Look at Me by Anita Brookner

introduced to the regulars; he seemed to grasp the rules immediately. Hewas, after all, a very clever man. I watched him a lot. I saw that he was a little stiff, a little shocked by Maria’s exuberance, but that was only to be expected. I saw that he was enthralled by the sheer novelty of the evening, by the possibilities opened up to him by these new friends. I did a lot of watching that evening. I watched the Frasers and their evident amusement at the success of their strategy. I watched their heads come together, their foreheads momentarily touch, the laziness with which they disengaged. I watched, with a touch of sadness, James watching the Frasers. Of course, the spectacle of two people’s happiness is always something of a magnet for the unclaimed. When I finally smiled to myself, and looked down, and drank my coffee, and looked up again, I found that James was watching me.
    ‘Where do you live, Frances?’ he said. ‘Somewhere healthy, obviously.’
    ‘Healthy?’ I asked.
    ‘Well, you always look so healthy when you blow into the Library in the morning.’
    I laughed. ‘That’s because I walk to work. I love walking. But it’s no great distance. I live in Maida Vale. And I lived with
my
mother, until she died.’
    I felt him relax, and my little sadness passed. ‘I like walking too,’ he said. ‘I do quite a bit of it.’ At this point we were turned towards each other, and I sensed that Nick and Alix were watching us. ‘You’ve been at the Library some time now, haven’t you?’ he went on. ‘Do you like the work?’
    ‘But you don’t know her secret,’ Alix broke in. ‘She’s really a writer. She’s writing a novel.’
    I protested, but Nick said, ‘Don’t be an idiot, Fanny. Tell him all about it.’
    So I succumbed and said my piece, and made it funny, and he laughed, and Alix called for the bill, and waved me imperiously aside when I insisted that it was myturn, and then James, whom I now thought of as James, with fairly impressive determination, brought out his wallet and put four ten pound notes on the table.
    ‘Well,’ said Alix, ‘you must be our guest next time.’
    ‘I’d love to,’ he agreed. ‘This has been so very pleasant. Can I offer you a nightcap somewhere?’
    I think perhaps that he had suddenly grown rather impatient with that hothouse atmosphere of intimacy that had so attracted him earlier in the evening. And his legs were so long that he found sitting at a small table rather uncomfortable. And so we found ourselves, somewhat incongruously, in the lounge of a very large hotel in Knightsbridge and sat ourselves round a table surrounded by acres of orange and brown geometrical carpet. There was no one else there but an Italian family chattering in a corner; their small daughter, a beautiful child with big over-tired eyes and tiny earrings, ran round and round, getting more tired, and stopping on her way to gaze at us. Alix offered her an olive from a dish on our table, and she covered her face with her hands and ran back to her mother.
    I remember that they were putting up Christmas decorations, two-dimensional gold trees fixed to the fake pilasters.
    ‘Rather early, isn’t it?’ I remarked to Alix. It was only the third week in October.
    ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘They always do it early. Foreign tourists expect it. Anyway, it can’t be too early for me. I love Christmas.’
    ‘I don’t,’ James and I said simultaneously, and looked at each other in surprise.
    ‘I usually spend it with my mother,’ he explained. ‘We’re both divorced and we both dread it.’
    ‘I can’t wait for it to be over,’ I confessed, not wanting to go into the business of Nancy and our sad little celebration. Public Holiday Syndrome is something youkeep to yourself, I thought. I was amazed and enchanted to find a fellow sufferer.
    ‘But you must come with us this year,’ cried Alix. ‘A whole crowd of us usually gets together. You know practically everyone by now. It’s