A Closed Eye (5 page)

They had friends to dinner, went to Glyndebourne, went abroad. Obediently she forgot her own life and adopted that of her husband. She had always hankered for stability and had always feared pity, the mournful pity she now felt for her parents, and thus found it easy to be her husband’s creature, to dress as he liked her to dress, to entertain his business partners and their wives, finally to find herself on equal terms with her former friends, to cross the social gap of which she had scarcely been aware in the innocence of her youth but of which she now measured the significance. Looking back, she saw the pink woolly slippers her mother wore with her black dress at the end of the working day, saw the clutter of dirty cups and crumbed plates on the desk in the room at the back of the shop, heard Mr Latif ask, ‘
Et comment allez-vous ces jours-ci, ma petite
Harriet?’ saw his hand on her mother’s arm, saw her mother’s eyes warning her to be pleasant. She had no difficulty in preferring to be Mrs Lytton. Freddie was courteous, stable, appreciative. On his fiftieth birthday they had lunch at the Connaught and then went on to an exhibition at the Royal Academy. Afterwards he bought her a silk scarf at Fortnum’s, and when she protested, saying, ‘But it’s your birthday, not mine,’ he replied, ‘But when it’s your birthday
you will still be younger than I am. I feel I have to make it up to you.’ She hugged his arm, and when they got home she took the champagne from the fridge, and they spent a pleasant evening.

Of his first wife there was no mention. Harriet did not ask about her, thinking the matter of no relevance, and indeed of little interest. He was simply not a man who could ever make her jealous. Despite his attentions to her she did not consider him a sexual being. Faithfulness was simply a natural condition, like breathing.

Of course she dreamed of a lover, but these were real dreams, in her sleep, and they troubled her only on waking, when she sometimes remembered them, and never in the daytime. This lover was faceless, but she knew that he was her own age, and that he both awoke and dispelled the loneliness that she felt in his arms. He made her aware of the strangeness of life, of its intrinsic strangeness, as they embarked together on that journey that only two can share. In her dream she wept and sighed, as if in acknowledgement of her real life and its unimportant compensations. The stranger in her arms knew her every mood, her every movement, felt as ardently and as sadly as she did herself, but took her away with him even as he vanished into the real light, so that on waking she was surprised and alarmed to find the body of her undisturbed husband in her bed. It will never be my bed, she thought, only his. He does not even know me, and he leaves me undiscovered. This is his loss as well as mine. But he knows so little, and is so well satisfied that this is not a regret that he will ever care to be acknowledged. Briefly she felt sorry for him, for his ignorance. She felt slightly superior, more his equal. With an unlived life of her own she felt reality breaking into the illusion with which her husband was content.

On such mornings, when she awoke, she felt a sudden ebbing of warmth and shivered slightly as she drew the curtains,
although the spring morning was mild and damp, and the earth emerged from the night as if from a warm sleep of its own. Flat white light fell on buds and rustling birds, and although the cloud cover was low there was little doubt that the same unwavering light would persist until after seven in the evening, until nearly eight, in fact, and that she would no longer need to light the candles on the dining-table. Spending the evening in the flat with Freddie in this indeterminate season oppressed her a little: she felt a childish desire to be out in the streets, to stand by the railings in the park and watch the darkness come down, and see the trees lose their outlines to shadow. She did not quite know how to deal with these intimations of restlessness. Freddie, on his own admission, was too tired to take a walk, regarded walking as a pursuit for those who did not work, did not go into the city with a briefcase and return home smelling of cigars and exhaustion. Harriet deferred to this, but, remembering her own working days, felt wistful. Freddie, who sometimes dozed in the evenings when they were not going out, looked older when asleep; his hair was thinning and turning grey, and he had put on weight. Presumably he had seen his marriage as the one task heroically to be performed before the tiredness of middle age took over. Once married he could relax both his vigilance and his efforts. Harriet saw all this and felt sorry for him. She did not yet feel sorry for herself.

Freddie tolerated her friends, the girls, as he called them, and this toleration she took for encouragement to see them. These meetings all took place on neutral ground—in restaurants or hotel dining-rooms—as if the four of them, individually and collectively, wanted to be free of their new lives, their new homes, and to rediscover the solidarity of their youth, with which they had dealt so carelessly at the time. They were all older, and the threat of dispersal hung over them. Pamela, now a farmer’s wife, and living in Northamptonshire, came
to London irregularly, which was always the signal for a meeting. Harriet was surprised to find her looks so changed: a reddened complexion, a chipped front tooth, and long darker hair had replaced the bold blonde head of her earlier days and also the commanding pronouncements on style which they had accepted without question. With Pamela’s looks gone authority seemed lost. Mary was due to go to Hong Kong with her husband who worked for Cable and Wireless. Of the four of them she had perhaps changed the least, was still confident, rushed, important. Tessa, after two painful love affairs, was engaged to a television journalist called Jack Peckham: no money, she assured them, but never mind, he was a wonderful lover. Her wedding was to be simple, at her own request, but her parents had bought them a flat in Beaufort Street; after that they were on their own. The marriage seemed ill-starred to Harriet, to whom marriage was a grave affair, but in this setting, among the four of them, it was not what was new that was important but what was already over, their common youth, their shared past. Somehow what each of them had to tell about her new life failed to arouse the same interest. What they appreciated was the physical presence of the others, a sudden shared goodwill. Together they monitored each other’s progress towards maturity, towards middle age, or what they thought of as middle age. When she was with them Harriet felt a girl again, and when she thought of her present substantial position it was with the onset of a certain bewilderment. They embraced ardently on parting, saw Pamela, who was five months pregnant, into a taxi, made Mary promise to write regularly, kissed and waved, turned and waved again, as if immense distances were to separate them for ever, as if husbands would now remove them from the pre-sexual conformity which they felt to be their right, and as if this were suddenly a matter for regret. Harriet stood on the pavement outside the Royal
Court Hotel and thought of a desolate telephone call of the evening before. ‘He doesn’t really want to marry me,’ Tessa had said. ‘But I’m pregnant and that’s all there is to it. And I’m so tired, Hattie. I can’t seem to get it right, somehow. Not like you.’ Yet none of these reflections had come to light in the course of their lunch together, on the contrary; Tessa had been mordant, sprightly. It was another illustration, Harriet had thought, of the adulteration that had taken place in their original behaviour. None was what she had previously been.

Walking home, at the dead hour of three in the afternoon, she was anxious for the comfort and shelter of the flat, which she saw as both protection and dignity, in much the same terms as she viewed her husband. With him she need feel neither pain nor pity. Sorrow, the sorrow that she had occasionally glimpsed in earlier days, would never come to her from Freddie Lytton. The warmth that she had felt when she was with her friends—the girls, as she now thought of them, shading, perhaps unconsciously, into Freddie’s way of thinking—was ebbing away from her, like those dreams whose disappearance left her so strangely chilled. But it was the warmth, she decided, that was illusory, unreliable, something of a snare. The real climate was moderate, even a little cool, and probably for that very reason less conducive to disorder, or distraction. Real life warned one to keep up one’s guard, not to be seduced by attachments, certainly not those encountered in dreams. She wondered why she felt so sad. But they had all felt sad, she realized, sad for the very changes to which they were submitting, so difficult is it to leave childhood, and its innocence and courage.

Innocent: but this was an illusion too, she reasoned, as she walked the damp mild streets, with the haze of green in front of her that was the park. I was not so much innocent as undemanding, not knowing how to stake my claim, not even daring to think I had a claim to stake. She thought of the
room behind the shop, and her childish father’s smile, of her mother’s harassment, of her own meekness. She saw this now quite coldly. She also saw the anomaly of her presence at the Dodds’ house in Cadogan Square, always dressed in garments which had not sold in the shop and were therefore too old and too inappropriate. She remembered, with a rush of shame, a cherry red frock with a bow at the neck, designed for a matron, one of the Pont Street variety. At least that would never happen again, she thought, glancing down at her beautiful olive tweed suit. They must have been very kind to me, seeing at a glance that I did not fit in. Undoubtedly they were sorry for me, though I never knew it. Yet I became one of their set, even if I was the least important member of it. Pamela and Mary: I doubt if there was a great deal of affection for me there, although I failed to see it at the time. Tessa was always my ideal. And perhaps it suited her to have so disingenuous a friend. The friendship, she now saw, was based on habit, on her own assiduity, but also on something more, as if Harriet’s very modesty, her lack of sexual awareness, had ensured that Tessa remained connected to a condition that was not shadowed by calculation. Had they ever discussed men? Or boys, as they were then called? Perhaps it was fortunate that they had lost sight of each other for a while, when she was at secretarial school and the others were doing their cookery course. Her own marriage had reunited them, and then Mary’s later the same year. At Pamela’s wedding they had made a joke of these reunions, yet each saw the others go with genuine emotion.

And now Tessa. And after that, no doubt, dispersal, for what could keep them all together when partners had to be considered? And they were no longer girls; at thirty Harriet looked back to an infinity of time past. Breaking in on her thought came a sudden feeling of muteness, as if there were no one in whom she could confide, even supposing that she
might ever find the words to express what she wanted to say. She was aware of emotions that had never come to the surface. When she withdrew her hand from her glove to find her keys she was surprised to find it trembling. She told herself that these reunions were pointless if they derogated from her present contentment. She told herself that she had no need to keep a watch on Tessa’s happiness, that in fact it no longer concerned her. That aching friendship that the four of them had briefly experienced, at the Royal Court Hotel, was to do with the past, with the sense of time slipping away, with the well-known effects of a spring day after a long winter, with different journeys to different homes, with a sense of no longer being fully known. Their bodies now held secrets, were no longer presented to each other for inspection. They had learnt to be silent on certain matters. Even Tessa, on the verge of an exciting marriage which was also perceived as a disaster, and already pregnant, could only joke and boast. After so long, after so many transparent years, they had grown opaque to each other. And this would—must—continue. The dignity of their husbands was at stake. Later, perhaps, when they were much older, they might confess mistakes, regrets. But Harriet saw them all bound in the meantime by certain rules. She herself had reason to be grateful for those rules.

To calm herself she went to the window, and saw directly opposite, across the oblong enclosure of trees and shrubs that was Cornwall Gardens, the mysterious window that was always closed yet always lit up. She had seen the light blazing there at five in the morning and at midnight. Sometimes a figure could be seen moving rapidly across it, as if in agitation. Was it a sickroom, a nursery? Somehow that agitated figure seemed to Harriet like a prisoner, for whom she felt a terrified sympathy. Soon the branches of the trees would thicken with foliage, and she would no longer be able to see clearly. On
this particular afternoon, still light, still bright, but very quiet, she could discern no silhouette. Yet the light was already on. Suddenly the figure appeared, as if from nowhere, and took up a position at the window. With a qualm of fear she turned away, for even worse than seeing the stranger was the thought of the stranger seeing her, lonely, at the window, and gazing with longing at a world which was beginning to disclose concealment, estrangement, silence.