A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner Page B

will.’
    ‘Okay. Keep well. Bye.’
    So I did send the change of address cards, she thought, as she replaced the receiver. I thought I did. I must have been out when Tessa called. Oh well, never mind. I’ll stay at home for a bit. It will do me no harm.
    ‘Dawn,’ she said. ‘I think we might go out this evening. I don’t feel like cooking.’
    ‘Good idea,’ said Dawn cheerfully. ‘I’ll do the ironing, shall I?’
    Such a pleasant girl, thought Harriet. More my own type, was what she really thought. Pamela always had that effect on her.
    ‘You’re looking pretty,’ said Freddie, breaking a roll. In fact she was not; her face was too thin, her eyes too big. He loved her diffidently, although he could never quite say so. Her unhappiness, he thought, was due more to moral than to physical upheaval. All he could do was ease her through it. No doubt she would want to give parties for her friends as soon as she was back to normal. But whereas his own friends always found her delightful, he saw that she would be in some ways inadequate when faced with another kind of hierarchy. Contact with her own friends brought on, or left behind, a complex of feelings which made her look older than her years. He resented anyone or anything that took away her youthfulness, which was to him unique, not to be compared with that of her contemporaries, whom, he thought, she did not resemble. He wished to bestow on her calmness and good order, and sighed inwardly at the thought of all the changes she must undergo, and he with her. At this rate I shan’t be able to retire, he thought, although the idea attracted him. All his travelling had been done when he was in the forces, or away on business. He would have liked to explore different worlds, at his leisure. India appealed to him, Malaysia. Without the child he could have afforded to take things a little more easily. They could have followed the sun: the West Indies in winter, Greece in the spring, and summers in a house they might even have bought in the country, or near the coast. He was a discreetly wealthy man, and none of Harriet’s current expenditure seriously inconvenienced him,but he could see that it was not making her happy. And he had always had a desire to see the autumn leaves in Vermont, or Canada. He sighed again at the prospect before him: unremitting work, and short trips on Concorde.
    ‘Very pretty,’ he said.
    ‘You never speak of Helen,’ said Harriet. She felt on edge, ready to provoke, and at the same time ashamed of herself.
    ‘I never think of her,’ he replied, although he did, remembering her harsh hilarity, her frequent jibes at his cautious manners. The differences between his first wife and his second were so profound, and at the same time so obvious, that he did not see how he could ever explain them to her. Hearing in his mind’s ear Helen’s laughter in the bedroom—and it was always that laughter, or more properly speaking the cruelty of that laughter—he wished to spare them both what to him had been almost constant humiliation. A marvellous hostess, of course; her household was impeccable, her dinner parties brilliant. ‘Without me you’d be nowhere,’ she had flung at him. ‘You’d have no friends at all if I didn’t attract them.’ He thought she was probably right. But he had found the task of living up to her onerous and increasingly uncomfortable. After Helen, Harriet had had the appeal of disembodied kindness, of timidity allied to the desire to please. He had felt himself gently released from the restrictions and the disruptions of his earlier marriage. He knew that he did not make Harriet happy, but tended to disregard this. Happiness was what young people wanted; at his age he knew that comfort was more important. He had made her comfortable, and in that he was prepared to take a grim pride. After all, nobody else had done as much. He had no regrets, no misgivings: at least, he would have said as much a few months ago.