Free Look at Me by Anita Brookner Page A

which they are supposed to gain a strength to live more realistically. Certainly there was an undercurrent of brutality there, but not, oddly enough, of hostility. People were accepted, sins or crimes forgiven or indulged, disloyalties understood. Occasionally there would be a quiet night, when nobody much turned up, and I was surprised to note how the conversation languished. Maria would sit at our table, and she and Alix would exchange only desultory remarks, yawning from time to time. Nick never said much, after his initial greeting of Maria. She, in turn, treated him with enormous respect, as indeed everyone else did, and spoke reverently about his work. But those quiet nights were quite outdistanced by the noisy ones, when the laughter rose and the faces became flushed and there was a marvellous feeling of masks being cast aside and politeness abandoned. Collusion, complicity, the honour that is said to obtain among thieves: these were what delivered me from my rigidity and my fearfulness, for I hoped to become like one of those friends, my new models.
    And those nights delivered me from the ones I used to spend, with Nancy’s silent offering on a tray, sometimes watching television with her in the kitchen. Those early, lonely nights, when I habitually went to bed too soon and got far more sleep than I needed. And when the only noise was the sound, far below, of the lift gates clashing, but no step along the corridor, no one coming to our door. We had no visitors, for the old order was maintained. And it was the old order from which I had been delivered, and I sat thankfully in the smoky noisy restaurant and I got far less sleep than I needed, and all this I owed to Nick and Alix.
    Who also, when they wished, delivered me from Sundays.Sunday was a day I had dreaded for as long as I can remember, a day given over to silence, and to ‘resting’, to long walks, and visits to the National Gallery. When my mother was alive, the day had had a certain sweetness. Nancy would change into her dark blue dress, and the three of us would eat lunch together in the dining room, at that baronial table. The two women would retire, after this lunch, and the silence would become even denser, as if all the clocks had stopped. I would walk for two or three hours, until it was time for tea, which Nancy would bring in on one of her trays; my mother would be a little restored after her rest, and that is when I would read to her what I had been working on.
    But recently Sundays have been a burden. I could hardly ask Nancy to sit with me at that table; she would think it improper for me to take over my mother’s functions, for she still regards me as a child. So I usually go out. Nancy never goes out unless she has to, and I feel that on Sundays she should have the flat to herself. Sometimes I go to my Aunt Julia, my father’s sister, but I don’t care to do this too often because she always wants to discuss stocks and shares and I really can’t get interested in money to the extent of moving it around, as Julia does. Sometimes I go to friends of mine in the country, very old friends, a married couple whom I am beginning to find rather dull. I suspect that they feel the same about me. Usually I go round to the Benedicts, Olivia’s parents. They have always been immensely kind and I suppose that I feel at home there, although their home is very different from my own. Olivia’s mother was made a Life Peer by Harold Wilson and talks about nothing but the Labour Party. Olivia’s father is a comfortable but retiring sort of man, a company lawyer by profession. Olivia’s brother David is a doctor and he got us our jobs at the Library; it has always been assumed (and indeed greatly hoped by my mother) that Davidand I will marry. Lunch at the Benedicts’ is a brisk and chatty affair which always ends in a furious cracking of brazil nuts; the food is indifferent, which surprises me in a Jewish family. But I like being there and I am very fond