Something in Disguise (25 page)

‘Oh – don’t
shout
!’ They were now only about twenty yards from the house from which there was no sign of life. Blinds, she saw, were down on the upper windows:
perhaps everybody
was
away. ‘What do you want to do?’ She felt it would he better if she knew.

‘Just have a look round.’ He seized her hand and walked her rapidly up to the long, narrow windows of what turned out to be a dining-room. ‘Dinner is laid for two,’ he
said after peering in.

‘They must be somewhere about, then,’ she said, trying to sound reasonable rather than terrified. But already he had gone ahead and was disappearing round the corner of the house.
‘It would be worse to be caught without him,’ she thought. Bees in the wisteria were making the outdoor equivalent of ticking clocks in empty houses – too loud and the only noise
she could hear. She followed him, and away from the bees became aware of her heart beating.

Round the corner was a conservatory tacked on to the house. It was quite large, and hexagonal in shape. The garden door stood propped open by a watering can, and she could see that it had a
black and white marble floor. There were pots of geraniums and fuchsias, a table and various garden chairs, a french window leading into the house, but what really struck her was a tea trolley laid
with an elaborate country tea and a kettle actually over a spirit lamp.

‘John! Honestly! They’ll be coming to have tea any minute.’

But he simply went in and took a cucumber sandwich and then flung himself into a basket chaise-longue. ‘If anyone else
does
turn up we can always ask for more cups. Come and have a
sandwich, dearest Eliza. They’re awfully good, they’ve got that touch of curry powder in them.’

She stared at him: he was smiling – nearly laughing.

‘I own all these sandwiches,’ he said.

‘Is this your house then?’

‘It is, actually.’

She stared at him a second longer and then burst into tears. ‘Absolutely
beastly
– you are!’

‘Darling Liz – I couldn’t resist it; it was only a joke –’

‘Not at all of a joke!’

‘You were so funny: I never knew you had such a law-abiding nature –’ He got out of the chair; she was crying more; he would have to apologize to make her feel better.
‘I’m terribly sorry, and I’ll never do it again –’

But she interrupted, ‘You couldn’t! I know all your other houses.’

‘Oh no, you don’t. There is yet another, in Jamaica, so I could do it again, but I won’t. Cheer up. Think how much better it will be to have a nice tea than be chased off the
premises by an angry and righteous owner. I’m not angry or righteous.’

‘You’re just smug and horrible.’ But she mopped up her face and sat down and made the tea for them both.

Leslie had felt quite upset by all the fuss about the cat. The point wasn’t that Alice was unreasonable – there was no question but that she was
that
–
it was whether in her condition he shouldn’t perhaps have tried to humour her more?

Naturally he didn’t want her to be upset. The worst thing about marriage – in its early years at least – seemed to be the terrible way you couldn’t take anything for
granted – had to keep on noticing the other person, making allowances or putting your foot down, not to mention changing all your social habits, it
was
taken for granted you’d do
that. And what did you get for it? The cooking wasn’t up to Mother’s, although it wasn’t bad. Company, but really when he came to think of it, he wasn’t at all sure that
women were much good at that side of life. He wouldn’t have married a vulgar bit like Phyllis Bryson for instance, joining in the laughs at men’s stories in the pub: no thanks, not for
him. There was the sexual intercourse side of things, but here again, you ran into trouble. It had become clear to him by degrees that Alice didn’t seem to be all that keen on it –
intercourse, he meant – not that he would necessarily have thought the more of her if she had been; when you came to think of it there wasn’t any way that a woman could be enthusiastic
about intercourse and still be what for want of a better word he could only call decent. So it wasn’t exactly that he wanted Alice any different in the dark to what she was, so much as, being
a normal man, he sometimes felt he could do with a change. He supposed that when she’d had a couple of kids everything might settle down and become more normal. After all, everyone went
through it. This last reflection cheered him up and he decided to phone Rosemary to see if she could pop over to Alice and cheer her up a bit.

‘Down in the dumps, is she?’ Rosemary’s voice had the kind of cheery, professional concern that implied that this was nonsense of Alice, but that it could be dealt with by
someone who knew how. Leslie explained about Claude and Elizabeth coming for the night.

‘Deary me: what a storm in a tea-cup! Not to worry: I’ll drop over and see if I can’t take her out of herself.’

Leslie put down the phone much relieved. Rosemary was a good sort; she could be a real tonic if she tried. Alice always seemed especially pleased to see him on the days when Rosemary had been
over.

After tea, he said, ‘Elizabeth! We’ve got to talk. Shall we do it now, or would you rather wait until after dinner?’

‘I’d rather start now.’ The thought of waiting for a serious talk once you knew that it was going to happen was awful.

‘I don’t even know whether talking about it is going to make you understand, but at least I’ve got to try.’

‘Yes.’

There was a very long silence. A Spanish servant had cleared away the tea and been given instructions about the car and Claude. He had asked what time they wished to dine and then padded quietly
away. The silence went on much longer than just waiting for the Spaniard to go.

‘Goodness! This is much worse than I thought,’ he said at last.

‘The thing is, I must have seemed an awful coward in France: when Jennifer came and everything went to pieces. Well, you see, I
am
: that’s what she does to me. I don’t
mean it’s just about you, any more than I mean that there have been a lot of other girls. If s really anything I try to do except make money. It’s partly why I’ve got so much
money and hardly do anything.’

‘
Why
does she?’

‘There are two aspects of that question. Why does she
want
to stop me having any kind of life, and how does she manage to succeed?’

‘Well, start with why she wants to.’

‘That’s not very difficult. Jennifer, at a very early age, was deprived of her mother. Even before that, she was deprived of a motherly mother, if you see what I mean. Howling
egocentrics like Daphne take up having children like archery or the harpsichord; they soon find you have to work at it far harder than the effect seems worth. Jennifer was never an easy child. When
I finally divorced Daphne, she was old enough to know what was going on in a way, but she certainly wasn’t old enough not to look at the whole thing entirely in terms of her own loss or gain.
She’d lost a mother: she’d won me as it were. I’ve been a kind of hostage for her security ever since. Children seem to be rather good at that.’

‘But – she isn’t a child now, any more, is she?’

He looked slightly taken aback: then he said, ‘I told you, she’s very young for her age.’

‘But she still doesn’t have to be treated as a child, does she?’

‘I’m not at all sure that I know how
else
to treat her.’

This seemed to stop either of them having anything to say.

‘We’ve got plenty of time to talk about this,’ he said in the end. ‘Do be sure of one thing. Somehow I’ve got to make you understand, in fact we may have to stay
here until you do. Come on: I’m going to show you the house.’

‘So having thought about it a great deal –’ she corrected herself, ‘as much as I possibly could – it did seem that this was the only useful
contribution I could make. Even though it is only pot
en
tially useful.’ And she smiled apologetically: in spite of feeling like death, she might easily live to be eighty . . .

Dr Sedum seemed to clear his throat and say something at the same time.

‘I’m sorry: what did you say?’ It had sounded like ‘furry concerns’ which it couldn’t have been.

But it was family considerations that Dr Sedum had mentioned.

‘Oh no: that’s – they’re quite all right. I asked my children, Oliver and Elizabeth, you know, and they would both
far
prefer to have the little house in Chelsea.
So
that
is all right.’ She paused, because, actually, the rest of it – meaning Herbert, wasn’t: yet.

‘I shall have to discuss it with my husband of course.’

Dr Sedum nearly shut his eyes and rocked slowly backwards in his huge chair.

‘It’s just a matter of telling him, really. I mean – much though he seems to love the place, he couldn’t possibly manage there without me. He’d be fearfully lonely
and uncomfortable and he hates being either of those things. It’s just a matter of telling him,’ she repeated, beginning to dread the thought.

They were sitting in the sitting-room in Dr Sedum’s mews in Belgravia. In spite of it being a hot and sunny afternoon, the room was do dark that May would not have been able to see to read
in it. This also meant that it was difficult to see Dr Sedum’s face clearly, which in turn meant that it was harder than usual to understand what he said. In the spring – the only other
time she had been there – there had been lamps lit and it had been much easier. But now, although the curtains were not drawn and there were windows at each end of the room, she could see
that one of them faced a quite alarmingly close, black, brick wall and the other was entirely covered by the leaves and branches of some dusty evergreen. The room smelled of coffee and stale
clothes. Dr Sedum always offered people coffee and they always accepted, and a girl called Muriel who typed all day in a tiny little room by the entrance door always heated it up a bit and brought
it in. There was a sugar substitute and some powdered milk in a pottery jar that you could have as well. May had had some powdered milk, as she was afraid that black coffee (which had at one time
been instant and then constantly reheated) would make her indigestion worse.

Dr Sedum said something that sounded like ‘evil suspense’. It couldn’t be that.

‘What?’ she said.

It turned out to be ‘legal aspects’: he wanted to know if she had a good lawyer.

‘Oh, I think so,’ she responded vaguely. She had thought that lawyers, by the nature of their profession, being fair and everything, must really all be the same. ‘He was my
first husband’s lawyer,’ she added. Lawyers, she felt, were not a thing in her life that Dr Sedum could expect to change. But he just smiled in a conclusive manner, and said let him
know how things went, so she knew that the interview was over before they had had time to talk about anything in the least interesting. He shook hands with her at the head of the steep and narrow
stairs, and Muriel met her at the bottom. Through the half-open door to Muriel’s office she could see that someone else was waiting to see Dr Sedum and she wondered if they, too, had had to
think up some great practical reason for the privilege of spending half an hour alone with him.

‘
You
say something about it.’

‘What shall I say?’

‘Well you could at least ask questions,’ he said – not only irritably for him, but pretty crossly for anyone, Elizabeth thought. Still, questions seemed a sensible idea: the
only difficulty was that they were all very hard questions for
her
to ask.

‘Do you mean that she – Jennifer – will make things awful whenever she turns up?’

‘I suppose I mean that she might.’

‘When mightn’t she?’

‘I suppose if she got used to the situation – felt it didn’t threaten her: or, I suppose, she might fall in love with someone herself.’

There was a silence while these distant possibilities receded still further.

Then, using a certain amount of courage, she asked, ‘Is it our having an affair that she finds so objectionable?’

‘Don’t know: don’t think so. You mean, if we were respectably married, she’d be all right?’

‘I did mean that; yes.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said again. The trouble is that one can’t do that sort of thing as an experiment. It would be so frightful if we were wrong about it.’

‘But it
couldn’t
be an experiment – from the point of view of Jennifer! I mean it simply isn’t enough her business to be that!’

‘Perhaps it oughtn’t to be – but it is.’

‘It certainly oughtn’t to be,’ she said feeling angry and wanting to cry. ‘She’s not a child; she’s twenty. Like me!’

‘She’s not like you – at all.’ He said this very sadly, and she began at once to feel less angry and more sad.

They were sitting in the window seat of his dressing-room. Outside, the orange and violet of the sky was slowly darkening out: milky mist was rising from the meadow and a young owl was trying
out his cry that sounded with sudden, juicy, jack-in-the-box ease – probably frightening even him, Elizabeth thought.

‘You have to give her a chance to grow up?’ she said with a slight question at the end so that it didn’t sound too obvious or patronizing.

‘But we can’t get married to do it,’ he said. ‘Come on – we’d better go and have dinner.’

‘. . . in witness thereof I have hereunto set my hand this blank day of blank nineteen hundred and blankety blank.’ He cleared his throat, took a final swig of the
cold tea and looked expectantly at his audience. ‘I sign it of course; George Frederick Herbert, etc. etc.’ He made a point of never telling people like Hilda his real surname: you
never knew what that kind of woman might get up to if she was given the chance.

He had been reading for nearly twenty minutes. Mr Pinkney, that solicitor chap, had drawn up a draft according to his specifications which, broadly speaking, were that he was leaving everything
to his dearly beloved wife Viola May: he had fetched it that morning, lunched at the club where he had tried unsuccessfully to interest the member who had introduced him to Mr Pinkney with the
results of this introduction – the member had simply said all wills made him feel morbid, old man: so now, after a little spot of dash with her, here he was reading the thing to Hilda. He had
read over the whole caboodle in Mr Pinkney’s office and again over his lunch at the club, but somehow, to get the full flavour of it, it needed to be read aloud, and by God it brought out the
best in him when he did. He read well – hadn’t fully recognized this talent in himself – and felt staggered, confounded, positively intoxicated by his own generosity. He was
leaving everything, every single blasted little thing to Viola May. Not simply his shares, but clothes, weapons, mementoes, books, the car, the dogs, a hell of a lot of snapshots of damned
interesting and unusual places, some jolly good books – well he’d mentioned them, but not what they were: classics, mostly, but some pretty rare books on India as well – eye
witness accounts of the Mutiny, for instance, which some feller had had privately printed – all long before his time, of course, but after all, he’d served there, knew the country
better than most, and that book was a piece of exclusive history as it were; probably highly valuable if truth were known and by no means the only rare book of the lot; then his stamp collection
– heaven only knew what that would fetch . . . then there was all the furniture he had bought for Monks’ Close; hundreds of chairs, whacking great pictures, filing cabinets, fire-irons,
his transistor radio set. All his clothes were made of far better cloth than you could buy nowadays, so even they would fetch a good bit . . . his mind was crammed with these and other generous
assessments (he’d insisted on Mr Pinkney itemizing his possessions in groups of catagories – otherwise the whole document would have been barely two pages) and he had to admit that the
whole thing sounded very well . . . He looked across the small room to Hilda again. She was sitting in the other chair – the upright one – with her feet on a small footstool, her hands
tucked into her kimono sleeves, her plumpish chin resting in the vee of its low neckline, her eyes indubitably closed. How like a woman! A feeling of hatred for her surged up, made his gorge rise
as the saying went, only it didn’t stop but went on up to his head so that he felt that something up there was going to explode. Steady on! The doctor had said months ago that his blood
pressure was up and that he shouldn’t indulge in undue agitation: a nice thing if having just read his will he was to drop dead! He could see the funny side of that: nobody could say he
hadn’t got a sense of humour. He started to take deep, quieting breaths and just then, Hilda opened her eyes and said, ‘Very nice, Bogey.’