A Friend from England Read Free Page B

always need to be accompanied in order that no one should take advantage of her. And this was what both Oscar and Dorrie felt as well. It took me a good while to get used to this idea because of the gulfs in communication that stretched between them. Their conversation was largely meaningless, which I found very restful, until the aunts and brothers turned up with news of the outside world. Left to themselves, and this now seemed to include myself, they were largely ruminant. ‘Well, dear,’ Oscar would say, levering himself out of his too soft chair. ‘There you are. Seen your mother?’ And to me, ‘Well, Rachel. Nice to see you. Sit down, there’s a good girl.’ And while Heather went off to bring her mother back from wherever she had been going – it was usually to the kitchen – Oscar and I would subside into a state of mild companionship, the day safely concluded, as if our arrival were all that was needed, and no amount of information we might bring was necessary.
    I still see Oscar rising from his chair to greet us. He carried his bulk well, and he always wore a dark suit and a very white shirt, although his ties were a little more interesting now than they had been in the days of Southampton Row. He and Dorrie were not the sort of people to dress in elaborate leisure wear when they were at home: indeed, it always seemed to me that they dressed up for our visits. I see Oscar laying aside thenewspaper and smoothing down his tie, waiting politely for us to establish ourselves before enquiring for Dorrie and requesting us to bring her back. I see now that he feared for the safety of his daughter because she was in some way responsible for the peace and prosperity of his wife. And Dorrie thought of Heather as not only a loved child but as someone who might cause Oscar to worry. They saw each other exclusively in personal terms. It always surprised me that they were less impressed by the way that Heather ran her boutique than anxious to know what she was doing with her free time. Was she eating properly? This seemed to me an odd question to ask of a woman of twenty-seven, but I supposed that all parents worried about their children’s diet. Mine had not, which was why I found it so delightful to sit and be fed by Dorrie, whose food was a magnificent celebration, on an unimaginable scale of magnitude, of infant tastes. This was why I found it so delightful, too, to adapt my own anxieties, which were of a much more complicated order, to those of the Livingstones, for although I could see that they were worried I could not take their worries very seriously. Indeed, I was aware that they gave themselves over to these worries as a sort of luxury, and I felt their consciences were perhaps too fine for the real world. Dorrie’s most characteristic remark was, ‘I hope I did the right thing.’ This remark would crop up at intervals later in the afternoon, when the sisters and brothers-in-law were assembled. These relatives constituted a sort of moral court of enquiry, to which Dorrie would feel bound to submit her case. Even if she took a defective article back to the shop from which she had bought it the day before, she would feel ashamed. Even if some act of rudeness had been perpetrated against her, as when a man had jostled her when they were both after a taxi in Piccadilly, she would worry. ‘I simply said to him, “You won’t mind if I take this, will you? I believeI was first.” ’ And then, with a crumpled expression, ‘I hope I did the right thing.’
    The sisters and brothers-in-law I found less interesting because more worldly. Oscar’s brother Sam was a solicitor married to a rather silly woman called Ann who had nothing very much to say for herself. Dorrie’s sisters, Janet and Rosemary, and their husbands, Gerald and Lawrence, were sharper versions of Dorrie and seemed to regard her with the same mixture of love and anxiety as that which she lavished on Heather. Far from envying her her wealth