A Friend from England Read online

  The sound of a key in the lock made me jump: Michael was back, and I did not want to confront him. But it was Oscar who came into the room, looking heavier than when I had last seen him. When he greeted me his eyes took on a watchful expression, the expression that used to be bent on Heather.

  ‘Rachel, my dear,’ he said. ‘How nice of you to come.’ He scooped up the little cat and began to stroke her, but his eyes never left my face. ‘And what have you two girls been talking about?’

  ‘Nothing, really,’ I said. ‘I think we’re both too exhausted by being ill. Maybe we’ll revive after a cup of tea. Heather’s in the kitchen, seeing to it.’

  I felt anxious in his presence, as if I had failed in my duty towards him. But he smiled kindly, seemed as if to relax, and lowered himself into a chair, with the cat on his knee. Sounds of spoons, being dropped, rather than lowered, into saucers, signalled a return to normality.

  ‘Yes, it’s a nasty business, this flu. You probably need a holiday. You didn’t go away this summer, did you? You can always use our place in Spain, when we’re not there, you know.’

  ‘Perhaps Heather should go,’ I said. ‘But how would she manage at the shop?’ How did she manage, I wondered, with all these honeymoons and other absences?

  ‘Oh, didn’t she tell you? She’s found a manager, a nice chap. Calls himself Jean-Pierre, if you please. But otherwise perfectly sound. She’s made him a partner. She’s a limited company now – I saw to that. It leaves her quite free. And she trusts him absolutely. She’ll just see to the buying now.’

  ‘What a good idea,’ I said. ‘Then perhaps she should go to Spain. Catch the last of the sun.’

  ‘Well, maybe she will. But she’s going to Milan next week for the collections. Didn’t she tell you? And I’ve persuaded her to have a few days in Venice afterwards. She has this Italian friend, Chiara. I thought it would be nice if they had a weekend at the Gritti.’

  For of course life was easy if there was plenty of money, I reflected, and then felt a little ashamed of myself, for I might have behaved in exactly the same way had my circumstances been different. But poor Michael didn’t seem to be getting much of a look in. It amazed me the way that Heather and her father had closed ranks so easily. I detected in Oscar an unwise desire to detach his daughter from her husband which was a little too overt.

  ‘And will Michael join them? The two girls, I mean.’ I felt I had to say this, as if the poor fellow needed an advocate, as if plans were being made in his absence about which he knew nothing.

  ‘Oh, I expect he has some business in Spain,’ said Oscar absently, still driving a rhythmic and steady hand down the cat’s spine. ‘I expect they’ve both decided to be away at the same time. Ah, here she is. How are you feeling, dear?’

  Heather’s closed face relaxed slightly in her father’s presence. She had assembled a tea of sorts, although the cake looked to be of Dorrie’s make. They were really rather claustrophobic, I decided. But perhaps that is the curse of happy families, the curse of which they are unaware but which they visit on all outsiders. No doubt Heather would never get free of them, and might not even want to. As if in unwitting contrast, Oscar began to discuss my plans for buying my flat and then buying out Eileen Somers, which to me, although an obviously sound idea, represented a slow uphill slog of many years. I would need to take out a loan, and, as far as I could see, spend the rest of my life paying it back. But I liked the flat – at least I liked it when I didn’t compare it with anything better – and I loved the shop. It was just that in moments of weakness, such as now, I wished that my life were not quite so reasonable.

  With her father, Heather became once more the devoted daughter of the old days, quiet, amenable, acquiescent. Perhaps there was a more closed look about her, as there was about Oscar, but they seemed to find contentment and security in each other’s company. I almost expected Oscar to say, ‘Where’s your mother?’ Where was she, in fact?

  ‘How is Dorrie?’ I asked, once again advocate for the absent.

  ‘A little tired,’ said Oscar. He put the cat down and took a cup of tea from Heather. That subject, too, appeared to be closed.

  I took my leave of them as soon as I decently could. Their complicity disheartened me. I felt that Oscar was there in some protective or consolatory capacity which seemed to me faintly indecent. I had no experience of this kind of relationship, my own father having died when I was quite young, but I could not see myself behaving in the same way. I had always felt that adults should maintain a superior ignorance in this respect, and I felt Oscar to be too involved in Heather’s domestic life, too watchful, too much a confidant. The very idea made me feel faint, as if the wretched Michael’s secrets were laid bare. But he was essentially a man without secrets, too unwise to censor his very obvious childishness. Much as I disliked and pitied him, I disliked the idea of his being betrayed, in all his silly innocence, even more.

  I found myself striding home, fuelled more by indignation than by returning strength, but recovering a little strength from the indignation itself. My supine acquiescence in all these stratagems, my enrolment as an additional protector, began to enrage me. With the clear light of prescience I realized that this situation could not be prolonged indefinitely, and that once I was out of sympathy I must either stay away or show my hand. In any event, I was fed up with Heather, who had tried my patience in her various manifestations for long enough. If she were not sufficiently mature to sustain her own marriage, she must see to it that the getting of wisdom must be her first priority.

  The whole thing had been a waste of money, I thought, while simultaneously trying to calculate my own income and expenditure: Oscar had promised to look over my figures. These romantics with their elaborate weddings and their princely trousseaus, and not a thought, or not enough thought, for the sometimes sour and disappointed sensations that follow, as if the world is necessary to sustain the illusion, as if, left alone, no couple can wholly live up to it. This reflection served the useful function of reaffirming me in my independence, in my adventurous single state, in my disabused view of human affairs. I would press ahead with my own enlightened plans, I thought, and once I got home I would invite Robin for a drink and discuss with him the prospect of our partnership. As far as I could see, this would work perfectly: all it needed was a little planning, a little energy, a little goodwill. I turned to this prospect with relief after the insubstantial exchanges of the afternoon.

  As it happened, Robin was just going off for his swim when I got back to the shop. He of course tried to persuade me to join him – he would never give up – but was easily diverted from this plan when I said that there was something I wanted to talk over with him, something to do with our future. Could he come back for a drink after his swim? Or would he like me to meet him somewhere? What about that peculiar wine bar he had once taken me to, the one with the lifebelts and the mess jackets? The Mauretania?

  ‘The Titanic,’ he said. ‘Fine. See you there about seven.’

  In the event I got there first and had to wait for him. I took a seat at the bar and ordered some fruit juice, then, thinking I looked a little too obvious, or rather, thinking I looked obvious when I had no plans for being obvious, I moved towards a table near the door. The place had filled up while I had had my back to it; sounds of laughter and a haze of smoke gave it an old-established air, although it was still fairly new. I rather lazily watched a knot of people who were evidently celebrating something or other, probably a business deal of some kind, as they were all men. A pearl grey flannel back evoked some vague reminiscence of something I had seen but it was not until the man wearing it turned round that I saw that it was Michael. He was in his usual state of hilarity, tossing back his leonine hair between each bout of laughter. He looked not in the least disconcerted at seeing me, but made no move to greet me. He did however move aside from the group he was with to raise his hand and give me his habitual wink. It was when he lowered his eyelid, in the glare of an overhead spotli
ght, that I saw that he was wearing blue eyeshadow. As he rejoined his friends, and burst into yet more laughter, I further saw that the glossiness of his lips and cheeks owed nothing to the suns of Spain, but had been obtained with instruments nearer to hand.

  SEVEN

  MY first thought was that Dorrie must never know. The others, presumably, already did. Heather had found out, in her incurious way, and no doubt the secret was contained somewhere in that glacial bedroom; I had visions of Michael preparing for his nights out in the north light of those large windows, the pitiless and undifferentiated glare almost encouraging him to add colour to the scene. Heather would have told her father, no doubt trusting him to solve the problem, untie the knot, abolish the so inconvenient husband, who might or might not be a fraud. How did I know? I had never come across this little idiosyncrasy before. The Colonel had of course always known; hence the anxiety that was so striking a feature of his parental attitudes. His pre-marital behaviour now struck me as desperate, his relaxation at the wedding, and his sporting proposals made when Michael and Heather were away, as obscene. But Dorrie had no notion, I was quite sure. Dorrie still thought of her daughter as happily married, ‘adjusting’ to her new status, and perhaps a little ‘tired’ on account of it. Eccentricities of this sort could never figure in Dorrie’s view of the world, where all was truly for the best, and patience was rewarded, and everything came to those who waited, and, naturally, the best was always worth waiting for. And so Dorrie must be protected, from her own incomprehension, as much as from anything else. I would say nothing, to any of them. The burden of this secret must be borne by each of us in isolation.

  I left the wine bar without waiting for Robin: I would talk to him next day at the shop. I felt humbled and embarrassed as if the revelation affected me personally. Out in the safety of the street I blushed when I remembered Michael’s childish hilarity. It was the inconsequence of his behaviour that offended me: he had not appeared to mind that I had unmasked him but had gone on smiling and winking with as much fervour as if we were the best of friends. I began to wonder if he were in fact mad, or whether this were some super-refinement of the travel business, an attempt to persuade others of the beneficent results of living in the sun. Whatever the explanation he would have to go. I could see that. Even if Heather armed herself with the roughest of good humour, she could not be expected to tolerate a farce of this kind. There was something peculiarly menacing in the way the marriage had been engineered, as if the victim, in this case Heather, had been of no importance whatsoever; all that had mattered had been to provide a cover for this incorrigible child, so that he might enjoy his little games under the cloak of respectability. I wondered if I had missed any signs, if any of us had. But looking back, all I could see was that dreadful eagerness. And Dorrie had been as eager as the Colonel: I saw that now. In her desire to bring her daughter to that longed-for apotheosis, she had not minded too much that the bridegroom was of rather inferior quality. Dorrie was easily persuaded: her shopping expeditions proved that. And since she imputed all faults to herself (‘I hope I did the right thing’) she would no doubt quash any little misgiving she might have had before it even reached the level of consciousness.

  And Oscar could not have known. Whatever instinctive objection he had had to Michael, whatever reluctance he had felt to the idea of Michael as a man, had surely been of a nebulous and general nature, for his own life had only prepared him for problems that were straightforward and in the nature of things, to be tackled with the patience and good humour that were his professional attributes. Men like Oscar never discussed sex, let alone sexual peculiarities or aberrations; they would have felt a strong distaste at the very idea of these subjects being brought under the public gaze. In the days when we had gone to the theatre together I had learnt very quickly that he was only at ease with the noble passions. He was moved, I could see, by the idea of great and impossible love, the sort of love for which kingdoms were sacrificed, and which might prove to be fatal. Indeed, my strongest impression of those evenings we had spent at the opera was of the way that he and Dorrie had clasped hands tightly when such a love was heralded, as if in no circumstances could it be withstood, let alone rejected. They were curiously romantic for their age. For all Dorrie’s joy in weddings, and the pride she took in Heather’s engagement, it was true love which held her, which brought a look of mature recognition to her face, which convinced her of its inevitability, despite the warning signs.

  I had been softened and amused by the solemnity with which they had accepted all the farrago of romantic passion. For to me it was a farrago, both on the stage and in real life, something archaic and unmanageable, unsettling and devastating, and to succumb to such a passion would be a quite voluntary step towards self-destruction. When I thought of those great operatic emotions I felt, for a moment, a quaking, a dissolution, as I had when I surrendered to the drowning waters of my dreams. I had no doubt that I would find the real thing as distasteful as I had that commotion, that violent and threatening disturbance that I had experienced when I consented for that one and only time to go with Robin to his health club, and immersed myself, as if fated to try to please him, in those blue and chemical waters. It was a mistake I would not make again.

  I saw that I had no part to play in what must come next. If Heather had chosen not to speak to me, not to confide in me, there was no way that I could let her know that I had discovered her secret. I owed it to her pride to represent myself as passive and uninformed. And I did not see how I could be of any use to her unless I joined her in her dilemma. Truth to tell, I was as ignorant of what to do as she probably was herself: an annulment, I thought vaguely, should be arranged, but I had no doubt that the Colonel would put up a furious opposition to this. And Michael would of course be governed by what his father thought he should do. And there would inevitably be an unpleasantness surrounding this action, for many people would demand an explanation. I could see those sisters of Dorrie’s retrieving the upper hand, sincerely shocked by the misfortune that had overtaken her but settling in quite comfortably to this new dispensation, which would return their little sister to them as innocent, and as in need of help and protection as she had always been. And did one return wedding presents in the case of an annulment, or were they just thrown in, as if the recipient probably needed or deserved some sort of consolation prize? I saw all sorts of indignity ahead. Yet the pretence could not be sustained. However impermeable Heather appeared to be, she could not be expected to put up with this outrage, this insult. I felt hugely angry on her behalf. Did the Sandberg ménage think her so stupid that she would not notice what was going on, or, worse, that she would not mind? I could think of no more gross behaviour to a woman than this indifference, this coarse bungling of her emotions. Whatever women put up with from men, they should never countenance indifference. Any violation of inner secrets is preferable. This was a surprising thought to me, for I usually err on the side of implacability, but for a moment or two I identified so completely with Heather and her gentle upbringing that it was I who had issued from that suburban villa, from that virginal bedroom with the apple tree outside the window; it was I who now sat in moral darkness in that pompous flat, with the wedding presents still inviolate in their cupboards, and only the little cat called Phoebe for company.

  I no longer blamed Heather for confiding in her father. I felt for them both in what would inevitably be a sentiment of utter disarray, of helplessness, and, worse, of embarrassment. I could see that it was not good for a father and a daughter to meet on those terms, in such a situation, and that it might colour their relationship for some time, perhaps for ever. I could not think of a solvent for this situation. These things, after all, did not happen. To forfeit one’s innocence in such circumstances was unimaginable. I could see further that Heather would not reclaim her innocence unless something utterly unexpected happened to her; if she stayed the same, she would stay tainted. My heart ached for her, as I thought of her trying to lead a no
rmal life, to go to her shop, although there was little enough for her to do there now, with Jean-Pierre installed, or to sit out the time that she was condemned to spend with her husband. Significantly, the Colonel had begun to make himself scarce: I could picture him tiptoeing like a marauder from the scene. No doubt he would return if he sensed that trouble was about to be made. By ‘trouble’ he would understand any righting of the wrong in which he had been instrumental. And Michael would of course profess smiling ignorance of what the trouble might be. One of the main difficulties of talking to Michael had always been to try to get him to be serious. He spoke in clichés, and no doubt some psychic trick had taught him to think in clichés. They would get no help from Michael, who would maintain his unfocussed bonhomie until such time as events really threatened him with exposure or, more probably, dispossession, when he would instantly break down into hysterical panic. Trying to deal with him in that condition would be even worse than trying to breach his habitual radiant indifference. And yet I still felt a twinge of pity for him and his terrible life. I could see his frightened face, as in fact I had never seen it, or had seen it only in that misty anteroom in which all these sightings of mine took place. And I could see him back with the Colonel, cramping his style again, and the Colonel’s lady friends not too pleased about it. Everyone would lose face. It was not to be borne. But the only alternative was to go on as if nothing had happened. That was not to be borne either. There was no way out.