A Circle of Friends Read online

  ‘I’m really too astonished to comment.’

  ‘I know it’s a bit sudden. But you’re going away so soon, and honestly, you’re the first good thing that’s happened to Lawrence since—well, since he started on this adolescent tediousness.’

  I sat in silence, dazed at the prospect.

  ‘You can always go away if you don’t like it, of course, or if it all seems hopeless. But we’re desperate, really we are. We’d be awfully grateful if you’d come.’

  We were sitting side by side, which made it easy for me to avoid her gaze. Besides, I was still blushing down into the remains of my hamburger.

  ‘I’ll give you fifteen pounds a week,’ she said.

  ‘Good heavens! I mean, you don’t have to——’

  ‘Oh, but of course. Only don’t tell Freddy.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t think he’d like the idea.’

  ‘But you said “we” just now.’ I forced myself to look at her.

  ‘Well, he’ll be grateful, too, afterwards.’ She was blushing a little herself now. ‘It’s all a bit complicated. He likes you—Freddy, I mean—you don’t have to worry about that. It’s just that he doesn’t think Lawrence deserves to go to Cambridge if he can’t get there under his own steam. He’s rather Puritanical in some ways. Or perhaps it’s just American. But I feel that if Lawrence is—well, like he is—it’s because of emotional mix-ups, and us living in too many places at once, and all that’s our fault, so we should try and help him. You see?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Good.’ She sighed with relief. ‘Don’t say anything now. Think about it.’

  I knew I would think about it, and also what my decision, wrested from sleepless nights, would be.

  ‘I wish Adam were here. It’s a bore the way he pretends to work during the mornings. He doesn’t at all, really. He just sits there gossiping.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not much of a shopper. I suppose I’d be better if I had a house of my own.’

  ‘Can you face another hour? I want to get Lawrence some new shirts from Ohrbach’s.’

  ‘Men’s clothes, now, I’m quite good at. I wear them, you see. I’m really very self-centred.’

  We got off our stools and stood facing each other.

  ‘Not a word to Freddy, mind,’ said Henrietta.

  ‘All right.’

  We went out into the snarl of Lexington Avenue. It was really quite hot. The street was almost as airless as Bloomingdale’s had been. Manhattan was a vast department store, and there was nothing I wanted to buy. It was probably because I didn’t have any money, I decided.

  *

  The night before I left Freddy and Henrietta gave me a farewell party.

  ‘It’s really too odd,’ said Henrietta, ‘we’ve only known you three weeks, and here we are saying goodbye to you as though you were our oldest and dearest friend.’

  ‘It’s possible to be young and dear,’ said Adam. ‘Don’t make the poor man feel it’s all a mistake.’

  ‘The younger the dearer, usually,’ said Howard, the cigarette dipping to signal his pleasure at his own joke.

  ‘All right, fellas,’ said Freddy. He was carrying a jug of martinis. ‘What’s the matter with you all tonight? Why isn’t anyone drinking too much? Here, Martin, have another.’

  Lawrence stood silently behind him, waiting to hand cashews. He ate while he waited.

  ‘Hey, stop that,’ said Freddy. ‘You’re supposed to be handing those round, not guzzling them. Jesus Christ, my children.’

  Lawrence raised his eyebrows at me, and offered me the bowl of nuts. I told him to have mine for me, and he moved away.

  ‘How were the movies?’ said Henrietta to Adam.

  ‘What movies?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, some private ones,’ said Adam. ‘They were all right. The usual thing. They do go on so, though. One of them lasted about three hours, and was just a man eating a banana.’

  ‘It’s been done before,’ I said. ‘Samuel Beckett.’

  ‘It wasn’t quite like that. This man was in drag.’

  ‘What’s drag?’ said Lawrence, returning with the cashews.

  ‘There,’ said Henrietta. ‘Now look what you’ve done.’

  Adam looked very serious and said, ‘It’s a special kind of make-up. Like in a Noh play.’

  Lawrence looked steadily at him and said, ‘Do you want any nuts? If not, I don’t see much point in carrying them around all evening.’

  ‘Had enough yourself?’ said Henrietta.

  ‘What is drag?’

  ‘It’s like in a pantomime,’ said Howard. ‘You know how the principal boy is always a girl, and the ugly sisters are just two crude comedians? Well, it’s like that.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lawrence. ‘I suppose you think I’m too young to know. Honestly, with the things that go on in this household, I can’t believe there’s anything I don’t know already.’

  ‘Touché,’ said Henrietta.

  ‘Oh, my dear boy,’ said Mrs Van Dieman, approaching from behind and taking a small splinter of cashew, ‘you’ll find there’s an awful lot you’ll never learn. Look at me, an old woman, and I don’t understand a half of what’s going on.’

  Lawrence did look at her, then shrugged and walked pointedly away. Mrs. Van Dieman chewed animatedly on her nut.

  ‘How’s Percy?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s here somewhere. I left her under the piano. She likes the pedals, you know.’

  ‘She certainly is a foot-fetishist,’ said Adam. ‘Maybe you should get her some of those little mitten things for cold weather.’

  Mrs Van Dieman looked offended. ‘She already has four pairs. One of them is fur-lined. She will just chew them.’

  It was a small party, and I did not invite my few friends outside Henrietta’s magic circle. They wouldn’t have mixed or matched, I decided, and anyway I hadn’t seen them for some time. Only Howard, Adam, Mrs Van Dieman, Sally and the Grigsons were there. It was rather like a party after a party. We all seemed to know each other too well to have anything much to say. After a while Freddy sat at the piano, slyly kicking Percy from the pedals and accompanied Anne in a brief recital of songs by Hugo Wolf. She had a very thin, pure voice which turned abruptly harsh when she tried to increase the volume. Melancholy pervaded the room.

  I listened with only half an ear, congratulating myself on ending America so much better than I had begun it. Adam, who was sitting in a chair beside me, leaned over during one of the most lugubrious songs and whispered, ‘I’m awfully glad to hear you liked Henrietta’s idea.’

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘About Lawrence. I think you’ll be marvellous for him.’

  ‘Oh. Nothing’s settled, you know. I mean, I may have a proper job by then. It’s quite a long way off—a whole summer away, really.’

  He likes you so much. You’re the only person he feels he can really talk to.’

  I shrugged, embarrassed. Lawrence and I had had no proper conversation since the evening he’d told me about Jack the Ripper. He did make eyebrow movements at me, it was true, but these were about as communicative as my long optical exchanges with the now neglected thar.

  ‘Do you know the thar in Central Park Zoo?’ I said.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The thar. It comes from the Himalayas. It’s a sort of goat thing.’

  ‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

  ‘Nobody ever has. It’s so sad for it.’

  ‘How many legs does it have?’

  ‘Four, I think. I’ve only ever seen its head and neck.’

  Adam looked at me as if I’d just told him the most intimate secrets of my life. ‘What a strange world you must have lived in,’ he said at last. ‘Isn’t it nicer now you know real people like Henrietta, instead of thars?’

  ‘Oh, much. Infinitely.’

  ‘She’s the most wonderful woman in the world in some ways,’ he said. ‘And don’t believe a word anyone ever says otherwise.�
��

  He sat back in his corner of the sofa, gave me an admonitory nod, and listened to Anne.

  Later, after we’d argued for twenty minutes about where to have dinner and decided to have another drink first anyway, Howard came up to me and said, ‘I do hope it’s all going to be all right.’

  Knowing he meant the opposite, but not what he was talking about, I smiled politely.

  ‘I feel responsible for you, you see,’ said Howard, his smile sliding away towards the middle of the room. ‘After all, I introduced you. It was one of my most successful coups.’

  ‘All arranged, was it? Then why didn’t you introduce us earlier?’

  ‘No, no. I don’t plan things. People get me all wrong. I just thought you’d like each other. And you did. I only want people to do what they like. I’m really very straightforward.’

  ‘It’s your contact lenses. No one can see what’s going on in your eyes.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, taking his cigarette out of his mouth and grinning, ‘so you’d noticed. Clever Martin.’ And he sidled away.

  I watched him go, wondering what, if anything, to believe. He should have been—he was—a pair of ragged claws, a sinister Prufrock, continually revising his friends.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said to Freddy, who was sitting a few feet away, absorbed in mining fool’s gold from one of his ears, ‘why is Howard so creepy?’

  ‘Howard? Creepy?’ He took his finger from the ear and examined it. Apparently satisfied he wiped his nail on the chair-cover. ‘Howard’s just a joke. You’re supposed to laugh at him. He’s the clown around town.’ Pleased with the phrase, he repeated it. ‘Hey, Howard. You’re just the clown around town, you know that?’

  Howard’s thick lips trembled on a smile, then thought better of it.

  We all went out to dinner and drank a lot more, and by midnight I had to be carried to bed. In the hallway of my apartment-house, Tom Margierson or Ed Schneider was putting out his garbage.

  ‘Good grief,’ said Adam, who was carrying my legs, ‘I didn’t know you lived in the same building as this man. Hi, Tom, did you enjoy the movies?’

  ‘They were OK,’ he said. ‘Do you want a hand?’

  ‘No, we can manage.’

  Just before I passed out, after Adam and Freddy had gone, I had a moment of startled sobriety. After all those months I’d had a chance to discover which was Schneider and which was Margierson, and I’d been too drunk to open my eyes and see. I slept with chagrin, woke with crapula, and by mid-afternoon was out of sight of America, being thoroughly sick.

  Part Two

  ‘Hi, Larry,’ he said. ‘My, don’t we look sulky.’

  I picked up his suitcase, curtly. I had reason to be curt. He was three days late. I was also curt because I was so angry I didn’t know what I might not say. Also I very much disliked being called ‘Larry’.

  ‘How’s the play going?’ said Adam.

  ‘Extremely badly.’

  ‘Oh Lord, why?’

  ‘Because it’s impossible to have proper rehearsals if half the actors aren’t there. I should have thought that was obvious.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it if I had the first opportunity in my life to spend a week-end with a real Roman princess, could I?’

  ‘You could have refused the invitation. Or at the least you could have postponed it. You seem to have felt free enough to postpone your visit here.’

  ‘Well, if that’s how you’re going to be, I think I’ll go right back to Italy, thank you.’

  I thought about this for a moment. If I played Grizzle, I could redistribute the small parts easily enough. Perhaps it would be better if he didn’t stay.

  I stopped by the station exit and waited for him to find his ticket. ‘It’s up to you,’ I said.

  He took me by the arm, which I very much disliked, and said, ‘Oh, come on, let’s not take it all quite so hard, shall we?’

  I shook his arm off and went to the car. I put his suitcase in the back seat and got in. He looked worried.

  ‘I didn’t know you could drive.’

  ‘Well you do now,’ I said, starting the engine. I’d passed my test at the beginning of the holidays. I felt as though I’d been driving all my life.

  The reverse gear was a bit sticky, as usual, and Adam fidgeted nervously while I yanked at it. When we were on the road, he said, ‘I’m very sorry if I’ve caused you a lot of trouble.’

  I shrugged. He had practically driven me mad, that was all. It was quite inexcusable behaviour and there was no point in denying it. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d’ve given the part to someone else a week earlier. But she was so sure he was typecast for it.

  ‘Nice country,’ he said a few minutes later.

  ‘These hills are called the Cotswolds,’ I said. I felt I had made it clear enough that he’d behaved extremely badly. I’d met him myself because I didn’t trust anyone else to give him the necessary jolt. ‘All the streams round here run into the Thames. They have trout in them. Until the industrial revolution this was a big sheep area, and very rich. Then everything went to Yorkshire. I can’t remember why. Coal, I think. Since then it’s been pretty much a backwater.’ Americans were always pleased to get a brief social history of the area from a local inhabitant. The village church and an afternoon in Chipping Camden usually reduced their week-ends to orgies of pretentious posturing about their English ancestors. I hated all that.

  ‘Quite the historian,’ said Adam. Of course, he was a sort of journalist and may have read it all up in advance. He used to write anonymous travel bits for his magazine, which was why he was always in Europe. ‘Who else is staying at Charncot?’

  ‘The Van Diemans—all of them. And——’

  ‘You mean even the kids?’

  ‘No, of course not. Emily, George and Marcia. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘More than enough.’

  ‘And then there’s a school-friend of mine called Tim McCarthy, and his sister, Lucy. That’s all, Oh, and Martin, of course. He’s sort of permanent.’

  ‘How nice. Just like New York.’

  ‘Howard Auchinclos is coming. Or threatening to come. I don’t expect he’ll show up, thank goodness.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have a part in the play?’

  ‘Are you serious? Howard?’

  ‘Well, why do I have to have one, then?’

  ‘It’s her idea, not mine.’

  ‘Who’s “she”?’

  ‘My mother. Who did you think?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure.’ He looked at the scenery for a while. It was a rainy evening, and there was nothing much to see except damp meadows with wet cows standing about in them. ‘Is mine a very long part?’

  ‘None of the parts are very long.’

  ‘I never even heard of the play before. Who did you say wrote it?’

  ‘Henry Fielding. Martin knew about it somehow. It’s very funny. If only it’s done properly.’

  ‘Like father, like son,’ he said. People were always saying that. It was stupid. ‘Is your father here?’

  ‘Not yet. He’s supposed to arrive the day before the play—on Friday.’

  ‘Listen, you’re going to have to fill me in on everything.’ The view apparently no longer interested him. ‘Your mother’s phone call wasn’t exactly explicit. She just said you were doing this play and I had to come. Now, what’s going on?’

  I told him. The roof of the village hall was falling in. A fête was being held to raise money to restore it—though it was of no architectural merit, and in my opinion they would have done much better to pull the whole thing down and start again. When asked to help with the fête, she decided it would be ‘more fun’ to do something ourselves than simply to man a couple of hoop-la stalls. A one-act farce in the hall itself would show our imaginative superiority to the neighbours and save us all from having to bowl for the pig and other horrors. The play we chose was Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb. I was directing it.

  ‘And you’re performi
ng it when—Saturday?’

  ‘Yes.’ We had four days, and the thought made me curt again. We’d relied on having a week to fit in the outsiders, but here was Adam arriving on the Tuesday night before we opened, and he hadn’t even read the play yet.

  ‘You’ll have to learn your lines jolly fast,’ I said.

  ‘I hope there aren’t too many of them. Who am I, and what do I have to do?’

  ‘You’re Lord Grizzle, the Court Chamberlain. You’re in love with the Princess Huncamunca—that’s Mom—and she can’t make up her mind between you and Tom Thumb, who’s Martin, on his knees. Really, she wants you both. There’s a scene when you find she’s gone and married Tom, and you’re furious. All she says is:

  Oh! be not hasty to proclaim my doom!

  My ample heart for more than one has room:

  A maid like me Heaven form’d at least for two.

  I married him, and now I’ll marry you.

  But that only makes you more furious, and you say:

  Ha! dost thou own thy falsehood to my face?

  Think’st thou that I will share thy husband’s place?

  Since to that office one cannot suffice,

  And since you scorn to dine one single dish on,

  Go, get your husband put into commission.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Adam, ‘do you know the whole thing by heart?’

  ‘Pretty well. It’s quite short. And after you’ve gone on about that for some time, you stomp off to raise a revolt, and so there’s a huge battle in Act Three between you and Martin.’

  ‘Act Three? I thought you said this was a one-act farce.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just the way Fielding wrote it—it’s part of the send-up. It’s a parody of eighteenth-century poetic tragedy, you see.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do. How cultured do you have to be to appreciate the finer points?’

  ‘We’ve cut the bits we can’t understand,’ I said. ‘We’ve thrashed the whole thing out pretty thoroughly, Martin and I. It’s a great nuisance you weren’t here.’

  ‘And is that all? I mean, is the plot just your mother, Martin and me?’