A Circle of Friends Read online

  One evening Henrietta asked me to go to the theatre with him and her and Adam Livingstone. I didn’t want to be seen in public with them at that stage, and anyhow I’d seen the show and not liked it. So I just said I’d join them for dinner afterwards. Then it turned out that they were going to dine at a restaurant, so I had to be with them in public after all. I was there first, and when they came into the restaurant they really did look like lovers. I was sure of it this time. She was bubbling over with jokes from the show and telling them in a loud voice to everyone around. I certainly hadn’t thought it was that funny. It was one of those satirical shows that everyone was talking about then, and half the jokes I didn’t understand, being American, and the other half I didn’t care for. They’re very parochial when it comes to humour, the British. Adam seemed to be as happy as they both were. I felt very old and left out of it. I couldn’t understand why Adam didn’t notice anything about them. It was obvious enough to me.

  When I told George and Marcia what I thought, they just laughed at me. George always thought the best of people: that was why he’d been married twice before, both times against my advice. I asked them if there was any truth in the rumour I’d heard that Freddy was happy enough to stay behind in New York, because he’d fallen in love with that Sally Hinkle. She was a nice girl, a teacher. George said there was nothing in it at all. I’m sure he was right. She wouldn’t have got involved with him unless she knew he was finished with Henrietta, I’m sure of that. She was a nice girl. She taught out on Long Island, some place.

  *

  I’ll say they did! The old bastard’s eyes kept moseying over towards the hunting whips in the hall. They stood in a huge elephant’s foot which his father had brought back from India in the days when men were men and the British Empire got hot pants from sitting on the sun. (That was my sergeant’s joke, and it didn’t go down in English because they don’t pronounce ‘set’ and ‘sit’ the way we do, and anyway it wasn’t such a good joke in the first place.) You could see the old man was just dying to crack one of those whips across my bare ass, only he didn’t quite have the guts. She had him just where she wanted him. I have to give Henrietta that—she could wrap the old man round her little toe and he’d only stroke his moustache and make catarrhal noises in his throat and smile at her out of his bloodshot eyes. It was the mother that really stank. There’s no other way of putting it—she was putrid, she was high. She’d stood for Parliament one time and almost got herself elected, only then she drove into a wall somewhere in the South of France and couldn’t walk any more, so that finished her, career-wise. She went around the house in a wheel-chair, and if you ask me she was secretly pretty glad about that accident because it meant she had even better opportunities for snooping than before. It was silent, that chair, so you could never hear her coming. He’d put in an elevator for her, so she wouldn’t have to be carried up the stairs all the time, and that was silent, too. You’d think you’d finally got rid of her two floors up, and then there she always was. She had very wispy grey hair, and wore grey gloves all the time on account of the scars from her accident. She couldn’t use the right hand at all any more, and even when I first met her she was plainly dying. The left side of her chair had a deep pocket where she kept pills and syringes and a whole drugstore full of medicines, and she’d look at you, as you stood there in front of her, trying to make some sort of conversation, and she’d reach for a pill in this deep pocket and say nothing, just stare at you. Then she’d take the pill, still not moving her eyes, without a glass of water or anything, and then she’d put on a smile, as though only now could she face you. She’d completely outfaced you by then, naturally. You could see the smile spreading, wrinkle by pained wrinkle, from the corners of her mouth to just about the middle of her cheeks, where it gave up and turned back home. She loathed me, because I wasn’t English and a Lord and I didn’t have any money very much, and Henrietta wanted me all the same. I loathed her right back—I’d’ve chewed gum in her face to spite her. She thought she was something special just because her father had left her a hundred thousand pounds and she’d married a country gentleman with another few hundred thousand and who’d survived being in the Guards in the first world war. But she was nothing, nothing—a bundle of prejudice wrapped in shawls and dumped in a wheel-chair, that’s all, and not even intelligent with it. What she had was a kind of mental energy which had nothing whatever to do with intelligence. She pursued things to death, she hunted them down in her mind, she had incredible persistence. It was famous hunting-country round there.

  They still kept four horses for Henrietta and her father to ride—four for two people, in the middle of the war. I guess they thought they were helping to save gasoline. I wasn’t asked to ride at first, in case I’d wear a cowboy hat, I daresay. But they invited me one day, and to show them, I hired a pink coat—only that was wrong, too, because you weren’t supposed to do that except for hunting, and didn’t I know there was a war on? I wasn’t always sure, the way they lived. Henrietta thought I was deliberately kidding them, but I wasn’t. I had a sense of humour all right, but I wouldn’t have dared risk a stunt like that as a practical joke. You should have seen the way his eyeglass popped out of his face, like it was a glass eye! I thought it was, at first, till I saw the black piece of string he dangled it from. Oh, of course I was green, I was a hick from upstate New York, and I’d gone to college in Ohio, for goodness’ sake, and my parents just owned a big hardware store, three garages (at Rochester, Buffalo and Batavia) where they sold Buicks, Pontiacs, La Salles and Oldsmobiles (they swore by General Motors but they thought Chevvies were beneath them) and—it cost them as much in conscience as it did in cash—a liquor store. They just couldn’t resist an easy profit. But that didn’t mean I was nobody; all I needed was training. I was learning to be a soldier instead of taking up my scholarship to Yale Drama School, it’s true, but I reckoned it didn’t take long to learn anything you wanted to know, like how to pop an eyeglass and talk like a Britisher and live the way you happened to choose to live.

  And I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to learn how to marry an Englishwoman. I thought I was good enough, anyway. I didn’t know then that most people don’t regard as useful or even interesting any experience gained outside their own particular environment. And there Henrietta’s mother was like most people, only more so. In her eyes I could never even begin to be good enough. God knows how she ever imagined she’d be suitable to represent other people in Parliament. She knew about as much about the world as a child of eight. She talked about ‘us’—meaning the British country gentry like herself—and ‘them’—which meant just about everyone else: the grooms and gardeners at Charncot (there were half a dozen of them still in 1942, ancient but active) and the people in the village and the rest of the people in England and then the whole wide world beyond the English Channel, black, brown, white and yellow. ‘They’ were everywhere, a permanent menace, like death-watch beetles. At the moment ‘they’ were masquerading as Germans and Japanese, but as soon as the war was over ‘they’ would be trade unionists again (as many of them still were, in fact) and ‘they’ would live in the dirty mid-land towns that Mr and Mrs Brooke hoped were now being bombed to pieces by the dirty Hun—only not the cathedral cities, of course, that was a kind of sacrilege. The Baedeker raids really made them mad. It just shows how crazy the Germans were, imagining people like the Brookes, who ran the goddam country, could ever be demoralised by the bombing of cathedrals. They thrived on it, they grew purple in the face and listened to Winston Churchill on it, they even finally allowed a seedy ally to marry their virgin pure daughter on it, kind of.

  Not that she was virgin pure by the time we married, I’d seen to that, but at least she wasn’t pregnant yet, by one of the miracles of the 1940s, that was something for the Brookes to console themselves with. And I did speak English of a sort. And my family were British in origin—not so very far back, either. We weren’t exactly indentured slaves, though Mrs Brooke sure made
me feel like one. My father’s father had fled from the Liverpool docks, and my mother’s mother came from Newcastle with her father in the eighteen-eighties. We weren’t blue-blooded, of course—socially speaking I guess my ancestors were more depressed than elevated. When I was drafted and knew I was going to England, I asked my father if there was anywhere or anyone he’d like me to look up, but he said his father hadn’t come to America to start digging around in its dirty British roots after two generations. He said people had come to America from Europe to get clear of all those goddam Europeans and their wars, not to join them, and he thought Roosevelt was the worst traitor in American history since Benedict Arnold. Of course, after Pearl Harbour he admitted that it was all one war, Pacific and European and African, but he still thought Roosevelt was a crummy bastard who should have kept Eleanor tied to his wheel-chair. It was like that in Batavia—quiet and Republican and centrally heated.

  God, I suffered from cold that first spring in England. I couldn’t believe it—I mean, I knew there was a war on, but hadn’t the British ever been warm? Henrietta said it explained why the island was so vigorous historically—people went out to conquer the Empire because it was so cold sitting around at home. Not even breeding kept you warm, though they’d tried that, which explained the over-population. She didn’t go for her parents’ views on things at all. She even said she’d vote Labour if there was ever another election, and her mother just looked at her and fished for a pill in grey silence. It didn’t matter to me what she voted—I hadn’t voted myself then—so long as she would marry me. She didn’t see much point in us getting married at first. She said that could come later. And she certainly didn’t hold back on the favours. No, it was me that was all for marriage. I guess I was very young and thought marriage made everything different, and of course it did. For one thing, it took away all the furtiveness and nudging at hotels, and I hated that. Maybe it was my American upbringing, but I hated to tell a lie. And then I got a big kick out of marrying a rich English girl, with bright red hair and a grey stone house in the country with a poppa with a moustache and—well, it was all like England was supposed to be. And, hell, of course I was crazy about her. I had been, the day I first saw her, which was at a party in London given by an Englishwoman I had an introduction to from my college room-mate, Pete Rynearson. Pete was a year older than me, and he was in England three months before me, and left it just as I arrived. So all I saw of him was this note, which said not to miss out on the parties of Mrs Olive Miller, in Tedworth Square, Chelsea. Well, I didn’t know anyone in London, and Rainbow Corner had no crock of gold for me, so I wrote to Mrs Miller and said I was Pete’s buddy, and she invited me round, and there was this redhead called Henrietta Brooke, who said she was doing war-work. She was secretary to some bigshot in some Ministry in Kensington High Street and she said she was wasting her talents and was trying to find something more interesting. If she’d been a man, she’d’ve volunteered for the Marines—just for the hell of it; she was that kind of girl.

  Instead she volunteered for me. I guess she thought it was kind of crazy to go around with a private first class, to take me to all the swell places—the Ritz bar, and a whole bunch of terrible pubs in Soho full of bad poets and deserters, and then—Charncot. I was a private because I wanted to be a private and refused promotion even to corporal. I didn’t like fighting, and I particularly didn’t like either giving or taking orders, but if I had to fight, and I reckoned I did, then I decided I’d rather take orders than give them. They were always getting at me to become an officer, even a sergeant, to do this course and that. But I reckoned I knew what I liked best. There’d been a teacher in college, his name was Karminski, and maybe he was a communist and maybe he wasn’t—(he was dead by the time the cruds started investigating all that, lucky for him), but he sure made me feel there was a lot to be said against being a member of the officer class. I was no Marxist, then or ever, but I took Karminski’s course in Political History and it opened my eyes. I can’t tell you about the dialectic and all that crap—I’m in the theatre. But I was on the side of the underdog with the same automatic reflex that my father was on the side of the Republicans, and maybe because he was, I don’t know. I didn’t know a single Negro or anyone out of work or anything like that, but all those people had my undivided sympathy, and I guess they still do. It all looks different from your forties, but your real feelings don’t change. Left-wing people sometimes ask me what’s the point of having a theatre where people come just to be entertained. And my answer is, sure they come to be entertained, and what’s wrong with that? But being entertained means being moved—to laughter or tears or anything in between. And if people are moved enough by something they see in the theatre, they don’t forget it. And that’s why it’s possible to have social drama, instructive entertainment, education through feeling, whatever you want to call it. My business is moving people’s feelings, and naturally I try to move them according to my own feelings about things in general.

  Anyhow, at that time I was very young and green, and I wouldn’t become an officer for anyone, not if they jailed me for it, though I was all for the war on Hitler. And it didn’t bother me that Henrietta was rich, because so would I be one day, when my poppa died. And at that time, in the war, it seemed that just about anything would go. And it usually did. I was young and in the army and miles from home—oh, and there was a kind of crazy democracy of the uniform, off limits, and Henrietta was part of that craziness and made it great. And her parents sure weren’t. You can say that again and again and again. Boy, if there was ever a cold reception, it was the one after my wedding.

  The objection was overcome, and the marriage took place in London on August 10th, 1942.

  I honestly thought my father was going to have a stroke. I remember very clearly saying to myself, ‘What a good thing I took that First Aid course at school!’ My mother was upstairs, lying down after lunch, and it was June, and I hadn’t seen Freddy for three weeks because of some ridiculous exercise he was on, and I couldn’t bear it any longer, so I said, ‘I think I ought to tell you, Daddy, that I’m pregnant.’ It wasn’t true, of course. But I thought he might believe it, and he did. And I knew he’d want me not to tell my mother ‘because of the shock it would give her’, so he’d have to agree to let me marry Freddy and explain about the baby later. Only, of course, there wouldn’t be a baby.

  He didn’t have a stroke, he just went terribly pale and his moustache fluttered a bit—it often did, as though there was a little bird hiding beneath it—and then he said, ‘Can’t you see a doctor?’

  He was sweet, my father. I would never have guessed that he even knew about abortion, let alone that he’d suggest it. But now he had done, I had to say, ‘I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.’

  It was too funny, really. I mean, I’d always been the one with all the advanced ideas and immoral views and everything, and he was the one maintaining decent standards of public behaviour, and I adored him for it. And now I was being old-fashioned and moral, and he was standing against the mantelpiece, his moustache fluttering, and his face all white, recommending a man in Harley Street. ‘How on earth do you know about it?’ I said, because I was really just so astonished.

  His face went on being white—when it was like that his flesh went all marble and the veins looked very blue, which frightened me—and he said, ‘It’s none of your business what I know.’

  We were very fond of each other. So I said, ‘Daddy, this is ridiculous, you know perfectly well I’m not really pregnant, and I’m only saying it to make you let me marry Freddy. Why do we have to pretend?’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘No, of course not. You know me. Would I ever do such a silly thing?’

  His moustache fluffed out once, then relaxed. It was as though it had folded its wings. When I was a child, I used to stroke it and call it ‘Jack’, which was my father’s name. ‘Well,’ he said, and then he cleared his throat. The colour began to come back to his cheeks. ‘Loo
k here, Henrietta, what is it you see in this fellow?’

  He was wonderful, then, Freddy. He was young and—not exactly handsome, but strong, striking and quite incredibly energetic. I’d met nothing before but awful debs’ delights, really, and then suddenly there was this busy man, rushing about, cramming in lunch, the Wallace Collection, two exhibitions, a play and dinner, all in one afternoon and evening—or so it seemed. And then simply bustling me into bed. And that was very exciting, too, because I hadn’t done it before, and it was everything it was supposed to be, so we did it a lot. And then he’d be up at dawn and polishing his boots or something before I’d begun to get my eight hours. I was always a rotten secretary the morning after a night with Freddy. Oh, and besides—how can I remember what it was like being in love with him? I’m not young any more, and you change, you feel differently. When you’re young, you’re so light-headed. As you grow older, you feel your centre of gravity sinking down your body. But when you’re young, you don’t really have a centre, it’s everywhere, in your hands and your feet and your head and your heels. And I don’t feel like that any more. My head’s screwed on so much more tightly now. My feelings leap up, but my head stops them leaping out, as it were. And when I was young they just gushed out all over everywhere. Now I can’t even remember what it was like, exactly. I just see it in other people, and envy it.