Free A Friend from England by Anita Brookner Page A

Thinking, for me, is accompanied by a wave of sadness. Therefore I try to avoid introspection. I long ago decided to live my life on the surface, avoiding entanglements, confrontations, situations that cannot quickly be resolved, friendships that lead to passion. With my quite interesting work, and the affairs that I keep quiet about, I reckon I manage pretty well. I tend to be rather merciless with those of my friends who cannot do the same, and I favour sensible arrangements. I dream a lot, and apart from my dreams of drowning, I like and value the night hours, when I seem to be in an altered state.Then I am able to tolerate myself. In the daytime I keep busy, always on the surface, and that suits me too. Sometimes I meet someone who makes me think that I might always be as I am in my nocturnal imaginings: dreamy, vulnerable, childish. The Livingstones fulfilled this function for me. After being grown-up and liberated throughout the week I could regress comfortably and safely in their welcoming and uncritical presence. They were not bound to me by ties of blood, nor even of affinity: they made no demands, did not suggest ways in which I might improve myself or change my life. No one thought I ought to move from my flat above the shop or go on holiday or do anything energetic and uncharacteristic. They were not inquisitive about my habits or relationships, did not expect me to do anything except turn up on a fairly regular basis and assist at the unrolling of their noiseless and curiously unhopeful lives. This I was more than willing to do. In exchange for my presence and my interest, always unfeigned, they offered the seduction and the novelty of a fixed point, one that drew me on like a charm, perhaps because of the deliberate lack of fixity in my own perspectives. I did not even have to say much when I was with them, but could drift contentedly on the stream of their desultory talk, could annihilate my daytime self, and merely be present in the body, waking from time to time to scrutinize their undemanding presence. The fact that they revealed nothing of their inner lives was an added pleasure of their company. I had no doubt that their inner lives were as complicated as my own (but I had made a conscious decision to eschew complications) or indeed as anyone else’s; from their withdrawn expressions I assumed them to be living at some subterranean level, immersed in a sea-dream that never rose to the surface. Their sleepwalking demeanour, the food that always appeared as if by magic, and the abundance of material goods that flowedthrough their lives I took to be signs of a fortunate dispensation. I grudged them nothing, I envied them nothing, merely rejoicing in the aspect of their successful arrangements with fate. Their forays into the outside world heartened me, marked as they were by even greater abundance, but it was the deep peace and safety of their home, rooted and furnished and nourished as it was, that drew me to them, drew me on into deeper acquaintance. When I was not with them I rarely thought of them, for they made no calls on my time. We practically never telephoned each other, except for the excitement of the engagement, when calls were more frequent, for we had nothing much to say. I had simply been gathered in, and my justification was that I would bear some vague responsibility for Heather, always to my mind the least capable of them all at looking after herself in this cruel world, always absent, always in need of care. Now it seemed as if she too had been gathered in, and I began to wonder, rather sadly, if I should be needed any more.
    So that I was all the more glad, after about a month, to receive a telephone call from Dorrie. They were back from Spain, and Heather and Michael were due to arrive from Venice that evening. Would I care to join them for tea the following day at Heather’s flat? She was sure that Heather would like to see me. ‘And of course we’ve missed her. And Michael too, of