Something in Disguise (7 page)

So she wrote to May, whom she knew would be really interested to hear about her new job, and waited to tell Oliver when he felt more like it.

Lady Dione rang up a few days later to say would she mind awfully doing a dinner that very night? No. Right: had she got a pencil? She’d get one. She was to go to some
people called Hawthorne in Bryanston Square. ‘They’re quite young from the sound of her voice,’ Lady Dione had said, ‘just married, and she can only cook one thing she
learned from Cordon Bleu. She wants you there at five thirty; dinner for six, and she’ll have bought all the food. Right? Right. And the best of British luck to you,’ she added, more
amiably than people usually make that remark.

‘Do you want me to fetch you?’ asked Oliver, who was now entering into the spirit of the thing. ‘I can easily borrow Sukie’s car by taking her out first. Haven’t
been out for days.’ The game was now permanently on the sitting-room floor, and he had spent hours making friends play test games which they always lost because he was still inventing the
rules. But Sukie, who had spent nearly two terms at an art school, had painted him an art nouveau board and they’d spent many a happy hour making tiny little models of aeroplanes, people and
bombs out of glitter wax, bits of matchboxes and tinfoil.

‘It would be lovely, if it won’t be too late for you: probably after eleven.’

‘My darling Liz, you must stop worrying so about
time
.’

‘Yes, I must.’ She wanted to get on with clearing up the house, having a hot bath and eating a couple of boiled eggs before going to Bryanston Square. She nearly always had boiled
eggs before any sort of adventure and she didn’t want to be late for this one. ‘I’ll try not to worry about it,’ she repeated, and escaped.

Mrs Hawthorne opened the door to her at Bryanston Square. She was tall and thin, and fashionable to the point of prettiness: she wore a Thai silk trouser suit, pearl encrusted
sandals and such an enormously thick dark pigtail draped over one shoulder that Elizabeth guessed it must be false.

‘Hullo!’ she said. ‘You must be Miss Seymour.’ She was carrying a small, white, elegantly clipped poodle who began yapping uncontrollably the moment Elizabeth stepped
inside the flat. Mrs Hawthorne shut the door saying without any conviction, ‘Shut up Snowdrop – shut
up
!

‘I’ll put her in the bedroom: hang on a minute.’

While she was doing this, Elizabeth waited in the hall. It was a very expensive flat: very thick pale-blue carpet, and a tank full of tropical fish; William Morris wallpaper, the kind she knew
you jolly well had to like in the first place, since if you cleaned it with pieces of bread it would last for ever.

‘Now. Where shall we put your coat?’

Elizabeth felt she could not be expected to know the answer to that; however, she took it off and looked obliging.

‘I suppose you’d better shove it in the coat cupboard.’ Mrs Hawthorne made this sound so like a concession, that it was almost offensive.

‘I’ll take you to the kitchen.’

‘You’d better, if you want any dinner,’ thought Elizabeth, wondering how Mrs Hawthorne managed to make quite ordinary sounding remarks sound so rude.

The kitchen was small, but spotless, all steel and Formica and what passed with the uninitiated as teak. It looked as though it was an Ideal Home kitchen, and not as though anybody had actually
ever used it.

‘All the food’s in the fridge.’ She opened the door of a gigantic Lec. ‘Potted shrimps for first course, cold duck, and stuff to go with it, and then strawberries and
cream. That was absolutely all I could
get
. Oh yes – some cheese. All right? You’ll find knives and things in drawers. The dining-room’s through there.’ She pointed
to a hatch. ‘I must go and cope with Snowdrop: she can’t stand strangers and she loathes being shut up.’

‘What was the point of
having
me?’ Elizabeth muttered as she unpacked her overall. The mixture of there being virtually no cooking to do, and Mrs Hawthorne’s unfriendly
behaviour, was most disconcerting. ‘I must be fairly stupid to mind being disconcerted so much; Oliver wouldn’t,’ she thought as she took the food out of the fridge. Horrible
frozen peas – the worst kind: and who in their senses would put new potatoes in the freezing compartment? The duck had that wizened, false look that nearly all shop-cooked birds seem to get;
the strawberries turned out to be green on their hidden sides; but the potted shrimps were comfortingly just themselves as they always are. She found a huge white loaf – like a giant’s
Sorbo sponge – in the bread bin and that was that. There did not seem to be any butter, or coffee. The kitchen, indeed, contained one small packet of Indian tea, a jar of lump sugar and tins
of grapefruit juice and Aristodog. Nothing else. It was twenty to six: she went in search of Mrs Hawthorne.

She heard her talking on the telephone and knocked rather timidly on the door. Mrs Hawthorne told her to come in, but the moment that she did so, the poodle rushed at her in a caco-phanous
frenzy. Mrs Hawthorne, who was lying on a white satin eiderdown (the room was unmistakably the bedroom) said, ‘Oh lord! Hang on a minute, Boffy darling, I’m being interrupted,’
heaved herself off the bed and collected the poodle.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, but there doesn’t seem to be any coffee – or butter for the toast and the vegetables . . .’

‘Oh – really!’

‘I could go out and get them, if you like. I don’t think all the shops will be shut.’

‘Oh well – do that then. That’s marvellous.’ She turned back, with the poodle in her arms, to the telephone. ‘Boffy? Still there darling? A domestic crisis . .
.’

‘Er – the only thing
is
, I’m afraid I haven’t brought any, so could you possibly let me have some money?’

‘Oh God – hang on again darling, there seems to be another one. Another
crisis
– well, she’s new . . .’ She put the receiver down and indicated with her
head. ‘Over there.’

There was a small lilac purse the same colour as her suit Elizabeth picked it up and opened it.

‘No – bring it to me: I’ll do it.

‘Damn! I only seem to have a pound note.’

Elizabeth opened her mouth to say something about most shops having change, but she didn’t because she knew she was going to croak or squeak which was what always humiliatingly happened to
her voice when she was angry and nearly in tears.

‘You’ll have to take it, won’t you? Don’t be long.’

She ripped her coat out of the coat cupboard and marched out of the flat. The lift was being used so she went on marching – down the stairs. She had never met anyone so
young
and so
horrible in her life. For a moment she thought of not going back; but then she realized that she couldn’t let the agency down like that, on her first job too: they’d probably never give
her another one. Mr Hawthorne must be horrible as well; or else terribly stupid. Perhaps the moment you earned your living, people
were
horrible to you. No wonder poor Oliver hadn’t
been able to stand the accountants’ office if this was true. Then she remembered May and how she’d behaved to the few people who’d ever worked for her. Of course it was nonsense:
there was probably nobody as nasty as Mrs Hawthorne in the whole of north-west London. It was only for one evening; she’d do her best, earn her three guineas and get the hell out. By the time
she reached Edgware Road, where she knew there was a large self-service grocer, she was planning to tell Oliver all about it. Mr and Mrs Hawthorne drinking tinned grapefruit juice and eating bowls
of Aristodog for breakfast, because what
else
they did for that meal she could not see. Perhaps feral-type vitamins really brought out the beast in people.

In the grocer she bought butter, coffee and a couple of lemons for the shrimps, and cashed out at a register operated by a young black man. He took her pound impassively, but when she smiled at
him, and apologized for not having anything smaller, he smiled so beautifully at her that she felt warmed by it. In the middle of his smile he yawned, put up an elegant hand which hardly hid his
mouth and then laughed. ‘All work makes you tired,’ he said putting change on to her palm. ‘Work is a terrible thing.’ He put the lemons into a bag then the butter into a
bag, and then the coffee into a third bag. ‘You have no basket?’ ‘’Fraid not.’ He stooped and came up with a carrier. ‘I give you family hold-all bag.’
There were people queueing behind her, but he placed each of the three small bags carefully in the carrier and then held it to see if the parcels were well disposed therein. The woman behind her
looked sour and began to mutter. He put the carrier back on the counter, arranged the string handles for her and inclined his head. ‘Ready for you now. Easy – and nice.’

She thanked him, and saw his face shut down again as the sour woman plonked her stuff on the counter and thrust her money at him saying, ‘We haven’t got all night, you
know.’

She walked back worrying about how people nearly always seemed to be horrible to one another – just in ordinary life – so naturally there would be wars.

Mr Hawthorne opened the door to her this time. His face was a uniform pale pink, and he was very nearly bald, but he was clearly quite young in spite of this, in the same way that you could tell
about pigs. In one hand he carried a cocktail shaker which he was agitating steadily all the time he opened and shut the door. ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘And what shall we do with
your coat?’

‘Last time, we seemed to think it had better go into the coat cupboard.’

‘Of course.’ Her accent had thrown him. Filthy snob. Anyway, she needn’t be
sorry
for him.

The rest of the evening was more of a cold war against the kitchen than against the people. (She didn’t see much of the guests, whose voices sounded very much like their hosts’, but
she reflected that nobody who wittingly went to dinner with the Hawthornes could be very nice.) The problems were much more that there was neither a bread knife nor a potato peeler anywhere to be
found, and come to that, not even a sharp knife of any description. The horrible, new, spongy bread was a nightmare to cut; the potatoes were the joke kind of new that would not scrape; she found,
also, that she was expected to carve the duck. Laying the dining-room table when you didn’t know where anything was, and it had been made impossible for you to ask, took simply ages. Luckily,
Mr Hawthorne came out to the kitchen to decant some claret, so she was able to ask him when they wanted to eat and where they wanted their coffee served. Twice the poodle escaped in order to come
and yelp at her and snap around her ankles. She came to the conclusion that it was slightly off its head, as indeed she would be if she had to live cheek by jowl with Mrs Hawthorne. When she took
the coffee in, they had obviously been talking about her ‘. . . hasn’t had to
cook
a thing –’ Mrs Hawthorne was saying as she brought in the tray), and their efforts
at covering this up were rudely ineffective. When she was washing up, Mr Hawthorne came into the kitchen and said, ‘Are we expected to pay
you
?’

No, she said, the agency:
they
would pay her.

‘Because really it seems a ridiculous sum, considering how little you have had to do.’

‘I was asked to come here to cook dinner. The fact that Mrs Hawthorne had bought pre-cooked food is nothing to do with me.’

‘Naturally, I can
see that
,’ he said, as though he was making an enormous concession because she was so very stupid. ‘It doesn’t take very much intelligence to
see that
. But the fact remains that you didn’t have to do anything except boil a few potatoes, which I take it most of us could manage if we were really pushed to it, and you’re
trying to charge us four guineas.’

Elizabeth, her heart thumping, put down the (only, and wringing-wet) drying-up cloth. ‘The agency are charging you, Mr Hawthorne: they engaged me on your behalf. I think you’d better
take the matter up with them. My brother is collecting me in ten minutes so I must finish the washing up now.’ And in case he could hear her heart thumping, she turned on the cold tap very
hard which splashed them both so suddenly and so much that he retreated without saying another word.

She dried the rest of the things on her apron, wiped the draining board, turned out the kitchen lights and collected her coat. She couldn’t bear to wait in the flat for Oliver, who, in any
case, might be late, as watches never went very successfully on him.

He
was
late; not very, but enough to make her feel abandoned as well as miserable. He and Sukie drew up with a flourish: they looked very gay, with Sukie wearing a pink velvet yachting
cap on her straight, ashy hair.

‘Pop in, sorry if we’re late, how was it?’

Sukie was thoughtfully in the back, so she climbed in beside Oliver just as tears began to spurt from her eyes.

‘Darling Liz! Here!’ He seized the remains of a packet of popcorn and started to feed her. ‘It’s almost impossible to cry if your mouth is absolutely full. Unless
you’re about two, when it all slides out like a slimy blind. Poor Liz!’ He put his arm round her and gave her a hug and such a weighty kiss on the cheek nearest him that all the popcorn
had to change sides, and she nearly laughed.

She told them about it, and Sukie said things like, ‘The bastard!’ ‘Fantastic scum!’ and what a good thing they were
both
so ghastly, married couples often
weren’t, and Oliver said he had a good mind to join the agency and get hired by them; one evening with
him
as their cook and they’d change their tune. The rest of the drive home
cheered Elizabeth up completely, because Oliver thought of such awful things to do while being their cook: ‘Casserole of poodle was probably a fine Siege-of-Paris dish; of course I’d
say that I only cooked live food: the meal would start with their beastly tropical fish
en gelée
, and end with me advancing on lovely Mrs Hawthorne with my meat chopper asking him how
he would like her done.’

They all had hot buttered rum when they got back to Lincoln Street, because Sukie had found a very pretty silver flask of her father’s that she was stealing to put scent in, and it seemed
a waste not to use up the rum. After it, Elizabeth suddenly felt so tired that she was being turned to dormouse stone on the spot, so Oliver told her to go to bed. Sukie must have stayed the night,
because when Elizabeth woke at about six, as she always did when things were worrying her, and went down to get a drink of water, the scarlet Mini was still parked outside the house. But by the
time she and Oliver got up there was no sign of Sukie, and the Mini had gone. When she mentioned tentatatively to him how nice Sukie was, his face closed and he said shortly, ‘She’s
all right. A bit dim, though. A little of her goes a long way.’ ‘Goodness!’ she thought, ‘If he thinks that about Sukie, it’s jolly nice to have
me
all the
time.’