Incidents in the Rue Laugier

A Start in Life

Providence

Look at Me

Hotel du Lac

Family and Friends

A Misalliance

A Friend from England

Latecomers

Lewis Percy

Brief Lives

A Closed Eye

Fraud

Dolly

A Private View

Altered States

Anita Brookner
INCIDENTS IN THE RUE LAUGIER

Anita Brookner is the author of several novels, including
Fraud
,
Dolly
,
Providence
,
Brief Lives
, and, most recently,
Altered States
. She won the Booker Prize in 1986 for
Hotel du Lac
. An international authority on eighteenth-century painting, she became the first female Slade Professor at Cambridge University. She lives in London.

M
Y MOTHER READ A LOT, SIGHED A LOT, AND WENT TO
bed early. She had been a Maud Gonthier, from Dijon, brought up to expect something better than the provincial restrictions which had stifled her as a girl. She never found it, at least not with my father. Boredom softened her slightly cross face into a contemplative frown, as if she were puzzled, as if she had mislaid something of considerable significance. My father, a disappointed man, left her to her own devices, thinking she had brought these troubles on herself. In fact he was jealous of her, of her silence, her composure; he even envied the melancholy, which conferred on her a distinction which nature had denied to him, although secretly he thought of himself as an unusual character, as we all do. He was a secondhand bookseller, with a small shop in Denbigh Street. My mother, who, as a girl, had hoped to marry into literary circles, had been agreeably alerted when told of this. When she saw the
shop she felt an immense disappointment.
Ça fait prolo
, she thought, and hoped that her expression gave nothing away to the man she had somehow agreed to marry. He knew, of course, being sensitive to slights. Tiresome though it is to have to record this, he never quite forgave her. Theirs was an ordinary marriage, cemented by decorum, by custom, eventually by loyalty. My mother had a more mature attitude than my father, who never quite eliminated a certain edginess from his behaviour. He suppressed this as best he could, and in the end it could only be seen in the wolfishness of his smile. My mother read the classics and kept her own counsel.

Please accept me as an unreliable narrator. My parents died years ago, and I left home long before I lost them. When I was clearing my mother’s flat (she survived my father by only four years) I found a notebook from which I have constructed the story which follows. What I found was not the diary, written in a faded hand, beloved by novelists. This was nothing more than a small spiral-bound pocket-book, of the sort to be found in any French stationers, with squared greyish paper and a shiny checked cover. In fact I did not find this for some time: I had put the suitcase containing my mother’s few personal effects—her birth and marriage certificates, a few letters from myself, a rose pink silk kimono which I had not seen before—into the back of a cupboard, half meaning to leave it there, unwilling, for some reason, to disturb her shade, or the memory of her quietly reading. I only took it out again when I acquired more suitcases of my own and needed the space. The notebook was old, slightly bent at the corner, the pages stuck together. There were only a few notations, apparently written on the same day.
‘Dames Blanches. La Gaillarderie. Place des Ternes. Sang. Edward.’
Further down the same page, and written with a different pen, a recipe for Sauce mousseline. Then a short list of book titles. Last of all Proust’s opening line:
‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.’
This I thought to be an adequate epitaph for a woman whom I remembered as infinitely reserved, and who, as far as I could judge, had left no very profound trace, apart from the usual memories, on my life.

But recently I have found myself repeating some of my mother’s attitudes—reading, sighing, going to bed early—and I began to wish for clarification. It seemed to me impossible that a life could be covered by those so brief notations, yet I was never in any doubt that it was in fact her life that was so covered. This muteness had a sort of elegance about it, unusual in these days when women have so much to say for themselves, and my mother was an elegant woman. It was entirely characteristic that she should not expand on what was little more than a code. Perhaps I regretted the fact that my mother never spoke of herself, or indeed spoke much at all unless she had something definite to impart. I found her dignified, admirable, but ultimately frustrating, at least to the adult I had become; when I was a child I seem to remember that we loved each other without restraint, but there were no confessions, no confidences, a fact I now find puzzling. What remained of her was somehow contained in those few words in the small notebook, written in her purposeful hand, with some deliberation, or so it seemed to me, at least collectedly, and indeed posthumously, for none of these words had any connection with the life I had known, and that she had presumably known as well. Only one did I recognise, but out of context. Something predated me, and I had no idea what it was.

Above all I was intrigued by the word
‘Sang’
. What had blood to do with my mother’s distant and uncommunicative life? We had, as far as I could see, little in common: in fact I may even have removed myself deliberately from her infinite discretion, as did my father. Like my father I found her apparent
serenity irritating, yet I have reached the age when a woman begins to perceive that she is growing into the person whom she least plans to resemble: her mother. When I thought of her in later life I habitually experienced a slight sinking of the heart, an involuntary lowering of the spirits, occasioned perhaps by a comparison between our two destinies, hers so fixed, so immutable, mine quite deliberately volatile. Something about her very immutability—there, on the sofa, in the drawing-room of our flat in Tedworth Square—commanded my respect, although the fate of women fifty years ago is something of a closed book to me. Marriage had seemed to be her destiny, as it still was for most women in those days, as it had no doubt been that of her own mother, whom of course I knew. It seems odd that she maintained a distance between herself and my father, although she was a faithful and diligent wife, observant in those matters which my own generation has learned to neglect.