Altered States Page 3

  I detest these gatherings, mainly because I sense that they are makeshift. We have no family, nor warm loving circle which would automatically respond to our needs and on which we could call in an emergency, should one arise. I detested London and its Sunday silence which was now to be my portion. Not that I rebelled against my inheritance: rather I sensed my mother’s loneliness, and knew that she would soon be my sole responsibility, at least until I married, as I supposed I should have to. Indeed I saw marriage as a way of ensuring my mother’s safety, although I knew that she loved me as I was, without entanglements. My line of conduct was to be dictated by two conflicting duties, getting married in order to supply my mother and myself with something resembling a family, and staying unattached in order to remain my mother’s confidant. For the time being all was well. My mother was not old (I consigned my fleeting impression of age down to the strain of the occasion) and she was in good health. I had to remember that she was shy, unprotected by a man, and quite undemanding. When the time came I would enquire more deeply into the circumstances of her life, which I supposed to be quite comfortable, and arrange my own life as well as I could to answer her longings without sacrificing my own.

  ‘And you remember Sarah?’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ said a red-haired girl in a very short skirt, and immediately drifted away.

  That was to be the pattern of our relationship. As soon as I saw her I knew that I should be eternally seeking to attract her attention. I watched her for as long as I could: she seemed to be attended by two acolytes or bridesmaids.

  ‘Who are those girls?’ I asked my mother.

  ‘Friends of Sarah’s. She asked if she could bring them, and I thought it would be nice for you to see some young faces. You can talk to them later. Now I want you to meet Jenny.’

  ‘Jenny?’

  ‘Humphrey’s wife, dear.’

  ‘I thought she was called something else?’

  ‘We call her Jenny. That’s what Humphrey calls her. Such a darling, Alan. We’ve become firm friends.’

  I was prepared to embrace anyone who would be a firm friend to my mother, and shook hands warmly with a small trim woman of about my mother’s age who had her arm linked through that of the sagging Humphrey, his marital status thus advertised. He appeared to be as vague as ever, but now wore an innocent smile of something approaching happiness.

  ‘Well, Alan,’ he said. ‘Nice to see you again. This is my wife, Jenny,’ and he patted the hand that was passed through his arm.

  When I greeted his wife I could see what had attracted him to her in the first place, although to me, then, they seemed of an age so canonical that attraction was hardly in order. It was not her small rounded figure, nor her fair and largely unmarked face, so much as the timid smile of delight which she manifested whenever a favour came her way. I was apparently, at this moment, just such a favour, as would be any man who treated her with a level of respect. It occurred to me, at that moment of meeting, that such respect was something of a novelty to her, that marriage, even to Humphrey, was an unexpected bonus, and that she was prepared to discharge her domestic duties with a fervour perhaps denied to more settled, spoilt women, women who had married young and grown used to their status and attributes, and had learned to look outside their marriage for any excitement that they had decided was currently being denied to them. No wonder Humphrey wore a smile, albeit an uncertain one. His uncertainty was of no account. His wife was certain enough for both of them.

  In the midst of this crowd—and by now there were about fifty people in the room—they looked archaic, ill-matched, perhaps, but welded together. They were each other’s last chance, or so it seemed to me. They even made me feel a little wistful. I think all men long secretly to find the woman whom they can trust to look after them, with whom they can regress in the intervals of making love. This was now clearly Humphrey’s good fortune, and I longed to know what benevolent providence had brought the two of them together, in Paris, of all places, a city which I thought favoured only the young and the assured. She looked at him fondly, while he stood there, with his unfocused smile, an embarrassed but happy man, one unprepared for happiness after years of silent familial closeness, the nearest he had ever come to personal fulfilment. As if unconscious of itself, his hand stole out to pat hers from time to time, and when it did her face lit up, as if they had been married that very morning.

  She was a pretty woman, with that peculiar air of expectation that made her seem younger than her age. In a crowd such as this she did not attract much attention; it was only near the source of her security that she seemed to bloom, and more, to give out rays of benevolence. There was nothing in her appearance that singled her out; her figure, in her rather severe high-necked blue dress, was unremarkable, but her feet, I noticed, were frankly ugly, larger than one might have expected, and with an odd broken look, as if her shoes had had to be beaten out of shape in an effort to accommodate them. Her hands, by contrast, were small and pretty, and if she kept her left hand so constantly through Humphrey’s arm it was perhaps to keep her wedding ring in evidence. She beamed at me with such affection that I felt obscurely flattered, though I had never set eyes on her before that moment.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said, although it felt odd and inappropriate for the young man I was then to offer congratulations to an elderly woman on her marriage to a much older man. The young man I was then was also more intent on tracking down Sarah, whose red head could be seen in a distant corner, and who, momentarily detached from her two friends, seemed to be talking animatedly to a man I vaguely remembered as my mother’s regular escort to the theatre.

  A hand posed on my hand brought me back to order and to Jenny who was smiling at me fondly.

  ‘I have so wanted to meet you, Alan. My dear Alice talks of you all the time. Has she told you about me?’

  ‘Yes indeed. Forgive me for mentioning this, but your accent is quite French. Mother told me you were Polish.’

  She laughed delightedly. ‘But my dear, I lived in Paris for over thirty years. I went there as a young girl. I think of myself as a Parisienne.’ This last remark stirred Humphrey into some kind of protest. ‘But now of course I am English, an English wife with an English husband and an English family.’ She laughed again.

  I decided that there was no irony in this remark, although I could not distinguish the family to which she alluded. In brief there was no family: I had myself, only half an hour earlier, been regretting the fact. Certainly there was Humphrey, who took on some kind of importance now as a latter-day paterfamilias; certainly there were Sybil and Marjorie, who occupied a distant part of the room and seemed to be radiating awkwardness and isolation. They had come up from the country for this affair; despite their reluctant acceptance of my mother they never missed one of her parties. It gave them deep satisfaction to note that professional caterers had been hired to prepare the canapés and vol-au-vents. ‘I see you decided to have it catered, Alice,’ was usually their parting remark, thus leaving my mother with a reproachful vision of their former culinary munificence, or so they thought. I could not see that Sybil and Marjorie would be likely to extend the hand of friendship to the woman who had so effectively taken over their former charge. Of course there was Sarah, but Sarah did not seem to be part of anyone’s family. Sarah, at that moment, had summoned her two friends, who seemed to act as pilot fish, and was making for the table which had been set up as a bar.

  ‘Sarah,’ called Humphrey. ‘Come and say hello. We’ve seen nothing of you.’

  She turned her back to the table and surveyed them for a moment before deciding to come over. To myself she paid no attention at all. Then she strolled languorously to Humphrey’s side and linked her arm through his, so that he stood with a woman on each arm. Despite the fact that this seemed to enchant him—for even a man as old as Humphrey was susceptible to flattery—I could see that Sarah’s intention was to point up the stunning contrast between herself, taut as a whipcord in her minute bla
ck suit and her low-cut silk shirt, and her uncle’s elderly wife with her broken feet. In this she succeeded. Jenny detached her arm from that of her husband and moved nearer to Sarah. I registered the fact that Sarah was the family to which she now wished to lay claim. As if to reinforce this impression, Jenny put out a tentative hand and stroked Sarah’s cheek. I hope that she turned away before she saw the girl’s slight moue of distaste. Or was it a grimace? Whatever it was, we all decided not to have noticed. Sarah was to be allowed to behave badly on account of her youth, although she was not that young. I reckoned that she must have been twenty-three or -four, old enough to know better. At the same time I decided that she was unrepentant, perhaps because she had no fear of censure. She was certainly rather alarming. I felt my pulse rate increase, as it always did in the presence of danger. Humphrey too was a little abashed. The only person who did not seem put out was Jenny, who continued to smile fondly.

  ‘Doesn’t she look lovely?’ she said, and there was a longing in her voice and in her eyes that would have told anyone attentive enough that her idea of family was perhaps no more than a lovingly cherished fantasy. In that moment, a moment of intense embarrassment, I saw that Parisian background as lonely, an affair of stratagems. I had lived there, I knew how hard it was to exist on a small amount of money, to live in a cheap hotel, never quite warm enough, never quite clean enough, to look forward to one meal a day for the relief of sitting in a restaurant and not in one’s room eating a baguette out of a twist of tissue paper and perhaps a slice of ham or a piece of cheese, calculating that if one did not stop for coffee one would have nearly enough for the cinema that evening, and forgetting the discomfort of all these calculations for the sheer joy of being free to walk the streets of the beautiful city at any hour of the day or night. That was what I had felt, but I was young, and I was not a woman. To a woman of Jenny’s age (and what exactly had she been doing there? How had she been living?), the reality must have seemed quite different. I resolved to get the story out of my mother, in whom everyone confided. If I could recognise anything I could recognise poverty. Perhaps that was why I was so reluctant to go back there, to the cheap hotel that I had thought so romantic at the time. Even the innocuous hardships I had suffered had left their mark. I had been happy there, but perhaps, finally, I was more at home here, in my mother’s drawing-room, in London, on a misty Sunday in November.

  Jenny leaned forward confidentially and took my hand. ‘Your mother and I have become great friends,’ she said. ‘We have such lovely long talks. And we go out! We have afternoons out! Humphrey likes to rest in the afternoon, so dear Alice and I set out together for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Where do you go?’ I asked. I was distracted once more by Sarah’s red hair, her black figure sauntering across the room, the calculating way in which she put olives into her small pursed mouth. She had resumed her preferred stance, near the bar, so that every man in search of a drink, either for himself or for his wife, would have to confront her. ‘What do you do?’ I said to Jenny, with an effort at enthusiasm.

  ‘We go to the Royal Academy, if there’s anything on. Or we go round the stores. That’s what we really enjoy. And we have tea out, in a hotel. And then I put Alice into a taxi and go home to cook Humphrey’s meal.’

  And my mother goes home to an empty flat, I thought. I resolved to spend more time with her, as I had resolved on many previous occasions. But she was a self-reliant woman, grown used to her own company, and had never burdened me with expectations I could not honour. I was glad she had found distraction in the company of this touching little woman, though how much pleasure she really derived from an afternoon spent window-shopping or taking tea in a hotel was a mystery to me. In fact the idea was vaguely monstrous. My dignified mother … But perhaps she had been lonely, had been glad just precisely of this sort of undemanding contact so unexpectedly provided for her. I would do more for her, I decided; I would make a point of eating Sunday lunch with her. Maybe I could take her out to lunch in one of those hotels she now favoured. This seemed a recipe for old age. I already had the restrictions of the office to cope with, after my years of freedom; now it appeared that I was to take on the burden of a family weekend, I who had just decided that I had no family. The family I would eventually want was situated in the future, had no shape, but was radiant with promise. My mother had already belonged to someone else’s family. Much as I loved her—and I did love her very deeply—I did not want her to spoil my chances.

  ‘Alan,’ called my mother warningly, and with a nod of her head indicated Brian, who was surrounded by Sarah and her friends and thus effectively separated from Felicity. Felicity, I could see, would not be gracious in such a situation.

  ‘Will you excuse me?’ I said to Jenny. ‘I think Mother …’

  She smiled and patted my hand again. ‘You go, dear. Go and find the young people. Go and find Sarah.’

  The young people, once I had detached them from Brian, closed in on me with the vaguely menacing jollity of nymphs or maenads. Their scents conflicted; hair was tossed carelessly over shoulders, without regard for the plates of food being circulated.

  ‘Sarah I know,’ I began ponderously. ‘But I don’t believe I’ve met …’

  ‘Berthe,’ said the dark one. ‘Berthe Rigaud. Sarah and I were pen friends. She used to come and stay with us in the holidays.’ She spoke with the near cockney accent of the upper-class English girl, only the faintest of intonations giving her away as French. She seemed a cut above the other two socially; that English, I guessed, had been learned at her nanny’s knee. She too was in black, a black suit, with a low-cut black camisole, which she filled abundantly. The other girl, in contrast, although doing her best and parading the same insouciance, seemed out of place, as though she had willed herself into animation and had even had a little too much to drink for that very purpose. In her prim blouse, with its piecrust collar, she was obviously self-conscious. ‘Angela Milsom,’ she confided. ‘We’re actually staying with Sarah this weekend. Your mother very kindly invited us.’ She seemed grateful for my presence, as if only a man could save her from other women. I believe I must have subconsciously noted this fact at the time.

  ‘That house!’ shrieked Berthe. ‘In the middle of nowhere! You have to get rid of it, Sarah. No wonder you preferred to come to Paris. The invitation’s still open, by the way.’

  ‘I fully intend to get rid of it,’ said Sarah, feeding in another olive.

  ‘You want to sell the house?’ I sounded fatuous, even to myself. ‘I can help you with the conveyancing, if you like. I’m a solicitor.’

  ‘We know,’ said Berthe. ‘Your mother told us.’ She seemed to find this amusing. In retrospect I can see that it was.

  ‘Have you got a card?’ asked Sarah. The very question seemed to turn me into a terminal bore.

  ‘I’ll send you my address,’ I said. ‘I presume you’re still at Parsons Green?’

  ‘Not for long.’

  ‘But Sarah,’ protested Angela. ‘It’s a lovely house. And the garden is, well, lovely. And anyway doesn’t it belong to your mother?’ A legal mind, I noted.

  ‘It actually belonged to my father,’ said Sarah. ‘So it’s come to me, right? My mother doesn’t live there any more. I’m looking for a flat in town. Maybe you can help me with that too.’ She had obviously inherited her mother’s vagueness about my functions, although in this case annexing them for personal use.

  For the first time she seemed to look at me, drawn perhaps by the intensity of my gaze. I had been looking at her, or perhaps looking for her, for a good while now. My higher faculties noted the symmetry of her features, her pre-Raphaelite shock of hair, her icy blue eyes, and registered her as not exactly a beautiful woman but certainly an arresting one. I also registered the fact that she was both vague and unaccommodating, with the sort of insistent presence that made no concession to others. I blushed, in my usual deplorable fashion, and felt ridiculous, so much so that under the pretext of finding an
other drink I was obliged to move away. A wave of laughter followed my no doubt scarlet back, though when I was brave enough, and angry enough, to return to the group with the last of the champagne I noticed that I was not the only one to blush: the girl called Angela was a deep and unhappy red.

  ‘You’re not going?’ I heard my mother protest, in the slightly carrying voice she used in these circumstances. The protest was to disguise the fact that she had had enough, and was longing for a quiet cup of tea and a rest in the silence of her bedroom.

  ‘Alice, it’s been lovely,’ various people concurred, as they moved towards the door.

  ‘Very nice, Alice,’ said Sybil, whom I was reluctantly obliged to join. ‘Your usual caterers? Marjorie quite enjoyed the little pizzas. Unusual, she thought them.’

  ‘If you’re ever down our way, Alice,’ said Marjorie. She did not consider this an unfinished sentence, and so did not bother to finish it.

  ‘Goodbye, Alice. Goodbye, Alan,’ said Humphrey. ‘Come and see us. Like old clocks, do you?’ he asked me. I had not the slightest interest in old clocks. ‘Got one or two fine examples, part of my father’s collection. Be happy to show them to you, if you’re interested.’ I expressed appreciation.

  ‘Alan,’ said Brian, waylaying me on my much impeded passage to a bedroom to collect people’s coats. ‘A word.’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘I want to get one thing straight. That girl, Sarah, she, well … I mean she would have …’