Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [68]
‘Yes, of course, Edith. Good night, dear.’
‘Please don’t get up,’ said Edith to Mr Neville, placing a hand rather firmly on his shoulder. She did not care if this was construed as familiarity. She was suddenly very tired of being reticent. He could have said something, she thought, acutely aware of the pregnant silence behind her retreating back. And Mrs Pusey will spend the rest of the evening trying to find out what he will good-humouredly refuse to tell her. I am not needed.
Although her steps were light and silent, it seemed to her that she was trudging up the stairs like a weary traveller. And in the dim pinkish room, so serious, so quiet, she sat down once more like an exile. Finally, she moved over to the little table, took a sheet of paper, and wrote.
‘My dearest David,
‘This is the last letter that I shall ever write to you and the first one that I shall ever post. I am going to marry Philip Neville, a man I met here; I am going to live in his house near Marlborough, and I do not think that I shall ever see you again.
‘You are the breath of life to me. One should not say such things, I know. You do not want to hear them. When I spoke those words to Penelope she looked aghast, affronted, as if I had dealt myself out of normal society by confessing as much. And so it seems that I have burnt too many boats, crossed too many bridges, ever to return to what I was before, or what I thought I was.
‘I do not love Mr Neville, nor does he love me. But he has made me see what I will become if I persist in loving you as I do. I had begun to see this before I came here, and perhaps that wretched business with poor Geoffrey was the result of what I had begun to see. That fiasco will be avoided this time, mainly because Mr Neville will see that it is. He assures me that I will very soon, under his guidance, develop into the sort of acceptable woman whose confidence and stamina and indeed presumption I have always envied. Rather like your wife, in fact.
‘I have never been a great success in this way, and so it was supremely ironical that I should fall in love with a man who has always been a success in every way. I lived for you. Yet how often did I see you? Perhaps twice a month? More, if we met by accident. Sometimes less, if you were too busy. And sometimes a whole month without you. I have imagined you at home, with your wife, and your children, and those times were bad. But much worse were the times when I suspected that your attention, your curiosity, had been aroused by somebody new, some girl whom you might have met somewhere, at a party, perhaps, as you once met me. And then I would scrutinize women in the street, in the bus, in the shops, looking for a face that I could fit into your fantasy. Because, you see, although I lack the details, I know you very well.
‘I know, you see, that whatever you feel for me, or perhaps I should say, once felt for me, I am, as Swann said of Odette, not your type.
‘There is no reason why we should ever meet again, except, of course, by accident. Mr Neville, who has a fine collection of famille rose dishes, no doubt spends a certain amount of time in the salerooms and auction houses, and it is just conceivable that he may wish me to accompany him on these visits. But I have told him of my indifference to collecting and I doubt if he will insist.
‘I shall try to be a good wife to him. One does not receive proposals of marriage every day in this enlightened age, although curiously enough I have had two this year. I seem to have accepted them both. The lure of domestic peace was obviously too great for one of my timorous nature to resist. But I shall settle down now. I shall have to, for I doubt if I have anything more to look forward to.
‘You thought, perhaps, like my publisher, and my agent, who are always trying to get me to bring my books up to date and make them sexier and more exciting, that I wrote my stories with that mixture of satire and cynical detachment that is thought to become the modern writer in this field. You were wrong. I