Free Undue Influence by Anita Brookner Page A

could take them back with you. Keep them here, of course. There might be some extracts that could be used …’
    ‘His book?’ I asked.
    ‘It was to be his life’s work,’ she said sadly. ‘But he waited too long. Maybe that is the way with all long-term projects. They keep one company in a reassuring kind of way. And then one day it’s too late. But he talked about it as if it were a going concern. My poor father had few diversions in his life, the shop every day, his two girls at home. My mother had died when Hester was still young. She devoted herself to me and to Father. And as you see we carry on his way of life.’
    ‘You never thought of doing something different?’
    ‘Well, there was the shop, you see. We knew he was going to leave it to us.’ She sighed. ‘And in the end we did what he wanted us to do. Girls did in those days. It’s only when you’re old, Claire, that you see how unjust this was. He didn’t want us to marry, though Hester was a beauty. You may not think so now …’
    ‘Oh, but one can see that,’ I protested, for Hester, and indeed Muriel, still impressed, despite the hearing-aid and the stick. What was appealing about Hester was her smiling eagerness, without thought of reward or reciprocity. She would appear every day with freshly-made rock cakes in a greaseproof bag and appreciate our comments, as if they were not regularly offered. Muriel was more circumspect; she was the breadwinner, after all; she was obliged to be businesslike. Though she appeared to pay it only minimal attention she kept the shop going, I had no idea what her overheads were. In any event the house in Marchmont Street was theirs. St John Collier had done that much for them, but I thought it sad that they had never moved out.
    I was also surprised that they lived, and always had lived, in Bloomsbury. To judge from St John Collier’s philosophy I had imagined them to be denizens of some leafy suburb or garden city. But I suppose that what was once an accident of geography had hardened over the years to a conviction that he was part of a ‘set’, an authentic Bloomsburian. That there was room for such people I did not doubt; not everyone had Virginia Woolf’s capacity, though whether she ever noticed him when they passed in the street, as they must have done on occasions, would have been highly unlikely. He, of course, would have raised his hat, lifted his stick, given a pleasant smile of recognition. I thought even more kindly of him, ploughing his simple furrow with unshaken belief in hisown observations. He would have taken it badly when she died.
    But by that time, in the blessed aftermath of war, he would have felt a timid hope that he too would be acknowledged as a venerable local character. Whether or not this was ever the case would not now be known. But I am sure that he had a very wide constituency of like-minded people. Simple people satisfied with a reassuring message of goodness and hope. All over the country women (and they would have been predominantly women) would open their magazines and read his page with obedient smiles. The nature articles, though more rigorous in style, might have appealed to men. They did not much appeal to me. But I too had been avid for his advice, which seemed to belong to a lost age of contentment. We were more divisive now, more fragmented. To begin with, we all worked. St John Collier’s readers were largely passive. There was another illustration which I treasured, that of a woman sitting in an elephantine armchair, her ankles neatly crossed. She is reading by the light of a standard lamp with a fringed shade. Perhaps she is reading St John Collier’s page. In any event she looks at peace with the world.
    ‘His book?’ I prompted, for Muriel had gone off into a reverie. It took her a second or two to focus on me. She is old, I thought with a tremor, but it was impossible to feel pity. Pity is for the weak, the incompetent, the unsuccessful: Muriel was none of