A Friend from England Read online

  The evening was blue over the city, and the chill of autumn was in the air. In the park, cold seemed to rise from the ground; there was a smell of rotting leaves. I realized to my surprise that the year had turned. One always expects the summer to last for much longer than it does: one forgets the very sensation of being cold. Yet the people that I passed no longer had that expansive air that goes with the summer season; their heads were lowered, their walk purposeful. Shorter days and longer nights were upon us. I began to think about the trip I planned to Florence after Christmas, but for once I could summon little enthusiasm. I was beginning to find these journeys curiously purposeless, which to me was a bad sign. I had always managed so well, had returned to regale my friends with wonderful stories. Something amusing always seemed to happen to me. There was no reason why any of this should have changed. It was just the melancholy of an autumn evening, the symbolic dying of the light, that had affected me. The smells of autumn – chestnuts, chrysanthemums – were in fact rather tonic, the air crisp, reviving. I bought some flowers, their dense, heavy white heads smelling of pepper, and exhaling an irreducible coldness, and turned into the entrance of Heather’s block of flats. After the night outside the faintly scented warmth breathed luxury and indolence. There was not a soul about.

  Dorrie opened the door on to an even more exquisite smell, of something simmering in herbs and wine. She was flushed and pretty, and genuinely glad to see me. Oscar hovered behind her, his face creased into a smile.

  ‘Oh, how lovely!’ she said, burying her face in the flowers. ‘You shouldn’t, dear. But how sweet of you.’

  ‘Dorrie,’ I said. ‘What is that marvellous smell?’

  Her face became serious. ‘I’m making a beef casserole for the freezer. You know how to do it, Rachel? Though I suppose you wouldn’t want to make it just for yourself. But if you do, buy really good meat. And don’t buy it in a supermarket. Go to a first-class butcher.’

  ‘Dorrie, Dorrie,’ laughed Oscar. ‘Rachel doesn’t want to hear all this. Come in and sit down, dear. We’ll have a glass of sherry.’

  They had clearly been lonely. That was my impression, as we all sat round the fire in the lavishly appointed room, which looked too big for the two of them. Curtains were pulled, lamps lit. As I drank my sherry, Dorrie continued her instructions, while Oscar looked on her with a loving eye. Once more I succumbed to their spell. I watched Dorrie as she continued with her recital of ingredients, then, launched into her subject, went on to detail even more splendid and complicated dishes. This soft little woman, with her tranquil expectations, her industrious use of plenty, seemed to me to be totally unspoiled by her good fortune. Her brows arched as finely above her large melancholy blue eyes as they always had done; her expensive silver-gilt curls still bore the mark of a department-store hairdresser rather than that of an elegant salon; she still wore only a wedding ring as adornment, and her blue pullover and skirt still bespoke a cautious attitude to fashion. But I noticed one thing that struck me with the faintest flicker of unease. She sat with her ankles crossed and her knees slightly apart, in that posture that old women adopt. It is a posture that defines lack of potency in an ageing woman, just as a broader stomach, the downward pull of gravity, defines lack of potency in an ageing man. It did occur to me then that her complaints that they had become an old couple were perhaps genuine. I began to see that they were already looking forward to the arrival of a grandchild to revive them. Until then, between the wedding and the christening, so to speak, they were in abeyance.

  ‘I’m going to give you some to take home with you,’ she said. ‘Just put it in the fridge and heat it up tomorrow evening.’

  ‘You can also give her some of those biscuits you made,’ Oscar added. ‘You made enough to feed an army. They’ll never finish them all.’

  ‘When are they coming home?’ I asked, for it seemed to me that their place was here. They had been away too long.

  ‘On Saturday.’ They spoke together, then laughed at each other.

  ‘We had a lovely summer,’ Dorrie said. ‘She was with us for almost three weeks. But when she went to join Michael we found we missed her terribly. Silly, isn’t it? After all, it’s not as if we saw her every day before she was married. She worked very hard in the shop, and then she was away at the collections twice a year. But we always knew where she was, what she was doing. This time, when she left us, we didn’t know where she was going, where she would be. And I didn’t think she looked well.’

  ‘Come now, darling, she was perfectly well. You worry too much. After all, she’s a married woman now.’

  ‘Yes, but she was so quiet,’ said Dorrie, her forehead creasing into a frown.

  ‘But Heather has always struck me as a quiet girl,’ I put in. ‘Calm. Quite a thoughtful person.’

  This seemed to me as polite a way as possible of conveying Heather’s mulish but amiable silences, her smile that gave the appearance of being remotely controlled. When I first met her I thought she must be deaf. When I got to know her better I revised my opinion slightly: I thought she was retarded. But when the evidence mounted up – the shop, her clothes, the way she drove her car, and the astonishing fact of her engagement and her marriage – it seemed to me that she was a creature of some depth, shrewd, as I have said, but also possessing an admirable reticence, with the wit to know how to protect her inner life from the gaze of the curious. I appreciated this last trait: it is one I possess myself.

  ‘And is she very happy?’ I asked.

  Oscar said nothing. Dorrie said, ‘Yes, of course she is. I did ask her, and she said, “Don’t worry, Mummy. Nothing has changed.” Wasn’t that nice of her? She wanted me to know that she was still our little girl.’

  I looked at Oscar, whose face was expressionless. ‘Some more sherry, Rachel?’ he asked. ‘Or would you like to eat?’

  ‘It’s only a cold supper, I’m afraid,’ said Dorrie, recalled to order. ‘A little consommé and a chicken salad. Or there’s melon to start with, if you prefer it.’

  We went through to an agreeably large dining room, with a round beechwood table and matching beechwood chairs, and pale blue hessian on the walls. The food was delicious, of course, and my compliments were sincere. This encouraged Dorrie to regale me with more recipes and suggestions for dishes that I could prepare easily for myself. It was useless to tell her that I preferred to eat out: she would have looked at me in amazement. When we were seated round the fire again, and she had poured chocolates from a casket into various cut-glass dishes, and then darted up again to go and make the coffee, I asked Oscar about the shop. What would he advise? He smoothed down his tie, and told me that he would have to look over my books to see if I could afford it. If I would send him my bank statements for the past year he would go through them and see if I needed a bridging loan. He looked happier at the prospect of doing this. ‘And what about the flat?’ he asked. ‘Have you bought that, yet?’ I said that I calculated on being able to do that at the end of the year; it was to be my Christmas present to myself. ‘Then, in due course, with the money you save on rent, you could buy out your other partner,’ he said. ‘And you would end up with a valuable property on your hands. And eventually you could sell the lot and buy a small place abroad. Enjoy a bit of leisure. You deserve it.’

  ‘Oscar,’ I said. ‘Are you telling me to consult Colonel Sandberg?’

  He looked at me, I looked at him, and we both laughed.

  ‘Somehow, Rachel, that is something I would not advise.’

  We had a lovely evening. I succumbed once more to Dorrie’s warmth, to Oscar’s kindness. I had to see the wedding photographs, of course, which I did not think a great success, although Dorrie and her sisters looked lovely. But when I saw those two automata in their white suits I felt as if I were being treated to excerpts from a German ballet or opera, something by Kurt Weill, perhaps. Even standing beside their wedding cake they looked expressionless, with the same glassy blue eyes, the same red lips. A blur in the backgroun
d was the Colonel, who had moved. Laughing at one of his own jokes, no doubt. To go away in, Heather had worn another suit, very narrow, in the rather hideous pink that was so fashionable that year. It struck me that she would not have been very comfortable sitting in that skirt. It was Michael who was laughing in the final photograph, his face subsumed into a double row of childish-looking teeth. Sun flashed on the chrome of the car, and on his tossed-back hair.

  ‘These photographs are terrible, Dorrie,’ said Oscar. She looked disappointed but conceded that they were not very good. ‘The photographer was recommended by Teddy Sandberg. No doubt he is better with villas and time-share apartments. Things that don’t move.’

  ‘Oh, Oscar, don’t be unkind. I think she looks lovely.’ Nothing would deflect Dorrie, who then produced from her bag more photographs of Heather at various stages of her development. She had been a pretty girl, I saw, when she was young, and not yet withdrawn behind her remote smile. Even now she was rather striking. Between the garçonne haircut and the dangling jet ear-rings her face was quite classical, with a broad smooth brow and widely spaced eyes. But the face looked uninhabited and she had no change of expression. She looked, in these latest photographs, inanimate, not dead, but as though she had not yet come alive. I could not think of an appropriate comment to make. The impression was almost powerfully disconcerting.

  ‘But look at the time!’ I said. ‘It’s almost half-past eleven. I must have been keeping you out of bed all this time. Don’t worry about me. I’ll get a taxi.’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the kind,’ said Dorrie indignantly. ‘Oscar will take you home. Oscar!’ But he was already on his feet, searching for his keys. ‘It’s been so lovely to see you, Rachel. Don’t leave it so long another time. We’ve missed you, dear. And we’re always here if you need anything.’

  I kissed her, and saw her standing at the door until the gates of the lift shut her off from my view.

  In the car Oscar was silent. I said, ‘Dorrie seems well.’ He answered, ‘She’s well enough,’ and then fell silent again. I felt a little awkward. When he stopped the car outside my shop, I turned to him and said, ‘That was a lovely evening. Thank you so much. And I’ll send you those papers, if you really don’t mind. I would really appreciate your opinion.’ He sighed, but did not move, and for a moment or two we sat there in silence. Then he sighed again, and turned round to face me. ‘I don’t like him, Rachel,’ he said.

  ‘Michael?’ I ventured.

  He nodded. ‘I’ve tried to like him but I can’t. There’s something about him … He never looks me in the eye. He’s never serious. Always laughing, joking. All about nothing. And that father of his, always interfering. No, that’s not fair. He doesn’t interfere. He advises. And I don’t trust his advice.’

  ‘You don’t have to take it,’ I said.

  He sighed again. ‘If only the boy were less of a boy, there wouldn’t be any need for all this advice. But he’s not manly enough, Rachel. He never wants to stay at home. Always wants to go out in the evening. He says he’s seeing clients but I think he just wants to go out and enjoy himself. I’ve noticed that he tends to sulk a bit. She lets him go, of course.’

  ‘Heather is a wise woman,’ I said. ‘She’s very shrewd.’

  ‘She’s too good for him.’

  I laughed. ‘You’re bound to think that. They’re only just married. Give them time to settle down.’

  He sighed again. ‘You may be right. But keep your eye on her. If she wants to talk to you … She wouldn’t talk to her mother. She wouldn’t want to hurt her. They’ve always been too close.’

  I told him that I would telephone her the following week and he seemed resigned, after that assurance, to letting me go. But I got the feeling that he had more to say. It was only because I judged it unwise, at that stage, to let him unburden himself further that I moved to get out of the car. He would inevitably regret the fact that he had confided in me. I left him, with a further reference to my papers, and to the fact that I was in his debt. It was the only way I could think of to repair his self-esteem. I don’t think he was taken in, though; the matter was too serious for that. I trudged up my stairs, with my box of biscuits and my jar of beef casserole, reflecting that my business with the Livingstones was not yet over.

  SIX

  AS it turned out I did not telephone Heather the following week because shortly after my evening with her parents I succumbed to the prevailing bout of flu and was extremely ill for about ten days. I lay in my bed above the shop, waiting longingly for Eileen to come upstairs and make me a cup of tea. I was not used to being ill and the experience weakened me at some fairly critical level: I was no longer the dandy of my imaginings, invulnerable, amused, passing lightly through life, with my feelings well protected. Overnight I seemed to have come into contact with my own mortality. Even when the fever had passed and I was well enough to get up, I moved cautiously, testing my movements, like an old woman, and frequently sat down again in the middle of some fairly simple sequence of actions, as if to ponder the necessity of completing them.

  Those days of recovery were some of the worst I can remember. The routines of ordinary or real life seemed to me quite meaningless. I remember spending obscure and submissive afternoons in my small living-room, conscious of the dust I was too weak to displace, feeling subdued and sad as I contemplated the unlovely corners of what had always seemed to me to be a perfectly adequate flat. The iron smell of the over-efficient central heating was in my nostrils as I sat all day, waiting for darkness to fall so that I could prepare for bed. My attitude to the dark at that time was amorous and fearless: I was more than half in love with easeful death. Recovery from this little illness filled me suddenly with a distaste for my life. It was all unsatisfactory: my home, my work, my ‘prospects’, for which I must make such arduous arrangements. I felt a great need for some kind of recompense, one not earned by my own efforts; I had visions, entirely unwelcome, of that great good place that I could never reach. I felt a sourness within me when I contemplated my conduct. I knew that although it preserved me, it was not good.

  In my weakness I was tearfully grateful for kindness. I looked forward to the moment when Robin’s curiously unhealthy face would appear at the top of my stairs, after the day’s work was finished, and I used to make up shopping lists for him, since he was kind enough to offer this service. The fact that I could not eat the food when he brought it was secondary; what I really wanted was to see a face, any face, at the end of those long unnatural days. I remember trying to eat one of Dorrie’s biscuits and bursting into tears because I thought I must have looked so pathetic: I could see myself choking over this biscuit, as if it were a symbol of more beneficent days, and it was at this point that I realized that I must take some resolute action to bring myself back from this brink. I must become what I had always been, even though I did not like that person very much any more. But to risk this decline into heavy-heartedness was more than I could afford: I dared not remain in my weakened state. I therefore summoned the doctor, demanded vitamin injections, made a thorough nuisance of myself, recovered a little of my sharpness, and began to feel better. I began to eat again, and the descent into sleep was no longer quite so precipitous. After a few days I went downstairs to the shop, and although I made a shaky start I was soon my old self again.

  Nevertheless, I felt weak for some days and excused myself from further effort. I had not left the building for over two weeks, and the weather, grey and somnolent, hardly tempted me to do so. With the tourists and visitors gone it seemed to me that there was a peculiar hush over the city; sometimes, when I stood in the doorway to get a little air, I could hear the whine of a receding car die away in the distance before the next one caught up with it. We were not busy in the shop: it was the lull before the Christmas rush, and sometimes we sat all afternoon, reading, without being interrupted. Although I was used to this sort of daytime existence it did strike me as somewhat lacking in joie de vivre, but maybe I was still su
ffering from the after-effects of my illness, for I found it very difficult to invest my depleted energies in any activity whatsoever. Even making a cup of tea seemed to require a major decision. Finally, when the discomfort of my condition was too much for me to tolerate without a mild feeling of shame, I moved to the telephone to make my long postponed call. I could think of nothing worse than an evening at the theatre with Heather and Michael, but the irritation of not going through with it was almost as strong as the irritation of having to put up with it. Besides, they probably liked musicals. Already annoyed, I dialled Heather’s number.

  The voice that answered was toneless, which annoyed me even further. After all, I was the one who had been ill. Why couldn’t she ever be the one to telephone? Why was I always expected to look after her? Why was her mind so apparently empty of the kind of thought that furnished everyone else’s?

  ‘Heather?’ I said, in as enthusiastic a tone as I could muster. ‘Hello. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I’ve had flu.’

  ‘So have I.’ The silence after this remark sounded final, as if Heather’s flu had pre-empted any other kind.