Free A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner

seen them for quite a while.’
    ‘As long as you don’t stay out too late,’ he said.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll be back in time for dinner.’
    But next day, in the train, she rather regretted her decision, regretted those afternoons in the sunny dusty flat, pouring tea out of a brown pot surrounded by cake crumbs. She felthomesick for the kind of pleasure she took in Tessa’s presence, which restored to her some semblance of the authority she was now about to forgo, had always forgone, in the company of her unrealistic parents, like no other parents she knew, with their flimsy frivolous tastes. In contrast to the weather of the past few days the morning was overcast, moist and heavy. As the train left Victoria she felt a qualm of nausea, her first, and wished that she had stayed at home. She had come to cherish her quiet days, now that their end was in sight. She felt a little wistful as she thought of the trials ahead of her, as if she had not yet fulfilled her quota of independent activity. About her baby she had no qualms; her baby would be perfect, and unmarked. But walking from the station she longed for a moment to have no one to go home to, to have no parents, no husband, no baby, just a day to herself, as if she were a girl again.
    They saw her before she saw them. They were on the little concrete balcony of their flat, tremendously dressed up, as if she were a real visitor. Merle wore a smart cream coat and skirt, Hughie a houndstooth jacket that was obviously new, perhaps donned for the occasion, to mark a day on which something happened. They had always thought that smart clothes formed part of their effectiveness, assumed in the teeth of occasional misgivings. Both were smoking. When she looked up, it was to see them both waving. She waved back, feeling love and something like relief. They had abandoned her lightheartedly to her fate, and she, perhaps unconsciously, had done the same, yet all had survived. And in the mere recognition of each other’s outlines—a gesture, an attitude—they knew that they were from the same mould. They loved her, it was now quite evident; they loved her now that she was gone. They loved her awkwardly, inexpertly, and with a certain regret. They were still lightweights, but now they were growing older. They seemed touched by a new seriousness;bored, and without resource in their limitless freedom, they had only their legend to fall back on and their evenings to look forward to. The days were uneventful; time sometimes dragged, was becoming a problem. All this she saw at a glance, in the smoker’s languid and somehow disillusioned motions, in the stiffness, unremarked before, of her father’s shoulders, as he shot the cuffs of his heartbreakingly new jacket. She remembered a line from
Little Dorrit
, which she had left at home, beside her bed, ‘Her father! Her father!’ as the pious heroine repeatedly refused to attend to her own interests, and Dickens himself threw up his hands in impotence. Though she felt none of this she knew that for her own father she would always retain an awful pity. Perhaps no sacrifices would be necessary—for that she had Freddie to thank—yet she knew him better than she had ever known her mother, knew him instinctively, because she had some of his own longing for childish homely ways, for soft answers, and for protection. She realized how dependent they were, and always had been, on her mother’s competence, a competence they had always taken for granted, had sometimes found too harsh. She feared for them both; saw the brittleness of the arrangement, although they did not see it themselves. She supposed that they still loved one another, although the idea seemed strange to her. The loves that lingered, that entered memory, were not the ones she would have expected. Such loves were sometimes painful, which was why, she supposed, one moved on, moved outward. Old longings were only safe when they were submerged, allowed to