Read Online Lewis Percy by Anita Brookner - Free Book Online Page A

damp of nostril but calm of presence, his former bearing resurrected for the occasion, had once, in Lewis’s hearing, replied, ‘You make more noise than I do, you silly bitch,’ and had been orderedto leave. ‘Poor old thing,’ Mrs Percy had said. ‘He probably has nowhere else to go.’ ‘Oh, he’ll be back tomorrow,’ said Miss Clarke, with a laugh that was tolerant but a little too hearty. ‘I like to do my best for everyone but I can’t have the atmosphere disturbed. I feel sorry for him really. But old people can be very tiresome, can’t they?’ She was perhaps forty-three to Grace Percy’s sixty-two. ‘Yes,’ Grace Percy had smiled in return. ‘Yes, I dare say they can.’
    ‘There is something very sad about that woman,’ she had said to her son on their journey home. ‘I somehow doubt that she will marry. And she knows this. It has probably broken her heart but she is too good a woman to show her feelings. What comes out is a terrible cheerfulness, with no cheer in it.’
    Lewis had laughed and pressed his mother’s arm. He loved her in this mood. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘What happened to her? Did some rotter let her down?’
    ‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Percy, surprised. ‘There never was a rotter, that’s the trouble. She’s the sort of great-hearted woman who would be magnificent with a rotter. That deep bosom, that high colour. The sacrifices she would have made! The faith in his untested abilities she would have maintained! She would have taken on his parents, his friends, even his lovers. I can just see her keeping open house for all his hangers-on, being decent to the women who ring up, lending him money.’
    ‘Why wouldn’t someone like that want to marry her?’ Lewis had asked in his innocence.
    ‘Well, he might be a homosexual,’ his mother had replied. She thought it her duty, for which she braced herself, to introduce her son to these complexities. ‘At any event someone who couldn’t tolerate the intimacy of women. And I have to say, although I shouldn’t, that Miss Clarke gives the impression of someone whose intimacy might be a little tiring.’
    She said no more, thinking to spare Lewis the spectacle, which she had quite clearly in front of her, of Miss Clarke,full-throated, wild-eyed, in the throes of some spectacular but unrequited ardour. It was the sort of thing for which actresses became famous in the theatre. Jacobean tragedy would have suited her, she reflected.
    ‘The sad thing is that many women of Miss Clarke’s type never marry,’ she said mildly. ‘And yet they would make excellent wives. Miss Clarke probably has a chest of drawers full of exquisite linen,’ (nightdresses, she thought, but kept the thought to herself). ‘She probably still adds to it. And she always looks well turned out, have you noticed? Those very pretty blouses, those high heels. And nice discreet scent. And always well made up. And her hair always immaculate.’
    ‘I suppose she’s all right for her age,’ said Lewis. ‘But I think she’s pretty unattractive.’
    ‘She was possibly always heavy in the bust, even as a girl,’ said his mother. ‘Now, of course, her waist is bigger than it was before. That happens to women in their forties,’ she said, giving Lewis’s arm a tap. ‘You should know that. So that you’re not disappointed when your wife gets a little older. The figure loses definition,’ she added, although her own had long disappeared into a kind of Gothic sparseness. Contemplation of Miss Clarke’s misplaced and unsought abundance always brought her a tiny spasm of personal gratitude for her own good fortune. Although Lewis did not know this, Mrs Percy always reflected at this point, ‘After all, I had darling Jack.’ But such thoughts were not to be spoken, and after thinking them Mrs Percy felt a little ashamed.
    ‘Remember, Lewis,’ she had said. ‘Good women are better than bad women. Bad women are merely tiresome. Learn to appreciate goodness of heart.