A Private View by Anita Brookner Page B

had said she must leave: her own mother was alone, and she liked to keep her company. Her thanks were profuse, and were lazily accepted, as if a favour had been conferred. He had burned with shame, but there was one consolation: with Louise he would never lose face.
    Recklessly he had walked her to her door; recklessly she had invited him in. A small grey-haired woman had greeted them with some astonishment, but had agreed to make tea. She also decided to make them a sponge cake, for which they had to wait in embarrassed silence, while whiskings and whirrings seeped through from the kitchen. But it was a day for embarrassment, which in his mind was always connected with Reading, as if the emotion were Reading’s gift to her sons and daughters. Bland had praised the cake too effusively, and had found himself gazing into a face as calm and as colourless as a nun’s. A small grey eye had viewed him without indulgence. Mrs Wilson, who had drunk no tea herself, had taken the tray back to the kitchen and had stayed there, ostentatiously tactful, or perhaps genuinely indifferent to his presence. Louise had followed her shortly afterwards. Bland heard the words, ‘Is he still here?’ Then Louise returned, looking unhappy; he had taken her hand and kissed her, then, since it was expected of him, he had left. The incidents of that afternoon were never referred to again. To do so would have been to question their status in the world, their very identity. Without words they consoled each other as best they could.
    He almost loved her, and would have married her had she been slightly but essentially different. He thought that she probably felt the same about him. Each was too loyal to admit that something else was desired, something less sedate.Louise, for all her placidity was a healthy woman, while he himself was bruised with unassuaged longings. Yet they were undoubted allies. Prepared for disappointment, they nevertheless made the most of their friendship, which became, and had remained, a civilised and affectionate affair, an affair of long walks, teas in distant hotels, discussion of the week’s news. Looking back, Bland found their innocence honourable. In those early days they were able to confess freely to each other their obligations towards their less than accommodating parents. They found comfort in their occasional intimacy. They progressed from the borrowed flat to a small hotel, then to a larger one, and after his mother’s death and his removal to London he had got in touch with her again, thanking her for her kind letter of condolence, and explaining that the events of that last year had been so sad (‘sad’ was the most neutral word he could find) that he had not been in touch, but that he longed to see her again. When could they meet?
    By that time he was installed in the flat over Baker Street Station, and their meetings were frequent and easy. They had continued to come together until she had announced that she was getting married. By that time they had both come up in the world, but although free, had become trapped within the framework of their early relationship. They had continued to meet until she removed herself to Lymington and her awful husband. At least he thought of him as awful, having been introduced to him when the three of them met, not entirely by accident, at a concert at the Wigmore Hall. Tall, bony, and already nearly bald, the husband-to-be, a retired doctor, had given him a quasi-professional handshake—brief—but said little. Bland, whohad not expected to like him, found him worse than expected, and prepared to wash his hands of the whole affair. But his heart was sore at the prospect of losing Louise, and in the end it had proved impossible to break the thread that bound them together, time, in this instance, being on their side.
    Shortly after their son was born the husband had become some sort of an invalid, and had eventually died. This had not affected Louise unduly: by that time she