Dolly Read online

  Acclaim for ANITA BROOKNER’S

  Dolly

  “One of her best novels since her Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac … a novel to savor.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Subtle and wise … Brookner is a writer with enormous intelligence.”

  —Houston Post

  “Brookner weaves Dolly’s elements together with enormous skill.”

  —Boston Globe

  “The central character—Dolly—may be the one most worthy of interest that this prolific author has yet described.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Imagine the emotional and psychological texture of a 19th-century novel by Austen, Brontë or George Eliot. Now infuse this writing with a razor-sharp late-20th-century sensitivity to the underlying dynamics of family life. But even such a formula does not approach the achievement of Anita Brookner’s Dolly … a riveting family portrait.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Sharp, impressive … nearly perfect.”

  —The Spectator (London)

  ANITA BROOKNER

  Dolly

  Anita Brookner is the author of eleven novels, including Fraud, Providence, Brief Lives, and A Closed Eye. She won the Booker Prize in 1986 for Hotel du Lac. An international authority on eighteenth-century painting, she became the first female Slade Professor at Cambridge University in 1968. She lives in London.

  ALSO BY ANITA BROOKNER

  A Start in Life

  Providence

  Look at Me

  Hotel du Lac

  Family and Friends

  A Misalliance

  A Friend from England

  Latecomers

  Lewis Percy

  Brief Lives

  A Closed Eye

  Fraud

  Copyright © 1993 by Anita Brookner

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, Ltd., in 1993, as A Family Romance.

  First published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1994.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition

  as follows:

  Brookner, Anita.

  Dolly / Anita Brookner

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82628-2

  1. Women—Fiction. 2. Family—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6052.R5816D65 1994 823′.914—dc20 93-14537

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  1

  I thought of her as the aunt rather than as my aunt, for anything more intimate would have implied appropriation, or attachment. Attachment came later, in a form that was wistful, almost painful. At the same time it is only fair to say that I never felt for her that simple affection which is unreflecting, almost a background to one’s emotional existence, something one takes for granted, as if it had been born with one, or rather as if it had come complete at one’s birth, part of the panoply of family life. I liked to read about this sort of thing, even as a child, as if I were missing it, longing for it, when all the time I was perfectly happy, at home and at peace with my mother and father.

  In these contexts, both real and imaginary, Dolly—the aunt—was a misfit. It was without surprise that I learned that Dolly was not her real name, though I doubt whether in the long run this has much significance. She was a presence, or rather an absence, which seemed to give rise to a certain anxiety, at least on the part of my mother, who was her sister-in-law, and whose beloved brother Hugo Dolly had married, in circumstances of great romance, or so they seemed to me when I first came to know their story. It was a favourite story, recounted when I was very young, again by my mother, who was present at their first meeting. Dolly’s absence I took for granted, for in the manner of fairy stories I assumed that after the apotheosis it was natural for people to vanish. In fact Dolly lived abroad, in Brussels, with my uncle Hugo, whom I thought of as my uncle, and was encouraged to do so by my mother who loved him dearly. He was a hero in her eyes, although even at a young age I sensed that my father felt less warmly towards him. Given their remote degree of affiliation this was allowed, and consequently did not seem to matter.

  Dolly was the wife my uncle had acquired before my birth: I knew neither of them. A brief family visit to Brussels, when I was four or five, did not bring us any closer. My mother was concerned about her brother’s health, and I was aware of anxious discussions behind closed doors. For that reason I was taken out on long walks by my father, and of that visit I remember Dolly as part of the general discomfort, no more important than the wearisome length of the Rue de la Loi, where their flat was situated, and the, to me, menacing arch of the Cinquantenaire, which I thought marked the limit of the known world.

  Images of discomfort abound from that brief visit. My uncle was in bed, and every now and then I heard the tinkling of a bell which signified that he was awake or that he was hungry. He seemed lively enough for an invalid, was certainly exigent, ringing the bell at half-hourly intervals. The bell was answered by the maid, Annie Verkade, a grim silent woman of whom I was vaguely frightened, although she paid no attention to me. I thought that Dolly and Hugo must be very poor, for there was no carpet on their shiny creaking wooden floors, and the bed I was put into was in a room so bare that the only distraction was to watch the squares of light from the windows of the houses opposite, and to calculate who lived there and what they were doing. I liked to make up stories in which children featured, and as far as I could see there was not another child in the whole of Brussels. I was clearly an embarrassment on that visit, when urgent family matters were being discussed. Because I had no idea what these could be I was fretful, aware only of disquiet, of long anxious colloquies between Dolly and my mother. I sensed that my mother was upset and that Dolly was the cause of her unhappiness. I know now that Dolly had to bear the brunt of these discussions because my uncle had removed himself from them, but at the time I registered Dolly as an active agitated presence who abruptly stopped talking when I entered the room and aimed a dazzling artificial smile in my direction, as if expecting me to be impressed by her gallantry.

  I was not impressed: I was if anything insulted, for I knew that there were secrets, and that these were secrets in which I could have no part. I resented Dolly even then for invading my parents’ peaceful world, and for removing me from Prince of Wales Drive to this unfriendly town. I was parcelled out between my father and Annie Verkade, who was no more fond of me than I was of her. In the event the visit was hasty, rushed, confined to a mere long weekend, for my father had to get back to his office, to which he was exceedingly loyal. My impression of Dolly, on that occasion, was of a stranger in a black and white dress, which I thought was too tight. She did not fondle me or take me on her lap, as I smugly expected her to do, but simply smiled those vivid and meaningless smiles at me, and adjured me, in a heightened voice, to be a good girl and not to upset my mother. I had an impression of blackness and of whiteness: black eyes and white teeth, and the white handkerchief which dashed away her tears. The tears were followed by a particularly public smile. ‘I keep going,’ she said, to my troubled mother. ‘I don’t let him see how worried I am. I carry on; I hide my misgivings. That’s what one has to do in this world, Jane.’ (This last was for my benefit.) ‘Let them think of you as
always singing and dancing.’ At four, or possibly five, I thought this advice negligeable.

  After our return to London, myself tired and disturbed, a strange conversation took place between my mother and father.

  ‘He has always been delicate,’ my mother said.

  ‘But you can’t look after him,’ my father replied. ‘That’s her business now. She seems to manage well enough.’

  ‘I don’t understand why she feels so poor. After all, Hugo has his job, and it seems to be rather important.’

  ‘I dare say she exaggerates.’

  ‘Of course they go out a great deal, or seem to.’

  ‘There you are then. He can’t be so delicate. Or so badly off, for that matter.’

  ‘I hate to think of him so far away. I keep hearing the sound of that bell from the bedroom.’

  ‘It was only the flu. They take it so much more seriously on the Continent. In France, for example. In Belgium too, I expect.’

  ‘They said something about coming over next year. To see Mother. And us, of course. Perhaps we should do something to entertain them.’

  ‘They won’t stay here,’ said my father calmly. It was not a question, merely a statement.

  ‘Oh no,’ said my innocent mother. ‘They will want to stay in Maresfield Gardens.’ This was the home of my grandmother, my mother’s mother, to whom, now that I come to think of it, Dolly bore a distinct resemblance. They were both Europeans, vain. My mother had escaped the influence entirely.

  After I had been put to bed in my own room I forgot Dolly completely, and was glad to do so. I had identified her with that creaking flat in the Rue de la Loi and its various discomforts, with Annie and the Cinquantenaire and with the ballpoint pen which my father had bought for me in a curiously shaped department store which he said was almost a historical monument. The pen spluttered and leaked when it was suggested that I write a postcard to my grandmother. Both pen and postcard were abandoned.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dolly, passing through. ‘Keep busy. I always keep busy. Annie will give you your goûter.’

  This foreign word was another sign that I was far from home, a feeling I attached to Dolly herself. To be with Dolly was to feel far from home. This was the interesting and valuable insight which I brought back with me from that visit. It is not true that children do not understand adult feelings. They understand them all too well, but they are powerless to deal with them. I knew then, as I was to relearn later, that Dolly signified a sad estrangement from everything which I assumed to be rightfully mine: my family, my friends, my school, my peaceful English life. My father, I think, felt the same, and for this reason was anxious to distance my mother from her brother and sister-in-law. And in this, for as long as he could keep my mother under his benevolent and somewhat hypnotic gaze, he was successful. He worried over her, thinking her as frail as the bedridden Hugo, who only had the flu. She had had a heart murmur as a child, although this had disappeared. To me they were both invincible. The look of care on my mother’s face I attributed to Dolly, the aunt. It must have been at that time that I cast her as the aunt, a generic form of life, rather than as my aunt, a member of my family.

  At the end of the year—it must have been at Christmas—they came to England. My mother, who had been quite peaceful, was jolted once again into anxiety. This time the anxiety was caused by her desire to entertain them, in a suitably attractive manner, ‘for we must seem very dull to them,’ she explained to me. ‘They go out such a lot.’

  ‘Why are there no children?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, poor Dolly,’ said my mother.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well,’ she said carefully. ‘There is no room for them in the flat. You saw that.’

  I accepted this explanation. I had to: my mother was already making plans.

  ‘Perhaps we should have them for Christmas,’ she mused. ‘But then Mother would be upset. No, we shall have to go there. We must think of something else.’

  The matter concerned her for several days.

  ‘We must take them out to dinner,’ she announced to my father.

  ‘Very good,’ he said, courteously laying aside his evening paper. ‘I’ll book a table at Francesco’s.’

  Francesco’s was our local Italian restaurant: we always went there on birthdays.

  My mother looked shocked.

  ‘Oh, no, darling, that would be far too dull. They are used to a very active social life, you know.’

  ‘But we are not.’

  ‘All the more reason to make an effort.’

  ‘What were you thinking of?’ he enquired, even more courteously. ‘The Ritz?’

  Her face lit up. ‘Of course! How clever of you! We must take them to dinner at the Ritz.’

  My father was an honourable man. He did not point out that this would be excessive, that we were not the sort of people who dined at the Ritz. Already he foresaw the agonies of indecision into which the prospect of enjoying herself, and of ensuring that her brother enjoyed himself, would plunge my mother.

  ‘They don’t dress these days,’ he said kindly. ‘Your blue silk suit will do very well. I had better book the table tomorrow. If you’re sure,’ he added.

  ‘Oh, quite sure,’ she said, her face a vivid pattern of fear and determination.

  ‘Will I be there?’ I enquired.

  ‘No, darling. You wouldn’t enjoy it. Miss Lawlor will be here to give you your supper and stay with you while you are in bed.’

  Miss Lawlor was our daily housekeeper and by way of being a family friend. She had been passed down the line from my father’s mother, with whom her own mother had been in service until she retired, when Miss Lawlor took over. My Manning grandmother had sent Miss Lawlor to the marriage of my parents as a sort of wedding present or dowry, evidently doubting my mother’s ability to keep her husband clean and fed. This state of doubt, or more properly speaking incredulity, was inspired by her violent antagonism to my other grandmother, Antonia (Toni) Ferber, whom she considered to be a frivolous and unworthy woman, incapable of instructing a daughter in her marital duties. Her antagonism was warmly returned, to the apparent satisfaction of both parties, who thus had a perfect excuse not to meet. In this, as in everything else, my mother was entirely innocent. It was understood that my father would visit his mother on his own, and that he would accompany my mother to Maresfield Gardens when the occasion could not decently be avoided. In this complicated situation Miss Lawlor was the equivalent of oil poured on troubled waters. She was a tall wistful silent woman, rather like my mother, in fact, and her social life revolved around the Women’s Fellowship at her local church. She lived in Parkgate Road, so that it was quite convenient for her to come in every day to give my mother a hand. I believe that she was unhappy on her own with nothing to do, and looked forward to the company. She seemed to melt into the shadows of our rather dark flat, whose windows looked out onto the bushes and trees of Battersea Park. Sometimes she sang a hymn in a tentative girlish voice, as, rubber gloved, she passed a yellow duster over the cumbrous sideboard (also a Manning inheritance) in my parents’ dining-room. At half-past midday my mother and Miss Lawlor sat down to a light lunch, which my mother prepared. My mother called her Violet: she was Miss Lawlor to my father and myself. She had been a feature of our household for as long as I could remember.

  I did not mind staying at home, although I wanted to see my mother in her ball gown.

  ‘Oh, no, darling,’ she explained. ‘Nobody dresses these days. It is just dinner, you know. Just to mark the occasion.’

  I thought she looked very nice in her blue silk suit. In fact I thought she looked incredibly beautiful, but then I always did. My father wore his mild expression, which, I was later to realise, denoted forbearance. His face softened when he looked at my mother, as it never failed to do.

  ‘I shall have to wear my old coat,’ she said apologetically.

  ‘You can leave it in the cloakroom,’ he told her. ‘Nobody is going to examine your c
oat.’

  ‘Goodnight, darling,’ she said, embracing me. She smelt, uncharacteristically, of some pungent scent, a gift, no doubt, from my Ferber grandmother, who was always trying to liven her up. There was a contest of wills there too, although my mother never consciously entered into it. Smiling negativity was her tactic with her mother, who recognised it for what it was, and more or less accepted it, perhaps as a just punishment. All in all my parents were a haven to each other, finding in Prince of Wales Drive, and in the largely wordless company of Miss Lawlor, a peace that neither of them had ever found at home with their contentious parents.

  The following day my mother looked preoccupied. Nothing was said to me: no relic of the fabulous meal was smuggled home, as I had hoped it would be, in my mother’s handbag. That evening my father took refuge behind his newspaper, as usual. He was not a man who could stand a great deal of conversation. My mother stared unseeingly at her book, which she eventually laid aside.

  ‘Well, I think they enjoyed it,’ she said.

  ‘They should have done. It was not exactly an inexpensive evening.’

  ‘I’m sure we did the right thing. Of course, they are used to going out.’

  ‘I gathered that. The champagne alone …’

  ‘But that was quite appropriate. I think they enjoyed it,’ she repeated, this time a little more doubtfully. ‘Although Dolly was disappointed that there was no dancing.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘She looked lovely, didn’t she?’

  ‘No better than you, my love.’

  ‘And Hugo is happy when she is happy.’

  ‘Oh, there was no trouble with Hugo.’

  ‘Did you notice Dolly’s coat?’ said my mother. ‘That was mink, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed it,’ said my father reflectively.

  ‘They are a handsome couple, aren’t they?’

  ‘They have been, no doubt. A little past their best now, perhaps.’