A Private View Read online

  His mother he saw as she had been in her sad latter days, in a dress with a button missing, her swollen feet in stained furry slippers, her hair wild. Years of bad luck had made her intolerant, so that she had never had a kind word to say to him, or indeed to anyone else. But there had been no one else: just himself, his father, and his mother’s quarrelsome sister. It was her sister’s death, rather than her husband’s that had affected her. The slight stroke she seemed to have suffered on hearing of the news had led to a marked deterioration in her behaviour, so that meals were no longer prepared, and any washing had to await the reluctant attentions of a once-weekly cleaning woman.

  It was after his truncated university career and his subsequent beginnings as a clerk that she took to wandering into his room, shutting the window, and sitting there for half a day, not caring where she was, as though one place were as good as another, as no doubt it was by that stage in her life. No allowance had been made for his youth: that was surely a legitimate cause for complaint. But what good would it do him now to complain about all this? He was a grown man, he was even an old man; he had survived them. In a year or so he would have outlived them. The thought was somehow terrible.

  He wondered if it were natural to be thinking so persistently of his parents, particularly as he did not miss them. He wondered if it were healthy, or desirable, to be thinking of the past just now when he should be thinking of the future. What good did it do to succumb to these ruminations at any time? If he did so would he not become as disaffected as they had been? So far he had escaped this particular affliction. He did not see this as a great achievement: the lesson had been there for any fool to learn, but age, he knew, brings unwelcome returns to earlier selves, even unknown, certainly unsuspected selves. He saw himself, an old man, sitting in his chair, a muffler round his neck. He could see this much more clearly in that the heating was still on the blink: after an initial early puff of warmth the radiators had apparently given up for the rest of the day. Maybe there was a power cut that he had not heard about; he had not been watching television, and the battery in his radio had given out. He was thus presented with a useful way in which to spend his morning: he could go to the shop in Marylebone High Street and buy a couple of batteries. The radio, of course, would have to be left behind. For now he was convinced that he must leave.

  His distraction was profound. Air; he needed air, a breath of normality, however factitious. He slipped out of the building without his customary greeting to Hipwood, or to the Milsoms, the elderly couple from the ground floor who went out shopping together every day at the same time, and whom he used to see, standing behind the glass doors, surveying the weather, when he left for the office. He had always liked them: they seemed pleased with their little routines, with each other’s company, although there was an air of ill health about them. Both were curiously crooked, as if they had suffered from rickets in childhood. Clearly their beginnings had not been easy, although presumably they had risen to the degree of affluence that permitted them to live in this building. Scrap metal, he had heard Hipwood, who knew everything, say; he had paid no attention. The Milsoms were shy, not daring to trust their vowels to the likes of Mrs Lydiard, but they felt comfortable with Bland, and always nodded and smiled to him. Or had done. Now they no doubt longed to ask him how he was, registering his altered appearance. At least, he supposed it was altered; he had not scrutinised it lately. In his present state of mind he could hardly give an account of himself to anyone, let alone the Milsoms, who, in their shyness, would not know how to respond, even if his remarks were calculated to put them at their ease, along the lines of ‘A bit tired, you know?’ Even that would bring a look of concern, a shifting of feet, a tightening of Mrs Milsom’s hand on the handle of her wheeled basket. Yet he was tired, there was no denying it, and he longed to tell someone. But what he had to tell was so confusing that he had to keep all information to himself.

  He walked carefully along Kendal Street, applying himself to keeping his balance, and trying to ignore the bitter cold, the dull light, as if the earth had not the energy to shift itself, as if it would be winter until the end of time. He turned up his collar and regretted his tweed hat, which he thought might be promoted to everyday wear. He no longer had the heart to wear the magnificent fur hat that Putnam had brought him back from Russia and which he had occasionally worn to the office, receiving compliments on his appearance, which had hitherto not been dramatic. He felt half dressed, as if he had forgotten some item of clothing, and for a moment wondered if he had come out in his slippers. But all seemed to be in order; it was the day that was at fault. He had to fill in the time between now and later this afternoon, when he would knock at her door, and, with an air of désinvolture, invite her in for a cup of tea. This would no doubt precede her answer to all his questions, most of them unstated, and her verdict on what was to be his future. He hoped that some last-minute inspiration would come to his rescue; as it was he felt dull-witted. Had he had more energy he would have gone for a walk in the park, yet at his present shuffling pace he doubted whether he would get far. He must buy some food, he thought, although he was not hungry. He did not seem to have eaten recently. Restaurants were the answer to his problem, but he had momentarily lost all memory of his surroundings, and in any event felt too shamefaced to do other than eat at home. He made a detour to Selfridges, and bought a cooked chicken and a quarter of ham. He added a bag of salad, which he knew he would eventually throw away, some pears, a wholemeal loaf, and a piece of Roquefort. After a pause in the middle of the shop, he bought a bottle of Beaujolais. Then, much encumbered, he took a taxi home.

  He surveyed his living-quarters as if he were seeing them for the first time, or the last. The sitting-room, as Putnam had once observed, looked like the waiting-room of a Harley Street psychiatrist, except that that would be warmer, with an even purring warmth designed to allay disquiet. He had never felt exactly comfortable in the flat, although he doubted whether it could now be improved, or even disturbed. It had an immemorial feel to it, as if it were the home of someone who had recently died. He tended these days to retreat to the bedroom, although that too, in the mysterious way of bedrooms, appeared sombre and uninhabited. The bed, which had been outrageously expensive, was his refuge; he had hoped, and indeed had planned, to die in it. His few drawings, mostly English, mostly from the end of the nineteenth century, hung on the walls, flanking the one decent object he had retrieved from his parents’ house, a handsome gilt-framed mirror ornamented with stucco garlands. A longer cheval mirror occupied a corner: his ghostly reflection was the first thing he saw when he got out of bed in the morning.

  This room was his true home, his retreat. It even crossed his mind that he might return to it some day, when his journeyings were over, and his companion no doubt lost. He would not sell the flat, he decided. It could remain as it was, ready to receive him, a broken man, at the end of his life, his money spent, or rather wasted, his hopes confounded. He lingered in the room, wondering how it would be, that last, that final state. In the half light, which was all the light that ever seemed to enter here, the grey-blue walls dissolved into kindly shadow, so that his eyes encountered no disquieting vista but rather a pregnant silence, a withholding, as if some secrets remained to be disclosed, and would not be disclosed until due time had passed. He hung his jacket in the wardrobe and put on a navy blue cardigan. Even his clothes were suddenly dear to him, infinitely pathetic, pointless, and unprotected, careful suitable garments, carefully chosen, carefully tended. They would be left behind: there would be no room for much in the one bag he intended to pack.

  He turned to the window, which looked out onto gardens now bleached by the bitter weather. He was within shouting distance of Radnor Place, the scene of his first social débâcle. Since that time he had avoided confrontations of principle or belief, in the hope that his modest pretensions would allow him to pass through life unnoticed, as they had done. Until now. The supreme irony was that he had almost reached the
end of his life before being visited by this powerful impulse to change it, and that the catalyst was someone of whom he equally powerfully disapproved. He could not solve this conundrum. He could only live through it and hope to survive it.

  For the first time in this whole inexplicable adventure he felt a sadness at leaving, and realised that this sadness could only be mitigated by hopes of an eventual return. A sudden shower of rain struck the window, and he stepped back with a shudder. The sun, the sun! Suddenly, passionately, he longed for it, longed to cancel this pitiless nadir of the year, and of his spirits. No amount of feasting or celebration could obliterate this month, though he had done his best with it in recent years, had endured the enforced stay in the Hardwicks’ Surrey house, resigned to the good cheer and the jolly routines. These kind friends looked upon his visit as forming part of a Christmas tradition, as bogus as it was instant. He had already told them that he would be away. And however strange his new surroundings, they would surely be less strange than the churchgoing and the heavy meal and the dark nights that would otherwise have awaited him. Every year he had sworn to stay at home; every year he had given in to their insistence. Now he could not even stay at home. Home was a difficult concept at the best of times, and never more so than at this moment.

  He went into the kitchen and put the ham on a plate, together with a slice of the chicken. He contemplated the salad, then stowed it away, only to delay the moment at which he would discard it. He cut the bread and poured a glass of the wine, which fortunately was at the right temperature. A strange calm seemed to have succeeded his former excitement. He had almost forgotten that this afternoon was to be anything out of the ordinary. He tasted the cheese, which necessitated another glass of wine. By the time he got up to make some coffee he noticed that the bottle was three-quarters empty. No matter: he had always had a good head, and there was no danger of his losing it now, for he had already lost it. He washed up, carefully turning the fine plates which he had bought in a junk shop in Brighton; he admired once more their solid weight and their confident pattern, as if he might never see them again. He supposed that once he had disappeared the plates would be removed by Mrs Cardozo, who also admired them, along with anything else she considered to be superfluous to his requirements. He would be dispossessed, of course, but in a sense the process was already under way, and its progress was in any event ineluctable.

  He had managed to avoid or to overlook the fact that his afternoon would be a long interval of waiting for the verdict to be delivered on what remained of his future. He could do nothing until Katy informed him of her decision. In a curious way the decision was no longer his: it had passed from his grasp, and with its passing he was reduced to powerlessness. A childlike feeling of sadness, together with the half-light of the room, and his tired limbs, stole over him; he felt as if he were back in the house in Reading, and as if his mother had just left his bedroom, cigarette in hand. He had always slept heavily in that room, either out of despair or out of pity for the ruined woman who wandered into it when he was not there, and left her disturbing presence to imprint the brown carpet and the Jacobean curtains. Instinctively he removed his shoes and lay down under the quilt. The wine had acted on his stretched nerves like a sedative, and was interfering with his ability to plan what he would say to Katy when she came that afternoon. He would be as reticent as he could manage: that had been his stance all along. What he feared now was a breakdown of his reserve, a rage, an outcry if she resisted him. He was on the edge. Again the deep throb of his original excitement strengthened his resolve. He felt the almost intolerable emotional tension of one who is face to face with the action of a lifetime. In that moment he left his previous life behind, and there might have been no beginning, no home, no parentage, no birthright, only the prospect of a future so uncharted that he seemed to have passed at once into an ageless adulthood, never again to know innocence, or irresponsibility, or self-esteem, but always to be on the rack of mature considerations, arrived at coldly, and without illusions.

  While pondering the enormity of his situation he fell asleep. Almost at once, it seemed, he had a dream of his parents, looking young and lighthearted, but heavily made up, like Kabuki players. They appeared to be ministering to each other, but without anxiety, without rancour, the rancour which had dogged them in later years. Somehow, in this dream, he realised that he was seeing them as they had been when they were young, before he knew them, newly married, perhaps, certainly optimistic. Even in the dream he felt a pang of love and envy, and these two emotions obliterated his later distresses as though they had never been. Simply he was seeing them for the first time, as they really were, without relation to himself and his needs, and thus exonerated from his later strictures. They had been unsatisfactory as parents, that he knew. What he had never known, but knew now, was their bewilderment, their disappointment that age had not maintained the promise of youth. Now he himself, struggling with that same disappointment, knew them to be as innocent as the common ruck of mortality. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he threw in his lot with them, with their ordinary unhappiness, which was perhaps their legacy to him, and his true inheritance.

  The sleep that followed this dream—for he had briefly surfaced before the tide dragged him down again—was so profound that when he awoke it was to a feeling of finality. It is all over, he thought, and knew it to be true. He was not even surprised. If the past had claimed him in one sense, the present exerted its hold in another. There would be no flight to the sun: his future lay with the bitter seasons of reality. There would be no leaving this room, which now seemed kindly, even hospitable. He saw his madness for what it was, the final upheaval of an unlived life, such as might have tormented some saint in the desert. Was not St Antony tempted by visions of lascivious women? St Antony’s remedy had been to scourge himself and pray. He, Bland, would no doubt undergo similar discomfort in the light of future reflection.

  He prepared the tea-tray with a feeling of gravity, arranging biscuits on a plate, as if in the hope of tempting an invalid. But when the bell rang and he opened the door it was to a Katy dressed once again in her T-shirt and jeans, her feet encased in an incongruously smart pair of black suede pumps. She wandered past him into the flat without her usual calculated greeting. Strangely, neither wanted to be the first to speak. He went into the kitchen to make the tea; that done, he placed the tray in front of her as he had done so many times before. Her inaction made her seem listless and defeated. He was not too surprised by this: her attention span was limited. He had seen her yawn and slump into exaggerated inanition, only to recover her colour and her spirits if some diversion were on offer. That, in fact, was how he had first seen her. This, though, was different. Her hair was unwashed; her eyes refused to meet his. There was an air of hostility about her, different in kind from her usual anger, heavier, more immovable.

  He understood. He had been too slow for her, too old, too prudent. Her efforts had been in vain; he had not endowed her in whatever way she had expected; he had not made his life over to her, together with his flat, his worldly goods, as she had willed him to. He knew that she cared nothing for him, that she probably felt for him the contempt that was in keeping with her age, and with his. Now that she was leaving—a fact of which he was in no doubt—she did not bother to hide her dislike.

  ‘So you’re going back to America?’ he said.

  She nodded. She picked up The Times, and scanned, with apparent interest, the temperatures on the back page.

  ‘Back to Mr Singer?’

  She tossed The Times to the floor. ‘Well, there’s nothing for me here, is there?’

  ‘When are you going?’

  ‘As soon as I can borrow the money for the ticket,’ she said, careless now.

  He looked at her averted face, averted not from embarrassment but from indifference.

  ‘I can help you with that,’ he said, aware of a stunning disappointment. He hardly knew what to say, since her responses were apparently in abeyance. ‘Perha
ps if I gave you a cheque?’

  ‘That might be best,’ she replied absently.

  There was a pause. ‘Well, if you’re sure … You’ll let me know when you’re leaving?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  Her expression had become severe, as if she had surprised him in some shortcoming. It was he, finally, who was embarrassed. To stem the blush he felt creeping over him he took his cheque-book from the drawer of his writing-table and made out a sizeable cheque, one which he thought might cover everything: the ticket, a hotel, a flat even, meals, new clothes. He wanted her to be safe, though he had denied her safety. But safety bored her, like his careful room, his careful solitary life. He thought it all for the best, but felt a terrible fatigue, as if he might be ill.

  She examined the cheque briefly, then put it in the pocket of her jeans. No further words, it seemed, were to be exchanged. Words were in any case superfluous, since they had no need to explain themselves. She turned her back, walked towards the door, and twiddled her fingers in farewell. Already she had recovered a little of her purposiveness. When she left the silence was profound.