A Private View by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online

gratitude that there were no witnesses. I must be tired, he thought. With an effort he got up from his chair and went into the bedroom. His unopened bag still stood on the bed. He removed it, still unopened, lay down, and within minutes was asleep.

 3 
    H E AWOKE WITH A START. A VIBRATION IN THE dark room suggested either the telephone or the doorbell. He groped for his bedside clock and saw that it was four-thirty: he had slept through the entire afternoon. For a minute or two he lay on his back, wondering why he had awakened so suddenly, why in fact he had ever been asleep. The telephone was silent: he must have dreamt the noise. This period of unconsciousness alarmed him; he usually slept only at night, and then briefly, and with many interruptions. He was in the habit of leaving the radio on, enjoying the companionable voices in the peace of his own bedroom, enjoying the fact that he could simply listen and not be obliged to respond. In the course of his life many dinner parties had come his way, during which, as an eligible bachelor, and through the passageof time merely as a spare man, he had done his social duty to the best of his ability. For this reason, and no doubt for many others, unexamined, it was always a relief to return to his flat, to turn out the lights, and to listen passively to conversations which did not challenge or disturb him, and from which, swimming up from the depths of his light sleep, he could learn the occasionally interesting fact. An added bonus was that he was not required to remember such facts in the morning.
    This sleep had been different, deep and strange. He had even had a couple of dreams, which, in his experience, was unusual. In one of them he had distinctly seen his mother’s face, ironic and unfriendly, as it had appeared in her last illness, when she sat in a chair, hair and dress obscured by cigarette smoke and ash, eyes fixed on him as he attempted guiltily to read his book, a book pretentious by her standards, pretentious even by his at that date, but doing duty for a whole world which he was forbidden to enter. He had longed for her to die and had suffered ever since, had done penance for this longing, which was in fact a longing for freedom, and thus legitimate. He had been nineteen at the time, his heart swollen with grief and pity for this ruined woman, who, he thought, loved him as little as he loved her. He had done his best, perhaps better than a nineteen-year-old could be expected to do; he had been there at the end. Therefore the memory of her unsympathetic gaze had been deeply unwelcome, a reminder of times past. The other dream was more fragmentary, had been both trivial and vivid: a street somewhere, which he must once have known but now could not place, glimpsed in the silence of a suburban afternoon.
    Of the two dreams, which, together with their attendant associations, had flashed past his inward eye in the space of less than a minute, it was the second which stayed with him as an after-image and seemed imprinted on his retina. Everything—the weather, the time of day—was present: it had seemed to him to be about four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Only the location of the street was imprecise, and in a sense irrelevant. He had walked down such streets in his youth, when he was anxious to restore peace to his soul after enduring the quarrelsome company, if it was company, of his parents for any length of time. A Sunday would have provided such an interval, since a large lunch was eaten in the middle of the day. He had been reduced to whiling away the blank afternoons until sheer weariness forced him home. But the second dream, though connecting with the first inasmuch as both took him back to adolescent hurts and soulfulness (was such a period of his life never to be over?), had seemed to contain later material, as if the suburban street were some sort of ideal far removed from his actual and extremely metropolitan setting, which by comparison—and all