A Circle of Friends Read online

  Elated at the prospect of free liquor from Howard, I went out for breakfast. On the stairs I met Gina Coleridge. Her hair was dashingly strawberry blonde this morning, and her arms were full of parcels from Bloomingdale’s. I stood aside to let her pass with an old-world courtly bow.

  ‘Hi, there,’ she said as she passed. ‘And how are you today?’

  She was out of sight before I had framed a suitable reply.

  *

  When I reached East 62nd Street that evening, I immediately turned away and began to walk round the block. A compulsively early arriver, I knew from experience that two circuits, with a pause for the shops on Madison Avenue, would bring me to the party nicely on time. The air was cool but not snubbing, and a chemical breeze from New Jersey carried the familiar odour of cheap cigars and hangover faeces dowsed in old, watered Bourbon. It’s a unique smell and doubtless a deadly one if breathed too long. Knowing my lungs would soon be safe among the sweet airs of Wimbledon, I relished it.

  In a small dress-shop called Jayne’s a middle-aged woman, her glasses bouncing from a ribbon round her neck, was helping an equally middle-aged man with a grey face and a still greyer T-shirt to remove the dresses from seven foolishly smiling dummies. Silent behind the plate-glass, they seemed to be performing a ritual rape. It was April, season of such things. After a while the woman noticed me watching and gave me a wide, white, dental smile as foolish as one of her wax-work virgin’s. Appalled, I continued round the block to a tobacconist’s. I did not like the taste (especially the aftertaste) of tobacco, but a cigarette could cover a multitude of verbal hesitations. One could suck in slowly, blow out through the nostrils, essay a smoke-ring, cough, light and stub, all without having to say a word. People often said they smoked at parties to have something to do with their hands; I smoked to have something to fill the terrible silence of my mouth, the clownish social gape of my conversation.

  Back on Madison, an obliging bank informed me that the time was nine thirty-seven and the temperature fifty-one degrees. I decided on one more turn before the party and walked rapidly north, east, south and west again to find the time now a suitable nine forty-one and the temperature still holding to a comfortable fifty-one.

  A uniformed Negro stood in the lobby of Howard’s apartment-house, feeling delicately among his teeth with a pink toothpick.

  ‘A nice evening,’ I said, as I waited for the elevator.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Small-talk, as usual, exhausted, I stared at my feet. My shoes were irretrievably dirty. Perhaps, I suddenly wondered, it had been my slovenly dress rather than the sloppy manipulation of the slide-rule that had lost me my job. As the lift rose, I rubbed each shoe vigorously against its neighbour’s trouser-leg, then carefully dusted the trousers with my hands and wiped the hands on my handkerchief. They remained grubby, but Howard never shook hands so it wouldn’t matter. Not that his informality wasn’t rigorously groomed. His guest-list was a chronic kaleidoscope, throwing up endless new combinations of strange faces. Once every six weeks I would be invited to feel like an old element in a new salad, to be mixed, tossed and tasted by a fastidious cook. I never felt Howard asked people simply because he liked them.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Come on in.’

  The usual cigarette dangled from his mouth and disappeared with him behind the door as he stood aside for me. His brief hall was in semi-darkness, and I strained without success, as always, to decipher the single small picture high up on the wall. It looked like a drawing or engraving of classical figures gambolling, or perhaps lunching, on the grass.

  ‘You do know the Grigsons, don’t you?’ said Howard over his shoulder, leading me towards the living-room.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you did.’ He looked briefly back at me, as though to make sure I was suitable, seemed satisfied and went on in.

  His living-room was tall and long, with a big marble fireplace which he said he’d bought from a New England mansion which was being torn down to make room for an Expressway. Within its gleaming, salvaged flanks there burned a small wood fire, Leaning on the chimney and looking at herself in the glass above it was a woman in her late thirties with rather coarse red hair and a dark green dress which barely missed clashing with it.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘I’m squeezing a spot.’

  Howard smiled crookedly down at his white carpet, then pushed me towards two men. ‘This is Martin Bannister. I don’t think you know Freddy Grigson. Or Michael Salvesen. That,’ he added, squinting at the woman with red hair, ‘is Henrietta Grigson.’

  ‘I said for you not to look at me’ All eyes were on her as she caught the spot between her thumb-nails and squeezed. ‘There!’ She took a piece of tissue-paper from her handbag and wiped her nails, then the spot.

  ‘Jesus, Henrietta,’ said her husband, ‘can’t you do that in the bathroom?’ His name was vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t think why.

  ‘This mirror’s better,’ said Henrietta. Her toilet completed, she turned and smiled at me. ‘Hallo. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Martin Bannister.’

  ‘How nice.’

  She had, despite the small blemish by her left nostril where the spot had been, a bright, English complexion, with red cheeks and a healthily creamy forehead. She showed a lot of gum when she smiled, as she was doing now. Her hair was thickly disobedient, busy destroying what looked like that morning’s coiffure in a riot of self-expression.

  ‘Let me fix you a drink,’ said Howard, sidling towards a table laid out with bottles and glasses. ‘What’ll you have?’

  ‘Bourbon, please.’

  ‘And for me,’ said Henrietta, handing her glass.

  ‘Can’t you wait till you’re asked?’ said Freddy. ‘I thought the English were supposed to be so polite.’

  He was short and beefy, his arms hanging uncomfortably inside the sleeves of his suit, as though they were brooding on some colossal trial of strength. His hair was short and black, and a permanent scowl seemed to have settled on his forehead, beetling his eyebrows over his brown eyes.

  Henrietta turned away from him with a deliberate air of boredom. ‘And what do you do?’

  Her accent was very British, Freddy’s the mild, almost mid-Atlantic, emphasis of New England.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I did have a job till quite recently, but——’

  ‘But it’s none of your business, Henrietta,’ said Freddy.

  If there was one thing which made me reach for my conversational cigarettes it was being caught in the malevolent cross-fire of strangers’ domestic broils. I succeeded in failing to light three successive matches before Salvesen unkindly offered me his lighter.

  ‘Did you quit or were you fired?’ he asked, as I sucked in smoke.

  Choking, I said I’d been fired.

  ‘Well done,’ said Henrietta.

  Salvesen, a fortyish man with close-cropped grey hair in the manner of a Mid-Western college professor, laughed.

  Freddy scowled. ‘Listen to the British leisure-class, everyone.’

  ‘Now, Freddy,’ said Salvesen, ‘you’re a director, you don’t have to play the roles yourself.’

  Freddy scowled more deeply as I realised why I had heard of him. He had run a small off-Broadway theatre for several seasons, presenting leftist plays with critical, but no popular success. He had tried to present himself, too, as the American interpreter of the British ‘angry’ playwrights of the fifties, but there were other claimants in the field, and his interpretations were rarely staged.

  ‘What were you doing that you got fired from?’ said Henrietta.

  I explained.

  ‘Oh, then you were quite right to leave.’

  Salvesen said, ‘Now come on, sweetie, that’s not how good capitalists talk.’

  She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Money is dull.’

  ‘Nothing is dull that’s unpredictable.’

  ‘It’s time you had a little socialism in America and made it a li
ttle more predictable, then. You could start by nationalising the banks.’

  ‘That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said this evening,’ said Freddy.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you two have found something to agree about,’ said Howard. He introduced a blonde girl called Sally Hinkle, who looked astonishingly like the one who’d snatched her brassiere from my prurient gaze that morning. Henrietta didn’t seem very pleased to see her, but Freddy grabbed her arm and took her over to the drinks.

  ‘You don’t want to take what Freddy has to say about politics too seriously,’ said Salvesen to me, as though anxious I shouldn’t get a wrong impression. ‘He’s never got over the fact that Joe McCarthy neglected to investigate him.’

  Henrietta blushed. ‘That’s terribly unfair.’

  ‘Maybe a little.’

  She turned pointedly to me. ‘Are you thinking of getting another job here?’

  ‘No. I’m about to go home.’

  ‘Oh, but why? How long have you been here?’

  ‘Since last August.’

  ‘And have you been outside New York at all?’

  ‘Only for week-ends. Washington, Boston, that sort of trip.’

  ‘Then you should move west and stay somewhere else. New York isn’t America.’

  ‘I’ll say it isn’t,’ said Salvesen. ‘And believe me, the rest of America isn’t New York.’

  Henrietta still wasn’t talking to him. ‘What are you going to do when you get back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must have some idea, surely?’ said Salvesen. He looked even more like a professor, a disapproving one.

  ‘I don’t honestly think I’m very suited to anything.’

  ‘How nice,’ said Henrietta. ‘Nor am I.’

  ‘Now come on, come on. You have great capacities. You’re a major cook, for one thing.’

  ‘It would be nice to have a restaurant.’ She looked suddenly over her shoulder at Freddy and Sally, then quickly back. ‘Where do you live in England?’

  ‘London. The suburbs.’

  Salvesen, who seemed quite worried about me, said, ‘What did you do before you came here?’

  ‘I worked in advertising. I have a degree in English, you see.’

  Henrietta laughed. ‘And were you fired from that, too?’

  ‘No, I resigned. It was so depressing.’

  ‘Quite right. It must be awful. Absolutely awful.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Salvesen, ‘you Britishers use the words “awful”, and “terribly”, and “nice” just much too much?’

  Henrietta waved him aside. ‘Are you interested in the theatre?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Then Freddy can’t offer you a job and we can be friends.’

  ‘I don’t think I quite follow you.’

  ‘Oh, everyone’s always trying to get into the theatre—and they try to approach Freddy through me. I’m glad you’re not doing that.’ She smiled warmly at me. ‘How terribly, awfully nice.’

  Salvesen groaned.

  *

  My policy at parties was always to hover on the edge of the group whose conversation was most animated. I could thus appreciate what was going on without having to contribute to it. That evening I found myself always on the edge of the group round Henrietta, for she was strikingly the most amusing person there. It wasn’t that she said very much herself, rather that the most amusing people gravitated to her. Perhaps it was simply that people seemed more amusing than they actually were when she was listening to them. Her laugh, higher-pitched even than my own, was quick and kind, however shredded the reputations in the air. It was agreeable just to be in earshot of it.

  At one moment, though, I was trapped in a corner with Sally, who proved to be a very languid instructor in what sounded like Therapeutic Political Science at a Long Island Junior College, and a tiny woman called Mrs Van Dieman. Mrs Van Dieman, a widow (as she explained) of some three years’ standing, barely came up to my nipples, and I was a modest five foot seven and a half in my shoes. She had blue hair, shading to mauve, an enormous black handbag and a vicious Sealyham bitch called Persephone, or Percy for short. Percy was stunted both in mind and body and I had met her before and instantly disliked her. Now she lay in a chair and yapped for canapes. Mrs Van Dieman absently fed her cocktail olives while she lectured us on the creature’s ear diseases, which had been many and smelly. There was, too, an uningratiating history of incontinence.

  Sally soon edged away, smiling, like a free particle attaching itself to a more agreeable atom, and I was left by myself to puntuate Mrs Van Dieman’s veterinary flow with the approved exclamations of pleasure and sympathy. I was proficient at these exclamations, having majored socially in blue hair and corners, but I did not care for dogs, and my attention slipped to Henrietta’s group, only three or four quick paces away.

  Mrs Van Dieman observed this and plucked my sleeve. She went in for a great deal of minuscule jewellery—tiny rings on her pencil-slim fingers, cigarette-holders made of gold thread, cameos so small you would have needed a microscope to distinguish their subjects. She even carried round her own ash-tray, a minute mother-of-pear pill-box.

  Now she had put one of her specially thin cigarettes into what looked like the frame of a dwarf’s quizzing-glass and was asking me to light it. I fumbled leisurely and produced the empty book of matches which I always carried to escape from such corners.

  ‘I’m so sorry—I’ll go and find one for you.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said, restraining me as I was about to break away, ‘I have a lighter.’ She opened the vast bag, delved briefly and came up with a gold bottle-top. She shook it vigorously, and a suitably diminutive flame appeared in one of its indentations. Just as she lit her cigarette with the air of a conjuror completing a particularly dumbfounding trick, someone jogged her elbow from behind. The light flew from her hand to the chair, where Percy promptly ate it.

  Mrs Van Dieman shrieked tinily and seized the animal by its hind-legs to shake it. Percy hiccoughed, then bit her.

  There was a snort of laughter from behind me and Adam Livingstone gripped my arm.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he said, gasping, ‘did you see it? Oh my God, it was superb!’

  Needing support for his own hysteria, he pulled me away from that developing round the chair. ‘Oh, it was too good, it was just too much! Did you ever see anything like it?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Do you think she’d do it again?’ he said, letting me go and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘For the cameras? It would have been too awful if I’d missed it. I simply have to tell Henrietta. She’ll be furious she wasn’t there.’

  Adam Livingstone was a tall thin man with a long nose which seemed to peck at the people he was talking to. Born in New Mexico, he affected mildly Western clothes and provincial ignorance, though he had lived in New York for at least twenty years. He was in his early forties, a virtually non-contributing editor to an upper-middle-brow literary magazine and he lived on Morningside Heights, way up on the West Side. Tonight he wore a black string-tie and a dark blue velvet jacket.

  He pushed his way to Henrietta and told her what had happened.

  ‘You mean Percy finally bit her?’ said Henrietta, her face lighting up. ‘How wonderful!’

  We all looked at the scene by the chair. Mrs Van Dieman was agitatedly stroking Percy whose fluffy white hair was lightly flecked with her owner’s blood. Percy had sicked the lighter up on the cushions, along with some other, less valuable things.

  ‘Martin did it,’ said Adam. ‘I saw him. He deliberately jogged her elbow.’

  ‘Did you really?’

  ‘No. I don’t know who it——’

  ‘Of course you did,’ said Adam. ‘It was the neatest trick of the year.’

  ‘Oh, I do wish I’d seen it,’ said Henrietta, pouting. ‘I always miss things.’

  ‘That is the biggest lie of the season. I don’t know anyone round whom more extraordin
ary things happen.’ He turned to me. ‘By the way, do you know each other?’

  ‘Er, yes,’ I said.

  ‘Of course we do,’ said Henrietta. ‘We’ve known each other for hours.’

  ‘Have you heard what happened when we were in Macy’s the other day, buying bath-towels?’

  ‘Shush,’ said Henrietta, smiling but shaking her head.

  ‘Shush yourself. We were having a big argument about whether red or orange would go better with my new bathroom—have you ever been to my apartment? You must come. Anyway, we suddenly saw a little old lady from the Salvation Army stuffing copies of War Cry, all folded up very neat and small, into the pillow-slips.’

  ‘It’s true. She really was.’

  ‘Let me tell this story. We watched her for a few minutes—well, about half a minute, I suppose—and then she saw us and scuttled off to the elevator as though the Hound of Heaven was baying in her tracks.’

  ‘It’s a very old idea,’ said Howard, who had sidled over from Mrs Van Dieman. ‘The message seeps through your sleep. It’s in Brave New World.’

  ‘Exactly what I said,’ said Henrietta. ‘But you don’t expect the Salvation Army to have nuclear-warheads on its rockets, do you?’

  ‘Will you all shush?’ said Adam. ‘I haven’t finished yet. Well, as if that wasn’t enough, Henrietta called over an assistant and complained that there weren’t any War Cries in the bath-towels, and why weren’t there?’

  ‘We had had rather a good lunch, it’s true,’ said Henrietta.

  ‘Can you imagine? There was chaos—the assistant went white and called the floor manager, and the floor manager called the house detective, and I don’t know who wasn’t there, Mr Macy himself, I expect. And as a result of all this, Henrietta got the bath-towels at a discount. Isn’t it just too much? I think the floor manager would have paid us to take them away if we’d stayed another five minutes.’

  ‘No, I think we timed it about right,’ said Henrietta. ‘He was beginning to go white at the nostrils.’

  ‘It sounds an unnecessarily complicated way of getting a discount,’ said Howard. ‘And besides, one simply doesn’t buy one’s towels at Macy’s.’ He sidled back towards Mrs Van Dieman.