Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [20]
‘What do you do?’ she enquired, her eyes wide with this vision, gazing off into the middle distance.
‘I am an auctioneer,’ he replied. And then there had been a brief silence.
They had met at one of her friend Penelope Milne’s irritating little parties. ‘Drinks before lunch next Sunday,’ came the inexorable voice over the telephone. ‘Now don’t let me down. You can work in the afternoon if you want to. I’m not stopping you.’
But you are, thought Edith. Since you are too mean to provide any food, and since I don’t care to eat at half-past two or whenever I get back with a splitting headache, my day is effectively ruined. And Penelope had such a curious attitude to providing food; she regarded it as some sort of unseemly submission. Her company could only be purchased via the old and hoary routes of flowers, theatre tickets, and intimate dinners at the best restaurants, of which she was a connoisseur. To Penelope, men were conquests, attributes, but they were also enemies; they belonged to the species that must never be granted more than the amount of time and attention she considered they deserved. Her tone with such men was flirtatious, mocking, never serious; she spread about her a propaganda of rapid affairs, rapidly consummated, with a laughing lack of commitment on both sides. She seemed to take a pride in the steady succession of names. She was, Edith saw, accomplished in venery. And as an accompaniment, she was given to sighing elaborately over Edith’s uneventful life and was clearly of the opinion that Edith only wrote about those pleasures that reality had denied her. She was generous with offers to introduce Edith to various grass-widowers of her acquaintance – ‘my cast-offs’, as she laughingly referred to them – and was piqued when Edith pleaded that she was really no company when she was working on a book. She would have taken pleasure, Edith knew, in setting up a meeting, with herself present; she would have master-minded Edith, with many a jocund reference to her own successes with the amiable candidate; she would even have ushered them off the premises to a restaurant of her own choosing, would have whispered something in the cast-off’s ear, and then said firmly to Edith, ‘I’ll ring you in the morning.’ Yet she considered men to be a contemptible sex, and her eyes would sparkle when she recounted tales of conquest at the various committee meetings which were the very stuff of her social life. ‘That dreadful little man,’ she would say dismis-sively, of someone who did not know the rules of her game.
She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years. She and Edith had in common the dispositions of their houses, for they were at opposite ends of the tiny terrace, their domestic arrangements, which consisted of the window-cleaner (not to be missed; they had each other’s keys), and Mrs Dempster, their dramatic and unpredictable cleaning lady. There was an understanding between them that if either were ill the other would shop and cook. This last contingency had not yet arisen but was of a comfort to them both. Edith, tired, yawning, aching from her silent day, would push away her typewriter, wander out of her house and into Penelope’s, and be quite happy to advise her on what to wear on her next sortie. Penelope, though never referring to the matter of Edith’s work, would push her forward, as if she were a child, at her all too frequent parties, and say, ‘And of course you know Edith Hope. She writes.’ Such was their friendship.
On this particular Sunday Penelope had drummed up a good attendance and there were many people there whom Edith did not know. She resigned herself to standing around for the requisite amount of time (Penelope did not like one to sit down) when the resonant sentence floated into her consciousness. Tracing it to its source, she saw a tall, lean, foxy man helping himself to a handful of peanuts; she