MILLICENT BELL
Walking back through the misty park I already knew that Sarah was
vain, unreliable, and feckless. In this I was correct. What I did not
know-and this was something I never entirely managed to fathom–
was the extent of her insouciance, her literal inability to take any
matter seriously. I knew that if I fell in love with her I should be
embarking on a long and hopeless odyssey of missed appointments, of
telephone calls that were never returned, of explanations for absence
that were infinitely more mystifying than the truth would have been,
of sheer infuriating disappointment. But at the beginning of an affair
one does not count the cost ....
611
Alan says, at one point, "I never read love stories," but Anita Brookner's
readers will recognize the onset of a Proustian love obsession. It doesn't mat–
ter that this Swann occasionally succeeds in sleeping with Odette.
As
the
relationship unrolls its predicted history, we see that, as he says, she was never
entirely indifferent to
him;
"Rather, she was unknowable, enjoying our com–
ings together as much as I did, but not appearing to remember them."
Exasperated, Alan breaks things off and accepts the consolations of one of
Sarah's friends who at least knows how to nurse him through the flu and cook
meals---and before he quite knows what he is doing they marry. The marriage
is a banal disaster. Angela doesn't like sex, and her pregnancy doesn't improve
things.
And then Sarah turns up one day in his office, sitting on the corner of his
desk, "her short black skirt riding up her thighs, her mane of crinkled red hair
falling over one shoulder." She is soon on her way back to a lover in Paris.
Though Alan drops everything and bolts after her, he never catches up with
his inamorata, and he returns home to find that Angela has had a miscarriage
for which everyone blan1es
him.
In the months that follow his wife regresses
into depression and finally overdoses on sleeping pills. From all of this there is
no recovery. Brookner's sad hero becomes a guilt-burdened solitary who
spends vacations alone in a Swiss town where he knows no one, returning to
London to his work and his small circle of relatives whose legal advisor he has
become. Negotiations over inheritances bring
him
into contact once again
with Sarah who has been willed an uncle's house and wants to sell it, thereby
displacing the penniless widow. Alan persuades Sarah to give up the proper–
ty-but this means she will have to marry her French protector.
There is something deliciously old-fashioned about Brookner's novel.
Gracefully written and economic, it could be a
conte
by Balzac or
Maupassant-ironical, witty, and studiedly superficial. Sarah, about whom one
would like
to
be curious, is a novelistic convention whose "real" character it
is boodess to ask about. I cannot help wondering, just the same, whether,
if
