Making Things Better Read Online Free PDF

in an instinctive, almost inoffensive manner. This was what had led, indirectly, to their eventual separation. He suppressed a lingering feeling of shame as he remembered the attempt he had made to deflect her outspokenness. For himself he had not minded; for others he had minded too much.
    With a sigh he went to the mirror and surveyed himself, as if preparing to meet her straight away. She had thought him handsome, ‘distinguished’, as she put it, and might even think so now. The great attraction for him was, and always had been, her physical ordinariness, although she was a pleasant-looking woman and might have made more of herself. This she clearly thought either unnecessary or impossible. In any event she presented an efficient if slightly unkempt appearance which he was always mentally tidying up, anxious for her to have her hair expertly cut, to put some colour on her lips, even to wear the scents he took pleasure in buying for her. But she laughed those away, and continued to content herself with a vigorous wash before facing the day. He found her natural smell exciting, although part of him was comprehensively disappointed that she did not resemble the pampered women he had been used to in his youth, with their painted nails and faces. His aunt Anna, for example, was always perfectly dressed and coiffed, and if the continued effort made her seem a little bad-tempered he appreciated that too. Instinctively he preferred women who made much of themselves, were capricious, flirtatious even, though he knew that such behaviour had gone out of style. Josie, with her bushy hair and unadorned face, which he had loved, had not altogether displaced the image which he would, somehow, have found easier to understand.
    But they were old now, their looks no longer a bargaining counter. In the mirror he saw a sombre thin-faced man who could no longer be confused with his younger self, his eager smile eclipsed, more by solitude than by experience. In truth he felt himself to be as unprepared for life as he had been in his youth, though he tried to be as competent as he had always been, or so he supposed. He knew that he stooped, that he tired swiftly, that he could no longer walk as far as he had been accustomed to do, that he felt the cold to an abnormal extent. This chilly spring, these long light evenings, made him as fretful as a child, disturbed his sleep to an extent that made him anxious to get up and begin the day, even though that day was as empty as the night had been. He thought back to the nights he had spent with his wife, but without a flicker of desire—strange, since they had been such enthusiastic partners. He had been anxious for continuity, for permanence, after years of fleeting relationships, garnered opportunistically to satisfy his appetites. He was as idealistic about marriage as any young girl, could hardly believe his good fortune in finally acceding to the married state.
    And he had wanted someone to be kind to him, to look after him, and to allay the sadness he seemed still to feel, a sadness which had nothing to do with hardships and disappointments but was rather an inheritance he did not fully understand. To attribute this sadness to early privation seemed to him not quite to explain it. Certainly there were legitimate sadnesses which were perfectly obvious, but the sadness had outlasted the various phenomena that had provoked it, so that now it was not only ineradicable but somehow renewed each day by the condition of old age. Those cold nights in an unwarmed bed were not only physically uncomfortable but emotionally, even morally, unbearable. This was not how things should end. And he felt bound to conclude that his divorce, while reconciling him once again to his solitary dreaming state, the state in which he still cherished Fanny Bauer, had brought about a diminution in his perception of what life still had to offer.
    It was not even that his wife had satisfied every imaginary