Something in Disguise (28 page)

The fourth day it was fine; not smooth or hot enough to fill the swimming pool but good enough to go out: the sea was the steely blue of some roads – the great diagonal shoulders of water
were still capped with creamy feathers, and above, the sky was boisterously blue and white. They walked, round and round the deck past rows of people swaddled in rugs on long bony chairs looking
like Channel-crossing jokes in
Punch
, past the sardonic-looking sailor who was greasing staples very slowly on steel hawsers, past the officers’ quarters (a little above them) from
which came snatches of curiously sedate jazz accompanied by whiffs of coffee and bacon, to where they could look down upon the bows of the ship ploughing vigorously towards the horizon: round to
the starboard side (no sun and so no passengers except for a pair of earnest table-tennis players), past a cabin – one of the two really grand ones – from whose open window they could
hear an angry lady explaining why she preferred flying everywhere: for six rounds they found her in full spate. Eight rounds were supposed to be a mile, but any kind of repetition makes things seem
longer, and they stopped, by mutual consent, at a mile and a half. It was extraordinary how much they seemed to agree with each other, Elizabeth thought.

The next day it was perfectly fine and there were flying fish – like small silver darts – that shot suddenly from the sea to stream their arcs through the air before they vanished
from sight. The pool was filled – with sea water; Elizabeth, who had said that she wanted to bathe, got into her bathing dress before she had changed her mind.

‘Why have you?’

She was standing in the middle of the cabin before her dressing-table. She looked at him crossly and he knew she was anxious.

‘I just don’t want to.’

‘But why not, darling?’

‘
You
know perfectly well.’ And when he was silent at this, she said, ‘You can
see
why not. I’m portly.’ She looked down at herself with distaste.

‘Oh. Well
I
can’t see anything portly about you at all.’

‘You can. You’re just pretending. Of
course
you can.’

‘I really can’t you know.’

But she interrupted almost triumphantly. ‘That shows you’ll mind when you can. You wouldn’t sound so consoling if you didn’t secretly mind. You know perfectly well
I’m portly now and it’s going to get much worse.’

He put down his book, took off his reading glasses and put on his ordinary ones. ‘Ah; you’re not crying. You have a fearful capacity for sounding as though you were, and then, on the
other hand suddenly doing it when you haven’t sounded like it.’

‘Stick to the
point
. I thought it was women who were supposed to be so bad at that.’

‘It is, but I am as well. Women and me.’

‘You’re nearly laughing! It’s no joke, I can tell you, having to face the prospect of my whole relationship with you being ruined just because of any old Tom, Dick or Harry or
whoever’s inside me.’

He did laugh then. ‘Oh I do think you ought to know that. I mean, if that’s what you’re facing, I do think you ought to know who’s making you face it.’ Without the
slightest warning, he picked her up and carried her to his bed. ‘Now Elizabeth. Now then,’ he said, raising his voice to prevent her interruption, ‘why on earth you should feel
that having our child will ruin our “whole relationship” I can’t think –’

‘Of
course
you can!’ she said, or this time cried, again. ‘It’s obvious. I’ll look more and more awful until even you can’t love me. A lot of
people’s teeth and hair fall out.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Well they have millions of stoppings,’ she amended sulkily, ‘and some people’s hair goes all dull and greasy.’

‘Heavens, how horrible!’

‘And supposing it’s a hideous criminal or simply a terrifically dull child. People do have them.’

‘I know. Look at Jennifer.’ He met her eye easily, and she flung her arms round his neck. ‘It’s all right, darling. Jennifer
is
dull: and seeing that – being
nasty
about
her as you would say – makes it much easier to be nicer
to
her.’

‘You really don’t feel guilty any more?’

‘Yes, I do, but I can manipulate it: the acme of success in middle age. Arrange your guilt to suit your means. Thanks to you, I’ve done that. Don’t worry. This new Cole
won’t be dull: at least, not to us and that’s what counts.’

A bit later, she said, ‘Well – even if it starts all right, I may be such a rotten mother that it immediately grows up awful. Nearly everyone says that they had something frightfully
wrong with their childhood which proves that it must be a jolly difficult thing to get right so I bet I won’t.’

‘Won’t what?’

He had been stroking her neck absently: she was curled up against him but he was so much larger that he could look down on nearly all of her.

‘Get the childhood right and stop it turning out to be a wicked monster.’

‘If you really hate looking after it we’ll get a nurse: then it will grow up with all the old-fashioned neuroses instead of the fashionable ones.

‘Oh no! I’ll do it. Other people might get it even wronger.’

He smiled then, perceiving that she was now enough reassured.

‘It’s marvellous the way you aren’t sick. How do you feel?’

‘Perfectly all right. Goodness knows, I’ve
had
the being sick part. Nearly three months of it. It’s extraordinary: I don’t feel anything at all. Except a bit
important,’ she added after thinking about it.

Alice lay perfectly still: after a second or two, the puppy whimpered, came up to her and licked her ear and a piece of her forehead. The thin dark ice that she had not seen at
all on the crazy-concrete paving was now splinter-cracked into a huge clumsy star. The air was so cold that it still made her gasp if she even started to take a deep breath, so she decided
she’d better not try again. It was so cold, that not only were her face and hands icy, but when she touched her smock it was just as bad – like clothes on a dead person. But she
wasn’t entirely cold because there seemed to be a kind of hot spring inside her that was gently welling up and keeping her legs – or at any rate her thighs – beautifully warm: she
had at one and the same time a feeling of disaster and a sense of comfort, and it seemed a pity to change this by moving or having a thought – or anything at all. The puppy was irritating:
kept coming up to her with its little frowsty breaths and complaints – disturbing the peace, which indeed it had always done. Her ankle hurt: this discovery was of course a nuisance and
should also have been a relief; it wasn’t though. By turning her head rather uncomfortably she could see that the jigsaw gate was hung with icicles: it was cosier to turn back to her own open
front door. The house must be getting cold, and just as she found that she couldn’t help wondering how long she had lain on the path (after, it was obvious of course, tripping somehow and
falling on the ice) she had suddenly – but thank God gently to start with – a pain that was like a skewer, or an enormous long butcher’s knife stabbing the bottom of her spine and
then probing, feeling the best place and way to split it. The pain – so intense for the apparent gentleness that at first it seemed as though it ought to be a laughing matter –
accelerated without warning into something past the beginning of a scream. It was like missing a bus; hopeless too quickly for screaming to help. Then, just as she was wondering who
was
screaming, it all stopped – or seemed to – turned into a bit of pain, discomfort, and then nothing again. The funny thing was that as soon as it was over the whole thing seemed like
something she had read in a book: ‘a dreadful pain like a sword pierced her back with mounting waves of agony,’ that kind of stuff: rather dull and nothing to do with her at all.

It wasn’t just her ankle – it was a long way up her leg. She shifted to see if she could see any damage; she was of a size that made looking at any part of her legs difficult and it
seemed to her ages since she’d seen her feet when she was standing up. But after twisting a bit she could see that she had a horrid graze from her ankle bone nearly up to her knee. Her
stocking was rent, but bits of it were sticking to the rather dirty and clotted-looking wound. When she tried to reach the stocking to pull it away from her leg – perhaps take it off if she
had the energy – a piece of paper slipped out her hand. ‘Half a pint of double cream today please,’ it said.
That
was what it was. She had been going to put a note on the
gate for the milkman, and the puppy, or dog it was really by now, had suddenly shot past her in the doorway and she’d lost her balance. It always behaved like that – rushing out the
moment you opened a door as though it had been imprisoned all its life, but once out, it had no sense of adventure. It had come back to her again, sniffing the graze on her leg, and now, with its
head turned away from her it was intently licking the path: licking up the bits of ice? she wondered, and then it moved a bit and she saw that what it was licking – almost lapping up –
was blood; very dark red, and surely far too much to have come from her leg? Nausea, terror, had hardly a chance before the skewer interrupted with total efficiency: this time she could not imagine
how she had stopped feeling what it had been like last time. After it, she was possessed by a sense of irritable urgency: she had to do a lot of difficult things before it happened again (which she
now knew it would) but she didn’t know what they were. Well, she’d have to move; she couldn’t do anything lying on her own front path like that. When she finally got to her feet,
and started to lumber back into the house, she realized that it certainly wasn’t blood just from her leg and it wasn’t even only blood. As she almost fell into the chair by the
telephone in Leslie’s study she thought – quite easily – ‘I’m losing the baby, then,’ and like her first feelings about the pain, she could have been reading
about it in some magazine story, without much interest.

Lavinia could be awfully tiresome: even when she was a child, she had displayed what May – having just been wretchedly subject to it – now called arrant curiosity.
It was really not, or, at any rate hardly, her business what May so urgently wanted to see Dr Sedum
for
; if she was any kind of sport, she would simply have accepted May’s word for it
and just driven him down when May told her to – or perhaps suggested, was a better word. Heaven knew she didn’t want to dictate to Dr Sedum, but the circumstances did seem to add up to
a kind of emergency and May always felt at her worst in those. In any case, one false step, spiritually or practically, and she might be cast aside like old gloves or a petty sin. No – she
had to see Dr Sedum, and due to her rotten health Mahomet was going to have to come to the mountain (whenever she faced that phrase there was the fear of getting it the rude way round for the other
person). And the only member of the League (that she knew) who could drive Dr Sedum down to Monks’ Close was Lavinia. So why couldn’t she just
do
it, and stop asking niggling,
maddening,
pertinent
questions? She didn’t at all seem to understand that (a) it was always alarming using the telephone when you weren’t quite sure where Herbert was, and (b)
that he went through all the toll calls with a tooth comb and would be sure to ask what this one had been. Why on earth not ring people up in the cheap time, he would demand, not realizing, of
course, that he and the cheap time most unfortunately coincided. He was
always
at home in the evenings unless he was actually in London, but since she’d been feeling so awful, he had
stayed at Monks’ Close. This was both kind and tiresome of him: fearfully kind if you didn’t want a life of your own, and a tiny bit tiresome if you did. Anyway – after it taking
far too long (from the toll-call-in-the-morning point of view), Lavinia had agreed to drive Dr Sedum down for the afternoon. (Herbert, with even less reason than Frank Churchill – he had far
less hair – had gone to London to get it cut. He was going by a late morning train and would try to get something to eat at his club, he had said.) The moment that he was gone (the old
Wolseley was audible for miles), she began to get up. One of the most frightening things about her these days was the way she often couldn’t properly feel her feet – swinging them over
the side of the bed, she sometimes didn’t realize when they hit the floor. This morning she watched carefully and – perhaps because she was watching – she thought she could feel
them a bit better than usual. This morning the fears that she pretended to herself were nameless seemed not so much to be that as without other substance; everybody thought they were dying of some
fatal disease at one time or other in their lives. She had a slow, hot bath and put on her warmest jersey with her blue suit. The day had begun with frost and fog; the latter had cleared but the
sky was leaden, without either cloud or sun: it was a typical English December day and Herbert had remarked (as he always did when it was either cold or wet) how homesick he had been for weather
like this when he had lived in India. This seemed to May extraordinary and Oliver had agreed – had remarked that the Indian equivalent of
that
kind of homesickness would be missing
cobras very badly and must therefore, except for a very small minority largely made up of other, immigrant cobras, be nonsense. Oh dear, she did miss her children: she didn’t want them to be
younger or smaller again, she simply missed their frivolous company. She lunched off a large glass of milk and tried to think about the Absolute so that she would be in the right frame of mind for
Dr Sedum. Even with months of practice and Help in the form of Times galore she did not feel that she had got any better about this – in fact she often felt that she had actually got worse:
it was extraordinary how trying to hold on to one thought was like trying to hold your arms over your head, or even stretched out like poor Jesus: she hoped He hadn’t been expected to do both
things at once . . . There she went, thinking about the difficulties of doing something rather than the thing itself. The trouble was that she was really dreading the interview with Dr Sedum
(although it was always, of course, wonderful to see him). It would be less wonderful to have to see him with Lavinia, but, on the other hand, Lavinia would probably understand the horns of her
dilemma and possibly help.