A Circle of Friends Read online

  ‘I’ll use a false address, then,’ he said impatiently. ‘It doesn’t matter. Really. They don’t count in my life the way you do, and Anne and Lawrence.’

  ‘You don’t even like Anne,’ I said. He was being very exasperating. ‘And I hope my children don’t talk about Freddy and me like that.’

  ‘They’re all right in their own way, my parents,’ he said. ‘We get along. I’ve taken a respectable job on my father’s recommendation. It’ll keep me till all this is over. Maybe for life. Are you going to defend the case or not?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think you’d do best not to, honestly.’

  ‘It does seem so wrong. I mean, not just unfair but actually wrong. After all, we’re not guilty.’

  ‘The means justify the end. That’s what this friend of mine says. He says everyone lies in the divorce courts, but divorce is still a social benefit.’

  ‘I think marriage is better,’ I said. But I agreed to let the case go undefended.

  Martin didn’t understand about marriage—how could he? At dinner, he wanted to talk about Adam and me, but I didn’t. While we were eating, I suddenly realised how much Freddy was spoiling. My friendship with Martin was ruined beyond all hope of repair; seeing him by himself, and feeling pretty disenchanted with everything while I saw him, I realised that Martin just didn’t quite come up to scratch. He was very sweet and nice and even quite clever, but there was something terribly missing in him. I felt very ashamed of myself for feeling that, and made a special point of being kind to him.

  I felt very isolated that autumn. I did see Martin in London from time to time, but I couldn’t ask him down to Charncot, obviously. And I couldn’t really take him round with me, not now that we were linked together as criminals. Although I’d agreed to let people think we had been lovers, I hated the idea of their prying. So we always met alone—we went to the theatre or concerts, or simply had dinner in the flat. I found him more and more inadequate.

  And then Adam arrived. Dear Adam, I was in a sad mess that winter, and he saw it and was his nicest, most appealing self. He set himself out to cheer me up. He didn’t exactly say he’d marry me, of course, but he did change things rather by stating the circumstances under which he wouldn’t marry me. Or at least, he implied them.

  ‘You’ve got to fight this case,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, but we’ve decided it’s much simpler not to.’

  ‘It may be simpler not to, but have you thought of the consequences? You don’t want to marry Martin, do you?’

  ‘No thanks. He’d like to marry me, though.’

  ‘I daresay he would. Now listen. Henrietta, don’t you let his old-fashioned romantic rubbish go to your head. All he wants is to make a gallant sacrifice for you. He’s longing to be falsely accused. I know that type.’

  ‘I thought you liked him.’

  ‘I do, but that doesn’t alter anything I said.’

  ‘Why should I stop him making a sacrifice, if it helps me and he wants to make it?’

  ‘Because it’s you who’ll be sacrificed, dear. Who’s going to marry you when you’ve been divorced for sleeping with someone else? It’ll make you look like the village whore—Huncamunca with a vengeance. You can’t allow that.’

  ‘It hadn’t occurred to me like that, actually.’

  ‘I daresay it hadn’t. But it’s how it’ll occur to everyone else, believe me.’ And he avoided my eye, but I hoped he meant what I thought he did. ‘You’ve got to defend the suit and win. Then you can go to Alabama and get a quiet, unostentatious divorce and your honour will be saved.’

  ‘My honour?’ I said. ‘Really, Adam.’

  I wondered whether I really wanted to marry him. He was old to be single, and old bachelors don’t domesticate. Our affair, brief and wonderful, had been—well, just that. He certainly didn’t just go through the motions. If Freddy had only stayed over in Minneapolis another fortnight, we might have broken then, and I might have had the right co-respondent. And then poor Martin wouldn’t have been bothered, because we’d probably never have met him. However you looked at it, Martin seemed to be the fall guy. Adam was never the fall guy. Perhaps that’s why he was so attractive. I knew perfectly well he’d be a lousy husband. But I couldn’t help it, I wanted him. I was too old to care about whether it was love or not. I just wanted to have him for my own.

  ‘You’re not very kind to Martin,’ I said. ‘Why should he go to all the trouble and expense?’

  ‘Because he’ll be proved innocent at the end, which anyone not so dewy-eyed would be very pleased about.’

  ‘No one ever believes that anyone is innocent in a divorce case. People only want to believe the worst of each other.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I certainly don’t deny that. Count me in with the ordinary folks. We all like scandal. I’ve heard you gossip yourself, haven’t I? But all the same it’s better to have a judge say you’re innocent. I suppose you are innocent, you two?’

  ‘Of course. Can you imagine Martin——?’

  ‘No. No, you’re quite right, it’s unimaginable. Emily Van Dieman’s been saying it’s all true. She is a ghoul, that woman. She says she saw it all along.’

  ‘Martin knew all along that I wanted you,’ I said. Surprise attacks sometimes work.

  Not with Adam, though. ‘Did he now?’ was all he said. ‘What little birdy told him that, I wonder?’

  ‘He’s not a fool,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ said Adam, ‘not the ordinary kind, anyway.’

  I don’t think Adam was ever in love with anyone. It was one of the reasons he was so attractive. I rather despised him with one part of me. And yet I wanted him so badly. It was something Martin could never have understood.

  Martin didn’t seem to mind about defending the case after all. Adam was right, I think; Martin was living in a world where gestures were more real than what lay behind them.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Just as you like. Of course it’s much better for you to clear your name.’ He hesitated, then he went on, ‘I didn’t think you cared much about that, to be honest. But that just shows how little I really understand you. I’d never have suggested not defending it if I’d thought you were worried about your reputation.’

  ‘I’ll pay for your lawyer, of course.’

  ‘You really don’t have to. He’s a friend. He knows I don’t have any money.’

  ‘I got you into this mess, and the least I can do is to get you out of the financial part of it.’

  He blushed. ‘I wish I wasn’t so hopelessly poor. It’s so limiting. There’s so much I’d like to do for you.’

  ‘You’ve done too much already.’

  ‘My friend says we’re bound to win, by the way. He’s been wanting to fight it all along.’

  I didn’t tell him that my lawyer was less confident.

  ‘How was Adam?’ he said.

  ‘He was fine. He was getting people to write about the moral climate of Europe today. I said we could teach him a few things.’

  ‘I expect he knows most of them already,’ said Martin. ‘Except no one ever quite realises how corrupt everyone else is. I’m amazed at what I’ve discovered in the City. Basically, people are so lazy they just don’t want to know things.’

  ‘Perhaps your trip to America did influence you, after all.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. Then he smiled. ‘It changed my whole life, of course.’

  ‘I just hope it’ll turn out to have been for the better,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it was certainly that,’ he said. ‘It’s quite fun in the City—you’d be surprised. But I’m afraid I’ll be sacked when the case comes up. My boss is MRA—terribly keen on cleanness and all that. He’s very strong against immorality.’

  ‘It’s just your luck, isn’t it, to come up against someone like that?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so. I’d say I’ve been incredibly lucky, most of the time. But I’m afraid he’ll say he can’t have anyone in the office who’
s guilty of extra-marital misbehaviour.’

  ‘What a terrible phrase.’

  ‘It doesn’t really say much about it, does it?’ he said. ‘Life’s really much more complicated than that.’

  I didn’t say anything. I felt like someone who’d corrupted an innocent and should have had a millstone put round his neck. Except that I wasn’t sure that Martin could ever really be corrupted.

  His Lordship found a certain vindictiveness in the husband’s attitude towards the wife and the co-respondent, but he was satisfied of the truth of his evidence. He had very carefully considered the matter, and had decided that probability was against the respondent and co-respondent. Much of the evidence of association was capable of an innocent explanation, but this was not.

  It was strange in the court-room. I liked it. We were all there—Freddy and Henrietta and I—and all sitting on different benches facing the judge. It was a newish court-room, with concealed lighting. The judge sat up above us, wise and wigged and patient. I’d got to feel very friendly towards him during the seemingly endless proceedings—he had a nice businessman’s face, and heavy horn-rimmed glasses, as though he should have been on a committee to help boost exports, instead of picking justice out of the sad debris of English marriage-beds. He was very polite, too. He only made one awful joke, about my poems. Otherwise he seemed interested only in hearing the evidence, in deciding whether Henrietta and I were lying or whether Freddy was. After the first day, it all felt very impersonal, as though I was sitting in the living-room at home and watching it all on television, with my mother saying, ‘That one’s the murderer—look at his face,’ and my father saying, ‘What did he say? I missed that.’ I knew we hadn’t committed adultery or anything like it, of course, so the proceedings seemed detached from any actual truth about life. I thought of the millions of false deductions on which our everyday lives are based, the partiality of our witnessing to birth, marriage and death, our lack of science, our humanity. We do our best to discover the truth, we listen to all the available evidence, we hear all points of view; and our judgment is still made in the dark, justice is blind.

  I think the real thing I discovered was that it doesn’t matter. I began to take an outsider’s interest in the verdict. It no longer seemed to involve me. It might have been a case about pilfering at the docks, for all I recognised of the detail. But truth of a kind was going to be reached in the end, and I longed to know what it would be. It wasn’t going to be the truth, because that exists once and once only and can never be exactly recaptured. No, it was going to be a judicial truth, an abstract invention, a human creation, as valuable, really, as a work of art. Morally, anyway, if not aesthetically. I waited for the judge’s summing-up with the impatience of a man in, say, New Zealand, waiting for the English football results to check his pools. Crewe Alexandra and Third Lanark are meaningless noises to him; perhaps he has never seen a game of football; he may not even know how many players there are in each team. And I watched the bobbing of barristers and the usher’s hushing as though they, too, were players in some sport I knew nothing of and whose aims were inscrutable to me.

  And then we got the verdict. It was like seeing my first Cubist painting. I simply couldn’t understand it at first.

  His Lordship was satisfied that adultery had been proved against the respondent and the co-respondent and pronounced a decree nisi on the petition, exercising the court’s discretion in respect of the petitioner’s admitted adultery, with an order that the co-respondent pay the petitioner’s costs. Questions relating to the custody of the children were referred to Chambers.

  Solicitors.—Messrs. Huddleston, Glazebrook & Co; Messrs. Heuffer & Co; Messrs. Dowell, Ashburnham, Rufford & Co.

  Mind you, it all worked out for the best. Freddy and Sally, they’re a lovely couple, just made for each other. She’s so quiet and he’s so full of energy, they match each other like black and white. And they have two little boys now, I forget their names. Freddy’s doing very well. He had to give up his own little theatre, because Henrietta was paying for most of that, so he went commercial, as he called it. He’s had three hits on Broadway in two years, and that’s quite exceptional. Last time I saw him he said he was thinking about taking up a movie offer.

  I haven’t seen Henrietta since that summer they all put on that play down at Charncot. She doesn’t come to New York any more, I guess. She never did marry that young man, and I reckon she was quite right. That would never have worked. I don’t know what happened to him—went back to the sticks, I guess. There wasn’t much to him. But I miss Henrietta. She was always the life and soul of a party. Howard was saying only the other day how dull New York was without her. He’d seen her in England, mind. He goes over there every year. I can’t be bothered to travel any more. I just get out of New York for the summer, to the Cape, but that’s about all. George and Marcia have a summer place up there, and I look after the kids while they go to parties with their friends. I don’t mind missing the parties so much. I’m getting old. I saw Adam Livingstone the other day—he never married. He was looking almost as old as me, I thought. He’d got very grey. He said he hadn’t seen Henrietta in a year or two. He never did care much for England, that young man.

  Part Four

  Loveland, Colorado, is a small, dull town, named for a rail-road engineer, and why anyone should choose to live there rather than in a hundred other mid-western towns it’s hard to judge. Once it lay on the main road from Denver to Laramie, but these days a superhighway streams across the flat plains a mile or two to the east, and except in the holiday months there are few true-lovers’ knots in the traffic of the punningly heart-strung streets. The state of Colorado gives a higher old-age pension than most of its forty-nine peers, and Loveland has its share of the retired just as it has its own radio station and its own small lake. Once a year it makes the national press with the predigested, newsless regularity of Guy Fawkes’ Night in London or St Patrick’s Day in New York, when elaborately conscientious lovers from all over the United States send their St Valentine’s Day cards to be franked by the local postmaster. Otherwise nothing happens except in the summer. Then Loveland becomes the Gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, and Big Thompson Canyon rumbles with the coming and going of car-borne orange tents and over-excited children. In winter, though, nothing suggests the alpine. The town sits on the edge of the plains, the first low jagged ridge of rock across the lake its comfortable backrest as it firmly refuses to know how cold it’s getting up on Long’s Peak. The snow never lasts more than a few days there. Skiers hurry through, of course, onward and upward, and the picture windows dispassionately frame the regular exquisite sunsets over the Rockies, but for all the difference the mountains make to Lovelanders’ lives, their town might be Iowa or Illinois.

  Loveland is easily forgotten. As one drives away, north to Fort Collins or south to Longmont and Boulder, the radio station dwindles into static and the town itself vanishes into the muddle of one’s memory, a few streets of ail-American houses, another placid suburb of nowhere, a nice place to retire to, to live in till you die. It merges into America.

  I remember it now only because of its name. I was there just twice in my life—once going up to Estes Park, and once returning. If it didn’t live up to its name, at least its reputation as a gateway was confirmed. I passed through.

  The divorce made much more scandal than any of us had expected. My footling poems, those carefully disguised riddles and wrapped messages, impenetrable in theory, all too patent in practice, provided the cartoonist with copy for at least three days. A Sunday paper offered me a contract to write one poem on an erotic subject a week for six months. I was lampooned on television, a joke even to those who felt sorry for me. I didn’t mind for myself, but Henrietta, naturally, was not amused, and my parents were prostrate with shame. All Wimbledon, they thought, was sniggering behind its curtains, and they may well have been right. I resigned from my job, straight-faced and red-eared.

  It’s very s
trange to be swept down on by the public. It’s like being a peaceable worm about one’s morning business, suddenly carried off not by a known enemy like a thrush or a blackbird, but by some quiet alien bird escaped from a zoo—an albatross or a vulture, some creature one never suspected of lurking behind the bland grey English skies. I was used to being laughed at—I had patiently listened to mockery all my life. But to be there, on the front page, with a bad picture and the judge’s wise and erroneous conclusions—that was something quite else, like losing one’s balance and clutching for support that isn’t there, like continuing to fall, never touching the merciful ground. It was like, perhaps, being weightless, and the feeling lasted long after the public had dropped us as brutally as it had picked us up. We were suspended in our own ludicrous ‘story’.

  When we did touch earth again, Henrietta was almost more upset about the verdict than I was. She kept saying, ‘But it’s monstrous, it’s quite monstrous.’

  ‘Never mind. At least you’re free.’

  ‘Free! To do what? And who with?’

  ‘You must make up your own rhymes to that,’ I said. ‘I’ve written enough poetry.’

  She looked at me blankly, so I recited the limerick about who does what and to whom. I thought she’d been deliberately quoting it.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ she said. ‘Where do you want to go? We can’t stay here, it’s too awful’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘I thought perhaps people wouldn’t go on about it so much in America.’

  I thought of Howard and imagined how he would be going on about it at that very moment, with wonderful embroidery, with exquisite stump-work. ‘Why not Egypt?’ I said. ‘India? Australia? Japan?’

  ‘There are the children,’ she said. She wasn’t listening to me. She hardly ever did any more. ‘I must be at Charncot for the Christmas holidays, and get through that.’

  ‘Do you want me to help?’

  ‘Good heavens, no.’ I hadn’t supposed she would, but for a brief, enchanted moment I remembered our weeks together before that misbegotten play.