At the agreed time Marcia rang Amelia’s bell and waited. A young woman came to the door. She invited Marcia in. Aurelia was finishing her piano lesson.
In the kitchen overlooking the garden, two young women were cooking; in the dining room a long, polished table was being laid with silverware and thick napkins. In the library Marcia examined the dozens of foreign-language editions of Aurelia’s novels, stories, essays — the record of a writing life.
There was a sound at the door and a man came in. Aurelia’s husband introduced himself.
‘Marcia.’ She adopted her most middle-class voice.
‘You must excuse me‚’ the man said. ‘My office is down the road. I must go to it.’
‘Are you a writer?’
‘I have published a couple of books. But I have conversations for a living. I am a psychoanalyst.’
He was a froglike little man, with alert eyes. She wondered if he could see her secrets, and that she had thought he’d become an analyst so that no one had to look at him.
‘What a ravishing scarf‚’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Goodbye‚’ he said.
She waited, glancing through the chapters of the novel she had brought to show Aurelia. It seemed, in this ambience, to be execrable stuff.
She caught sight of Aurelia in the hall.
‘I’ll be with you in one minute‚’ said Aurelia.
Aurelia shut the door on the piano teacher, opened it to the man delivering flowers, talked to someone in Italian on the telephone, inspected the dining room, spoke to the cook, told her assistant she wouldn’t be taking any calls, and sat down opposite Marcia.
She poured tea and regarded Marcia for what seemed a long time.
‘I quite enjoyed what you sent me‚’ Aurelia said. ‘That school. It was a window on a world one doesn’t know about.’
‘I’ve written more,’ Marcia said. ‘Here.’
She placed the three chapters on the table. Aurelia picked them up and put them down.
‘I wish I could write like you‚’ she sighed.
‘Sorry?’ said Marcia. ‘Please, do you mean that?’
‘My books insist on being long. But one couldn’t write an extended piece in that style.’
‘Why not?’ said Marcia. Aurelia looked at her as if she should know without being told. Marcia said, ‘The thing is, I don’t get time for … extension.’ She was beginning to panic. ‘How do you get down to it?’
‘You met Marty‚’ she said. ‘We have breakfast early. He goes to his office. He starts at seven. Then I just do it. I haven’t got any choice, really. Sometimes I write here, or I go to our house in Ferrara. For writers there’s rarely anything else but writing.’
‘Doesn’t your mind go everywhere except to the page?’ said Marcia. ‘Do you have some kind of iron discipline? Don’t you find ludicrous excuses?’
‘Writing is my drug. I go to it easily. My new novel is starting to develop. This is the best part, when you can see that something is beginning. I like to think‚’ Aurelia went on, ‘that I can make a story out of anything. A murmur, a hint, a gesture … turned into another form of life. What could be more satisfying? Can I ask your age?’
‘Thirty-seven.’
Aurelia said, ‘You have something to look forward to.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘One’s late thirties are a period of disillusionment. The early forties are a lovely age — of re-illusionment. Everything comes together then, you will find, and there is renewed purpose.’
Marcia looked at the poster of a film which had been made of one of Aurelia’s books.
She said, ‘Sometimes life is so difficult … it is impossible to write. You don’t feel actual hopelessness?’
Aurelia shook her head and continued to look at Marcia. Her husband was an analyst; he would have taught her not to be alarmed by weeping.
‘It’s those blasted men that have kept us down‚’ Marcia said. ‘When I was young, you were one of the few contemporary writers that women could read.’
‘We’ve kept ourselves down‚’ said Aurelia. ‘Self-contempt, masochism, laziness, stupidity. We’re old enough to own up to it now, aren’t we?’
‘But we are — or at least were — political victims.’
‘Balls.’ Aurelia softened her voice and said, ‘Would you tell me about your life at the school?’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘The routine. Your day. Pupils. The other teachers.’
‘The other teachers?’
‘Yes.’
Aurelia was waiting.
‘But they’re myopic‚’ Marcia said.
‘In what way?’
‘Badly educated. Interested only in soap operas.’
Aurelia nodded.
Marcia mentioned her mother but Aurelia became impatient. However, when Marcia recounted the occasion when
she had suggested the school donate the remains of the Harvest Festival to the elders of the Asian community centre, and a couple of the teachers had refused to give fruit to ‘Pakis’, Aurelia made a note with her gold pen. Marcia had, in fact, told the headmaster about this, but he dismissed it, saying, ‘I have to run all of this school.’
Marcia looked at Aurelia as if to say, ‘Why do you want to know this?’
‘That was helpful‚’ Aurelia said. ‘I want to write something about a woman who works in a school. Do you know many teachers?’
Marcia’s colleagues were teachers but none of her friends were. One friend worked in a building society, another had just had a baby and was at home.
‘There must be people at your school I could talk to. What about the headmaster?’
Marcia made a face. Then she remembered something she had read in a newspaper profile of Aurelia. ‘Don’t you have a daughter at school?’
‘It’s the wrong sort of teacher there.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I was looking for something rougher.’
Marcia was embarrassed. She said, ‘Have you taught writing courses?’
‘I did, when I wanted to travel. The students are wretched, of course. Many I would recommend for psychiatric treatment. A lot of people don’t want to write, they just want the
kudos. They should move on to other objects.’
Aurelia got up. As she signed Marcia a copy of her latest novel, she asked for her telephone number at school. Marcia couldn’t think of a reason not to give it to her.
Aurelia said, ‘Thank you for coming to see me. I’ll look at your chapters.’ At the door she said, ‘Will you come to a party I’m giving? Perhaps we will talk more. An invitation will be sent to you.’
From across the road Marcia looked at the lighted house and the activity within, until the shutters were closed.
*
Marcia waited beside Sandor at his porter’s desk until he finished work at seven. They had a drink in the pub where they had met. Sandor went there every evening to watch the sport on cable TV. He didn’t ask her why she had suddenly turned up, and didn’t mention Aurelia Broughton, though Marcia had rung to say she was coming up to see her. He talked of how he loved London and how liberal it was; no one cared who or what you were. He said that if he ever had a house he would decorate it like the pub they were sitting in. He talked of what he was reading in Hegel, though in such a garbled fashion she had no idea what he was saying or why it interested him. He told her stories of the criminals he’d known and how he’d been used as a getaway driver.
He asked her if she wanted to go to bed. His request was put in the tone of voice that said it was just as fine if she preferred
not to. She hesitated only because the house in which he had a room could have been a museum to the 1950s, along with the failure of the two-bar electric fire to make any impression on the block of cold that sat in the room like death. There was also the hag of a landlady who would sit at the end of his bed at midnight.