Authors: Anita Brookner
Blanche dreamed that she was rowing a small boat to the Isle of Wight. The passenger in the boat was her mother, who was dressed in beige chiffon with a large straw hat. She required Blanche to row her away from the mainland because she was going out to tea and was unable to proceed under her own steam, being a decorative and frivolous woman given to iron requests which brooked no refusal. On the mainland, staring at the departing boat, was Bertie, and Blanche understood that although not wishing her to leave he was in no way disposed to prevent her from going. Blanche, in consenting to escort her mother, and thus in some way fulfilling her filial duty, was aware that she was doing a fatal thing. The proof of this was that in her hair, which was untidy, were planted four white feathers. On the further shore, to which Blanche was rowing, stood Mrs Duff, smiling and waving, applauding Blanche’s act of obedience. She awoke from this dream with a beating heart and a feeling of panic.
But I did get away, she reassured herself. Although she made it so difficult for me, assuring me that a man like Bertie could not possibly be serious about a woman like me, I did get away, although Bertie himself disliked my mother and seemed at one point only too willing to concede defeat. I got away from all the duties which had been imposed on me, most of which were illusory, and all I learnt from my
calculating mother was to be her opposite and not to calculate at all. Thus I began my real life in a state of awful innocence, trying to find more duties to perform, thinking myself forever indebted to the one who had sprung me from that daughterly trap, and forgetting his boredom with all forms of obedience. And aware, all the time, that my mother, who contrived a clever illness to mark my desertion, considered that she had right on her side and hogged all the attention at my wedding by feeling faint and demanding a chair at various strategic moments. Bertie ignored her, of course, but a surprising number of women, friends of hers, clustered round her and eyed me reproachfully. They seemed to have decreed for me – and for me alone – a life of forbearance, prudence, fortitude, humility: all the Christian virtues, in fact. They thought me so vague, so unpromising, that I could afford to have no desires. They often praised my goodness, by which they meant my docility, my filial servitude. Mother was almost insulted by my success. She went on a world cruise immediately afterwards, I remember, and captivated various widowers, one of whom stayed on to perform all the duties for which she had earmarked me, until her death ten years ago.
But what was Mrs Duff doing in the dream? Is it simply that she is a symbol for all the evangelical women who uphold a standard of goodness that one is not supposed to question? When I meet her in the street and refuse all her kindly invitations, is there not the same look of wistful reproach in her eyes, as if she thinks that what I really need, in my present dilemma, is her company and the company of respectable matrons like herself? As if, once fatally wounded in the war between the sexes, I should think it only appropriate to withdraw and to become modest and grateful for a quiet life? As if I must make reparation for my adventure and not sit at home by myself, drinking, or taking up with waifs and strays? She once told me, when we were
both trapped at the hairdresser’s, that she had met her own husband when she was sixteen, but that she had been too young to leave her mother and had made him wait for five years. And this pious although perhaps unnatural resolve is somehow all of a piece with her behaviour at the butcher’s, where, unfortunately, I also meet her, and where she smartly attacks the boy for trying to sell her escalopes of veal which have already been cut and are lying palely in a dish on the block.
‘Now, Brian,’ she says, in a nannyish tone. ‘You know my husband won’t eat that.’ Or, ‘You know I telephoned earlier. If that fillet of beef isn’t cut yet I’ll send my husband to collect it later.’
For Blanche saw that Mrs Duff, secure in her married bliss, gloried in her ability to command this husband, this dentist, who had waited for her for five years, and, being a modest woman, merely demonstrated her strength in these righteous ways. And sorrowed that Blanche was unable to do the same, her eyes widening in sympathy as Blanche bought one veal chop. And was no doubt good to her mother too, and fitted both husband and mother into her contented life, having reconciled these incompatibilities without ever suspecting that they were incompatible.
Blanche, who had found her own desire to be of service almost futile, had nevertheless continued to desire to be of service, having suffered more from her original dereliction of duty than she knew. But Bertie, although accepting her efforts on his behalf, had thought them marginal, had not consciously required them, and, she knew, would have valued her much more if she had been sought after by other men, if she had been vain rather than bookish, with something of her mother’s unfairness and frivolity. Thus she had come to fashion herself into an enigma, with an expression of studied indifference, which he appreciated, and which she now sought to perpetuate, all the while aware
that she had failed on two counts, to be thoroughly good and thoroughly bad.
The woman that Blanche had become repudiated the Mrs Duffs of this world, seeing in them only a sanitized version of her former self, in the days when she would dreamily follow her mother, picking up her purchases, accompanying her on her numerous social engagements, longing to be free. The woman that she was then had sought to become other, and was thus attracted by all forms of disobedience, scorn, refusal, and, in addition, derision, cruelty, or the higher indifference, the true indifference to another’s well being. She saw that these qualities, in some mysterious way, preserved, whereas devotion and submission, whether filial or marital, merely made one seem uninteresting. She also saw that her original misunderstandings could have been corrected by the birth of a child, who would not only be an eternal agent of reconciliation, but the recipient of her own childishness, the last hope of a good outcome in a world flawed by false expectations.
Her visits to Sally Beamish were not disinterested. She saw in the child, Elinor, the embryonic adult who could still, perhaps, after her unpromising start, be reclaimed for a life that was both sensible and rewarding. And she saw in the mother a sly comment on the investment of such energies as she possessed, saw in her the crystallization of those female qualities in which she knew herself to be deficient. A whole education seemed to await Blanche in that dusty and unattractive room, in which, perversely, she found attractions that were missing at home. And this education promised her the advancement of her own unfinished story, of her disappointed hopes, and of her unused and unrequited faculties. She would have liked to do something decisive, to temper the child’s terrible fortitude, her dumb refusal of frivolous alternatives to the real meaning of life; she would have liked, in all modesty, to have proved a good friend,
although whom this would benefit most was a little hazy in her mind; for she found herself to be unusually curious about all aspects of this story. It was as if, once again, she was an eager pupil in the business of living life as she supposed it should be lived, never having had real knowledge of anything except the contents of her own mind. These were the various calls that she answered as she found herself on the way to Sally’s basement, promising herself that she was only ‘looking in’, since she had not seen Sally at the hospital since their first encounter there.
On the evenings of such days Bertie would find her distracted, flushed, quite obviously not expecting him, and, assuming that she had a lover, would become amused and rather more attentive. Blanche, recalling herself to herself, would tell him that there was a bottle of Muscadet in the fridge, and leave him to get it while she briefly regarded herself in the glass and regretted, mildly, that he had found her before she had had time to have her bath and change.
‘You’re looking well,’ he said, on one of these evenings, appreciating anew her fine head and her distant expression. ‘Going out much?’
‘Yes,’ she answered without guile. ‘I have made a new friend.’
‘Mousie would like it very much if you would come to dinner one evening. As you know, we are going away soon and I shan’t see you for some time.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Blanche. ‘I am not sophisticated enough to be able to tolerate such a civilized arrangement. I might make an injudicious remark or start raving on about Henry James.’
‘I think we have heard of Henry James, you know, although of course I rely on your good taste not to embarrass Mousie.’
‘You would be very unwise to count on my good taste,’ said Blanche. ‘I am trying to get rid of it. I plan to become
dangerous and subversive. Do not look to me to be Millie Theale. A silly girl, I always thought. She should have bought that rotter outright. What else is money for?’
‘And whom are you planning to buy outright?’ asked Bertie, feeling a renewal of interest in her.
‘Oh, no one you know,’ she answered truthfully.
For these days she always left a couple of ten-pound notes under the lid of the chipped teapot in Sally’s lugubrious kitchen. Neither of them ever referred to this exchange.
Yet her missionary zeal, misplaced, was never more superfluous than when Elinor was absent, staying with her grandmother, Paul’s mother, in well-heeled Surrey suburbia. Blanche wondered at the antagonisms or alliances that Elinor’s absence or presence signified. She wondered too about Elinor’s father, of whom she had seen a photograph. This showed a smiling young man with weakly romantic good looks of a kind to seduce timorous women: abundant dark hair, shining eyes beaming forth messages of boyish goodwill, and a curved, almost feminine mouth. He looked like every mother’s favourite son, and despite his rather obvious beauty Blanche surmised that he was a bore. He was certainly either rather inept or very clever, for he was apparently in thrall to the mysterious Mr Demuth, the American enigma, and was forced to act as
homme de confiance
, a position which could entail certain humiliations of a domestic nature. On the other hand, if he endured his year’s apprenticeship he could count on a handsome sum of money and could come home in triumph to his wife, bearing her red fox coat, and to Elinor, with perhaps more impractical toys. And then what? Would they move away, as a family, and set up home properly? Blanche doubted it. Sally was the sort of woman who demanded to be entertained, who would expect to eat most of her meals in good restaurants, and would claim handsome compensation for her year alone with the child. And in all this Elinor would no doubt be
obliged to spend more and more time with her grandmother and would remain dumb for as long as her father was absent from her life, for as long as he behaved like the usurper’s lover, which, Blanche thought, he must continue to do for it was his fate to succumb to, and be controlled and frustrated by, such a woman, and he would count himself lucky to be in such a hazardous position.
In some recess of her mind Blanche was aware that her friendship for Sally Beamish was not a genuine friendship but one which had been born out of her own needs. On the second and only other occasion on which she had contrived to bring Elinor home with her for lunch she had been aware of Miss Elphinstone’s slightly more critical stance.
‘Well, she’s taken to you and no mistake,’ Miss Elphinstone had said from the doorway, until invited to join them at the table. ‘But you don’t want to go putting yourself out for her. She’s got a home of her own, hasn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Blanche had replied. ‘But it leaves a lot to be desired. I doubt if you would approve.’
‘Whether I approve or not’s neither here nor there. It’s where she belongs. She’s not old enough to go out visiting without her mother.’
And she had looked severely at Elinor, as if Elinor were a deserter, and did not talk to her. Elinor, perhaps sensing disapproval, had pushed her baked egg aside and refused to eat her stewed apple. Although Blanche had never seen her cry she now watched the child’s face darken and had judged it wise to forgo Elinor’s nap and take her out to the park. Sitting forlornly on a bench, watching Elinor play with another child’s tricycle, she warned herself that she was becoming foolish, that this would not do, that there was to be no form of maternity for her, even if her fantasies had once tended that way. She saw too that Elinor was no Victorian child, dedicated to preserving the harmony of her own little family, eyes upturned, hearing heavenly voices,
but tough, with the toughness of one who has studied the dynamics of survival and made it her business to learn the rules. On the evening of that day Blanche bathed and changed, sat in her drawing-room with a bottle of wine, and reflected that she had caught herself just in time: she had been about to make a fool of herself again. Now she would simply do what a reasonably effective middle-class woman could do for Sally and her child and then leave them alone. But the image of what her restored independence would be failed to charm her, and she felt herself again to be a prisoner of her own fate, unresigned, yet powerless in the face of what others had decreed for her.
Blanche was not a foolish woman, although she eagerly contemplated foolishness in others, hoping to steal some lightness of touch from their behaviour. Her charitable actions towards Sally, the contributions placed under the lid of the teapot, she rightly counted as nugatory, for her motives were impure. And so it was with a wistfulness sharpened by self-criticism that she next encountered Sally Beamish’s down-drooping and abstracted hospitality, and she determined to put this odd acquaintanceship on a more realistic basis, assuming once again her quizzical stance and denying for herself any part in the fortunes of these people.
This, though, was not too easy. Sally had come to rely on her in a disappointed sort of way, as if Blanche were a poor substitute – poor but available – for more active assistance. As far as Blanche could see, Sally spent those days when Elinor was absent simply lying on her
chaise-longue
, smoking, and waiting for someone to turn up. Blanche suspected that there was a man, or even men, in the background and that Elinor’s removal to her grandmother’s house was not unconnected with this fact. Sally had the careless smile and the genuine absentmindedness of one who was used to a constant stream of favours. Many were her references to her life before she had been marooned in this basement, but they were
references to parties, holidays, tremendous sprees that did not end until the dawn of the following day, joy rides, Morocco for breakfast, dinner in Venice. Blanche assisted at these reminiscences in a subordinate capacity, wondering how Sally had had the money for this hedonistic life when she was now so obviously in need of it. The answer, as far as she could see, was with the absent Paul, who had obviously spent all he had on her, and, the money having gone, had been forced to take up this curious position with the American, Demuth.