A Circle of Friends Page 9

  She sighed impatiently. ‘She’s eighty. She’s dying, Lawrence. It’s probably their last chance to see her. And she’s asked for them.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘I think she may have left them everything.’

  I said I hoped it would be a lot, in that case, because only a great deal of money would justify the twins’ absence the next day. I left her in the drawing-room, unbosoming herself to Mom. It was quite incredible how many things seemed to gang up to block my efforts to produce something decent. I knew all the others thought I was taking it all too seriously. But it seemed to me there was no point in doing anything unless you did it as well as you could. The trouble was my cast was really all audience. They wanted to be entertained, not work for others’ entertainment. It was jolly hard trying to be an artist.

  As I was going to bed that night, Anne came in in her dressing-gown and said, ‘I don’t think you’re paying enough attention to Lucy.’

  ‘And what business is that of yours?’

  ‘She expects to be looked after, not just ordered about by you, you know.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Anne, can’t you see that I’m practically going out of my mind trying to get this show on the road? I can’t be social as well. Lucy understands that, I’m sure.’

  ‘She doesn’t understand it at all. She told me so. She said she hoped she hadn’t offended you in any way. She likes you very much, but you’re very cold and stand-offish with her. I said you were offended simply that other people existed in the world as well as yourself, and not to worry. But you’ve just got to be nicer to her.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I wondered whether Lucy had sent her or whether she’d come of her own interfering accord. ‘Well, thanks very much for the message. What do you want me to do? Go to her room and rape her?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Lawrence.’

  ‘Well, it certainly sounds like it.’ I knew how girls always got cross when you started being basic and talking about sex. They always seemed to think that necking was an end in itself. I didn’t know a single boy who felt like that. We all thought necking was a great bore, because it stimulated, often in the most embarrassing way, without ever satisfying. The girls always made it quite clear that they weren’t going to satisfy us, whatever complaints we made. And they didn’t let us do very much, even when they pretended to be enjoying the necking enormously. The whole thing was exceedingly tiresome.

  So I said, ‘Look, I’m tired, I’ll try and get round to sparing five minutes for sexual intercourse with Lucy tomorrow some time.’ It had just the effect I’d hoped for. It was always much more effective to say ‘sexual intercourse’ and things like that than to use the four-letter words.

  ‘God, you’re disgusting,’ Anne said. ‘That isn’t what I meant at all. You’re so crude.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Just behave like a civilised human being for a change, that’s all.’

  I snorted, and she went away, banging the door. Not a very civilised exit, I thought. All that talk about sex annoyed me, especially Lucy using Anne as a sort of go-between, if she was doing that. It kept me awake, thinking about it, and I needed all the sleep I could get.

  *

  Howard turned up the next day. I never understood what people saw in him. I thought he was ugly and rather stupid. He was always trying to be very clever by saying things which were all implication and no fact, and half the time he had no idea what he meant himself. You were supposed to see him as a sort of mysterious figure with his finger in every pie and a knowing smile for everyone you’d ever heard of. But actually he just gave parties in New York in the winter, and travelled about in the summer, and was rather a bore. He was all right, really, I suppose; he just wasn’t as amusing as everyone said. Martin thought he was sinister, God knows why.

  When he arrived, the first thing he did was to say ‘Hello, Martin’, with one of his knowing smiles, and Martin blushed at once, as though he’d been caught out doing something terribly wrong. He was very credulous, Martin.

  Naturally, Howard had no intention of helping with the play at all. I wouldn’t have had him in it for anything, but I did think he might at least help put up the black-out and things like that. He was as stupid as Mrs Van Dieman about it, I thought, making unfunny little jokes which everyone laughed at nervously—because they were so unfunny, in my opinion.

  ‘What on earth do you see in Howard?’ I said to Martin, when I got him alone that morning. Howard had arrived by an improbably early train, having just got off a plane from somewhere—Ireland or Scotland, I think—at Birmingham. He was terribly pleased with himself for surprising everyone by turning up for breakfast.

  ‘Oh, he’s a—a sort of organiser,’ said Martin.

  ‘What does he organise, then?’

  ‘People. He knows everything that’s going on. He’s the spider at the centre of the web.’

  ‘Well, really,’ I said. ‘And what does he catch?’

  Martin just shook his head.

  ‘I think that’s all rubbish,’ I said. ‘He’s just rich and lazy and has more time to spend gossiping on the phone than other people, that’s all.’ And I repeated something I’d heard Adam saying about him. ‘He doesn’t even write, like everyone else one knows.’

  ‘I believe he did work once,’ said Martin. ‘In some special kind of insurance. I’m not sure he doesn’t still go down to Wall Street two or three times a week.’

  ‘Two or three times a week! That’s not work, that’s simply taking exercise.’

  ‘He inherited a lot,’ said Martin, almost defensively. ‘I don’t see why rich people should pretend to work if they don’t want to.’

  I wished I didn’t have the prospect of work looming over me. It ruined everything, knowing I had to start at about threepence a week somewhere soon, doing something stupid.

  ‘Right, now,’ I said, ‘About this play. Can’t you get a little more passion into it?’

  ‘I thought you said to do it straight,’ he said, blushing as though the mistake was his.

  ‘Yes, so I did. Sorry. Look, you don’t have to feel guilty about it. It’s really just a question of knowing what you want to do, and doing it. If you’re sure in your own mind, it’ll all follow.’ I didn’t believe it for a moment, but I thought it might encourage him.

  ‘It won’t, you know,’ he said, blushing even more. ‘Really, it just isn’t like that. I’ve tried doing it as you say, and nothing follows at all. I’m no good, Lawrence. I ought to be stage-manager or something. I’m much too shy to be an actor.’

  He was always saying how he was no good at things. Usually he was quite wrong—he terribly under-rated himself, I thought. But this time, of course, he was right. It was too late, though, to recast the part. I thought I could have managed the lines all right, but my movements would have been all haywire.

  ‘You’re not that bad,’ I said. ‘And thinking you are will only make you worse.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘You need to relax. Let’s forget about the lines for the moment and concentrate on the movements. You don’t look at all comfortable on those knee-pads yet.’

  ‘I’m not. They’re agony.’

  ‘Well, we must get them fixed. Of course you’re going to be all tense, if you’re worrying about hurting yourself all the time.’

  And then we started on my secret plan to make Martin’s performance tolerable. The idea was to get him so self-conscious about his movements that he wouldn’t think about the lines, and it worked. After a quarter of an hour of making him really embarrassed about his arms and legs, he was speaking naturally and well.

  *

  The run-through—without the Bailey boys, who’d been allowed to go to Cheltenham to collect their inheritance, as Mom put it—was much better than the night before, and I was really quite pleased, except about Howard. He watched it, unfortunately, grinning in that irritating way of his, being smug and condescending. At the end he clapped three or four times, slow
ly, and said ‘Bravo’ in a very mocking voice. No one paid any attention to him, though, and luckily the phone rang as I began to give notes, and he was the only person free to answer it. He took rather a long time to come back, which was a relief to me, and when he did, he had a big jug of martinis, just as if it was New York. Like a fool, I thought what a good idea it was for everyone to have a drink and relax. I even helped myself.

  Tim came fussing up to me about the sets.

  ‘What about them?’ I said. He was in charge of all that side of things, not me. One of the reasons I’d invited him was because he was so good at the mechanical side of things. He’d never been a particularly close friend of mine at school, but he had done the sets for two house plays.

  ‘I must have some volunteers to help with the painting,’ he said. ‘It’ll take ages to do them by myself.’

  ‘Everyone can help while we’re going slowly through the play this afternoon,’ I said. ‘There’ll be plenty of time. And if everyone’s painting while he’s not acting, I know where he is for a change.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Tim. Then he announced it all very clearly, twice. He was that sort of person—very useful to have around.

  When he heard that the flats were being painted down at the stables, Howard said, ‘It sounds like a Herculean labour,’ but no one even smiled, which gave me a certain amount of pleasure.

  It was a lovely day for a change, and though the grass was still wet, we all sat out on ground sheets and chairs, eating cold things Mom had brought that morning. George tried to make hamburgers on a portable stove which he and Marcia had brought as a gift.

  ‘You really need hickory sticks, I’m afraid,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s all in the flavour of the smoke, you see.’

  The hamburgers were pretty black at the edges by the time we got them, but they were all right. Lucy said she thought they were delicious. I offered her another, but she said, No, she was slimming.

  ‘Oh, all girls say that,’ I said. ‘All the time. It must be a miserable life, being a girl.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like it if I were fat,’ she said, showing which way her mind was running.

  ‘How do you know? Maybe I’m one of those people who love fat girls, like Rubens.’

  ‘Oh, Rubens,’ she said. It was obvious she didn’t know anything about him at all. That was the trouble with girls like Lucy, there was almost nothing you could talk to them about. I don’t expect she’d ever so much as been to the National Gallery, let alone the Tate. ‘Do you really think you’d like me fat?’

  I pretended to run my eyes over her like a farmer at the cattle-market. She was really not bad looking. She had nondescript eyes, sort of blue and grey and nothing very much, and a rather bony nose, and a little mouth, with freckles on her upper lip. And she was well developed, as I said, below the neck. Perhaps she could lose a little weight, I decided, only that was my head talking. The rest of me wanted very much to see her just as she was only without the clothes on.

  ‘I can’t really say,’ I said, still kidding. ‘You can’t really judge flesh without seeing it, you know.’

  She blushed scarlet, then. ‘You are awful,’ she said.

  ‘Wait till you know me better. I can be much more awful than that. I’m almost unspeakable at times. Worse—I’m untouchable. Are you untouchable?’

  ‘Do try not to be so disgusting,’ she said, in a sort of aunt’s voice. She was just like Anne. The first suggestion of anything real, and they always lifted their noses in the air and started sniffing.

  ‘What’s he on about now?’ said Anne, leaning across from the next ground-sheet.

  ‘I’m uttering foulness and obscenity,’ I said. ‘Have some more wine, Lucy.’

  ‘I think you’ve had quite enough,’ she said, and took the bottle away. I’d been just about to pour myself another glass. She had a nerve, treating me like that, considering the way she’d actually come into my bedroom. I knew what would have happened if I’d walked into hers without being invited.

  ‘Oh, he’s being like that, is he?’ said Anne. ‘I’d ignore him. What do you do with him at school, Tim?’

  ‘Oh, we all get along,’ said Tim. I don’t think he ever thought about people very much. He just accepted them as part of the furniture and got on with whatever happened to interest him. ‘Everyone’s pretty decent.’

  ‘But when he’s like this, just hopeless and silly?’

  Tim looked puzzled. ‘What are you talking about? I wasn’t listening.’

  I’m being terribly frank,’ I said, giggling slightly, because it all seemed quite ridiculous. I mean, there we all were, sitting about on ground-sheets on the wet grass, and if Lucy had actually been naked, then we’d’ve had the ‘Dejeuner sur l’Herbe’. Only I didn’t think she’d see the joke, so I didn’t tell anyone why I was giggling.

  ‘What are you being frank about?’ said Tim. He was chewing a chicken bone.

  ‘All I said was I couldn’t judge whether or not Lucy was fat unless she took all her clothes off.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s true,’ he said. ‘I mean, you never know what’s not going on under all those petticoats and things, do you?’

  ‘Petticoats!’ said Lucy. She and Anne began to laugh helplessly.

  ‘Scientifically speaking,’ I said, as gravely as possible, ‘I think it’s essential to have a clear look at the subject before hazarding a guess. Would you agree?’

  ‘It’s not scientific to hazard a guess at all,’ said Tim, finishing his bone and wiping his fingers with a napkin. He looked like a doctor scrubbing his hands after surgery, I thought, and that made me giggle again.

  ‘There,’ said Lucy. ‘Boo to you, Lawrence.’

  It was a stupid scene. I couldn’t get rid of the thought of us all sitting there solemnly eating chicken and hamburgers, and Lucy stark naked in the middle of us, offering me the wish-bone. I wished I could tell someone about it, but there just wasn’t anyone who would have understood. So I went on giggling.

  ‘He’s ga-ga,’ said Anne. ‘Quite batty.’

  It was nice to lie there and laugh, with Lucy naked under her clothes, quite close beside me. We went on getting sillier and sillier and laughing about less and less. It was very enjoyable.

  At last I discovered it was ha If-past two, and we were late getting started for rehearsal again. The Bailey boys hadn’t come back yet, either.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Will George, Tim, Lucy and Adam please heave themselves towards the summerhouse? And will Mom and Martin please rehearse their scene together somewhere for fifteen minutes—just run it through. I shall want Martin in a quarter of an hour with Anne. Act Two people at three thirty.’

  Adam didn’t get up, he just lay there with his eyes closed against the sun. ‘You go on ahead,’ he said. ‘I don’t speak for ages. I’ll arrive in time for my lines.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ I said. ‘This is the last rehearsal for getting every detail of each scene right. Everyone is wanted whether he speaks or not.’

  ‘I want to rest,’ he said. ‘Can’t we have just five minutes?’

  ‘No. We’re late already.’

  It started the afternoon very badly, all the drinking at lunch. Everyone was sleepy and forgetful and slow. I began to get a slight headache. Martin and Anne were late.

  ‘Have you been rehearsing with Mom, Martin?’

  ‘No. There was the washing-up to do. It’s Mrs Fuller’s day——’

  ‘Damn that. You were supposed to have got that scene up by yourselves.’

  ‘And you were supposed to have read Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews before the play came on. You haven’t started either of them yet, have you?’

  For some reason Martin seemed to think he was in charge of my education. I was supposed to write a holiday essay for the English master at school. I had to read some author fairly thoroughly and then criticise him. Martin was always needling me about it. Because of the play I’d decided to do Fielding. But that wasn’t any of Martin
’s business.

  ‘That has nothing whatever to do with your behaviour,’ I said, ‘which is quite inexcusable.’ I was curt.

  ‘Do just stop bullying everybody, for heaven’s sake,’ said Adam. ‘Let’s get on with the damned play, not quarrel all the time. Christ, I’d hate to be a boy at your school, Lawrence, if you ever get to be a prefect. You’re so picky.’

  ‘Not a very likely event,’ I said, meaning that no one would ever imagine Adam was a boy again. He didn’t like being reminded that he wasn’t as young as he thought he looked. But unfortunately he thought I meant it wasn’t very likely that I’d ever be a prefect.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, ‘with your talent for bossiness.’

  ‘Shall we get on now?’ said Tim. He didn’t like arguments. He was very sensible, really.

  All this ill-temper naturally didn’t do anything to help the performances, and by the time we came to her scenes in Act Two there was a good deal of muttering and murmuring going on.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve offended anyone, but the whole point of all this is to get the play as good as possible by Saturday evening. We don’t want people laughing at us, do we?’

  ‘I thought that was just what we did want,’ she said.

  Everybody roared with laughter, of course. I got my own back when we came to the scene between her and Martin, though, because they hadn’t rehearsed by themselves at all. It’s a very short scene, with Glumdalca careering into it like a bat out of hell, but it’s important, because it’s the only place, apart from the wedding, where they’re together, and I produced it with a good deal of extra care. For instance, when Tom says

  Where is my princess? where’s my Huncamunca?

  Where are those eyes, those card-matches of love,

  That light up all with love my waxen soul?

  and so on, I had him do a sort of ballet round her, leaping up and down trying to reach her neck with his hands, but never tall enough, so it looked as though he was ripping bits off her dress. This was quite a successful piece of business, but it required careful timing, which is why I’d sent them off by themselves. Also, it required a special dress which came to pieces a little at the front. She’d made a splendid thing, all flounces and bits of old eiderdown, but Martin wasn’t very expert at the jumping part. It wasn’t very complicated, really, but it was the sort of thing which almost always goes wrong in amateur productions. At the end of the scene, after Huncamunca has said she’s promised to Grizzle, and she’s sorry, but it’s written in the book of fate, Tom says: