Look at Me Read Online Free Page A

their arms. Things are even quieter in the summer. Then it is the turn of the old people to pay their children a visit, and from my window I hear thevoices rise from the pavement and the sticks tap, and should I happen to look out I might see Mrs Hunt or Lady Cohen negotiating the difficult business of getting into the car. ‘Goodbye, Mr Reardon, and thank you
so
much,’ they cry as they rearrange their old legs in the narrow space. ‘Goodbye, Madam,’ says the porter, and he waits on the pavement until the car has moved safely on its way.
    I am hardly aware of this place as home, although I have always lived here, and, as the flat now belongs to me there is no real reason for me to move, particularly as prices are so high at the moment. Indeed I am so excessively comfortable, and my life is so regulated, that the question only rarely crosses my mind. But that restlessness of which I spoke is in part caused by boredom and in part by lack of company. I sometimes have fantasies of a life in which I would spend evenings sitting on somebody’s bed, exchanging confidences, keeping up with each other’s love affairs, comparing clothes, trying out new hairstyles … Although all that is hardly to my taste. But it is very difficult to invite anyone here. If life were suddenly to change and I were to make a completely new circle of friends I should have to do some radical rearranging. I am hardly likely to give dinner parties for ten or soirées for fifty people, although the rooms are big enough. And I can see that I should have a hard time disowning the furniture, of which I have grown inexplicably fond, although I spent some of my most critical years grumbling about it. The wind of change would have to blow very hard indeed for me to feel that I had at last taken possession of this place and was entitled to make it my own.
    For in my mind it still belongs to my parents. My mother and father moved here during the war, when my father’s job necessitated their being in London. They moved in very quickly, as one did in those days; withina week they had got rid of their house in Surrey, which my mother was finding too difficult to manage. They took over the flat lock, stock and barrel as the owner was anxious to sell before she went to join her sister in America. That is how they came to inherit this extremely peculiar décor, which looks like something sprung direct from the brain of an ambitious provincial tart. Times being what they were, my parents did nothing to change it; they were in any case too wrapped up in each other, too fearful for the safety of each other, to care for their surroundings, so long as these were safe, warm, comfortable, and could keep danger at bay. Even when life settled down and became more normal than they ever dared to hope, they changed nothing, perhaps out of superstition. That is how I came to grow up with all manner of terrible cut-glass mirrors with bevelled edges hanging from chains over tiled fireplaces, shaggy off-white fitted carpets, zig-zag patterned rugs, nests of walnut tables, semicircular armchairs upholstered in pale creaking hide, standard lamps with polygonal ivory satin shades, white wrought-iron trellises over the radiators, a dining table massive enough to overshadow the ten dining room chairs whose seats are composed of beige brocade secured with brass studs, divan beds with headboards which sweep round to accommodate bedside cabinets, dressing tables with sheets of glass covering the surfaces and triple mirrors, and,
pièce de résistance
, a collection of china and glass birds, some rather large, which march along the shelves of highly polished pale wood bookcases with sliding doors made of yet more glass.
    My mother domesticated this interior by inserting her many photographs of my father, and later of myself, under the topmost surface of her dressing table. She did not much care for her surroundings but she liked the solidity of the flat, which is in a reassuring stone