Altered States (5 page)

‘That house!’ shrieked Berthe. ‘In the middle of nowhere! You have to get rid of it, Sarah. No wonder you preferred to come to Paris. The invitation’s still open, by the way.’

‘I fully intend to get rid of it,’ said Sarah, feeding in another olive.

‘You want to sell the house?’ I sounded fatuous, even to myself. ‘I can help you with the conveyancing, if you like. I’m a solicitor.’

‘We know,’ said Berthe. ‘Your mother told us.’ She seemed to find this amusing. In retrospect I can see that it was.

‘Have you got a card?’ asked Sarah. The very question seemed to turn me into a terminal bore.

‘I’ll send you my address,’ I said. ‘I presume you’re still at Parsons Green?’

‘Not for long.’

‘But Sarah,’ protested Angela. ‘It’s a lovely house. And the garden is, well, lovely. And anyway doesn’t it belong to your mother?’ A legal mind, I noted.

‘It actually belonged to my
father
,’ said Sarah. ‘So it’s come to me, right? My mother doesn’t live there any more. I’m looking for a flat in town. Maybe you can help me with that too.’ She had obviously inherited her mother’s vagueness about my functions, although in this case annexing them for personal use.

For the first time she seemed to look at me, drawn perhaps by the intensity of my gaze. I had been looking at her, or perhaps looking for her, for a good while now. My higher faculties noted the symmetry of her features, her pre-Raphaelite shock of hair, her icy blue eyes, and registered her as not exactly a beautiful woman but certainly an arresting one. I also registered the fact that she was both vague and
unaccommodating, with the sort of insistent presence that made no concession to others. I blushed, in my usual deplorable fashion, and felt ridiculous, so much so that under the pretext of finding another drink I was obliged to move away. A wave of laughter followed my no doubt scarlet back, though when I was brave enough, and angry enough, to return to the group with the last of the champagne I noticed that I was not the only one to blush: the girl called Angela was a deep and unhappy red.

‘You’re not going?’ I heard my mother protest, in the slightly carrying voice she used in these circumstances. The protest was to disguise the fact that she had had enough, and was longing for a quiet cup of tea and a rest in the silence of her bedroom.

‘Alice, it’s been lovely,’ various people concurred, as they moved towards the door.

‘Very nice, Alice,’ said Sybil, whom I was reluctantly obliged to join. ‘Your usual caterers? Marjorie quite enjoyed the little pizzas. Unusual, she thought them.’

‘If you’re ever down our way, Alice,’ said Marjorie. She did not consider this an unfinished sentence, and so did not bother to finish it.

‘Goodbye, Alice. Goodbye, Alan,’ said Humphrey. ‘Come and see us. Like old clocks, do you?’ he asked me. I had not the slightest interest in old clocks. ‘Got one or two fine examples, part of my father’s collection. Be happy to show them to you, if you’re interested.’ I expressed appreciation.

‘Alan,’ said Brian, waylaying me on my much impeded passage to a bedroom to collect people’s coats. ‘A word.’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘I want to get one thing straight. That girl, Sarah, she, well … I mean she would have …’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘She made a dead set, if you catch my drift. I had nothing
to do with it. Not too tactful, with Felicity standing there.’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘Probably. Anyway I want to assure you that I had nothing to do with it.’

‘You are drunk.’

‘What a stunner, though,’ he said regretfully, as Felicity closed in and led him away to be punished.

My mother and I were eventually left alone with the crumb-strewn plates and the dirty glasses. My mother wore the defeated look that even the most successful parties can bestow when they finally come to an end. With the departure of the guests a sadness seemed to have settled on the room. The hired waitresses and the barman moved about swiftly, anxious now to be gone, all amiability in abeyance. A cheque was handed over. The door at last shut behind them.

‘Have a rest,’ I said, patting my now fragile-seeming mother on the shoulder.

‘I’m all right, dear. Yes, I will have a rest, though I’m not tired. What will you do?’

‘I’ll walk back to the flat and read the papers. But I’ll tell you what, Mother. I’ll walk back again and take you out to dinner tonight. That way you won’t have to do a thing.’

Her face brightened. ‘Are you sure, dear? That would be lovely. Just the two of us? You’re sure you don’t want to bring a friend?’

My mother, it was clear, thought along conservative lines. ‘A friend’ meant a girl-friend, a connection she thought none of her business. But I had no girl-friend at the time, and besides, was not particularly interested in the sort of girl who would have been delighted to spend a quiet evening with my mother. If I wanted anything from a woman it was not docility, though that was what I eventually settled for. I knew myself to be fairly dull, fairly unremarkable, but I wanted my
interlude of licence, irresponsibility. Simone and I had been too alike, too close in age and outlook, for our affair to have been anything but sunny, and slightly banal. A certain lightness of touch had been in order: we had never quarrelled, and we had parted without rancour on either side. In retrospect it seemed depthless. I did not exactly want to suffer; I simply wanted to have experienced something significant before I became middle-aged. At the back of my mind, of course, was the image of Sarah’s red hair, her scornful laugh, her small pursed mouth.

‘There’s no one,’ I told my mother. ‘Besides, I want to hear all your news.’

She laughed. ‘You’ll think me quite silly, I know.’

I kissed her, and promised to come back at seven.

‘How you’ve grown,’ she marvelled, and looked at me fondly as I shrugged into my coat. It seemed to take me a long time to get out of the building and into the street.

Although it was only about two-thirty, London appeared to have settled into a pre-twilight calm. Sloane Street was deserted as I headed towards the park, my usual route back to Wigmore Street when I left my mother’s flat. I had drunk just enough to make me depressed, and I viewed the oddly silent city without indulgence. I saw myself surrounded by old people, my mother, Humphrey, Jenny, and at the same time realised that I would outlive them all. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that there is too short an interval for enjoyment in our lives, and that even mistakes are preferable to a prudent calculation of advantages, a return on our initial investment, such as Brian was about to make. I could have told him that he was acting out of character, but I guessed that he already knew that.

There is no combination so disastrous as that of a suspectible man and a dysfunctional woman, or of course of such a woman and just such a man. Walking back through
the misty park I already knew that Sarah was vain, unreliable, and feckless. In this I was correct. What I did not know—and this was something I never entirely managed to fathom—was the extent of her insouciance, her literal inability to take any matter seriously. I knew that if I fell in love with her I should be embarking on a long and hopeless odyssey of missed appointments, of telephone calls that were never returned, of explanations for absence that were infinitely more mystifying than the truth would have been, of sheer infuriating disappointment. But at the beginning of an affair one does not count the cost. Already I knew that there would be an affair, and that it would not lead to possession. This did not deter me: I had confidence in the strength of my own desires. If I felt anything in the nature of a warning I was brave enough to ignore it, stupid enough to castigate myself for just those dull virtues that turn men imperceptibly into good husbands. If I were to fail with Sarah it could only be because I was not good enough for her.

My calculations displeased me. I should use this dinner with my mother to find out more about Sarah. A certain amount of bad faith was inevitable until Sarah and I were established on an equal footing. I also needed telephone numbers. I needed to know about Berthe Rigaud and Angela Milsom, in case they should be required for further information. I was a lawyer, after all, or so I flattered myself; I needed case notes. The man I was to become could have told the man I was then that these preparations are not truly necessary. If they are to become necessary then an obsession is almost certainly lying in wait. I was foolish enough to think that I was strong enough, and cheerful enough by nature, to avoid unhappiness. I was not yet old enough to see that I was in error.

The flat seemed silent and abandoned, although I had left
it only that morning. I picked up the papers and settled down to read, my mind agreeably stimulated by the prospect of a new love affair. In retrospect I can say that I never felt more of a man than I did at that moment, on that silent afternoon, before I was put to the test, before my life began and ended.

I took Mother to the Berkeley and we had a surprisingly convivial evening. I had not realised how enormously pleased she had been by my invitation. When I saw her in her black dress and the cameo ear-rings my father had given her I resolved to put my intrusive questions out of my mind and to concentrate on her comfort and enjoyment. Her cheeks were a delicate shade of pink; although she normally had a small appetite she finished her sole and drank a glass of wine. A man at a table for one, perhaps a guest in the hotel, glanced at her appreciatively. She did not notice, though I did. Even at my young age I liked women to be cherished. I liked to think of them as needing a modicum of protection, encouragement. I liked them to be modest, grateful for flattery, expert at soliciting kindness. Brought up by such a mother I had not quite learned the crude manners of the age, although
I was aware of them. ‘Patronage!’ had snapped the prettiest of our secretaries when I had complimented her on her long shining hair—and this on my first day in the office. She had relented, and even smiled apologetically, and the matter was allowed to drop. I thought that a confident male and a reasonable woman could work things out to their mutual advantage. Even today I do not see why this should not be possible.

‘I understand you have a new friend,’ I said to my mother.

‘A dear,’ she replied. ‘She has made Humphrey very happy.’

‘And they met in Paris? That seems out of character for Humphrey.’

‘Apparently she rescued him. He had lost his way and couldn’t remember how to get back to his hotel, so he went into this café, the Deux Magots, I think …’

‘Everybody knows it. Even Humphrey must have known it.’

‘ … and Jenny was sitting at the next table. He took a chance and asked her if she knew the Hotel Lutetia.’

‘She must have thought it was a proposition.’

‘Hardly. It would have been quite clear that Humphrey was not the sort of man to invite a woman to a hotel.’

I could see poor Humphrey, marooned in the brilliant city, aghast at its ferocious conviviality, and missing his clocks and his dusky flat. I could see him, out of sheer desperation, plucking up his courage to ask for directions from this inoffensive-seeming woman at the next table. He would have been emboldened by her smile, as timid as his own, and when she had offered to show him the way, would have eagerly paid for both their coffees and escorted her out into the street.

‘But that’s what he did,’ said my mother. ‘He invited her to dinner at the Lutetia, and to lunch the following day. And he
told her that if she were ever in London to be sure to let him know.’

‘Which she did.’

‘Oh, very correctly, dear. She wrote to the address he had given her and mentioned that she would be spending a weekend in London, visiting friends.’

‘A good touch.’

‘And they met, and he took her to tea at the Ritz, and when she said she’d like to see where he lived he showed her the flat, which I think is quite dreadful. But he’s fond of it, and she said she loved it.’

‘Also a good touch.’

‘But you see, dear, and this is the beauty of the thing, she does love it. You should see how she looks after it, dusting and polishing all the morning. She even cleans behind the radiators.’ My mother looked amazed, as if such a manoeuvre had never occurred to her. ‘All quite understandable, because, you see, she’d been living in a small hotel.’

‘Ah! Now I understand. Where you and I would see only beige carpet and brown velvet curtains she saw central heating and constant hot water.’

‘Exactly! And it is all quite innocent. She’s not an adventuress, you know.’

‘I don’t think they still exist, Mother.’

‘I think they may be called something else now.’

‘But what do we know of her before the advent of Humphrey? If she was living in a hotel she must have been fairly poor.’

‘Very poor, I understand. She told me about this quite naturally, without self-pity. Apparently she was an orphan, brought up by an uncle and aunt, who resented her.’

‘Where was this?’

‘In Warsaw. She was a pretty girl, and talented, whereas her cousins were stupid and spiteful. She could play the
piano, and she was good at languages, but the uncle tried to get her a job as a machinist in a clothing factory. So when a friend suggested running away and trying their luck in Paris she didn’t hesitate.’