Odd Girl Out (15 page)

‘Would you like some salmon, afterwards?’

‘No thank you. I once went in a boat when I was staying in Scotland with my Nan, and they caught salmon trout and whacked them on their heads and they certainly didn’t die and
everybody said that fish couldn’t feel I was sick. I did it in the boat to show them.’

‘That might apply to any fish. I thought you said you liked seafood.’

‘I do: I haven’t got any serious principles – only amateur ones. I’d like a sole – just plain grilled. I expect
it
had an awful end, but you see I
wouldn’t know about it.’

Edmund ordered the pâté and sole for both of them, and was then presented with a wine list. ‘I know you like Sancerre.’

She nodded. ‘Fine. If I drink too much wine in the middle of the day I become torpid or – ’

‘Or?’

‘Hopeless,’ she answered: he hadn’t the slightest idea what that meant.

After they had ordered the food and drink, there was another silence. It was all rather like a thunderstorm, Edmund felt, either the air would be cleared by some cosmic row, or they would both
go on feeling on some kind of brink.

‘You’ve changed your clothes, I see.’

‘Yes. Have you got a Gauloise?’

He hadn’t, but they could be easily had, and he acquired some. When Arabella had had one lit for her, she inhaled it, carefully, and blew the smoke out of his direction.

‘Are you in love with someone?’ Edmund asked suddenly.

‘No. I don’t have to pretend, you see, so – no. In a minute, you’re going to say it’s a pity that I have so much money. You may be right, but at least it means that
I don’t have to pretend to love someone because I need them practically.’

‘What makes you think that you are in such a minority position there?’

Their pâtés were brought and put before them. Arabella at once put out her cigarette. ‘I don’t know if I am. But a lot of people want to make up to you because
you’ve got money, and
because
you’ve got money, you needn’t let them.’ She picked up her fork and ate a sorrel square of her pâté. Then she said,
‘You seem to be encouraging me to talk about myself.’

‘I am.’

‘Well, to put it as briefly as possible, I don’t know what the
hell
I’m supposed to be doing. I just drift on – any asset is supposed to be a responsibility and a
pleasure. I don’t seem to recognize the first, and I don’t at all manage the pleasure bit. I don’t belong anywhere, to anyone, you see: that seems to be where most people start
their lives – I don’t mean artists or monks or dictators – just supposing you haven’t got any vocation, how
do
you start? ‘I’d like a safe place to
experiment from.’

Without thinking, Edmund said, ‘You’re safe with us.’

‘I know! I can’t tell you how much I realize that.’

While she finished her pâté, he looked at her more carefully than he had ever done before. The white trouser suit – attractive though it was – did not really become her,
what was it? – almost Florentine appearance: in fact her face alone distinctly reminded him of some painting – or of someone
in
a painting; he imagined her in sprigged muslin
with her feet bare, dancing with a wreath of leaves or flowers on hair cut and flowing much as it did now: perhaps it was not sprigged or embroidered muslin at all, but something more diaphanous .
. . For no reason that he was prepared to consider, other than that it was for no reason at all, he felt fleetingly faint. The sensation had passed before his attention, and above all, hers, needed
to be drawn to it.

‘You haven’t finished your pâté.’

He drank some wine. ‘Do you want it?’

‘If you don’t – yes please.’

Comfortable feelings of kindly command, of comforting, elder-cousinly superiority took possession. ‘Will you have room for your sole?’

‘Easily.’

She was so slender that he marvelled at how much she habitually ate. Slender indeed! If he were her older brother, he would probably call her scraggy. Just then, she picked up her wine glass and
held it out to his so that they touched. They drank and she smiled – her long, curving smile that stopped the rest of her face looking too long and oval.

Edmund thought of the drive to Hadley Common and the house whose keys were in his pocket. He smiled, and she laughed, just as he thought she was going to ask him what he was smiling at.

They ate their fish, and like most people attracted by any mystery, he began to ask her questions. He was amazed and fascinated by how little he knew of her. The week at Mulberry Lodge, with its
simple and leisurely routine peppered by her presence, had none the less revealed nothing about her beyond small, commonplace discoveries. She liked to sleep a great deal; she washed her hair
continually; she did not like her mother; she had moments of childish, almost operatic affection; she did not wear shoes very much; she was extremely untidy; her knowledge was so startlingly
general, erratic, and in every sense unspecific, that she was unexpectedly good company or none at all. She was very young, and privileged in ways that she did not seem – as supposedly most
of the young would not – to recognize. Now he found himself cross-examining her, and she would answer each question with apparent artlessness, but also, he felt, with enigmatic reservations
that were beyond his experience in sophistication.

‘Have
you ever been in love?’

‘Oh, of course, I have thought so.’

‘Once?’

‘Often. Little and often.’

‘But has it made you unhappy? Or happy? Or changed you?’

‘I can’t know that,’ she had answered, making it very clear that it was the last part of the question she had referred to.

Before he had thought very clearly, he had persisted, ‘But apart from men – I suppose –
have
you ever needed anyone or cared about them?’

Her face changed. They were eating chocolate mousse – again chosen by her. She did not stop eating it, but said, ‘Yes. I did care about one person, in the sense that you mean. I
mean, I
needed
them. My Scottish nurse. That sounds awfully corny, but I can’t remember when I didn’t know her, and she was always
there,
you see, being the same, saying
the same things, someone I could always go to and stay with. I didn’t have to consider whether
she
loved
me
– it wasn’t part of it at all. She was old, and rather
fierce and often funny, because she said things so well, but I don’t think it would have mattered what she was like about being funny — it was her always being
there
–
never letting you down in that simple way – until – ’ She stopped, and without any warning, tears began to slip down her face. She took no notice of them – went on eating
her mousse, swallowed and said rapidly, ‘My mother suddenly sent me to a boarding-school, and when I heard she was going to do it, I rushed to Nan and said I didn’t want to go and it
was an awful idea, and Nan could stop it, because my mother took notice of her because it made me less trouble, you see, and Nan said – she said – it was the worst surprising thing in
my life – that it would be the best idea, and I should go at once. I had an awful row with her about it, and she was just as rock-like, or obstinate about it, as she’d always been about
anything. They made me go, and I did everything bad I could think of to get expelled so that I could go back to her, but it was no good: they put up with anything for that one term.’ She
stopped eating the mousse, and put her hands on her face to move the tears off it. ‘She had cancer, you see. She knew. She never told me. She didn’t think it would be good for me to be
about while she died of it. It was her idea – the boarding-school. But she never
told
me, and when I came home for the holidays, she was dead. So I didn’t come home, I had to go
to my mother in America. I never said good-bye to her: she didn’t understand that I’d rather have been able to do that. She thought she was protecting me: what she’d always done,
only then I didn’t understand the protection. I thought she’d let me down, and by the time I found out that she hadn’t, she was gone, dead, burned up. I couldn’t tell her
that I was sorry. That was the person I cared about.’

After a long silence, during which she stopped brushing the tears off her face and drank some wine, Edmund said, ‘How old were you then?’

‘Seven. It was ages ago. They weren’t much good at cancer then. The pain, I mean.’

He handed her a cigarette and lit it. He felt the only thing to do was to go on asking questions. She was blowing her nose when he asked the next one, and said, ‘Sorry. What?’

‘Had you always been in Scotland until then?’

‘Most of the time. She knew my father, you see, she lived on his estate. If I was sent for to godawful places like Geneva or London or New York, she always came with me. But the best times
were in Scotland.’

‘And since then?’

‘I’ve knocked about all over the place. You know what my mother’s life is like. Well, perhaps you don’t, but I do.’

‘Have you ever been back there?’

‘No. There was nothing to go back for. There’s nothing to go anywhere for, come to that, but at least most places are neutral.’

Coffee was brought them. ‘Would you like a liqueur?’

‘I’d like a brandy. I’ve never talked about that before. To myself, endlessly, but not to another person.’

‘Does it make it better?’

‘Nothing will make it better.
You know –
that’s all.’

She drank the brandy as though she’d been shipwrecked, and then the scalding coffee. Then she said, ‘I’m going to find a Ladies and wash my face.’

He drank his coffee (he had refrained from brandy) and paid the bill.

Outside, a dense and almost colourless sky seemed to be pressing down upon them. She said, ‘What are we going to do now?’

So of course he said, fetch his car from the garage, and drive to see the house near Barnet. He wanted to put the hood up, as he was sure it was going to rain, but she said, ‘Oh, do
let’s wait until it does. It would be lovely to have rain when we were driving fast.’

She settled in the car, lit another Gauloise from the packet he had given her, and said, in a studiedly offhand voice, ‘Thanks for a super lunch. It was very kind of you, and I
did
enjoy bits of it, actually.’

After some driving and no conversation, she said, ‘What do you think your father and my mother must have been like? Together – I mean?’

‘I can’t honestly remember. I was at a prep school most of the time.’

‘There wasn’t much of that, was there? Time, I mean.’

‘I can’t remember that, either. She was always very nice to me – Clara, she made me call her. She used to come to Sports Day and the Winter Play. At least,’ he added
honestly, ‘she did for that year. All the other boys were impressed by her. The first time I wondered whether she mightn’t be a bit too much – you know – ’

‘Flamboyant?’

‘Exactly. Well – she never was. She always managed to wear the right hats and look wonderful and not silly in them. And she always gave me the presents I most wanted, that my father
would never have afforded me. I was very disappointed when she left.’

‘Disappointed! What an extraordinary word to use!’

‘It’s what I was.’

‘It’s what you think now you were. I bet it’s not how you put it to yourself at the time.’

Indeed, he had not, he now was forced to recall. His father had written him a – what seemed at the time – pompous letter: well, probably it had been: ‘Your stepmother and I
have most unfortunately agreed that we must part. So I am afraid you will have to make do with your dull old father. Clara and I shall always, I hope, remain the best of friends . . .’ (how
mysterious
that
had seemed to Edmund then, as his best friend, Hastings minor,
was
his best friend precisely because they
did
want to spend as much time as possible together:
if Clara and his father were going to remain the best of friends why didn’t the silly nits stay in the same house, then?) ‘but,’ his father had continued, ‘our lives are not
really compatible.’

‘I felt awful about it. It was frightfully dull after she had gone. No flat in London – no treats – just a dreary little oasthouse in Sussex with my father stuck in his study
all day, and a series of housekeepers who hated me having friends to stay.’

‘Of course I hadn’t been born or thought of then.’

Egocentric, she is, he thought, and said, ‘Good God, no. You’re much younger than I am.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty-eight.’

‘Mm. That’s fine for a man.’

He could think of nothing to say in reply and so didn’t. They were now out on Hendon Way: there was very little traffic and he felt the urge to arrive at this house. Get the work out of
the way as soon as possible. Why?

‘Will this house be full of horrible people?’

‘No. They’ve gone abroad.’

‘Their horrible furniture, then?’

‘No they’ve taken, or stored that. It will be empty, dusty and probably full of shutters that we’ll pinch our hands having to open.’

‘Still – the best way to see a house.’

As they reached Barnet, huge, reluctant drops of rain began to fall. By the time Edmund had consulted his map and been misdirected, there were surgical forks of lightning of fluorescent
brilliance, followed by the pause before distant thunder.

The house was mostly Georgian – a bit mucked about, but in a splendid position. They drove through battered and half rotten gates. A miscellany of outbuildings confronted them, with
one black-painted door into the house itself.

‘The house first,’ said Edmund. ‘And whether you like it or not, I’m going to put the hood up now. I don’t want to drive home on sodden seats.’

‘Even
talking
about the hood makes you cross.’

She went away through some garden door while he struggled with it. It was pointless having a drophead in England: but even the thought of choosing and buying a new car gave him a sense of power
and luxury. It was changing something in his situation, a thing he hardly ever did.

He walked through the garden door, now left open, through which Arabella had gone. She was standing beneath a huge cedar, looking up into the sky. She looked like a contemporary immortal –
if there could be such a creature – her hair streaming farther down her back with her upturned head, the white crêpe clinging and flowing when she moved. She had kicked off her shoes,
and they lay tossed upon the lawn. The lawn had not been cut for some time – it was covered with daisies and clover and the odd buttercup, except where she stood under the great, dark tree.
Beyond her stretched more lawns studded with trees at graceful intervals. He thought she had not seen him, but before he could stop watching her, she said: