The Rules of Engagement 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

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  ALSO BY ANITA BROOKNER

  Copyright Page

  Acclaim for Anita Brookner’s

  THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

  “Elizabeth Wetherall is clearly recognizable as one of Brookner’s exquisite gem solitaries. . . . To read Brookner is to come into contact with a first-rate mind. . . . [She] is relentlessly existential. But also comic.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “The story is told . . . with such elegance and polish that its surface—satiny, flawless and smooth as an onion, as always—holds a fascination equal to its content.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “One of the great strengths of Brookner’s fiction: her ability to lay bare in limpid, measured, luminous prose her characters’ least admirable, most desperate motivations.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “[Brookner renders] her characters with intense fidelity. Few novelists have such a subtle, portrait artist’s sense of their characters.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Brookner is a master of the art of the middle distance and as graceful as a matador when she uses the bright cape of her elegant Jamesian sentences to keep intimacy at bay.”

  —The Boston Globe

  1

  WE MET, AND BECAME FRIENDS OF A SORT, BY VIRTUE of the fact that we started school on the same day. Because we had the same Christian name it was decreed that she should choose an alternative. For some reason—largely, I think, because she was influenced by the sort of sunny children’s books available in our milieu—she decided to be known as Betsy. When we met up again, several years later, she was Betsy de Saint-Jorre. Not bad for a girl initially registered as Elizabeth Newton.

  How much nicer children were in those days than the adults they have become! Born in 1948, we were well-behaved, incurious, with none of the rebellious features adopted by those who make youthfulness a permanent quest. We went to tea in one another’s houses, sent each other postcards when we went on holiday with our parents, assumed we would know each other all our lives . . . The Sixties took us by surprise: we were unprepared, unready, uncomprehending. That, I now see, was why I married Digby: it was the right, unthinking thing to do. That was why Betsy took it upon herself to have a career, out of despair, perhaps, at not being provided for. Choice hardly dictated our actions. Yet I suppose we were contented enough. Certainly we knew no better. And now we know too much. Discretion veiled our motives then, and perhaps does so even now, even in an age of multiple communications, of e-mails, text messages, and news bulletins all round the clock. We still rely on narrative, on the considered account. That is how and why I knew Betsy’s story, though I cannot claim to know all of it. There were areas of confusion which it seemed better not to disclose. But she was always painfully honest, rather more so than prudence might advise. That quality made itself felt when we were still children; her desire to explain herself, to be known, was perhaps really a desire to be loved. That too was discernible, and it set her apart. In later life, when I knew her again, that quality was still there, obscured only slightly by the manners she had acquired, and always at odds with her mind, which was exacting. In other circumstances she might have been remarkable. But her hopes had been curtailed, and in the years of her adulthood one sometimes saw this, in the odd distant glance directed towards a window, or the eagerness with which she smiled at any passing child.

  Her initial demotion from Elizabeth to Betsy was thought to be justified, given her uncertainty of status. She took it in her stride, thinking it gave her permission to assume an altogether different character, someone more lighthearted, skimming the surface, responding always with a smile. She longed to be superficial, with the sort of ease that I and my particular coterie took for granted. Adult responsibility, of an altogether unwelcome kind, had already come her way, in the shape of her widowed father and the faded aunt who kept some sort of primitive life going in that flat above the surgery in Pimlico Road. She was unfortunate: that was generally agreed, and it made her something of an anomaly in our midst. My mother professed sympathy for her, but viewed with dislike Betsy’s attempts to be winning when she came to our house in Bourne Street, on the rare occasions when I was obliged to invite her. The enthusiasm with which she greeted my mother’s teatime offerings (meagre enough in those days of austerity) and the attention she paid to the contents of our drawing-room were not attractive, and my mother was not tactful in acknowledging the evidence of Betsy’s social awkwardness. I had many years in which to reflect on my mother’s harshness. Even when young I was aware of a desire to depart from this, to be less brittle, less proud, less conformist than my mother. Now I see that I have not quite managed it. My only victory is that the harshness has been internalized. My judgements even now are sometimes less than charitable.

  There was another reason for my mother’s dislike, and that had to do with the cause of Betsy’s profound disenfranchisement. Her father’s negligence, or incompetence, had led indirectly to the death of one of his patients, who happened to be an acquaintance of ours. Pity and dislike, first manifested by my mother, affected Betsy even more than her father’s disgrace, which she inherited. It seemed ordained to follow her through life, for there was nothing she could do to rectify it. His error was, I dare say, a common one: a lump in the breast which he assured his patient was a cyst revealed its malignancy in due course and led not only to that patient’s demise but to his own, after a year of brooding and of unpopular comment in the neighbourhood. I met him once, when I went home with Betsy, the only time I did so; he entered what I suppose had once been her nursery, where we were discussing our homework, turned off the electric fire and opened the window. I found this insensitive, though it may have been protective, but there was little in his demeanour which struck me as kindly. I thought him completely inadequate to fulfil the role of father, but I think he was simply indifferent to children. His better manners were reserved for his patients, in particular for his female patients. Maybe a desire to reassure, or even to comfort, came uppermost in his professional armoury. There was no whisper of impropriety, or none that I was aware of. His greater failure was his dwindling reputation in the year that followed our friend’s death, and his own death, from a heart attack, while sitting at his desk in his consulting-room, an irony he was spared. Irony was not a quality much appreciated in the 1950s. Now of course it is all-pervasive.

  Sympathy was expressed, condolences were offered, and then the incident was forgotten, though not the fate of the patient. It was thought fitting that he should disappear, and that Betsy should be consigned to her aunt. This aunt—Mary to her niece, Miss Milsom to everyone else—was even less promising than her brother-in-law. Tall, thin, colourless, and obviously virginal, she inspired a vague repugnance even in those unliberated days. ‘Poor thing,’ said my mother, with a rich show of sympathy, but here again her dislike, or more probably her distaste, was evident, perhaps justifiably so. Miss Milsom had come to keep house after her sister’s death, shortly after the birth of Betsy, and she did so in a conscientious but defeated manner, so that it took her all day to pre
pare a meal which was no doubt unpalatable. After commiserating with Miss Milsom, or more probably for Miss Milsom, my mother would laugh, showing all her sparkling teeth, as if to demonstrate the difference between Miss Milsom and herself.

  Nowadays, of course, we would assume that Miss Milsom and the doctor indulged in sex of a sort, but then we assumed no such thing. Those were innocent days; sex had yet to become the commodity on offer to all that it is now. By the same token there was little show of love between the aunt and the niece, neither of whom had been able to envisage an alternative to their present arrangement, but they were both loyal and obedient people, and they sustained an undemanding harmony, which, though honourable, provided little joy. Betsy proved to be a clever girl, who was obliged to keep her cleverness to herself, except at school, where she developed a passion for the drama, and was given to declaiming lines from Shakespeare and even Racine (we were doing Hamlet and Bérénice); it was her one opportunity to deliver herself of aspiration (and it was aspiration rather than frustration) and to make contact with adult emotion.

  The solution Betsy and her aunt made to their mutual lack of comprehension was their weekly visit to the cinema, usually on a Saturday evening, when they enjoyed a timid contact with the crowd. An early supper, the cinema, and a cup of tea on their return to the flat satisfied Miss Milsom’s sense of a justified indulgence, both for herself and for her niece. She viewed the films as an outsider: not for her the extravagance, the licence, the romance. Even so, something in her disciplined soul responded, whereas Betsy remained faithful to the grander concepts in her favourite Racine. ‘Que le jour recommence, et que le jour finisse/Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice . . .’ These lines became prophetic, so that at the very end, when I visited her in the hospital, I would see her eyes widen in her thin face, and hear her murmur, ‘. . . sans que de tout le jour . . .,’ and then fall silent.

  However, she naturally gave no sign of this when we were children, even adolescents. She was a pretty girl, though there was no one to tell her so. Our friendship in those early days was largely a matter of propinquity, and that only at school. My mother discouraged it. ‘Can’t you find someone more suitable?’ she would say, meaning someone richer, more fortunate, more useful. She envisaged a life for me exactly like her own, marriage to a professional man, a comfortable establishment, licensed idleness, licensed amusements. Betsy’s general lack of all these prospects ruled her out of what my mother, even in those days, thought of as an appropriate social circle. And she had noted, and condemned, Betsy’s ardour when she came to our house, her slightly too emphatic good manners. Maybe she had also noted Betsy’s appraising eyes, which had, for one or two significant moments, been trained on herself. Brought up in circumstances of bleak rectitude, Betsy was inclined to view any departure from that state with something like surprise. My mother was a frivolous woman but she had a well-developed sense of self-preservation; any hint of criticism offended her. Not that Betsy was critical; she was too well-mannered for that. But she was wide-eyed, no doubt with some sort of admiration, at the display my mother put on for any sort of witness, even one so very unimportant. I could intuit exasperation in the way she tapped her cigarette on the lid of the silver cigarette box before lighting it with a flourish. ‘Do you want to show your friend your room?’ she asked, after a brief silence. ‘And show her round the garden, why don’t you?’ We were dismissed. In the garden Betsy said, ‘Your mother’s very beautiful, isn’t she?’ I saved this up to tell my mother after Betsy had left, hoping that this would propitiate her. For she was slightly annoyed; I knew her too well to miss the signs. And Betsy tended to have that effect on others, certainly in later life. Through sheer incomprehension she would fail to administer the right platitudes. This may have been a sign of virtue, one she had no doubt absorbed from her reading of the great dramatists, who only deal in virtue, and of course its opposite.

  This is not to imply that Betsy possessed any recondite powers of divination. It is rather that those who have meagre beginnings are obliged to study the world more stringently, looking for clues. And there was much to learn, not only for Betsy but for girls of our generation, too old for the Fifties, too young for the Sixties. We were still bound by the rules laid down by parents and teachers, obliged to be obedient, respectful, with little understanding that we were entitled to make choices that had been denied to the generation that had preceded ours. In this matter I was as ignorant as Betsy, but perhaps more secure; my parents had a strong influence on me, largely because they were both decisive characters who abided by certain social rules which they saw fit to pass on to me. I now see, with all the wisdom of hindsight, that I was given the wrong instructions, as were my peers. Today I look at the truly liberated young (and the even more liberated middle-aged) and marvel at their insouciance, their apparent lack of anxiety. Even now I wonder if there are no penalties for what I still regard as bad behaviour. We were untroubled by desire, though timidly aware that the world was changing. On our excursions to the King’s Road on a Saturday morning (the morning being safer than the afternoon, given over to householders, shoppers) we discussed the future in terms of what work we would do. This did not much interest me, whereas Betsy was considerably exercised by the prospect of a future for which no provision had been made. In that way she was more realistic than I was, for my grandparents had left me some money, and although this was controlled by my father I received an allowance which would enable me to postpone any far-reaching decisions. My mother had mentioned a cookery course, a year in Florence; this possibility I kept in reserve. In all innocence I mentioned these matters to Betsy, as we sat drinking milky coffee out of glass cups. She looked at me, perplexed. ‘But don’t you want to work? Or go to university?’ she asked. ‘You’re good at English.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind being a journalist,’ I said, but this in fact was only a conversational counter. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Well, I’ll have to get a job, won’t I?’

  ‘You’re the one who ought to go to university. You’re good at languages. Your French . . .’

  ‘There won’t be any money for that. And I need to look after Mary. She’s not strong, you know. She has anaemia. It makes her tired. That’s where you’re lucky.’ She blushed, as if she had committed an impropriety. It was the only time—the only time—I ever heard her refer to the imbalance in our fortunes. To be envied simply because one had parents, after all a natural endowment, was not something I could understand. I had read stories about orphans and I knew that they were to be pitied. But I could not see that her father was much of a loss, and in any event she had the sort of courage that enabled her to look towards the future, a courage in which I was strangely lacking. For the moment I was content to drift, to live out my last school years, and then perhaps to light upon a solution, or to have one arranged for me.

  ‘Do give my love to your mother,’ she said, as we shrugged on our coats.

  It was perhaps an attempt to retrieve an earlier faux pas, a reference to my good fortune in possessing parents, but it revealed her concomitant weakness, a need to go too far. Too far in politeness, in accessibility, in offers of service. I was to witness this on many occasions, particularly as we grew older. Those evenings at the cinema, watching the fabled lives of others, had done nothing to persuade her of the necessity of dissembling, of holding back her assent, of flirtatiousness and unreliability, such as attended the heroines of those Hollywood romances her aunt favoured, and whose trickiness, whose feistiness always brought about the desired, the honourable result. Betsy never mastered that art. Her eyes would widen with something like shock if she encountered anything less than the plainest of speech, the slightest deviation from the truth. I could see that this might make her something of a burden; I could even see that there might be some things one would have to conceal from her, but at the age of fifteen, of sixteen, I put it down to lack of a mother who could instruct her in what was appropriate. She never entirely lost that faculty,
and whatever one knows to be the desirability of honesty, one lives long enough to regret its persistence in others, particularly in those who knew one when one was just as honest oneself.

  What I did not tell Betsy—and this was one of several related matters that I was obliged to conceal from her—was that my parents did not get on, and that I had become used to hearing angry voices issuing from their bedroom far into the night. My one desire was to get away, and to live my life far from the contamination of these adult matters. I valued a sort of innocence, or more probably ignorance, which I feared might be destroyed. My confused feeling at the time was that I should be allowed to make my own mistakes and not be harnessed to those of others. Instinctively I resisted my mother and her plans, thinking, perhaps correctly, that they did not have my best interests at heart. In this I was probably wrong, but I did not know then that two people could hate each other and still live together. I was aware that my father had a friend, but a girl is more likely to forgive her father than her mother. My mother, as far as I knew, was faithful, but fidelity had merely sharpened her tongue, her powers of criticism. Her scornful bitter voice in the bedroom filled me with horror, even with terror. I thought that parents should be sweet-natured, self-effacing, and some children are lucky this way. My plans were non-existent, but they centred around some form of escape. My one comforting thought was that I had my own money and could at some point run away, even go abroad. At sixteen this was unrealistic. At the same time I was sufficiently ruled by my upbringing and the codes of my class to know that I must lodge no complaint, express no dissatisfaction, and carry on as if all were for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

  That I did not take Betsy into my confidence was perhaps an enactment of this code, which has somehow stayed with me, and also perhaps because I could not face the look of sympathetic horror in her unwavering gaze. I did not see how I could inflict that outrage on one whose innocence (or ignorance) had not yet been compromised. That was why I deflected all questions that had to do with my future, even with the putative choice of a profession. Our friendship depended on a sort of mutuality: she must not be told that I was already in touch with the sordid truth of which she could have no knowledge. She was only too willing to admire my parents; she would not be able to understand that they were not necessarily admirable. I thought that she should be protected from sadness, since she had most certainly endured the sadness of not having known her own mother. She had done well, so far, and I had no wish to cloud her horizon. It was not that I had any special loyalty to her beyond the limits of our childhood friendship. Had I known what was to follow I think I should have behaved no differently. Again, one respects those qualities one does not possess oneself.