Friendship is perishable, just ask the Duchess of Cambridge
If I were pressed to say why I loved him, wrote the essayist Montaigne of his friend, Etienne de la Boétie, I could only explain it by saying, because it was he; because it was I. A fortunate few of us will have a friend like La Boétie, cherished until death, but most friendships are more perishable.
Some have a lifespan little longer than that of a garden annual. Others trundle along comfortably for years, until something happens to make the former soulmates realise that their friendship, like the clothes of a decade ago, no longer fits. Then there are the ruptures as brutal as broken love affairs, attended by the discordant realigning of allegiances.
The shifting alliances of celebrities, signposted on social media, offer a gripping form of real-life drama. It would take the busy pen of a latter-day Duc de Saint-simon to keep up with the kaleidoscopic repatternings of Taylor Swift’s friendship squad, while Khloe Kardashian’s altruistic reaction to a defunct friendship was to post her guidelines to the Four Stages of Break-up: “Sometimes you gotta get rid of people who don’t support you like you support them.”
This might be the moment for Khloe to share her wisdom with the Duchess of Cambridge, whose friendship with her Norfolk neighbour, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, is supposed to have hit a turbulent patch. The fact that the Royal family, uniquely among their fellow celebrities, don’t (yet) publish an online chronicle of every passing thought makes rumours of a ruffling of their swanlike composure all the more intriguing. Still, if friendship is, as Oliver Goldsmith bleakly put it, “disinterested commerce”, why are we captivated by its vicissitudes?
In an age of fractured families and transient love affairs, many of us find the bonds of friendship offer our best hope of stability. Perhaps it has always been so: arguing in 1938 that he would rather betray his country than his friend, the novelist E M Forster cited Dante, who placed Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of hell for betraying their friend Caesar. Fast-forward to the forthcoming season of Game of Thrones, and we find the betrayal of the sacred bonds of hospitality a leitmotif. Friendship may be less overwhelming than love, less visceral than blood ties, but we dispense with it at our peril. The worst solitude, said Francis Bacon “is to be destitute of sincere friendship”.
Preoccupied as I am with clothes, it had not occurred to me to consider what I might wear post-mortem. But a recent correspondence in The Daily Telegraph has changed that. “Sir,” wrote Hazel Tibenham of Derbyshire, “Shrouds seem to have gone out of fashion.” John Donne, whose portrait was taken in his shroud, weeks before his death, would be shocked. Given the vastly profitable market for designer Christening robes and wedding dresses, there is clearly scope for a line of haute couture shrouds – which brings us to another anxiety. How, the novelist Nancy Mitford asked her fellow novelist and occasional spiritual advisor, the Catholic convert, Evelyn Waugh, does one’s soul find the right body at the resurrection? Is it “like finding your motor after a party”? A bespoke shroud would certainly narrow the options when it comes to reconnecting with one’s mortal remains on Judgment Day.