A Friend from England (7 page)

They were to honeymoon in Venice, at the Gritti Palace Hotel. This was the Colonel’s contribution, and I felt that he had the more economical part of the alliance. The offers of villas in Portugal or Spain had proved to be illusory, or at least not conclusive, and not to be concluded without a great deal more discussion and display of expertise. I got the feeling that the Colonel had been impressed by the Livingstones’ serious attitude to expenditure, and had found himself forced to live up to them. The odd unsaleable villa that he might have had up his sleeve had been returned to its file, and he had risen to the heights demanded of him, even to the extent of arranging a holiday without a discount, without a percentage for himself, or any of those complicated returns that people in the travel business know about. I can’t say why I thought of him as mean. He wasn’t; and he appeared to be well off. It was just that his money didn’t seem to me to be as straightforward as the Livingstones’, and wherever it came from or wherever it went to seemed to be hedged about with restrictions. I began to see that Michael’s childhood might have been spent in more wearisome circumstances than Heather’s, that he might have been aware of his father’s affairs, the speculations, the occasional gigantic windfall, the years of affluence, and the periods of bluff. I began to feel sorry for him.

But the wedding was truly charming. I didn’t go to the register office – for Heather had, unexpectedly, stood out against a religious ceremony – but merely turned up at the Ritz with my shoes in a paper bag, exactly like a child going to a party. Outside, the rain was streaming down, and for once I didn’t mind it, so great was the emanation of festivity from the hotel
itself. Inside, the streaming windows merely enhanced the beauty of the white flowers, and through the veil of water I could see the green of the park, now in full leaf. Heather and Michael were wearing deliberately similar white suits, in which they looked young and solemn. Dorrie and her sisters were the ones to do the wedding full honours: silk dresses, large hats, frail sandals. The Colonel and Oscar were in morning dress, the Colonel looking like a bantam as he paraded jauntily up and down the receiving line, his hands clasped beneath the tails of his coat. Oscar greeted me with a smile that was almost weary. He pressed my hand, and said, ‘Our little Rachel. Thank you for coming, dear.’ I had to turn away, for sudden tears had come into my eyes. Dorrie was so happy that I doubt if she knew who was there. I resolved not to bother her, but to write her a long letter the following day. She would like that.

The idea of a tea-dance was a great success with Heather’s friends, those mysterious friends with whom she was reported to have spent her evenings. There were a great many of them, but they were a homogeneous lot; they might all have come from the same family. The dancing got under way pretty early, and the image of the children’s party came back to me as the young people took to the floor, while their elders drank tea at little tables and waiters sped round with plates of delicious pastries. There was probably champagne but I didn’t come across it. It was when I saw Michael and Heather dancing together, in their white suits, that I began to see that this might not be the empty partnership that I had feared. There was no excitement, no languor in their performance; on the contrary, they looked absorbed, business-like, even slightly careworn, as they foxtrotted round the ballroom. They looked like children, learning to dance on the parquet floor of their dancing school, good children from another age, allowed to amuse themselves to the
sound of a wind-up gramophone. They danced all the afternoon, intently, and without conversation. When they eventually decided, by mutual and unspoken arrangement, to go back to the top table, their place was taken by Oscar and Dorrie, who amazed and delighted us all by dancing a perfect tango. There was no doubt in my mind which was the properly married couple. Dorrie, fugitive blushes crossing her face, dipped and turned in as gentle an expression of courtship as I dare say has ever been seen, while Oscar expanded into the man I always supposed him to be, arms masterfully extended, expression with a hitherto unnoticed patina of secret pride and amusement. The floor cleared while they were dancing, and as Oscar bent Dorrie backwards murmurs of admiration arose from the younger couples, who had only ever seen this sort of thing on television. Her feather-patterned blue silk trailing momentarily on the floor, Dorrie was abruptly swung upright, and as the dance ended and everyone applauded they both smiled shyly and clasped each other’s hands. It was delightful.

I had to leave before the end. As I turned to go I looked back and saw, against a background of vague green and streaming windows, Heather and Michael, in their white suits, dancing on and on, sturdily quickstepping round the floor, and quite impervious to the romance of the occasion. It seemed very quiet in the lobby. I changed my shoes in the ladies’ room, and went out into the rainy street, suppressing a shudder at the wet needles that fell on my head, and bracing myself to stand at the bus-stop with all the other wage-earners, still hearing the strains of the tango in my mind, and still seeing those two children, white-suited, dancing to their wind-up gramophone, while the rain streamed down and drowned all the white flowers.

A
FTER
this I found myself in rather a lull. Heather and Michael were in Venice, and Oscar and Dorrie were recuperating from the wedding in Spain. We were busy in the shop and I was fairly tired in the evenings, too tired to seek very far for entertainment. Robin, my colleague, saw me languidly gathering my things together at the end of a hectic Saturday afternoon and said, ‘What you need is more exercise.’ I should explain that Robin copes with his life extremely well by belonging to a lot of clubs: health clubs, jazz clubs, theatre clubs, and so on. He is a frequenter and a discoverer of wine bars. A mild but organized bachelor in his mid-thirties, he has solved the problem of leisure by being out all the time. In this way he is able to both leave and find his flat immaculate and undisturbed, and the low-level degree of companionship seems to suit him very well. He is one of those men who says, ‘I am never lonely’ (though I suspect he is), and, ‘London satisfies all my needs’. When he takes his holiday he goes on package art tours of Italy or walks, with a party set up for this purpose, in the Lake District. He maintains that his extremely consistent output of work and concentration is assured by his habit of jogging every morning and swimming at his health club every evening once the shop is closed.

Robin is the only person who knows about my fear of water, and he is constantly urging me to go swimming with him. ‘It’s just a matter of getting used to it,’ he said to me, seeing me drooping in the back of the shop, ‘and the benefits are enormous. And psychologically you’ll be a different person. Look at me. I used to have colds all the time. Now I’m a hundred per cent fit.’ He still
has colds, but I didn’t point this out. ‘You can come with me this evening,’ he went on. ‘There’ll be nobody there. And I won’t watch if you don’t want me to. You don’t have to dive or anything. Just get in and swim a few lengths. You’ll be a different person,’ he repeated.

The different person I was going to be (for we all want to be different) did in fact accompany him that evening. It is hard to describe how or what I felt. I was a good swimmer because we had lived by the sea when I was small, and my father and I had swum almost every morning in the fine weather. Besides, it was not swimming that I was afraid of. I think it was actually the sight of water and some vague but powerful fear of being sucked into it. When I had walked into the sea with my father I had felt quite safe, but, undressing at Robin’s health club, I could hear the peculiar muted din of water being violently disturbed and I began to shiver. Standing on the edge of the pool I could see a little steam hovering over the chemical chlorinated blue, and below me a pattern of tiles wavering and shifting; my leg, when I inserted it, immediately looked blanched and dead. A man wearing goggles and a nose clip was ploughing furiously up and down, and I was fearful of the commotion he was setting up, of the mess and foam he was creating. The noise echoed under the glass roof, a mournful and reverberant noise that filled me with horror. I waited until he was out of the way before launching myself and managed to swim a length without much trouble. But he was faster than I was or wanted to be, and I could hear him behind me. Every so often he passed me, rocking me in his wake; once my nostrils filled with the waves made by his arms and I retreated to the side, coughing in a hysteria of fear. ‘Go on,’ shouted Robin. ‘Don’t give up.’ Two girls, of enviable slimness, watched me curiously, before losing interest and neatly up-ending themselves in the water. They came up, hair streaming, and turned on their
backs and floated. Water to them was familiar, an element in which they could play; their streaming hair made fronds below the surface. They decided to race each other, backstroke, and at one point, caught between their flailing arms and the man in the goggles, I thought I must sink. I couldn’t, of course; I was too good a swimmer, but my mind seemed to give way. I felt I must surrender, break down. I wanted no more of it. I waited for a gap and swam to the side; when I got out, my legs were shaking. Even when I was dressing I could hear the dull shouting, magnified under the glass roof, and the fact that these were sounds of enjoyment made no difference to me. I knew that I had not beaten my fear, that I never should, and I resolved never to put myself to this needless test again. I should simply avoid all expanses of water. I did not feel I had to prove anything. Or rather, I had just proved something. My fear was still there.

That night I slept heavily, the sleep of exhaustion, or of regression. ‘There you are, you see,’ Robin said to me the following Monday. ‘I told you you could do it.’ I said nothing, for it was not his fault, was not even anything to do with him. But the incident had thrown me off balance and I was rather thoughtful for a while.

The process of thinking does not become me. I feel my face growing longer, my eyes sinking deeper. Thinking, for me, is accompanied by a wave of sadness. Therefore I try to avoid introspection. I long ago decided to live my life on the surface, avoiding entanglements, confrontations, situations that cannot quickly be resolved, friendships that lead to passion. With my quite interesting work, and the affairs that I keep quiet about, I reckon I manage pretty well. I tend to be rather merciless with those of my friends who cannot do the same, and I favour sensible arrangements. I dream a lot, and apart from my dreams of drowning, I like and value the night hours, when I seem to be in an altered state.
Then I am able to tolerate myself. In the daytime I keep busy, always on the surface, and that suits me too. Sometimes I meet someone who makes me think that I might always be as I am in my nocturnal imaginings: dreamy, vulnerable, childish. The Livingstones fulfilled this function for me. After being grown-up and liberated throughout the week I could regress comfortably and safely in their welcoming and uncritical presence. They were not bound to me by ties of blood, nor even of affinity: they made no demands, did not suggest ways in which I might improve myself or change my life. No one thought I ought to move from my flat above the shop or go on holiday or do anything energetic and uncharacteristic. They were not inquisitive about my habits or relationships, did not expect me to do anything except turn up on a fairly regular basis and assist at the unrolling of their noiseless and curiously unhopeful lives. This I was more than willing to do. In exchange for my presence and my interest, always unfeigned, they offered the seduction and the novelty of a fixed point, one that drew me on like a charm, perhaps because of the deliberate lack of fixity in my own perspectives. I did not even have to say much when I was with them, but could drift contentedly on the stream of their desultory talk, could annihilate my daytime self, and merely be present in the body, waking from time to time to scrutinize their undemanding presence. The fact that they revealed nothing of their inner lives was an added pleasure of their company. I had no doubt that their inner lives were as complicated as my own (but I had made a conscious decision to eschew complications) or indeed as anyone else’s; from their withdrawn expressions I assumed them to be living at some subterranean level, immersed in a sea-dream that never rose to the surface. Their sleepwalking demeanour, the food that always appeared as if by magic, and the abundance of material goods that flowed
through their lives I took to be signs of a fortunate dispensation. I grudged them nothing, I envied them nothing, merely rejoicing in the aspect of their successful arrangements with fate. Their forays into the outside world heartened me, marked as they were by even greater abundance, but it was the deep peace and safety of their home, rooted and furnished and nourished as it was, that drew me to them, drew me on into deeper acquaintance. When I was not with them I rarely thought of them, for they made no calls on my time. We practically never telephoned each other, except for the excitement of the engagement, when calls were more frequent, for we had nothing much to say. I had simply been gathered in, and my justification was that I would bear some vague responsibility for Heather, always to my mind the least capable of them all at looking after herself in this cruel world, always absent, always in need of care. Now it seemed as if she too had been gathered in, and I began to wonder, rather sadly, if I should be needed any more.

So that I was all the more glad, after about a month, to receive a telephone call from Dorrie. They were back from Spain, and Heather and Michael were due to arrive from Venice that evening. Would I care to join them for tea the following day at Heather’s flat? She was sure that Heather would like to see me. ‘And of course we’ve missed her. And Michael too, of course. I’m taking some food over – she’ll be too tired to do anything for a while. You know how to find the flat, don’t you, Rachel? We’ll see you there about four, then.’

It was clear to me from this conversation that Dorrie had no idea of the reality of her daughter’s marriage, but had simply thought in terms of the wedding. If she considered it at all, she conceded that marriage might have ‘tired’ Heather, as if she had been subjected to repeated assaults from her husband. Privately, I assumed this to be an impossibility. I had an image of
the golden-haired Michael in his white suit and his bride in hers and of their nursery-style dancing and of his ghastly father, and if I knew anything at all it was that theirs was some peculiar but no doubt satisfactory arrangement, agreeable to them both, whereby they removed themselves from parental care and oversight and played at being grown-ups. As far as I could see, no deep feeling, indeed no feeling at all, had come into play. Heather’s rather bovine expression had not changed at all throughout this adventure. As for Michael, he had had to be prompted by his father, as if, left to himself, he might forget the whole thing. The Colonel’s anxiety I now tended to interpret as a partly justified fear that without his supervision this marvellous alliance might slip from his grasp. This anxiety, which, even at the time, I had thought almost maternal, was what a mother with a particularly lack-lustre or indeed frankly impossible daughter might feel on seeing the perfect opportunity of disposing of her with honour about to fade from her grasp. Michael, I thought, was negligible. Michael was a son: he would never be a husband. Did he know what husbands were like? What they did? He had never seen his father behave like one, for his mother had died at his birth. I had no doubt that the Colonel had had a few little arrangements of his own, for I remembered that look of appraisal he had bestowed on me; at the same time, I knew somehow that these arrangements had been conveyed to his son in a mixture of bluster and subterfuge, with knowing looks and laughter to which the boy would try to adapt himself, only gradually growing into an understanding of what this meant. At the same time I knew that Michael’s answering laughter would conceal distress, would keep him frozen in childhood bewilderment. For this reason I hoped that Heather’s shrewdness would be sufficient to cope with the situation.