A Private View Page 4

  ‘Is there a problem?’ This question was accompanied by arched brows.

  Bland shook his head. He supposed all this to be above board, although Mrs Lydiard’s face was a study in both eagerness and alarm. But young people, he thought, they have these slapdash arrangements. Why should they expect us to approve? We don’t, of course. But that is a matter of indifference to this girl. His hand retained the feeling of her small soft hand, so very different from Mrs Lydiard’s wrinkled knobbed paw, different from his own, on which the veins stood out.

  ‘How long would you be staying?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, until they come back. Don’t worry; I’ll be careful. And Sharon knows all about it.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Anyone would think you didn’t trust me.’

  His answer was to hand over the keys. ‘Here you are then, Miss Gibb.’

  ‘Katy.’

  He made an effort. ‘Katy, then. You know where I am if you need anything.’ Although I hope you won’t, he thought.

  The girl yawned, and suddenly turned even paler.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It’s just that I think I’ll go to bed, if you don’t mind. Only I’m liable to faint if I don’t.’

  ‘Of course,’ they said.

  At the door she turned and offered her hand again. ‘You’ve both been very kind. Goodbye, Mrs Lydiard.’

  ‘Moira.’

  ‘Mr Bland.’

  ‘George,’ he said, sincerely annoyed. He did not intend them to be friends. ‘I hope you’ll find everything you need. You know where we are,’ he added heartily. He was anxious to get rid of her before she passed out, as she threatened to do.

  ‘I shan’t forget your kindness,’ she said, lingering.

  He was surprised by the luminous, almost amorous look she gave him. But then the same look was bestowed on Mrs Lydiard, so he thought no more about it.

  When the door finally closed behind her he felt a palpable sense of relief. Mrs Lydiard, on the other hand, seemed stimulated by her unusual morning and was inclined to linger. Bland coughed briefly to disguise the rumbling of his stomach.

  ‘I wonder how she got past Hip wood,’ he said.

  ‘Hipwood must have been making his tea. I must apologise, Mr Bland. I can see that you think I have been too precipitate, but I couldn’t just leave her sitting outside my flat, could I?’

  Bland, who thought she had been precipitate only in the matter of introducing their Christian names, made a mild dismissing gesture with his right hand, thinking that the matter could now be concluded, that Mrs Lydiard could get on with whatever she had been in the middle of doing before this diversion, and that he could finally enjoy what remained to him of his day. Mrs Lydiard’s response was to unwind her red shawl and to settle herself more comfortably in her chair. Lonely, he supposed; well, he could hardly grudge her a few moments’ conversation.

  ‘She reminded me of my daughter,’ said Mrs Lydiard. From these words Bland immediately assumed that Mrs Lydiard’s daughter was dead, and with a brief sigh prepared to lend a sympathetic ear.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a daughter,’ he said.

  ‘I hardly ever see her. She’s in America, you see; that’s what reminded me of her. Philadelphia at the moment, although her husband moves around a lot. I’ve never got on with him; that’s what caused the breach. When I think whom she could have married I could weep. I have wept, Mr Bland, but that was at the beginning. Now I’m almost used to it, being alone, I mean. To be honest, I was never a very good mother, too restless on my own account, I suppose. Angela never forgave me for divorcing her father; you can hardly tell a small child that a marriage has run its course, can you? I always got on better with my son.’

  ‘You have a son?’ he asked, wondering whether to make more coffee, and deciding against it.

  ‘In Yorkshire,’ she said briskly. It seemed as if the prospect of her son, whether he were happy or unhappy, left her intact, whereas the daughter was clearly a thorn in her flesh. If the girl, Katy Gibb, reminded her of her daughter, he had an idea of how the daughter must have opposed the dead weight of her sulkiness to the mother’s determined glamour, for Katy Gibb had seemed to him sulky, but at the same time intrusive, so that both he and Mrs Lydiard were marooned indoors on her account, whereas they should have been about their separate affairs, strangers to each other. This sudden intimacy was unwelcome, though Mrs Lydiard gave every appearance of welcoming it. He sighed again: her affairs were not his concern. He had appreciated her, if he had ever thought of her at all, for her excellent demeanour, for the pleasing picture she made as she set out on her morning pilgrimage to Marks and Spencer. He had thought she was making a fine job of supporting herself, both mentally and physically. Silently he had applauded her for making no claim on him, for so spectacularly not needing his help. Yet here she was, at nearly twelve o’clock on a Saturday morning, telling him her life story, whether or not he wanted to hear it.

  Appearances were deceptive, he thought. To the outward eye this woman was self-sufficient, even exemplary, yet she too had a history, one which he was no doubt doomed to hear. People tended to tell him things, mistaking his polite expression for one of interest. The allusion to her daughter he thought conventional, possibly superficial. And where was the daughter in all this? He hoped that she did not figure too largely in Mrs Lydiard’s account. Mothers and daughters were beyond his comprehension: even mothers and sons had proved difficult. He had harboured ambivalent feelings towards his own mother; he suspected that he might, if they ever met, sympathise with the daughter rather than with Mrs Lydiard, who now looked refreshed and competent, having delivered herself of information which she clearly felt lay in better hands than her own. Bland had heard many confessions in his time, and had learned, if necessary, to guide them gently towards some conclusion, to search for some crumb of comfort, to point out the way in which some dignity could be retrieved, even in the most hopeless of circumstances. Mrs Lydiard, on the other hand, despite her admission that she had been a bad mother, did not seem disposed to dwell on the matter, and was even now smoothing out her gloves as if she had made him privy to some interesting new material and was now waiting for him to contribute something of a similar nature. He wondered if she were rather foolish, or perhaps simply as decorative as her own appearance. Yet she must endure lonely hours, as he was about to, and he owed her some sympathy, a sympathy he did not yet feel. He had preferred her in the abstract, when he hardly knew her, when she was simply an agreeable figure in the landscape.

  ‘Any grandchildren?’ he asked, somewhat desperately.

  She made a face. ‘My daughter has two: one black, one Korean. Adopted, of course. My son-in-law never had much sense of reality. You can see why we don’t get on. Not that I want to burden you with my affairs. Well, I must leave you. So sorry to have ruined your morning. You’ll let me know if Miss Gibb proves tiresome, won’t you? Although I feel a little sorry for her. She looked so tired, didn’t she? I remember that look: Angela had it when she was struggling with her homework. I’ll leave you my telephone number, and of course I’ve got yours. That way we can keep in touch.’

  But he did not want to keep in touch, he reflected, as he opened the door for her and at last shut it behind her. He wanted most definitely to be left alone, even if the prospect were unpleasing. He supposed that Mrs Lydiard was bored; he supposed that he himself was bored. But the bored do not necessarily attract others of their kind, and in any case he did not intend to sink into that half world in which any acquaintance is made to do duty for a friend. Despite a natural feeling for women he did not wish to know too many. Oh Putnam! And in any case he was after some stronger emotion in his life than that afforded by such Lilliputian concerns, stronger than resignation with what fate had offered him, stronger than the gossip of a Mrs Lydiard and her kind, stronger than irritation with the tiresome circumstances that such a day as today provided.

  He glanced at his watch, saw that it was too late to go out and buy something for lunch, found
and ate an apple, and sat for half an hour staring fixedly into space, his fingers occasionally drumming on the arms of his chair. He wanted life, more life; somehow the events of the morning, inconsequential though they had been, had brought this realisation to the front of his mind. He had never lost his heart, burned his boats, gone in search of something indefinable, out of reach. He had remained at home, cautiously, sensibly, even contentedly. He felt a pang of derision and despair that made his eyes blur with momentary tears. His fingers wiped them away; he felt incredulous. As always his reaction was one of gratitude that there were no witnesses. I must be tired, he thought. With an effort he got up from his chair and went into the bedroom. His unopened bag still stood on the bed. He removed it, still unopened, lay down, and within minutes was asleep.

  3

  HE AWOKE WITH A START. A VIBRATION IN THE dark room suggested either the telephone or the doorbell. He groped for his bedside clock and saw that it was four-thirty: he had slept through the entire afternoon. For a minute or two he lay on his back, wondering why he had awakened so suddenly, why in fact he had ever been asleep. The telephone was silent: he must have dreamt the noise. This period of unconsciousness alarmed him; he usually slept only at night, and then briefly, and with many interruptions. He was in the habit of leaving the radio on, enjoying the companionable voices in the peace of his own bedroom, enjoying the fact that he could simply listen and not be obliged to respond. In the course of his life many dinner parties had come his way, during which, as an eligible bachelor, and through the passage of time merely as a spare man, he had done his social duty to the best of his ability. For this reason, and no doubt for many others, unexamined, it was always a relief to return to his flat, to turn out the lights, and to listen passively to conversations which did not challenge or disturb him, and from which, swimming up from the depths of his light sleep, he could learn the occasionally interesting fact. An added bonus was that he was not required to remember such facts in the morning.

  This sleep had been different, deep and strange. He had even had a couple of dreams, which, in his experience, was unusual. In one of them he had distinctly seen his mother’s face, ironic and unfriendly, as it had appeared in her last illness, when she sat in a chair, hair and dress obscured by cigarette smoke and ash, eyes fixed on him as he attempted guiltily to read his book, a book pretentious by her standards, pretentious even by his at that date, but doing duty for a whole world which he was forbidden to enter. He had longed for her to die and had suffered ever since, had done penance for this longing, which was in fact a longing for freedom, and thus legitimate. He had been nineteen at the time, his heart swollen with grief and pity for this ruined woman, who, he thought, loved him as little as he loved her. He had done his best, perhaps better than a nineteen-year-old could be expected to do; he had been there at the end. Therefore the memory of her unsympathetic gaze had been deeply unwelcome, a reminder of times past. The other dream was more fragmentary, had been both trivial and vivid: a street somewhere, which he must once have known but now could not place, glimpsed in the silence of a suburban afternoon.

  Of the two dreams, which, together with their attendant associations, had flashed past his inward eye in the space of less than a minute, it was the second which stayed with him as an after-image and seemed imprinted on his retina. Everything—the weather, the time of day—was present: it had seemed to him to be about four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Only the location of the street was imprecise, and in a sense irrelevant. He had walked down such streets in his youth, when he was anxious to restore peace to his soul after enduring the quarrelsome company, if it was company, of his parents for any length of time. A Sunday would have provided such an interval, since a large lunch was eaten in the middle of the day. He had been reduced to whiling away the blank afternoons until sheer weariness forced him home. But the second dream, though connecting with the first inasmuch as both took him back to adolescent hurts and soulfulness (was such a period of his life never to be over?), had seemed to contain later material, as if the suburban street were some sort of ideal far removed from his actual and extremely metropolitan setting, which by comparison—and all this in the split second of lucid dreaming—had seemed flimsy, meretricious, unconvincing, as if his slow steady rise to affluence had been an error, as if no happiness could ever come of it. With Louise he would have lived differently, he knew, possibly in just such a street, in a substantial but unpretentious house, in which the rituals of tea-time would have been honoured and all the neighbours known. Here he knew virtually no one: he sometimes wondered whether he could even tolerate this flat, which would have seemed to him unimaginably perfect in those early sore-spirited days. It is not home, he thought, staring into the darkness of the room: it does not comfort me, holds no warmth of memory. Not that memory, these days, was in any way propitious. If he had any spirit he would leave it until in the passage of time it lost some of its negative associations. He could go away again, not precipitately, but in a more deliberate fashion, could travel like a gentleman. And perhaps at the end of such journeying he would find, or make, another home, a real home. The image was becalmed but unnerving, as the dream had been. The emptiness, the silence! He registered the fact that although the effect had been peaceful it was a feeling of alarm that had woken him.

  For this reason the doorbell, when it rang again, was almost welcome, although he wished he were in a better condition to answer it. Stumbling into his shoes, aware of his dishevelled state, he limped down the corridor, switching on the lights as he went. On the landing, and waiting patiently, stood Katy Gibb, looking considerably more amenable than when she had first appeared earlier that day. She had shed her jacket and trainers: indeed her feet were bare, and he had time to notice how beautiful they were, slim, white, and unmarked. He remembered her hand in his, and the agreeable impression that had made. Her cheeks were now a healthy pink; her pale rather small eyes regarded him in a manner which conveyed both shyness and frankness. The only odd thing about her appearance, apart from her feet, was the fact that her hair was streaming wet.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘Are you feeling better?’ Though I am the one who feels ill, he thought.

  ‘I came to thank you,’ she replied, ‘for being so kind to me this morning, and to ask if you could lend me some tea. There doesn’t seem to be any in the flat.’

  ‘The shops are probably still open,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, it’s hardly worth going out now. And besides, my hair’s wet.’

  Conscious that he was not at his best, he was not anxious to ask her in, but as he turned towards the kitchen she quite naturally followed him.

  ‘This is a nice flat,’ she said. ‘Do you live here alone?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he replied, rather shortly. ‘Here’s your tea.’ He noticed that it was his last packet. He would have to do some serious shopping in the morning; it was, as she had said, too late to bother with now, and in any case he wanted to wash and change, feeling shabby after his long sleep.

  ‘Thank you so much. And I was wondering, is there anywhere to eat round here? I’m not very domesticated, I’m afraid. Could you put me in the picture? I don’t want to be a nuisance, or anything. Only all my friends seem to be away for the weekend.’

  This could have been put more tactfully, he thought. But he was ashamed of his ruffled temper, which he feared may have been apparent to her, and conscious of the waif-like picture she made, with her bare feet and her wet hair.

  ‘Why don’t I give you dinner?’ he said. ‘We’ll ask Mrs Lydiard to join us, and you can tell us all about yourself.’

  ‘Lovely,’ she said, all but clapping her hands. Don’t overdo it, he thought, and smiled sourly at his own crabbed reaction. At the same time he felt a vague disquiet that he had descended the slope to misanthropy so quickly—he thought of it as misanthropy rather than misogyny, for he desired to see no one at all on this particular evening, neither man nor woman—and he felt balky and unattractive.

&nb
sp; ‘What time shall I pick you up?’ enquired Katy Gibb.

  This too seemed tactless, but he put his irritation down to the fact that he had not yet managed to have his bath and had eaten nothing for what now seemed a very long time. And this morning I was in Nice, he realised with surprise.

  ‘Shall we say seven-thirty?’ he said. ‘There’s quite a good Italian restaurant round the corner. And we’ll all meet up here first for a glass of sherry.’

  He telephoned Mrs Lydiard, who expressed herself to be delighted at the prospect of this rather random invitation. Then he made himself a cup of tea with what was left in the caddy, wondered if he had time to slip downstairs to the shops, realised that he was cutting his arrangements pretty fine (his bag still unpacked) and resigned himself to coffee in the morning. He thought of hiding the coffee, in case Katy Gibb came back for it, then had the grace to laugh at himself and at last ran his bath.

  As usual he contemplated himself sombrely. The body, he thought, was no longer good for much as an object of pleasure, or even as a subject of pleasure, yet it had served him well, and, more important, gave no warning of hidden illness, of imminent breakdown. There might be some anomaly waiting its time beneath the pale skin, behind the bony ribs, but for the moment it was leaving him in peace. If meagre, it was not altogether disgraceful; a little stooped, perhaps, but he could make an effort in that direction. He was powerless only with that which lay outside his normal competence, which might account for the fact that he had chosen so unexciting a partner as Louise. Yet even Louise had surprised him, and thus he had surprised himself. Nevertheless, he still felt somewhat ashamed of his constancy. It had never occurred to him to question hers.