A Friend from England Read Online Free PDF

serve. On one decisive afternoon, Heather actually picked me up there. However, she turned politely away while I was seeingto a customer, as if this transaction should not be witnessed. She was wearing a beautiful brown tweed suit and she looked unusually grown-up and independent; however, she smiled indifferently when I asked her if there was anything she would like to take away with her, and then selected a couple of paperbacks as if to please me. These remained in the back of the car: I saw them there a week later. Thus, uncorrupted by other people’s information, Heather remained to all intents and purposes incorruptible.
    I was however intrigued by the change of attire. The black avant-garde garments had disappeared: Heather was dressed as comfortably-off young women might be expected to dress. In addition to the chestnut suit she wore a pullover of ivory cashmere with a printed silk scarf knotted and tucked into the neck; she carried a handbag rather than a sort of gamekeeper’s pouch and her moccasins were the colour of conkers when they first split the green husk and emerge, glistening, to lie among the fallen leaves. She was, of course, as dreamy as ever, and nothing in her manner signalled that any change had taken place. But there was something in the way she handled the car – reversing rather carelessly, remarking on someone else’s bad parking – that bore the stamp of an assurance that had not been there before. Heather had always driven her car as if both she and it were competing for an award for good behaviour. She washed and groomed it conscientiously and nothing was allowed to mar its pale interior. On the road she drove steadily, and never did anything to kindle the emotions of other drivers. But on the day in question I noted that her driving was a little less smooth than usual, while on the back seat lay not only the paperbacks she had reluctantly acquired in my shop but several carrier bags from Harrods and some dry cleaning in a sheet of plastic. ‘Don’t mind the mess,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have time to go home after lunch.’ I thought thatshe was treating me to a hospitality rather more casual, more incidental, than the kind she usually bestowed: she was offering me a glimpse into a crowded life, rather like those women who value one largely as a reflector, and to whom one has to pay one’s dues for being allowed to join them for a minute or two on their brilliant upward progress. I do not mean that Heather was suddenly giving herself airs, or finally coming to the realization that she could do as she liked; she was too decent and too genuinely obscure to behave in so parvenu a manner. But I became aware that her life, in those intervals between the weekends, might be subject to some kind of investment, that Heather might actually have some kind of a context independent of that of her parents. The idea intrigued me but it also cheered me up. I had begun to feel uneasy about the pious hopes Oscar and Dorrie might have had that I would somehow look after Heather, guide her towards a radiant future, that I might in fact inherit Heather from her parents when those parents, in obedience to some inner information, decided they could do no more. I had already received hints of this, subliminally, in the mild but dispassionate gaze that Oscar let fall on his only child, in the distant calm of Dorrie’s eyes, as she poured tea or handed cakes, in the smile that was always on her face when her drawing-room was full. It was the smile, above all, that registered with me, the smile of a woman who, doing the best she possibly could herself, would warm into greater pleasure at the sight of the good deeds of others. It was a smile that could droop into disappointment at even the rumour of a duty shirked, a burden unborne, a signal not received.
    I said, ‘You look lovely, Heather. I like the new style. And I love the colours.’ She said, quite seriously, but with a hint of professional expertise,