I said, with as much hidden nervousness as curiosity, ‘With Arthur gone, where are all your friends? Surely … just being alone here?’
‘Yes,’ She drank deeply from her glass. ‘I’ve not been so good with my friends. It wasn’t just a question of Arthur.’
‘How?’
‘Oh, coming over here in the first place. They didn’t understand that.’
‘You mean the Edwardian bicycle out in the back hall? And all this, the Gothic restoration?’
‘Perhaps. Some of them said it was “cute”. They were being polite. But most said nothing. They thought I was out of my mind.’
I smiled then. I very nearly laughed. But I stopped just in time. ‘Are you?’ I said.
‘Do you think so?’
‘I wondered. But,’ I hurried on at once, ‘all this — it’s nothing so crazy as my lying up in the woods out there for ten days, running about naked with bows and arrows.’
‘No. That’s really strange,’ Alice said, looking at me, genuinely surprised once more. And indeed it was, I thought. By comparison her life in this Gothic folly was almost conventional. There was something of an agreement between us now, I felt: a wordless contract that we shared against the world. We had somehow touched each other without touching.
‘Besides, about friends,’ she went on. ‘I’ve always asked too much or been too honest or had too much money. The usual things.’ She rubbed her chin. ‘Friends were difficult. Loving — or hating. That was easier.’
‘Of course. But —’
‘The friend thing, you know,’ she interrupted with enthusiasm. ‘It’s like this: friends prepare themselves too much for you. Oh, that’s exactly what they’re not supposed to do. But it happens: it becomes prepared, a role you or they take on: “I’m your friend.” But I’ve never been completely sure about that.’
‘They might just have wanted something from you — in your case?’
‘Possibly. But much more it was the feeling of their coming a long way out of the past, into an equally long future. It all seemed endless,’ she added lugubriously.
‘But isn’t that the whole point about friendship: that it is the same, that it is always there?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘It should be. But, I told you, I just haven’t been good at it. I had a great friend once — oh, I didn’t see her that often. But when I did, well, it was like living suddenly, when you realized you’d just been getting by before. I met her in Florence, at the design school I went to there. An English girl. She did silk-screen printing, beautiful scarves and things. She was very bright and funny: original — outré, you’d say. And talented. So I offered to back her myself, with my money, to go into partnership. But she wouldn’t. Said it was taking the easy way. In fact she thought I was patronising her, or trying to get in on her act. Either way I … I found in the end I simply couldn’t explain myself to her at all. And I wanted to. I wanted that very much because I knew it was the real thing.’
‘The real thing?’
‘Yes: what you have to do, the real thing, whatever it is, with the one person you can really do it with. The rest is just — inconsequential chatter. Friends are great for that,’ she added derisively. ‘The world is full of “friends”,’ a sudden extraordinary vehemence rising in her voice. ‘They’re almost as bad as the others, the enemies, the vulgar fourth-raters most people are today: thugs and gangsters when they’re not mean-minded little schemers. I hate them, hate them all.’
Vulgar fourth-raters, I thought: Alice had lapsed into her Edwardian archaisms again, an embattled Duchess, where the bourgeoisie were storming her gates.
‘You rather narrow your field though, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Seeing life that way. Making it all — or nothing.’
‘That’s exactly what Arthur told me. Like everyone else, he loves compromise. Arthur Roy. Funny name, like a king. But he wasn’t. He’s a New York attorney. He loves his friends, too, down in the Century Club. They mean a great deal to him. But then his whole life is a kind of Club. And I couldn’t join it in the end. And it’s too late anyway now. We’re not actually divorced yet. But as far as I’m concerned I’m Miss Troy again.’
I thought of telling her how all this struck me as pretty childish, how the problems in her life seemed largely of her own making; of telling her how she just lacked the necessary abilities to compromise, to understand, perhaps even to settle for less; of saying to her, in short, that she had simply failed to grow up.
But then I thought how, like Alice, I, too, had cut myself off from wider life and friendship in the past few years; with what perhaps childish derision I too now looked on the contemporary world: a dull place filled with duller people — the churlish, the crass, the ignorant, the cunning. And I thought how an innocent sot like Spinks stood out in such a world, as Alice’s girlfriend obviously had. Like her, Spinks in his way, with all his beer-laden enthusiasms, Spinks was the real thing, too. I knew how rare such people were. And how much one could miss them.
Besides, in criticising Alice for her immaturity, I would surely be doing no more than Arthur had apparently done. She would have heard it all before. Criticism wouldn’t cure her at this late stage. But finally I said nothing because I saw how, if Alice had been a woman of any ordinary sense and convention, I wouldn’t be here, in Arthur’s fine clothes, drinking ice-cold gimlets in her warm drawing-room. I’d have been in Stow police station by now, waiting on a murder charge.
‘I’ve tried to make my own life,’ Alice summed up, in a confident, a happy and not at all a disappointed tone.
‘But why all this very English life? Why so much of that? The pre-Raphaelite paintings, the Gothic decor, the old kitchen; British wild flowers.’
‘Oh, I’ve loved all that ever since I was a child: I had an English nanny, she was always reading to me. Scott’s novels and the stories of King Arthur, the search for the Holy Grail, and that sort of thing. The Knights of the Round Table … I had a book then. I used to read it myself oh, so many times, I lived with it. I must have been about ten or eleven: a big story book, In the Days of the King, it was called, with wonderful line drawings by Walter Crane: a Knight going through a thick, evil, brambly sort of wood on a white charger with a beautiful long-haired maiden, up sidesaddle in front of him: a dark wood. But there was an extraordinary brightness about their heads, I remember, like haloes, like a fire in the dark. They were going to win.’
‘Yes. I wonder if the Knight was Launcelot, taking Arthur’s wife away. He certainly won.’
‘Maybe. But I was never cynical.’
‘No. I can see that. It’s a fine quality: to believe the best.’
‘All right, maybe it was a little crazy, this Anglomania. But I told you: I had the money to do what I wanted. So why not?’
‘And your parents? What did they want?’ I must have looked doubtful.
She smiled, her eyes narrowing happily. ‘Oh you can’t blame them for anything. I get on pretty well with them. My father’s just retired. My two elder brothers, Teddy and Harold, they’re in charge now. Along with one of my uncles. It’s very much a family business.’
‘Don’t you miss the family?’
She hesitated here. ‘I do and I don’t,’ she said finally, equivocating over something for the first time.
‘You’re the only daughter?’
‘Yes. The youngest.’
She spoke with the slightest tone of regret here, so that I said, ‘Poor little rich girl, were you?’
‘I went to a lot of costly private schools that I hated, if that’s what you mean. Boarding schools. I hated being cooped up. I spent a lot of my time trying to run away. The riding; that was the only thing I liked about them. That and the running.’