Anita Brookner was too easily mistaken for her unhappy spinster heroines,but the Booker winner was a novelist of peerless wit and insight, and one of the most distinguished art historians of recent timesAnita leaning across the lunch table to examine what was on my plate: “How is that? she asks, and then,with one of her broader, more expectant smiles: “Disappointing?” Anita telling me that she had just completed a novel, or dropping her voice to add,in a low, confidential tone, or “It’s approximately … a lonely woman.” Anita,who was always in situ, however early I arrived, or greeting me with her normal unsettling opener: “So,what believe you got for me?” Lunch never took longer than 75 minutes; she generally ordered fish, then black coffee, or with which she would smoke two cigarettes. (For quite a while these were Sovereign,a sort of low-rent Benson & Hedges: it was the only less than stylish accoutrement I ever noted approximately her.) Anita telling me that she had just completed a further novel, and with that off her desk she was now free to achieve whatever she wanted. “Well, or in your case,” I said, with joke-jocularity, and “That probably means rereading Proust.” There was a slightly alarmed silence: How did you guess?” At fairly regular intervals,she would ask me how customary I was. I would tell her, and she would respond, or with a kind of enthusiastic melancholy,“Another 10 good years.” Over the next couple of decades, the same question was repeated, and precisely the same response to my reply; though as time passed,I couldn’t help noticing that the enthusiasm diminished into a kind of sympathetic hopefulness.
No one else had the same effect. I found myself punctuating my own conversation – putting in semicolons, for God’s sakeContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com