Friend of My Youth

He felt that she was doing something that didn’t fit in with her seriousness and aloofness, her caustic tone. She was behaving in a way that his mother might have predicted. (“I’m sure she is really a nice girl, but I’m not sure she has been very well educated,” his mother had said, and even Murray understood that she was not referring to the books Barbara might have read or the marks she had got at school.) What was more troubling was that she was behaving in a way that didn’t even tie in with her sexual nature, or what Murray knew of it—and he had to assume he knew everything. She was not really very passionate. Sometimes he thought that she pretended to be more passionate than she was. That was what these clothes reminded him of and why he couldn’t mention them to her. There was something unsure, risky, excessive about them. He was willing to see all sorts of difficult things about Barbara—her uncharitableness, perhaps, or intransigence—but nothing that made her seem a little foolish, or sad.
    There was a bouquet of lilacs in the center of the table. They got in the way of the serving dishes and dropped their messy flowers on the tablecloth. Murray became more and more irritated at the sight of them, and at last he said, “Barbara—do we really have to have those flowers on the table?” (The fed-up voice of a proper husband.) “We can’t even see around them to talk.”
    At the moment, nobody was talking.
    Barbara bent forward, shamelessly showing cleavage. She lifted the bouquet without a word, creating a shower of lilac blossoms onto the cloth and the meat platter. One of her earrings fell off and landed in the applesauce.
    They should have laughed then. But nobody was able to. Barbara gave Murray a look of doom. He thought that they might as well get up now, they might as well get up from the table and abandon the unwanted food and inert conversation. They might as well go their own ways.
    Victor picked the earring out of the applesauce with a spoon. He wiped it on his napkin and, bowing slightly to Barbara, laid it beside her plate. He said, “I have been trying to think who it is that is the heroine of a book that you remind me of.”
    Barbara clipped the earring back onto her ear. Beatrice looked past or through her husband’s head at the tasteful but inexpensive wallpaper—cream medallions on an ivory ground—that Murray’s mother had chosen for the gardener’s cottage.
    “It is Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtsev,” said Victor. “She is the fiancée—”
    “I know who she is,” said Barbara. “I think she’s a pain.”
    Murray knew by the abrupt halt of her words that she had been about to say “pain in the arse.”
    “It’s Beatrice,” Murray said to Barbara as he helped her do the dishes. He had apologized about the lilacs. He said that it was Beatrice who had unnerved him, who had blighted the evening for them all. “Victor isn’t himself with her,” he said. “He had his light hidden under a bushel.” He thought of Beatrice descending on Victor to extinguish him. Her jabbing bones. Her damp skirts.
    “I could do without either one,” said Barbara, and it was then that they had the exchange about conspicuous people and secret missions. But they ended up finishing the wine and laughing about the behavior of Adam and Felicity.
    Victor began to come around in the evenings. Apparently the dinner party had not signalled for him any break or difficulty inthe friendship. In fact, it seemed to have brought him a greater ease. He was able now to say something about his marriage—not a complaint or an explanation, just something like “Beatrice wants …” or, “Beatrice believes …”—and be sure that a good deal would be understood.
    And after a while he said more.
    “Beatrice is impatient that I do not have the barn ready for the horses, but I have to first deal with the drainage problems and the tiles have not come. So it is not a very fine atmosphere on the farm. But a beautiful summer. I am happy here.”
    Finally he said, “Beatrice has the money. You know that? So she is obliged to call the piper. No—have I got that wrong?”
    It was as Murray had suspected.
    “He married her for her money and now he has to work for it,” said Barbara. “But he gets time for visiting.”
    “He can’t work all day and all evening,” Murray said. “He doesn’t come by for coffee in the daytime anymore.”
    This was the way they continued to talk about