Dolly by Anita Brookner Page A

then performed the one good deed for which my mother knew her, and despatched Violet to Prince of Wales Drive ‘to look after poor Henrietta’. Having thus disposed of nearly everyone she knew she then took thedogs out for a run. Yet at a mere sixty-five, after a lifetime of healthy exercise, she suffered a fatal heart attack, appropriately enough in the park. It was the barking of the dogs which alerted passers-by, rare at that hour, for it was getting dark. My father was very subdued for a while, yet when my mother pointed out how fitting this death was, how painless the manner of her leaving this life, he cheered up. Death is arbitrary, after all. No one is safe.
    Against these fairly unusual backgrounds my parents stand out emblematically, like pale creatures newly liberated from engulfing darkness, slender pillars of English virtue advancing, hand in hand, towards the light of common day. Having effectively divorced themselves from home and family, they felt free to invent their lives, as if they were characters in Dickens. This meant doing the opposite of what they had been brought up to do, living lives of the utmost orderliness and decorum. I felt a painful love for these mild and conscientious parents, whose moderate voices unfitted me for the realities of the world I was to inhabit.
    ‘The snail’s on the thorn,’ my father would announce, his signal that he was about to go for a walk. And then, politely, ‘Would Jane like to come, do you think?’
    I was too young or too small to accompany him, but the formalities had to be observed.
    ‘I’m afraid I shall need Jane to help me make pastry,’ my mother would inevitably reply.
    ‘Very well. Then I shall look forward to eating it.’
    I never felt excluded from their lives, never witnessed any primal scene, was not encouraged to formulate any family romance, although I was to do this later in the books I wrotefor children and for which I became quite well known. As far as I was concerned my parents were two grown-up children, rather like myself. I longed to preserve their innocence, while my own innocence was as yet unformulated. I resented on their behalf any gross intrusion, any shadow of
louche
adult concerns. Into this category I put both debt and sexuality. I reckoned myself the ideal company for my mother, with the possible addition of my friend Marigold Chance: anything more worldly, I suspected, might damage her. In this conviction I was remarkably prescient. As I say, and try to explain in my stories, children are alive to adult feelings. I mounted guard on my mother, keen to protect her, for no one knew her vulnerability better than I did. My grandmother Ferber I could just allow, for she seemed to keep a respectful, even a mournful, distance. My first misgivings about the impermeability of our world came during that first visit of Dolly and Hugo to our flat. Since Hugo was to die shortly afterwards my feelings of caution, of anxiety, of guardedness, became focused upon Dolly. Yet at that stage Dolly too was innocent, or as innocent as she ever managed to be. I rather think that innocence was not in her nature, yet that this was not entirely her fault. Or maybe it was. I had reason, in later life, to be impressed by the simplicity of her motives, and at the end, of course, she was as disarmed as the rest of us.
    At that stage, however, at the moment of our first meeting, I merely registered her as an unusually taut presence, conveniently symbolised for me by the tautness of her silk dress, which, as she took care to point out, had been made by hand. Her enthusiasm, which was her normal mode onsocial occasions, nevertheless had something fitful about it, as if she longed to be somewhere else, as of course she did. Yet I could not quite forgive her impatience, since it seemed to make my mother anxious, while my father’s politeness became even more pronounced. I lingered in the room long after the time at which I was expected to leave it, for Dolly