The Debut by Anita Brookner

Author:Anita Brookner [Brookner, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

THAT had been three weeks ago. Since then she had got used to shutting up her books in the Bibliothèque Nationale at five sharp so that she could clock in in time for her bath, had even got used to Humphrey’s observing her through a crack in the bathroom door. The evenings were long, that was the only thing. The mazy pleasures of Paris distracted her in the daytime, and besides, there was so much to do: so much work, so much French to be spoken, meals to be eaten in the brasserie round the corner, books to be bought. In the evenings, though, she did not always feel like reading. Bursts of foggy music from the cinema next door signaled the beginning and end of the performances; high heels tapping along the corridor announced the return home of her neighbors, whom she had never met. She felt too humble to buy a radio.

One endless Sunday she went to the Louvre. She made the classic promenade down the Champs Elysées, through the Tuileries to the Square Court, where children were wheeling about on their bicycles, and because she was reluctant to leave the still-warm air, over the Pont des Arts and up the rue Bonaparte to the Luxembourg. There she sat, becalmed, going only to a café in the Place Saint-Sulpice for a sandwich some time after half past one. Dahlias blazed in the flower beds of the Luxembourg Gardens; when the gardeners removed them winter would have begun in earnest. The long straight paths were now thick with fallen leaves for it had been a very dry summer. An ancient invalid sun came out briefly to warm her iron chair but was soon vanquished by the haze obscuring the gray-blue sky. The easy days were over.

She wandered back to the museum, although the light was no longer good. She was indifferent to most of what she saw until she came to the Flemish primitives, with their immaculate pain and sorrow, their thoughtful grieving little heads, their chilly, pallid Christs deposed, as it were, into the unhelpful climate of northern Europe. She paid a duty visit to the early nineteenth-century galleries and was bemused, as always, by the sheer size of everything: giant figures enmeshed with one another, toiling toward rescue after shipwreck, toward liberty after oppression, toward Paris after Moscow; never would they find peace or be reconciled to their proper dimensions. At a country funeral stretching down a considerable expanse of one wall, a woman wiped her eyes with a handkerchief the size of a small tablecloth. A noble Roman, turning his back on his dead sons, twisted enormous and imperfect feet to demonstrate his anguish. In front of what she considered to be a vaguely improper allegory of Endymion being embraced by a moonbeam, she saw two youngish people convulsed with laughter. The laughter seemed to her not French; it contained the agonized excesses and repressions of English school life. She moved closer to the couple: a man and a girl.

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