Something in Disguise (4 page)

‘What are you
doing
?’

‘Getting the oil off my hands.’

The next conversation about Elizabeth’s future was at dinner.

The dining-room was, of course, large; a rectangular room whose ceiling was too high for its other dimensions. A red-and-blue Turkey carpet very nearly reached the
caramel-coloured parquet surround. The colonel had bought the carpet, together with a gigantic Victorian sideboard, a stained oak pseudo-Jacobean table and eight supremely uncomfortable and rickety
chairs, in a local sale. The windows were also large, but so heavily leaded that they gave the room the air of a rather liberal prison: the top of the centre one was embellished in a key pattern of
blue and red stained glass. There were four immense pictures (also bought by the colonel in another sale): one of a dead hare bleeding beside a bunch of grapes on a table; a huge upright of a
Highland stag standing on some heather; a brace of moony spaniels with pheasants in their mouths; and a rather ambitious one of a salmon leaping a weir. These were hung upon panelling of highly
varnished pitch pine: they were not glazed, and so, as Oliver said, wherever you sat at table there was no way of escaping at least one of them. It was twenty-five to eight, and the colonel was
doling out sparse portions of the salmon trout. ‘What’s all this?’ he said when he saw the mayonnaise.

Oliver answered immediately, ‘It is a sauce made of egg yolks and olive oil and flavoured with black pepper and vinegar called mayonnaise. It was invented by a French general’s chef
at the siege of Mahon – hence its name; how
interesting
that you should never have encountered it before.’

The colonel put down his servers and glared steadily at his stepson.

May said, ‘Herbert didn’t mean that, did you dear? He meant –’

‘What’s it doing
here
?’ finished Oliver. ‘Ah, well Liz made it, with a bit of help from me. We thought you’d like a sauce with a military
background.’

There was an incompatible silence while the colonel served the fish and handed plates to May for new potatoes and peas. Then he said, ‘I’m all for plain English cooking,
myself.’

May shot a reproachful glance at Oliver which he did not miss, and said, ‘Anyway, these are the first of our own peas.’

The colonel stabbed one with his fork. ‘Far too small: Hoggett is always premature. If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a hundred times –’

‘They taste delicious,’ said Elizabeth. (I can’t
bear
this: meal after meal of trying to make things right – of keeping them dull so that they won’t go
wrong.)

‘Are these our own potatoes?’ asked Oliver politely.

‘We don’t grow enough potatoes to have new ones,’ said Elizabeth quickly. Oliver knew perfectly well that one of the colonel’s petty tyrannies was to force an arthritic
old gardener to go through the motions of keeping up an enormous kitchen garden. This meant that the colonel resented bought vegetables and prohibited the use of their own until they were so old as
to be almost uneatable. He
knew
that, so why didn’t he shut up? She glared at him, and his grey eyes immediately fixed upon hers with an empty innocent stare.

‘. . hope Alice was pleased, anyway,’ May was saying to her husband.

‘Tremendous palaver – just to get a girl married: still it all went off quite smoothly. The Mounts seemed impressed with the house.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Oliver.

The colonel took his napkin out of a cracked and yellowing ivory ring, wiped a moustache of much the same colour and turned to Oliver.

‘Oh. And why, may I ask, are you not surprised?’

‘I only meant that as they are in the building business, they would, so to speak, look at it with a professional eye. It must have cost a packet to build – even in
nineteen-twenty.’

Elizabeth was stacking the plates which she then carried to the sideboard, where waited a trifle, left by the caterers. She brought this, placed it doubtfully in front of her mother, and went
for clean plates. The colonel had decided to accept Oliver’s speech about the house at face value, and so he had merely grunted. Now he said, ‘Ah! Trifle!’

There was a silence while they all looked at the trifle. ‘Caterers’ Revenge,’ thought Elizabeth, as her mother began gingerly spooning it on to the plates. She knew what it
would be like. Sponge cake made of dried egg smeared with the kind of raspberry jam where the very pips seem to be made of wood, smothered in packet custard laced with sherry flavouring. The top
was embellished with angelica, mock cream and crystallized violets whose dye was bleeding carbon-paper mauve on to the cream.

‘A classic example of plain English cooking,’ said Oliver smoothly.

‘When is he going to
leave
?’ thought the colonel, ‘Insufferable beggar.’

‘What time is your train, Oliver?’

He looked at his mother and felt reproved. ‘The last one is ten thirty-eight.’ He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly nervous – something of a traitor. ‘Liz and I
thought – I wondered whether it might not be a good thing for her to come up with me for a bit. Look around, and perhaps get herself a job.’

May was clearly taken aback, but she managed to look calmly at her daughter, and asked – really wanting to know, ‘What do you think, darling? Would you like to go to
London?’

‘I think I might quite like to.’ Her eyes were on her mother’s face; she frightfully wanted to find out what May really felt, but now, with Oliver doing it all so treacherously
in front of him, she was afraid she wouldn’t find out. May might awfully mind her going away, and not be able to say so. ‘It would be leaving you with rather a lot.’

‘Nonsense.’ Even the colonel had found the trifle heavy going, and was again wiping his moustache. ‘You must stop treating your mother as though she is a chronic invalid:
she’s perfectly capable of looking after herself. And on those few occasions when she is not, what am I for? Eh?’ He glared round the table, looking, Oliver thought, about as jocular
and useless as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion.

‘Is there room in the flat at Lincoln Street?’ May, who had given herself hardly any trifle, now stopped pretending to eat it.

‘She can have the second-best bedroom and a fair share of all mod. cons. She can look after me when I get home exhausted from work: very good practice for both of us.’

May opened her mouth and shut it again.

The colonel took a tin of Dutch cigars from one of his capacious pockets, opened it, and offered one to Oliver, There were – as usual – two in the tin. Oliver refused. The colonel,
pleased about this, lit one for himself, and said, ‘Ah – the office. And how is the job, Oliver? Going well, I trust?’

Oliver said, ‘As well as can be expected.’

‘I could come home for week-ends.’ Elizabeth was the kind of girl who blushed if other people told lies, and deflection was her form of apology.

‘There comes a time,’ the colonel said, ‘when all young people have to leave the nest and try their wings.’

‘Well, that’s settled, then.’ Oliver got up from the table. ‘Liz joins the chicks in Chelsea. If you’ll excuse me, I must go and pack. What about you,
Liz?’

‘Are you going to
night
darling?’

Elizabeth halted in her tracks: if only Oliver hadn’t done all this at dinner; if only she could have
talked
to her mother; if only she didn’t feel so guilty about wanting to
go so badly . . . But May got briskly to her feet and said.

‘In that case, I had better come and help you pack.’

The colonel was left in the dining-room alone. He took a second tin of cigars from another pocket, extracted one, and put it in the first tin. It would be a relief to get rid of both young
Seymours: have May to himself: with Alice gone, it was better to have May to himself.

Barely three hours later, Elizabeth sat opposite Oliver in the train. Most of the reading lights in the compartment did not work, but in any case, she did not want to read.
Oliver had gone to sleep: she stared without seeing anything out of the dirty window and tried to think, but she was feeling so much that it was very difficult. Escape was the first thing she felt:
a sense of freedom, but funnily, of
safety
as well; as though she had been locked up or ill-used – like girls in ordinary Victorian novels, and detective or spy stories since. Why?
Nobody had ever been unkind to her; it was her fault that she could not feel at ease with her stepfather who had only ever been dull, pompous, and
obvious
really with her. Too like himself
to be true – something like that. Before she had met him, she had thought that what people said about Colonel Blimp and ex-army men, particularly those who had served in India, was a sort of
coarse shorthand to save them having to know or describe anybody. She couldn’t think that now. It was almost as though he was a jolly good character actor toeing the popular line. Perhaps it
was the house that was so ugly and nasty as to be sinister. May had said when she married him, ‘He’s not meant to be your father, darling, because you had a perfectly good one;
he’s just meant to be my husband: it would be stupid of me to try and provide you with a new father at your age. Of course I hope you like him, but you needn’t feel you’ve got
to.’ But how could she – how
could
she ever have thought that she would be happy with him? And in that house? She had bought it because he wanted it. The moment she had married,
Elizabeth had realized how much she was meant to be married to somebody; she wasn’t at all the kind of woman to manage life on her own. And just when Oliver and she might have started looking
after
her
for a change, she’d made it impossible for them. Their family life had become a kind of conspiracy; jokes, habits, any kind of fun or thinking things awful had become furtive
and uncomfortable. Apart from the blissful feeling of escape (and as she was so selfish she couldn’t help feeling that), she felt really worried about May. While Alice had been there, she had
provided a kind of buffer for all of them. Alice was used to her father; she had become devoted to May, she had never stopped doing things for other people, or at least for her father, which
stopped other people having to do them for him.

She had never got to know Alice: they had always been so anxiously, fumblingly
nice
to each other, had early set such a high standard of you-through-the-swing-doors-first courtesy that
neither had never found out what the other really liked or wanted. Alice had once shown her some poetry – short, rhyming verses about nature going on whatever she was feeling: they were very
dull, imbued with a kind of sugary discontent; nature-was-pretty-and-Alice-was-sad stuff. She had read them very slowly to look as though she cared, and said they were jolly good in a hushed voice
to show that words were inadequate to express her feelings. And Alice had said how bad they were very fast a good many times, laughing casually and getting very pink. But really the poems, which
Elizabeth could see had been meant to be a confidence, had simply put another barrier of nervous dishonesty between them. Practically their only point of contact had been Claude. She had found
Alice, changed into her new pale-blue going-away suit, with Claude overflowing in her arms: Alice was crying and Claude was licking his lips and staring hopefully at the floor so perhaps they were
both
minding. Elizabeth had promised to be nice to him, and now, except for concealing the larder crime, here she was escaping. At least if I’m not famous for being intelligent, I
ought to concentrate on being reliable and nice. But she had a feeling that people’s natures just went on regardless of their talents; you weren’t any nicer because you were stupid.
Oliver, except for his dastardly behaviour to Herbert (she called him Herbert to herself and nothing to his face), was just as
nice
as she was, and although she didn’t always agree
with him he was far more interesting because he knew so much and could talk about it. She had tried reading books about
things,
like soil erosion and monotremes and the Moorish influence in
Spain, but none of these subjects ever seemed to fit into day-to-day conversation. She had tried asking May what she ought to do about this (just after she failed Oxford and before the domestic
science school), but May had said most unhelpfully that hardly anybody she knew thought. Oliver did, she retorted; he was brilliantly clever – a Second and he hardly seemed to work at all!
But May had just said, ‘Yes darling, I expect he is’ rather absently, like someone agreeing with a boring question so that they could stop talking about it. Much though she adored her
mother, Elizabeth had wondered then whether it was because she was a bit old-fashioned
and
a woman (a pretty hopeless combination when you came to consider it) that made her not set the
store by intelligence that she should. She wouldn’t have married Herbert if she’d cared about an intellectual life. She certainly hadn’t married him for money, and at her age sex
appeal was out of the question – so what was it? It was like being stuck with someone for ever who said at least one awful, obvious thing a day, like a calendar where you tore off Tuesday but
couldn’t help reading what it said. The most outstanding feature of her mother was how nice she was to absolutely everybody, so possibly she regarded Herbert as a challenge; perhaps, also,
she was the only person who could see that secretly, deep down, Herbert was a very good man. Dull people often were, unless that was what their friends said about them to make up for their
dullness. I do hope I get less dull, she thought. Living with Oliver ought to help that. She looked at him. He lay, or lounged, opposite her, legs crossed so that she could see a blue vein between
his socks and his trousers. His head was thrown back, his eyes shut, a lock of his pale-brown hair was lying over his bulging forehead. Even asleep, he managed to look plunged in thought. He was
wearing a very old but nice tweed suit that had belonged to their father: his only civvy suit, May had said, so he had got a good one – to last. He had lovely eyelashes that curled upwards
very thickly: he said girls always remarked on them. She supposed she would be meeting his girls at Lincoln Street. I can always go home at week-ends to keep out of his way, she thought; I’ll
be terrifically tactful and not surprised at anything. Anyway, I
should
go home: I would hate her to feel abandoned. She started to think of her mother carrying the heavy supper trays from
the dining-room all along the passage – two baize doors that were meant to stay open but never did – to the kitchen. And then doing all the things that had to be done before anybody
could have an evening there, let alone go to bed. Usually Alice and she had done a good deal of it; mostly Alice, she admitted honestly. Putting all the horrible food away so that they were certain
to be faced with the left-overs next day, feeding Claude, turning out lights and getting more coal for the fire in the colonel’s den (wouldn’t you know he’d call it that) where
they sat in the evening. There was only one really comfortable chair, and you bet, he took it. Filling hot-water bottles, turning down the beds, drawing bedroom curtains: Herbert liked everything
to go on as though there was a large resident staff: oh lord, and now it was just May to be that . . . She shouldn’t have come or gone or whatever she’d done . . .