Something in Disguise (30 page)

‘For God’s sake, Oliver, don’t try to be clever: I’ve been on an aeroplane all night and I’m bushed.’

‘I’ve been under a Labrador all night and I’ve got ’flu. At least,’ he added, ‘that’s the least that I’ve got.’

‘What’s your cash situation?’

‘Approximately twelve quid.’ He was just starting to say but he needed it, when she said (far too loudly: it hurt his ear) ‘Oh goody! London here I come!’ and rang
off.

‘She’s got a nerve!’ he said – several times – to himself: trying to work up a sense of pure indignation (that worthless little chit turning up just when it
happened to suit her) to counteract the spurts of excitement and fury that were already stopping him thinking clearly. He hadn’t seen Ginny since that – very necessary – quarrel
about her getting Jennifer to Cap Ferrat, although they’d had one or two horrible conversations that had begun with her apologizing nothing like enough, showing that she didn’t really
care about having ruined Liz’s holiday, and him telling her this, whereupon she instantly stopped apologizing at all and simply said in the same breath that she hadn’t done anything and
he was an idiot to mind the tiny thing she
had
done. There had been two conversations exactly like that. ‘She’s got a nerve!’ he said again as he realized that his fury was
not because she was coming, but because he was feeling so awful when she was. There were two things he could do, he told himself. One, get up as quickly as possible and just not be here by the time
she came, and two . . . but in the middle of not being able to think what two was he absent-mindedly swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. Instantly he felt so frightful that he lay
down again. There were two things he could do: one, was to keep absolutely still until he either died or recovered however long either condition might take to achieve . . .

The door bell was ringing and Millie’s broadsword tail was lashing his Adam’s apple: she was out of bed facing the door with her back to him; she knew perfectly well that bells meant
that people had to answer them and this meant that she, Millie, had the chance of getting the hell
out
of wherever she might be – her chronic wish.

Ginny stood drooping on the doorstep looking even smaller and more fragile than usual in a stiff, felty coat the colour of mustard (English, not French or German).

‘It’s four pounds ten,’ she said. Then she jerked her head backwards in the direction of her driver who looked quite frighteningly like Prince Philip and added,
‘
he
says.’

A typical Ginny way of getting out of it; announcing the price and then putting it all on to someone else. He’d left the money upstairs oh
damn
because if he sent Ginny for it, she
might give away all he’d got.

‘Well, that seems rather a lot to me.’ His no-nonsense smile was being ruined by chattering teeth.

The driver straightened up from a fulsome exchange with Millie.

‘It seems a lot to
me
, sir,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but there it is,’ Then he added, ‘It’s the time of day, you see, sir.’

‘Oliver do hurry up: I’m simply freezing!’

Then, while words were failing him, she cried, ‘Oh darling – it’s so marvellous to see you again, you’ve left your wallet upstairs I bet, I’ll get it for
you.’

Millie bounded after her into the house. It was easier to let her get the wallet – he couldn’t, he thought,
manage
another trip to the top of the house and down again.
‘It’s in my jacket,’ he called. It was going to be tough bargaining with Prince Philip when he was wrapped in an eiderdown. Still he’d
earned
those twelve pounds;
they were damn well going to slip through his fingers the way he wanted them to. The driver was unloading Ginny’s luggage – black-and-white striped canvas – and carrying it piece
by piece to the bottom of the flight of steps up to the front door. No tip, thought Oliver viciously. Just as he was thinking that, Millie bounded out of the house again with the wallet in her
mouth which she tenderly laid at the driver’s feet. Her tail was wagging gently and she had an expression on her broad face that was both creative and benign. By the time Ginny had appeared,
Oliver had given the driver five separate pounds and was thanking him profusely for the filthy ten shilling note produced as change.

‘There we are, then,’ said Ginny after he had staggered up the steps for the last time with her luggage. She hadn’t offered to carry any of it, but when he tried to look at her
morosely, so that she would ask him what was the matter and he would tell her, everything went dark and a stair or a banister or something struck him across the face. When he came to, he was flat
on his back.

‘. . oh
Ol
iver!’ She sounded distraught, and without much effort he kept his eyes shut to hear some more. Just then, she dropped an ice cube into a sort of niche above his
collar bone. He sat up and it rolled down to an even more private place. He glared at her. ‘Oh God! Honestly.’

‘Don’t worry; it’ll melt in two ticks: you’ve got the most ghastly fever. A tear went on your face just now and it sizzled like a drop scone.’

‘Have you been crying? Have I been out for ages? Can it be that deep down you care for me?’

But she answered with disarming truth, ‘Don’t be silly: you know perfectly well I haven’t
got
a deep down. But yes, you have been just lying there. Long enough for me to
look up Dr Garth-Elwyn-Garth’s number, anyway.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘He’s the most eminent gynaecologist in England. Mummy swears by him.’ And when he burst out laughing, she said crossly:

‘Oh shut up! I don’t
know
any other doctors in this country. It would be easy if we were in an hotel – you just ring up and say you want one and he comes. Why
don’t we just slip off to Claridge’s? They’ve got everything there.’

‘I thought you’d run out of money.’

‘I have. You have a bill, stupid.’

‘But you have to pay it in the end, idiot. Thanks to you, I’ve now got seven pounds ten. And thanks to you, he added most unfairly, ‘I’ve probably lost my job.’

‘It’ll probably bring out the best in you.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Nearly every great man has been poverty-stricken and diseased at some time or other.’

‘Nearly every kind of man’s been that. There’s absolutely no guarantee of what it brings out.’ She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him. The black fox
beret she was wearing made her face look unbearably fragile.

‘I must go to bed,’ he said.

‘I must have a bath first, darling – I’ve been travelling such ages.’

‘I didn’t mean bed with you: I’m much too ill,’ he said and immediately wondered whether this was in the least true.

But in fact Oliver really was quite ill and Ginny surprisingly stayed and looked after him, proving fairly efficient in some – exotic – ways. She ordered food, for instance, not just
from Fortnum’s, where her mother had an account, but from the Star of India and Fu Tong as well. She used what she called her hocking diamond which travelled everywhere with her in a dented
Elastoplast tin and got what seemed to Oliver a fantastic sum from the pawnbroker. With this she bought some clean sheets and sent all the others to a laundry. She bought Aristodog for Millie so
there was no horrible horse-meat to cook, and bought muscat hot-house grapes for Oliver that he worked out cost about one and ninepence a grape. She bought mimosa that lasted only a day but was
worth it, and Campari and champagne that she mixed with a shot of Pellegrino. She bought him paperbacks and L.P. records and a transistor radio and a pair of pyjamas from Harrods. For herself she
bought sixteen different lipsticks for her collection and an auburn wig. When Oliver got better, she wrapped him up and took him in taxis to the Curzon Cinema and the Starlight Club and the Reptile
House at the Zoo: Just ‘nice, warm, cosy places,’ she said. Once she cooked him the most terrific dinner. It took her all day, and even the day before she was abstracted and snappy
thinking what to cook. But it
was
a stupendous meal: Oliver ate until he was bursting but there was a lot left. ‘Marvellous!’ he said. ‘Better than Elizabeth?’
‘Different,’ he’d answered shortly. Liz was not a good subject for them because of the Jennifer incident. ‘What will you do with all the remains?’ She was setting
aside a good deal of a cold goose stuffed with cherries in a rather dismissive manner. ‘Oh we shan’t eat any
more
of it. I’ll find someone: a tramp or some of a movie queue
– they’re usually so bored they’ll eat anything – what shall we do? I feel boredom coming on.’ She was wearing a lilac-coloured Pierrot suit with large, watery black
spots and a huge white frilly ruff round her neck. ‘Couldn’t we have a party, or something? It’d be a good idea, really, because I’ve got to go to Dublin in a
minute.’

‘
What
?’ She’d never said a word about Dublin.

‘You know. For Christmas. I only stopped off here for Christmas shopping. I’m meeting Mummy and Roderigo there –’ she looked at her watch, ‘the day after tomorrow,
actually.’

She looked so very pretty and unreliable that he felt he must have a serious conversation with her.

‘Ginny! We’ve got to talk.’

‘No, we haven’t. No need at all.’ She looked nervous and lit a small cigar.

He thought of how she had been the last five days: domestic – in a way – efficient: she had not minded ringing up the right person at Harrods and explaining the situation (which
meant, of course, that he had lost his job) any more than she seemed to mind his feverish sweats, the dirt in the house, the persistent quiet problem of Millie but above all, the fact that he was
– or had been – literally in no state to entertain her in any sense whatever. Except for going to bed, of course.

‘
I
need to.’

‘Talk, then.’ She looked away from him then, as though it would be rude to watch anyone doing
that
.

He was lying on the battered old sofa in the sitting-room and she was curled up in the only serious chair.

‘Well, I thought it would be an awfully good thing if we got married. There you are: as beautiful as the day, and rich and young and tremendously needing a stable background –’
but she interrupted, ‘What ghastly cheek of you to say that! I must say!’

‘Ginny, it wasn’t meant to be. But you can’t want to spend all your life flitting from one hotel or villa or rented house to another doing nothing but try to amuse
yourself.’ As he said this, it sounded like something anyone could easily go on doing, but it was also something that almost everyone who had never done it decried, so he went on, ‘I
mean, it was all very well when you were a child and dependent upon your mother and all that –’

‘Never been that! You don’t know Mummy! You can’t be dependent on her! Anyway, the sort of people who talk like you, dreary old Oliver, wouldn’t at all approve of me
marrying like that – as a kind of escape.
So
?’

He sat up. ‘I should have thought you would have wanted your own life, at least –’

‘How would marrying you make any difference to that?’ She lay back sideways in the chair with her legs swinging out over one arm.

‘Don’t be dim on purpose. I mean having your own house –’

‘Don’t
you
be so silly. You don’t have to be married to have a house and lots of people who
are
married don’t have them. I don’t see the connection.
If you are going to go on being so boring I must have a drink.’ She got up – almost leapt up – and prowled over to a Fortnum’s carrier bag from which she drew a bottle.

‘Are you always so rude to people who propose to you?’

‘Yes. Now you’ll have to wait while I get some salt and glasses.’

While she was gone, he shut his eyes frowning and trying to think why things were going so badly. Something to do with her neurosis, he decided, and he’d touched some raw and painful bit
in her.

She brought very small glasses, an eggcupful of salt and a saucer of cut-up, very small, green lemons.

‘Tequila,’ she said. ‘Help yourself.’

He watched while she filled a glass to the brim, put a pinch of salt on the edge of her hand, ate the salt, knelt to drink, and then squeezed the lemon juice down her throat. This was the kind
of thing she did in a manner both practised and dashing. When she was licking her fingers, he said:

‘I can’t take neat lemon juice.’

‘It’s lime; much nicer than lemon.’ She had another shot as quick as lightning and then said, ‘Now – you can go on.’

‘Being boring?’

She shrugged her shoulders so that the frill hid her ears.

‘It’s not difficult to bore you: there’s no challenge there.’ But even that didn’t seem to move her, and she remained frozen in the shrug.

He tried the tequila minus all the salt lime nonsense and it was like a small, disgusting explosion at the bottom of his throat.

‘People who are most easily bored are usually the most boring.’

‘If you think that, why on earth do you think you want to marry me then? You’re silly not to have salt and lime.’

‘Because it’s not the only thing about you.’

‘I’ll tell you something.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s both have another swig first. You may find you needed it.’

In silence, he waited while she poured the drinks, put salt on what she described as the lockjaw bit of his hand and got the limes handy. Then she said, ‘Right,’ and they went
through the ritual. He began to see the point of tequila, and was just about to say so, when she remarked,

‘It’s time you knew, I think, that I don’t have any money.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I’m not in the least rich – any more. I used to be, but now I’m not. Not a peseta, not a cent, not a threepenny bit. That’s why I called from the airport.
I’d run out.’

There was a silence while she watched him and he tried to think what he thought. Ginny bored but with money was not an easy proposition, but Ginny bored and without a sou made him feel really
nervous. And the economics of the thing: living with Ginny was more a case of two could live as cheaply as about seventy-four . . . even if they both worked like mad at Harrods from morning till
night . . .