A Private View Read online

  ‘I know nothing about business,’ he said shortly. This was not quite true; he knew how organisations worked, but thought that this knowledge was hardly relevant to the matter in hand. ‘And I doubt if you know much either.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she replied. ‘But that’s exactly what I’m looking for, don’t you see? After all, I’m the potential, aren’t I? I’d be the investment. It’s sponsorship I need. I’ll supply the expertise. Don’t you worry about that!’

  ‘And what expertise would that be?’

  ‘Anything you care to mention! Aromatherapy. Aerobics …’

  ‘My dear girl, we are in the middle of a recession. You can’t honestly believe that this is going to catch on …’

  ‘Of course it is! Health is very big news! How many people do you know with a personal fitness trainer?’

  ‘Not one,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I know six or seven,’ she finished triumphantly. ‘All friends of mine, all young people, men as well as women.’

  ‘You mean they pay good money to be exercised, when they could just as easily go for a brisk walk on their own? For free?’

  ‘I’m afraid you just don’t understand the modern ethos, George. One gets at the mind through the body.’

  ‘I dare say little has changed in that respect.’

  ‘Yes, but now there’s much more stress,’ she persisted. ‘These days you have to call in the experts if you want to keep out of the hands of the doctors, and all those filthy drugs they pump into you.’

  ‘Actually, doctors don’t do that.’

  ‘Oh, come on, George. Everyone knows what harm modern medicine can do.’

  ‘I never heard of any. But this is a silly argument. What you want to do, if I can get this clear, is educate the mind through the body. Or shouldn’t it be the other way round?’

  ‘They work in harmony, of course,’ she said pityingly, as if dealing with a lesser intelligence. ‘That’s what I want to do, yes.’

  ‘Well, I can’t understand why you need my advice.’

  ‘I need premises,’ she said. ‘I need a place where people can come. Well situated, of course. A flat would be ideal. How much would one like this cost?’

  ‘More than you could afford. More than I could afford now. You surely weren’t thinking …? No, I’m sure you weren’t. In any case what money I have is all tied up.’ This was relatively true. ‘I believe there are certain government schemes, training schemes, and so on. There may even be grants. Although I doubt if you’d be considered a high priority.’

  Indeed, never had she seemed a lower priority than she did now. Her face had fallen. She had not been excessively friendly when she presented herself after Louise’s departure: the mere fact of Louise had activated her reserve of anger. He was ashamed to note that he felt quite frightened of her. She was all blind will, it seemed, and not particularly discerning. Her needs were taken to be obvious: she implied that she had no time to waste on pleasantries or even on preliminaries. Like all those who look to others to fulfil their requirements, however absurd, however outrageous, she was disproportionately annoyed when such help was not forthcoming. And she possessed several useful techniques, including a drawling distaste for anyone who disappointed her, and an ability to take offence at an unsuspecting criticism. Those who were lured into thinking that she was at home with the truth could find themselves excommunicated from her presence by virtue of an unpopular opinion. Friendship could turn to enmity, and no doubt already had; he wondered, for example, whether she and Sharon Dunlop were currently on speaking terms. It appeared to be up to him (or down to him, as she would no doubt say) to sort this out, just as it appeared to be his business to extract some grain of truth from her increasingly blithe remarks.

  However, as always, his sense of pity was aroused. And also his sense of shame, for it seemed to him that his remarks had been too harsh, or rather that she was not constituted to face the truth, preferring always a cloudier version of events, and a solipsistic one. He may have seemed brusque, peremptory, for how else to account for her downcast features, her sudden withdrawn sulkiness. The interview had started badly, he realised, because she had seen Louise leaving the flat. But why should Louise not have visited him, and what right had this girl to be displeased? She was jealous, but he thought that she did not like him. It was not affection that inspired her jealousy: it was a global resentment that included both himself and Louise. It was in fact a mystery to him that she had no affections. He had never seen her so clearly: a waif, a victim, but the kind of victim that criminals are said to be by kindly probation officers, who will look into their backgrounds and produce a culprit in the form of anyone who may have exerted a bad influence in the past. He realised that he was dealing here with a special case, and that he would do well to tread carefully. He had no doubt that she possessed weapons superior to his own. And he had no idea when she would decide to use them.

  Now, however, she was merely morose. But she cannot have believed that I would simply hand over a sum of money, he thought. At any other time he would have felt aghast, indignant. Now, once again, in that moment of having his worst fears confirmed, he felt sorry for her. He had taken away her last hope, illusory though it had been. Her hopes were not his responsibility, he reminded himself. Nevertheless, he had been instrumental in disappointing them. She might even now be wondering why Howard Singer’s creed had so woefully let her down. She had told him how great she was (but had omitted to tell him how great he was), and nothing had happened. Nobody had believed her. Perhaps nobody ever had.

  He studied her, in her would-be seductive pose. Now that both the anger and the pity had been registered he was able to ignore them both. He saw her hand go up and pull gingerly at the sore on her mouth.

  ‘Did you have any lunch?’ he asked.

  ‘A tin of sardines.’

  ‘I thought you people believed in a healthy diet. Fresh fruit and vegetables, and so on. There’s a perfectly good shop downstairs.’

  He suddenly thought, but that is what the rich say to the poor. What is happening to me? Why this desire to protect her? She is quite unworthy. All at once, seeing her sitting there, obstinate and defenceless, he felt a pang of something quite unfamiliar, quite expansive, quite inconvenient. He felt a lightness, a sense of empowerment; the past seemed to him constricted, constrained, his years of work merely unenterprising. It was not quite a moment of illumination, but it nearly resembled a transformation of some kind. He wanted to study the girl further, to keep her near him, to see if there were any worth under the nonsense, to get to know her true nature. It seemed important to him to make her grateful, even to make her smile. At that moment it seemed to him imperative not to disappoint her.

  ‘How would you like to spend Christmas in Rome?’ he said.

  8

  THE IDEA THAT HE MIGHT BE APPROACHING some new and strange experience excited and alarmed him. The effect was to keep him in his chair, long after she had gone, eyes wide with surprise. To begin with he attempted to suppress the idea that he was fascinated by her, as if it could be dismissed by an effort of will. It would mean the end of everything, the end of George Bland whom everybody knew and accepted without much thought. But perhaps that was the pity of the thing, he reflected. He was not loved, not particularly valued. Perhaps Louise loved and valued him, but Louise would have to go if he married Katy. The possibility was enough to envelop him in a scalding blush. For he might marry her, he thought: that would solve her problems if not his. From this new and admittedly shaky vantage point he saw himself as a man who had always been in favour of marriage. He would no doubt, he thought, have married Louise had she not deserted him and married Denis Arnold.

  This reasoning at last proved untenable, and some part of his lucidity reasserted itself. Marriage instantaneously became out of the question. In any event he doubted whether Katy would even consider it. He was a man of sixty-five and she was a woman in her thirties. She would, in her words, consider marriage to a man su
ch as himself incredibly naff. He was made of conventional material: that was all there was to it. But he reserved enough judgment to see the affair for what it was, and for what it would be. Her obvious immaturity he was inclined to view with some indulgence. Besides, he credited her with a great deal of primitive common sense. She had, after all, engineered the strange situation in which he was apparently imprisoned.

  After half an hour he abandoned the idea of marriage, embarrassed for having even considered it. Reason told him that he could not expect her to be faithful to him. It did not matter: her attraction for him was not physical, and he doubted whether he would ever make love to her. Truth to tell, he did not see her body as having any power over him. She was of another generation, and thereby removed from his expectations. These days he was relieved that there was no one to witness his own physical changes: the spreading calloused feet, the slightly bent shoulders, the irrelevant penis. He could no more think of undressing in front of her than he could of exhibiting his gracelessness in public. For she would not be kind.

  What really tempted him—and he was surprised by the force of this temptation—was the idea of jettisoning his careful tedious life and of surrendering to the idea of venality, vulgarity. The descent might prove irresistible; certainly the idea was proving companionable. And it was as an idea that he welcomed it, for he knew that it was mind and not body that was thus engaged. He would take a perverse joy in letting her ruin him, or perhaps not quite ruin him, for it would be his pleasure to tempt her and tease her, to withhold his favours while she fretted and sulked and pitted her wits against his. For he would win. And it would be entirely within his gift to gratify her, all the time amusing himself with her stratagems. He saw their association in terms of wicked joy for himself, of pleasurable reward for her. At the same time, by deploying his own stratagems, he would be keeping in check those more painful feelings that he had for her, the pity and the sadness which he could not obliterate. The pity was for her, the sadness for himself. He hardly knew where these feelings came from, yet somehow, in the midst of this strangeness, they continued to keep him company.

  She was a lost girl: that he knew without a doubt. So alien was her past that he could not even see into it, beyond his own wayward imaginings. He could only suspect the abused or at best neglected childhood, for she did not have the sunny assurance of one who had been loved. Happy families, he thought, tended to infantilise their offspring, sometimes for life, whereas she had a shrewdness that spoke volumes. Of her later life, the life beyond the army camp in Germany which he had envisaged for her, he had no idea. Possibly a further posting with the father whom he saw as irate; Cyprus, perhaps, or Aden. At some point she would have left home, never to return. She would have gravitated to the city, have made contact with those she spoke of as her friends, although they were not much in evidence, and at some point got to know Sharon Dunlop, then Sheila Robinson, and moved into the flat in Muswell Hill. There would have been boyfriends, lovers, many affairs; he had no illusions on that score. It was no doubt in the wake of some unhappy experience that she had gone to America, and, as luck or ingenuity would have it, had fallen in with Howard Singer. He was beginning to feel grateful towards this man, whom he hated so intimately: at least she would have found a semblance of human warmth in his coterie or coven, and perhaps have earned enough to remain solvent, though on present evidence that seemed unlikely. If she were as destitute as he supposed her to be then his affair was well aspected: he would represent her last hope.

  The apparent ease of the thing repelled him, but that, he told himself, was because he was unused to this sort of satanic planning. He felt torn between the man he had always been and the more adult version of himself that he was planning to be. It was time to join the real world. His past life now seemed drained of colour, as if an automaton had performed those duties in which, until recently, he had taken such a pride. Those days at the office, so comforting because so familiar, so unsurprising, now appeared to him to be ludicrous, almost grotesque. He had been a man in the prime of life, and he had subjected that manhood to an anaesthetic of routine and small indulgences. Even the one love affair of his life was in some ways the equivalent of the office, a safe haven, something—ah, that was it—which brought retirement as its natural conclusion.

  And now that he was officially retired, retired in the eyes of the world, he would be expected to take his leave with the same discretion. Those who had known him would soon forget him. There would be no malice in this: he had reached the age of separations, when generous curiosity is replaced by self-absorption. It would be assumed that he had remained the same as he had always been. And in a sense this was true, for he had never, until now, claimed any part of the world for himself, never acted out of character, never committed a folly, never unexpectedly disappeared …

  And now he planned to disappear, and the plan was to be entirely his own. It had come to him without warning, when he was thinking of other matters, in particular the routine simple matter of Christmas hospitality. Maybe the prospect of this had been the unconscious spur to his change of mind and heart. Mind rather than heart, he assured himself: yes, definitely mind. The whole thing had the attraction of a logical process, except that the logic was Mephistophelian. The beauty of the plan was that each would think he had the best of the bargain. As for the forfeit, that would no doubt fall due eventually. The prospect did not alarm him, perhaps because he had reached an age when debts are called in, when one surrenders bodily vigour to the inexorable demands of time. Time gave one an initial endowment which it then progressively cancelled, and Time’s ally, Nature, equally progressively imposed humiliations. It would not be the same for her: she would become impatient, rebellious even. It would then be his pleasure to tempt her back into a good humour, to devise for them both some exquisite diversion. For he could afford it, a reflection which somehow brought no gaiety. Nevertheless his money would enable him to retain control of the situation, for his mind, which would be so pleasantly exercised, would not lose sight of this important advantage. It would, in a sense, be an intellectual diversion for him, one in which he was assured of the upper hand.

  And yet, at this point in his reasoning, the old vulnerable sadness stole over him, and he was forced to admit to himself that part of him loved her, and that what he loved was that unprotected untutored anticipation in her that corresponded to the infinite longing which he knew himself to possess. It hardly mattered that her anticipation was for an illusory material success, whereas his was for some aspect of life which he hardly knew, not satisfaction so much as an emotional gratification which he had thought, somehow, always, to be out of his reach. It would be a way of cancelling at last that childhood self which so obstinately persisted, for there would be no opportunity for childishness in the life that he was currently devising. He would live on his wits, quite as much as she would.

  He saw himself on the balcony of a foreign hotel, in a lightweight suit, waiting for her to return from her morning’s shopping. They would travel widely, constantly, never staying for long in any one place, for they would be an ambiguous couple. He would make no attempt to conceal his age, would no longer raise a tired smile when porter or concierge referred to her as his daughter. She would deceive him, of course, but that would hardly matter. The pain of the thing would spring from an incompatibility which his mind alone could not overcome, so that at the end he would be uncomforted, an old man in a lonely bed, not because she had a young lover—that he could accept—but because the sadness had become impervious to whatever release she could offer. She would ultimately represent frustration because their separate disappointments had failed to annul one another, and each would be returned to a solipsism even more dangerous than the solipsism that had gone before.

  He thought too that he loved her for her silent scowling face, the face of an unhappy child, and of a powerless one. She did not always show that face, but it persisted behind the seductive smiles with which she had favoured him from tim
e to time. She had shown him that face at their first meeting; she had shown that face to Louise, who had subsequently pronounced her to be rather tiresome, a mild form of condemnation entirely in keeping with the mildness of Louise’s character. Katy, he thought, would be a formidable enemy to another woman. He wondered about her mother, who had left so little feeling behind. Not a strong character, he supposed, dismissed by the child, who favoured the irascible and seductive father. Thus, even at a young age, she would have set out to flatter and to placate. It was clear that she had not succeeded. There was an aura of failure about her which did not deceive him. For a woman in her thirties (for it seemed to him now that she must be all of thirty-five) to dress like an adolescent and to have no home was surely evidence of a curious formation. He was fascinated by her failure, which he felt as though it were his own, and he longed to protect her from further knowledge of it, just as he hoped to exchange his own vulnerability for something harder and less costly.

  He would take her abroad, he thought: indeed, he would have to. He could hardly imagine them living in his flat, although that was what she wanted. He knew very well that she planned to turn his sitting-room into some sort of treatment area; he could see his furniture receiving the libations of her essential oils. No doubt, in his dotage, he would be given a white jacket and put on duty at the door. That was what she wanted. Whereas he proposed to give her another life altogether, and which she would accept, but perhaps restively. They would travel, live elsewhere, a perpetual elsewhere. He saw, from his imaginary balcony, a red sun sinking over palm trees, and realised that this was an image which had confronted him during his recent sojourn in Nice. Such a little while ago! He looked round the room with a start: had it always been so dark? The lamps seemed weak and dim against the encroaching blackness outside the windows. In a moment of panic and exaltation he thought that he would be pleased to leave all this behind. They would follow the sun, perhaps never coming home. They would, in effect, have no home, apart from the temporary homes offered to all rich travellers. And having no home they would have no responsibility, and thus gain a kind of freedom. He could offer her freedom if nothing else, although he did not think that freedom was what she wanted. What she wanted was her own way, and satisfaction for her blind frustrated will. She would not find it, any more than he would. But perhaps it would take her a long time to find out, and perhaps by that time he would have learned how to let her go.