Dolly by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online Page A

for very long. I am sure that Toni hoped to draft her future son-in-law into residence in Maresfield Gardens, but my mother and my father were to be adamant on this point. ‘Very well,’she said finally, when this matter was settled. ‘But don’t expect me to visit you. Where did you say? Prince of Wales Drive? Somewhere in south London, isn’t it? Too far for me. But if you have decided …’ She heaved a pathetic sigh. I imagine that at this point she had begun to feel her age. My mother was thirty when she married, which makes Toni seventy-three at the time. She was in good health but moved around very little. My father’s attitude was simple. He saw that no real affection bound Toni to her daughter, and therefore he felt only a very slight affection for Toni. He recognised her for what she was, a selfish and resilient woman. He had disliked the atmosphere at Maresfield Gardens, the hawklike profiles raised enquiringly from the coffee cups. He thought the ambience perfervid, haunted by the ghost of Freud and other Viennese associations. Even the conjunction of the Berggasse and Maresfield Gardens was, he thought, too apt, too prompt, too symbolic to be a mere accident: no good could come of it. He regarded my mother’s innocence as all but miraculous. By comparison Prince of Wales Drive seemed sane, rational, uneventful. They could walk in Battersea Park, which they could see from their windows. And so it was to be. Toni kept her word: she rarely visited them. They, for their part, were enjoined to visit her in Maresfield Gardens. This arrangement continued, at increasingly lengthy intervals, until her death, by which time her legendary indifference to her daughter had reasserted itself.
    One visit to us I do remember. I must have been small, watching from a window. I was drawn to the window by the ticking of the cab, a sound which still draws me to the window today. My grandmother stepped heavily from the taxi,planting one foot in front of her and slowly disengaging the other. She was wearing a bright blue suit which fitted her rather too closely: she had put on weight and was very conscious of it, although she remained an impressive looking woman. She was carrying a cake from some Swiss Cottage bakery, the reason, no doubt, for her increasing girth: she was never to lose her sweet tooth. She raised her head and saw me at the window. Her brief wintry smile hardly disturbed her morose features which were tremendously bedizened with make-up: lipstick, blusher, eye-shadow, all chosen to bring out the blue of her still startling eyes. Her hair was dyed a defiant apricot. She looked as if she owed her appearance to an entire morning spent in front of her dressing-table mirror, and all to see my mother, of whom she was not particularly fond, and the grandchild whom she watched carefully but did not fondle. Whether she had hopes for me or not I never knew, but I think she pitied my mother for her tepid existence, for never having known the hothouse love she had known as a girl in Vienna. At that stage, in her old age, she had come to realise that that love had held an element of parody, even of tragedy; her failure to captivate her father stayed with her, as did the image of Frau Zimmermann, watchful in the background. In the recesses of her infant mind she had always known of their liaison, known it imperfectly, but known nevertheless. Her ultimate lack of fulfilment she attributed rightly to this period in her life.
    We visited her, in Maresfield Gardens, after Hugo’s death. She sat in a chair, apparently turned to stone. Her face was thickly powdered, but her lips and eyes were pale: tears,which we were not to witness, had obliterated all the colours. There was something reproachful in her attitude which I only later came to understand. Hugo’s death had made her not only sad but bitter, as if it were inevitable that the men in her life should let her down. In her heart I think she knew that my mother was the better