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This puzzled her. After all she had loved Henry, and by no stretch of the imagination did she love Steve. He was not, she had to admit, immediately lovable, was too stony, too empty, too defiantly solitary. She thought that she had come to terms with childlessness, only very rarely thought how nice it might be to have a daughter, until she realised that any daughter she might have had would perhaps have resented the need to keep her company. She had never really envisaged the possibility of having a son. It was simply that in her case some authentic biological process had been omitted, and try as she may to rid herself of the prejudice, she felt that a son corresponded naturally to that process, gave a truer sense of achievement. So had she avoided joy, as she had in most of her dealings with the world, settling instead for reasonable satisfaction. Yet at this late stage of her life (but was that not the point?) she felt newly vulnerable to the sight of a young man’s head moodily bent as he disappeared down the corridor, or the soles of his feet pressed together like a baby’s under the breakfast table. He will have to go, she thought, or I shall soon have ruined the habits and the discipline of a lifetime, and it is by those habits, after all, that I’m obliged to live.

She thought of ringing Kitty to ask whether David had had this effect on her, but suppressed the thought as ridiculous. For all her status as a tragic mother, Kitty was not permeable to the simpler affections. Besides, there was no reason why
David should touch a maternal chord. The poor fellow, for some reason, inspired a certain contempt, whether for his easy convictions, or for his hapless good cheer, or for his all-embracing physical and emotional forbearance. Kitty might not be permeable to the simpler affections but she was extremely susceptible to masculine charm, and David possessed none. Even in their short acquaintance Mrs May had felt irritated by his gladness. Kitty probably dismissed him as a sort of eunuch. He had made no effort to tease her, to cajole her, which was what she may have expected; his innocence in this regard compounded his original offence, which lay in his problematic physicality. He had made his fiancée pregnant but seemed strangely removed from the evidence. Kitty would no doubt have appreciated a hint of licence: like many old women she looked to the young to gratify her in this particular way, to remind her of her own youth and its conquests, and of all that she had done to evince a certain reaction from a man, a reaction that David bafflingly refused her, so that she felt slighted, foolish. Dislike came more easily then, and dislike based on disappointment is difficult to dislodge.

From that single encounter over the tea table Mrs May had divined that Kitty felt for her inappropriate granddaughter the same emotion that had overwhelmed her when faced with the refractory child. She herself had felt for the girl a certain distaste which Ann had done nothing to justify. Perhaps it was the lazy turn of the head, a certain sly watchfulness, which may have signalled nothing more than an ability to gauge Kitty’s mood, that had awoken in Mrs May an unwelcome reminder of her own girlhood, which had been as innocent of sexual involvement as that of any Victorian maiden. Young men, the brothers of friends, had existed, but on the periphery, while she had sat at home reading
Persuasion
. Like
Anne Elliot she believed that all she had to do was wait, and any slight disappointment she felt, when a belated consciousness of her unsought condition was brought home to her, was compensated by the thought of the lifelong fidelity with which she would reward the man who would eventually awaken her love.

In the meantime she had been the object of a certain lazy scrutiny, not from the brothers of those friends with whom she had once walked home from school, but from the friends themselves. It was the same sly speculative look that she had seen on Ann’s face, as if Ann had crossed the line that marked out the experienced from the inexperienced. This was understandable, but nevertheless unwelcome. It was as if the girl took a pride in reminding old women like Kitty, like Mrs May, to whom nothing more could happen in the way of romance, that she at least was sexually active. Mrs May could have told her that her pride was misplaced, that she was in fact deluding herself if she thought she had acquired a singular advantage. Kitty too had felt the weight of that misplaced superiority. Even more than the exasperating David who, by comparison, seemed positively virginal, Ann, once more, had frustrated her. Kitty might have longed to offer advice, not knowing that mothers in these enlightened times frequently took advice from their daughters. Kitty, in short, would have liked to act as a matriarch, as a patroness, graciously revealing a little—but not too much—of that arcane knowledge that only married women possess. Instead of which Ann’s almost insolent smile—and it did indeed almost verge on insolence—had relegated her to the sidelines, and worse, had reminded her of her obsolete status, and with it her no doubt imperfect knowledge (for so it was judged) and her redundant maternity. Seeing Austin half lying in his chair, his pills carefully
to hand, Ann could not help but revel in her own youth, her own fertility. Even if these were compromised, or at least not particularly well aspected, she had succeeded in exhibiting her trophy, and, young as she was, had thought that sufficient proof of sexual success.

Mrs May could have told her otherwise. There is no longer any rule that states that a woman gains credit from the man with whom she is involved. Perhaps there never was. The beauty of Anne Elliot lay in her spotlessness, a quality in which Mrs May had long desired to believe. Yet in her own experience it was that very spotlessness that called forth that particularly insulting smile from those whom she had thought to be her friends. For too many years she had deliberately maintained her defences until at last she had wearied of them. Timid affections, even infatuations, had left her dismayed: it seemed to her that she was always being introduced to girls flourishing engagement rings, while she was still bewildered by the fact that she had not even been aware of them as rivals. The prestige of engagements in those far-off days! Mrs May thought that no modern relationship could carry the same charge. For years, it seemed to her, she had seen the identical small diamond flourished on the same plump hand, had detected the same degree of satisfaction as her own unpartnered state was revealed. If she were honest—and it was not a matter on which she cared to dwell—it was the superiority of those other girls, her one-time intimates, that had ended her innocence. It was when
Persuasion
no longer had any power to persuade that she had been forced to take matters into her own hands. Since there were no beneficent elders to instruct her, and none even to hold her back, for her equally innocent parents were quite content to keep her at home for as long as she wished, thinking her happy, she had, with uncharacteristic
boldness, set about looking for a husband. She had not found one. It seemed that she was too unaware even for that stratagem to succeed. Almost unknowingly she had passed the age of early engagements, early marriages, and had become an old maid. That was what the smiles had forecast for her all along.

Mrs May’s lips twisted wryly as she reviewed the facts that no-one had suspected. They were not facts on which she cared to dwell, yet in their way they were relevant to her eventual marriage, to her austere widowhood, even to her present position as Steve’s unwilling landlady. It seemed that all it took was that look of veiled derision on Ann’s face as she contemplated her grandmother’s transparent crossness to send Mrs May, a mere spectator, back to her own past, and the manner in which she had conquered the threat, as she saw it, of female calculation, and allied herself, however temporarily and dangerously, with the world of men. For she had become, for a brief and hallucinatory period, a woman for whom finer considerations were in abeyance, and all that was once signified by the thought of love conspicuously absent. And she had done this deliberately, aware of her fall from virtue, aware that innocence prolonged beyond a certain point can become ignorance, aware that the time had come to shed both.
Persuasion
was removed from her bedside table and put back on the bookshelf. She rather thought she had not taken it down since.

Her attachment to the man who had helped her to form what others no doubt saw as her unattractive reticence was not innocent: that was why reticence was in order. The man in question was so unsuitable as to remove any hopes she might have had for a successful outcome. She had met him at a party to which she had been invited by one of the girls at
work, for she had already found the secretarial post from which Henry had rescued her. The attraction was immediate, but on her side the attraction had not turned into liking, rather the opposite, and this dichotomy was her first introduction to complex emotion, a radical departure from her earlier expectations. It was a love affair in all but name, for to name it would have been inappropriate. He was ardent, intemperate; she thought him slightly mad, but his madness was to prove contagious. He drank too much, was feckless, was always short of money, though extravagant, was compromised in some way she could not readily identify, but by the time she knew all this it was too late for her to extricate herself. He had a crumbling mansion flat in Down Street; a good address, he maintained, was essential, though the flat was filthy. She disapproved of him, was even frightened of him, yet in his dingy bedroom had felt differently. For all his shortcomings he was an excellent lover, and she in her turn proved a more than adept pupil. She said little, as did he; words, they both knew, would only divide them.

Their involvement gained an edge from the fact that both knew it to be temporary. It was, she thought at the time, because neither of them had anything to lose: her own folly was surely fatal, and he, Michael, had, ever since their first meeting, maintained that he would die young. This assertion was so much of everything she disliked about him—his neediness, his sentimentality—that she was unprepared for his suicide. The police, it appeared, were interested in his debts, and in certain misappropriations of which she had known nothing. She had read of his death in the evening paper; his family background made this noteworthy. There was nothing to connect her with him; for this reason, and because at heart she despised herself, she was relieved though shocked that it was
finished. Shame at her own behaviour crept over her gradually, as if she were implicated in her lover’s disgrace, as of course she was. Since that day she had acquired a reputation for being enigmatic. It was a very small advance, but an advance, none the less, on being thought inexperienced.

It was different now, she knew. All sorts of liaisons were accepted, single mothers taken for granted; bishops, preaching about family values, merely sounded foolish. The world of
Persuasion
had been long gone even when she had read it as a girl, believing it to be the norm. Yet Jane Austen had never gone out of fashion; rather the opposite. It was as if those who flouted traditional values longed to be reminded of fine manners, even if they marvelled at them, and made little attempt to emulate them. What marriages were celebrated made news in the papers. In the magazines she picked up at the hairdresser’s the brides, ever more elaborately caparisoned, wore the same look of triumph that her erstwhile friends had harboured when flourishing their engagement rings, perhaps with more justification. Men, she thought, had not changed as much as women had. Predators and freebooters still existed, but they could be outmanoeuvred. Many of them subsided into nostalgia, perfected domestic skills, saved their energies for work and sport, while women, who seemed to age much more slowly than in the past, formed more honest friendships. Few of them would accept privation, or exclusion; there were now recognised channels of complaint. Female disorders were accommodated; no-one need suffer. Patience, acceptance of one’s lot were devalued. Only the old escaped sexual speculation. The young assumed that they alone had access to what they called commitment, and sometimes let their pity show.

As for herself, she had been marked by her experience, which had been whole-hearted and short-lived. What she had
learned about herself had not been welcome. She had shown ruthlessness and deceit, and she was alarmed at her lack of scruple. She had turned away from sex, then, even from affection. No-one had known of her visits to Down Street, but it had taken her several years to delete them from her memory. She had become, in the meantime, an exemplary daughter, an exemplary employee. She went from home to the office, from the office to home. She kept her features impassive. Several times she regretted the fact that her stock of experience was so slender, but did nothing to remedy this state of affairs. Her father died, and then her mother; she bought her flat and moved her belongings and prepared herself for a solitary life. A broken paving stone in St James Street had delivered her, and she discovered that it is sometimes good to awaken envious speculation in others. She considered her own character to be something less than meritorious, but in time she forgot her earlier adventure and became a good wife. She paid for her respectability with her silence, for no-one, not even Henry, certainly not Henry, had known of her past. He had accepted her for what she had become, a quiet, pleasant, rather dull, but infinitely reliable woman who never gave offence. Her new relations saw only the dullness and looked no further.

And now, in old age, the mask had become the face, so that she was rigorously and genuinely dull. But there remained an awareness of more troubled sensations which she tried to metamorphose into detachment; usually she was successful, but for some reason not at present. She had been unprepared for old age to render her so harmless. It was as if her sins had been wiped away, leaving only concealment in their place. She even wondered whether she had in truth been so very remiss. By today’s standards she had merely been unwise, had acted
out of character. Yet she still felt obliged to make amends. Sometimes, in the very early morning, she had an illumination: none of it matters. But this tended to vanish as the light grew stronger, and the cautious habits of recent years reasserted themselves. In the glass she saw a mild placating expression, unaware that her features were normally set in a forbidding frown. Had she known this she would have attributed the frown to a necessary act of self-censorship.