Look at Me by Anita Brookner Page A

serial story for Alix, for Nick had confided to me, once when we were driving down Sloane Street, that she sometimes got rather depressed and that it was up to us to divert her and to ward off those moods when she remembered Jamaica, and her father, and would sound off about the awful metal windows and the cramped kitchen of the flat off the King’s Road. But at the same time it seemed to me that Alix’s depression was of a recognizable and tolerable sort, the sort with which Nick, as a doctor who specialized in these things, should surely be able to deal. It was, essentially, a depression that could be cured, a depression that might vanish at the prospect of a new attraction or entertainment, a depression, in short, that I was inclined to reclassify as plain boredom. I knew enough about the work done at the Institute to realize that true depression, the figure of Melancholia with hertorn book, is another matter altogether. Really hopeless people do not expect miracles, nor do they manage to summon up the energy to look for them.
    In any event I kept this to myself, for I learned very quickly that I must never criticize. For happy and successful people, Nick and Alix were extraordinarily sensitive to criticism, and I learned not to look askance at her when she claimed to have come down in the world or complained of Maria or even of Nick, whose work occupied a good deal of his attention, attention which she thought should have been devoted entirely to herself. I can see now that she was not only restless but even dismayed by the lack of continuous satisfaction which her present life provided. It was for this reason that her attention seized on gossip, on intrigue, and, if none were to hand, usually through the agency of Maria, she would interrogate strangers, whom she thought looked interesting, and try to find out the central drama of their lives. We had certain discussions about this, for I maintained that dramas in a life took a long time to mature, that every life was of its essence dramatic, but that careful study was needed to perceive such dramas, either in the making or in the sad disappearance. But she insisted that I was wrong; some lives, she said, were more interesting than others, and most could be discounted. What she wanted was a drama that would last until something else claimed her attention, one that would fill an empty afternoon, or a week, or, at the very longest, a month. Her anecdotes were of a violent or sensational character, as if all the mediating information had been removed. ‘But he can’t just have dropped dead,’ I would protest, when she told me about her father, or, ‘How do you know she never spoke to him again?’ when she offered her account of Maria’s divorce. ‘Nonsense,’ she would say. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Fanny. You just don’t know whatmakes people tick. How could you, working in that place and living in that morgue?’ There was no answer to this, and after a time I would cease to contradict her. When she claimed to have talked a woman out of a suicide attempt – a woman she had encountered in the supermarket, in tears – and that this woman, after suitable advice, had gone home in a totally different frame of mind, I said nothing. What could I say? I did not doubt that her assurance and her gusto could have an inspiring effect. And, thinking of Miss Morpeth, I certainly had no victories of my own to place in the balance.
    So I learned to divert her, for, during a period when Nick was very busy and inclined to be late home, I took to making my own way over in the evenings, crossing the park in the fine autumn dusk. It was on those evenings, when I would stay with her until Nick came home, that I would tell her about the people in the Library, turning them into characters, making them broader and more extreme than I should have done had I been talking to my mother, or Olivia. As I intended, in my new life, to dispense with shadows, I made them