A Friend from England by Anita Brookner Read Free Book Online

as Heather, who remained quiet and restrained in his company, as if to allow him the spotlight which she felt must inevitably fall on him. When I entered the Wimbledon drawing-room the following week I found him in the centre of a group of admiring women, for the aunts succumbed immediately and Dorrie had a look of adoration on her face. Given the chance to examine him for a moment, before I was introduced, I judged him to be playing his part well but with slight exaggerations. He was explaining himself, as I suppose he felt called upon to do, and he managed to field all the questions by answering them before they were asked. Thus all embarrassment was avoided, and this tedious
rite de passage
was accomplished with a certain amount of charm. What I felt, I think, in that short moment before I was drawn into the circle, was that perhaps too much charm was being displayed, and that the expressions of rapture that played across his extremely mobile features were perhaps a little premature, a little out of place, and a little excessive compared with the calm restraint emitted by Heather herself. To my mind, they looked already like an old married couple; but it was a married couple of a kind that fatigues onlookers or witnesses. In this couple, it seemed, the husband was destined to play the child, the clown, even the criminal, while it was the vocation of his wife to absorb the high spirits,however aberrant they might become, and to remain watchful, indulgent, and wise, an ancestor to her child-husband.
    This impression was the affair of a moment, and over-critical even by my standards. There was something about his expansiveness that made me uneasy, although it was entirely appropriate to the occasion. His very movements were exaggerated: his clothes seemed agitated, as if hard put to contain him. There was a fearful restlessness about him, something florid and opaque, and yet in repose, which he rarely was, he seemed a conventional enough figure. He was a man of middle height, with a thickish body contained in grey flannel trousers, a white shirt, and a blue blazer with gold buttons: he wore an expensive gold watch and a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. His tie seemed to signify some association or other which I could not hope to understand. His main feature was his hair: conspicuously golden, thick and wavy, hair that is rarely seen on a man once he has passed adolescence. For the rest, his face was an amalgam of undistinguished features, given animation by the ceaseless smile. The eyes, of a rather washed-out blue, were on the small side, but they were fearfully animated. I wondered where the disagreeable impression I had first received when I met his glance had come from. When his smile faded to a reasonable wattage, I could see that he was rather amiable, not too bright, not perhaps very distinguished, not even very grown up, but doing his best in difficult circumstances. He had the air of dreading the spotlight but playing up to it, and he was doing rather well on this occasion. It was not easy for a youngish man (and I should have said he was about thirty) to field the avid questions of a group of middle-aged women, but he was doing his best and managing to please everyone. If he were doing this without much reference to Heather, who sat looking on, with a remote smile onher face, I supposed that this had been agreed between them beforehand.
    He was accompanied by his father: I later learned that his mother was dead. The father had none of the captious brilliance of the son, but in his way looked, to my mind at least, equally unreliable. He was a small neat man, with abundant silver hair, and a look of hard-packed but still active flesh about him. Michael addressed him as ‘Colonel’, and Dorrie, bewildered, did the same, until instructed to call him Teddy. The Colonel acted rather like his son’s manager, instructing him to divulge this or that matter, mostly relating to their family enterprise,