A Start in Life Read online

  George remained mercifully unaware of his infirmities. ‘Is Sally back yet?’ he would ask, and Ruth would say, ‘Not yet.’ ‘Can’t be long now,’ he would assure her, as if she needed the assurance. He would wander back to the drawing room and the television set and wait for the next meal. Nobody visited now. Nobody telephoned. It would not do much good if they did. Once the telephone had rung and a voice had said, ‘Alain Duplessis.’ This was repeated several times, but George, who had been trained to put the receiver to his good ear, knew no one of that name and so assumed it was a wrong number and thought no more about it.

  There was no question of Ruth’s going back to France. After a while she got in touch with Anthea and Anthea came swooping into Oakwood Court, cheeks aflame, to tell Ruth what to do. Or rather what not to do. George was delighted to see her. ‘Ruth’s pretty friend,’ he murmured, and tried to take her hand. Anthea was marvellous with him, and cheered him up, and teased him, and gave every appearance of enjoying it as much as he did. George was almost normal by the time she left.

  In the hall Anthea hissed, ‘For God’s sake, get out before he’s bedridden. Find a housekeeper. Do something. Have you any idea what you look like? What about the flat in Paris? Is it still there? Have you got a lease?’

  Ruth thought of her flat and the sunlight and the cake she had made. The clean sheets were still on the bed. She hoped that the food she had left in the larder was not attracting mice.

  ‘I can’t go back,’ she replied. ‘I’ve got to stay here. I can’t leave him. Besides, I’ve got a job. Professor Wyatt has offered me an assistant lectureship. I’m very lucky really.’

  They looked at each other. Anthea’s eyes filled with tears.

  ‘You shouldn’t be alone,’ she murmured. ‘Is there no one?’

  Ruth laughed. ‘Only Roddy,’ she said.

  They kissed. Anthea tried to comfort Ruth but Ruth was bony and unyielding and in the end Anthea rested her head on Ruth’s shoulder and had a good cry, and then wiped her eyes, and put on some more lipstick, and left, and went back to Weybridge, and Brian, and her twin sons, Christopher and Martin.

  In the country of the old and sick there are environmental hazards. Cautious days. Early nights. A silent, ageing life in which the anxiety of the invalid overrides the vitality of the untouched. A wariness, in case the untoward might go undetected. Sudden gratitude that turns bitterness into self-reproach. George fretted more over Ruth now than he had ever done during her childhood. If she went out, she would look back and see him at the window, watching her. When she returned, he would still be there. He had time to think of the meals that might tempt him but no appetite to eat much of them. He resisted attempts to get him out of his dressing gown. He refused to walk far. Above all, he required constant reassurance that she would not leave him.

  After a couple of years it became clear that he would make no further progress, nor any less. Ruth, after a telephone call from Anthea, now pregnant with her third child, went back to the house in Edith Grove and found Miss Howe, much diminished, still in her basement. Miss Mackendrick has been dead for three months and her rooms, cluttered and musty, had not been cleared out or re-let. Ruth contacted her former landlord and took Miss Mackendrick’s rooms on a temporary basis. Her old flat was occupied by a young couple who played the guitar and made rather a lot of noise, yelling to each other on the stairs. Ruth spent one evening, at the most two, a week in Edith Grove. Sometimes, on these evenings, she would baby-sit for Hugh and Jill in Beaufort Street. But most of the time she wrote her book. When she went back to Oakwood Court, George would be at the window, in his dressing gown, waiting for her.

  22

  She married Roddy almost as a matter of course, since George was so attached to the idea. She married him without a great deal of emotion, but in recognition of the fact that he had paid her the compliment of asking her to be his wife; what his motives were she could never understand. In fact Roddy was lonely, and, hypochondriacal like his aunt, was given to scares about his health and his future. Ruth’s calm, her unostentatious energy, seemed like strength. Once she nursed him through a bad bout of ’flu, adding a daily visit to Bayswater to her long list of chores. He was impressed. When he recovered, he rang her up and suggested that they might go to a concert. He fell into the habit of collecting her from the college when he had finished work and driving her home. Sometimes he stayed for a meal, for she had become a very good cook. He felt comfortable in her presence, at ease, relaxed. Eventually he asked her to marry him. In this he showed sense; it is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.

  During the six months of their marriage Ruth felt a great sense of security, which, she was assured by Anthea, is what every woman needs. Her colleagues, she was amused to note, were rather more polite to her than they had been when she was merely a daughter. It seemed easier to live at Oakwood Court from every point of view. Although Mrs Jacobs would not have objected to their permanent occupation of the Bayswater flat, there was an air of uncertainty over her own arrangements. She was always rumoured to be coming back to London, but she never actually came, and one day her sister Phyllis, a managerial woman, took matters in hand and disposed of the flat and its contents in the space of a fortnight. Roddy did not much mind; he had found it hard to keep everything laundered and all the machinery maintained and sometimes he had yearning thoughts about his basement. But he was no good at looking after himself, and he thought that once they had found George a housekeeper he and Ruth could settle down quite comfortably somewhere on their own.

  At Oakwood Court things were a little brighter. The mere presence of Roddy cheered George tremendously, and although Roddy still found him tiresome he was quite amicable about watching television with George and brought him home the evening paper and sometimes drove him out in the car at weekends. Ruth was relieved to see them taking care of each other, for George was as anxious about Roddy’s health as Roddy was himself. Roddy felt protected. Ruth, her mind sifting through the day’s preoccupations, thought that she had been lucky. Roddy, she knew, was an amiable but childish character, but she clung to him in the night when she wakened so inexplicably in terror, with fragments of dream evaporating into the greater unreality of her present life. At these times, she thought in all humility that she was a fortunate woman.

  Roddy died, not of an illness as he had feared, but as a result of a motor accident on the Kingston by-pass: they never found out what he was doing there. A policeman brought the news to Oakwood Court. Ruth and George were both quite dazed, and for once in their lives talked openly to each other, turning to each other for a little comfort. They could not believe that such a thing had happened, that they were both, once again, survivors. They wondered how they had been singled out for such a privilege.

  In due course Ruth sold the shop, since there was no prospect of George’s taking it over again. The money was very useful and they paid a woman to come in every day and do the cleaning. George got quite attached to her and was rather surprised when she would not consent to live in. Ruth went back to spending two nights a week at Edith Grove. She had kept the rooms on, for, as she explained to Roddy, most of her books were there. Her work on Balzac, after hanging fire for a year or two, eventually picked up again and she was able to plan the second volume.

  One Saturday, as Ruth was preparing a daube of beef, there was a ring at the doorbell. George shuffled out of the drawing room and stood expectantly in the hall. Their visitor, to their very great surprise, was Mrs Cutler, in a fun fur coat and high-heeled boots, with several carrier bags on the mat at her feet.

  ‘Long time no see,’ she said exuberantly, as Ruth murmured a welcome. George, disappointed that it was not Sally, returned to the drawing room. Mrs Cutler followed him.

  ‘Well, that’s a nice welcome, I must say,’ she bellowed, for she remembered him as being on the deaf side and the poor sod looked years older. ‘After all this time.’

  ‘Have you come back?’ asked George.

  M
rs Cutler uttered a screech of laughter which ended in a cough. ‘Not bloody likely,’ she said, opening a large handbag and extracting a packet of Senior Service. ‘Leslie won’t let me do a thing in me own place, let alone anybody’s else’s. No,’ she added, inhaling deeply. ‘I came up for the sales and I thought I’d look in on you and see if there was a cup of tea going. And I wouldn’t mind spending a penny,’ she conceded. She looked at them as if expecting sounds of appreciation.

  After she had returned from the bathroom, leaving the door open as usual, and after she had drunk a cup of tea and smoked three cigarettes, she regaled them with stories of life at the Clarence Nursing Home. ‘Of course,’ she said, screwing up her eyes against the smoke, ‘we’ve made a lot of improvements there. Colour telly. Fluorescent lighting in all the bedrooms. The old dears think the world of us.’ Ruth looked at her in her checked miniskirt, her unventilated royal blue angora jersey, her necklace of vaguely ethnic ceramic platelets. She could not do it. The temptation to put George into a nursing home had never been very strong, although Anthea had introduced her to the idea long ago. But George, thought Ruth, had had style; he could not end up like that. She knew what the Clarence would be like: the television on all day, the residents encouraged to sit outside in the brisk sea wind, the food consisting of mince and mashed potatoes and masses and masses of prunes. And Mrs Cutler or Mrs Dunlop or whatever she was passing among them graciously with a kind word (‘Never say die!’) and a cigarette somewhere about her person.

  George sensed what Ruth was thinking but was too frightened to trust her judgment. His face became flushed and distressed and Ruth put a hand on his arm. Mrs Cutler, who knew danger signs when she saw them, hobbled to her feet, collected her carrier bags, and took her leave. At the door, she whispered to Ruth, ‘You’ve been a good girl,’ and added, ‘but if I were you … Well, if you ever want a break,’ she winked and nudged Ruth in the ribs, ‘you know where I am. Keep in touch, anyway. I enjoy a laugh over the old times.’ Then she was gone, nippily, down the stairs. Ruth could hear her resounding cough until the doors finally shut behind her.

  George stood in the doorway of the drawing room, his face fearful and slightly averted. Ruth took his arm, patted his hand.

  ‘With a bit of luck we shan’t see her again,’ she said. ‘So you can take that look off your face.’ She kissed him, then went back to the kitchen and her cooking.

  Dr Weiss returned her lecture notes to their file, plugged in her electric kettle, and made herself a cup of coffee. When her mind had slowly emptied of her conclusion, which, according to habit, she found herself reviewing more critically than when she had delivered it, she opened her mail. This consisted largely of memoranda beginning, ‘It has come to my notice that …’ or ‘It has been brought to my attention that …’ Then she reached for a sheet of paper. Dear Ned, she wrote, dear Ned, it is so long since we met and I have six more chapters to show you. I am rather pleased with my study of Diane de Maufrigneuse. Will you come to dinner next week or the week after? It will have to be either Wednesday or Thursday as the weekends are eroded at either end by my father. He is very old now and since my mother’s death relies on my company rather heavily. And of course you must be busy yourself. Do let me know when we can meet. P.S. The section on Eugénie Grandet has turned out rather longer than expected. Do you think anyone will notice?

  THE BEGINNING

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  First published by Jonathan Cape 1981

  Published in Penguin Books 1991

  Copyright © Anita Brookner, 1991

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-241-97650-0