A Start in Life by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online Page A

shan’t see you until Wednesday,’ she told Anthea. ‘I’m not coming in tomorrow.’
    ‘He’s not coming for the whole day, is he? You’d do better to leave everything until the last moment. What are you going to wear?’
    ‘That blouse of my grandmother’s and my tapestry skirt.’
    ‘Not bad. Too elaborate, of course. You’ll look as if you’re dressing up for him.’
    ‘Well, I am,’ said Ruth humbly.
    ‘For God’s sake,’ cried Anthea in exasperation. ‘Why do you have to let everything show?’
    At least, Ruth consoled herself, I have no manipulative powers. These, she knew, constituted the quality that distinguished the villains from the virtuous. Yet why, she thought, did Balzac take such a delight in Bette’s terrible stratagems? She decided to postpone thinking about this until she had more time.
    Richard was due at eight o’clock on Tuesday evening. Ruth woke at her habitual early hour of six and wondered how she was going to fill the day. With anticipation, naturally. That is how most women in love fill their day. Frequently the event anticipated turns out to be quite dull compared with the mood that preceded it. The
onus for redeeming the situation rests on the other person who is, of course, in no position to know of the preceding mood. Thus both fail and both are disappointed.
    In the morning, which was bright but charged with steamy cloud, she went for a walk in the cemetery to calm her mind. For a little while it worked. There was no one there but the gardener and an old man with a young child: they took small steps, their heads down, all the time in the world to spare. A rank, growth of a loose purple flowering weed flowed over the graves, binding them together in a common fate. It seemed hard on the newly dead not to be able to join the others beneath the flourishing undergrowth. Vaguely deterred by the absence of a religious edifice, which would somehow give the whole excursion a weight which it presently lacked, Ruth turned homewards at half past ten and made herself a cup of coffee. The rest of the morning could be taken up with deciding where to buy the chicken. And perhaps a bunch of flowers.
    She got out her notes on Racine and contemplated the plight of the stricken (but ageing) Phèdre. ‘
Oui, prince, je languis, je brûle pour Thésée.
’ Professor Wyatt would read out that verse with a telling pause before the last two words, thus revealing Phèdre’s substitution of her husband’s name for that of the young man, Hippolyte, for whom she burns and languishes. Hippolyte, whose mind is occupied by ‘la jeune Aricie’, a suitable virgin of good family, is devoured by a sea monster as he rushes along the shore in his chariot. Richard on his bicycle, thought Ruth, although she always envisaged the episode as one of those monumental and frightening beach scenes by Picasso, showing mammoth figures with inflated arms bowling slowly along a strip of sand: a sense of nightmare behind the comedy. She did not really care for Hippolyte, she decided, although Phèdre was enough to put anyone off. The combination of outraged and
thwarted sensuality and priggish inviolability (Hippolyte is a ward of the goddess Diana) seemed to her avoidable, given a little goodwill on both sides. ‘As you grow older, you will come to see this as a paradigm of middle-aged love,’ said Professor Wyatt. ‘All you have to decide at the moment is whether the vengeance wrought is brought about by the old gods of antiquity or the new and punitive God of the Jansenists.’ This was what she now tried to do.
    But she was restless. And even rather unhappy. The break in her routine, occasioned by her extreme dedication to the idea of the god-like Richard was, she knew, wrong, not sensible, doomed, in fact. But it was appropriate that she should spend the day alone for the very strength of her feelings had already removed her from normal contact, and certainly from normal conversation. But how very sad it was to