Something in Disguise (2 page)

May, wearing an anonymous macintosh over her wedding clothes, was mixing the dogs’ food in the scullery. Biscuits – like small pieces of rock – a tin of
animal meat and last night’s cabbage lay in a chipped enamel bowl, and she was stirring it with a wooden spoon. It smelled awful and did not look enough, but she did not notice either of
these things because she was trying to think about the Absolute – a concept as amorphous and slippery as a distant fish and one that she feared was for ever beyond her intellectual grasp.
‘The Whole,’ she repeated dreamily: at this point, as usual, the concept altered from being some kind of glacial peak to an orange-coloured sphere – a furry and at the same time
citrus ball; but these visual translations interrupted real understanding of the idea – were nothing, she felt, but childish cul-de-sacs, the wrong turning in this cerebral maze. She tried
again. ‘God,’ she thought, and instantly an ancient man – a benign King Lear and at the same time Father Christmas in a temper – was sitting on a spiky, glittering chair.
‘Absolute Being’; the chair wedged itself on the glacial peak. She sighed, and a bit of cabbage fell out of the bowl. A very interesting man she had met recently had told her to live in
the present. She picked up the piece of cabbage and put it back into the bowl. The trouble with the present was the way it went on and on and on, and she found it so easy to live in that when the
man had suggested to her that she wasn’t doing it the right way, she had felt sure he was right.

It was so easy to be a vegetable, she thought, staring humbly into the bowl, and somehow or other the amount more that was expected of one must be achievable by slow degrees: it was not
necessary to jump straight from a cabbage to God. It was worse than that really; babies, for instance were all right; even children – ‘little children’ – were spiritually
acceptable; but somewhere along the line leading to adolescence people got demoted from being children to being vegetables, and often wicked vegetables at that. The Christian world blamed a good
deal of this on to carnal knowledge. This seemed, to her, to be an over-simplification, because even she could think of a lot of dreary and comparatively unevolved people whose carnal knowledge
seemed to her nil . . . Anyway, this interesting man had said that sex was a good thing – if properly approached – but he had added that hardly anybody understood how to approach it
properly. The only time she had thought about sex had been the gigantic months after Clifford had been killed, when underneath or inside her misery had continued her aching unattended body that
simply went on wanting him, that seemed no more able to recognize his death than some poor people could recognize that a limb that itched and twitched was no longer there because it had been cut
off. Several of her friends had lost their men in the war, but she quickly discovered that the plane on which such losses were touched upon was the empty-chair-beside-the-fire one: the empty body
in the bed was never admitted in the social annals of bereavement. She hadn’t ‘approached’ sex before Clifford, and she hadn’t approached it with him. He and it had arrived
together; she had loved him almost at once and remarked – breathlessly soon afterwards – how lucky it was that when you loved someone there was so much to do about it. They had had four
years of interrupted, but otherwise splendid pleasure, but always with the war lying in wait – at first, hardly mattering, seeming distant and unreal and vaguely wicked as a child’s
view of death. After Oliver was born there were a few more months when Clifford – doing navigation courses at a Naval Training Establishment – worked harder, but was still able to get
home more often than not. Home was then a two-roomed flat at the top of a non-converted house in Brighton. They were poor – a sublieutenant’s pay and her fifty pounds a year was all
they had – but Clifford had a second-hand bicycle for getting to work, she became extraordinarily good at vegetable curries and, as Clifford had pointed out, a baby was one of the cheapest
luxuries currently available. Then the war had pounced: a fine spring afternoon, and he had come back early – she heard his step on the linoleum stairs and ran to meet him trembling with
unexpected delight . . . Next morning he left her at five, a full lieutenant newly appointed to a frigate. She had sat in the tiny blacked-out kitchen staring at his half-drunk cup of tea and
wondering how on earth she could bear it. To be in love, to say goodbye for an unknown amount of time (weeks? months? years? she would not imagine further) only to know that
he
was to be put
professionally in danger somewhere, and that, worse, this was fast becoming the accepted, general situation, was the beginning of the war for her. She had sat in the kitchen hating men for
devising, allowing, lending themselves to this monstrous stratagem, which seemed to her then as evil and pointless and heartless as the origins of chess. Even
he
– she had sensed his
professional excitement, his pride in that wretched piece of gold lace, his complete acceptance that the Admiralty could, at a moment’s notice, break up his private life and send him anywhere
to fight and perhaps be killed . . .

He
hadn’t
been killed for nearly another three years after that morning: the war had played cat and mouse with her: after three years of sharpening her courage by a succession of
these partings, of stretching her anxiety and loneliness to breaking point in the months between them, of informing her fears (it was impossible not to discover a good deal of the horrors and
hazards of convoy work in the North Atlantic and that was Clifford’s life), it pounced again. He never saw his daughter: he never even
saw
her, she had used to reiterate – a
straw of grievance which she clung to for months because even some kind of grievance seemed to help a bit – with the days, at least. So, like thousands of women and hundreds who had been
deeply in love, she settled down to the problems of bringing up two children without their father or enough money . . . When they were up, and before, she hoped, they had begun to think of her as a
responsibility, she had married again.

Reminiscence was not thought: it couldn’t be, because it was so easy. Another interesting point the interesting man had made was that anything worthwhile was difficult; he had not actually
said that if you stumbled upon some natural talent, the talent would turn out to be inferior or unnecessary, but she suspected, in her own case, at least, that this was probably so. Obedience to
natural laws, he had said, was essential,
if only you could find out what they were
. Obedience and your own talents turning out to be no good had a ring of truth about it: the people who ran
institutions seemed always primarily concerned with the dangers of spiritual/temporal pride in their subjects; look at nuns and the Foreign Office . . .

‘Oh madam! Whatever are you doing in here on a day like this!’ It was Oliver doing his imitation of the horrible housekeeper who had ruled the colonel’s life until May had come
into it.

‘I’ll do it,’ he continued, looking into the bowl; ‘you haven’t got enough there to keep a lovesick Pekinese – let alone those two great witless sods in the
kennels. Give me another tin of what’s-his-name and go and be gracious somewhere.’

‘Thank you darling. Have you seen Alice?’

‘No. Should I have?’

‘I just wondered if she was all right.’

‘Why don’t you go and see, then? It’d be a kindness: that ghastly Rosemary’s been at her, and guess what she’s up to now?’

May shook her head as she struggled out of the macintosh.

‘She’s made Liz iron Alice’s veil. Came to her and said she couldn’t find any of the servants to do it. “There aren’t any, my dear,” I said.
“What, in a great house like this!” she said. (Christ, this stuff smells like Portuguese lavatories!) “There’s Mrs Green who does for us three times a week, but she’s
sulking because of the caterers so she’s not doing for us today.” So then she went mincing off to Liz who says that ironing is dangerous because her dress is too tight under the arms.
She really does look awful in it, but she’s ironing just the same. We may not have servants, I told Rosemary, but the house is fraught with splendid little women. Rosemary said something
about Alice being a bit weepy.’

May looked concerned: ‘I’ll go and see her. Where’s –’

‘My stepfather is bullying the caterers. You look much less awful than Liz, I must say. Who
usually
does this filthy job?’

‘Alice used to. From now on it’ll be me.’

‘Make Daddo do it.’

‘Oliver – don’t call him that. Just for today. It upsets him. He’s afraid you’re laughing at him.’

‘His fears are absolutely grounded,
I’m
afraid.’ Then he looked at her again and said, ‘You know what I think?’ He had lit two cigarettes and put one in her
mouth. ‘I think you should get out. After two years of this you must know it can only get worse.’

‘Please darling, shut up.’

‘Right. Sorry. I just want you to know,’ he added in a quavering manner, ‘that vulgar and pretentious though it is, you can always make your home with me.’

‘Good,’ she said in a more comfortable voice, and went.

Herbert Browne-Lacey, May’s husband, Alice’s father and the stepfather of Oliver and Elizabeth, had given up the caterers in despair (the fellows didn’t seem
to understand a word he said to them, as though he was talking Dutch or Hindi) and was now stalking up and down the side of the lawn which was banked by rhododendrons beginning to flower. He was in
full morning dress and walked slowly, holding his grey top hat behind his back in both hands: the wind was very uncertain. His feelings were sharply divided: naturally any father would feel so at
the marriage of his only daughter. He was glad that she was getting married in some ways, and sorry in others. He would miss her; he thought of innumerable things: the way she made his
middle-morning beef tea; her ironing the newspaper if May got hold of it first (women were the devil with newspapers and it was absolutely unnecessary for them to read them anyway), how good she
was with the dogs (the long, wet walks, kennel-cleaning and feeding), her housewifely activities (the house had twenty-five rooms but Alice had helped to make it possible to do with the one char),
and as for boots and the odd medal (he touched his left breast and there was a reassuring clink), why, she was jolly nearly up to his old batman’s standards. Of course she was marrying a
prosperous, steady young man. Leslie Mount was clearly going far; the only thing that worried the colonel was whether he had a sense of direction. Money wasn’t everything . . . He began to
think about money. The wedding was costing far more than he had meant it to: on the other hand, he would no longer be responsible for Alice. When he had told Leslie that Alice was worth her weight
in gold he had felt that he was simply being appropriately sentimental: now, he began to wonder whether there wasn’t some truth in the remark. May, bless her, of course, was so confoundedly
unworldly: not always impractical – she made damn good curries of left-overs, not hot enough, but damn good – but she had her head in the clouds too much of the time to recognize the
value of money. She did things and bought things quite often that were totally unnecessary. Totally unnecessary, he repeated, working himself into one of his minor righteous rages. And those
children of hers were totally out of hand.
They
were responsible for her worst extravagances: it would have been much better to put the boy into the army than to send him to a fiendishly
expensive university, and as for the girl, what was the point of having her taught domestic science – again, at fiendish expense – if the result was simply that she sent all the
housekeeping bills soaring with her fancy cooking? Money between husband and wife should be shared, in his opinion, and this meant that May had absolutely no right to squander that inheritance from
her relative in Canada – an estimable old lady who had died about a year before the colonel had married May. He had forced her to buy this house with some of the money, because any fool could
see that property was going to go up, but after that, he had got nowhere. She had insisted upon having her own bank account and cheque books, and could therefore scribble and fritter away any
amount of capital without reference to himself. The only times when the colonel could contemplate being French – or something equally outlandish – were when he thought about the
marriage laws: there was no nonsense about women being independent
there
. His rather protuberant and bright blue eyes blazed whenever he thought about the Married Woman’s Property Act.
Well at least he made her pay her share of the household accounts: she couldn’t have it both ways. But the wedding presented difficulties. He had managed, by playing on Leslie’s
father’s snobbery and patriotism, to wrest from him a certain share of the – in his view – totally unreasonable and iniquitous expenses of this jamboree. He was, after all, a
gentleman, a soldier and he had served his country, and he had made these three points delicately clear to Mr Mount who was clearly no gentleman, but had the grace to recognize this fact, and who
had been reduced to explaining and apologizing for his flat feet (a plebeian complaint if ever there was one, nobody at Sandhurst had ever had flat feet, by God!) which had precluded his serving
his country in any way but building ordnance factories. There was a world of difference between that sort of job and being in Whitehall.

But the fact was that those factory-building fellows had made the money, and simple chaps like himself, fighting for their country, hadn’t. Mr Mount had offered to pay half the cost of the
reception, and the colonel had accepted this, because, after all, Alice
had
no relatives that they ever saw apart from himself, whereas the Mount contingent was positively pouring from
Bristol or wherever it was they came from, so Mr Mount paying half was really the least he could do. The border was looking very ragged. Alice hadn’t seemed to put her heart into it these
last months although he had pointed out again and again that if you wanted a decent herbaceous border you had to work hard on it in the spring. He sighed and his waistcoat creaked: he had had the
suit twenty-six years after all – bought it to get married to Alice’s mother, and although his tailor had adjusted it several times to accommodate the effects of time, no more
adjustments were possible. Few men, however, could rely upon their figures when they were in their sixties as well as he could. The upkeep of this place was a terrible strain to him: it was so damn
difficult to get anyone to do anything these days. He pulled a pleasant gold half-hunter out of his watch pocket – twenty to twelve – must be getting a move on. The watch had been left
to Alice by her godfather, but it was no earthly use to a girl . . . He turned towards the house and began shouting for his wife.