A Private View Read online

  Acclaim for Anita Brookner’s

  A PRIVATE VIEW

  “Elegant.… Brookners formidably dandyish satire has always exercised itself rewardingly on options and consolations.… Her poetry of forlornness is stronger and stranger than ever.”

  —Hermione Lee, The New Yorker

  “Anita Brookner is justly praised for her restraint and insight.… Think of Graham Greene’s unhappy wanderers or Henry James’s travelers.… The clean lucid prose is Brookner’s own.… The reader finishes this novel with admiration for her skill.”

  —Frederick Busch, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “A sly, amusing and ironic comedy of manners. … A Private View shows Brookner writing at the top of her form, with subtle humor, great intelligence and level-headed sympathy for her characters and all their foibles.”

  —Houston Post

  “Brookner’s many fans will be pleased to hear that in A Private View she is in form and in familiar territory.… She is painstakingly skillful [and] masterly in her control.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The best novel she has produced.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph (London)

  “Beautifully written and piercingly acute.”

  —The Times (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

  Dolly

  Anita Brookner’s

  A PRIVATE VIEW

  Anita Brookner is the author of fourteen novels, including Fraud, Dolly, Providence, and Brief Lives. 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.

  Copyright © 1994 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 Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, London, in 1994. First published in the United States in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

  Brookner, Anita.

  A private view/Anita Brookner.

  p. cm.

  1. Middle-aged men—England—

  Psychology—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6052.R5816P73 1995 823′.914—dc20 94-26413

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82629-9

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  1

  GEORGE BLAND, IN THE SUN, REFLECTED THAT now was the moment to take stock. Nice, a town which he had not visited since his first holiday abroad, some forty years earlier, spread its noise and its light and its air about him, making him feel cautious; he was not up to this, he reckoned, having become unused to leisure. He had been here for four days and had found nothing to do, although there was much to occupy his thoughts, most of them, indeed all of them, proving unwelcome. Nice had been an unwise choice, though in truth hardly a choice at all; it had been more of a flight from those same thoughts, which faithfully continued to attend him here. He had sought a restorative, conventional enough, after the death of an old friend, Michael Putnam, who had inconveniently succumbed to cancer just when they were enabled, by process of evolution, or by that of virtue rewarded, more prosaically by the fact of their simultaneous retirement, to take their ease, to explore the world together, as had been their intention. They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and, more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.

  His friend Putnam, whom he sorely missed, had left him a quite respectable sum of money, which, added to his own capital, made of him a fairly wealthy man. The irony of this did not escape him, for he had started out poor, and poverty was imprinted on his mind and no doubt in his heart. If he were spending freely now it was in an effort to get rid of some of his money and in so doing to allay the pain of Putnam’s death. Yet the incongruity displeased him. Seated in an expensive restaurant—as it might be Le Chantecler—all he could remember was his last sight of Putnam, skeletal hand clutching the latest of a series of get-well cards from former colleagues, great eyes turning to the window in shock and doubt, then turning back to his friend with a look that was timid, wistful, almost eager, for he had trusted in life right up to the end. That the look had to be met, sustained; this was not easy. In time it had proved almost unbearable, but the effort was made, day after day, until, at the end of a mere three weeks, the eyes had closed for ever.

  Bland was shaken by his death, had sought comfort in late out-of-season sunshine, which now struck him as garish. No one, he thought, could understand their friendship, as they themselves had understood it. Both unmarried, they somehow did not impress the outside world as lovers, yet their closeness was remarked upon, puzzled over. In fact, what they had in common was their origin in shabby beginnings and their slow upward rise to middle-class affluence. This was their gleeful rueful secret. Lunching together on a Sunday at the club, or at one of the better London hotels, they might test each other with a brand name with which to conjure the past. Both appreciated sweet food and strong tea. Both, before making a purchase, had the same instinctive reaction: Is this allowed?

  Sharing the past, any past, but particularly their own, made it more comfortable. Now that he was alone Bland found the present irksome, shot through with a sadness he had not previously suspected. And this was not merely the sadness of Putnam’s death, for that was more properly grief, but a sadness for the life they had lived through together, keeping up each other’s spirits, applauding in each other the middle-class virtues which, to their surprise, had come to them quite naturally, so that from an initial bedrock of misgiving and suspicion had flowered charity and judicious benevolence and a hard-won fair-mindedness. He had loved Putnam; now that Putnam was dead, he, George Bland, felt half dead himself.

  With Putnam gone the rest of his life must be assumed single-handed, until it was his turn to lie in a hospital bed and to embrace friendship as if it were love, for so it would seem in those last heightened moments. With Putnam gone the past was his alone, and the present too. For the time being the present was the more problematic, although he knew that time, in passing, would annihilate his comfortable harmless days and restore to him early sights and sounds, and with them the emotions that had always accompanied them. Above all, in his new unsupported state, he felt a curious sense of shame, that he had saved his own life to so little purpose. He was comfortably off, and he was superfluous. He had no family, no wife, no lover; he had lived so carefully that he occasionally caught sight of himself as an object of ridicule. He and Putnam, working contentedly in the same organisation until the retirement which Putnam had not lived to see, and which he, Bland, must now shoulder unaccompanied, had been cautiously happy. This grotesque interlude in Nice,
for example (when he and Putnam should by rights be on their way to the Far East, as they had planned), offended him in some obscure way, nagged at him as some social mistake might have done. He hoped that he might meet no one he knew and be forced to explain himself, and to explain a presence which he would be hard put to justify.

  But Putnam’s illness had made him shaky, as if for the first time he had realised that he was a man of sixty-five, not old, but elderly, upright, still slim, but with thinning grey hair, a more prominent nose. All at once, in the golden sunshine, with the breeze still warm in this late season, he felt alone, as he had not done since he was an adolescent. It seemed to him that he knew no one, that the office, the comfortable background to his life for so many years, had evaporated, or passed into other hands, leaving him adrift, to spend too much time sitting in cafés, or staring at the sea. He was newly aware of the pathos of their lives, his and Putnam’s, each leaving the other his life’s savings, since they had excluded the possibility of there being other beneficiaries. And all those sad thoughts, now unshared, threatening to overwhelm him, as they once had. He had fought against them, successfully as it seemed, in the years of his maturity, but Putnam’s decline, mercifully short, had made him vulnerable again, and he was subject now not only to aching muscles if he walked too far, but to a backward-looking cast of mind which made his present comfort seem nugatory, as if it were built on sand, as perhaps it always had been.

  Sometimes, in the absence of Putnam, he had to activate an inner voice, or voices, which he imagined to be those of tutelary deities, a surrogate family, bold decisive aunts, loyal unquestioning cousins, quite unlike the relations, or rather relation, he had known, his Aunt Lilian, with whom his mother had quarrelled enjoyably for as long as he could remember, as long in fact as they were still alive. These voices urged him to indulgence, even to excess. ‘Why not?’ they said. ‘You can afford it.’ Yet there was nothing he wanted, so that the function of the voices was dubious, and indeed unhealthy, for their encouragement seemed to belong to a phase of his life which was now safely behind him: the poor boy from Reading, unwittingly involved in the machinations of disorderly parents, for whom he had felt alternate bouts of love and hatred, a conflict which persisted in him and which he had never managed to resolve. To his bewilderment and shame his parents had descended the ladder of bourgeois respectability to the undistinguished level at which they felt most comfortable, so that his father, once a sports journalist, was now habitually to be found on the racecourse on his own account, and his mother, once a nursing sister, spent most of her days smoking, reading undemanding novels from the library, or enjoying a passage of arms with her husband or her sister Lilian.

  He had learned to look after himself from an early age. When his father dropped dead at Kempton Park, and Lilian arrived with a cheque, saying, in a tone which denoted triumph, ‘I suppose George will be getting a job now?’ he had known that his life was doomed. He had left Reading University after only one year, had entered the cardboard box factory as a junior clerk, and had cared for his mother until her death. It was at this point that the voices had first manifested themselves, urging him to run for his life, to sell the house, to request a transfer to the London office (which, in those days of easy employment, had been granted), and to all intents and purposes to disappear from sight, only to reappear some years later as a successful and trusted employee in the enterprise which had begun as a cardboard box factory and was now a prosperous conglomerate, the cardboard boxes having diversified into all forms of packaging, with a subsidiary which specialised in office materials. As these became more sophisticated, both staff and turnover increased, until the firm, known simply as Rogerson’s, after the family that still owned it, was quoted as one of the more conspicuously successful achievements of the new commercially minded Britain.

  The day that Putnam had walked in, a spry spare little accountant from Birmingham, the thought had occurred to Bland that they might be friends. He had asked Putnam whether he had found somewhere to live (he had) and whether he would like a quick meal on the way home. Putnam had accepted with alacrity, and over dinner in an Italian restaurant they had discovered numerous points in common. Thereafter life was harmonious. It had seemed that at last he would feel free, no longer obliged to dissemble or to apologise, and this freedom was to him so intoxicating that he had looked for nothing further, content with his work, his growing comforts, and the friendship of Putnam. In due course it was Putnam’s approval that replaced the voices in his own head, voices which he now regarded as the poor companions of a starveling past, when he was still a prisoner, waiting for his sentence to end, as it had done.

  Putnam had been attractive to women and had subjugated the likeliest of the organisation’s female employees, but he was discreet about his adventures, and managed never to give offence, even when he was effecting a changeover from one woman to another. Refreshingly, he conducted his affairs without indulging in confidences, as would have been easy to do, and so no woman had ever come between the two of them. Putnam had had his affairs, and Bland had had his girlfriend Louise, or had done so until she married a doctor and went to live in the New Forest. He had known her since they were both adolescents in Reading; he had loved, and in fact still cherished, her peaceful fastidiousness, qualities almost unknown to him at the time, together with her white blouses and her frequently washed hair. They had pursued their love affair in borrowed flats and later in hotel rooms, finally in his own small flat, Louise’s eternal good nature rising perpetually above the often sordid arrangements. But at the point at which their long-delayed maturity could be assumed and taken for granted, and their love affair already had reached and passed the twenty-year mark, she had told him that she was getting married, still in that placid tone in which she was wont to address him. For a time he had felt alarmed rather than upset; he had relied on Louise to keep him company and eventually to become his wife, although he had told her repeatedly that he was not ready for marriage. Indeed he was never ready, was still not ready even now. She had got tired of waiting, she had told him uncomplainingly. Her husband was much older than herself and something of a crank, but within a year Louise had had a son, and was thus able to tolerate her husband’s relatively early death with much of her usual equanimity.

  Bland had visited her, in Lymington, on hearing of this event; he had in fact read of it in The Times and had telephoned her straight away. In the course of his visit, which he had intended to be sympathetic, he had found himself distracted by Louise’s son, then a boy of six, and repelled by the child’s ugliness. Philip was untidy, restless, overpoweringly friendly. His teeth seemed broken, although they were in fact merely irregular; he spoke in a barely comprehensible monotone and laid about him with hot grimy hands. Louise was devoted to the boy; Bland knew that he had lost her, and resolved not to pay another visit. But their lives were too interwoven for one of them to lose the other. And now, many years later, when they were almost old, he telephoned her, or she telephoned him, every Sunday evening. He was still half bored, half comforted by her calm plaintive tone, and paid as much attention to it as he might to a bird outside his window. She gave him news of her son, now a successful marketer of computer games. He did little more than listen. They knew each other so well that conversation was hardly necessary. Once each had ascertained that the other was still alive there seemed to be nothing more to say.

  The telephone call went with a certain Sunday evening melancholy, the light fading, only a rare car passing, windows reluctantly springing into bloom as the weekend was, by unspoken consensus, agreed to be over, and the working week about to encroach on what little liberty was left. But he had loved the working week, loved his large immaculate desk, looked forward to the Monday lunch with Putnam at the club, happy to espouse whatever outrageous proposition Putnam had thought up over the weekend. Holidays were planned, but not very seriously; more seriously was the retirement project envisaged, that long journey to the Far East, by the slowest rout
e they could devise, and all the time in the world to talk it over.

  It had never come about. Putnam, the sweat standing out on his forehead, had concluded their last Monday lunch with, ‘I seem to have a pain,’ this said with an air of ghastly hilarity. Bland had taken him in a taxi to the hospital, and when he returned to visit him that evening knew, from the altered cast of Putnam’s features, that he was going to die. ‘Looking after you all right, are they?’ was all that he managed to say on that and subsequent occasions, but he bought him fine cotton pyjamas, arranged for a barber to go in and shave him daily, for Putnam had been immaculate for as long as he had known him. Later there had been bottles of Floris cologne to hide the smells of which Putnam seemed mercifully unaware, and that was the saddest time of all. ‘All right, old chap,’ he had said, laying a soothing hand on Putnam’s forehead. There was nothing more to say. The fact that Putnam refused to believe in his imminent death broke the thread of effortless communication that had sustained their friendship and their life together. Bland felt this keenly: it was the single factor that more than any other brought home to him the fact that he was on his own.

  And then Putnam’s heartbreaking will, leaving him the money he no longer wanted or needed! He had, as his Aunt Lilian would have said, done all right for himself. He had risen through the ranks to become Head of Personnel; he was thought to be good with people, an impression, since confirmed, dating from a tiny incident in his early days with the firm, when he had dealt with Mrs Bertram, Kenneth Rogerson’s personal secretary, who had had something resembling a breakdown and whom he had proficiently escorted home to her large gloomy flat off the Marylebone Road. He had glimpsed an unmade bed through a half open door, and heard an unfed cat mewing angrily in an icy kitchen. He had taken the groceries day after day when his work was over, and, more delicately, had put in train the machinery for her retirement (a respectful word in the right quarter). He had even, in a small way, been responsible for her pension (another respectful word). The memory filled him with shame, as did most of his supposedly good deeds. Oddly enough he had not minded at the time. Kenneth Rogerson had noted his efficacy, and perhaps something more: his dutifulness. It had not seemed out of the way to Bland to perform the same tasks for Kenneth Rogerson himself, after the latter’s stroke. He had visited him weekly, at his flat in St James’s, again with groceries, and with the Sunday papers. Rogerson had been irascible by that stage, but after the man’s death Bland had found himself richer by a respectable portfolio of shares. This too filled him with shame. He remembered in this connection not his own kindness but an initial humiliation, the disastrous occasion when Rogerson, thinking to do him a favour, had arranged for him to have a room in a flat belonging to his niece and nephew, a brother and sister for whom he professed to have no time and little liking.