Odd Girl Out (29 page)

‘It’s me: it isn’t anything out of a bottle. It’s supposed to run in the family.’ Then she added, ‘You smell nice too.’

They lay for a few minutes of entire and peaceful amity: neither, then, would rather have been in any other circumstances. Then Arabella withdrew her arms from round Anne’s shoulders and
said, ‘I feel a bit drunk and rather sleepy. And I love being in bed with you.’ She kissed Anne’s face – turned towards her – and her neck, and then her left breast.
Then she turned over on to her other side and went to sleep.

Anne, whose breast responded to the kiss – a faint shock of excitement that resounded throughout her body – waited until it was over to think about it, and then decided that there
was nothing to think about. ‘Women
are
nicer than men,’ was the only ripple of an idea that spent itself as she, too, drifted into sleep.

Edmund, having survived his journey, climbed out of his aeroplane into the hot, spiced air: went through the formalities at the airport, got into a taxi and was driven
riotously into the centre of Athens. He was staying at the Olympic Palace, one of the newer hotels that was admirably run by dispossessed Greeks from Cairo. His room was cold with the air
conditioning: furnished as though for an immensely privileged prisoner – nothing unnecessary – everything that could be needed for one night. He waited until the charming boy who had
brought his bags to the room had gone, and then went to the window. By peering to his right, he could see the floodlit Parthenon. By not peering at all, very yellow lights, palm trees, traffic, and
immense buildings in a state of decomposition or erection were before him. The shock of change, inevitably experienced by any but the constant traveller or the person oblivious to any environment
whatsoever, hit him. He wondered whether he wanted a drink, and then thought, better not. He tried to think about Mulberry Lodge and its inhabitants, and a confused picture of Anne, feverish and
somehow unattractively vulnerable because of her illness, occurred and was easily dismissed. He tried to think about Arabella, in her room, surrounded by Ariadne and her kittens, and at once his
mind broke out into a kind of rash of loneliness and longing and distance from her. He tried to think about her calmly – with an indulgent tenderness, to feel that this separation, by its
sudden and temporary nature, could only be better in the end. All rational thought dissolved into simply wanting to see, touch, hear and be with her. He had also an aching curiosity about whether
she was now feeling as he felt, or at all like it, or even a little of some part of it. He decided to drink some of the bottle he had bought on the plane, and write to her. And so, with water from
the tap, and whisky from his briefcase, he set about covering a piece of the hotel airmail paper . . .

‘My darling Arbell,’ he began. ‘I miss you quite unbearably.’ He crossed out ‘quite’, wrote ‘Why are you not here? With me?’ and then realized
that he would have to use a new sheet of paper. Love letters could not have words crossed out in them. He started again. ‘Darling Arbell, I miss you. Why etc.’ ‘I think about you
all the time,’ he proceeded. But this brought him to a halt. There had not been very much time, and it was not true. Love letters must surely be both extreme and truthful to find their mark.
(He had had no practice at all at such measures.) ‘I don’t think I have ever loved anyone in the way that I love you.’
Think?
He crossed that out, recognizing that this
would have to be a draft: the real letter would have to be written out at the end – when he had managed to express his feelings with all due emotion and sincerity. For he
did
love her,
and he wanted to tell her so: no question about that. ‘I keep remembering the lake and the rain – your streaming beauty as the sun came out . . .’ He was away; amazed at himself
– his pen rushed back and forth: he finished and poured himself another (neat) whisky without noticing as he covered the page with all the things he might have said to whoever it should have
been when he was twenty-one. It was not until he reached the end of the page and the second whisky that he was brought to a sudden and complete standstill. He could not possibly send a letter of
this kind – or, really, of any significant kind, to Arabella. Arabella, living with Anne, would be put in an impossible position. The Greek stamp, his handwriting, everything would give it
away. But, if he could not write what he felt to Arabella what was the point of writing at all? He was too tired and had drunk too much to be able to think. It was Anne whom he should be writing
to, but he would think about that tomorrow; he had no news for her, and he could not imagine writing her a letter that contained anything else. The great thing about these situations, he thought,
as he got ready for bed, was that if one was in any doubt, it was better to do nothing. He must retain his sangfroid. He did not consider the problem of retaining what he had never, so far, turned
out either to need or to employ.

Janet lay alone in bed. She was hungry, and anxious and depressed and sorry for everything that was, or was not, happening to her. When she had got back with the shopping to
Henry’s expected greeting (if you could call it that) he had gone on to say that he had to leave that afternoon for his two or three days’ work filming in Oswestry. She didn’t
believe him, and then she did, and then she didn’t care much which was right. She asked him for money, knowing that he probably hadn’t got any, and that if he had,
she
wouldn’t get it, and then washed and ironed his supposedly drip-dry shirt as he required her to do. His going meant that the food she had bought could be made to last far longer: it also
meant that she was in the same state of anxious and monotonous suspension that seemed to be all her life now. She had fed the children and Henry had had a bath, which meant that nobody else could
for God knew how long. She thought how marvellous it would be to be somewhere like the Arts Theatre Club with – well, practically anyone – telling her what a good actress she was going
to be and giving her delicious food and drink. Henry went at about four: then she tried ringing a few friends, but they all knew what her life and situation was like, and they were all too near it
to want any experience – even second-hand. She couldn’t say, ‘Come and have a drink and tell me the gossip’, because there wasn’t any drink. She couldn’t even
make anyone a decent meal. In the end, she found a middle-aged mid-European actress – good at her work, but unbeautiful and unwanted except for neurotic character parts. This woman turned up,
and they ate corned beef hash while the woman told her what sods men were and Henry in particular. She was glad when Lisa went. The woman combined a hatred of men with a maddening,
Freudian-all-knowing comprehension of Janet’s life. She had brought a bottle of gin with her, and after what might be described as more than her fair share of this, her lesbian tendencies
became distressingly apparent. Janet found this at once horrifying and absurd. She didn’t want to go to bed with any bloody woman thank you very much. And men were not all as Lisa described
them, although she was disastrously right about Henry. Whenever Janet tried to be practical about (her own) situation, Lisa accused her of being cold, and British, and practical. She disposed of,
or ignored the children as one might bed bugs or influenza. Nothing chronically serious – simply the products of ill-management. When she left, she said how marvellous it had been to have a
serious talk with anyone in this country, and Janet tried to imagine what an unserious talk could have been like. She had wanted to be cheered, not sneered at. So now she was back – not
exactly where she had started – hardly anyone, she reflected, could ever be that – but back to the stalemate of her life that she reckoned a hell of a lot of people had to contend with.
No career, because of the children: no money, because of Henry. The children because of Henry, and no alternative to Henry because of the children. Luke began his nightly howling. She got,
shivering, out of bed to try and deal with that.

A
RABELLA
woke early in the morning. Because the curtains were not drawn, the first sunlight woke her, and she lay in the
pretty room in the comfortable bed and thought how good everything was. Anne, asleep, looked far younger, more vulnerable and even more feminine than Anne awake. She lay on her side, turned towards
Arabella, with one corner of the pillow bent under itself to raise her head. Her short, dark hair was in curly disarray, her eyes fast shut, and the look of resolution that is often apparent in
people fast and seriously asleep made Arabella feel older, protective, and full of affection. She watched Anne quietly for some time: there seemed to be no dividing line at all between the kinds of
feeling one could have for somebody. Women
are far
nicer than men, occurred to her as a thought (it was one that she had had before in her life); they seemed to set more store by continuous
affection; they did not regard sex as a kind of foray from which one emerged at square one; they liked talking when given the chance – about sex when given the chance – and they were
not, or hardly ever, so concerned with their pride, their
amour propre,
their conceit or whatever. They were humbler, more grateful creatures, taking human relations seriously and acute
about any reciprocation. She is a nice, good, dear, even darling girl, Arabella thought, and I’d give anything in the world to have breasts like that. How wonderful it would be if
she,
Arabella, could have a child – in the family, so to speak – and they could all live happily (in the same place) ever after. I conceive at the drop of a hat, she thought; Anne
doesn’t want children, but if I looked after them, she’d simply find out how good it was having them. Edmund could supply the children, and Anne and I could have a lovely time bringing
them up. What seemed absolutely extraordinary to her was the way most people told you beforehand that anything but the most tried principles of social relations couldn’t work out. How did
they know, if they’d never tried them? But they wouldn’t try them, because they were so afraid that if they
didn’t
work out, everybody else would be able to tell them why
not. I mustn’t spoil things, she thought; Anne, like most people, would think something was wrong with her if I could make her as happy as Edmund clearly can. She hoped that Edmund would find
he had to stay in Greece much longer than he had expected to do.

After four days (it was now Tuesday) Edmund realized that Sir William had been right about the potentialities in Greece: he also realized that he was not going to manage to do
what had been expected of him in two weeks. He therefore sent two cables; one to Sir William explaining that it would all take longer than he had thought, and one to Anne explaining that it would
all take longer than he had thought. By now he had been on trips to Hydra and Spetsai, and then, branching out a bit, to Naxos, Ios and Paros. All this took a great deal of time. The first part,
the Hydra/Spetsai part, was relatively easy, but the other islands bore little or no relation to one another, which meant that in between each excursion he had to return to Pyraeus (or Athens) and
start again. He drank innumerable cups of coffee and ouzo with various people. He took to sleeping after lunch – when possible – some time after four in the afternoon, and not expecting
to dine until ten or eleven at night. He journeyed with Greeks whose command of English was more than adequate; who provided him with ravishingly pretty girls in the evening who spoke not a word of
his language. After four days, the superiority of men over women in Greece caught hold, and he went to bed with a very young, dark-haired girl, who was entirely acquiescent to his deepest wish. He
began to enjoy himself. The incredible and continuous beauty of the country had reached his senses; the excellent food and wine – so much decried by those who have had no experience of it
– made him feel both exceedingly well and particularly happy. Arabella receded in his mind, and Anne was hardly there at all. He congratulated himself on how adaptable he was, and enjoyed his
total lack of emotional responsibility.

‘Think how
awful
it would have been, having this cheating disease with Edmund going off every morning, and no you.’

‘Well, you don’t have to, because here Edmund isn’t, and here I am.’

They were making raspberry jam together. Anne’s illness came and went, much as Dr Travers had predicted, but when she felt ill, they both repaired to her bedroom where Arabella had moved
the television set, and sat, or lay in bed together, watching it in a desultory way.

‘It really tells you too little about too much of the world,’ Arabella had said, quite soon after this regime had established itself, ‘so one can really afford to be pretty
frivolous about it. It’s a kind of “Gather ye causes while ye may” policy which it’s easy not to take too seriously.’

By now they ate rather expensive food procured by Arabella and either not needing to be prepared at all, or done by Anne. The raspberry jam was simply a daytime pursuit, because Anne happened to
feel up to it. By now, Arabella had abandoned her room to Ariadne, and Anne enjoyed their evenings together in her bedroom. They drank rather a lot, because Arabella seemed to arrange that, and
Anne felt – after the stories of lecherous stepfathers – that Arabella was owed almost anything. There was no more news of Clara, but if there had been, Anne felt able to deal with her,
whatever her temperature turnd out to be at such a time.

After Edmund’s cable had arrived, Arabella said, ‘Well, he must be enjoying himself, or he wouldn’t want to stay longer. Isn’t that marvellous?’

‘He’s never been away so long.’

‘But you’re all right, aren’t you? So when he comes back, you won’t make him feel guilty.’

‘Of course not.’

The jam was setting: Anne had put little bits of it on saucers, and now it was behaving as it should. Anne put it into the warmed jars, and Arabella wrote out what it was in her best
writing.