Free A Friend from England by Anita Brookner Page B

course. I’m taking some food over – she’ll be too tired to do anything for a while. You know how to find the flat, don’t you, Rachel? We’ll see you there about four, then.’
    It was clear to me from this conversation that Dorrie had no idea of the reality of her daughter’s marriage, but had simply thought in terms of the wedding. If she considered it at all, she conceded that marriage might have ‘tired’ Heather, as if she had been subjected to repeated assaults from her husband. Privately, I assumed this to be an impossibility. I had an image ofthe golden-haired Michael in his white suit and his bride in hers and of their nursery-style dancing and of his ghastly father, and if I knew anything at all it was that theirs was some peculiar but no doubt satisfactory arrangement, agreeable to them both, whereby they removed themselves from parental care and oversight and played at being grown-ups. As far as I could see, no deep feeling, indeed no feeling at all, had come into play. Heather’s rather bovine expression had not changed at all throughout this adventure. As for Michael, he had had to be prompted by his father, as if, left to himself, he might forget the whole thing. The Colonel’s anxiety I now tended to interpret as a partly justified fear that without his supervision this marvellous alliance might slip from his grasp. This anxiety, which, even at the time, I had thought almost maternal, was what a mother with a particularly lack-lustre or indeed frankly impossible daughter might feel on seeing the perfect opportunity of disposing of her with honour about to fade from her grasp. Michael, I thought, was negligible. Michael was a son: he would never be a husband. Did he know what husbands were like? What they did? He had never seen his father behave like one, for his mother had died at his birth. I had no doubt that the Colonel had had a few little arrangements of his own, for I remembered that look of appraisal he had bestowed on me; at the same time, I knew somehow that these arrangements had been conveyed to his son in a mixture of bluster and subterfuge, with knowing looks and laughter to which the boy would try to adapt himself, only gradually growing into an understanding of what this meant. At the same time I knew that Michael’s answering laughter would conceal distress, would keep him frozen in childhood bewilderment. For this reason I hoped that Heather’s shrewdness would be sufficient to cope with the situation.
    And they had danced together like brother and sister.That was what had worried me at the time. It even worried me slightly now, although I began to feel my familiar exasperation with Heather, as I always did just before seeing her, as if the sight of her mild face stimulated me to a fury both on her account and on my own. Well, if she were either stupid enough or clever enough – I could never decide which – to enter into a
folie à deux
with this strangely affecting and disappointing man, that was surely her own affair. It was certainly nothing to do with me, although I began to see that at some point she might run into trouble. But I remembered her extreme reticence, the way she had issued news of her courtship in the form of a single bulletin, almost a press statement, the competent way with which she had dealt with the enquiries of her aunts, and I assured myself that she knew what she was doing. I was all the more anxious to believe this because I did not relish the task of lining up my experience with Heather’s inexperience and taking on the burden of inducting Heather into a fully adult life. In a way I wanted Heather to remain as she was, just as I wanted Oscar and Dorrie to remain as they were, fixed points in a volatile universe. I simply wanted things to go on as they were, an unchanging backdrop against which I could conduct my own variations. I saw them as the dry land to which a hapless swimmer such as myself might cling for safety.
    I dare say everyone has