A Private View (11 page)

He almost loved her, and would have married her had she been slightly but essentially different. He thought that she probably felt the same about him. Each was too loyal to admit that something else was desired, something less sedate.
Louise, for all her placidity was a healthy woman, while he himself was bruised with unassuaged longings. Yet they were undoubted allies. Prepared for disappointment, they nevertheless made the most of their friendship, which became, and had remained, a civilised and affectionate affair, an affair of long walks, teas in distant hotels, discussion of the week’s news. Looking back, Bland found their innocence honourable. In those early days they were able to confess freely to each other their obligations towards their less than accommodating parents. They found comfort in their occasional intimacy. They progressed from the borrowed flat to a small hotel, then to a larger one, and after his mother’s death and his removal to London he had got in touch with her again, thanking her for her kind letter of condolence, and explaining that the events of that last year had been so sad (‘sad’ was the most neutral word he could find) that he had not been in touch, but that he longed to see her again. When could they meet?

By that time he was installed in the flat over Baker Street Station, and their meetings were frequent and easy. They had continued to come together until she had announced that she was getting married. By that time they had both come up in the world, but although free, had become trapped within the framework of their early relationship. They had continued to meet until she removed herself to Lymington and her awful husband. At least he thought of him as awful, having been introduced to him when the three of them met, not entirely by accident, at a concert at the Wigmore Hall. Tall, bony, and already nearly bald, the husband-to-be, a retired doctor, had given him a quasi-professional handshake—brief—but said little. Bland, who
had not expected to like him, found him worse than expected, and prepared to wash his hands of the whole affair. But his heart was sore at the prospect of losing Louise, and in the end it had proved impossible to break the thread that bound them together, time, in this instance, being on their side.

Shortly after their son was born the husband had become some sort of an invalid, and had eventually died. This had not affected Louise unduly: by that time she had a son, a house, and a social position. He supposed that she had always been conventional by nature, for which he did not blame her; he was conventional himself. When a daily nanny was installed she resumed her visits to London. There was little love-making by this time, although no opportunity was wasted. She was quite calm about this, suffered, or appeared to suffer, no guilt. Curious, he had questioned her. ‘After all,’ she had replied, ‘I knew you before I ever met Denis.’ He was given to understand that this, in her eyes, validated an
affaire
which had never, technically, been an infidelity. Women, he thought, were sometimes more ingenious than men.

And ever since, the telephone calls had continued, still banal, but with a deep peace about them which comforted them both. Each, by this time, felt related to the other, bound by a common inheritance. The calls were perhaps more satisfying than the occasional meetings: their conversations were by now so schematic that they were almost abstract, each pursuing a familiar line of thought. In a way he loved her still, could not imagine her out of his life. Sometimes, when tidying her hair in his bedroom, she said, ‘Shall we?’ But he knew from her rueful smile that her heart was
not in it. They had both aged, perhaps prematurely. There was no compulsion now, nor was there any need to explain, to make excuses. When he took her down to catch her taxi back to Waterloo his kiss was warm and loving. It was a blessing to him to know that she felt the same.

It had seemed that he could manage without marriage. From this he deduced that he was meant to be solitary, had always remained, and would always remain, the same. Solitude, which occasionally baffled him (how had it come to this?), felt familiar. As he made his way up the social and professional ladder, away from the greater solitude of his youth, he embraced what was probably freedom, or rather liberty, and this, he thought, had always been his greatest wish, his need. Away from his contentious parents, away from his love for Louise, away from modest single-bedroomed flats to his present almost superfluous comfort, in an enviable position, a few minutes from the park, he had embraced each change with ardour, but not, he thought, with satisfaction. The finer rooms, the larger windows, seemed to him part of a predestined flight, in the course of which he had obeyed impulses which he did not appear to generate of his own free will. He failed to supply the enthusiasm which should, ideally, have come from others. Carefully ordering carpets, curtains, wallpapers, he had arrived at a passionless good taste which was tolerable when he returned to it in the evening but oppressed him rather in the light of every day. Now there would be time to spare, and he would have to find some accommodation with his surroundings, or else some new interest to take him away from them, so that after an interval, repeated daily, he could feel once again a mild gratitude that his money had enabled him to live in such easeful splendour.

The internal telephone rang. ‘Mrs Arnold is here, sir,’ announced Hipwood. He approved of Louise, who in her turn knew the ropes. She always had a word with Hipwood, enquiring after his health; she even sent him a Christmas card, although Bland had told her that this was not necessary. She made a point of presenting herself, lest Hipwood should assume the worst. Bland knew that he did this automatically, but it was part of Louise’s curious innocence to believe that it was up to her to make people think well of her. In addition to this, she had, in recent years, taken on the mantle of a country gentlewoman, accustomed to receiving respect and acknowledging the obligation of being gracious in return. Sometimes Bland thought that if she were a little more devious she might be better company, but he knew that nothing would change her now, any more than he could change himself. His very slight boredom, he knew, came from lack of change, and the prospect of the long day ahead, together with their almost formulaic greeting, threatened to depress him. This had been the pattern of their relationship: an atavistic closeness, formed when they themselves were almost embryonic, balanced by a divergence of tastes which the passing years had only emphasised.

‘Well, dear,’ she said predictably, as he opened the door to her.

‘Well dear,’ he replied, ushering her into the sitting-room. After these preliminaries he thought he could probably foresee what the rest of the day’s conversation would be. Louise would talk about her grandchildren, in whom he took not the slightest interest, and he would make appropriate noises, diverting her attention from time to time to a sight, a sound, which he thought would please her: the nearly tame blackbird that lingered in the tree outside his
window, a child’s face glimpsed for a second amid the hurrying crowds. He preferred anonymous children to those who came complete with a set of parents: anonymous children belonged to everyone. Louise, as usual, would ask few questions, leaving his inner life undisturbed. They were most in harmony during their habitual long silences. It was silence rather than dialogue, the silence of things unsaid but understood, which had confirmed their original unity, and Bland now looked forward to those intervals, on which he knew he could count, and in which he could recapture their earlier closeness, so essential to them both and yet so familiar that surely a very slight feeling of tedium was forgivable.

Nevertheless, he was pleased, as always, to see her. She looked well, in her forest-green suit, with the Hermès scarf he had given her the previous Christmas. ‘Comely’ was the word he would have chosen to describe her. She had the unsurprising good looks of a healthy woman who was now able to care for herself, to shop selectively, and to visit the hairdresser twice a week. Fine mild eyes beamed from under unreconstructed brows: a discreet pink lipstick enlivened the still girlish mouth. She had never been a beauty, but had always contrived to be pleasing. Now the gaze was kindly but frank, as if there were no longer any need to be modest, and the hair was carefully coiffured in a style appropriate to the older woman. Her figure, slight in his day, had in fact filled out considerably, although her legs had remained slim. She took a pleasure in her appearance, which he thought reflected her pleasure in the life she now lived as a contented widow in a small town where she was well known and well liked. Yet he knew that her visits to London, and to him, were part of that pleasure, just as they had become part of
that agreeable well-run life. She saw no anomalies in their long history: in her view it had always been meant to continue, and indeed to end like this.

‘We’ll have lunch round the corner,’ he said, already in a hurry. ‘And then I want you to see the Sickert exhibition. It’s quite exceptional. I saw it yesterday and I can’t wait to go again.’

‘Whatever you say,’ she replied. ‘But you will remember that I want to go to Selfridges, won’t you? I told you about the present situation, didn’t I? And I want to look at curtain material. That blue in the drawing-room faded quite badly last summer.’ (‘Drawing-room’, he noted.) He made a noncommittal noise.

‘And yet it was such a good colour,’ she went on. ‘Perhaps if I got a darker shade …’

‘Shall we have a quick lunch first?’ he said impatiently. ‘Then we can go straight to the exhibition. You can do your shopping afterwards, and come to me for tea.’

‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘As long as you leave me plenty of time.’

She snapped shut her powder compact, retied her scarf, and announced herself to be ready. They walked companionably round the corner to the Italian restaurant, where he was well known, and ate, as always, veal. ‘Nice to see you again, sir,’ said the waiter. Of course, there had been that dinner the other night. He smiled. The first of the silences installed itself, and was prolonged until they had drunk their coffee. ‘Lovely,’ she repeated. It was so easy to give her pleasure, he reflected; that had always been part of her charm. It may even have made him a little lazy, as if he might have preferred more of a challenge: more foreplay, he privately
termed it. Yet he knew that a more difficult woman would have defeated him, might entertain him initially but would baffle him and leave him bereft, if not positively damaged. With Louise he was safe. That too was part of her charm. It was a gift for which men were nearly always grateful. And if they sometimes grew discontented, feeling in themselves an unused store of curiosity, they eventually grew resigned as time and age did their inexorable work. That was why old married couples seemed so contented, he thought: they had bowed to necessity, which in their case was not the mother of invention, but its opposite. They were like survivors of a war, grateful for a comrade in adversity, grateful too that hostilities were at an end, and that a peace treaty had been signed and witnessed.

After that, Bland thought, most men would have the delicacy to keep their disappointment to themselves, as he did now. The day seemed to have become dusky very early, although it was only just past two, and the crowds in the streets, surely more numerous than usual, impeded their progress. In the taxi she asked him about his Christmas plans. He answered her abstractedly, remembering only that he had meant to go away. ‘I was thinking of Rome,’ he said, only half believing in the project. ‘I shall be alone this year,’ she told him. ‘They’re all going to Sarah’s parents. I thought of a cruise, but I hate travelling alone.’

‘Maybe we could go together,’ he said moodily, aware that the onus was now on him to express enthusiasm. A sudden shower of rain spattered the window of the taxi: he felt glum. ‘That’s why it got so dark,’ she observed. ‘Maybe it’ll clear up now.’

But the day became slightly more melancholy, and the
pictures did nothing to cheer him. He gazed conscientiously at the images which had so delighted him on the previous day, and did his best to point them out to Louise, but he seemed to have lost the thread, and the crowds got on his nerves. Louise laughed dutifully at the Tiller Girls, but seemed untouched by Venice, by Dieppe, and by the comic tragedies so slyly indicated by the droop of a moustache, a head propped up by an exasperated hand. He would have to come back another day on his own, he decided; maybe he was tired. He steered her thankfully towards the exit, and put her in a taxi to Selfridges. He would walk back, he told her; he would see her later. Alone he took a deep breath, glad of the respite. Yet I am always glad to see her, he reminded himself. Perhaps I am not quite myself, burdened with all this new leisure. Yet he knew that was not the cause of his malaise. He felt himself to be like one of the failures in the pictures, seedy, tetchy, graceless. He was glad of the dark afternoon, so that he could no longer catch sight of himself.

By contrast the flat seemed almost welcoming. He opened a window on to the darkling sky, leaned out, and breathed deeply. He was, he supposed, prepared for the evening, which would be long. Unwilling to pull curtains, he remained leaning on the window-sill, aware that for a man of his age such a brooding position was ridiculous. When Louise’s steps could be heard in the quiet street, and he could just make out her form advancing confidently towards him, he retreated into the room, and put the day to rest.

Later it became better. As they sat together, all the lamps lit and the tea-tray between them, he felt as fond of her now as he had always been, and ascribed his earlier disaffection to some passing physical cause. He always loved her most when
she was about to leave, when the end of her visit was in sight. Then it seemed to him imperative to arrange a further meeting, for she was in a sense his lifeline, even though he had grown as used to her as a child is to its mother. And she was always pleased to fit in with his plans, or even to suggest a plan of her own. He liked to look at pictures and she at gardens: they shared and shared alike.

‘I’ll ring on Sunday, of course,’ he said.