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ACCLAIM FOR Anita Brookner’s VISITORS

“Brookner’s powers of observation and psychological acuity continue, in novel after novel, to produce elegant, spectacularly perceptive writing about what just lurks beneath the facade. ”

—The Miami Herald

“Paragraph after paragraph shines with intelligence. … As beautiful as a perfectly executed 18th-century painting. ”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A particularly wise portrayal … a daring novel about the anxiety and alliances of old age. ”

—Christian Science Monitor

“Quietly true to life. … Her triumph is subtle. ”

—People

“Brookner, like Jane Austen before her, is a master of nuance, a wit of some repute, and a perfectionist in both plot and character. ”

—The Newark Sunday Star-Ledger

“Quietly resplendent. … You may want to cheer as Dorothea May goes from a life of quiet desperation to quiet triumph. ”

—The Dallas Morning News

“Another brilliantly quiet gem. The incomparably subtle Brookner puts soft, revealing touches on the face of loneliness as only the elderly know it. ”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Anita BrooknerVISITORSAnita Brookner is the author of seventeen finely crafted novels, including Dolly, Fraud, Altered States, and Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1984. An international authority on eighteenth-century painting, she became the first female Slade Professor at Cambridge University. She lives in London.

ALSO BY Anita Brookner

A Start in Life Providence Look at Me Hotel du Lac Family and Friends A Misalliance A Friend from England Latecomers Lewis Percy Brief Lives A Closed Eye Fraud Dolly A Private View Incidents in the Rue Laugier Altered States

Visitors is a work of fiction. The characters in it have been invented by the author. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JANUARY 1999

Copyright © 1997 by Anita Brookner

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. , New York. Originally published in hardback in the United States by Random House, Inc.

, New York, and in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a division of Random House UK, London, in 1998.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows: Brookner, Anita. Visitors / Anita Brookner. p. cm. I. Title. PR 6052. R5816V57 1998 823’. 914—dc21 97–10494

eISBN: 978-0-307826329

Author photograph © Jerry Bauer

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Contents

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Towards evening the oppressive heat was tempered by a slight breeze, although this merely served to power drifts and eddies of a warmth almost tropical in its intensity. But this was England: somewhere in the atmosphere was a memory of damp. Truth to tell, the day had been almost uncomfortable: one was not used to such temperatures. The light, however, compensated for everything. Not quite crystal clear, but blinding in the absence of cloud, and gaining authority from the becalmed stillness of the garden, it put Mrs May in mind of novels and stories celebrating gardens other than her own, gardens which were part of estates, demesnes, where richly endowed families conversed in idleness, sat on terraces, or awaited visitors. ‘What meads, what kvasses were brewed, what pies were baked at Oblomovka!’ The great sun, clearer then, must have shone down on that Russia as it did now in London, at six o’clock on a Sunday evening in early September. It was the hour at which she was accustomed to experience a slight failure of nerve. At seventy she understood how closely she was being subsumed into the natural process, feared the dark, welcomed the light. On this particular day the sun had