Altered States (28 page)

‘Are you eating?’ asks my mother wistfully on the telephone, although she is now over eighty, and I am in advancing middle age, have indeed advanced beyond it. I accept the fact that we lead separate lives; I also accept the fact that one day, perhaps not too far off, she will leave me, and that I shall then be alone as I have never been before, albeit in a relatively solitary life. Perhaps I am well qualified for solitude. My discipline rarely lets me down, except perhaps when I am on holiday, as I am now, and find the days long. Even their numbing calm is acceptable; it corresponds to something settled in my nature. In any event I know that no further change can be expected. That too I accept.

It is that difficult hour between five and six, when the light begins to alter and presages a long dusky evening. At home I should be bidding the girls in the office good-night and welcoming
as familiars the surge of home-going traffic and the lights of the new supermarket in Baker Street. If I am not going out again I pick up something to eat and am in the flat in time to watch the seven o’clock news. I find it convenient to work in the evenings, now that I am so seldom interrupted; the invitations still arrive, but I rarely accept them. I spend week-ends at the cottage, at least when Brian and Felicity are not using it. Sometimes they drive down for the day, with the children, and I particularly look forward to these occasions, since the children are an object of fascination to me, a fascination quite devoid of covetousness or regret. That is one of the blessings of my becalmed state: I no longer have the capacity for desire or envy, and although I know that this condition has not been arrived at without renunciation (I do not say sacrifice), I find it acceptable, strangely so in view of the ambitions I once had for myself, and the confidence I also had that those ambitions could be satisfied.

Acceptance may well be the only reward I have been able to recognise, but also the price I have had to pay. It is just that at this particular hour, in Vif, it seems a little inadequate, a falling short, although I have heard highly successful men (and women) bemoaning their lot, as if success had endowed them with an almost existential anxiety to examine their achievements and to measure the distance to be travelled—still—before they experience that satisfaction that so eludes them. I have no such illusions. I am what I was always programmed to be, a well-regarded man of some substance, with an uninteresting private life. I am aware that this is an almost anomalous position, well below current norms, but perhaps there is still room for dull people such as myself, if only to throw into higher relief the exploits of those whose lives are more vivid than my own. I read about such people in the newspapers every morning. By the time I leave for the
office I am more or less convinced that behind Wigmore Street there stretches a hinterland of scandalous happenings, many of which will come in for my professional scrutiny in the course of my working day.

Here in Vif I am allowed to be as dull as I know myself to be. Dullness is appreciated here, and my days have a dullness I am not able to achieve anywhere else. After breakfast I take my long walk, either to Chelles or down into the town. Coffee is taken at the Grand Café de la Place, or, if in Chelles, at a little bar called Le Papillon. I lunch at one of the two open-air restaurants, for it is still mild enough in October to sit outside. Then there is the walk to the station for the English papers, and sometimes a cup of tea at the English Tea Rooms. This takes up most of the late afternoon, so that I arrive back at the hotel with plenty of time to take my bath and change before dinner. Unfortunately, as on this particular evening, there is rather too much time, and the news from England is not sufficiently interesting to claim all my attention. I get up and walk to my window, which overlooks the terrace, and watch the sky darken. There are few people staying here, although the hotel is open all the year round. I dare say some arrive for Christmas, and I learn from Monsieur Pach that it is getting difficult to book a room in the summer months. October usually sends people to the sun before the winter closes in, and I have the hotel more or less to myself. Indeed I am something of a favoured guest, one who will never make inconvenient demands or disrupt the discreet calm of the dining-room. This suits me well enough. It touches me to be received with deference, as I am here, for I feel myself to have a poor record in those matters which usually attract a good opinion. Certainly I am under no illusion that the deference of Monsieur Pach and his staff is anything other than a professional obligation which they honour, perhaps a little more
than usual in my case, since I give them so little trouble and return so faithfully every year.

The accident of that woman at the station, the woman whose highly respectable back I contemplated, disturbed me, although I have got into the way of dealing with disturbing reminiscences, and on the whole manage to master them. There was something so familiar about her stance, her movement from one foot to the other, that I very nearly broke my self-imposed rule and tapped her on the shoulder, if only to see her face. I count my inability to do so part of my new wisdom, although that wisdom is frequently indistinguishable from a kind of willed impotence. If it had been Sarah I should not have known what to say. The story I tell to Jenny on my visits to her treat Sarah as the unattainable goal that we nevertheless pursue. It is the essence of the story that one day she will be found, or rather that she will come to us of her own free will. The woman on the platform was too unremarkable to fulfil such a mythic function. Sarah Miller, or Sarah de Leuze, is now a woman with a domestic history and appointments, having dispensed with her undomestic youth as I have with mine. I could no more follow her now than I could shed the years since I last saw her, in my office, as if she were an ordinary client, and I simply her man of business. That woman’s highly polished shoes had no connection with my Sarah, who disdained such conventions. In those days I thought of her as mine, though she continually escaped me. There was no way in which I could lay claim to that matron, with her hat and her handbag, not even to tell her that her memory still held some fascination for me, that I returned to it for further information, as if to understand it better, although any fool, myself excepted, could have made sense of it in the days that I so signally wasted.

That is why I never go to Paddington Street these days. I am sure that the flat has long been sold, but the street,
for me, still resonates with a kind of desperation, with that everlasting attempt to take possession. Together with this memory there is the memory of Angela running after me, her white blouse glimmering in the light cast by a street lamp. Attention of another kind was being sought, or was it the same? My wife does not haunt me, except as an image: footsteps behind me, windblown hair, confusion. Strangely, I welcome this image, which seems to me now an emblem of our mutual innocence. My regret is that this innocence was so short-lived, that Angela became wise and knowing after her fashion, and that her knowledge darkened her features and clouded her fragile prettiness. She would not have aged well. I have done rather better, if only because I am more adept at concealment.

Sometimes I measure the time left to me and wonder how I shall fill it. It may of course surprise me by being dramatically circumscribed—by illness, by disability, by accident, by default. I suppose I shall continue as I have begun, for I see no prospect of change. These days in Vif are consoling, inasmuch as they are the outward symbol of contented mediocrity, whereas if I were to return to Paris I should re-awaken every sort of desire, largely for my youth, when desire could be so easily satisfied and so easily renewed. Yet even youth can be overshadowed or compromised. My father, whom I knew so little, had a younger sister to whom he was devoted, and whose early death was surrounded by mystery. What was the cause? A fever disregarded, an illness mismanaged by the family doctor, whose reputation never fully recovered? In any event there had to be a post mortem, something quite shocking in my father’s respectable family, and references to ‘poor Prue’ were always accompanied by pursed lips and sighs of regret. One grows up with such mysteries, and respects them, although a voice in one’s head longs for a simple explanation. As one grows older it becomes clear that
there are fewer and fewer simple explanations; that is why family piety, which keeps the mysteries intact, is of such value to all who continue to venerate such phenomena. Their transformation into myth is also of some value. To this day I have failed to discover the reason for poor Prue’s death. Even my mother’s voice is lowered when I question her about it. For Prue is unfinished business, like most of the more disturbing events of our lives. That is how they retain their power, since no conclusion can be drawn. I understand this now that the events of my life come under this heading. If I can take any credit in the matter of my own affairs it is that so far I have managed to look facts in the face. So far, that is, although sometimes I experience a kind of failure of nerve, a weakness which I have done my best to resist.

Occasionally there is a spectacular sunset here, and everyone assembles on the terrace, maids included, to view the sight. There are few distractions in Vif, and this one satisfies a fleeting sense of occasion, noticeable even in those who do not appreciate change. But more often than not the sky is overcast and darkens imperceptibly. For that reason it is as well to be indoors, for there is a melancholy even in this healthy place, even in this hotel. It occurs to me to wonder what I am doing here, out of season, when I could be at home, perhaps sitting in Cecily Barclay’s flat sipping a whisky and trying not to pay attention to what she is saying. Her language partakes of that vaguely aspirational order which I take to be common to her profession in these days of raised consciousness and attainable self-esteem. I am too fond of her, and much too lazy, to argue. She believes in easy, or at least reachable, solutions. That is what separates us, a fact that affects her more than it does me. She believes that therapy is the answer to the sort of stalemate at which we have arrived, and I dare not tell her that this stalemate suits me well enough, for I intend to proceed no further. We satisfy
each other in a well-meaning sort of way, and we are both too aware that this is something fragile, not to be examined too closely. That is why Cecily is always on the brink of suggesting therapy, and never quite doing anything about it. She knows that we will never marry, but finds it impossible not to believe in happy endings. So one’s archaic nature has the last laugh.

In a couple of days I shall return to London. I shall go back to that chaotic flat in the Edgware Road, take Jenny’s hand, and tell her that I am now definitely on Sarah’s trail, that in fact I caught a glimpse of her, waiting for a train, but as it was getting dark I did not have time to see her face before the train drew in. All I have to do, I shall tell her, is to retrace my steps and repeat the sequence of that particular day’s events. Maybe I shall even believe this. Maybe I shall return specifically for this purpose. And when I see Jenny’s eyes close and am able to tiptoe to the door I shall tell myself that this particular quest has had some validity even for me, that the transformation of an unremarkable affair into a sort of pilgrimage has a certain nobility which pleases me. It was, after all, so banal, so commonplace. But in that mysterious half-light, with the sound of the approaching train, it did seem possible once again to believe in its force. That is why there will be genuine fervour in my voice when I recount this particular episode, for what Jenny will not know is that for an instant I believed that everything might be restored, that the apotheosis might be waiting for me in some real or imagined twilight, at the end of an ordinary day, and that the rush of the oncoming train will signify not the conclusion of the story but its true beginning.

“Anita Brookner has staked out a distinctive
territory … and made it clear that she is one of
the finest novelists of her generation.”
—
The New York Times

BRIEF LIVES

Brief Lives
chronicles an unlikely friendship: that between the flamboyant, monstrously egocentric Julia and the modest, self-effacing Fay, who is at once fascinated and appalled by Julia’s excesses. Thrust together by their husbands’ business partnership—and by a guilty secret—Julia and Fay develop an intense bond that is nonetheless something less than intimacy.

Fiction/0-679-73733-2

A CLOSED EYE

In
A Closed Eye
, Anita Brookner explores, with compassionate insight and stylistic brilliance, the self-inflicted paradoxes in the life of Harriet Lytton, a woman whose powers of submissiveness and self-denial are suddenly tested by the dizzying prospect of sexual awakening.

Fiction/0-679-74340-5

DOLLY

From the moment Jane Manning meets her aunt Dolly, she is both intrigued and disgusted. Where Jane is tactful and shy, Dolly is outrageous and unrepentantly selfish, a connoisseur of fine things, an exploiter of wealthy people. But as the exigencies of family bring them together, Brookner shows us that we may end up loving people that we cannot bring ourselves to like.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74578-5

FRAUD

At the heart of Brookner’s new novel lies a double mystery: What happened to Anna Durrant, a solitary woman of a certain age who has disappeared from her London flat? And why has it taken four months for anyone to notice? As Brookner reconstructs Anna’s life and character through the eyes of her acquaintances, she gives us a witty study of self-annihilating virtue while exposing the moral frauds that are the underpinnings of terrifying rectitude.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74308-1

HOTEL DU LAC

In this novel, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question “Why love?” It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses. But instead of peace and rest, she attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure.