Visitors by Anita Brookner

her she’d get married in that thing you saw her in.’
    ‘If you have a hand in the wedding it will be beautifully done,’ said Mrs May quite sincerely.
    ‘Thank you, Thea. It’s nice to receive a little support and encouragement. And how are you getting on?’
    ‘Oh, not too badly. Not too badly at all. But we shall all be pretty tired once they’ve gone.’
    ‘Austin insists that we go to Freshwater. You wouldn’t like to join us, I suppose?’
    This invitation, though quite possibly genuine, was couched in a manner and a tone of voice that expected a refusal.
    ‘You know how I enjoy my quiet way of life, Kitty. I don’t move far these days.’
    ‘No, you don’t, do you?’ said Kitty, refreshed by the thought. ‘Well, we’ll see you on Friday. Seven-thirty. Goodbye, now.’
    Mrs May replaced the receiver and was suddenly aware ofa gap in the afternoon. She willed Steve to come back, if only to have a bath before going out again. ‘Look out of the window,’ she planned to say to him, quite casually. ‘I’ve hired it for you. It will give you a bit more freedom. And perhaps we could go out for a drive? At the weekend? If you’re not too busy, of course.’

‘How’s it going, Dorothea?’ Steve’s taciturnity was somewhat moderated by the sight of the car outside in the street, a fact which, although welcome as a sign of comradeliness, was nevertheless in some ways regrettable. It had suited them both to mount a certain reserve, a reserve made more piquant by a no less certain stealth: each would listen for the other going down the corridor, a metaphorical ear to the door. Now they were obliged to acknowledge proximity, although not as yet intimacy. She felt the weight of his appreciation—for the car, not for her person—in his cheery meaningless salutation, repeated several times a day when they were obliged to meet. He required no answer to his greeting, nor had she—after one fervent, ‘Oh, very well, Steve, and you?’—any answer to give him. In fact neither required the other to speak. She intuited that his greeting was defensive, pre-emptive, as though by offering this formula he was at the same time signifying that he was not available for questioning.
    She knew nothing about him beyond the fact that he was reasonably tactful; beyond that, and his reclusiveness, which almost matched her own, there was no evidence of nurturing.It was impossible to imagine him sitting in the same room as a mother or a father, yet she thought she detected a dolefulness in his always retreating figure that made her feel protective. Although he looked like a man he was at pains to conceal a boy’s feelings. She admired the set of his features, which gave nothing away, and thought that any girl who set her sights on him would have a hard time. Mrs May doubted whether he had lived at such close quarters with a woman since leaving home: body building seemed to have replaced any interest in the opposite sex in his particular physical economy. Living at such close quarters she had become more readily acquainted with his appearance: the short dark hair, the pleasantly blank smile, the mouth which, when not under strict control, betrayed his dissatisfaction, the neat concentrated body, of average height, that spoke of punishing exercise, the bare feet that rejected shoes until the last minute. She thought too that she detected something disturbingly affectless about him, as if he were some sort of mercenary, home on leave from a distant war zone, scrupulously cleaned up, and all at once bored.
    She had no idea what he did with his time. Apart from dinner at the Levinsons his days were unaccounted for. Running served him in lieu of an occupation; she was given to understand that he met David in the park and ran round Kensington Gardens with him. She assumed that they spent the morning together, or part of it, and possibly got themselves something for lunch. She did not know whether he had any money, a matter which