Read Online Making Things Better by Anita Brookner - Free Book Online

Besides, his knowledge of women was so slight that this was in the realm of abstract thought. As far as he knew women were divided into two categories: those like Fanny Bauer who tormented one and those like Josie who offered refuge from such torment. Now he saw that this was less than fair to either of them. They were both, in their different ways, similar at heart. Both were opportunists in the best possible sense, able and willing to turn matters to their advantage, even if by the most traditional route, by marriage. It was entirely possible that he had failed them both, by not endowing Josie with that missing element of romance, by not being less romantic, less impetuous, more of a solid prospect, in his approach to Fanny. He had picked the wrong moment to act the lover, should have turned himself for the occasion into a sober citizen. As for Josie, she had seen her advantage in solid prospects: the respectable setting of a family she would soon outgrow, the bourgeois comfort of a flat that would soon prove to have been merely a temporary refuge. And no romance, he reflected, could have survived Edgware Road and the cramped quarters barely adequate for one ménage, let alone two. The strain had told very quickly, so that it was almost a relief to him when she made her decision. And by that time Fanny was simply a mirage. He could still see her as a girl, that was the strange thing, as if the intervening years had no substance.
    He wandered back down St Martin’s Lane, thinking he might go to the National Gallery, might look at the Claudes and the Turners for half an hour. He did this from time to time, applied himself to a pleasure that had outlasted all the rest, yet aware that art was indifferent to whatever requirements he might bring to the matter. He still had in his mind Freddy’s contempt for his former calling, and worse, his boastful negligence, his repudiation, as if art had proved fallacious in some way, as if it were preferable to be the equivalent of a playground bully, a ruffian, rather than the suffering aesthete he had been in his former life. Herz hoped that there was no real need to choose between these two extremes, but thought that there might be. It was informative that after seeing Josie he felt the need for something incorporeal, as if the one ushered in the need for the other. Yet after a calming half hour he would be aware of the sound of his own footsteps and would long for company of the simplest kind. The sight of children, sitting cross-legged on the floor and listening to a lecturer explain a picture to them, made him want to join them, if only for a minute or two. Yet in today’s sad climate an adult man approaching a group of children was no longer an innocent sight, even though a man as old as himself might be thought to be above suspicion. Unfortunately nobody was above suspicion these days. It was a matter of prudence to behave with the utmost circumspection, as if one’s guilt and folly, the accumulation of a lifetime, might in an instant be exposed to the public gaze. And how could one recover from that?
    Finally, more hesitant now, he decided to give the National Gallery a miss. He would keep his favourite pictures for another day, a better or a worse day, it hardly mattered now. Now he would go home, but not on foot. He had noticed that he was becoming a little unsteady. That was why he had largely given up travelling. He was afraid of a collapse in a foreign city, saw himself lying on a pavement, surrounded by unknown faces. Such a thing had never happened, but he had begun to fear the day when it might. He was safer now at home, for home had become his ultimate refuge. In the taxi he decided to telephone Josie that evening to thank her for their lunch, and once again to wish her a pleasant holiday. That was the right note to end on, he thought, and then, in a panic, asked himself why he should be thinking of endings. Nothing was over. In a couple of months’