Read Online A Friend from England by Anita Brookner - Free Book Online Page B

with Heather’s friends, those mysterious friends with whom she was reported to have spent her evenings. There were a great many of them, but they were a homogeneous lot; they might all have come from the same family. The dancing got under way pretty early, and the image of the children’s party came back to me as the young people took to the floor, while their elders drank tea at little tables and waiters sped round with plates of delicious pastries. There was probably champagne but I didn’t come across it. It was when I saw Michael and Heather dancing together, in their white suits, that I began to see that this might not be the empty partnership that I had feared. There was no excitement, no languor in their performance; on the contrary, they looked absorbed, business-like, even slightly careworn, as they foxtrotted round the ballroom. They looked like children, learning to dance on the parquet floor of their dancing school, good children from another age, allowed to amuse themselves to thesound of a wind-up gramophone. They danced all the afternoon, intently, and without conversation. When they eventually decided, by mutual and unspoken arrangement, to go back to the top table, their place was taken by Oscar and Dorrie, who amazed and delighted us all by dancing a perfect tango. There was no doubt in my mind which was the properly married couple. Dorrie, fugitive blushes crossing her face, dipped and turned in as gentle an expression of courtship as I dare say has ever been seen, while Oscar expanded into the man I always supposed him to be, arms masterfully extended, expression with a hitherto unnoticed patina of secret pride and amusement. The floor cleared while they were dancing, and as Oscar bent Dorrie backwards murmurs of admiration arose from the younger couples, who had only ever seen this sort of thing on television. Her feather-patterned blue silk trailing momentarily on the floor, Dorrie was abruptly swung upright, and as the dance ended and everyone applauded they both smiled shyly and clasped each other’s hands. It was delightful.
    I had to leave before the end. As I turned to go I looked back and saw, against a background of vague green and streaming windows, Heather and Michael, in their white suits, dancing on and on, sturdily quickstepping round the floor, and quite impervious to the romance of the occasion. It seemed very quiet in the lobby. I changed my shoes in the ladies’ room, and went out into the rainy street, suppressing a shudder at the wet needles that fell on my head, and bracing myself to stand at the bus-stop with all the other wage-earners, still hearing the strains of the tango in my mind, and still seeing those two children, white-suited, dancing to their wind-up gramophone, while the rain streamed down and drowned all the white flowers.

FOUR
    A FTER this I found myself in rather a lull. Heather and Michael were in Venice, and Oscar and Dorrie were recuperating from the wedding in Spain. We were busy in the shop and I was fairly tired in the evenings, too tired to seek very far for entertainment. Robin, my colleague, saw me languidly gathering my things together at the end of a hectic Saturday afternoon and said, ‘What you need is more exercise.’ I should explain that Robin copes with his life extremely well by belonging to a lot of clubs: health clubs, jazz clubs, theatre clubs, and so on. He is a frequenter and a discoverer of wine bars. A mild but organized bachelor in his mid-thirties, he has solved the problem of leisure by being out all the time. In this way he is able to both leave and find his flat immaculate and undisturbed, and the low-level degree of companionship seems to suit him very well. He is one of those men who says, ‘I am never lonely’ (though I suspect he is), and, ‘London satisfies all my needs’. When he takes his holiday he goes on package art tours of Italy or walks, with a party set up for this purpose, in the Lake District. He maintains that