A Friend from England (3 page)

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?’

I
N
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.

But we were not young. Heather was twenty-seven and I was thirty-two, and we had been working and independent for years. We were young only in the sense that we were not unduly burdened with responsibilities, were not in poor health, and were not married. We were not even a natural pair, for we had nothing in common except Heather’s parents. It never occurred to me to wonder what Heather got up to in Portman Square, but if ever I gave it any thought her life, somehow, failed to convince me. I sensed in her no trace of clandestine excitement or secret alliances, no unsuitable friends or dangerous acquaintances. I saw her treating her friends to the same even-tempered and natural hospitality as her parents meted out in Wimbledon. For some reason I saw her friends as predominantly female; there was something unaltered in Heather’s placid expression, and this was what gave her aunts pause. They saw in this undemanding girl a sort of incapacity; but what I saw was absence. Like her parents, she was utterly deficient in the desire to do anything dangerous or proprietary, deficient, too, in bad faith, in curiosity, in speculation. She moved through her life not as a sleep-walker, precisely, for I believe she managed her little shop quite efficiently, but rather as a swimmer in calm and protected waters, powered only by the healthy movements of a beautifully functioning organism. Her very steadiness irritated me, until I was even more irritated by the vivacity of her learned responses when she talked to her aunts, but her steadiness also shamed me, as did her habitual mildness.

There was something inherently immovable, or perhaps non-negotiable, about the three of them, but only in Heather did this quality make one a little uncomfortable, as if something were out of joint. For Oscar and Dorrie one had no fears; one knew that they were good, and if they tended to be immovable in this
life, there was no doubt that in some future incarnation they would reap the reward promised in the Bible and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble. But there was something artificial about Heather’s demeanour, although she was not aware of this; when I thought about it I had the feeling that she was a potential victim. Not the victim of a violent action, exactly, but of a trick. Once I had come upon her, in the hallway of her parents’ house, dreamily standing on one leg, large earrings reflecting a beam of sunlight from the glass above the front door, apparently doing nothing. In fact she was reading a postcard which she had picked up from a piece of furniture imitating a Florentine marriage chest, but she gave the strong impression that nothing was taking place. And when she would help to carry in the tea from the kitchen to the drawing-room her head would be bent and her rather long pale neck would emerge from her black sweater as if she had been prepared for execution. One thought of her not exactly as a woman but as some sort of animal known for its unassuming qualities, a heifer, perhaps. Heifers are also traditionally associated with sacrifice. The difficulty with Heather seemed to be that she lacked the emotional equipment even for sacrifice, though sacrifices were planned for her by those watchful aunts. Little parties were arranged by her married cousins, Sarah and Georgina, at which Heather was exhibited to various young men who were said to be acquaintances of their husbands. I was never invited to these ordeals, of course, since it was feared that I might forget the family conspiracy and strike out on my own, but from what I gathered later Heather had failed to play her part, had smiled politely but in evident bewilderment at the ponderous and slightly obscene badinage destined to put her at her ease, and had left early, casting the whole thing into perspective with the words, ‘No, thank you, I came in my own car.’ These horrible rituals were then
further discussed, and at last I began to feel a genuine sympathy for Heather, although I could see that her impenetrability might prove to be a problem for her mother and father.

But supposing that she were happy with matters as they stood? Supposing too that she possessed that genuine mildness of temperament, that latency to which I have referred, that was not only the quality that she shared with her parents but the quality that she could share with nobody else? Supposing that Heather’s shrewdness, which I had somehow never doubted, lay in her perception of this fact? Supposing that she had taken stock of her situation and realized, quite calmly and maturely, that she was unfitted for those watchful occasions, at which others, it appeared, were always to be allowed to lay bets, preferring, as a matter of dignity, the quieter manners of her parents’ house, with its rituals and its customs so devoid of malicious intention, so maddening to those of a more contentious disposition? Heather could see, as I could, that her mother was superior to those sisters of hers, and that those sisters disguised their largely unconscious envy as exaggerated concern for Heather’s well-being. She could even see that their concern was not devoid of a certain prurience, the prurience that some ageing women feel when excluded from the sexual odysseys of the young. Their view of Heather’s obduracy was baffling and uncomfortable even to themselves, for they were essentially harmless women who did not fully understand their own mixed motives. I pitied these harmless women, faced with this evidence of their own baseness, and so anxious to disguise its existence that they increased their ostensible anxiety over Heather’s unpartnered existence in order to hide its traces. Heather knew all this, of course; her uninflected smile began to seem more complex to me as I saw it as a weapon with which she guarded her virtue.

It was probably over the meaning and substance of the concept of virtue that we all came adrift. For myself, the battle was long lost: such shreds of virtue as I retained served only to make me seek it in others, and, when I found it, to be moved beyond all words, ready to defend what I had already forfeited. In this way, my odd relationship with the Livingstones was of great value to me; they were fixed points of reference in a slipping universe, abiding by rules which everybody else had broken. Heather I was eventually willing to take on as a contemporary embodiment, faint but unmistakable, of those rules. I think she had a feeling that she was somehow endangered, or that she belonged to an endangered species, for she sometimes asked my advice on quite simple matters, as if unwilling to reveal her ignorance to others among her contemporaries. And in due course it began to be apparent to me that Oscar and Dorrie regarded me as a chaperone for Heather, whose incapacities may have contributed to their melancholia but whose very integrity and unalterability they cherished. Even the aunts saw me as having some value, or perhaps function would be a better way of putting it, for I doubt if they liked me. ‘I’m sure Rachel meets some interesting people in that bookshop of hers,’ they would say. ‘I’m sure Heather would love to meet them – she was always a great reader.’ For they thought I ruled over a sort of Bohemia, and, greatly daring, were willing to trust me with an enterprise at which they had so surprisingly failed.