Look at Me (5 page)

After that we didn’t talk any more because Nick had brought home a man with whom he had been arm wrestling in the pub, and this man, who was Irish, told us his entire life story, and it was really very interesting.

I worried about asking them back, although at that stage I drew the line at the Irishman, because I knew somehow that Nancy would resent it. She doesn’t cook much now and as we have practically never had visitors in the evening she likes to lock up early and any alteration to her routine upsets her and makes her fearful. I explained this to Alix, and as it turned out I needn’t have worried because they usually eat out. There is a restaurant on the ground floor of their block of flats, and they find it much more convenient to eat there. This was delightful news to me because it meant that I could join them without feeling guilty about it, and pay my way or treat them at the same time.

I went there with them the following week and that
was another revelation. As an eating place it has the advantage of convenience, but the whole point is that this is where Alix meets her friends. She is one of those fortunate women who create circles of loyal friends wherever she goes, so that being with her is like belonging to a club. She is particularly friendly with a terrifically aristocratic Italian lady called Maria, who lives in one of the flats, and who has had an equally fascinating life. Maria and Alix are such friends that they can say terrible things to each other and call each other all sorts of names and still end up roaring with laughter. Maria is very handsome in that high-boned haughty way you sometimes find in North Italian women; I say handsome rather than beautiful because she is tall and very commanding. She has the same easy manner as Alix and is on excellent terms with all the other diners. I got the impression that all the regulars eat early and all Alix’s friends come later, so that an evening spent in the company of Alix and Maria, and Nick, of course, is an evening unlike any other.

I was dazzled, delighted. We spent a whole evening there, Maria sitting at our table and smoking, and it was all the Bohemian evenings I had ever read about. Maria is apparently rather rich, although her financial affairs are quite spectacularly complicated on account of her divorce: she and Alix devote much of their time to this problem. She prefers to stay on in London, I gathered, where she has many friends. Many of them seemed to trickle in that evening and she greeted them with great enthusiasm, moving from one table to another, or lobbing shouts of recognition as people came through the door. Some of them made mock dodging motions as they came in, but they didn’t get past Maria, whom Nick described as Italy’s very own nuclear warhead. ‘We’re all terrified of her,’ he added. ‘If we’re not careful she’ll see that we don’t get any dinner. She can’t bear bores.’
Maria cuffed him round the head and he made as if to hit her back and then she really hit him and he shouted ‘Unfair!’ and they both collapsed with laughter.

‘This is Fanny,’ said Alix, with a ceremonious clearing of her throat. ‘Be nice to her. She’s an orphan.’

‘Hello, Fanny,’ said Maria, offering a large hand, which I shook. ‘Welcome to the club.’ I was so touched. All I managed to say was, ‘Thank you.’

I tried to work it all out in my diary that evening when I was in bed. I felt as if I had been reprieved from the most dreadful emptiness. I had tried so hard to live sensibly and without undue expectation – for my expectations, alas, have often led me to make mistakes – and now that something so encompassing and vivifying had turned up I found it difficult to believe in my luck. Good things could only follow. I lay awake for a long time, and after some thought I decided to consider all the mistakes and the misconceptions of other days as water under the bridge. I had always desired to get matters right, and now it seemed as if I were to have just the help I needed. Some friends change your life, and although you know that they exist somewhere you do not always meet them at the right time. But now the road ahead seemed easier. I had been rescued from my solitude; I had been given another chance; and I had high hopes of a future that would cancel out the past.

The first time that I saw Nick and Alix together, I felt as if I were witnessing the vindication of nineteenth-century theories of natural selection. In the persons of Nick and Alix, the fittest had very clearly survived, leaving people like Olivia and me and Mrs Halloran and Dr Simek and Dr Leventhal to founder into unreproductive obscurity. So stunning was their physical presence, one might almost say their physical triumph, that I immediately felt weak and pale, not so much decadent as undernourished, unfed by life’s more potent forces, condemned to dark rooms, and tiny meals, and an obscure creeping existence which would be appropriate to my enfeebled status and which would allow me gently to decline into extinction.

I had been used, of course, to Nick’s hectic charm, his immense height, his generally golden quality. I had only to watch Olivia, and Mrs Halloran, for that matter, to see that his effect on women measured something very high on the Richter scale. How can I describe it? There was nothing particularly recondite about his careless endearments, which we had all grown used to; somehow, though, he managed to make one feel as if those
‘Darlings’ (Darling Fanny, Darling Olivia, Darling Delia) might one day be invested with significance. He seemed to prepare an atmosphere of affection for himself, yet I think we all felt that this was his natural climate. He was born to it; he was, or seemed to be, totally ignorant of the sad compromises and makeshifts, the substitutions and the fantasies, that constitute the emotional baggage of the average person.

We assumed that this diapason of love had followed him from home, that it had always been his natural element, that he had never lacked for it. If he used endearments it was because he had always heard them used towards himself. He struck one as a much-loved creature. Yet there was that restlessness, that urgency about him that reminded one, or perhaps brought to mind, made one conscious of, his undoubtedly intense sexuality. It was this particular dimension of his personality that made him so impressive. However spectacular and satisfying his life may have been in this respect, he always made one feel that he had the capacity for more, for other experience, for infinite fulfilment. He was a hunter. The combination of his golden and indiscriminate affection and his hard if random gaze at the women around him made one feel that possibly, and potentially, he might favour one. And it would have been a favour, of that there was no doubt. He was devoid of that element of need that makes some men, and rather a lot of women, unattractive in their desires; he was, in fact, desire in its pure state, but desire which was not necessarily active, desire which might awaken at unforeseen moments, in anyone’s company, a random impulse, a natural condition.

We loved him as a phenomenon, a model of how ideal a man might be. And men loved him too, and oddly enough, they loved him for the same reason. They wished to be that model, to have that hard random
glance, that assurance of easy victory. They would even have applauded, or at least condoned, any actual infidelity or indiscretion on his part. But he never was unfaithful or indiscreet, from what I gather. He was, rather, the possibility, I might even say the promise, of these things. He intimated that lawlessness would not trouble him, that his will would be served. He reminded one of the unfairness of life, and excited one with the idea that one might, if he wished, become a part of that unfairness, always reserved for the beautiful, the strong, the imperious, the healthy, the decisive, leaving the meek to inherit the earth or rather to live on the promise of that inheritance. Nick, or his appearance, convinced one that unfairness is built into every system, that the Prodigal Son, despite his deplorable behaviour and his unedifying record, was embraced by his father simply because he had come back, because there had been such vacancy while he was away.

We all felt rather like that about Nick. His impromptu appearances, always hasty, always unfinished, made us aware of the dullness that had preceded them. When he left the Library, we cleared up his untidiness, we carried his piles of photographs upstairs to his room, we never reminded him of the way he was always overdue with his returns, some of which were needed by other readers; we took messages for him, and made excuses for him, and refused, ever, to criticize him. We felt that he was a protected species, an example of the very highest breed of human being. So intense was this aura around him that one did not immediately connect it with the privileges he had undoubtedly enjoyed since birth. His parents, his home, his looks, his prowess, his school and university and professional records were all impeccable, yet we never thought that these things were causes. Rather, they were effects, which assured him confidence, but which were not directly responsible for that
confidence. The fact that he always wore the right clothes, that he always went to the right barber, that he played the right games, these seemed to us to be explained by his munificent personality rather than by an enlightened use of the right instructions given from the very outset. We felt he was a natural leader of men. Yet his greatest gift to us was that intermittent speculative gaze, as if he might call one of us, from our dull safe places, to join him for an instant. He never did, of course. But the possibility, each of us thought, was there. Each of us – and every woman he had ever met, except Olivia – was just as actively waiting.

When I first saw him with Alix, I understood that we had been waiting in vain. I understood that he was, quite simply, unattainable. Unattainable, that is, by the likes of anyone who was not Alix or her equivalent. Alix was the only sort of woman whom Nick’s sort of man would have chosen, and we were left with the distinct impression that there was only one example in each category: Nick and Alix. We were also left with the impression that they themselves knew and recognized this fact. It was when I saw them together, for the very first time, rejoicing in their complicity, their physical similarity, that I stopped any feeling I might have had towards Nick, other than the one I have already described. Instead, I fell in love with them both. Everybody did. They were used to it.

The first impression that one received was of a supreme married couple, matched in every way. The most obvious match was physical. They had a look of health and of exigence: one felt that no distant country would intimidate them, no contingency give them anxiety, no moment dare remain unfulfilled. One felt that the world was theirs, the physical world, that is, because it had been created for their diversion, and that if they wanted to feel the heat of the sun then they would
quite naturally take off for Africa, rather than shiver and complain and wait for summer like the rest of us. ‘I am interested in absolutely everything’, I was to get used to Alix saying, and I did not question her, for with the entire universe open to her inspection, how could she not be? Whereas I tended to think in terms of the most obvious points of reference – neighbours, friends, colleagues, people in the bus queue – Alix and Nick would compare races, cultures, ethnic prototypes. What impressed me most about this was not only their breadth of view, but the fact that their lives contained no element of routine, that they would obey any summons, providing, of course, that it amused them to do so, answer any invitation, go anywhere, do anything. I thought them brave. They merely thought themselves sensible.

As they came through the door, that first afternoon, they appeared to walk with the same confident unhurried stride, and to look at each other rather than at their surroundings, as if the surroundings could wait, and were not, in any case, important enough to claim their attention. ‘Pictured here enjoying a joke’, as the captions said in those old copies of the
Tatler
that my mother used to pass on to Nancy and which are no doubt still in the kitchen cupboard somewhere. The Frasers’ joke was of the same elevated and exclusive variety. It was no mere affair of hilarity, no spasm of passing amusement; it was, rather, an area of collusion, a shared knowledge of some ultimate delight which they desired to keep to themselves. One could easily imagine them strolling with the same unconcern, the same gaze directed towards each other rather than around them, through every circumstance of life; one could imagine them transplanted to the remotest civilization, the most exotic and untested of climates, and they would still consider themselves to be of primary and immediate importance.

I exaggerate, of course. Had I reflected for a single
moment, on the occasion of that first meeting, I would have told myself that there is no such thing as a charmed life, although appearances may lead one to suppose that this phenomenon exists. And I have always been susceptible to such appearances. Once I followed a girl in the street simply because she looked so lucky that I could not tear myself away from her. Apart from her youth and her beauty, she had the sort of assurance that promised well for her, as if her expectations were so high, so naturally high, that she had set a standard for herself that others would be encouraged to reach. She seemed to await the best of everything, and I remember staring at her as if she had descended from another planet. Being an observer in these matters does not always help one. Sometimes the scenes and people one observes impart their own message of exclusion. And yet the fascination of the rare perfect example persists, and it demands that one lay down one’s pen and stalk it, study it, dissect it, learn it, love it. That was how I felt when I first saw Alix with Nick. I knew that I could never learn enough about them, but also that I might never understand what I learned. Therefore I watched them with particular care.

After that first impression of royal expectation, of perfect balance of forces, of mutual satisfaction, came a second impression, equally strong, and, to me, much more persuasive. At some level of my consciousness I recognized that they were impervious, that one could not damage them, that they would not founder through shock or deteriorate through neglect. They could not be hurt, except possibly by each other, and they were so clearly in accord that there was no division between them and thus no likelihood of a wound being inflicted. They were allies, partners, accomplices, moving at the same speed, liking and disliking the same things, possessing the same reserves. One could, if one wanted to,
treat them roughly (though this was inconceivable); one would, in turn, want to be treated gently, for their greater strength was never in any doubt. The only danger to be feared from them was that they might find one insufficiently amusing, that they might be bored, that they might pass one over. It occurred to me that children might feel this way about superior parents, although I had never had such feelings about my own who were modest gentle people, greatly concerned for each other’s tranquillity. With my sharp tongue I had had to be very careful not to hurt them, and they, of course, had never hurt me. But I had never had to try hard to please or divert or entertain them, either, and I think I longed to use my sharp tongue and to be restless and critical and amusing, even if it was at other people’s expense. To me in those days it seemed like freedom not to have to care for anybody’s feelings if I didn’t want to. I hated every reminder that the world was old and shaky, that human beings were vulnerable, that everyone was, more or less, dying. I had lived with all this for far too long.