Undue Influence (4 page)

‘Have you had many applications for the post?’ I inquired cannily. I had already removed my coat.

‘One or two,’ she replied. ‘They seemed disappointed when I explained the work to them. I think they saw themselves putting together something more contemporary. And they were unsuitable in ways I could not quite understand. So modern, you know. Young men with their shirts hanging out. And one older man smelling of drink who evidently thought I should have heard of him. He had a beard, and a collection of mannerisms. I could see that he despised me. Called me “Dear lady,” detected spinsterishness. Well, I am a spinster; I make no apology for that. How soon do you think you could start?’

I was startled, had not expected to come so far so quickly. I said that I could start at once, if that was what she wanted. She gave me a smile that lit up her pale austere features.

‘You had better familiarize yourself with the material,’ she said. ‘And there is a café round the corner if you require lunch.’
She spoke as if lunch were a reckless indulgence. ‘And my sister comes round at about four o’clock with something for our tea. I’m sure you will be happy here. But,’ she held up an admonitory hand, ‘I must be sure that you will take the work seriously. My sister and I revered our father. These days, I dare say, he would appear unsophisticated. But he wrote in happier times, before all this satire.’ I did not point out that satire was mainly the product of the long-dead Sixties. I was anxious to get down to work. When she mentioned the minuscule salary, also characteristic of the Sixties, I understood why all those young men with their shirts hanging out had turned the job down. This was a time warp. St John Collier, whose
œuvre
I was about to disinter, was no more a figure of the past than was his daughter. When Hester arrived that same afternoon, her presence announced by an eager shout from outside the door, which her sister was then obliged to open, I felt immensely at ease.

I might also say at home. St John Collier’s writings struck me as entirely worthy, although the added attraction was the piles of obsolete women’s magazines in which most of them were entombed. The nature articles I could deal with more or less summarily. But in the basement, on my own, except for a very occasional customer, I could indulge my curiosity, not in the great man himself, but in all those horoscopes, those letters of advice—so prudent, so circumspect—written, I suspected, and replied to by the august woman whose photograph was featured at the top of the page, those constipating recipes, and above all the illustrations to the stories, with their winsome lady role models (except that nobody had them then) and their air of gentility which even I, a spoiled product of a later age, felt bound to admire.

Nostalgia for the shop struck me painfully, but I still had this peculiar interval to observe. Truth to tell it rather frightened
me, while the poor array of comestibles which I had dumped on the kitchen table and still not put away made me heartsick. I felt as if someone should be looking after me, but had the sense to see that this attitude was dangerously unhealthy, even archaic. I still had the weekend to get through, and this I knew would be difficult. Weekends were supposed to be festive; they were to be anticipated joyfully. I had always found them somewhat problematic. I seemed to sleep badly on a Friday night, and of course towards the end of my mother’s life I hardly slept at all. She had died on a Sunday, which I knew would forever colour the day which even happy people find burdensome, at least towards the evening. I could do what everybody else did now, go to a six o’clock film, if that was what I wanted. That left the matter of food. I was by now quite hungry, and it was still only Friday. I resolved to telephone Wiggy and invite her, quite casually, out for a meal. In Wiggy’s company I should feel less awkward, less conspicuous; my bereaved state would be less obvious. And if necessary I should eat out every evening, early, on my way home from work. But I still longed to get back to the shop, and the Greek café round the corner, and Hester’s cakes. An extraordinary shift seemed to have taken place in my habits and customs. I suppose that this is the inevitable result of a death in the family.

On the Saturday evening Muriel Collier telephoned to ask how I was. I thought that was good of her, and gratefully assured her that I was fine. My voice seemed strange to me, and evidently to Muriel as well, for I was told that I need not come back to work until I felt like it. I promised her that I would be in on Monday, trying not to sound too eager. Then I rang Wiggy, and suggested a meal, which I thought might inaugurate various other meals. I thought the timing was right: her lover never appeared at the weekend but devoted himself to familial pursuits in the Home Counties.

‘All right,’ she said cautiously. ‘Where would you suggest?’

‘Oh, we’ll find something,’ I promised her. ‘I’ll pick you up around seven.’

So I did, but our dinner was not a success. Two women on their own amid the Saturday night revellers did not make a good impression. There is a stigma, even now. I said as much to Wiggy, who did not particularly want to be reminded of this. Not that her lover ever takes her out for a meal. It is rather that his presence in her life gives her a feeling of being accompanied, and this, however illusory, confers a certain composure. For one dreadful minute in the course of the evening I saw that she felt sorry for me. That was no doubt why she said, ‘This is fun. Let’s do it again.’ But the pasta (which, come to think of it, I could have cooked at home) seemed hard to digest, and the noisy restaurant was beginning to give me a headache. I longed to be out in the homegoing streets, alone, though I knew that I was condemned to such occasions for the foreseeable future. Wiggy knew this too, but we were honour bound to observe the proprieties.

‘I’ll ring you tomorrow,’ she said, with a tentative squeeze of my arm. And we parted, I think, gratefully, which merely added to my sadness.

I walked the usual route home, slipping from shadow to light to shadow again. The flat was warm when I let myself in; although it was late May the weather was still wintry. I thought I might spend the following day, Sunday, tidying my mother’s room, throwing away all the childproof pill bottles which at the end remained unopened. I went to bed discouraged, but I slept deeply and woke with a slightly lighter heart. I spent the morning and a good part of the afternoon tidying and cleaning: this was no doubt how I should spend all my remaining Sundays. This thought made me sad all over again, and I went
to bed far too early. That is why, perversely, I overslept on the Monday morning, and was late arriving at the shop. Muriel raised her eyebrows slightly and pointed downwards. I thought she was consigning me repressively to my duties in the basement, but in fact all she meant was that I should not make too much noise. We had a customer.

Three

At first the man in the basement looked to me like an older and more careworn version of the man with bowed head in the café in Marylebone Lane who was not Mrs Hildreth’s son and for whom I had imagined a whole illusory history. (I am not infallible.) This man had the same air of lassitude, which I detected in spite of his polished appearance. He was formally dressed for his visit to a dusty bookshop, although he could not have known that it would be quite so dusty. He wore a finely tailored grey suit with a faint chalk stripe, a very white shirt, and highly polished shoes. I think it was the brilliantly laundered shirt that led me to make the comparison with Mrs Hildreth’s putative son, as if this man too had emerged from the hands of a watchful woman and set out, fully caparisoned, to encounter the hazards of the ordinary working day.

Except that this man obviously had no connection with the world of work: he was too careful, too immaculate. And besides, what sort of man do you find in a bookshop at ten o’clock on a Monday morning, unless he is some sort of don, about his own affairs? This man, however, was too presentable to be one of the academics we get in from time to time. He turned briefly when I said ‘Good morning’ before turning back to the shelves. I had an impression of a fine blond head and a
fair-skinned face prematurely worn into furrows of anxiety which gave him an elderly look, although his figure was tall and upright and rather graceful.

In his hasty return to his earlier perusal of the shelves I sensed a reserve. This man would not waste time on a strange woman, with whom in any case he was not on terms of familiarity or friendship. I found him attractive, more attractive than the prospect of a day with St John Collier, who had begun to acquire a patina of benign tediousness. I pitied those two girls having to listen to him throughout their childhood, although the experience seemed to have done them no harm. Their respect for their father had remained intact, a fact at which I could only marvel. My own father had never emitted a single philosophical or semi-philosophical dictum, so that I had learned at an early age not to look to him for enlightenment, or even very much in the way of affection. He found me as tiresome as I found him, but I had never quite resolved the factors that made us so antagonistic.

I took the cover off my typewriter and pretended to be studying my papers. It would be impolite to start work with this man at my back, although he was paying me no attention. From what I could judge he was reading his way steadily through whatever came to hand, as if he had found sanctuary in our basement and was in no hurry to leave. I also detected an almost unnatural stillness, almost a watchfulness about him, as if he were sensitive to my own inactivity, or as if he knew that I was not normally an inactive person whom he had no wish to constrain by his presence. For this reason he was conscious of me, as I was of him. I shuffled the typewritten pages on my desk; clearly I could not start on the women’s magazines while he appeared to be reading Heine’s collected poems. I corrected a few typing errors, resolving to work properly, in
a resolute fashion, when he had gone. But he showed no signs of going, and in the end I merely sat still, with a pen in my hand, as if to give an impression of profound thought.

He did not much worry me. I am at ease with men, to whom I am inclined to forgive much. This, I thought, was the direct legacy of my unfortunate father, to whom I forgave little. I was ten years old when he had his first stroke, and I became used to his clumsy presence, but also to his irascibility, as if not enough deference were being paid to his condition. He was inclined to sulk when he considered himself to be neglected. In fact he was not neglected, but he was quick to sense when my mother was tired, or when I warily brought him a cup of tea and was forced to watch while it ran down his chin … And that awful last sight of him as he lay comatose in the hospital, his hand still about its business under the sheet. ‘It’s the catheter that’s bothering him,’ said the nurse, but she was young, and as embarrassed as I was.

For that reason I appreciated wholeness in men, whatever their moral character. The partners I have chosen have all been well set up, viable, as if I need to know that they carry no trace of mortal illness, that I am not threatened with their decrepitude. My worst nightmare is to be shackled to a sick man, for I have seen what physical sickness can do to the mind. I dare say my father was aware of his lamentable appearance. I am sure he was aware of my lack of love for him. But with a young person’s primitive instincts I was frightened of ugliness, wanted to have nothing to do with it. To have him in the flat all day was bad enough. And to be fair I was not entirely to blame. He did not care for me, although he pretended to do so. He cared only for my mother, who tended him faithfully. He found my childhood noises distasteful, which was why I soon learned to be quiet, so as not to remind him of my presence.
I was anxious not to have to encounter him, although this was impossible, as he installed himself in the living-room and stayed there, in his chair, unavoidably present. For this reason, when I came home from school, I made straight for my bedroom. I read a lot in those days. I have a picture of myself furiously reading, my fingers in my ears to drown out the sound of his harsh, altered voice, how it came out as a groan, as if he were angry all the time.

No doubt he was angry, yet he was determined to live, whereas I, again with the ruthlessness of a child, thought it would be more appropriate if he would simply disappear. I was nineteen when he had the second stroke, the one that killed him. Until then all I knew of men was impairment, inadequacy. After that I wanted only a certificate of durability, unaltered features, easy unthinking movements. Presumably daughters are more easily influenced by their father’s habits and appearance than by their worth. The idea that my father could have provided me with worldly instruction was simply laughable. Who could learn from a man so gracelessly concerned with what remained of his damaged life? Or so I thought, in my ignorance. In mitigation I can state that he was inclined to dismiss me as unimportant. It was not until he was dead that I began to relax. It was shortly after his death that I took, at my mother’s urging, my first tentative holiday. I like to think she remained in ignorance of what was to become something of a habit. In any event my holidays were never discussed in detail. We pored over the photographs and postcards together—rood screens and tympanums, choirstalls, misericords, clerestories and elevations—as if these had had exclusive claims on my attention. I faltered when I found that she had compiled several albums of the postcards, which she kept in her bedroom. She was so
innocent herself that I am sure she managed to think me innocent as well.