The second is truly strange. Back in London, after her mother’s death, Emma is introduced, by an acquaintance whose kindness she naturally finds obtrusive, to a divorced doctor, Philip Hudson. Going back to his house after an ‘acceptably impersonal’ hotel lunch of cold salmon (what a lot of salmon, cold or smoked but never hot, is consumed in Brookner’s world), Emma accidentally walks into a bedroom, where Philip’s son, Mark, is sleeping the deep sleep of a junior doctor upon a rumpled bed, ‘his face classical in its emptiness’.
For a moment I contemplated him, as Psyche once contemplated Cupid … At the sight of his surrendered nakedness I saw what had been missing from my life. It was another coup de foudre, information received, though not knowingly given…
This might have been powerful if allowed to stand as an expression of missed desire — Emma, who has always associated classicism with civilised restraint, glimpses a different, if equally classical beauty in the abandon of satiated sleep. But, ludicrously, Emma goes on to remark, ‘I would have welcomed some sign of comprehension, even of willingness to talk, but I was alone in this discovery, and perhaps one always is.’
Self-pity (‘alone’, ‘always’) leads to absurdity. No self-conscious older woman could possibly ‘welcome’ the notion that an unknown and naked young man might wake to find her spying upon him. As for that ‘willingness to talk’, the mind begins to boggle.
The extraordinary thing is that this convoluted fissure leads nowhere. I (far too romantically) assumed that newly awakened Emma would then shy away from a relationship with Mark’s father, a heavy man with ‘scanty hair and commonplace features’. Not a bit of it. ‘Occasional visits from a part-time lover were perhaps all that I could tolerate’; so smoked salmon sandwiches, and perhaps something more, are apparently in order.
The novel is brought to life, rather disconcertingly, not by moments of putative happiness, but by occasional flashes of vivid resentment. Emma’s hated uncle adds much-needed animus to the narrative. And there is an extraordinary scene when Philip tries to withdraw from his peculiarly semi-detached affair with Emma. Her passionate bitterness, though there is no evidence that their relationship has ever given her positive pleasure of any kind, is utterly disproportionate to the facts of the novel, but more live than anything else within it.
A strange, interesting novel, then. Resentment, which fuelled some of the early novels, here spills on the forecourt. And we are left at the end with rather baffling or even waffling musings:
If a hope is evanescent, how can it never desert one; and if it never deserts one, how can it be abandoned?
Despair in the past has made Brookner’s fiction taut; here, it threatens slackness.
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