Look at Me Page 6

  ‘But first of all we must do something about your appearance,’ Alix would say, and this meant sitting me down at her dressing table and dabbing at me with blushers and eye shadows and then turning me round and showing me to Nick. He would reward me with his hard, speculative gaze, which brought more colour to my cheeks, although when I was turned round again to inspect myself in the mirror I would be horrified to see my clean brown face so smudged, and as I watched my new slightly crooked dark red lips utter some words I was quite surprised that my new enlarged eyes could register such pain. I became quite firm on the matter of my appearance, and wiped and scrubbed all the colour off, raising my dripping face in their bathroom to find Nick leaning curiously against the door jamb. I would brush past him and go back into the bedroom to do my hair, only to find Alix at her dressing table, turning her head from side to side to study the back of her neck, anchoring her chignon with pins and combs, settling her pearl studs in her ears, and stubbing out her cigarette. Myself quite forgotten.

  They were essentially amorous, teasing, arousing, withdrawing. It had become second nature to them, as had their satisfactions and their occasional boredom. Since I had long ago cast myself in the role of an observer, always with my writing in mind, I observed, but always with little shocks of either pleasure or disappointment. I observed their areas of tolerance and intolerance, their favours offered and just as abruptly withdrawn. I found myself striving to capture their attention, their good will. I knew that I could lose all this quite easily, simply because I was so predictable, so consistent. So bourgeois, as Alix would say, not troubling to hide from me the fact that this was the supreme condemnation. I see no harm in the bourgeois way of life, myself. I like regularity of behaviour and courtesy of manner and due attention paid to the existence of other people. I like an ordered life and discretion and reliability. And honesty. And a sense of honour. But I am aware that all these things have little currency where matters of love and friendship are concerned, and that an attractive shamelessness is a good passport to social success. Much better value, as Alix agreed, when I once said some of this to her.

  And yet they had a sort of regard for me, or perhaps it was a tolerance, an acquired taste, a novelty. They cast me in the role of their apprentice, and as such they looked after me. They would never, for example, allow me to take a taxi, when we left the restaurant; they always insisted on driving me home. Alix would question me persistently about my love affairs, my income, my desires, and I would answer her in all simplicity. And yet I would see her turn with evident relief to the roaring ritual insults she exchanged with Maria. Maria, in her way, was a critic. Maria sharpened her up. And when Alix had a fight on her hands, an intrigue, a speculation, she was released from the cold grey boredom, in which ambiance I so clearly belonged.

  They soon became an addiction, to which I gave my- self, aware that it was precarious but also aware that it was more fruitful than my regular orderly life, with its bourgeois preoccupations, that it yielded more company, more excitement, than I could hope to find on my own. Sometimes it left me a little sad, and the images would resurface, and the images would be of a resignation and of a patience with which I had always been impatient. I would exchange the burden of my memories and of Nancy and Dr Constantine and Dr Simek and all the other doctors that I looked at every day (Goya’s Dr Arrieta would come into my mind) for the haphazard and impromptu and exciting company of the Frasers, for their restlessness and their cruelty and their kindness. I took, as they say, the rough with the smooth. I could no longer think of life without them.

  As for Maria, I found her oddly restful. She was pleasant to me in an offhand but perfectly polite manner and accepted me, always with a formal handshake, before turning her attention to Nick and Alix, with whom she shared the same callous and unselfconscious jokes. I regarded her as an adjunct to their life which I did not resent, and which did not even interest me very profoundly. I got on with my dinner, handing them over to her in my mind; their quarrels and teasing raged over my head while I gathered strength for further study. And of course I wrote it all down.

  The restaurant was always crowded, always full of noise and smoke. Voices rose, jokes were shared between tables, new arrivals greeted with mockery or acclaim. Everybody knew each other or about each other. An indecent sort of honesty prevailed and I soon knew the secrets of every couple or threesome; I discounted these as irrelevant to my enquiry and let the provocative comments go past me. I was a little surprised at their lack of reserve, and at Alix’s persistent questioning. But they seemed to find it normal, and perhaps it was. Certainly they seemed to enjoy it. It had the liberating and unsettling effect of one of those encounter groups, in which people are encouraged to criticize each other, or confess, and from which they are supposed to gain a strength to live more realistically. Certainly there was an undercurrent of brutality there, but not, oddly enough, of hostility. People were accepted, sins or crimes forgiven or indulged, disloyalties understood. Occasionally there would be a quiet night, when nobody much turned up, and I was surprised to note how the conversation languished. Maria would sit at our table, and she and Alix would exchange only desultory remarks, yawning from time to time. Nick never said much, after his initial greeting of Maria. She, in turn, treated him with enormous respect, as indeed everyone else did, and spoke reverently about his work. But those quiet nights were quite outdistanced by the noisy ones, when the laughter rose and the faces became flushed and there was a marvellous feeling of masks being cast aside and politeness abandoned. Collusion, complicity, the honour that is said to obtain among thieves: these were what delivered me from my rigidity and my fearfulness, for I hoped to become like one of those friends, my new models.

  And those nights delivered me from the ones I used to spend, with Nancy’s silent offering on a tray, sometimes watching television with her in the kitchen. Those early, lonely nights, when I habitually went to bed too soon and got far more sleep than I needed. And when the only noise was the sound, far below, of the lift gates clashing, but no step along the corridor, no one coming to our door. We had no visitors, for the old order was maintained. And it was the old order from which I had been delivered, and I sat thankfully in the smoky noisy restaurant and I got far less sleep than I needed, and all this I owed to Nick and Alix.

  Who also, when they wished, delivered me from Sun- days. Sunday was a day I had dreaded for as long as I can remember, a day given over to silence, and to ‘resting’, to long walks, and visits to the National Gallery. When my mother was alive, the day had had a certain sweetness. Nancy would change into her dark blue dress, and the three of us would eat lunch together in the dining room, at that baronial table. The two women would retire, after this lunch, and the silence would become even denser, as if all the clocks had stopped. I would walk for two or three hours, until it was time for tea, which Nancy would bring in on one of her trays; my mother would be a little restored after her rest, and that is when I would read to her what I had been working on.

  But recently Sundays have been a burden. I could hardly ask Nancy to sit with me at that table; she would think it improper for me to take over my mother’s functions, for she still regards me as a child. So I usually go out. Nancy never goes out unless she has to, and I feel that on Sundays she should have the flat to herself. Sometimes I go to my Aunt Julia, my father’s sister, but I don’t care to do this too often because she always wants to discuss stocks and shares and I really can’t get interested in money to the extent of moving it around, as Julia does. Sometimes I go to friends of mine in the country, very old friends, a married couple whom I am beginning to find rather dull. I suspect that they feel the same about me. Usually I go round to the Benedicts, Olivia’s parents. They have always been immensely kind and I suppose that I feel at home there, although their home is very different from my own. Olivia’s mother was made a Life Peer by Harold Wilson and talks about nothing but the Labour Party. Olivia’s father is a comfortable but retiring sort of man, a comp
any lawyer by profession. Olivia’s brother David is a doctor and he got us our jobs at the Library; it has always been assumed (and indeed greatly hoped by my mother) that David and I will marry. Lunch at the Benedicts’ is a brisk and chatty affair which always ends in a furious cracking of brazil nuts; the food is indifferent, which surprises me in a Jewish family. But I like being there and I am very fond of them all; it is just that I know I have to leave them to an afternoon together, for they are very devoted and hardly see each other during the week, and that is when I go to the National Gallery or the British Museum or the Tate. When I walk home, it seems to me that the hour between five and six is the saddest hour of the week.

  So that to be rushed up the motorway in Nick’s car, with Alix singing rude songs in the back, is a distinct improvement. The intention is always to take a healthy walk, or to visit a friend, or to find a place for tea, but we never seem to get out of the car, or when we do Alix finds it too cold, so the walk never materializes. But the tea safari has become very amusing. We pretend to be inspectors from some food or hotel guide, and when we have eaten, Alix insists on interviewing the manager or the manageress. She has this gift of bringing people out, and going home in the car she mulls over the information and makes us laugh with her comments. But sometimes she gets one of her sudden moods of boredom and falls silent, thinking, no doubt, of Sundays in Jamaica as the grey unspectacular suburbs unfold and we come back to London. I sense then that they want to be together, and I leave them. Nobody goes to the restaurant on Sundays, so I spend the evening alone. But by this time I have more to write about, so it doesn’t really count.

  One dread Sunday every month I visit Miss Morpeth, my predecessor at the Library, now retired and living in a very warm flat in Kensington. It has fallen to my lot to visit her once a month, to see how she is getting on; I have somehow been voted into this activity by the staff at the Institute, who seem to think that I am good with old people. The matter was mysteriously decided one afternoon during my absence at the dentist’s, and when Dr Leventhal put it to me, I was so relieved to be back at my desk that I agreed. The sad thing is that these visits give no pleasure either to myself or to Miss Morpeth, who would be more gratified by a visit from Dr Leventhal, or, best of all, from Nick, on whom she dotes.

  Miss Morpeth has all the unseemliness of a plain elderly woman in not very good health. I hear her limping to the door and unfastening all the locks and bolts which she deems essential for her protection. I follow her down the corridor, noting her elastic stocking, her thinning hair, her yellow neck. She wears sad green skirts with matching cardigans, amber beads. On her right hand, her mother’s wedding ring. She seems sealed off from the vital interests of the living world, and I think she dislikes me, not only because I have succeeded her, but because I am young, because I can walk without pain, because I am not humiliated by my body. Miss Morpeth is a conscientious woman and she tries to overcome this hostility, which shames her. Every time I come she prepares a nursery tea of bread and butter, cut very thin, and jam, followed by Battenberg cake. This is ready on a trolley in the kitchen and all I have to do is wheel it into the sitting room, while Miss Morpeth raises the kettle in one careful hand - a red hand, with almost anatomically blue veins - and pours water which has boiled once or twice, so great is her anxiety for me to have come and gone, into her mother’s china teapot.

  When she is settled in her chair, and she has asked me her ritual question - ‘Would you like your cake first or your bread and butter?’ - and the business of teacups and plates is settled, and later, when she has lit up her cigarette with the gold lighter we all gave her when she left, we turn to the matters of the day. There is a ritual to be observed here too. She asks about attendance figures in the Library, about the intake of new material in the various categories, about Dr Leventhal, questioning me closely on his ability, for he was not a favourite of hers, and finally on the subject closest to her heart: Nick’s career. She is passionately interested in this, and his visits to the Library were the highlight of her day: she would abandon everything to help him, struggling with folders of photographs until he would take her quite firmly by the shoulders, turn her round, and march her back to her desk. He was very sweet to her, and he brought Alix to the little party we gave her when she retired. I vaguely remember him introducing them to each other, although that was before I really knew her. I remember Nick saying,’Now you can do whatever you want’, and then turning away to get Alix a glass of sherry. They promised to visit her, and said they hoped to see her as often as she could put up with them, but I don’t think they ever have. And frankly, as I sit in her stuffy room, eating the bread of affliction, bread that we do not really want to share with each other, I sense their reluctance to enter this other kingdom of the shades, and I condone it.

  The ritual is pursued in its accustomed fashion. After I have told her that Nick and Alix are well (and felt uncomfortable in doing so, for though my interest in them is justified, I do not care to think of hers) I ask her about her forthcoming visit to Australia. Miss Morpeth made sensible plans for her retirement by announcing her decision to take a long trip to visit her niece in Melbourne. We all agreed that this was the best thing for her, since she had been finding the winters increasingly taxing and sometimes had difficulty in walking without a stick. After some delay the project has ripened to the point of no return, and I discuss with Miss Morpeth the best place to buy lightweight luggage, although how she is to carry anything at all I do not know. ‘I intend’, says Miss Morpeth, with the air of one yielding to a dangerous impulse, ‘to take Nick up on his kind offer to drive me to the airport.”Of course.’ I agree. ‘He will be only too delighted.’

  After this exchange, the visit is to all intents and purposes over. I wheel the trolley back into the kitchen and insist on doing the washing up. This takes much less time to do than it takes Miss Morpeth to dry the fussy cups and arrange them on hooks in the kitchen cupboard. She never asks me how I am. She was quite kind when my mother was ill, but maybe she feels I no longer need kindness. Maybe she resents me even more profoundly than I know. I always forget that she hates being kissed goodbye until it is too late and she has drawn back in affront. I always, like a child, kiss everybody, or offer my face to be kissed, and it gives me a tiny shock when faces are turned away from me. Then I leave. Something makes me wait outside the door while the chains and locks are activated for the evening, and then I bound down the stairs with an energy made more frantic by the thought of Miss Morpeth sitting down to her usual Sunday task of writing to her niece. By the time I reckon she has placed the comma after ‘My dear Angela’, I am down four flights of stairs and halfway to the bus stop.

  For by this time I am tired of being serviceable and being sensible and I begin to resent this call on my time. I am anxious to leave Miss Morpeth, even anxious to get home. This time of the year, when the leaves drift silently down, and the nights draw in, always makes me melancholy. I think with longing of the Frasers, but I know that this is the time they like to spend together, and so I never telephone. The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is also difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.

  Five

  That was how my new life started, and I was delighted with it. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that the Frasers were introducing me to, and even instigating, a form of further education from which I could not fail to benefit. I became sharper, funnier, more entertaining. I made the Library into a sort of serial story for Alix, for Nick had confided to me, once when we were driving down Sloane Street, that she sometimes got rather depressed and that it was up to us to divert her and to ward off those moods when she remembered Jamaica, and her father, and would sound off about the awful metal windows and the cramped kitchen of the flat off the King’s Road. But at the same time it seemed to me that Alix’s depression was of a recogniza
ble and tolerable sort, the sort with which Nick, as a doctor who specialized in these things, should surely be able to deal. It was, essentially, a depression that could be cured, a depression that might vanish at the prospect of a new attraction or entertainment, a depression, in short, that I was inclined to reclassify as plain boredom. I knew enough about the work done at the Institute to realize that true depression, the figure of Melancholia with her torn book, is another matter altogether. Really hopeless people do not expect miracles, nor do they manage to summon up the energy to look for them.

  In any event I kept this to myself, for I learned very quickly that I must never criticize. For happy and successful people, Nick and Alix were extraordinarily sensitive to criticism, and I learned not to look askance at her when she claimed to have come down in the world or complained of Maria or even of Nick, whose work occupied a good deal of his attention, attention which she thought should have been devoted entirely to herself I can see now that she was not only restless but even dismayed by the lack of continuous satisfaction which her present life provided. It was for this reason that her attention seized on gossip, on intrigue, and, if none were to hand, usually through the agency of Maria, she would interrogate strangers, whom she thought looked interesting, and try to find out the central drama of their lives. We had certain discussions about this, for I maintained that dramas in a life took a long time to mature, that every life was of its essence dramatic, but that careful study was needed to perceive such dramas, either in the making or in the sad disappearance. But she insisted that I was wrong; some lives, she said, were more interesting than others, and most could be discounted. What she wanted was a drama that would last until something else claimed her attention, one that would fill an empty afternoon, or a week, or, at the very longest, a month. Her anecdotes were of a violent or sensational character, as if all the mediating information had been removed.