I never read love stories. If I read modern fiction at all I tend to go for thrillers of the most traditional kind, perhaps because they satisfy my sense of justice. Angela, my wife, read a lot, but in the same selective fashion, preferring up-market sagas of village life in which every mild imbroglio is satisfactorily sorted out. These novels, I suppose, flattered her somewhat exaggerated sense of her own gentility. Like Lady Stavely, in Orley Farm, my mother’s favourite novel, ‘She liked to see nice-dressed and nice-mannered people about her, preferring those whose fathers and mothers were nice before them.’ On these grounds alone my mother and I qualified, though I flatter myself that Angela never knew how distant I was in my mind and feelings from that niceness she so treasured. Poor girl, she was moderate in all things, except one. In that way she ensured that she would never be forgotten.
Had I read literature, steeped myself in fantasy instead of the law, I should have been better prepared for the condition in which I found myself after Sarah’s visit to the office. I should have known that being in love means knowing no respite. I should have viewed my daily telephone calls to Paddington Street with resignation, or even with indulgence. They were never answered, except at one remove. ‘Hi, this is Sarah and I’m not here right now. Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you.’ Strange how many people affect an American accent and locution on these machines. Soon I took to strolling up to Paddington Street after work; it was not far from the office after all. I was extremely lonely at this time, yet found it impossible to contact any of my friends. If they were trying to contact me I was unaware of the fact, since I was out of the flat most of the time. My evenings had come to take on a strange pattern. After a hasty meal I would walk up Baker Street to Paddington Street, to see if there were a light in any of the windows. Since I did not at that stage know which of the flats was Sarah’s this was a particularly pointless exercise. Yet I came to rely on that furtive evening walk as part of the day’s activities. If it did nothing else it prepared me for sleep.
The invitation to the house-warming had not materialised, and my fruitless telephone calls did nothing to elucidate the matter. I could of course simply turn up at her door in the course of one of my evening patrols, but I shrank from so obvious a solution to the problem. Three years at Oxford and nearly four in Paris should have alerted me to the notion of courtly love, but I rather think that even if I had been acquainted with it, had grown up believing in minstrels and troubadours, I should not have recognised my own behaviour, which had more in common with the Middle Ages, or even the Dark Ages, than with the twentieth century.
My mother, who never telephoned me at the office, managed to get hold of me one evening. Her call exasperated me, as I was just about to leave the flat, but I love my mother, and I detected a note of anxiety in her voice which was uncharacteristic. I shrugged my coat off again and settled down to listen to her, my eye on the clock, as if there were little time left to me before I was due to leave.
‘Alan? Are you all right, dear? I’ve had some trouble getting hold of you.’
’Of course I’m all right, Mother. You can always reach me at the office, you know. I’m out rather a lot in the evenings at the moment.’
‘Well, I’m glad you’re having a good time, dear. But actually this might be a matter you need to deal with officially. I’ve had a rather disquieting letter from Sybil. She seems to think that you were instrumental in selling her house.’
‘Did you remind her that I am not an estate agent?’
‘She has, as you know, only the vaguest idea of what you do. She seems to be rather more confused than she was, although she was never exactly lucid.’
‘I had nothing to do with the sale of the house, Mother. Sarah sold it. Doesn’t Sybil speak to her own daughter?’
‘It appears that she has trouble getting through to her.’ In this I was prepared to sympathise. ‘She said that the only time she managed to speak to her Sarah told her that you had organised the lease of the new flat.’
‘So I did. Perfectly routine piece of business. That was the first I knew of her selling the house, or rather having sold the house.’
‘Sybil says she shouldn’t have done it.’
‘But she did. None of this has anything to do with me.’
I could hear my mother’s hesitation at the other end of the line. ‘Don’t you think you should have asked her about this, dear? Of course it’s none of my business, and of course I don’t appreciate the legal niceties, but I do see that Sybil has a point …’
‘I simply negotiated the lease on Sarah’s new flat. I didn’t ask her about the sale of the house because at that stage it was no longer relevant. The conveyancing was perfectly straightforward: there was no mortgage, nothing to delay the matter. I saw no reason to refuse to act …’
‘That seems a little precipitate, if you’ll forgive my saying so, darling.’
‘Mother, I do this sort of thing all the time. I’m not responsible for all my clients’ actions. I don’t ask them to unburden themselves, search their hearts, unearth their motives. I don’t ask them what sort of terms they are on with their mothers. Anyway, why didn’t Sybil think to enquire before all this happened?’
‘You know Sybil. She can’t cope with change. She can’t even anticipate it. She obviously thought that Sarah would go on living in the house, probably as a married woman. She had no idea …’
‘What has this got to do with me?’
‘I’m coming to that. If you’re satisfied that there is nothing for which you feel in the slightest bit responsible there’s no need to worry. Although with Sarah I should have advised caution. She was never reliable: always the quick and easy answer to everything. Or no answer at all. And she never got on with her mother. In a way it’s just as well that the girls moved down to that place of theirs—I believe that in every other respect they’re quite happy—because there would have been trouble with Sarah sooner or later. But it was a little callous of her, don’t you think?’
‘Are you sure she didn’t tell Sybil she was selling the house?’
‘She may have done.’ My mother brightened as this thought took hold. ‘In fact she probably did. But you know Sybil when she thinks she has a grudge. Remember how she reacted when Humphrey married.’
By this time I was kicking moodily at the chair leg. ‘I still don’t see where I come into it.’
‘I’m afraid Sybil has got it into her head that you engineered the whole thing.’
‘But I didn’t.’
‘So I told her. But she said she intended to write you a stiff letter. I know you’ll know how to deal with that; I just thought I ought to warn you. She won’t do anything, of course: in fact she’s always been rather frightened of you. Big men frighten her—she’s that sort of woman. Thankfully few of them survive. It’s interesting how times have changed …’
‘Mother, I’ll deal with it, I promise you. It’s just that I was on my way out …’
‘I’m so sorry, Alan. Of course I’m being a nuisance. When will I see you?’
‘I’ll try and come over on Sunday. It’s just that my evenings are rather taken up at the moment.’
There was a pause. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked finally, a question I usually avoided. I did not want to know about my mother’s life, which I saw as empty, wistful. I had longed for her to remarry, so as to ease the burden of her solitariness onto shoulders other than mine. And there was a claimant, a thoroughly respectable bachelor who lived a floor above her in Cadogan Gate and who continued faithfully to escort her to the theatre even when she had turned down his proposal.
‘But why don’t you accept?’ I protested when she told me. ‘You could have been a wife instead of a widow.’ For I imagined widows indulging in ceaseless sentimental tears, whereas all the widows I know now lead aerobics classes. She had smiled, and said something that terrified me. ‘ “Was it not her position in life to be his mother?” ’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘What are you saying? Of course you’re my mother, but that’s not a position …’
‘I was quoting, dear. Lady Mason says that in Orley Farm, I love it, as you know.’
‘What are you doing?’ I asked her.
‘Reading.’
‘Not Orley Farm again? You must know it off by heart.’
‘The Claverings. I’d forgotten how it ended. Just write Sybil a gentle but firm letter, dear. But once she gets hold of an idea … Come to lunch on Sunday if you can. Are you eating?’
‘Of course. I have lunch with Brian or a client most days. And I have breakfast in this coffee bar down the road. I don’t need much in the evenings. Are you eating?’
‘Rather too much. Jenny sees to that.’
‘I’ll see you on Sunday, Mother. I’ve got to go now.’
‘Good-night, dear. Until Sunday. And I’m sure you’ll know what to say to Sybil. God bless.’
I walked to the window and looked out. It was a fine evening in late autumn, my favourite season of the year. There are a few pedestrians at my end of Wigmore Street once the office workers and the dental nurses have gone home: the music lovers at the Wigmore Hall do not make themselves felt until much later. At the back of my mind I was aware of overstepping some sort of mark, and I was unsure whether this was professional or moral. As I said, I was unversed in the idea of love, and the theories surrounding it. I think I knew that it was subversive, even at that stage, before I had been completely overtaken. But when I speak about being overtaken is this not simply to exonerate myself, as if I were a passive instrument—not even an agent—at the mercy of powerful and indifferent forces? The one lesson I learnt from the whole affair was that one is responsible not only for what one does but for what is done to one. But I think I also knew relief that at last I had the ideal pretext for contacting Sarah, instead of waiting for her notional party. There was no reason, apart from the inability to get through to her on the telephone, why I should not simply have invited her to dinner. I did not do this because I was not ready for her. I was still at that stage which I now recognise as adolescent. I wanted to move straight from my imaginings into a full-blooded affair. With an affair I knew I should be on safe ground. I did not want to have dinner with her, to get to know her. I already knew her, or what I wanted to know of her. Besides, I was afraid of a refusal.
Sybil’s letter arrived the following morning. It appeared to have been dashed off with extraordinary energy on several sheets of dark blue writing paper. I scanned it hastily before leaving the flat: it contained many admonitions but no threats. ‘Scandalous’ was underlined several times, as was ‘Thoughtless’ and ‘Impertinent’, this last embellished with three exclamation marks. The letter seemed to issue from a correspondence already fully formed in Sybil’s head, as if I had previously written to her, outlining my feeble excuses for disposing of her property. Since she had, as it were, already established my side of the argument, I saw no reason to get involved, and told myself that it would be prudent to have no hand in the matter. My conscience was almost clear, though a little tender, my duty, as I saw it, was to instruct Sarah as to her obligations towards her mother, or, if that were impossible, to write to her, and occasionally to answer the telephone. This promised a certain amount of pleasure, although it was not the romantic pretext I sought. I really would have preferred to meet Sarah on neutral ground, devoid of all contingencies, but this was again an illusion, possibly a delusion, as if the only circumstances in which it would be possible for us to come together were to be situated in the confines of a dream. From this I was able to deduce, but much later, that my feelings were admirable, exalted no doubt, but doomed to remain unrealised.
It was a fine morning, with an early mist just dissolving into early winter sunshine. I was halfway to the office before I remembered that I had had no breakfast, strode back again, drank my coffee, ate my toast, and was still early for work. At some time during the morning I dialled Sarah’s number, and, as usual, got no reply. At this point it occurred to me to wonder why I was making such a fool of myself. I was nearly thirty, neither decrepit nor disadvantaged, and yet I seemed doomed to assemble these rickety structures of possibility around a woman whom I hardly knew and who probably only thought of me, if think of me she did, as some kind of dim adjunct to a family with which she no longer had any contact. For if I retained anything from Sybil’s letter, apart from her general condemnation, it was a sense that as a parent she was unlikely to have had much contact with her offspring for some time.
From Sarah’s point of view I could judge the unwelcome nature of Sybil’s erratic vigilance: this was not a mother in whom an independently minded daughter could or would confide. I was uncertain about mothers and daughters, but I knew that even my own loved parent sometimes made me sigh with impatience. How much more so, then, would that seductive child-woman reject a mother who was not only completely solipsistic but aesthetically unpleasing. I only ever seemed to have seen Sybil in the heather mixture coat and skirt in which she visited my mother, her short bristly hair crowned with her trilby hat, yet in her youth she must have possessed something of the aura that her daughter had inherited. After all, she had once been a bride: presumably the tension that gathered her face into a permanent frown had not always been there. Even so it was hard to see how Sarah had developed her more artful personality from the genetic elements at her disposal. That she was unique, a lusus naturae, fitted in with my perception of her, one which I was somehow unwilling to abandon. It harmonised with my curious state of impotence, justified my unwillingness to confront her on any kind of rational pretext. Yet Sybil’s letter provided me with just such a pretext, perhaps the only one I should ever have, and it was with only the slightest tremor of impatience at what seemed to be a duty I was only half minded to discharge that I picked up Sybil’s letter and left the office for Paddington Street.
The day had passed in a dream; I could hardly remember how it had passed or what it had contained. Most of what it had contained was speculation, yet in the street that speculation had turned once more to dreaming. I almost wanted to postpone this meeting so that I could continue to enjoy my fantasy undisturbed. And yet when I pressed Sarah’s doorbell I had no hesitation in assuming that she would answer it, although for once I should have preferred her not to. This was to change, of course, as events and expectations themselves changed. Within seconds, as it seemed, she stood facing me, her white face startling in the half light of the hallway She looked abstracted, though not thoughtful; her abstraction issued directly from her habitual self-absorption, yet had nothing self-indulgent about it. I was struck with the thought that I had misjudged her, that she was not as light-minded as her careless manner and habits would suggest. If I were to sum up my impressions as we stood on either side of the door it was that she was a serious person who was in flight from seriousness, who sought frivolity, insouciance as an escape from whatever occasionally dulled her eye or drained her colour. As she stood staring at me, as if she had no idea how I came to be there, or on what pretext, she seemed to be having some difficulty with herself, pushed her heavy hair away from her forehead with an old woman’s gesture, and swayed from one foot to the other like an actress warming up in the wings. When she said, ‘You’d better come in,’ her voice was almost resigned.
I was appalled but hardly surprised by the confusion in the flat, a confusion too long established to be temporary. In fact it seemed like a bivouac, as though inhabited by squatters, yet what furniture there was—a pale leather sofa, a gilt-framed mirror propped against a wall—seemed opulent and slightly inappropriate. The floor space of the small sitting-room was covered with the writhing flexes of two telephones, one of which was ringing as I entered. It would not, I knew, be answered, nor was it. A large stock of old copies of The Times and the Financial Times obscured the seat of the rather pretty reproduction Louis XV chair to which I was vaguely directed, but I remained standing, as did Sarah. She wore a loose flowered dress and her feet were bare. Again it seemed difficult to capture her attention, although we were the only two people in the room.
‘Would you like a drink?’ she said suddenly, as if coming out of a dream.
‘Later, perhaps. I’ve come because I had a letter from your mother, which I think you should know about.’
‘I doubt it. She writes to me too, you know.’
‘She seems to think you shouldn’t have sold the house without telling her.’ Put like that Sybil’s case seemed unanswerable.
‘Well, I did. If she’d wanted to keep it she shouldn’t have pushed off and left. Not that I wasn’t pleased to see her go.’
‘But did you tell her what you intended to do?’
She shrugged. ‘I told her when I’d done it. That seemed more to the point.’
‘She seems to think I should have known about this. I think she’s got it into her head that I masterminded the whole thing.’
‘I shouldn’t let that worry you. Her head’s always been stuffed with conspiracy theories. That’s why she was so impossible to live with. One of us had to go. I’m only glad it was her. She’s probably mad, anyway. Who in their right mind would volunteer to live in an old folks’ home?’
‘I understood they had their own flat,’ I said.
‘But it’s one of those horrible outfits with a warden, for when you fall out of bed and break your hip.’
‘Have you seen it?’
‘Oh, I’ve seen it all right. Sinister. Beautiful country house, or must have been once, inhabited by people on Zimmer frames. They’re all right, the two of them. They’ve got what they wanted, though why they wanted it is a mystery to me. They’re still active, Marjorie still drives. You can just see the Disabled stickers on all the windscreens, can’t you? If you ask me they’re both crackers. Always were.’
Her face was scornful, as if the elderly could only conjure up feelings of disgust. She was also ashamed, I could see, because her mother and her aunt had deliberately chosen old age and in so doing had turned their backs on everything she stood for, youth, beauty, desire, as if these things were unmentionable. She appeared to think that they had done her a monstrous wrong, for which she would defy them with all the means at her disposal.
‘If you could perhaps write to her, without dropping me in it,’ I ventured.
At this her attention switched abruptly to me, her scorn undiminished. ‘I never even mentioned you. Why should I? I hardly know you. I’m not sure I even want to know you.’
‘All right, all right. I’m not trying to interfere …’
‘Of course you are.’
‘Well, I am. But why should I be blamed for something you should have sorted out?’
‘You don’t get it, do you? She writes me letters like that. I dare say she writes them to a lot of people. She’s crackers, like I said. Anyway this is boring. Is this why you’re here?’
‘Partly,’ I said. ‘I’ve been trying to get you on the phone. I wanted to ask you out to dinner.’
‘Oh, you did, did you?’
‘Why should that annoy you?’
She shrugged again. ‘Everyone asks me out to dinner.’
‘What of it? And anyway, I’m not everyone.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘Are you always as rude as this?’ I asked, bewildered.
At this she grinned and said, ‘You’d better have that drink.’
I stayed with her that night, of course. Apparently it was as easy as that. As I seemed to have envisaged a mythic pilgrimage, a romantic conquest of imponderable obstacles, it might be said to have constituted an anticlimax. But only on the level of my more febrile imaginings. On the level of verifiable reality it was the revelation for which nothing had quite prepared me, conducted in silence, with what seemed like supernatural energy on both sides. I took this unbelievable gratification to be mutual: indeed no further proof of our inevitable conjunction was needed, or so it seemed to me. I never questioned my desire for Sarah, nor, oddly enough, hers for me. Any declaration, I thought, would have clouded the issue. Since she accepted me, for whatever reason, I sought no explanations from her. Thus I was never to know the reasons for her compliance. But then again I had the proof, and my memory would furnish me with details which she, perhaps, could not or would not have confirmed, had we ever indulged in one of those conversations which our activities served to demonstrate as being otiose, only resorted to by others less superbly matched. I was constrained through shyness, though I might have enjoyed such loving gossip, whereas she was silent through a form of impermeability, as if to give herself away might constitute an almost terminal weakness. And yet I was sure of her. She had given me all the assurances I needed. She had no further need to give an account of herself, at least, not to me.
In the morning I did not even care that I was unbathed, unshaven, that I should have to spend the day like that. This did not greatly disturb me, although normally it would have done. An alternative hygiene had replaced the obedient disciplines of the days, weeks, months, years that had gone before.
‘I’ll ring you,’ I said. ‘Please pick up the phone from time to time.’
Her face had resumed the strange clouded expression of the previous evening. Her stare did not seem to take me in, or to take in what had passed between us. I refused to let this annoy me.
‘See you,’ she said vaguely.
‘When? Shall I come this evening? We could …’
‘Have dinner, I know. Don’t be a bore, Alan. Don’t cling. I’ll see you around. Right now I want to have my bath.’
I was aware of the strong smell of her hair, stronger after a night on the pillow. When the door closed behind me I found myself, somehow, in the street. I began calculating how and when I would see her again, though I knew that this would not be easy, that she would only see me when she wanted to. Throughout the day I could smell her hair. I telephoned several times. Each time there was no answer, yet I had an image of her, sitting in the flat, on the floor, perhaps, willing the sound to stop, the silence to be restored.