Something in Disguise (24 page)

‘What
are
you doing in Bristol?’ said John Cole’s voice.

It was John. It wasn’t Oliver – it was John.

‘Are you there?’

‘Yes. I’m in Bristol.’

‘Yes, I thought you must be. Do you want to stop being there? Because if you do, I’ll fetch you.’

‘Now – would you?’

‘Yes. I’m at London airport. That should just give you time to pack.’

‘Oh! I don’t think I
can
, though. I’m supposed to stay the night here: at least. I mean I haven’t even
been
here for a night yet.’

‘Couldn’t you explain to them?’

‘Well – no, I couldn’t really. Not enough to stop people feeling hurt.’

There was a pause, and then he said, ‘All right: what about tomorrow morning?’

‘That would be O.K.’

‘Would it be lovely as well as O.K.?’

But as soon as she didn’t answer, he added quickly, ‘Jennifer has gone to Capri with some of Ginny’s set.’ Then he said, ‘Oliver said he didn’t think
you’d mind my ringing you, but I quite see about staying the night. Would ten o’clock tomorrow morning suit you?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry, I’m no good at talking on the telephone.’

‘The trouble is that there’s nothing else you can do on it really. Never mind. Tomorrow; ten o’clock.’

‘Have you got the address?’

‘I have.’ She waited; there was a faint click and then the dialling tone. He never said good-bye.

She put the receiver down and walked unsteadily back into the sitting-room trying to compose her face to suit the now so distant as to be meaningless situation of Leslie versus Claude.

Leslie was definitely intrigued, as he put it, by Elizabeth’s telephone call. This was partly, Elizabeth felt, because he was rather rudely amazed that
anyone
should want to call
her long distance, and partly because she sensed that he had wrung from Alice some form of capitulation about Claude, and, having got his own way, was breezily determined to change the subject.

The young man sounded definitely intriguing, Leslie repeated; was he someone they might have met at the wedding? Which was absolutely ridiculous, Elizabeth thought, since he must know perfectly
well that apart from the caterers everybody at the wedding had been some sort of actual or potential relation.

No, she said.

Well people didn’t phone people for nothing; that was a fact and certainly not at this hour of night, so perhaps there might be another wedding that they’d meet him at?

He was like Rosemary in plus-fours, Elizabeth thought, but even
he
could make her blush.

He was a friend of hers and Oliver’s, she said: he happened to be in the neighbourhood and Oliver had suggested to him that he pick her up. Which he was doing tomorrow morning at ten
o’clock. And from coldly and casually not looking anywhere, she turned to Alice with something like entreaty. Alice made an effort to smile and said that she thought perhaps she would go to
bed. Would Leslie take the puppy out? Of
course
he would. Where was the poor little chap? In the kitchen in his basket. When he had gone, Alice said:

‘Would you mind very much having him in your room tonight? Claude, I mean,’ she added.

‘Of course not. I’d love to have him.’

Alice followed her to the door of her room. ‘He’s very good at night: as long as he’s got someone warm to lean against and you don’t turn over too much.’

‘I’m sure he is: I’m awfully sorry, Alice.’

They kissed clumsily; Alice’s eyes filled with tears and she said, ‘Just bad luck.’ Then she had to go without saying good night to Claude, because Leslie and the puppy had
returned.

But with Alice gone, all pity, all dismay vanished. It was almost impossible to feel really happy
and
really sorry for someone at the same time – or at least
she
didn’t
seem to be managing it: of course she wasn’t simply happy about John – they were going to have to have a serious talk, about Jennifer and everything. It was more a mixture of tremendous
relief that she’d heard from him, and excitement at the thought of seeing him, and apprehension about what seeing him would be like. ‘This time tomorrow,’ she thought, unable to
think any more than that about it.

Claude still lay in her suitcase, but now his tail hung out and down the side of the bed like a bell pull in a Beatrix Potter story. She lifted him out of the suitcase on to the bed, and without
the slightest pause he started to climb into it again. So then she lifted the suitcase on to the floor and he got out at once. He had no intention of spending his night on the floor. When she was
in bed and had turned out the lights, he subjected her to nerve-racking minutes while he walked over her dressing-table hitting things and knocking them over. She called him, and after a suitable
delay, he landed with exaggerated caution on her neck. He then tramped wearily over her, testing various places to see whether or not they could be expected to take his weight, until he finally
settled in the crook at the back of her knees. Here he sneezed eighteen times and then got down to a thorough all-over wash. His muscular and rhythmic tongue shook the whole bed for what seemed
like hours. But he did one good thing. From thinking that she would not be able even to shut her eyes, he made her long for him to shut up and let her fall asleep. Eventually, he did.

John arrived punctually at ten. Leslie had left for work, it having been made interminably clear that Claude was not to be in the house when he returned that evening. Elizabeth left them alone
together and heard Alice saying good-bye to him and then the outbreak of his fury when he found himself back in his travelling basket. She had tried to do the breakfast washing up but Alice had
stopped her: ‘You’ll leave me nothing to do.’ So now she stood in the sitting-room by the front windows that looked on to the small blazing desert that was to be a garden when, as
she had heard it variously put, Leslie got round and Alice faced up to it. The thought of being Alice was, at the moment, so awful, and the kind of chance whereby
she
had escaped this fate
so utterly mysterious that she felt a kind of moral sadness for the world . . . She could see the car.

The bungalow gate made him look even taller than usual – turned him into a kind of Gulliver; he stopped to undo the fussy little catch, but really, he could just as well have stepped over
the whole thing; she rushed to the front door and opened it before he had finished striding up the concrete-scored-to-look-like-crazy-paving path. He beamed discreetly at her, looking much browner
than he had looked in France. Alice appeared in the doorway of the guest room and Elizabeth introducing John, suddenly saw her as a complete stranger might do: a large, ungainly girl, but striking
in a gentle, picturesque manner, as much out of proportion and place here as, say, a Labrador in a hen coop. She was very pale, but blushed when John shook hands with her and immediately started to
apologize for Qaude about whom John, as yet, knew nothing. Elizabeth, who had thought that perhaps they would have to endure coffee and each person trying to think of things to say that would be
all right for the other two, realized from her glazed expression and oddly trembling mouth that she was very near breaking down again: it would be better if they left as quickly as possible.

So this they did. Claude, whose protests had settled in volume much as a long distance runner adjusts his speed to the course, was put on the back seat with Elizabeth’s small red case
beside him. Elizabeth thanked Alice again for having her: they kissed, and their noses bumped together painfully.

‘I promise I’ll take him home to May.’

‘I know: thank you so much for coming, Elizabeth.’

She stood at the gate – it looked absurdly small beside her, too – and waved to them like someone who had never done it before. When Elizabeth turned back for the last time, she was
still waving.

As soon as they were out of sight, John stopped the car and put Claude’s basket in the boot which he propped open. ‘I’ve nothing against him, you understand, but I want to keep
it that way.’

‘As long as he can breathe.’

‘Lots of fresh air in that boot.’

‘He loses his voice in about forty miles.’ She couldn’t help feeling a bit guilty about him.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked some time later.

‘Somewhere nice:
I
don’t know. Let’s just – see.’

They were out of Bristol by now, into the rich green and multi-coloured country: fields of ripe corn; hedgerows overgrown with flowering brambles; cottage gardens choked and blazing, the thick,
grassy verge crammed with poppies and buttercups and cow parsley . . . she thought of Alice jammed in the house Leslie had built, pregnant, and still, in spite of marriage, lonelier than she had
seemed before: of her mother, doggedly frittering her time away with menial and unnecessary tasks for a bore; and of Oliver, wasting his brilliance and youth for lack of opportunity or purpose or
something like that . . . She did not want to think about Oliver; in fact, in her selfish way, she did not want to think about any of them: they all added up to life being some kind of tightrope;
if you were on it and didn’t look down, everything seemed easy, but if you even began to look down . . .

When she could no longer even hear their car, Alice turned back to the bungalow. It was going to be another baking day. She had planted three white geraniums in the piece of
earth that she had marked out for a flower-bed, and already their lower leaves were wilting. In any case, only three plants in a whole garden looked odd and wrong, but it had been too late to sow
the lawn and the man who was to turf it had not turned up. There was no shade in the garden, it was really just a rectangle of ploughed-up earth with a garden path laid at one side of it. Then
there was the house with the puppy. The black dots that lay in wait one inch from her eyeballs took yet another curtain call – diminishing as though sinking to the bottom of a curtsy and then
bobbing up again. She started walking up the path, trying to find things to notice that would stop the sick, empty feeling that seemed to come and go but always to come back. The puppy was
alternately hurling himself against the study door and howling. The thought occurred to her that it would be possible just not to go into the house at all; she was perfectly in control of herself
– all she had to do was
not
go on walking towards the front door: she could stop everything as simply as that . . . But still she would have to be somewhere. She shut the door very
slowly and leaned against it: breathing had become something she was having to notice to make sure it went on happening. She went into the sitting-room meaning to sit down somewhere and wait for
things to get better, but the room, when she reached it and looked round her, seemed to horrible, so arranged to expose her as an alien, neither at home nor even at ease, that she couldn’t
sit alone there. In her underclothes drawer in the bedroom – hidden beneath the pastel Celanese and nylon lace – was the red-leather book that she had bought in Barcelona. It had thick,
white paper with gilded edges. Into this she copied her poems when they were as finished as she could make them. She took the book back to the sitting-room and sat for a long time with it on her
lap. Sometimes she looked at the poems: she knew them by heart, and also exactly what they looked like in her writing on the page, but it was comforting to look. They were never really what she had
meant, but they reminded her of whatever that had been; it was the nearest she got to being able to tell anyone anything, and in reading or recalling them, she was able to become somebody else whom
she was telling. This made it the opposite of lonely. The last poem was about the bird in Cornwall.

‘But it said:
PRIVATE ROAD
!’

And John, maddeningly like Oliver, replied, ‘So it did.’

They were driving through a beech wood, a chequered, green cavern – ahead was the sunlit, tunnel-shaped exit: it looked dazzling and mysterious, but then they were out and it was just
ordinary summer afternoon light. On either side of the narrow road were hedge and meadow, the road curved, declined, and then straightened, and on their left, the other side of a field, and set a
little above it, was a very square and pretty house. John stopped the car. It was built of stone so bleached by the sun that it was neither grey, nor white, nor cream. The shallow roof was almost
concealed by elaborate stone coping, and the middle of the front was entirely covered by wisteria. John got out of the car.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To explore. Come on.’

‘I’m sure it’s private property.’

‘Awful for them if it wasn’t,’ he said cheerfully, and opened a wicket gate. There was a wide path of cropped or scythed grass which led straight across the meadow towards the
house. This, she now saw, was in fact set on a terrace some ten or twelve feet above them, that was faced with the same stone and contained a black painted door in the centre and at their level.
John was striding towards this. She followed him because if he was going to get into trouble it would be disloyal not to get into it with him, and also perhaps she might prevent him from doing
anything too idiotic. The door would be locked anyway, she betted. But to her dismay, he opened it easily and walked through.

‘John!’

‘Don’t you want to see the house? I thought it was rather pretty.’

She caught him up. ‘John honestly!’

He had begun on the flight of shallow stone steps that clearly led up to the terrace above them.

‘It’s August,’ he said. ‘People who live in this sort of house are always away then. Don’t be such a little stickler: you know we don’t mean to do any
harm.’

‘Gardeners,’ she said: it was awful being shown up as craven and law-abiding.

‘We can always deal with them.’

They had reached a lawn path hedged with sweetbriar. He picked a piece of this and held it out to her. ‘Pinch it.’

‘There you go –
taking
things now!’

‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’