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

mysteries of love … Alfred, stern and unbendingly dutiful, inspires these feelings in a whole range of women, from Frederick’s motherly secretary to one or two of Sofka’s friends. All are careful to censor their reactions, allowing themselves only an anxious smiling concern for his condition. Alfred is preoccupied by his condition and therefore does not notice the range of female sensibilities to which he has access. When he is a little older, this imperviousness will drive women to unwise acts and statements, which they will later regret.
    It is in any event the peach-like face and the silky hair of Nettie which form Alfred’s unique wish for the company of a woman other than his mother or his elder sister. But he thinks of Nettie not as a woman, although at nearly sixteen she is all the woman she will ever be, but as a child, that beautiful over-excited over-tired child with eyes black as black glass, her head thrown back, her arms extended, as he tried to dance with her at that long-ago wedding and at two weddings since then. She always seemed to be straining after life in a way that troubled him, for he could imagine nothing better than to stay as he had been, as they had been. With his mother there to care for him and with Nettie to love, Alfred’s dream is crystallized, and in a curious way this dream will survive unmodified throughout his adult life. It seems to Alfred that there are two kinds of love: the one that cares for your welfare, your food, your comfort, and the one that engages your wildest dreams and impulses. At this blessedpoint in his life, still in childhood, Alfred possesses both types of love, sacred and profane. He will grieve for such plenitude for ever after.
    To Alfred Sofka is quite simply a deity, one who bends her cool lips to his hot cheek or smooths the hair from his forehead when she thinks he has been reading too much. She is the one whose disapproval he would do anything to avoid and whose pain he would burn to avenge. He knows no one as beautiful as Sofka, with a beauty that does not disturb, a beauty always smiling, never challenging, implying caresses of the kind that lull a child to sleep. Even his beloved sister Mimi would do better, thinks Alfred, to follow Sofka in this respect, for Mimi, although good as gold, is also young and he senses in her an innocent stirring which to him spells corruption. It is the love that knows no questing and no conclusion that appeals to Alfred, and he does not yet know that he will not find it on this earth, for he thinks that he has found it in Sofka. And Sofka treats him like the man he has been forced to become. As he departs for the factory every morning, Sofka, in her Japanese silk
peignoir
, stands at the door to embrace him; she smooths his forehead once more, and hands him his newspaper, sending him off to the Westminster Bridge Road with his head held high, able to forget for a moment the grim day that lies ahead, in his pride at joining the community of the world’s workers, in the knowledge that a loving and admiring woman will be waiting for him when he returns. In this way he experiences that good conscience that others never find, perhaps never look for. And when the door closes behind him, he knows that his mother will devote her morning to the grave and seemly pursuits of good housekeeping, and when he returns in the evening, tired with the unnatural tiredness of a young man grappling with an antipathy which he cannot overcome, he knows thatSofka will have prepared for him the minced veal cutlet and the soft fruit pudding called
Kissel
that he prefers. He does not yet know that his antipathy is the price of his good conscience, and that in later life, bewildered by his inability to find further happiness, he will be reaping the reward of that antipathy and that good conscience, for having overcome that early hurdle he finds himself suspicious of those who take life more easily, and having wrestled the enemy of his boyhood to