Free The Rules of Engagement by Anita Brookner

splendour of Edmund's surroundings and activities, the lithe bodies of his children supplementing his own, as if they were a different race, and inhabited a different atmosphere to our own, to Digby's and mine, and now, tiresomely, to my mother's. Until she sat down, glass of whisky to hand, and started unloading her dire observations for my instruction, I had not actively minded our uneventful summer. Both Digby and I were preoccupied and did not converse much, yet there was a kind of harmony in our silence, and I had felt the faintest inkling of a distaste for Britten Street and a recognition that honourable behaviour does impress one and convince one of its validity. Yet, of course, as soon as I perceived this the counter-argument became active, and I was ready to issue hot denials of the importance of dignity and gratitude in human affairs and to claim rights that would in any case be rendered obsolete by age and infirmity. In this I was very much of my time, since women had long discovered the euphoria of protest, possibly because their own mothers, like mine, were uttering dire warnings, shaking their heads at the heedlessness of youth, willing younger people to observe their own constraints, without success. There was an envy there, which daughters perhaps intuited before their mothers did, and it served to sour relations for a time. Certainly I did not intend to compare myself with my mother, whose hand had once again crept to her sunken cheek. I willed my own hand to remain in my lap. Had I been alone I should have run to a mirror to make sure that my appearance was unchanged.
    After weeks of blank and grateful sleep I had begun to dream again, and I had had two dreams that seemed oddly baleful, as dreams do when they linger in the mind. In the first I had been persuaded that all the lights in the flat had failed, and that I must remember to ask the caretaker to check the fuses. I was aware that I was dreaming this, that it was the middle of the night, and that I must telephone the caretaker as early as possible the following morning, yet the image of the lightless flat was so convincing that I actually got out of bed and went to the bathroom, where the light worked normally. I could hardly reassure myself by switching on the lights in the other rooms, spent perhaps a couple of minutes looking out of the window on to the silent street, and then got back into bed, where I immediately, or so it seemed, had another dream. This took place in a notional daytime, on a sunny afternoon much like the afternoons I had been used to spending in the garden. This time, in the dream, I was in South Kensington, not far from Melton Court, and about to enter a café , where Edmund was already seated. He appeared not to know me, but this disturbed me less than the fact that his hair had turned white. I could make no sense of this, for Edmund seemed to be guaranteed protection from age, until I realized that it was not Edmund who had turned white but Digby.
    “ And Digby looks terrible, ” said my mother, intruding into my mental landscape. “ Are you sure you're looking after him? ” “ He gets tired, ” I said lamely.
    “ He works very hard, too hard. I think he's quite looking forward to retirement. ” Though what I should do when he was at home all day I had not yet worked out.
    My mother's hand was at her face again. “ He couldn't remember my name, ” she said, in genuine alarm. “ He called me Helen. ”
    “ Helen was the name of his first wife, ” I told her, though this made me sad. “ You must have reminded him of her. ”
    She smiled, with her new lopsided smile, as if this were some kind of compliment. Yet some instinct moved her to get to her feet and make noises of departure. She was staying at the Basil Street Hotel, where my wedding reception had taken place, and she was anxious to be re-absorbed into its benign atmosphere, after revealing too much, and indeed learning too much, in the course of the