Leaving Home by Anita Brookner

Author:Anita Brookner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307431363
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

11

A LETTER FROM FRANÇOISE BROUGHT NEWS OF A SORT: I could no longer write to her flat in the Boulevard Diderot because it had been repossessed and she could not trust the landlord (in effect the repossessor) to forward her mail. For the moment she was at her mother’s house, on holiday, but this situation could not continue. She wondered whether I intended to retain my hotel room, for which I paid by the month, or whether she might use it until she found an alternative. Perhaps, if I were coming to Paris, she could meet me and discuss this. Also, she added, almost as an afterthought, could I keep the last weekend in September free? Her mother was giving a small lunch party, and they would both like me to be present.

This letter struck me as odd for several reasons. It heralded a redistribution of living space with which I had barely come to terms on my own account, almost forcing me to decide whether or not to return to Paris. I did not see why Françoise should not make her own arrangements, until I remembered how fatalistic she was in some respects, always preferring the quick and easy solution. This had been the case in the Boulevard Diderot: the flat had been borrowed from a departing friend, and she had simply stayed on until the friend stopped paying the rent. She may or may not have had the money to put this haphazard arrangement on to a proper basis; this was always a difficult matter to discuss. Clearly my hotel room would present the same rent-free advantages, particularly if I took my time in coming to a decision. And to be fair I had given no sign of forward planning, although she knew that I should have to collect my remaining possessions at some point. My immediate priority was to find a flat in London, but I had not entirely renounced my hotel room, keeping it as a useful pied-à-terre, at least for the foreseeable future, until I had checked all my references and had more or less finished my work.

As the Ancients knew, luxury weakens both the body and the resolve. The flat in which I had grown up, and which I knew so well, was by no means luxurious but its comforts were insidious and in any case habitual; I took for granted the fact that everything was in place and that if I moved out I should have to start again from nothing. At the same time there was the threat of a permanent invasion from Rob, in comparison with which bare floorboards and uncurtained windows would be a small price to pay. My room in Paris was after all only a temporary expedient. What had begun as a romantic adventure (but had never become one) was no longer invested with its original aura. By this reckoning there was no reason why Françoise should not move in, at least until she had decided what to do.

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