Something in Disguise (12 page)

‘Here we are, then.’ She put the tray down on a small bamboo table by the window, and with her back to him, peered into the dressing-table mirror to make sure that none of her
mascara had smudged. She knew it hadn’t, but men never liked you to watch them dressing. She had slipped into her embroidered kimono affair that a very nice regular had brought her all the
way back from the Far East . . . which reminded her that she was just in time to adjust the hands on the cuckoo clock to stop the poor little chap from coming out and shouting cuckoo four times for
four o’clock. A very nice gentleman had brought it all the way back from Switzerland: her flat was full of these foreign tokens, each one with its own story if truth would out.

‘How’s the tea coming along?’

‘It should be perfect now.’ If only he’d get up off the bed, she could fold it up and return everything to normal. ‘Come and have it in this nice chair.’

When he was well into his second biscuit, she filled up his cup and said, ‘Bogey!’

‘What is it?’

She’d been dreading this moment ever since he’d rung up.

‘I’m afraid everything has got a weeny bit dearer.’

He put his cup down in slow motion and turned to stare at her.

‘How do you mean “everything”?’

His pale blue eyes bulged like glass marbles: he knew perfectly well what she meant. Oh well! If he was going to dig his toes in, she would have to put her foot down.

‘I mean things like tea and biscuits –’ (he started to push his cup away) ‘and the rent, Bogey dear.’

‘Same for all of us. Cost of living only goes
up
: never comes
down
.’

‘Don’t I know it.’

‘Oh, I don’t suppose you do. Women never have any head for the practical aspects of life. Leave that to the men.’

There was a brief unsatisfactory silence while she told herself there was no sense in losing her temper, and he wondered what devil in him made him come and see her at all. Something pretty
primitive and deep-down and uncontrollable. Her figure wasn’t what it was.

‘Well there it is, I’m afraid.’

‘There
what
is?’

‘It’s another thirty bob: on top of the usual. I can’t help it Bogey – I’ve kept it down as long as I could.’

‘I thought you were
fond
of me.’

‘It has nothing to do with how I feel.’

‘I looked on you as much more than a –’

She stared at a biscuit. Eventually, he said,

‘Some prices may be going up, but you’re not getting any younger, you know.’

Her hands held on to each other for comfort, but because of the kimono sleeves he couldn’t see them. He got heavily to his feet, feeling in his pockets, counted out the notes and then
slowly sorted four half crowns which he put on top of them on his biscuit plate.

‘There y’are m’dear: all present and correct.’ Unwilling jocularity, or perhaps he was sorry about what he had just said and didn’t know how to make amends. He
walked slowly to the door, opened it, and said,

‘Seriously, Hilda, chaps like me – living on a pension and all that – you don’t want to price yourself out of the market, do you, old girl?’

She shut the door after him and went to the bathroom to fetch poor Siegfried – she always had to put him out of the room when she had customers, or else he chirped and sang all through
everything. She took off his cover, dear little chap, he put his head on one side and made an experimental cheep. As she picked up his cage and carried it carefully back to the room, she realized
she was crying: a tear splashed through the bars on to Siegfried’s cage sand, making an enormous blob like ink in advertisements. She knew she wasn’t getting any younger.

May heard the Wolseley coming up the drive and hurried to the front door. The house was – not exactly frightening – but more and more depressing to be alone in:
towards the end of a day, one could easily feel quite frightened at how depressed one had become, and things like turning on the wireless often made it worse. She missed Alice: if only the dogs
were allowed into the house, or if Claude was less self-contained and spoke mote – really, Lincoln Street with Oliver and Elizabeth had been so cosy . . .

‘There y’are m’dear, all present and correct.’ He put his old Burberry on the carved eagle’s shoulders of a lectern and bent to kiss her cheek and pat her shoulder
as he always did.

‘Did you have a pleasant day?’

She had to ask him again, as he seemed not to have heard her.

‘Fair to middling.’

After the shepherd’s pie and tinned figs, which they consumed in his den, he suggested that he make her some coffee. So she loaded and fetched the tray with all the apparatus – test
tubes and spirit lamps, filters and, of course, the actual coffee. As the muddy brown liquid churned up and down, he asked,

‘Did that cousin of yours make it for lunch?’

‘Yes! Oh yes. She brought a friend with her: it was very interesting.’

There! Now there was hardly any concealment: although she knew that there was, really: the very idea of Dr Sedum and what he stood for would make Herbert simply furious. At the thought of
Herbert thinking her underhand, she blushed.

Herbert said he was too tired to play backgammon and had the notion that a spot of early Bedfordshire would do no harm. She knew that she would not sleep so soon after the coffee, so she said
she would watch the television for a bit. She switched on the vision without sound to see whether it would be funny, or she would like it, but this seemed to clear the way for the only thought she
had been trying to not to have, and having ever since Dr Sedum and Lavinia had left: that if she had not married Herbert she would now be living in London with darling Oliver and Elizabeth (if they
wanted her to, of course) within easy reach of Great Possibilities (Dr Sedum and his Ideas); and finally, and perhaps worst of all, that she seemed to have less and less in common with Herbert who
was (quite honestly) both exacting and dull. Oh, this was really
shocking
of her! She turned up the sound on the television to drown her guilty protestations . . . a
good
man . . .
deep depression sweeping southwards . . . simple and straightforward . . . unusually heavy frosts for the time of year . . . A
good
man.

By the beginning of August, Elizabeth had cooked fifty-two dinners: Oliver, on the other hand, had gone to eleven interviews and had actually taken two of the jobs, but neither
of them had turned out to be right. One of them had been in a very new book shop that concentrated upon selling poetry and giving customers cardboard cups of Nescafé, and he had quite
quickly had a row with the shop’s manager: ‘In one morning, he said that Tibetans were probably better off under Chinese rule; all Americans were suffering from vitamin deficiencies
from eating so much frozen food; and the French were the only people with literary taste. I’ll Robbe-Grillet you, I said, and that was that.’ The other job had been as a courier, taking
a lot of nice, middle-aged women to the Costa Brava, which he said he could not go on doing because they simply hated it when they got there, and group dysentery and disillusionment wore him to a
thread. ‘Dogfight’ had not yet been sold, although Sukie had driven him patiently all over the suburbs to places where stony-faced men bought and manufactured games. He had had to write
out the rules in frightful legal jargon so that nobody could understand them, at least, certainly neither Elizabeth nor Sukie could, and Sukie said he’d simply managed to make the game sound
complicated and boring. He quarrelled with Sukie rather a lot, and alternated bouts of depression with fractious, manic energy. Elizabeth would come home weary from clearing up some dinner party to
find that he had made a great Indian feast by collecting dishes from the nearest curry restaurant. Or he would take her out and make her spend far more of her earnings buying clothes for herself
than she felt she could afford. For about three weeks he gambled, with, she felt, horrifying success: he spent these sudden gains on a pair of wine coolers he bought in an auction at
Sotheby’s.

‘How much did they cost?’ she yelped just after she had fallen over them in the narrow hall.

‘Forty-two pounds.’ He switched on the hall light ‘Aren’t they a marvellous sight?’

‘What
are
they?’

‘Wine coolers. How vulgar of you to ask how much something that you don’t know what it is costs.’

She gazed at the fluted tubs of some impassively dark wood delicately inlaid with brass. The lids were fluted as well, and crowned by a handle made of a carved, rather angry crouching swan. She
touched one of them. ‘That part is nice.’

‘See?’ He lifted a lid. ‘They’ve got their linings. What did you
think
they would be for?’

She frowned. ‘Well, I suppose some Indian could keep the ashes of his best elephant in one of them. What on earth made you spend all that money?’

‘You remember David Broadstairs? Well, he’s starting an antique business on a Thames barge. He asked me to keep my eyes open for anything nice, so I have – I did. He’ll
sell them for me at the most enormous profit, you’ll see.’ Then he added sadly, ‘He’s got a terrifically rich sister, but she looks like an old-fashioned Channel swimmer and
she couldn’t even pass her “O” levels. I do think God’s sense of justice goes too far at times. I’m off to see our mother in Surrey now.’

‘You never told me!’

‘I’ve told you the moment I saw you after I knew. She sounds as though she needs a visit.’ He kissed her lightly on a bit of cheekbone, and was gone. She opened the door after
him and called:

‘When will you be back?’

‘Late tonight, probably – why do you want to know?’

‘People ringing up – you
fool
.’ He whipped round in the street and charged straight at her so that she had to clutch him not to fall over.

‘Let’s get this clear:
you’re
the fool:
I’m
the whiz kid: you’re younger than me: I’m far heavier and stronger and my sense of chivalry died
when I saw matron at school during a fire practice. O.K.?’

‘O.K.’ She was nearly in tears at being called a fool but she was laughing. She scratched what looked like some egg off his corduroy jacket, and a lot came off under her nail, but
the mark looked exactly the same.

‘Why can’t I go with you?’

‘Because it’s nicer for May if we spread her children out.’ He kissed her. ‘You smell like a delicious clean cow. If Sukie rings, tell her I’m out with Shirley
MacLaine: no – tell her, and I mean this, tell her I’ve gone away with Ginny Mole: she’ll believe
that
all right, and it’ll be more likely to choke her
off.’

Then he really did go.

Back in the silent, empty little house, Elizabeth made herself a large mug of iced Nescafé, kicked off her sandals and lay on the battered old sofa wondering whether she ought to read a
serious book as she was having some free time by herself. London in August wasn’t very nice: or perhaps nowhere felt so good if Oliver wasn’t there. She ought, as he pointed out, to
make some friends of her own, but somehow, what with her job (and she had to have that because between them they needed more money than May socked them)
and
Oliver and his friends and life,
there never seemed to be any time. But she had to face it: the job wasn’t getting her anywhere – just as Oliver not getting a job wasn’t getting
him
anywhere: the trouble
was that Oliver didn’t mind – after the courier job he’d said that he simply wasn’t one of life’s travellers, and that Stevenson’s remark was a horrible mixture
of austerity and showing off; personally, he, Oliver, was one of life’s arrivers and wasn’t going to let his life degenerate into a hopeful mystery tour. She hadn’t liked to ask
who Stevenson was (either a friend of Oliver’s, or else someone dead and famous, because whichever he was she’d get snubbed) . . . Well, she couldn’t read a book, because she had
awful leather patches to put on the elbows of Oliver’s tweed jacket: she’d promised to do the sewing if he got the leather, thinking he’d never get it, but he did, at once.
‘And what’s more, it’s very distinguished.’

‘What
is
it?’ And she had gazed with discomfort at the strip of stiff, wrinkled hide that still had tufts of dark and pale fur attached to it.

‘The hind leg of a man-eating tiger. Annabel’s father shot it in Bengal and had it made into one of those
snarling
rugs, but he doesn’t take much notice of it nowadays,
so Annabel cut off this bit for me. If he
does
notice, she’ll say it got moth.

‘He was a frightful tiger – full of cheap bangles and beads: just get on with your sewing and
don’t
get soppy about the wrong things,’ he added. ‘You
can’t be sad about
every
one who’s dead.’

Now, she’d no sooner started getting on with it, when the telephone rang, and a voice that was clearly Sukie trying to pretend to be someone else, asked for Mr Oliver Seymour.

Elizabeth explained that he was out, and the person – Sukie – rang off before she could say when he’d be back. A moment later, it rang again and Sukie, sounding pretty
desperate, said, ‘I know it’s you. Are you
sure
he’s out?’

‘Yes, of course I am. All day.’

‘When, when will he be back?’

‘He wasn’t quite sure.’ The trouble with loyalty was that it always seemed to include a good deal of hard-heartedness to whoever you weren’t being loyal to. There was a
pause, then Sukie said,

‘The awful thing is, I think Oliver’s tired of me: I can’t
bear
to think it, but I can’t help thinking it’

‘Oh – poor Sukie!’

‘What do you think?’

‘Well –’

‘Is there someone else, do you know?’

‘I don’t –’

‘Because he keeps on talking about one of the most boring people I’ve ever met in my life and I couldn’t help wondering.’

‘Sukie, I really don’t –’

‘Has he mentioned someone called Ginny to you?’

‘Only just.’

‘Well he never stops mentioning her to me. She’s one of the most boring people I’ve ever met in my life.’