Making Things Better (13 page)

‘I'll see what I can do. Don't be surprised if you don't hear from me immediately. I've got a few things on my mind at the moment.' His face took on a look that was half-scared, half-complacent. ‘Two problems, actually. The first is that Helen wants us to get married. The second is that I've been seeing someone else.'

‘Oh, dear.' This was so heartfelt that he was obliged to add, ‘Can't you do both?'

‘Not really. Both are very keen on commitment, as they call it.'

‘It sounds so legalistic.'

‘And I want a bit of freedom,' Simmonds burst out. ‘I thought we had an understanding, Helen and I . . .'

‘Are you sure you want freedom? Freedom is sometimes a mixed blessing. Without obligations one frequently does less rather than more.'

‘I have obligations,' protested Simmonds. ‘I'm a professional man.'

‘I should get married, if I were you. It's important to have someone to go home to in the evenings.'

‘In fact my evenings have been well taken care of. I think I can say that without fear of contradiction.'

Herz was alarmed by the combative tone of this last remark. ‘You are in love, of course. Love and freedom are incompatible, although freedom seems to beckon with each new enthusiasm. It is an illusion, Bernard, freedom, I mean. There is no such thing. In theory I am free. Yet if I were to change my name, move to another country—both of which I could do—I should not be free, any freer than I am now. You, on the other hand, are free to marry, as you have always been. One does not always possess the choice. And freedom, after all, consists in having a choice. I can see that falling in love has upset you, but then it always does. Sometimes it's the emotions that go with the new person that are so enlivening. And so misleading. One's own affections gradually take precedence. Does your new friend really care for you?'

‘I think so, yes.'

‘I rather imagine loyalty counts in these matters. It is so much more important than fidelity. Sexual fidelity, that is. Perhaps you owe Helen that loyalty?'

‘She's not making it easy for me.'

‘Why should she? Women seem to want permanence more than men do. Books are published on the subject; a whole industry has grown up in America. I picked up somebody's discarded newspaper the other day and read an article on this very subject. “To be continued”, it said.' (In fact he had devoured the article, as he sat, unobserved, in the public garden, and had almost determined to buy the following day's instalment before being restored to his senses by the arrival of the children at lunchtime.) ‘There seems to be a genuine incompatibility. More coffee?' He wondered how he could tactfully bring the discussion back to his own affairs. He was aware that he had given offence. ‘No, no, let me. I insist,' he said, as the bill was presented.

Simmonds brooded, then roused himself. ‘I'll be in touch,' he promised. ‘Just be patient. My advice to you would be to take a holiday.' (It was what everyone said.) ‘Or have a check-up. See your doctor; get yourself fighting fit. You're looking very thin, you know.'

‘Only the flu. I'm quite all right, really.' But he knew this to be untrue. He was frequently breathless these days, which was one of his reasons for spending his time so quietly. In the misty deserted garden there was no one to see him put a hand to his heart to check its rapid and sometimes irregular beat. He put this down to his recent disturbance, which had assumed a physical disguise as if to mock him further. Even now he was anxious to get home in case his mounting distress should become apparent. Calmly he paid the bill, added his usual large tip, hoped he would find a taxi without delay. ‘How will you get home?' he asked politely.

‘Underground. Oh, by the way, this letter came for you. Obviously from someone who thought you were still in Hilltop Road. I should have forwarded it. You're right, I've been neglecting my duties.' He looked so crestfallen that Herz felt like embracing him. Instead he patted his arm, and said, ‘I'm so grateful, Bernard. As always. Let us meet again soon.' He put the letter, unexamined, into his pocket. The relief of getting home was so great that he left it there, until the slight rustle, as he removed his coat, prompted him to put it on his desk. Then the far more important business of getting himself to bed took precedence. The letter could wait. In any case there was no urgency. A letter sent to Hilltop Road could have little relevance in his present, unstable situation. Not for the first time he regretted that almost ancestral flat, so very different from the gimcrack lodgings that had succeeded their time there, and of which Chiltern Street was merely the latest avatar.

The sound of rain woke him from a brief but profound sleep. He looked at his clock: two-thirty. He knew from experience that his night was over, and in that instant decided to go back to that unsympathetic doctor and ask him for sleeping-pills. These dark hours were too conducive to unwelcome reflections. He felt unusually wakeful, and also uneasy. This unease was the result of his dinner with Bernard Simmonds, and their conversation, principally his part in it. He had been both flippant and didactic, the very mark of an inattentive listener. Yet he had not been inattentive: he had been wary, reluctant to engage in a discussion of the other's amorous dealings, or indeed of anyone else's. Such matters were no longer for him, and yet he had recognized Bernard's excited awareness of his own predicament, the slight heat that came from him as he deployed his credentials: not one woman but two! Even through the weariness and distaste he felt Herz had silently congratulated him. And this lent his pious moralizing an ambiguity. If he had been able to break through the restraint that was usually the tone set for these meetings he would have urged Simmonds to obey his instincts, relegate good behaviour to the past, and impose his will on both his long-term companion and his new lover. In so doing he might have attained that ideal freedom which Herz's judicious reflections had done so much to spoil.

Herz's own notions of freedom, based on the highest precepts, had recently been undermined by that brief illumination. He recognized the signs in Simmonds but thought that he should give no authority to what was so eagerly awaiting his sympathetic response. It was sympathy that had been required of him. He should have been politely respectful of this confession; instead he had taken refuge in an old man's farrago in which cynicism vied with irrelevance. His very expression, he thought, might have betrayed reluctance to hear more, yet he knew that he had remained as gravely attentive as always, and only a little less self-possessed than he would have wished. His main reaction had been one of impatience, an impatience that now enveloped the dark room, the clock, and all the other accoutrements of his so careful and now threatened surroundings. He would have liked to write Simmonds a note, apologizing for having been so preoccupied, but knew that he would not do so, for to do so would merely compound the offence. He would also like, in this same unwritten note, to remind Simmonds that the matter of his lease must take priority over any emotional troubles that might be brought into the discussion, but knew that he would not do this either. He would remain silent and await developments, since that was what was expected of him. He would suggest another dinner early in the New Year, during which he would remain on his guard against his own indiscretions, while allowing Simmonds full licence to indulge his own. That too was what was expected of him.

Rain was falling when, on the following day, he set out for the surgery in Paddington Street, conveniently close to the public garden which he supposed would be out of bounds for the rest of this dark morning and no doubt the dark mornings that were to follow. Christmas would mark the nadir of the year, after which would begin the very slow ascent towards the light. Briefly he entertained fantasies of evasion: the prospect of that notional resort, populated by leisurely walkers, passed once more before his mind's eye, although he knew that it was his own creation. He also had a brief, quite isolated memory of a fluted glass dish on which his mother used to serve a chocolate cake on Saturday afternoons. These flashes of memory, which came quite unannounced, delighted him, and diverted him from his usual monotonous broodings. They came in the daytime, in the full light, rather than at night, when his wakefulness was mysteriously given over to unremittingly rational thought. For this reason he deduced that the night hours were of some service, and decided to forgo his visit to the doctor: sleeping-pills could wait. In any event the nights were less problematic than the days, which could be ruined by bad weather. He retraced his steps, entertained by the memory of that glass dish and of those remote weekends in Berlin when friends would visit. He now realized that his mother's attachment to Bijou Frank had been an attempt to revive that custom, of which nothing now remained. In the flat he resigned himself to a day at home, a prospect which normally filled him with dismay. On his desk he saw the letter which Simmonds had handed to him as they parted the previous evening, but instead took up his volume of Thomas Mann once more, and sank gratefully into the landscape, so well remembered, so totally familiar, of the bourgeois past.

13

The letter, which was inadequately stamped, had taken some time to reach Hilltop Road, longer still to reach Chiltern Street by way of Bernard Simmonds. Before settling down to read it Herz glanced at the signature: Fanny Schneider (Bauer). This he had somehow anticipated from the ladylike handwriting on the numerous sheets of flimsy paper. It was the handwriting of someone given to an expansive account of her own dealings with the world, not too attentive to the world's responses. Having no longer waited for this letter, which would have spared him many anxieties and disappointments, Herz found himself curiously unemotional at actually reading it. Like all messages which arrive too late it had missed its mark, lost its point. He held the thin pages for several seconds, wondering why they left him so indifferent. The contents were somehow irrelevant. The reality of Fanny Bauer had been dissipated by years of absence, of separation. He could still summon up that feeling of separation, which must have lain dormant since their last meeting. That had been abortive, leaving him with a sense of shame and confusion, his marriage proposal unhesitatingly rejected, against the unlikely backdrop of the Beau Rivage. Even as she refused him Fanny had taken up her bag and reminded her mother that it was time to change for dinner. Her mother, whom he had difficulty in recognizing as his dashing aunt Anna, had followed her without a word, sparing Herz only a look which might have been approving, accepting his homage as nothing less than her daughter's due, but informing him at the same time that such homage was no longer necessary, that he was no longer an eager boy, that he had outgrown the eagerness without gaining much in the way of worldly success. Perhaps that eagerness had surfaced in his proposal, which seemed so unsuitable in this setting, in this high-ceilinged room, in which he had suddenly felt entirely alone.

Or perhaps the separation had lasted longer even than that, since the children's birthday party at which he had gazed worshipfully at his cousin, admiring her haughtiness, her flightiness, wishing that they were for him alone. In time he came to recognize her behaviour as meretricious, but did not blame her for that. Quite simply she was better prepared for life in the world than he was. He saw that she would be demanding, easily bored, that she would not conceal her boredom, so that others would exert themselves to amuse her, and later to tease her in return, so that a heartfelt avowal of love or loyalty would be anomalous, as if phrased in a different language. He had known even then, at that same children's party, that she was cruel and that he was doomed to be faithful. Had she not snubbed him dreadfully when he had not understood a game they were playing and that she had instigated? The game consisted of truths and dares and forfeits, one of those humiliating games which need to be played with a maximum of artifice so as not to lose face. He had failed miserably, and had been deemed to be so inept that Fanny had dismissed him, relegating him to a corner where he sat with a puzzled smile on his face as the game continued without him.

That sense of exclusion had stayed with him and informed his every subsequent action. Across the years he could still recall, in sad detail, his misery, which at the time he had not understood for the adult emotion it was to become. And in Nyon he had recognized her dismissal of him as inevitable, had simply wished that she would allow him more time to contemplate her, to understand the changes that had taken place in her appearance, to discuss their lives, and if possible their feelings. That had not been allowed: the years had wrought too many changes to be described, even if there had been time to describe them, as he so vainly wished. Instead his aunt had invited him to join them for dinner. On learning that he would be leaving on the following morning Fanny had smiled, but had confined her conversation to the most banal of remarks, most of them addressed to her mother.

He had covertly studied the now buxom figure seated opposite him, had thought her still beautiful, though she was now paler than she had been as a girl: her eyes were as lustrous as he remembered them, her hair as dark. Only her hands were the plump hands of a woman who did no work and who spent days in pampered idleness. He had had no difficulty in remembering that she was a widow, for she had the unawakened look of one no longer troubled by her senses. He even wondered whether she had loved her husband, Claude Mellerio, or whether her marriage had been a practical arrangement on her part, brought about by her mother. Faced with her strange equanimity he had assumed her physical nature to be passive, giving pleasure by virtue of that same passivity but receiving none in return. He saw that although lacking in that one vital sexual attribute she would nevertheless continue to intrigue. Her self-possession alone would present a challenge. He doubted whether any man had or would deprive her of it.

Walking by the lake in the very early morning of the following day he reflected that this marked the difference between them, his own assiduity meeting her own impassive calm, and saw that this quality was directed not at himself alone but at men in general. He saw that she would never quite understand a man's yearning, or even his physical impulses, that she would be happier in female company, and most of all in the company of her mother. The transformation of the spirited girl at the party into this dignified and untroubled woman was not altogether surprising: she had never understood that others could be moved by their feelings, had mistaken her own caprices for sentiments, had never broken out of the chrysalis of her girlhood, and had remained monstrously unfamiliar with adult emotions, at home only with those that suited her purpose. That her purpose had been to be looked after in advantageous circumstances had no doubt been the reason for her marriage. Practical considerations would have been uppermost in both women: Mellerio had promised an easy way of life and would respect their closeness. Widowhood, however, to judge from their expressions, suited both Fanny and her mother much better. Their attachment to the hotel, which seemed so much their natural setting, was in fact an expression of true feeling: this was their due. Widowhood was Fanny's version of honourable retirement. What impression could he have made, with the dust of Edgware Road still figuratively clinging to his heels? How could he imagine this delicate creature consenting to remove herself from this setting? His own humility, his consciousness of the enormity of what he was asking, had done something to prepare him for her refusal, but he was nevertheless chilled by her negligent way of dismissing him. She had kept her superior manners; her smooth mouth concealed a stinging tongue. Thus had she ruled, through a mixture of detachment and an ability to defend herself which would confound those in search of deeper feelings, even when deeper feelings were appropriate. She might annoy a man but she would also baffle him. What did she want, that man might ask. Simply to be left alone would have been the answer, had she been minded to give one.

Thus partly exonerated, Herz had watched the sun rise over the lake, had at length castigated himself for a fool, then turned back to the hotel to collect his overnight bag before taking a taxi to the station. What compounded his feeling of helplessness was the fact that he had not been able to pay for the dinner. His instinct was always to do so, but they had waved away his attempts, as if he were still the poor relation they had always considered him to be. That this had not been exactly the case in Berlin was in fact true enough of him in London; he provided for his diminished family but this alone condemned him: he was obliged to earn his living, while Fanny and her mother were cushioned by Mellerio's will and need never work or think in terms of working. So perfectly did Fanny fit the profile of a kept woman that he supposed that this might add to her appeal for a man. He would be purchasing the genuine article, albeit a stereotype. Maybe the genuine article was indistinguishable from a stereotype, a stereotype rather than an archetype, such as would appeal to the romantic Herz supposed he had been. He had longed to encompass the sheer otherness of Fanny, and she, with a lifted eyebrow, had once again condemned his expectations. Peaceful Nyon, with its unhurried strolling population, served as an ironic backdrop to his recognition of defeat. What had been an incompatibility at that children's party was no less an incompatibility in these new changed circumstances. And yet the sense of loss had never entirely disappeared.

In stark contrast to the humiliation of the experience, Nyon was mild, tentative, the sky a compromise between grey and blue, the old men playing chess in the café near the station as grave as senators. He could understand the appeal of the place for Fanny and her mother: it was an oubliette into which the cares of the world vanished. Their routine would be soporific, reassuring. Even he was seduced by the quiet rhythm of the place, the very sparseness of the streets, the unhurried pace of the few passers-by abroad at this early hour, the stone doorways leading to dark interiors, the scarlet of a geranium in a window box prudently restrained by an iron grille . . . By contrast the London to which he was returning was coarsened by work, by the harsh effort of earning money, by the absence of just those features that made Nyon seem benign, if a little unreal. He imagined a tranquil way of life such as that enjoyed by Fanny and her mother: the leisurely dressing, the adornment, the preparations made for a day of inactivity, in which the most daring excursion would be to the local
pâtisserie
for coffee and cake. Both were plumper, as they could not fail to be in this protected environment. The added weight had made them both appear voluptuous, yet their conversation, what he had heard of it, had been unremittingly practical, a sharp reminder to the waiter that their usual bottle of wine was missing, a comparison of the prices charged by two or more hairdressers . . . Few remarks had been addressed to him, for which he had been grateful, aware of how awkward his presence must be in this dining-room, through the large plate-glass windows of which he could just see the lake promenade, and beyond that, tideless waters stretching to a smudged horizon. The ladies had eaten delicately, but with appetite. He had thought of his mother and her valiant pretensions, of his father, struggling back to consciousness after one of his characteristically obliterating naps, of his brother, a failure who had found failure to be his proper element. Lastly he thought of himself and all his misplaced efforts, his short-lived marriage and the blame that had accrued from it. He longed to jettison the lot and simply walk out of the hotel into an unknown landscape, an unknown future. In that so unattainable future he would not be accompanied. Even in fantasy he could not see Fanny clinging to his arm. Fanny was married to her mother, who acted as her agent, her manager. If Fanny were to marry again it would be to someone who would make her mother part of the bargain. In this evolutionary struggle he could barely qualify.

He smoothed out the pages of the letter with some reluctance, so distinct was the memory of what had been less than a forty-eight-hour absence from work. ‘My dear Julius,' he read. ‘No doubt you will be surprised to hear from me across this distance of space and time. I found your address in a letter from your mother to mine; it was tucked between pages 123 and 124 of
Buddenbrooks
which Mother was reading before she died. I have been unable to read the book since that awful day, but I recently took it down when I asked Doris, my maid, to dust the shelves. The letter fell out, and it was a great relief to know how to contact you, for I am in need of friends, and I remember how faithfully you used to visit our house in Dahlem all those years ago. When I say I am in need of friends you will understand that life has not been kind to me. I have lost two husbands, but I confess that the greatest loss has been Mother, who lived with us until her death. We had never been apart from each other and I miss her dreadfully. Since her death everything has gone wrong. I am sure that if she were still here she would know what I should do. You and I are now the only members of our family: I say this although I do not know whether this letter will find you, or indeed whether you are still alive. We are now very old and only one thing can happen to people of our age. It seems particularly hard that I should be subjected to added misfortune at this stage of my life, and I write to ask you whether you can advise me.

‘Let me explain. I met my second husband, Alois, in Nyon, where he was taking a holiday. He and Mother got talking, and it transpired that he was from Bonn, where he had a small printing works. We had dinner together, the three of us, and I found him agreeable. Mother thought it a good match, since he appeared to be a man of property, and we married shortly afterwards. I have to say that he was very smitten with me, and, as I say, I found him agreeable. At first all went well; we had a beautiful house in Poppelsdorf, a suburb of Bonn, and Alois's sister, Margot, was very welcoming and attentive. The surroundings were pleasant and there were servants who looked after everything, so that it was quite easy to adjust after life in the hotel. Unfortunately Alois was not a well man; he suffered from asthma and various other complaints, and although I tried to cheer him up, and, indeed, bolster him up, he remained something of an invalid. Margot was a frequent visitor, too frequent I sometimes thought, and we did not always agree. I think she was jealous of me; she was a widow, not particularly attractive, and very possessive towards her brother. In time Alois's health deteriorated, and with it his business. To cut a long story short we were obliged to sell the house and invest the proceeds in his company. Worse, we had to move to a flat in Bonn, which I found intolerable. The inevitable happened, or it may not have been inevitable in other hands: Alois went bankrupt. Fortunately he had put what remained of his assets in my hands, but the shock more or less killed him. He lingered on for a year, getting more and more depressed, and died quite suddenly, not of his assorted ailments, but of a heart attack.