Look at Me Read Online Free PDF

her father’s insolvency. One must never mention either money or the cold to Alix. It makes Nick too wretched, as well as Alix herself.
    So we live in this flat, Nancy and I, and we hardly ever speak. Of course, I am not here in the daytime, and now, thank God, hardly ever here in the evenings either. There is no point in changing anything. There is more than enough money, I am almost ashamed to say, thinking of poor Alix shivering in her fur coat, although it is not the sort of money that Alix would be inclined to respect. My father originally inherited a toy factory in the East End from his rather idiosyncratic family. He sold it as soon as he could, and with his friend Sydney Goldsmith formed a sort of partnership for investing on the Stock Market. They were absurdly successful. They turned themselves into a limited company, had lunch two or three times a week in order to discuss business, diversified, and ended up rather rich. That is where my money comes from, and I care for it as little as my father did. He was mainly concerned with earning a living in a way which would leave him entirely free to devote himself to my mother. I think Sydney was the brains of the partnership. He was very fond of my father, and their friendship seems to have had a peaceful sweetness about it that I have never encountered since. Indeed, all the emotions of those days remain unmatched … After my father’s death Sydney would visit my mother once a month, always with a box of chocolates, which she gave to Nancy after he had left. ‘Well, Fanny,’ he would say to me in the hall, divesting himself of his sharp camel hair coat and his soft brown trilby hat (he always dressed like a gangster), ‘how is our dear one today?’ And he would sit with my mother and talk to her of my father,although I think he loved her himself. Their innocence, it seems to me now, was unbounded. I slightly dreaded these visits, which followed the same pattern, the same antique pattern. I always had to stay in for Sydney’s visits, and although I recognized that he was, as my father claimed, the dearest of men, I would count the minutes until he took his leave. This too followed a prescribed pattern. He would bend over my mother’s chair and kiss her forehead and say, ‘Any time, Beatrice. Call on me any time. My time is yours.’ He would always have a word with Nancy on the way out, would in fact make a point of knocking on the kitchen door to thank her for tea. She loved him too. He still comes, although I am rarely here. I believe he lives in Worthing now. I think he said something about moving down there. Cutting adrift, he said.
    The men in my mother’s life were like priests, ministering to her. They loved her in a way I hope I am never loved, my father, Sydney Goldsmith, and Dr Constantine, who looked after her for so many years. It is why I seek the company of the young, the urbane, the polished, the ambitious, the prodigiously gifted, like Nick and his friends. In my mother’s world, at least in those latter days, the men were kind, shy, easily damaged, too sensitive to her hurts. I never want to meet such men again. In a way I prefer them to be impervious, even if it means that they are impervious to me. I can no longer endure the lost look in the eye, the composure too easily shattered, the waning hope. I now require people to be viable, durable. I try to catch hold of their invulnerability and to apply it to myself. I want to feel that the world is hard enough to withstand knocks, as well as to inflict them. I want evidence of good health and good luck and the people who enjoy both. Those priestly ministrations, that simple childish cheerfulness, that delicacy of intention, that sigh immediately suppressed, that welcomingof routine attentions, that reliance on old patterns, that fidelity, that constancy, and the terror behind all of these things … No more.
    There is absolutely no need for me ever again to pretend that everything is all