A Closed Eye Read online

  Never very expertly shaved—unusual, she thought, in a diplomat, although he was now long retired—he exuded bonhomie and waves of scent as he followed her into the salon, rubbing his hands with enjoyment.

  ‘Such an interesting day,’ he said, in his faultless English. ‘I went through my photographs. All the early albums, you know. Father and I on holiday at Bembridge. We went there every year when I was a boy. Father had the yacht then, of course.’

  ‘Your mother died young, I think you told me?’ said Harriet, pouring out the Muscadet. She had heard this story before, many times, but it served as a subject for conversation in this strange place.

  ‘I never knew her,’ he said. ‘She died when I was a baby. But I have photographs. A beautiful woman. Father never forgot her, never thought of marrying again.’

  ‘And how did you grow up to be so contented? One would think you had had a great deal of love to be so, well, so happy, so satisfied … I don’t know how to put it. You always strike me as a very fulfilled person.’

  ‘Fulfilled!’ He took a handful of peanuts, a couple of which came to rest on his canary-yellow tie. ‘I am fulfilled, Harriet! But I owe that entirely to Missy.’

  ‘Of course, Missy,’ said Harriet. The beloved governess, with whom he had certainly been in love, as a child, as a boy, perhaps even as a man.

  ‘I cannot remember life without Missy,’ he went on. ‘She was with me until she died, you know.’ As always, at this point in his recital his eyes filled with tears. ‘She kept house for me, when I was working.’

  ‘Where did you live?’ she asked.

  ‘Hyde Park Gate. A flat, just big enough for the two of us. When she died I came back here: I couldn’t have stayed on. In any event I had already retired. There was nothing to keep me.’ His face fell into the pouches and folds characteristic of old age. For a moment he looked almost mature.

  ‘So we both ended up in the Résidence Cécil.’

  ‘But you will go home, Harriet! Once you have recovered your spirits. And what shall I do without you?’

  She smiled at him. ‘I shall have to go back to London at some point, I suppose. The house is still there. But that is what I cannot face—the empty house.’

  His face sprang into an energetic grimace of sympathy.

  ‘Ah, yes. The empty house. Without Freddie. I understand.’

  She was silent, as always, when this matter arose, not quite knowing how to convey the fact that Freddie’s death was the last link in the chain that had once bound her to her own life, that she had in more ways than one outlived him, even before he died, and that she now functioned in ghostly form, as if all the living substance had been withdrawn, and only her strong and obstinate heart, beating away imperviously, held her on this earth.

  ‘Have you no one left?’ he ventured.

  ‘Why, yes. My parents are still alive, incredibly enough. I don’t know why I say that, but they always strike me as too young to be old. They are in their late seventies now, but still very active. They’ve always been popular, sociable. They used to love dancing. Well, those days are past, perhaps. They have aged, recently. Since my daughter died,’ she said steadily.

  There was a silence. ‘Ma pauvre amie,’ he said finally, stretching out a mottled hand to her. But she got up, took the bottle, and poured him another glass of wine.

  ‘I do not like the past, Joseph,’ she said. ‘I am not like you. Nothing in my story appeals to me. And yet, as a girl, I was happy. Happy in a very simple sense. It goes with youth, or it did in my case. Not in yours,’ she smiled at him. ‘Now that I look back I see a sort of progressive darkening. Paradise lost. And yet it was a very humble paradise. I was a good but silly girl,’ she said. ‘And I have been a good and excessively foolish woman.’

  ‘You are still young,’ he protested.

  ‘Young? I am fifty-three. And I feel very old.’

  Her tone frightened him. He did not know how to counter such bleakness, having always to hand the consolation of easy tears. Seeing this, she smiled at him.

  ‘But I haven’t told you my news!’ she said. ‘I may be having a young friend to stay. I have known her since she was a child; she is my goddaughter, or as good as. Her mother always said that I was to be her godmother, but in fact she had so much on her mind that matters got a little confused. But I have always thought of myself as … Well, I have tried to be close. Such a talented girl. Perhaps we could come with you on one of your days in Geneva or Lausanne. She may find it dull here; I hadn’t thought of that. I shall rely on you, Joseph. You always have such good ideas.’

  His face brightened. It usually did, she reflected, plumping up cushions after he had gone. Mention a treat, an outing, a festivity, however modest, and he was a child again. But she wished he would not always talk of the past. The past to him was his golden treasure, all love, all happiness. Fortunate man to possess such capital! In comparison, her own past—she meant the past before, the pre-historic past—had been drab but dreamy, the sort of past that someone with no ascertainable history or parentage has, someone in whom the illusions of childhood outwit circumstance. With parents like children, frail, demanding, fearful, restless, as if some pleasure were being withheld from them. Only recently she had begun to think of them as adults, feeling pity for lives so haphazard, feeling gratitude that at last they were happy, that their old age was in some miraculous way their youth restored, that they no longer thought much of her, she who had interrupted their idyll so many years ago, and had more recently dealt them a terrible blow, just when they were beginning to think that life had been merciful with them, that at last—at last—they might make some concession to reality and admit that they were perhaps growing older, not old, not yet, but able in good conscience, and with due deference to their legendary youth, to relax, and with little more than a backward glance, to settle down.

  UNLIKE Monsieur Papineau, her only friend in this curious aftermath to a life, she could not recall her childhood with anything like the quality of affection which he lavished on the past. And yet she had been quite happy, although always aware that her advent in the lives of her parents had not been entirely welcome. But parents like hers were not destined to become parents, had been too young, too feckless, too irresistible to each other to bestow themselves on a child, particularly the kind of child she had turned out to be, so, as they said when they contemplated her, unlike themselves.

  What she knew of those parents she had had to reconstruct later, for they, understandably enough, only spoke of themselves in glowing cinematic terms. She could not, they thought, take in their wonderful romance; they had remained too close, two brave (they thought) people against the world. All their daughter knew was that they had always been good-looking. That was their birthright and their charm. As lovers they were picturesque, notable. She had been brought up on the legend of their beauty, although it was already diminished by the time she knew them. Her mother, Merle, had been a ravishingly pretty girl in the fashion of the time, petulant, provocative. As Merle Harrap she had been trained in pretty ways: singing and dancing lessons, deportment, nothing practical, for she was expected to marry young. She met Hughie Blakemore in London, just before Hughie went to Oxford. Both knew immediately that they were meant for each other, that Oxford was an interval wished on them by outside forces, that he would break free in order to spend his time with her. In any event he was restless, weak-willed, evidently not a scholar, though handsome, dashing, and conventional in every other respect. He broke his widowed mother’s heart in leaving at the end of his fourth term in order to live with Merle, who was then taking dancing and elocution lessons, prior, as she thought, to a career on the stage. They lived like birds, on Hughie’s allowance, enjoying their youth. They married, to everyone’s relief, soon after, at a scandalously young age (a fact they exaggerated in later life). Harriet was born in 1939, by which time Hughie had joined the RAF. They were so young, so dashing, that Harriet’s birth passed almost unnoticed. Except, ‘Oh, Lo
rd,’ said Merle, when shown the baby. ‘It may fade as she gets older,’ said the nurse, pulling the shawl a little tighter round the baby’s face, where the red mark appeared so incongruous beneath the wide innocent eyes. Merle felt for her, as well as love, a kind of reluctant pity, almost a distaste. She was glad to leave the child with her nurse and to put on the little black dress, the fur cape, and the cocktail hat to go off to her young husband, equally dashing in his air force uniform, with the officer’s cap pushed back from his forehead, and the white silk scarf draped carelessly round his neck. How they drank! How they danced! In smoky basements, in hotel ballrooms, very occasionally in the officers’ mess when he wanted to show her off. And she did him proud, with her neat figure and her high heels, and her red, red lipstick which she renewed frequently, lifting her eyes provocatively from her mirror to gaze into his. He adored her, she him, although she was not having as good a time as she suspected he was. He had the gift, had always had it. But after she got a job as a mannequin at Marshall and Snelgrove things got a bit brighter. Then there was a bad period when she did not hear from him, and then came the news that his plane had been shot down over Osnabrück and he had been taken prisoner.

  When she got him back he was different. The absence in his eyes frightened her; he seemed docile yet distracted. She resolved never to let him out of her sight again. With what she had saved, and his full disability pension and gratuity, she rented a little shop in William Street, filling it with the kind of smart black dresses that she herself liked to wear, and later with the dark greens and navies favoured by what she privately thought of as the old trouts in Pont Street. These splendid women were puzzled by the Labour government and the outbreak of an unspectacular peace. ‘We held the fort,’ they assured one another, disappointed when no one asked them how they had done it. Hughie sat in the room at the back of the shop, glad to be safe. As time went on he grew more confident, emerging for a chat with the old ladies—he was still very handsome—opening the door, carrying their parcels to the car, making coffee. The arrangement worked, well enough. The flat above the shop was small, which meant that the nurse had to go, and the landlord was somehow shady, lavish with extra clothes coupons, and perpetually mentioning that the rent would have to be reviewed. Merle grew very thin, smart, haggard, brilliant-eyed. Harriet went to school.

  There were moments of peace, of unity, of something like sweetness. After school Harriet would sit with Hughie in the room behind the shop and do her homework. Hughie would place before her, with slightly shaking hands, a cup of weak tea, and later, even more tremulously, a doughnut on a cracked plate. He would subside into his chair with a sigh of contentment and address himself to his own tea, but sometimes his hand shook so violently that he could only raise his cup to his lips with a visible effort at control. After this he would wink at Harriet. ‘Everything okay, sweetie?’ he would ask. His slang dated from before the war. ‘Everything tickety-boo?’ Yes, she would nod, for she was a stoic in her way. ‘Merle means blackbird,’ she might say, looking up from her French homework. ‘Blackbird, eh?’ he would reply. ‘To me she’s Helen of Troy.’ And he would get up and go into the shop, as if unable to be parted from her for another minute. And the old ladies from Pont Street would smile as he put his arm round her waist, although Merle herself was now too tired and too busy for this kind of thing. ‘I can get it for you, Mrs Armstrong,’ she would be saying. ‘I saw the material the last time I went to Maddox Street.’ In Maddox Street something mysterious went on once a month and resulted in the exchange of scarce cloth for illegal coupons. Merle gave the material to an outworker, and everyone was precariously satisfied.

  It was demanding, it was even hazardous, but they managed. Regularly a car drew up and out stepped their landlord, Mr Latif, a sharp-eyed Lebanese businessman, come to pick up the post-war pieces in the form of derelict property. Those were the days when the Lebanese were rich, active, and influential, a merchant class of infinite resource. ‘Hughie! Harriet!’ Merle would call, agitation in her voice. They would present a smiling front, coffee and cakes would be brought out, and Mr Latif would lay aside his hat and his coat with the razored lapels and relax a little. Few people welcomed him these days, and he liked the girl, with her eyes flowering candidly above the birthmark. She did not wince when he patted her cheek, seeing no harm, as indeed there was none. He liked her for that perception. She was perhaps young for her age; he liked that too. ‘Eh bien, ma petite, comment allez-vous ces jours-ci?’ he would say, in order to see how she was doing in French. ‘Très bien, merci, Monsieur Latif,’ she would reply. It was all he could get out of her, but all the same he was quite pleased. He was sorry for her, doing her lessons at the back of the shop, with only the impotent father for company, for so he thought of him. It was perhaps pity for Harriet (or was it for Merle, who accepted his embraces?) that kept him from raising the rent: the shop did not interest him, although he had his eye on the flat, which he intended to repossess. But he was in no hurry, and in his way he was glad of the welcome they gave him. He thought them doomed, but hoped that the girl would be all right. At Christmas he brought her a large box of crystallized fruits. She thanked him and put them on one side. Hughie’s shaking fingers seized on them with delight. He craved sweet things, as well as sweet thoughts, sweet words, sweet music. There was not enough sweetness in the world to satisfy Hughie, who aged only physically, and that barely at all: his mind retained the ardour and goodwill he had possessed as a boy. Merle, seeing him smile with satisfaction as he performed some small task—a cup to be washed, a parcel to be tied—asked herself whether she had the strength to maintain this household all on her own, and then told herself that she not only could but must.

  Sometimes it was manageable. The little back room was warm in winter, when the rain lashed the windows. Merle, taking a break, would kick off her high-heeled shoes, and Hughie would massage her feet. Harriet would close her books and run next door for coconut macaroons. Tea would be brewed and cigarettes smoked. When she saw her mother relaxed Harriet would open her book again. They asked nothing of her, seemed glad of her presence, did not enquire into her thoughts. It was in many ways a sheltered upbringing, so much so that Harriet had no longing for the outside world. The shop and the back room, so warm, so peaceful, and her simple father and her brave mother were company enough for her. And then there was school, which she also loved, and the public library. She was quite happy.

  She had a friend, whom she worshipped, Tessa Dodd, a cut above her, indeed a cut above the rest. The Dodds lived in Cadogan Square. Colonel Dodd, a solid invincible-looking man, went to Whitehall every day and did something patriotic. Mrs Dodd had her own dressmaker and did not patronize ‘Merle’. Tessa was tall and fair and commanding, a heroine to her contemporaries. Harriet would be invited for tea, along with Pamela Harkness and Mary Grant, whom she also thought of as her friends, although there was an indefinable difference. They were kind enough, though the three of them were occasionally distracted by laughter which left Harriet puzzled. Skirts would be tried on in Tessa’s bedroom after tea, blouses exchanged. The blouses were unbuttoned at the top, to judge the effect. ‘Tessa, you can’t!’ Mary would shriek, and they would collapse. After that, exhausted, and perhaps a little disgusted, they would kindly include Harriet in their conversation. ‘What are you doing tonight, Hattie?’ Mary or Pamela would ask. ‘Washing my hair’ or ‘Reading’, she would say, and be aware of a giggle suppressed. But they were kind, and she was always asked again.

  (Oh, my companions, thought Mrs Lytton, in her exile. My lost companions.)

  Yet of the four of them she was the one to marry first, although there was little sign of this. She went to a secretarial school in Oxford Street, where again she was perfectly happy, happy above all after her day’s typing, when she walked home in the darkening evening, at one with the home-going crowd. Even at the age of twenty she perceived the beauty of this, the virtue of doing a day’s work and receiving the reward, the legitimate rewa
rd, of the lighted streets and the buses, and the girls—like herself—in their smart cheap clothes. In the summer she walked through the park and thought that this was all she needed, or indeed knew, of wider spaces and of fresher air. Tessa she still saw occasionally, but Tessa was busy most evenings, and in the daytime attended a cookery course with Mary and Pamela. But though distracted and high-spirited Tessa was still kind. The others she did not see, nor did she particularly want to, since Pamela had advised her to cover her birthmark—now largely faded, but still visible—with heavy make-up. Harriet overlooked this, but could not quite forget it. ‘I must rise above it,’ she said to herself in her bedroom that night, after shedding a few tears. ‘I must simply live on a higher plane.’

  She got a job typing invoices in a bookshop, which she also loved. Again, she was perfectly happy. From the back of one shop to the back of another seemed to her a logical progression, and a satisfactory one. She had no ambition. She still walked home, from Cork Street now, and still perceived the beauty of the procedure. One evening there was a visitor sitting with her father, a man who had been in his squadron and who had thought to look him up. He stood up when Harriet entered, and was introduced as Freddie Lytton. Both Merle and Hugh seemed excited and gratified by his presence, although Mr Lytton appeared taciturn in comparison. To judge from the fine sheen on his hair and his complexion he was wealthy. He seemed contained, thoughtful, a dry laugh merely escaping him from time to time. A man good at keeping his own counsel, making his way. He was with an oil company, he said: his large car stood at the door. Harriet, flushed from the evening air, was grateful to him for making her father laugh. There was a bottle of whisky on the little desk, and next to it the visitor’s fine black gloves. He was perhaps forty-five or forty-six, elderly. ‘Your father showed me how to make up my bed,’ he told her. ‘I hadn’t a clue.’ Merle and Hugh laughed. Harriet joined in politely.