A Private View (25 page)

While pondering the enormity of his situation he fell asleep. Almost at once, it seemed, he had a dream of his parents, looking young and lighthearted, but heavily made up, like Kabuki players. They appeared to be ministering to each other, but without anxiety, without rancour, the rancour which had dogged them in later years. Somehow, in this dream, he realised that he was seeing them as they had been when they were young, before he knew them, newly married, perhaps, certainly optimistic. Even in the dream he felt a pang of love and envy, and these two emotions obliterated his later distresses as though they had never been. Simply he was seeing them for the first time, as they really were, without relation to himself and his needs, and thus exonerated from his later strictures. They had been unsatisfactory as parents, that he knew. What he had never known, but knew now, was their bewilderment, their disappointment that age had not maintained the promise of youth. Now he himself, struggling with that same disappointment, knew them to be as innocent as the common ruck of mortality. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he threw in his lot with them, with their ordinary unhappiness, which was perhaps their legacy to him, and his true inheritance.

The sleep that followed this dream—for he had briefly surfaced before the tide dragged him down again—was so
profound that when he awoke it was to a feeling of finality. It is all over, he thought, and knew it to be true. He was not even surprised. If the past had claimed him in one sense, the present exerted its hold in another. There would be no flight to the sun: his future lay with the bitter seasons of reality. There would be no leaving this room, which now seemed kindly, even hospitable. He saw his madness for what it was, the final upheaval of an unlived life, such as might have tormented some saint in the desert. Was not St Antony tempted by visions of lascivious women? St Antony’s remedy had been to scourge himself and pray. He, Bland, would no doubt undergo similar discomfort in the light of future reflection.

He prepared the tea-tray with a feeling of gravity, arranging biscuits on a plate, as if in the hope of tempting an invalid. But when the bell rang and he opened the door it was to a Katy dressed once again in her T-shirt and jeans, her feet encased in an incongruously smart pair of black suede pumps. She wandered past him into the flat without her usual calculated greeting. Strangely, neither wanted to be the first to speak. He went into the kitchen to make the tea; that done, he placed the tray in front of her as he had done so many times before. Her inaction made her seem listless and defeated. He was not too surprised by this: her attention span was limited. He had seen her yawn and slump into exaggerated inanition, only to recover her colour and her spirits if some diversion were on offer. That, in fact, was how he had first seen her. This, though, was different. Her hair was unwashed; her eyes refused to meet his. There was an air of hostility about her, different in kind from her usual anger, heavier, more immovable.

He understood. He had been too slow for her, too old,
too prudent. Her efforts had been in vain; he had not endowed her in whatever way she had expected; he had not made his life over to her, together with his flat, his worldly goods, as she had willed him to. He knew that she cared nothing for him, that she probably felt for him the contempt that was in keeping with her age, and with his. Now that she was leaving—a fact of which he was in no doubt—she did not bother to hide her dislike.

‘So you’re going back to America?’ he said.

She nodded. She picked up
The Times
, and scanned, with apparent interest, the temperatures on the back page.

‘Back to Mr Singer?’

She tossed
The Times
to the floor. ‘Well, there’s nothing for me here, is there?’

‘When are you going?’

‘As soon as I can borrow the money for the ticket,’ she said, careless now.

He looked at her averted face, averted not from embarrassment but from indifference.

‘I can help you with that,’ he said, aware of a stunning disappointment. He hardly knew what to say, since her responses were apparently in abeyance. ‘Perhaps if I gave you a cheque?’

‘That might be best,’ she replied absently.

There was a pause. ‘Well, if you’re sure … You’ll let me know when you’re leaving?’

‘Quite sure.’

Her expression had become severe, as if she had surprised him in some shortcoming. It was he, finally, who was embarrassed. To stem the blush he felt creeping over him he took his cheque-book from the drawer of his writing-table
and made out a sizeable cheque, one which he thought might cover everything: the ticket, a hotel, a flat even, meals, new clothes. He wanted her to be safe, though he had denied her safety. But safety bored her, like his careful room, his careful solitary life. He thought it all for the best, but felt a terrible fatigue, as if he might be ill.

She examined the cheque briefly, then put it in the pocket of her jeans. No further words, it seemed, were to be exchanged. Words were in any case superfluous, since they had no need to explain themselves. She turned her back, walked towards the door, and twiddled her fingers in farewell. Already she had recovered a little of her purposiveness. When she left the silence was profound.

As one might walk carefully in a ruined building, so as not to cause further subsidence, he picked up the untouched tea-tray and took it through to the kitchen. Perhaps because of his recent dream his mother’s intonations echoed in his ears. Her observations, he had to admit, were often acute, though always unfriendly. He was not yet ready for the sort of criticism which would have escaped her had a similar situation arisen in her lifetime, and he shrank from entertaining any, since criticism now was beside the point. In a way the two women were not unalike. It occurred to him to ask himself why he had seemed so young in his dream, absorbed, wondering, and he understood that he had never mastered the intricacies of adult behaviour, which would have enabled him to have dismantled this episode from the outset. His mother had been indifferent; so had Katy. Katy had indeed been vastly indifferent, and had erected her own house of cards on his life and his possessions, without ever taking the trouble to test the ground, to question him about
his own likes and dislikes, his own preferences, without walking delicately around him to judge whether he was ready for her to take over, and whether she could do anything appropriate to make him more amenable. That was what had brought about his last-minute reconversion, the realisation that she was profoundly indifferent to his life. If only she had asked him … what? Not even so much as what he wanted, as what he thought, felt, imagined! Yes, that was it: imagined. She had treated him as a prostitute treats a client, with dislike, as perhaps she treated all men who failed to maintain a significant hold over her life, like her father, like Howard Singer. He should, even at this stage, feel pity for her. Instead he felt a generalised distress that one so young could have such rudimentary sensibilities. ‘Tell everyone how great you are’: that ridiculous instruction had been adopted by her as others might embrace a philosophy or discover the resources of religion, and her own evangelism, learned so late in life, and grafted on to a possibly defective natural growth, had merely reinforced her blindness to the reality of otherness, to the qualities which fallible human beings rely upon to guide or support them through this life.

By comparison his own projects were only defensible insofar as they provided for both of them: some possibility of a good life might have emerged had everything gone according to plan. Otherwise he saw himself as a fool rather than a knave, a man deluded by his own folly into forgetting his age and his inclinations, his history and his dignity. He examined his conscience and found no prurient intentions. His very indifference to what her behaviour told him about herself had merely strengthened his resolve to magic her into another life, a life which he himself had somehow mislaid during
what he thought of as his years of obedience. He had wanted them both to be innocent, as if they were two travellers who had met by accident, and who saw no need to burden each other with their life histories, so charmed were they to have discovered one another in a lonely and deserted place. That such innocence was too much to expect, certainly too much to demand, was now borne in on him with crushing force. Finally, it was the misapprehension that made him suffer, rather than his own inchoate imaginings. He had projected those imaginings on to someone who did not even suspect their existence, and whom he could not now blame for disappointing him. He could not condemn her for her misuse of him. In a sense his was the greater misdemeanour.

Their lives were incompatible: that was the truth of the matter. His history was a foreign country to her, one which she had no wish, no need, to visit. Compatibility is not the affair of an instant. It is preceded by knowledge, by sympathy, by understanding. It is preceded by history, the history he shared with Louise, with Putnam. He understood now why Louise was always in his thoughts, although he had done his best to ignore them, and had even succeeded. That old intuition which had always been there, that period of their lives when no explanations had been necessary, that long, that even tedious predictability: that was true friendship. He had not even felt friendship for the girl, for his brooding obsession could not be confused with true friendship. Friendship meant reliability, a telephone call which could be made, or answered, in an emergency. Friendship was what served at the end, when one was near one’s last resting place. And by no stretch of the imagination could he
see Katy at his bedside, although, should the need have arisen, he would be there at hers. Or would have been. Even his imagination was foundering now. The figure on the balcony, in the lightweight suit, remained merely as an image, but a potent one, as if it were the figure of an exotic stranger, one whose acquaintance he would dearly love to have made.

Though it was only just past five-thirty he went back to the bedroom and lay down again on his bed. He knew that a lonely night of reflection awaited him, and he welcomed it. He had still to overcome his enormous sorrow at not having managed to admit to his life all those elements he had somehow been at pains to exclude: licence, passion, adventure, fury, recklessness. Had he once been able to indulge such forces, to achieve a perfect liquidity of the emotions, he thought that he might have been able to face death with equanimity, knowing that nothing had been wasted. He did not in all honesty think that he had used the girl as a mere pretext for such indulgence, that it was an old man’s lust disguised as philanthropy that had misled him. The proof, he thought, was that he had felt for her some of the same sadness that he felt for himself, as if they were not only unprotected but uninstructed, and if not innocent then certainly defenceless. The strange odyssey that he had planned for them had indeed something childlike about it, proof of his own childlike wishes, in which sex and sin played no part.

It seemed that extreme instinctive love of that nature was to be denied him, along with the energies that informed those wilder imaginings sanctioned by desire. He remembered in this context a conversation he had once had with Putnam. It had been shortly after the summer holidays, some
two or three years earlier. He had been in Aix-en-Provence, where one of his discreet encounters had taken place. It had been perfectly agreeable, extremely appropriate to the time and the circumstances, and it left him depressed, even more depressed than usual. The utter predictability of the episode, and that included the love-making itself, filled him not with shame—that would have been easy to understand—but with longing. On his return to London he had gone on one of his long walks (Kennington, he seemed to remember: the huge incongruous churches came back to him) and had called in to Putnam’s flat afterwards. It was a Sunday: they were to go back to work the following day. For Bland there was something of the apprehension of returning to school, which always afflicted him at such times.

In the rust-coloured gloom of Putnam’s flat, and in the glow of his superior electric fire (synthetic orange coals, embedded in black Bakelite), they had sat in silence, eating crumpets. Both were in a ruminative mood, it seemed, with little to impart in the way of information.

‘You’re quiet,’ Putnam had finally said. ‘Anything wrong?’

‘Tell me something,’ he had replied, out of the depths of his preoccupation. ‘Why should life seem exciting only if there is the possibility of throwing it away? And not even in a good cause. Fatal passion is what I’m talking about, I suppose, and what a failure you feel if you’ve missed it.’

‘I wouldn’t give you a thank you for a fatal passion. A fatal passion can turn nasty, you know. That’s why it’s called fatal.’

‘I seem to have missed it altogether. I seem to have almost
avoided it, as if I doubted my own ability to deal with it. Maybe I was too modest.’

‘Don’t be so bloody vain! Only vain people proclaim their modesty.’

‘Not modest, then. Unprepared.’

‘You are what your destiny made you. We all are.’

‘I keep feeling I’ve done something wrong, as if I’d been locked out of something by my own fault.’

‘That’s probably true. We’ve all done something wrong. I do something wrong every time I have a fling with a married woman. Not that there have been all that many,’ he added.

‘And that doesn’t make you suffer?’

Putnam lit a cigarette. ‘Not much,’ he said finally.

‘I suppose that’s the difference between an affair and a love affair. I wouldn’t mind suffering for the real thing. In fact I long to.’

‘You’re a romantic. An adolescent. Grown men don’t want to suffer. It all comes from reading, you know. If we didn’t have the books to go on we shouldn’t put up half such a show. At least you wouldn’t. I don’t anyway.’

Now, lying on his bed in the dark, he thought of that conversation and how even Putnam had not understood him. Yet no doubt Putnam had been right. It made no difference. He had continued to think in terms of the seamless adventure, onto which he had so recently imposed the flight, the foreign exile, the passion transmuted into a watchful benevolence. Something had gone wrong; something was amiss. Maybe he was not up to the mark. Maybe the life he had led had been insufficient preparation. In the timeless dark it seemed to him that the passion he had always sought had become attenuated, until now it was an affair not only of longing, but of infinite regret.