Family and Friends by Anita Brookner

the ground and worsted it he does not know how to transact with those who have had a more fortunate passage. Some men are children all their lives because they have had admiring mothers who chronicle their every game of football and their every lovable misdemeanour. Alfred too has a mother who watches him, jealous lest a fact of his life escape her. But she has seen to it that his life never will escape her, for he is now locked into a family enterprise from which there is no honourable issue, no issue of choice, that is, but only violent disappearances, as Betty will find out. Sofka, instinctively, through love, but also through fear, has transferred her vigilance from Frederick to Alfred, like a prudent investor transferring funds from one bank to another. Frederick’s light-heartedness, though so enjoyable, really does not measure up to Alfred’s severity. Frederick is for leisure, for diversion, for entertainment; Alfred is for work, for investment, for security.
    When Alfred leaves for the factory every morning, breathing conscientiously the only fresh air he will encounter until the evening, and breathing rather hard, as if his antipathy were already at work, he is unaware of the random enquiring glances sent in his direction by many girls and some women. He is aware only of the task before him, planning to plunge directly into the morning’s work so that, in the hour he takes for lunch, he can pay a visitto Charing Cross Road where Mr Levy has put by an interesting six-volume edition of Shakespeare’s plays, illustrated with photographs of contemporary actors and actresses in appropriate costume. Alfred cannot afford it but Mr Levy is touched by his attention to the books and is allowing him to pay a little towards them every week. For Alfred, although doing a man’s work, is still drawing a boy’s salary. This is thought to be good for him, for, unknown to himself, Alfred has been entered on a long course of character training by those who know better than he does. In this way his character will be trained – by privation, of course – beyond those of any whose friendship he is likely to seek. His character, in fact, will be a burden to him rather than an asset. But that is the way with good characters.
    Alfred, trying to deal with the antipathy that this way of life has forced upon him, and trying also to deal with the good conscience which is perhaps only blamelessness in disguise and can be forfeited at any moment, knows from his reading that virtue is its own reward. This seems to him rather hard, for by the same token vice is also its own reward. But if he translates his predicament into fiction, if he views it as a pilgrimage or a perilous enterprise or an adventure, if, in fact, he thinks of himself as Henry V or as Nicholas Nickleby, then he can soldier on, comforted by the thought that his efforts and his determination and all his good behaviour will be crowned with success, recognition, apotheosis. In this way it even crosses his mind that when Nettie comes home she will find him admirable. He desires to be found admirable by Nettie, thinking himself entitled to this desire, since he has obeyed the rules so far. He has, above all, obeyed his mother in everything. He does not yet know that men who obey their mothers in everything rarely win the admiration of other women.
    Alfred is a worthy character, although he has had worthiness thrust upon him. His only reward is the approbation of others: of Sofka, of Mimi, who admires him and almost understands him, of Frederick, who is so delighted that his sibling promises to relieve him of all responsibility that he laughingly defers to him on many matters and readily acknowledges that Alfred’s judgment in business is already superior to his own. And there is Lautner who truly respects him. Without Lautner, of course, Alfred’s apprenticeship would be infinitely harder than it is at present; without Lautner at his elbow, always prepared to make suggestions