Undue Influence (18 page)

‘Did she tell you all this?’

‘No, I guessed it. I didn’t want to upset her. I went on pretending that she might take off at any minute. We even discussed the best routes—you can see, there are train timetables there.’

‘Probably out of date.’

‘Almost certainly. When I heard her overhead I said nothing. It seemed wrong to inquire.’

‘She was frightened.’

‘But she wanted to live up to the pretence. She wanted to think that at any minute she could be a world-class traveller. All it would take was a little courage. But her courage consisted of accepting that she couldn’t manage it.’

‘She never struck me as lonely.’

‘I don’t think she was. I think she had come to terms with it. She just knew she had to stay within limits.’

‘Do you honestly think something dramatic would have happened if she had gone to Budapest or Biarritz?’

‘I think it would have killed her.’

‘You’re not serious?’

‘Perfectly serious. The odd thing was that when she was working she did go away. She took her three weeks like everybody else. The difference was that she had something to come back to, something to tell the girls, as she called them. They all got on very well, apparently; they used to tease her, pretend she was a woman of the world, likely to spring surprises. I dare say that suited her. Whereas the reality …’

I knew the reality, which I had fought with the weapons at my disposal. For Eileen those lonely days amid the tourist sights would have been unrelieved. The preparations would have been enthusiastic; no doubt she had bought new clothes from the shop. And the destinations would have been ambitious, fashionable, whereas she would probably have been happier in some modest English seaside resort, changing for dinner, exhibiting her sunburnt face in the bar, inquiring after the children of the other guests, not too conscious, in that incurious company, of her solitude. Whereas the sharp eyes of the French, the Italians, would have found it out immediately. Pride sent her to the demanding south, in her new clothes which proved to be somehow not quite right. Pride accompanied
her home again, with assurances that she had had a marvellous time. She would have had as much of a marvellous time as she could endure. She had done this for a number of years, no doubt thought that she could do it again. But on her own she was not so sure. She could drop the names of glamorous and beautiful places, but that was why she had gone there. They had served their purpose. And besides she no longer had an audience. I knew what a difference that made.

I merely said, ‘How sad.’

Wiggy gave me a thoughtful look. ‘I hope you’re not going to waste the summer, Claire.’

‘Well, the shop, you know. I’m a bit tied there for the moment. But no, I’m not going to waste it. When are you off?’

She made a face. ‘Friday. I don’t want to go, actually. I want to stay here and see George.’

‘Remember Eileen,’ I said.

‘But she was different.’ We pondered the nature of this difference, but said nothing. We smiled apologetically at one another and agreed to have dinner in ten days’ time.

‘Same place?’

‘Same place,’ I said. I was unwilling to say goodbye. I think she was too.

The following morning Minnie, who cleans the shop, announced that she was going on holiday.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘Cuba,’ was the answer. This did not surprise me; she comes from there. I gave her two weeks’ money and resigned myself to going round with a feather duster. Muriel had evidently forgotten about Minnie, she who was so vigilantly attached to every transaction that took place. I wondered whether she was beginning to be a little vague, whether her watchful eye simply hid a desire to hang on for as long as possible. I should have
to deal with this too, as tactfully as I could. I did not want to get embroiled in what I thought of as old people’s problems, but I was extremely disheartened on my own account. In fact I succumbed to an entirely uncharacteristic depression which lasted for most of the morning. When Martin appeared, at about midday, I was released from this state as if I had been restored to my own youth.

‘I’ve been to Dorset,’ he explained.

‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘I’m so glad you looked in. I’ve been wanting to invite you to dinner. To repay your hospitality,’ I added, as if this were the only term he would understand.

I was no longer surprised at my lightning change of mood. In fact it seemed as if my early unhappiness had merely prepared the way for the enthusiasm I now felt. This did not surprise me either. After all, everything is connected.

Thirteen

The desire and pursuit of the whole was the only instruction my mother gave me, and I never knew what she meant. I think I related it to her own disappointment, spending dull days with an almost immobile husband, or possibly to the courtship she had entered into half-heartedly after her friend’s wedding. Who knows what went through a girl’s mind in those conformist days? I saw, and maybe she had too, some very slight betrayal of honesty in her friend’s desire that she should not be left out, that all weddings should prepare the way for other weddings, so that the newly-married woman would not have to pity her unmarried friend, and that some semblance of complicity could be restored.

But in fact the friend would have been conscious of the distance between her own eager husband, so proper and so desirable, and the shy widower towards whom she had directed my mother. Perhaps she had not liked to see her alone, on the outskirts of the wedding party, her untouched glass of champagne in her hand. In any event she had dispatched her, knowing what she was doing, hoping that she was acting in all good faith, but hiding from herself the knowledge that her high-minded and innocent companion would accept the arrangements that she was making for her.

Her only error, and she may have perceived this at the time, was to believe, or to make herself believe, that this partnership would make my mother happy. She would have been too happy herself to make a balanced assessment. She may even have thought that my mother was in any case too unawakened to be able to seek her own happiness for herself. Yet even in those prelapsarian days when nothing was supposed to occur after marriage, at least to the girls they were then, she must have felt some misgivings. The man in question was clumsy, inhibited, well-behaved; no doubt she told herself that he would be kind, as if this fact would cancel out all the others, in particular his physical dullness, not caring in that moment of joy that she herself would never settle for anything less than perfection, which, to her mind, she had found in the subject of her choice.

The desire and pursuit of the whole was what my mother cherished, had always cherished, and had never known. This ideal, which went with her vaguely Arthurian beliefs in chivalry, in knightly quests, had remained unrealized. She had told me that a man’s major quality was courtesy. No doubt at that distant wedding she had been relieved to have been rescued from her faintly embarrassing position. I imagined them both, my father and my mother, standing a little straighter, discarding their champagne, and joining in the festivities, the congratulations, in slightly better heart. And she would have appreciated the fact that he had taken her arm to guide her away from the garden as the guests were leaving, for if a man did not know these gestures what virtue did he possess? She had probably thought that he would serve as a companion, and she was newly deprived of company. And he, a widower, would have embraced the possibility of a second chance, particularly with one so untouched, so obviously inexperienced. He had escorted her home, had asked if he might be in touch, and after
various decorous diversions they had become engaged. The long engagement was no doubt in consideration of his sad bereavement. But this was the part that had always remained unclear. Why was the engagement so protracted? I see now that although events were moving inexorably to their foregone conclusion that my mother knew, no doubt in the course of his embraces, that this was not what she wanted. Thereafter she issued this vague—to me—ideal as if it should contain not her own disillusionment but rather the illusion to which she still clung, a life’s journey with the perfect partner, a union so complete that it left no room for doubt or regret or dashed hopes. This last she was not to know.

Maybe I am wrong in this (but misgivings of this kind would open the way to all sorts of reflections). Maybe this was simply a maxim that fitted in with her art school studies, with her taste for plain furniture, her slightly bewildered sympathy with my unexpected antipathy to the man to whom she was still indebted. In any event she had, in her oblique way, instructed me, or rather given me permission to seek something different, and in so doing had confused me forever, as it seemed. My own desires, once I became aware of them, were easily satisfied. I did not think beyond them. But now I did. Now I began to see some virtue in the life my mother had lived, whereas before I had avoided dwelling on it. There is something horrifying in speculations about one’s parents’ intimate life, which should always remain discreet. Yet now I saw something correct in my parents’ union which seemed out of reach for one of my disposition. They had behaved faithfully, even through the long years which I had experienced as frustrating, even shocking. They remained courteous: even my father’s complaints were easily appeased. What was unmistakable was his disappointment in me, not simply because I was more rebellious
than he thought fitting but because he saw that I would never be as fine a creature as my mother.

In my defence I could assert that I had no wish to be. I was aware that I had grown up with something less than perfect in my background. However well they behaved, and they did behave well, I knew that they were both disillusioned. My mother in particular had attained adult status without ever knowing romantic ardour, would have schooled herself to believe that companionship was a worthy substitute for love. Her hopes for me would no doubt have remained unformulated. Of my own rash behaviour I am still convinced that she knew nothing. Thinking me to be intellectually curious, and entitled to legitimate diversion, she gently urged me to spread my wings, knowing instinctively that I would always return to her. As I had done. And that maybe was the flaw that united us. There is no rule which says that a daughter should be faithful to her own mother, yet we loved each other and our closeness was no hardship. No doubt my mother believed that her own ideals would instruct me to pursue that whole which remained mysterious. But I was impatient of ideals, and besides I did not know how to identify that particular one. Who does?

Now I think it is simply a metaphor for love. Desire and pursuit I could understand; there was no problem there. But anything abstract defeated me, or had until now Now I saw it as the miracle that removes one from lifelong loneliness, that puts an end to expectation. If it formed an image in my mind it was a vaguely pre-Raphaelite one, like the Burne-Jones I had seen with Wiggy at the Tate. I had not understood the picture, which was dreamy but explicit: a procession of girls descending a staircase. They had low foreheads, wore white dresses and garlands in their hair; one carried a flute. What they were doing, whether they were virgins or some kind of enclosed
order, was not made clear, but I had known, for all of a split second, that I wanted to be of that company, surrounded by others of my kind, all of us with the same level of unknowingness but confident that our strange beauty would bring us within reach of our goal. It was not the painter’s intention to show that goal; I thought him something of a virgin himself. But the picture put my mother into context for me, and I was grateful to it. Looking around the other pictures in the same room I saw that the men were exactly the same as the girls descending the staircase. They had the same high-nosed features, the same inviolable innocence. A union between the two would produce no offspring, would probably never even be consummated. Yet there would have been total compatibility. In this way I understood my mother’s maxim, which was, as I thought, delivered for my benefit. Now I see that like Burne-Jones’s maidens it was the ideal she had once embraced, but betrayed, that she was not entirely guilty in having done so because it had taken her a lifetime to understand it. It was to remain an ideal—that was its function—but it would gain in desirability from having secret adherents. They would never be any kind of elect, but they would remain true to themselves. It had always struck me as odd that my mother preferred the Tate to other museums. Now, retrospectively, I understood.

The man sitting opposite me in my own kitchen surely belonged in the Arthurian or Burne-Jones category. His unusual fairness—the hair and skin having the same blond tint—relegated him to some distant age before cosmetic embellishment, of which he was all too obviously unaware, as if he had just left school. Yet here was a man of forty or perhaps a little older, I thought, as I noted the fine lines that bracketed the mouth, who could hardly have spent his life in ignorance of worldly
matters. No one can do that, however aspirational they may remain. There are women who have a singular faculty, who are unthinkingly, unstintingly kind, as if in ignorance of the world’s cruelty, as though no other form of behaviour existed. Even I had been the recipient of such random kindness, from the owner of the café near the shop, who always smiled and asked eagerly, ‘All right, love?’ whenever I looked in, as if she genuinely wished me well. I think of this faculty as being in the gift of women. I had never yet experienced it from a man. Besides, kindness, of the same undiscriminating sort, is not what one is looking for in a man, though perhaps it should be. One rather looks for its opposite, a certain combative excitement. Now I had captive in my own home a man who had probably never understood this. He had probably accepted this invitation as coming into the approved category, that of ‘entertaining’, and therefore legitimized. He was in fact ‘entertaining’ me with an account of his bird-watching activities in Dorset, an old hobby of his, he said, one that he had practised as a boy in Norfolk, where the birds were quite different. I made noises expressing interest, while serving the fine pineapple I had bought earlier at Selfridges. I had let it get warm on the windowsill; the scent hung over our plates, bringing illusions of southern warmth, though there was none of that here. He was at one with the virtuous austerity of our furnishings, as if he had been designed by the same hand. I watched his fastidious gestures with fruit knife and fork and wondered whether he had any idea of what was passing through my mind. He was talking rather a lot, as a guest is supposed to do. I even caught sight of an ordinary male response in his eyes, but that too was part of the procedure, the appreciation due to the hostess, permitted, even expected, in the absence of other guests.