A Private View by Anita Brookner Page A

room to room. On days like these he pitted himself against
The Times
crossword, forcing himself to finish it against the odds: the discipline, he thought, was good for his soul as well as his mind.
    Today was to be Louise’s day, so he dressed carefully in his grey suit, mindful of his appearance, as she always was of hers. They had graduated to fine clothes after paltry beginnings,although in those early days in Reading she had always contrived to please him, in her simple blouses and her pleated skirts. She dressed, as he thought, politely, and he, as a man of his generation and his class, considered politeness a virtue. Her only coquetry was her shining hair, which always had a sweet powdery smell, as if she had just emerged from a warm bathroom. They had met when they were both eighteen; he was a student, just beginning at university, and she was a clerk in the local branch of Lloyds Bank. Greatly daring, he had asked her out one day, and was much encouraged by her placid consent. She had seemed neither alarmed nor intrigued by his invitation, thus conferring on him a feeling of assurance, for he had been more nervous than he had allowed her to see.
    She lived at home with her mother, as he did: their lives exactly mirrored each other’s. After that first visit to the cinema, at which decorum prevailed, they had taken to walking together on Sunday afternoons, which they soon agreed was more enjoyable. Her life was an open book to him, as his was to her; the thought had early occurred to him that he might marry her. But he was tied to his mother, who was deteriorating rapidly, although at that stage the decline was general, non-specific, and characterised by increasingly sarcastic behaviour and a refusal to do anything for herself that could be undertaken by her son. He sometimes thought that this was deliberate, as indeed it might have been. He was too young, and too inexperienced, to recognise its morbidity.
    He remembered with shame his first attempt at hospitality. He had decided to take Louise home to tea, knowing that her excellent manners would protect them both. It was a Sunday afternoon, for by this time they always met on aSunday, walking if it were fine, going to the cinema if it were wet. His mother, whom he had informed of this event, had declined to honour the occasion with any sort of preparation, had in fact remained in her chair with a quizzical expression, as if Louise were being presented at court. After Louise’s desperate pleasantries had finally petered out, and silence threatened to immolate the entire occasion, his mother had finally given tongue. ‘I hope you can do something with that son of mine,’ she had said. ‘He’s been a baby far too long.’ He had known what she had meant, and blushed. Louise’s hand had stolen into his, and he had loved her for that gesture, and for her simple sturdiness on his behalf. He had thought then, and he still thought even now, that her archetypal simplicity contained seeds of greatness of which she was entirely unconscious.
    In fact Louise and he had become lovers some six weeks previously, in a borrowed flat, and for the space of a single afternoon. The event had been mutually satisfactory; they were content to postpone further explorations until they had achieved a better time and place. There had been a simplicity about that too, a lack of urgency which he found more acceptable than the more torrid conception of desire to which his youth entitled him. He was staid by nature, and fortune had provided him with an appropriate partner. She was calm, unflustered by his advances, which she reciprocated with a pleasure which he knew to be real, for she could not dissimulate, and this was another of her very real virtues, more precious to him then than his mother, squinting through her cigarette smoke, could ever appreciate. Since, on that one and only occasion on which they were to meet, it was quite clear that no attempt had been made athospitality, Louise