Leaving Home Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Praise

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  ALSO BY ANITA BROOKNER

  Copyright Page

  Acclaim for Anita Brookner’s LEAVING HOME

  “Clarity is Anita Brookner’s coin. . . . Brookner’s measured tone, her precision, and her disregard for obvious poetic devices make her writing strikingly spare . . . wonderfully economical.” —The Atlantic Monthly

  “Sophisticated. . . . There’s humor here, even social comedy—Emma’s futile search for an appropriate dress reads like Henry James channeling Bridget Jones—but Brookner’s wit is so brittle that it’s surprising the pages don’t shatter when turned.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “A modern-day descendant of the subtly observant Henry James but blessedly free of his propensity for the Gordian knot sentence, Brookner mines a small . . . terrain yet manages to extract from it rich insights about the human condition.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Always a marvelous writer, word by word, line by line, page after wonderful page.” —The Washington Times

  “Brookner writes with consummate skill, drawing readers into her characters’ small worlds. . . . Brookner’s fans will find satisfaction and settle in to enjoy the finely crafted, subtle structure and language of the book.” —Rocky Mountain News

  “An intelligently crafted story.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “Jane Austen’s two inches of ivory, when worked with that extremely fine brush of hers, were room enough for six glorious novels. Anita Brookner’s small patch of territory, similarly circumscribed and fastidiously worked, has so far accommodated twenty-three. . . . Short and scrupulously applied to the interior worlds of solitary English women of a certain class, Brookner’s books are as uniquely and reliably identifiable as a sip of Lapsang Souchong.” —The Boston Globe

  “There is much to enjoy in this tale of innocence and experience, not least of all Brookner’s brilliantly anatomized secondary characters. . . . An exceptional author.” —Newsday

  1

  SUDDENLY, FROM THE DEPTHS OF AN OTHERWISE PEACEFUL night, a name erupted from the past: Dolly Edwards, my mother’s friend, a smiling woman with very red lips and a fur coat. I remember the coat because it was not removed for the whole of her visit, which she no doubt intended to be fleeting, having, she implied, much to do. There was another friend from my mother’s prehistory, before I existed, but this presence was less distinct, perhaps not seen at such close quarters. Betty? Betty Pollock? The Pollock seemed shifting, uncertain, an approximation. Maybe that had been her name before she married, for in my mother’s day everyone got married. Women wore their husbands much as they wore their pearl necklaces, or indeed their fur coats. The shame that attached to unmarried women was indelible, and my mother seemed to bear something of that imprint although she was a respectable widow. Dolly Edwards, with her flourishing presence, obviously felt sorry for my mother in her lonely state, with only an eight-year-old child for company. Fortunately my mother did not perceive this, although I did. My mother was impressed by this visit, grateful, even happy. And Dolly Edwards played her part valiantly, reminiscing, producing names unknown to me and rejected by me as having no relevance to my own life. I may even have been jealous of this woman who had known my mother before her anomalous condition was confirmed by the death of my father. Truth to tell she did not much miss him: solitude seemed so much her natural state that Dolly Edwards was not mistaken in making of this a flying visit. My mother marvelled for days over this, with no resentment. It was less a visit than a visitation. It was never repeated.

  The other friend, the one I thought of as Betty Pollock, though that might not have been her name, was less opulent, but kinder. This friend we actually journeyed to see, an event so rare that I remembered it. This visit occasioned no wistful comments from my mother, probably because Betty Pollock was not someone of whom she had learned to be slightly afraid. She was even rather unattractive, though clearly was not concerned by this, and in any event her large plain features were transformed by her dazzling smile. The other thing I noted about her was that she was happy. This was mysteriously apparent. I experienced it with relief, though I did not understand it. Now of course I can identify it as a state of steady satisfaction combined with an absence of longing. This must have been less the gift of her husband than of Betty Pollock herself, her smile signalling her contentment with her lot to all within her radius. She too had very red lips, though her hair was grey. She too was eager to reminisce, having nothing to hide. Yet my mother seemed inhibited in her presence, perhaps because of the contrast between them. I think that Betty Pollock vanished from the scene shortly after this visit: her husband was anxious to leave London and move back to Swanage, where he had grown up. I think my mother missed her, though not as much as she missed Dolly Edwards, who remained out of touch.

  They had once been part of the same set, though this was a modest suburban affair, formed largely by parents who knew each other as neighbours or friends, and vigilant elder brothers who did duty as escorts when no other was available. I see Dolly as the bold one, Betty as the poor one, and my mother as the beauty, but whose beauty was undermined by an innocence that never left her. She longed for an ideal life which would not betray her, became married because her own mother wished it, and survived widowhood almost as a return to her natural state. I never knew a woman so inactive, her days reserved for reading and thinking. I soon learned not to disturb either process. Yet I think she was lonely, a perception that filled me with distress. We loved each other greatly, yet so exclusive was that love that it was experienced more like anguish. That feeling has remained with me and will no doubt survive all the rest.

  It was therefore somehow appropriate that she should die and leave me bereft, and also appropriate, though unforeseen, that I should attach myself to a surrogate—though not a surrogate mother—whom I saw as capable of acting as a mentor. This was not a subject on which I was anxious to dwell, although it had no doubt accounted for my current wakefulness. That this wakefulness had produced only the completely irrelevant name of Dolly Edwards was one of those connections that the unconscious chose to make ahead of and perhaps more comprehensively than anything achieved by deliberate attention. Dolly Edwards was an associate, however negligent, of my mother. My mother was somehow not viable. It had become necessary for me to look for safety elsewhere, owing to my mother’s frailty, her reclusive habits, and her early demise. At all times I had been fearful of leaving home in case something should happen to her. Yet leaving home had become a necessity, although a painful one, if ever I were to find freedom. The unconscious had a complete network installed: I had only to be patient and all would be revealed. I tried to work out the significance of what my abrupt awakening had tried to tell me. When the information came through it was not surprising: I had to undertake a journey. I had to leave home. If I had switched on the light I would have seen my travel bag, half filled, resting against my bedroom chair. What was marvellous about this was not the way in which the information had reached me but the fact that the entire process—waking, remembering, and finally coming to full consciousness—had taken no more than a few minutes, or even seconds. My impression of an endless night was erroneous, proo
f once again of the dark hinterland that produces our more useful understanding.

  The circuitry was admirable. My eight-year-old self had seen that my mother had somehow been let down by her old friends. In Dolly Edwards’s case this was easily explained: she was confident and affluent (the fur coat) and my mother was neither. Betty Pollock was a happy and satisfied woman, as even I had perceived: again, my mother was neither. In the days that succeeded these two encounters, disappointment had turned to sadness at her own inability to advance, and in the shadow of that sadness, only contained, only bearable if left undisturbed, I felt doomed to follow if I were not to make some sort of independent outbreak of my own, and on my own behalf. My best chance would lie in finding another source of authority, another agent of influence. I did not know whether this could be allowed, let alone arranged. It would be a journey away from home, symbolic no doubt but nonetheless real for all that. In any event it would have to be managed, and managed, if possible, without disloyalty, more or less invisibly, above all in good faith. I remain convinced that this is a critical task but not one which brings with it a resounding sense of victory.

  In my own life very little has changed. I am older now, of course. I live alone, in a small flat, with the instinctive frugality of those who live alone, financially secure though never extravagant. I sit and write the book on which I have been working for some years now and which is almost finished, much to my publisher’s surprise. In fact, despite the many delays, this tactic has served me rather well. The book is always immanent, but not in a position to be judged. The larval nature of the book pleases both one’s friends and one’s rivals. When questioned about its progress one responds with a certain smile, a smile that implies secret activity, and replies, quite truthfully, that one seems to have collected a great deal of material, so much so that the book may turn out to be more substantial than anticipated. I have seen this technique used to great effect by the worldly, so that the very absence of the book is more potent than its presence could ever be. In my case I can only plead an anxious sincerity: there is a great deal of material, and sometimes it seems that there will always be a reason for me to undertake one more journey, to revisit familiar sites and walk once again in deserted gardens, the only visitor on grey autumn mornings, until I realize that my work is truly finished. And that may be a very sad day.

  My departures are all the same now, accomplished without difficulty but with a certain philosophical fatigue. Once I would have gone anywhere, strenuously; now I tend to go to the same places, which I know well, too well perhaps. I also see a few friends who have survived our now separate lives. Once we were familiars; now we are merely figures in the same landscape, and what had once been eagerness has become obligation. There is no blame attaching to this; the trajectory had been designed by the unconscious, a long time ago. But the unconscious does not rule the world, does not even illuminate it, apart from these brief fragments of understanding. It is, after all, only part of the self. The other part, the most important, is subject to the will. But it is also subject to the will of others.

  2

  I LEFT HOME ORIGINALLY TO STUDY IN FRANCE, THOUGH this was a decision I was happy to leave to others. I had expressed an interest in classical garden design at some point and this had been noted by my college tutors. Almost independently of my own volition I was provided with a scholarship from some benefactor’s funds, and it was assumed that I should spend some time in France studying plans for ideal gardens, those which had been laid out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and those which had existed mainly as ideals, sometimes offered as inducements to wealthy patrons such as Fouquet, some merely as emanations from the artist’s mind. It was these last which fascinated me, the ideal archetype so perfect that its realization could only be an anticlimax. In fact it was the classical code—reticence, sobriety, order—that attracted me, and I thought it would be valuable to see these qualities laid out in observable form. Truth to tell it was the theory that shaped these gardens rather than the gardens themselves that was of interest: the creation of pure articulated space. Details of vegetation were irrelevant, as was the desire to impress. I was in search of a certain symmetry, a place of excellence that I should recognize and somehow make my own. I had no way of attaining this condition myself, but I felt that here was a concept that inspired a standard of behaviour far removed from the tame and unambitious customs that were my true inheritance. The design of the classical garden was an objective correlative, but a thoroughly acceptable one. It was out there, but it also corresponded to a disposition that I hoped to develop.

  This exercise would also be valuable as a pretext for securing my liberty, more pressing now that I was no longer a child observing my mother’s strange constraints, her inability to merge her experience with that of others, her silent days spent in mysterious rumination, but an adult of whom others seemed to approve.

  Nevertheless, the act of leaving her to her fate seemed hazardous, though she accepted the prospect with equanimity. Garden design must have seemed to her completely irrelevant, as it occasionally did to me, but she saw that the wider world must be embraced at some point and that this was an appropriate way of severing the connection with our so quiet way of life and of making friends whom she had no possibility of welcoming, perhaps bearing in mind her own lack of success in this matter. My concerns, I thought, were less for myself than for her safety, her comfort, when I was no longer there to ensure either. My own future seemed completely blank, but with the prospect of those others who would take me in hand and dictate my future for me. In order for that to happen I had to be physically removed and if possible unwitnessed, for to make such arrangements while still in my mother’s orbit would seem disloyal. Somewhere else such intentions could be given free rein, without prejudice. Yet I was surprised at her calm acceptance. We should each be alone; that perhaps was a matter she found so easy that she had no fears for me in my own coming isolation. Nor did I. I was healthy and even confident; besides, this leave-taking had been ordained for me by those others who perhaps had my welfare at heart. There was a moment of that so familiar anguish when we said goodbye (but with the prospect of frequent visits home), and then I was gone.

  There was no man in our family, apart from my mother’s older brother, a bachelor, who, I now see, supported us from the income of my grandfather’s investment in and ownership of modest properties in outlying places we had never had the occasion to visit. He bore this burden grimly, for which I disliked him. Had I had brothers I should have had a more realistic view of the world; as it was I relied on fantasy, knowing, or at least trusting, that one day I should meet the ideal lover who would complete my education. This task too would be left to others. I liked the brothers of my friends and found it natural that we should appreciate each other’s company, and sometimes more, but I was in no hurry to accelerate the process which I found entirely natural. Yet the wistfulness that I felt as silence habitually settled on our quiet flat was identified, perhaps unconsciously, with the absence of a man who would have provided me with the information I knew I lacked. That was a man’s function, as I saw it, and no amount of feminist propaganda could dislodge this conviction. My own father had died when I was three, and I had no memory of him; that is to say I was unsure of his worth. I felt that he had failed in his duty to take care of my mother, but at the same time I was determined that this duty should not descend on to me. My mother’s brother would have been delighted for me to become my mother’s support and provider—her husband, so to speak— and this was the real reason for my determination to leave home. Garden design was at the furthest possible remove from a sensible life plan; hence its appeal. Hence my acceptance of my fate, about which I felt curiosity rather than enthusiasm. At the back of my mind I knew that I could always return home. I also knew that such a return would symbolize a failure so profound that I might never recover from it. Nothing would be said, but that very silence, added to all the others, would be definitive.


  Yet I had no notion of how I was to live in my new incarnation. My knowledge of Paris was hazy, confined to what was visible through the windows of the coach that took school parties on their way to exchange visits with a school in Cologne. I imagined Paris as another version of the ideal garden, with parterres, fountains, straight lines leading to other straight lines, the whole thing precluding any unauthorized interruption. Though I knew that this was ridiculous I did not question my ability to master the ground plan. Some sort of habitation had been found for me in a student hostel, which I thought I might leave when new destinations revealed themselves. All this thinking was quite abstract, divorced from contingencies. I knew no one; my task, I thought, was to discover everything and thus to fill my days, and indeed my nights, with such sights and sounds as would form the basis of my new life. There was perhaps a slight unease, which related to my untested ability to function on my own. But then there would be others to guide me on my way. And I had no real fear, or if I had, that fear was incorporated into determination. I had to shed certain burdens which I had inherited from my mother, a tendency to melancholy, to rumination, an acceptance of solitude. I saw these characteristics as dangerous, as indeed they were, and I saw my mother as something of an anomaly in the world which I envisaged for myself and which I intended to inhabit, that world of straight lines leading to other straight lines in a design of perfect symmetry.

  It was in this spirit of hardiness and self-consciousness that I said goodbye to my mother and my home, although when I saw her face at the window and her arm raised to wave to me— gestures more appropriate to a welcome than a leave-taking— my spirit threatened to fail. I was grateful to the anonymity of the landscape, to those unknown and somehow savourless streets, and to the windows behind which people still slept, for it was Sunday morning. If I was aware of anything it was of silence, the peculiar Sunday silence which had always depressed me, and even disturbed me, for I thought it unnatural for life to be extinguished in this way, having no notion of the gratitude with which the week’s work could be relinquished. The same silence enfolded my journey. Nobody spoke to me. At the same time nobody seemed to think that I was out of order. My feeling that I conveyed an air of competence emboldened me. When we landed in Paris I congratulated myself on having accomplished this rite of passage successfully. The rest, I thought, would follow.