Lewis Percy

by Anita Brookner

  Perhaps, but she was not as pleasant as she was beautiful. She made demands, she had demands, already in place: her attention was not to be wasted on him. She was too used to admiration to relinquish her autonomy. He saw that she would not notice him more than was absolutely necessary. He saw there an indifference which she regarded as her right: only the spectacular need apply. So it was to be him and Howard Millinship, he thought; and the decision still to be taken. The thought that he might have to rely on these people made him feel slightly faint, evidence that the former, unreconstructed Lewis Percy was still, however uncertainly, in place.

  ‘You leave tomorrow?’ he said. ‘Then I’m very lucky that you were free this evening. Back to America?’

  ‘No,’ said Howard Millinship, neatly eating olives. ‘We go to Paris. Jeannine’s parents have a flat there. They’ve retired to the country now, so we take advantage. We usually spend the summers there, when everyone’s away. Jeannine shops and I work. We go to the country at the weekends, of course, and we manage to have a month in the sun before flying home. Our semester begins in September,’ he added. ‘Earlier than yours. We break off in May. You’ll get used to it. And it has the advantage of leaving you free to come to Europe before the tourists get there. Are you still terribly busy?’ he asked. ‘Grading papers, I suppose?’

  ‘Well, I don’t actually teach,’ said Lewis. ‘I just work in the library.’

  ‘I admire you for that,’ said Howard Millinship. ‘It takes some courage to refuse a teaching post and devote yourself to research. I only hope you won’t miss it too much when you come over to us.’

  Lewis abandoned any attempt to confess the lowliness of his position, which had never struck him as abnormal, and which in many ways had suited him perfectly. In any event he was too fascinated by the neatness and dexterity with which Jeannine Millinship was wielding her fork and the thoughtful manner in which the smoked salmon was being inserted into her faultless mouth. This was a woman of high accomplishment, with exacting standards. He entirely understood her lack of interest in him. Women who looked so untouched by need or greed bore about them an invisible golden shower, like the one enjoyed by Danaë. Except that this woman would never be required to barter favours. The beauty had grown out of money, rather than the money out of the beauty. How did she fare, Lewis wondered, on a small campus in Massachusetts? Probably she was indolent enough to absorb whatever came her way, and supremely indifferent to Howard’s colleagues, who might, for all he knew, be excellent men, handsome and hearty in the American fashion, pleasing to women. They would all be in love with her in any case, though their wives might not be so keen. But American women were better at fighting their corners, and she would wave away their dislike with a languid hand, attributing it to mere jealousy, and not feeling chilled by the absence of affection. In time she might become like the woman at the next table, he thought, starved out by the lack of her own desire, but still beautiful enough to attract overwhelming attention. And if she were a woman of conventional morality – he had no reason to think otherwise – she would see the admiration of other men as a just tribute, not only to herself but to her husband as well. Though she appeared quite cold, and beautiful, much as an idol or an icon is beautiful, Lewis hoped that there might be humanity hidden somewhere inside, as he hoped this of everyone, despite receiving information to the contrary. The friendship of these people might be problematic, he thought; he would prove too simple for them. And yet they appeared to find him acceptable. Howard Millinship, in particular, treated him as if he were older and more eminent than he could ever possibly be. Above all, they were gloriously diverting to look at, a fact on which he felt impelled to remark.

  ‘Forgive me for staring,’ he said. ‘But you really are an amazing looking couple.’

  At this they both smiled. Even Jeannine looked at him with something approaching warmth. Presumably they were so used to this kind of observation that they regarded it as an essential preliminary, and could not proceed until the formalities had taken place. But there was a perceptible relaxation in the atmosphere, and he no longer feared for the success of his evening.

  He began to enjoy them simply as phenomena, who had raised the temperature of this unsettling day to something he recognized as detached aesthetic enjoyment. Modestly he hoped not to waste their time, and if that meant consenting to go to America then that was what he would have to do, if only to keep the agreeable expressions on their faces. In the meantime he would do his best to emulate their high standards. Even this he felt to be an innovation; in his mind certain constrictions were eased, leaving behind something precariously like appetite. He saw no reason why he should not dine out more often, even though he had few friends of the order of the Millinships. The benefit they bestowed was of a more metaphysical variety, something like the consciousness of a birthright. Life was not confined to what the rich and beautiful could command. The particular strength of such people – their function, in a sense – was an awareness of entitlements. That was their most valuable lesson. Not that I could stand this every night, he thought. And anyway I am not rich. But I am not all that poor either. I live below my means. That too is a metaphysical condition, and one that I must endeavour to correct. He ordered a bottle of wine and cautiously prepared to share a little pleasure. He reflected that it was a pity they were leaving so soon. He would have liked to have seen them again, just for the opportunity of being able to study them. Many intriguing lessons were there to be learnt. He felt like a man let out of prison, on probation. The world had moved on, was no longer as he remembered it.

  Jeannine, after almost motionlessly conveying a considerable quantity of food to her mouth, accepted coffee and brandy and lit a cigarette. Lewis became aware that it would not do to discuss work or indeed anything of an abstract nature in this woman’s presence: to do so would be to lose her always intermittent attention. To engage in a discourse of any profundity would be to court her displeasure, for although she was both intelligent and sophisticated she did not care to be ignored or overlooked. When her husband returned to the subject of Lewis’s possible arrival in America, Jeannine took a lump of sugar and tried to tempt the little dog from the next table. It was a seduction, Lewis thought, and a rather cruel one; now she and the dog’s owner were going to compete for the dog’s favours. She was acting, he saw, out of the same sense of infallibility that was the consequence of her perfect appearance and which dictated all her actions, and it would not seem to her that she might be treading on others’ toes; beauty had made her impermeable. As a stratagem for distracting her husband from his tedious preoccupations it worked perfectly. Soon all eyes were on this little contest, which had an underlying note of seriousness. Lewis’s sympathies were with the dog, a poor nervous creature who started wildly after the sugar lump, only to be restrained by his mistress’s iron hand. ‘I don’t think he likes to be teased,’ said the luckless companion, leaning forward as if ready to separate the two women. ‘He’s very highly strung.’ ‘Oh, I understand dogs,’ said Jeannine. ‘I have had dogs all my life.’ Nevertheless she dropped the sugar disdainfully and lit another cigarette. Her quest for her husband’s attention was now so palpable that Lewis was forced to abandon any attempt to explain his present situation in the interest of changing the subject. ‘Oh, absolutely,’ he heard himself say rather hastily to Howard Millinship. ‘If you’ll leave me your address I’ll write to you within the week. I just need a little more time to think.’ At the back of his mind was the thought that he might somehow get out of it, but that it would not do to say so at this particular moment.

  ‘Then you’ll come? I can tell the Dean?’

  ‘I’ll let you know within a week, certainly. Some more coffee, Jeannine?’

  He thought, rather hazily now, that a moment of decision might have been reached, might even have passed, but without his active participation. That would have to come later, or, on the other hand, it might not come at all. These people, charming though they might be, were,
after all, strangers. The future was unreal, not to speak of the various social difficulties he might encounter if he were actually to leave. Resignation, moving house, possibly divorcing: how did one manage these matters? How did anyone? He had a vision of Mrs Harper and Goldsborough banding together to prevent him from leaving the country. Mrs Harper, he saw, was a massive obstacle on his route to freedom, if freedom was what it was. Even Tissy’s future would have to be negotiated through Mrs Harper, who in all matters of importance acted as her daughter’s broker. It seemed to him now as if his entire courtship had been conducted through Mrs Harper. She was better at being a grandmother than she had been as a mother, Lewis thought. She loved the child painfully, although her reticence was so entrenched that she could not say how much she loved her, did not in fact encourage anyone else to do so. She and the doctor had succumbed instead to the kind of untidy attention that Lewis associated with old age: damp kisses, the lowering of a heavy cheek onto the top of the small head, the fussing over collars and socks with spoiled reddish hands. Poor Mrs Harper. She had once been a beauty, no doubt proud, refined, with her Belgian accomplishments as her dowry. And she had squandered it all on a renegade husband and a reluctant lover. He supposed that there had been an awkward adultery at some stage, and the resulting pregnancy concealed until it was no longer possible. Was it then that the husband took off? If so, Mrs Harper had not been rewarded for her indiscretion. Instead she had found herself less loved than she had expected to be, and with a small child who insisted on her distracted attention. Lewis could now see the reason for those entwined figures, for Tissy’s so voluntary incapacity, for the costive petulance with which Mrs Harper’s disintegrating beauty had always been surrounded, like a miasma, so that it was difficult to know what one might have done to upset her.

  And now that beauty had gone entirely. Now she was old, overweight, too discouraged to dye her hair. The doctor’s death had hit her hard. Only the little girl retained her fierce loyalty, which might otherwise have been relinquished with gratitude. How difficult it was to be happy, Lewis thought, and yet it should be so easy. Even he knew it was easy, and in his not particularly interesting life (but unique, unique to him) had sensed transcendence at various unimportant moments of the day, had felt it earlier this evening as he had pulled the yellow rose towards him and inhaled its scent. The future might yet yield happiness; it was poor-spirited to think otherwise. But for Mrs Harper it was no longer a possibility. For that reason he wanted to see her comfortable, dignified, in his house. She aroused a certain reluctant pity in his mind, and he felt she deserved a gesture of solidarity from someone, if only from himself. Without that, who could survive?

  Tissy, who had so brilliantly managed to make herself weightless, imperceptible, would be more of a problem. Tissy was eternally unfinished business. He did not see what would or could happen to Tissy, for it was unlikely that her flush of liberation would last once family forces were brought to bear. Those friends of hers, Fran and Kate, still seemed to telephone her occasionally, but not to ask her to join them as they had formerly done. Possibly they viewed her association with Gilbert Bradshaw as a defection. Tissy had indeed assumed a manner of airy inconsequentiality when this man’s name had been mentioned: it was the manner of a girl who wants to show off to her friends, and Lewis supposed that those friends, their roles reduced from participation to audience, had taken offence. In any event, all that was in abeyance. He had no way of knowing what Gilbert Bradshaw’s intentions were, but he saw, with sudden penetrating clarity, that Tissy must marry him. She must marry Gilbert Bradshaw: in so doing she would be free, and so would her mother. And so would he. More and more it seemed to Lewis that all he had to do was to go away and stay out of sight until all these events had taken place.

  And the little girl? He would have to trust her to remember him, he thought, and hope that she would eventually trust him to make her happy.

  ‘I expect you’ll be taking your vacation shortly,’ said Howard Millinship, who now had his arm on the back of his wife’s chair.

  ‘Well, no,’ said Lewis. ‘My daughter is too little to be taken from her mother, and I like to see her every day. She lives with her mother, not with me.’

  ‘How old is she?’ asked Jeannine.

  ‘Nearly three. My wife and I are separated, you see.’

  ‘You’d better divorce before you come to the States, then. You’ll have a far better time if you’re free. You’ll probably marry again.’

  ‘Well, I suppose my wife will divorce me, when she feels ready to.’

  ‘Does she work?’

  ‘I doubt if she earns much. She works for an antique dealer. I thought I might give her the house. I think – I hope – she was happy there.’

  ‘Chic,’ said Jeannine. ‘And where will you live?’

  ‘I must look for a flat,’ he said, passing a rather anxious hand over his hair. ‘I have a lot to do. How odd. This morning I had very little to do, or so it seemed. Suddenly everything has changed. I must start looking for a flat tomorrow. You know, I’m not sure that I can come to America this year – there’s going to be so much work to do. I really ought to go back to Paris, for a start.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’ she said negligently. ‘You could have the flat.’

  ‘The flat?’

  ‘Yes, our flat. Nobody uses it except us. My mother might come up for a wedding or something, but that needn’t interfere with you – there’s plenty of room.’

  ‘I should like that,’ he said slowly. ‘I could get on with some work again.’ But it was with the ache of revived memory that he saw a vista of early mornings, and himself, with his briefcase, walking exultantly down great avenues: not much of an image for a man of thirty-eight, he thought, but for him it looked as if it might have to do.

  ‘You really are most awfully kind,’ he said. ‘Could I take you up on that?’

  ‘Of course. It’s better for us to have someone staying there. I’ll leave word with the concierge – she has a set of keys. Just let Howard know when you’ll be going.’

  ‘Where is the flat?’ he asked.

  She was carefully repairing her mouth, gazing intently into a small mirror. Finally, with a snap, she shut the little case.

  ‘Place de l’Alma,’ she said.

  He remembered the market, and the buying of the cheese, as some men remember their childhood. It will all be changed, he thought. I am no longer twenty years old. This could all be a mistake. Had he not read somewhere, everywhere, in fact, that one should never go back? And now he would have to re-enter the time machine, and who knew how he would fare? He would leave the safety of his ordinary life and risk disillusion, even pain. And loneliness, of course. This would be a difficulty. No Pen, no Jessica. No more Tissy: Emmy gone for ever. But one way or another he had lost them anyway. If nothing awaited him, in this future from which all familiar landmarks had already disappeared, could this be more intolerable than to continue as he was? Recently he had noticed in himself a heaviness, a dullness, which he attributed to his way of life. It had affected him physically, making him weary. The weariness usually attacked him as he set out for Mrs Harper’s house every evening. The unvarying nature of this excursion had turned his day into a series of utterly predictable events. And when he reached the house no attention was paid to him. Jessica, after greeting him – but still with that residual reluctance – would be absorbed in her supper. Mrs Harper would sit with her while she ate. And Tissy would not be at home, or, if she were, she would sit abstractedly to one side, like a visitor, but, unlike a visitor, clearly protective of her own independence, parading her absent-mindedness, her lack of attention, remote in a manner that he was supposed to decode, into which he was meant to read the fact that she no longer had anything to say to him. She would be called frequently to the telephone. Conversations, or what he could hear of them, were monosyllabic, from which he deduced, or was meant to deduce, that the caller was Gilbert Bradshaw. Of course! He now saw, and felt sure, t
hat she had laid her plans; she was, he thought, remarkably consistent. What hindered her from bringing all this into the open was the kind of embarrassment that can only express itself as defiance. She might be consistent, but she was also consistently childish. She had never grown up, and yet she was capable of grown-up manoeuvres. She had left Mrs Harper no card to play except the happiness of the child.

  For Tissy had never been a good mother. He had found this surprising, in view of the careful way in which she had hugged and rocked her baby, and had become anxiously solicitous in her place. No wonder that the child had not known what to make of him. He should have been able to make her laugh, but his love was so hedged about with his own vulnerability that he must have appeared almost tearful with anxiety. Indeed the tears had risen to his eyes on more than one occasion when he was playing with her. He had seen himself as one of those stricken fathers in Hans Andersen, roaming the friendless world with his child on his shoulders, and had been unable to bear it. Perhaps it would be better for Jessica if he disappeared. Gilbert Bradshaw, having no intimate ties with the child, could be jovial, reassuring. He and Tissy would be parents in the purely formal sense, producers of Christmas trees, holidays, bicycles, and that might arguably be better than a father with a broken heart. For when he was with her he truly felt his heart to be broken. Better then to concentrate on what he regarded as the direction of his wife’s ambitions. Let her be happy, if that was what she wanted. Why should she not be? Happiness was not a matter of merit, after all, but of good fortune.

  He signed to the waiter to bring the bill.

  ‘I don’t see why you should give up your house,’ said Jeannine, who at last appeared to be taking an interest in him. ‘Your wife might marry again. She ought to move out then.’

  ‘Would that be fair?’ he asked.

  ‘Quite fair,’ she said firmly.

  ‘I can’t thank you both enough,’ he said, as they rose to go. ‘You’ve helped me make a lot of decisions I didn’t think I could make.’