Altered States Page 6

  Sybil’s letter arrived the following morning. It appeared to have been dashed off with extraordinary energy on several sheets of dark blue writing paper. I scanned it hastily before leaving the flat: it contained many admonitions but no threats. ‘Scandalous’ was underlined several times, as was ‘Thoughtless’ and ‘Impertinent’, this last embellished with three exclamation marks. The letter seemed to issue from a correspondence already fully formed in Sybil’s head, as if I had previously written to her, outlining my feeble excuses for disposing of her property. Since she had, as it were, already established my side of the argument, I saw no reason to get involved, and told myself that it would be prudent to have no hand in the matter. My conscience was almost clear, though a little tender, my duty, as I saw it, was to instruct Sarah as to her obligations towards her mother, or, if that were impossible, to write to her, and occasionally to answer the telephone. This promised a certain amount of pleasure, although it was not the romantic pretext I sought. I really would have preferred to meet Sarah on neutral ground, devoid of all contingencies, but this was again an illusion, possibly a delusion, as if the only circumstances in which it would be possible for us to come together were to be situated in the confines of a dream. From this I was able to deduce, but much later, that my feelings were admirable, exalted no doubt, but doomed to remain unrealised.

  It was a fine morning, with an early mist just dissolving into early winter sunshine. I was halfway to the office before I remembered that I had had no breakfast, strode back again, drank my coffee, ate my toast, and was still early for work. At some time during the morning I dialled Sarah’s number, and, as usual, got no reply. At this point it occurred to me to wonder why I was making such a fool of myself. I was nearly thirty, neither decrepit nor disadvantaged, and yet I seemed doomed to assemble these rickety structures of possibility around a woman whom I hardly knew and who probably only thought of me, if think of me she did, as some kind of dim adjunct to a family with which she no longer had any contact. For if I retained anything from Sybil’s letter, apart from her general condemnation, it was a sense that as a parent she was unlikely to have had much contact with her offspring for some time.

  From Sarah’s point of view I could judge the unwelcome nature of Sybil’s erratic vigilance: this was not a mother in whom an independently minded daughter could or would confide. I was uncertain about mothers and daughters, but I knew that even my own loved parent sometimes made me sigh with impatience. How much more so, then, would that seductive child-woman reject a mother who was not only completely solipsistic but aesthetically unpleasing. I only ever seemed to have seen Sybil in the heather mixture coat and skirt in which she visited my mother, her short bristly hair crowned with her trilby hat, yet in her youth she must have possessed something of the aura that her daughter had inherited. After all, she had once been a bride: presumably the tension that gathered her face into a permanent frown had not always been there. Even so it was hard to see how Sarah had developed her more artful personality from the genetic elements at her disposal. That she was unique, a lusus naturae, fitted in with my perception of her, one which I was somehow unwilling to abandon. It harmonised with my curious state of impotence, justified my unwillingness to confront her on any kind of rational pretext. Yet Sybil’s letter provided me with just such a pretext, perhaps the only one I should ever have, and it was with only the slightest tremor of impatience at what seemed to be a duty I was only half minded to discharge that I picked up Sybil’s letter and left the office for Paddington Street.

  The day had passed in a dream; I could hardly remember how it had passed or what it had contained. Most of what it had contained was speculation, yet in the street that speculation had turned once more to dreaming. I almost wanted to postpone this meeting so that I could continue to enjoy my fantasy undisturbed. And yet when I pressed Sarah’s doorbell I had no hesitation in assuming that she would answer it, although for once I should have preferred her not to. This was to change, of course, as events and expectations themselves changed. Within seconds, as it seemed, she stood facing me, her white face startling in the half light of the hallway She looked abstracted, though not thoughtful; her abstraction issued directly from her habitual self-absorption, yet had nothing self-indulgent about it. I was struck with the thought that I had misjudged her, that she was not as light-minded as her careless manner and habits would suggest. If I were to sum up my impressions as we stood on either side of the door it was that she was a serious person who was in flight from seriousness, who sought frivolity, insouciance as an escape from whatever occasionally dulled her eye or drained her colour. As she stood staring at me, as if she had no idea how I came to be there, or on what pretext, she seemed to be having some difficulty with herself, pushed her heavy hair away from her forehead with an old woman’s gesture, and swayed from one foot to the other like an actress warming up in the wings. When she said, ‘You’d better come in,’ her voice was almost resigned.

  I was appalled but hardly surprised by the confusion in the flat, a confusion too long established to be temporary. In fact it seemed like a bivouac, as though inhabited by squatters, yet what furniture there was—a pale leather sofa, a gilt-framed mirror propped against a wall—seemed opulent and slightly inappropriate. The floor space of the small sitting-room was covered with the writhing flexes of two telephones, one of which was ringing as I entered. It would not, I knew, be answered, nor was it. A large stock of old copies of The Times and the Financial Times obscured the seat of the rather pretty reproduction Louis XV chair to which I was vaguely directed, but I remained standing, as did Sarah. She wore a loose flowered dress and her feet were bare. Again it seemed difficult to capture her attention, although we were the only two people in the room.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ she said suddenly, as if coming out of a dream.

  ‘Later, perhaps. I’ve come because I had a letter from your mother, which I think you should know about.’

  ‘I doubt it. She writes to me too, you know.’

  ‘She seems to think you shouldn’t have sold the house without telling her.’ Put like that Sybil’s case seemed unanswerable.

  ‘Well, I did. If she’d wanted to keep it she shouldn’t have pushed off and left. Not that I wasn’t pleased to see her go.’

  ‘But did you tell her what you intended to do?’

  She shrugged. ‘I told her when I’d done it. That seemed more to the point.’

  ‘She seems to think I should have known about this. I think she’s got it into her head that I masterminded the whole thing.’

  ‘I shouldn’t let that worry you. Her head’s always been stuffed with conspiracy theories. That’s why she was so impossible to live with. One of us had to go. I’m only glad it was her. She’s probably mad, anyway. Who in their right mind would volunteer to live in an old folks’ home?’

  ‘I understood they had their own flat,’ I said.

  ‘But it’s one of those horrible outfits with a warden, for when you fall out of bed and break your hip.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen it all right. Sinister. Beautiful country house, or must have been once, inhabited by people on Zimmer frames. They’re all right, the two of them. They’ve got what they wanted, though why they wanted it is a mystery to me. They’re still active, Marjorie still drives. You can just see the Disabled stickers on all the windscreens, can’t you? If you ask me they’re both crackers. Always were.’

  Her face was scornful, as if the elderly could only conjure up feelings of disgust. She was also ashamed, I could see, because her mother and her aunt had deliberately chosen old age and in so doing had turned their backs on everything she stood for, youth, beauty, desire, as if these things were unmentionable. She appeared to think that they had done her a monstrous wrong, for which she would defy them with all the means at her disposal.

  ‘If you could perhaps write to her, without dropping me in it,’ I ventured.

  At this her attention
switched abruptly to me, her scorn undiminished. ‘I never even mentioned you. Why should I? I hardly know you. I’m not sure I even want to know you.’

  ‘All right, all right. I’m not trying to interfere …’

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘Well, I am. But why should I be blamed for something you should have sorted out?’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? She writes me letters like that. I dare say she writes them to a lot of people. She’s crackers, like I said. Anyway this is boring. Is this why you’re here?’

  ‘Partly,’ I said. ‘I’ve been trying to get you on the phone. I wanted to ask you out to dinner.’

  ‘Oh, you did, did you?’

  ‘Why should that annoy you?’

  She shrugged again. ‘Everyone asks me out to dinner.’

  ‘What of it? And anyway, I’m not everyone.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Are you always as rude as this?’ I asked, bewildered.

  At this she grinned and said, ‘You’d better have that drink.’

  I stayed with her that night, of course. Apparently it was as easy as that. As I seemed to have envisaged a mythic pilgrimage, a romantic conquest of imponderable obstacles, it might be said to have constituted an anticlimax. But only on the level of my more febrile imaginings. On the level of verifiable reality it was the revelation for which nothing had quite prepared me, conducted in silence, with what seemed like supernatural energy on both sides. I took this unbelievable gratification to be mutual: indeed no further proof of our inevitable conjunction was needed, or so it seemed to me. I never questioned my desire for Sarah, nor, oddly enough, hers for me. Any declaration, I thought, would have clouded the issue. Since she accepted me, for whatever reason, I sought no explanations from her. Thus I was never to know the reasons for her compliance. But then again I had the proof, and my memory would furnish me with details which she, perhaps, could not or would not have confirmed, had we ever indulged in one of those conversations which our activities served to demonstrate as being otiose, only resorted to by others less superbly matched. I was constrained through shyness, though I might have enjoyed such loving gossip, whereas she was silent through a form of impermeability, as if to give herself away might constitute an almost terminal weakness. And yet I was sure of her. She had given me all the assurances I needed. She had no further need to give an account of herself, at least, not to me.

  In the morning I did not even care that I was unbathed, unshaven, that I should have to spend the day like that. This did not greatly disturb me, although normally it would have done. An alternative hygiene had replaced the obedient disciplines of the days, weeks, months, years that had gone before.

  ‘I’ll ring you,’ I said. ‘Please pick up the phone from time to time.’

  Her face had resumed the strange clouded expression of the previous evening. Her stare did not seem to take me in, or to take in what had passed between us. I refused to let this annoy me.

  ‘See you,’ she said vaguely.

  ‘When? Shall I come this evening? We could …’

  ‘Have dinner, I know. Don’t be a bore, Alan. Don’t cling. I’ll see you around. Right now I want to have my bath.’

  I was aware of the strong smell of her hair, stronger after a night on the pillow. When the door closed behind me I found myself, somehow, in the street. I began calculating how and when I would see her again, though I knew that this would not be easy, that she would only see me when she wanted to. Throughout the day I could smell her hair. I telephoned several times. Each time there was no answer, yet I had an image of her, sitting in the flat, on the floor, perhaps, willing the sound to stop, the silence to be restored.

  6

  Mother’s boy-friend, Aubrey Fairweather, was there when I called on the following Sunday. A thin patrician-looking man who was always content to take no for an answer, or so I had assumed, he visited Mother punctiliously, never outstaying his welcome. In a crisis, if he ever acknowledged such a thing, he would rather drink an exquisitely dry sherry than a double brandy; his most familiar gesture was his careful insertion of a cigarette into an amber holder, a gesture which seemed to belong to the age of drawing-room comedy, as did his Paisley cravat and his sleek silver hair. Some years older than my mother, he had taken her refusal to marry him with a contained smile, and had the grace, or the persistence, to continue to bestow his presence on her, thereby indicating his superior nature. I rather liked him. His effete appearance gave no hint of the fact that he was a great traveller: even now he was liable to disappear for a couple of months. ‘China,’ he would explain on his return: ‘Peru.’ He also had a house in France, near Cagnes. I thought he had his bachelor life well organised. I could tell he was no good for Mother. He was sensitive and civilised; so was she. What she needed, I thought, was a more robustly male presence, but so far none had presented itself.

  Nevertheless I warmed to Aubrey, who looked delicate but was probably made of teak. I was also sorry for him, for his deliberate gestures and careful appearance. I thought these characteristic of men who had survived their years of active experience and were forced to roam the world in search of lesser delights. I was filled, at that stage, with the memory of Sarah, and the awesome revelation of our matching physical temper. For the first time in my life I had met a woman with that rare sort of genius, effortless, uninvented, almost unconscious. This was the gift she possessed and I had been its recipient. Like Julian Sorel in another context my virtue had been equal to my happiness. This phrase had puzzled me ever since Mother had persuaded me to read the novel, another of her favourites. She had blushed and said, ‘It means that he acquitted himself well, and no further explanation was needed. I’m sure you see the beauty of that Alan.’ I had, in fact, although I had thought the novel difficult. Yet along with its crankiness went a sort of excitement, which convinced me that its author had been young and ardent and romantically fulfilled, even though his hero had ended in prison.

  Sitting in my mother’s drawing-room with those two well-behaved people I could feel my youth threatening to overwhelm me. I wanted to get up, pace the room, throw open a window, leave at once for a long walk. I did not want to listen to Aubrey’s measured sentences, or my mother’s faithful and polite interjections. Yet when I was seated at the dining-table, and we were all three eating my mother’s excellent roast chicken, followed by her equally excellent lemon tart, I succumbed to a feeling of family solidarity, a feeling to which I was willing to admit Aubrey on a temporary basis, largely because I was so filled with benevolence towards the elderly, whom I pitied for no longer having access to the happiness I had so recently known. I pitied them both for their very politeness, which I thought must be a regrettable substitute for impulses which had died with their youth. They seemed to have no idea that they were unfortunate or benighted, but I found myself looking for and finding signs of impending old age in their heightened colour, the satisfaction with which Aubrey plied his fork, their savouring of the sweetness of the lemon tart and the last mouthful of wine. After the coffee I knew that Aubrey would go upstairs to his own flat and pass out. I always left soon after lunch so as to let Mother have a rest. I had no wish to see her asleep, thinking it would detract from her dignity. Also my restlessness would not permit me to stay silent until she woke up. The terrible stillness of Sunday afternoons, the impression I had of sleep settling on elderly people everywhere in this corner of London, combined with the habitual dead calm of the streets, afflicted me with a melancholy which I was ill-equipped to bear, made me feel uncared for, as if those who should be caring for me had abdicated their responsibilities, leaving me alone and without resource. On the afternoon of this particular day, of course, I intended to go straight to Paddington Street, a fact which must be kept from my mother at all costs. In fact it was she who introduced Sarah’s name, as she straightened the collar of my jacket and brushed my sleeve.

  ‘You wrote to Sybil dear?’ she said. ‘And you managed to have
a word with Sarah?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I thought I might go round there this afternoon,’ I replied, and with those words felt an onrush of the fiery joy with which Sarah’s name was now associated. There was also a certain amount of sweetness in the fact that I had been open with my mother, who at that stage certainly did not suspect my involvement. I never liked to lie to my mother, though I considered certain aspects of my behaviour too likely to shock her. The fact of this partial confession—that I intended to call on this particular woman—alerted me to the possibility that in ideal circumstances Sarah and my mother might be contained in the same thought, that Sarah’s name might be introduced quite naturally into any conversation I might be having with my mother, as if she were a bona fide relation, or as if she were my wife. I did not see why I should not marry her, although I could see why she would not marry me. There was the question of getting her to concentrate for a sufficient length of time on myself, my history, my attributes, all of which appeared to be of no interest to her. Her engagement with me was confined to the physical, and for the moment I found this so exciting that I preferred to think of myself as a lover pure and simple, that illusory family framework fragmenting even before I had time to reflect on the possible benefits of squaring the circle, never far from my conventional mind. I had no desire to marry, nor was there any pressure on me to do so. My mother, I knew, secretly valued the fact that I was unattached. I had wanted to make her feel included in my secret life, but there was an impropriety in this. I had probably left the condition in which it was natural for me to confide in my mother far behind, with my school-days and my first holidays away from home.