A Closed Eye (2 page)

S
HE ADDRESSED
her letter to Miss Elizabeth Peckham, 59 Judd Street Mansions, Judd Street, London WC1, Grande Bretagne, and thought about Lizzie finding it when she returned home in the evening from her job at the Staveley Press, where she worked as a picture researcher. She thought about the flat, which she had visited twice. The first occasion had been entirely memorable; the second, inevitably, less so. She had been oddly anxious about the girl, who seemed so cold, so self-contained. The pretext for that second visit (but was it already four years ago?) was the return of a cardigan, which had somehow found its way to the house in Wellington Square; it had been kept in a carrier bag, until, in the great clearing up that had taken place, she had made her way to Judd Street in the darkening evening, through the rush-hour crowds, in the chance of finding Lizzie at home.

The building, Lizzie’s home now, had been gloomy, badly lit, with a black and white tiled floor and a huge caged lift. Once inside the flat she had had an impression of dimness, although lamps were lit, one with its shade turned up to give a better light. Lizzie must have got up from her desk to open the door; on the blotter was an empty carton of low-fat yoghourt. An open volume of Vuillard reproductions lay on a depressing brown sofa. The girl had been polite, as if not
really surprised at seeing her, although she could not have been expected. She was always polite, or rather patient, as if waiting to get on with her own thoughts, willing to put up with distractions, but not willing to prolong them. Everyone knew that Lizzie was clever. ‘Have you thought of what you want to do later?’ Freddie had asked her when she was a silent adolescent. ‘I’m going to write,’ said the girl unhesitatingly. ‘But not straight away, not until I’m old.’ ‘How old?’ Harriet had persisted. ‘Forty,’ was the answer. Freddie, behind a newspaper, had laughed; he was already over seventy. But Harriet had taken her seriously. ‘You will have to travel, I suppose, and have lots of interesting experiences.’ ‘Oh, no,’ Lizzie had said. ‘It will all come out of my head.’ That was all that she would say. Prudently, she would divulge no more of her plans. In any case she seemed to be guarding her self-imposed designs, was already wedded to austerity and self-management. She gave the impression that no one would understand what she already understood so well herself.

Helpless, and not helped by any normal social noises, Harriet had glanced round the pitiless room, large, cold, dominated by the desk. A very small electric fire remained unlit. Lizzie had been wearing a sweater and jeans: Harriet had supposed that she changed into them when she came home, but in fact Lizzie had worn them to work like everyone else.

‘Is there anything you need, Lizzie?’ she had asked. ‘You see, we are going away for a while. I thought I should let you know.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Lizzie politely.

‘I don’t like to think of you so much on your own. Of course, you have your work, I do see that. And you must have many friends.’

‘Friends? Yes, I suppose so. But my work keeps me quite busy.’

‘And you are still in touch with Elspeth, of course?’

‘I see her sometimes,’ said the girl indifferently.

‘And your father is still in America? Washington, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then, dear.’ She paused. She had the feeling that Lizzie was waiting for her to leave. ‘I hope you are eating properly,’ she said. ‘Nutrition is so important at your age.’

‘I have lunch,’ said Lizzie. ‘I don’t want much in the evening.’ She registered politeness, even resignation, but remained standing.

‘Then I will let you get on with your work,’ said Harriet, as much to let the girl out of an impasse which she had no means of negotiating, as to admit defeat to herself. Perhaps Lizzie was unused to company, she thought. But she had always been reticent.

‘Goodbye then, dear. I will be in touch when we return.’

‘Goodbye. Thank you for bringing the cardigan.’

‘I was always Harriet to you in the old days. Do you remember?’

‘Of course,’ said Lizzie, turning to the door.

Out in the street Harriet had thought of the peculiar anxiety surrounding the girl, anxiety which she did nothing to disseminate, as if it were her protection, wariness her weapon. Pale, slight, she seemed as childlike now as she had done eight years earlier, when she was fourteen, when the conversation about her future profession had taken place. Harriet supposed that she had forgotten all about it, but this was not the case.

But Lizzie Peckham’s decision was intact. Harriet Lytton’s visit had not affected her one way or the other, apart from an underlying annoyance, although she rather wished she had got rid of the empty yoghourt carton, and made a resolution to do so in future as soon as she had finished her supper. Otherwise she felt no misgivings about herself, although she was aware that other people found her difficult. This did not upset her. She accepted herself totally.

Harriet, in the street, was thinking along similar lines. I suppose I have become difficult to get along with, she mused. Living so long with my thoughts has made me awkward, unmanageable. I may have been intrusive, asking all those questions. Politeness was her own armour, against the world, but also against what was within herself. She would be grateful, for once, to get home, and once home, to get away. This darkness usually found her standing at the window, looking out on to the dimly lit street, until she turned with a sigh to Freddie and the task of tempting him to eat. Food was always on her mind: another anxiety.

And now, in the Résidence Cécil, when all that could have happened had already happened, she turned again from the window, where, unknown to herself, she stood each evening to catch the last glimpse of animation in the little street, the room behind her warm, bright, empty, waiting for a presence which she herself could not bestow. She thought about dinner, but felt a distaste for the meal she had no wish to eat. I could walk round to the Beau Rivage, she thought, as she so often did. Yet once in the flat she found it difficult to leave—and knew that when the time came she would heat some milk and go to bed. Evenings were very long.

On an impulse she moved to the telephone.

‘Joseph? Je vous dérange? Venez boire un verre.’

‘En anglais
, Harriet,
en anglais.’

‘Your English is perfect, as you know. It is my French that needs improving. You are quite heartless, Joseph.’

She could hear his eager steps on the stairs while she was still tidying her hair. This was quite unnecessary, she knew, for Monsieur Papineau did not find her attractive, although he seemed to delight in her company. They were indeed both past the age of romance: indeed, romance had not been much in evidence in her own life at any time. And Monsieur Papineau—Joseph—was the very antithesis of romance, although
his approach to life was comprehensively amorous. Monsieur Papineau, quite simply, loved. A man of serenity, naïve, hopeful, childlike, he relished what the day brought him as only the very innocent can afford to do. His delightful rotundities spoke of the care which he devoted to his diet; Harriet saw him every morning, with his string bag, alert in the entrance, sniffing the air appreciatively, before stepping forth to begin the day’s consultations with shopkeepers. Sometimes he devised a treat for himself, lunch in one of the fine restaurants in Geneva, or perhaps a day going round the shops in Lausanne. He was pleasantly wealthy, or at least she supposed he was, and passionately Anglophile. On Saturdays he would go to the station bookstall in Geneva and buy up the English magazines:
Vogue, Country Life, The Economist
. He had been at Oxford, had held a post at the Swiss Embassy in London, but remained, after a lifetime of presumably honourable activity, like a boy, pre-sexual. He dressed floridly, in coloured waistcoats, with a silk handkerchief cascading from his breast pocket. Harriet, from her window in the morning, could see the top of his tartan cap, or the voluminous beret he wore when it was damp.

He had been marvellous when Freddie was ill.
‘Allons-y, avançons,’
he had joked, supporting the bent figure as it crept up the stairs. He had had more patience with Freddie than Harriet had had herself, regarded an afternoon spent in Freddie’s largely wordless company as a treat in itself, just one of the many that filled his pleasant days. She remained drily grateful to him for his ministrations, yet aware that he could never share her own dark thoughts.

He beamed at her in the open doorway.

‘Ah.’ She sniffed.
‘Monsieur Rochas?’

‘No,’ he said happily.
‘Gentleman, de Givenchy.’

Never very expertly shaved—unusual, she thought, in a diplomat, although he was now long retired—he exuded
bonhomie
and waves of scent as he followed her into the salon, rubbing his hands with enjoyment.

‘Such an interesting day,’ he said, in his faultless English. ‘I went through my photographs. All the early albums, you know. Father and I on holiday at Bembridge. We went there every year when I was a boy. Father had the yacht then, of course.’

‘Your mother died young, I think you told me?’ said Harriet, pouring out the Muscadet. She had heard this story before, many times, but it served as a subject for conversation in this strange place.

‘I never knew her,’ he said. ‘She died when I was a baby. But I have photographs. A beautiful woman. Father never forgot her, never thought of marrying again.’

‘And how did you grow up to be so contented? One would think you had had a great deal of love to be so, well, so happy, so satisfied … I don’t know how to put it. You always strike me as a very fulfilled person.’

‘Fulfilled!’ He took a handful of peanuts, a couple of which came to rest on his canary-yellow tie. ‘I am fulfilled, Harriet! But I owe that entirely to Missy.’

‘Of course, Missy,’ said Harriet. The beloved governess, with whom he had certainly been in love, as a child, as a boy, perhaps even as a man.

‘I cannot remember life without Missy,’ he went on. ‘She was with me until she died, you know.’ As always, at this point in his recital his eyes filled with tears. ‘She kept house for me, when I was working.’

‘Where did you live?’ she asked.

‘Hyde Park Gate. A flat, just big enough for the two of us. When she died I came back here: I couldn’t have stayed on. In any event I had already retired. There was nothing to keep me.’ His face fell into the pouches and folds characteristic of old age. For a moment he looked almost mature.

‘So we both ended up in the Résidence Cécil.’

‘But you will go home, Harriet! Once you have recovered your spirits. And what shall I do without you?’

She smiled at him. ‘I shall have to go back to London at some point, I suppose. The house is still there. But that is what I cannot face—the empty house.’

His face sprang into an energetic grimace of sympathy.

‘Ah, yes. The empty house. Without Freddie. I understand.’

She was silent, as always, when this matter arose, not quite knowing how to convey the fact that Freddie’s death was the last link in the chain that had once bound her to her own life, that she had in more ways than one outlived him, even before he died, and that she now functioned in ghostly form, as if all the living substance had been withdrawn, and only her strong and obstinate heart, beating away imperviously, held her on this earth.

‘Have you no one left?’ he ventured.

‘Why, yes. My parents are still alive, incredibly enough. I don’t know why I say that, but they always strike me as too young to be old. They are in their late seventies now, but still very active. They’ve always been popular, sociable. They used to love dancing. Well, those days are past, perhaps. They have aged, recently. Since my daughter died,’ she said steadily.

There was a silence.
‘Ma pauvre amie,’
he said finally, stretching out a mottled hand to her. But she got up, took the bottle, and poured him another glass of wine.

‘I do not like the past, Joseph,’ she said. ‘I am not like you. Nothing in my story appeals to me. And yet, as a girl, I was happy. Happy in a very simple sense. It goes with youth, or it did in my case. Not in yours,’ she smiled at him. ‘Now that I look back I see a sort of progressive darkening. Paradise lost. And yet it was a very humble paradise. I was a good but silly
girl,’ she said. ‘And I have been a good and excessively foolish woman.’

‘You are still young,’ he protested.

‘Young? I am fifty-three. And I feel very old.’

Her tone frightened him. He did not know how to counter such bleakness, having always to hand the consolation of easy tears. Seeing this, she smiled at him.

‘But I haven’t told you my news!’ she said. ‘I may be having a young friend to stay. I have known her since she was a child; she is my goddaughter, or as good as. Her mother always said that I was to be her godmother, but in fact she had so much on her mind that matters got a little confused. But I have always thought of myself as … Well, I have tried to be close. Such a talented girl. Perhaps we could come with you on one of your days in Geneva or Lausanne. She may find it dull here; I hadn’t thought of that. I shall rely on you, Joseph. You always have such good ideas.’

His face brightened. It usually did, she reflected, plumping up cushions after he had gone. Mention a treat, an outing, a festivity, however modest, and he was a child again. But she wished he would not always talk of the past. The past to him was his golden treasure, all love, all happiness. Fortunate man to possess such capital! In comparison, her own past—she meant the past
before
, the pre-historic past—had been drab but dreamy, the sort of past that someone with no ascertainable history or parentage has, someone in whom the illusions of childhood outwit circumstance. With parents like children, frail, demanding, fearful, restless, as if some pleasure were being withheld from them. Only recently she had begun to think of them as adults, feeling pity for lives so haphazard, feeling gratitude that at last they were happy, that their old age was in some miraculous way their youth restored, that they no longer thought much of her, she who had interrupted their idyll so many years ago, and had more recently dealt
them a terrible blow, just when they were beginning to think that life had been merciful with them, that at last—at last—they might make some concession to reality and admit that they were perhaps growing older, not old, not yet, but able in good conscience, and with due deference to their legendary youth, to relax, and with little more than a backward glance, to settle down.