The Bay of Angels by Anita Brookner

to bear. But, like Chekhov’s darling, I never seemed to learn. Simply, I was unhappy because I could not trust him. That is to say I could trust him when he was with me, but not at all when we were apart. I kept my feelings to myself, in accordance with his rules. I wanted him in my life for ever, whatever the price I had to pay.
    We saw each other as often as he wished, had travelled together, and in small hotels, out of season, becalmed, had got on easily and well. I had been invited to his parents’ house in Dorset for a weekend, and had been impressed. His parents seemed relieved that I was financially independent: this seemed to be something of a ticket of admission to their society. I did not like them, could not entirely come to terms with their indifference towards a guest. I now see that this was because they had had so many guests like myself, with expectation written large in their anxiety to please. I thought them a cynical couple; they automatically assumed that we would want to share a bedroom, which shocked me slightly: I should have preferred a little more hypocrisy. My attempts at carelessness were never entirely convincing. I see that now. At the time I merely resolved to do better, to try harder. That this was not what was expected of me was no impediment. As far as I was concerned it was up to me to change, to become adaptable, even when I could see that such adaptability would have to encompass a large cast of people—Adam’s friends—whom I could never entirely admire. Therefore it seemed imperative to invite him to Nice, which I thought of as my home ground. I thought that contact with two transparently good people, my mother and Simon, might reveal another part of him, even to himself. I think I saw us refashioned as innocents, as I had been with my earlier friends of that first summer. I remembered the children in the garden, my clear conscience in their company.
    In that small hotel in Spain, where we had spent our Christmas vacation, he had seemed so much more accessible, and I in my turn had warmed to his accessibility, reclaiming something of my earlier confidence. Not that I was ever entirely confident when I was with him: I was a spy as well as a lover. As he lay on the bed in our cheap room, his eyes distant, I watched him, safe in the knowledge that we knew no one in this tiny place, and that in the evening, as in the evenings that had gone before, we should walk along the harbour wall, and I should feel his arm around me. That holiday, which he later dismissed as rather boring, had convinced me that the episode must be repeated as frequently as possible. That it was not possible had to be put down to Adam’s extremely crowded social life, and his dislike of having anything decided for him. An accomplished escape artist, he justified his unavailability with elaborate generalizations about men and women, which I found annoying and unconvincing, but have come to accept as obvious.
    ‘The more a woman falls in love with a man the more he’s going to back off. It’s natural. Women lose their power when they fall in love. Men get irritated by this, don’t like them so much.’
    ‘Does this always happen?’
    ‘I reckon so.’
    ‘Does it happen to you?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    He had the grace to look slightly ashamed. He too was young, and not as cynical as he liked to appear. But his liberty mattered more to him than whatever affection he might have felt, and it was in a spirit of making amends that he agreed to come to Nice.
    The visit was a disaster. My mother was bewildered by the freedom Adam felt in a house in which freedom was held at bay by rules which were in fact imposed by an elderly man. Simon hated him because he was young and careless. Adam would put his arms round Mme Delgado when she arrived in the mornings, bestow smacking kisses on her stern face. Clémence, he called her. I could see that she loved it, loved him, the bad boy who enlivened her austere days. My