Look at Me Read Free

clears his throat and says, ‘Dr Fraser, if you would be so kind …’, which is his all-purpose phrase, and he shows him the photograph. Nick, who is always in a tearing hurry, and who has to combine his research with his professional duties and a full social life, makes a disappointed face. ‘Joseph,’ he says, ‘it really is too ridiculous that we never have time to discuss this properly. Why don’t you come to dinner one evening? I’ll get my wife to give you a ring.’
    ‘I have no telephone,’ says Dr Simek, as might have been expected. ‘Perhaps now we could …’
    ‘I’ll get her to ring here,’ Nick assures him. ‘One of the girls will take a message.’ Actually we are not allowedto use the telephone, which is in Dr Leventhal’s office and which is in fact his telephone, but I don’t suppose he would mind as it has to do with research. I assume that they have had this dinner, which Dr Simek certainly looks as if he needs, but he shows no signs of leaving Nick alone, and Nick sometimes advances behind his back with exaggerated wariness, willing him not to turn round. Dr Simek never does turn round: I suppose that, being a foreigner, he does not recognize the informal approach. Of course he knows that Nick is in the room because he has seen him come in, and I think he also knows that Nick is avoiding him, but he merely purses his lips and gets on with his work. Curiously enough, Mrs Halloran and I find ourselves in some sort of complicity with Nick on these occasions. Our eyes follow his progress round the room, and he gives us both a grateful wink as he tiptoes out.
    It is strange how this fails to annoy me, although as a rule I am sensitive to bad manners. It is just that occasionally, very occasionally, one meets someone who is so markedly a contrast with the general run of people that one’s instinctive reaction is one of admiration, indulgence, and, no doubt, if one is not very careful indeed, of supplication. I am not arguing the rights and wrongs of this: I am simply stating the facts as they appear to me. And not only to me, for I have noticed that extremely handsome men and extremely beautiful women exercise a power over others which they themselves have no need, or indeed no time, to analyse. People like Nick attract admirers, adherents, followers. They also attract people like me: observers. One is never totally at ease with such people, for they are like sovereigns and one’s duty is to divert them. Matters like worth or merit rarely receive much of their attention, for, with the power of choice which their looks bestow on them, they can change their minds whenever they care to do so. Becauseof their great range of possibilities, their attention span is very limited. And their beauty has accustomed them to continuous gratification.
    I find such people – and I have met one or two – quite fascinating. I find myself respecting them, as I would respect some natural phenomenon: a rainbow, a mountain, a sunset. I recognize that they might have no intrinsic merit, and yet I will find myself trying to please them, to attract their attention. ‘Look at me,’ I want to say. ‘Look at me.’ And I am also intrigued by their destinies, which could, or should, be marvellous. I will exert myself for such people, and I will miss them when they leave. I will always want to know about them, for I tend to be in love with their entire lives. That is a measure of the power that they exert. That is why I join Nick in a smile of complicity when he spares himself the boredom of a conversation with Dr Simek. It is a kind of law, I suppose.
    ‘That’, says Mrs Halloran heavily, after every other one of Nick’s disruptive visits to the Library, ‘is one hell of a man’, at which point Olivia asks her to be quiet and observe the rule of silence, and Mrs Halloran says, ‘Miss Benedict, why don’t you get hold of that sodding offprint I’ve been asking for every day for the last month instead of