A Misalliance by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online

have any more cake, thought Blanche. It is synthetic and horrible and will do her no good. I would let her have a banana and some fruit juice; she would find the banana easier to eat and it would be better for her. But she said nothing and smiled at the girl as she gave her her change, registering, as she did so, a disagreeable impression which she could not analyse although it was powerful enough to make her transfer her attention from the child to its mother.
    Unlike the child, the mother was spectacular, vivid, obtrusive. The ichor of extreme and abundant youth and fertility made its pulse felt in the sheen of her skin, the coarseness of the red hair, the limbs swimming in their layered cotton garments, the small feet bare in their black leather sandals. An air of wealth surrounded her and glinted from the gold bracelets she wore on either wrist. The incongruityof finding such a woman in charge of so plain and serious a child worried Blanche, as if the woman, by virtue of her very contemporaneity, her involvement in her own passionate and desirable present, could not possibly give the child the attention it needed, as if, in the shadow of such a mother, the child had learnt, too young, too drastically, the lesson that some are born to bask in the attention of others while some are destined for a discreet position in the half-light. While the mother’s every movement proclaimed her intense appetite for life, the child’s eyes seemed to be drawn downwards, in eternal contemplation of the elusive piece of cake, which she would not abandon until she had mastered the art of successful capture; while the mother laughed in conversation with the blonde woman on her left, and rectified her bracelets, and examined a chipped red nail, the little girl continued to ply her wavering teaspoon, an expression of perfect gravity on her face.
    What worried Blanche, in the anxiety she now felt as she followed the child’s unvarying efforts, was that the balance of life was on the wrong side here, that the vitality was invested in the mother rather than in the little girl. For an odd moment it seemed to her as if the mother were actually younger than the little girl, and she wondered if that was why she had felt so decisive a reaction when she had first identified her. It was not that her behaviour was in any way tiresome or displeasing; it was in fact a relief to find the mother of so small a child, in so gloomy a place, laughing so naturally and so confidently. What disturbed Blanche was the curiously blind and undifferentiated smile that the girl turned on everyone, as if the smile were not so much a response to the smiles of others as a function of the girl’s own progress, as she swung through the rows of chairs, her cup of tea and her cigarette held slightly outstretched, like a libation, and then Blanche saw what had given her that slight shock of recognition. The girl’s expression was thesame as the expression of those nymphs who had seemed to mock her progress through the Italian Rooms of the National Gallery on long slow April afternoons. She had the smile of a true pagan. She would operate according to the laws of the old gods rather than huddle in the mournful companionship of the fallen world.
    So disagreeable a realization – for it was stronger than an impression – caused Blanche to accuse herself of gross eccentricity. It was as if the sight of the woman and the reaction she had produced had brought out in Blanche the latent madness of which Mousie had implicitly suspected her and of which she had hitherto given no sign. The woman, or girl, for she could be no more than twenty-four or -five, had done her no harm, had addressed no word other than a request for tea, had swept her searchlight smile over Blanche’s face without ill-intent, not seeing her because she had no reason to see her, taking Blanche’s outstretched hand with the plate, the teacup, at face value, simply as commodities. It was not the effect of the