A Circle of Friends Read online

  ‘Christ, it’s cold! It’s unbelievable! It’s marvellous!’

  I slipped in from a rock, the first shock of the water completely numbing me, so much so that I forgot to swim and immediately sank. The pool was deeper than it looked. By the time I had automatic reflexes working I could feel just how cold it was. I crawled splashily over towards Adam, the threshing of legs helping a little. As I reached him, his face went blank with shock.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said, thinking the water was too cold for him. Then I saw that he was looking over my shoulder at something.

  Henrietta was standing on a rock, preparing to dive. She was stark naked. She had once had a goodish figure, I thought, the cold making me see everything in an aggressively detached way, but she could lose some weight around the hips. It wasn’t for several moments that I was startled by her nakedness. By that time she had swum over to us, letting out little yelps of horror at the iciness of the water.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it absolutely beastly? We must be quite mad.’

  As she trod water, her breasts seemed to swim up and down, independent of her body. But it was too cold to gape, or even to talk much, so we swam three times across the pool, then got out. It wasn’t as easy as getting in, and Adam and I had to help Henrietta pull herself up on the rock. I had never seen a naked woman before, except in strip-shows, and they didn’t count. Now I saw everything, but with this curious arctic detachment, my teeth chattering as I gawked.

  ‘What a very eighteen-century scene,’ said a voice from the other side of the pool. Howard’s. ‘Really quite charming.’

  ‘Help!’ said Henrietta and fled behind her tree.

  ‘You bastard,’ said Adam. ‘What the hell do you mean by sneaking up on us like this? You’re a snooper, a voyeur.’

  ‘I heard strange cries, and didn’t want to miss anyone drowning, did I?’

  ‘You’re a crud,’ said Adam.

  He stared furiously across the pool at Howard, his hands on his hips, his whole body shaking with cold. Howard grinned and waved his hand at us as he turned away.

  ‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ he said.

  Following Adam back to our clothes I saw that his underpants had turned transparent in the water. I looked quickly down at my own and scampered behind the bushes. As we dried ourselves on Mrs Van Dieman’s absurd towels, Adam saw me looking at him. He was undemocratically well endowed.

  ‘Size has nothing to do with it,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve always worried.’

  ‘You worry too much.’

  When we got back to Mrs Van Dieman’s, Howard was sitting in his rocking-chair, drinking tea.

  ‘Did you all have fun?’ he said.

  Adam stuck his tongue out at him and went on into the house with Henrietta, who only said, ‘That was a dirty trick and you know it.’

  Howard smiled, thoroughly pleased with himself.

  *

  Anne Grigson didn’t like me. She didn’t like anyone very much. There was a girl in her class who was just about all right, and there was a biology teacher who was just great, but she got along very well without the rest of the world, thank you. ‘Bannister,’ she said to me one evening, ‘why do you always look so pleased with things?’ I said I didn’t know. She gave me a one-eyed wither from behind her lock of hair and left the room.

  It was very affected of her to call me ‘Bannister’. People in America never used surnames. I asked Lawrence why his sister had taken so against me.

  ‘Has she?’ he said. He was sitting at the desk in the living-room, doing some holiday work.

  ‘Yes. She calls me Bannister.’

  ‘Oh, that. I wouldn’t pay any attention. She’s just going through some phase girls have.’

  Freddy was taking a bath and Henrietta was late back from the hairdresser’s. We were all going to go out to dinner, then down to the Village to hear a new folk-singer.

  ‘She doesn’t call anyone else by his surname.’

  ‘Then it’s probably a compliment. Did you ever do Latin?’

  ‘Years ago. What’s the problem?’

  ‘Cicero. Where we have to do one of the world’s great bores when there are two or three Latin writers actually worth reading, I simply do not understand.’

  ‘I seem to remember he was a little long-winded.’

  ‘Long-winded! He never drew breath.’

  ‘Who else do you rank among the world’s great bores?’

  ‘Racine is number one,’ said Lawrence promptly. ‘Cicero’s second. Third? Probably Shakespeare.’

  ‘Do you really not like him? Or are you just being trying?’

  ‘Of course I don’t like him. What do you mean, am I just being trying?’

  ‘You often are. When you put your mind to it.’

  He scowled at me, giving his face some character.

  ‘Aren’t you?’ I said. ‘You’re really quite good at it when you’re on form.’

  The scowl deepened, then he grinned. ‘I suppose I am.’

  ‘You’ll be up there with Racine and Cicero if you’re not careful. What Shakespeare play are you doing?’

  ‘Boring old King Lear.’

  ‘Now come on,’ I said. ‘If you think that’s boring, you must be boring yourself, because——’

  ‘Oh, I know, I know. Of course it’s good and everything, but if you had to do it in school with our English master, you’d find it dull, too.’

  ‘I bet my English master was quite as bad as yours. But no English master, however revolting, can ruin a play like Lear. Not if you read it properly and ignore the master’s fatuousness.’

  ‘Fatuous is just what he is,’ said Lawrence. He had turned away from the desk now, and was tilting the chair back against it. ‘He makes us read it aloud in class and then takes all the best parts for himself. No one else ever gets a chance to be Lear, for instance. And he reads so badly—he doesn’t have any sense of the rhythm or anything. And then he spends all the time trying to shock us with the dirty bits. You know—Lear’s full of them. He’s always picking on the youngest boys to ask them if they know what a whore is. That sort of thing. He’s the most fatuous man I know.’

  ‘But if he’s so stupid, you’re surely intelligent enough to pay no attention, aren’t you?’

  ‘He sets the exams, though, and marks them. I bet I got nought.’

  ‘Why? What did you say?’

  ‘Oh, well, I’d been reading something about all the stuff there is about nature and natural and unnatural and so on, and I wrote about that. Edmund and Edgar. All that tripe.’

  ‘Why do you call it tripe? It’s one of the main themes of the play, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, but Jack the Ripper didn’t say anything about it in class, and unless you vomit up all the crap he’s officially dished out he marks you down.’

  ‘I don’t expect he will, really, will he?’

  ‘He’s perfectly capable of it.’

  ‘Why’s he called Jack the Ripper?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was terribly brave in the war or something —wiped out whole battalions of Germans single-handed. He’s always telling us how we don’t know about life, how we’re not men till we’ve had a tart and been in a fight. Honestly, he’s absolutely ghastly. He’s always on about sex. About how we’d all have had a hundred girls by now if we’d been at a grammar-school. I suppose he must be impotent.’

  I laughed.

  ‘He’s got the most awful wife. She’s about eight feet tall and never wears any make-up and pinches people’s arses all the time. They let her teach French to the new boys, you see. She’s called General de Gaulle. They don’t have any children. Being married to her would be enough to make anyone impotent.’

  ‘Yours sounds a terrible school.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not too bad, really. Some of the other boys are reasonably intelligent. You can have a serious conversation, I mean, so long as the masters don’t try to butt in.’

  ‘You must be rather hard t
o teach.’

  ‘Maybe. I’m not like this at school, usually.’ He balanced himself delicately on the chair, leaning forward with his chin in his hands. ‘I’m quite amenable to discipline, really.’

  ‘One wouldn’t have guessed it.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ He gazed at the carpet. The room was getting dark. ‘I loathe New York,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘I’m just beginning to like it.’

  ‘I like the country. I hate towns. In England we have ponies and can ride all over the place. It’s not riding to trot round Central Park, is it?’

  ‘I can’t say. I’ve never done it.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t, believe me. Half the time you think some Puerto Rican’s going to leap out of the bushes and hold you up. Or some drug-addict’s going to shoot you out of the saddle.’

  ‘You make it sound rather exciting—like a Western.’

  ‘In Central Park? Are you crazy?’

  ‘Well, an Eastern, then.’

  ‘Have you ever been to the West?’

  ‘No. I wish I had.’

  ‘You must go. It’s marvellous. We went there one summer, when Pop couldn’t make it to England. Just for three weeks, driving about, you know. It was much better than the movies. The Grand Canyon—it’s just incredible. And there are hundreds of other places like that, too.’

  ‘It’s not much like your part of England, though, is it?’

  ‘No. But you can ride properly there. We stayed on a dude ranch for a few days. Everyone’s always saying how awful dude ranches are, but this was just super. You could vanish into the mountains and not see or smell or hear a car for months. I’d like to go there again. Often. You can be really alone and think about things.’

  ‘Do you like to think about things?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t you?’

  ‘Not much. I get depressed. I always seem to end up thinking about myself and how dull I am and everything.’

  ‘You’re not dull,’ said Lawrence. He seemed astonished. ‘What an extraordinary thing to say.’

  ‘I lead an interminably dull life.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He lost his balance in the chair and fell back against the desk. ‘Well, who doesn’t? Bloody Cicero.’

  ‘Hey, what’s going on in here?’ Freddy stood in the doorway. ‘Lawrence, don’t you know enough to turn on the lights when it gets dark? Or are you too damned lazy?’ He switched them on himself. Lawrence turned himself quickly round to face the desk. It was a guilty gesture and Freddy pounced on it. ‘Don’t just sit there, draw the curtains.’

  Lawrence got up and went to the window. He stared down at the street.

  ‘What were you two talking about, anyway, here in the dark?’

  ‘Cicero,’ I said.

  ‘Good grief, no wonder you wanted the lights out, Lawrence. Sparing your blushes, huh? Martin, you’re a good man to sit and listen. What are you drinking?’

  ‘Actually, I’m not.’

  ‘Well, have one with me.’ Freddy went to the drink trolley and opened the ice-bucket. ‘Jesus Christ, Lawrence, where’s the ice? You only have one job around here, why don’t you do it?’

  Lawrence pulled the curtains quickly across and said, ‘All right, it’s only just cocktail time.’

  ‘No, I’ll get it,’ said Freddy. He liked to sound martyred. He stalked out with the ice-bucket.

  ‘You see why I hate New York,’ said Lawrence from the window. He adjusted the curtains, then picked up his Cicero and his Latin dictionary and went to his own room.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Henrietta. ‘I do wish Adam were here.’

  We were in Bloomingdale’s, assaying curtain materials. Henrietta was going back to England a few weeks before Freddy. ‘She can’t leave a good thing alone,’ he said. ‘I guess I won’t recognise the place when I get there.’ And Anne said, ‘Mummy, for goodness’ sake, Charncot’s all right as it is.’ Henrietta ignored them.

  My own New York shopping had been confined to eggs, milk, coffee and orange-juice, and I lacked the sensitive fingertips of the true cavaliere servente. To me one piece of cotton felt just like another, and often more like wool. The only decision I’d ever been forced to was between the two neighbourhood supermarkets, in one of which orange-juice would always be two cents cheaper than the other. But how to know which without going to both? It was simpler, ultimately, to eat breakfast at Al’s half-way between them.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Henrietta, ‘if I get those bronze ones for the dining-room, what am I going to do with the sea-green I’ve planned? Lawrence’s room? But he’ll make an awful fuss if he doesn’t get the yellow. Though bronze would go terribly well with the carpet, don’t you think? Especially if the wallpaper turns out right after all.’

  Dumbly, I held the parcels. Adam had never been to Charncot, either, but he had a genius for speculative matching.

  ‘Let’s look at lampshades,’ she said abruptly. ‘Maybe they’ll give me a few ideas. And anyway, let’s not decide anything definite today.’

  ‘We’ve made some decisions already,’ I said, weighed down by them.

  ‘Oh, those. They’re all minor things, they can go anywhere, really.’

  ‘Be sure and come back when you’ve decided, now,’ said the assistant. I was amazed at her unweariedness.

  On the way to the lampshades Henrietta veered into the carpets, where there was a special on Bokharas. She prowled the aisles while I rested on a heap of yellowish wolfskins. Large stores are debilitating, they have the air of knowing the customer will never find quite what he wants. Not wanting anything, I found Bloomingdale’s airless and Kafka-like. When a young man with a tartar-toothed simper asked if he could help me, I said, ‘Oxygen,’ which he took for ‘No’.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, when Henrietta had again decided against decision, ‘but I simply can’t stay here another five minutes.’

  ‘What? You don’t love Bloomingdale’s?’

  ‘It’s not that. I’m weak and hungry.’

  ‘Oh good, you mean it’s lunchtime. Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t really what I meant.’

  ‘Where shall we go?’

  ‘Wherever you like.’

  My lack of money comfortably matched Henrietta’s abundance. I’d seen her slide dollar-bills to Freddy—and Adam—too. Howard said Henrietta had inherited a million and a half dollars from her father, but she said he didn’t understand how to convert pounds to dollars and it was much less than that, and besides, she had a sister-in-law in Petersfield. She was, though, patently rich. Today she decided on a cheap lunch without a drink, saying she was slimming.

  ‘You don’t have to, you know.’

  ‘Of course I do. But I never do it properly, so it’s all hopeless. But if I do skip a drink I feel virtuous.’

  ‘I see.’

  Most of the girls I’d known had been aggressively masculine in their logic; it was probably something they abandoned with their virginities. Henrietta’s particular illogicality was to assume that a cheap meal was necessarily less caloried than an expensive one. She ate a chicken salad sandwich, oozing with mayonnaise, and drank two cokes.

  ‘It’s the lettuce which is so good for you,’ she said, her tongue sweeping up the goo around her lips. ‘I don’t know how you can eat that greasy hamburger. Without tomato sauce, either.’

  ‘My mother always said it was rude to add sauce, even salt, to food. It’s an insult to the chef.’

  ‘You call him a chef?’ she said, looking over at the sweating Puerto Rican by the grill. ‘He’s a short-order cook, and pretty short at that.’ She wiped her fingers on a paper napkin, then tipped up her cardboard mug of coke till the ice jounced against her teeth. ‘Horrible stuff,’ she said.

  The only remarkable feature of the lunch-counter at which we sat was the juke-box. Instead of the usual barrage of pop-songs it played operatic arias. Also you could buy three minutes of silence for a nickel. Today, though, it was out of order. Silence was free.
r />   ‘You know,’ said Henrietta, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘I’m much too exhausted to think.’

  ‘Shush. I think Adam’s right. What are you going to do when you get back to England?’

  ‘Find a job, I suppose. I have excellent qualifications, you know. I only lack fire to be a great success.’

  ‘Couldn’t you put it off for a while?’

  ‘Put what off?’

  ‘Being a success. You see, I’ve been thinking about Lawrence. He’s obviously not going to get into Cambridge unless he works terribly hard in the holidays, and he’s obviously not going to work terribly hard in the holidays unless there’s someone to make him, and Freddy and I are obviously not the right people to make him. So why don’t you come and be his tutor?’

  ‘Me! But I’ve never taught anyone anything!’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. What he needs is someone whom he likes and trusts and who can reach him.’

  ‘I have a horror of becoming a schoolteacher,’ I said. ‘I can’t explain it to you now. But it’s one of the reasons I’m no good at anything else.’

  ‘You won’t be being a schoolteacher. Being a tutor’s being a sort of permanent house-guest.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m one of life’s natural paying guests,’ I said. I was hardly aware of what I was saying. ‘And why me? Lawrence doesn’t seem especially pleased when I drop by of an evening.’

  ‘That’s where you’re quite wrong. He’s always asking whether you’re coming or not. Ever since the evening Freddy caught you talking about Cicero together.’

  ‘You make it sound like a guilty passion,’ I said, but I was blushing with pleasure that anyone, even a schoolboy, found me interesting.

  ‘If you could bear just to spend the summer holidays with us at Charncot, perhaps he’d feel—well, that there was someone he could talk to and everything. I don’t mean that you should sit down with him for eight hours a day in Freddy’s study and work. But if you were there, just around the place, then he wouldn’t feel hemmed in so much by us.’