A Friend from England Read online

  The atmosphere in their house was marked by a perpetual Sabbath calm, yet as I only ever visited at weekends I suppose this was entirely appropriate. I had occasion to visit them rather frequently because I had recently come into a small legacy that was hedged around with obscure legal problems, something to do with imprecise wording in the will, on which Oscar seized with an element of his old professionalism. Actually, I believe a solicitor could have cleared the matter up without much difficulty, but I sensed that Oscar welcomed the opportunity to investigate, to make telephone calls in the small garden room designated as his office, and to treat me once more as a ward who needed his advice. At one period I went there nearly every weekend, and once my business was settled the habit was formed: it was even decreed that Heather could pick me up in her car and bring me to Wimbledon as well as taking me home afterwards, rather as if I were a small child going out to tea with her friend’s parents. Probably they thus hoped to seal the alliance between Heather and myself, although we had nothing in common beyond an attachment to Oscar and Dorrie. Heather was apparently more mature than I was, but I had reason to doubt the reality of this apparent maturity; in any event, Dorrie seemed to think that I was the more sensible of the two, which was not the case. She would summon me into the kitchen, on the pretext of wrapping up cakes for both of us to take home, and ask, ‘How do you think she’s looking?’, while in the drawing-room Heather would be discoursing on some form of illness with every appearance of adult commitment. We would all sit down and drink a glass of sherry before Heather and I left: although their sherry was of the highest quality, and the glasses fragile and of a pleasing shape, this ritual was accompanied by an involuntary wince on the part of Oscar and Dorrie. They hated anything sour or sharp, but they confessed to liking the smell of the sherry, which somehow added itself to the vanilla of the cakes and the cigar smoke and the closed-in warmth and Dorrie’s flowery scent. It felt sophisticated to them, and although their standard of comfort was very high they went on adding to it conscientiously, in the same way as they habitually added to Heather’s birthright, so that the car, on our return journey, would be packed with parcels, the fruits of a week’s shopping on Dorrie’s part, for although she looked as if she never left the house, she now recognized the more exclusive department stores as her natural habitat and embarked on a shopping expedition once or twice a week, no doubt with the same expression of resignation that she wore at home.

  Once admitted to the family circle, I found myself falling into the same docility as that which characterized Oscar and Dorrie and Heather: it was pleasing to me to be thus returned to childhood, although I was quite aware that Dorrie looked to me, as a true adult, to induct Heather into the finer mysteries of life. I suppose she thought I might make her a little less amiably incurious, that I might be the cause of her ascending to a self-awareness that would protect her from the wickedness of the world, for they knew that she was still too much their child, and moreover a child with a great deal of money in the background. It was not that they feared fortune hunters, for they longed for her to be married, much as they longed for her to be grown-up, as if only in realizing this condition would she free them from the anxiety they both felt in her presence. They did not fear fortune hunters – indeed, they would have welcomed one, if he were amiable enough – but they had a true sense of the dangers that threaten the unwary. When they saw Heather chatting to her aunts, her brutal haircut crowning her innocent face, her feet in their goblin shoes planted, like those of a schoolgirl, on the lavishly flowered carpet, their mouths pursed, and their eyes seemed to be looking inwards. Their good daughter, who came home to them every weekend, and telephoned every day, was the world to them, or rather that part of the world that they could spare from contemplation of each other, and yet they wished her otherwise, still theirs, but someone else’s as well, someone whose supervision would replace their own, leaving them in that state of latency which they, in their timorous dealings with the world, found to be their true climate.

  It was for this reason, as well as the affection which they naturally and unassumingly felt for young people, that they welcomed my presence. They felt that I had been emancipated by the loss of my own parents, that this had made me stronger, more self-reliant. How I was to impart all this to Heather was quite unclear to me, since she seemed to treat me rather as Dorrie treated her, and would display the same sort of concern for my comfort as Dorrie did for everyone in her house. She would tuck a rug over my legs in the car, partly out of hospitality and partly out of affection for the rug, which her mother had bought for her quite recently and which had been one of the weekend presents. Although I never attempted to get on intimate terms with her, for I found the effort of asking leading questions somehow too onerous to be undertaken, I could feel the force of her passive temperament, and I say temperament rather than personality, for there was little personality in evidence. Perhaps that was what disappointed Dorrie: she came from a generation in which girls were renowned for their personality, and although she gave no sign of it herself she firmly believed in that kind of sprightliness that she mistakenly thought made girls popular. Heather did not smile much, but I put this down to a mild form of distraction: she might, for all I knew, have had an intense inner life, but the impression she gave me was one of opacity. I thought her admirably equipped to deal with her new wealth, for Heather was above all at home with materiality. She had a care for her belongings, for her accessories, her accoutrements, that impressed me as serious; even the way in which she handled the car, in a pair of fine leather gloves assumed for the purpose, was careful, as was the way in which she offered me her own forms of hospitality during the brief moments between my ringing of her doorbell and our leaving for Wimbledon. ‘Time for a coffee?’ she would say. ‘Tea? Drink? No? Shan’t be a minute. You’ll find some magazines on the table. Help yourself to cigarettes.’

  I could quite see why I was supposed to be Heather’s passport to the world. Rather older than her, I certainly looked more worldly, particularly to one of Heather’s simplicity. There was something disarming about her, and this had to do not so much with lack of intelligence, although she did not seem too bright to me, as with that quality of innocence that she had inherited from her parents. I felt that for all her material assurance, her familiarity with the good things of life, Heather would always need to be accompanied in order that no one should take advantage of her. And this was what both Oscar and Dorrie felt as well. It took me a good while to get used to this idea because of the gulfs in communication that stretched between them. Their conversation was largely meaningless, which I found very restful, until the aunts and brothers turned up with news of the outside world. Left to themselves, and this now seemed to include myself, they were largely ruminant. ‘Well, dear,’ Oscar would say, levering himself out of his too soft chair. ‘There you are. Seen your mother?’ And to me, ‘Well, Rachel. Nice to see you. Sit down, there’s a good girl.’ And while Heather went off to bring her mother back from wherever she had been going – it was usually to the kitchen – Oscar and I would subside into a state of mild companionship, the day safely concluded, as if our arrival were all that was needed, and no amount of information we might bring was necessary.

  I still see Oscar rising from his chair to greet us. He carried his bulk well, and he always wore a dark suit and a very white shirt, although his ties were a little more interesting now than they had been in the days of Southampton Row. He and Dorrie were not the sort of people to dress in elaborate leisure wear when they were at home: indeed, it always seemed to me that they dressed up for our visits. I see Oscar laying aside the newspaper and smoothing down his tie, waiting politely for us to establish ourselves before enquiring for Dorrie and requesting us to bring her back. I see now that he feared for the safety of his daughter because she was in some way responsible for the peace and prosperity of his wife. And Dorrie thought of Heather as not only a loved child but as someone who might cause Oscar to worry. They saw each othe
r exclusively in personal terms. It always surprised me that they were less impressed by the way that Heather ran her boutique than anxious to know what she was doing with her free time. Was she eating properly? This seemed to me an odd question to ask of a woman of twenty-seven, but I supposed that all parents worried about their children’s diet. Mine had not, which was why I found it so delightful to sit and be fed by Dorrie, whose food was a magnificent celebration, on an unimaginable scale of magnitude, of infant tastes. This was why I found it so delightful, too, to adapt my own anxieties, which were of a much more complicated order, to those of the Livingstones, for although I could see that they were worried I could not take their worries very seriously. Indeed, I was aware that they gave themselves over to these worries as a sort of luxury, and I felt their consciences were perhaps too fine for the real world. Dorrie’s most characteristic remark was, ‘I hope I did the right thing.’ This remark would crop up at intervals later in the afternoon, when the sisters and brothers-in-law were assembled. These relatives constituted a sort of moral court of enquiry, to which Dorrie would feel bound to submit her case. Even if she took a defective article back to the shop from which she had bought it the day before, she would feel ashamed. Even if some act of rudeness had been perpetrated against her, as when a man had jostled her when they were both after a taxi in Piccadilly, she would worry. ‘I simply said to him, “You won’t mind if I take this, will you? I believe I was first.” ’ And then, with a crumpled expression, ‘I hope I did the right thing.’

  The sisters and brothers-in-law I found less interesting because more worldly. Oscar’s brother Sam was a solicitor married to a rather silly woman called Ann who had nothing very much to say for herself. Dorrie’s sisters, Janet and Rosemary, and their husbands, Gerald and Lawrence, were sharper versions of Dorrie and seemed to regard her with the same mixture of love and anxiety as that which she lavished on Heather. Far from envying her her wealth they were mildly perturbed that this might expose her to some sort of trouble. They seemed disposed to offer a great deal of advice; conversely, Dorrie felt called upon to give an account of her activities, down to the last purchase or the last encounter. The brothers-in-law were amiable, rather supine men, as men tend to be when married to nervous critical women, and their task in life was to calm their wives down. Dorrie tended to become even more self-doubting when in the presence of her sisters, whose misgivings about Heather were rather too apparent. They both boasted married daughters, and obviously felt that the time had come for action to be taken regarding poor Heather. I must say that of them all only Heather was completely unaware of her failing; she really thought that her aunts and uncles turned up only to see Oscar and Dorrie, and I daresay they did, for they were a remarkably close-knit family. But while Heather offered her earnest advice, which, as a member of the emancipated young, she felt it incumbent upon her to do, I could see the sisters occasionally exchanging looks heavy with preoccupation. In these encounters Heather’s age seemed to be fluctuating or negotiable: young enough to be patronized yet much too old to be single, old enough to know about female complaints yet too young to have any. I could see that nobody would relax until they were all brought together to discuss the wedding plans. ‘And what about Rachel?’ Gerald or Lawrence or Janet would say. ‘Any steady boy-friends?’ For they were at heart so unspoiled as to think that all boy-friends were steady.

  I remember them for their very real kindness and for the becalmed state into which they put one. As we sat among the cake-stands, and the sherry was produced, as the sun outside the tightly shut window declined yet sent strong beams after a recent small shower, as the harmless talk was conducted over my head, I reviewed them in an entirely affectionate and favourable light. Even their slight melancholy, present in Oscar’s smiling silence, in Dorrie’s invitation to stay on ‘for a light supper’, as if she feared our departure, in the sisters’ stern affection and the brothers’ eventually turning to each other to discuss the news of the outside world, enchanted me. I felt as if I were in the presence of a distinct culture, rather like the one that had prevailed in the Russian novels I so enjoyed, in which endless days are spent sitting on terraces, and the feckless elder brother worries the nervous married sister and the wan younger daughter is consumed with passion for an unsuitable student, and the retainers enter the drawing-room with the familiarity of long association. I had that same sensation of time being endlessly capacious, and memory and melancholy being equally tyrannical, the sense of strong feeling and deep family commitment, the same insulation from the world, and above all the self-sufficiency. I had no doubt that in her old age Heather would look back on these afternoons with the same sense of loss. What meads, what kvasses were drunk, what pies were baked at Oblomovka! Even I, disaffected and partly disillusioned as I was, could feel myself being overtaken by these padded afternoons, these unreal conversations, these respectable bourgeois customs, and the love and comfort that these people offered one another. Yet my main memory of those times, or rather the image that comes most frequently to mind, is not that of Dorrie saying, ‘I hope I did the right thing,’ or her sisters admiring each other’s shoes, or Gerald or Lawrence waving away the offer of more cake, or Sam being given his glass of whisky; it is not even of Heather, dressed up in her boutique garb and talking enthusiastically, but disappointingly to everyone who was listening, about the order she had had from a minor but fairly well-known actress, but of Oscar, rising slowly from his chair, casting aside his newspaper, smoothing down his tie, his smile of welcome almost putting his sadness to flight, and saying, ‘Well, dear. There you are. Seen your mother?’ Only, much later, when these things had come to mind rather forcefully, I seemed to hear him saying something else. ‘Where’s your mother?’ And, in a look of real anguish, which I had never actually seen on his face, he would, in my mind at least, repeat this. ‘Where’s your mother?’ I would hear. And again, ‘Where’s your mother?’

  TWO

  IN order to live alone successfully it is probably necessary to have an audience, or else to be so steeped in self-esteem that one’s every action is perceived as ceremonious. With no one to enquire of me, ‘What did you have for lunch?’, the question I found myself asking nearly everyone with whom I was on friendly terms, I tended to gravitate towards those families whose domesticity was so engulfing that all I had to do was listen and marvel at the plenitude of activities simply living in their midst seemed to engender. The Livingstones, with their serious acquisitions and their dedicated appetites, would have attracted me on this simple level had I not already been seduced by their very real qualities: their modesty, their love for one another, their exemplary family closeness and interaction, and their fundamental goodwill, which made it entirely natural for them to include me in their plans. Their hospitality was of the Biblical kind: the stranger at the gates, the fatherless, the widow and the orphan were encompassed by them as a matter of course. Fundamentally, their very true melancholy, which had no foundation that I could see, but which was simply a function of their reflectiveness, led them to need company of an undemanding sort as a barrier against the rest of the world with its evils and its snares, for they were not armoured, as most people their age were supposed to be, but rather at a loss to account for bad behaviour, broken promises, disillusion, cruelty, sharp practice, having no capacity to deal with any of this, the daily fare of those who perceive life as a jungle and grimly negotiate for themselves a passage through it.

  Of course, I tried to repay their hospitality. I bought tickets for the theatre, the ballet, the opera at the Coliseum. These occasions were to my mind only a limited success: the plays I chose were comedies, through which they sat politely, and only Heather enjoyed the ballet. But Heather was not present at our nicest evening, when we went to La Bohème. I saw Oscar and Dorrie holding hands tightly throughout the last act, and both dabbed their eyes when the curtain went down. ‘Lovely, dear, just lovely. I don’t know how we can thank you,’ Dorrie said, tucking her handkerchief into her
evening bag. Both were very formally dressed, Oscar in a dark suit with a dazzling shirt and a pale tie, Dorrie in a blue silk dress with a beautiful white cashmere shawl. But even here it was a case of noblesse oblige: Oscar insisted on taking us out to an extravagant supper, and Dorrie enjoyed looking around at the women and the clothes they were wearing. They were, of course, no strangers to this kind of entertainment; if anything, they were a little worried at being in my company, as if they might offend me if they failed to enjoy themselves. Their pleasure at having been so moved was mixed with relief at not having to utter false expressions of delight. They were so painfully honest that they would have made a poor job of it, but of course they did not know this. ‘I’m not good at compliments,’ Oscar said, ‘but this has been a real treat. Hasn’t it, dear?’ Dorrie, her eyes already melting again with reminiscences of Mimi’s death, replied, ‘Just wait until I tell the girls. And how Heather would have loved it. But of course she’s out nearly every evening with her friends. And I expect you are too, Rachel,’ she added. This last remark was not given the sharp look and the accent of interrogation that her sisters (the girls) would undoubtedly have supplied. Dorrie was without guile and thought that it was natural for young people to be out. For she saw us as young and therefore entitled to pleasure, and she thought, or chose to think, that the pleasures of young people were innocent.