Something in Disguise (37 page)

‘Yes,’ he was saying; and then, after a pause, ‘I said – I accept the call.’

She thought then from his voice that it was Jennifer, and moments later, when his look of speculative affection dissolved to a courteous blank and he settled down to listening she knew. No good
going on sleeping, or even pretending to sleep.

After a very long time, John said, ‘It certainly sounds like rather a muddle.’ There was another pause while he listened. Then he said: ‘Oh
no!
Why? You really ought to
know why by now. We’ve come all this way in
order
to be by ourselves. Honeymoons aren’t usually attended by close members of the family. I realize that. Yes – you told
me.’ He listened to another long speech. ‘Well – we’ll have to see. Wait a minute.’ He groped for a pencil. ‘Next time, you might work out the hours before you
call.’ He wrote something down. ‘All right all right. I was simply telling you. Yes – I’ll see to it.’ He put down the receiver and turned to Elizabeth. ‘Oh
dear, oh damn. That was Jennifer.’

‘Yes.’

‘She has contracted some sort of alliance with someone who sounds like a
joke
– they’re so awful.’

‘Is she in love with him?’

‘Love?’ He looked startled. Then he said, ‘She’s only known him ten days; he’s married and he’s just got through a cure. He’s also a Catholic so he
really is married –’

‘Goodness.’

‘She is also pregnant – she says.’

‘How can she be, if she’s only known him ten days?’

He shrugged. ‘Some sort of remote lack of control. But why does she have to come here?’

‘She’s
not
coming here!’

‘That’s what she rang up about.’

Elizabeth threw herself back on her pillow in mock horror to conceal the real kind.

‘She’s bringing him with her.’

‘How long for?’ she asked much later when they were having breakfast.

‘Nothing was said about that.’

‘When, then?’

‘This afternoon. I’m meeting them at the airport.’

‘I don’t want you to.’ She was trying to sound sulky because she was frightened.

‘Darling, don’t be silly.’

She burst into tears which faintly shocked both of them. He thought of course she was pregnant; she wondered why on earth she should seem to hate Jennifer so much. After a few seconds
ineffective struggle, she rushed off the terrace into the house. He, in turn, sat battling with the murmuring pangs of guilt that had become noticeable, like indigestion, when her tears had brought
his attention up against them. In the end, finding he could do nothing about himself, he went to comfort her.

She was sitting on the edge of the bath, sternly combing her hair.

‘You asked me last night whether I cared at
all
what I did. Remember?’

She went on combing her hair. ‘You said, “not if I’m with
you
.” ’

‘That’s right.’

He took the comb out of her hand and threw it on her dressing-table. ‘I want
you
to feel like that,’ he said and took her hands. ‘I want you to feel that you could have
’flu or break your leg or embark upon an evening or a week with some of the world’s greatest bores, or be shipwrecked or anything awful you can think of, and that you’d feel all
right about any of those things because you were with me. The only thing
I
couldn’t bear would be to be without you.’

‘The only thing
I
couldn’t bear.’

‘So however awful Jennifer is – and I expect she’ll be that one way or another – she won’t make any real difference to us. See?’

‘I warn you,’ he remarked when he had finished signing the letters the secretary brought in before lunch, ‘I warn you that all this engagement business is probably just a bid
for my exclusive attention. And I’ll have to go through the motions of considering the match and advising her against it.
That’ll
mean a few heart to heart talks.’

‘I’ll come with you to the airport?’ she suggested after lunch.

‘No – it’ll be bakingly hot, and you went to bed far too late last night. Have your siesta and I’ll come back and wake you up with tea.’

But he never did come back because on his way home from the airport the car went at a great speed into a bus that was travelling in the opposite direction, and thence through some fencing into a
small ravine. The bus driver said that he thought the car was completely out of control, but the whole thing happened on a corner and so quickly that it was difficult to know for certain. The
police said that the steering was locked and that an inner tube had blown, and that either or both of these things could have caused the accident. John, who was alone in the car, died almost at
once, but nobody in the bus was seriously hurt.

It was Oliver who fetched her from Jamaica. By the time he got there the worst of the arrangements were over or had been made: the lawyer and accountant had flown out and gone
back, the inquest was done, reporters dealt with – even the packing was finished. Oliver arrived one morning and took her back to London that afternoon: she did not want to stay; the sun was
out too much, she said. There was only one road to Montego Bay and the airport and so they passed the ravine with its broken fence. She asked the driver to stop the car, and got out, and Oliver
knew that she did not mean him to come too. When she came back, she said, ‘She made him go to the airport for nothing. Didn’t bother to call and say she’d changed her mind –
just sent a cable letter that afternoon. I wish I could stop thinking about any of that.’

He did not know what to say. She seemed to him to be either stunned or oddly restless – as when for instance, she completely repacked a suitcase in the plane. But everything about her
– even the restlessness – seemed to be stiffened with a kind of dignity that he had not known she possessed. She slept in the aeroplane and woke with tears on her face, but she went
away at once and came back without a sign of them. He could not help feeling slightly afraid of her and hated himself for this feeling, because it could be no use at all to her. When they were
being given dinner and she was pretending to eat, he asked her where she wanted to go, and she said at once the house in the country.

‘Not ghastly old Monks’ Close!’

‘No: John’s house.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘Of course I do.’

McNaughton unexpectedly met them at the airport. As soon as they had been cleared by Customs, there he was immediately. She clearly had not known he would be there: she called his name, and took
his hand in both of hers, and for a second he saw a look of such desolation in both their faces as though exactly the same thing had hurt them in the same way at the same moment, and then she
– his sister – stopped it, said things, made them do things with the luggage and get through the next few minutes somehow.

They spent the night in an hotel at her request, and the next day, Oliver drove them down to the house in the country in the same white car that she had been given in France. On the way, he told
her about May, and Herbert, and Alice, ending with the extraordinary and awful time he had had with Alice, when she had poured out all her terrible suspicions.

‘Never known Alice talk so much,’ he said – seeing that he had really caught her attention. ‘You know how she doesn’t seem able to tell you anything that she wants
you to know? Well, this time she couldn’t stop. She walked out on Leslie, planning to go back to the old Close, but she caught a rather late train from Bristol so she tried to spend the night
at Lincoln Street, poor little thing. I was out. It was an appalling night, so off she went to Waterloo and caught some sort of milk train or whatever they’re called because she was afraid
she hadn’t got enough money for an hotel. When she got to the station it was nearly five, of course no cabs so she walks – through snowdrifts and all. And when she got there, she found
him dead, and poor darling May weeping with a torch and a coal shovel in the garden because she couldn’t bury Claude.’

‘What had he died of?’

‘Herbert? Rage, I should think. But the thing is – you were right about him.’ She was silent, and he was afraid that he’d lost her again. ‘Because what do you think
Claude died of?’

She shook her head.

‘Arsenic, my dear: a hell of a lot of it. Meant for May. That’s what I mean. He was such a screaming bore, I didn’t think he could be wicked as well – but that’s
what he was. A monster. Alice said her mother
and
her stepmother. She took poor old Claude to be analysed because she was so worried about May. She thinks May doesn’t know and it would
kill her to find out.’

‘What does May think?’

‘She thinks Alice doesn’t know, and it would kill her to find out. That’s why she was trying to bury Claude.’

‘Poor May! Poor Alice!’

‘Well – in a way. But they’ve decided to look after each other – because they feel each other have had such an awful time. So they’re going to live in Lincoln
Street and go to frightful meetings where nobody can say what they mean because they don’t mean anything. It suits Alice because it makes her feel more like other people, and it suits May
because it makes her feel worse than everyone else which is what she feels is right.’

She asked more questions about her mother; indeed, the subject lasted them almost until they arrived. He knew when they were approaching the house, because she fell silent except for telling him
which way to go, which was not the quickest way, she said, but the way she had come before. The morning had been grey and overcast, but as they drove through a beech wood the road became a
lattice-work of shadows and sunlight, and the bare trees ahead turned fox-coloured. Then they were out of the wood and a few minutes later she told him to stop. That’s the house,’ she
said. ‘Will you come with me now?’

They walked through a wicket gate across a field towards the house which was set on a terrace above them. There was a black painted door which she opened to present them with a flight of steps.
They walked slowly and in silence up the steps, past a little thorny hedge where she stopped a moment, and then on to the house itself. At the dining-room windows he saw that the round table was
laid for two. Elizabeth was ahead of him now, walking round a corner of the house which had bare snaky branches growing round its windows. When he joined her, she was standing in front of a
conservatory, its windows misted so that one could not see clearly inside. She tried the door and it opened. Standing on the black and white floor in a huge tub was a camellia growing up to the
roof, twelve, fourteen feet high and encrusted with flowers and buds of pale red flowers. She shut the door behind them and said: ‘He promised that my best Christmas present would be
here,’ and then she made a sound articulate only of sheer misery that ended, ‘Oh Oliver! What shall I
do
? How do I bear it,’ and stretched out her hands blindly to find
him.

Much later, when she had finished crying, for that time, she said some of the things that she had to say once – to someone. ‘It’s the first time I do something – anything
– that I last did with John that’s so difficult. I keep on making myself do them – in a way to spoil things – to try and make things I remember with him
un
holy, and
then, even that seems wrong and feeble. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ he said – really trying to. But nothing had ever happened to him, he knew, that could ever approach making him feel as she was feeling, and as he wondered whether it
ever would, he noticed a pang of humble envy.

‘It changes,’ he said. ‘Time changes people always whether they like it or not. You’ve got that baby to have and bring up. And if you go on wearing that black velvet mac,
you’ll end up looking exactly like an outsize mole,’ and was rewarded by the first, watery smile. But she said:

‘I feel like black. I know now why people wear it. But after I’ve had the baby, I won’t, of course. Babies prefer yellow or red.’

‘Shall I stay with you – till you have it, anyway? Not happily ever after or anything, but just as a sort of stopgap?’

‘It’s what people usually are to each other, isn’t it,’ he went on after she had agreed and he’d thought that she might be going to cry again. ‘Except for
people properly in love, of course,’ he added out of kindness to her feelings. ‘And I can’t imagine being that.’

‘Of
course
you will. I’ve had mine, but
you
will.’

They looked at each other in a way that they had always done whenever each had thought the other wrong or stupid (‘she’ll find another love; of
course
she will’), and
both were aware of the familiar state of affectionate challenge that on this single occasion neither had the slightest intention of taking up.

Elizabeth Jane Howard is the author of eleven novels, the last of which completes the bestselling ‘Cazalet Chronicle’, which comprises
The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion
and
Casting Off
.

The Long View

The Sea Change

After Julius

Odd Girl Out

Getting It Right

Mr Wrong

Marking Time

Confusion

Casting Off