A Friend from England Read Online Free PDF Page A

slightly obscene badinage destined to put her at her ease, and had left early, casting the whole thing into perspective with the words, ‘No, thank you, I came in my own car.’ These horrible rituals were thenfurther discussed, and at last I began to feel a genuine sympathy for Heather, although I could see that her impenetrability might prove to be a problem for her mother and father.
    But supposing that she were happy with matters as they stood? Supposing too that she possessed that genuine mildness of temperament, that latency to which I have referred, that was not only the quality that she shared with her parents but the quality that she could share with nobody else? Supposing that Heather’s shrewdness, which I had somehow never doubted, lay in her perception of this fact? Supposing that she had taken stock of her situation and realized, quite calmly and maturely, that she was unfitted for those watchful occasions, at which others, it appeared, were always to be allowed to lay bets, preferring, as a matter of dignity, the quieter manners of her parents’ house, with its rituals and its customs so devoid of malicious intention, so maddening to those of a more contentious disposition? Heather could see, as I could, that her mother was superior to those sisters of hers, and that those sisters disguised their largely unconscious envy as exaggerated concern for Heather’s well-being. She could even see that their concern was not devoid of a certain prurience, the prurience that some ageing women feel when excluded from the sexual odysseys of the young. Their view of Heather’s obduracy was baffling and uncomfortable even to themselves, for they were essentially harmless women who did not fully understand their own mixed motives. I pitied these harmless women, faced with this evidence of their own baseness, and so anxious to disguise its existence that they increased their ostensible anxiety over Heather’s unpartnered existence in order to hide its traces. Heather knew all this, of course; her uninflected smile began to seem more complex to me as I saw it as a weapon with which she guarded her virtue.
    It was probably over the meaning and substance of the concept of virtue that we all came adrift. For myself, the battle was long lost: such shreds of virtue as I retained served only to make me seek it in others, and, when I found it, to be moved beyond all words, ready to defend what I had already forfeited. In this way, my odd relationship with the Livingstones was of great value to me; they were fixed points of reference in a slipping universe, abiding by rules which everybody else had broken. Heather I was eventually willing to take on as a contemporary embodiment, faint but unmistakable, of those rules. I think she had a feeling that she was somehow endangered, or that she belonged to an endangered species, for she sometimes asked my advice on quite simple matters, as if unwilling to reveal her ignorance to others among her contemporaries. And in due course it began to be apparent to me that Oscar and Dorrie regarded me as a chaperone for Heather, whose incapacities may have contributed to their melancholia but whose very integrity and unalterability they cherished. Even the aunts saw me as having some value, or perhaps function would be a better way of putting it, for I doubt if they liked me. ‘I’m sure Rachel meets some interesting people in that bookshop of hers,’ they would say. ‘I’m sure Heather would love to meet them – she was always a great reader.’ For they thought I ruled over a sort of Bohemia, and, greatly daring, were willing to trust me with an enterprise at which they had so surprisingly failed.
    The truth was, of course, somewhat different. I owned a third of a small bookshop in Notting Hill and there was nothing Bohemian about it. My partners were a pleasant middle-aged woman called Eileen Somers and mild bookish Robin Burt who did most of the work behind the scenes: I preferred to