Undue Influence (3 page)

‘You must do something about the door, Muriel,’ shouts Hester.

Muriel looks up briefly from whatever she is reading. ‘We need a man for that,’ she says, and the subject is dismissed.

I have no fantasies regarding Muriel and Hester, who have always struck me as creatures of the utmost rectitude, and therefore somehow not interesting. I prefer those who go about their business with an obvious burden of feeling. ‘The Man of Feeling’ was the title of an (unpublished) essay by St John Collier, which will be the lead in our book. It is incredibly complacent, like his interpretation of God’s purpose. But I know those unconscious gestures, those suddenly lowered eyes that give away inner conflict. I can read them like a book. This I prefer to all those books I have not read and whose titles I know so well. I could sell you anything in the shop, since
I am so familiar with the stock. But I prefer the living flesh and its ambiguity. I am in my element there, a hunger artist whose hunger is rarely satisfied.

During the few days I spent alone after my mother’s death I was able to observe a slight alteration in my behaviour. These days were worse than I had anticipated. The floorboards echoed as I moved from my bedroom to the sitting-room, and I was reminded of my father’s lumbering progress, and also of the slight feeling of fear I had always experienced at his approach. This fear had always been baseless; my father was not a threatening figure, merely an inconvenient one, but it now occurred to me that he must have been unhappy. He was in a position to register his deterioration; his one good eye was sharp, and he knew that he was now a clumsy elderly man, whose wife’s relative youth disturbed him, as if he had not sought it in the first place.

Their marriage had always struck me as a cynical arrangement. My mother, impractical as she was, had little hope of an independent life, particularly as she had a slight fear of the outside world and was only able to function if she kept to a rigid routine. It probably reassured her to be taken over by a will stronger than her own. She must have felt a certain relief as this substantial stranger translated her from one life to another. As for my father, his predominant emotion must have been gratification. My mother, at the time of her marriage, was young, certainly unspoilt. I doubt if he were very experienced himself, in spite of that brief first marriage that had ended when his wife died of cancer. ‘To Madeleine, the epitome of womanhood.’ As he seemed to descend gratefully into uxorious habits, and as I was alerted to these at a young age, I sensed that what he appreciated was a certain continuity, with my mother drafted in to make sure that the pattern was not disturbed.

This she did impeccably, and for this reason was perhaps secretly relieved when he died, after a second stroke, gracelessly, in hospital, his hand fumbling under the sheet. She too had observed her period of mourning, in the flat, as I did now, before resuming her regular way of life. But it seemed to me, as she went out in the afternoons, to some gallery or other, that she was still fearful, or perhaps more fearful than she had been when my father was alive. For this reason she sometimes spent whole days at home, reading, in the silence of the long summer afternoons. This made me uneasy, but she showed no signs of depression, discontent. My return home in the evenings, from whatever I had been doing, occasioned a joyful smile. The book was laid aside; she was ready for my news. I offered it, with suitable omissions.

I once, rashly, asked her if she was lonely. She frowned in concentration, duty bound to be accurate, to render an account, to herself as much as to me.

‘Not lonely, exactly,’ she said. ‘But an odd thing happens. I think back to the people I knew when I was young, and realize how good they were to me. My friendships seemed to me then, and seem to me now, so secure! As an only child—like you, my poor darling—I relied on my friends a great deal. We lived a little way out of London, and everything seemed safe. In the evenings I could go over to a friend’s house and we would go out for walks. Can you imagine such simplicity?’

‘I go out for walks too,’ I reminded her.

‘But, darling, your walks are dangerous! London is hardly the place for an evening walk. I am anxious when you are out. Not that I should ever try to stop you.’

‘Nothing has happened to me.’

‘Of course not, you are a sensible girl. But I remember those evening walks I took with my girlfriends, one in particular, Cathy; we were inseparable. I would walk to her house, and
then she would walk me back to mine, and so on. It sounds silly, I know, but there seemed to be a golden haze about the evenings then. Very few cars. And we discussed secrets, although of course we had none to speak of.’

‘What happened to her? Cathy, I mean.’

‘Well, she married very young. She was eighteen. She had been to a cousin’s wedding and met a man not much older than herself, and in due course he very properly proposed to her and they were married. In her wedding dress she looked different, older, and for the first time in my life I became aware of separation. It affected me deeply. Cathy and her husband moved away, and the evenings were never the same again. It struck me at the time that in any event I would be excluded. That’s what makes me so unhappy when I hear about children being excluded from school. It is a brutal business: one never quite forgets it.’

‘So you were lonely, then. Even then.’

‘Well, of course. But I had already met your father. He was at the same wedding, a friend of that same cousin’s parents. And it seemed to me that Cathy conspired to encourage us: she probably wanted me to feel, what? Not left out. Because our conversations were no longer transparent. Her husband-to-be was rather jealous of an intimacy in which he had no part. And your father was courteous, respectful.’ She paused. ‘He restored my pride,’ she said finally.

‘That doesn’t seem to me a very good reason for marrying the first man who asks you.’

‘Oh, but it is, Claire. Not that I hope you’ll ever understand this.’

‘And now?’

‘Well, I have no friends now. Cathy and I still send Christmas cards, but that is all. These days I only have acquaintances,
neighbours, people I pass in the supermarket. We inquire pleasantly after each other’s health. And at my age I can hardly expect to make new friends. But I can’t honestly say I’m disappointed about this; it seems part of a natural process. I appreciate my quiet life. Of course, I miss your father.’ My expression must have been sceptical, because she shook her head and smiled. ‘The early days of our marriage were lovely,’ she said. ‘We had holidays—Venice, the South of France—and it was delightful to have a companion. And we had weekends in the country, looking for things for the flat. I knew he was a good man. But then he had that little accident’—she meant his stroke—‘and I had to get used to looking after him. He loved me, you know. And he was so proud when you were born.’

Reading between the lines I could see that my father’s stroke had put an end to her physical life, but I was careful not to raise this matter. In any event she would not have enlightened me.

We had lived affectionately, but also carefully, together, each anxious to protect the other’s privacy. It comforted her to know that I was respectably employed, while in my basement I was able to chart her tentative afternoon progress down Bond Street to the Royal Academy, or on the bus to the National Gallery, or in a taxi to the Tate. I could have done that last journey on foot, but my mother had become frail, and in the weeks before her death had not gone out at all. Her death was like her life, modest, self-effacing. I was unprepared for it. Perhaps I wanted to be. A superstitious, even terror-stricken part of me was glad that she had left no trace. Yet I knew that I should miss her for the rest of my life.

I was also in a quandary about what was expected of me. The flat was mine, but I hated to be alone in it, and besides,
there was no food. Was it in order for me to go out for a meal? I felt ridiculously self-conscious, as if the whole world must be aware of my plight. I concluded that the sensible thing to do was to stock the bare cupboards and the fridge. There was an all-night supermarket at the top of Baker Street, and I was surprised that it was so empty, until I realized that it was nearly ten o’clock at night. I had spent the whole day in a swoon of memory and reflection. The evening air reassured me; I was not in a hurry to return home. I took a walk: George Street, Marylebone High Street, New Cavendish Street, into the unpopulated regions of Wimpole and Harley Streets. It was finally the absence of people, of familiars, in this minatory district, that caused me to turn back, but the experience was salutory. I vowed to resume those evening walks that I had previously kept short in deference to my mother’s anxiety. I was less lonely in the street than I was at home.

As I let myself into the flat I reflected that it would be pleasant to know there was someone already there, albeit in another room. I saw the point of a marriage even as discreet as my mother’s. Yet what I felt was a wistfulness all my own, a dangerous longing for company. And not any company. I thought with pity of my mother’s girlhood, her evening walks with her friends, the wedding at which she had been eagerly and awkwardly introduced to my father, their long, long engagement … I thought of her as a virgin, sacrificed, and then I thought of the days of their companionship, in Venice, in the South of France. And I almost envied them. I thought of my friend Wiggy, waiting in for a visit from her lover, and grew angry on her behalf. Better a marriage, however brief and unsatisfactory, than an arrangement such as hers. I thought I ought to get married; I thought that Wiggy should. It seemed to me that neither of us had the least idea how to go about
this. If anything Wiggy’s case seemed even more extreme than mine. Yet when she rang, as she had taken to doing every evening, I detected no unhappiness in her voice. She is dear to me, but we share no secrets. I visit her for a cup of coffee in her flat in Museum Street; she is always taciturn and even-tempered. She says I cheer her up, by which she means that I entertain her. She loves my stories, my fantasies (everything is connected), and settles back to listen. After which I usually go on my way quite light-heartedly, feeling in control, colourful. Except that my mother’s absence made me too aware of my mental processes, aware too that I had tried to supply myself with a form of company that now appeared ghostly, too obviously invented. Somehow I felt uneasy about my behaviour, in a way I could not quite define. I looked forward to going back to work. What I needed was the soothing company of St John Collier. Surely no one could devise a better ally in difficult times.

The food which I had bought, and which I should have to buy again and again, seemed insubstantial, the plastic carrier bag pathetic. I placed the contents on the kitchen table: a grapefruit, butter, a tin of coffee. This was not a meal. In the last days of her life my mother had subsisted on tea and biscuits: I now did the same, shamefully. I seemed to have lost my amused perspective on the world. The only respite was to get out of the flat; buying the food seemed to me nothing more than a pretext. In those dark streets I had recovered slightly, as if it were my destiny to go about, a wanderer on the face of the earth, unclaimed. This was how I spent those not quite innocent holidays in cathedral cities, making opportunities for myself which now seemed to me equally shameful. And I was hungry. The prospect of a meal, served in decent surroundings, now seemed enticing, and I resolved to eat out in future.
I would take Wiggy with me, although I knew that she might prove recalcitrant. She was a home-loving creature, and seemed to have resigned herself to a life of waiting, as if her lover might look in at any minute, although as far as I knew his visits were infrequent. I had often wondered how she put up with this. I could not conceive of such passivity, at least for a woman at the end of the twentieth century, although I had the example of my mother constantly before me. But my mother was
hors catégorie;
no one could elect to live that way now. And in any event, with her death, a new order was established, one in which I had only myself to rely on, in which the future would be of my own making.

Somehow I must arrange affairs so that these dreadful days and evenings were not to be repeated. I was uncertain how this was to be achieved, but I thought, or rather hoped, that serendipity would play a part. It had not so far let me down. The job at the shop had come about almost without any effort on my part. I had answered a mysterious advertisement in the
Spectator
which merely stated that help was needed on a private literary project. I had telephoned the number given, had been summoned for an interview, and once I had got past the recalcitrant door had met both Colliers whom I had immediately classed as unworldly, much more unworldly than I was. They had engaged me at once, which seemed to me suspicious, until they showed me the basement. This was gloomy, not quite clean, and smelled of gas.

‘You will not be disturbed,’ Muriel assured me. ‘We get very little call for foreign language books, though why that should be I can’t quite understand. We get a certain number of academics in the summer. Those who know where to find us, that is. They tend to come back. Pleasant people.’

The peaceful silence of the shop had surprised me. It was
not out of the way, far from it, but it had a provincial air, as if it had been in a side street in Ludlow, or Barnstaple. And then Muriel, behind her desk, did not look like a shopkeeper. She had a distant aristocratic appearance which she had no doubt cultivated as being suitable for the daughter of a man of letters. What had surprised me was her superiority, which was genuine. Yet here was a woman who had devoted her life to this dusty enterprise, as though it were a genuine calling. I did not then know about her days in the Land Army, which would have seemed to me as remote as the Peasants’ Revolt. Rather I imagined suitors battling their way in vain through the obstinate door, and being held at arm’s length by Muriel Collier’s distant but well-mannered smile. She seemed to accept me without question, or maybe she was simply anxious to get back to her reading.