A Friend from England Read online

  I suspected this Chiara, but by this time I suspected practically everybody. My ill will had reached such proportions that I silently accused them all of complicity, of making things too easy for her. But there was no doubt that she had transformed the situation. Among the tea cups an air of expectation reigned. Even the operation seemed a thing of little importance. The general feeling seemed to be a desire to get it out of the way so that life could resume its normal appearance, and all be as before, with Heather in attendance once more. Dorrie was cheerful now, and had her normal colour in her cheeks. When Sam came in, on his way home, welcomes and good wishes had to be repeated. We were all surprised when we saw how late it was.

  It was a nurse who told us to leave. The long night of preparation was about to begin. I kissed Dorrie and told her that I would telephone the following day, and would come back when it was all over. I waited outside the door, hoping to catch Heather, for now my curiosity was aroused. It was difficult, and it would have looked too obvious, to detach her from her father at this stage, yet I did manage to have a word with her. It seemed surreal, in that corridor, to ask her whom, in particular, she had met. ‘Oh, I’ll give you a call,’ she said, infuriatingly. ‘Before I go back.’

  NINE

  WHEN I telephoned the Clinic the following afternoon, I was told that Mrs Livingstone had had her operation but was still sedated. Her husband was with her, but no other visitors would be allowed. I was advised to telephone again later.

  I was a little surprised that such a curfew should be imposed. I had thought that the actual surgery would take about half an hour at the most, and would be followed by a quick recovery and a rapid discharge. The whole thing was proving to be more cumbersome than I imagined. But I supposed that the anxiety of her family had prevailed and that they had agreed to turn this little episode into a sort of rest cure, to which no time limits need be attached. Indeed, the current mythology was that Dorrie was ‘exhausted’, and that explanations were not difficult to find. That disastrous marriage had ‘worn her out’; she was ‘prostrated’ by the outcome, although curiously enough nobody seemed to want to take any responsibility for this. The fabled preparations for the wedding, the wedding itself, were seen as a manifestation of family virtue, of unselfishness, of generosity, even of chivalry, and I suppose that this was more or less true. The brute fact of the rapid dissolution of the marriage itself was viewed with distaste, as if it were happening to somebody else. If pressed to examine this attitude a little more closely, the consensus of the sisters would have been that Michael had proved unreliable, that his background was eccentric, and that he had failed to settle down. Heather would emerge from this imbroglio as if from a convent, with not a stain on her character.

  All this was so near the truth – which only Oscar and I possessed – that it was found to be generally acceptable, even comfortable. I was not alone in noticing the fine web of deceit thus thrown over the affair, for I had seen Oscar turning his face reflectively to the window from time to time, as if taking a brief sabbatical from family unanimity. The same cosmetic procedure seemed to have overtaken the business of Dorrie’s ear, which did not in itself, as far as I could see, require prolonged bed rest. My general irritability on this score contained a quantum of fear, certainly, but also of impatience. How the rich succumbed to their ailments! And how premature this prostration would be when news of Heather’s little divagations came into greater prominence! Would her imminent departure be greeted with the same indulgence as her forthcoming uncontested divorce? Would the same euphemisms be used to describe what was only too obviously a foreign adventure of the most banal kind? And would these euphemisms eventually die on the lips when that adventure was repeated at regular intervals?

  If, on the other hand, Dorrie were really ill, then Heather’s temporary defection would be overlooked, forgotten, cancelled, in the relief of her having returned to deal with the situation. Indeed, it would be a matter of urgency to secure Heather’s continued presence even before that presence was officially required. As so often in my relations with the Livingstones, I now reflected that I had done all I could, or, unfortunately, nearly all: my supreme, my ultimate task would be to talk sense to Heather, persuade her, in my own inimitable way, that what awaited her in Venice could be postponed sine die (could indeed be renewed or replicated at a time to suit her in the future) and that it would be more seemly on her part to inaugurate a period of official spinsterhood until the time was propitious for her next brief disappearance. This would be a matter of convenience all round, I would explain: I would not harp on the fact that fears for Dorrie’s health could not be entirely discounted, but would take the line that the life she was about to embark upon required a coolness of attitude and a long-term strategy that she would do better to contemplate, perhaps in the comfort of her now deserted flat, before succumbing to its more obvious pitfalls. To this end I telephoned her, hoping to catch her before she left for the hospital to be with her father when Dorrie came round from her anaesthetic.

  Having to see her was, as always, inconvenient, but time was short, both the time allowed for the interview and the time I could spare from the shop, where business was suddenly booming and Robin was beginning to look a little frayed. It was a sense of my own position that led me to force the issue. I set out for Marble Arch on one of those gloomy days that threaten rain but never deliver it, fearful, despite myself, of those lowering clouds and what they concealed. The events of the previous days had put me into such a state of nervous receptivity that my hydrophobia seemed to darken the edges of my mind and even the sight of Robin pouring glass after glass of water down his throat made me uneasy. I found myself glancing upwards at the dark grey sky, as I hastened along the Bayswater Road, willing it to remain dry until I reached the safe anchorage of Heather’s flat. There I would deliver my message as expeditiously as possible before hurrying back to my own four walls. It is when I am in this state that I have bad dreams. All of this was an additional burden to me.

  Heather opened the door and stood politely aside to let me into her flat. She seemed to have no idea why I should wish to see her, but was, as ever, wordlessly accommodating. I felt it was appropriate to remain standing while I pointed out the error of her ways, and she, with her invincible politeness, remained standing with me. She was not an inventive girl and had no thought of making me comfortable. I was grateful for this for there was no way in which I could feel comfortable in my decision to do what clearly had to be done. Indeed, as we stood there in the hallway of her silent flat, a clock ticking monotonously somewhere in the background, I could feel the familiar tide of exasperation rising to the full.

  ‘Heather,’ I said, gamely. ‘You mentioned that you were going back to Venice, and I don’t think you should.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, apart from the fact that your mother is ill, I think your timing is wrong.’

  She looked at me, with that familiar amiable blankness in her face. Clearly I was going to get no help from her. I tried again.

  ‘You mentioned that you had met someone and I rather gathered that you were going back to see him. Or to be with him.’

  ‘That’s right. Marco. Marco Barbieri.’

  I was momentarily diverted. ‘Marco? Chiara’s brother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But Heather,’ I said, rather more gently. ‘Surely you can visit your friend at any other time?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she replied. She was rather pale now. ‘We love one another. We’re going to be married.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Heather. You are married. Surely once is enough? You’ve got all this,’ I gestured towards the chandelier, the only emblem of ‘all this’ I could find available. ‘Why not stay here and make the best of it? You can visit him in due course. Of course you can. Or he can come here. Why can’t he do that?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she repeated. ‘He can’t leave. He supports his widowed mother. I shall have to live there.�
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  ‘With his widowed mother? In Venice?’

  ‘Well, of course.’

  She seemed to take it for granted that I would accept this, as she had apparently done, with no show of resistance.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be unkind but I think you set too much store by marriage. After all, you went into marriage with Michael as if it were the most natural thing in the world that you should. And it hasn’t worked out, has it.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But you see, I love Marco.’

  ‘Well, then,’ I exploded. ‘Why not just love him? It can be done, you know. You don’t have to marry everyone. In fact I think you should steer clear of marriage. And I can’t see you living with anybody’s widowed mother in Venice. The whole idea is preposterous. Your place is here.’

  She said nothing, but merely rested her hand for support on a console table. I remember looking at her reflection in the mirror that hung above it. She was back in her black garments, for some reason, a loose sweater and a long jersey skirt, that made my heavy raincoat feel oppressive by comparison. Her hair was cut short again, and a long strand lay across her forehead. She seemed to me to be dressed in mourning clothes, or in the clothes appropriate to a Venetian daughter-in-law. I revised my earlier estimate of her future career.

  ‘Look here,’ I said, in some alarm. ‘Don’t do anything stupid. You can have your love affair. After all, you have money. If money is a problem there …’ My voice trailed away, as she turned to me in some amusement. Now I lost the reflection of her in the mirror as she moved towards me out of its range.

  ‘Rachel,’ she said. ‘Why are you saying all this? My mind is quite made up, you know.’

  ‘Because you are in danger of marrying a man whom you have just met,’ I said grimly. ‘Just as you did before. And marriage is not the answer to everything, you know. Some women are just not meant to marry.’

  ‘And some women are,’ she replied. ‘I am. I always wanted to be married, even when I was a little girl. I wanted to be married and to stay married, like my parents. I want children. I want a home.’

  ‘You’ve got a home,’ I said meanly, thinking of my hard-earned flat. ‘You’ve got two homes. You can always go back to your parents.’

  ‘I only want one home,’ she said. ‘I want my husband’s home.’

  ‘But you’re going to make the same mistake again! Look here, Heather, I know you’re inexperienced, but this is ridiculous.’ I sat down. ‘Don’t you know that you can fall in love again and again, and that it doesn’t always work out? Don’t you realize that in these situations it is up to you to stand clear? To keep a cool head? To preserve yourself?’

  ‘Like you?’ she asked, still politely.

  ‘Well, yes, why not? I manage. In fact I do very well. Of course, I haven’t had your advantages,’ I said, breathing rather hard. ‘I can’t cancel everything the minute it all goes wrong, as you are apparently prepared to do. I haven’t got loving parents who think everything I do is right, even if it isn’t. I have to live by the light of reason. I’m not saying it isn’t hard. I’m just saying it can be done. And reason means being grown up, even a little sceptical. Reason means not having weddings every five minutes, with new clothes, and people giving you presents, as if you were still a little girl. Reason means doing it the hard way, keeping quiet, being discreet. Reason means having the strength to do without.’

  ‘You make it sound terrible,’ she said.

  ‘It is terrible,’ I burst out. ‘But who said life wasn’t terrible? People like you seem to think it is a sort of party, to which invitations are sent out. People like you don’t seem to realize when the celebrations have to stop. Or that not everybody gets to go to this party of yours. Some of us have to work,’ I said. ‘Stay buoyant. Stay purposeful. Stay smiling, and helpful, and solvent. People like us are braver than people like you will ever be. And, frankly, I think I am years ahead of you. I know what I need, to be all these things, and clear-headed, and useful. Women don’t sit at home any more, you know, dreaming of Prince Charming. They don’t do it because they’ve found out that he doesn’t exist. As you should have found out. I live in the real world, the world of deceptions. You live in the world of illusions. That is one of the differences between us. Another one is that I don’t choose to go public every five minutes. What I do is my own affair and nobody else’s. Of course, it’s terrible,’ I said, with some passion. ‘But you see, I’ve found out that there are no easy options.’

  ‘I didn’t say it would be easy.’ A very small flicker of trouble crossed her face.

  ‘Oh, but you believe it will be.’ Nothing would stop me now. ‘Women like you, protected, sentimental, spoilt, how could you possibly envisage difficulty? You have no conception of it, the height, the depth, the duration of it. Listen, Heather, I wanted to get married once. Of course I did. But he was married, and nobody made it easy for me. Yes, I thought like you once. I wanted the same things. But since then … Well, he taught me a lot. He taught me to take care of myself, to give away nothing I couldn’t spare. He taught me to see to it that I was the one in control. That’s a grim lesson to have to learn. But I learnt it. And I’m still here. And I’m not likely to end up supporting someone else’s widowed mother in the back streets of Venice, miles from home.’

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said. ‘I rather want to get to the hospital. I’d give you a lift, but you’re going in the opposite direction.’

  ‘And what about your parents?’ I went on. ‘Have you told them? And are they prepared to bail you out once again? Oh, you make me despair. Why do you think I came here? I’m trying to tell you not to do anything final, not to throw everything away. There are other men. There are always other men. You may not like the idea but I can promise you that you will come to terms with it. You will have to. I had to. Again and again and again. But it need not be a death sentence, you know. You may even learn to enjoy it. In fact, you may have to. Your entire future may depend on it. I know, I know. Women like you are squeamish about things like that. But who said it was all a fairy tale? Women like you or women like me?’

  She collected her keys from the table and put them in her bag.

  ‘Shall we go?’ she said, opening the door and standing aside to let me pass.

  Without noticing how this had happened, I found myself on the pavement outside the entrance, feeling bulky and superfluous in my raincoat and still breathing irregularly after my outburst. I was, at some level of consciousness, aware of Heather stealing silently away in her flat black shoes after glancing at me once more, with her usual adamantine amiability. I felt exhausted and ashamed, as one always does after any kind of confession. But someone has to say these things. Someone has to point out to people of Heather’s imperviousness that there are a few duties connected with being an adult in an adult world. Except that I wished that it did not have to be people like me that issued the warning. I felt the old sickening sense of loss that privileged people always visit on me. It is a peculiar sort of love affair that I have with them. I want to be like them, yet at the same time I want to be taken under their wing, into their protection. And this can never be. For such people know, even before I do, that I am not like them. They are very sorry but the fact is ineluctable. I had seen something of that in Heather’s face while I had been trying to bring her to her senses. That look was to return to me frequently in the course of the afternoon. I felt disconsolate and downgraded, but that is sometimes the price one pays for standing one’s ground. There seemed to be no answer to any of it.

  But it was clear that I could not attempt to come to terms with Heather again, nor could I even face her. That look of hers, as if she could not hear anything that I had been saying, was enough to warn me. I felt that I had lost her, and that the loss was entirely my fault, which was ridiculous, because what I had been trying to do was preserve that little family in all its pristine innocence, the quality that had attracted me to them in the first place. I still felt
that it was absurd of her to embark on a romantic adventure at this particular juncture, to pretend that everything would be all right, when it so clearly would not, to abandon home, obligations, duty, loyalty, just at the moment when they would be most needed. Her plans were so impractical that someone like me was necessary to point this out. But it was precisely people like me who had no credibility in her eyes. Her particular form of nurturing made someone like me sound unrealistic, as if my entire formation were out of order. And I saw, sadly, I must admit, that she had not considered my words to be at all serious – not frivolous, exactly, but out of court, off bounds, disreputable. She would never grow up, never make the right decisions. She would drift calmly from one disaster to another, never thinking that there might be an alternative, and that the answer might lie within her buried powers. Her famous shrewdness had quite deserted her. And in the meantime there was her mother to consider. I envisaged, with a further sinking of the heart, that first hesitant stirring from the anaesthetic, and all the bad news that was waiting to greet Dorrie as she endeavoured to gather her forces together for the task of recovery.

  I wandered listlessly back to the shop, where other, more practical, duties awaited me. My life suddenly seemed effortful: I suppose I was rather tired. I felt as I had felt after those storms of childhood, when, with tears, I had begged for forgiveness. How right I had been, I thought, to steer clear of all those weakening emotions, to sail free. And when I eventually saw the lights of the shop – for it was already dark: I must have been gone for some time, must in fact have delayed Heather – I was glad once again to have all those other duties awaiting me. Robin, harassed, merely nodded to me as I slipped in. I took off my coat and joined him, and stayed there until six o’clock. Trade was brisk, and we did not even have time to make a cup of tea.