Latecomers by Anita Brookner

Author:Anita Brookner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141959559
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

9

‘Harrods,’ murmured Christine in a broken voice. ‘All over Harrods. Every department. And she wasn’t even all that tired at the end of it. At least, not as tired as I was. And I wasn’t doing anything except watch her. Or accompany her. I was her lady-in-waiting.’

Fibich smiled. He was fond of his wife in this mood: flippant, independent, viable. He liked to share with her his absorption in the Hartmanns, both of whom he perceived as stronger, superior, not for any genuine reasons but because they had a fearlessness, even an obtuseness, that made them more successful at life’s game. Indeed, the very fact that Hartmann thought of life as a game, and, moreover, a game that could be won, intrigued and at the same time incapacitated Fibich. By the same token, his wife, although a genuinely good woman, whose qualities he had known and relied upon since he was a boy without a home, was somehow less effective a presence than Yvette whose massive complacency did a great deal to reassure him. When Yvette scolded him for not eating something oppressively complicated he felt an odd gratitude to her for acting in so commanding a fashion. Whereas Christine, hovering anxiously by his side while he took his first taste of a carefully bland concoction, put him in mind of a nurse, or a governess, appointed to supervise him, but not necessarily to give him pleasure. He knew that he could have married no one else. He knew that he loved her. Yet he also knew, in an unrealized way, that his true life lay elsewhere, that it remained undiscovered, that his task was to reclaim it, to repossess it, and that for as long as it remained hidden from him he would be a sleepwalker, doomed to pass through a life designed for him by others, with no place he recognized as home. Increasingly, what he felt was a kind of homesickness, although he could not have explained this.

In the meantime this would have to do, this hazy blue flat, always in half shadow, always encountered by him with a start of surprise. And this anxious, sometimes dolorous wife. And the extravagant son who had somehow been foisted on them and who was the main reason, he thought, for his wife’s silence and withdrawal. They had not really discussed the son, whom they suspected of ignominy: each wanted to preserve, for a little longer, the peace of his absence, which would soon come to an end. Only one more term at Oxford, and then the question of his future would have to take a more definite, a more practical form. With a heavy heart Fibich realized that he could offer no guidance, or none that Toto would respect. And, to be honest, he felt in such need of a compass himself, so ardently desirous of an explanation, that practical suggestions died on his lips. There was also a curious reluctance to have the boy back in the flat,

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