Family and Friends Page 17

  When Lautner returns he says nothing. This is a supremely painful moment for him. His past, his incredible present, inhabit him to the exclusion of all those assembled, of that family with whom he has only honorary kinship, like a temporary visa. Mimi looks up, bright-faced, a little sleepy now. How innocent she is still! Lautner finds that he cannot meet her eyes. ‘Sleeping?’ she asks, her smile now a little anxious. Lautner knows that he must arrest the general movement away from this warm safe room, but he finds himself incapable of resolving how to bring this about. ‘Joseph?’ repeats Mimi. Lautner walks slowly over to a small table, stands with his back to them, head bent. He appears to be straightening something on this table, closing the lid of the cigar box. When he turns to face them, they see that he is in fact an old man. ‘Oh, Joseph,’ whispers Mimi, suddenly not daring to raise her voice. ‘Do you think we should send for Frederick?’ ‘No,’ says Lautner. ‘There is no need now.’

  Immediately Lili and Ursie, alerted by some ancient knowledge, set up a high-pitched keening. This noise becomes wilder, louder, as Mrs Beck, her lips working, takes them into her arms. Benjie, his face red, his hands hanging helplessly at his side, watches them, until, at a sign from Mrs Beck, he shepherds them both from the room. ‘Tanti,’ sighs Nettie, and turns away. Dolly and Hal stand stock still; after a while Hal puts a hand over his eyes. Will shakes his head, his cheerful face crumpling. ‘Mama?’ whispers Mimi fearfully. ‘Mama?’ Then, louder, ‘Mama? Mama? Mama?’ Lautner moves forward, but he appears not to be in full control of his movements, and before he can reach her, Mimi has fainted into Nettie’s loving arms.

  Alfred has turned to stone. Around him the room is in confusion. From the kitchen come the sobs and cries of the girls, now out of control. Those cries will continue all night as the girls, broken, relive their history, their earlier losses. Mrs Beck takes Benjie on one side; her task is to instruct him. He smiles unhappily as she retains him by the door. Dolly and Hal, after whispered consultation, turn to go; Dolly makes as if to take Alfred in her arms but Hal puts a hand on her shoulder to constrain her. Nettie and Will remain. Lautner has led Mimi to her old room and sits beside the bed on which she lies, her eyes closed, her hand pressed to her side. Alfred, staring into the abyss, walks stiffly to the door and shuts it behind him.

  Obeying some ancestral impulse, Alfred takes a silk shawl and covers his mother’s looking-glass. Then he turns and takes up his position at the foot of her bed, where he will remain all night. He is aware of Lautner coming and going but he will have none of him. In the intervals of lucidity he hears Lautner speaking quietly on the telephone; he is dimly grateful to the man for making those arrangements which must be made. He also hears the broken cries of the girls, as, turning in their haunted sleep, they greet their banished ghosts. At some point he is aware of Lautner at his elbow, placing a book before him. When he glances down he sees that the book has been opened, and that a marker has been placed in it. His eye seeks the appropriate passage: ‘A virtuous woman who can find? Her price is above rubies.’ At some further point he is aware of Lautner cutting at the lapel of his jacket, rending his garment.

  Alfred stands all night in his mother’s room, at the foot of her bed. I never meant to leave you, he says, and now he knows it to be true.

  14

  WREN HOUSE is sold. To be honest, nobody misses it. Muriel has been returned to her brother’s bungalow, holding herself in readiness for a sign from Alfred that he has bought another house and will require her services once more. The acquisition of this house is becoming illusory, in the manner of Alfred’s other projects. He is constantly on the point of moving out of Bryanston Square, selling the firm, going to live abroad, buying an estate in Herefordshire, putting money into a stud farm, settling in Scotland. He may be going to do any or all of these things but he will certainly have to do something: now that Mimi and Lautner have moved back to Bryanston Square Alfred’s temper is constantly on the boil, although the meals are the meals he always loved as a boy, and both Mimi and Lautner beam with pleasure when he joins them in the drawing-room. But it is a dreary life, he thinks, moving from his study to his bedroom; convenient but dreary. When he has decided whether it is to be Scotland or Herefordshire, winter quarters in Madeira or a service flat in Whitehall Court, he will soon be gone. Once he has arranged for the firm to be liquidated and the money to be suitably invested, then he will be a free man at last. Yet he seems not to be in a hurry to implement any of these plans. Something keeps him in Bryanston Square, some factor in his life which says, Stay. As if it were a voice which, when he becomes impatient and begins to rage as he did as a boy, says, Stay. Thus, for the time being, he remains at Bryanston Square.

  He never ran away with Dolly. Somehow the idea disappeared when his mother died. Although the scrupulous Hal remained impassive and courteous, although Dolly herself became more openly possessive, the idea of Dolly, as opposed to the reality, seemed to change overnight from alluring to distasteful. Alfred, who previously thrilled to the evidences of Dolly’s impudence, began to see that they were in fact tiresome. He began to see that the management of Dolly was in fact entirely in the hands of Hal, and that without the assurance of Hal’s massive patience Dolly could quite quickly go off the rails. What form this would take was not quite clear but Alfred, a bachelor, has always been uneasy about female tantrums. He probably has some memory trace of his sister Betty as a child, screaming herself red in the face, tears spurting from her eyes, only to be comforted by Frederick, ever indulgent to a woman even if that woman were only his sister. It is curious how easily Alfred appears to have come to terms with what others might see as quite a major defeat. But it was in fact Alfred who proposed that they should go on that Mediterranean cruise together, all five of them: Dolly and Hal, Nettie and Will, and himself, the generous host. He said that he was grateful to them for rallying round during his mother’s last days, and indeed family feeling seems to be growing in him at last. The cruise, during which Dolly wore a great deal of white linen and got rather drunk in the evenings, and Nettie’s still red hair shone like a marigold in the fierce sun, and Hal and Will settled down amicably in deck-chairs with a cigar and a couple of good political biographies, found Alfred at last reconciled to foreign shores. Leaning on the guardrail, surveying the next port of call, he appeared to reflect that compromise is not a bad solution, and that modified escape does not destroy the possibility of return. The cruise was a great success and has been repeated every spring for the past five years.

  Mimi lost her baby. They put it down to shock at her mother’s death, and, sadly, it was clear that she would never have another. For a long time she was quite ill, sliding back into that depression, that irradiation of the spirit, that had afflicted her so long ago on her return from Paris. There is a period in her life which was almost entirely unlived. When Lautner came home in the evenings he would find her lying on the sofa, as he had left her that morning, looking to him as if she had not moved from that moment to this. Mimi would be quite unable to say what she had done with her day. All she could remember was lying on the sofa, listening to the pneumatic drills in the road outside: the sun, a hot white disk, seemed blurred and obscured by the dust rising from the pavement. No breeze stirred the long stiff lace curtains and the green plants looked fleshy and venomous in their Indian brass pots. All day long Mimi lay there, looking at the blighted sun, hearing the shattering drills, until she almost ceased to be aware of where she was or why she was there. It was Alfred, exasperated as he always was by Mimi’s languishing condition, who suggested that Lautner and she move back to Bryanston Square. ‘It is the most sensible idea,’ he said. ‘She will be happier there. And in any event the place will soon be yours. As soon as I have settled my affairs I shall be gone.’

  For Mimi, coming home was a sort of completion, perhaps the only one possible after that original false start and her recent tragedy. If Mimi’s cup ever runneth over, it runneth over with decency rather than with anything more vital
. Since losing the baby she has become very much more dependent on Lautner, who is indeed a devoted husband. See how patriarchally he places encompassing arms on the back of the sofa on which Mimi is seated! See how he stands when she enters the room and opens the door when she leaves it! Mimi accepts these attentions gratefully and graciously. She seems to have abandoned her determination to be a young matron and is now actively training to be an older one. She glides about the apartment with an ever watchful eye to its good management: sweet smells of lavender and vetiver issue from her cupboards, and the journals are all uncreased on the table in the study. This is perhaps her true apotheosis, this return to the still intact dreams of her girlhood. If occasionally a sigh escapes her it is because she sees now how it could and should have been. But all that is past now and she can take pride in the well-regulated life that she always knew she was called upon to live. The piano is silent these days. Since the loss of her baby Mimi finds that music upsets her, brings on a headache. She finds too that these headaches can only be relieved by slow relentless tears. For this reason she has decided to get rid of the piano, although Lautner is sad about this. The piano played a large part in his life and he would be sorry to see it go. But Mimi, straight backed in one of those muted silk dresses in which she so resembles her mother, has no time now for Lautner’s sentimentality. She knows exactly how like a lingering illness sentiment can be, and how effectively it can interfere with one’s duties.

  Sometimes Mimi gets up from the sofa and goes to the window. Not very often because she does not allow herself too much time for day-dreaming, and in any event since Lili’s marriage she only has Ursie in the kitchen to help her. Sometimes Mimi thinks, if only I had been bolder, had tried again sooner, had pushed my claims. But she never thought she had any claims, had only waited, and, waiting, had been found. And, after all, honour has been saved. She has married, she has conceived. And if the outcome has not been all that she had wished, well, that is occasionally the way with outcomes. And there was always this suspicion, born when she sat at the piano in Mr Cariani’s academy and heard Betty stamping away at her dancing, that the good live unhappily ever after.

  Nothing much is heard from the others these days. When Sofka died, Frederick and Evie sent a telegram: ‘Heartbroken. Thinking of her today and every day.’ Occasionally Evie writes, long enthusiastic empty letters in her flowing script, lavish with endearments and promises of a visit home as soon as they have appointed a new manager or overseen the last stage of the redecoration, but nothing ever seems to come of these reassurances. It is always Evie who writes these letters: Frederick appears to have dematerialized into the Riviera sun. Alfred telephoned him from Marseilles when the ship made a stop there, but Frederick was not in and Evie could not be found. Perhaps Frederick was in Nice, at the Ruhl, pursuing his afternoon ritual, still with that ceremonious grace that now appears so old-fashioned. Frederick does not know this, or if he knows does not care. His instincts have served him so well all his life that it would be disloyal of him to abandon them. And so, portly now, but light on his feet, Frederick lifts his hat to ladies young and old in the streets of Bordighera and raises a glass smilingly to his wife at dinner. His children, rangy French-looking teenagers who have grown out of their resemblance to their mother, will shortly leave home and be seen only intermittently, in the holidays. The rest of the time they will speed about Europe fearlessly on their mopeds and plan to settle in America as soon as they are old enough.

  Betty too is plumper, older. Looking after Max has condemned her to a sedentary life, and she always had a sweet tooth. These days she sits beside the pool, tightly encased in the latest beachwear, her hair dyed a vivid red, her mouth an enlarged scarlet bow. Betty has not moved with the times, although she occasionally attempts to get her figure back with yoga exercises. Most of her days are spent watching television, old films which give Max pleasure. She prepares little snacks for him, little Hollywood salads of cottage cheese and fruit, little confections of pineapple and coconut. She thinks it shameful of Alfred not to send more money, but this is an old grudge and one that no longer corresponds with the truth. The money arrives regularly but Betty is still apt to flare up when she thinks of Mimi in Bryanston Square. It has been suggested to her by Max that she should go home for a visit, but they both know what this means. It means that if and when Max dies Betty will have to go back and live with her brother and sister. This knowledge is rejected. Betty shudders delicately when the subject is mentioned. ‘That awful weather,’ she grimaces. ‘My health would never stand it.’ For she knows that she will never go home again and that some old trouper’s pride will keep her sitting here, by the pool, to the very end.

  What happened to the ludic impulse that was once so strong in Frederick and in Betty? Although it seems that Mimi, with awful dignity, has at last and finally acknowledged that her life is to be lived without it, how can it be that Frederick is content to spend his days as an ageing hotelier, in a resort that none but the retired are now prone to visit, with only the minute distraction of his afternoons at the Ruhl to compensate him? Why does Betty, so fiery and so fearless in her early days, sit like a child, in her childlike clothes, eating concoctions that might have been devised for a child’s party? Can it be that their youthful habits pertained only to their youth, and that middle age has left them stranded, without guidelines, and curiously and noticeably devoid of impetus? Can it be that the presence of a partner, who can be said, in both cases, to be the ideal partner, has somehow subsumed the essence of those who once appeared so strong, so self-aware? Who could have foretold the ultimate passivity of Frederick and of Betty, subsiding into the permanence of what was originally a temporary arrangement, with a backward glance only to the mythic elements of their own lives? How have these artists in self-referral managed to edit themselves into a version so static, and yet so emblematic, that those at home, who have not seen them for many years, have no difficulty at all in picturing them, Frederick in his linen jacket and his panama hat and his pale shoes, smiling and strolling and savouring his pleasures, the boulevardier of his mother’s imagination, and Betty, cross-grained and vivid in her flimsy clothes, eternally toying with something coloured in a long glass, and glancing down critically at her painted toenails? Can it be that the ludic impulse, once so strong, has vanished, or has transmuted, or transferred, leaving those early celebrants adrift, becalmed, yet somehow legendary?

  These thoughts frequently occur to Mimi, who has always pondered more deeply than any of the others. She reflects on the pluses and minuses of life to a quite considerable extent these days, and the thinking has hollowed her cheeks, made her stately, rather handsome, yet not too communicative. Mimi has acquired depth, a depth not of her own choosing. She is mildly matriarchal, given to sober pursuits, an excellent housewife. She is at ease with Lautner and his elderly ways, no longer seeking diversion. They still take their afternoon walks, for Lautner, now retired, is tireless in his self-appointed task of supervising Mimi’s health and comfort. They talk little of those matters which they both still have at heart, managing to convert their memories into a pleasant concern for each other’s welfare, and relying on the habits of a lifetime to see them through certain dark moments. In this they are successful. They are to be found in the drawing-room, with a silver tray of coffee-cups in front of them, entertaining visitors, family and friends. They drive out with Alfred to see those various properties which he has not so far decided to buy, but which he surely will some day, one day. And it is Mimi the matriarch and Alfred the man of property that Frederick and Betty idly or resentfully envisage when they turn their thoughts to home from their sunlit exile.

  But what Frederick and Betty signally fail to envisage is the transmutation of their own early singularity, of that wild card that, in their hands, was to take them so far away, and then to leave them, stranded. Nobody knows what has happened to that wild card. Nobody talks about it. But nobody thinks of it as being entirely absent, or unable to recur.
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br />   To all intents and purposes life changes very little in Bryanston Square. Alfred is still there, although he has his eye on a house on the Suffolk coast. One of these days he will run Mimi down to see it. Until then, or until he thinks of another house, somewhere else, the time passes without their noticing it very much. On most evenings they have visitors. Dolly and Hal come, although Dolly is so discontented these days that she needs a great deal of cajoling; in the middle of a conversation she is apt to announce, ‘I want another brandy.’ Hal purses his lips. This is becoming a problem, although he supposes that he can deal with it. Lili and Benjie bring their two enchanting children, Laurie (Laura) and Charlie (Charles, but in reality Karl, after Lili’s dead father). Mrs Beck, who has remained in touch with both Mimi and the girls, still enters the room with a faintly admonitory air but gets on very well with Lautner who is now quite old. They have much in common, these two. Lautner introduced young George Beck into the firm of Dorn and Co. and is always delighted to know how he is getting on. It has long been hoped that George would marry Ursie, who has been a little bit short-tempered since her sister left. But she is a good girl, though no longer quite so pretty; she has always liked George, and, more important, Mrs Beck, and now it seems certain that she will settle down. They are all so pleased. Will and Nettie come, with their little daughter, for the unexpected happened, just when it seemed to be almost too late: a child, after all these years. It seemed like a miracle, and perhaps it was. Mimi smiles, serves coffee, serves marzipan cake.

  Here they all are, family and friends, in the wedding photograph. It is the last one in the album. George and Ursie stand, politely smiling, between Lili and Mrs Beck. Dolly, slightly out of focus, as she was in reality on that day, appears to lean heavily on Hal. Will smiles, plump, good-natured, unquestioning as ever. Mimi, upright, in pale lace, with a rather imposing hat, looks very like her mother. Lautner, although greatly diminished, still turns to her fondly. Here is Alfred, tall, stiff, still a handsome man. Here is Nettie, very close to Alfred, leaving Will almost unattached, unpaired. And in the front row, the three children: Laurie, Charlie, and Nettie’s child Vicky (Victoria). See that look on Vicky’s face, that imperious stare, so unlike a child, so like Sofka. See Alfred’s hand proudly clasping her little shoulder. See the resemblance. Wait for the dancing to begin.