That Punitive Meal

For Christmases of the classic Brooknerian sort, one heads to Fraud (see here and here) and A Family Romance (here). A later Brookner, The Rules of Engagement, offers variations on the theme.

...her happy voice on the telephone, as she told me that she had been invited to the Fairlies on Christmas Day for lunch, or was it dinner? whatever that punitive meal was called...

The narrator's own seasonal plans are at this point 'obstinately' shapeless, and later resolve into an organised walk with baffled Japanese students. In the narrator's, or Brookner's, hesitancy over what to call the Yuletide feast, one learns everything about her sense of exclusion - though here the narrator, unlike so many Brooknerians, is solidly English. In A Family Romance the celebratory meal is firmly 'lunch'. I'm not sure what I'd decide. The meanings, in England at least, of lunch, dinner, tea and supper are determined by class and slippery as eels. One plumps for one or another at one's peril.

Never glad confident morning again

In the absence of more reliable signposts one seeks parallels in literature. In the time ahead, when every day, for many, will seem like Christmas Day, one thinks of Anna Durrant in Anita Brookner's Fraud (1992), the lonely walk Anna takes across a deserted, Pompeii-still London in windless air under a low grey sky.

Later in the novel another character, the elderly Mrs Marsh, nurses her son Nick through a bout of the flu. His convalescence is powerfully described, the reduction in his routine, his devotion to the predictable rhythms of the Radio 4 schedule.

A recent New Yorker piece (here) considered episodes of social distancing in Victorian novels: Bleak House, Jane Eyre. Elsewhere in Brookner there are more than several chapters on illness and recovery. One recalls the end of Look at Me (1983), Frances cared for like a child after her traumatic night walk; or the horribly extended migraine that afflicts the protagonist in A Misalliance (1986) and the blessed ministrations of a saintly neighbour, with her gifts of lemon barley water and a cold chicken.

In Altered States (1996) Alan Sherwood gets the flu and is looked after by Angela, who soon, almost inevitably, becomes his wife. Somehow his world has changed, his options narrowed:

Illness serves as a corrective: one emerges from it sober but diminished. One learns that one's continuation cannot be taken for granted, or, as the poet puts it, never glad confident morning again.

On Thinness

Somebody once saw one of Anita Brookner’s shopping lists. She lent a student a book; the list fell out. It was for only two items: slimming biscuits and a small pot of Marmite. Evidently, concluded the speaker, she was very keen to be very thin. She was indeed thin, though perhaps she didn’t want to be. Speaking of the other positive things that had accrued to her from her entry into the life of a writer of fiction she said she even put on a little weight. At first writing had been, as it is for Frances in Look at Me, penitential, a penance for not being lucky, but later Anita Brookner had only good things to say. Her second career, if not perhaps as involving as her first, brought its rewards, made her well.

What were slimming biscuits? Evidently some healthful preparation, now obsolete. She was, when I met her, very thin, almost brittle. As thin and as brittle – one might ask – as her fiction?

In her fiction, in 1992’s Fraud in particular, there are themes of food anxiety. Anna Durrant is very probably anorexic. Her doctor worries about her. She dreams of sweet food, a vast sugary cake that breaks apart to reveal… a wedding ring. Freud would have had a field day with that one.

A huge disgusting pudding features in the disastrous climactic scene of Look at Me. Terrible truths are revealed, and everyone is enjoined to eat – eat – eat!

At the close of A Private View, his adventure at an end, his illusions dismantled, George Bland, in the act of biting into a biscuit, doubles up with grief.

The form of Brookner’s novels – their briefness, their thinness – led to accusations of slightness. Certainly there was a lack of full engagement or commitment to the notion of creation, a suggestion that such activity – such storytelling – was somehow a little vulgar. She said once she wasn’t imaginative; she could only invent. And yet there was a hunger to write, an almost pathological desire. And yet there was also a longing to finish and have done.

Lines of Beauty

What's your favourite Brookner line? Something positively freighted with many things Brooknerian. Something perhaps only Anita Brookner could have written.

Look at Me
A novel replete with quotability. I'm going to choose one of the most extreme, almost self-parodic lines, from the truly chilling chapter 11: Frances's desolate trek through a hostile nighttime London:

This must be the most terrible hour, the hour when people die in hospitals.

(Larkinian too. Think 'Ambulances' or 'The Building' - each room farther from the last and harder to return from.)


Falling Slowly
Miriam is imagining the thoughts of her contemporaries, those with lives more conventional than her own. You are not one of us, she imagines them thinking. You do not shop for cornflakes, fish fingers, baked beans. You will not grow fat. You do not take family holidays, the car loaded with junk. You only look astonishingly young, but you must be getting on.

Too late for you, then. You will just have to make do with the rest of your life, with only yourself for company. (Ch. 9)

Latecomers
Fibich, years later, safe in middle age, remembers getting on the Kindertransport, leaving his mother behind in Berlin. They would never meet again. Now in England, in the 1980s, in a London restaurant, he breaks down.

'I should have gone back,' whispered Fibich. 'I should not have left. I should have got off the train.' (Ch. 14)

A Misalliance
Now for something a little (but only a little) lighter:

Since living alone she had experienced varying degrees of exclusion, and, out of sheer dandyism, had made an ironical survey of the subject. (Ch. 3)

Out of sheer dandyism. All those hate-filled unthinking critics all those years: how could they have got Anita Brookner so wrong? How could they have overlooked her impeccable but subversive dandyism?


'At the Hairdresser's'

I am not lonely except in company. (Ch. 3)

What can one say to this? Echoing Larkin again, I think: 'nothing to be said'. Other than 'Brooknerianism in a nutshell', perhaps?


Visitors
For my next, a touch of aphoristic robustness.

Mrs May knew what families were for: they were for offering endless possibilities for coercion. (Ch. 2)

A Private View
Katy Gibb has gone, leaving George Bland disconsolate. Katy was an impossible proposition; their lives were incompatible. But he had been in love.

He made tea and drank it gratefully, yet in the act of eating a biscuit his face contracted once more with grief. (Ch. 11)

George Bland and that biscuit.


Family and Friends
Mimi, wounded for ever by events in her past, mourns her life - though it is not Frank for whom she yearns but the missing element in herself that would have brought him to her side.

It is as much as she can do now to avoid pain, simply to avoid pain. (Ch. 10)

The formal construction. And that repetition. Compare Providence in the climactic scene:

I lacked the information, thought Kitty, trying to control her trembling hands. Quite simply, I lacked the information.

This could go on and on. Let me end for now with something evocative from Altered States (ch. 13) and something hopeful (yes, that) from Fraud (ch. 8) - both, I note, deploying exclamation marks. As I may have said before, always look out for Anita Brookner's exclamation marks.

The melancholy of London flats at nightfall! 

Then the marvellous thought struck her: but there is no need to live like this!

London flats, nightfall, melancholy

Chapter by Chapter #2

I wish there were a word-count facility on my e-reader: it might yield some interesting results. I noticed during my recent reread of Fraud (1992) something I'd only half-recognised before: how Brookner's chapters have a tendency towards being extremely regular in length. I reckon if I were to count the words in each of Fraud's chapters the results would be remarkably close.

How did she do this? She wrote in longhand, and cleanly, with few corrections (a page of the MS of Family and Friends (1985) is to be found online alongside the Paris Review interview) - so it was probably just a case of her allocating herself a set number of sheets of paper per chapter.

But why did she do it? She was certainly a writer, and probably a person, who lived according to her routines. Imposing such structures and patterns on the job of composition would have given momentum to a writing process that, as John Bayley says somewhere, possibly wasn't experienced at the full fever pitch of passionate engagement.

In the 1990s, in A Family Romance (1993) and A Private View (1994), Brookner experimented with chapter length. The chapters in those novels are approximately double the usual Brookner length. She returns to her old pattern in some later novels.

In the 2000s things seem to be up in the air again, matching perhaps the edgier tone of those last novels. Brookner's first and final chapters had always been subject to irregularity, but chapter 3 of The Bay of Angels (2001) is intriguing and a little disconcerting for being only four pages long.

Pity and Fear: The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark

The tone, from the start, is unsettling, uncanny: over-detailed, affectless, and then with sudden accesses of poetry and metaphor. Of the heroine's pinewood furniture: 'The swaying tall pines among the litter of cones on the forest floor have been subdued into silence and into obedient bulks'. What is Spark's game? For she's certainly playing a game.

Like Anna in Anita Brookner's Fraud, Lise in Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat (1970) has gone missing - or rather is about to go missing. Or rather is about to be brutally murdered. Spark, in typical postmodern Sparkish fashion, larks around with chronology. We know early on, even before Lise has arrived at her final destination - an unnamed probably Mediterranean city - that she is to die. We find out by the end how this comes about, and why. The ending is chillingly bleak.

Lise is unknowable, even by Spark ('Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?'), an author who's in the driver's seat but of a vehicle that's just a little bit out of control. The narrative has an established end-point, but the journey is unpredictable. Lise careers madly from scene to scene, picking up and idly shedding subordinate characters. The novel has a dreamlike quality, but this is a trick. Lise's life and her story are in fact strongly teleological: unknown to the reader, known only to Lise (and Spark, of course), a diabolical plan is in motion. There is nothing random about this novel.

The Driver's Seat depicts an immoral universe and might be seen as an immoral or amoral novel or rather novella: brutish and short. But it lingers in the mind, minatory, cautionary. Take care, says Spark. Her eye may be pitiless - the whole 1960s world of cheap foreign travel is richly evoked - but her heroine is pitiable, and a warning to us all. '[F]ear and pity, pity and fear' echo the tale's closing words.

*

As this is a blog largely devoted to the work of another author, it would be remiss of me not to consider Brookner's views on Muriel Spark. Here is Brookner in the New York Times in 1984 (see link here), offering a reading of a later Spark novel:

In all her novels Muriel Spark gives the impression that although she has risen above the problem of evil, the struggle has been great; the effort has left her in possession of a high-spirited despair, a sometimes painful irony - painful precisely because it is effective. One has sometimes yearned for what is not there, as if the victory of overcoming has exacted too heavy a forfeit. At times it has seemed as if the heart of the matter has been excised and only the nefarious transactions recorded. […] The Only Problem … is Mrs Spark's best novel since The Driver's Seat, and it is, yet again, a disturbing and exhilarating experience.

Undue Influence: Echoes

One of the fun things about reading a writer as prolific as Anita Brookner is seeing how she reuses material. And not just themes, though this is the obvious place to start. Early in Undue Influence, for example, when Claire Pitt emerges from the Gibsons', she gets the authentic Brooknerian feeling of escape: 'The dear street!' How many others have exclaimed over such a release?

More concretely we get references to Blakeney in Norfolk. We're always alert when Brookner's characters venture from London into the English provinces, where danger often lurks. Blakeney features also in Brookner's 1992 novel Fraud, and there's another intriguing detail found in both books. In Fraud Dr Halliday (very similar to Martin Gibson in Undue Influence) must endure trips in his odious father-in-law's boat, and in Undue Influence Martin Gibson's stepfather takes him on a boat trip, which he finds an emetic experience (and we know from A Friend from England that water is rarely to be trusted). The Fraud father-in-law is also called Gibson.

This Needless Test

People seemed to behave more reasonably in those remote days. The companionship engendered by the late War had not entirely fragmented. Nobody jogged. Nobody went to the gym.

Brookner, 'Benedict Nicolson', Independent Magazine, 10 September 1994

Not long ago we said a few words about booze, a most unBrooknerian topic. Continuing this series, let's look at sport and exercise. Sport first: no one in Brookner watches it, plays it, thinks about it. There are no visits to football fixtures; the Brooknerian year is not punctuated by even the most genteel of sports. Compare the way the aristos in Trollope live their lives in tune with the sporting rituals of the Season. There are still people today whose years are structured in this way. But they're not to be found in Brookner.

But there are always joggers. Anna Durrant, in chapter 8 of Fraud, enduring the loneliest Christmas day on record, nevertheless spots a few determined joggers. But they represent otherness rather than any kind of solidarity. Jogging also represents an uncongenial modernity, as the passage above suggests. But Brooknerians are flâneurs. Indeed the street, as opposed to the restrictiveness of indoors, is often celebrated. Take this from Strangers:

To be once again in the street felt like the order of release. Air! He wanted air! (Ch. 11)

Indoors is the domain of the established and the happy and the complacent, the literal insiders. The living-spaces of Brooknerians are contrastingly empty, unheimlich, as Rachel says of her bedroom in A Friend from England.

It's in that novel that we find one of the most striking and uncharacteristic scenes in the whole of Brookner: in chapter 4, when Rachel visits her colleague's health club. The swimming pool's smell, the echoing noise, the curiosity of others, the sense of violence and disturbance, are all powerfully evoked. The reputed benefits of sport and exercise prove worthless in the Brooknerian world:

Even when I was dressing I could hear the dull shouting, magnified under the glass roof, and the fact that these were sounds of enjoyment made no difference to me. I knew I had not beaten my fear, that I never should, and I resolved never to put myself to this needless test again.

Everything's terrible, cara

At last, though, we see what Brookner is up to. Rachel is sent to Venice for the crisis - 'the ultimate nightmare: a city filled with water' - and does indeed find herself sinking. Like Strether in The Ambassadors (late James hangs, somewhat stiflingly, over the whole novel), she goes to fetch Heather back from the life she has chosen, and finds herself at risk. 'Perhaps I was beginning to find a symbolism in her undistinguished adventure and the light it was shedding on my own life.' What we are reading is not a social comedy or novel of sensibility, but an allegorical debate between a false life of repression and a true life of risks and engagements. And it is the 'Brookner heroine' who is defeated. 

But how narrow the terms of the debate are, with no alternatives for women other than self-deceiving freedom or sexual dependency! And how faintly the opposition is drawn! And how neurotic and obscure the narrative is! - as troubling as Giorgione's painting 'The Tempest,' which Brookner characteristically provides as an analogue for her allegory. Rachel is 'made for the dark' - 'Who said life wasn't terrible?' she says to Heather, echoing James' Prince in The Golden Bowl: 'Everything's terrible, cara, in the heart of man.' For all Brookner's sly distancing of this narrative voice, it's impossible not to feel that this harsh, dark fable speaks of her own despair; it may be that if she didn't write, she would drown.

Hermione Lee, LA Times, 20 March 1988

Early on in A Friend from England Rachel gets intimations that things may be adrift, when the Colonel rings her up and makes a fairly repellent pass at her. It is one of Brookner's raw, shocking moments. 'If someone as horrible as the Colonel had found me out, then I had to know that something was wrong' (ch. 5).

Gradually Rachel comes to the fore, developing like a photograph in the old analogue world of the novel. Gradually she begins to see herself afresh, has panicky thoughts of flight, fantasies of hanging the closed sign on her shop door. Anna in a later novel, Fraud, will actually enact such a disappearance, and hers will be in a measure successful. But Anna is a more distant figure, compared with Rachel in the later parts of A Friend from England. As Hermione Lee suggests, Rachel may be the fictional spokeswoman for real despair. The outburst in chapter 9 - 'People like you seem to think [life] is a sort of party ... I live in the real world, the world of deceptions. You live in the world of illusions ... Of course, it's terrible' - is one of Brookner's most brilliant manifestos. She goes in for them from time to time, lets her protagonist shout and scream, lets her or him put forward the extreme Brooknerian case.

At the end, in the masterly Venice scenes, Rachel sees her bleak future plainly. Lee is right to criticise the terms of debate - 'Without a face opposite mine the world was empty; without another voice it was silent' - but Brookner simply hasn't any other answers. And nor have any of us, not even Oscar Livingstone, once so spruce, once such a romantic, now a shabby widower, stumping away in the novel's last lines in a parody of a Hollywood ending into a rapidly sinking sun.

On Drink

In one of Anita’s later novels, the female protagonist, when having supper alone in her flat, regularly has a glass of white wine. Being interested in wine, I couldn’t help noticing that each time supper occurred, the wine was different: first a chardonnay, then a pinot grigio, then a sauvignon, and so on; but the last wine to be drunk in the book was, unexpectedly, sweet – a sauternes. I wondered if such changingness might be significant, intended perhaps as an emblem of the protagonist’s volatility. At lunch I mentioned this theory, and referred to that puzzling late switch from dry to sweet. ‘Oh no,’ replied Anita unconcernedly, ‘I just went into a shop and copied down the names.’

Julian Barnes, Guardian, March 2016

No one ever gets drunk in an Anita Brookner novel. The character identified by Julian Barnes is probably Blanche in A Misalliance - a very mild toper, all things considered. Very mild in comparison with, for example, the folk to be found in an average Kingsley Amis. Followers of this blog will know I've a penchant for Amis. I always love his drinking scenes, those long extended set-pieces that occupy such central positions in his novels. Amis himself was a legendary drinker, but said he never wrote while drunk. In his Memoirs he criticised writers such as Paul Scott, claimed he could always spot the moment in a Scott novel when the stuff went pouring in.

Mentions of drink in Brookner novels - champagne in A Friend from England, a glass of beer in Fraud - are few and far between, and represent not so much points of interest as moments of authorial awkwardness, moments when she steps a little gingerly outside her range. What, one wonders, would Brookner's world be like if it were less sober?

Dorrie affairée

Who does not enjoy a set piece, by which I guess I mean an extended scene depicting a social occasion? Brookner goes in for them infrequently, but usually memorably. Disastrous meals are a feature: one thinks of Look at Me's climactic meal, or the dinner party in Fraud.

Such scenes, with their food, their clothes, their vulgar demotic dialogue, can unbalance a novel as finely woven as an Anita Brookner. In A Friend from England, for example in the engagement party and wedding scenes in chapter 3, Brookner seeks a middle way: dense paragraphs, indirect speech, a painterly attention to detail and manner and impression. This is in keeping with the estranged, disillusioned mood of the narrator. Rachel has things in common with Anthony Powell's almost disembodied narrator in his Music of Time sequence. Powell also has a fondness for a set piece, but his are on an epic scale. I remember a scene in one of the early novels, A Buyer's Market or The Acceptance World, that goes on for about a hundred pages.

Brookner's Rachel is more troubling in her passivity. There is something rotten, almost vampiric in her dependence on her adopted family. In spite of its surface sheen of amused irony, her story anticipates the disaffection of several later heroines, Zoe in The Bay of Angels or Emma in Leaving Home.

The Roaring Streets

They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.

Dickens, Little Dorrit

Then she turned resolutely, and followed the path which Anna had taken, out into the bright, dark, dangerous and infinitely welcoming street.

Fraud

For reasons that don't need to be gone into, I found myself this afternoon reading aloud the conclusion to Little Dorrit, and memories returned of the closing lines of Brookner's Fraud. Art may not love us and may not console us, but it certainly enriches our lives.

A Disconcerting Opacity

Brookner often takes us to Paris, but not so often to the Louvre. In late, late Brookner, in Strangers (2009), Sturgis gives the Louvre a miss, putting it 'definitively behind him', preferring an 'improvised existence' for which no one will take him to task (Ch. 25).

In gentler, more expansive mid-period Brookner, in Fraud (1992), Anna Durrant dutifully puts in time at the museum. But it is not the 'great discordant machines of the Romantics' that claim her attention but the portraits of Ingres, 'calm, replete, satisfied with their immensely enviable situation in this world, and careless of the world to come' (Ch. 12).

Anna remembers Baudelaire's remark that he found it hard to breathe when faced with an Ingres portrait: he felt as though the oxygen had been sucked out of the atmosphere. This is evidently a favoured description, which Brookner returns to in her essays on Ingres in Soundings (1997) and Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000). Ingres is indeed several times the object of Brookner's somewhat appalled fascination. In the novels we find characters visiting the National Gallery and gravitating towards Mme Moitessier and her impossible dress.* Mme Moitessier is perhaps like one of those Brookner monsters, a Dolly, a Julia, adamantine in her self-regard and unassailability.

In Soundings Brookner discusses the painting at length:

She sits in her crowded boudoir with her famous finger to her temple, dominating with ease her challenging dress. Her gaze is both remote and replete; its descent from the Mona Lisa is not difficult to trace. At first sight it is an arrogant work. Yet on further contemplation the hard-edged image seems to fade and become more opaque, and Mme Moitessier undergoes a transformation from upper-class fortune-teller to Delphic oracle. Nor is this merely a matter of contrasting the personality she presents to us with her mirror image, that not quite accurate reflection seen in a glass darkly, as if the other side of her were in a different room. By concentrating on the shadowy depths of the portrait, and laying emphasis where it is least expected, Ingres endows the foreground with a disconcerting opacity. Central to the confusion of meanings is the door off to the left, a door through which no one will ever enter or leave.

*Unfortunately I can't find the references, but I know they're there.

Last Lines

Traditional or progressive? Brookner is commonly described as the former. A study of Brookner's endings can be instructive in this regard.

A number of her novels begin in a notional present and then move into the past. By the end the narrative has returned to the beginning. The ending isn't perhaps in a lot of doubt, though there may be shocks and surprises along the way. Falling Slowly is an example of this kind of novel.

Others - A Private View, for example - are presented more chronologically. George Bland has his adventure, and at the end at least a version of the status quo is restored.

At the sentence level, several of the novels attempt a moment of epiphany (e.g. Fraud), often delivering a not always persuasive, or earned, sense of hope (Leaving Home ends like this).

What we don't find, except possibly in Incidents in the Rue Laugier, is (Middlemarch-style) a rundown of the Nachgeschichte, details of the various characters' ultimate fates.

Aspects of Brookner's practice, then, are more modern, and less traditional, than we might suppose.

***

And my favourite Brookner ending? It's probably the closing lines of Brief Lives, I guess - Brookner at her most darkly mordant:

So irrelevant did her death seem that I almost looked forward to discussing it with her, felt something like a quickening of interest. 'What was it like?' I should have asked. 'Not all that bad,' I can hear her say in her most famously throw-away tone. 'You might give it a try one of these days.'

Endings

Brookner's, like Trollope's, is a conservative imagination. 'George must decide how much - or how little - he can do to transform the status quo,' reads the blurb to my edition of A Private View. Many a Brooknerian strives to break free, only to see the old dispensation restored. Not that Brookner doesn't provide final moments of epiphany, largely unearned. We might cite the closing lines of Fraud or what happens in the last sentence of Lewis Percy. Such endings give her work a novelistic shape, though Brookner knows their limitations:

There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. (Haffenden interview, 1985)

The restoration of the status quo is achieved most memorably in the moments of shock and revelation that end, say, Providence or Undue Influence. The conclusion to Hotel du Lac is of another order.

[Haffenden:] [Edith] wins her freedom ... by accident, but the end - when she changes the wording of her telegram from 'Coming home' to 'Returning'- is ambiguous.
[Brookner:] 'Coming home' would be coming back to domestic propriety: 'home' implies husband, children, order, regular meals, but 'Returning' is her more honest view of the situation. (Ibid)

Brooknerians long for change but also fear it and reject it. They know the key discovery of the Romantics, that it is better to travel than to arrive. They know what arrival looks like; they see it in those around them. Let us finish with Miriam in Falling Slowly as she imagines the scorn and contempt of her contemporaries:

You are not one of us, said their eyes; you do not slop around untidily, push your hair back behind your ears, dress in the first thing that comes to hand. You do not shop for cornflakes, fish fingers, baked beans. You will not get fat. You do not take family holidays, the car loaded with junk. You only carry a briefcase, look astonishingly young, yet you must be what? getting on, anyway. Too late for you, then. You will have to make do with the rest of your life, with only yourself for company. (Ch. 9)

A Brooknerian Christmas

'The loneliest Christmas Day on record,' said one reviewer of Chapter 8 of Fraud.

There are episodes in many novels - Trollope has not a few - when the plots are up and running and the author simply marks time. These can be interesting moments, and Anna Durrant's lonely Christmas has its perverse charms.

I don't think I've read Fraud since the 1990s, and what comes across now, in comparison with the harsher, more raw novels of the succeeding decade, is the evenness, even the gentleness of the tone. 'Like all successful characters, [Anna] could only exist in a book, but the author is perhaps too wryly conscious of the fact,' said John Bayley in the London Review of Books, and I can see what he meant: there's an enchanted, unreal, fairytale aspect to Anna's terrible Christmas Day.

She wakes early, at 5.45, after a blessedly chemical sleep. For a moment she considers staying in bed; but for Brooknerians this is an intolerable fantasy.

She bathes, dresses, drinks tea, aware all the while of the 'oppressive silence of the streets'. She remembers the undemanding, harmonious Christmases she spent with her mother. 'Fatal alliance!' comments Brookner.

Then a marvellous thought comes to Anna: 'there is no need to live like this!' This, then, after all, is perhaps a chapter that advances the plot, such as it is. She thinks about living in France, remembers boyfriends of the distant past: 'She would walk by the Seine, alone now, but no longer lonely.'

There follows, at ten o'clock, a meeting with a neighbour, a Mr Harvey. Mr Harvey has plans for the day, and doesn't want to waste time with Anna. But he's also achingly desperate not to give offence. The pair enact an elaborate, comic pavane about one another, hovering at one point behind their respective front doors, as a second meeting would be embarrassing.

Miss Carter, Anna's mother's old dressmaker, lives with her cats in a basement flat in Brompton Square. The streets, we learn, are 'as still as Pompeii'. Miss Carter, 'more timid than anyone knew ... really only comfortable when undisturbed', does not take kindly to Anna's visit, which is brief and ends in awkwardness and indignation.

Anna, 'resigned now to the empty day', returns home across the park. It isn't yet two o'clock, but the sky seems to be darkening towards evening. There are one or two determined joggers. It starts to rain. 'Bleak, bleak, she acknowledged, under the leaden sky...' But she knows she need spend no further winters in this way.

At home she boils two eggs, but can eat only one; then she gets ready for bed and listens to a concert on the radio. She feels 'almost at peace, but dangerously so, as if waiting for death'. At last she judges it acceptable to retire, allowing herself the luxury of a pill. Thus a 'beautiful peace began to loosen her limbs, and she lay back on the pillows, a smile of anticipation on her face'.

A Merry Christmas to you all!

A Fraudulent Encounter

I met Anita Brookner only once. I was in a London street with my French friend Marie Delemotte. It was August 1992, and I was nineteen. Marie was much older - ours was a cross-generational friendship - and when I excitedly told her the identity of the rather elderly-looking woman tottering towards us on the pavement, my friend, unimpressed, said, with what I probably would have called Gallic insouciance, 'Oh, go to her! Why not?'

But my heart was thumping. Here was my heroine, my favourite author - here in a London street, at two o'clock on a summer's afternoon - here, in the flesh, or the somewhat exiguous flesh, for the woman approaching us was very thin and seemed frail. She walked with a stick. But Brookner would only have been in her sixties in 1992, and was to live another twenty years and more. She wore a white blouse, a white skirt and a red blazer with large shoulders. Her hair, bright auburn, looked newly coiffed.

The street was Elm Park Gardens, Brookner's home for many years. High banks of mansion flats rose about us, muffling the sounds of the city. Brookner entered one of these blocks, and on an impulse I left Marie and followed the author. I found myself in a vestibule, subfusc, dim; Brookner was talking to a neighbour who had just issued from a bronze-coloured lift. The conversation was about doctors.

The neighbour eventually departed, and I spoke. 'Dr Brookner? I just wanted to say I'm an enormous fan of your books. I've read Fraud.'

'Fraud? Already?' said Dr Brookner of the novel that had only just been published.

'Yes, yes,' I gushed, 'and it's very good!'

'Well, I'm ... most ... gratified,' replied Dr Brookner slowly, in her rich alto, and in what seemed to me pure Brooknerese. 'Are you going up?'

She meant in the lift.

'No, no,' I said, gulping now, and the poor lady escaped, and I exited into the dazzling street, where an amused Marie Delemotte met me.

'Interesting. So that was why we came down this particular street, eh?'