Authors: Anita Brookner
The person on whom Blanche would have liked to have lavished all this alternative waste and profusion (for waste was as illusory and haunting as the absent sun) was no longer there, and there was no family for whom she might have liked to prepare meals and treats. The only child of parents long since dead and almost forgotten, Blanche had begun her apprenticeship of living alone from an early age, and was thus an expert. An expert is not necessarily contented with his or her expertise, and Blanche found her skill sorely tried as the days grew longer. Her marriage had been a source of amazement to her because there was always somebody to talk to. At the beginning she had talked too much, too artlessly. Novices in love think they have to explain their childhoods, recount their entire history up to the moment of meeting the object of their choice. And they do not learn from the fact that this process may have to be repeated. Blanche, although innocent, had learnt her lesson quickly, and had come round fairly soon to the sort of impersonal conversation that her husband most enjoyed. Like many rich
men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography. He called her fanciful but was at one time proud of her. He liked to travel, to beautiful and fashionable places, and while he looked up old friends in these places she wandered through the towns, by the shore, lonely and content, knowing that he would be there when she got back. When they met again in the evenings, in these fashionable and beautiful places, she would try to tell him of her simple enjoyment, her solitary cup of coffee, her walk in the public gardens, or some conversation she had overheard. But he was impatient with this, and had much to tell; his information was full of incident, as if his friends, like himself, had more staccato lives, faster, more eventful, more objective. It was then that she had learnt to tailor her conversation to his requirements and to those of his friends; she was not calculating in this, but simply wanted to please. And she succeeded admirably, for his friends, who were not quite hers, found her rather amusing. As she was habitually elegant, she passed muster very well. But she always thought back to the early days, to her breathless welcoming of him in the evenings, her dashing to the kitchen to bring him a taste of something she had prepared that afternoon for dinner, and to what he called her romancing. Her transformation into the controlled and quizzical creature she had become had been effected on the whole without pain. It was her husband who had fashioned her into the woman she was now, so independent, so dignified, so able to manage on her own.
The images of waste and heat came together suddenly in her mind as the bus rounded Hyde Park Corner: a market in the South of France, and bushels of plums releasing their scent in the hot sun. A stallholder had stuck a carnation into the apex of the pyramid of fruit, already spoiling, moist, blackish pink, overripe. She had bought some of the plums and they were soon oozing through the bag. After inhaling
their smell, which was almost of wine, she had thrown them away.
Her smile careful, her mind elsewhere, as it so frequently was these days, Blanche greeted a woman whose face was familiar to her and made her way to the platform of the bus. Trying to place the woman took no small effort, simply because of the unwieldy furniture in her mind. The woman’s smile had been so warm that Blanche supposed they knew each other quite well, were neighbours, in fact, and that it was only her increasing preoccupation which forced her to reconstruct the woman so laboriously. From an image of anxious brown eyes and a pretty concern for others she arrived at the conclusion that this woman, as well as being an acquaintance, was known to her in some professional capacity. Doctor? Dentist? That was nearer. The face had been bent over some sort of ledger or appointment book in the image that now came into focus. Of course, the dentist’s receptionist. Mrs Duff, the dentist’s wife, who helped out with great pride when the regular receptionist took her holiday, and who, when not at Harley Street, was Blanche’s neighbour, an inhabitant, like herself, of the flowerless streets of West Brompton.
Phyllis Duff: a good woman. The picture was now clear. Excellent wife, devoted companion. Keeping up to date, up to scratch, planning her wardrobe – modest but superior – with due care but little conceit. Always presentable, in the old fashion of the wife of a professional man, usually to be found in her spotless home. Mrs Duff had no pretensions to be, nor could she ever be mistaken for, the new breed of woman who takes on the world. She had the brilliantly cared for appearance, the fine stockings, the rosy silk scarf, the first-class handbag, of the woman who dresses for a day in town, emerging a little hesitantly from the stony fastness of her mansion flat, looking at all the shops but returning home only with some lampshade trimmings. A woman, in
her own and her husband’s eyes, of some importance, with sacred rituals: my quiet time, my day for baking, my evening for the League of Friends, my spastics. A woman preserved from another time, smiling trustingly and confidingly, given to pleasantries of a bland and custom-worn nature, lacking in surprises. Blanche reflected on the wholesomeness of Mrs Duff, her extreme remoteness from the world of business activity, from the technological expertise, the sheer boldness, of Bertie’s new friend. Like the virtuous woman in the Old Testament, Mrs Duff supervised all the goings out and the comings in. Her husband, when he left in the morning, knew that when he reached the end of the street, she would be standing at the window or on the little balcony to wave, following him with melancholy brown eyes. And that when he returned in the evening it would be to a warm kiss and the aroma of a serious meal. Blanche, unwrapping a Dover sole from a paper that managed to be both dry and glutinous, imagined Mrs Duff at her preparations, the gleam of her immaculate kitchen, her gravity, her expertise, her peaceful anticipation of the evening’s reunion. Her wifeliness, so out of date, so infinitely beguiling.
Stirred to something approaching restlessness or vivacity by the very fact that the day had been partially conquered, Blanche wondered if Bertie might look in on his way home. For this reason she took a bath early and dressed in a white silk shirt and a patterned velvet skirt that she knew he had once liked. He was disappointingly vague about colours and tastes and might not even remember it, she thought. She tried to remind herself how inadequate his responses had been after all those sense impressions she had tried to ply him with. She could hardly believe how drained of them his day might be, although he himself did not seem to feel the lack.
‘What did you have for lunch?’ she would ask him eagerly.
He would appear to search painfully in the recesses of his
memory. ‘Meat,’ he would say finally. Or, ‘Some sort of fish.’
Moving now with some purpose about her kitchen, she took another look at her sole, found it dispiriting, and put it at the back of the fridge. She would cook it later, for she was conscientious about her well-being and thought it poor-spirited to descend to the sort of food that people tend to eat when they are alone; bits of cheese and fruit and the ends of anything that had not already been eaten. She liked to set a table, even now, and did so as if, were she to be surprised, all would be in order, civilized, devoid of self-pity. Even after a year of this kind of life she still thought in terms of Bertie’s calling in, as sometimes he did; she did not care, out of pride, out of love, to cause him any of the uneasiness she was almost sure he must feel. She took out a bottle of Vouvray, nicely chilled, and put it on a small silver tray with some very thin dry biscuits. That was what her shopping was best at these days.
The dull but harsh white light of a sunless April evening, with a hint of damp in the air which turned the pages of the evening paper limp, and the unrelieved green of the garden beyond her window, caused a spasm of physical chill which she counteracted with her first glass of Vouvray. The evening, if Bertie failed to come, did not look promising. All she could expect would be a telephone call from her sister-in-law, Barbara, a few letters to be answered, some sort of music on the wireless, and then the order of release: bed. How is it possible, she thought, pouring herself another glass, how is it possible that my life has slipped through the net in this way? It is true that I have only been on my own for a year and am still a little shaken; perhaps I shall get used to this … inactivity. For she felt herself to be inanimate and did not know that many people feel like this, men as well as abandoned women. But she knew, without a hint of sentiment, that her life might just as well be over, and
although she had stared so recently at that image of Bacchus and Ariadne in the National Gallery and had willed that ecstatic moment of recognition into being – so immediate that Bacchus’ foot has not had time to touch the ground as he leaps from his chariot, so shocking that Ariadne flings up a hand in protest – nothing now would happen. The greyness of the sky would permeate her evenings and her days would be spent in unrewarding schemes of sustenance and improvement. But she was in need of the unwilled action, the bonus, the discovery that would bring back into her veins the warmth of that illusory sun that had shone for her once and whose whereabouts she could not now locate. Scanning the empty sky from her window, and hearing the last car of the returning wage-earners being parked in the street below, she sighed and thought that Bertie would not come now.
The telephone rang: Barbara. The two women had remained on good terms after the divorce, for Barbara, a more sardonic version of her brother, had always regarded his activities with some scepticism. When he had introduced his sister to the computer expert with whom he had fallen in love, Barbara had remained unimpressed. ‘You want your head examined,’ she had said to him afterwards. This had not gone down too well, for Bertie had always needed his sister’s approval.
‘Amanda is all I ever wanted,’ he had replied. ‘We fell in love almost simultaneously. She has given me a new lease of life.’
‘You mean she’s twenty years younger than you are,’ said Barbara, unmoved. ‘And what are you going to do about Blanche? She was all you ever wanted once.’
‘Blanche has become very eccentric,’ he replied.
This was pretty well undeniable. Blanche went to such lengths, thought Barbara, always dressed to the nines, making elliptical remarks that no one knew how to take. Always
carrying on about characters in fiction, or characters whom she said should be in fiction, and sipping uninhibitedly from various bottles of wine. But one couldn’t deny that she was a first-class wife, although less interesting and open-hearted than she had been when Bertie had first brought her home. And a woman who bore no malice, taking all the blame. She had simply bowed her head when Bertie told her that he was in love with this Amanda, or Mousie, as he uningratiatingly called her. Bowed her head and said, ‘Do you want me to move out?’ Even Bertie had been uneasy about her humility, which was entirely genuine, and had rather sharply told Mousie they must look for somewhere to live: Blanche would remain where she was. Mousie had thought this a rather foolish idea, and so, in many ways, did Blanche. She had no desire to remain in the flat and had thought of living abroad, but she forced herself to stay because she knew that Bertie wanted to be generous, and she had not the heart to disappoint him.
‘The least he could do,’ said Barbara, who, like Bertie, misunderstood the situation. ‘And is he making you an adequate allowance? He is not a poor man, Blanche. I hope you are not being foolish.’
‘I was not foolish enough,’ said Blanche mournfully. ‘I suppose that he got bored with my being sensible all the time.’ Barbara privately thought that Blanche was very far from being sensible, at any time, but she let it pass. ‘It is far too late to be foolish now,’ Blanche went on. ‘Besides, I have money of my own. I don’t want any more.’
Barbara had sighed, had taken a closer look at Blanche’s thin face, and had been moved to something like compassion.
‘Perhaps you’ll marry again,’ she said. ‘You’re quite a young woman. And still good-looking.’
She did not say, ‘How will you live now?’ But that was what she meant, and they both knew it.
‘I shall be fine,’ said Blanche, with one of her intimidating
smiles. ‘I am thinking of joining the Open University. Or finishing my thesis on Mme de Staël. There will be plenty to keep me busy. I shall do a Cordon Bleu cookery course.’ ‘You are a very good cook, Blanche,’ said Barbara. ‘Don’t be silly.’ ‘I have always been interested in archaeology,’ Blanche went on repressively, for matters were threatening to get out of hand. ‘Something entirely new. There will be no time to be bored. Besides, I have always despised women who say they are too frightened to live alone. There is no room for that kind of woman in this day and age.’
Barbara, who knew that Blanche was precisely that kind of woman, had since made a point of telephoning every evening. As they understood each other perfectly, neither made any attempt at serious conversation.
‘Am I disturbing you?’ Barbara would say. ‘Are you alone?’
‘As it happens, I am,’ Blanche would reply, in a tone that indicated surprise at this turn of events. After which exchange comments would be friendly, ruminative, neutral, for each had an interest in keeping the tone light. They were united in having too little to do and in their desire to make the best of it. They felt humbled and disturbed by their old-fashioned immobility, aware that they were out-moded, almost obsolete. Despite their many voluntary activities, they felt unworthy. They looked out with wary but not uncritical eyes on the changing moral landscape, and consulted with each other on matters of no consequence, having not quite mastered the art of declaring their dearest wishes and their hearts’ intentions. Instead, they kept their secrets to themselves, and understood each other perfectly.
‘How is Jack?’ asked Blanche on this particular evening.
‘A touch of gout. Temper not good, as you might have expected. And he insists on playing bridge tonight, with that couple next door. Well, it is our turn, I suppose, but I tend to forget about these things. Tell me, Blanche, how long do
you suppose taramasalata keeps? I somehow can’t bring myself to throw it away, although it looks hard round the edges.’