Something in Disguise (19 page)

Back at their table he said, ‘I’m going to take you home now and Oliver and Ginny can make their way later.’

When they were well out of Cannes, he drove very fast to a small café they’d never been to before. ‘We’re going to have a spot of coffee and cognac.’

They sat at a small table in a dark corner, and he said, ‘Of course I must explain a bit: of course I must do that. I was going to, anyway, but I thought I had much more time.

‘Jennifer is – she’s had a rotten childhood, of course. You know she’s the same age as you?’

‘You told me.’

‘Twenty. Well – she doesn’t seem like twenty at all. She’s fearfully young for her age.’

‘Where does she live?’

‘She wanted her own flat in London: she shares with two other girls. She’s just started at an acting school – last term, I mean. Of course it’s holidays now. She’s
got a sort of flat in the house in Buckinghamshire. To use when she feels like it. She sometimes spends a week-end there with me, but she’s always hated making plans. She wants to be free.
You know.’

He met her eye at the end of this with a smile that was apologetic and also curiously urgent – as though beneath or inside his random remarks about Jennifer there was some anxious and
secret message to be conveyed. She wanted to ask quite simple – probably stupid – questions like, ‘Will she resent us?’ or even, ‘Has she any idea about us?’ but
she didn’t ask because she felt that she knew the answers and they would be all wrong.

There was a short silence and then he said hopelessly, ‘I’m sure you’ll get on.’

He paid for the brandy and drove her home. Ginny and Oliver were not back. He stayed in the car and she felt another wave of fright.

‘Are you going to bathe with the others?’

‘Are you going to the airport now?’ She knew it was far too early for Jennifer’s plane.

‘I might as well.’

‘I shall go to bed.’

He nodded agreement to this dreary plan, and so she got out of the car and made for the house. As she reached the steps, he called, ‘See you in the morning!’ in a hard, cheery voice.
She was nearly crying, and found that Ginny’s stopping-a-bus gesture was the best answer to that.

In the bedroom – now most obviously and merely hers – she lay on the bed resenting Jennifer, needing Oliver, despising Ginny, worrying (illogically, surely?) about May, her mother,
whom she had so heartlessly and gladly abandoned to what Oliver had described as a living death worse than fate,
loathing
Horrible Herbert, hating Jennifer (why on earth should
she
mind her father being happy?) wanting Oliver just to be there teasing her and making light of her feelings, wishing she didn’t think Ginny was so heartless and
decadent
, feeling guilty
that she had so often and so adroitly avoided going back to Surrey for weekends; perhaps May felt as abandoned by her as
she
now felt abandoned . . . Perhaps it all served her right . . .
Then she could no longer stop thinking about John; could think of no one else and got rid of all her tears.

‘What’s up?’ John Cole asked his daughter.

‘How do you mean, Daddy?’

They were lying on the sea raft a hundred yards out from shore and there was no one else within range.

‘Why are you making everyone feel uncomfortable?’

‘I don’t think I’m making
every
one feel uncomfortable.’ She started putting on more lotion from a bottle that she wore tied to her waist. Her skin was very white,
and had constantly to be protected from the sun.

‘Well, you’re making
me
feel awful. I don’t like my daughter being unfriendly to my guests.’

‘Guests! Honestly, Daddy! Come off it! She’s not a guest.’ She wore a red linen hat with a flopping brim that suffused her face with a pink glow: it wasn’t all her
natural indignation.

Before he could reply, she put down the bottle of lotion, gripped her knees with hands that were so like Daphne’s, and said:

‘Listen, Daddy! How would you feel if I was sleeping with a man twenty-five years older than myself?’

‘It would depend upon what
you
felt about him. And what he felt about you.’

‘I’m not talking about feelings. I’m talking about the plain facts of the matter as any outsider might see them.’

‘Why?’

For a moment that silenced her: she gave a deep (patient?) sigh.

‘How long have you known this girl?’

‘Jennifer do stop cross-examining me – not very long – a few weeks, why?’

‘All I can say is that it seems very odd to me that someone of
twenty
– someone exactly my age – who hasn’t got any money would want to risk setting up with
somebody old enough to be her father. I suppose you gave her that car!’

‘Why not? She hadn’t got one.’ But flippancy was useless with her.

‘I must say that she tried to conceal the fact that you gave it to her.’

‘I think,’ he said with both patience and revulsion, ‘that she was trying to be tactful.’

‘Tactful! Why should there be any need for tact?’

‘Jennifer I’ve had enough of this – I warn you –’

‘So have I! I don’t see why you should abandon Mummy simply in order to indulge some kind of Lolita complex – you’re just infatuated and at your age it’s
disgusting!’

When she was like this, pale grey eyes protruded, chins became one, bosoms heaved, thighs quivered. To be responsible in any way for her existence filled him – as it always did –
with a disgust so murderous that immediately afterwards he felt as he imagined somebody might who had actually committed a murder in a sudden fit of hatred and loathing. This was his daughter, his
only
daughter: if he was responsible in one way for her unfortunate appearance, it could be said that he had only himself to blame if he was unable to fall back, as it were, upon her
character. She was, she must be, literally what he had made her. Poor girl, then. In the same way that he could not bring himself to speak of Eliza to Jennifer, he surely owed Jennifer the same
loyalty. They must simply be kept apart. She had begun to cry now: he was afraid that her acting school had simply oiled the works where histrionics were concerned.

‘There, there,’ he said, ‘I really can’t remember when I last took a nymphet to a motel. And it’s a bit unkind of you to keep rubbing in my age: an astonishing
number of people regard forty-five simply as the gateway to maturity.’

But she simply looked at him with wet, resentful eyes and said, ‘I do wish you wouldn’t be so hard and cynical.’

Over her head, on the top terrace by the villa, he saw the tiny figure of his love. She was walking very slowly, and then, because she stood still for a moment, he imagined that she was looking
out to sea, to the raft, to him. He wanted to wave to her, but knew that the gesture would be misinterpreted by both girls. Must keep them apart, he thought again.

He suggested a swimming race back. Jennifer was a very good swimmer and would easily beat him.

‘I’d rather go if you don’t mind.’

‘I
do
mind.’

‘I feel as though you are a bit ashamed of me.’

‘It’s not
you
I am ashamed of – it’s myself.’

‘But that’s just the same for me, don’t you see?’

‘Yes I do. Darling: I’m so sorry about it all. But I’m sure she’ll get used to the idea: it was just rather a shock.’

Silence. Then he said, ‘Please – Eliza – you won’t abandon me entirely, will you? Will you?’ But she looked at him with that bright, trapped look of someone who was
prevented only by pride from crying.

Jennifer’s footsteps – voice. ‘Daddy!’

‘Coming!’

‘Don’t bother. It’s only, do you think Elizabeth would mind
awfully
if I borrowed that car you gave her to drive Ginny back to the Roc?’

She shook her head then, saying, ‘Of course I don’t mind,’ pulled the key on its ribbon over her head and handed it to him. Their hands touched and all the other starvations
shouted out. Jennifer came in and said, ‘I’m sorry!’

Two days later she and Oliver left. It was all quite civilized: everybody told somebody else quite acceptable lies: Oliver said that their mother was not well and wanted
Elizabeth to come home; John said how sorry he was that they had to go; and Jennifer said what a pity it was that she was losing her chance to get to know Elizabeth as they must have so much in
common. Other things were said, of course.

‘Can’t you stop her?’ Oliver asked Ginny.

‘Stop who?’

‘Don’t be an idiot.’

‘Jennifer thinks her father should go back to her mother,’ said Ginny primly. ‘It’s mad, of course. People never go back to people – except in books. Look at Mummy:
she’s always going back to people in movies but she never does in life.’

‘Can’t you tell her that?’

‘Oliver don’t be so
dim
! It’s not
really
what she thinks. She just wants her father to herself.’

‘Well, if you knew all that, it was bloody of you –’ And they had a frightful row which ended with Ginny saying she was going to Martha’s Vineyard, she was sick of
France, and Jennifer was right about one thing – young men were a pain.

They left on a three o’clock plane after an extremely uncomfortable lunch at the villa. Ginny came to it, but she was not speaking to Oliver. John and Elizabeth did not
speak to each other. Oliver, who loathed her, ignored Jennifer, who was chattering at Elizabeth with a placating eye on her father. Nobody ate much, and in the end Oliver and John had a desultory
conversation about the early winter days of the Riviera, Katherine Mansfield, and Gjieff. As soon as coffee had been served, Elizabeth, who had refused it, said that she must go and finish her
packing.

‘I’ll help you, if you like.’

Elizabeth stopped at the end of the terrace. ‘No thanks, Jennifer. I prefer to do it alone.’

Oliver said quietly to John, ‘I think it would be better if we had a taxi, you know.’

‘I’d arranged for Gustave to drive you. I’m not coming to the airport – don’t worry.’

Somehow or other, the cases were put in the car, various farewells got through and they were off. Oliver looked at his sister. She sat rigidly, staring out of the window away from him. She was
wearing the dark blue linen suit in which she had left Lincoln Street, and there was a white stripe on her fingers where the ring had been. Oliver took one of her hands and held on to it. Neither
of them knew how much English Gustave understood, so they said nothing.

In the aeroplane, once they were up, Oliver said, ‘Have a huge brandy.’

She looked at him for the first time, and he could tell by her thick upper lids that she must have been crying after lunch. ‘That’s another thing. I’ve only got ten
bob.’

‘Ha ha! I thought of that. Look what I’ve got.’ And he pulled out of his breast pockets a bundle of notes. ‘I haven’t even counted them yet.

‘Oh Oliver! Where did you get that.’

‘Don’t sound as though you’ve never seen a five pound note in your life before. They haven’t come from outer space.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Loot: from that
damned awful little bitch.’

‘Not Ginny!’

‘Of course not. I never take money from women I
have
loved. No – the real, prize, first-class, hysterical, neurotic, hideous, boring, megalomanic little bitch: Jennifer Cole.
I popped up to her room after lunch and took what I fancied.’

‘Oh Oliver!’

‘Oh Elizabeth! I call it meagre revenge. It doesn’t matter to her: I bet she just asks for and gets what she wants. She probably didn’t know what was in her Hermès
wallet. Let’s see. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-one, two, three – ten. That’s going to keep the wolf from the door: and anybody who saw Jennifer would only have to show her
to the wolf – she wouldn’t need money.’

‘It’s stealing.’

‘That’s what it is. And if you asked me whether stealing twenty-three pounds ten is as bad as what that little bitch has just done, I’d say you want your head examined.
Anyway.’ He ordered the brandies and ginger ale. ‘That’s to satisfy your puritanical urge. All women feel reassured by long drinks – even if there’s twice as much
alcohol in them. Darling Liz. It’s not as bad as you think. You’ve kept your watch, I see. So you must regard the situation as not entirely lost?’

‘Do you think it was wrong? I didn’t want to seem pettish. I left everything else, but he knows I lost my other one. I don’t understand anything about it.’

‘Of course you don’t.’ The brandies had arrived and he poured the ginger ale, mixed it up with his finger. ‘There. A nice, brotherly drink. Swig it back. The situation is
perfectly simple, really. Jennifer doesn’t want anyone competing with her for her father’s affection. How about that?’

‘That part is not in the least difficult. But what does
he
feel about it?’

‘Oh – there you have me. Haven’t the slightest idea. Can you imagine what on earth made May marry Herbert? People are so keen on explaining every nuance of human behaviour that
they fall back on the kind of invention that tells you more about
them
than it tells you about what they’re explaining.

Although I’d hardly call either Daddo or Jennifer a nuance,’ he added a bit later. ‘Go on: drink up, and we’ll have another. We’ve got to face Lincoln Street after
I’ve been alone in it for a fortnight. We need a spot of blurring and bracing.’

Just before they were landing, she said, ‘I do need to know what he feels, though.’ She had had the two brandies, and was now simply relaxed and unhappy.

It was raining in London and looking its August worst. In the bus she cried a bit, but silently, and then, holding a bit of his coat sleeve, said, ‘It would be so awful without you –
you can’t imagine.’

‘Don’t cry too much; there’s nothing to blow your nose on but five pound notes. Think of me. Think of wicked horrible Ginny buggering off to Martha’s Vineyard in order to
get away from me. Think of my broken heart.’

‘Oh yes! Poor Oliver! Do you mind awfully about her? I mean –
is
your heart broken?’

‘A bit,’ he said, ‘but don’t worry – it’s smaller than yours.’