A Circle of Friends Read online

  But then Lawrence was notoriously hard to please. The way things were at Charncot seemed perfect to me. The whole place was paradisiac—the small, English scale of the landscape, the unreliable weather which demanded frequent big log fires in the drawing-room, the simple, family life we led. I did my best to earn my salary, and was even surprised by how willing Lawrence was to read and discuss things. And then Anne and Henrietta were not laggard with their own opinions, till we might have been one of those princeling Renaissance courts where everyone had elaborate interpretations of Gemistos Plethon. Perhaps the children didn’t appreciate Henrietta’s contributions as much as I did; but then, I was in love with her, and they were not.

  No one ever understood our relationship, and I suppose it wasn’t strictly credible. I knew I loved her after I’d been back in England three days. Three days was quite enough to disenchant me with Wimbledon—I was, after all, a man whom even New York had failed to enchant. By then my parents and I had exhausted our gossip and reminiscence, and were back to what seemed an almost pre-natal ritual of conversation. It was an eternal slow movement, an endless rumination on my prospects. That I had none, I knew only too well. So I took a temporary job at Cook’s as a courier, to keep myself out of the house as much as anything. Exploring London on devious errands, I thought only of New York. I wanted back, as they say there; back not to New York itself, of course, but to that magic circle round Henrietta. And though I had never thought of myself as being in love with her while I was with her, as soon as I was away I discovered my infatuation. People can become addicted to drugs unintentionally; they only discover their addiction when they suffer the terrible, almost unendurable agonies of withdrawal. So I discovered mine. And far from attempting a cure, I gave in to the drug with an almost voluptuous inertia.

  When Henrietta arrived—I’d arranged to have myself sent to meet her at the airport—I was already fully conscious of all I’d been unconscious of before. She, naturally, was not. She’d taken a friend’s flat in Holland Park for the summer, and was often in town. She seemed always to be calling to invite me to dinners and plays and parties, just as she had done in New York. Only this time we were usually alone. It would have been very easy for me to pour out my feelings; I could, almost any day, have dropped neatly on one still unswollen knee and said, ‘Henrietta, I love you, forgive me!’ I even imagined doing so; but I also imagined her slightly disapproving reply: I was joking, of course. But it was not a joking matter. In the first thrill of delusion and self-deception, I dreamed of her rapturous fall into my arms and her exquisite declaration of her own passion for me. I speculated on possible secret signs which had passed from her to me of her infatuation. I murmured over the chance remarks she’d made that could conceivably be interpreted as deliberately ambiguous. I remembered and vividly re-created glances and gestures whose meaning I had, at the time, perhaps dim-wittedly misconstrued. I was the ordinary idiot lover, hearing her footsteps at every turn, and dreaming on the train back to Wimbledon that she, unable to restrain her passion further, would be waiting for me in a taxi at the other end.

  And then I had a revelation. It was on that dreary train, where I had had so many fantasies about her. I had a dirty, ill-lit compartment to myself. The seat covers were drably green, and between the scratched mirrors above the seats were ancient photographs of forgotten south-coast towns, like St Leonard’s and aptly named Dymchurch. The train swayed and spoke as though horse-drawn. I tried to read an evening paper, but the shaking and the poor light made it impossible. I glanced up crossly at the dim and grimy bulb, whose mate had surrendered all flicker of life. And under that single grimy bulb I had my illumination.

  Henrietta was not and was never going to be in love with me. I was too young and to callow even to interest her in that way, and besides my appearance was unattractive and my experience nil. It would be quite wrong to distress her by telling her my own feelings—and any declaration might suspend indefinitely the relationship I now so passionately suffered. Instead I must stay silent, trusting that things would go on as they were going as long as possible. As an Englishman I must choose the empirical course; crude continental theories of pure passion, with their preconceived attitudes and empty gestures, their fierce confrontations and studied rhetoric, were alien to me and her. Any crass physical expression of my feeling would burn down the house in which I so lovingly dwelt. And the illumination, my pillar of fire, led me on to see how fortunate I was. Silence would cause me no pain. My physique made few demands upon me. I had no distaste for sexual love, but I clearly had no great drive towards it, either. I could, I knew, control such as I might suffer from. And if I could do so, I must; it was the courtier’s duty.

  I felt extraordinarily happy,’ almost painfully virtuous, as I stepped off the train. I had chosen sublimation. Now, it seems I could hardly have chosen anything else; my experience of love was incomplete in every respect. At seventeen I had felt very strongly for a girl down the road, but that was purely physical and inquisitive. I used to lie awake at night imagining her naked, and trying unsuccessfully to extend the limited repertory of sexual combinations of men and women then known to me. But I didn’t know the girl, I didn’t even know her name, Since then various girls, some nameless, some not, had taken her place in my ageing imagination, and a few genuine impulses of tenderness had moved me towards others. But no grand passion had ever inflamed me before. The thought pleased me: I had been saved for this.

  Art was well known to be the most satisfying, the least destructive form of sublimation there was. So, once established at Charncot, I began to write Henrietta courtly poems, with all the feeling carefully fenced out, I hoped, by the barbed wire of complex forms. She was very fond of gardening, and with the help of Gerard’s Herbal and other books in her father’s splendid library, I evolved elaborate floral conceits; given time, I could have composed a whole grand opera of double meaning. Lawrence and I spent hours reading the French and English poets for models, and then we wrote competitively—sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, rondeaus, ballades. Mine were not mere exercises, like his, but when we gave them to Henrietta for judgment she, of course, did not know this. Once I dared a simple acrostical statement of my love, but I don’t think she noticed it. The plainness of my meaning seemed to shout aloud to me; but as far as the others were concerned, my cryptograms went brilliantly unsuspected.

  And so all went well, went dizzyingly, dazzlingly well. Lawrence found himself able to defeat me in formal argument from time to time, and that was real progress. I saw Henrietta every day, I basked in her presence, I lolled before her like a seal in the sunshine. I rode her horses and I walked her lawns. For three delectable weeks, nothing could go wrong. But then I discovered that though my body was obedient, my mind was brewing contention and revolt. As soon as we started on the play, even before he had arrived, I was crazily jealous of Adam.

  The day Henrietta got the letter asking her to help with the fête, we all fell over ourselves trying to think of a suitable masque for her that we could cast out of the household. We had no idea that she was thinking of a larger company. Then I thought she saw it as simply another excuse for a big party. And then I bitterly accepted that what she really wanted was for Adam to come at any cost. He was due to stay later; she had already seen him as he passed through London; but that was not enough. She insisted on ringing all over Europe to find him—he seemed to be moving from one vanishing countess to another, from Baden-Baden to Biarritz—she had to have him and no one else. I thought he was being deliberately evasive; he was too neatly not in at the right moment, he had too often just left, just yesterday, madame, this morning, signora, five minutes ago, gnadige frau. And when she did find him, he was too non-committal, he postponed and delayed. I’d been struck, seeing him with her in London, by how much Henrietta resented his apparently casual anti-British remarks. Like all Americans, he made much (though no one can ever make too much) of the ingrained slovenliness of British service, of the rudeness and delays, the
drabness and the damp. They were-the same complaints that Henrietta made herself; but coming from him, they made her pink and English. If he hated it so much, she wanted to know, why did he come to England at all? He said he couldn’t think—it was always the same. One hoped for improvement, but there never was any, and this time there was a marked deterioration in the telephone service.

  All this was simply mid-Atlantic small-talk, but it was given an undercurrent, a seriousness I didn’t understand. Then, when it was plain that Adam was deliberately going to be late for the play, when Lawrence was becoming intolerable with his demands on time, patience and histrionic talent, and my knees were beginning to ache and bleed—then I realised that Adam’s hostility was personal rather than patriotic, that he was trying to keep Henrietta, not England, at a distance. And realising that, I also realised I was no longer in control of myself as much as I’d liked to think. As the house filled up with participating guests—the Van Diemans, Lawrence’s friend from school and the pretty sister Lucy—the whole previous atmosphere of the holidays, the family closeness, disappeared. I began to hate the play. But most of all I resented the person who hadn’t yet come, because I knew that when he did arrive, my place next to Henrietta would be taken; and I had made sacrifices for it; and I prayed that his plane would crash.

  Now Adam had been at Charncot nearly three days, and my jealousy was as swollen and purple as my poor injured knees. Henrietta loved him and hid it from no one; yet no one, strangely, seemed to notice. Howard made no oblique offensive comments, Mrs Van Dieman sniped only at me. Love is supposed to make one blind; but it seemed that I was the only person with my eyes open. And it was hard to keep them open, the way everyone stayed up at nights now. The evening Adam arrived, they were still gossiping and drinking at five, a bright morning streaming through the curtains. My watchfulness dim, I woke at six to find myself abandoned on the sofa. I had smiled doggedly and drunkenly till past dawn, and then I’d been left, a limp bundle on lumpy cushions, while they went to bed. I refused even to consider whether it was separately or together.

  The next morning I went into the town with Henrietta, not because I wanted anything, but because I couldn’t bear to let her out of my sight. I was still half-asleep, and I forgot my rehearsal. Lawrence was unbearably offensive when we returned, but I’d had my small satisfaction for the day—a fifteen minute drive there and back down country roads, with her, alone, and an hour or so of carrying public parcels. I don’t suppose either of us said anything very much. She was wearing dark glasses—she had a hangover. I felt rather sick myself. But it was something to have driven, even in virtual silence, to the town and back again.

  After that, the play took over; or, really, Lawrence did. And Henrietta was so occupied with the logistics of a house full of guests and a rehearsal every five minutes that I don’t think Adam spent any more time with her than I did. Unless, at night—— But I wouldn’t think about that. The fact that he seemed as deprived of her company as I strangely gave me no pleasure. I was in a lunatic position: because I wanted her to be happy and knew she was in love with Adam, I felt I ought to want her to see him as much as possible. I suffered tortures of jealousy when she did see him and agonies of guilt when she didn’t. I must, I think, have come quite near to madness. Instead of attending to Lawrence’s injunctions about the play—he was importunate with injunctions, and I was a bad actor made worse by his importunity—I sat up writing poems, and slipped them under Henrietta’s door, like a troubadour, I thought; more like a child, perhaps. On the few occasions we’d been sent to rehearse together, she’d had pressing household chores to attend to—genuinely, of course—Lawrence had no idea what demands he made on people. So we’d pretended—and she’d gone off to see Mrs Fuller or to ring the butcher, while I’d read a book or written her a poem. This afternoon was the first time for days that we’d sat still in a room together.

  ‘Did you like my last poem?’ I said.

  ‘Mmm?’ She had almost finished sewing, and we would have to rehearse. I was tired of acting her lover, when I was that in real life.

  ‘The sonnet about how the lupin has very long roots, and how they——’

  ‘Oh, that.’ Her tone discouraged further literary talk.

  ‘Then you didn’t like it?’ I could see it on her bedside table, on top of a pile of such niceties.

  She put down the slippers and said, ‘I don’t think you should slip things under doors. Mrs Fuller found your poem this morning and thought it was most peculiar.’

  ‘Did she? I don’t expect she understood it.’

  ‘It was fairly plain, I’d’ve said. They’ve really been getting too plain, your poems, Martin.’ She picked up the trousers again to avoid my eyes.

  ‘I can’t be too plain, can I?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I know it started as a sort of joke. But it doesn’t seem as funny as it used to.’

  ‘It isn’t in the least funny to me.’

  ‘I was afraid of that.’

  ‘Were you really?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any point in going on with this conversation,’ she said, still not looking up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t help it. I’m just terribly jealous. I can hardly bear it.’

  I hadn’t meant to say anything. But there I was, on her bed, without my trousers. My defence is my defences were down.

  ‘Are you really?’ she said. ‘How nice. I am glad. Who are you jealous of?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t have to pretend with me,’ I said. ‘It’s all quite obvious to anyone involved with you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Two red points glowed in her cheeks.

  ‘You do. You just don’t want me to go on about it, do you? All right, then, I won’t.’

  ‘I think it would be best,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t help having fallen in love with you. Anyone would, under the circumstances.’

  ‘You don’t love me, Martin, that’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Of course it’s ridiculous. It’s ludicrous. It’s entirely barmy. And equally of course, you can’t and don’t love me.’

  ‘Oh, but I do,’ she said. ‘I love everybody. You know me.’

  I couldn’t say anything to the feebleness of that.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘if you insist. Let’s have this all out.’

  ‘I don’t insist. I’m sorry I brought it up. I swore not to, honestly. It just—well, it’s always been a bit of an effort keeping it down.’

  ‘Well, now it’s out, let it evaporate,’ she said. ‘That’s often the way. When you think you feel something very deeply and keep it to yourself, you get it all out of proportion.’ She sounded like a lady doctor. ‘I’m very fond of you, and you’re very fond of me, and it’s very nice for both of us that it should be so, but it’s just nonsense to talk about love. Of course you’re not in love with me.’

  ‘I am, though.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, we’ll agree to differ,’ I said. It was surprisingly easy not to go on about it. I really didn’t want to, I found. But I was glad she’d noticed, and that now she definitely knew, and that she didn’t mind all that much, after all, I’d somehow supposed that she would mind.

  ‘All right,’ she said, and smiled at me. I think she thought I’d’ve forgotten about her in three weeks.

  ‘I never imagined I’d be jealous,’ I said. ‘It’s odd, that. I’d worked it all out—how I’d manage and everything, and then Adam ruined it all.’ I just wanted to explain it to her, let her see it from my point of view. I was quite detached about it all myself.

  ‘Adam,’ I said. ‘Does he——?’

  ‘Let’s drop the whole subject, shall we?’

  ‘Why? It’s so interesting.’

  ‘It’s really not your affair,’ she said. And then we both laughed shakily at her poor, unintentional pun.

  ‘Of course it’s my affair,’ I said. ‘Do you think I’d b
e here at all, if it wasn’t? If I had an ounce of commonsense, I’d be working from nine to five in the City, like everyone else in Wimbledon who isn’t a housewife. But I haven’t, and I’m here. So of course it’s my affair.’

  ‘Don’t you like being here?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I haven’t even thought about it. It doesn’t really seem to be anything I have any control over.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very nice,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t have any control over being in the Army, if there was conscription still.’

  ‘I could always desert from the Army. I don’t think I could from here.’

  ‘It’s all very tiresome.’ There was a long pause, then she said, ‘Everyone thinks we’re having an affair, you know.’

  ‘Surely not,’ I said. I was astounded.

  ‘Oh yes. They’re positive about it. Emily Van Dieman strongly disapproves. It’d be much easier, really, if we were, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I’m quite unsuited to you, you know.’

  ‘You are extraordinary sometimes, Martin. I think you must rather enjoy being a hopeless lover.’

  ‘Perhaps. It’s not anything I can control, is it? I can’t control anything very much, actually.’