Read Online The Bay of Angels by Anita Brookner - Free Book Online Page B

very skilful: they were both too disinclined for a confrontation for one ever to have taken place. Instead, she told me on the telephone that she was trying to persuade him to take her on holiday: Venice, she said, where they had spent their honeymoon. To judge from subsequent telephone calls this holiday was still on the horizon, always a possibility, but a possibility never quite brought into the foreground. She was sure I would understand if I postponed my next visit until Christmas.
    This suited me well, or well enough, for I too had reason to feel embarrassment. Adam had a new friend. ‘This time it’s serious,’ he said, with that charming carelessness which had drawn me to him in the first place. I shut the door of Langton Street behind me for the last time and wandered back to the flat in the early hours, suffused with a blush which I thought would never fade. Again I blamed myself. So deep was my shame that I was grateful to the unsuspecting streets for sheltering me from the public gaze. I registered failure in the one area of my life in which success meant most to me, and I knew that I could never speak of it, least of all to my mother. Simon, I knew, would be delighted, for she would certainly tell him. What else did they have to talk about? For a time indignation on my behalf would wipe out the memory of his conduct. He could be, and would be, self-righteous, producing as justification his distrust of Adam, his fear lest I be hurt. It would be a useful way of defusing a situation which had made them both uncomfortable. My mother would have been shocked out of a complacent acceptance of their apparent harmony. I should be performing a service if I played the part of a heartbroken girl who looked to them for support. Perversely, perhaps, I refused this role. My own feelings were so overwhelming that I could not consider those of my nearest and dearest. Besides, they had ceased to be the people I considered closest to me. Their compromises, their adjustments removed them from the tragic single-mindedness which was to be my lot. They retreated into the background of my life, where I desired that they should stay.
    Within a few weeks, it seemed, the fixed points of my existence had revealed themselves to be untrustworthy. My reaction was to withdraw from those who knew me, to sit at home in the flat with my dictionaries and my thesaurus, to ignore the sun outside my kitchen window, and to work as though I intended work to fill my existence. The unworthiness that a rejection confers on the one who has been rejected was almost palpable. I preferred not to be seen. In the late afternoon I would go out to the park, and walk, my head bent, seeing nothing. Friends telephoned and suggested a drink, a meal. Sometimes I accepted, but such occasions were not a success. I had little to say for myself, could hardly talk about my dull work when such details were supposed to furnish conversation. And in comparison with real work—or what I thought of as real work—my efforts seemed nugatory. In that way, surprised, they began to think me uninteresting, for I had nothing to offer them, no confession of a broken heart which they perhaps suspected I was harbouring. They too would have been lovingly indignant on my behalf, and sometimes I wished that I could be entirely honest, but not for long. Uncensored behaviour seemed to me unbelievably dangerous, and like the Spartan boy with the fox under his shirt I preferred to suffer. I suffered so well, both for my unhappiness and for my silence, that I felt reduced to wordlessness, and relied more and more on my dictionaries to supply those words to which I felt I had no right.
    Of course I could have behaved differently. I could have acted the part of a friend, even to Adam, whom I would have questioned delightedly, as if I were on his side. But I could not be on his side in this of all matters. I could have joked about him with my other friends, who were surely aware of the situation