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Authors: Anita Brookner
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was apparent to him, or, if it was, whether it would have made any difference to my status. I could not spend the rest of this disappointing day indoors. I decided to take a book and go to the garden, out of loyalty, out of longing, not out of exasperation. Instead I went to a café round the corner and ate a full English breakfast in the guise of lunch, swallowing every greasy mouthful with something like genuine enthusiasm. This was another change in my behaviour, a preference for gross and speedy satisfactions. Uncomfortably full, I walked to the garden and chose a seat from which I could no longer see the windows of the flat. But I was restless; without the prospect of seeing Edmund I was reduced to pure vagrancy. Finally I went home, roasted the chicken, peeled the potatoes, washed the salad, and sat down to wait not for my lover but for my husband. That husband was agreeably surprised to find me sitting in my usual chair, with an open book in my hands.
“ No class tonight? ” he asked.
“ Cancelled, ” I replied.
After we had eaten he went into the other room as usual, and switched on the television. When I joined him I found him asleep, a scene of passion beaming out unnoticed. When two characters joined in a violent embrace I switched it off.
“ I was watching that, ” Digby protested mildly.
“ No, you weren't. Your eyes were closed. ”
“ Oh, I knew what was going on anyway. One always does. ”
I looked at him uncertainly. But there was nothing in his mild gaze to give me pause, and after a few minutes I went to bed, his remark dying quietly on the night air.
5
If I had learned anything it was that the highest virtue — honour, dignity — can be subverted or negated in an instant, given the right stimulus. Sublime behaviour exists now only in the pages of Betsy's beloved Racine. I also learned that nature, that great benefactor, exacts its punishment for all the bounties hitherto enjoyed, without a thought of worth or entitlement, and that all life ends badly. “ Peacefully, in his sleep, ” one reads, but what of the preceding hours or minutes? Shakespeare has it over Racine here, and Hamlet's doubts and fears speak for all of us. It is these rather than the statecraft that the seventeenth-century classicists brought to the consideration of these matters that resonate in the mind. I also learned that it is the gods who are in control, and that their pagan indifference can be visited on any life, no matter how correctly that life has been lived. I have come to believe that there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that comes at the end, the sheer regret that one's life is finished, that one's failures remain indelible and one's successes illusory. I also believe that there occurs a moment of renunciation, when one is visited by the knowledge that time is up, that there is to be no more time, or that if a little time remains it will be lived posthumously, and with a sense of pure loss. This is also, conversely, an invitation to play Russian roulette with one's life and affections while one has the time, to take chances, to defy safety. But of course one no longer has the time to do that. The ability — the capacity — to take chances has been lost. All is subject henceforth to the iron decree of mortality.
The first of these propositions I had been able to verify for myself. The second came to me by way of information relayed by my mother during one of her brief visits to London from the villa in Spain she had bought with a further injection of money from my father and which she shared with a woman friend. I looked at her, perplexed, unwilling to accede to these morbid matters which she seemed to have embraced without prior warning. It was true that I no longer saw her on a regular basis; had I done so I should have been prepared for the change in her appearance, which I could not quite analyse. Her face seemed to have changed its shape, to be hollowed out on
“ No class tonight? ” he asked.
“ Cancelled, ” I replied.
After we had eaten he went into the other room as usual, and switched on the television. When I joined him I found him asleep, a scene of passion beaming out unnoticed. When two characters joined in a violent embrace I switched it off.
“ I was watching that, ” Digby protested mildly.
“ No, you weren't. Your eyes were closed. ”
“ Oh, I knew what was going on anyway. One always does. ”
I looked at him uncertainly. But there was nothing in his mild gaze to give me pause, and after a few minutes I went to bed, his remark dying quietly on the night air.
5
If I had learned anything it was that the highest virtue — honour, dignity — can be subverted or negated in an instant, given the right stimulus. Sublime behaviour exists now only in the pages of Betsy's beloved Racine. I also learned that nature, that great benefactor, exacts its punishment for all the bounties hitherto enjoyed, without a thought of worth or entitlement, and that all life ends badly. “ Peacefully, in his sleep, ” one reads, but what of the preceding hours or minutes? Shakespeare has it over Racine here, and Hamlet's doubts and fears speak for all of us. It is these rather than the statecraft that the seventeenth-century classicists brought to the consideration of these matters that resonate in the mind. I also learned that it is the gods who are in control, and that their pagan indifference can be visited on any life, no matter how correctly that life has been lived. I have come to believe that there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that comes at the end, the sheer regret that one's life is finished, that one's failures remain indelible and one's successes illusory. I also believe that there occurs a moment of renunciation, when one is visited by the knowledge that time is up, that there is to be no more time, or that if a little time remains it will be lived posthumously, and with a sense of pure loss. This is also, conversely, an invitation to play Russian roulette with one's life and affections while one has the time, to take chances, to defy safety. But of course one no longer has the time to do that. The ability — the capacity — to take chances has been lost. All is subject henceforth to the iron decree of mortality.
The first of these propositions I had been able to verify for myself. The second came to me by way of information relayed by my mother during one of her brief visits to London from the villa in Spain she had bought with a further injection of money from my father and which she shared with a woman friend. I looked at her, perplexed, unwilling to accede to these morbid matters which she seemed to have embraced without prior warning. It was true that I no longer saw her on a regular basis; had I done so I should have been prepared for the change in her appearance, which I could not quite analyse. Her face seemed to have changed its shape, to be hollowed out on
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