Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [30]
And for Mrs Pusey, Edith reflected, she fulfilled the same function. Mrs Pusey and, by extension, Jennifer, were beginning to emerge in a rather harder light than had at first been apparent. Mrs Pusey had had the sort of success that Monica was scornful of achieving: bourgeois, luxurious, demonstrable. Mrs Pusey’s references to her husband made Edith uneasy, perhaps because they appeared to be a function of Mrs Pusey’s narcissism: Mr Pusey, who still had no name, would have remained without a profession or a home had these not been added by circumstantial evidence. His character, his tastes, even his looks were veiled in mystery. The manner of his departing this life was still obscure and undated, although Edith had learned to be wary of this final revelation, fearful of the bestowing of comfort and sympathy that this would inevitably call forth. I too have a past, she thought, with an uncharacteristic spurt of indignation. I too have had my deaths and my departures, some of them quite recent. But I have learned to shield them, to hide them from sight, to keep them at bay. To exhibit my wounds would, for me, denote an emotional incontinence of which I might later be ashamed.
Yet it was less Mrs Pusey’s tranquil exhibitionism that worried Edith than the glimpses she had caught of a somewhat salacious mind. Mrs Pusey’s disposition to flirt, even when there was no one around to flirt with, was, to Edith, somehow disturbing, although it was done with such lack of inhibition that it should have appeared harmless. On those rare occasions when Mrs Pusey was sitting alone, Edith had observed her in all sorts of attention-catching ploys, creating a small locus of busyness that inevitably invited someone to come to her aid. She would not be still or be quiet until she had captured the attention of whomever she judged to be necessary for her immediate purpose. And the enormous celebration of her own person, of her physical charm, so ruthlessly yet innocently set forth, was this altogether attractive in a woman of her age? This determination never to leave the field, not even for Jennifer, who appeared quite overshadowed, quite passive, in comparison with her mother’s ardent eye, her cocked head, her passionate absorption in what to wear next. And that glimpse, that Edith had had, in her bedroom, of those exotic déshabillés, not all of them in the quietest of taste, did one laugh them off as a harmless indulgence, a simple love of adornment, of play? Which was surely, undoubtedly, what they were. Edith wondered, sensing ancient prejudices about to come to the surface. Her mother, Viennese Rosa, would have had no doubts at all. She would have taken one look at Mrs Pusey and laughed her grim laugh; she would have discerned at a glance the sort of temperament she most admired in a woman, a subject much debated with her sister and her cousin in those days when they discussed their conquests and their rivals just out of earshot of their mother and aunt. Très portée sur la chose, they would have agreed, in the atrociously accented French they used as a code. And Rosa would have curled her lip, not out of contempt, but out of vengeful regret for her own wasted years, which should have been filled with lovers and their intrigues but which had instead been monopolized by an increasingly mute husband and a silent child.
And Mrs Pusey hated Monica, in whom she sensed both opposition and failure. To Mrs Pusey, Monica was not merely a fortune-hunter but the sort of woman she, Mrs Pusey, should not be asked to admit into her presence. Those heights of scornful distinction, so effortlessly attained by Monica, were written off by Mrs Pusey as ‘a front’. She did not say what lay behind the front. But she intimated that she knew.
The company of their own sex, Edith reflected, was what drove many women into marriage. So it had been with her. The meekness of her bowed head had failed to avert the confidences with which Penelope Milne daily sought to regale her and, even