Undue Influence by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online Page A

left alone to admire, I felt a vague residualdistaste. I did not know how long I was supposed to stand there (for it seemed to me impossible to sit down) and the muted conversation which I could hear coming from another room activated some primitive memory of earlier overheard intimacies.
    The light was dim. A couple of opaline lamps supplied what there was; there was no ceiling rose. At home we had been lit by a plain chandelier, for which the word was if anything complimentary: three unadorned wooden arms supported bulbs in parchment shades. This too had given a bad light; my mother’s and father’s reading lamps had supplied the rest. Here I was conscious of light being deliberately excluded. Everything had a high finish. It was warm and silent. I searched for the source of this warmth but could see no radiators. The marble fireplace held a steel grate filled with dyed blue hydrangeas. This struck me as the only artificial element in this nightmare interior in which everything was designed in relation to everything else.
    I began to wish that I were out in the street, enjoying, if that is the word, one of my solitary walks. I reckoned that Martin Gibson had no business to leave me standing there while he pursued some conversation in another room. From what I could overhear this conversation was muted but enthusiastic, the sort of tone adopted in a sickroom. So I was not wrong about the illness, I thought. There was a sense of a conspiracy that left me attending vaguely on the sidelines, a mere spectator, or rather auditor. And yet I had no other role. The role that was assigned to me I had devised for myself. Martin Gibson, whom I had admired in the shop, seemed now to be reduced to a sort of servant, emptied of substance by a wife who was somehow impotent, laid up; his manhood, such as it was, would be subsumed by her needs. I felt sorry for him, but mypity was edged with irritation; this was the kind of call I was bound to answer. I saw myself as Potiphar’s wife, embracing a reluctant Joseph, and felt the sort of reprehensible excitement to which I was prone. I knew my character was poor, that I could lay claim to few moral qualities. In these moments I thought of my mother, her artlessness, her careful days in the belted smock, copying from the model, and the sadness that her friend’s wedding had occasioned. I knew that such simplicity was beyond my reach, let alone my grasp. That was why, at the age of twenty-nine, I stood in a stranger’s room calculating my chances.
    When Martin Gibson returned his face showed a certain animation. ‘Cynthia, my wife, would like to meet you,’ he said. ‘If you are not in a hurry do come and say hello.’ He lowered his voice. ‘She sees so few people these days. She says her illness has driven all her friends away. So when she hears a strange voice …’
    ‘I’m sorry your wife is ill,’ I said. ‘What is the matter with her?’
    When I looked back on this remark I found it intolerably crude. Though plain it was evidently unanswerable, for Martin Gibson, who was, I noted, still wearing his chalk-striped suit, looked as if this were the one question that no one in their right mind would have thought appropriate.
    ‘Her heart,’ he said. ‘And her nerves, of course. Poor darling.’
    I wanted to hear more, but little more was to be vouchsafed. I thought of one of the books my mother had insisted I read, about a man with an ailing wife. My mother had thought it a masterpiece; I had not. This had disappointed her. ‘It’s not the saddest story ever told,’ I protested. ‘Why was he so helpless?’ She had smiled. ‘It is circumstances that make us helpless,’ shereplied, and I saw that she was looking back to her own past years of incarceration. I said nothing after that, but my dislike for the story increased, and has remained.
    I followed Martin Gibson along a corridor and into a bedroom lit by more opaline lamps, but more brightly. I hardly had time to register