Look at Me (6 page)

I needed to know that not everyone carries a wound and that this wound bleeds intermittently throughout life. I needed to be taught that life can put on a good turn of speed and bowl one along with it. I needed to learn, from experts, that pure egotism that had always escaped me, for the little I had managed to build up, and which had so far only gone into my writing, was quickly vanquished by the sight of that tremulousness, that lost look in the eye, that
disappointment
that seemed to haunt me, to get in my way, even to obtrude on my consciousness, when I was busy building up my resources of selfishness. I had only to see the dry, dyed hairs thickening in Mrs Halloran’s comb as she prepared herself for her evening visit to the Feathers, or Dr Simek buttoning his old-fashioned gloves at the wrist, or to remember Nancy’s stern but trusting blue eyes looking up
at me, for the whole edifice to crumble. And this process would go on, despite my injunction to myself to ignore it. It would erupt in the form of images, which is appropriate, I suppose, since I deal with them all day, but they would irritate me as much as something obscuring my natural field of vision would irritate me. These tiny fugues are extremely random and unpredictable; they swim up from some area which I cannot control and which I should dearly love to forget about. Sometimes I see, sometimes I hear, forgotten episodes from my real life, and I always try very hard to invent a new life for myself so that I can get away from the old one, although to all intents and purposes that old life, which I had hitherto lived precariously and with a resignation mixed with impatience, had been very easy. It had been so easy that I was not satisfied with it. I suppose that is why I write, in order to recompose events, to make them sharper, funnier, than they really were. Above all, funnier. I write to be hard. I do not intend to spare any feelings, except, of course, my own.

It was, therefore, to my very great annoyance, that on the morning of the day of my first meeting with Alix Fraser, the day of that royal progress through life, that easy relegation of phenomena not found attractive, that I was haunted by the spectre of Dr Constantine. Dr Constantine was my mother’s doctor, a small leathery man with a face like a nut and bandy legs. He looked more like a jockey than a doctor, and his strong Dublin accent reinforced this impression. I doubt if anyone took him seriously as a doctor; he was too shy, too full of awkward jokes, some of which were inaudible, to impress one with his superior knowledge. He could do very little for my mother except keep up her spirits, which he did by calling to see her every Saturday of her life. This was a visit which went according to a prescribed pattern. He would stay for exactly three-quarters of an hour,
nursing a glass of whisky, which my mother would nod at me to pour out, and tell her all about the affairs of the neighbourhood. Small matters: the young man they were thinking of taking on as a partner, his receptionist’s daughter’s new baby. That sort of thing. He would take her pulse as he spoke and wind up by saying, ‘Ah, you’re doing fine.’ She would say, ‘Thanks to you, doctor’, and he would blush, and my mother would add, ‘And to my darling here.’ Nancy and I would wait for him at the door and he would say again, ‘She’s doing fine’, but he would never meet my eye. And one day … One day I was summoned home by Nancy, who telephoned the Library, and when I got there it was to find my mother having an attack and Dr Constantine crouched over the telephone in the hall, his face red, his composure gone. ‘I’m begging you, Matron,’ he was saying. ‘Find me a bed. Ah God, Matron, I can’t deal with it here.’ He was despairing, distraught, his small brown eye searching, somewhere beyond my head, for succour. Yet he dealt with it, because there was no bed free in the hospital, and in the end she died at home, and he was not there, and he apologized to me. He would have wept if I had not been very polite and formal and kept it short, that apology. I felt nothing. In any event, I felt less than he did.

He was not there. But I was.

So that on the morning of the day that Alix came to the Library it was extremely annoying to have vividly in my mind’s eye the image of Dr Constantine crouched over the telephone, his face red, his small eye vacant and despairing, and to have in my mind’s ear the sound of his voice. Begging. Without resource.

Also, and for no reason that I can identify, I saw a cigarette box that belonged to my father, made of rosewood, with a marquetry inlay. I used to play with it as a child, during the long silent afternoons when my
mother was resting, and only now do I see how badly it was made, for the edge of the border was rough and slightly raised and it should have been as smooth as silk.

When I am in these moods, the best person to be with is Olivia, whose moral strength never falters and in whose company I steady myself, perhaps for the next onslaught, perhaps for the germ of an idea that I can write about when I get home in the evening. She is my only critic. But I think she condemns my hard-won frivolousness.

As I have said, I felt intrigued, excited, by the awesome match between Nick and his wife. They came in carelessly, laughing and absorbed, and at first sight, and indeed on further understanding, they seemed to me to be a single phenomenon. It was only later that I saw Alix as separate, and when I first perceived that she had a personality of her own I also perceived that this personality was not only anterior to her life with Nick but superior to it as well. In our dark and serious room, like a nursery for grown-up children, Olivia and I were drinking coffee out of mugs with suitably juvenile decorations. Women in their places of work frequently give way to these domestic impulses and festoon their offices with pot plants and alternative shoes and the odd cardigan: Miss Morpeth, my predecessor, had her own bone china cup and saucer and a padded velvet coat hanger, and I put these details into my story, which Olivia thought was rather tasteless. Being unmarried and childless, and still living in our parents’ houses, Olivia and I don’t go so far as to create a home away from home; we limit ourselves to our Mickey Mouse mugs, over the rims of which our eyes scan the Library and each other, meeting in a mutual warning gaze when anything disruptive or subversive seems about to happen. It was in such a gaze that our eyes became locked
when we heard that laughter outside our door, presaging our introduction to Alix.

She was not beautiful but she had such an aura of power that she claimed one’s entire attention. She was tall and fair, with rough streaky hair and rather small grey eyes which disappeared when her magnificent mouth opened in one of those laughs that I came to know so well. The mouth, and everything about it, was her most important feature: the long thin lips, the flawless teeth, the high carrying voice. We saw and understood Nick’s delight when he inspired her to laughter and the head went back and the mouth stretched and the sound, which was in fact rather swallowed and restrained, rewarded him. The brilliance of that laughing face, with the careless hair and the rapacious teeth, was the exact complement to Nick’s roving unplatonic gaze, indicating immense reserves of appetite and pleasure. She left one in little doubt that it would be an honour to engage her attention.

They seemed to be in incessant physical union; he held her hand or put an arm round her shoulder or sought her eye, which held his quizzically, the eyebrows raised. There was an unspoken dialogue between them, which they occasionally suspended in order to range round for further topics of interest or amusement. She looked speculatively at Olivia, who blushed, and then at me, and I was heartened, at that early stage in our acquaintance, to note the raised eyebrows and the smile, as I put down my mug and stood up. I stood up instinctively, half wary, half welcoming, entirely deferential.

‘We were having an argument,’ she said, as if she had known me for years, or as if she thought any formalities a waste of time. ‘I think my hair would look better swept up, but Nick is dead against it. What do you think?’

I hardly knew what to say, but there was no need for me to speak because Nick was already protesting.

‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you know I like it the way it is. It was like that when I first met you. You can’t want to change it.’

She laughed. ‘I’m bored with it. Anyway, you never want anything to change. Just let me show you. No, don’t say anything yet.’

And she slipped out of her fur coat, which she threw over the back of a chair, disarranging a pile of photographs, planted her bag on my desk, took out a handful of combs and hairpins, and piled her abundant hair on top of her head. When it was sufficiently anchored, she turned to me for my verdict.

‘I think it looks very nice either way,’ I said lamely, but that didn’t seem to matter either because she had already turned to Nick and posed with one hand on her hip and the other smoothing up the escaping strands at her neck. Mrs Halloran and Dr Simek had suspended their research and were looking on as if some voluptuous cabaret had been devised for their entertainment.

‘Darling,’ Nick protested again, ‘you must do as you like, of course, but you know how I feel about it. Couldn’t you just leave it? Just to please me?’

By this time she was gazing into a small hand mirror, turning her head from side to side to gauge the effect. I tried to look as if this were the sort of thing that usually went on in libraries. I could feel Olivia’s disapproval and I knew instinctively that I wanted to dissociate myself from it. I was surprised by Nick’s pleading tone, but supposed that it was part of some erotic understanding, an idea which intrigued me.

‘H’m,’ she said, when she had finished her inspection, which took rather a long time. ‘Well, I’ll work on it. As for you,’ she added, turning to Nick, ‘you like it your way all the time, don’t you? Every time, in fact,’ and she laughed at him, poking him with her finger, and saying, ‘Yes? Yes?’, at which point Dr Simek pursed his lips
and returned his eyes to the folder in which he kept his notes. Mrs Halloran continued to stare unabashed. Olivia picked up a photograph and began to trim it carefully with a pair of scissors.

As she snapped her bag shut, Alix turned to me and said, ‘Which one are you?’

I said, ‘I’m Frances, and this is Olivia’, but she took no notice, and it was then that she invited me to taste her famous spaghetti, adding, inevitably, that she had come down in the world. I got out my diary but she waved it aside. ‘I never know what day it is,’ she said. ‘Come tomorrow. Darling, are we doing anything tomorrow?’

Dr Simek looked up, and Nick’s face took on an exaggerated look of pain.

‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘We were going to have that talk, weren’t we, Joseph? But it would be better if you read my article first, you know. So what about some time next week?’

‘I have …’ began Dr Simek.

But he was interrupted by Alix, who had put on her coat and was demanding to know where she had put her gloves. Had she left them in the restaurant? If so, he would have to go back for them.

‘Hopeless, my husband,’ she confided to Mrs Halloran, who, I was surprised to note, stared back at her unblinkingly, withholding the approval that I was so eager to offer.

‘That’s that, then,’ she said, once the gloves were found. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow. Nick will tell you the way.’ And immediately she switched her attention to Nick, looking into his eyes and dazzling him with the slow dawning of her smile.

There was quite a silence after they left. I had remained standing all this time, and as I slowly sat down again, I could hear them laughing on the other side of
the door. I could even hear her say, ‘Well, don’t tell me I don’t do my duty.’ Then Nick murmured something, and she replied, her voice unmodulated from its usual carrying resonance, ‘Yes, but darling,
what
a crew. The things I do for England. Frances, did you say that girl’s name was? I seem to have asked her to dinner. What’s the matter with the other one?’ And then her voice died away and after a minute or two I heard the front door close behind them. Olivia, who had kept her eyes on her work throughout this episode, said nothing. Her initial blush had faded, leaving a startling whiteness.

‘Well, girls,’ said Mrs Halloran, after a pause so total that we could even hear traffic noises from the opposite side of the square, ‘I hope you were paying attention. That’s how to treat a man, if you ever get one, which I doubt, in this place. You won’t get
him
, that’s for sure. She has him by the balls.’

This brought us back to reality. Olivia, without raising her voice, suggested that Mrs Halloran might be happier working in the Westminster Public Library. Dr Leventhal appeared in his doorway, glasses in hand, and asked if by any chance we were finding ourselves at a loose end. If so, there was some filing to be done in the basement. Dr Simek, who had closed his eyes, during this last pronouncement of Mrs Halloran’s, succumbed to what was clearly an expensive temptation, fitted a yellow cigarette into his long old amber holder with the gold ring round it, lit it with an equally ancient lighter, and inhaled deeply. Mrs Halloran, her face mottled and moody, remained staring straight ahead, her onyx rings beating a steady tattoo on the table. ‘All right, all right,’ she said, as Dr Simek turned to her with his usual courtesy. ‘I’ve got work to do too, you know.’

‘I should make a start on it,’ observed Olivia pleasantly. ‘We’ve wasted enough time today already.’

And somehow the afternoon returned to normal and
resumed its unhurried course. The afternoon gradually slipped over the edge that connects it with the daytime and began to offer intimations of the evening to come. I was working on Van Gogh’s self-portraits at the time, I remember, trying to disentangle the sequence that he painted when he was either becoming mad or had already gone mad. I was doing this very conscientiously, matching up extracts from the letters and typing them carefully on to slips of paper which I attached to the mounts. I tried to take a detached and efficient interest in what I was doing, but at some point I became aware of the painter’s small crafty blue eye staring back at me from its scarlet setting. I felt no sympathy. On the contrary, I felt a spurt of dislike for him, with his workman’s clothes and his silly fur hat. My feelings were all for his benighted brother, trying to be a respectable art dealer in Paris and having to cope with this nutter and his demands. I try to raise a small cheer for sanity, from time to time. We rationalists must fly the flag, you know.