A Misalliance by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online Page A

girl’s indifference that alerted Blanche (for why should she not be indifferent?) so much as the girl’s lack of sadness at seeing her child in these surroundings. Blanche, who was used to Miss Elphinstone’s pursed lips as she strove to conceal her disappointment when she found a stray empty bottle, could detect sorrow, could detect it a mile off, could detect it even in Mrs Duff, met on the bus or in the street, eyes widening in sympathy as she registered Blanche’s stately and disarming progress, her elaborate stratagems for going nowhere in particular, could detect it in Barbara, with her laconic telephone calls. The gift of compassion is born in one or not at all; the artificial commodity, assumed or advertised, misses too many clues. Compassion acquired later in life might have murmured over the plight of the little girl; it would not have registered the odd dimension of the deep and unfettered optimism – almost a secret – of the mother.
    Taking herself further to task, Blanche wondered why the mother should not be optimistic. The child did not seem in any way endangered, did not even look ill. Only her gravity was unnatural, and her silence; Blanche now realized that she had not made a sound. As the room emptied, and Blanche came from behind the counter to collect the empty cups, she hovered near the couple, curious to absorb more of their signals. The mother continued to smile, to smoke, to glance at her watch: evidently an appointment had been missed or had not been kept. Her eyes did not at any time engage Blanche but continued their sunny progress over tattered magazines or through the contents of her large shoulder bag. Several times she got up and went to the telephone in the corner to make a call. She gave the impression of being not so much in a hospital as in some sort of transit area. Her mild impatience, as she checked her watch, added to the suggestion that she was in an airport lounge. She looked ready to fly off at any moment; the child might have been brought along to say goodbye. The idea that it was the younger of the two who was the more grown-up deepened, as Blanche, lingering by the table, gazed into the little girl’s face and found in it the entirely responsible expression of a tiny adult.
    ‘I’m afraid she must be getting tired,’ she said to the mother.
    The girl laughed. ‘Well, now we’re here, we might as well stay,’ she said. ‘We were a bit late and they told us we’d got out of order and had to come back next week. But I know the doctor; he’ll see us if I can catch him.’
    ‘She doesn’t seem to be at all ill,’ said Blanche.
    ‘She isn’t. She’s perfectly fine, aren’t you, Nellie?’
    ‘Nellie? That’s an unusual name, these days.’
    ‘She’s called Elinor. And
I
don’t think there’s anything wrong with her. It’s just that she doesn’t speak,’ said the mother, turning away to light another cigarette.
    The implications of this statement registered less with Blanche than the fact that the child’s name was Elinor and that it suited her. She was well dressed, although her clothes were cheap, cheaper than those of her mother.
    ‘Was that nice?’ she whispered to the child, taking away the plate with the still unfinished morsel of cake on it.
    Sitting back, and placing her hands in the pockets of her anorak, the child nodded. So she was not deaf, Blanche thought.
    ‘Is she your only child?’ she asked, falling back on trusted formulae, aware of a need to know more.
    ‘Well, she’s not really mine,’ said the girl. ‘Her mother died when she was a month old. And then I married her father and took them both on.’ She laughed, as if at the enormity of this, eluding or abolishing all the information that might have been included and was not.
    Blanche felt humbled by evidence of such rapid thinking, such careless experience, such lack of hesitancy. There was no evidence in the girl of painful decisions, painfully arrived at: she acted as if such