A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online

which was also perceived as a disaster, and already pregnant, could only joke and boast. After so long, after so many transparent years, they had grown opaque to each other. And this would—must—continue. The dignity of their husbands was at stake. Later, perhaps, when they were much older, they might confess mistakes, regrets. But Harriet saw them all bound in the meantime by certain rules. She herself had reason to be grateful for those rules.
    To calm herself she went to the window, and saw directly opposite, across the oblong enclosure of trees and shrubs that was Cornwall Gardens, the mysterious window that was always closed yet always lit up. She had seen the light blazing there at five in the morning and at midnight. Sometimes a figure could be seen moving rapidly across it, as if in agitation. Was it a sickroom, a nursery? Somehow that agitated figure seemed to Harriet like a prisoner, for whom she felt a terrified sympathy. Soon the branches of the trees would thicken with foliage, and she would no longer be able to see clearly. Onthis particular afternoon, still light, still bright, but very quiet, she could discern no silhouette. Yet the light was already on. Suddenly the figure appeared, as if from nowhere, and took up a position at the window. With a qualm of fear she turned away, for even worse than seeing the stranger was the thought of the stranger seeing her, lonely, at the window, and gazing with longing at a world which was beginning to disclose concealment, estrangement, silence.

W HEN Harriet first saw Jack Peckham she put up her hand, instinctively, to shield her face. With no one else had she ever done this. The gesture was symbolic, as if she were hiding more than her face, as if she were hiding herself, for she recognized in him the stranger of her dreams, and in the light of day did not wish to be found. The four of them were in a restaurant, a week before Tessa’s wedding. Freddie had grumbled at the idea of this dinner, which, he thought, had nothing to do with him, but Harriet had insisted on this being their treat, and the most graceful way to show the recalcitrant Peckham that there were witnesses to his dubious entrance into Tessa’s life, and as if to warn him against a too precipitate departure from it. Theirs was apparently already a tired arrangement: he would stay with Tessa until the baby was born, and then they would separate. He had it in mind to be a free man within a couple of years.
    ‘I’ll never divorce him, never,’ Tessa had said to Harriet in the Ladies’ Room. ‘Anyway, he might as well be married to me as to anyone else. You’ll see what he’s like. He’ll never settle down until somebody makes him. And when he sees the baby …’
    Harriet, apart from noticing the antagonism in Tessa’s voice, and understanding it, knew that she was wrong, thatJack Peckham was unlikely to be seduced by a baby, or by a simulacrum of marriage, or even by a woman’s longing for him, because he was a prodigious man who was made for adventure in the wider world, and whom the same four walls, however welcoming, would irritate beyond endurance. He was already irritated by having to dine with this friend of Tessa’s and her pompous husband, a man of the kind who normally made him utter a short bark of laughter. He seemed to create annoyance wherever he went and to be indifferent to it. He had arrived late, wearing jeans and a leather jacket: light caught the very fine reddish stubble on his jaw, and his longish hair was untidy. Harriet became aware simultaneously of her husband’s disapproval and of that same husband’s costive navy blue suit and striped tie, his sparse hair, and the cologne which he used and which she now realized she had never liked. She switched her attention as best she could to Tessa, who had coloured hectically at Jack Peckham’s arrival and had caught at his hand, which was unresponsive.
    ‘Too bad of you to be so late, darling,’ she had said, in a tone