Something in Disguise (6 page)

The party had been a success in the end, but it took a long time to start. Sukie and Annabel arrived in a Mini each. Neither of them had auburn hair. They wore clothes like string vests and
feather boas and striped plastic boots, so Elizabeth was glad about her tights. Apart from their striking appearance they seemed awfully intelligent and knew all Oliver’s other friends and
whom they were talking about. A lot of them had been to Oxford, and some of them had gone to Spain together – apart from innumerable parties like these where they all knew all the records
they were playing – and she felt rather out of it. She tried to be helpful about the food and what drink there was. Sukie had brought a bottle of Scotch, and Annabel a nearly full bottle of
Cointreau which a friend of Oliver’s insisted on mixing with Coca-Cola and soda. ‘It’s absolutely
foul,
Sebastian.’ But Oliver had said nonsense; all drinks were foul
till you got used to them. Afterwards she found that Sebastian had mixed them up like that – with Oliver’s approval – to make them last. The Gauloises ran out after the pubs had
shut, but somebody produced some sort of sticky wodge in a cold-cream jar that he said was hashish, and one or two people tried a spot of that on Annabel’s nail file. By then, everybody was
very friendly and there was a competition to gauge what hashish was most like. Stuff from between tremendously wide floorboards, Elizabeth had thought aloud, and all the people who had said worse
than school jam and scrapings off the lids of chutney bottles agreed with her, so warmly that she blushed with her sudden notoriety. Thereafter, whenever she had said anything, people stopped
talking and listened kindly for another
mot,
but she never said anything else that was any good. Nothing seemed to happen to anyone as a result of the hashish, except for someone called
Roland who was sick, but he said that that was something he had for lunch. By then they were drinking Maxwell House in the whisky-Cointreau-Coke glasses, the gramophone had been changed from jazz
to Monteverdi which Oliver said could be played at a mutter (people had banged on the wall and finally rung up), and a – to her – incomprehensible, but frightfully interesting argument
had broken out about the time-lag of influence that philosophers had upon politics and religion. Kiyckerkgard, Neecher, Marks, Plato (at least she’d heard of
him
) were being bandied
about and words like subjective and relative were in constant use. It seemed generally agreed that it was all right for things to be relative, but not at all all right for them to be subjective.
She noticed that nearly everyone could squash anyone else by calling them that. She felt terribly sleepy by then and was quite glad when Annabel said she must get out of her eyelashes they were
weighing her down so, and they went upstairs. They stayed in Elizabeth’s bedroom, talking about eye make-up and really good second-hand clothes’ shops and what it would be like to marry
an Asian or African, and Annabel said how much simpler everything would be if everybody was sort of fawn-coloured, but this would probably take a million years and
they
wouldn’t live
to see it; and it was very cosy being with Annabel in such eugenically difficult times . . . Then Annabel told her about how frightful it had been being an au pair girl in Lyons, and they talked a
bit about careers, and that was when Annabel told her about this marvellous new agency. ‘You just go to them and say you want a job: it doesn’t matter a bit if you think you can’t
do anything:
they
think of that. They specialize in being a last resort for people who want someone; they say their clients are so broken down by the lack of butlers and people to arrange
flowers and do typing for them that they’re glad to have
anyone
. I’ve been exercising a cheetah for the last ten days. Fifteen bob an hour – you can get danger money for
exotics, so I never do dogs and any of that domestic jazz. Daddy doesn’t mind what I do as long as I don’t get overdrawn.’

By the time they joined the others Elizabeth felt that Annabel was almost certainly going to be her best friend.

The conversation had changed when they got back to what it would be like nowadays being a modern master-criminal. Pretty easy, most people seemed to think, but rather dull. That was one thing
where a class structure was invaluable. Oliver said: the aristocracy of the underworld ought to steal huge sums of money from people like mad, but never hurt anyone. It would only be the working
classes who hit old ladies over the head and took their handbags with pensions. He was instantly accused of being a ghastly snob by someone called Tom who was reading sociology. The conversation
got boring again. She went to sleep.

She woke hours later, to find Oliver carrying her upstairs. He took off her clothes, wrapped her in his dressing-gown and levered her into bed. ‘Your fringe is a wow.’ Sleep
again.

Next day Oliver was terribly gloomy. She knew that brilliant people were far more moody than the other kind, and made him a specially good brunch, but he wouldn’t eat it. He said that the
party had been kid’s stuff, old ropes, a nasty little canapé de vieux: he was getting nowhere; he was damned if he wanted to be reduced to writing a novel at
his
age . . .

‘Is that what you were thinking of doing?’

‘It’s bound to cross the mind. If you don’t
know
anything and can’t write poetry or a decent play, there’s not much left, is there?’

‘I suppose not,’ she said respectfully. She was sitting carefully on the end of his bed trying not to move her legs which people who were
in
bed always called kicking.

‘I’m too old, really, anyway. I don’t want to
be
a novelist, you see. Just to write one adolescent best-seller. You have to be under eighteen for that. Even you are too
old.’

‘Was the
Evening Standard
no good?’

‘There was nothing in it for you. I wasn’t looking for me.
The Times
is the one I look in for me. It’s different for girls: you just need a job; I need a
career.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Twenty past two. I would like something like being Churchill’s private secretary: I seem to have missed everything. It’s this damned narrow social life I lead. It’s a
pity May didn’t have me taught to play the trumpet or to be a dentist or something obviously rewarding like that . . .’

‘Have a lovely hot bath.’ She was beginning to know some things about him.

‘Good idea. You run it. No cold – just hot: I’m practising for when I go to Japan.’

‘I know what,’ he said an hour and a half later. ‘I say, you
have
made this room nice . . .’

She was so pleased that she looked round it to notice what he had noticed; the
Encounters
all upright, which made them look distinguished instead of merely untidy, everything clean, or
clean
er,
and she had hung the curtains back from the cleaners since last December . . .

‘You haven’t listened to a word I was saying!’

‘Sorry!’

‘I think the best thing is for me to marry a very rich girl – very rich indeed. Then my natural talents will have time to develop naturally. Also, have you noticed how everybody
nowadays who is supposed to have initiative always turns out to have some capital as well? And, it’s much easier to develop integrity if you’ve got something to lose . . .’

‘What about the girl?’

‘Eh?’ He looked at her. ‘Oh, she’ll love me all right, don’t worry.’

‘But supposing you don’t –’

‘That doesn’t matter.’ he said, almost irritably. ‘Rich girls are used to a pretty low standard of marriage. She’ll adore
me,
and I’ll be considerate
and nice to her, and she’ll be thankful I don’t turn out to be an utter swine. That’s what they usually marry – a swine in a sheepskin car coat who takes her out in a
borrowed E-type.’

She said nothing. She was shocked and hoped he was joking.

Annabel’s agency was above a greengrocer in Walton Street. It took her nearly a week to find this out because whenever she rang up Annabel, a woman who sounded as though
she had been born in Knightsbridge on a horse said that Annabel was out and she had simply no id
eah
when she would be in. She laughed a lot after she said this, which was very loudly, and
Elizabeth found it tremendously difficult simply to say ‘Goodbye’ to somebody who was in the middle of laughing like that, and not frightfully easy even just after they had stopped. So
she didn’t ring up much, and the curious days and nights with Oliver went by; but in the end Annabel
was
in, and she got the agency’s address, put on her tidiest clothes and went
to see them.

It was run by two ladies called Lady Dione Havergal-Smythe and Mrs Potts. Both seemed rather surprising people to find running an agency: Lady Dione looked about fifteen – even in dark
glasses – and Mrs Potts, who was the perfectly ordinary age of about fifty – old, anyway – turned out to be Hungarian. The agency consisted of two small rooms: one in which
customers or clients waited to see Lady Dione and Mrs Potts and one where they saw them. There were two telephones which rang very nearly as often as they could, so that any sustained conversation
was difficult. In between two calls Elizabeth was invited to sit down which she started to do, until she realized, perilously near the point of no return, that the chair indicated was minutely
occupied by a Yorkshire terrier.

‘Put her on the floor, would you very kindly?’ Lady Dione’s voice was unexpectedly deep and authoritative, and Elizabeth felt that the kindness referred to the dog rather than
to herself.

Mrs Potts was talking fluent Italian (Elizabeth, who didn’t know her nationality at this point, thought that she must
be
Italian as the peevishly caressing inflections continued).
Lady Dione’s telephone rang again – she listened for about half a minute and then said, ‘Good God! No.’

‘And what can we do for
you
?’ she asked, as though she was quite ready to repeat her earlier remark after Elizabeth had told her.

‘I’ve come about a job. Annabel Peeling told me that you had them. Jobs, I mean.’

‘Oh! People nearly always come to us wanting people to
do
jobs.’ Lady Dione seized a very expensive-looking leather address book.

‘Do give me your name. And address. And things like that.’

Elizabeth did this.

Lady Dione pushed her dark glasses on to the top of her head and said earnestly, ‘What would you
like
to do? I mean – somebody wants almost anything.’ Her eyes were like
Siberian topazes, Elizabeth thought: her only piece of jewellery was them so she jolly well knew what they looked like. Knowing that was a bit like Oliver, she thought: but she had to be left a
brooch to know anything, and that was the only thing she’d ever been left, so that showed you . . .

‘I can cook a bit,’ she said.

‘Gosh! Can you really? I mean not just
sole Véronique
and chocolate mousse?’

Elizabeth shook her head.

‘Hetty! (Mrs Potts, she’s Hungarian.) Miss –’ (she consulted her book) ‘Seymour can cook!’

Mrs Potts had stopped having her Italian conversation, and was having another in some unknown mid-European language.

‘How marvellous!’ she said, with only a trace of an accent (pre-war B.B.C.). ‘Wait for me, Di. We must spread her very thin!’

‘We must wait for Hetty.’ Lady Dione took a small cigar out of her lizard handbag.

‘I must say that when you said Annabel had sent you, my heart sank. That girl thinks of nothing but money and is quite ungifted. If you live on your connections – as opposed to your
attractions – under the age of twenty, you are in for the most ghastly middle age.’

Mrs Potts finished her conversation, and having replaced her receiver, took it off again.

‘Oh – all right,’ Lady Dione did the same.

‘Now. You can get three guineas for cooking up to six, and more for more. I take it you just want to do dinners?’

‘What are your qualifications?’ Mrs Potts’s voice, though chameleon to the point of virtuosity, had a certain edge which those non-committal creatures do not, in their neutral
moments, seem to possess.

Elizabeth took a deep breath.

‘I spent a year at Esprit Manger, six months Cordon Bleu, and three months with Mme Germaine. Orange,’ she added.

Lady Dione and Mrs Potts looked at each other in a way that made Elizabeth feel quite important. Then Lady Dione said:

‘How many evenings would you like to work? Don’t do more than you feel like,’ she added earnestly.

Elizabeth thought. ‘About four?’

‘That’s simply marvellous of you.’ She turned eagerly to Mrs Potts. ‘What do you think Hetty? I mean there are just scads of people who –’

‘I think we shall be able to suit you, Miss Seymour,’ Mrs Potts interrupted smoothly. ‘Perhaps we could call you later in the day?’

The moment Elizabeth got to her feet, the Yorkshire terrier leapt, with one neat spring, into the chair, where it gazed up at her with burning, reproachful eyes.

‘We have your telephone number, Miss Seymour?’

Elizabeth nodded. Mrs Potts had met her eye some minutes ago, and continued, Elizabeth found now, implacably to meet it. Elizabeth wondered rather uncomfortably whether Mrs Potts was perhaps a
Lesbian, but then she thought no you couldn’t be Hungarian
and
a Lesbian, it would be too much of a coincidence getting two minorities in one person . . .

‘Right then – sweet of you to come.’ Lady Dione’s dark glasses were back into position. ‘And do remember,’ she called as Elizabeth reached the door,
‘that if you don’t
like
anyone we send you to, you needn’t ever go again.’

‘You can report to us,’ confirmed Mrs Potts – with a smile as sugary and firm as Brighton Rock.

When she got home, she found Oliver lying on the sitting-room floor poring over an enormous sheet of paper.

‘I’ve had a brilliant idea – a new board game based on the Battle of Britain. I’m going to call it “Dogfight”: it’ll make a fortune – you’ll
see,’ he remarked. ‘Get me your nail scissors, there’s a duck, and I would love a Welsh rarebit.’