Read Online Look at Me by Anita Brookner - Free Book Online

went to the restaurant.
    I think they were both glad that I took such an interest in Nick’s work, Nick for obvious reasons, and Alixbecause she got fed up with it, regarded it with pride but also with some resentment, and occasionally behaved as if he were being unfaithful to her when he was actually engaged on it. She had the same attitude to my writing, I soon discovered, although I could not see how this constituted a menace to her peace of mind, and anyway I was only too glad to be relieved of the burden of my solitude – which was what my writing represented – to persevere with it. And yet it was an old habit, to which I returned when solitude reclaimed me, usually late at night, when I was sleepless, and when I wrote my diary these days I had so much more to record, always with a view to my nebulous novel. But I found that this novel, which was supposed to be about the Library and the characters who used it, the odd people whom I used to describe so amusingly to my mother, had been elbowed out of the way by the extraordinary quantity of new information I seemed to be acquiring. I wrote it all down, but I could not see how to use it, for it all seemed to have to do with the Frasers, and how could I possibly use that? Yet around those silent midnights, when the flat in Maida Vale had long been put to sleep, my pen raced over the pages, gaining speed and point from the increased urgency of my absorption in their lives.
    As I said, Alix did not like my writing. She regarded it as a secret which I was keeping from her. ‘But what do you write about?’ she would demand. I could never tell her, not because I was embarrassed about it but because it had as yet no definite shape. I felt that it had to be kept under lock and key until it had resolved itself, which it would do, sooner or later; I was superstitious about letting anything escape. I tried to explain this, but quite clearly I failed to convince her, and she regarded it as a sort of disloyalty. ‘Darling,’ she would call out to Nick, ‘Little Orphan Fanny’s holding out on me.’ ‘Oh, poor baby,’ a muffled voice would reply, usually frominside the clean shirt into which Nick was changing, before we all went down to the restaurant. ‘Come and make her tell me,’ Alix would call out, and she was almost serious. He would come into the sitting room, his sleeves inside his shirt but his chest bare, and I would watch as he went over to her and nuzzled his face in her hair. ‘She who must be obeyed,’ he would say, and, to me, ‘Force yourself. She always gets her own way in the end.’ So I would force myself, and with the slightest feeling of betrayal (but this was somehow better than my earlier solitude) I would tell her about the characters – and in the telling they became ‘characters’ – whom I had intended to put into my novel. I found that when I exaggerated the grotesque nature of their behaviour I could raise a momentary laugh but most of what I told her left her impassive. ‘H’m,’ she would say. ‘Sounds very odd to me. I can’t see anybody wanting to read about such a lot of deadbeats.’ She read little herself, although their flat was always cluttered with expensive magazines. I can still see Alix flicking disdainfully through the pages, as if unwilling to believe any woman better dressed or more alluring than herself, holding such women at arm’s length, and finally flinging them aside in order to renew her nail varnish or to try, once again, to perfect her new hairstyle. This always required Nick’s attention, or his final verdict, and as the three of us gathered around her dressing table, making suggestions, persuading or dissuading, the question of what I was writing faded quite naturally into the background. And after a while, when I telephoned, I ceased to use the excuse that I was writing and instead asked her if I could get her anything in town.
    She once said, ‘If you must write, find something that interests other