Authors: Anita Brookner
‘You talk too much, Blanche,’ said Bertie. ‘Come here.’
So she had continued to invite Patrick to dinner and had made a point of flashing him a placating smile before seating him next to the prettiest woman she could think of. He seemed unperturbed by both the smile and his partner and would eat his way judiciously through the meal and make a few equally finely judged remarks in the latter course of the evening, his long thin fingers lightly clasping his brandy glass. He would always offer to take his partner home but managed to do so with a show of good manners that only just masked reluctance. Women were offended by him. They would telephone Blanche the following morning, puzzled, unnecessarily critical, and try to find out more about him, for he was so eminently eligible that they dared not trust their instincts and let him go.
‘I know nothing about him,’ Blanche would say, more or less truthfully. ‘He is quite high up in the Civil Service, I believe. And he loves music.’ She thought that quite enough to be going on with.
‘Have you got a telephone number for him? It’s just that I’m giving a little party next week. I hope you’ll both be free, by the way. And it might amuse him to come. I thought he seemed rather lonely.’
Yes, he is very good at giving that impression, thought Blanche, and was forced to revise her opinion of Patrick, whom she continued to think of alternately as a man of hidden fires and a cold fish. And there was that fatal evening when Bertie had suggested that it would be a kindness if she invited his new secretary, who was of course Mousie, on the pretext that she was lonely too. How did Bertie know this, Blanche had enquired. Well, he had found her weeping one day and had been obliged to comfort her. I see, said Blanche. In that case I shall invite Patrick. They can weep on each other’s shoulders, tell each other what rotten childhoods they had. Not that Patrick had ever revealed such low-class information. But who knew what depths he might descend to, given the right stimulus?
Blanche remembered that evening very well. She had served a vegetable terrine, baked chicken, salad, cheese, and fresh pineapple with a raspberry sauce. Not one of her better menus, she recalled sadly, but then the whole evening had got off to a bad start when Mousie had arrived half an hour too early and had to be sent to the drawing-room with Bertie in attendance until the other guests arrived. Blanche could hear cries of, ‘You know you did, Bertie. Oh, I feel awful about this. Do you suppose your wife will ever forgive me?’ Miss Elphinstone, who liked to stay to set the table on these occasions, had raised her eyebrows at this; she and Blanche had exchanged a brief look, and then, ‘I wonder if I should have bought another pineapple,’ said Blanche. ‘Two slices
each would be my outside maximum,’ said Miss Elphinstone firmly. ‘Pineapple can lie heavy, you know.’ And, slipping on her navy blue silk coat, which Blanche had bought in the Saint-Laurent sale and abandoned shortly afterwards, she had picked up her bag and said goodnight, her monastic cheeks very slightly flushed. She was an excellent woman, and, for all her propriety, she sometimes arrived at conclusions which were less than a faint suspicion in Blanche’s mind. Blanche, in any event, was at that moment measuring out her rice.
That evening had given her an opportunity to see a rather clever woman at work, although Blanche missed this opportunity, as she missed so many others. She thought Mousie very boring and wondered why she kept on reverting to her mistake in arriving so early. She then wondered why Bertie had to keep on reassuring her that it did not matter, why Mousie had to clasp her hands to her cheeks, declaring that he was embarrassing her, and why even Patrick’s Roman features had relapsed into a faint smile. She had merely registered the fact that Mousie had been insufficiently trained out of her attention-getting ways which had no doubt been very effective when she was younger but were surely redundant now. Teasing, of an inordinate nature, had gone on for the rest of the evening. The other guests had been Barbara and Jack, people on whom Blanche could rely to keep the party going when she was out of the room. None of it had been a success. At one point she had gone into her bedroom for a bit of peace and quiet, leaving them with their coffee; she had taken a few deep breaths of air out of her window, not knowing why she felt so tired and ill at ease. Bertie had come to find her and had reproached her, saying that her absence had unsettled Mousie, who was sure she had upset Blanche by arriving too early. ‘I haven’t been gone five minutes,’ said Blanche wearily. ‘I wasn’t planning on going to bed, you know.’ Although quite suddenly the
thought of her bed took on the splendour of a heavenly vision and she wondered how she could possibly last until all her guests had gone.
Back in the drawing-room she found Mousie, becomingly flushed, protesting that Bertie had given her too much to drink. She also found Barbara looking rather strangely at Jack, who could be heard urging Mousie to have a little more brandy. Patrick sat, his patrician features minimally relaxed, enjoying the spectacle. Mousie had not paid any attention to him throughout the dinner, and he was enjoying himself. Furthermore, he had not relished the prospect of telling her about the harpsichords, although he had been known to use them as a weapon to deflect too eager an interest in his ways. When he offered, with a show of false alacrity, to take Mousie home, Bertie had said, ‘It’s a bit tricky from here, a bit out of your way. Perhaps I’d better …’ Blanche, who had lit an unaccustomed cigarette, glanced at him in surprise. Patrick, smiling fully at last, and with a certain measure of satisfaction, had kissed her goodnight and had taken Mousie by the arm. Bertie had seemed a little ruffled and tended to blame Blanche afterwards for asking Mousie how she amused herself when she was alone. ‘I only meant to ask her what she did at the weekends,’ said Blanche. ‘It was you who told me that she was lonely. Why all this fuss? She strikes me as perfectly capable of leading her own life. And she is very pretty.’ ‘You may have upset her,’ said Bertie gravely. ‘Bertie,’ said Blanche. ‘I am going to bed. I strongly advise you to do the same. If she telephones me in the morning and apologizes for arriving too early I may scream.’ But in the morning there was no telephone call from Mousie, and Blanche shrugged and forgot the whole thing.
All of this stood in the way of her now telephoning Patrick. And more besides. For she felt that that particular evening had marked the end of her innocence and that ever
since then she had been wary, cautious, on the alert, though never sufficiently on the alert to avert surprises, usually of an unwelcome nature. And had fashioned herself into something so unimpeachably careful and scrupulous that no one would suspect the panic that had overtaken her so frequently in the months that followed. So prayerfully had she behaved, so convinced that the worst would overwhelm her, and so determined had she been to show none of this, that it was as if she had struck a bargain, and if fate proved kind and told her that she had been mistaken, then her worst suspicions need never be known and her dark imaginings left in the deepest vault of her memory that she could devise. And when the worst did happen she merely threw it off with as much amused laughter as she could muster and determined to improve herself so that nothing could afflict her again, thinking, again mistakenly, that some unworthiness in herself had brought this about, and that if she improved she would be rewarded. What that reward could now be was unclear. Before her eyes, as if to save her but also to provide her worst torment, came those sightings of Bertie in his mother’s garden, or the shining seas of southern towns, or those market places where she had seen and smelt the fruit in their profligate piles. And in order to remind herself that these things still existed, that fantasies of a high order had always informed a certain reality, one to which she now had no immediate access, she had begun her visits to the National Gallery, to be met there only with the austere visions of saints, the dolorous lives of virgins and martyrs, and, most singularly, the knowing and impervious smiles of those nymphs, who, she now began to see, had more of an equivalence in ordinary life, as it is lived by certain women, then she had ever suspected.
And if I let this continue to happen, she now thought, pouring herself another glass of wine, if I were to sink into an endless fantasizing, I should be no better than Sally
Beamish, in her basement, remembering all her parties and holidays, and lapsing into a state from which others have to rescue her. Reality must be my only cure now, she thought: the art of the possible. And, as if to comment on her resolution, a passing cloud released a shower of rain.
‘Patrick?’ she enquired into the telephone, in a lively but neutral tone. ‘It’s Blanche. Blanche Vernon. Yes, it has been a long time, hasn’t it? I was wondering if you could come for a drink one evening this week. Not a party,’ she added hastily. ‘Just me, I’m afraid. I need your advice. You couldn’t possibly make it this evening, I suppose? Oh, wonderful. Half an hour?’
The telephone rang as soon as she put down the receiver.
‘Blanche? Where have you been all day? I wanted to ask you to dinner this evening and now you’re going to tell me it’s too late. I haven’t yet decided whether this is your fault or mine. You won’t come, of course.’
‘It’s kind of you, Barbara, but I’ve got Patrick Fox for a drink in half an hour. You wouldn’t like to join us, would you? Oh no, better not this evening: I told him I’d be alone. You know how he likes to prepare for his encounters. Another time, perhaps.’
‘Patrick!’ said Barbara. ‘What a good idea! Yes, we must all meet again. It would be just like old times.’
‘Yes,’ said Blanche. ‘And only Bertie missing.’
‘Blanche,’ began Barbara, after a slight pause. ‘You don’t suppose …?’
‘Oh no,’ said Blanche. ‘I don’t.’ And, after a pause, she added, ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow and tell you how he is.’
Patrick’s Roman head, she saw, was now allied to a rather pear-shaped figure. Those past few months of being an extra man at dinner had begun to take their toll. But I have probably changed too, she thought, although I can’t see it myself. In fact I have changed so remarkably little that it is positively sinister. I have not gone mad and over-eaten,
sobbing over the pastries, nor have I dyed my hair another colour. I have not spent any more money on clothes – much less, in fact – and my figure is still quite good. I always knew that women alone could fall into so many traps that I took good care to avoid them. Routine is important. And the frightful emptiness of the day can be overcome if one simply leaves the house at a sensible hour and does not return until one is agreeably tired. I am probably looking just as I did on that awful evening when Mousie came to dinner and which was when I last saw Patrick. But Patrick, who remembered Blanche as a handsome, reckless-looking woman, found her quite changed by the expression on her face. The eyes, which had always seemed so distant and amused, were now wide with innocence and doubt, and her movements were narrower, more hesitant. Otherwise she was recognizable, he saw thankfully, not gone to seed. By this he meant something disreputable, gipsy-like, bedraggled. He had half expected her to be trailing around in discordant garments, having read in the Sunday newspapers that the loss of a partner has a high stress count and can threaten sanity and even life; he had fully expected the door to be opened with the safety chain on, one bleared eye regarding him suspiciously through the crack. A bachelor, Patrick feared women unless they were impeccably presented and if possible exotically decked out. He put his distaste for the natural state down to his well-known love of the arts. His feelings for Blanche had been constant and severe, as if she bore a certain responsibility for causing him to think about her and even to contemplate a change in his habits. During his courtship, which was kept under such control that even Blanche wondered if she had imagined the whole thing, he behaved like a man who has just had news of a grave illness, for which he must make reluctant but decent allowance in the weeks to come. Yet he was a man of honour; at no point, contemplating the sheer inconvenience
of it all, did he renounce the idea of marriage. He simply felt that it suited his dignity to treat the matter as one which would inevitably bring him some regrets, and in his efforts to hide these regrets from Blanche he was frequently reduced to saying nothing at all. Sometimes his regrets were so acute that he was forced to spend some evenings by himself, when he would wander round his large dark drawing-room, handling certain precious books, striking a poignant single note from his harpsichord and wondering if his housekeeper would leave him if he brought home a wife. One thing led to another on these evenings of abstinence, and he would tell himself that all he required after a hard day at the office was half an hour with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and a couple of Brandenburg Concertos: anything else would be redundant. Then he would remember Blanche’s peculiar mixture of raciness and delicacy, remind himself that she had all the qualities he regarded most highly in a woman, remind himself also that his friend Bertie held the same views, and move ineluctably to the telephone to tell Blanche that he had tickets for a concert on the following evening and that he would pick her up at seven.
Blanche’s guilty conscience over Patrick came not from the fact that she found Bertie a better man than Patrick but that she found him a worse one. Whereas Patrick would take her arm and guide her along pavements as though she were an invalid, Bertie, lost in thought, would frequently stride on ahead, leaving Blanche, quite happily ruminative, following at some distance behind him. Thus her fondest memories of being wooed by Bertie were simply of herself wandering, without much thought, along various streets, taking time to note how the trees were turning or which houses were being painted, and always, in blissful view somewhere ahead, Bertie, who at some point would turn round and say, ‘Do come
on
, Blanche.’ She supposed that she rather enjoyed this position of servility, not because it made her feel like a
slave but because it allowed her to feel like a child. With Patrick one always had to dress up and have opinions on atonal music. Bertie, curiously enough, found her devoid of mystery, whereas to Patrick she was an enigma, compounded of her essential femaleness and her unexpected judgments. He appreciated her as a clever woman; Bertie very occasionally gave her an indulgent look but more often told her she talked too much.