Look at Me by Anita Brookner

this, and his visits to the Library were the highlight of her day: she would abandon everything to help him, struggling with folders of photographs until he would take her quite firmly by the shoulders, turn her round, and march her back to her desk. He was very sweet to her, and he brought Alix to the little party we gave her when she retired. I vaguely remember him introducing them to each other, although that was before I really knew her. I remember Nick saying, ‘Now you can do whatever you want’, and then turning away to get Alix a glass of sherry. They promised to visit her, and said they hoped to see her as often as she could put up with them, but I don’t think they ever have. And frankly, as I sit in her stuffy room, eating the bread of affliction, bread that we do not really want to share with each other, I sense their reluctance to enter this other kingdom of the shades, and I condone it.
    The ritual is pursued in its accustomed fashion. After I have told her that Nick and Alix are well (and felt uncomfortable in doing so, for though my interest in them is justified, I do not care to think of hers) I ask her about her forthcoming visit to Australia. Miss Morpeth made sensible plans for her retirement by announcing her decision to take a long trip to visit her niece in Melbourne. We all agreed that this was the best thing for her, since she had been finding the winters increasingly taxing and sometimes had difficulty in walking without a stick. After some delay the project has ripened to the point of no return, and I discuss with Miss Morpeth the best place to buy lightweight luggage, although how she is to carry anything at all I do not know. ‘I intend’, says Miss Morpeth, with the air of one yieldingto a dangerous impulse, ‘to take Nick up on his kind offer to drive me to the airport.’ ‘Of course,’ I agree. ‘He will be only too delighted.’
    After this exchange, the visit is to all intents and purposes over. I wheel the trolley back into the kitchen and insist on doing the washing up. This takes much less time to do than it takes Miss Morpeth to dry the fussy cups and arrange them on hooks in the kitchen cupboard. She never asks me how I am. She was quite kind when my mother was ill, but maybe she feels I no longer need kindness. Maybe she resents me even more profoundly than I know. I always forget that she hates being kissed goodbye until it is too late and she has drawn back in affront. I always, like a child, kiss everybody, or offer my face to be kissed, and it gives me a tiny shock when faces are turned away from me. Then I leave. Something makes me wait outside the door while the chains and locks are activated for the evening, and then I bound down the stairs with an energy made more frantic by the thought of Miss Morpeth sitting down to her usual Sunday task of writing to her niece. By the time I reckon she has placed the comma after ‘My dear Angela’, I am down four flights of stairs and halfway to the bus stop.
    For by this time I am tired of being serviceable and being sensible and I begin to resent this call on my time. I am anxious to leave Miss Morpeth, even anxious to get home. This time of the year, when the leaves drift silently down, and the nights draw in, always makes me melancholy. I think with longing of the Frasers, but I know that this is the time they like to spend together, and so I never telephone. The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is also difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.

Five
    That was how my new life started, and I was delighted with it. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that the Frasers were introducing me to, and even instigating, a form of further education from which I could not fail to benefit. I became sharper, funnier, more entertaining. I made the Library into a sort of