Authors: Anita Brookner
‘Madame Eva,’ Kitty said uncertainly. ‘I did some shopping for her.’
‘I expect she’s popped out for a moment,’ said the neighbour, stretching out her hand for the bag. ‘I’ll take the things, shall I?’
‘She said she wasn’t going out,’ murmured Kitty, handing over the shopping bag.
‘Oh, she won’t have gone far. You’ll probably see her around.’ And the door was politely but firmly shut.
Kitty, a little disconcerted, wandered slowly away in the direction of the main street. It seemed to her odd, even disquieting, that Madame Eva, whom she now had to think of as Mrs Cartwright, should have disappeared when she had seemed so perturbed by the thought of going out. As she reached the corner, she looked back, and was heartened to see the medium, with the cat in her arms, just emerging from a small turning opposite her house. She caught sight of Kitty and waved, and Kitty waved back, strangely relieved. And facing each other, walking backwards, each waved until the other was out of sight.
Kitty was amazed to see that it was nearly one o’clock. Suddenly the rest of the day had ceased to be a problem. She bought a newspaper and went back to the café and ate lunch. She scanned her paper and ordered more coffee, waiting until the small crowd had left and gone back to work. There was no sound now but the hiss of the coffee machine, and the tuneless melancholy whistling of the Italian owner. Kitty, seated beside the plate glass window, looked out indulgently at the street,
but, finding the people too distracting and her own thoughts too important, dropped her eyes to the table and to the glass vase holding three dark red and rather exhausted carnations and turned them about and lifted the vase to her nose for the sweet and faintly rotten smell and even brushed her face against the thin and infinitely soft petals, wondering at the tightness of the stem and the complexity of the flower. Then, putting the vase down, she lit a cigarette and smiled faintly to see how the time was getting on and that soon she could wander home and make a cup of tea and then it would not be long until the evening, when she really would have to work, and she would be in bed early and the way ahead would be quite simple.
But still she sat, eyeing the carnations, the smoke of her cigarette drifting round her head, until the Italian owner called out, ‘Another coffee, signora?’ and she started, and nodded, and said, ‘And the bill, please’, and gave him her newspaper, and taking a deep breath she stubbed out her cigarette and drank her coffee and went out into the street, where people were complaining of the heat, but humorously, as if enjoying the ordeal. As she made her way back to the flat she felt as if she had passed the day in a dream, and indeed something of the dreamlike mood still persisted, even as she looked through her manuscript once more, and shampooed her hair, and stripped her bed and made it up with fresh sheets. The same atmosphere of dream impelled her to sit in the window, and she did not really notice the light diminishing its glare and the shadows lengthening. It was not until eight that she got up and made coffee and ate an apple, and shortly after that went to bed.
She slept heavily and deeply and awoke feeling very calm.
She was out of the house by eleven, and in her yellow dress, with her ordinary face, she felt quite equal to the
brilliant day. She travelled alone, and walked with pleasure from the station to the university. She lunched with Pauline and then spent the afternoon in Pauline’s room, soothed by her undemanding presence. Pauline kept her eyes firmly on the examination schedules. She did not want any part of this initiation ceremony; she thought that Kitty looked like an obedient child before a party, and although she was moved by Kitty’s happy expectancy, she rejected the idea that she might be responsible for any extensive nurturing. She had had enough of that.
‘Right,’ she said at last, scrubbing her face with her powder puff. ‘Let’s get it over, then. Redmile, I mean. The rest belongs to history and I take no responsibility for it. Come along, Kitty, look sharp. Your dress is very nice. Are you sure you remember what this is all about? You seem to be in a dream.’
Kitty cleared her throat. ‘I am quite ready,’ she said.
‘Ah, Miss Maule,’ exclaimed Professor Redmile. ‘And Dr Bentley. How very pleasant. Do come in.’ He was good at this sort of thing, they had to acknowledge. He managed to keep up a steady blast of hilarity until the last guest had departed; he went to so many parties that he rarely had to think about what to say, having learnt that remarks of any consequence were out of place on such occasions, particularly as one was quite unable to hear a reply, if one were ever forthcoming. There were quite a few people there: Kitty noticed the Professors of Spanish and German, the Roger Fry Professor, looking hot and glum, and his wife, various Friends. No Maurice. Kitty accepted a glass of sherry and felt a momentary pang of fear. Not about the lecture: that was written down, and she would perform however badly she felt. But about these people who were to become her colleagues and associates and from whom she suddenly felt so estranged! Redmile chanting,
‘Splendid! Splendid! Great stuff!’ His disaffected secretary Jennifer, circulating with the standard bottle of sherry. The Roger Fry Professor’s face getting too red too quickly. His wife, stoking up on peanuts. The high uninhibited voices of the Friends, none of whom appeared to know who Kitty was or what her function was. Their awful clothes, she thought. She stuck close to Pauline, not willing to launch herself into this alien sea until it had been sanctioned by Maurice. With Maurice there she would begin to revive.
Professor Redmile came over to them, one hand sweeping through his sparse but long hair. ‘You will have a splendid audience, Miss Maule. Not nervous, I hope?’ Suddenly, she was.
‘I shall be quite relieved when it is over,’ she smiled.
‘Of course, of course. But if it will make you feel any better, I can tell you that there may be good things to follow. Of course, I cannot say anything yet. But I think you may feel confident. Ah, there is Maurice. I was beginning to think he had been detained.’
Maurice, unaccountably wearing a dinner jacket and looking extremely handsome, greeted several people, all of whom turned to him as he entered, abandoning their partners, spouses, and whatever they had been saying. Kitty, her face radiant with relief, ignored Pauline’s warning glance and made as if to go over to him. But although he smiled at her, his eyes swept past her, and she was left standing expectantly and feeling rather alarmed. Why was he dressed? Where was he going? Why did she not know? She was aware of how little she knew about his life, and this knowledge was unwelcome at such a juncture, for she wanted to feel her new confidence, she wanted so much to enjoy her anticipation and for it to be unmarred.
Pauline, looking at her, said rather quickly, ‘I think you may have to do something about Larter, Kitty.
He seems to have taken to you.’
‘But his work is quite all right,’ said Kitty, her eyes still shocked.
‘He is apparently making rather a nuisance of himself in the town. When I say the town, I mean the bicycle factory again, and that awful caff near the station where the long-distance lorry drivers go. If you were to have a word with him? He wouldn’t take it from us. He regards us as senior citizens, unacquainted with the joy of sex. As indeed some of us are,’ she added, after a pause.
‘I really don’t think I can …’ Kitty began, but at this point Professor Redmile came up to her, his geniality reinforced by the heat of the evening.
‘When you are ready, Miss Maule. I shall introduce you very briefly. Good luck. Quite an ordeal for her,’ he said, in much the same tone of voice, to the Friend on his left, as Pauline touched Kitty on the arm and nodded towards the door. Really, thought Kitty, momentarily nettled, I am not deaf. I am not incapable. I am even very slightly bored with this evening. I should like to be taken out to dinner afterwards, not go straight home, where Caroline will be waiting. ‘Hello, Maurice,’ she said with studied carelessness. ‘You’re surely not going to sit through this, are you? You will be bored to death.’ He smiled at her as if he knew everything she was thinking and had been thinking since he had first come into the room. ‘Of course I’m coming. Good evening, Pauline.’ ‘Good evening, Maurice,’ said Pauline, her hand tightening on Kitty’s arm as she urged her forwards. A surge of panic ripped through Kitty. I am not ready for this, she thought. It is not going to be quite as easy as I supposed. Her eyes looked back to where Maurice was standing, detained by a Friend. He winked at her over the Friend’s head, and then she was all right again.
Standing on the rostrum, while Professor Redmile
began what he had described as a brief introduction and which somehow managed to incorporate a fairly dense account of the plans he had devised for the structure of the New Building, she felt quite composed. She managed to seem interested in what was said, although she could see the Roger Fry Professor’s hand pressed to his brow in the front row. She was indeed alarmed by the fact that she could see and recognize so many people. Many, she knew from experience, were already sinking into a brief doze from which she might or might not be able to rouse them. Maurice, bless him, was near the door, where she could glance at him from time to time without appearing to do so. She began to feel something of a professional challenge; this had to be good. The room was surprisingly full, not only with students from the Romance Languages Department, but with the curious, who attended these special evening lectures rather as if they were bull fights or gladiatorial contests, to see if the performer were going to get hurt. It was murderously hot. As Professor Redmile appeared to be reaching some sort of conclusion satisfactory to himself, she straightened up, unclenched her fists, and cleared her throat. She allowed herself one more look at Maurice, and then caught sight of Larter, grinning in unashamed encouragement, his thumb jerking discreetly upwards. Kitty smiled, and when Professor Redmile turned to her, and she heard a small patter of applause, she was quite confident. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she began, in her clear voice, ‘I should like to examine, if I may, some aspects of the Romantic Tradition, a tradition which still affects us today, although we may not recognize it. For although we think we know what a Romantic is, Romantics do not always know it themselves.’ There was a little murmur of laughter and the lecture had begun.
In extreme heat, and in the brilliant sunlight of early morning, Old Church Street bore a passing resemblance to a deserted Mediterranean port. Empty, silent, and sun-struck, the pavements were already dusty from the long drought. Leaning out of her window at seven o’clock on the Saturday morning, Kitty Maule could smell the river a hundred yards away: rank and insistent, for the water was low. The sun drained her of appetite, almost of thought, and she could not envisage the moment at which it would be evening, when the punishing glare would diminish, when a small crowd would gather on the pavement outside the pub and stay there, becalmed, in the warm milky air, until the light went altogether.
It seemed unnatural to dress in this weather and she contemplated staying indoors in her nightgown until it was time to prepare for the evening. But this was clearly inadmissible, and besides the extraordinary light had a peremptory appeal, as if she must go out into it and feel its strength, as if not to do so were some kind of perversion. All over England sensible people sat in the shade. Those intoxicated by the great sun innocently offered their faces and bodies to it, waiting to be transformed into something more than their habitual pale selves. With no garden of her own, Kitty was
reduced to wandering along the bleached streets of her immediate neighbourhood or sitting in the small public square by the river. She dreaded this place for the memory it had left with her of that ancient mother and daughter, and also because Caroline tended to sit there, exuding discontent. Kitty’s own serenity was powerful enough to survive intact until the evening, but she thought it a pity to let it get unnecessarily damaged. Nevertheless, she spent most of the morning in the garden.
There was much to think about. She found herself in the unaccustomed situation of being popular and successful. To her not very great surprise, she had passed the test of her lecture with flying colours. Coming home alone, afterwards, she had felt a sense of well-being and almost of worth; she was assured of a permanent post for next year and could thus conclude that her apprenticeship was at an end. For two days she had rested secure in this knowledge and also in anticipation of a pleasant future. Pleasant in the sense of corresponding to her modest worth; pleasant in the sense of its being the correct conclusion of her attempts to achieve a position that would somehow merge her anomalous beginnings into her stronger linguistic background; pleasant in the sense that at last she had a feeling of place and could connect herself with an institution in which her ambitions, which were as modest as her experience, could be and would be realized. This would be, as it were, her daytime self. For stronger emotions and delights, for a more positive future, she would place her faith in the events that would be brought to birth by Maurice’s (and her) dinner party. For the first time in her life she felt nothing but confidence in the future.
The garden was deserted. Along the Embankment, lorries rumbled in the shimmering air; the sun was so strong that Kitty could hardly bear to read. At what she
assumed was lunchtime, several men brought their glasses of beer down from the pub, loosened ties, and soon removed shirts altogether. Dazed, she stood up, aware that she must go home and eat something, and that more time had passed than she had accounted for. She wanted everything to be rational and measured today; she wanted to be as safely in control as she had been on that astonishing Tuesday; she wanted to be excellent. She brought bread and cheese and two peaches, and made some strong coffee, a little uncertain of what to do with the afternoon. Caroline was absent, to judge from the silence, although this was surely no weather for Harrods. ‘What do you do there every day?’ Kitty had asked her. Caroline had looked blank. ‘But I don’t go there every day. Sometimes I go to Harvey Nichols.’ She had seemed to think this was a comprehensive answer. Suddenly Kitty missed her, would have welcomed the sound of Woman’s Hour or some other soothing routine noise that would indicate the continuance of normal life. The silence was really rather alarming. She leaned out of the window again, as if she could summon up the apparition of Caroline on her way home, but the street was empty. Really, she thought, it is almost easier to be at work; I am not built for leisure. This heretical thought was soon dismissed to join others – a very slight boredom, an edginess, a certain low desire to show off in front of the Redmiles and the rest. As if a definite strategy were suddenly within her reach and could now be employed. As if her position might be strengthened by displaying what had been so sedulously concealed. There is really no need to conceal it any longer, she thought. In fact I shall lose face by further concealment, not the other way round. That is the paradox.