Altered States (22 page)

‘La vie de château, quoi?’
said Jenny. There was a further silence.

‘Sarah came,’ said Humphrey abruptly, mashing his spoon into his plate of port wine jelly. ‘Always comes on her birthday. Time she was getting married, I told her.’

‘Oh, she will marry, have no fear of that,’ said Jenny composedly.

‘Thought you were going to marry her,’ said Humphrey, restored to something like life by the thought of Sarah. ‘Did you marry someone else? Some other girl? Annabel?’

‘Angela,’ both Jenny and I said simultaneously. That was the only time Angela’s name was mentioned, without it being conspicuously avoided.

‘Asked her what she wanted for her birthday,’ Humphrey went on. ‘Said she wanted one of the clocks. Gave her that little silver carriage clock of mine.’

A significant nod from Jenny indicated a gap on the mantelpiece, between two worthless brass candlesticks.

Humphrey chuckled. ‘She knew to take the most valuable. Jenny was angry.’ He chuckled again.

‘You should not have let her have it, Humphrey,’ said Jenny, her colour rising.

‘Why not? All this will come to her anyway.’

‘Humphrey …’

‘I promised my brother I’d take care of her. She’ll get everything. Well, it’s mine, isn’t it?’

‘Your programme must be starting, Humphrey.’

‘Didn’t someone say you were a solicitor?’

‘I am a solicitor, yes.’

‘I’ll give you my will. You can look after it.’ He looked crafty. ‘Can’t trust her, you know.’

‘I hardly think …’

‘Why? Haven’t been struck off, have you?’

‘No, no.’

‘Well, come and see me before you go. Don’t forget.’

I stood up and steered him out of the room. When I had lowered him into his chair, I went back to Jenny, my napkin still in my hand. Her colour was high, her expression hard.

‘You see how I’m placed, Alan. Entirely alone.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I had a long talk with Sarah, well, not long, while Humphrey was out of the way. Make sure some man takes care of you, I said. Make that man marry you, I told her.’

‘What man?’

‘The man she’s living with, of course. In Paris. De Leuze, his name is.’

‘I’m out of touch, I’m afraid.’

‘A very respectable sort of man, I’m told. Older than she is, which is all right now, although later on … But she could be a young widow, if things turn out …’ She left the sentence unfinished. ‘It’s the money that’s important.’

‘Why won’t she marry him?’

‘She says she doesn’t love him.’ She laughed, with what seemed like genuine amusement. ‘As if love had anything to do with it.’

‘Does she love someone else, then?’ I asked, my mouth dry.

‘You’d have to ask her that yourself, wouldn’t you?’ she said harshly. ‘I talked some sense into her, I hope.’

‘I thought you were fond of her.’

‘Well, of course I am.’

‘Well, then, why give her such bad advice? At least, it seems bad to me.’

She put down the dish she was holding. ‘Listen to me, Alan. Sarah is like me, neither daughter nor mother. There’s only one way for her to earn respect. If necessary she must make the best of a bad job.’ As I have, were the unspoken words. ‘Respect is what a woman needs in this world.’ Oddly enough I remembered my mother saying something like the same thing.

‘But surely, these days …’

‘Oh, no, make no mistake. Women get older. For men it’s different. I’m sure you still have your diversions.’ She regarded me without amenity. ‘Men can bury their past. An unmarried woman
is
her past. Whereas a wife has a social position. A spinster has none.’

‘But this is ridiculous. She’s still young. There’s nothing to stop her doing what she wants to. She could even have a child …’

She flashed me a look of triumph. ‘She can’t have children. She’s a barren fig tree, like me. The same reason in both our cases. An early abortion …’

‘I don’t want to hear this.’

‘The wrong women have the children, Alan. And even then some of them don’t know how.’

It seemed as though all the bitterness of her life had suddenly
risen to the surface. That bitterness was sufficient to obliterate all her affections, together with the efforts she had made to secure them. From the other room came a burst of laughter from the television, together with Humphrey’s hoarse chuckle.

‘And that’s what I’ve come to,’ she said, as though we had been talking about her all along.

‘And Sarah?’

‘I’ve given her my advice. I could do no more.’

‘You used to be so loving,’ I said. ‘So warm-hearted. I hardly recognise you.’

She sat down again, smoothing the tablecloth with the flat of both hands. ‘I’ve had a hard life,’ she said quietly. ‘You didn’t know me when I was a girl, in Paris. Or earlier than that, with my uncle and aunt. There was no love lost in my childhood, unlike yours. I used to look at families, wondering what it was like, to belong to them. I was young, I had my love affairs, I thought they would last. They lasted as long as I was with someone who could pay the bills. Then that stopped. I always worked. And I got tired, more and more tired. Then I met Humphrey. I was overjoyed, but overjoyed because he needed me. Do you understand that? What I thought was love was gratitude. We were grateful to each other. And even that was good enough for a while. But you’ve seen him; he has no use for a woman. Probably never had. And I had to do without. And now he doesn’t even like me. And I’m still on my own, after everything.’

‘You seemed so happy.’

‘I was happy as long as I was respected. As long as I had a social position. Alice made me feel, well, appreciated, normal, like every other woman with a family. I thought I could be a mother to Sarah. But neither really wanted me. No one did. Not even …’

‘Don’t,’ I said quickly. ‘Don’t even mention her name.’

‘Even she …’

‘Please.’

We were silent. ‘Sarah lives abroad now,’ she said. ‘She has no need of this place. Humphrey can’t see that. Rather than leave it to me he’d rather leave it to those two old women of his. But no, it’s got to go to Sarah. As if this were any place for her.’

‘Is she in need of money?’

Jenny laughed. ‘She doesn’t even work. She never has. Not like me. She’s dependent on that man she’s living with. That’s why I told her to see that he marries her.’

‘Do you have an address for her?’

She looked vague. ‘Humphrey’s got it somewhere, but I don’t know where. He hides everything from me. Her face when she took the clock! “Uncle would want me to have it,” she said. I could have told her not to rely on him. I did, and look where it got me.’

At this point, and as if to refute her, or any hopes she still may have cherished, Humphrey shuffled in with an envelope. ‘My will,’ he said. ‘You look after it for me. It’s all in order.’ He looked at Jenny. ‘What did you say his name was?’

With a pop another of the bulbs in the chandelier expired. It seemed a fitting end to our conversation. But I was not yet to be released. At the door, with Humphrey in abeyance, she plucked my sleeve, anxious to retain me. Her breath was sour in my face, as she once again launched into her accusations and justifications.

‘You see how it is, Alan. I can’t leave him. I hardly ever get out these days, and I do so long to look round the shops. You can see how shabby I am.’

Indeed I had noticed that her blue dress was slightly faded, her obstinately high-heeled shoes eased out of shape by her painful feet.

‘Sometimes I think I should have been better off had I
stayed in Paris. At least there I could lead a cultured life, even on very little money. But here he keeps me short. I should have known that he’d just sit back and ignore me. I should have looked at those two sisters of his.’

‘Sisters-in-law.’

‘And have they been in touch with me? Not a word. Oh, he telephones them. What he tells them I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps it might be wise to let Sybil know that he is, well, under the weather.’

‘Not I! I was willing to be friendly, but one look told me that we had nothing in common.’ She sighed. ‘I’ll tell you the truth of it, Alan. I had no family, and when you have no family you rely too much on your friends. And they let you down.’

Rather, I reflected, they could not take the weight of the deprived soul’s dependence, could not bear the reproaches when a telephone call was not returned, could not fail to notice the desperation and the barely disguised aggression when a difference of opinion made itself known, could not bear to be seen through the distorting mirror of the other’s needs, and would finally exchange that other for the comforting normality of a casual acquaintance.

‘What do you want me to do about this will?’ I asked. ‘I’m bound to execute it.’

‘Then that’s the end of me, I suppose. I might as well go back to Paris. Of course, I’ll fight it. I won’t leave without a struggle.’

‘Sarah might be persuaded …’

‘I’m the last person she’ll bother about.’

As this was probably true I was silent.

‘You might tell Alice how I’m placed,’ she said.

I picked up my bag, felt the weight of it, and drew out the dish I had bought for her in the market at Cagnes.

‘She sent you this,’ I said.

She looked at it with contempt. ‘These things are two a penny in the south of France.’

It had in fact been rather expensive. ‘Don’t you want it?’

‘You keep it,’ she said. ‘Thank you for the flowers.’

‘I’ll need Sarah’s address,’ I told her.

‘I told you, I haven’t got it. He’s got it, only he won’t let me see it. Care of de Leuze, I suppose. Although I gathered that they were moving to Geneva. He’s an industrial chemist, very well placed. Not that she says much. She wrote something down for Humphrey, and now I can’t get it out of him. No, Sarah doesn’t have much use for me. A hard girl. No sympathy, no sentiment. And I was so willing to be friendly with her. I loved her, Alan.’

She waited for me to say that I had loved her too, but I remained obstinately silent.

‘I wanted a daughter,’ she said; again I remained silent.

She sighed. ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you. It was good of you to come, a young man like you. And still good-looking. I always liked a handsome man.’

‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said, although I was not sure how true this was. I kissed her, at which her face brightened. She was still a woman who responded to a man’s attentions, I noted, and she was cursed with a senile husband whose initial need of her had been based solely on the panic of someone adrift in a foreign city and unable to speak the language. No wonder she despised him.

I hastened down the fawn-carpeted corridors, under the dim light of various low-watt bulbs. Ancient cooking smells drifted from behind closed doors. The melancholy of London flats at nightfall! It was only Thursday, but it felt like Sunday. I did not have the courage to walk, and my taxi was enlivened by a powerful floral deodorant. I wanted a bath: I wanted to walk naked through my flat. I wanted to remind myself that I was still intact, that I had not yet succumbed
to rancour and recrimination. If I wanted more than that I repressed the knowledge. That would come later. My chief feeling, the feeling uppermost in my tired mind, was one that a certain chapter of my life, the one I prized the most, had ended. I was aware that certain steps could not be retraced, however heady the impulse. I placed the dish on my desk and went to bed. That night I was wakeful, yet I did not mind. Unwillingly I glimpsed possibilities, stratagems. One speaks these days of a window of opportunity. I resolved to wait and see if even now one would open for me.

Towards the end of the following month I received two telephone calls, one from Mother, one from Jenny. Both told me the same thing, that Humphrey had died. Jenny had found him on the bathroom floor early one morning, and was all the more shocked in that she had heard nothing. Apparently he had taken to wandering about before she was up; he slept little, although the legend was that he slept all the time. Towards the end of his life he began to resent Jenny’s presence in the flat, and liked to reassert his ownership by means of a stealthy inspection of his former domain in the early hours. This tired him so much that by the time that Jenny was making the coffee he was back in bed, and had to be coaxed into sitting up, and even later into getting up. On this particular morning he must have had a malaise and collapsed,
blocking the bathroom door. It was only after considerable efforts that Jenny gained access. I imagined the graceless scene: the old man, unwashed, bundled into his camel-hair dressing-gown, and his bewildered wife, herself dishevelled, trying to drag the body out of that confined space. She had tidied her hair and run to a neighbour, who rang for an ambulance and then made Jenny a cup of tea. Jenny was apparently so overwhelmed by this act of kindness that she burst into tears. The neighbour took this to be an entirely commendable sign of grief and promised any further help should it be needed. Thus Jenny began her first day as a widow somewhat restored to the dignity she had long ceased to enjoy as a wife.

The story of the neighbour was told to me by Jenny herself: the rest was my interpretation. On the telephone she sounded if anything almost excited by this turn of events, a fact commented upon by my mother, to whom I recounted the gist of her confession to me on the last and disastrous evening I had spent with them both.