A Closed Eye (21 page)

Later, much later, she thought that she must have been imagining Immy’s life rather than her own. Yet she could not deny a certain beguiling hopefulness in her imaginings which had nothing to do with her daughter. For Immy was an aristocrat, straight-nosed, straight-backed, largely unconfiding. Her early flirtatiousness had entirely disappeared; she was self-contained, extraordinarily so for a child of nine. She appeared to find her parents uninteresting, for which neither of them blamed her; she was too beautiful for them to feel anything but humility in her presence. She left the table as soon as she could, running up to her bedroom to practise her recorder. Miss Wetherby she now found too old and too dull, much to Miss Wetherby’s disappointment. But Miss Wetherby was experienced with children, experienced enough to let Immy go. In the face of Miss Wetherby’s resumed impassivity Harriet persuaded Freddie to relax his ban on having a dog in the house, albeit in the basement. Soon Rex, a small wire-haired terrier, accompanied Miss Wetherby on her surprisingly active walks round Battersea Park. Imogen remained unimpressed by the dog, and unattracted by it. She was developing a kind of scorn for her surroundings. ‘Growing up,’ said
Freddie, who no longer kissed her anywhere but on the top of her glossy black head. They felt a little apologetic when she was with them, aware of a timidity to which she was a stranger. So the light feckless girl of Harriet’s imagination was not her daughter, who sometimes seemed quite angry, but herself, her embryonic self, who might have existed in another life, but who had got married and settled down.

This fantasy, these ephemeral feelings, receded gradually like a tide on a silent beach, leaving behind a cold residue which was equally tenacious, for it enveloped her for the rest of her life. She thought at first that the weather might have something to do with it. From greenness, promise, mild days, and soft skies it veered to frost at night, and a colourless mist which lasted until midday. Nor did these mists hold the promise of fine weather: they persisted keenly, damply, covering the sun with a grey haze, subduing bird-song. She began to doubt the existence of spring in this prolongation of winter, although the lilac and the may were in bloom and the chestnut candles had turned from green to white. ‘It will all be wasted,’ she thought. ‘It is no longer relevant.’ In this new damp greyness she began to doubt the memory of that evening in Judd Street, probably the most significant of her life. She had exhausted it with reflection; it no longer yielded anything when she summoned it up. Then she knew that it had been inadequate, that it had no status as an amorous encounter. No doubt it had been a form of politeness, the sort of compliment that a cynic like Jack might pay to a prude like herself. She blushed with shame, although she knew that if he were to make the slightest sign she would go to him. But she was not brave enough, or perhaps not foolish enough, to make the first move.

When the blush, and the successive blushes, faded, she felt a chill that sent her to her bedroom for an extra sweater. That was when she had that curious episode of being unable to get
warm. Freddie had been quite alarmed by her pallor, and by her apparently insatiable desire for sleep. On the pretext of her indisposition she slept voraciously, going up almost as soon as they had finished dinner, spending afternoons under a rug on the sofa. Her descent into sleep was voluptuous, as though it were all she had ever craved. She awoke trying to retain the fragments of a dream, or even a memory: for instance, what had the shops on either side of her mother’s shop in William Street been called? Where precisely had she bought the cakes for tea, when Mr Latif was due? The persistence of these memories horrified her, as did the sight, when she awoke, of the thick cream linen curtains and the thick white carpet of the bedroom she shared with Freddie. He was very kind to her at this time, thinking that she was upset at the prospect of their daughter going away to school. ‘It is your age,’ he said. It was undoubtedly a crisis of some kind, but in fact it only lasted for a month or two. She tried to treat it like a physical illness, was not above using it as an excuse for her desire for sleep. Freddie, convinced that she was undergoing a process common to all women, left her alone, for which she was grateful. The coldness, the sleepiness, and the gratitude persisted; even when recovered she retained a memory of disorder.

They had a family holiday that year, the last before Imogen went away to school. They took a house on the Devon coast, near Salcombe. ‘Do you want Lizzie to come?’ she had asked. ‘Lizzie’s not my friend any more,’ said Immy, tossing her head. ‘Sophie and Alexandra are my friends. Anyway, I don’t like Lizzie. Are we going to a hotel? I’d rather go to a hotel.’ ‘We are going to a very nice house,’ said Harriet patiently. She managed not to say, And do be nice to your father. He has a great shock coming to him. It is called retirement. She knew that Freddie would be bored with no office to go to, knew that he disliked the house in the daytime, disliked it
even more now that he could hear the distant bark of the dog, had suggested that they have dinner earlier, could be heard making hearty telephone calls. Yet the holiday had been a success, she thought. They had felt happier away from London, at least she and Freddie had; Immy had been bored, except when they took her out to dinner. The weather had been perfect, a succession of hot cloudless days, and the doors of the drawing-room opened on to a patio, where Freddie sat in a short-sleeved shirt and a panama hat reading P. D. James. She wore a cotton dress and sandals, and did her shopping first thing in the morning. Then she took Immy to the beach, and read
What Maisie Knew
. They ate sparingly at lunch, and, in deference to Immy, dressed up in the evening and had dinner at the hotel. ‘And how is Madam this evening?’ asked the waiter with a flourish of napkin. ‘Very well, thank you,’ said Immy distantly, fingering the necklace of corals which Freddie had found for her in a local jeweller’s. She had, at those moments, an entirely adult air.

She thought that they had been contented on that last holiday. The idea of going back to London had terrified her. At night, after Immy had gone to bed, she and Freddie had stood wordlessly in the little garden, Freddie with his arm round her waist. Then she knew that he too was reluctant to leave this place, and to face a future without work, without Immy. In bed he did not touch her, occasionally gave a kind of groan. ‘I am too old,’ he once said, into the darkness of the night. So that is to be the end of it, she thought, and it is all I have ever known. She felt sorry for them both, sorry for their daughter, who would have to deal with lightless parents when she herself was on the verge of so many discoveries. She would get no help from them, and must therefore encounter no hindrance from them either, must not endure the humiliation, the tastelessness of prohibitions, warnings. Yet Harriet longed for her daughter to marry young, and happily, to go
away from them to a better life, not a worse one. They would do what they could for her, acknowledging their deficiencies. It was all that they could do, for the young now had the upper hand. They were both conventional people; perhaps convention was what they had in common. It may even have been all they had in common. Immy would have her year abroad, if she wanted it (but she seemed to take no interest in her future), and then they would prepare the upstairs flat for her; she would have her own friends, and no obligations. But how would they endure the long days without her? She was sometimes bad-tempered in their company, as if they were a heavy burden for a child with such high standards of beauty. Her beauty had already staked many claims. She was effortless with the opposite sex, already commanded the attention of the twelve-year-old French twins staying at the hotel. She was shedding childishness rapidly, too rapidly. Already she found this peaceful holiday dull, was bored with the beach. At fourteen she would be a woman, while her mother was still a girl. ‘Can’t we go out somewhere?’ she fretted every morning. ‘It is too beautiful a day to spend in the car,’ Harriet would reply. But Freddie could not quite hide his disappointment.

Late in the warm dark nights she found that she missed Tessa painfully, and on waking she yearned for her. The house had wide sunny windows, which reminded her of the flat in Beaufort Street, and the afternoons they had spent there before the children were born. She missed a female friend, who would be all compassion, all competence. This too she saw as an illusion, for Tessa had been brooding and sometimes impatient. But female friendship, these days too often turned into some kind of ideology, was what she craved, something to soothe her unreliable heart, and she saw that that was what they had both wanted, and even Mary and Pamela as well, some vision of safety in a cruel world, some haven, once they
had outgrown mothers and fathers, who, in her case at least, had proved insufficient. Tessa had been strong, wayward but strong. And she had been right, entirely right, in forcing Jack to marry her—it was indeed a proof of her strength—for Jack would have passed on, not unaffected, but unregarding, irresponsible. Suddenly the image of Jack was diminished by the memory of Tessa, of Tessa’s lonely face on her hospital pillow. She longed to have her back, to assure her of her own loyalty. She longed, once more, to protect Tessa, although she had never been in a position to do so, had in fact been the weaker of the two. Tessa, until she was cut down, had wrestled with life, and her defeat was cruelly out of character. Now Harriet could see that they had susceptibilities in common, and longed to tell Tessa as much. She thought that if she could see Tessa now, there would be no lies or silences between them. Tessa, having experienced death, would forgive her friend’s ultimate foolishness, for there is little time for foolishness this side of the grave. That flower-decked horror at Golders Green … And no Lizzie. But where was Lizzie now? Did she belong entirely to the past, and to her uncertain future? Lizzie, as always, registered as an absence, an unknown, passed over by the likes of Imogen. Sometimes Harriet yearned to be with Tessa, childless again. Yet Immy came first, must come first, and it was for Immy that she persevered in what had become a difficult and lonely life. Even Freddie, she saw, was lonely. But Freddie was lonely because he knew that his daughter did not love him. This added another silence to all the others.

The return to London was as bad as both she and Freddie had privately believed it would be, and was further darkened by the prospect of Immy’s departure. The child was now restless, demanding to go out, yet all that Harriet could devise was met with an elaborate show of disappointment. She kicked her way round Peter Jones, waiting for her school
uniform to be assembled, and had to be mollified with a milk shake in the restaurant. This was not entirely to her liking either. Harriet could see that her daughter had it in her to be one of those rich proud beautiful women who seem to be composed of superior materials to the ordinary model. She felt a sudden chill of estrangement as she contemplated the brooding face, and it was with a curious misgiving that she compared it with the childish hand clasping the spoon. ‘My darling girl,’ she said gently. ‘We shall miss you very much. You won’t forget us, will you?’ She despised herself for this appeal, but felt in that instant so denuded that it might have been she who was leaving home, and going away from all that was familiar. Leaving home! Even the thought of it made her weak, yet she had not particularly minded leaving home herself, had in a sense volunteered to go. And yet ever since she had longed to get back there, not in any geographical sense, but symbolically, had felt a yearning, a heaviness, an aching sense of loss on summer evenings, had never felt like the rich woman she was supposed to resemble, had never believed herself to be a suitable or even a credible consort for a wealthy man, had longed for old simple ways, for her little walnut bed, the rain beating against the windows of the back room, the cracked willow pattern plate, and the cup and saucer which did not match it. Were they happy, she thought, suddenly and painfully, those childish parents, in comparison with whom her daughter was infinitely more worldly? Did the day drag for them, did they, with a sigh, contemplate the empty noisy sky outside their windows, the traffic, the raucous gulls? Was the day empty for them until the light faded, and they had their baths, and with a languid air, as if the day had exhausted them, prepared themselves for their public appearance, in hotel lounge or bar, aware that they were too old to be frivolous, and never, in any case, fond of drink?

It was with the greatest difficulty that she pulled her mind
back to this hot morning in the present, the sun flashing off the plate glass window of Peter Jones, the plastic bags collapsed at her feet. ‘I think we should go down to Brighton,’ she said. ‘Granny and Grandpa will want to see you before you go away.’ She hated the sound of the words, and their long echo, but could not see how to avoid them. Immy appeared unmoved. ‘I don’t want to go to Brighton,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to do there. And they don’t see me anyway.’

‘Well, then,’ said Harriet firmly. ‘They must come and see us. Remind me to ring them when we get home.’

She would book a table for tea at the Ritz, she thought: they would love that. It seemed more important to provide pleasures for her parents than for her daughter, who was so disdainful. Oh, darling, she thought, please be a good girl, a loving girl, one with tender feelings, and a long memory. I know that you think us both inadequate, your father and I, and have no time for that pathetic couple, your grandparents, but it is important that you keep the faith, or memories will come back suddenly, unannounced, when you are far advanced into another life. You are our miraculous child, unhoped for, more beautiful than we had ever dreamed you would be. You have the advantage of us there. But you take for granted what is only temporary. It is necessary for you to develop a loving heart, in which, at the moment, you appear to be a little deficient. It is not your fault, or rather it is not your fault yet, but one day it may be. Then she saw the little hand clutching the foamy spoon, and felt her own heart nearly break. ‘We shall miss you,’ she said, having received no answer to her earlier question. ‘We must see that you have a good time before you go.’