Something in Disguise (9 page)

At last she felt that she could perhaps go up to their room and unpack. Mrs Mount said she’d pop up and show her the way: Rosemary said she would come too – she longed to see
Alice’s nightgowns. Sandra followed in their wake – partly because she had been sent to bed and it was the easiest way of pretending she wanted to go up anyway. Before they left, Mrs
Mount put Alice’s plates of largely unfinished food in front of the dog who gulped up everything without otherwise moving at all – it was a kind of living Hoover, Alice thought with
weary disgust.

The room – the guest room as Mrs Mount explained, no good putting Alice in Leslie’s old bed – had been done up specially for Alice. New paper, new curtains and bedspread:
Rosemary had chosen it, as Mrs Mount was a weeny bit old-fashioned. Two walls were ochre-coloured and two were a rather muddy turquoise. The carpet was a mixture of these colours – speckled
like a thrush but not in nearly such good taste. The room contained a three-piece suite and a small double bed covered with a slippery old-gold eiderdown which Alice knew would be possessed of
reptilian agility in the night. On the dressing-table was a colour photograph of a very fat little boy leaning against a lamp-post. ‘Leslie when he was little,’ said Mrs Mount, ‘a
present for
you
, dear. For years I’ve been saying it was high time he got married. He was such a lovely little boy.’

Sandra made retching noises, and that was the end of
her
, since Mrs Mount, in an entirely different tone of voice, ordered her to bed that minute. She went – kicking her boots
against the skirting board before she remembered that they were her new birthday boots – bought with Great-Aunt Lottie’s money.

Rosemary, with unspeakable energy, had started to unpack one of Alice’s suitcases. Alices hated this so much that she wanted to scream, but instead she smiled and protested inside. Mrs
Mount, laughing indulgently, said
she
knew when she was in the way, she’d be popping off, and leave the girls together. This she did.

‘At last!’ cried Rosemary. ‘Old people never know when they’re not wanted, do they? Now! Let’s put our feet up, and tell me all about it.’

Alice went on unpacking, or tried to, but at the same moment as she realized that she couldn’t think of anything to say to Rosemary – something that would make her shut up or go away
– the back of her neck felt icy cold and she couldn’t see anything properly. She heard herself asking for the bathroom, and the next thing she knew was that she was alone in it, having
been violently sick. She sat down on the edge of the bath, shivering, and too weak even to wash her face. She noticed that she had bolted the door, and then heard Rosemary’s voice.

‘Are you all right? Alice!’

‘I just want to go to bed.’ Then, with a further effort, she said ‘Please leave me alone, Rosemary.’ It was amazing that she had bolted the door. Her face was wet with
tears and sweat – like a bit of Kipling. She did not care what Rosemary did now: she would not come out until Rosemary had gone. The worst of it was that although she wished that she was not
there, in Mrs Mount’s bathroom in Clifton, Bristol, she could not really think where she wanted to be. Not in Surrey, certainly: look at the lengths she’d gone to to get away from
there. Before that, there had been furnished rooms: in Earls Court, in Stanmore, in Finchley, in Stoke Newington. Before that, the house in Westdown Road, Seaford, that had belonged to her first
stepmother – twenty years ago, she could hardly remember it; she’d been six, and they’d just come back from India. No – India had been two years earlier; she must have been
four then. All she could remember about India was the spicy smell of her Indian nurse, the wailing at her mother’s death, delicious fruit drinks and an old man who seemed always to be
watering the garden of their bungalow. Coming back to England it had been funny not having to wear a hat, and people’s feet made an awful lot of noise so that she’d been afraid of being
trampled on, which she’d never felt with Indian people. She couldn’t want to be in India if that was all she could remember of it. The trouble was that all these places had Daddy
looming over them so much that it had made them nearly the same. In fact, everything she could remember seemed to be years and years of being alone; the only child; being nearly always bored and
sometimes frightened; being in the way, or at least out of place; wondering what to do with herself and hearing other people openly speculate about this problem – punctuated by terrifying
occasions when she was suddenly dispatched without warning to some new school, or to some acquaintances of Daddy’s: agonizing afternoons of answering a battery of dispassionate questions,
choking on bread and butter, having to drink milk, or tea with horrible sugar in it, and Daddy coming to fetch her talking in a kind of public genial voice which he never did at home . . . The
schools were worse, though, because they went on for longer and sometimes she had even to live in them. By the time she was sent off in this manner she had become used to hours and even days alone,
and to live in a regimented but alien crowd was torture to her. Introspective children who are neither pretty nor very clever are simply a baffling nuisance to overworked staff; the children
immediately recognized her as easy prey for bullying, and in the end too dull even to be worth those attentions. She longed for a friend, but had no idea how to make one; she blushed very easily,
and her asthma ruined every summer term; school food brought out the worst of her acne; and the difficulty she found in communicating – with anyone at all – made her seem far more
obstinate even than she was. May was the first person whom she had really not been in some measure afraid of, and by then she was twenty-three. Oliver and Elizabeth had seemed so wonderfully lucky
and glamorous that to become related to them was an almost celestial privilege. At first she had planned that Elizabeth would become her greatest friend and Oliver might become – anything.
She had actually shown some of her poems to Elizabeth, but watching Elizabeth read them, she’d seen pretty quickly that poetry didn’t mean much to her: she’d been impressed, of
course, but she hadn’t understood it. Her feelings about both of them – Oliver and Elizabeth – had soon settled to a kind of fearful admiration, and she had turned, with some
relief, to May. At first she had thought that Daddy’s third marriage was going to release her from unpaid bondage into the freedom of a job and money of her own. But when Daddy had insisted
on May buying that enormous house, she had realized that for someone not used to looking after Daddy anywhere, let alone in a mansion, the combination would be too much for any one person, and
certainly for May, who was not really a practical person at all. So she had stayed at home to help, until she had slowly begun to feel that Daddy really wanted her to make a life of her own. He had
even offered to send her on a cruise to meet people. She had refused that point blank; the thought of being stuck on a ship with a lot of strangers getting on with one another seemed like being the
only prisoner in a social concentration camp. She had compromised with Spain, once she had found that May thought she ought to have a proper holiday: Sitges and Leslie had been the result, and here
she was. So it was idiotic to say that being here was worse than being anywhere else, really – it was just strange, and goodness knows she was used to strange places. She got up from the edge
of the bath and washed her face in cold water, and then making sure that she was leaving the bathroom as she expected Mrs Mount would wish to find it, she went back to the bedroom. Rosemary was
nowhere to be seen. She undressed behind the door, in case Leslie should come in, and climbed into bed. She had been right about the eiderdown. If only Claude was here, he would pin it down. The
last thing she thought of before going to sleep were the lovely times when she would wake in the night with a feeling of claustrophobia and a dead weight on her chest, open her eyes to find two
luminous orbs a few inches from her face and hear the grumbling mutter of his purr starting up as he realized he’d made her uncomfortable enough to wake her up. Perhaps
he
felt lonely,
too.

Alice and Leslie were only staying with the rest of the Mounts until they could move into their new home. This was a luxury bungalow built by the Mounts on a new housing estate
beyond Clifton. Leslie had shown Alice the plans, but she found them so difficult to understand that she was completely unprepared for the – nearly completed – article when she saw it
Leslie took her the next morning, after a huge Mount breakfast (the Mounts went to work on nearly everything you could think of to be on the safe side). The point about the bungalow, Leslie
explained, was that they were building forty-nine others that were structurally the same, which brought down the costs quite a bit, but, on the other hand, as this one was to be theirs, he had
added a number of features to it which would certainly make it a one-off job with a distinction of its own. What sort of features, Alice had asked, really not knowing what features of a building
might be. Spanish-style touches, Leslie had answered. She glanced at his profile – he looked complacent and mysterious.

The housing site was a large one, and the sense of devastation which any building enterprise brings to the surrounding land was probably at its worst, since all the bungalows had been begun, and
many of them were in varying stages of completion. From the distance they looked like white mini-bricks put on a ploughed field; as they got nearer, Alice saw that the third-of-an acre plots had
been marked out with barbed wire and chestnut palings. Here and there were drunken remnants of the original hedges that had marked the fields. A concrete mixer was working; scaffolding was being
noisily disassembled; there was a bonfire burning what looked like giant’s rubbish; and the perky cackle of transistor radios filled up the cracks of silence between the crashes, thuds,
hammering and tip-up lorries changing gear as they were ponderously manoeuvred in the rutty, makeshift roads. A great many men were standing about watching the man loosening the bolts on the
scaffolding with a ring spanner, and several men were vociferously directing a lorry loaded with tiles which seemed to have got stuck.

Leslie drove to one end, or corner, of this battlefield where one of the most finished of the bungalows crouched.

‘Here we are,’ he shouted.

Getting out of the car, Alice stepped immediately into a heap of very wet sharpsand. ‘Look out!’ cried Leslie, as people usually do after you haven’t. She stood on one leg and
took off her other shoe: the sand was like damp sugar; several men had stopped watching a man unloading tiles from a wheelbarrow and were watching her. Leslie came up and held her arm. ‘Bad
luck!’

‘Never mind. Let’s go and see the house.’

At this moment a small man in a hat turned up at a kind of fast hobbling walk – like someone pretending to run in a comedy.

‘Good morning, Timpson.’

‘
Good
morning, sir.’

‘This is the new Mrs Mount.’ Leslie said this as though there were dozens of them.

‘
Good
morning, madam.’ He had a ferrety little face and all his gestures were exaggerated by dishonesty. Now, he looked at his hand, wiped it on his trousers and held it out
to Alice with an expression of such humility that it was almost aggressive. His hand wasn’t in the least dirty.

‘Mr Timpson is our foreman. I’ve brought my wife to see our new home.’

‘Definitely.’ He held his hand out again – this time as though warding off a blow. ‘Don’t tell me. I know. All ladies are impatient. I’ll tell you frankly
– it’s a miracle what we’ve performed in the time. Forty-seven – no I’m telling a lie – forty-eight weeks ago this place was just a field with animals in it. Now
– and have we had our troubles – you wouldn’t recognize the place. Fifty lovely homes in the twinkling of an eye.’

They were walking up what Alice supposed would eventually be the path to her front door. When they reached it, Mr Timpson clapped a hand to his head: this seized up any other movement he had
been on the point of making. ‘Don’t move, sir! Isn’t there a lovely little old custom that slipped our memory?’

Leslie and Alice stopped too, and looked at him.

‘I may be wrong,’ cried Timpson: he was now mincing sideways up to Leslie, ‘but,’ he put a hand shielding his mouth from Alice and spoke even louder, ‘don’t
we cany the bride over the threshold the first time she enters her domain? Correct me if I’m wrong.’ He clapped his hand over his mouth and looked roguishly ashamed.

‘Quite right,’ said Leslie, and turned to Alice.

Alice, as we have said, was a big girl: she was quite simply the wrong size to be carried at all – except by Tarzan, or in an emergency like the house being on fire. But Leslie, though not
much taller than she, was stocky and determined. He picked her up and carried her, her handbag thumping painfully against his thighs as he staggered into the bungalow.

‘Easy does it,’ cried Mr Timpson having seen that it hadn’t. He had also seen one of her suspenders as her skirt had got rucked up, and Alice loathed him more than ever. She
was blushing and didn’t know where to look so as to avoid Mr Timpson’s horrid little eyes, so she looked down, straight on to the enormous bottom of a man in blue dungarees who was
hitting what looked to her like random bits of floorboard with a tiny hammer.

‘Move for the lady, George,’ said Mr Timpson in a voice which bordered on being quite different from any he had used before.

Alice looked at Leslie to see if she could tell what he thought about Mr Timpson, but she couldn’t. In fact, Leslie couldn’t have minded him, she thought resentfully as they got back
into the car half an hour later, since Mr Timpson had been allowed to accompany them throughout their tour of the bungalow, which was not very large, and except for workmen and loose doors and
tools and things was empty. She had seen it all in about five minutes, but Leslie and Mr Timpson stood interminably in each room talking about sub-contractors, the Government, the Electricity
Board, fibre-glass insulation and Marley tiles. Mr Timpson always agreed with Leslie, so perhaps that was why they talked so much, Alice thought. The Spanish-style features turned out to be the
threat of a good deal of wrought iron, tiles on the floors, which she thought would be slippery and cold, and an all-black bathroom, which did not strike her, among other things, as particularly
Spanish. There was also an eye-level grill in the kitchen. There were two bedrooms, one large and one small, a large sitting-room, a sort of study, a small dining-room with a hatch through to the
kitchen, one bathroom and two lavatories. Her future home. In the car, Leslie asked her what she thought of it, and she said she was sure it was going to be very nice.