Something in Disguise (14 page)

‘Do you want your steak
on
pâté
on
toast?’

Before he could answer, the front door rang without stopping for what seemed like ages.

John Cole said, ‘I’ll go. There’s an intercom by the door there. I’ll tell you when we want to start on the caviare. Don’t, for God’s sake, go before
I’ve seen you.’ He went.

He’s dreading it, Elizabeth thought: perhaps he’s still in love with her? Yes. No. If he isn’t, she must be very awful for him not to take her
out
to dinner. Surely that
would have been the answer?

Voices: a contralto treacle; John Cole’s. Door shutting; the woman laughing – a husky, but high-pitched laugh – another door shutting, and silence.

Silence for what seemed ages, but Elizabeth, who timed it, knew that it was no more than twenty minutes. She hummed and hawed about cooking the steak, and something told her not to until both
the Coles were safely in his dining-room. But this didn’t seem to be going to happen. She fidgeted around the kitchen, fiddling with the soufflé mix, turning the steak in its salt, oil
and lemon juice, swinging the basket of watercress. Eventually she sat down, combed her hair and put on a spot more lipstick: her fringe was too long again – it was getting, as Oliver had
said, like one of those intensely reliable dogs. Seeing herself for long always made her feel shaky and depressed. She decided to have a proper look at the dining-room.

The paper was like the passages at Convent Garden – broad stripes – only here it was two different fairly dark greens. The walls had several pictures that looked, at first sight, to
be French Impressionists, and on closer examination (and bearing the champagne and caviare in mind) stayed being them. The damp patches, the marks on the lime-coloured carpet, the rather low, smoky
ceiling, all gave the impression that the room had been decorated years ago – pictures and all – and then simply left Was this the work of Mrs Cole?

The moment Elizabeth thought this, she heard Mrs Cole’s voice; continuous and, even at a distance, seeming too loud. She slipped back into the kitchen: the voice got louder.

They seemed to be taking a very long time to come downstairs. She put the steaks under the grill; got the caviare out of the fridge and then, her heart beating out of sheer curiosity, made for
the dining-room.

Mrs Cole was sitting at the table, but not at the place set for her. She had dragged (at least Elizabeth supposed it must have been she who had dragged) a chair and placed it tremendously near
her ex-husband’s place.

‘Cawers – goody-goody-goody gum-drops!’

Mrs Cole’s voice was naturally rather high, but with a good deal of husky interference which gave her a much wider vocal range than most people. At any rate, her voice certainly made you
look at her. Elizabeth looked, and then immediately looked away, because she found Mrs Cole’s enormous, pale blue, rather protuberant eyes fixed upon her.

‘Is this a little chum of Jennifer’s?’

‘It is not.’ He pushed the caviare over to her while Elizabeth fetched the silver porringers from the sideboard.

‘He’s a
sodding
awful liar, isn’t he?’ Mrs Cole laid a thin, white, heavily freckled arm upon Elizabeth’s overall. ‘You know all about where Jennifer
is, don’t you, darling?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t –’

‘Miss Seymour has kindly come in to cook dinner. She’s never even
met
Jennifer. Come on, Daphne, stop needling, and have some nice caviare.’

Without letting go of what had become her grasp of Elizabeth’s overall (the skinny arm culminated in a hand that was shaped like the foot of some bird of prey), Mrs Cole started to dig her
spoon into the pot. ‘Vere is the
wod
ka?’ she asked. Drops of caviare dripped from her shaky, laden spoon and rolled about the table. When some of it was in the bowl, she stabbed
at it petulantly. ‘No cavvers without wodders,’ she said in a sort of voice that a large doll, if it could talk, would talk. She was altogether like a huge, old doll, Elizabeth thought.
Even her hair had a very wide parting in it – like doll’s hair – and she wore it in a long, permanently-waved bob – like Rita Hayworth in ancient films. Mrs Cole’s
head and the shoulders of her black crêpe dress were showered with dandruff, and well over and above her Chanel No. 5, Elizabeth could detect the odour of cheap raspberry jam that so often
accompanies this condition.

John Cole, without answering, took out a bunch of keys and left the room. The moment that they were alone, Mrs Cole’s grip on Elizabeth’s arm tightened, and just as Elizabeth was
going to pull herself away from this rather surprising and horrible person, she said,

‘While he’s away – quick! write down her
number
– I only want to
see
her.’ She had let go at last, and was fumbling desperately with her bag.
‘
You
look for me, darling, any old scrap will do – I just want to give her my love.’ And for a moment Elizabeth found herself looking down into the huge, heavily made-up
doll’s face, whose eyes were of such open agony that she felt her hair prickling with shock. She would do
any
thing to stop someone looking like that.

The bag, which had seemed quite small, was crammed with dirty, broken, spilt things – loose aspirins coated with brown face-powder, a miniature bottle of Gordon’s gin, a grey elastic
sanitary belt, a screwed-up packet which could contain no smokable cigarette, a little Disney-type dog made of pipe cleaners, a chiffon handkerchief with a swansdown puff attached, some cloakroom
tickets, pencils (broken), Biro (top off), a tube of something that was oozing out at the bottom . . .

John Cole was back. He carried a bottle of vodka in one hand, and two very small glasses in the other. Elizabeth, who had been burrowing, as directed, into Mrs Cole’s handbag, saw his
face, and felt herself beginning to blush. Mrs Cole looked at her with hatred, but there was something helpless about it, and Elizabeth, now feeling treacherous in both directions, put the bag back
on the side of Mrs Cole’s chair. Her ears were burning, and the steak needed basting.

‘What a one you are for locking things up. It would have been awful being married to you when the Cru
sades
were on. One would have been
hobbling
about in a chastity belt . .
.’

When Mrs Cole was trying to be horrible she had a kind of old-fashioned drawl . . . Who on
earth
was Jennifer? None of your
bus
iness, you fool. She basted the steak with its
juices, finished her glass of (now rather warm) champagne and tried not to hear their voices next door. The trouble was that you could. You couldn’t hear absolutely everything they said
unless you tried very hard indeed – and possibly you couldn’t then – but without trying at all, you could hear enough to make it very difficult not automatically to try. Mostly it
was Mrs Cole, who seemed to be talking a good deal, but he was also answering, or arguing with her. Sometimes she shouted, or almost cried out, and once Elizabeth thought she was actually crying,
but then she realized that it had been a laugh turning into a paroxysm of coughing.

The steaks were done; the toast fried; the pâté put into position. The watercress was in a silver bowl in which (she had to admit) it looked its best. Now what? Did she wait until
rung for, or march in with the next course? Perhaps this was why most cooks in the old days had had such fiendish tempers and took to drink. Hours seemed to have gone by. She decided to march.

The candles on the dining-room table had been lit, which made the rest of the room seem darker. Mrs Cole sounded as though she was in the middle of some rambling accusation. John Cole, who,
elbows on the table, almost looked as though he was blocking his ears with his hands, gave a brief affirmative nod as she came in: clearly she had done the right thing. She put the tray on the
sideboard, and went to clear the caviare bowls. ‘. . . but that’s what you
always
do, always assume the worst instead of the best, not like me, I always assume the worst instead
of the best . . .’

They had neither of them eaten much caviare. Mrs Cole’s helping seemed to be absolutely everywhere except inside her and the original pot was nearly full. The vodka bottle, on the other
hand, was nearly empty. It stood at Mrs Cole’s right hand, and as Elizabeth cleared away her bowl, she grabbed the bottle, emptied it into the tumbler which had been meant for water, and sank
it.

John Cole said, ‘Daphne –’

Mrs Cole said, ‘Merry old soul indeed! Christmas; celebrations – fun; coming off your high horse; the trouble with you, Jack, is that you’re nouveau riche – that’s
not like art nouveau getting fashionable with time like bead dresses and bobbed hair: the riche are always with us, and far too many of them are nouveau – they’ve never been popular for
one very good reason – they suffer from moral over-compensation – like cork legs or being a Lesbian – they can’t help regarding riches as a kind of drawback they’re
going to surmount. Nobody goes about saying “he’s marvellous, in spite of being nouveau riche.” But that’s what they want. They all want it. They don’t realize that
however riche you are, there are some things that money can’t buy. Like stopping being nouveau.’

At this point, her head sunk gently forward until it was enjoined with the steak Elizabeth had placed before her. There was a profound and continuing silence. Both John Cole and Elizabeth gazed
at Mrs Cole until they looked at each other. Mrs Cole’s arms lay on the dark, polished table like pieces of Arctic coastline, each side of her head. It became clear that any move that was to
be made was not going to come from her.

Then John Cole said, ‘I must take her home: oh dear, oh damn!’

‘Shall I –’

‘No. You could help me get her upstairs, though. People like this are a dead weight. Hang on a minute here, while I get the car out.’ And he left the room in such haste that the
candle nearest the door nearly blew out.

He was pretty callous about her, Elizabeth thought, because whatever someone was like, you couldn’t help feeling sorry for them if they were being like Mrs Cole was now. Nobody would pass
out with their forehead in a lot of hot gravy unless they had got past caring about anything. Except drink and Jennifer whoever-she-was. She went to the kitchen, damped a clean drying-up cloth and
tried to lift Mrs Cole’s head out of her plate in order to clean it up a bit. This operation, she quickly found, needed three hands: one, at least, for Mrs Cole’s head (which was
surprisingly heavy), one for wielding the damp cloth, and one for removing the plate of steak. She got the plate out of the way, but dropped the cloth and then lost control of Mrs Cole’s head
which rolled forward again almost as though it had nothing to do with the rest of her. She groaned and started to breathe rather noisily, but she must be better off lying on the cloth. ‘Poor
Mrs Cole!’ she thought rather uncertainly. She was very glad when
he
returned.

They carried her upstairs; Elizabeth leading, backwards, with the feet. One of her shoes fell off and apart from her smeared make-up and the gravy she seemed also to have lost an ear-ring, but
she looked so absolutely awful by now that Elizabeth rather hoped that neither of them would start worrying about the ear-ring. They’d both begun saying things like, ‘Mind the head: can
you manage the feet?’ so they were hell-bent on trying to pretend she wasn’t anyone. The front door was wide open, and so was the car door. Luckily, it was a very large car, but even
so, it seemed to Elizabeth that they had, rather heartlessly, to stuff her into it.

Before he got into the car, he said, ‘I beg you not to go before I get back. I’ll only be about twenty minutes.’

So she went back and tidied up: cleared the food out of the dining-room (it seemed such an awful waste of steak that she put it all on a dish in case John Cole knew a dog). She licked the
caviare pot spoon not to waste that, and it was delicious: she put the pot firmly in the fridge before tackling the washing up – not much of
that
anyway. Now that it was almost over,
she felt very sad: it seemed awful that people should either have lives with nothing happening in them (like hers) or lives where whatever it was that happened was quite so squalid and frightening
(like Mrs Cole).
He
might be all right – fall into neither of these categories – but then he was a man, and she had a sinking feeling that most of the
ordinary
bad things
happened to women rather than men. Men were probably saved up for heroic death (like her father) or glamorous danger (like Oliver when he’d borrowed someone’s quick motor and sneaked
into a race at Brands Hatch – all that kind of thing). Perhaps men were largely responsible for the things that happened to women – perhaps
he
was the reason why Mrs Cole had
taken to drink! Perhaps Jennifer was her own child, and John Cole wouldn’t let her see her own daughter – was, in fact, not only nouveau riche, but wicked, it was simply his glasses
that misled one . . . And Daddo! she thought, with exactly the same hectic alarm; supposing
he
was wicked and just masquerading as stupid and dull! There was absolutely no reason, she went
on, wildly, why on earth stupid people shouldn’t be wicked: it was far more likely, when you came to consider it. It was supposed to be far easier to be wicked than to be good, and Oliver had
said that one of the hallmarks of stupid people was that they always did what they thought was the easiest thing: the fact that it often turned out not to be that was neither here nor there . .
.

The front door slammed: why hadn’t she
left
? She seized her bag and basket, turned out the kitchen lights, and almost ran up the basement stairs, straight into John Cole at the
top.

She ran into him with such force that if he had not caught hold of her shoulder, she would have lost her balance and fallen back down the stairs.

‘Steady.’

‘I’m going home now.’

‘Hang on a minute.’

‘I’ve got to go – honestly.’

But a strand of her hair seemed to have got caught in one of his waistcoat buttons: she jerked, and tore the tangled hairs out by their roots with half a dozen little dwarf mandrake screams of
agony. Tears filled her eyes.