Free Altered States by Anita Brookner

they wanted it is a mystery to me. They’re still active, Marjorie still drives. You can just see the Disabled stickers on all the windscreens, can’t you? If you ask me they’re both crackers. Always were.’
    Her face was scornful, as if the elderly could only conjure up feelings of disgust. She was also ashamed, I could see, because her mother and her aunt had deliberately chosen old age and in so doing had turned their backs on everything she stood for, youth, beauty, desire, as if these things were unmentionable. She appeared to think that they had done her a monstrous wrong, for which she would defy them with all the means at her disposal.
    ‘If you could perhaps write to her, without dropping me in it,’ I ventured.
    At this her attention switched abruptly to me, her scorn undiminished. ‘I never even mentioned you. Why should I? I hardly know you. I’m not sure I even want to know you.’
    ‘All right, all right. I’m not trying to interfere …’
    ‘Of course you are.’
    ‘Well, I am. But why should I be blamed for something you should have sorted out?’
    ‘You don’t get it, do you? She writes me letters like that. I dare say she writes them to a lot of people. She’s crackers, like I said. Anyway this is boring. Is this why you’re here?’
    ‘Partly,’ I said. ‘I’ve been trying to get you on the phone. I wanted to ask you out to dinner.’
    ‘Oh, you did, did you?’
    ‘Why should that annoy you?’
    She shrugged again. ‘Everyone asks me out to dinner.’
    ‘What of it? And anyway, I’m not everyone.’
    ‘You can say that again.’
    ‘Are you always as rude as this?’ I asked, bewildered.
    At this she grinned and said, ‘You’d better have that drink.’
    I stayed with her that night, of course. Apparently it was as easy as that. As I seemed to have envisaged a mythic pilgrimage, a romantic conquest of imponderable obstacles, it might be said to have constituted an anticlimax. But only on the level of my more febrile imaginings. On the level of verifiable reality it was the revelation for which nothing had quite prepared me, conducted in silence, with what seemed like supernatural energy on both sides. I took this unbelievable gratification to be mutual: indeed no further proof of our inevitable conjunction was needed, or so it seemed to me. I never questioned my desire for Sarah, nor, oddly enough, hers for me. Any declaration, I thought, would have clouded the issue. Since she accepted me, for whatever reason, I sought no explanations from her. Thus I was never to know the reasons for her compliance. But then again I had the proof, and my memory would furnish me with details which she, perhaps, could not or would not have confirmed, had we ever indulged in one of those conversations which our activities served to demonstrate as being otiose, only resorted toby others less superbly matched. I was constrained through shyness, though I might have enjoyed such loving gossip, whereas she was silent through a form of impermeability, as if to give herself away might constitute an almost terminal weakness. And yet I was sure of her. She had given me all the assurances I needed. She had no further need to give an account of herself, at least, not to me.
    In the morning I did not even care that I was unbathed, unshaven, that I should have to spend the day like that. This did not greatly disturb me, although normally it would have done. An alternative hygiene had replaced the obedient disciplines of the days, weeks, months, years that had gone before.
    ‘I’ll ring you,’ I said. ‘Please pick up the phone from time to time.’
    Her face had resumed the strange clouded expression of the previous evening. Her stare did not seem to take me in, or to take in what had passed between us. I refused to let this annoy me.
    ‘See you,’ she said vaguely.
    ‘When? Shall I come this evening? We could …’
    ‘Have dinner, I know. Don’t be a bore, Alan. Don’t
cling.
I’ll see you