A Circle of Friends Read online

  Then I will tear away the leaf

  Wherein it’s writ; or, if fate won’t allow

  So large a gap within its journal-book,

  I’ll blot it out at least.

  And I had Martin do a bigger leap than ever, whereupon half Huncamunca’s dress was supposed to come away in his hands.

  Well, to start with she hadn’t brought the dress, though this was the first time it was to be properly tested. So we had to wait while she fetched it, and then wait again while she put it on. And then, of course, it didn’t work. The thread was too strong or Martin was too weak, or something. All that happened was he heaved at her and she fell over on top of him with the dress still in one piece.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, from the floor. ‘I wonder what went wrong.’

  ‘I can tell you,’ I said. ‘You didn’t rehearse.’

  It was a thoroughly satisfactory moment from my point of view, and from then on the rehearsal seemed to go better. The Bailey twins came back from Cheltenham, looking no richer and rather solemn, and by six thirty we were all set for the next run-through. Then Howard arrived with another tray of Martinis. This time I said everyone must wait till after we’d finished.

  There was a terrible row about that.

  ‘You’re inhuman,’ said Adam. ‘And you’re taking everything far too seriously. Give me one of those, Howard, for God’s sake.’

  ‘If you want to ruin your performance with drink, go ahead,’ I said, seeing it was impossible to keep the adults off the bottle. ‘But it seems a pity when everything was going so well.’

  ‘It’ll go better now,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be so stuffy,’ she said, helping herself.

  ‘I am not being stuffy.’

  ‘Don’t you think that perhaps you’re being a little unfair?’ said Martin.

  ‘No I don’t. I saw what happened after lunch.’

  ‘You shouldn’t blame your own incapacity on others,’ said Howard. ‘Some of us can hold our liquor.’

  ‘Oh, let them drink,’ said Lucy. ‘They’re old, they need it.’

  ‘There!’ she said. ‘Someone who understands! Dear Lucy, how sweet you are, and how absolutely beastly Lawrence is.’ And she kissed her and put her tongue out at me. I just shrugged.

  I got them all back on the stage eventually, and after a quick look at the Bailey twins’ scenes we started on the run-through. I don’t know why, but I suddenly thought the whole thing was quite dreadful. Everyone seemed just stupid, not funny at all. Instead of looking like people entertaining others, they seemed just a bunch of friends giggling at their own private jokes. Mrs Van Dieman laughed at everything she’d laughed at before, just as falsely as before. Howard didn’t laugh at all. Nor did I. I just got more and more depressed as it went on, and gradually I stopped caring. A very bad rehearsal is a great relief in one way. You can’t believe it’ll ever be so ghastly again. And since you’re completely committed to the play by that time, anyway, you feel sort of reckless. Desperate and reckless. I gabbled my own lines as fast as possible, just to get the thing over, and at the end I said, ‘Thanks, everyone, very much. It wasn’t bad at all. Now let’s have a complete break from it till tomorrow.’

  Then I slipped quickly away, while they were saying, ‘I thought it went much better than this morning’ and things like that, and I went for a walk by myself. It was a beautiful evening, and I walked away from the house, along the fields towards the beechwoods. From the woods there was a big view down the valley over the top of the village. Everything was very green still, though it was September now. It had been a wet summer. The fields were full of puffballs, and I kicked them as I walked along. They were very satisfying, the way they flew to pieces as you kicked them, splaying out like cow-pats.

  I came into the woods and walked slowly through them, enjoying the damp beechy smell, and then I came out again by the stile into the big field called The Leasows. Usually it was pasture, in fact I couldn’t remember it ever having been ploughed. But I hadn’t been through the woods, I realised, for ages. And now it was a wheat field, and not quite ripe yet. I’d meant to walk along The Leasows towards the village. I’d thought about going to the pub and having a drink and buying some cigarettes. It would have been nice to smoke them in the woods on the way back. But now I just sat on the stile and thought about nothing and everything—life and the play and the pointlessness of most things and the stupidity of most people. I wished I was back at school and dead and seven years old again and grown up. Most of all I wished I was grown up and free and could do what I wanted where people would take me seriously and listen to my ideas and not treat me like a child any more. I was sick of being a child, but not for the usual reasons. I didn’t want to drink and make a fool of myself, like most adults, in a childish way. I wanted to achieve something, to do something really big and important. And I couldn’t do that for years yet, and it was intolerable. I had to finish school and get into Cambridge and go to Cambridge and get through Cambridge and then learn whatever profession it was I decided on and it wouldn’t be till I was about forty, that I’d be able to do anything I really wanted. Or so it seemed, and I sat on the stile in terrible frustration that I wasn’t forty years old, and I don’t think there was anyone who would have understood me.

  I could hear them shouting for me down at the house, but I didn’t answer. It was over half a mile away, but you could hear things very clearly. It was beautifully still. All the countryside was beautiful, I thought as I wandered back. But it wasn’t where one did things. The country didn’t do anything nowadays except provide food for people. It was nice to visit, too. But serious places were towns, like New York. And I hated New York.

  As I came into the fields from the woods, Lucy was coming towards me. She hadn’t followed me, she said. She just wanted to be alone for a while.

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘They wanted you down at the house just now. Didn’t you hear them calling?’

  ‘Yes. I decided not to answer.’

  I put my arm round her and we walked happily back to the house, not saying very much, just enjoying being together without any of the pretentiousness we usually created for each other.

  ‘It was awful this evening, you know,’ I said. ‘Could you tell?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said.

  ‘Well, don’t tell the others, will you?’

  ‘I think they probably noticed, too.’

  ‘They were all a bit tired. Of course, they’re only amateurs. We mustn’t expect too much.’

  ‘I think you do sometimes. I think you honestly do, Lawrence.’

  ‘Well, it’s a fault on the right side.’

  We went into the house. Everyone was flopped about the drawing-room, waiting for dinner.

  ‘Gosh, where have you been?’ said Anne. ‘We thought you must have gone out and shot yourself because the play was so bad. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t that bad. Would you have liked me to commit suicide? Am I that awful about it?’

  ‘God, yes,’ she said. Anne was all right, really, so long as she wasn’t with her pretentious American friends.

  After dinner we played word games for a bit, but I was too tired to stay up very late. As I was going to bed, Tim saw me and said, ‘I say, Lawrence, I’d quite forgotten about my holiday essay. What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be doing Henry Fielding. It’s a mad idea, I’ll never get it done.’

  ‘Gosh, I haven’t even thought of a subject.’

  ‘Are you looking forward to your last year?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think school’s pretty silly, honestly.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘I know what you mean. The thing I can’t stand is the compulsory gym. I think that’s ridiculous. It’s not as though we don’t get quite enough exercise without that.’

  ‘I hate the way Old Granny pats your arse to see if you’re wearing underpants. I just loathe that.
I’ll hit him if he does that to me again.’

  Old Granny was Mr Grandidge, the chief gym instructor. For some unknown reason, an hour a week out of the classroom time-table was set aside for gym. We all thought it was quite idiotic.

  ‘Yes, that is bad,’ said Tim. ‘But I mind them taking it out of lessons most.’

  ‘Do you suppose we’ll be prefects next year?’

  He blushed. ‘I’m going to be one next term. Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘Bad luck,’ I said. I was terribly jealous. ‘Good night, Tim.’

  ‘Good night,’ he said. He seemed to want to apologise for my not being a prefect, so I went quickly into the bathroom.

  *

  I was first down to breakfast in the morning, and felt full of energy.

  ‘Hello,’ I said to Mrs Fuller. ‘Did you have a nice day off?’

  ‘Very nice, thank you,’ she said. ‘I went to see my sister.’ She always went to see her sister. It was one of the nice, regular things about her.

  I’d finished breakfast before anyone else appeared. Then Tim, Lucy and Anne showed up, but there wasn’t a sign of a grown-up.

  ‘I think they all went to bed rather late,’ said Lucy. ‘I heard someone talking at four in the morning. I know it was four because I looked at my watch.’

  I hadn’t planned to do very much rehearsing that morning—mainly just tidying up here and there. But even that much wasn’t possible without any actors. It was quite inexcusable, the day Pop was arriving and the day of the performance, to have almost the entire cast lying in bed till eleven o’clock. Eventually, I went to wake her while the others got on with painting the set.

  ‘Look, this just isn’t good enough,’ I said.

  She was sitting up in bed, looking bleary. She said, ‘Oh Lawrence, do for heaven’s sake stop acting like Henry Irving or whoever it is. This is a joke play put on as a joke for our friends. Now go away and let me get up.’

  ‘The trouble all along,’ I said, ‘has been that some people have put entertaining themselves well above entertaining other people. All this drinking that goes on—how can I have proper rehearsals if everyone’s drinking all the time?’

  ‘You sound just like your father.’

  ‘Well, what’s so odd about that? I think you’re all behaving extremely badly.’

  ‘Go away,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down in half an hour.’

  When I’d got everyone finally assembled, I said, ‘I don’t want to do very much today except get the dress rehearsal rehearsed, as it were. That’s to say, I want everyone to do one or two bits in costume before this evening.’ And then I listed the various scenes I wanted done, and when, and then we got the blackout in the village hall organised, and the carting of the flats up there, and the setting of the whole thing up.

  The afternoon was very busy, with the women all sewing away like mad, and me not attempting to do more than suggest the slightly larger and funnier gestures which people could make now they had large and funny costumes. I must say she’d done a jolly good job on the costumes, with Marcia’s help. The only things which didn’t work properly were Martin’s knee-boots—the shoes he wore on his knees, I mean. And Huncamunca’s dress still didn’t rip right. So I sent them off to rehearse that by themselves, till they’d got the whole thing perfect.

  There was so much to do that we’d all completely forgotten about Pop. At least, I had. So he’d taken the taxi from the station. The first I saw of him was when he came strolling across the lawn with his hands in his pockets and a big grin on his face.

  Part Three

  I never did like that young man. I don’t know why people used to ask him around. He never said anything, he was hardly even polite. All he did was drink your liquor and smile into his glass, like he didn’t have the manners to look you in the face. He was nobody’s idea of a beau. I couldn’t see what Henrietta saw in him, then or now. And I didn’t like it, a sensible woman like her carrying on with a boy like that. Why, he didn’t even look as though he had his full growth yet. And her pretending he was to give Lawrence special coaching! What was he doing spending week-ends down to Charncot in the middle of June, then, while the boy was still in school? And it wasn’t only week-ends. He was living there by the fourth of July—I know the date, because I was there myself. She gave a party for all her American friends who happened to be in England—a real American party, with a little American flag hung over the front door and hot dogs. Only it rained, and we spent the day indoors mostly. He never left her side, except to refresh her drink.

  I’d taken a house in London that summer—first time I’d done that since 1938, when I was still the right side of fifty, though even I can hardly believe it. I’d visited between whiles, of course, and I knew how much had changed. But St John’s Wood was pretty much the same. I even took a house in the same street as before—not too big, just three bedrooms. George and Marcia weren’t coming for long. They’d left their kids with her mother, Mrs Chester, in Cleveland, and no one would want to leave anyone long with her. Or in Cleveland, come to that. I reckoned to stay there till October, then go to Paris for a couple of months, and be back in New York in time for Christmas. I didn’t have too many summers left to spend in Europe, so I planned to enjoy this one leisurely. When you get to be my age, you start to go slower. Henrietta, now, she never slows down, but then she’s only around forty still. Maybe that’s her trouble. Maybe that’s how the whole thing got started.

  She had—I guess she still has—this very lovely home down in the country. You take the train to some little place —it’s beyond Oxford, I know that. There’s a good train gets you there in time for a cocktail or two before dinner. She meets you there in the station-wagon. It’s a beautiful place. Her family have lived there for generations, I believe, and it’ll go to Lawrence, of course, when she dies. It’s all very old.

  I’ve known Henrietta a good many years now, and I’ve always considered her a very nice woman. I just hated to see her getting into trouble. But the first time I went down that summer I smelt trouble all over the place. The boy was there, and he had a face like a lovesick racoon. He had some kind of a job, he said, working as a courier or some such for a big travel agency there in London, and he spent his time taking people to and from the airport and showing them the sights. He was a sight himself, with his eyes like a spaniel’s. I never did like a spaniel—he will salivate all over you. I like a terrier. Freddy, now, he was a terrier. But Martin was a spaniel if ever I saw one. I couldn’t see what it was she saw in him. I could understand what he saw in her, mind you, in spite of her being so much older and with a child almost his age. She was a very intelligent woman, and she had good looks, and she had personality. Wherever she went, people just liked to be near her. I guess there aren’t too many women in any generation with all those things, and maybe Martin just had never seen anyone like her before. The way he trailed after her, you might have thought that he’d never even seen a woman before.

  What I didn’t like was the way she let him—let him trail like that. Every woman’s had an admirer in her time, and she knows it’s most agreeable to have one of these fellows following around after her in the heat of the summer, bowing and scraping and fetching her iced coffee when she wants it. But Henrietta had had enough admirers in her life to know better than let it go so far. Why, it could have been her own son that was moping after her, like a burr in her train. Mind you, it didn’t take a lifetime of experience to see that she was lonesome with Freddy all tied up in New York. And the boy was very young—well, he was certainly young for his age, anyway. And when a woman’s forty or so she begins to feel she isn’t quite as attractive as she used to be. What am I saying? She knows she isn’t, and it’s very flattering to have a very young man hovering about you, trying to clamber into your bed. And if you’re a foolish woman of forty, you let him, and if you’re a wise one, you pat him on the head and gently let him know that you’re very gratified but the gratification is going to remain strictly verbal. I
know what I’m talking about. I was forty and admired once, too. There was a young fellow named Henry Mann used to come begging and pleading to my door. He’s a grandfather now, lives in Los Angeles. But he could beg and plead as much as he liked, I never let him further than the door. I was never alone with him in my own house, and I took care not to be so in anyone else’s. His heart didn’t break. A year later he was married, and I kissed his bride. It was very agreeable while it lasted, but I guess I was relieved when it was over. No woman in her right mind wants to put up with all the selfishness of a young man again, not if she’s done it once.

  Now I didn’t know for sure whether she’d taken him to bed that first time I saw him down there or not. I certainly hadn’t suspected anything of the sort back home. But I could smell which way the wind was blowing, and I didn’t like what I smelled. Of course, I didn’t want any trouble. I wanted to stop trouble. But I could see that words of advice wouldn’t be welcome, so all I did was write to Freddy and hint—just hint—that his wife was missing him very much and it was high time he finished up his business in New York and came on over. Of course, he didn’t, but that wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t too sure Martin wasn’t after some of Henrietta’s money, too. I never did make up my mind about that. I think he was capable of it. He said so little, something must have been going on inside his head. But then I think he was calf-crazy about her, too. Maybe it was a little bit of both.

  Henrietta brought him to dinner with me one night in London. They were very late—he’d had to deliver some tourists from the Tower of London to the airport, she said, and there’d been an accident which had held him up. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think it was right for them to expect me to give my sanction to their love-affair. I didn’t think she should have brought him to dinner. And I’d heard that story about the accident on the road to the airport so often—though in my day it used to be simpler. We just said there’d been a terrible snarl on Fifth and left it at that. Well, I had some English friends to dinner that evening, and I couldn’t comment at the time. Afterwards Henrietta and Martin stayed till all hours, till I was quite tired out, anyway. And the English friends were so delighted by her, that they wouldn’t go, either. I never did get an opportunity to discuss it with them. I wanted to know if things had maybe changed in England more than I realised.