Free A Start in Life by Anita Brookner Page A

went on talking.
    ‘I have lost more than you have ever had,’ said Helen imperiously, ‘yet I remain buoyant, optimistic.’
    Mrs Cutler revealed a fine head for argument.
    ‘If it’s all in the mind, who said you ever had it?’ she countered.
    ‘My success is as real as your bunions,’ retorted Helen furiously. ‘And we hear enough about those.’
    The technical victory was Mrs Cutler’s.
    ‘It says here that neither exists,’ she said, laying down her tongue sandwich to find the source of her conclusion in Mrs Eddy’s text.
    Helen laid the back of her wrist to her forehead – a gesture for which she had also been famous – and said ‘I cannot bear it,’ in so genuinely broken a voice that Mrs Cutler shot her a glance and retired to the kitchen to do last night’s washing up. George, reluctantly replacing his
sandwich, put his arm round Helen to comfort her.
    ‘Come on, darling heart, it’s not like you to give way like this.’
    Helen, who was picking the meat out of his bread and eating it, rallied.
    ‘It’s just that I get so tired listening to her stories about her beastly marriage and her beastly feet.’
    At this point Mrs Cutler came in with another tray, bearing the
amende honorable:
three plates of sliced tinned peaches. She had intended to offer them coffee, but thought better of it.
    ‘I’ll have an early night if it’s all the same to you,’ she said, tight-lipped.
    ‘Yes, do, darling,’ urged Helen. ‘You’ll feel better in the morning.’
    She was feeling much better herself, and allowed herself an extra sleeping pill as a treat. She was quite ready to settle down after so stimulating a day.
    When Ruth returned from her usual long walk later that evening, she discovered George in the kitchen eating artichoke hearts out of the tin. He looked furtive but not unhappy. She kissed him goodnight and went silently to her room. George, smiling, allowed himself one of his late father’s cigars.

9
    In the evenings Ruth walked. She was too lonely to sit in her room reading, too restless to work. She went down to Edith Grove and started walking from there, down to the river, along the embankment to Chelsea Old Church, all the way to Victoria and back to Sloane Square and along the King’s Road and into the Fulham Road until it got too late and she caught the 31 bus home. The weather was superb: a golden autumn such as she could not remember. The streets were tranquil; knots of young people dedicated to love and peace strolled along or drank their beer on the pavements outside the pubs. In the cooling dusk she was not disturbed.
    She had never found the long vacation so difficult before. Usually she worked in the even more silent library, well pleased with her steady progress, her growing involvement with her characters. But now things were different. Work was a refuge and she found herself unable to seek that particular sort of asylum. Work, she thought, is a paradox: it is the sort of thing people do out of sheer inability to do anything else. Work is the chosen avocation of those who have no other calls on their time.
    She did not really mind being at home. It was anonymous, familiar; she had no further need for independence. Her recent encounter with reality had shocked her and made her feel childish. Only her books and her notes allowed her some measure of dignity, but there was no one waiting to read her essays or to question her on the
psychology of
Le Misanthrope
; alone with her work, she felt a regretful distaste for so much unacknowledged effort. That this was but a shadow of a much stronger regret she was not yet fully aware. She only knew that she found it hard to fill the time. Anthea and Brian had gone off to Greece. Richard was with his friends in Somerset: no doubt the wretched Harriet was being listened to still further. Even Mrs Cutler had spent the previous weekend with her sister-in-law, whom she loathed, in Totteridge (‘Beautiful place she’s got there. Just like the