Free Altered States by Anita Brookner Page A

around. Right now I want to have my bath.’
    I was aware of the strong smell of her hair, stronger after a night on the pillow. When the door closed behind me I found myself, somehow, in the street. I began calculating how and when I would see her again, though I knew that this would not be easy, that she would only see me when she wanted to. Throughout the day I could smell her hair. I telephoned several times. Each time there was no answer, yet I had an image of her, sitting in the flat, on the floor, perhaps, willing the sound to stop, the silence to be restored.

6

    Mother’s boy-friend, Aubrey Fairweather, was there when I called on the following Sunday. A thin patrician-looking man who was always content to take no for an answer, or so I had assumed, he visited Mother punctiliously, never outstaying his welcome. In a crisis, if he ever acknowledged such a thing, he would rather drink an exquisitely dry sherry than a double brandy; his most familiar gesture was his careful insertion of a cigarette into an amber holder, a gesture which seemed to belong to the age of drawing-room comedy, as did his Paisley cravat and his sleek silver hair. Some years older than my mother, he had taken her refusal to marry him with a contained smile, and had the grace, or the persistence, to continue to bestow his presence on her, thereby indicating his superior nature. I rather liked him. His effete appearance gave no hint of the fact that he was a great traveller: evennow he was liable to disappear for a couple of months. ‘China,’ he would explain on his return: ‘Peru.’ He also had a house in France, near Cagnes. I thought he had his bachelor life well organised. I could tell he was no good for Mother. He was sensitive and civilised; so was she. What she needed, I thought, was a more robustly male presence, but so far none had presented itself.
    Nevertheless I warmed to Aubrey, who looked delicate but was probably made of teak. I was also sorry for him, for his deliberate gestures and careful appearance. I thought these characteristic of men who had survived their years of active experience and were forced to roam the world in search of lesser delights. I was filled, at that stage, with the memory of Sarah, and the awesome revelation of our matching physical temper. For the first time in my life I had met a woman with that rare sort of genius, effortless, uninvented, almost unconscious. This was the gift she possessed and I had been its recipient. Like Julian Sorel in another context my virtue had been equal to my happiness. This phrase had puzzled me ever since Mother had persuaded me to read the novel, another of her favourites. She had blushed and said, ‘It means that he acquitted himself well, and no further explanation was needed. I’m sure you see the beauty of that Alan.’ I had, in fact, although I had thought the novel difficult. Yet along with its crankiness went a sort of excitement, which convinced me that its author had been young and ardent and romantically fulfilled, even though his hero had ended in prison.
    Sitting in my mother’s drawing-room with those two well-behaved people I could feel my youth threatening to overwhelm me. I wanted to get up, pace the room, throw open a window, leave at once for a long walk. I did not want to listen to Aubrey’s measured sentences, or my mother’s faithful and polite interjections. Yet when I was seated at the dining-table, and we were all three eating my mother’s excellentroast chicken, followed by her equally excellent lemon tart, I succumbed to a feeling of family solidarity, a feeling to which I was willing to admit Aubrey on a temporary basis, largely because I was so filled with benevolence towards the elderly, whom I pitied for no longer having access to the happiness I had so recently known. I pitied them both for their very politeness, which I thought must be a regrettable substitute for impulses which had died with their youth. They seemed to have no idea