Session One: On ‘A Friendship’
Kids’ tricks
We begin with the boys playing a trick on their father, which they
must know is cruel. If they really think
it’s a ‘joke’, then they lack sensitivity, surely, even love.
His response is not to look at what could be wrong with his
relationship to them, nor to reprimand them directly. He focuses on their mother’s alleged
negligence. Is that easier for him? The marriage is threatened (first time), by
their both avoiding their own parenting issues.
Their ‘trick’ on their mother about the death of Miss Martindale’s
mother is also insensitive, and seems designed for them to be able to laugh at her for being so gullible. It’s Margy who sees the lying, and then
Francesca tries to pass the problem on to
Philip as a matter of punishment and discipline, which he doesn’t deal
with properly.
Friendship and Marriage
Margy is more perceptive, but also more manipulative, than
Francesca. She’s never had a stable
‘weary’ relationship, and there’s a suggestion that she dislikes Philip out of
jealousy. Francesca seems to be the one
stable thing in her life. Their
friendship is longer, and deeper, than Francesca’s marriage.
Philip is ‘stable’ because he is tradition and profession and
class and gender bound. He has no vitality. He controls, and perhaps stifles Francesca who doesn’t seem to mind that, and is willing to
be dominated. In his stability he is
the opposite of Margy, but he is like her in dominating Francesca, though she
does this more subtly than he does.
Philip is able to hold in his feelings in the manner of the British
gentleman. This makes him seem cold,
boring, and limits his ability to show affection to Francesca, and perhaps more
destructively, to the boys. He is, it
seems, genuinely hurt by Francesca’s unfaithfulness. But it doesn’t threaten the marriage.
His dislike of Margy is very much unspoken, though she knows it’s
there, and perhaps they are jealous of each other in relation to
Francesca. She is innocent in that she
takes people at their word, things as they seem, and so is led into an affair
with Sebastian, though how this exactly happens is left unexplored. As also the temporary ‘depth’ of her
feelings. You may think that such a wife
would be unlikely to do such a thing. Or
perhaps she’s naïve enough to be drawn to it by Margy and then weak enough for
Sebastian to take advantage of her, as everybody else in the story does.
Why does Philip demand his ‘pound of flesh’ at the end? He can at last get rid of Margy. Her friendship with Margy is surely deeper
than her love for Philip, though she seems to understand neither. The friendship leaves both women in a
dungeon of loneliness.
Transitions
Trevor always treats the crises in the story in a retrospective way, not directly
described, by as reported by a character.
This is true of Philip’s discovering the cemented golf bag, Francesca and Philip’s row, Sebastian’s seduction of Francesca and their
affair, Philip’s discovery of her infidelity, Philip’s demand that Francesca drop
Margy. There is only one ‘face to face’
climax, which is where the friends part.
Point of View
The treatment of the crises in retrospect allows Trevor to give
one or other character’s point of view of it.
But throughout the story he shows this or that moment from a particular
character’s point of view. Sometimes he
does this conventionally.
He hated her, Francesca thought
Sometimes it’s almost imperceptibly done through free indirect
discourse. When Trevor describes ‘the stuff he dabbed on his underarms’ (my
italics) this is the viewpoint of Margy, a symptom of her lessening affection
for him. And there’s also irony. In the same passage, we get
‘Handsome,’ Margy remarked, referring to
the commode.
Wider Themes
·
People
don’t know much about each other or themselves?
·
Nothing
happens until the end of the story.
Other happenings are mainly ‘offstage’?
·
Do we
‘like’ any of the characters? Do we just
lament human beings’ behaviour?
·
Loneliness
and our fear of it and attempts to evade it?
·
Kinds
of deception?
·
Lack
of love anywhere in the story?
