Free Lewis Percy by Anita Brookner Page B

seemed brighter. In a moment of depression he turned out again one evening after his supper and took the Elizabeth Bowen back to the library. He had left it late and arrived just as the lights were being clicked on and off to signify closing time. But he was rewarded by the sight of Tissy Harper, this time in a pale pink twinset, one arm already inserted into the sleeve of a grey jacket.
    ‘Take your time,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t put the lights out until you go.’
    ‘I just wanted to return this,’ he said, placing the book on the counter, near her hand. ‘I’ll come back another day.’ He hesitated, and then asked, ‘Can I walk you home?’
    ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but my mother’s here.’
    Her mother was in fact looking at him rather insistently from the vantage point of a seat opposite the one Mr Baker would have been occupying had he not beenturned out earlier by Miss Clarke. Ah, but the mother was a surprise. The mother, thought Lewis, was a beauty, a bold strenuous-looking woman, with a curiously out-of-date sexual appeal. She was heavily made up, her mouth a dark red, her eyebrows arched in permanent astonishment, an artificial streak of white inserted into her upswept dark hair. She had exactly the same look of disdain that he remembered from the screen goddesses of his childhood. For all its apparent and carefully nurtured perfection the face was discontented, with an incipient puffiness round the mouth and chin. Lewis could see no resemblance at all between the mother and the daughter, but then he remembered Miss Clarke hinting that the father had gone off with another woman, and he supposed this renegade, this ingrate, to have had the same fair looks that his daughter now possessed.
    But why had the father gone off? What sort of a woman did a man go off to, when he had this red-lipped smouldering creature at home? For she was still in the prime of life, not much more than fifty, he supposed. She looked tricky, hard to please, and also capricious, exigent, the last person to be the guardian of a pristine semi-invalid daughter. A fur coat was flung back from a plumpish compact little body; her skirt was short enough to show fine legs in fine stockings. He could see no sign of conjugal or maternal disillusionment in her face, but simply impatience. Mrs Harper looked like a woman whose husband had left only a minute before, to perform some necessary but unimportant duty, and who would return immediately once the duty were out of the way. Mrs Harper, in fact, looked like a woman invisibly accompanied by a man. Yet here she was, tied to her daughter, clocking in at the library four times a day, without any possibility of release from this obligation until the daughter resumed her autonomy.
    Lewis felt a pang of pity for them both. He felt too that if he could wean Tissy away from her mother he might effect the happiness of three people. He still retained a sense of chivalry towards women. He was aware of hislack of experience, and ashamed of it, but he was even more ashamed of certain publications bought in Paris and hidden beneath his sweaters until they could be safely deposited in public rubbish bins. These texts had left him with a sense of surprise and disappointment, and he hated the idea that the getting of wisdom involved both. For himself he envisaged something more chaste, if that could be managed: it could be brief, but it must be perfect, heroic. He would be prepared to lose all, but only if at some point he had gained all. Although Tissy Harper, with her prayerful hands and her downcast eyes, might not provide the promised sins of the flesh, she still represented a quest and a safeguard. She would be kind, would not mock or disregard him, would care for him studiously and with gratitude. And her mother could go back to whatever society she had been forced to abandon – he imagined hotel terraces, bridge games, cocktails – when the girl, her so unsuitable daughter, had become her only