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

back to her by Maria. This provided her with a sort of excitement which Ifound rather tedious. Nick and I would be greeted with a furious account of what Maria had said about her to a mutual friend, one of those friends whom she telephoned every day. ‘I’ll never go near that bitch again,’ she would pronounce, usually on the evenings when I had arranged to take them to the restaurant. Then Nick would ring up Maria, and plead with her, and the telephone would be handed to Alix, who would shout, ‘You cow!’, and after a lengthy and accusatory riposte from Maria she would shut her eyes and dissolve into her secret and hedonistic internal laughter, and we would go down to the restaurant after all, about an hour and a half later than usual, and I would have my way over the bill.
    What interested me far more, although I also found it repellent, was their intimacy as a married couple. I sensed that it was in this respect that they found my company necessary: they exhibited their marriage to me, while sharing it only with each other. I soon learned to keep a pleasant noncommittal smile on my face when they looked into each other’s eyes, or even caressed each other; I felt lonely and excited. I was there because some element in that perfect marriage was deficient, because ritual demonstrations were needed to maintain a level of arousal which they were too complacent, perhaps too spoilt, even too lazy, to supply for themselves, out of their own imagination. I was the beggar at their feast, reassuring them by my very presence that they were richer than I was. Or indeed could ever hope to be.
    Alix would break from Nick’s embrace, laughing, leaving him flushed, and turn to me, and remark, ‘She’s blushing! We’ve shocked her!’ And I would smile pleasantly and noncommittally, and she would throw herself into a chair and light a cigarette and say to Nick, ‘We must do something about her. Darling, you must know some men. Find her a man, or something. Can’t you find someone for Fanny? She’ll grow cobwebs justsitting here with us. She’ll get bored.’ And Nick would say, ‘I know, I know’, with his comic guilty look, the one he used when Dr Simek waylaid him, and I would smile at them, hoping, in spite of my resistance to this display, that they sincerely wanted me to share as they shared and be happy, and that somehow they would make our party of three into a party of four, that they would cause there to be two couples, and we would be equals at last. I discounted their cruelty as a by-product of their excitement. I know that euphoria, that mania, that love and carelessness breed. And because I longed to experience it again on my own account, and not just to watch it, I had to trust them.
    ‘But first of all we must do something about your appearance,’ Alix would say, and this meant sitting me down at her dressing table and dabbing at me with blushers and eye shadows and then turning me round and showing me to Nick. He would reward me with his hard, speculative gaze, which brought more colour to my cheeks, although when I was turned round again to inspect myself in the mirror I would be horrified to see my clean brown face so smudged, and as I watched my new slightly crooked dark red lips utter some words I was quite surprised that my new enlarged eyes could register such pain. I became quite firm on the matter of my appearance, and wiped and scrubbed all the colour off, raising my dripping face in their bathroom to find Nick leaning curiously against the door jamb. I would brush past him and go back into the bedroom to do my hair, only to find Alix at her dressing table, turning her head from side to side to study the back of her neck, anchoring her chignon with pins and combs, settling her pearl studs in her ears, and stubbing out her cigarette. Myself quite forgotten.
    They were essentially amorous, teasing, arousing, withdrawing. It had become second nature to them, ashad their satisfactions and their