Something in Disguise (27 page)

When Oliver had seen his mother off (standing on the platform watching in case she waved, with ‘Colonel Bogey’ on the amplifying system) he had so little money and
so little to do that he walked. On Westminster Bridge he wondered about becoming a politician, but then somehow he felt that it might seem to imply a basic sympathy with the status quo and he
wasn’t at all sure that he had enough of that . . . When he got to Victoria Street and passed the Army and Navy Stores, the idea of being an explorer came and went. There was hardly anywhere
left to explore that wasn’t so nasty and difficult to be in that one wouldn’t really enjoy it . . . He plodded on. It wasn’t that he liked not being able to think of anything to
do: it wasn’t even that he didn’t try to think of something, it was simply that the only things that seemed to him at all nice – like living with darling Elizabeth or meeting a
new, wildly attractive girl and going to bed with her long before he knew her too well – were neither of them money-spinners, and delicious meals and foreign holidays clearly used money up.
He knew he was meant for better things: it was just a question of knowing which ones.

‘What you mean is that if you married me I might
get
to want children, and then, whatever we said or did about it – everything would go wrong?’

‘Something like that;’ he was watching her face very closely.

‘Oh.’ She knew he was watching her and kept her face deliberately still, not realizing that he would notice that as much as he would notice anything else.

They were sitting at the end of a small lawn edged with yew. Behind them, on a stone pedestal, was a stone lady whose naked back was turned but whose downcast profile was visible as she looked
for ever over her shoulder and down upon the lawn.

‘Why are you so sure I’d want them?’

‘I’m not. It simply isn’t a risk I feel able to take. At the moment, I mean.’

After another long pause, she said. ‘So what do we do?’

‘It isn’t lack of love. I can’t imagine loving anybody more than I love you, but I still seem to have some of the perfect fear left over. Darling.’

A little of the strained unconcern left her face as she repeated, ‘What shall we do?’

‘Not part, and stay as we are together at the moment, that means nothing. We’ll do nothing: just live.’ He took her hand and stroked the back of it gently. ‘Do you like
this house?’

‘Best.’

‘Good. We’ll spend all my spare time in it.’

‘We’ll not get married and not have children but stay together,’ she said, but asking for confirmation.

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t mind about the marrying or children part: I just want to stay with you.’

The trouble was that if she relaxed she fell out of the bunk and if she braced herself against the next quivering, uneven plunge, she could not get to sleep. John was all
right: he was so tall that even lying as diagonally as his bunk permitted he was naturally wedged, and provided he didn’t try to move he seemed to be safe and able to have long refreshing
sleeps that Elizabeth quite envied. Sometimes she would give up trying to sleep and kneel upright to look out of the port-hole. The sea and the sky – an angry grey and skim milk that heaved
and pounded and lurched – were so tilted and confused together that she felt quite glad to have this scene bounded by the round, brass rim. Sometimes she struggled with the giant screw that
made livid rust marks on the glossy white paint until she could free it and swing the window open. Then a strong soft wind beat against her face like the damp wings of some powerful bird; she could
put her head out and feel it more, withdraw, and hear the domestic creaks of wood straining against the sea and feel more sharply the vibration made by the engines – a kind of solid and busy
reassurance. It was not a bad storm, just ordinary Atlantic December weather, they said; the forecast – after a day or two more – was good, they would all be sitting out on deck sunning
themselves, they’d see. Elizabeth did not care. She did not feel in the least sick, and was perfectly happy. This was the third day out, the time was so packed with traditional activity that
they seemed to be living in crowded slow motion, and already she felt as though they had been in the ship for weeks. The first thing was China tea at seven in the morning with the breakfast menu,
as John liked to have that meal – a large one – in privacy. ‘I like tea, and then you, and then breakfast.’ Getting up took ages because of having to hold on to something
nearly all the time, but there were nice things about it: the shower was like a scorching cloud-burst and could be salty or fresh; shoes got cleaned every day and towels seemed always to be new. On
the first morning they had got themselves wrapped in rugs on deck and were given cups of steaming Bovril – called beef tea – as though, Elizabeth thought, they were really precious and
had been frightfully ill. That morning they had also walked – round and round – holding hands and not talking at all. Even then she had still been worrying – had not been
absolutely certain: and so the newly minted feeling of beginning, of being festive and shining and unused, had been rubbed with anxiety. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, ask: it was then that
she discovered how often someone may inquire about the welfare of another simply in order that – having got the right answer – they may dismiss them from their mind. Of course,
she
didn’t want to do that, but if she asked, he might have to lie and that was something that he shouldn’t have to do – with her at least. So they walked until he said,
‘That’s enough to earn us a drink,’ and they went in to the large saloon where the tables and chairs were screwed to the deck and she found that he had ordered a bottle of
champagne and wondered if that, too, didn’t smack a bit of going through the motions until he had said, ‘I asked for this because it was our first drink – do you remember?’
and when he smiled at her she remembered the first time he had ever done that and the extraordinary difference it made to his face.

‘You’re smiling a great deal,’ he said.

‘Am I?’

‘Every time anyone looks at you.’

‘Oh. Oh dear.’

‘They’re all loving it. It’s an excellent thing, really, because a good many people with fringes look rather stern in repose. Dear Mrs Cole.’

The first lunch time the saloon was fairly crowded; the wind was freshening, but only enough for people to make jokes about it. The menu was enormous, the tables elaborately set with linen and
silver and flowers: stewards charged skilfully through swing doors and rushed about with a high degree of bustling order. The captain sat at a round table with seven such hideously boring-looking,
although otherwise assorted, people that John and Elizabeth (alone at a table for two) spent most of the meal trying to think what they could all be. In the end they settled for a sociologist, his
wife, who wrote children’s books, an ex-mountaineer who’d made a belated fortune out of windproof garments, and
his
wife who bred Afghan hounds, and a bucolic man who’d
always been a baronet with a woman who’d always been just a wife. That left one lady whose appearance was so ambiguous that it was far from clear what she could ever have accomplished. A
widow of one of the directors of the line, they decided weakly.

‘Poor captain.’ On this particular day, Elizabeth had been disposed to think everyone more unfortunate than herself.

After that first lunch, she had slept for three hours and woken to find John sitting by her bunk with tea.

‘In case you are harbouring the slightest doubts I’m really finding being married to you much nicer than I thought.’

Later they played backgammon and drank Planter’s Punches in the bar. That night it began to get rough and now here it was, just about as rough as she felt she could manage. Already, quite
a lot of people couldn’t manage it. The captain’s table had shrunk to the ex-mountaineer, minus wife, and the captain. Tablecloths were damped, the ledges round the tables were up, but
still whole tablefuls of glass and china crashed to the ground. The stewards charging through the swing doors often lost the contents of their trays before they reached the few stalwart passengers
who continued to appear for meals, but morale seemed high, the ship was excellently run and the large jovial captain exuded efficiency and good will. Walking round the deck was out of the question
now: they ate and read (backgammon was no good as everything slid about too much) and had drinks, made love a great deal, and John slept while Elizabeth dozed and dreamed.

The wedding had only escaped being awful by its shortness. She had spent the night before it at Lincoln Street with Oliver. ‘At least you’re not having to put up with me in pink net.
Or Daddo making speeches,’ he added after a time. They were both sitting on her bed; Oliver was polishing her shoes and drinking Guinness which he said made his spit more nourishing to shoe
leather. John had particularly not wanted family about (the Jennifer situation) and Elizabeth, with reasons none the less violent for being indefinable, seemed absolutely determined on keeping the
colonel and John apart. They had met very briefly when Elizabeth and John had returned Claude to Monks’ Close: they had arrived without warning at the innocuous hour of tea time, but this had
so enraged the colonel that May had thought he was going to have a stroke. They had ‘broken in’ on him when he was in the greenhouse mixing something up for the lawn; no common courtesy
left – he’d looked up from measuring something because he thought he’d heard a sound behind him, and there was this giant stranger without so much as a by-your-leave standing over
him – enough to give any honest feller a heart attack. He’d lost his temper: not for long, but enough to make everyone feel intensely embarrassed; then he’d stalked off to find
Elizabeth’s mother. Poor May had made the mistake of offering them tea, which was accepted, and this had made the colonel stalk even farther – down the drive in fact, with a clashing of
gears in the old Wolseley. May had had such an awful time with him afterwards that she had collapsed – in tears – and the next day had gone so far as to suggest that perhaps she and
Herbert were not really suited . . . but he wouldn’t hear of that . . .

So in the end only Oliver and McNaughton, the charming Scottish chauffeur who had brought a bunch of dahlias grown by himself, had come to the registry office. They had all waited in a small,
ugly room until called into a larger ugly room where the ceremony was performed. After Oliver and McNaughton had witnessed the certificate they went back to the first room, already full of the next
wedding party; people staring at their own white shoes and the gap between their hands on their dark blue serge knees; people speaking so quietly out of shyness and discomfort that in the end they
said everything again much too loudly. It all looked a bit like having a collective tooth out, Oliver had said. They had packed into the Rolls and McNaughton had driven them to Claridge’s
where John had taken a room. McNaughton parked the car and joined them for a drink or two and then left them. Elizabeth had wanted him to stay to lunch, but John had said that McNaughton had been
quite firm about that. You could drink with anyone, he had said, but you couldn’t enjoy a meal outside your own class. He’d fetch them at three. They were driving to Southampton, to
catch the boat for Jamaica. As soon as McNaughton had gone, Oliver had said that if they didn’t mind, and even possibly if they did, he didn’t think he would come to Southampton:
he’d feel too awful for too long coming back. The other two immediately said of course not and how much they understood, but everybody was a little dashed by this: Elizabeth had begun
imagining him going back to Lincoln Street by himself until he said don’t worry, he was going to a smashing party that evening. They had a very delicious lunch beginning with oysters and
ending with crêpes Suzette. Outside it was raining and there was an east wind, and when she hugged him, Oliver said, ‘You can always tell if she’s healthy by the state of her
nose: ice-cold at the tip – even in August. Just like a dog, really.’ Then he and John had shaken hands and John had shivered and said, ‘How I hate saying goodbye to
people.’ He looked as though he was surprised that he’d said that.

Elizabeth had watched Oliver waving and then turning away before (of course) they were out of sight. ‘People shouldn’t do that,’ she said aloud but really to herself.

‘What shouldn’t they do?’

‘Turn away while you can still see them doing it. It doesn’t sound as though they don’t care enough; it sounds as though they don’t care at
all
.’

‘Look, or looks. I see what you mean. But it’s supposed to be bad luck to wave someone out of sight.’

‘I bet it isn’t. I bet that was just invented by someone very lazy at seeing people off.’ A tear bounced on to the car rug and then sank greedily as though into moss.

John took her hand. ‘I know what it is.’

‘What?’

‘You’re so happy, you need the luxury of a small grief. We’ll ask him to stay if you like,’ he added.

She shook her head. ‘Much better for him to try to get a job. You’re quite right about luxury and small griefs. It wouldn’t work the other way round, though, would it? I mean
if you are really sad
or
miserable something nice but small isn’t the slightest good.’

‘I know,’ he said, but when she looked anxiously at him he said, ‘If you start worrying about me I’ll get your passport out and show it to people in the ship.’

The Customs and Immigration men seemed quite unmoved by her picture and handed back both passports as though John was not married to and taking abroad a dangerous criminal lunatic. When
Elizabeth pointed this out, he said, ‘Oh yes, they did. They notice everything. But they’re very patriotic, you see. They realize it must be good for England.’

In their cabin had been a bowl of shop roses with a card from Alice. ‘Wishing you every happiness,’ she had written in her upright childish hand. She must have gone to some trouble
to get the card sent to the Southampton flower shop. There were also some orchids from Lady Dione Havergal-Smythe and Mrs Potts, whose name was spelled Fopps (Lady Dione’s had come out
perfectly). By the second day out the flowers had to be put in a bucket and wedged in the bathroom, and they died very soon after that.