Look at Me Read online

  ‘I’m not…’ we would say, simultaneously, but we never pursued it, for James hated these allusions, and I found them tiresome. But evidently we had been brought up by like-minded parents. My mother had always told me to ignore a remark which I found offensive unless someone’s honour depended on it. So I always looked at James and laughed at these moments, and, truth to tell, I enjoyed those moments of complicity as much as all the rest.

  Secrets, the right to have secrets. We had very few, for although he told me that I knew him better than anyone, I never really felt that I knew him at all. It was our shyness that we had in common, and it was this that Alix mistook for lack of experience. Because of the bond that our shyness created, because it was always reinforced by those convivial evenings, the walks home from the restaurant seemed to us heightened, more significant, than an ordinary walk home from work at the end of the day. It was on one of these occasions that I renounced all caution and invited him in, although I knew that Nancy, looking like a mole in the brushed wool dressing gown that I had bought her, would inevitably shuffle in from the kitchen when she heard two sets of footsteps (her hearing is extremely acute) and have to be introduced. But even this passed off well, for she reminded James of his old nanny and he had a very nice talk with her. After that, she took to leaving us little trays, biscuits and coffee in a Thermos flask, as she had for my parents when they were much younger and still went out in the evenings. And it came to be a very sweet routine for me: the long walk home, in the dry cold, the empty streets, the silent entry into the flat, so as not to wake Nancy (for it was sometimes very late), the removal of coats and gloves, the quick embrace. I would slip into the kitchen to collect the tray, and James would go into the drawing room and light lamps and switch on the terrible electric fire with the simulated logs in the fireplace surrounded by pink tiles with blue kingfishers painted on them. We would drag two pale hide footstools, with cabriole legs, in front of the warmth and drink our childish drink, and then I would sit on the ground at his feet and he would put his arm round me, and his large authoritative hand would stroke my face and hair. Sometimes we would talk, sometimes just sit together in silence. I think we were so happy that we found this enough.

  Even when we were apart I did not feel alone. On Sundays, after lunch with the Benedicts, I would walk through the streets to the National Gallery or the Tate, and I would think of James, who always spent this time with his mother. I would feel no urgency, no longing, simply an unclouded and beneficent energy. I would look in the windows of expensive shops and wonder if the many exotic things that I saw would be suitable for my adornment. This was pure fantasy for I had no intention of buying them. But it was a significant exercise, for it meant that I considered myself worthy, as I had never done before. The change in my consciousness was so bewildering that I looked back on my previous life with a sort of amazed pity. That narrowness, those scruples, that prolonged childhood… I even, and this is a great test, began to consider journeys I might make, for my own pleasure, without him. I had never been to Greece, and I thought I might now go, some time soon. And I knew that if I went I should enjoy it, as I had never enjoyed a journey before. Because I should have James to come back to. By the very fact of his existence, he had given validity to my entire future.

  He had told me, and these facts I lovingly rehearsed as I walked along the Mall, now grey, the gutters filled with dried and scudding leaves, that he had been born in India. His father had been a diplomat and the family had lived abroad, in different postings, for some years. He had grown up in Brazil, in Egypt, before being sent home to school. This excited me and made me want to enlarge my own horizons. I wanted to emulate his familiarity with different continents, with exotic places. It conferred on him a worldliness, to which I deferred. Sometimes I thought that he must find me dull, and once I confessed as much to him. But he laughed and said, ‘Dearest Frances. You couldn’t be dull if you tried’, and kissed me. Yet I felt in him a superiority, a masculine experience, all the more powerful because he did nothing to exploit it. And at the same time, with so much to turn over in my mind, I did not feel too dull myself.

  I began to see him as one of those persons whose destiny I had always desired to follow. To be in his company, to hold his hand, to feel his large fingers tighten round my own, made me feel very humble, very fortunate, very chosen. At such times I would steal a glance at his fair, punishingly flattened, hair, at his hawk-like nose, and wonder what he could see in me. I felt that there must be a world of women, beautiful women, waiting for him. When I thought of this my heart would beat a little unsteadily, and my earlier euphoria change into a wonder that had something anxious about it. I felt there was a danger to me in his very excellence. And yet he seemed perfectly contented. I think in all conscience that he was happy too.

  Alix, of course, who was immensely interested in the whole procedure, could not believe that this was all there was to it. I could hardly believe it myself. It was not like anything I had ever known before. But I seemed to be unable to explain this to her. Or rather she seemed unable to accept it. Perhaps I was simply at a loss, for suddenly all the available words, scenarios, plots, exaggerations, seemed to have failed me. That was the most extraordinary thing; I was wordless. Yet Alix could not see that this was the most extraordinary thing. I could, but she couldn’t. She assumed that I was being furtive. ‘Darling,’ she would call out to Nick, ‘she’s holding out on me again.’ I would laugh, as I always did, although I was making such rapid strides in self-confidence that I thought it time she took James and myself for granted. But as she had introduced us, she felt she had a proprietorial right in the matter, and she would often exercise this. There was, I perceived, a certain feudalism in her attitude; she not only exacted a sort of emotional droit de seigneur; she extended this into perpetual suzerainty. Part of me observed this, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had lost the words with which I might once have investigated the matter.

  Instead I turned away from her, aware of some area of unfinished business that threatened our friendship, yet unwilling to waste time on this. I had more impor- tant things to do. I had James, my life’s work, to study. I had to find out what pleased him, what made him laugh, what he liked to eat. And I had to take my time over this. It all needed the most enormous amount of thinking over. In the first place I had to cancel out all the old information, forget I ever knew… all those sad spoiled things. Caution was needed. I saw that. I had visions of myself at my old merciless interrogations, and shuddered. This time I was going to be innocent, even if it killed me. And I would not take notes. Well, not many. As few as possible.

  So I made no demands, brought about no changes. I was uninformative but I was agreeable. I tried to keep the friendship in order. We continued to eat together, at the usual place, because Alix knew and liked it, and, perhaps because of the increasing cold, Alix was becoming distant and a little fretful. One evening, I remember, she took me into the bedroom and said, quite seriously, ‘You’re holding out on me, aren’t you?’ And I said, just as seriously, ‘No, Alix, I’m not. “Do you honestly mean to tell me’, she went on, turning her head from side to side and watching her reflection in the mirror of her dressing table, settling the pearl studs in her ears, and smoothing her hair at the back of her neck, ‘that you and James aren’t having a roaring affair? You must think I was born yesterday.’ I said, although it displeased me to do so, that I was not keeping anything from her. ‘H’m,’ she snorted, by which time Nick had appeared in the doorway, wondering why we were taking so long. His expression was mischievous, but also pleading, and his glance strayed to Alix, who was by now carefully making up her mouth. She who must be obeyed. Then we went back into the sitting room, where the sight of James, in his long, severe overcoat, thrilled me with delight and I forgot the whole incident.

  Nothing could spoil my pleasure. Even when I saw the magazine with my short story in it, folded back to the title page - ‘Professor Rosenbaum and the Delphic Oracle’
- and on that same page, clearly unread, a round brown ring, as if a mug of coffee had been rested there, I only said, laughing, ‘You haven’t read my story.’ Alix turned her head, her grey eyes vague and distant. ‘Oh. Oh, that. No, I haven’t’, and then, her eyes still vague, ‘Are you very cross?’ And I laughed again, and said that I wasn’t, but that she had better read this one because I wasn’t going to write any more. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t take the spare room.’

  There was a certain awkwardness about- this. Alix held on to the fact that I had said that I could not move in with them because I needed the flat for my writing. Now that I had announced that I was not going to write any more, she refused to see why I could not take the room. But my flat had become very dear to me, and our late silent evenings, sanctioned by Nancy with her buns and coffee, had become very dear to me too. And I knew they meant quite a lot to Nancy, for she had quite ceased to worry about locking the front door, and so, in some symbolic way, the flat had changed, had become my home, as it had never been before. She was acknowledging me as the mistress of the house, and this was another innocent pleasure, for I had never thought of myself in this light. In fact, as we had so much room, and as James was so fed up with living in Markham Street with his mother, who was not half so accommodating about his late returns, I wondered at which point I should suggest… But I put this idea behind me, for I knew that he might consider this precipitate. Dear James. I found him so ludicrously well brought up, so full of honour, and I treasured these qualities, for after my long claustration I needed something reliable in my life. Otherwise, the change would have been too dramatic. I needed, I suppose, a continuation of respectability, of quietness. I needed to see Nancy’s smile, which I had not seen for a very long time, and which now greeted me in the mornings, when our paths crossed. I needed to enjoy her little indulgences, the fresh rolls she brought me back on Sundays, after she had been to Mass, or the nursery puddings that she started to make again. I needed to deserve these things. And I wanted to be spoilt, at the same time, in the way, I suppose, that fortunate young women are spoiled. Or lucky ones. I wanted to be treated like… Like a bride, of course.

  And yet I did not love James, in the fatal sense. I did more than that. I enjoyed him. I knew about love and its traps. How it starts well, how mistakes are made, how, in moments of confidence or unbearable pain, things are said which can never be unsaid. How caution intervenes, and you behave like a polite friend, aching with the need to renounce that caution, if only to say intolerable things again. How those intolerable things seem to contain the essence of your knowledge of each other, of intimacy. How cruelty comes into it. And terror. Suspicion. How you are bound by those rules of politeness, self-imposed, once again, never to seek out the vital information. How not knowing becomes worse than knowing. How your life becomes devoted to finding out. And how you find out. I knew all that. I never speak of it.

  But James was my friend, and I held his hand as confidently as a child holds the hand of its parent. I told him everything, for he loved to hear me, and being so reticent himself, it was an amusement and a diversion for him to hear me rattle on. And I came to know how to make him laugh, and all the funny things that I had been saving up for my diary and my stories I lavished on him, and they became warmer, kinder in the telling. And he knew things too. He seemed to think as much of Olivia as I did, which made me very happy. He told me that Dr Simek had been a very eminent specialist in Prague, and a professor at the University, that his daughter was an actress but that she had joined the Party, and that now she no longer wrote to him. That, more than his exile, was Dr Simek’s great grief. He told me that Mrs Halloran had also been on the stage, although in a much rowdier capacity (I suppose I might have guessed that, and I felt a momentary pang of annoyance because I hadn’t), that Dr Leventhal was the sole support of his widowed sister, with whom he lived. I asked him about Nick’s research, but he did not want to talk shop, and I never asked him about his. I thought, and I was right, I know, that we dealt with each other as each other would have wished. He pleased me all the time.

  For I always knew when I would see him. He did not keep me waiting. He did not make me wonder or speculate. This was so unlike the last time, the time of which I never speak. I can only say that everything that had happened then was miraculously reversed, and I embarked on this venture with full confidence. The worst thing that a man can do to a woman is to make her feel unimportant. James never did that. That whole late autumn, which was exceptionally cold and exceptionally dry, favouring our walks, was for me a time of assurance and comfort and anticipation. There were no images in my head. I did not write. I was happy.

  Oddly, or perhaps not oddly, when you come to think of it) I wanted nothing more. I had no thought of going on to the next stage, because I was enjoying this one so much. I knew that it would take me a long time to unlearn my lessons, to let down my defences, to find out how to be carefree and trusting. I still kept to my old habits, still lunched with Julia or the Benedicts on Sundays, made an expedition to Harrods to buy a blouse that Nancy had seen advertised in my Sunday paper and 96 a wanted to send to her sister in Cork, because I could not easily renounce a way of life that I had known for so many years. I knew that when the time came some sort of transition would be effected, but that even this transition must be carefully lived through. I did not want to hurt anyone - that old reflex. No one must be disinherited. If I did this carefully, I thought, then I would deserve all my happiness. As to that happiness, so nebulous, and yet so focused, I would let James organize that.

  Suddenly it became much colder, and a recognition of the season impinged upon me. The Frasers began to talk again of Christmas. I paid less attention to their plans for us all to get together - I did not entirely want to think of this, for it meant that Nancy would be alone - and concentrated on finding wonderful presents for them all. I went shopping, in those same department stores, but this time looking at incredibly expensive and extravagant things: French soaps, jars of Stilton, cashmere pullovers, Carlsbad plums. I did not buy them for I wanted to extend my pleasure. Every lunchtime I would desert Olivia and go window shopping. From being very frugal I now became anxious to spend as much money as possible. I was in a state of euphoria which cancelled every prudent thought I had ever had.

  The cold made our walks exhilarating. We huddled together in the starry silence, my hand in James’s hand, in his pocket. We strode through the park, where no one now lingered, no one looking for love or the price of a drink. The flat, when we reached it, was beautifully warm and dim, and sometimes I hated to think of James turning out again and walking all the way back. Once or twice I asked him, tentatively, to stay. Once or twice he hesitated, as if waiting to be persuaded. But it never turned into an issue, and in a way I was glad. I felt that it should not happen like this, although I knew that it might. In my mind I had fixed the childish thought that we must both reach Christmas in this peculiar condition of innocence, of unspoiled expectation, of happy hope. I wanted it all to go properly, to go well. And somehow, in that flat… I wanted him to take me away. I wanted an hotel, near a lake, in the mountains, where nobody knew us. I wanted us to be alone. I even wanted to wait until he suggested it.

  So that in the meantime I took every pleasure that the unresolved situation offered. I enjoyed my friendship with the Frasers so much more that I was no longer officially regarded as subtly unfortunate, although Alix still occasionally referred to me as Little Orphan Fanny. I enjoyed being there with James. And, of course, I enjoyed James. It seemed to me that enjoyment could only increase if things went on as they were for a little longer. After that I would do whatever was demanded of me.

  One evening, as we were preparing to leave the restaurant, Alix said, ‘This is ridiculous.’ Nick joined in, ‘No, honestly, nobody in their right mind stays out in the cold the way you two do. You must be mad.’ Alix went on, ‘What makes you think they stay out? I never believed that for a moment.’
There was an odd little pause. It seemed to be up to me to do or say something, but I somehow could not decide what it was. Moreover, I did not see why the decision had to be made in that context, at that point. So I merely laughed, and said, ‘Alix, you simply must not tease’, which fell a bit flat. She looked at me and said, ‘I honestly think you’re round the bend,’ and, turning to James, ‘As for you, I’d be a bit worried by now if I were in her position.’ He stared at her, and I thought he was going to lose his temper, but he never does, so he didn’t. It passed off somehow. We felt, James and I, strangely apologetic. We felt that they were disappointed with us, irritated by us. We felt that we had bored them, or, rather, not diverted them in some essential way. So that when they insisted on driving us home that same evening, we looked at each other and then said we’d be awfully grateful. It was rather cold. Alix insisted on their dropping me off first. She sat in the back of the car, her fur coat wrapped tightly around her, and I remembered how difficult she found the winter. Again I felt a pang for her, and did not mind when she snuggled up to James, who was also sitting in the back. I sat with Nick in the front, ready to be dropped first. I did not ask them in because I knew that the noise of four people would alarm Nancy. I kissed James hurriedly and watched him climb back in the car, next to Alix. And then I watched them drive off. It seemed extraordinary to be alone, for the first time in nearly three weeks.

  Alix telephoned me the following morning. She sounded much more lighthearted than of late, and did not even complain of the cold. ‘When shall I see you?’ I asked, aware that Dr Leventhal had come into the room behind me. ‘Oh, as soon as possible,’ she replied. ‘It will all be much easier now. “Easier?’ I asked. ‘How?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘more convenient anyway. I’ve managed to persuade James to take the spare room. That way we can all spend more time together.’