Incidents in the Rue Laugier Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR Anita Brookner’s

  INCIDENTS IN THE RUE LAUGIER

  “In Incidents in the Rue Laugier, Ms. Brookner offers us a fastidious and thorough exploration of Maud’s inner world in prose that is exquisitely considered. No nuance of feeling escapes her.… A classic of high comedy and pathos.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Both tantalizing and melancholy.… Her prose is invigorating.… The secrets of any life, even the most anonymous, are not negligible to Brookner, who is not afraid to turn her gaze on ashes and see the flames that were the cause.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “One of the finest novelists of her generation.”

  —The New York Times

  “Few contemporary novelists can match Ms. Brookner’s consistently high level of achievement: the penetration of her vision, the sense of conviction in what she is doing, and the unforced elegance of her writing.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “[Brookner’s] sure strokes make for a picture that lingers.”

  —People

  “There can be no doubt that [Brookner] is one of the great writers of contemporary English fiction.”

  —The Literary Review

  “Brookner is a writer of great skill and precision. Passages of brilliant writing abound, hard-won insights that startle us with Brookner’s clarity and succinct intelligence.”

  —Michael Dorris, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Incidents in the Rue Laugier should recapture old fans and find new converts.”

  —The Bookseller

  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

  A Private View

  Altered States

  Anita Brookner

  INCIDENTS IN THE RUE LAUGIER

  Anita Brookner is the author of several novels, including Fraud, Dolly, Providence, Brief Lives, and, most recently, Altered States. 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. She lives in London.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JANUARY 1997

  Copyright © 1995 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 in hardcover by Jonathan Cape,

  a division of Random House UK, London, in 1995. First published

  in the United States in hardcover by Random House, Inc.,

  New York, in 1996.

  Incidents in the Rue Laugier is a work of fiction. The characters in it

  have been invented by the author. Any resemblance to people living or

  dead is purely coincidental.

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

  Brookner, Anita.

  Incidents in the Rue Laugier/Anita Brookner

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82630-5

  I. Title.

  PR6052.R581615 1996

  823’.914—dc20

  95-4720

  Author photograph © Jerry Bauer

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  ONE

  MY MOTHER READ A LOT, SIGHED A LOT, AND WENT TO bed early. She had been a Maud Gonthier, from Dijon, brought up to expect something better than the provincial restrictions which had stifled her as a girl. She never found it, at least not with my father. Boredom softened her slightly cross face into a contemplative frown, as if she were puzzled, as if she had mislaid something of considerable significance. My father, a disappointed man, left her to her own devices, thinking she had brought these troubles on herself. In fact he was jealous of her, of her silence, her composure; he even envied the melancholy, which conferred on her a distinction which nature had denied to him, although secretly he thought of himself as an unusual character, as we all do. He was a secondhand bookseller, with a small shop in Denbigh Street. My mother, who, as a girl, had hoped to marry into literary circles, had been agreeably alerted when told of this. When she saw the shop she felt an immense disappointment. Ça fait prolo, she thought, and hoped that her expression gave nothing away to the man she had somehow agreed to marry. He knew, of course, being sensitive to slights. Tiresome though it is to have to record this, he never quite forgave her. Theirs was an ordinary marriage, cemented by decorum, by custom, eventually by loyalty. My mother had a more mature attitude than my father, who never quite eliminated a certain edginess from his behaviour. He suppressed this as best he could, and in the end it could only be seen in the wolfishness of his smile. My mother read the classics and kept her own counsel.

  Please accept me as an unreliable narrator. My parents died years ago, and I left home long before I lost them. When I was clearing my mother’s flat (she survived my father by only four years) I found a notebook from which I have constructed the story which follows. What I found was not the diary, written in a faded hand, beloved by novelists. This was nothing more than a small spiral-bound pocket-book, of the sort to be found in any French stationers, with squared greyish paper and a shiny checked cover. In fact I did not find this for some time: I had put the suitcase containing my mother’s few personal effects—her birth and marriage certificates, a few letters from myself, a rose pink silk kimono which I had not seen before—into the back of a cupboard, half meaning to leave it there, unwilling, for some reason, to disturb her shade, or the memory of her quietly reading. I only took it out again when I acquired more suitcases of my own and needed the space. The notebook was old, slightly bent at the corner, the pages stuck together. There were only a few notations, apparently written on the same day. ‘Dames Blanches. La Gaillarderie. Place des Ternes. Sang. Edward.’ Further down the same page, and written with a different pen, a recipe for Sauce mousseline. Then a short list of book titles. Last of all Proust’s opening line: ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.’ This I thought to be an adequate epitaph for a woman whom I remembered as infinitely reserved, and who, as far as I could judge, had left no very profound trace, apart from the usual memories, on my life.

  But recently I have found myself repeating some of my mother’s attitudes—reading, sighing, going to bed early—and I began to wish for clarification. It seemed to me impossible that a life could be covered by those so brief notations, yet I was never in any doubt that it was in fact her life that was so covered. This muteness had a sort of elegance about it, unusual in these days when women have so much to say for themselves, and my mother was an elegant woman. It was entirely characteristic that she sho
uld not expand on what was little more than a code. Perhaps I regretted the fact that my mother never spoke of herself, or indeed spoke much at all unless she had something definite to impart. I found her dignified, admirable, but ultimately frustrating, at least to the adult I had become; when I was a child I seem to remember that we loved each other without restraint, but there were no confessions, no confidences, a fact I now find puzzling. What remained of her was somehow contained in those few words in the small notebook, written in her purposeful hand, with some deliberation, or so it seemed to me, at least collectedly, and indeed posthumously, for none of these words had any connection with the life I had known, and that she had presumably known as well. Only one did I recognise, but out of context. Something predated me, and I had no idea what it was.

  Above all I was intrigued by the word ‘Sang’. What had blood to do with my mother’s distant and uncommunicative life? We had, as far as I could see, little in common: in fact I may even have removed myself deliberately from her infinite discretion, as did my father. Like my father I found her apparent serenity irritating, yet I have reached the age when a woman begins to perceive that she is growing into the person whom she least plans to resemble: her mother. When I thought of her in later life I habitually experienced a slight sinking of the heart, an involuntary lowering of the spirits, occasioned perhaps by a comparison between our two destinies, hers so fixed, so immutable, mine quite deliberately volatile. Something about her very immutability—there, on the sofa, in the drawing-room of our flat in Tedworth Square—commanded my respect, although the fate of women fifty years ago is something of a closed book to me. Marriage had seemed to be her destiny, as it still was for most women in those days, as it had no doubt been that of her own mother, whom of course I knew. It seems odd that she maintained a distance between herself and my father, although she was a faithful and diligent wife, observant in those matters which my own generation has learned to neglect.

  I never discovered whether she had ever loved him; I rather thought not. Yet she was a moral woman, and I should have thought her a stranger to any form of calculation. He, on the other hand, was often quite harsh, and yet I am left with the impression that he loved her, not in any idealistic or worshipful sense, but with the raw force of his rather frustrated nature. They were on an uneasy footing. Only my mother’s calm defused a potentially disturbing situation.

  There were no arguments. There was no quarrel. And yet it always seemed to me that some gigantic quarrel must have taken place in the past, long before I knew either of them. All this is speculation, of course. Of my parents’ secret life I am the only manifestation. Yet something went on before, something that created attitudes which I have inherited. The known part of a life is often misleading, a disguise. I now wish that my mother had been happier, or had had a memory of past happiness to sustain her. My impression is that she renounced her life long before it ended. Yet she kept the little notebook, with its inscrutable code, just as she kept the beautiful silk kimono, which she certainly never wore at home. I found to my surprise that as I contemplated this evidence my curiosity turned to sadness, for I realised that she was doomed to remain a stranger, had indeed elected to be a stranger, bequeathing me only little gestures, such as shading her eyes when she looked up from her book, as if the light of reality were too harsh, and those sighs, which I am told I utter without knowing.

  I do not appear in the story that follows, or at least only inadvertently. It is a fabrication, one of those by which each of us lives, and as such an enormity, nothing to do with the truth. But perhaps the truth we tell ourselves is worth any number of facts, verifiable or not. This unrecorded story—unrecorded for a very good reason—is a gesture only, a gesture towards my mother, whom I have come to resemble, and who told me nothing either of what had happened, or what had failed to happen, and how she came to live with us, so far from home.

  TWO

  AT THE TIME OF HER MARRIAGE MAUD GONTHIER HAD NOT been much interested in matters of class, ancestry, or status, believing herself to be above such matters, or if not above, untouched by them. She had known little of the world beyond Dijon, and little of her reduced family beyond her mother and the dimming memory of a young father, who, in the middle of playing with her, would be shaken by a cough and would have to sit down with a handkerchief to his lips.

  Pierre-Yves Gonthier, who died of tuberculosis, had been a conscientious boy from a poor background, who, by dint of hard work, application, and family piety, had obtained a post at the Prefecture and in time fulfilled his mother’s most cherished ambitions. He thus belonged to the most respected caste in France, the civil service, and although his work in the Bridges and Highways department was routine and undemanding he was always conscious of the dignity of office, as if he were the Prefect himself, was always impeccably turned out in a grey suit and a white shirt laundered by his mother, and was accepted by his colleagues with mild affection but with little interest. He was grateful to the authorities who had appointed him for a more personal reason: without this badge of respectability he would have been unable to marry Nadine Debureau, whose father, a doctor and a tyrant, was conscious of such distinctions and would not have countenanced a son-in-law who worked in his mother’s shop, an unfortunately modest affair, far from the commercial centre of town, and doing a not very active trade in layettes and baby clothes.

  Nadine, a handsome girl, longing to get away from her father, and from her elder sister, and resembling in fact her dead mother, was aware of Pierre-Yves’s admiration and was eager to encourage it. She therefore attended all those functions at the Prefecture to which her father, as a local worthy, was invited. Within six months the young man had made his request and had seen it accepted. The father thought it better to acquiesce; his idea was to clear his house of daughters as soon as he could—he had an acquaintance ready to take the elder girl, Germaine, off his hands—so that he could settle down to a bachelor existence, could be looked after by a housekeeper, could play bridge twice a week at the Café Riche, and drink as much as he liked. This he would achieve to his eventual satisfaction, although along the way the rewards were not as fulfilling as he had envisaged. Germaine, once married to an army doctor with the rank of colonel, and satisfactorily removed to a small manor house in the Brie region, was seen only on rare visits; the younger girl, Nadine, continued to live in Dijon. The doctor failed to take his own advice and slowly turned purple with incipient apoplexy. He consoled himself by arranging for the proceeds of his house to be divided between the two girls after his death. This, he thought, absolved him from any accusation of selfishness.

  The young couple set up house in a flat in the rue des Dames Blanches, a property which had belonged to Nadine’s mother and which had been rented out by the doctor to an elderly woman of some means. Shortly before the wedding this woman had announced her intention of going to live with her daughter in the south, and the doctor could hardly refuse to hand it over to the bride and bridegroom, although he had vaguely intended to occupy it himself when he retired. The flat was not in good order, as the elderly tenant, in the way of old people, had thought it would serve its turn until she went south: the kitchen was gloomy, the bathroom rudimentary, but the salon, with its red striped walls, was rather grand, and its windows looked out onto the street, a short quiet grey street, with, in the distance, the imposing bulk of the Musée des Beaux Arts.

  It took them five years to decorate and furnish the flat to their satisfaction, by which time there was a small child. Pierre-Yves, with the heightened sensibility of the tubercular, would gaze at the child with tears in his eyes: already he looked back with longing to the early days of his marriage, when he and Nadine, whom he called Didine, would walk arm-in-arm around the Place Darcy and down the rue de la Liberté, nodding to acquaintances, and deciding that there was nothing in the shops that they wanted beyond what they already had. He would look back on those days as if centuries had passed, as if he were an old man, although he was young, and d
id not know of his illness. The child was almost too much happiness to bear; he at least did not think that he could bear it. His joy turned to discomfort, and then to constriction; somehow he managed to conceal this from colleagues, being less disastrously stimulated during the daytime, among the Bridges and Highways, than at night, when he grew hot and restless. It was his superior who saw to it that he enter a sanatorium in the Haute-Savoie: the case was not uncommon, and there was a good chance of recovery. But he knew, as he waved goodbye to his wife and daughter, who saw him off at the station, that he would never see his home again, and from that moment slipped down quite rapidly towards his death.

  At the funeral his mother and Nadine’s father, who barely acknowledged one another, seemed to lay a burden of accusation on the widow. The mother clearly believed that if he had not wasted himself in marital excess her son would be with her still; the father felt only contempt for a weakling with an impaired constitution. He himself was to die within the year, but succeeded in hiding from himself the undoubted dangers of his chosen way of life. The little gathering dispersed, leaving the cemetery to the sun and shadows of an ironically brilliant October day. There was little conversation.

  In the rue des Dames Blanches wine was served, but no meal: there was disaffection in the air, and Nadine would have none of it. She had loved her husband, somewhat to her surprise, and although she resented his tragedy she was marked by it. In the curious excitement of his illness he had loved her more passionately than she had ever imagined possible, and she knew that she would never be loved like that again. ‘Not in this life anyway,’ she told herself bleakly, begrudging God His monopoly of the next. She was impressed by this love, although not altogether grateful for it: apart from the child, Maud, she had little enough to show for it, no money, apart from her husband’s pension, and the prospect of a year’s mourning. It was not until her father died, and she received her share of the proceedings from the sale of his property, that she was able to contemplate her life. As matters turned out she was in a position to give her daughter a first-class education at the most exclusive convent in town, and thus to ensure that she made useful friends. For the money would not last indefinitely, and before it ran out Maud would have to marry, and to marry well. She calculated that this might happen when Maud would be eighteen or nineteen. After that she would live on the pension, which would be enough for one, but not for two.