Family and Friends by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online Page A

addition to all this, Frank Cariani is a very handsome man. For Betty, the idea that Mimi might see him naked before she herself does is simply not to be borne.
    Betty’s plan is to acquiesce to the finishing school idea, to suggest that Frederick accompany her as far as Paris, and that he then put her on the train to Lausanne. Knowing Frederick and his habits, she will be able to dissuade him from seeing her to the Gare de Lyon, since she has behaved so beautifully during their brief stay at the Hôtel Bedford et West End, not screaming, not demanding to drink champagne, not wearing outrageous clothes. Having said goodbye to Frederick, Betty will lie low for a couple of days until she knows him to have left Paris. She will then – and this is the difficult part – wait for Frank Cariani to join her. She has the better part of nine hundred pounds, she is quite fearless, she believes in their future as the highest-paid character dancers in Paris, and Frank is a simple fellow who is very tired of living under his father’s thumb. He tells himself that once he has established himself as a reputable name in the entertainment world he can always go home and find Mimi again. Mimi is not the type of girl who will, or indeed, can, do anything independently. But Betty knows that her mission in life is to be a woman who prevents men from staying with their virgin loves, and she is eager to embark on this career.
    On the day of Betty’s departure for her school in Clarins, Sofka weeps as if she is saying goodbye to her for ever. Betty weeps too. There is a kind of random sorrow in Betty that guides her roughly to the inner meaning of these occasions. While the chauffeur loads the suitcases into the car, Betty embraces her mother and her sister. Only Alfred refuses to relax in her arms and turns his cheek stiffly for her kiss. Then the car moves off, veryslowly, with a handkerchief fluttering at the window. On the street, Sofka, her own handkerchief quite soaked, suddenly grips Mimi by the hand, draws her to her side, and drops her head for a moment on to Mimi’s shoulder. Mimi, surprised, smooths her mother’s cheek. Sofka alone knows that she has sacrificed one daughter in order to keep the other.

4

    ‘D EAR NETTIE ,’ writes Alfred, aged sixteen. ‘I hope you are well and happy. Thank you for your postcard showing the lake at sunset. It looks very pretty.’
    Alfred sucks his pen and stares out of the window. He is not good at writing letters, perhaps because he is already very good at hiding his feelings. This he needs to do because he imagines his emotions to be so violent that they constitute a danger to others. His feelings are basically a love for Sofka and Mimi, a growing dislike of Frederick whom he sees as idle and flippant, decamping from his office in order, so he says, to give Alfred a taste of being in charge (at sixteen!), and sheer unbridled hatred of Betty, a response that surprises him, and which is in itself rather interesting. Alfred’s purity reacts instinctively to another’s impurity; what he feels for Betty is not in fact hatred but disgust. Alfred senses about Betty, when she passes him, a sharpish odour, the acid sweat of a true redhead, which makes him grit his teeth. In this way, and for this reason, he will always be resistant to the odours of women, shocking them sometimes by a very slight movement of recoil when they bend to kiss him. For this reason too he will only be accessible to a woman whom he recognizes as akin to himself, or to a woman so artificially fragrant that he does not sense her real presence.
    Alfred’s heavy burden of feeling, his purity, and his scorn have added a lowering quality to his handsome face which makes him doubly attractive to certain types of women, usually older women. He is perhaps Hippolytus to their Phaedra, and they look at his tall slim body, his long eyelashes, and the compressed line of his red lips and wonder how it would be to initiate him into the