Look at Me (2 page)

Most of the real work in the Library is done by Dr Leventhal, the librarian, who combs the many reference books in search of maladies and images of maladies and who then passes the information on to Olivia or myself. We do the work of mounting and filing, of collecting offprints of learned articles, and we also look after the visitors who come to consult our archives. We are not very well known to the general public nor would we wish to be, but we cater for our own staff of doctors and for outside specialists and the odd, the very odd, visitor. At the moment we can count on Mrs Halloran and Dr Simek. Mrs Halloran is a wild-looking lady with a misleading air of authority who claims to be in touch with the other side and who is trying to prove her theory that
the influence of Saturn is responsible for most anomalies of behaviour. You get a lot of borderline cases in libraries. Dr Simek is an extremely reticent Czech or Pole (we are not quite sure which and we do not see that it is our business to enquire). He is working, on a series of tiny file cards, on the history of the treatment of depressions, or melancholia, as it used to be known, and he comes in every day. They both come in every day, largely, I suspect, because the Library is so very well heated.

Mrs Halloran’s attempts to engage Dr Simek in conversation – efforts which he courteously and wordlessly ignores – usually reach some sort of climax when they both want to study the same folder of photographs. Mrs Halloran always wins, because she makes such a noise that it is in everybody’s interest to shut her up, just as some people get a lot of sympathy because they complain all the time. On these occasions Dr Simek smiles, inclines his head, and says, ‘Miss Frances, if you would be so kind …’, and requests more photographs. I always deal with him because Olivia is more brutal and has been known to tell Mrs Halloran to keep quiet or go to another library. Mrs Halloran knows that she would not last five minutes outside the confines of this peculiar place, half study, half nursery, and subsides, for a time, at least. Round about midday she says, ‘Either of you girls coming round to the Bricklayers?’, and we say, as we always do, that we are so busy that we are simply going to have a quick sandwich in the canteen. Mrs Halloran goes out for a couple of hours and comes back breathing rather heavily, her concentration gone, as is proved by the way she gazes out of the window for long periods and taps on the table with one or other of her massive onyx rings. She does not seem to know that she is doing this, and eventually Dr Simek looks up, inclines his head politely, and says, ‘Madam, if you would be so
kind …’ I think this was the first phrase he learned when he came to this country. He never goes out to lunch. He never seems to eat at all. When I bring Olivia her tea I sometimes take him a cup, which is a bore because then Mrs Halloran wants one too, and then Dr Leventhal appears in the doorway that divides the Library from his office and wants to know if we are having a party, and could we please remember that silence is the rule. He is the sort of man who only breaks his own silence in order to utter a derogatory remark. But he is otherwise quite harmless. I would not say that we were genuinely fond of him (that would hardly be appropriate) but he is easy to work for, a mild, heavy man, probably shy, probably lonely, very correct, easily tolerated. We all get on very well.

The potential boredom of this routine is broken by the visits of one or other of the Institute’s own doctors, particularly one of the two whose research we are funding, James Anstey or Nick Fraser. Particularly Nick Fraser. Nick is everybody’s favourite, even Dr Leventhal’s. For as long as Olivia and I have known him he has been distinguished by that grace and confidence of manner that ensure success. He is tall and fair, an athlete, a socialite, well-connected, good-looking, charming: everything you could wish for in a man. Our all-England hero, Olivia once called him, in those days when she was more than a little in love with him. She may still be, for all I know, but she never mentions it and I don’t ask. Sometimes her mouth tightens after one of his lightning visits when, in a mood of general hilarity or euphoria, he sweeps in, flings his arms around Mrs Halloran (‘Delia, you old monster, what are you doing here?’), demands, with an urgent clicking of the fingers, a whole pile of photographs, looks at his watch, remembers he has an appointment, begs me, with his ravishing smile, to take them up to his room, and sweeps out again,
leaving a trail of disorder and excitement. Dr Leventhal appears in his doorway, sees who it is, and subsides. ‘Don’t take them,’ says Olivia. ‘Why should you?’ ‘Oh, but I must,’ I reply. ‘I can’t hold up his work. He’s so brilliant. I mean his work is.’

‘You mean he is. You have succumbed, just like everybody else. The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie vanquished once more by the brutal fascination of the upper classes.’

She talks like that. She was brought up in a strictly socialist household. Also, she pines a little, I think, because Nick is married to the equally dazzling Alix, whom Olivia, for various reasons, can’t stand. We have never discussed this because on some matters reticence is preferable, particularly when feelings are liable to change. We are both rather old-fashioned, I suppose, and although our friendship is deep and sincere, we do not really subscribe to the women’s guerrilla movement. I think we like to maintain a certain loyalty to the men who have, or have had, our love and affection; we regard ourselves in some way as being concerned with their honour. Ridiculous, really, when you come to think of it. I have learned that there is no reciprocity in these matters. But in any case Olivia is a creature of such high breeding that she would consider such a discussion to be in questionable taste. So we never say anything, although I have seen her eyes darken and her face grow paler than usual after one of these visits. There is no hope, of course. I think she saw that even before I did. She is very brave.

So I struggle up the stairs with Nick’s photographs and he leans back in his chair for an instant and smiles and says, ‘Darling Fanny.
What
a good girl you are’, and I go downstairs again, and do something strenuous and unpleasant, like a lot of very brisk filing, until Mrs Halloran comes back from her lunch and knocks something
off one of the tables with her bag and the afternoon gets under way.

Nick is also working on depression and it sometimes surprises me that he talks to Mrs Halloran, whom he knows from the pub, rather than to Dr Simek, who was apparently quite an authority in his own country. I would have thought that they would have a great deal in common. Dr Simek has often tried to retain his attention but he is too courteous, too resigned, and Nick is always too much in demand for them ever to be able to get together. Dr Simek seems to accept this, as he accepts everything else: the un-European character of this Library, with its cups of tea and its ash-trays and Mrs Halloran, who is sometimes quite drunk, and the fact that one of the librarians is more or less immobile. I feel that it is just as well that Dr Simek is working largely on the nineteenth century for there is no doubt that Nick will sweep the board of honours when he publishes his own work on depression. Dr Simek always waits until Nick has finished his joke with Mrs Halloran, his head on one side, his lips slightly pursed, his eyes looking studiously down at the photograph in his slightly trembling hand, and when the laughter has died down, he clears his throat and says, ‘Dr Fraser, if you would be so kind …’, which is his all-purpose phrase, and he shows him the photograph. Nick, who is always in a tearing hurry, and who has to combine his research with his professional duties and a full social life, makes a disappointed face. ‘Joseph,’ he says, ‘it really is too ridiculous that we never have time to discuss this properly. Why don’t you come to dinner one evening? I’ll get my wife to give you a ring.’

‘I have no telephone,’ says Dr Simek, as might have been expected. ‘Perhaps now we could …’

‘I’ll get her to ring here,’ Nick assures him. ‘One of the girls will take a message.’ Actually we are not allowed
to use the telephone, which is in Dr Leventhal’s office and which is in fact his telephone, but I don’t suppose he would mind as it has to do with research. I assume that they have had this dinner, which Dr Simek certainly looks as if he needs, but he shows no signs of leaving Nick alone, and Nick sometimes advances behind his back with exaggerated wariness, willing him not to turn round. Dr Simek never does turn round: I suppose that, being a foreigner, he does not recognize the informal approach. Of course he knows that Nick is in the room because he has seen him come in, and I think he also knows that Nick is avoiding him, but he merely purses his lips and gets on with his work. Curiously enough, Mrs Halloran and I find ourselves in some sort of complicity with Nick on these occasions. Our eyes follow his progress round the room, and he gives us both a grateful wink as he tiptoes out.

It is strange how this fails to annoy me, although as a rule I am sensitive to bad manners. It is just that occasionally, very occasionally, one meets someone who is so markedly a contrast with the general run of people that one’s instinctive reaction is one of admiration, indulgence, and, no doubt, if one is not very careful indeed, of supplication. I am not arguing the rights and wrongs of this: I am simply stating the facts as they appear to me. And not only to me, for I have noticed that extremely handsome men and extremely beautiful women exercise a power over others which they themselves have no need, or indeed no time, to analyse. People like Nick attract admirers, adherents, followers. They also attract people like me: observers. One is never totally at ease with such people, for they are like sovereigns and one’s duty is to divert them. Matters like worth or merit rarely receive much of their attention, for, with the power of choice which their looks bestow on them, they can change their minds whenever they care to do so. Because
of their great range of possibilities, their attention span is very limited. And their beauty has accustomed them to continuous gratification.

I find such people – and I have met one or two – quite fascinating. I find myself respecting them, as I would respect some natural phenomenon: a rainbow, a mountain, a sunset. I recognize that they might have no intrinsic merit, and yet I will find myself trying to please them, to attract their attention. ‘Look at me,’ I want to say. ‘Look at me.’ And I am also intrigued by their destinies, which could, or should, be marvellous. I will exert myself for such people, and I will miss them when they leave. I will always want to know about them, for I tend to be in love with their entire lives. That is a measure of the power that they exert. That is why I join Nick in a smile of complicity when he spares himself the boredom of a conversation with Dr Simek. It is a kind of law, I suppose.

‘That’, says Mrs Halloran heavily, after every other one of Nick’s disruptive visits to the Library, ‘is one hell of a man’, at which point Olivia asks her to be quiet and observe the rule of silence, and Mrs Halloran says, ‘Miss Benedict, why don’t you get hold of that sodding offprint I’ve been asking for every day for the last month instead of telling me what to do? I don’t tell you what to do, do I?’

‘You just have,’ says Olivia, who is never less than totally composed, and after that they subside for an hour or two, until dissension breaks out again over the matter of whether Mrs Halloran gets a cup of tea or not. Oddly enough, Olivia quite likes her, although I suspect that she finds her life in the Library rather painful at times. But she never says anything. How could she? Apart from her unspoken love for Nick, there is her unspoken dislike of his behaviour. Neither, of course, will ever register with him. It is when I think about this that I
congratulate myself on not being in love with anyone. I am not in love with Nick. I am not in love with Dr Leventhal (difficult to imagine) or Dr Simek (even more difficult) or even with James Anstey, even though he is tall and ferocious-looking and presentable and not married and undoubtedly what Mrs Halloran would call a bit of a handful.

I used to make my mother laugh when I went home in the evenings and described the characters who came into the Library. ‘My darling Fan,’ she used to say, her eyes widening, ‘I think you have a gift.’ She knew all their habits, and where they lived; it was like a serial story to her. She encouraged me to write it all down, and so I bought the usual large exercise book and kept a sort of diary, and I like to think that one day I will use this material and write a comic novel, one of those droll and piquant chronicles enjoyed by dons at Oxford and Cambridge colleges. I could do it, I know. Since my mother died, I have had no one to talk to about these things, no one who is so interested, who knows the characters, who wants to find out what happens next, who responds with such delight. So I tend to write a bit more, these days, when I get home in the evenings, although it is not the same, and I have to struggle to keep a note of despondency out of what gets put down. In fact sometimes I have to struggle quite hard, because I do hate low-spirited people. I would even say I hate unfortunate people, which is why I do not enquire too closely about Dr Simek. I have put all that sort of thing behind me.

And it seems that I am right to do so, because a short story I wrote – actually about the Library, although heavily disguised, of course – was once published. I was not on the whole as pleased with it as everyone else seemed to be, but I’m glad that my mother knew about it before she died. It was one I hadn’t read to her, which
in an odd way may have been just as well. She always took people more seriously than I try to do.

So the days go by in an orderly fashion. I get up, I come to work, I have lunch with Olivia, I stick on the photographs, I even try to work out some of the pictures for myself. I find the power of images very strong, even when I do not understand them. Sometimes an image stands for something that will only be understood in due course. It is a mnemonic, a cryptogram, very occasionally a token of precognition. I pay very great attention to images, both at the Library and away from it. I spend a lot of time on my own, and the contents of my mind, which is nothing out of the ordinary, amaze me with their random significance. That is why I like the Library, not only for the task of classification which is its main purpose, but for the potency of its images, like the Fool on the Tarot card, or Melancholia with her torn book, or Goya with his doctor.