Lewis Percy by Anita Brookner

enthusiasm on the part of what he could not help thinking of as the main beneficiaries?
    Their house suddenly seemed intolerable to him and he wondered how soon he might leave. But he could not leave without some sort of a sign from them as to how he was to continue. He knew that he would come back, yet he also knew that he would want to be a welcome guest, not merely tolerated, but gladly, excitedly, anticipated. It seemed to him that he could rise to fulfil any expectation, if only that expectation were to be indicated. Without that he would turn away in disgust, yes, disgust. He had come so near to beggary that he was indignant on his own behalf. He thought how differently his mother would have behaved in a similar situation and longed to be at home again, away from these people with their enormous reticence, their absolute lack of desire, their basic powerful refusal of life. Their indifference alone made him want to insist that they pay more attention to him, yet at the same time he had a feeling of impatience, as if he were in two minds about the whole affair and might easily be persuaded to call it off. He lacked a champion, a spokesman, an advocate, someone who would tell him what he wanted to know, that he should opt for the wider, fuller life. Something called to him beyond his present circumstances, beyond anything he could logically see, yet here he was, entrapped in this small room as if it were his destiny, as if his course were already chosen for him. The effect of Mrs Harper – and of her daughter too – was to deprive him of initiative. He longed to be gone, but curiously doubted his ability to free himself from their spell.
    And that saturation of sweetness, overlaying an immoveable core of opacity. He saw a trace of melting cream on his plate and felt a qualm of nausea. Tissy’s plate was clean; as he glanced at her her cup came gently and finally to rest in her saucer. She turned then to look at him, and smiled. He smiled back, vastly relieved. His strategy now, he saw, was to get her out of this room, preferably without her mother, and into his own house. In those astringent and much saner surroundings he would get to know her, and get to know her on his own terms. After all, this meeting was only a rite ofpassage, one that they had all been obliged to perform, and one that they probably found to be as discouraging as he did.
    ‘I must be going,’ he said. ‘Thank you for this splendid tea, Mrs Harper. I wonder if you’d both like to come to my house next Saturday?’ Harrods, he thought. They sell cakes, don’t they?
    Mrs Harper stubbed out her cigarette. ‘One of these days,’ she conceded. ‘If Tissy is not too tired.’
    With this he had to be content. ‘I’ll see Tissy at the library,’ he said, ‘and fix something up with her. Would that be all right?’ For by now he was determined to persevere, and, more important, to get his own way.
    As he was rising to go the doorbell rang.
    ‘Tissy, let Ralph in, would you?’ said Mrs Harper, piling dirty plates on to a papier mâché tray, another relic of former times, he supposed, and of a more commodious house. ‘The doctor,’ she added, for Lewis’s benefit. ‘He looks in once a week to see how Tissy is getting on.’
    For a moment he had thought he might have a rival and was surprised to notice how alarmed he felt. For he seemed set on his course to become Tissy’s husband, even if she had given no sign that she was to be his wife.
    He was reassured, too, by the visit of a doctor, as who is not, when there is no illness in the house. The presence of a man had seemed to him to be lacking, and he wondered if the mild depression he had felt throughout his visit was due to the fact that however sympathetically he felt towards women their unadulterated company made him feel uncertain, at a loss. Fatherless, always seeking a home among women, reading their books in an effort to love and understand them better, he nevertheless looked to