The Perfectest Herald of Joy

“Silence is the perfectest herald of joy" - Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

When you are fourteen and sitting at a table in a ski lodge lounge with your best friend and two girls, you feel grown up and at sea. You have taken a bold step into adulthood, and it is an unfamiliar place.

I was not much of a conversationalist. A teacher had once called me “laconic” - I took it as a compliment. What conversations I had were with other boys, because I had attended a single-sex boarding school since I was eight. With my peers, I could discuss sports, war, and other things I have now forgotten.

None of this male camaraderie prepared me to talk with girls.

Even in my inexperience, I knew that the fairer sex did not like to talk about sports or war - maybe they do now, but not then. Furthermore, while I was aware of what was uninteresting to them, I was less sure of what subjects they did like to talk about.

The girls were the Tylden-Wrights. They were also fourteen and twins - but not identical. One was blonde, and the other had brown hair. To my raw and untutored eye, they were beautiful. None of us had spoken on the organization of the affair. Yet it seemed I was assigned Suzy, the blonde, while Edward was to be brunette Jenny's partner.

It was after dinner. I was content, sated, and enjoying the natural high of a day spent skiing. Jenny and Edward sat scooched together while Susan and I mirrored their closeness. There was some desultory chat, as Edward was not as talkative as usual.

This was lucky, as his favorite subject was toilet humor. And as ignorant as I was about the codes of conversation between boys and girls taking the first steps on the path to maturity, I suspected that fart jokes were probably not the ticket. Especially, as Suzy smelt of soap and flowers.

She and Jenny were wearing blouses and skirts, with jewelry and makeup, and looking terribly grown up. It was odd because I had only seen them in ski clothes during the day - or in the evenings wearing corduroys and sweaters. Edward and I were in our Viyella shirts and gaberdine trousers. We all looked our best, including Edward. Although his best was not very good as he was uninterested in fashion.

During a lull in the conversation - to be honest, there were more stops than starts in our chat - I looked around. To my eye, we fit in. No one was staring at us in reproof or whispering about our presence in the bar. And despite my apprehension, I felt we were holding our end up.

I was an old hand at sitting at tables in hotels and ordering things to be charged to the room. My parents were travelers. And my sister and I had been in scores of hotels across Europe. My father earned a decent living, so we were able to stay in places where the staff spoke English - most of the time.

This was welcome because I have little facility for language. Six years of French instruction had produced no discernible fluency in the tongue. And my native shyness precluded me from taking a stab at using whatever I had managed to learn. I was in constant fear of making a mistake.

Edward too appeared abashed, which was odd as he never seemed to care what others thought. His idea of a good time was to pretend to pick his nose in front of old people and laugh at their disgusted reaction. Tonight he had the good sense to keep his hands away from his face, so I dodged that bullet. I suspect that had he gone for his prominent proboscis the girls would have cut the night's activities short. That is the penalty for having a disgusting friend. You are known by the company you keep.

It was odd that Edward and I were as close as we were. We had nothing in common. If nothing else, there was a geographic challenge. We lived within biking distance of each other in London. Or if it was raining, four tube stops apart. However, we went to different schools. Mine was just outside London, near Windsor.

His was in Scotland - and that is as precise as I can be, as anything more than ten miles north of London was, to my mind, an undifferentiated landscape of green fields and sooty industrial towns where people spoke with odd accents, used the definite article chaotically, and wore cloth caps. Edward also never talked much about his schooling except to tell me he was among the stupidest boys there.

Scholastically, he was telling the truth. I was a solid B student in a good school, while he brought up the rear at a school for boys who were not of the highest academic rank. However, it was not due to a low IQ but rather to a complete lack of interest in learning whatever his school set out to teach him.

But Edward had depth. He loved photography. He knew what ‘f stop’ meant. He read all manner of photographic magazines that had far more science in them than I was learning in my physics classes. He even had a dark room at his house where he developed the black and white photographs he took.

He shot in color as well. He had to take those negatives to the store like the rest of us because he lacked the chemicals needed to develop them. He once described the process to me. It was to little avail, as it was mostly over my head.

He could also tell you about every car we saw. How big its engine was, How fast it went. Its vintage. That kind of thing. He was not interested in many things - but would spend hours on the things he liked.

We were also different when it came to sports. Physical activity is a significant part of British private schools. My prep school - which I had attended from eight to twelve - prominently displayed its motto “Mens sana in corpore sano.” “A sound mind in a sound body.”

I practiced and played football, rugby, or cricket six days a week, depending on the season. At other times, I would run track and field and play tennis. For me, it was bliss. For Edward, it was unmitigated hell. He was not athletic.

I was a reader. He liked comic books. I like clothes. He could not care less. I used a hair dryer and worried when I thought I had not arranged my hair just so. Edward considered brushes blunt tools best used sparingly. I would move my part around until it was straight and distinct. Edward’s head was a field of wheat in a stiff breeze.

Yet he seemed attractive to Jenny. It was likely because there was no one more honest. He was guileless and did not practice deceit. He would answer questions directly without equivocation while I contemplated the meaning of what I was about to say from every angle before I released it into a public space.

Boarding schools in England belonged to an organization that organized holidays for the students. In the spring and summer, they had Mediterranean cruises where the constabulary divided the two sexes into their own tribes. We slept in dormitory cabins with bunk beds. During the day, we visited various cities familiar from history books and stuffed with old buildings and other things to see.

These port towns teemed with olive-skinned locals with a voluble yet unintelligible enthusiasm for weighty matters that remained stubbornly unresolved.

In the winter, we went to the Alps and skied. There the people were paler and less loquacious. Their conversation was more matter-of-fact and business-like. There was a point to the exercise, and the antagonists would conclude apace because their time was valuable; their list of things to accomplish was long.

One feature of these vacations was a lack of parents. The schools provided some teachers to chaperone. However, the weight of their authority rested lightly on their charges. And their presence was absent in the darkened room where the four of us sat sipping vin chaud - a redolently spiced, warm red wine that sanded the edges off.

The conversation proceeded well enough. Suzy and Jenny showed no signs of boredom - no surreptitious glances at watches or meaningful stares at each other anticipating the final whistle. In the early going, we relied on getting to know each other.

Our acquaintanceship was recent. It had lasted six days to date. And until this evening had been nods exchanged in the lobby and when we coincidentally found ourselves waiting at the same time for the cable car that would take us to the top of the mountain.

On one of these occasions, the attendant who regulated the queue looked at me and asked, nodding at Suzy, if she were my “petite amie.” Was Suzy my girlfriend? I wished she was. And my heart warmed as she heard the question and turned to me with a smile as if receptive to the idea.

After that, as the cable car ascended, I struck while the iron was hot. I asked her if she would like to get together that evening after dinner. She said yes - as long as her sister could come as well. In return, I said I would bring Edward if that were all right. It was. And the matter was thus satisfactorily resolved when I proposed a time.

So, there we were, on the last night of our week in the Alps, sitting at a table in a hotel in Courchevel, drinking hot spiced wine.

The early momentum of the conversation started to falter. I sensed that we were playing on a sticky wicket - our rhetorical ammunition was close to being spent. And then disaster. The conversation died. I did not know what to do. Edward was no help. He stared wordlessly at something important on the back of his hands in his lap.

I flicked through a mental card file for something to talk about. There was nothing. What was the form? Where was the off-ramp? How could I get out of this hole? There was no light at the end of the tunnel.

I was not alone in my panic. Edward radiated helplessness. Jenny was searching for defects in her glass. And the hum of conversation around us heightened my sense of failure. I felt the embarrassment warm my neck. And then the dam burst.

As I looked shiftily around, trying to see where salvation would come from, I met Suzy’s eyes. To my surprise, they were not accusatory, nor was there a trace of the contempt I thought I deserved. Instead, they gleamed with humor. The corners of her mouth turned up, and then she offered balm for my tortured soul.

“Silence is golden,” she said.

The rest of the evening went by in a blur. We laughed, joked, and talked as if we had all known each other for years. We talked about books and movies and comedians and music. Of travel and our families. Of scary teachers and venerable relatives. Of passions and pet peeves.

Then the night came to an end. Edward and I walked the girls back to their room. Susan and I lagged so we could kiss on the stairs. It was brief and modest and tender.

The next day was suitcases and buses taking us to the airport. Suzy and Jenny were on a different flight, so our goodbye was at the hotel door. It was chaste as the crowds made romance an impossibility.

I did see Suzy one more time back in London. Her family lived in the country, but she came to town to visit an aunt and slotted me in. We exchanged letters. But life is capricious when you are young, and I never saw her again.

She changed me. I never worried about conversations again. If silence descended, I would let my mind wander to that night and smile.

Suzy should see me now. You cannot shut me up. I can make conversation out of a piece of jewelry, a painting, or a book on a coffee table. The art is to discover the other person’s interests - just ask them - and then talk about that. Usually, they will do the heavy lifting. Then tell their friends what a brilliant conversationalist you are.

All because Suzy spoke when I could not think of anything to say.