Free Dolly by Anita Brookner Page B

Dolly in her pretty accent, which she was to lose so quickly.
    She introduced her mother, who nodded and smiled. As Fanny spoke no English many an awkwardness was evaded.
    ‘Such a beautiful dress your daughter is wearing,’ said Toni loudly, with exaggerated intonation, as if speaking to a native from the other side of the world.
    ‘My mother is a well-known dressmaker in Paris,’ said Dolly.
    ‘Ah, yes,’ replied Toni. ‘You have so many clever dressmakers. Chanel. Patou.’
    ‘C’est Monsieur Dior maintenant,’
offered Fanny shyly. In her tentative smile could be seen the ghost of her daughter’s desire. But where Fanny’s smile merely offered friendliness Dolly’s offered ardour. By the end of the evening some sort of accord had been reached, although it was still unformulated. Toni saw in the girl a prospective daughter-in-law whom she could almost take to as a daughter, that is to say as a replica of herself: that hint of appetite, that imperious raisingof the head she recognised as if they had come from her own background, whereas my fifteen-year-old mother, looking shy and pallid in an awkward dress made out of parachute silk, would obviously, so she thought, never do her credit and could be left in the care of Nanny Sweetman. And the name, Schiff, like a taste of home … He might marry her, she thought. She saw no difficulty in persuading him to do so, she who had held his hand until he was eleven years of age.
    On the floor again Dolly and Hugo were striking up an even more rapid acquaintance. Dolly, flushed with pleasure, pressed Hugo’s hand: his own hand returned the pressure on the small of her back.
    ‘Tomorrow?’ he enquired. ‘Or, better still, tonight?’
    ‘I am here with my mother,’ she explained.
    He made a face. ‘So am I.’
    She liked him: he was kind. He would do her no harm. He was a good son and could therefore be counted on to behave decently to her mother. She saw, with her expert eye, which had been trained on several previous men, that he would be a complaisant husband. She determined to marry him. She would not necessarily love him, but he was the equivalent of the bar in Fréjus, the restaurant in Saint-Raphaël, coveted in a fantasy by Lucette and Michèle, those girls for whom she retained a feeling of the utmost friendliness. She would put up with the old lady and the little girl: she would have to. What else could she do? She did not have the courage to return to Paris, even if that were a serious option, as it no longer seemed to be. Her mother’s eyesight was now too bad to permit of further work and therefore of further income:Dolly, in the room they shared, had come upon her trying to read the printed sheet giving the times of the evening’s festivities on the dressing-table, her head bent fatally close to the paper, her face, when she raised it, distant, puzzled. Her mother’s eyesight was the deciding factor. I have no doubt, even at this distance, that Dolly was an honest woman. I simply believe that her scruples derived from a different set of circumstances. As far as I know she was never unfaithful to my uncle after their marriage. But he failed to banish that look of expectation which she habitually wore, as if it were time to get dressed and to make her way back to the Place de la Concorde and the Crillon and the evening’s pleasure. In time, of course, that look of expectation had acquired a patina of trust that was almost childlike in its simplicity.
    In the course of conversation—again, on Toni’s part, articulated very clearly—Dolly pulled matters together by saying that they were staying in an hotel in London while looking for a flat. Did Mrs Ferber perhaps know of anything? Toni did. She was the owner of the house in Maresfield Gardens in which she occupied the ground-floor flat. A military man and his wife had the first floor, but the second floor was momentarily free. There was now no need for her to advertise, or rather to take in someone