Free Brief Lives by Anita Brookner Page A

with Owen and Charlie chatting behind us. We would rest in the cool of the house in the afternoon, although no sun is too hot for me, and I would leave Owen and steal out into the garden. We went to bed early, leaving the car for Charlie and Julia, who liked to go back to Nice and did not get home till very late. Owen and I would be asleep by then, like children: like children we would fall asleep hand in hand. At those times I never thought that we could ever let each other go out into the world alone.

SIX
    MEMORY BEGINS TO falter here, as if in anticipation of darker times ahead.
    We took one more holiday in Nice, although not so successfully. We went one Christmas, the Christmas of the year which had seen our former visit, but this time Owen failed to borrow a house and we went to an hotel, the Negresco: it was ruinously expensive and not very nice, and although the weather was fine we did not really want to be out all day. Hotels make one self-conscious: one desires not to give offence, perhaps in the hope of being welcomed back with more deference than has been shown on the first occasion. We found the reception cool, or perhaps I am imagining it. Every morning saw me smiling placatingly at chambermaids anxious to do the rooms in which Owen still slept and Julia contemplated her wardrobe. Sometimes Charlie, who evidently had the same scruples as I did, would join me in the lobby. Finally we would leave a message for the other two and go out for a walk. It made mesad that Owen showed no inclination to be alone with me, as he had done on our previous miraculous stay in this part of the world, but of course Charlie was very agreeable, very kind, and did his best to make me forget my discomfiture. For that was what I felt. I knew that Charlie and I were blameless boring people and that we had left our more interesting partners behind—or rather that they had refused to join us. I think Charlie always felt he had no individuality that could compare with Julia’s, and so he kept mostly quiet when in her company, acting as her attendant, her protector, her perfect escort. Yet he was an attractive man in his own right, fit and bland and good-tempered, with an easy smile and excellent manners. It was only his silence, or rather his relative silence, that made him seem curiously out of the running, marginal, neutered, almost, as if his duties as Julia’s husband precluded him from ever again fully engaging in normal human activity. His mode of address to me, on those slightly disappointing mornings when we took our walk together, was, ‘All right, my dear? Let’s try and find some newspapers, shall we? And then, I think, a cup of coffee.’ We would sit outside a nearby café, sometimes for half an hour or so, reading and saying nothing, until the waiter came to be paid, and we would look up with a smile, fold our papers, and get to our feet. On our return to the hotel we would find Owen and Julia in the bar, nursing the first drink of the day, and realize that it was past eleven o’clock. ‘Where on earth have you been? Julia would demand. ‘Only out for a breath of air,’ I would say. ‘It’s so beautifully sunny, and quite warm.’ Julia would stare at me under her eyelids. After a pause she would pronounce, ‘How very odd.’ She never failed to register surprise when we could voluntarily absent ourselves from her side. And then, losing interest, or reaffirming possession, orperhaps both, ‘Charlie, run upstairs and get my glasses, would you, darling? The key? No, I haven’t got the key. Well, ask at the desk. They must have a spare.’ And so it went on.
    I hated these time-wasting moments or hours. I could see the sun outside the darkened bar and longed for it as only one whose youth has been spent with the alarms and the distress and the heartbreaking cheerfulness of the war years can long for peace and beauty and brilliance, and that healing warmth. My eyes could not see enough radiance to satisfy me, for I