Something in Disguise (20 page)

It wasn’t until after Elizabeth had rung up that May realized how down she had been. Three or four times a day she had been telling herself that this was absurd. The
weather had been good: Herbert had alternated trips to Lord’s with a much keener and more practical interest in the garden than he had shown before. He treated the lawn with various
chemicals, hosed it, rolled it, mowed it, and walked about it discussing its future perfection and the possibility of croquet. It kept
him
happy. He was just the kind of man to get obsessive
about lawns, she thought. Mrs Green had been angelic: especially when May’s digestion had been so stupidly bad that she hadn’t felt like cooking – let alone eating –
anything. Mrs Green had even got her nephew to repair May’s electric pad because she simply couldn’t get her feet warm at night. Of course she worried about Oliver – not having a
proper job, not seeming to care to get on with his life – but what she had already learned from the League had taught her to despise that kind of practically dishonest concern. Dr Sedum would
simply ask
who
she was really worrying about – Oliver or herself? And as it was clearly worse to worry about herself, she knew that that was what she must really be doing. Elizabeth
she suspected of being in love; a perfectly natural and reassuring condition. Lavinia had said that the impression she was creating upon other members of the League was largely favourable. The few
people with whom she had obliquely discussed the difficulties of living with Herbert had treated him as a chronic natural hazard – like a degree of fall-out or the buildup of pesticides. It
had – reasonably enough – been a reflection upon
her
that she was allied to such a man. Quite right (she was sure that anybody who could point to any of her behaviour and
pronounce it shoddy, dishonest, underhand in some sickeningly unconscious manner must be right): but the facts were that she had to go on living and dealing with what she had done. The house, for
instance. The curious thing about that was that she (not forgetting darling Oliver and Elizabeth) seemed to be the only person who really hated this awful house. Herbert, naturally (it was he who
made her buy it), adored the place; but, far more mysterious, Dr Sedum and co. seemed
also
to think well of it. Lavinia had pointed out that many of the rooms were ideally suited to communal
activities, although she was maddeningly unprepared to say what they might be. May was in a curious position
vis-à-vis
the League. At steady intervals she was invited to a Time
– in a garden flat in St John’s Wood – but she could not go unless it happened to coincide with one of Herbert’s cricket days. When she
did
go, she came away feeling
curiously depressed. This was partly because everybody except her seemed to understand everything that was going on, and partly because, this being so, she
pretended
to understand when she
did not. There were usually about nine people, one of whom was allegedly in charge and who read something and then asked other people what they thought about it. Everybody spoke in very calm,
deliberate voices – as though everything was unspeakably bad but they had faced up to it. Nearly all of what people said was in the form of a question – so all the talk was like some
wavering chain with an occasional bead. The reading matter was so wide, as well as high-minded, as to be (to May anyhow) totally obscure. There had been one paper where it had started with primary
colours and May had thought, oh good she knew what they were, but in no time the Trinity, the Milky Way, the Three Bears, fairy stories, triumvirates, geometry, Shakespeare’s plays,
being-more-civilized-than-allowing oneself-to-be-presented-merely-with-the-alternative had all been thrown into the breach until the air was heavy with cigarette smoke and the whole of philosophy,
and people were even pretending to want to interrupt one another. Einstein would be dismissed as clever (?) and Krishnamurti as not a realized man (?). The question marks saved everyone from
noticing how far someone had stuck his neck out. No wonder May left with indigestion – of a different kind from her run-of-the-mill prosaic kind – and wondering as she took the tube to
Waterloo whether these symptoms, both physical and mental, were just the result of being fifty – i.e. too old for serious mental or spiritual effort. Herbert simply made her feel older by
wanting her to make a will, because, he said, things could be so difficult with stepchildren if it wasn’t all cut and dried. When she’d rung up the only lawyer she’d ever known
because Clifford had used him, he said the same thing. But when she’d told Herbert this, thinking he’d be pleased, he’d got quite shirty, as darling Clifford used to say, and said
he’d got a perfectly good lawyer already, there was no need for her to go ringing people up behind his back. Sometimes it seemed impossible to do anything right, and she really felt so
wretched a good deal of the time that she seemed to have no energy. Herbert, who talked a good deal about her state of health, said he was going to take her into Woking to see a tremendously good
doctor, but when she suggested getting on with this scheme he said give it a few more days with the pills he’d always used in India for
his
indigestion, and the hot drinks he brought
her every evening. Twice Herbert made appointments about ten days in advance, and on both occasions she felt so much better that the first time she refused to go at all, and the second time she
only went to please Herbert.

All in all, she was very glad when Elizabeth rang up and said she was coming down for the week-end.

They were mutually surprised by each other’s appearance. May thought that Elizabeth looked dreadfully unhappy, and Elizabeth thought her mother looked worryingly ill. Neither of them
mentioned these facts. They talked instead about Oliver, who
might
, apparently, be going to get some sort of job on a London newspaper; about Alice, who was apparently pregnant; and finally
about Claude, who had taken to hunting all night in muddy and dank places and drying off luxuriously in the linen cupboard to which he seemed mysteriously always to have access. He had also kept
such a sharp eye on any food imported into the house not specifically for him that he no longer bothered to kill and crunch up bluebottles. ‘His one asset, from our point of view, simply
thrown away. He’s tripped Herbert up twice in passages when we haven’t had spare bulbs and Mrs Green thinks his moulting gives her asthma. Somehow the awfulness of Claude is very
consoling.’

Elizabeth looked at her mother’s profile (she had met her daughter at the station in the Wolseley, which she drove with great care extremely badly). It was easy enough to imagine what her
mother needed to be consoled about: Daddo and the horrible house. Apart from May’s beautiful English complexion (that Elizabeth supposed she must be noticing so particularly because everyone
in the South of France had been too brown to have one), her face looked as though she had lost too much weight too fast. Elizabeth felt that as well as looking ill, her mother did not seem to be
happy. Nobody who thought of Claude as a consolation could be
very
happy.

‘How is Alice getting on?’

‘It sounds as though she is having a baby: at least she has absolutely every Victorian symptom. She writes me extremely long letters, and the moment I have screwed up the energy to reply
she sends another one. Imm
ed
iately. She wants to come and fetch Claude, but she says she’s so sick in
any
vehicle that she dare not risk the train.’

‘Perhaps I could take him to her!’

‘Oh darling, that would be kind. Alice simply adores that cat, and on top of everything else she sounds a bit homesick, althought how
anybody
could be homesick for this, I cannot
imagine.’

They had swept precariously round the drive (May treated all corners – even gentle curves – as dangerous) until the monstrous builders’ folly was in view. Oliver, who never
tired of insulting it, had once said that it would be ideal for an American film producer to do a B feature on the haunted-house theme. Beams, battlements, leaded windows, nail-encrusted doors,
awful, useless chimneys that looked as though they had been knitted in moss stitch, liver-coloured bricks, ill-judged pieces of roughcast (dinosaurs’ vomit Oliver had also said) made the
place a landmark: it was called Monks’ Close, and Oliver had also said how lovely it would be if you opened the hideous front door one day and found it chock-a-block with monkeys.

Herbert was standing in front of the front door to greet them. He wore cricket flannels, a white shirt and a panama hat and carried a syringe. He waved this last in greeting and then stood
elaborately at attention as the car drew to a halt.

‘Well well well
well
! Here you are. Welcome home, m’dear. Don’t bother with the car now. I must say, Elizabeth, you’re looking remarkably well. Flying the nest
seems to agree with you, eh?’

Elizabeth had never known him so affable. He even made her a fearfully weak gin and tonic without being asked: but she took her small suitcase up to her room by herself. It was exactly as awful
and the same. It seemed to her as though she had been away for – not a hundred, but about ten years. The thought that forty-eight hours ago she had been with John in the villa drinking
Paradis and feeling so happy that she could notice
everything else
seemed extraordinary now. In the cupboard were a few outgrown, or at least outloved, clothes: they seemed both girlish and
faded. The horrible bridesmaid’s dress was there, too. How John would have laughed at her in that! The trouble was that she could not bear to think about John – in case it was no good
thinking about him. The great thing was to think about other people: May, for instance, and even Alice. She washed her hands and combed her hair, collected some cigarettes out of her case and went
down in search of her mother.

May had made dinner and to her amazement, the colonel had more or less laid the table, so there was nothing to be done.

‘It’s not very exciting, I’m afraid darling,’ May said. ‘Just steamed plaice and some baked apples. We’ve taken to eating very little in the
evenings.’

‘That’s fine. I’m not especially hungry, anyway.’

‘Well, Herbert is trying to keep his weight down, and eating at night doesn’t seem to agree with me at all these days.’

Elizabeth watched Claude, who was crouched on the back door mat cracking drumsticks with his head on one side, almost as though he was testing for sound.

‘He seems larger than ever.’

‘He is. He must be: I can really hardly lift him now. That is another problem: he’d never fit into his cat basket Darling, would you like another drink?’

‘I’d love one: what about you?’

May shook her head. ‘I’ve had my little cocktail. The drink’s in Herbert’s den.’

In summer, the den looked merely dingy rather than dank. It had an unreasonably high ceiling with unfunctional beams. The furniture, a nasty mixture of pitch pine and mahogany, was bilious from
the evening sunlight which filtered in through the narrow, heavily leaded windows. The flat surfaces of the room were ranked with photographs of the colonel, in uniform and out of it, in various
hot and cold countries, and accompanied by an assortment of animals – alive or dead – as his sense of occasion had seen fit. There were also a number of metal filing cabinets –
unlabelled and locked. Elizabeth found that she was looking at each awful room quite freshly, as though it had absolutely nothing to do with her.

Herbert was sitting in his large chair with his head thrown back listening to the cricket news from a small and badly serviced radio resting on the arm of his chair. A whisky and soda lay within
his grasp. When he became aware of Elizabeth, he went through the bizarre and contradictory motions of not getting up out of his chair although he knew he should: or, possibly, seeming to get up
out of his chair and then not managing it because he was listening too hard to the radio. Elizabeth took advantage of this pantomime to make signs at the drink and herself, and with the barest
flicker of hesitation, he seemed to agree. Luckily for her, the drink was still unlocked, but pouring a slug of gin under Daddo’s eyes, as Oliver had been wont to remark, required the most
artistically unsteady hand if one was to get a decent drink. There was about a third of the bottle of tonic left from her first drink. No ice: no lemon. Just as she was deciding it was worth the
journey to the kitchen for, at any rate, ice, the news came to an end.

‘Ha! M’dear – you should have let me do that for you.’ He had switched off the radio. ‘Lost without m’cricket. Haven’t been up so much this season with
May being a bit off colour.’

‘She doesn’t look well: has she seen a doctor?’

‘First thing I thought of. Got her to one in the end. Bright young chap in Woking. Mark you, had to make at least two appointments for her before I could get her there. She won’t
take enough care of herself, you know.’

Elizabeth asked what the doctor had said, but he was hunting for the drink cabinet key on his vast and crowded key ring: he didn’t seem to have heard her.

‘What did the doctor say?’ she asked again.

‘What? The doctor? Oh – he thought she’d been overdoing it. Alice’s wedding and all that. I told him the moment she knew she was coming to see him she seemed much better
– much more like her old self – and he produced some fashionable twaddle about psychology – they all do it now, you know, can’t stop ’em, even got it with M.O.s
towards the end of my time. Personally and between you and me, I don’t think
any
woman of her age likes to admit to herself she can’t do as much as she used to when she was
younger. I don’t say it, of course, but my view is that she should rest more, settle down a bit, all this dashing up and down to London takes it out of her. Wish you’d have a word with
her about that, m’dear.’

His pale blue eyes were fixed upon her face: he looked anxious, tactless – or rather as though tact was an almost unbearable price to pay for him getting things right with people –
and above all, as though he needed help of some kind if only he could explain the kind . . . She began her customary retreat from dislike and ridicule: it was unfair, worse than bad taste, wrong
for her to laugh at her mother’s husband with her brother. He was like she was; simple, not specially clever or good at understanding things, but here he was, clearly doing his best. She
smiled at him (she had no idea how anxious her smile was) and said that of course she’d do anything she could. The colonel seemed tremendously relieved by what she said. They finished their
drinks in an unusually companionable silence.