Altered States

A Start in Life

Providence

Look at Me

Hotel du Lac

Family and Friends

A Misalliance

A Friend from England

Latecomers

Lewis Percy

Brief Lives

A Closed Eye

Fraud

Dolly

A Private View

Incidents in the Rue Laugier

Altered States

The Visitors

ANITA BROOKNER
Altered States

Anita Brookner is the author of several novels, including
Fraud
,
Dolly
,
Brief Lives
,
Incidents in the Rue Laugier
, and
Hotel du Lac
, for which she won the Booker Prize in 1986. Her most recent novel is
The Visitors
. An international authority on eighteenth-century painting, she became the first female Slade Professor at Cambridge University in 1968. Ms. Brookner lives in London.

The woman on the station platform had her back to me. If she had turned round I would have been able to satisfy myself that she was not someone I had once known. Even at this distance of time and place I should have known that other woman anywhere. As it was I could only contemplate this particular back view and once again return my memories to the oubliette to which I had consigned them. I was in any case reluctant to proceed to an identification. The woman on the station platform was smartly but not fashionably dressed in a sober chestnut-coloured suit and the sort of brown felt hat still favoured by certain middle-aged middle-class women in Germany. I doubted whether this woman was German, although she certainly looked European. This much was attested by her shoes, which again were smart
without being fashionable: narrow brown brogues, with a medium heel. I noticed that they were brilliantly polished.

That I was able to contemplate this woman at such length no doubt says something about myself, but I am averse to falsely intelligent summaries, such as seem to be prevalent nowadays, and prefer long moments of reverie and speculation, which seem to me more conducive to satisfactory conclusions. We were the only two people on this particular platform, and I was only there because I had come down to the station to buy the English papers, which usually arrived at about four o’clock. The light was already going: it was a misty dusky afternoon, still quite mild, but with that particular stillness that speaks so eloquently of the decline of the year, and with it all hopes one had had in the spring, season of false promises. Behind me, in the town, I had left the subdued comfort of the English Tea Rooms: beyond, at the end of the main street, at the foot of the steep path leading up to the hilly suburbs where all the more prosperous villas stood, was the Hotel Eden, and my small and dreadfully quiet room. This was too like a monastic cell to convey any prospect other than that of austere rest, such as might be appreciated by those who had spent the day walking, as I was supposed to have done. Sometimes I managed to coax some whispery music out of the bedside radio; that, if I were particularly tired, was generally distraction enough. But on this quiet afternoon I was bored, and had felt the need of some human presence, or at least of newsprint. If I lingered on this station platform it was because it seemed an appropriate place to be at the end of an uneventful afternoon. And because, for one shocking moment, I had thought the woman with her back to me, with her sensible hat and shoes, might be Sarah Miller, or Sarah de Leuze, as she now presumably was, who had the gift of turning up when least expected. It was part of her ravaging charm to disarm one
with her presence when one had thought her lost for ever, only to disappear again when one’s need had turned to the most intense and hopeless longing.

I felt that longing now. That was why I lingered, in the misty half light, in my bulky English clothes: Burberry and tweed cap, woollen socks and walking shoes. I tend to wear everything when I travel, so as not to carry much. With my small bag I can pick up and disappear quite easily. I had nothing much to do with my time, and no one was expecting me, which was why I lingered, a substantial English ghost, haunting the woman in the German hat, until it became borne in on me that she was not at all like Sarah, was older (though Sarah would now be nearly my age), was more settled, with a fantastic air of capability conveyed by her back.

A housewife, I concluded, although that term is anachronistic these days, or perhaps just a wife, married to one of those silent substantial peaceable men in whom this region abounds. The woman too had an air of peaceable worth about her, and in my fantasy I endowed her not only with an excellent digestion but a good conscience, the one usually contingent upon the other, in no particular order. Then the woman shifted her weight from one ankle to the other, and the way her knees came together reminded me again of Sarah, and her habit of swaying from one foot to the other, a mocking smile on her face, as if enjoying one’s too fervent gaze. If this woman were Sarah I would fold my arms around her, as I had always tried to do, and sometimes succeeded in doing, before she escaped. There was of course no question of my touching this utterly respectable woman, whose face I still had not seen. It was simply that the combination of dull weather and grave silence, the thin white mist that so often descends without warning here and seems to lay delicate fingers on the skin of one’s face, and the benign emptiness of this quiet little town might have emboldened me, not to
embark on any crude adventure, but to remember the woman for whom I had been searching, and not only metaphorically but in pursuit of a mission. That was the fruitless task which I had undertaken in order to pacify a poor sick woman, not quite a relative, on what was too obviously her deathbed.

I felt that this person on the platform might hold the key to the mystery, might in some extraordinary way enlighten me as to where Sarah might be, for although I tended to see her everywhere I had not yet laid eyes on her in ways that might be construed as physical, verifiable, even disappointing, as the end of certain stories sometimes turns out to be. This woman in the brown hat, this very real woman, would no doubt have a settled existence and many friends: she could ask questions, might already know a certain amount. The fact that her presence, or rather what I could intuit from her back view, was so compelling, awoke in me the suspicious feeling that if she were not Sarah herself, restored to me in this strange manner after an absence of fifteen years, then she might possibly know where Sarah might be. My desire to address her, so that she would turn and show me her face, was negated by my immobility, my inability to move, and by the weight of memory that I allowed to overwhelm me for a brief moment. I felt that even if I managed to open my mouth no sound would come. Besides, the silence of that still afternoon laid a kind of enchantment on the scene which was not unpleasant to me: to break it would have seemed unmannerly. I felt that the woman and I were contained in this enchantment, and that the station of this little town was the setting for some drama that would eventually unfold, and in which we would both be bidden to speak, although our lines had not yet been written.