A Start in Life by Anita Brookner

Author:Anita Brookner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241976500
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

13

George, much to his annoyance, seemed to be going deaf in one ear. He went down to the doctor’s surgery, thinking to have some wax removed, but was met with a kind of hearty complicity he did not greatly appreciate.

‘Nothing to be done,’ said Dr Maxwell. ‘One of the penalties of getting on a bit.’ He never spoke of growing old and always pretended to be the same age as the patient he was treating.

Nevertheless, George was put out. Getting on a bit? He was no age at all, and twice the man he had been a mere two years ago. From five to six thirty every evening he took his ease in Sally’s flat, which he also liked to think of as his flat. ‘Let’s go back to the flat,’ he would say. She would cook him a little something and enjoin him to relax, as if he had performed some immense labour. The shop was left increasingly in the care of Mrs Jacobs’s sister’s boy, Roddy, who was waiting to hear if he had got a job at Sotheby’s and who would otherwise have been working as an assistant at Harrods. The arrangement pleased everyone concerned.

In Bayswater George rediscovered the delights of his youth. Mrs Jacobs behaved just like his mother. ‘You look tired,’ she would say. ‘You do far too much.’ His towelling bathrobe hung next to her own and a variety of lotions and powders had pride of place in her hitherto unsullied bathroom. Signs of his presence, actual or intended, were everywhere to be seen. In the teeth of Mrs Jacobs’s protests he had rigged up a machine for making morning tea by the side of her bed. The only time she had used it, steam had squirted out sideways, damaging the valance of her satin counterpane. Some of the furniture in the sitting room was placed on the slant because of the size of the speakers from the record player. George’s sun lamp was in the spare room and his portable grill was in the kitchen. Sally had put her foot down when she had seen him plugging it in, although the corners of her mouth had only seemed to contract with disappointment as the other items were introduced. George had taken no notice. But, ‘I do all the cooking that goes on here,’ she said. ‘You can take that back and get a credit note.’ But George had never got around to it somehow.

The delights of his youth. A little bit of smoked fish as an appetizer. Cold meat loaf and horseradish. Cucumbers in sour cream. And cheesecake, which Sally made herself, and which was so rich that he had to eat it with a spoon. And all the while he ate she would sit at the table and watch him sternly, her face propped in her hand, to see that he left nothing on his plate.

She loved to have a man to feed again. The disruption of her flat, the intrusion of

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