Making Things Better by Anita Brookner

home. But not to come home had struck him then as now as against nature. Not to come home was to disappear from view, as he had never had the courage to do. And home had been so longed for, so aspired to, that he knew that he would never have had the courage to abandon it, not even for a lifetime of future felicity. That too was an illusion. It was sheer common sense to stay with what one knew.
    It was strange how the Nyon episode was somehow secret. It was not a guilty secret; on the contrary, it fulfilled the function of a youthful indiscretion of which one is somehow proud, although he was already a middle-aged man when it had come about. The sheer unlikelihood of Josie’s understanding it had reinforced his desire to keep it to himself. The ladies in their black dresses . . . This memory was not communicable. And there was no need to confide in Josie, who certainly did not look to him for confidences. The less he told her the less she seemed to want to know. His deaths, those of his parents, of Freddy, he kept to himself. When he had measured the extent of his solitude he had sought her out, had briefly courted her understanding. He was more ashamed of this than of the Nyon episode. She had responded, but ‘positively’, urging him to take up various activities in which he had no interest, and if anything congratulating him on his new status as a completely isolated and unattached person. ‘Now you can please yourself,’ she had said, as if this were the only conclusion to be reached. It was then that he had inaugurated the custom of inviting her to lunch three or four times a year. He thought it a duty to be observed, a civilized duty which kept open lines of communication, though little was communicated. His father’s death from cancer, his mother’s decline, had no need to be dressed up in mournful colours: they both knew, in their different ways, that those deaths were a release. A release which she acknowledged but he did not. He still felt those hands grow slack in his, still metaphorically stood at their bedsides. By definition anyone who was not with him at those moments was a stranger. And his grief and subsequent loneliness were no cause for congratulations.
    Over coffee they both mellowed, aware that this somehow disappointing occasion was nearly at an end. He felt apologetic, as if it were his fault that their normally companionable exchange had not taken place, had let them down, in fact. He recognized that Josie had no reason to blame herself for this; indeed she rarely blamed herself for anything, and quite rightly. Guilt was not merely a weakness, it was misleading, casting one’s entire life into doubt. He could hardly, at this point in their relationship, explain himself to her, marvelled that she had once accepted him for what he was, or rather what she thought he was, some sort of exotic, different from her normal experience of men. His status as an exile, which she recognized rather more than he did these days, had intrigued her, had given him some sort of romantic aura, the only element of romance conferred on a character on which he himself had no illusions. And how could he now make up for lost time? He was grateful that she had not been present to witness those deaths, of which in truth she had known nothing. He had telephoned her with the news that his parents had died, only to be briskly cheered up, as if that were the proper response to sad news. He could not explain to her, nor would he attempt to do so, how he had held his dying mother’s hand, knowing that the end was near, and remained silent as she had whispered, ‘Freddy? Freddy?’ And when it was all over, when the final death had taken place, when he had known that Freddy at last had been removed from his life, he had indeed felt relief, but it was a relief that had something terminal about it, as if he too had died. That was how he had continued to feel, not as a survivor, though that