Undue Influence (17 page)

Twelve

The streets emptied and then filled again with strangers. It was summer, and yet it was not summer: the weather consistently failed to come up to expectations. I took to leaving home very early, much too early, so as to have the city to myself. Besides, the sun shone briefly every morning, between six and seven, before clouding over into the inevitable humid dullness. Sometimes I got to the shop before the cleaner had left. I made her a cup of tea, then locked up again and went round to the café for breakfast. The day then stretched before me endlessly. By the time I opened up, at half-past nine, I felt as though I had already done a day’s work.

Somehow I was able to get rid of this feeling, so that I turned imperceptibly into what customers expected the manageress of a bookshop to be: useful, tactful, helpful. But a heaviness settled over me and I wondered how long I should have to continue like this. In the afternoons Muriel came in for an hour. Her manners were always restrained, but now I saw that she regarded me with something like suspicion, as if I had taken over from her, was filling the place where she had elected to spend her life, had ousted her, in short, although without me she would have had to shut the shop or even sell it. She would look round the shelves, almost disappointed that nothing was amiss, then take the money round to the bank. This I saw as
the first sign of distrust on her part, for I could easily have done it myself, and indeed had done in the past. Those customers who remembered her greeted her absently but came to me with their purchases. When she had gone I resigned myself to those long empty hours before I could close and sat at my desk with a book in front of me which I did not read. I walked home through now dull and dusty streets, eating at the café where Wiggy and I had gone, and reached Montagu Mansions at about eight o’clock. It was too early to go to bed but sometimes I did so, feeling heavy and disappointed, though without cause.

Every time the door of the shop opened I expected to see Martin, but he was absent for what seemed a long time, though it was really only a couple of weeks. I told myself that he was staying with those friends of his, either in Dorset or in Cortona, and this caused me an odd feeling of displacement, as if it were I who had gone away and was homesick in unfamiliar surroundings. His absence was not entirely unexpected. I felt as if I had ruined my chances, although I knew I could retrieve the situation when he returned. I would conduct the affair this time, leaving him no opportunity for pious reminiscence: I would confront him with the actual, with the business in hand. For I thought that my rights in the matter had been ignored, overlooked, and I was determined that my failure, or what I thought of as my failure, should be eradicated. It was up to me to redress the balance. When I thought of that evening in the restaurant I grew hot with indignation at his opacity. No man, I thought, should behave like that, delivering themselves to a woman’s attention with no hint of a suggestion that he should do more. I blamed myself as well; I had been too impatient for the conclusion of this affair—I would not use the word relationship for there was none. I knew what I wanted and I
thought that he should want it too. That was the heart of the matter and I could not see what was wrong with it.

Sometimes, after Muriel had gone, I indulged in a little make-believe, of which I was mildly ashamed. I was overcome with a longing for a normal life, one as filled with diversions as the Gibsons had had. Again, I thought that some attention was due to me, but instead of making me indignant this reflection made me wistful. I too should like a holiday, but again it was up to me to engineer one, and now I was tired of those buccaneering excursions, tired of ecclesiastical details and the less than ecclesiastical behaviour in which I indulged. Now these holidays appeared to me in a morbid light, and I felt secretive, shameful. The fact that I could never discuss them with anyone made matters worse. My mother of course had chosen a wilful ignorance, and was probably right to do so, yet now, looking back, I saw this as not quite straightforward, as if my entire inheritance had consisted of the obligation not to disturb others, or rather to give as little offence as possible.

Wiggy knew something of my activities without my having to tell her. Wiggy is a romantic whose illusions are still in place. She is steadily, consistently faithful to her lover, whom she never discusses with me. Our mutual exchange in this context is confined to a fairly routine ‘Are you seeing George this week?’ to which the reply is ‘Yes, tomorrow,’ or ‘Probably not. He’s very busy.’ And yet he telephoned her every day, which gave her life a settled aspect, and it was this that I began to crave. Stealthily it became clear to me that I had somehow forfeited respect, that I had failed to conform to what a woman should do and be, even in this unregulated age. I knew few people. This was not the reflection induced by Eileen Bateman’s demise but something quite different, though possibly related. I wanted a proper setting.

It was useless to remind myself that I had felt this before, that it was something to do with summer, which I regarded as the equivalent of the empty quarter, when everyone was away and I was left in the desert. This year I was not even able to make plans on my own account, owing to Hester’s accident and Muriel’s reliance on my presence in the shop. It was not even as though I particularly wanted to go away, or at least I did not want to go away on my own. Wiggy would be staying with her cousins in Scotland, as she generally did in both August and December, but I did not even have that resource. What I wanted was some sort of mutuality, some sharing of plans, some utterly banal interlude of walking hand in hand with someone devoted to me, in whose affections I was absolutely secure. My companion, whom I would not allow myself to identify, would address himself to my well-being. Only a husband would fit the bill. I made excuses for Martin, which I should have realized was a departure from my normal intolerance: he had suffered a bereavement, he was inhibited, unworldly, glad of a sympathetic ear. At the same time as I dismissed his performance as inadequate I began to question my own knowingness. What if he had been genuinely devoted to Cynthia, so that even to follow where she led had made him happy? And he was a man who followed because he was content to be the passive partner, disposed of by the will of another, obedient to another’s decree.

Where I was not wrong, I thought, was in considering the odd, even perverse attraction of this passivity, as no doubt Cynthia had done. There was about a man as simple as Martin an urge to violate that he would inevitably awaken in a woman like Cynthia, whose every gesture was predatory. And his response would have been her secret, hers and possibly his as well, if he had allowed himself to dwell on it. His seemliness
would soon have reasserted itself; he would want to believe in his own continued decency. So in fact it was up to his wife to make him love her. This struck me as my own situation, for I was still sufficiently in charge of myself to calculate my chances. In fact the element of chance was absent: I was thinking of a foregone conclusion. I felt an odd sympathy for Cynthia. She was not stupid; she would have known his hesitations. I excused her from understanding them; perhaps few women could. One has been fed stereotypes; perhaps they are a genetic inheritance. One knows how a man should behave, or one thinks one does. And if his approach is lacking in fervour one will do one’s best to inspire it. Poor Cynthia, on what was to be her deathbed, had been divested of her powers, worse, had become a burden, no longer capable of joining in the game of perpetual courtship at which they both excelled. And both, in their respective ways, would have known that the time for holidays was past, and only the grim present and the even grimmer future bound them together. When the present is satisfactory it is natural to seek diversion. When present comfort fades one is more inclined to think of flight.

That was my situation and I could hardly make myself believe that it was undeserved. But what I wanted was precisely undeserved in another sense. I wanted to be overwhelmed by delightful surprises, to hear people exclaim in my wake, ‘What a delightful girl!’ That this wish was puerile did not disturb me unduly. What did disturb me was the knowledge that none of this was likely to happen, that I should continue to leave the flat in the early morning, continue to encounter the man attempting to walk his unpleasant shuffling dog, continue to spend my days in the dusty shop, even continue to attempt to put Muriel’s mind at rest. I suppose it was inevitable that she should think of me as a usurper. Her settled expectations had
received an unwelcome jolt, and her no doubt inadequate domesticity revealed for what it was, an uninteresting set of tasks to be performed for as long as the future lasted. Her dignity had been impaired, and with it her status. Seated behind her desk she had felt at one with those early pioneers, those rigid but welcome reminders of the conformist past, so soon to be discredited. Muriel was as much a victim of the emancipation of women as I was. She had thought to do without love, only to be shown that love was on offer to those who knew how to deal with it. The climate of sexual liberation which succeeded her middle years, possible as long as she was not forced to contemplate a life of unbridled hedonism, had moved her into the age of exclusion, of disqualification. Old, Muriel would have seen that the young enjoyed a monstrous freedom, one that she had been denied through sheer goodness, by the example of an upright father, a devoted sister with whom she was condemned to finish out her days, ever more restrained by good manners, even more taciturn, even more bitterly reflective.

I of course had been empowered by what must have seemed to Muriel as inordinate licence. Now she had become aware of this and perhaps began to dislike me not only in the matter of my assiduity in the shop but for my youth, and all the advantages she imagined I enjoyed. I did enjoy them, but even young people can be lonely, whereas children can be very lonely, as I well knew. I wanted to reassure her that this was out of the question. What she wanted was myself back in the basement, attending to poor St John’s papers. Even at this late date she wanted to believe that his simple but admirable codes had held value, not only for himself but for others. She did not know, or did not wish to know, how wistfulness had overtaken him towards the end, would no doubt maintain that ‘Elderflower.
Stale nostalgic smell’ was a perfectly valid observation, ignoring the forlorn aspect of the expanse of white paper surrounding this particular notation and the other empty pages that succeeded it. The one good thing I had done was to stick that last page down again, for Muriel, I believe, would not have accepted that her father was a man like other men. She probably believed that all men were like her father, and that it was perfectly possible to deal with them in a professional manner, respecting their differences, which one was bound to take into consideration, but too proud to make the necessary concessions. Duty, stern daughter of the voice of God … It had served well enough, but now perhaps it threatened to serve no longer.

There was little I could do about this. What she would like me to do, I reckoned, was to resign as soon as she was able to put in a full day once more. That might be a couple of months, if Hester were to maintain her progress. Hester, I thought, was the stronger of the two, largely because she was innocent of Muriel’s regrets. Hester had somehow remained an eager girl who had no knowledge of defeat. When those suitors Muriel had mentioned had disappeared, a little puzzled, perhaps, she would have been as undamaged as when they had made her acquaintance. Thus she was not a victim in the sense that I imagined Muriel to be; rather she was unawakened, in her case a blessed state. It was eating of the tree of knowledge that did you down, since innocence was then pronounced to be irretrievable. I, who believed that everything was retrievable, and who behaved as if it were, was no longer so sure.

I called on Wiggy on my way home and said, ‘It looks as if I ought to be taking a holiday. Any suggestions?’

She opened a drawer and extracted a handful of leaflets. ‘Take your pick,’ she said. ‘These are what Eileen kept urging on me. I kept them because I couldn’t bring myself to throw
them away. Not that they’re much use to me. But you never know, do you? Might as well put them to some use. Tea?’

‘Thanks.’ I spread them on the table. Barcelona. Budapest. A tour of Georgia and Armenia. Various spa towns, Biarritz, Vichy. Who on earth would want to go to Vichy? Apparently it was much in favour with the ladies of Napoleon III’s court, who thought that the waters eliminated the ravages inflicted by the chocolate of which they were so fond. I thought of whalebone compressing those inflated diaphragms, all fizzy with gas.

‘Did she intend to go to these places?’ I asked.

Wiggy sat down. ‘This will interest you, no doubt. No, she didn’t. The farthest she ever got was that journey to Brittany. You know? The plate?’

I nodded.

‘She hated going away. It was after Brittany that she was ill. I thought it was flu, but now I’m not so sure. She was constantly nerving herself up to be a traveller, but she was really only happy when she was on her bike, on her own, in control. She knew that she ought to be more adventurous; that was why she collected all these brochures. Besides, it was something to do with her day. I’m sure she consulted travel agents, made extensive inquiries. But when she had the leaflets in her hand the whole enterprise somehow expired.’