Look at Me Page 3

  Like my mother, I have changed nothing in the flat. Although the days are so different, the nights, when I hear Nancy shuffling down the corridor to lock up, and shuffling back again, are just the same. The food is the same. And I can make no more impression on the decor than did my mother. Nancy becomes distressed when I suggest that she remove those china and glass birds which she dusts every day and washes once a week. The flat is much too big, but we have shut off the extra three bedrooms and we do not get in each other’s way. Besides, I can walk to the office from here. Sometimes it seems impossible and I dream of a candid attic somewhere, all white and empty, looking over trees. Then I finger the gold brocade curtains, with their tasselled gold tie-backs, and I think how my mother used to stand at the window, waiting for my father to come home. And then I know that I will stay.

  Once Nick and Alix brought me home, when I first knew them. They looked around in amazement and I thought appreciation, for it is very comfortable. But when they saw the birds, recently washed by Nancy, they caught each other’s eye and within seconds they were helpless with laughter, staggering, leaning in pain over the backs of the awful hide chairs. They would sober up, only to start off again, and I had to join in, although I felt… What did I feel? That I had not really looked at them before, had not noticed how absurd they were. I put them into a drawer when Nick and Alix had left, but Nancy took them out again the following morning and gave them an extra wash. I said nothing.

  Otherwise Alix seemed very keen on the flat, although she gave way to another paroxysm when she asked for an ash-tray and was given one in green malachite with a green malachite cockatoo on the rim, gazing down as if into a tropical lagoon. As I don’t smoke myself I had never really noticed it, but I did manage to relegate it to the back of a cupboard after they had gone. Nancy found it, of course, and it was soon back in its old place.

  Alix and Nick, unexpected, unhoped for visitors, bringing me home in the car after I had had dinner with them, and invited in with a mixture of eagerness and panic. They, mildly curious, always willing to be diverted, consented to sit down but not to remove coats, scarves, gloves. It was not a real visit at all. They would not let me pour them a drink or make more coffee, and yet they lingered, frankly taking an inventory. ‘I’m interested in people’s houses,’ said Alix. ‘I used to have a very beautiful one of my own.’ At which she heaved a sigh, and pulled out her cigarettes and her lighter. ‘Don’t, darling,’ Nick commiserated, but at that moment I tendered the cockatoo ash-tray and provided a timely diversion. We all joined in her laughter, grateful to her for having raised her spirits again. I saw, even then, that Nick was perpetually on the watch for a change in her mood, and I thought how fortunate she was.

  Pulling herself together with an effort which made her seem more authoritative than usual, Alix said it was ridiculous my having all this space, and that I should put Nancy into a home and take their spare room, which they were always thinking of letting in order to bring in some extra money. She said they could keep an eye on me that way, and I am thinking about it, although Nancy is a problem, and I have said nothing to her yet. Alix became quite excited when she saw the large bathroom with its pale green thirties’tiles and the bath which is so much bigger than theirs. Indeed, the whole flat is more their size than mine, as Alix said, and became impatient when I said that I preferred theirs. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to live there,’ she said bitterly. ‘And anyway you’ve only seen it once.’Nick always gets unhappy when she starts on about their flat, and said, ‘Darling, why don’t you ask Fanny to sell you her flat, then she could take ours. It’s more her size.’This form of indirect speech struck me as odd; basically there was no reason why he could not have put this question himself. But of course he doesn’t really want to move; he just wants to make her happy. Her eyes narrowed, as they always do when mention is made of either buying or selling. She does mind it so dreadfully that she has come down in the world, as she says, pulling a comically tragic face, and that her family’s estate in Jamaica has been sold to pay debts. When money is mentioned she draws her fur coat around her and shivers, for she remembers how she never spent a winter in England until she learned the facts of her father’s insolvency. One must never mention either money or the cold to Alix. It makes Nick too wretched, as well as Alix herself.

  So we live in this flat, Nancy and I, and we hardly ever speak. Of course, I am not here in the daytime, and now, thank God, hardly ever here in the evenings either. There is no point in changing anything. There is more than enough money, I am almost ashamed to say, thinking of poor Alix shivering in her fur coat, although it is not the sort of money that Alix would be inclined to respect. My father originally inherited a toy factory in the East End from his rather idiosyncratic family. He sold it as soon as he could, and with his friend Sydney Goldsmith formed a sort of partnership for investing on the Stock Market. They were absurdly successful. They turned themselves into a limited company, had lunch two or three times a week in order to discuss business, diversified, and ended up rather rich. That is where my money comes from, and I care for it as little as my father did. He was mainly concerned with earning a living in a way which would leave him entirely free to devote himself to my mother. I think Sydney was the brains of the partnership. He was very fond of my father, and their friendship seems to have had a peaceful sweetness about it that I have never encountered since. Indeed, all the emotions of those days remain unmatched… After my father’s death Sydney would visit my mother once a month, always with a box of chocolates, which she gave to Nancy after he had left. ‘Well, Fanny,’ he would say to me in the hall, divesting himself of his sharp camel hair coat and his soft brown trilby hat (he always dressed like a gangster), ‘how is our dear one today?’ And he would sit with my mother and talk to her of my father, although I think he loved her himself Their innocence, it seems to me now, was unbounded. I slightly dreaded these visits, which followed the same pattern, the same antique pattern. I always had to stay in for Sydney’s visits, and although I recognized that he was, as my father claimed, the dearest of men, I would count the minutes until he took his leave. This too followed a prescribed pattern. He would bend over my mother’s chair and kiss her forehead and say, ‘Any time, Beatrice. Call on me any time. My time is yours.’He would always have a word with Nancy on the way out, would in fact make a point of knocking on the kitchen door to thank her for tea. She loved him too. He still comes, although I am rarely here. I believe he lives in Worthing now. I think he said something about moving down there. Cutting adrift, he said.

  The men in my mother’s life were like priests, ministering to her. They loved her in a way I hope I am never loved, my father, Sydney Goldsmith, and Dr Constantine, who looked after her for so many years. It is why I seek the company of the young, the urbane, the polished, the ambitious, the prodigiously gifted, like Nick and his friends. In my mother’s world, at least in those latter days, the men were kind, shy, easily damaged, too sensitive to her hurts. I never want to meet such men again. In a way I prefer them to be impervious, even if it means that they are impervious to me. I can no longer endure the lost look in the eye, the composure too easily shattered, the waning hope. I now require people to be viable, durable. I try to catch hold of their invulnerability and to apply it to myself I want to feel that the world is hard enough to withstand knocks, as well as to inflict them. I want evidence of good health and good luck and the people who enjoy both. Those priestly ministrations, that simple childish cheerfulness, that delicacy of intention, that sigh immediately suppressed, that wel- coming of routine attentions, that reliance on old patterns, that fidelity, that constancy, and the terror behind all of these things… No more.

  There is absolutely no need for me ever again to pretend that everything is all right. It is not, nor was it ever. It was unendurable, and I trained myself to endure it. The sad and patient virtues that seem to be enshrined in the very fabric, the very furnishings of this flat - the flightiness of its details battli
ng unsuccessfully against the gravity of its overall demeanour - none of this has any further part to play in my existence. The blamelessness that flourished within these walls left us all deficient in vices with which to withstand the world, deficient in the sort of knowledge that protects and patronizes one’s ventures. I know now that one needs to be as cunning as Ulysses in order to negotiate one’s own passage. I believe that I have learned this lesson - I certainly hope that I have - and I intend to put my knowledge to good use, although I am not sure how. If necessary I shall write myself into a new way of life, and it will be a very amusing one. I have a long way to go, that I know. The old pattern still flourishes, because it was so complete, because everything here conspires to prolong it. It is like a long old age, forever forlorn and waiting for the end. Every morning now I hurry to get up and out of the flat, before Nancy gets back from Mass; I hurry to the Library, ready to observe the endless foolishness of serious preoccupation. I note every quirk of the behaviour around me, and when I get home I write it all down and I feel the weight of all that virtue lift, leaving me lighter and almost ready to begin again.

  I shall probably stay here until Nancy dies, or leaves, which is improbable, although she has a sister in Cork. It is her home as much as it is mine, for I am ready to leave and have been for some time. I should like to move nearer to Nick and Alix, if not actually into their flat. I need their high spirits, their energy, their durability. I need to participate in the life that they seem to generate; I need those impromptu meals, those last minute decisions, that ease. Here all is cautious, prudent, safe. The lift gates clash, and Nancy shuffles on her worn slippers, and sometimes that tray appears in front of me with the same tiny meal prepared and I shudder inwardly, although I eat it to please her. I could never hurt her. But she appears to think that nothing has changed, and that it never will, and she doesn’t realize (why should she?) that this frightens me.

  It is all so different at the Frasers’. Alix, who has had servants all her life, can’t cook a thing except steak and spaghetti, which in fact she does rather well, so that her spaghetti has become ‘her’ spaghetti, and people congratulate her on it. She has this amusing way of interrogating absolute strangers if she thinks that they look interesting, and we have often gone down to the restaurant in the evening, just the three of us, and ended up with two more people, or three, or often just one, for she is always fascinated by people who are on their own; I don’t suppose she knows many. Everyone succumbs to Alix, who can ask the most outrageous questions without giving offence, and after a time they find they want to confide in her, and they usually do. They ring her up, usually the morning after they have met, and I am sure they all feel that they have made a significant acquaintance. I think they wait, as I did, for that first invitation. ‘You must come and have some of my spaghetti,’ said Alix that day when she dropped into the Library after having lunch with Nick. ‘It won’t be much,’she added,’because I’ve come down in the world’, and she pulled a funny little face and looked at Nick, and he looked back, in a way that made me feel a little awkWard, and they went off together and were away for quite a time. That is how and when I met her, although of course I have known Nick for much longer. He is always in and out of the Library.

  Anyway, I went round to dinner one evening, the very day after I had met Alix, and I was enchanted. I loved everything: the little flat off the King’s Road, and the tiny kitchen where I watched her cook the famous spaghetti, which was very good, and the spare room where I left my coat, and which is actually rather small… Above all I loved the feeling of being taken over by Alix, by somebody with her strength and her decisiveness, after that kingdom of the shades in which I had been living for so long. We had quite a bit of time together before Nick came in, and she told me all about her marvellous childhood in Jamaica, or travelling about the world with her father, and how she misses all that vivid and strenuous life. I suppose it is rather dull being a doctor’s wife in London after all that, but the amazing thing is that she really takes an interest in Nick’s work and is always willing to help. I think that is marvellous of her, spending so much of her time with people who are unfit or depressed, and cheering them up. I can’t think of any greater tonic than talking to Alix. I know that people think the world of her and I could see how she must invigorate them; it is a gift she has. She was telling me of her success with one particularly unfortunate man, and how everyone had been impressed. She said that she thought it was because she was the sort of woman who understood his problems, but added, with a sigh, that it was all very trying and distressing, and not what she was used to.

  I said that I thought she was performing a great service.

  She sighed again. ‘One likes to think so,’ she said. ‘And if it helps Nick… After all, that’s my job now. And of course I am totally trustworthy. Everyone knows that. I am a mine of secrets.’

  Again I expressed appreciation.

  ‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘What do you do apart from drudge in that ridiculous library?’

  I told her what a help it had been to work on so steadily after my mother’s death, when I realized that it was my only protection, how the structure of the working day, the very banality of it, had helped me to compose myself after that wearying and bewildering time, how the silent presence of Dr Leventhal and Olivia had provided fixed points in the dizzying perspective of my new solitude…

  ‘Oh, you’re an orphan,’ she cried, with comic emphasis. ‘Darling,’ she cried to Nick who had come through the door at that moment, ‘she’s an orphan! Little Orphan Fanny!’ She made it sound as if it should be in capital letters. She made it sound funny and silly, and I felt better about it, and they have called me Fanny or Little Orphan Fanny ever since.

  After that we didn’t talk any more because Nick had brought home a man with whom he had been arm wrestling in the pub, and this man, who was Irish, told us his entire life story, and it was really very interesting.

  I worried about asking them back, although at that stage I drew the line at the Irishman, because I knew somehow that Nancy would resent it. She doesn’t cook much now and as we have practically never had visitors in the evening she likes to lock up early and any alteration to her routine upsets her and makes her fearful. I explained this to Alix, and as it turned out I needn’t have worried because they usually eat out. There is a restaurant on the ground floor of their block of flats, and they find it much more convenient to eat there. This was delightful news to me because it meant that I could join them without feeling guilty about it, and pay my way or treat them at the same time.

  I went there with them the following week and that was another revelation. As an eating place it has the advantage of convenience, but the whole point is that this is where Alix meets her friends. She is one of those fortunate women who create circles of loyal friends wherever she goes, so that being with her is like belonging to a club. She is particularly friendly with a terrifically aristocratic Italian lady called Maria, who lives in one of the flats, and who has had an equally fascinating life. Maria and Alix are such friends that they can say terrible things to each other and call each other all sorts of names and still end up roaring with laughter. Maria is very handsome in that high-boned haughty way you sometimes find in North Italian women; I say handsome rather than beautiful because she is tall and very commanding. She has the same easy manner as Alix and is on excellent terms with all the other diners. I got the impression that all the regulars eat early and all Alix’s friends come later, so that an evening spent in the company of Alix and Maria, and Nick, of course, is an evening unlike any other.

  I was dazzled, delighted. We spent a whole evening there, Maria sitting at our table and smoking, and it was all the Bohernian evenings I had ever read about. Maria is apparently rather rich, although her financial affairs are quite spectacularly complicated on account of her divorce: she and Alix devote much of their time to this problem. She prefers to stay on in London, I gathered, where she has many friends
. Many of them seemed to trickle in that evening and she greeted them with great enthusiasm, moving from one table to another, or lobbing shouts of recognition as people came through the door. Some of them made mock dodging motions as they came in, but they didn’t get past Maria, whom Nick described as Italy’s very own nuclear warhead. ‘We’re all terrified of her,’ he added. ‘If we’re not careful she’ll see that we don’t get any dinner. She can’t bear bores.’

  Maria cuffed him round the head and he made as if to hit her back and then she really hit him and he shouted “Unfair!” and they both collapsed with laughter.

  ‘This is Fanny,’ said Alix, with a ceremonious clearing of her throat. ‘Be nice to her. She’s an orphan.’

  ‘Hello, Fanny,’ said Maria, offering a large hand, which I shook. ‘Welcome to the club.’ I was so touched. All I managed to say was, ‘Thank you.’

  I tried to work it all out in my diary that evening when I was in bed. I felt as if I had been reprieved from the most dreadful emptiness. I had tried so hard to live sensibly and without undue expectation - for my expectations, alas, have often led me to make mistakes - and now that something so encompassing and vivifying had turned up I found it difficult to believe in my luck. Good things could only follow. I lay awake for a long time, and after some thought I decided to consider all the mistakes and the misconceptions of other days as water under the bridge. I had always desired to get matters right, and now it seemed as if I were to have just the help I needed. Some friends change your life, and although you know that they exist somewhere you do not always meet them at the right time. But now the road ahead seemed easier. I had been rescued from my solitude; I had been given another chance; and I had high hopes of a future that would cancel out the past.