Altered States Read Online Free PDF

At the same time I decided that she was unrepentant,perhaps because she had no fear of censure. She was certainly rather alarming. I felt my pulse rate increase, as it always did in the presence of danger. Humphrey too was a little abashed. The only person who did not seem put out was Jenny, who continued to smile fondly.
    ‘Doesn’t she look lovely?’ she said, and there was a longing in her voice and in her eyes that would have told anyone attentive enough that her idea of family was perhaps no more than a lovingly cherished fantasy. In that moment, a moment of intense embarrassment, I saw that Parisian background as lonely, an affair of stratagems. I had lived there, I knew how hard it was to exist on a small amount of money, to live in a cheap hotel, never quite warm enough, never quite clean enough, to look forward to one meal a day for the relief of sitting in a restaurant and not in one’s room eating a baguette out of a twist of tissue paper and perhaps a slice of ham or a piece of cheese, calculating that if one did not stop for coffee one would have nearly enough for the cinema that evening, and forgetting the discomfort of all these calculations for the sheer joy of being free to walk the streets of the beautiful city at any hour of the day or night. That was what I had felt, but I was young, and I was not a woman. To a woman of Jenny’s age (and what exactly had she been doing there? How had she been living?), the reality must have seemed quite different. I resolved to get the story out of my mother, in whom everyone confided. If I could recognise anything I could recognise poverty. Perhaps that was why I was so reluctant to go back there, to the cheap hotel that I had thought so romantic at the time. Even the innocuous hardships I had suffered had left their mark. I had been happy there, but perhaps, finally, I was more at home here, in my mother’s drawing-room, in London, on a misty Sunday in November.
    Jenny leaned forward confidentially and took my hand. ‘Your mother and I have become great friends,’ she said. ‘Wehave such lovely long talks. And we go out! We have afternoons out! Humphrey likes to rest in the afternoon, so dear Alice and I set out together for a couple of hours.’
    ‘Where do you go?’ I asked. I was distracted once more by Sarah’s red hair, her black figure sauntering across the room, the calculating way in which she put olives into her small pursed mouth. She had resumed her preferred stance, near the bar, so that every man in search of a drink, either for himself or for his wife, would have to confront her. ‘What do you do?’ I said to Jenny, with an effort at enthusiasm.
    ‘We go to the Royal Academy, if there’s anything on. Or we go round the stores. That’s what we really enjoy. And we have tea out, in a hotel. And then I put Alice into a taxi and go home to cook Humphrey’s meal.’
    And my mother goes home to an empty flat, I thought. I resolved to spend more time with her, as I had resolved on many previous occasions. But she was a self-reliant woman, grown used to her own company, and had never burdened me with expectations I could not honour. I was glad she had found distraction in the company of this touching little woman, though how much pleasure she really derived from an afternoon spent window-shopping or taking tea in a hotel was a mystery to me. In fact the idea was vaguely monstrous. My dignified mother … But perhaps she had been lonely, had been glad just precisely of this sort of undemanding contact so unexpectedly provided for her. I would do more for her, I decided; I would make a point of eating Sunday lunch with her. Maybe I could take her out to lunch in one of those hotels she now favoured. This seemed a recipe for old age. I already had the restrictions of the office to cope with, after my years of freedom; now it appeared that I was to take on the burden of a family weekend, I who had just decided that I had no family. The family I would