A Start in Life

by Anita Brookner

  One endless Sunday she went to the Louvre. She made the classic promenade down the Champs Elysées, through the Tuileries to the Square Court, where children were wheeling about on their bicycles, and because she was reluctant to leave the still warm air, over the Pont des Arts and up the rue Bonaparte to the Luxembourg. There she sat, becalmed, going only to a café in the Place Saint-Sulpice for a sandwich some time after half past one. Dahlias blazed in the flower beds of the Luxembourg Gardens; when the gardeners removed them winter would have begun in earnest. The long straight paths were now thick with fallen leaves for it had been a very dry summer. An ancient invalid sun came out briefly to warm her iron chair but was soon vanquished by the haze obscuring the grey-blue sky. The easy days were over.

  She wandered back to the Louvre, although the light was no longer good. She was indifferent to most of what she saw until she came to the Flemish primitives, with their immaculate pain and sorrow, their thoughtful grieving little heads, their chilly pallid Christs deposed, as it were, into the unhelpful climate of northern Europe. She paid a duty visit to the early-nineteenth-century galleries and was bemused, as always, by the sheer size of everything: giant figures enmeshed with one another, toiling towards rescue after shipwreck, towards liberty after oppression, towards Paris after Moscow; never would they find peace or be reconciled to their proper dimensions. At a country funeral stretching down a considerable expanse of one wall, a woman wiped her eyes with a handkerchief the size of a small tablecloth. A noble Roman, turning his back on his dead sons, twisted enormous and imperfect feet to demonstrate his anguish. In front of what she considered to be a vaguely improper allegory of Endymion being embraced by a moonbeam, she saw two youngish people convulsed with laughter. The laughter seemed to her not French; it contained the agonized excesses and repressions of English school life. She moved closer to the couple, a man and a girl. The man, though young, had white hair; the girl was dark and very pretty. They appeared to be very much in love. Their exuberance was too much for the Louvre to contain and attracted reproving looks from the attendant. As the gallery emptied and the light became bluish and obscure, Ruth and the couple found their way out and down the main staircase. She was not surprised to hear them speaking English and wished that she could signal to them that she was English herself. But she was by this time too immured in her own silence to make a sign to anyone.

  They were waiting at the bus stop and had evidently wandered, as she had, back up the rue Bonaparte. She heard them discussing where to eat that evening and a great pain filled her, that she should never be able to make such plans. The impossibility of her present life was apparent to her as it had never been before. She was a prisoner in her cell, and in addition to her physical restraints she had imprisoned herself in a routine as destructive of liberty and impulse as if it had been imposed on her by a police state. Every morning she caught the same bus to the Bibliothèque Nationale. Every lunchtime she ate a sandwich in the same café. Every evening she presented herself for her bath and returned, chilly, to her room where, she was beginning to realize, problems of increased loneliness awaited her. She studied the couple closely, as if they were an unknown species. They were, in fact, an unknown species. They were happy.

  In her blue dress, in which she had not taken Paris by storm, and her wool coat, Ruth felt shabby and obedient. The girl wore trousers and a pullover, the man a well-cut suit of tweed. A great desire for change came over Ruth and a great uncertainty as to how this might be brought about. For she knew, obscurely, that she had capacities as yet untried but that they might be for ever walled up unless her circumstances changed. Love, she supposed, might do it, but there was no one with whom she might fall in love. Nobody even looked at her, except Humphrey. She shuddered at the thought. At that moment the bus arrived, and in her abstracted move to board it she hit the young man’s elbow with her shoulder bag.

  ‘So sorry,’ she said automatically.

  He smiled. ‘We thought you were English. French people take the Louvre far more seriously. Especially on a Sunday.’

  They sat down facing each other. She was, in fact, unmistakably English in her heavy coat, with her heavy bag, and her heavy hair obscuring the shape of her head. Since the dinner with Richard she had ceased to pay much attention to her appearance.

  ‘We were admiring your hair,’ said the girl. ‘You don’t often see that colour here.’

  Ruth always deprecated her hair, which seemed to her too flashy for her personality, marking her out when she found it more restful to be obscure.

  ‘I ought to have it cut,’ she replied. ‘But I don’t quite know where to go.’

  ‘There’s a good place next door to our flat,’ said the girl. ‘Rue Marboeuf. Where are you getting off?’

  ‘At the Alma.’ Ruth was quite dazed by the suddenness with which this exchange had been effected. She was also trying to take in the news that these two English people had a flat. In Paris.

  ‘That’s our stop,’ the girl said. ‘Why don’t we have a coffee, then I can show you.’

  They were called Hugh and Jill Dixon. They held each other’s hands and told her about themselves. They had been married three months. Hugh was a dealer in Old Master drawings; Jill worked in a travel agency. They had each, separately, lived in Paris for some years and had met at a party. They were – and here Ruth felt a disappointment mixed with a dawning excitement – thinking of going back to London.

  ‘If you ever want to get rid of the flat,’ she murmured, ‘I’d be delighted …’

  The girl grimaced. ‘There are dozens of people after it. And it’s not much to look at. But you know what it’s like trying to find a place here.’

  Ruth found that she could make them laugh by describing her room in the rue des Marronniers, Humphrey and Rhoda, and the bathing regulations. It was a talent she had often used with Anthea; with Anthea, however, it did not always work. She was quite exhilarated by the success of her performance and insisted on paying for their coffee. It was turning into one of the best Sundays she had ever known.

  They were a picturesque couple, she so dark, he so prematurely white. They had the perfect teeth and the permanent tan of the very rich, yet the girl’s accent was suburban. The man was even less easy to place. He was young, immaculate, worldly, yet Ruth sensed that the last two attributes had been acquired quite recently. His watch was too expensive, his shoes, obviously handmade, too new. But above all, they were pleasant. Jill laughed a lot, as if everything amused her; sometimes she giggled for no apparent reason. The man merely smiled. He was more serious.

  They took her back to the flat, which was tiny and dark but nevertheless desirable. It seemed to Ruth an ideal refuge and she began to long for it quite painfully. She repeated that she would be grateful if they would let her know if they decided to leave. She gave them her telephone number in the rue des Marronniers. It was then that she realized that she had missed her bathtime.

  The look of horror on her face sent them both into peals of laughter. In her new mood of liberation Ruth felt that she had more time than usual at her disposal. She invited them out to dinner, since there was no point in going back to the rue des Marronniers until much later.

  Jill and Hugh turned out to have serious appetites. They took her to a noisy restaurant which they said was quite famous and they ate their way purposefully through several courses and drank a bottle of wine. It was restful being with them. They knew where to go, what to do; they were not fearful or shy and they seemed to like her. Her knowledge of Balzac did not seem to put them off. Ruth, cautiously, began to relax.

  ‘You don’t have to go to the library every day,’ said Hugh. ‘First thing tomorrow, you have your hair cut. Then you meet me for lunch so that I can see what you look like.’

  ‘Would you mind?’ asked Ruth of Jill, who choked again with laughter over her coffee.

  It was very late. She had never been out so late before in Paris. They took her to the Metro and thanked her for dinner, but she
felt that it was she who was indebted to them. The rue des Marronniers was silent; only the concierge’s dog was being walked by his owner, who wore his carpet slippers. He raised his hand silently to Ruth, acknowledging her presence for the first time since her arrival. She felt exhilarated and grateful. That night she slept without dreaming.

  Under Hugh’s direction Ruth had her hair cut very short and abandoned her heavy coat for a pale and expensive mackintosh in which she was never quite warm enough. She acquired pale stockings and pale shoes, but insisted on retaining her blue dress, which she had bought in such good faith in Kensington High Street. Hugh shook his head disapprovingly.

  ‘A tartan skirt,’ he said, brooking no argument. ‘Think about it, Ruth.’

  ‘Do you realize how much money I’ve spent?’ asked Ruth, who immediately regretted what she had said. It seemed to her that money was faintly indecent, something to be dealt with in secret. Hugh had no such inhibitions. He was usually short of it himself, and quite happy to let her pay for the coffee or the lunches they would have to conclude the purchase of yet another improvement. Feeling that she was being disloyal to Jill by spending so much time with Hugh, Ruth would insist on taking them both out to dinner or to an enormous lunch that occupied most of Sunday afternoon. She found Hugh an amusing and instructive companion. His art dealing seemed to leave him an immense amount of free time, although sometimes he took her with him to a gallery, making use of her fluent French when he wanted to discuss something with the owner. He also took her to see an elderly Polish painter, of whom he had great hopes, for the same purpose. With Jill at her travel firm all day, he found Ruth useful and pleasant to be with; he was not a man to enjoy his own company.

  Ruth’s visits to the Bibliothèque Nationale became less regular, her knowledge of Paris more extensive. Hugh took her to Balzac’s house in Auteuil, to the Musée de la Chasse, the Musée de l’Armée, to the Buttes Chaumont. He specialized in outings that were both authentic and free. He took her to antiquarian bookshops and to street markets and to a lecture by the famous Professor Duplessis at the Sorbonne. This last event was particularly impressive, for the amphitheatre was full – they had to sit in the front row – the delivery magnificent, and the students vociferous in their approval. Ruth was reminded, with a sharp pang of feeling, of the occasional beauty of academic life. Hugh also took Ruth back to her room one day and began to make love to her; she was so amazed that she forgot all the routine objections.

  ‘But why?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  There was no doubt that her looks improved. She put on weight and brushed her hair and learnt the difficult Parisian art of being immaculately turned out, although she had only one cold tap and indifferent lighting to help her. Her heels clipped along the corridor with authority these days, and she was no longer afraid of having time on her hands. The money was going pretty fast, for she could not refuse to tide Hugh over from time to time. But her work also was going fast, and at this rate of progress she should have enough money to see her through.

  Hugh, she was well aware, was an adventurer. She had read about such people, and anyway he made no bones about it. He did most things for money or pleasure; if it was possible to combine the two, he did. His wife, who earned enough to pay their weekly bills, regarded him sympathetically as an agreeable and amusing accomplice. She, who had had many trips and much hospitality free from the travel agency, did not doubt that you made the most of what was offered and took it by force if necessary. If Hugh got his lunches paid for she did not grudge him the time spent with Ruth, whom she regarded as a pleasant bore.

  Ruth, who knew most of this by instinct, began to think of the world in terms of Balzacian opportunism. Her insights improved. She perceived that most tales of morality were wrong, that even Charles Dickens was wrong, and that the world is not won by virtue. Eternal life, perhaps – but who knows about that? Not the world. If the moral code she had learnt, through the literature she was now beginning to reinterpret, were correct, she should surely have flourished in her heavy unbecoming coat, in her laborious solitude, with her notes and the daily bus ride and the healthful lonely walks. Yet here she was, looking really not too bad, having spent more than half her money, eating and drinking better than she had ever done in her life, and absconding from the Bibliothèque Nationale to spend time with another woman’s husband. Rhoda Wilcox eyed her even more narrowly when they met in the kitchen these days. The elder Mrs Weiss would not have known what to make of her at all.

  She had much to think about; that was what was so agreeable about kicking over the traces. That was what they did not tell you. It was no longer a question of whether she should or should not do such and such a thing but whether she would or would not. Yet she was aware of something out of joint. She would have preferred the books to have been right. The patient striving for virtue, the long term of trial, the ecstasy of earned reward: these things would never now be hers. She had deviated from the only path she knew and she had lost her understanding of the world before the fall. That there had been a fall, she was quite sure. She had only to look at her glowing self to be assured of that. And selfishness and greed and bad faith and extravagance had made her into this semblance of a confident and attractive woman, had performed the miracle of forcing her to grow up and deal competently with the world. People seemed to like her more this way. The concierge waved from his window to her, night and morning. There was indeed much to think about.

  Late November and still dry. Ruth walked to the Bibliothèque Nationale in a cold white mist, past the American Church, to have a look at the esplanade of the Invalides in this peculiar light. Footfalls were muffled, voices enigmatic. A bus seethed past on almost silent wheels: ‘Jean Nicot’, sang out the conductor mournfully. Her head down, Ruth thought about Christmas, a festival celebrated with a certain amount of bad temper in the Weiss household. For the last few years George had bought a hamper from Harrods and a small cooked turkey. There never seemed to be anything practical to eat. The elder Mrs Weiss had filled the flat with the odour of a roasting goose and red cabbage, although officially she ignored the occasion of Christmas. Helen, on the other hand, became sentimentally religious, fingered her late mother’s rosary, and said, ‘Of course, we should have gone to church.’ They never did because George was not quite sure where he stood and did not care to offend his mother while she was still alive. After Mrs Weiss’s death there was Mrs Cutler who claimed to be able to say her prayers just as well in an open field as any of those sanctimonious buggers down the road. Helen, sticky with crystallized apricots, agreed with her. George spent most of the day in front of the television. Ruth either read in her room or went out for a walk.

  Now, with her sharpened sense of the pleasures of life, she did not think she could return to London for just such another Christmas. She would telephone and tell them that she was going away, as indeed she planned to do in January, and that she was unwilling to interrupt her work. She would stay here, no doubt invite Hugh and Jill out for a tremendous meal, or even walk silently by herself. She was quite happy to do so.

  There was an additional reason for staying in Paris. Anthea, now married to Brian, might be coming through on her honeymoon, and although Ruth could see her in London, she felt that she would like to surprise Anthea in Paris and perhaps introduce her to Hugh and Jill. It seemed to her that she had many options open to her, and she was not willing to forego any of them, not even for the week she might have spent in London, having multiple baths, unobserved.

  And after these festivities, these celebrations, she would give Balzac his due. In the silent month of January she would journey west and south through France to Angers and Angoulême and Issoudun and Sancerre and Alençon: the settings for some of Balzac’s provincial novels and ground that might yield up secrets. She did not doubt that it was all changed now, prosperous and busy and emancipated, but she had an instinct, perhaps a correct one, that in the most quiet and private month of the year
the small towns might regress to their former innocent complexity, and that she might learn something of the intricacies of provincial life in the early years of the nineteenth century. She would stay in very small hotels, eat in the same restaurants every day; she would train her ear and her eye, and eventually she might read the texts in a new and enlightened way.

  She arrived later than usual at the Bibliothèque Nationale, her cheeks flushed from her long walk. The surly attendant greeted her with a faint smile, as did the man seated at the numbered place next to hers. Something about this man’s appearance, his bulky figure, his air of patient stoicism, teased her memory. It was not until he put on his hat, with its brim turned up all the way round, and went out for lunch that she realized who he was: Professor Duplessis. He was back within the hour, raised his hat to her as she rose to go out in her turn. It was a disorganized day. When she took her seat again at half past two she found him deep in her copy of La Muse du Département.

  ‘What are you working on?’ he whispered.

  ‘Vice and Virtue in Balzac,’ Ruth whispered back.

  He nodded. ‘There is plenty of both. When I was much younger I wrote something on Balzac myself.’

  ‘I know,’ Ruth whispered more enthusiastically. ‘I have it.’

  A man with a beret, a muffler, and a thousand file cards regarded them irritably. The library settled down for the afternoon.

  ‘I enjoyed your lecture last week so much,’ said Ruth in a nearly normal voice. ‘I was wondering if I might dare to ask to see you.’

  ‘Silence!’ hissed the man with the file cards.

  ‘What time do you finish here?’ asked Professor Duplessis. ‘I must leave at five sharp today. Can you spare the time for a cup of coffee?’

  Ruth smiled with pleasure. ‘I should be delighted,’ she said.

  So at five o’clock they looked at each other and left the library, opening their briefcases for inspection at the door, and straightening in the cold white mist that blurred the street lights in the rue de Richelieu. They went to a bar and talked; Ruth was aware that he had wanted to leave for somewhere at five sharp but he seemed to have forgotten. No man had ever asked her so many questions. Where did she live? Were her parents alive? How long would she stay in Paris? Which way did she intend to walk home? Did she always walk home?