Free Lewis Percy by Anita Brookner Page A

finger ostentatiously to his lips. Miss Clarke took no notice.
    ‘Agoraphobia,’ she said, with melancholy satisfaction. ‘Says she can’t go out alone. Her mother brings her in the morning, collects her for lunch, brings her back at two, and collects her again in the evening. I’ve tried to talk to her, but to no avail. Apparently it came on with adolescence, although I believe there was some family trouble as well. The father,’ she said, lowering her voice to imply discretion, but also comprehension. ‘Another woman, I suppose. That’s usually the way of it, isn’t it? A good little worker, mind you: I’ve no complaints. But who else would have her?’
    ‘Doesn’t she ever go out, then?’ asked Lewis.
    ‘Well, I’ve encouraged her, of course. I’ve told her she can’t stay with her mother all her life. But she turns quite faint if you go on at her. Frightened to death, you see. And it ties the mother down too, now that there’s just the two of them. Still, she seems quite happy. And we can’t always have things the way we want them, can we? Into each life a little rain must fall. Anyway you don’t want to hear about all this, what with your recent tragedy.’ She pressed her handkerchief to a ready tear. ‘Taking those, are you? Ah,
The Age of Innocence
, my favourite book.’ Lewis was ashamed of himself for thinking patronizingly of Miss Clarke. She was a romantic, and therefore an ideal reader, someone like himself. Nevertheless, walking home with the books under his arm, it was Miss Harper, Tissy, whose image stayed in his mind, tiny, chill, eternally distant, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. He had thought her quite plain.
    She might be somebody he could marry, he thought, quailing at the prospect of his mother’s empty house. The thought, though idle, was sudden yet not surprising. And then he could cure her, and she would be able to go out again. Or else she could stay indoors, waiting for him to come home. It would be nice to be expected again.
    He raced through
The Age of Innocence
and
Ethan Frome
, and was back at the library two days later. This time he was disappointed: no sign of Tissy Harper, or even of Miss Clarke. No sign of anyone, and only a large indolent girl he had never seen before at the desk. He took out an Elizabeth Bowen and a Margaret Kennedy. He found himself drawn to the books his mother had loved, as if in reading them he could get in touch with her in a way of which she would have approved. In any event such reading seemed to him salutary. He began to think that his official reading, which involved him in grown-up theories about heroism, and nineteenth-century heroism at that, might have led him, not exactly astray, but perhaps a little too far from normalconcerns. He whiled away several evenings with what he thought of as his mother’s type of book, and for a time he was soothed and charmed, although the moment at which he was forced to emerge from these tender fictional worlds was always harsh and painful. He began to long for a female presence, something shadowy, beneficent, something that would bring health and peace back into his life, which he perceived as threatened. The desire for such a presence was infinite, although he saw little possibility of its being satisfied. He thought how sad it was for a man of his age to be reduced to loneliness, with only his books for company. At the same time he began to realize that he could not spend his life reading. The British Museum was his refuge, but it was also his prison. He felt mildly distressed when the library closed, but once that moment had passed he strode out down the steps with a feeling of liberation. As the year stretched once more into spring the days perversely got both longer and chillier. Walking home, he could hear sad bird song under a darkening sky. In the gardens crocuses were already splayed and untidy, past their best. Timid buds showed on bushes; even the cheerless privet