A Virtuous Woman, Twice Scorned

The Misalliance by Anita Brookner (Pantheon: $14.95)

Blanche has been married to Bertie for 20 years, keeping a perfect house, serving up perfect meals, and, above all, creating a perfect ambiance, a jeweled setting for Bertie to enjoy and be set off by. Except that in Blanche’s case, the “setting” might not have been particularly gaudy. Blanche is a woman of perfect taste, good looks, a fine mind, and the possessor of a lifetime supply of blameless rectitude.

Bertie leaves Blanche, of course, and takes up with a computer slut named Mousie who cries a lot and insists that Bertie pitch in to help with dinner. Blanche is devastated, hopeless, emotionally maimed and entirely alone. All their married friends take up with Bertie and Mousie; it would be foolish, would it not, to side with a loser instead of a winner? Why should the world be otherwise?

Of course it doesn’t seem particularly fair that Bertie has denied his wife the opportunity to bear children all these years, and now--in the most tiresome possible way--has taken up with a woman who is barely more than a child herself. It’s just one of life’s little ironies. Blanche takes notice of it, but her real attention is not on “them” but on herself; how to stay alive today, and then again, tomorrow. She’s swimming dimly--her head bravely up, of course--through a Sargasso Sea of despair. She drinks maybe a bottle of wine a night.

And, situated in the lovely London flat she’s shared so many years with Bertie, she begins to see thin slices of the life “out there,” outside. Her ideas and experiences of reality come from two places where a single woman in a city may go without disgrace: museums, and the hospital where she is a volunteer. From her solitary museum forays--she stares and stares until it’s possible to go home without disgrace--she begins to see that in paintings, anyway, there are two kinds of women: the Christian-martyr kind, with knives sticking into them or their breasts served up on a tray, or the other kind, the pre-Christian goddesses, niads and nymphs--beautiful, predatory, remorseless women living their lives with greedy joy--utterly careless about those they destroy: “For ‘good’ women, Blanche thought, men would present their ‘better’ selves, saving their half-conscious energies for the others. And she herself, she further thought, had made the mistake of trying to fashion herself for the better half, assuming the uncomplaining and compliant posture of the Biblical wife when all the time the answer was to be found in the scornful and anarchic posture of the ideal mistress.”

Blanche’s concurrent lesson in reality occurs as she is volunteering in her hospital. She falls in with Sally Beamish, a young ditzy woman who’s taking care of a solemn little girl, Elinor, who is not at all willing or able to speak. Elinor’s mother is dead. Her father is off somewhere on the continent, working for shady characters. Two facts become immediately evident. Sally has been “deserted” just as much as Blanche has--although Sally is far from heartbroken--and little Elinor, in all her silent melancholy, gives Blanche a person to identify with; someone to love.

Special Conditions

From these set positions, the novel ravels itself up. Sally is the pagan. She extracts money and favors from Blanche not by asking or even manipulating but by simply expecting. When Blanche, in danger of becoming inundated by Sally’s physical and emotional demands, calls up Patrick, an old boyfriend, an ace-in-the-hole sort of person who she knows has always loved her, naturally poor dim-head Patrick falls in love with pagan Sally. That’s just the way life is. No wonder little Elinor doesn’t feel like saying anything to anybody in this world.

A lot depends in this book on whether or not the reader is willing or able to accept the special conditions which the author here sets up. The most obvious one is: How come Blanche stays so slim, elegant and beautiful when she tilts back a full fifth of wine--and all those slices of cake--every day? Isn’t it terribly convenient that Bertie is very rich, but that Blanche herself is also independently wealthy? (And, just asking, if Bertie is so wealthy wouldn’t he want an heir? Is he sterile or does he just detest children?) And one knows that for the purposes of this plot Blanche should see only her neighbor, her sister-in-law and her maid, but if she’s such a person of boundless rectitude and goodness, couldn’t she have found just one woman friend in the first 40 years of her life?

But any of these gestures toward reality could have rent the fragile fictional fabric that Brookner has set up here. This is not even a story of lost love: Bertie’s own brother refers to him as a “pompous bastard” and whenever Bertie appears in these pages, to check up on Blanche and have a drink or two, he exhibits as much personality as a garbanzo bean. No, the story is not at all about Bertie, poor devil. The story is about how a pitiable, lonely, elegant, good woman lives in perfect taste and has a fine and original mind, can pick up a scrap of happiness from somewhere. “The Misalliance” will appeal greatly to every woman who has ever felt put-upon, or used, or not treated with respect, or surrounded by dolts who can’t hold a candle to her virtue and hard work. I don’t know a single woman like that, myself, but you might.