Look at Me Page 11

  ‘Well, we can fix things on Friday,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what James…’

  ‘Friday? Oh, Friday. Well, I’m not too sure about Friday, actually. Nick might be working late. I’ll give you a ring.’

  That evening James took me out for a meal, just the two of us, and my fears were allayed when he walked me home, although it was not our usual walk. And there was no tray of coffee, because Nancy had not expected us home so early, and was still in the kitchen, watching television. We, or rather James, told her not to bother because he would have to leave straight away. I said, ‘Are you going to walk back?’ and he laughed, and answered, ‘Not tonight.’ I felt a pang of sadness that the old routine had been so lightly abandoned and then reproached myself because I seemed to be attaching so much importance to outward forms. He took my face in his hands, perhaps seeing my expression change, and said, ‘Don’t be sad, Frances. Sweet, serious Frances. My dear good girl,’ and that made me a little happier because then I knew that he was not blaming me for anything. But I did not like going to bed so unusually early, and I did not sleep well.

  The next day, at the Library, when the telephone rang, I found myself stiffening with alarm, and then perceptibly relaxing when Dr Leventhal failed to materialize in the doorway. My remission, however, was short-lived, because in a few minutes he came through the door and said, ‘Frances, a word with you, please.’

  I followed him out, thinking with dread of that time when Nancy had telephoned to tell me to come home, that she thought I ought to call the doctor. My heart was beating so hard that when he said, ‘I have had a call from Dr Simek,’ I nearly collapsed with thankfulness, as if I expected the time to start running backwards and all my hard-won assurance to desert me. I could hardly hear what Dr Leventhal was saying, and he looked at me closely.

  ‘Are you quite well, Frances? There’s a lot of this ‘flu going about, you know.’

  I said that I was quite well, although I felt a little off-balance.

  ‘As I was saying, I have had a call from Dr Simek. He is quite poorly, I’m afraid. The ‘flu, you know, and now his doctor has advised a rest. But he left some notes here and he wondered if you would take them round to him this evening. He seems to think you know what he wants. Take a taxi, of course. I will repay you from petty cash.’

  I was exasperated with Dr Simek, with the fact that I was never to escape from performing this sort of dreary service. In the taxi my mind seethed with images of pleasure from which I was excluded: warmth, intimacy, company, shared meals. I had not been doing anything that evening, so that this did not really inconvenience me. I was simply in a state of tension from which there seemed to be no release.

  Dr Simek lived in a large, dull house, up a few worn steps, somewhere near the World’s End. The door was opened on to steamy light and a smell of cooking by a woman in an apron, whose face I could not see. I told her my name and why I had come. ‘Ah, yes,’she said, in a rather surprisingly cultured foreign accent. ‘He worries about his work. I will take you up.’ She motioned towards a staircase carpeted with faded red. ‘If you would be so kind…’That was obviously the origin of the phrase. I asked her to go ahead of me, which she did. She knocked on the door of a room on the second floor.

  ‘Dr Simek,’ she murmured, and then, in a louder tone, ‘Dr Simek. A lady to see you.’

  The door opened and a hoarse voice said,’Thank you, Mrs Lazowska. Most kind.’ The landlady, or whatever she was, smiled at me, and nodded her head. I found myself nodding back, and then I went in.

  It became clear to me at a glance that Dr Simek was quite ill. He was seated by an ancient gas fire with a saucer of dusty water in front of it, and he was wearing an old silk dressing gown, with a silk scarf tucked into the neck. The room was lit by a bright centre light and contained a narrow divan bed, a chest of drawers with china handles, such as might have come out of a housemaid’s attic, a bookcase with a brick under one side, where the leg had come off, and a little table, on which stood a radio tuned to some foreign station. On the back of the door hung one of those awfV1 plarnic wardrobes, containing Dr Simek’s overcoatand h.is suit. He himself was seated in a chair covered in rubbed and fading velvet; he made as if to get up, but I went over to him, and put my hand on his shoulder, and he brought the other hand up and patted mine, and smiled.

  I had thought I should find him in low spirits, but he seemed to have recovered a certain worldliness, a certain sophistication. When I handed over his file of notes, he inclined his head and murmured, ‘Most kind’, and nodded to me to put them on the table. I asked him how he was, and he made a little face, and said, ‘As you see, Miss Frances. As you see’, and then, perhaps because he felt that he had been asking for sympathy, he fitted a yellow cigarette into his old-fashioned cigarette holder, and asked me to sit down. I sat on the bed, because there was nowhere else to sit, and there was another knock on the door, and it opened to reveal Mrs Lazowska, with two tall glasses of lemon tea on a tray. ‘Your tea, doctor,’ she said. ‘And for your guest.’ She put a small plate of strange biscuits on the table, and urged, ‘Eat, please. Please.’Dr Simek inclined his head to her, as if dismissing her, and she took this as her cue to go.

  It was very quiet, except for the roar of the gas fire, and very hot. The tea was scalding, but I drank it as quickly as I could. I was anxious to get out of there, and yet constrained by some old politeness, as if I were a child again, on my honour to behave well. Dr Simek took a lump of sugar in slightly trembling fingers, inserted it between his strong old teeth, and took a draught of tea. The gesture, which was repeated several times, made him seem incredibly foreign, and reminded me, perhaps in the way his lip lifted, that he had been a vigorous man, and, from the way his landlady treated him, an important one. He seemed in no sense apologetic about his surroundings or his dressing gown, and I felt young and slightly awkward. Searching for something to say, I looked round the room and my eye fell on a photograph of a very beautiful woman, on his chest of drawers.

  ‘Is that your wife?’ I asked, aware that this was a crude question.

  ‘My daughter,’ he replied. ‘Zdenka.’

  ‘She is very beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was beautiful.’ And the fingers trembled a little more, and the glass of tea was raised, and emptied, and lowered again. Then another yellow cigarette was inserted into the holder, and it was quite clear that Dr Simek was ready for me to leave.

  ‘I hope you will be better soon,’ I said lamely. ‘We have missed you at the Library.’ And he gave a fine ironic smile, as if he knew how little difference his presence or his absence made. I stood up, for suddenly this had become unbearable, and held out my hand. He laid his cigarette holder aside, and tried to get up, but found the effort too much. His face sagged as he fell back, and I went over to help him, but with great and unexpected strength he pushed on his arms and stood up, steadied himself with his hand on the back of the chair, retrieved his cigarette holder, composed his face into an expression of worldly good humour suitable to leave-taking, and inclined his head in farewell. He did not, perhaps could not, shake my hand, but remained braced against the back of his chair, his other hand gripping the amber holder.

  This image was so powerful, and so disturbing, that when I got home I wrote it down.

  And it haunted and irritated me so much that I was longing to see my friends and more than ready for my outing on Sunday. I made an effort and pushed all my doubts and suspicions to the back of my mind, and we had the most wonderful time. We raced out to Bray in the car, James and I sitting in the back, and when James took my hand I looked at him and he looked back and I knew that everything was all right again. It was a fine, sunny day, too good to be indoors, as Alix said, and we decided to cut the lunch and just drive on.

  ‘Barbara always was a bit of a bore, anyway,’ Alix decided, waving away our objections. ‘I can tell her we lost our way. And then when we really have nothing better to do we can start all over again.�
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  We had lunch in a pub by the river, and Alix and Nick decided that we ought to have a walk. They went off together arm in arm, gazing into each other’s eyes, and James and I looked at each other again and smiled. Then we went off on our own, but we just walked round the garden. The weather had turned warmer, as if spring were already on the way, and we were able to sit down together on a bench and watch the river.

  Later that afternoon Nick insisted on taking our photographs. I took theirs, and I don’t know whether they came out or not. Then Nick took mine. I found it on my desk two days later. It shows me sitting in a garden chair, in my blue woollen shirt and my blue pullover. I look very young, very trusting, very carefree. Very happy. I have it still. It is the only photograph of myself that I possess.

  Eight

  After that lovely day our attention seemed to slacken, our hold on each other to dwindle. There were only ten days to go before Christmas overtook us. We had a little party in the Library, mainly for the benefit of Mrs Halloran. Dr Leventhal poured sherry carefully into rather small glasses, and I handed round some mince pies. It was not a tempestuously joyful occasion, although Mrs Halloran, who had attired herself in green, with much occult pewter jewellery, had a good time, and after four glasses of sherry became rather sentimental and made a few hazy predictions for the New Year. ‘All you wish yourselves, girls,’ she proclaimed, as she was to do later in the afternoon when I took her a cup of tea, and later than that, when she could finally be persuaded to leave.

  Nick came to the party, and James looked in but did not stay. I had not seen Nick for just over a week, since he took our photographs in that garden, and I was surprised to notice a change in him. He was of course charming to Mrs Halloran, whom he teased as usual, and I was impressed that he stayed as long as he did, for there was nothing there to keep him, and his face, when 116, not creased into his usual golden smile, fell into a sort of blankness. This was so unlike him that I wondered if he were ill, although he looked perfectly well. He looked… ill at ease, at fault, preoccupied. He looked as if his attention were miles away. He looked absent, passive. He refused my mince pies with a brief automatic smile, then lapsed into a sort of reverie, jerking out of it only to flirt with Mrs Halloran. I wondered if anything had happened, and when we were both out of earshot of the others I asked him. He threw up his hands and made a mock grimace of guilt, and said, ‘Sorry, sorry. I’m not very sociable, am I?’which did not answer my question. I remembered the gesture rather than the words. After puzzling for some minutes I remembered that it was the sort of gesture he had used to make when he had not read Dr Simek’s article. Or invited him to dinner.

  This last reflection worried me. It was then that I realized that I was being slowly excluded from the dinners with the Frasers, or rather that was what I imagined. We had not met for a week. It was of course possible that the Christmas rush had caught up with them, although I did not see why this should impinge on their evenings. It did seem to keep James very busy, for he had numerous small nieces and nephews to think about, and I was all ready to help him shop for them, but he was good at shopping, he explained, and it was easy enough for him to go to Harrods. I had bought all my presents, because Christmas no longer seemed important to me; I just wanted to get it over, and to get away to the Benedicts’ house, at Plaxtol, with James.

  We were not very busy in the Library, which was just as well because Alix kept telephoning me. Sometimes she would say, ‘No news. just keeping up to date,’ and I would put the telephone down and feel absurdly disappointed. I found myself anxious for news, for information. But at other times she was far more worrying, and my knowledge that Dr Leventhal was becoming increasingly testy at the length of these calls compounded my feelings of irritation and of fear. She took her time over these calls, which now all had the same theme: that I was inconsiderate, that I simply didn’t know how to treat people, that I had been far from polite to herself and to Nick, and that if I was going to carry on like this I ought to stop seeing James.

  ‘But why should IF I protested, when she first put this to me. ‘What harm am I doing him?’

  ‘You’re simply standing in his way. He feels committed to you, and you’ve told me there’s no future in it.’

  ‘I’ve said nothing of the sort…’

  I could hear her lighting a cigarette and inhaling. ‘You said you didn’t love him, didn’t you?’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean I can’t see him. I enjoy being with him. I enjoy his company. He enjoys mine.’ I found that I was pleading with her, for the right to continue to see James. ‘Why does it have to change? We were very happy…’

  ‘There you are, you see,’she cried triumphantly. ‘You were very happy. Or rather you were very happy. It’s all self with you, isn’t it? What about him? Do you think he’s happy?’

  I said, ‘I’ll have to go now’, because I was so disturbed that I didn’t know how to go on. I wondered if I had really made James unhappy, and if so, what I could do about it. I wondered why he had not told me that he was unhappy, although I did remember his face, stern and downcast on too many occasions when we were together, the eyelids severe. His hands no longer touched my face, as they used to do, but stayed clasped in his lap; their astonishing gentleness had disappeared, and they looked angry again, hard and red. But if the terrible truth was that he no longer loved me, why had he not said so? And if he no longer loved me, why were we going away together? And if he no longer loved me, what had changed him?

  It was this last intolerable doubt that kept me connected to Alix, who obviously held the key to the whole dilemma. She must have encouraged James to talk to her, as he had not yet done to me; she must know more than I did. The uneasiness of my situation blinded me to the fact that she had no business to meddle in it, and that I would be justified in asking him not to confide in anyone but myself, if indeed he had anything to confide. The last sensible part of my brain told me that the whole thing was a fabrication, that Alix was bored, that she could not resist a situation which seemed to her ‘interesting’, and that she might indeed simply be using it for distraction, for entertainment. Because I no longer entertained her. I no longer confided in her. I had repaid her attentions with ingratitude. And that if James were confiding in her it was because he was a better guest than I was and knew what was expected of him. Knew what was due to Alix. That he was humouring her.

  This particular line of thought led to a truth which was not welcome. If he were humouring her, it was at my expense. And if he were doing this, then he was less than the totally honourable man that I had supposed him to be. But I could not believe this, although I remembered his new severity, which was quite unlike the severity which had marked him before I knew him properly. Before he loved me. Which led me to the other intolerable truth, which was that he had fallen in love with Alix. Or that Alix had fallen in love with him and was trying to estrange us.

  When this thought came I found I could not dislodge it and it swirled round and round in my head with full accompaniment of ugly and erotic images. I saw the three of them in some hateful collusion, as I had once Pictured them at the breakfast table, laughing. Pictured here enjoying a joke. My madness disposed them in arrangements which I did not know I knew. I heard Mrs Halloran saying once again, ‘She has him by the balls’, and I acknowledged the power and capricious will of Alix, her mastery, her autonomy, her fearlessness. She who must be obeyed. I saw Nick’s abstracted face at our little Christmas party, and I thought I understood it. I saw James being drawn away from me, because I was too dull to keep his interest. I had thought that we were happy in our modest way, with our walks, our coffee. I thought of our impending holiday, and I knew that I could not go through with it if these questions were unresolved.

  On an impulse, I seized my purse, went down to the public telephone in the basement, and dialled Alix’s number.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ I said, ‘about what you were saying. About James and me.’

  She sounded
very weary, very reasonable.

  ‘I’m not sure that there’s any point.’ I could hear the cigarette being inhaled. ‘I’ve made myself clear. If you don’t love him - and you’ve said you don’t - you’re duty bound to tell him that you can’t go on with it. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘But it isn’t,’ I protested. ‘I have some feelings in the matter, you know. You don’t seem to understand that. And that’s what I want to talk to you about.’

  She sighed. ‘Well, then, come round on Sunday. He’ll be out then. It’s his mother’s birthday. Come about four.’

  I said, stupidly, ‘I can’t. I’ve got to go and see Miss Morpeth. I go once a month and I can’t not go just before Christmas.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ she exploded. ‘That’s exactly what I mean. Your little habits. Your little routine. And you expect him to fit into that.’

  ‘Alix,’ I said, steadying my voice, ‘this is idiotic. I don’t even know what it’s all about. We must talk. Can’t I come another day? What about Monday evening? I could come to you after work…’

  There was a pause. Then, ‘We’re joining Maria on Monday. I’d have to ask her. Oh well, why not? Yes, come on Monday.’

  I was shaking when I put down the telephone. I felt as if I were about to come up for judgment, at a court which was already prejudiced against me. And I still could not see what I had done that was so wrong. I was, as I saw it, not only blameless but completely harmless. I was not forcing James to do anything that he might not wish to do. In fact I was not forcing him to do anything at all. Perhaps that was what was wrong, I thought. Perhaps he is the sort of man who likes to have things decided for him. Perhaps he is so upright and severe that I must initiate changes. That I must ask him why he hesitates, tell him that it is all right. That I must make him love me.