A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online Page A

which attempted to convey that they had been happily married for years.
    ‘I’m afraid I shall have to leave rather early,’ was his reply. ‘I have to go back to the office.’
    ‘Then we had better order now,’ said Freddie, who seemed to find Peckham’s presence displeasing. ‘Will you leave the wine to me?’
    ‘Delighted,’ said Jack Peckham, sitting sideways to the table. ‘Tessa mentioned that you were in the oil business. Can you fill me in on Riyadh? I have to go there in a few weeks.’
    It was then that Harriet made a sign to Tessa to join her in the Ladies’; it seemed to her urgent to find out more about this strange alliance which had previously seemed to require from her nothing but sympathy.
    ‘He is very handsome,’ she said moderately, while combingher hair. In the mirror she noticed, with a feeling of instant rejection, the white crêpe de Chine shirt, the black skirt, and the pearl stud earrings which she usually wore on such occasions. She felt she never wanted to see them again.
    ‘I hope I’m going to be able to manage this,’ said Tessa. ‘I usually feel sick in the evenings.’
    ‘I’m afraid Freddie is already a little put out,’ Harriet observed. ‘This is not going to be easy. Yes,’ she added, after a moment in which both scrupulously washed their hands, ‘he is marvellous to look at. He will break your heart, you know.’
    ‘He already has. He was bound to. I adore him. I hate him too.’
    Both silently acknowledged the rightness of this last remark. Yes, thought Harriet, as they turned to go, you hate him because you will never master him. He will leave you and you will wait for him, and maybe he will come back but too late, and you will not look as he remembered you in the brief moments when he ever thought about you. I should be the same. No, I should be even more abject; I should be contemptible. I should wait for ever, so that my life would resemble a long widowhood, and I should still be proud to have captured—for however fleeting a moment, a second, even—such a man’s attention.
    They went back to the crowded restaurant to find Freddie discoursing quite amiably to Jack Peckham, who was taking notes. So his time was not entirely wasted, thought Harriet meekly. Throughout the meal he continued to sit sideways to the table, as if he had no intention of staying. He ate decisively, economically, staring at his plate for a few seconds before making a strategic incision, then laying aside his knife as if of no further use to him. She studied him covertly, under her eyelashes. Although large he was very graceful. He was, she decided, the villainous hero of romantic fiction, the cruel lover who breaks hearts and thrills women, so that they look with disdain on the humbler, more available variety of menfor ever after. Thus did the virtuous Jane Eyre spurn St John Rivers, who would have made her a much better husband than Mr Rochester. Mr Rochester, she thought, has a lot to answer for, both in the book and in real life, where his legend lingers on. Only when he was blind and impotent did Charlotte Brontë let Jane have her way with him, and what kind of a victory was that? To master such a man demands extraordinary resources, of which undoubtedly the most effective is indifference. Jack Peckham had the unforgivably memorable looks which provoke a certain respect, from men as well as from women. Tall, big-boned, and of a reddish fairness, he lowered his head as if bored with admiring glances, and was taciturn, even rude, for the same reason. His extraordinary looks and his abrupt manners gave no clue to his character, but then his character would always be of less interest than his appearance, she thought, and so thinking, had no feeling of strangeness but rather one of familiarity.
    Of course, he was not made for a conventional marriage, particularly of the kind which Tessa envisaged: her jokey coyness must make him grit his teeth with fury. He would have to be greatly