Look at Me (16 page)

At last he asked for the bill and I waited by the door, buttoning up my coat, tugging at the belt in my haste. It had begun to rain, a fine thin drizzle, and the air felt dank, unhealthy. When he joined me I wanted to take his hand, but he was busy with wallets, with pockets; one hand went to his collar and another to his jacket, to pull it down under his coat, and then at last we set off, side by side, out of step, saying nothing. Then we came closer to each other, instinctively, in the ugly night, and after a while my hand stole out and took his, and that was how we reached the flat, silent, but hand in hand again.

There was no sound from the kitchen and I assumed that Nancy had gone to bed early. Our tray was on the kitchen table, and I left it there. I flung off my coat and went into the drawing room; I switched on the fire and the lamps and turned round to find him standing in the middle of the room, deep in thought. I went up to him and put my arms round his waist, round his damp coat, which he was still wearing, and then I laughed and said, ‘Darling, you’re soaking. Take this off.’ He hesitated, and I laughed again, and tugged at the sleeve, until he shrugged his way out of it. I pulled the two stools in front of the fire, but he did not join me. Instead he sat down in my mother’s chair and eased his collar away from his neck. He looked wary, distant, and it seemed to be up to me to take that curiously affronted expression off his face. I could not bear his strangeness. So I started talking, as larkily as I could, and I perched on the arm
of the chair, and after a time he grinned and pulled me down on to his lap. It occurred to me that one of us was behaving rather oddly and I assumed it to be me. But his silence appalled me. So I went on talking. I stopped eventually, and looked at him, and smiled, and stood up, and took his hand, and led him into my bedroom, and as I collapsed gratefully on to the bed I relaxed and pulled him towards me. I could feel his heart beating; I could feel his hands tearing at my dress. I thought, but it should not be like this, there is no need … I reached up for him but suddenly he broke free and stood up and said, ‘Not with you, Frances. Not with you.’ And as I lay there he turned his back on me and walked jerkily over to the bookcase, and stood there with his back to me. After a minute I sat up, and waited for him to turn round, to explain. But he would not, and eventually I got up and went over to him, and asked him what was wrong. I edged round him so that I was facing him, and I said, ‘What is it? What is it?’ I said, ‘What is the matter?’, thinking that I had angered him in some way. But he did not answer. And then, I think, I knew that I had lost him long before the evening had ever started.

I looked down at myself, at my creased dress, the collar slightly torn. I looked at him, but he would not meet my eye. I went out of the room and back into the drawing room and stood by the fire. Eventually I heard him come in, but I remained standing, with my back to him. I heard him come towards me, and hesitate, and then I heard him go out, and then I heard the front door close very quietly behind him. After a while, I raised my eyes to that mirror, hanging by its chains over the fireplace, and I saw my white face, the eyes staring, and the mouth swollen and open, the unaccustomed lipstick smeared all over it. Then, very slowly, I bent down and switched off the fire, and the lights, and went to bed.

The next day I worked steadily, much as usual. The Library was quiet. The telephone did not ring, although I found myself waiting for it. I planned to say that I was not well, if anyone called, and that I was going home. I would then go home. I think I hoped that this would happen, and that people would get worried about me. I think I hoped that if I went home James would eventually come and find me, and that in that bedroom I could somehow reconstruct that evening and make it all right, and then we could begin again and be once more what we had been to each other. But the telephone did not ring, and I was left undisturbed.

I hoped that James would come to me at last, if only to explain to me what had happened. It seemed to me that I had simply not understood some difficulty, and that once I did I could laugh and pretend that it did not matter. ‘Was it the wrong moment?’ I planned to say. ‘I was quite worried. I thought I had done something to offend you.’ And then he would laugh, almost out of relief that I had understood and was not upset, and then, if I was very careful, we could begin again. I had this all worked out, and I did not even worry that he did not appear that day, or the following day, because I realized that he had had a shock, and that he was annoyed, and that he did not know how to explain. I began to wonder if I should go to him, and make it easier for him that way, but I could not quite bring myself to do that. I knew that it might be necessary, but I kept putting it off. I thought that I might have to force things into the open before the following Monday, when I should see him at the Frasers’. I could not quite trust myself to behave as if nothing had happened.

But as the hours ticked slowly past, it began to seem as if this was what was going to happen. I felt – and there was not a minute of the day when this matter did not occupy my whole attention – that he should be
allowed absolute freedom in this matter, that I should not put any pressure on him, that I should simply put him first. I began to wonder if I had ever done this and realized, sadly, that perhaps I had not. My enjoyment of those tiny routines, which, when I now came to think about them, seemed to dwindle into the occupations of a child, or an invalid, had of course misled him. It was evident to me that I should have got to know him better, that I should have sensed in him a complication, a sort of refusal … But I had not sensed this. I had not even been aware of it. But if cleverer, more adult eyes than mine had perceived this and had tried to protect him, and in so doing had tried to warn me, then in fact Alix was blameless of anything except rather too much mystification. I realized that I would have to tell her eventually, if James did not speak to me of his own accord, and the knowledge filled me with disgust. And yet, as the time crept on, and James did not appear, I slowly became reconciled to the fact that I would have to go to Alix for an explanation, that it would become something no longer confined to the two of us, but once again a matter among the four of us, as it had been in the beginning.

But on no account would I tell her that he had said, ‘Not with you, Frances. Not with you.’ I heard those words over and over again, and in the end I came to understand that he had found me … not suitable in that way; that he had looked on me only as a friend, that this was a friendship that must be preserved in its nursery simplicity, with its healthy walks and its cups of coffee. I thought that I had probably mistaken that early excitement, which I had felt in both my mind and my body, but which he had evidently not felt in the same way. This realization left me numb. And I had told him so much: I had asked Olivia for the house at Plaxtol, and I had shown James that I expected him to be there
with me, just as if … just as if he would want to be. Just as if I meant anything at all to him in that way. I could never own up to this. Although I knew that Alix, and even Nick, would demand a full accounting, I knew that I could never let them know how mistaken I had been.

As the three days that separated me from the weekend slowly passed, and James still did not appear, my expectations fell away and died, and I knew that he would try to bury the incident and pretend that it had not happened, that he might never refer to it, might not even tell Alix and Nick. I perceived that it might be a matter of good manners to let it all drop, and that it was up to me to terminate our arrangement as unobtrusively as possible. On the following Monday I would be bright and entertaining, for now I needed my friends more than ever. I would plead tiredness when it came to going home, and quite naturally hail a taxi, and I would somehow let it be known that it was all over. It was, after all, what they wanted, in their various ways. And I must not be mulish or uncomfortable about this: it was nearly Christmas, and we were going to have to celebrate together. So that I must be very light-hearted. I would tell Olivia that we had decided not to use the house, and I knew that she would not ask me any questions. I would tell her some time. But not yet.

That was how I came to my realization, and I was amazingly calm about it. I slept badly, that was all. When I say badly, I don’t mean that I was restless or agitated. Quite the contrary. I fell into a deep death-like sleep that lasted all the way through until the morning, and when I woke up I would feel quite dazed. I would sit up in bed, trying to readjust to the waking day after what seemed like a total absence, and sometimes, even sitting up in bed, I would drift off again, and feel the heaviness pulling me down. Into these curious, almost amnesiac, states, images would enter, although I could
not always remember what they were later in the day. They worried at me, commanding me to remember them. And sometimes they would jump into focus. That was how I saw the rosewood cigarette box again, looking very large. It looked large because I was so small; I was running a child’s hand over the slightly irregular, slightly imperfect edge. I was repeating the gesture over and over again. I had nothing else to do, because I was a child and I was waiting for the adults to come back from what was so mysteriously keeping them and to allow me once again into their company.

By the time I was ready to visit Miss Morpeth I had composed myself into a facsimile of my former self: brisk, amusing, sharp, my round birdlike eyes on the lookout for oddities of behaviour that I might eventually use in that droll novel that, some day, I was going to write. I had not come round to this state of affairs without difficulty. Above all, the thought of reverting to the role of observer rather than participant filled me with dread and sadness. For although I knew that this was an easy card of identity to use in the game of social interchange, I felt it as the seal of death on any more natural hopes I might have entertained. In my role of observer (and I could already see the reviews: ‘witty’, ‘perceptive’, etc.), I should have to prepare myself for a good deal of listening. Without comment, of course. I would somehow be on my honour to extract sly morals from everything, to view the world as a human comedy, to identify connections, to unearth motives. To do everything that I could not manage to do in real life, in fact. I, who found it so difficult to shed my beady isolation, must in fact never appear to be lonely. I must be the odd one at every gathering, and in order to hide my sense
of shame I must pretend to be taking notes. Where I had once thought to say, Look at me, I must now turn the attention of others away from myself. I, who had once wanted to be recognized for reasons other than the ones I was now reconstructing, must forget that I had ever sought that recognition. No good would come of it.

I set out for Miss Morpeth’s flat on that Sunday afternoon in a mixed mood of deep exasperation and unpleasant clear-sightedness. The exasperation was merely the ultimate manifestation of my feeling for, or rather against, Miss Morpeth, and the perpetuation of this ridiculous duty for which I had not volunteered. As one sometimes tries harder with people whom one heartily dislikes, if only in order to hide that dislike from the other person and from oneself, I tried exceptionally hard with Miss Morpeth. I sacrificed one Sunday afternoon a month to her, and I answered the same questions every time I saw her. I heard the same observations about Dr Leventhal’s ultimate unreliability and what Miss Morpeth had said to the Director when she had been invited to sit on the board which had appointed him. I ate the same cake, which I did not like; I spent the same amount of time in the same frowsty room in which the windows were never opened. I washed up the same cups and saucers at the same moment of the day and waited while Miss Morpeth put them away; I heard the same bolts and chains being secured, in the same order, before I felt free to decamp and run down the stairs. As against all this strain and endurance on my part, I did not see that Miss Morpeth was making much of an effort. She clearly found me unsatisfactory, both as a librarian and as a human being, and her resentment of the duties she had to perform for my benefit, such as making the tea, showed in the very stiffness of her walk and the jerkiness of her speech. Besides, I felt, it was time she went to
Australia. Somehow I could not bear to go through that particular conversation again.

The unpleasant clear-sightedness of which I spoke came from my determination to make Miss Morpeth – and indeed everyone else – pay for the penalties they exacted from me. If Miss Morpeth was going to bore me stiff, then Miss Morpeth was going to be used as material. I would write Miss Morpeth into my system of things: she would become a ‘character’, and in due course I would, by virtue of this very process, gain the upper hand. As I tramped through the park, turning a hard, bright stare on the few passers-by, I was busy writing in my head a deadpan but devastating account of getting Miss Morpeth on to the aeroplane for Melbourne, starting with the purchase of the lightweight luggage, the alerting of Nick (of Nick? I had almost forgotten him), the drive to the airport, with conversation verging on the farcical on both sides (at this point I realized that I would have to go along with them), and then what? I would have to arrange for something unexpected to happen to Miss Morpeth. A romance? Difficult to imagine, given the elastic stocking and the sad green skirt. But if she were to meet someone equally unprepossessing, someone, yes, like Dr Leventhal, I thought I could bring off some kind of rapprochement, since I knew them both so well. The fact that they disliked each other so much in real life would give my authorial tone an extra piquancy. Then, I suppose, having brought them together, I could send them out to a sunny if tentative future together in the Antipodes.

At this point my new sourness curdled in my throat and I had to stop and take a deep breath before I could go on. I found that I could not contemplate the union of two people, even in fiction, without the ground threatening to give way beneath me. Were I to think of two living
human beings, ideally matched, and were I to catch sight of them, looking at each other with love, I think I should have died of it. I stood there in the park, on a grey Sunday afternoon, and I fought for control as the tears filled my eyes. That world, in which I was to have no part, how it hurt me! How it reminded me! And how great were the dangers to which I was now exposed, since that defection … But my vision was so blurred that I took a pull at myself and stared steadily through my tears until they disappeared, and remembered that I could, if I so willed it, gain some sort of a position, lending myself to events in order to control them at a later date. It was, in fact, the only tactic left open to me, and I had better start practising it straight away. All in all, I told myself briskly, this visit to Miss Morpeth was an excellent opportunity. And most timely. For on the following evening I was due to dine with the Frasers, and no doubt with James, and my defences were to be impregnable.