VISITORS
By Anita Brookner
Random House, 242 pages, $23
It is a Sunday in early September in London. The heat is oppressive, and the flat on the ground floor of the Edwardian mansion is suffused with a glorious English sun. The woman, Thea May, is closing the French doors to the garden. It is the twilight hour, at which she is accustomed to experience a slight failure of nerve. The light puts her in mind of stories–for she is a serious reader–in which richly endowed families converse in idleness, awaiting visitors.
Naturally, we are reading a British novel. This, “Visitors,” the 17th by Anita Brookner, whose “Hotel du Lac” won the Booker Prize, promises us quickly that this 70-year-old widow will, in the pursuit of hope and the face of disappointment, end up with the doors on her confined and confining life thrown open. The destination is never in question, but, as when reading Jane Austen, the pleasure is in the journey.
Thea, in her shuttered quarters, awaits the weekly, dutiful, chatty call from one of her dead husband’s married cousins, Kitty Levinson or Molly Goodman. Whichever one calls this week will inquire after her health, and she will not mention her heart problem. Whichever one calls will ask if she had a nice supper, and she will say she ate gazpacho and baked cod, or perhaps cold tongue with Madeira sauce. In reality, she will have a banana and settle down to read, returned to the great continuing task of keeping up appearances.
While dark falls, she recalls her past: The austere parents
(” `Be a brave soldier’ “), the drab, bookish girlhood with Sundays such as this one spent reading in the library. Her brief, illicit affair, when she was a working girl, with a well-born cad who killed himself (“She had read of his death in the evening paper”). And then the profound surprise of becoming Henry Mays’ wife, upon the accident of stumbling on the cobblestones and being caught by his strong arms. It was a fortunate juncture that turned on the fact that he–having returned after an ill-fated marriage to live with his twin sister, Rose, a stout woman in her 50s, who, dressed and scented, awaited his return each day with a girl’s ardor–was ready to leave home again.
This week it is Kitty who calls, and with a surprising request. Her grown granddaughter, Ann, the child of her estranged son, Gerald, is arriving unexpectedly from America next week to be married in haste. In addition to her fiance there is also a friend. Would Thea be a dear and let the young man, Steve Best, stay at her flat?
And so the curtain parts on the comedy of manners. Kitty and her devoted husband, Austin, take in Ann, who has grown from a recalcitrant child into a sullen giant; Molly and her husband, Harold, agree to board the pompous, pious groom, a religion teacher. But it is Steve’s move into Thea’s flat that is the heart of Brookner’s deft and charming story.
Unemployed and unenthusiastic, he brings his guitar and radio so that she can no longer enjoy her Schumann and Brahms, he needs an ironing board to press the suit he borrows from her dead husband’s closet, accepts a bit of money, allows her to cook him a few meals, rants about the ridiculously mollycoddled middle classes, and sulks until she procures him a car. To make up for his behavior, he offers to take her for a spin, to Richmond and then to tea at Kew (“(H)er heart leapt. . . . It was years since she had been there.”), only to head off to see his family in Cheltenham instead. Heartsick, Thea concedes that “nothing had been taken away from her: the bad news was that nothing had been added.”
When the bride balks at every attempt of her grandmother to produce a lovely, last-minute wedding, Thea, the solitary cousin-in-law, is called to the rescue. After a high tea amidst the pleasant smells of beeswax candles and carnations from many small tables–a banana loaf, tea cakes, two Victoria sponges, a pyramid of coconut tarts–Thea sees Ann alone. A truce is arrived at, a dress accepted and a plan cooked up to produce Gerald at the reception.
“Perhaps,” Thea muses earlier, “one is only authentic when one leaves one’s parents’ house, seeking the new but implicit with the old, the inherited.” By the end of “Visitors,” after the young people are off to Paris and Gerald back in his commune and the cousins safe in the shelter of their marriages, Thea embraces what she has inherited: a secondhand family. She is aware of “the need to make amends–for joylessness, for fatalism, for caution–in what time (is) left to her.”
Such a pleasure to read anew Anita Brookner’s wry, intelligent commentary on making a sensible enterprise of one’s singular and unexceptional life. She is an international treasure.
