Dolly by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online Page B

of her two children, but by then her disappointment was so comprehensive that she expected nothing further in the way of joy or gratification, knowing that in her life she had received only the barest minimum, and regretting the days of her youth and the ways in which she had spent them, or misspent them, hanging hysterically on to her father’s arm, while he made plans to dispose of her. She was a widow who had never enjoyed being a wife, a mother whose favourite child had predeceased her. Slowly her expression changed to one of outrage as she contemplated her fate. I remember that adamantine face, menacing and pale. Although I had very little to do with her, and indeed hardly knew her, although it was not possible to feel for her the glimmerings of something so intimate as affection, I retained a sort of admiration for that hieratic face, that four-square position in the wing chair, that formal, distant, almost cold insistence that we taste the various cakes she had provided for our teatime coffee. I find the idea of her making her lonely way to Swiss Cottage, on what must have been one of the worst days of her life, immensely impressive. And I have no doubt that she dressed carefully for that short journey, and bid acquaintances good morning, and returned their condolences in as steady a voice as usual. The follies of her youth were long gone, its excesses banished for ever. Of her solitude I can hardly bear to think,although I understand it very well. My own ability to tolerate a solitary life is, I am sure, an hereditary factor: it is the way my grandmother, whose influence on my mother was notable for its absence, lives on in me.
    My other grandmother I knew even less, a fact which I did not regret since she seemed, from what I heard of her, to be slightly mad, and may even have been so, for all I know. She was a widow living in South Kensington with two small wire-haired terriers to whom she devoted all her leisure hours. She really should have been a dog breeder rather than a mother, for she felt for her son a mild affection only one degree warmer than indifference, whereas she would actually play games with the dogs, for whom she also bought expensive rubber toys. The dogs were taken out morning and afternoon for an extensive run in Hyde Park, where my tireless grandmother, dressed winter and summer in trousers, a short-sleeved blouse, and an old tweed jacket belonging to her dead husband, threw balls and sticks, shouted instructions and encouragements, and scarcely noticed the seasons changing all around her. The only thing my father seemed to have inherited from her was her love of exercise: he too was impatient unless he had the prospect of a long walk before him.
    My Manning grandmother wore an eager religious expression which it was possible to mistake for friendliness. In fact she was meditating on the universal Oneness of things and attended some institution devoted to psychic research and spiritual growth conveniently near her in Queensberry Place. Her religious exercises, which she was fortunately able to pursue while romping with the dogs, consisted of exertingthe power of love, a gospel which she never ceased to proclaim. To love everyone is a noble enterprise; unfortunately it denies one a certain faculty of discrimination. My grandmother loved everyone, whether they liked it or not. In fact very few people were aware of this love since she had very little time for friendship, and in due course knew only the people at the psychic research place, all of them as eager as herself on the occasions on which they were gathered together, and all of them putting in claims for the distinction of total transforming conviction. Very few people visited her, although she was invited out to tea by the more sociable of the believers. On such afternoons she dressed in an archaic navy blue suit, with hard shoulders and box-pleated skirt, which transformed her appearance but did not flatter it. This was a pity for she was