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George Bland, in the sun, reflected that now was the moment to take stock. Nice, a town which he had not visited since his first holiday abroad, some forty years earlier, spread its noise and its light and its air about him, making him feel cautious; he was not up to this, he reckoned, having become unused to leisure. He had been here for four days and had found nothing to do, although there was much to occupy his thoughts, most of them, indeed all of them, proving unwelcome. Nice had been an unwise choice, though in truth hardly a choice at all; it had been more of a flight from those same thoughts, which faithfully continued to attend him here. He had sought a restorative, conventional enough, after the death of an old friend, Michael Putnam, who had inconveniently succumbed to cancer just when they were enabled, by process of evolution, or by that of virtue rewarded, more prosaically by the fact of their simultaneous retirement, to take their ease, to explore the world together, as had been their intention. They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and, more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.

His friend Putnam, whom he sorely missed, had left him a quite respectable sum of money, which, added to his own capital, made of him a fairly wealthy man. The irony of this did not escape him, for he had started out poor, and poverty was imprinted on his mind and no doubt in his heart. If he were spending freely now it was in an effort to get rid of some of his money and in so doing to allay the pain of Putnam’s death. Yet the incongruity displeased him. Seated in an expensive restaurant – as it might be Le Chantecler – all he could remember was his last sight of Putnam, skeletal hand clutching the latest of a series of Get Well cards from former colleagues, great eyes turning to the window in shock and doubt, then turning back to his friend with a look that was timid, wistful, almost eager, for he had trusted in life right up to the end. That the look had to be met, sustained; this was not easy. In time it had proved almost unbearable, but the effort was made, day after day, until, at the end of a mere three weeks, the eyes had closed for ever.

Bland was shaken by his death, had sought comfort in late out-of-season sunshine, which now struck him as garish. No one, he thought, could understand their friendship, as they themselves had understood it. Both unmarried, they somehow did not impress the outside world as lovers, yet their closeness was remarked upon, puzzled over. In fact, what they had in common was their origin in shabby beginnings and their slow upward rise to middle-class affluence. This was their gleeful rueful secret. Lunching together on a Sunday at the club, or at one of the better London hotels, they might test each other with a brand name with which to conjure the past. Both appreciated sweet food and strong tea. Both, before making a purchase, had the same instinctive reaction: Is this allowed?

Sharing the past, any past, but particularly their own, made it more comfortable. Now that he was alone Bland found the present irksome, shot through with a sadness he had not previously suspected. And this was not merely the sadness of Putnam’s death, for that was more properly grief, but a sadness for the life they had lived through together, keeping up each other’s spirits, applauding in each other the middle-class virtues which, to their surprise, had come to them quite naturally, so that from an initial bedrock of misgiving and suspicion had flowered charity and judicious benevolence and a hard-won fair-mindedness. He had loved Putnam; now that Putnam was dead, he, George Bland, felt half dead himself.

With Putnam gone the rest of his life must be assumed single-handed, until it was his turn to lie in a hospital bed and to embrace friendship as if it were love, for so it would seem in those last heightened moments. With Putnam gone the past was his alone, and the present too. For the time being the present was the more problematic, although he knew that time, in passing, would annihilate his comfortable harmless days and restore to him early sights and sounds, and with them the emotions that had always accompanied them. Above all, in his new unsupported state, he felt a curious sense of shame, that he had saved his own life to so little purpose. He was comfortably off, and he was superfluous. He had no family, no wife, no lover; he had lived so carefully that he occasionally caught sight of himself as an object of ridicule. He and Putnam, working contentedly in the same organisation until the retirement which Putnam had not lived to see, and which he, Bland, must now shoulder unaccompanied, had been cautiously happy. This grotesque interlude in Nice, for example (when he and Putnam should by rights be on their way to the Far East, as they had planned), offended him in some obscure way, nagged at him as some social mistake might have done. He hoped that he might meet no one he knew and be forced to explain himself, and to explain a presence which he would be hard put to justify.

But Putnam’s illness had made him shaky, as if for the first time he had realised that he was a man of sixty-five, not old, but elderly, upright, still slim, but with thinning grey hair, a more prominent nose. All at once, in the golden sunshine, with the breeze still warm in this late season, he felt alone, as he had not done since he was an adolescent. It seemed to him that he knew no one, that the office, the comfortable background to his life for so many years, had evaporated, or passed into other hands, leaving him adrift, to spend too much time sitting in cafés, or staring at the sea. He was newly aware of the pathos of their lives, his and Putnam’s, each leaving the other his life’s savings, since they had excluded the possibility of there being other beneficiaries. And all those sad thoughts, now unshared, threatening to overwhelm him, as they once had. He had fought against them, successfully as it seemed, in the years of his maturity, but Putnam’s decline, mercifully short, had made him vulnerable again, and he was subject now not only to aching muscles if he walked too far, but to a backward-looking cast of mind which made his present comfort seem nugatory, as if it were built on sand, as perhaps it always had been.

Sometimes, in the absence of Putnam, he had to activate an inner voice, or voices, which he imagined to be those of tutelary deities, a surrogate family, bold decisive aunts, loyal unquestioning cousins, quite unlike the relations, or rather relation, he had known, his aunt Lilian, with whom his mother had quarrelled enjoyably for as long as he could remember, as long in fact as they were still alive. These voices urged him to indulgence, even to excess. ‘Why not?’ they said. ‘You can afford it.’ Yet there was nothing he wanted, so that the function of the voices was dubious, and indeed unhealthy, for their encouragement seemed to belong to a phase of his life which was now safely behind him: the poor boy from Reading, unwittingly involved in the machinations of disorderly parents, for whom he had felt alternate bouts of love and hatred, a conflict which persisted in him and which he had never managed to resolve. To his bewilderment and shame his parents had descended the ladder of bourgeois respectability to the undistinguished level at which they felt most comfortable, so that his father, once a sports journalist, was now habitually to be found on the racecourse on his own account, and his mother, once a nursing sister, spent most of her days smoking, reading undemanding novels from the library, or enjoying a passage of arms with her husband or her sister Lilian.

He had learned to look after himself from an early age. When his father dropped dead at Kempton Park, and Lilian arrived with a cheque, saying, in a tone which denoted triumph, ‘I suppose George will be getting a job now?’ he had known that his life was doomed. He had left Reading University after only one year, had entered the cardboard box factory as a junior clerk, and had cared for his mother until her death. It was at this point that the voices had first manifested themselves, urging him to run for his life, to sell the house, to request a transfer to the London office (which, in those days of easy employment, had been granted), and to all intents and purposes to disappear from sight, only to reappear some years later as a successful and trusted employee in the enterprise which had begun as a cardboard box factory and was now a prosperous conglomerate, the cardboard boxes having diversified into all forms of packaging, with a subsidiary which specialised in office materials. As these became more sophisticated, both staff and turnover increased, until the firm, known simply as Rogerson’s, after the family that still owned it, was quoted as one of the more conspicuously successful achievements of the new commercially minded Britain.

The day that Putnam had walked in, a spry spare little accountant from Birmingham, the thought had occurred to Bland that they might be friends. He had asked Putnam whether he had found somewhere to live (he had) and whether he would like a quick meal on the way home. Putnam had accepted with alacrity, and over dinner in an Italian restaurant they had discovered numerous points in common. Thereafter life was harmonious. It had seemed that at last he would feel free, no longer obliged to dissemble or to apologise, and this freedom was to him so intoxicating that he had looked for nothing further, content with his work, his growing comforts, and the friendship of Putnam. In due course it was Putnam’s approval that replaced the voices in his own head, voices which he now regarded as the poor companions of a starveling past, when he was still a prisoner, waiting for his sentence to end, as it had done.

Putnam had been attractive to women and had subjugated the likeliest of the organisation’s female employees, but he was discreet about his adventures, and managed never to give offence, even when he was effecting a changeover from one woman to another. Refreshingly, he conducted his affairs without indulging in confidences, as would have been easy to do, and so no woman had ever come between the two of them. Putnam had had his affairs, and Bland had had his girlfriend Louise, or had done so until she married a doctor and went to live in the New Forest. He had known her since they were both adolescents in Reading; he had loved, and in fact still cherished, her peaceful fastidiousness, qualities almost unknown to him at the time, together with her white blouses and her frequently washed hair. They had pursued their love affair in borrowed flats and later in hotel rooms, finally in his own small flat, Louise’s eternal good nature rising perpetually above the often sordid arrangements. But at the point at which their long-delayed maturity could be assumed and taken for granted, and their love affair already had reached and passed the twenty-year mark, she had told him that she was getting married, still in that placid tone in which she was wont to address him. For a time he had felt alarmed rather than upset; he had relied on Louise to keep him company and eventually to become his wife, although he had told her repeatedly that he was not ready for marriage. Indeed he was never ready, was still not ready even now. She had got tired of waiting, she had told him uncomplainingly. Her husband was much older than herself and something of a crank, but within a year Louise had had a son, and was thus able to tolerate her husband’s relatively early death with much of her usual equanimity.

Bland had visited her, in Lymington, on hearing of this event; he had in fact read of it in The Times and had telephoned her straight away. In the course of his visit, which he had intended to be sympathetic, he had found himself distracted by Louise’s son, then a boy of six, and repelled by the child’s ugliness. Philip was untidy, restless, overpoweringly friendly. His teeth seemed broken, although they were in fact merely irregular; he spoke in a barely comprehensible monotone and laid about him with hot grimy hands. Louise was devoted to the boy; Bland knew that he had lost her, and resolved not to pay another visit. But their lives were too interwoven for one of them to lose the other. And now, many years later, when they were almost old, he telephoned her, or she telephoned him, every Sunday evening. He was still half bored, half comforted by her calm plaintive tone, and paid as much attention to it as he might to a bird outside his window. She gave him news of her son, now a successful marketer of computer games. He did little more than listen. They knew each other so well that conversation was hardly necessary. Once each had ascertained that the other was still alive there seemed to be nothing more to say.

The telephone call went with a certain Sunday evening melancholy, the light fading, only a rare car passing, windows reluctantly springing into bloom as the weekend was, by unspoken consensus, agreed to be over, and the working week about to encroach on what little liberty was left. But he had loved the working week, loved his large immaculate desk, looked forward to the Monday lunch with Putnam at the club, happy to espouse whatever outrageous proposition Putnam had thought up over the weekend. Holidays were planned, but not very seriously; more seriously was the retirement project envisaged, that long journey to the Far East, by the slowest route they could devise, and all the time in the world to talk it over.

It had never come about. Putnam, the sweat standing out on his forehead, had concluded their last Monday lunch with, ‘I seem to have a pain,’ this said with an air of ghastly hilarity. Bland had taken him in a taxi to the hospital, and when he returned to visit him that evening knew, from the altered cast of Putnam’s features, that he was going to die. ‘Looking after you all right, are they?’ was all that he managed to say on that and subsequent occasions, but he bought him fine cotton pyjamas, arranged for a barber to go in and shave him daily, for Putnam had been immaculate for as long as he had known him. Later there had been bottles of Floris cologne to hide the smells of which Putnam seemed mercifully unaware, and that was the saddest time of all. ‘All right, old chap,’ he had said, laying a soothing hand on Putnam’s forehead. There was nothing more to say. The fact that Putnam refused to believe in his imminent death broke the thread of effortless communication that had sustained their friendship and their life together. Bland felt this keenly: it was the single factor that more than any other brought home to him the fact that he was on his own.

And then Putnam’s heartbreaking will, leaving him the money he no longer wanted or needed! He had, as his Aunt Lilian would have said, done all right for himself. He had risen through the ranks to become Head of Personnel; he was thought to be good with people, an impression, since confirmed, dating from a tiny incident in his early days with the firm, when he had dealt with Mrs Bertram, Kenneth Rogerson’s personal secretary, who had had something resembling a breakdown and whom he had escorted home proficiently to her large gloomy flat off the Marylebone Road. He had glimpsed an unmade bed through a half open door, and heard an unfed cat mewing angrily in an icy kitchen. He had taken the groceries day after day when his work was over, and, more delicately, had put in train the machinery for her retirement (a respectful word in the right quarter). He had even, in a small way, been responsible for her pension (another respectful word). The memory filled him with shame, as did most of his supposedly good deeds. Oddly enough he had not minded at the time. Kenneth Rogerson had noted his efficacy, and perhaps something more: his dutifulness. It had not seemed out of the way to Bland to perform the same tasks for Kenneth Rogerson himself, after the latter’s stroke. He had visited him weekly, at his flat in St James’s, again with groceries, and with the Sunday papers. Rogerson had been irascible by that stage, but after the man’s death Bland had found himself richer by a respectable portfolio of shares. This too filled him with shame. He remembered in this connection not his own kindness but an initial humiliation, the disastrous occasion when Rogerson, thinking to do him a favour, had arranged for him to have a room in a flat belonging to his niece and nephew, a brother and sister for whom he professed to have no time and little liking.

‘Punch and Alfreda Rogerson, my brother’s children. We don’t get on,’ he had said, apparently without regret.

Bland had still been naïve enough to ask eager questions.

‘Punch? What an unusual name,’ he had said.

‘His name is Peregrine. Naturally he dislikes it. In many ways he has always been problematic. However, that need not trouble you. I’ll telephone him. Perhaps you’ll do the same.’ A piece of paper was handed over.

Bland, newly arrived in London, had accepted the offer eagerly, and that same evening had gone round to the flat in Radnor Place with his suitcase, bought in Reading just prior to leaving Reading for ever. The door had been opened by a very tall, very thin man, with a look of radiant goodwill playing around a weak mouth.

‘Punch Rogerson,’ he had said. ‘My sister will be in later. Come in, come in! Your room’s over here. You’ll have to excuse me; we’ve got a meeting here this evening. Care to join us?’

‘A meeting?’ Bland had queried, his suitcase on the floor beside him.

‘Prayer meeting; my sister Alfreda will fill you in on the details. I’m thinking of joining an Order, you see. You are a believer, I take it?’

But before he could answer the front door had opened again, and Alfreda Rogerson, as tall and thin as her brother, came in, followed by three women and two men, all of them talking in rather loud voices. These voices had continued to make themselves heard until long after dark, interspersed with bursts of high-pitched laughter. At some point Punch Rogerson, drunk with his own merriment, and also, it seemed, with whisky, had knocked on the door of Bland’s room and invited him to join them. He had been rapidly introduced: ‘Jamie, Caroline, Anna, Nigel, Cressida.’ He had nodded, embarrassed. He felt tired and hungry, but found himself with a large glass of whisky in his hand. It was his first contact with the rich. He noticed how well they all looked, as if doctors and dentists had vied with each other to keep Cressida and Nigel, and indeed Anna and Jamie, in perfect condition since childhood.

‘We usually end with silent meditation,’ said Alfreda crossly, ‘but as it’s your first evening… By the way, if you think of joining us, as I hope you will, we can put you in touch with Father Ambrose. Our people will take care of everything.’

‘Everything?’ he had asked, bewildered.

‘That is if you decide to stay,’ she said.

He had left the following morning, having spent most of the night composing a letter telling them of other plans, which he left on a console table in the hall. It was six-thirty; he had walked, with his suitcase, until he had found a workman’s café, near Paddington Station, where he had breakfast. At nine o’clock he was at a local estate agent’s. At nine-thirty he was at the bank arranging a loan. By the end of the week he was in his own tiny flat in a large red-brick building over Baker Street station. When Rogerson senior enquired how he was getting on he had told him that he had found a place of his own: no further details.

‘Very wise,’ Rogerson had said. ‘You have a mortgage, I suppose? Well, if you are in any need …’

He had not finished the sentence, and Bland had never reminded him of his extremely vague offer. It had taken him years to pay off the loan, years of doing without, of living modestly but uncomplainingly. He sometimes thought that these years of careful budgeting, careful to the point of sacrifice, had cost him Louise. He had never at any point blamed her for leaving him. By that stage he was too conscious of his real advantages for that. His most precious gain was liberty, a fact of which he was well aware. And in any case Louise’s departure was not rancorous: she was, and had ever since continued to be, thoughtful and loving. He was grateful for this too. It was, all things considered, a creditable relationship. And ever since then he had only to pick up the telephone to hear Louise’s voice, still full of concern for him. She was, he knew, very slightly boring; perhaps that was why he had not married her. But kindness in a woman had always struck him as a precious quality, and she had always been kind. What he felt for her now he would have described as esteem, although they had nothing more to say to each other. They were linked by their long history, two aged siblings who retained a common language, which they tried, with only partial success, to apply to their now separate concerns. If she disappeared, or rather when she disappeared, there would be no one left who knew him as well as he knew himself.

Seated at a café table, in the syrupy warmth of out-of-season Nice, he reviewed his life and found it to be alarmingly empty. It had been built on flight, he saw, flight from an uncomfortable childhood, an unfairly victimised adolescence, an atmosphere of tension and contention, his father drinking too much, his mother ever handy with reproaches. If he had sought liberty, his own liberty, as a method of vindication for those clouded years, then surely he had gone about the only way of achieving it, although his life, by the standards of most normal people, must appear dim, limited. Who, in these volatile days, stayed in the same organisation for forty years? Who could boast only one long-term – in fact embarrassingly long-term – love affair? Who, at his stage of life, managed without a car, a second home, a flutter on the money markets, or a little property speculation, as did most of the people he read about in his newspaper, and indeed some of the men he had known in the firm, men at the same level of seniority as himself, or even a little lower? Who remained unmarried, or, as they said nowadays, without a partner? Who enjoyed a friendship of rare quality with another man which managed to be entirely sexless? Who was as dull as he was? And was this not the consensus of those who knew him?

At this point it became a matter of urgency to activate those inner voices, those imaginary companions to whom he was bound to listen when other, authentic voices failed him. These voices reminded him that he was healthy (so far), wealthy (incredibly so in the light of his earlier humility in this respect), and independent. This last fact was undeniable. He was the possessor of a comfortable flat a few minutes’ walk from the park, where he could stroll without any limit on his time or leisure. Should he be ill he could avail himself of paid help, in the shape of Mrs Cardozo, his weekly cleaning lady, who, though noisy and unsatisfactory in almost every respect, was supposed to be devoted to him, or Hipwood, the downstairs porter, who sat behind a desk in the lobby of his apartment block, and who was amiable enough, although perhaps not entirely reliable. That was the rub: he was sixty-five, and illness, sooner or later would descend on him. The thought was frightening, but he told himself that he probably had a few more years in hand before he succumbed to pain or disability. He was hardy, he was free from immediate care, and he could afford to do as he pleased.

But nothing pleased him. His life of effort, of self-denial, of regular if tardy rewards, seemed to him almost shameful: that thought again. Shame was an emotion left over from childhood, but it had kept him company throughout many a year, always easily stimulated, quick to spring to the fore. Now he felt shame for this undeserved leisure, this pointless interlude in the sun. He had fled London as quickly as he could after settling Putnam’s affairs; it had seemed to him then that nature might heal him, might remind him that growth and flowering were as possible as decline and decay. But he had encountered no nature worth speaking of in Nice, only mineral expanses, which, in their relative aridity, reminded him that he was without occupation. Perhaps that was the problem. He had had no time as yet to experience retirement, for his days had been filled with visits of a business nature, and with the sad task of disposing of Putnam’s effects. When almost all had been completed, and only the flat remained to be sold, he had simply lingered in his own flat long enough to pack a lightweight bag and take a cab to the airport. The sun, he had thought: the sun is the cure for sad thoughts. But although the sun was unvarying throughout the day, the onset of night was sharp and disconcerting, reminding him that sooner or later he must return home. Then what to do all day? He had no calls on his time, and very few extravagances to indulge. He could walk in the park, of course, go to concerts. There was always the London Library, although not being a scholar he always felt a little shy there. He would read; he had always read voluptuously, and yet he still sensed his mother’s withering eye on him as he buried his head in a book in order to drown out the sound of his parents’ almost routine bickering.

One thing was certain: he would not go mad. He had never been in the least unstable, was in fact almost comically sensible. Any fantasy in his outlook had been supplied by Putnam. With that gone he was on an unenviably even keel. He knew that the days would be long, and probably empty; he knew that in due course Louise’s telephone call would be the one fixed point in his life, but he also knew that he could and would endure his altered state, for was he not, when all was said and done, an extremely fortunate man?

Except that contemplation of his good fortune filled him with distaste. All the forbearance, all the obedience, all the acceptance that had cast their shadow over his formative years now disgusted him. Why and how had he come to this, to this idle afternoon at the café table, out of everyone’s sight, with past contentment suddenly turned to ash? If he stayed here it was partly to avoid going home; if he lingered on this café terrace it was to delay the moment of going back to his hotel room. Confinement seemed to him tantamount to concealment, and he wanted his moment of visibility, wanted to be the focus of someone’s enquiry, wanted not to have to search for company. To all intents and purposes, to the waiter’s eye at least, an ordinarily impassive Englishman, he was filled with all the sadness of loss, not merely for Putnam, but for his whole past life, for his refusal of adventure, excitement, commitment. And now it was too late, for no one found excitement at sixty-five; no one was even attractive at sixty-five. No more women: the thought struck him as a blow, though he had never been careless with women’s feelings. There had been flirtations, the occasional sentimental friendship; above all there had been Louise, who had functioned as both wife and mother. There was still Louise, of course, but Louise belonged in essence to that past life which now seemed to him so distasteful. He sighed. At this, as if in answer to his sigh, the waiter came forward. Bland paid, added a tip. The waiter seemed a pleasant serious boy; Bland was anxious to learn something about him. But the waiter, obviously fearing an ulterior motive, refused to be engaged. ‘Bon, merci,’ said Bland finally. ‘A votre service,’ was the reply. They were the only words which had been addressed to him directly all day.

He wandered in the direction of the Place Masséna: the English papers would have arrived by now. The sea had taken on an opaque look, as if to cue the light to fade. He still had an hour before him in which to walk, but after that there would be a difficult interlude to fill before dinner. At home he would find it equally difficult, perhaps more so. And there would not be the solace of this beguiling golden light, this poignant late warmth. At home there would be greyness, darkness, the sultriness of central heating. Perhaps he would do better to stay here for a while, since he had no appointments. He caught a glimpse of himself sitting out the winter, an English tourist of an obsolete kind, no longer highly regarded because careful and solitary, not, when all was said and done, rewarding. He might buy a property here; he could, he reflected sadly, afford it. Without company his life would be penurious: it would be true exile, in comparison with which life at home would be relatively comforting. He thought of leaves falling in the park, the calm of libraries, the bustle of department stores. He felt a sudden ache of longing, or was it loneliness?

The light was now beginning to change, and it would soon be dark. He took a last look at the impassive sea, then, with a new urgency in his step, made his way back to his hotel and informed the man behind the desk that he would be leaving the following day. In his room he packed steadily, with a suspicion of haste. I was never meant to be here, he thought. I should be at work. I mean, I should be at home. He felt a moment of fear, as if he were no longer safe. Darkness, sudden as always, pressed against the window; cars roared along the corniche. He was aware of an alien life, nothing to do with him, utterly indifferent to whether he stayed or left. He wondered whether they could find him a seat on a plane that evening, but apparently this was impossible. Home, he thought, I must get home. This thought pursued him throughout a sleepless night. When he left, in the very early morning, it was with a feeling of infinite relief, as if he had outwitted a danger. Not until he was actually on the plane did he sense the vague stirrings of a species of nursery comfort, as if he believed the advertisements, a habit left over from a straitened childhood, as if British Airways would take care of him, and would have to, since in an emergency he could count on no one else. Henceforth he would have to be his own prop and mainstay, a prospect which filled him with despair, as if he had been called to task by an enemy so intimate that he knew his security to be undermined, efficiently and inexorably, for ever.

NOVELS BY ANITA BROOKNER

Anita Brookner

A PRIVATE VIEW

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

PENGUIN BOOKS

A PRIVATE VIEW

THE BEGINNING

1