Calculations

He saw that his acts of good will, towards both Helena and Mrs Gardner, had been interpreted as something of an insult, an act of charity which both had rejected with hauteur. He felt a renewed distaste for his own calculations.

Strangers, Ch. 20

This links with an over-quoted remark of Brookner's, about real love being a pilgrimage, carried out without strategy. (It comes from either the Haffenden or the Kenyon interview, and crops up with dreary regularity on Twitter.)