A Closed Eye (18 page)

Later in the day, when the light finally faded, and with it her ferocious energy, her mood became darker. It was physiological, she consoled herself, something to do with low
blood sugar. At this time she saw herself as a restless dissatisfied woman, dissatisfied because of that very innocence that had seemed her safeguard, and likely to be frustrated through the very timidity of her desires. It is all very well to be innocent, she thought, but I sacrificed true innocence long ago. Since meeting Jack I have made do with a facsimile, whether I knew it or not. It seemed real enough at the time, but secretly I wanted more. Perhaps most women did. Perhaps most women had unfulfilled life left in them, and sought a way to use it. But these thoughts were stale, and she dismissed them impatiently. In this mood of distaste, which always coincided with the early evening and the fading of the light, she knew that she had a choice, and that to deny that choice, or the possibility of choice, would be fatal. She did not doubt—she had never doubted—that the burden of responsibility was hers. The fabled lover, the imagined love affair, must be subsumed into one encounter, and that one encounter, which she still could not entirely envisage, must do duty for the life of adultery which she knew she desired. She judged herself quite coldly as a foolish woman, despised herself for being weak, but recognized the decision as ineluctable. Quite simply, the desire remained. But the desire, she knew, must also remain unsatisfied.

‘Do you want to come to Brighton with me tomorrow?’ she asked Immy. ‘You can miss school for a day. It’s nearly the end of term anyway.’

‘We have painting tomorrow,’ said Immy. ‘And my dancing class after school.’

‘Oh, of course. You don’t want to see Granny and Grandpa, then?’

‘Where has Lizzie gone?’ asked Immy, her cheeks unusually flushed, her attention to her drawing redoubled.

‘Lizzie has gone to stay with a friend of her father’s. You
knew that. I told you. Why, do you miss her? You’ll see her at school in the autumn, you know.’

Immy slid down from her chair, and carried her drawing off to show to Miss Wetherby.

‘I don’t miss her,’ she said. ‘I don’t care where she is.’

But Harriet paid little attention to this, struck as she was by the sight of the new moon, glimpsed unluckily through the window. Later she was to see that moment of bad luck as emblematic of all her indecisiveness.

‘You can have dinner with us tonight,’ she called after Immy. ‘Would you like that?’ There was no answer. She had not really expected any.

The seduction fantasy, or what she later came to think of as the seduction fantasy, took hold again the next morning, as the train was pulling out of Victoria. The seduction fantasy was, in itself, extremely seductive. It enabled her to bask in a glow of possibilities, imagined endings, which brought colour to her cheeks, but permitted her to remain on the safe side of experience. All it needed, she thought, was an element of imaginative daring, the knowledge that the situation was already adumbrated but could be controlled at will, like the switching of channels on a television set. Outwardly a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman, still youthfully slim, with dark hair that showed no signs of grey, she was inwardly luxurious, ruminating adventure. It was perhaps significant that the adventure was limited to one incident, which might not even take place.

Sun, shining through dusty windows, illuminated her seat. The southern suburbs of London struck her as poignantly homely, beautifully unassertive. Back gardens, narrow strips of poor soil, with clothes-lines and sheds, boasted a few late daffodils, a flowering tree. Briefly she imagined herself in one of those little houses, the French windows of her sitting-room open on to that small private space, sitting with a cup of tea,
listening to a serial on the radio. A careful humble retreat from the outside world: something she no longer had. For she was marked now, both by affluence and by dissatisfaction, both conditions absolutely foreign to her. She felt homesick for the shop, for the back room, and her father humming as he made the tea. He pulls me back, she thought; had he been stronger I might have left home more easily. I should have left home anyway, but I should not have felt this homesickness. Whether I like it or not, I have kept true to those early experiences. They seemed sweet now, pitiable, filled with the pathos of a home long gone. I am more like him than I realized, she thought with some surprise. Everything else has been a madness. One room would have sufficed. But then she would never have had Immy, and it was almost worth living as she did—for she hated it, she now realized—to have had her daughter, the daughter who was so marvellously unlike herself, who was bold, beautiful, fearless, and who would take what she wanted without a second’s hesitation.

In her mind her parents and her daughter belonged to two disparate lives. The link between them—herself—she could no longer get into any kind of perspective. Her daughter seemed to her to possess a spirit which she had come by as if by magic: certainly she had not inherited it from her mother or her father. Freddie, corpulent and cautious, might never have been young, while Harriet’s famed docility had not only kept her from harm but had precluded curiosity, experimentation. She had learned nothing but contentment in obedience, whereas Immy had been audacious, unafraid, even as a baby. Rough, sometimes, and laying claim to privileges without waiting for them to be handed down, and always, in every mood, beautiful. She seemed made of finer materials than those who had produced and nurtured her, like a princess in a fairy tale, bearing witness to money, and to that slow social ascent made so painfully by her anxious mother. She had an
assurance which was entirely natural; in this, did she but know it, she resembled her father in his professional capacity. Otherwise, no features, no trick of expression, could link her with her parents, or, despite fond comparisons, with her grandparents. In character too she was different, impatient, voracious, easily roused to anger. Yet these not notably attractive characteristics possessed a certain virtue, for it was understood that Immy demanded only the best, was impatient only with the second best, required from life only what she saw it could deliver, was not fearful, shy, self-effacing, knew, with some scorn, how meekness could conceal a certain holy vanity, preferred vanity unadorned and unashamed, was in fact shameless.

What perplexed Harriet was the task of guiding such a daughter through life, when she, her mother, was so uncertain. For this reason she wagered everything on Immy’s turbulent nature, hoping that this might lead her forward to a life which would be, in the world’s terms, successful. She suddenly had no use for success of any other kind. Let the meek inherit the earth, if that was what they so desired (yet it seemed out of character): she could see that the really astute contented themselves with the kingdoms of this world.

She saw Merle and Hughie before they saw her. They were sitting on their little balcony, gazing out to sea. Although she had not told them she was coming, they looked expectant, unoccupied, ready for diversion, any diversion. She waved. ‘Mother! Father!’ All at once they sprang into vivid life, stood up, conferred excitedly, waved back. Bored, she thought; they were monumentally bored with their peaceful existence, their labour-saving retreat. Brighton was not the West End. Whatever local hostelries they frequented were not Ciro’s or the Café de Paris. They probably even missed the war, which to them had been a time of youth, extravagance, and occasional frenzy. Her mother, she saw, was dressed as if for a
morning’s shopping in Bond Street, in a navy suit, with a striped silk blouse; her father, by contrast, seemed designed for a day in the country, in cavalry twill trousers, and a greenish tweed jacket. What courage they still possessed, if only to turn themselves out so spectacularly for a day of purposeless inactivity! Humbled, she hastened into the building, noting that the carpet in the entrance needed cleaning, and that the cream stucco of the walls had collected a bloom of grime. The door of the flat was already open, her mother’s arms were spread wide, her father’s delighted face radiated disbelief. ‘Hattie! Is anything wrong? You didn’t tell us you were coming. Is everything all right?’ She embraced them both, presented her mother with the armful of narcissi she had bought outside the station, and said, ‘Let me look at you. Of course everything’s all right. I just felt I wanted to see you. Are you all right?’ Unexpectedly she felt her eyes fill with tears. She was both glad to see them and sorrowful that they could supply no pointers to her adult life. Parents are only good as parents at a certain stage of their children’s lives, she reflected. Merle and Hughie were probably quite admirable when I was a child of ten. I found them companionable then. They were never harsh, or unreasonable, never took themselves very seriously as parents. But when lightweights grow old they are glad to lay aside burdens which threaten to grow too heavy. They abandoned the task quite thankfully when I married. Now we meet on uncertain terms, with little enough to say to each other. And yet there is that tug, that one moment of instinctive joy, that radiant instant of recognition, as if only the three of us belong together, as if there is no room, and never has been, for anyone else.

She did not doubt that Merle and Hughie recalled with perfect clarity and with unexpected nostalgia that little room behind the shop, and the rain lashing against the windows, and the doughnut on the cracked plate ready for Harriet’s tea.
Probably they now, with hindsight, viewed her marriage with the same regret as she herself did, but said nothing, even to each other, antagonized secretly by its lack of beauty. For they themselves were still beautiful, designed for a more beautiful life than the one in which they found themselves becalmed. She saw that they were more stoical, had more depth, than she had ever perceived. They dressed up, they went out, they befriended strangers, they made do with second- or third-rate distractions, and they were entirely loyal to each other, so loyal that they never confessed to disappointment, even in their moments of closeness. They had enormous pride, and their pride was on the whole justified. They did not envy their daughter: they pitied her. They preferred their flat, with its cold white windows and its rakish accoutrements, to Harriet’s solemn house, with its nurseries and its studies, its basement and attic floors. They felt, though this was never acknowledged between them, that they had given her away. Therefore, any gesture that she made towards them, even of the peculiar subdued love which they all felt but kept modestly out of sight, was greeted with incredulity, with joy, as if all their mistakes were cancelled, all their calculations forgotten, and the past resurrected with all its sadness removed: a moment of unity for which they felt unbounded gratitude.

Hughie insisted on making coffee. ‘But I’ve come to take you out to lunch,’ she told them. ‘I thought we’d go to the Grand.’ ‘Oh, let Daddy do it. Yes, do, darling. And find some of those nice biscuits.’ They sat dazed with pleasure, the pleasure of recognition.

‘You look marvellous, Mother. How do you do it?’

Her mother preened slightly. ‘We keep up our standards, dear. It’s so important when you get older. My mother—your grandmother, whom you never knew—insisted on that. “No slippers outside the bedroom, Merle. Always think of your husband looking at you.” Of course, after a day in the shop
I did give way a bit, didn’t I? But there’s no excuse now. And,’ she added sadly, ‘we have all the time in the world.’

At that point Hughie came back with a loaded tray. The usual assortment of cups, she saw, a glass plate of biscuits—a profusion of biscuits—and the inevitable buttered toast, which she obediently ate. Her parents sipped coffee, their faces thoughtful with pleasure, a pleasure to be savoured both now and later. Little rituals like this must make up their day, she thought.

‘Do you eat properly?’ she asked.

Her mother eyed her with sudden hauteur, as if she had overstepped the bounds of propriety.

‘Of course we do! What a question! As a matter of fact Daddy is very good in the kitchen. He even went to classes this winter.’ She looked at him with love and pride. Harriet noted that the tremor in his hands, which she remembered from childhood, was almost gone, only noticeable in the exaggerated care with which he stacked plates and cups.

‘Well,’ said her mother with feigned reluctance, indifference. ‘If we’re going to the Grand I’d better see to my face, I suppose.’

‘You look fine, Mother. You don’t need anything.’

Again that look of hauteur, that slight resumption of formality. Of course, she feared patronage, as if her daughter might so forget herself as to offer advice, refer to a discreet financial arrangement. She was in many ways a superior woman, Harriet thought, and thought so again when her mother reappeared freshly powdered, in an aura of scent. In the background she could hear her father vigorously brushing his jacket.

The next few hours were very pleasant. Their reception at the Grand was triumphant. ‘Oh, they know us here,’ said Merle. Waiters hovered around them with excessive zeal. Hughie offered little jokes, timidly, as if fearing to offend her.
The head waiter came over to see if everything was to their liking. ‘Very nice, thank you, Carlos. By the way, I don’t think you’ve met our daughter, have you? From London.’ Carlos inclined his head graciously. ‘Delighted to meet you, Madam. Everything all right, Sir? Madam?’ ‘We’ll have coffee in the lounge,’ said Merle. They beamed with pride and gratification.

In the lounge (‘I don’t think you’ve met our daughter’) they all felt that the visit had been an unexpected success. But now they were anxious for her to leave, so that they could savour it to the full. She recognized this, and did not press them. ‘I’ll walk a little,’ she assured them. ‘Don’t come to the station. It’s been a lovely visit. I’ll do this again, shall I? When Immy goes to school I’ll have plenty of time.’ They exchanged a sad look, as if in acknowledgement of time passing. That was the only reference to her other life. Otherwise she did not speak of her daughter, or of her husband. The day, the sunny day, belonged to the three of them. She thought they were in fine form. Nevertheless, she turned and waved until they were out of sight, as if she might never see them again.