A Friend from England (2 page)

Like her mother, Heather had a generous and at the same time melancholy attitude to her wealth and possessions. She would insist on driving me home, in her immaculate new car, as if she had nothing better to do,
and as if the fabled evening could wait. She was in no hurry, and something told me that she would have been just as happy at home as she was in Portman Square, pretending to be in the fashion business, but actually managing the boutique which Oscar had bought for her after his windfall. Despite her scornful and up-to-date appearance – the schoolboy’s hairstyle, the flat shoes, the long skirt, and the dangling earrings – she was a passive person and would have been content to shelter under the protection of her parents, going with them to their entertainments, accompanying them on their holidays, and eventually marrying a man who had been mediated through the various filters that separated the Livingstones from the rest of humanity. Instead, she did what was expected of her, appeared to enjoy what her parents had provided for her, and enacted for their benefit the emancipated image that they, greatly daring and humble, had imagined that she desired. In this way she repaid them, although I never heard her utter more than monosyllables in their presence. It was, I suppose, honourable of her to accommodate the wilder fling of their imagination in this way. As I say, Heather was shrewd.

It soon became clear to me that Oscar and Dorrie thought me a suitable companion for Heather, and that the strain of melancholy I had detected in that house had something to do with Heather’s destiny, which had not yet declared itself. Far from being a problem to them, Heather was docile; rather than the expected rebellion, she had presented them with a temperament as undemanding as that of a Victorian matron, and I say matron rather than virgin because Heather’s manner always struck me as extremely grown-up, whereas her expectations of the world were, like those of her parents, somewhat fearful. She was always very nice to her aunts and uncles, interested in their activities, which I found indistinguishable, willing to compare accounts of shopping
triumphs or disappointments, rather as if she were the same age as they were. She had a mature attitude, too, to ills of the flesh, professing to know all about ailments and remedies, although she was in the prime of life and not yet a martyr to anything, let alone the rheumatisms, the sinusitis, and the incipient ulcers that had cast their shadow over the brothers-in-law: she always knew someone who suffered in the same way, and was thus able to offer the names of specialists or chiropractors. She was, for instance, able to say of her assistant’s mother that she had been to ‘all the best men’ but had obtained instant relief from acupuncture. She was extraordinarily earnest as she discussed this, giving a foretaste of the woman she would become. In fact the woman she would become was not much different from the girl she already was, and there seemed no reason to suppose that she would ever change or develop or move away from the family circle. Whereas most parents would view this with something like relief, Oscar and Dorrie would sigh inwardly and contemplate their daughter with a mild bewilderment that contained a minute quantum of despair.

Heather’s pale milk-fed appearance, effortlessly triumphing over her modish black garments, differed not a lot from that of her mother, or indeed that of her father, and the same air of placid resignation seemed to emanate from all three of them. Their attitude to their good fortune was one of submission, and they seemed to be spending their money more in the line of duty than of pleasure. Occasionally I would see something in Dorrie’s face that reminded me of the wistful, complicated attitudes of my own mother, although the two women had never met, while Oscar sometimes looked as if he were contemplating a harsher future than the one that had been assigned to him. Although they had no reason to be unhappy, they were not altogether happy, and they were too innocent to recognize their condition
as pertaining to age rather than to substance. The time of reckoning was upon them: if they had ever wished for anything, they now realized that life had moved them on from logical fulfilment of those wishes. They were settled, they were more than comfortable, and likely to remain so, for Oscar had invested their money very wisely. And yet they were not as satisfied as they had expected to be. I am sure that Oscar sometimes regretted his little office and his box files and his onerous journeys on public transport; although he would have been happier working, he would have felt ashamed to carry on as before, thinking it somehow in keeping to be superannuated now that fate had removed him from the category of those who need to be seen to earn their money. Dorrie had probably changed less: her life was not much different from how it had been in earlier days, a reverent addiction to fine housekeeping. Yet they seemed to depend on each other more now that they were always together than they had when long periods of time had kept them apart. ‘Where are you going, dear?’ one would say to the other as a move was made towards the door of whatever room they were sitting in. And, ‘Where’s your mother?’ Oscar would say to Heather, if Dorrie happened to be absent for more than a minute. The end of their respective siestas would be marked by deep sighs, as if, once reclaimed by the business of ordinary life, they could say goodbye to free will.

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 other 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.’