A Friend from England

by Anita Brookner

  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.

  FOUR

  AFTER 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 imagini
ngs: 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.

  And they had danced together like brother and sister. That was what had worried me at the time. It even worried me slightly now, although I began to feel my familiar exasperation with Heather, as I always did just before seeing her, as if the sight of her mild face stimulated me to a fury both on her account and on my own. Well, if she were either stupid enough or clever enough – I could never decide which – to enter into a folie à deux with this strangely affecting and disappointing man, that was surely her own affair. It was certainly nothing to do with me, although I began to see that at some point she might run into trouble. But I remembered her extreme reticence, the way she had issued news of her courtship in the form of a single bulletin, almost a press statement, the competent way with which she had dealt with the enquiries of her aunts, and I assured myself that she knew what she was doing. I was all the more anxious to believe this because I did not relish the task of lining up my experience with Heather’s inexperience and taking on the burden of inducting Heather into a fully adult life. In a way I wanted Heather to remain as she was, just as I wanted Oscar and Dorrie to remain as they were, fixed points in a volatile universe. I simply wanted things to go on as they were, an unchanging backdrop against which I could conduct my own variations. I saw them as the dry land to which a hapless swimmer such as myself might cling for safety.

  I dare say everyone has arrangements of this kind, little bargains struck with uncharacteristic activity or behaviour. Eileen Somers, from my shop, a widow with two undergraduate sons, has a side-line in free-fall parachuting. Her late husband was a Wing-Commander in the Royal Air Force, and she feels that in this way she can keep in touch with him. Eccentricities abound in the most orthodox, the most humdrum of lives. And who was I to criticize this marriage that had been launched in the most genial of circumstances, with the almost frenzied goodwill of both sets of parents? For the parents had, on both sides, every reason to wish to see their offspring settled. Perhaps I sensed that there was some reservation as to how these children might be inducted into real life that gave me pause, or perhaps it was Oscar’s thoughtfulness when he scrutinized Michael that worried me. But in the end it was hardly my affair. I left the shop to Robin and Eileen and set out to walk to Marble Arch, determined to enjoy my rôle as spectator, determined also not to involve myself in matters regarding an intimacy which I had no desire to share.

  It was a bright windy day in early June. The summer had not been a good one so far. Brisk south-westerlies had kept the temperature down, and there seemed to be road-works everywhere. Dust blew into my eyes as I walked along Notting Hill Gate into the Bayswater Road, where Japanese tourists gazed uncomprehendingly at the junk displayed against the railings of the park. Doomed as they were to walk about all day, it was possible to feel for them an immense compassion. I was glad that summer journeyings were not for me. I usually went away after Christmas, in the slack season, thus allowing Eileen and
Robin to get on with their action-packed lives. I never minded summer in the city and frequently wandered about in the evenings after the shop was closed. I liked the feeling that everyone was abroad and that London was inhabited by transients. Sometimes I wandered long and far, and only returned home after nightfall. So far I had not done so this year, but the return of the Livingstones signified that I was in some way free once more, as if their rootedness gave me the security to be rootless, to test my vagrancy against their stability, my preparedness for adventure against their bourgeois world. The contrast was perhaps necessary to me for reasons which were present in me, not as reasons, but perhaps as instincts, as if I and they existed to offset each other in a way to benefit both conditions, as if I, in my willed impermanence, could look to them to measure it, and as if they, sensing this, looked to me to provide them with some entry into a region of greater understanding. ‘Rachel is a feminist,’ Dorrie had once said proudly, introducing me to one of the aunts. I think she thought me very brave. I think they all did.