MARGINAL COMMENTS
By MONICA REDLICH
OPPORTUNITIES which I have recently had for watch- ing other people spend money (chiefly while waiting to be permitted to spend it myself) have left me with a strong feeling that it is a great pity such efficient and decided choosers as are everywhere to be seen and heard should not have more scope for their talent. They can sum up so many different kinds of things so skilfully : a material is right in colour but not satisfactory in weave, a stripe is an eighth of an inch too wide, a brim is becoming but a crown too flat, a piece of furniture looks very nice now, but how is it going to look in two years' time ? In restaurants they are no less admirable, rejecting a dish unless all its ingredients are perfectly to their liking, demanding hollandaise sauce where the uninitiated would rest content with melted butter. Yet there is one branch of living in which all their connoisseurship fails them : they are no less able than the rest of us to choose themselves perfect friends.
One can imagine so well how they would set about it. Running a practised glance up and down the (so to speak) menu, they would give their order without any hesitation : One good raconteur, for dinner parties, just sufficiently spiced : a selection of dependable couples, neither dull nor malicious, with cars : one thoroughly sympathetic old dear, for crying on : several easily available people who are neither too good nor too bad at tennis, or golf, or bridge, or whatever is needed. It is easy to see what a wonderful selection they would work out for themselves : and it is just as easy to see that, if they or anyone else got the friends they consider they ought to have, they would be bored to distraction.
Perfect friends are all very well in theory, but in practice there can be nothing to recommend them, for one of the major duties of a friend is to fail to come up to one's own impeccable standards. What could the conversation be like after a party at which all the guests had been perfect ?
Imagination, as the saying is, boggles—and very rightly ; for if we were not able to say that dear Uncle Will had gone on too long, as usual, that Cynthia was a sweet girl but oh, those terrible hats, or that Peter and Jane had at last learned not to quarrel in public, how should we ever establish, to ourselves or to anyone else, the fact that we never go on too long, never wear conspicuous hats, and never quarrel when there is anyone within earshot ? After all, as we have all been taught from the nursery onwards, it is our duty to learn from the example of others : and the honours are perfectly divided, for they have no doubt been taking warning in pre- cisely the same manner, and can go away gravely lamenting our lapses from all the standards of taste they most deeply value.
The connoisseurs I have mentioned could very readily explain why it is that their friends do not reach the same standard of perfection as their clothes, their food, and their furniture. Friendship, they would say, is the one department of life in which they are given no freedom of choice ; all they can do is tolerate with what grace they may the least uncon- genial among their business connexions, old school friends, bridge partners, and other inescapable sets of associates.
It would be too much to ask, in these unsatisfactory circum- stances, that their friends should have the same finer qualities as themselves ; and the fact that they have anything in common at all is for the most part happily concealed from them, so that only their mutual friends are aware that while Madge (shall we say) thinks Jemima perfectly lovely but my dear so unreasonable, Jemima is absolutely devoted to Madge but deplores in her precisely the same shortcoming.
The more one thinks of it the more fortunate it appears for everybody concerned that people do not get the friends whom they think they deserve, but only the friends whom they could not for a moment suppose to be in the very least like them.
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