Essential Stories (25 page)

OUR OLDEST FRIEND

“Look out!” someone said. “Here comes Saxon.”

It was too late. Moving off the dance floor and pausing at the door with the blatant long sight of the stalker, Saxon saw us all in our quiet corner of the lounge and came over. He stopped and stood with his hands on his hips and his legs apart, like a goalkeeper. Then he came forward.

“Ah! This
is
nice!” he crowed, in the cockerel voice that took us back to the Oxford years. He pulled up a chair and placed it so that none of us could easily get out. It passed through our heads that we had seen that dinner-jacket of his before. He must have had it since the last term at school. It was short, eager and juvenile in the sleeves and now his chest had bolstered it, he seemed to be bursting with buns and toffee. A piece of stiff fair hair stuck up boyishly at the back. He crossed his short legs and squeezed them with satisfaction as his sharp blue eyes looked around our circle over his strong glasses.

“How awfully nice.” For niceness was everything for him. “Everyone is here,” he said and nodded back to the people on the dance floor. “Jane Fawcett, Sanderson-Brown, Tony Jameson and Eileen—I just missed them in Brussels, they’d just left for Munich—very nice catching them here. With the Williamsons!”

He ran off a list of names, looking over one lens of the glasses that were not quite straight on his young enthusiastic nose as he spoke them, and marking each name with a sly look of private knowledge. We were the accused—accused not so much of leaving him out of things, as of thinking, by so doing, that he
was
out of them. His short, trotting legs infallibly took him to old acquaintance. Names from the past, names that we had forgotten from school and then Oxford came out, and made our wives look across at us at first with bewilderment and then set them to whispering and giggling.

“What are you doing, Saxon?” someone said. “Are you still on the Commission?”

“In principle yes, in practice,” said Saxon, uttering his favourite words, “I’m the liaison between Ways and Means and the Working Party.”

“The liaison!” one of the wives said.

“Yes. It’s awfully nice. It works very well. We have to keep in touch with the sub-committees. I saw the Dustman the other day. He’s a Trustee now, he came in from Arbitration.”

“The Dustman?” Mrs. Selby said to her husband.

“Oxford,” said Selby. “Lattersmith. Economist. Very old. He was called the Dustman because he was very dirty.”

“Tessa’s father,” Saxon said. And as he shot the name of Tessa at us, he grinned at each one of us in turn to see what could be found in our faces. There are things in the past that become geological. Selby’s face became as red as Aberdeen marble; some of us turned to sandstone; one or two to millstone grit or granite; that was how alarm and disclaimer took us.

“Your oldest friend,” said Mrs. Selby to her husband, grinding out the phrase.

“In principle yes, in practice no,” said Selby bitterly mocking Saxon’s well-known phrase.

“
My
oldest friend, if you please,” said Thomas, always a rescuer.

“And mine!” two of us said together, backing him up.

“Is she yours?” said kind Jenny Fox to me.

“She is the ‘oldest friend’ of all of us.”

We laughed together loudly, but not in unity of tone. Hargreaves was too loud, Fox was too frivolous, Selby was frightened and two or three laughs were groans. There was something haphazard, hollow, insincere and unlasting about our laughter, but Day saved us by saying in his deep grave voice to Saxon:

“We ought to settle this. Who
is
Tessa’s oldest friend? When did
you
meet Tessa, Saxon?”

“Selby and I were at school with her, at Asaph’s.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” said Selby’s wife to her husband.

“I tried to get her to come tonight,” said Saxon. “She’s gone out with the Dustman. He said they might drop in later.”

Our wives put on stiff faces: one or two picked up their handbags and looked at the door on to the dance floor, as if they were going to search it, and even the building. The incident was one of Saxon’s always unanswerable successes but once more Thomas saved us. He said to Saxon:

“So
you’re
her oldest friend.”

And Selby said grimly: “Yes, you were at Asaph’s a year before me.”

“Saxon! You’ve been holding out on us,” we said with false jollity.

One of the ladies nodded at us and said to her neighbour: “They seem to be a club.”

The pious pretence on the part of our wives that they did not know Tessa Lattersmith was, in its way, brilliant in our embarrassed state. It brought out the hypocrisy in Harry James who said in a light-headed way:

“She’s married now, I suppose?”

“Oh no,” said Saxon. “She’s carrying on.” And he meant carrying on, as it were, in the sense of working hard on the joint committee, himself informed because he was, after all, the liaison.

“You mean,” said Mrs. Selby, “she hasn’t found anyone’s husband willing?”

“Shame!” said Saxon as at an annual general meeting. “Shame.”

“Perhaps,” said the kind young Jenny Fox, “she doesn’t want to be married.”

“She’s very rich,” said James.

“Very attractive,” said Day.

“Big gobbling eyes.”

“Lovely voice.”

“I don’t agree,” said Fox. “It bodes. It comes creeping into you. It gets under your shirt. It seems to come up from the floor. Expensive clothes, though.”

“Not like the Dustman’s!” shouted Thomas, rescuing us again. “D’you remember? I used to see him at the station waiting for the Oxford train. He used to walk up to the very last bench on the platform, and flop down. I thought he was a tramp kipping down for the night, the first time. His clothes were creased as though he’d slept in them. He had that old suitcase, made of cardboard I should say, tied with string—and parcels of books tied up. Like Herbert Spencer. You know Herbert Spencer had to have everything tied to him? He sat there looking wretched and worn out, with his mouth open and his thick hair full of dust—a real layabout from the British Museum. He hardly got his feet off the ground when he walked, but sort of trudged, as if he was wading through sand. He must be well past seventy.”

“No, he’s barely sixty. Tessa’s only thirty-two.”

“Thirty-seven,” said Mrs. Selby.

“He’s sixty-two,” said Saxon. “Tessa is a year younger than me.”

“The Lattersmiths were rich,” said James again. “I mean compared with the rest of us.”

“The Dustman’s wife had the money,” said Thomas. “She belonged to one of those big shipping families. Did you ever see her? She’s like Tessa—oh, she comes after you with those big solemn eyes.”

“We went to see her, didn’t we?” Day said to his wife. “She saw Diana’s necklace, her eyes were fixed on it . . .”

“
And
my rings!”

“She just wanted them. Greedy. She couldn’t bear it that Diana had something that she hadn’t got.”

“She wanted you as well,” said Diana.

“Oh,” said Tom, the rescuer. “There’s nothing in that. Old Ma Dustman wanted me too, in fact she wanted all of us. ‘I am so worried about Tessa, I wish she’d settle down. I wish she’d find a nice husband—now
you,
you’re fond of Tessa, I’m sure.’ ”

“Shame!” called Saxon again.

We had forgotten about him; he was sweating as he watched us with delight.

“No, it’s true,” I said to Saxon.

“And she couldn’t have them, poor things,” one of the wives said and the others joined in laughing at us.

James once more pushed us into trouble.

“Did you ever go on a picnic with them? I mean when they came down to School? No? Saxon, didn’t you and Selby? Didn’t you? None of your camp fires with damp sticks, thermos bottles and tea slopping over the tomato sandwiches. Oh no! And it never rained: old Ma Dustman had ordered sun down from Fortnum and Mason’s. They brought the Daimler and the butler came—how did they fit him in, I wonder? I bet he went ahead in the Rolls. He set tables and chairs. Silver teapot, the best Rockingham . . .”

“Not Rockingham, it can’t have been.”

“Well old Spode. Something posh. The butler handed round the stuff. I only just knew Tessa then. I had brought a girl called Sadie and Tessa brought a girl called Adelaide with her and Tessa said ‘I want you to meet Harry James. He’s my oldest friend.’ Sadie looked sick.”

“It had started then?” some of our wives cried out.

“Long before that,” I said. “In the cradle.”

“Exactly what she said just before we were married when you introduced me,” said Mrs. Day to her husband.

“She said it to me at our wedding,” said Mrs. Selby and, glaring at her husband, “I don’t know
why.
”

“I don’t get what her fascination for you all was!” said sly Mrs. James.

“Oh,” we all said largely, in a variety of voices, “I don’t know . . . She was about . . .”

“You know, I think it was sex,” said Jenny Fox.

“Was it sex?” we looked at each other, putting as much impartiality as we could into the enquiry.

“Sex! Of course it was sex,” said Mrs. Selby, putting her chin up and gripping her handbag on her knee.

“Not for me,” said Harry James.

“Nor me.” One wife squeezed her husband’s hand. “Why not?”

This dumbfounded us. We huddled together. Why had none of us made a pass? Were we frightened?

“You took her to picture galleries,” said Mrs. Selby.

“Yes,” said Selby. “She did nothing but talk about a man called Cézanne.”

“That’s it. A whole party of us went to Parma and she did nothing but talk of a man called Fabrice,” said Tom.

“Fabrice?”

“Stendhal,” said Saxon.

“I had Lawrence in Rome.”

“There was always another man. Anyone have Picasso? Or Giacometti?” said James.

“Who did you have, Selby? Russell? Einstein?”

Selby had had enough. With the treachery of the desperate, he said: “She talked of nothing but you, James.”

“No,” said Tom the rescuer. “You can’t have had.
I
had you, James.”

“I had Tom.”

“Day was my trouble.”

“With me it was Bill.”

“What a lovely daisy chain,” one of the wives said. “The whole distinguished lot of you. Who’s missing?”

“Saxon,” Jenny Fox said.

We all stared accusingly at him. Saxon went on squeezing himself. He looked archly over his glasses.

“I had the Dustman,” he said complacently.

We laughed but Mrs. Selby silenced us and said to Saxon: “Go on. You’re the only one who’s telling the truth.”

“She was always very worried about the Dustman,” he said. “They’re a wretched family. He scarcely ever goes home.”

And at this, the band started again and Saxon got up and asked my wife to dance. We were left with Saxon’s picture of that rich girl alone in the world. Before the evening was out he had danced with each one of our wives. We all grinned and said “Look at old Saxon at the end of term dance.”

If there was one non-dancer on the floor it was he. His feet, rather like the Dustman’s, trudged, in straight, fated lines, deep in sand; enthusiastically deep. He danced, as it were, in committee. Our wives found themselves in the grip of one who pushed them around, all the time looking askance from side to side as if they were sections or sub-sections for which he was trying to find a place in some majority report. They lost their power to dance. The matter had become desperately topographical to them; while he, as he toiled on, was running off the names of people.

“I saw him in Paris on the second day of the conference.” Or “They were in New York when Foreign Relations met the working party.”

Or “They ran into one another in Piccadilly when the delegation met the Trustees. Thompson, Johnson, Hobson, Timson, Richardson, Wilkinson”—our wives returned to us like new editions of
Who’s Who.

Except Mrs. Selby. She was much taller than he and on the floor she had the prosecuting look of one who was going to wring what she wanted out of Saxon. She did not look down at him but over his head at the piece of fair hair that stuck up at the back of his head. He soon had to give up his committee style. She got a grip of him, got him into corners, carried him off to the middle, turned savagely near the band and in this spot, she shouted to him:

“What’s all this stuff about Tessa and the Dustman?”

And as she said it, seeing him turn to the right, she swung him round to the left and when the dancers were thinning on the floor she planted him in a quiet spot in the middle.

“Tessa’s slept with all of you, hasn’t she?” she said.

“Shame!” Saxon said, stopping dead. He took off his glasses and there was a sudden change in him. Often since, seeing that naked look on his face, I have thought: “How he must have hated us.” I remember at school how we stuffed sausage down his neck and how he just let us do it. Sausage after sausage went down. Then off came the glasses and he backed to an open window. Now, on the dance floor, with his glasses off, Saxon suddenly began to dance—if that is the word for it—as if he had been stung. Where had he learned these extraordinary steps?— that sudden flinging wide of his short legs and arms, that strange buckling and straightening of the body, the thrusting forward and back of his punch-ball head, those sudden wrenchings of Mrs. Selby back and forth, and spinning her round, that general air of looking for a knockout in the rebound off the ropes. Mrs. Selby’s firm eyes were disordered as she tried to foresee his movements, and amid the disorder, she was magnetised by the fiendish rhythm of his feet and by the austere look of his unforgiving face.

“Hasn’t she?” called Mrs. Selby, in a last piteous attempt. The band stopped and she stood there getting her breath in the middle of the floor. Saxon, without music, dropped back into the goalkeeper stance we knew so well, with his hands on his hips and short legs apart. She was staring at Saxon, he was staring at her. It was a long stare. Selby and his partner passed them and he saw what Mrs. Selby saw: obstinate tears were forming in Saxon’s naked eyes; water filled them; it dropped on his pink cheeks. He took out his glasses and pretended to wipe them with his handkerchief and put them on. He was sternly, silently, crying. Mrs. Selby put out her hand repentantly; no doubt he did not see her hand but walked with her off the floor. We were clapping in the silly way people do and someone called out: