Authors: Anita Brookner
‘When is he coming home?’ asked Blanche in a carefully neutral tone.
Sally shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ she said.
They were seated as usual in the basement. Blanche assumed matters to be serious, as Sally had actually telephoned and asked her to come round. Once she had done this, however, she seemed to have as little as usual to say, although she managed to indicate that Elinor would be staying with her grandmother for some time, or at least ‘until we can work something out’. Her phrases habitually had a vague but modish air, explaining nothing. Blanche had done some shopping on the way, suspecting that the telephone call had been inspired by indigence, and on the pretext of putting something in the kitchen had left fifty pounds under the teapot lid. She had no way of knowing whether this was too much or too little. Judging by herself she supposed it to be enough, but then, although she was a woman of some means, she was both frugal and methodical, and all too prudent in her needs. But Sally, she could see, had higher expectations, and her original gifts of little clothes for Elinor had been met with a ‘Sweet of you, but you shouldn’t’ and a particularly disappointed smile.
The prospect of pulling Sally into shape, which Blanche now saw as the task before her, presented some difficulties. The original animation that Sally had shown in the Outpatients
Department only flashed back into life when past activities were being reviewed. The holidays, the parties, the dinners, Sally implied, were of such a superior nature that she could not be expected to put up with anything less, and it was therefore only natural that she should spend these listless though intent waking hours waiting for pleasure to be renewed. She appeared to have no ability, or no inclination, to be anything but a recipient. Her passivity seemed to mark an interval in her expectations, and in that sense to be seen by her as entirely appropriate. Where Blanche would arrive in the keen expectation of hearing definite news, or at least some plan of action, Sally, by contrast, seemed to be emptying her mind of everything apart from the memory of past activities. When these came into the conversation, as they did to an increasing extent, she would recover her lost animation; her features would sharpen, her eyes light up, and preoccupied laughter would escape her, as if the peculiar essence of these incidents could not possibly be conveyed but would be known, like a code, to those similarly advantaged. Her encompassing boredom with the present included Blanche, as Blanche could see. What was worrying was not only Sally’s increasing abstraction, her removal from the dilemma of the present, as Blanche saw it, but the fact that these reminiscences seemed to be quite disparate, not anchored in real time, and above all unconnected with her husband. Sally’s past life, the only one she cared to talk about, was surrounded by a crowd of people known to her only by their Christian names: who they were, what, if anything, they did, where they lived when not staying in hotels or villas – all this was outside the boundaries of her interest. It was as if they had been her companions in some mythic time when they had all moved weightlessly from party to party, resort to resort. It was a diet of hedonism, from which the fibrous content of real life had been removed.
Blanche saw, in Sally, how occasions of pleasure had bred indifference to anything less, how a continuous level of excitement had led to expectation of more, and how gratification had merely intensified her scorn for lives undistinguished by festivity. The parties of bygone days had simply prepared her for nothing but the next party: life had revealed itself as entertainment, enhancement, brilliance, and she could not see why she should do more than lend herself temporarily to her altered state. For this reason she seemed to have entered a period of hibernation, to have literally altered her body’s rhythms, to have slowed down her energies to such an extent that she could spent days marooned on her
chaise-longue
, smoking, and looking thoughtfully out of the window. Her strong white teeth would occasionally crunch through a piece of toast or an apple, for, unlike Blanche, she would have thought it poor-spirited to eat a proper meal without the appropriate company and service. She continued to dress in her avant-garde garments but she had become even less communicative than before, using well-worn phrases that apparently pleased her by their handiness, and lapsing into long periods of ruminative silence.
As far as Blanche could make out, she was not ill, not depressed, not undernourished or traumatized. Rather she showed the immense lethargy of the healthy animal whose needs are not met. And Sally’s basic need was apparently to live on the edge of exhaustion, over-stimulated by wine, noise, laughter, company, and the prospect of an endless rout. It became clear to Blanche that Sally’s life, before her marriage, and possibly for a brief period after it, had been a sort of saturnalia, that the saturnalia had been complicated by creditors, and that the result of these complications was her exile in the basement, while her husband worked to get more money together. Blanche was both appalled and charmed by such fecklessness, and she could not but compare it favourably with her own caution, the modesty of her own
expectations. She thought back, almost guiltily, to her early married life, her humble walks in the public gardens of those fashionable places, where her husband, impatient, went off to visit his friends; she thought of her visions of sunny gardens and hot days and southern markets, all known once but only in passing and long lost: how nerveless it all seemed, and how weak. She even thought, and not for the first time, that it was her timorous decency, disguised as brusqueness, that had caused her to lose Bertie, and she compared herself with the distantly musing Sally entirely to her own disadvantage. For Sally, like Mousie, like those cynical smiling nymphs in the National Gallery, had known, with an ancient knowledge, that the world respects a predator, that the world will be amused by, interested in, indulgent towards the charming libertine. At that moment Blanche knew herself to be part of the fallen creation, doomed to serve, to be faithful, to be honourable, and to be excluded. She saw that fallen creation, mournful in its righteousness, uncomforted in its desolation, and living in expectation, as she had waited long hours in her drawing-room for the hope that would not return.
Her initial sadness for the mute child was now compounded by an awful unwilling sorrow for the increasingly mute mother, and she felt that unless she resumed her resolutely composed former self she might well join them in their silence. A long and charmless vista of renewed cultural activities opened before her as she prepared to do her duty once again and to divest herself of the dubious but attractive company of Sally Beamish. For a brief moment she felt grave pain as she thought of the little girl, and even greater pain as she considered her own foolishness in wishing to – what? To adopt her? Nothing so specific. To befriend her, to contemplate her. Passive, as ever, in her loves, she had simply wanted to multiply the occasions of seeing Elinor, and was now ashamed to see her needs for what they were.
‘We really must get you sorted out, Sally,’ she said, finally, with a purposefulness which she did not feel. ‘I imagine funds are low. What about allowances, Social Security and so on? Are you sure you are claiming all that you are entitled to?’
Sally looked at her without interest. ‘I’ve been into all that. I’m not entitled to anything. I haven’t got stamps on my card or whatever you need and I can’t claim Family Allowance because Paul’s working out of the country. And he hasn’t got any stamps either.’
‘But this is monstrous,’ said Blanche. ‘Do you mean there’s no money coming in at all?’
‘I thought you understood that,’ said Sally. ‘I only have what Paul’s mother can send me.’ For some reason neither of them mentioned the money left under the teapot. Blanche felt herself blushing and hurried on.
‘And you still don’t know when Paul is coming back? Have you heard from him?’
‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard. There’s some complication, apparently.’ She drew her fine brows together and lit another cigarette. Her instinct, when sensing trouble, was simply to abstract herself, to empty her mind, and increase the distance from annoying topics. Now, faced with mysterious complications which were, apparently for that very reason, not to be explained, she became expressionless and remote, imposing on Blanche, by the very stillness of her body, a reticence which effectively blocked any remonstrances that might have met this remark. There was a brief silence.
‘Well,’ said Blanche heartily, as she put her right arm into the sleeve of her raincoat. Glancing through the smeared window she saw that a weak sun had banished the rain and that the long days were now firmly established. It would be daylight until ten o’clock. ‘Is there anyone else who could help you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Sally replied with apparent indifference.
‘As far as I can see we’re on our uppers. Of course,’ she added, glancing covertly at Blanche, ‘Nellie will have to stay with Paul’s mother until we can get things sorted out. I can’t bring her back here if there’s no money.’
Blanche rose to her feet. The implications of Sally’s last remark were not lost on her. ‘I think the best plan’, she said, careful not to let her expression change, ‘would be if I were to get the allowance side of things worked out. Do you know which is your local office or bureau or whatever the thing is called?’ She busied herself with her empty shopping basket, rearranging things in it unnecessarily, trying to subdue the uncomfortable beating of her heart.
Sally’s reaction to her
faux pas
was an increased, a heightened indifference. It was implied that all misfortunes were equally graceless and did not deserve any refinement of manners. ‘Oh, don’t bother,’ she said. ‘If you could just tide us over. My husband will straighten it all out when he comes home.’
Ah yes, thought Blanche. He is now ‘my husband’. Absent, of course, but legal nevertheless. And coming home, some day.
‘Let me see what I can do,’ she said. ‘Bertie has a friend at the Home Office. They were at Cambridge together. A nice man. I’ll telephone him this evening and see if he can bring a little influence to bear.’ Treat the matter as one of simple need, she thought, not of obligation, not of misplaced hope. A matter of justice, or of charity. No involvement. No more of that.
Sally’s down-drooping mouth and half closed eyelids told her that her efforts would be wide of the mark. She would rather that people continued to tide her over, as she puts it, thought Blanche; probably the people in that set of hers were continually tiding each other over. That sort of person is usually characterized by prodigality and bad debts, both thought to be amusing. How cruel I have become, she
thought sadly. It is as if I had never been young. I never had a bad debt in my life and now I am not proud of the fact. Perhaps a little more prodigality would have saved me. But I was careful and proud. ‘The best revenge is living well.’ What a fatuous remark. However, pronounced in mother’s icy tones, it took on the allure of a great maxim. And this is where it has got me. Far better to be like Sally and to have misspent one’s youth, even if one has to pay for it afterwards. Paying for it, however, is precisely the problem.
She emerged from the basement to a dazzle of white light, the sun beating through layers of moisture. There was an intense and sickly smell of elderflowers. This, then, was the summer, about which she had had so many inaccurate or outdated thoughts. She felt a slight tremor of panic as she contemplated the inevitable absences of those about to go on holiday: Bertie to Greece, Barbara and Jack to the cottage, even Miss Elphinstone on her coach trip. It would be her second summer alone. She bought an expensive bottle of Pinot at the wine merchants, and, feeling uninteresting and graceless in her heavy clothes, resolved to bathe and change before telephoning Patrick Fox. Having placed matters in his hands, she thought, she would, as it were, resign from the case. It seemed to her that she felt a good deal older as she contemplated this course of action.
Thinking over the events of the afternoon, Blanche wept briefly at her own foolishness, had a bath, changed, and poured herself a glass of wine, before thinking how best to tackle Patrick Fox.
On the face of it this telephone call was a simple affair. She had only to remind him of her existence, tell him that she needed his help, and suggest that he came round for a drink. Below this seamless surface, however, there were certain difficulties of a nebulous consistency. Patrick had been in love with her, to a limited extent and much to Bertie’s amusement, in the days before she was married. At one point she had feared that the news of her engagement to Bertie would prove quite literally fatal to Patrick, but as it happened he had simply gone back to restoring old harpsichords, which were his true passion, and had managed to behave quite creditably when they invited him to dinner, so creditably that Blanche wondered if she had imagined the whole thing. It was difficult to tell what Patrick was feeling; that was the trouble. He had the head of a Roman legislator, with hair gone prematurely grey, and under stress of great emotion his lips would very slightly purse, which lessened his air of impregnability: otherwise, nothing changed.
‘I could understand it if he would say something,’ Blanche had worriedly complained to Bertie. ‘As it is I don’t know whether I am dealing him a mortal injury in inviting him
to dinner or whether he would hate it if he were left out and simply heard about the evening from Barbara and Jack.’
‘If he doesn’t want to come he can always say no,’ replied Bertie. ‘He doesn’t strike me as dying of a broken heart. Not that it would be easy to tell, of course. It surprises me that he ever had the gumption to make a pass at you.’
‘Men are so crude,’ said Blanche. ‘How do you know he didn’t see something extraordinary in me? I am not a conceited woman, as you know, Bertie. But I have certain … qualities, perhaps, that a shy man like Patrick might have found endearing. I am a good listener. I take an interest in a man’s work; well, one has to. After all, one hears so much about it. No one need be ashamed of me in public. I give away no scandalous secrets like a number of women I know. You would be surprised, Bertie, by the lewd way in which women talk to each other, their disloyalty, their cackling laughter. At the hairdresser’s, even. Ready to betray their men at the drop of a hat. Egging each other on, getting out of hand. Well, no one need fear that sort of behaviour from me. What was I saying?’