Look at Me (11 page)

So that when I received a congratulatory letter from the prestigious American magazine, and the news that my story about Dr Leventhal’s Hellenic adventures would shortly be published, I felt no urge to sit down and write another. Rather the opposite. I looked on my success as the fitting conclusion to a career wrongly chosen, and dangerous in its implications of future effort and loneliness. I could now sign off with a flourish and never write again.

Of course, I was pleased, in a non-essential way. I felt the reward was undeserved because I no longer wanted that sort of reward. But Olivia was pleased, if only because she takes things so much more seriously than I do. And James was delighted. His haughty, horsey face broke into a smile such as I had never seen before when I told him about it. That smile was directed at the magazine, which he held in his hands, and I knew then that I wanted that smile to be directed nowhere but at myself. Look at me, I wanted to say, look at me. That was how and when I found out about writing.

I telephoned Alix, of course, because that is the sort of thing she loves. She gave a shout, and said, ‘Hey, hey. We must celebrate.’ ‘My treat,’ I said. ‘I should hope so,’ was her reply. ‘Shall I ask James to join us?’ I felt awkward at this point because I had thought of James so much that I could not have enjoyed this little celebration if he had not been there, so I decided to be entirely honest and said to Alix, ‘Oh, yes please. Four is a better number than three, don’t you think?’ Then I wondered if I had offended her because there was a short silence, and she said, ‘I think two is the best number of all, myself’, and I agreed so fervently that I managed to convince myself that we had been talking about the same thing. Perhaps we had; I shall never know.

Beginnings are so beautiful. I was not in love with James, but now there was something to get up for in the
mornings, other than that withering little routine that would eventually transform me into a version of Miss Morpeth, although I had no niece in Australia who might brighten my last years. Nor would I turn into Mrs Halloran, still game, but doomed to hopelessness. No glasses of gin for me, no bottle in the wardrobe of a room in a hotel in South Kensington, no evenings lying on the bed dressed in a housecoat too young and too pink, casting superior horoscopes for those who fear the future. With what thankfulness did I register my deliverance from this dread, which had possessed me for as long as I could remember. I breathed more deeply, slept more soundly, ate more heartily, freed from this weight. Nancy’s mumblings and shufflings ceased to bother me, for they no longer represented the shades of the prison house. In fact I began to love her as I had loved her long ago, when, as a child, I ran to her to be kissed, and made up treats for her. I realized that she too must feel isolated, particularly as she was so shy and did not make friends easily. As I swung out of the building one morning, I had a word with the porter, Mr Reardon, and arranged for him to go up to the flat and have tea, when he came off duty. He could sit with Nancy for half an hour, and give her the evening paper, which he always bought at lunchtime, for the racing forecasts. So that Nancy felt a little happier too.

I felt strong, I felt energetic, I felt … young. I had never felt this before. I had always understood that I would have to assume responsibilities that others found unacceptable. I had been writing the cheques and paying the bills and the tax when I was still in my teens; it was always I who called the doctor. Nancy would ask me to buy her a new dress, a new cardigan. ‘Like my blue one, Miss Fan. The one Madam likes.’ Every time I looked at her I could see some garment that I had bought either for Nancy, or for my mother, and the sadness of those
afternoons, in department stores, all alone, fingering modest nightgowns, opaque stockings, discreet and genteel garments, and taking them home to that claustral quiet, for their inspection. They loved those times. But I hated them. They were a parody of all the shopping I wanted to do. They interfered with my impulse to please myself, so that I might please others.

I had never thought myself interesting to look at, but now I could not help noticing that my eyes were wider, my expression lively with anticipation. I began to study my appearance in the glass. I looked through my clothes and put the dull sensible things on one side. I got rid of the heavy walking shoes, and gave my navy coat to Nancy. I bought a couple of pullovers, and a wool shirt, in light fresh colours, sky blue and white. I resurrected a pale grey dress with a white puritan collar and a black bow at the neck that I had not worn for a couple of years and had folded up and put aside because I thought it looked too elaborate for the sort of life I led. Now, as I examined myself with a franker sort of appreciation, I thought it made me look interesting, almost unusually so. I began to look forward to dressing up for the day that lay before me.

My attitudes in general seemed to have undergone a change for the better, making me less sharp, more receptive. I felt myself sliding deliciously downwards into a miasma of kindliness. I found amusement in my routine at the Library, not the engineered amusement that I had tried to amass for my stories, but genuine human oddness and fascination. I told no one of the change in myself, the sense I had that life was opening up for my inspection, and more than that, for my participation. Mrs Halloran had long since stopped waiting for me to mention Nick’s frequent appearances round the door when he collected me in the evenings. I had disappointed her, I know, but I did not wish to share
what I had. For it was such a novelty for me to have anything, although from her point of view I was one of the lucky ones, with the flat and my job and my stable income. I could not tell her that I was only just beginning my life, for she would have stared at me, had such a conversation ever taken place, and asked me what had ever stood in my way. I could not tell her that even in defeat, which was how I viewed my life until this moment, there are certain loyalties to be observed. Her lack of sympathy, I felt, would still have been absolute.

Olivia was pleased, although I had said nothing to her. She was pleased for me, because I was happy, although she may have regretted things for herself. She had not only her love for Nick to forget, but also the hope, which our two mothers had silently shared, that I might marry her brother David. I believe my mother said something to Olivia, when she began to get so very ill, although Olivia, being a creature of exquisite delicacy, has never mentioned this to me. But she knows that my mother loved her; she remembers my mother’s thin hand caressing her wondrous hair; she feels the loyalty too. Yet she was pleased for me.

I saw James every day. He would linger in the Library until I arrived in the morning, and I would make us both some coffee, which we drank from the Mickey Mouse mugs. And if we were not going to the Frasers, or meeting at the restaurant, he would walk me home in the evenings. I worried that I could not invite him to a meal, explaining that I would have to get Nancy used to the idea, but he said, ‘We have plenty of time’, and so there was no awkwardness on that score. The days passed swiftly between our early morning meetings and our long walks home. I don’t think that anyone noticed anything. James was much more reticent than I was, much more careful. I was cautious because I could not believe my good fortune; when I could believe it, I knew
that I should become extravagantly demonstrative. But he had a high level of control, which I suppose went with his professional demeanour; at any rate, it went well with the rusty unused voice and the haughty and impassive face. I found such reticence very exciting. For I knew he cared for me.

We were very shy with each other. I never asked him about his divorce, for I think I sensed that he too wanted to begin again. Because we were so shy – longing for our meetings, but sometimes faltering in conversation – we made sure that we went out with the Frasers a great deal. Those evenings at the restaurant, with James’s arm lying across the back of my chair, and Maria sitting down with us – so that we were five – were very precious to me. Alix and Nick made fun of us a little, but we learned to deal with it, as long as we were together. ‘Maria,’ Alix would say, ‘take a look at this. Aren’t they sweet?’

‘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.