Brief Lives by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online Page B

I thought they looked too old for me and longed to buy something cheap and pretty. So the sad thing was that I occasionally made excuses when she telephoned me or I telephoned her—I was always theoretically preparing for a dinner party—and when she asked me, as she always did, what I was going to wear, and I said, ‘My green silk,’ she would say, with surprise in her voice, ‘I don’t know that, do I? I don’t know half your clothes now. Do let’s get together soon. I’ll come over and bring a cake, and we’ll have a really good talk.’ ‘Lovely,’ I would say, but when we met there was a tiny constraint between us. ‘Are you happy?’ she would say. ‘That’s all that counts.’ ‘Of course,’ I would reply. But there was too much heartiness, too much airiness, too much flippancy in my attitude for Millie’s taste. She knew otherwise, and she was never wrong. She knew before I did.
    I would escape from the house, which I hated, and take long walks, but Gertrude Street, which is a handsome street, filled with handsome houses, merely feeds into other streets exactly like itself. It is also treeless and sees practically no traffic since it is closed at one end by a long low building the purpose of which I never discovered. Every time I left the house my spirits, already low, would be further lowered by the emptiness and the silence, and I would hurry round the corner to the place where the buses stopped to change drivers and look longingly at the small café with the steamy windows where the crews went for their tea. In memory I see those walks of mine as eternally overcast, under a white sky. The meagre light and the occasional whine of a car on its way to somewhere more interesting oppressed me almost as much as the house had done,and after a half-hearted excursion to the shops to buy something that was not really needed I would hear my footsteps ringing out as I turned back into Gertrude Street. Those eternal winter afternoons, when Owen was away in the sun, stretched before me in an endless progression; there was something implacable about their changelessness, and about my own despair. I had always been so lighthearted, but now I seemed to sigh a lot, and even to feel unwell. The headaches, announced so dramatically that first day in Vinnie’s flat, had become a regular feature of my life, and I had frequently to sit at my own dinner table unobtrusively pushing food about my plate and smiling at Jack or Molly or their equivalent with a pulse beating behind my eyes and a feeling of nausea in my throat.
    When Mother, whom I still visited regularly, asked me if I were happy I replied instantly and warmly that of course I was. She knew the truth of the matter, as did Millie. But I did not. That was another strange thing. As far as I was concerned I still loved my husband, and I think, even at this distance, that I really did. Owen never failed me, in his limited fashion, but his requirements were too formal, too impersonal, to satisfy my hopes. He wanted me to remain the devoted and humble girl that I had been when he first married me, and in my heart I was. But I was older now, old enough to be tired, and while I had been getting older and more tired. (I who had never been tired before) the world seemed to be getting younger. We were told that we had never had it so good, and the greater part of the nation seemed to think that this was the simple truth. But I noticed that the new frenetic music had put an end to the pretty songs which I used to sing and which only old people now seemed to remember. I suppose I had always sung for a staid and settled population, modest people for whom listeningto the wireless was treat enough at the end of a working day, or housewives and mothers at home. They were songs of love and longing, all kept in decorous perspective and proportion. I did not understand the shouting and enthusiasm of the new music or its lack of charm. I had no piano in Gertrude Street, and when I