Lewis Percy Read online

  Anita Brookner’s

  Lewis Percy

  “Anita Brookner, perhaps singlehandedly, has brought the intelligent discussion of moral issues back into serious literature by writing novels that are more fun to read than anybody else’s.… This tale of a late life education has been written many times, but never as well as it has here … a reference not only to its impeccable style but to its level of moral intelligence.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Brookner’s portraits of inner life are unsurpassable—always penetrating and astoundingly on the mark—but she has outdone herself.… A dazzling book.”

  —Louise Bernikow, Cosmopolitan

  “Poignant … Brookner hammers home with quiet grace a scathing sendup of the traditional Bildungsroman. Out of this small man she has fashioned something large: an everyman.”

  —Newsday

  “With … delicate perception and unhurried clarity … [Brookner’s] subtle insights create humor where we anticipate despair. Her satire is penetrating but never cruel, and it always hits the mark.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  by the same author

  THE DEBUT

  PROVIDENCE

  LOOK AT ME

  HOTEL DU LAC

  FAMILY AND FRIENDS

  THE MISALLIANCE

  A FRIEND FROM ENGLAND

  LATECOMERS

  BRIEF LIVES

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 1991

  Copyright © 1989 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 Ltd in 1989. First published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1990.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brookner, Anita.

  Lewis Percy / by Anita Brookner.—1st Vintage contemporaries ed.

  p. cm. — (Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82619-0

  I. Title.

  [PR6052.R5816L49 1991b]

  823’.914—dc20

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  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

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Author

  1

  Madame Doche, with an air of appreciation no less generous for being regularly at her command, took the camembert from Lewis Percy, prodded it with an expert thumb, pronounced it to be good, and ushered him into the salon. There the regular cast of his private theatre was assembled. What he thought of as the evening’s entertainment, the evening’s instruction, the evening’s reward, was deployed for his pleasure. All he had to do was take his seat.

  Sometimes he brought a bag of cherries: something minor but decorative was thought appropriate to his subordinate status. In the salon the women, his fellow lodgers, were eating their irregular refreshments, and as he was the only man he did not feel emboldened to add a note of robustness, although he was nearly always hungry and would have appreciated something more serious than the slices of ham and the couple of apples that he allowed himself. Occasionally Mme Doche took pity on him and served him a plate of the thick gruel-like soup which she made for her employer’s evening meal. The soup had usually to go down after the apples. An equally thick concoction of semolina might precede the ham. Lewis, being young, could accommodate these discrepancies. The pleasure of the evening did not reside in the food, though that was always welcome. The pleasure of the evening for him lay in the warm and uncritical company of the women, all temporary inhabitants, like himself, of the cavernous apartment of Mme Roussel, the eighty-three-year-old widow under whose roof they happened – for a year, for six months, for two years – to find themselves, for that was as long as their assignments in Paris were to last. While Lewis’s contemporaries sighed out their time in meagre student lodgings, Lewis, thanks to a stroke of luck at the Alliance Française and the money his father had left him, found himself in some splendour in the Avenue Kléber. His room was the smallest in the flat, little more than an afterthought to the main accommodation, but the supreme advantage was the conviviality of his fellow migrants. He thought of them as guests, Mme Roussel’s guests, although they paid rather highly for the privilege. Mme Roussel herself, being old and rarely completely dressed, was a benevolent absence. Her quarters, entered only by Mme Doche, were separate, at the end of the corridor. Occasionally, on their way to the bathroom, to which they were allowed strictly regulated access, they could hear her playing patience and talking to herself in a loud and surprisingly coarse voice.

  After handing over his camembert or his cherries Lewis would take his place with Mme Doche, Roberta and Cynthia, among the Louis XV chairs with their dingy tapestry seats, frayed, in the unseemly way of tapestry, by years of wear, under the twinkling bulbs of clusters of widely spaced wall lights. The salon was dim, its former splendour no longer even a memory. This faded background served only to bring into further prominence the presence of the women. Use of the salon in the evenings was one of the privileges for which they paid so highly. Having paid highly they then put it to their own use. Cartons of Chesterfield cigarettes were placed carelessly on the marble topped iron legged occasional tables, besides packets of smoked salmon and the matzos favoured by Roberta. Working at UNESCO she had access to far greater luxury than the rest of them and thus took further licence: a greasy paper might float down to the nineteenth-century Savonnerie carpet from the card table which she imported for her evening snack, or a riveted Sèvres saucer play host to the pips of her grapes. Cynthia, a student like Lewis himself, was more fastidious; indeed she was almost too fastidious for Lewis, although he was nearly in love with her. Cynthia, sipping her camomile tea, looked on appalled as Mme Doche sucked out the insides of mussels or tugged on the leaves of artichokes. Mme Doche, being the only one of them who was, so to speak, at home, was also the only one who ate regular meals.

  It was 1959. The windows of the salon had perhaps been closed since 1950, when Mme Roussel, then ‘cette chère Mélanie’, had last played hostess to her busy friends, women like herself of good family and limited interests and outlook. Since then she had declined into vigorous old age, tended by Mme Doche, who was both servant and companion. Mme Doche, however, had never graduated to the position of friend, and that was why she appreciated the company of Roberta and Cynthia, and even of Lewis himself. What prevailed, in that dim salon, in the evenings, was a below-stairs camaraderie, ready money defiantly making weight with the family portraits and the riveted Sèvres saucers, Roberta’s salary and Cynthia’s and Lewis’s allowances cocking a snook at the restrained gentility and the inherited fixtures of a long vanished bourgeois French family. Lewis saw their little group as a temporary encampment in alien territory and was continually and pleasurably divided in his loyalties both to the real if dingy chairs and the Bohemian life those chairs were forced to witness. But then he was writing his thesis on the concept of heroism in the nineteenth-century novel and was forced to dwell on higher things, even when he wished to be free of them.

  In this contest between the established and the imported it was the women who won him over every time. To them he owed his lasting conviction that wom
en were a congenial and compassionate sex. As they welcomed him, his camembert and his bag of cherries, with apparent enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that seemed to contain a peaceable indulgence for his youth, his obvious lack of sophistication and his enquiring and anticipatory smile, his heart expanded, and he felt himself to be in a company that had in it something maternal, something undemanding, something even slightly pitying. In later life he was to accept this as the very climate of femininity. It was what he had known in his mother’s house, and it never occurred to him to question this. Modest and timid, he looked forward all day to what he thought of as his homecoming. It was not the salon that constituted home. It was the women.

  An additional bonus was that after welcoming him they paid him very little attention, but continued to talk among themselves, as he thought women should. The subjects they discussed were nearly always the same: Roberta’s day at the office and what Mme Van de Waele, the Belgian delegate for whom she worked, had said, done, and worn – this last being of interest to Mme Doche – and Cynthia’s ailments, for which Mme Doche, a former nurse, offered advice and remedies. To Lewis all this represented important material, and as it was discussed conscientiously in French he thought it the height of worldliness. While meekly serving himself with a slice of his own camembert on one of Roberta’s matzos, he would in fact be surrendering his daily self, the self that went to the Bibliothèque Nationale and wrestled with the heroes of fiction, to this warm atmosphere of women, who, though largely ignoring him after their initial welcome, were, he felt, kindly disposed, and would muster as a body to protect him if the need arose. Mme Doche, in particular, seemed to him benign: her appreciation of his little contributions never ceased to touch him, and, more important, to make him feel comfortable with his gawky youth, the ankles and wrists that protruded from the sleeves of his tweed jacket and the turn-ups of his grey flannel trousers, the hair that sprang straight up from his forehead and which no amount of water could flatten. Her special softness he put down to the fact that she had a son somewhere: that, and her medical background, gave her a certain importance, a certain authority in the group. She was a large placid blonde woman who had once been a pretty girl and who still had an air of coquetry about her. Yet she too seemed happy with the company of women.

  Mme Doche was perhaps fifty, to Roberta’s thirty-nine, and Lewis’s twenty-two: Cynthia was twenty-five and ashamed of the fact. To Lewis Mme Doche was the most obviously maternal presence, although he could see that Roberta had it in her to be a mother, for she had a vivid and short-tempered kindliness mixed with a ruthless practicality that might, he thought, have suited a houseful of sons. Her natural mode of discourse was a series of gossipy pronouncements; she was an expert on everything, or on everything that mattered. With that, confident, disapproving of poor behaviour, frequently let down, yet with lively trusting eyes. Something a little too operatic in Roberta – her dedication to the office and to Mme Van de Waele, her restlessness, her marvellous greedy appetite – alerted Lewis to the fact that she aimed at higher things. She was the only one of them who did not seem to be cast in a mode of acceptance: Lewis did not know how he knew this. Roberta was usually laughing, head flung back, splendid Jewish teeth in evidence. Nevertheless she had an uncertain temper and would fulminate against a colleague who was also a friend and with whom she was nearly always on bad terms, throwing herself into a vigorous performance of an earlier quarrel, her colour rising, her body releasing fresh waves of scent as its heat increased. She could be laughed out of it, or comforted, but she had to have a full hearing: woe betide anyone who tried to take her to task. She was generous and impulsive, wresting Lewis’s plate from him and returning it with a peach or some grapes on it, but she was also outspoken, sometimes brutally so, and was apt to tell Cynthia, who considered herself a martyr to her health and her nerves, that there was nothing wrong with her. This was an obligation upon them all, but Roberta was more caustic. ‘Faites de la gymnastique ou faites-vous baiser,’ she would say, and would rock with laughter at the expression on Cynthia’s face. There was no malice in her. Simply, she had grown up in the school of hard knocks, and, as she put it, had been knocking around ever since. And as far as Lewis could see she was a vagabond, destined never to reach home. Although she seemed old to him he was not surprised that she had never married.

  And Roberta’s outspokenness always gave him the chance to comfort Cynthia, who was the only one of the women he cared to think about privately, individually, later in bed at night. Pretty Cynthia, her mouth down-drooping in discouragement at what fate had served up to her: a room in an apartment instead of an apartment of her own, and Lewis, a boy younger than herself, and therefore inferior, instead of the protective and adoring consort her fantasies had led her to expect. To Lewis Cynthia appeared radiant with promise, yet Cynthia herself seemed to think that she was destined for an early grave. Blooming, she gave herself over to headaches, cramps, sore throats, stiff necks, and mild stomach upsets. It was hazardous to ask her how she felt. What she felt, as opposed to how she felt, was disappointment, a forewarning that she might turn into Roberta, without Roberta’s robust temperament to sustain her. Placed in this apartment by an agitated mother, given an allowance and registered at the Sorbonne, Cynthia’s days were an easy but unsatisfactory mixture of lectures and cultural visits, these last regularly interrupted by a moment of malaise which would secure her escape. She would usually lie down in the afternoon and reappear, washed and changed, for the evening’s conversation. This regimen was supposed to prepare her for life ahead, a life without apparent direction, protected by money, already vaguely but hugely let down, taken in, short-changed.

  Despite her small tight beautiful face, there was something plaintive and valetudinarian about Cynthia, her dove-like ramblings usually serving as an introduction to tales of illness, her own and other people’s, mingled with self-questionings about what she was supposed to be doing. She had persuaded her anxious parents to let her come to Paris to study French civilisation, since she had shown no signs of wanting to do anything else, and her French accent was already pretty. Her mildly punishing appearance, her fussy self-protective walk, implied a whole world of dignified matronhood. Yet it seemed, incredibly enough, that this was not to be – or not yet, not while she was a girl. Her age and status seemed uncertain. Lewis eyed her with respect, as if she were already a woman, although she was only three years older than himself. She seemed to have access to a mature disappointment. Once her mother had come over to see how she was getting on. Lewis had caught sight of them from the bus, shopping in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. They looked resigned and helpless, stranded by receding waves of menfolk on whom they trained their batteries of silent accusation. The resentment Cynthia felt had no conscious focus yet could be sensed about her like an aura. It was this aura that prompted Roberta’s brutal recommendations. She would eventually marry, Lewis thought. Some confident and elderly business man would come along, view her as a prize, and be hooked; she would sit at the foot of his dining table in St John’s Wood, playing with the pearls he had given her and vaguely wondering what had gone wrong with her life. Although none of this had happened – or showed signs of happening – it was clear that Cynthia possessed a kind of invalid sex-appeal, which would beguile the sort of man who was half-appalled by women, half-afraid of them. She used her fabled delicacy as an instrument of persuasion. She would become a woman whom men were reluctant to cross. Lewis saw this as a most valuable lesson in what he hoped would become his lifetime’s quest: the study of, and love for, women. All information was valuable. In this way he would arrive at a higher understanding.

  At this stage in his life, and even later, especially later, in the light of memory, Lewis saw women in general, and these women in particular, as a beneficent institution. Their attitude towards himself he divined as merciful, which was precisely what he desired it to be. As to his attitude towards them, it was, given his extreme youth, still unformed, but he looked to his little group,
the first representatives of the species he had been given to study at close quarters, with a mixture of love, respect, and innocent enquiry. He seemed to think that all knowledge would come to him in this context. The only son of a widowed mother, tasting independence from her anxious care for the first time, he was grateful, in the midst of the bewilderingly adult city, to be taken in hand and to be thus returned to that silent passive dreaming adolescence which he had so recently left. His days were a mixture of great thoughts and trivial routine. He would rise early, strip-wash himself at the basin in his room, make himself a cup of coffee (use of kitchen allowed at specified hours) and emerge quietly into the grey morning. He loved this time, which made him feel at one with all the workers in the world, although he was only going to the Bibliothèque Nationale to begin his long day’s reading. Grasping his new briefcase, his mother’s present, and trying to ignore his eternally unassuaged hunger, he would stride out, down the long straight route to the Palais-Royal, where he would allow himself another cup of coffee and a croissant, and a morning paper – Le Figaro: he knew he was not old enough for Le Monde – which he would, in moments of boredom, read surreptitiously at his desk, giving his fullest attention to the announcements of births, marriages, and deaths. He particularly liked the deaths, the long string of relatives’ names, all joining in the immense douleur attendant on the decease of their wife, mother, grandmother, aunt, great-aunt, and sister-in-law. Such richness! Such a matrix, he thought, longing to sink into the arms of just such a welter of women, feeling lonely for a while with his lack of worldliness, his ignorance of his own entitlements, and always the thought of his mother at home, even lonelier without him.

  It was with a sigh, with a slight lowering of vitality, that he made his way towards the library. Scholarship seemed hedged about with such restraints, such restrictions on the living body. Already his long days of reading were beginning to give him headaches, although he enjoyed his work and could not envisage a future without it. It was just that, at present, he was unsatisfied by his days under the green-shaded lamps. While loving the thick silence that hung like a miasma over the noble room, he was too aware of the incipient mania around him to feel entirely comfortable. Inside every scholar lurked a potential fanatic. From any mild instinctive protest he might have formulated his writers delivered him. They were too epic not to be taken seriously, and too magnanimous. He felt that they had a particular message for him, and that he would learn a particular wisdom from them. This would be his final education, stored up for use in the years ahead. Sometimes he was bewildered by the amount of learning that was coming at him from every quarter, and sometimes it was with a further sigh that he contemplated the burden of his days. Sometimes he wanted to leave the library and run for his life.