have managed on your own.’

  ‘Of course I could,’ she retorted angrily. ‘I sent for you because I wanted to see you again, and because I could see you wouldn’t have the guts to do anything about it. It’s been two months, Lewis. Two months. Why didn’t you get in touch? It was the least you could have done.’

  ‘Emmy,’ said Lewis. ‘Don’t let’s go through this again. You seem determined to put me in a false position. I see you find it laughable – so do I, as a matter of fact. And I dare say you hate husbands as much as you hate wives, but I am one, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘So what? I’m talking about you and me. I don’t care about your other feelings. You can have those on your own. When I’ve gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yes. I’m going abroad to make a film, and even if I weren’t I wouldn’t see you again. Anyway,’ she added, ‘I doubt if you’re all that important. After all, it’s not as if I were in love with you.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘One certainly couldn’t say that. And please don’t start crying again. If you don’t love me why are you crying? Because you can’t have what you want? That is what small children do.’

  ‘There’s no need to be angry with me,’ she said, bursting into tears. ‘Everybody’s angry with me, Lewis,’ she sobbed. ‘Nobody wants me. Why don’t you stay? I need you to stay. You can’t go home now, it’s too late.’

  ‘If I leave now,’ he said, stroking her hair, feeling her warmth against him, ‘there’s no real harm done. And anyway, we’re in Pen’s house.’

  ‘There’s masses of bedrooms,’ she assured him. ‘Pen won’t know anything. I never discuss these matters.’

  He smiled, in spite of himself. She urged him deftly up the stairs, along the corridor. ‘Nobody will know. Your wife will think you’re with Pen.’ She unclipped her ear-rings, took off her many necklaces. He sat on a strange bed and watched her, aware that she was dangerous and that he was endangered. When he kissed her it was with the knowledge that the timing of this affair, if affair it was to be, was drastically wrong. Unprepared himself, he was disconcerted by the speediness of her behaviour. There was, to his mind, something a little too decisive about her actions. They were not consistent with the hesitations of a nascent attachment. He felt discomforted, almost angry. She was treating him, he thought, like one of those unsatisfactory lovers of whom she complained, but he could see that in fact she insulted her lovers by her very truculence, delivering her insults well in advance of their intentions. In effect, where she saw villainy, they saw only prudence, their own overtures being met with such practicality that they backed out, much as hotel guests entering the wrong room might excuse their mistake. For surely one was entitled to envisage an answering vulnerability? Desire left him, to be replaced by a curious concern, as if she were entirely his responsibility. He remembered her expression of desolation, almost of fear, when Pen had rebuked her. As if she thought there were no place for her anywhere! But what was her place? More to the point, what was his? And how could he restore some dignity to them both, caught as they were in this nearly farcical trap? How could he expect her to love him, as he now knew he loved her, when they were both so unsure of being acceptable? In love, he knew, humiliation could easily turn to hatred. And Emmy had been humiliated before he arrived on the scene. Whatever his actions, he would be blamed for them.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ he said. ‘There are things that ought to be discussed.’

  ‘What things?’ she said incredulously. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Things that don’t matter to you but matter to me. What is right in the circumstances. How to proceed. Whether to proceed at all. What follows from this. What you want. What I want. My wife is not to blame for this, whatever you might think. I can’t leave her,’ he said, with a sinking heart, aware that he had failed them both, had done a fatal thing.

  ‘So you’re going home now, are you?’ Her voice was hard now, unforgiving, but she turned her face momentarily away, unwilling for him to see her disappointment.

  ‘You don’t love me, do you?’ he asked her, taking her face in his hands.

  ‘How do I know?’ She shrugged his hands away.

  ‘I know.’

  She studied him curiously, hesitated, and then made up her mind, not, he could see, in his favour.

  ‘What a husband you are,’ she said. ‘And from my point of view, what a shit.’

  ‘Both, inevitably.’

  She rebuttoned her shirt. ‘Are you sure you can get home on your own?’ she asked, in a light acid tone. ‘Or would you like me to telephone your wife to come and collect you?’

  ‘Please, Emmy, don’t do this. I do love you. I want to be with you, but not here, like this. I want a better life,’ he said desperately. ‘Not just this. This is not good enough. Do you understand?’

  ‘Good enough?’ she said, with the faintest suggestion of a sneer, which he heard with dread. ‘Nothing is ever good enough, don’t you know that? At least
, it never has been for me. And now you’re making it worse. You could have made me happy, but you chose not to – that’s all I understand. I’m not happy either. Did you think of that?’