Something in Disguise (29 page)

She felt too weak to do all the scene-shifting required to use the morning room; the den, or study, would have to do. She dragged in a second comfortable chair – for Lavinia – and
collected a second electric fire: even so there were simply two small areas of scorching heat in an otherwise freezing room. Mrs Green – whose days at Monks’ Close were yet further
reduced by the quiet but inexorable decline of her bicycle, was not about: it
was
one of her days but she couldn’t come. She arranged a tea tray in the kitchen and put the huge kettle
on the kitchen range: in spite of it, the kitchen seemed very cold and the passages were so icy that she had taken to travelling about them in her oldest overcoat She filled a hot-water bottle with
water from the tap for a foot warmer and sat in Herbert’s chair to wait. As there were two electric fires, Claude sat with her.

They were late; it was nearly half past two when the dogs’ barking warned her of the car. Those poor dogs! Nobody took them out now that Alice had gone.

Dr Sedum wore his muffler and Lavinia had a fur coat: they were both smiling, which they went on doing without saying anything while May helped them off with their coats and led them to the
study (as she always called Herbert’s den when he wasn’t there). Dr Sedum sat in Herbert’s chair and she put Lavinia in the other nice one. Claude took one look at them and then
slunk out of the room as though they were infectious and it would be very dangerous for him to stay even a moment.

Dr Sedum stopped smiling, leaned slightly forward and exclaimed ‘Now!’ rather as though he was starting a race.

‘It’s about the house; this house.’ If she had thought Dr Sedum had stopped smiling before, she must have been wrong. He really stopped now. ‘Herbert – my husband
– seems to regard it as half belonging to him anyway. And when I pointed out – I had to try and make him see that I had bought it, he said it was the only thing he really cared about.
So I don’t see what – I simply can’t think how to –’

‘Are you trying to say that you want to go back on your word?’

‘No – of course I’m not!’ It was much easier to talk to Lavinia even if all you were doing was trying to shut her up. ‘But can’t you see how awkward it is? I
mean it means practically leaving it to the League behind Herbert’s back!’

Nobody answered this. After a moment she said, ‘It seems rather shabby to me.’

There was a pause during which she noticed that Lavinia looked knowingly at Dr Sedum, who, while he did not return the look exactly, did not snub it either. Then he cleared his throat softly and
spoke about one’s image of oneself for a long time, at the end of which she felt both confused and ashamed. She could see that it was awful either to do or not to do things simply because you
minded what other people thought of you: it was, or could be, a sickening kind of vanity and she had little doubt that this was probably what had caused her dilemma. She
wanted
to leave
Monks’ Close to the League, but Herbert would mind this and she minded Herbert minding. Yes – but
oughtn’t
she to mind? (Him minding?) Or was it (she knew that often
one’s feelings were exactly the opposite of what one supposed them to be – it was so lucky and calculable that they should be
exactly
the opposite) that perhaps she
didn’t
want to leave the house to the League but was afraid of what they would think of her if she didn’t and was therefore sheltering under Herbert’s alleged feelings? Or
was she cold-bloodedly using the house to see who would give her the most attention and interest – Herbert or Dr Sedum? She wondered which of these possibilities was the worst: if she knew
that
, she probably – almost certainly – would know which she was culpable of. It was amazing, she thought, how Dr Sedum could show you in a moment how worthless you really were .
. .

Lavinia suddenly, surprisingly, offered to make some tea for everyone. May, very gratefully, explained that she’d got a tray ready, showed Lavinia the beginning of the way to the kitchen
and returned to her uncomfortable chair opposite Dr Sedum. Lavinia wasn’t such a bad sort after all.

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she began; ‘one’s motives are nearly always suspect, aren’t they? At least, I don’t mean
your
motives, of
course,’ she felt herself blushing at the idea; ‘I mean mine, of course. It’s partly because I’m rather stupid – have never been able to think clearly about anything
at all – that I couldn’t think what to
do now
, you see. And I haven’t been feeling too good lately, either, which hasn’t helped.’

Dr Sedum lit his second cigarette, and then, as a gigantic afterthought, offered her one. It was likely, he said, that her poor health was due to her sense of conflict; nothing was more
exhausting than Wrong Imagination and Wrong Imagination was something so many of us suffered from. It often prevented events from taking their natural course, speaking of which, at what stage had
things got blocked, as it were? He seemed to remember that she had mentioned some lawyer in July . . .

‘Oh yes! I’ve done all that, I went to him very soon after I saw you. But you know how long everything takes. It wasn’t my
lawyer’s
fault,’ she quickly
added, ‘it’s just that I don’t get up to town as often as I should like, and when I do only half the things on my lists seem to get done. He did a draft and sent it to me but the
envelope made Herbert so curious that I didn’t like – I felt I couldn’t – so anyway in the end I told him to keep the actual will until I could get to London, and even then,
you see, I have to think of a reason for going to London – it really isn’t at all
easy
!’

Dr Sedum said something stern about easiness and she hastily agreed because she wanted to ask him something else.

‘Dr Sedum! Do you think that perhaps there is a possibility that I
am
ill – that I am
not
imagining it?’ She looked earnestly at him, in case – only out of
his extreme compassion – he might soften the blow. He smiled, and she realized immediately that it
had
been a silly question, but he answered at once with what she recognized was his
most indulgent kindness.

There was
always
the
possibility
, he said, that she was not imagining what she thought to be her state of health: anything was possible, and everything was conversely improbable;
it was essential that one consider one’s own nature in the light of events, but for most people this kind of consideration was a life’s work with no knowledge of how to go about it.
This was what the League was partly for or about. He was sure that as she understood better how to use her life for the glory of the Absolute she would find that minor anxieties dropped away like
so many dead leaves . . . Before she had finished thanking him, Lavinia arrived with the tea trolley. Tea was quite gay: Lavinia poured out and generally was so much at home that May felt as though
she was a guest at a delightful small party. Of course Lavinia knew Dr Sedum – really
knew
him – and was also a senior member of the League, often standing in the centre of the
Circle at Times.

After they had gone, she reflected that Herbert had taken her to that doctor in Woking whom he said was so good and that when she’d taken the powder stuff prescribed she had seemed to be
getting slowly better. The prescription was repeatable, and she decided to get some more.

Lavinia and Dr Sedum encountered the colonel three-quarters of the way down the drive, which was generally too narrow for two cars to pass one another. Lavinia made one of those coquettish
gestures of despair that most middle-aged women would do well to outgrow, but the colonel lifted a majestic hand and then backed noisily and damagingly to the entrance gate which he nearly rammed.
As it was, he parked so that it was very difficult for Lavinia to edge the Bentley past him: she wound down her window and leaned out in an attempt not to graze his wing, calling cheerfully,
‘How do you do! I am a cousin of May’s and we have just been paying her a visit!’ In League language this was being adroit; to the colonel it was plain worrying. He drove slowly
up the drive in first with bits of broken rhododendron dropping from the luggage rack, wondering what on earth May had been up to.

‘What on earth have you been up to?’ he asked as soon as he could.

‘How do you mean? Oh! Lavinia! She dropped in to see me. My cousin: she married a man in Texas who’s dead – I mean he died last year.’

‘Who was the feller she was with?’

While May was wincing at the idea of Dr Sedum being described as a feller, he went on, ‘Looked like a doctor, to me.’

‘Herbert, you really are extraordinary!’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ While she might be delighted by his perspicacity, he was too alarmed for complacence.

‘Well – he
is
a kind of doctor – in a way.’

‘What do you mean – in a way?’

‘I don’t know actually.’ She did not want to discuss Dr Sedum too much. ‘He’s not a
medical
doctor at all. But there are hundreds of other kinds,
aren’t there? I just know that he is one. He’s called Dr Sedum: a friend of Lavinia’s.

‘I know what,’ she said as she trotted after him into the hall. ‘He’s a doctor of philosophy. I bet you that’s it.’

‘
I
don’t mind what he is,’ he rejoined, now that he no longer did.

Neither of them wanted to explore Dr Sedum in depth.

Oliver woke up remembering quite clearly how awful he’d felt when he went to bed and looking forward now to having slept some of it off. He opened his eyes very
carefully; it was still dark, but then it nearly always was these days. He rolled his eyeballs gently and swallowed. It was no good pretending that it was just a hangover any more: both movements
made him wonder if he was at a not too distant point from death. He tried to shift his legs to sit up, but they seemed immovable. Just as he thought, ‘God! paralysed!’ he remembered the
vast and weighty Labrador who was a temporary P.G. at Lincoln Street. She was a noble and resigned creature, hell-bent on loyalty, and given the absence of her owner she turned all her attention on
to Oliver. Now her tail thudded against his ribs that he realized were actually aching – as though bruised. She got to her feet and stood on and over him (her nose was refreshing, but her
tongue felt like his – hot and abrasive): then, with a heavy, faintly artificial, sigh, she cast herself anew upon some more of his aching and bruised bones. With his free arm he knocked over
the glass by his bed and turned on the lamp: he’d drunk all the water anyway. It was ten to six; as he registered this, the Labrador heaved herself up again, jumped or fell to the ground and
firmly scratched some more paint off the door. She wanted to go out, and that meant both of them, whether it killed him or not. When the father of a friend of his had offered him ten shillings a
day for keeping and looking after Millie, he had, on accepting, jolly nearly said it was too much, but he hadn’t and it wasn’t. He wrapped himself in his eiderdown, crammed his feet
bare into outdoor shoes and padded down the steep stairs. His head throbbed in a way that made him feel as though it was one stair behind the rest of him. Millie had not yet worked out which way
the front door opened and there was some bulky confusion before she finally made her way to the street, casually bringing Oliver to the ground in her progress. It was freezing cold and
Oliver’s teeth immediately began to chatter: Millie, on the other hand, no sooner reached the fresh air than she began to amble. He gave her one chance which luckily she took before calling
her back into the house. Upstairs he put on another jersey, took the last three aspirins and got back into bed. Millie had managed to get her fur icy in those few minutes but her stomach was warm
and on the whole he was glad of her company. Together they fell into stupor.

Oliver was working at Harrods, for December anyway. He was doing this because he found that life at Lincoln Street without Elizabeth was more expensive as well as being far more uncomfortable,
and he had chosen Harrods because he hoped to see some of his friends there buying their Christmas presents. So far the friends part of it had been a dead loss; a woman who’d taught him not
much French when he was about ten who looked just the same and just as nasty, and who immediately remembered him with shrieks of Gallic hypocritical surprise, and someone he’d never liked
whom he’d known at Oxford and to whom he owed five pounds. Still, he’d only been at it a week – selling ties and handkerchiefs to desperate women – it was certainly the only
time of the year to sell in the men’s department, but on the whole the crush and rush was such that you never got to know anybody . . . By Thursday, he was feeling pretty fagged, but he put
that down to the ghastly hours he was having to keep. He got up at seven in order to give Millie a decent run before going to Harrods. He walked there, but took a bus back in the lunch hour in
order to take Millie out. Back in the evening and she would greet him with overwhelming vigour but clearly expected more exercise. Her horse-meat meal nauseated him so much that he hardly needed
dinner, but he would take her to the pub where she behaved beautifully and everyone would tell him what kind of dog they had or had had. On Friday he woke with a sore throat and a headache, but it
was pay day so he struggled through and had a rather longer session at the pub than usual, partly because it was so cold outside and partly because after a couple of whiskies he felt so much
better. But the feeling-better wore off sharply on the short, but agonizingly cold, walk home and by the time he went to bed he felt very ill indeed but pretended and hoped that it was because
he’d drunk too much. By ten to six, however, he was trying to tell himself that he’d only got ’flu.

At eight o’clock the telephone rang. It was Ginny.

‘I thought I’d call you,’ she began, ‘because I’ve run out of money and I thought you’d be the least bad-tempered about it.’

He took a deep breath and said, ‘That doesn’t sound as though you have a genius for friendship, I must say.’