Look at Me (7 page)

I distributed tea all round, that day, for we were all a little unsettled. But if the others were, for their various reasons, anxious to rid themselves of the impression that the Frasers had made, I was not. I went over it again and again in my mind. And when I walked Olivia to her car that evening, I did not linger. I did not stop for coffee, as I usually did, but sped home with great strides of excitement. When Nancy had locked the door behind me, as she always did unless I told her that I was going to be out, I sniffed the dull muffled air of the flat, I prepared to face the ritual tray of ritual food, I knew that all this was intolerable, and I tolerated it because I had been offered a glimpse of the world outside. I would see how the others, the free ones, conducted their lives, and then I could begin my own.

I slipped into the routine of dining with the Frasers, scarcely believing my good fortune. I registered with amazement the fact that Alix seemed to have taken to me, and that Nick accepted my presence in their flat without comment. In fact his face would appear round the door of the Library at about six o’clock in the evening and he would nod and I would pick up my bag and follow him out, aware of Mrs Halloran’s speculative eye on my back. I don’t think I was forcing my company on them, although I was avid for theirs. In those early days I never telephoned, except to say thank you, and these conversations would lead to another invitation, or rather to an assumption that I had nothing else to do. I was a little shy of confessing my unfilled evenings and always said that I was going to write, to which Alix always replied, ‘Oh, well, if that’s all, you might as well come round here.’ And of course I would always go. I salved my conscience by doing bits of shopping for her, and of course I insisted on paying when we went to the restaurant.

I think they were both glad that I took such an interest in Nick’s work, Nick for obvious reasons, and Alix
because she got fed up with it, regarded it with pride but also with some resentment, and occasionally behaved as if he were being unfaithful to her when he was actually engaged on it. She had the same attitude to my writing, I soon discovered, although I could not see how this constituted a menace to her peace of mind, and anyway I was only too glad to be relieved of the burden of my solitude – which was what my writing represented – to persevere with it. And yet it was an old habit, to which I returned when solitude reclaimed me, usually late at night, when I was sleepless, and when I wrote my diary these days I had so much more to record, always with a view to my nebulous novel. But I found that this novel, which was supposed to be about the Library and the characters who used it, the odd people whom I used to describe so amusingly to my mother, had been elbowed out of the way by the extraordinary quantity of new information I seemed to be acquiring. I wrote it all down, but I could not see how to use it, for it all seemed to have to do with the Frasers, and how could I possibly use that? Yet around those silent midnights, when the flat in Maida Vale had long been put to sleep, my pen raced over the pages, gaining speed and point from the increased urgency of my absorption in their lives.

As I said, Alix did not like my writing. She regarded it as a secret which I was keeping from her. ‘But what do you write about?’ she would demand. I could never tell her, not because I was embarrassed about it but because it had as yet no definite shape. I felt that it had to be kept under lock and key until it had resolved itself, which it would do, sooner or later; I was superstitious about letting anything escape. I tried to explain this, but quite clearly I failed to convince her, and she regarded it as a sort of disloyalty. ‘Darling,’ she would call out to Nick, ‘Little Orphan Fanny’s holding out on me.’ ‘Oh, poor baby,’ a muffled voice would reply, usually from
inside the clean shirt into which Nick was changing, before we all went down to the restaurant. ‘Come and make her tell me,’ Alix would call out, and she was almost serious. He would come into the sitting room, his sleeves inside his shirt but his chest bare, and I would watch as he went over to her and nuzzled his face in her hair. ‘She who must be obeyed,’ he would say, and, to me, ‘Force yourself. She always gets her own way in the end.’ So I would force myself, and with the slightest feeling of betrayal (but this was somehow better than my earlier solitude) I would tell her about the characters – and in the telling they became ‘characters’ – whom I had intended to put into my novel. I found that when I exaggerated the grotesque nature of their behaviour I could raise a momentary laugh but most of what I told her left her impassive. ‘H’m,’ she would say. ‘Sounds very odd to me. I can’t see anybody wanting to read about such a lot of deadbeats.’ She read little herself, although their flat was always cluttered with expensive magazines. I can still see Alix flicking disdainfully through the pages, as if unwilling to believe any woman better dressed or more alluring than herself, holding such women at arm’s length, and finally flinging them aside in order to renew her nail varnish or to try, once again, to perfect her new hairstyle. This always required Nick’s attention, or his final verdict, and as the three of us gathered around her dressing table, making suggestions, persuading or dissuading, the question of what I was writing faded quite naturally into the background. And after a while, when I telephoned, I ceased to use the excuse that I was writing and instead asked her if I could get her anything in town.

She once said, ‘If you must write, find something that interests other people. You can’t expect them to be interested in a lot of nuts.’ I at once became anxious to dissociate myself from these people, although their
ghosts lingered distressfully in my mind. ‘I’m the one who should be writing a novel,’ she continued. ‘If you only knew what my life was like before I came down in the world.’ And she would tell me about her schooldays in Switzerland, and the years she spent in Paris when she first came into her money, and the beautiful estate in Jamaica to which she returned each winter, to her adoring and handsome father whom she accompanied on his travels and who was so pleased to have such a colourful daughter on his arm. ‘People took us for lovers,’ she used to say, and she never really got over his death and the news about his impending bankruptcy. ‘Poor Daddy,’ she said. ‘He died just in time.’ But she could hardly bear to think of the days when the estate had had to be put up for auction, and although she had managed to salvage some of the furniture and bring it to England, she hated seeing it in its present setting.

I examined this furniture with some respect. I don’t know exactly what I expected to see, but it was certainly not these handsome and hefty Edwardian pieces, walnut tallboys and tables, olive green button-backed armchairs and sofas, all crammed into the mournfully regular little rooms of their Chelsea flat. Although I could not admire Alix’s furniture, I registered the fact that it had a more distinguished lineage than my own, and I could see why the zig-zag rugs and the wrought-iron lampstandards of Maida Vale had inspired her to mirth. The difference between us was that she clung to her memories and allowed them to overshadow the present, whereas I tried hard to disown mine and looked forward to a time when they would not trouble me. Then I would shed my surroundings, like a butterfly sheds a chrysalis, and I would fly towards a future which was not lumbered with other people’s relics. But Alix strove to preserve a past which was not only past but also out of date, since she now had her life with Nick. Sometimes I could feel her
weighing them both in the balance, as if … as if they had let her down. It was difficult for me to understand this, although I could only admire her exigence. Her eyes would narrow when she saw Nick’s books on the desk which had once belonged to her father, and she always kept the curtains half drawn because she could not stand the metal window frames, or the view of the houses across the street. Her sitting room was always half in darkness, which seemed appropriate to her tigerish nature. All this I wrote down in my diary.

And the little details too. How her black maid, Melanie, used to wash and iron her nightgown every morning. How the houseboys always poured hot water into the fragile teacups and emptied them and dried them carefully before serving the tea. The beautiful tropical fruits they had for breakfast, on the veranda. ‘You can get mangoes in Harrods,’ I offered, trying to be consolatory, but she merely tossed her head. And I could imagine her hatred of the cold grey streets and her contempt for Nick’s depressed patients, and the impatience of the wealthy sugar planter’s daughter as the boring colourless days succeeded each other, with only colourless people like myself to visit her. She seemed to be disappointed in her friends as well, in some indefinable way. And I, who was merely a latter-day recruit, felt permanently on probation.

Yet I was in my way necessary. I was an audience and an admirer; I relieved some of her frustration; I shared her esteem for her own superiority; and I was loyal and well-behaved and totally uncritical. Yet she found me dull, intrinsically dull, simply because I was loyal and well-behaved and uncritical. And I knew that she would always prefer people like her friend Maria, whom she could insult and scandalize, whom she would defame and snub, only to have it all done back to her by Maria. This provided her with a sort of excitement which I
found rather tedious. Nick and I would be greeted with a furious account of what Maria had said about her to a mutual friend, one of those friends whom she telephoned every day. ‘I’ll never go near that bitch again,’ she would pronounce, usually on the evenings when I had arranged to take them to the restaurant. Then Nick would ring up Maria, and plead with her, and the telephone would be handed to Alix, who would shout, ‘You cow!’, and after a lengthy and accusatory riposte from Maria she would shut her eyes and dissolve into her secret and hedonistic internal laughter, and we would go down to the restaurant after all, about an hour and a half later than usual, and I would have my way over the bill.

What interested me far more, although I also found it repellent, was their intimacy as a married couple. I sensed that it was in this respect that they found my company necessary: they exhibited their marriage to me, while sharing it only with each other. I soon learned to keep a pleasant noncommittal smile on my face when they looked into each other’s eyes, or even caressed each other; I felt lonely and excited. I was there because some element in that perfect marriage was deficient, because ritual demonstrations were needed to maintain a level of arousal which they were too complacent, perhaps too spoilt, even too lazy, to supply for themselves, out of their own imagination. I was the beggar at their feast, reassuring them by my very presence that they were richer than I was. Or indeed could ever hope to be.

Alix would break from Nick’s embrace, laughing, leaving him flushed, and turn to me, and remark, ‘She’s blushing! We’ve shocked her!’ And I would smile pleasantly and noncommittally, and she would throw herself into a chair and light a cigarette and say to Nick, ‘We must do something about her. Darling, you must know some men. Find her a man, or something. Can’t you find someone for Fanny? She’ll grow cobwebs just
sitting here with us. She’ll get bored.’ And Nick would say, ‘I know, I know’, with his comic guilty look, the one he used when Dr Simek waylaid him, and I would smile at them, hoping, in spite of my resistance to this display, that they sincerely wanted me to share as they shared and be happy, and that somehow they would make our party of three into a party of four, that they would cause there to be two couples, and we would be equals at last. I discounted their cruelty as a by-product of their excitement. I know that euphoria, that mania, that love and carelessness breed. And because I longed to experience it again on my own account, and not just to watch it, I had to trust them.

‘But first of all we must do something about your appearance,’ Alix would say, and this meant sitting me down at her dressing table and dabbing at me with blushers and eye shadows and then turning me round and showing me to Nick. He would reward me with his hard, speculative gaze, which brought more colour to my cheeks, although when I was turned round again to inspect myself in the mirror I would be horrified to see my clean brown face so smudged, and as I watched my new slightly crooked dark red lips utter some words I was quite surprised that my new enlarged eyes could register such pain. I became quite firm on the matter of my appearance, and wiped and scrubbed all the colour off, raising my dripping face in their bathroom to find Nick leaning curiously against the door jamb. I would brush past him and go back into the bedroom to do my hair, only to find Alix at her dressing table, turning her head from side to side to study the back of her neck, anchoring her chignon with pins and combs, settling her pearl studs in her ears, and stubbing out her cigarette. Myself quite forgotten.

They were essentially amorous, teasing, arousing, withdrawing. It had become second nature to them, as
had their satisfactions and their occasional boredom. Since I had long ago cast myself in the role of an observer, always with my writing in mind, I observed, but always with little shocks of either pleasure or disappointment. I observed their areas of tolerance and intolerance, their favours offered and just as abruptly withdrawn. I found myself striving to capture their attention, their good will. I knew that I could lose all this quite easily, simply because I was so predictable, so consistent. So bourgeois, as Alix would say, not troubling to hide from me the fact that this was the supreme condemnation. I see no harm in the bourgeois way of life, myself. I like regularity of behaviour and courtesy of manner and due attention paid to the existence of other people. I like an ordered life and discretion and reliability. And honesty. And a sense of honour. But I am aware that all these things have little currency where matters of love and friendship are concerned, and that an attractive shamelessness is a good passport to social success. Much better value, as Alix agreed, when I once said some of this to her.

And yet they had a sort of regard for me, or perhaps it was a tolerance, an acquired taste, a novelty. They cast me in the role of their apprentice, and as such they looked after me. They would never, for example, allow me to take a taxi, when we left the restaurant; they always insisted on driving me home. Alix would question me persistently about my love affairs, my income, my desires, and I would answer her in all simplicity. And yet I would see her turn with evident relief to the roaring ritual insults she exchanged with Maria. Maria, in her way, was a critic. Maria sharpened her up. And when Alix had a fight on her hands, an intrigue, a speculation, she was released from the cold grey boredom, in which ambiance I so clearly belonged.