Dolly by Anita Brookner

quite an attractive woman, with a fluff of gingery hair above a small sharp-featured face. She was the natural version of which my grandmother Toni was the work of art: the same reddish hair, the same blue eyes, the same fine skin which she had allowed to fall into a dozen tiny cracks, like an apple which has been stored too long. The daunting fervour of her expression, allied to her almost total absentmindedness, made her a somewhat enigmatic parent, and indeed she seems to have expected my father to fend for himself from a very young age. There was no other parent in the house; my father liked to say that his father had died in childbirth. In fact Richard Manning had been run over by a car outside South Kensington tube station. My father suffered no damage from this dereliction, and was philosophical about his mother’s shortcomings. Her indifference may even have served him rather well. She providedhim with a satchel when he went to school, with a briefcase when he went to university, and with several items of unwanted furniture when he left home. These pieces of furniture, of uncanny size, were a feature of our life in Prince of Wales Drive, since there was no prospect of anyone paying good money to take them away. One could see why she had found them to be superfluous.
    When my mother went to meet her for the first time she was nervous and suffering from a cold. To Eileen Manning, who never suffered from anything, this was a sinister affliction. She surveyed my mother with narrowed eyes.
    ‘You don’t look very strong,’ she said. ‘You look chesty. Are you chesty?’
    ‘I’m very fit,’ said my mother, coughing slightly. She had taken a mouthful of scalding tea in her eagerness to please and had swallowed it too quickly.
    Eileen Manning’s suspicious look was replaced by her habitual expression of enthusiasm as she tried to expound her psychic gospel. My mother, I am sure, listened politely, her eyes occasionally straying to the man she was to marry as if to reassure herself as to his sanity. Later, when he had taken my mother home, he returned to South Kensington and announced his intention to become engaged.
    ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s wise, Paul. Not if there’s lung trouble in the family.’
    ‘Henrietta is perfectly well, Mother.’
    ‘I doubt that, dear. But you must please yourself, of course.’
    She was in absent-minded attendance at the small reception Toni gave after the wedding, no doubt in her box-pleatedsuit, but after that was content to receive a weekly telephone call, in the course of which she would enquire, ‘And how’s that poor girl of yours?’
    Once a month my father would undertake to visit his mother, combining the visit with one of the long walks he so loved. He would go round Battersea Park, along Cheyne Walk to Pimlico Road, across to Sloane Square, along Sloane Street and into Hyde Park, where he might linger to watch the dogs, and, in winter, the red globe of the setting sun. Then he would leave the park, perhaps regretfully, and present himself at his mother’s flat in Ennismore Gardens for a cup of tea. He doubted whether his mother got much pleasure from these visits, but she received him placidly and reached up to kiss him when he left. I think she was an entirely contented woman, but I have to admit that I never consciously knew her. I think she broke the habit of a lifetime and visited us when I was a baby, but if I registered her presence at all it was only as another face bending over to examine me. These, with an infant’s privilege, I ignored.
    By mutual consent she and my mother rarely met; had they done so my mother would have been interrogated on what Eileen Manning was convinced was her progressive deterioration. When Violet Lawlor—part old acquaintance, part domestic relic of her early married life—sent her usual Christmas card in the winter of my parents’ marriage, Eileen Manning, as usual, sent back a card with a postal order tucked inside it. She