Something in Disguise (13 page)

There was another pause, during which it was quite clear to Elizabeth that Sukie was crying. Unable to stand this, she said,

‘As a matter of fact, Oliver has gone to see his mother – our mother.’

‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly: he told me just before he left. Probably back tonight.’

‘Really and truly? You swear you’re not making this up?’

‘Sukie, I absolutely promise.’

‘Oh! Elizabeth! Do you think that means there is some hope for me?’

Before she could stop herself, Elizabeth had said, ‘No I don’t. Oh look here, Sukie, you’d better come round: it’d be much better than talking on the
telephone.’

So Sukie came round in a flash, and they had a long talk about Life and not being possessive and whether young marriages turned out well on the whole or not and what jealousy did to
people’s character and how much being brilliant had to do with being cold, and whether young, and particularly young
brilliant
men ever really knew what they wanted and when neither of
them could think of any more ways of discussing Oliver, Elizabeth made some more iced Nescafé and then Sukie helped her wash her hair. Sukie was very good at this, rinsing Elizabeth’s
hair until it squeaked, and saying kindly that if Elizabeth took more trouble with it, it could be one of her best features, and that hundreds of people spent thousands of pounds having artificial
red-gold lights put into their hair. It was just one more of those days when knowledge of soil erosion, monotremes and the Moorish influence in Spain (or indeed anywhere else) would not have proved
of the slightest use . . .

About four o’clock they were just looking through an evening paper in case there was a film worth seeing, when the telephone rang.

‘Is that by any chance Miss Elizabeth Seymour?’

‘Yes.’

‘You won’t remember me. I was a guest at a dinner party cooked by you in Eaton Square last week. Artichokes vinaigrette, trout with almonds and cream cheese tarts: that
one.’

‘Oh yes; I remember.’ There had been eight people in all, so that meant he could be any one of the three male guests.

‘I was the tall, nearly bald one with thick glasses. The thing is, I’m in rather a mess. I wonder if you could help me out?’

Elizabeth waited.

‘I’ve suddenly been presented with the necessity of having dinner at home without staff of any kind. I wondered, if, by any chance, you happen to be free to help me out?’

‘How did you find me? I usually work through an agency.’

‘So I was told. But they seem to be permanently engaged: so I rang the Mountjoys – the Mountjoys of Eaton Square – and they gave me your number. I’m really rather
desperate or I wouldn’t have gone to such lengths. I’ve never liked the telephone.’

‘Well – I usually do work through the agency, and they would expect –’

‘Oh, I’ll pay them anything they expect, and I’m quite prepared to pay you more. I have a rather vulgar attitude to money in fact. I’ve found it’s the best attitude
to have. So don’t worry about that aspect.’

‘How many people do you want me to cook for? I
am
free, as a matter of fact,’ she added hurriedly.

‘Oh, what a relief! Just for two. A Mrs Cole and myself: I’ve ordered some of that very thick steak and some sort of pâté to go with it. Mrs Cole is something of a
carnivore.’

‘Do you want any kind of savoury or pudding?’

‘A savoury would be delicious. Could I leave that to you? Have you got a pencil to write down my address?’

‘No: hang on a minute.’ She couldn’t find one, but Sukie kindly produced her eyeliner and an advertising page of the
Evening Standard
. The address turned out to be in
Pelham Place (walking distance from Lincoln Street, jolly good thing), but when he produced his telephone number, the eyeliner broke, and she had to repeat it aloud while Sukie kindly arranged
bunches of matches on the carpet.

‘And what’s your name, please?’ she remembered to ask before he rang off.

‘John Cole. Tremendously in keeping with my appearance, I’m afraid you’ll find. Goodbye.’

‘What on earth could he mean by that?’ Elizabeth said as she put the receiver down.

‘By what?’ Sukie was cramming the unused matches back in the box. ‘You must admit I’m a marvellous secretary: full of resources.’

‘Saying his name was John Cole and it was tremendously in keeping with his appearance.’

‘No idea. It’s a pretty dull name.’

‘That’s it, then. He said he was nearly bald and wore thick glasses.’

‘Poor old thing,’ said Sukie absently. Then she turned the awe-inspring contents of her handbag on to the hearth-rug and found a pencil.

Elizabeth walked to Pelham Place. Sukie had offered to drive her, but she felt like walking, and also her hair wasn’t quite dry. She had managed to get Sukie to go, on
the grounds that it would be rather obvious for Oliver to find her in Lincoln Street, supposing he got back before Elizabeth did. The talk with Sukie had left her feeling far more contented with
her lot or life than she had been feeling before Sukie rang up. It was much luckier to be Oliver’s sister than one of his mistresses: to begin with, he was far kinder to her than he seemed
to be to people like Annabel or Sukie, and to go on with, whatever he was, he couldn’t really stop being it, which made the whole situation feel far more secure and free.

She arrived at the house at Pelham Place at about seven o’clock. It was one of those stucco, non-committal houses where you couldn’t be sure what kind of person might live. A long
time after she had rung the bell, she realized that the front door was open – and walked in. She could hear a gramophone, and a bath running: the kitchen, with luck, would be on the ground
floor, and if not, certainly in the basement. The gramophone was playing Mozart: one up to him, she thought, but she had got fairly professional in her expectations of her employers. Few of them
had turned out as awful as those first ones in Bryanston Square, but, on the other hand, none of them had struck her as people one was sorry not to be having dinner
with
(instead of actually
cooking their dinners). The kitchen
was
in the basement, but so was the dining-room, so
that
was all right. It was a comforting mixture of Formica and Elizabeth David –
hygienic, but well-equipped. The dining-room had rather old-fashioned Cole’s wallpaper (perhaps
he
made it) and the traditional amount of damp – or mildew. She unpacked the
materials for the savoury, put on her overall, and started looking for everything else.

John Cole materialized in that kind of twilight that you never notice until somebody else brings your attention to it. He was holding two glasses in his hands. ‘Do you like
champagne?’ is what he eventually said. He
was
very tall, and his spectacles winked in the reflection from the street lamp outside the basement window.

‘Now I would.’ Elizabeth took the glass and drank gratefully.

‘Your overall is so dazzling that I can’t see your face in this Stygian light.’ He switched on some lights. ‘I hope you are managing to find everything. My resident
couple left rather suddenly. This afternoon in fact. Would you like some more of that?’

‘Well – a little more. It’s very good.’

‘Ostentation combined with stinginess have given champagne an unfairly bad name.’ He had opened the huge fridge and extracted an unopened bottle. ‘Chuck me that cloth, would
you? Have you ever drunk decent champagne at a wedding, for instance?’ He was untwisting the wire from the neck of the bottle.

‘Sorry, I thought when you said “more” that we’d be finishing a bottle.’

‘That’s all right.
I’m
not stingy – ostentatious, but not stingy. And I wanted some more myself. Hold it out.’

He drew the cork and filled her glass to the brim. After he had replaced the bottle in the fridge, he leant against one of the teak draining boards and said, ‘Would it be all right with
you if I stay and drink with you while you do your stuff? I’ve had a pig of a day, and if I go and sit upstairs by myself I shall fall asleep.’ There was the briefest pause, then,
before she had replied, he added, ‘I
could
say that I’d be a help if you couldn’t find anything, but that would be a complete lie. I haven’t really the faintest idea
where anything is.’ Another slight pause, before he said, ‘But if you hate people being about when you are at work, I should quite understand.’

Elizabeth said, ‘Oh no! It’s – it’s much better having someone to talk to. Do stay.’

‘I will.’ She found she was looking at him exactly when he began to smile: this made him look more different from when he wasn’t smiling than anyone she had ever seen. She
smiled briefly back – even across the room she had to look up at him: he was extraordinarily tall. For a second, the whole evening suddenly seemed festive and momentous, as though something
very good was certainly going to happen. Amazed by this, she continued to look at him, or rather in his direction, but seeing only herself now. ‘
You’re
the fool,’ Oliver
had said only a few hours ago, and a feeling like that simply showed how right he was. She saw herself – a pair of little white dwarfs reflected in his glasses – and then she saw him
again, shoulders slightly hunched, head a little to one side, at the end of his smile – ‘staring casually,’ she thought, if that made sense. Her forehead felt burning under her
fringe. She got her pad with pencil attached out of her bag, and started to write out the menu in full in order to check off her materials.

‘What time would you like to have dinner?’

They both looked at their watches.

‘I should think in the neighbourhood of half-past eight. The trouble is that I can’t be sure when my guest will arrive.’

‘And of course you will want time for – a drink before dinner.’

‘No.’

She glanced at him, surprised, and then told herself that it was none of her business: but then, it was, a bit.

‘I don’t think I can start to cook your steak until your guest has actually arrived –’

‘There’s some caviare to start with. Here.’ He opened the fridge and indicated the largest pot of caviare that she had ever seen.

‘Right. Do you like onion and egg and chopped parsley – all that sort of thing?’

‘None of that sort of thing. Mrs Cole and I eat it in porridge bowls with spoons: I say, you’re lagging behind a bit with that champagne: if it’s too warm chuck it away; the
hallmark here is seasoned vulgarity.’

‘Mrs Cole and I.’ Of course, he had mentioned a Mrs Cole earlier. She was fitting greaseproof paper round the small soufflé dish she had brought: it did seem a curious way of
referring either to your wife or your mother – but that really
was
none of her business . . .

‘Is Mrs Cole your wife’ (How could I. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.)

‘Mrs Cole is my wife.’

(Oh. Is she indeed: well I don’t see why you had to be so secretive about it.) ‘Oh.’

‘To be exact, she
was
my wife: she isn’t any more; we’re divorced.’

(Well that’s something.
What?
in that case why did you ever say she was your wife and why on
earth
are you taking all this trouble to have her to dinner?)
‘Oh.’

‘Do
you
like caviare?’

‘I’ve never had enough to be sure: by itself, I mean. It’s nearly always
on
things. Now I’d better lay the table. Is the silver in the dining-room?’

‘Let’s go and see. It’s possible, I suppose, that Colonel Grzimek has walked off with it; or motored, which was more his style. Isn’t it odd,’ he went on as he
opened the dining-room door for her, ‘how one always speaks of servants in the past tense the moment they have left? There’s a nasty streak of egocentricity there, all right.

‘I maligned the colonel. There is the silver: all of it, by the look of things.’

He was towering over the sideboard on which there was a large rosewood canteen systematically stuffed with spoons and forks.

Elizabeth, suddenly remembering Daddo, couldn’t help beginning to laugh and then going on. He looked at her while she did this with approval and interest.

‘What an extraordinarily involuntary noise that is. The idea of a colonel being a butler amuses you? Well, he almost certainly wasn’t one. He was Romanian (there I go again, no doubt
he still is), and it was his way of showing me that he was too good for the job. There is something comfortingly international about military rank. He also said his wife was an ex-opera singer. He
almost certainly wasn’t married to her, and she showed no signs of even retrospective musicality, but she was a damn good cook. She did everything. She cleaned
his
shoes, while he
cleaned mine.’ By now he was sitting in the carver at the head of the table, while Elizabeth laid a place in front of him.

Where shall I put Mrs Cole?’

‘A very good question. It’s no good putting her at the other end, because she won’t stay there. There, I should think, would be as safe a compromise as any.’

‘If they were so good, why did they leave?’

‘I wanted them to come out to the villa and the colonel said that somebody had insulted him in Monaco in 1936 and there had been a little trouble; and then he said
I
was insulting
him and after that he sulked for two frightful days (a really effective sulker; the bathwater and the champagne became exactly the same uninviting temperature). Then he simply left . . .

‘No doubt,’ he added, following her back to the kitchen, ‘his loss will prove a blessing in disguise. That is how they usually come, I find. You get misfortunes in plain
clothes as it were, but not your average blessing.’

Elizabeth, rather dazed by the way in which he seemed to be talking about a lot of things she didn’t know about all at once, absently gulped the rest of her champagne.

‘I’m interrupting you: I’ll go. Let me fill your glass, and leave you to it.’

‘It’s all right, so long as you don’t expect any intelligent response.’ She was doing the part of a soufflé that you can do ahead of time. The steak was out and
ready; the watercress (the only concession to greenery in the entire meal) was waiting, washed, in the salad basket.