Something in Disguise (31 page)

‘Why did your mother do it?’ he asked.

She shrugged again. ‘Mightn’t even have
been
her. The only time my parents actually liaise is when they think up something nasty for me. They always seem in complete agreement
over that.’

Oliver drank some more tequila a bit too fast. This made him choke and Ginny laugh.

‘Is it fury you’re choking from?’ she asked when he could hear her.

‘No, but it will be if you go on like that.’

‘Well, isn’t it my money you wanted to marry me for?’

‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘I thought it was. And I can see it’s a completely different proposition –’

‘You mean you
don’t
want to?’

‘Stop pouncing! No, I think I
do
want to, and I’m only saying ‘think’ because we’re back at the dreary old problem of what to do with me to get me earning
some money. Clearly I can’t marry you without a job. You’d have to get one, too.’

‘Any minute now you’ll suggest that we both go
trudging
off to Harrods every morning to earn our married livings.’

This made him angry, as something of the sort had just begun to cross his mind. He shifted nearer the table in order to reach the bottle as she went on, ‘Rush hour every morning and
evening – worn to the bone, both of us and nasty little married crush hour every Friday – or is it Saturday? – night. Besides, we could never go anywhere decent – our
holidays would be too short. Surely you can see?’

He took another drink and said, ‘Why did you stay here then?’

‘Because I wanted some money and then, even when I found you hadn’t got any much, I was sorry for you.’

‘Well, I started by wanting
your
money, and now I’m sorry for
you
.’

‘What on earth for?
Are you
?’

‘Yes I am!’

‘No need to shout! I just wanted to know. And do you honestly think you love me?’

‘Considering how awful you’re being without putting me off, I must.’

She poured them both large drinks.

‘Well I don’t love you,’ she said calmly. ‘Sorry, but that’s that. And before you can start telling me that I might get to, I’d better tell you that it
isn’t just you – it’s anybody. I just never get to care enough. I used to think it mattered and tried awfully hard with people, but now I know I’ll never change so I
don’t bother.’

She twisted in the chair and leaned forward over the table with one of her sudden, but entirely controlled, movements, and began cutting up some more limes. He thought of her during the last few
days – and nights.

‘You seemed to me to have been bothering with me.’

She looked up from the lime cutting. ‘It is the easiest way not to be rude to people, really, isn’t it? Of course I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.’

‘What do you think you’re doing
now
?’

‘
You’re
making me have to do that –
probing
away and trying to change everything. And I warn you,’ she added, ‘tequila often makes people madly
quarrelsome, so you’d better be careful.’

Before he could reply, the telephone rang, and seeing that she seemed eager to answer it, he felt determined to thwart her. This was easy, as the instrument was on the floor by the fireplace,
much nearer to him, but he hadn’t realized that she’d left a tray on the rug at the end of the sofa until he’d stepped into and tripped over a bowl of braised celery. ‘For
God’s sake!’ he said just after he’d picked up the receiver: she seemed bent on humiliating him; there seemed to be no end to her horrible, appalling behaviour . . .

‘Darling – it’s me.’ It was May, sounding apprehensive and miles away. ‘Oliver? Was that you sounding so angry just now?’

‘Not with you, though.

‘If you’ve got people I –’

‘Nobody who matters,’ he said with what felt like vicious smoothness.

‘Oh well. Because I don’t want to interrupt you –’

‘You’re not. What is it?’ It must be something: she regarded even toll calls rather like brandy – only to be indulged in in an emergency.

Ginny had got up and was clearing away the remains of dinner except for the tray he had trod upon. The moment she opened the sitting-room door, thin far-off howls could be heard from Millie shut
up in the spare room above.

‘. . . so extraordinary – I felt quite frightened.’ May was saying. The line now seemed to be crossed, because from even farther away a woman’s voice said, ‘. . .
all over the back stairs – so Tuesday would be no good.’ Her voice faded suddenly and Oliver quickly asked, ‘What frightened you?’

‘I told you, darling; but it’s so unlike him that I expect it’s just because I don’t feel too good anyway that I’m imagining it.’

‘. . . five miles there
and
five miles back and I’ve never known her finish what’s on her plate –’ and another voice, astonishingly like the first said,
‘No good suggesting anything to
you
on a Wednesday –’ both voices agreed that it wouldn’t be. Millie howled again and Ginny hissed, ‘Shall I let her
out
?’

‘Do what you like,’ Oliver shouted – into the telephone by mistake.

‘Darling, you’re obviously having a party and I wouldn’t have rung you but I’ve never felt like this before –’

‘Like what? I’m sorry, but I didn’t hear the beginning part –’

‘So frightened. Somehow, it’s the most awful house to be alone in, so I wondered whether you could possibly –’

‘Where’s Herbert?’

‘I
told
you, darling – he’s gone
storming
off in the car. So
could
you – just for tonight?’

At this moment, the other voices broke in; a crossed line, they said with muted umbrage: it was funny how some people listened to other people’s conversations . . . May started to apologize; triumphant barking could be heard from Millie, and Ginny came to lean against the architrave of the open door in a
Petrouchka-like attitude. A wave of retrospective humiliation swept over Oliver at the sight of her.

‘I can’t possibly come down tonight; I’ve got appalling ’flu,’ he said more loudly than anybody else who was talking. There was silence for a moment. Then May
said:

‘Of course you shouldn’t dream of moving then, darling. But would you mind very much if I caught the last train up and came to you?’

Panic assailed him. Except for feeling that she mustn’t come – not
now
of all times, anyway – he was paralysed. If she came, he
knew
that everything with Ginny
would go wrong, and what’s more she’d
see
it go wrong. The crossed-line voice was now saying that it was the
second
Friday in every month that she went to Mr Worksop.

‘No,’ said Oliver; ‘don’t do that: not tonight, anyway. Look, I’ll ring you in the morning when things are a bit more settled. How would that be?’ he added
when there was no reply and then May – she sounded miles away again – said she didn’t know; she expected it would be all right.

‘It’s hopeless on this line, anyhow,’ Oliver said trying to sound bluff and calm instead of guilty and panic-stricken.

‘Good-bye, darling. It was nice to hear your voice.’

‘Good-bye.’ He put down the receiver and ostensibly glared at Ginny who was now sitting astride Millie.

‘That was your mother you couldn’t be bothered with, wasn’t it?’

He ignored this. ‘You
can’t
have meant what you said just now.’

‘I bet I did, but what was it?’

‘About not – about simply not hurting my feelings in bed – about not caring about me, in fact.’

‘Oh that. Mmm. ’Fraid you’re wrong.’

‘Women can’t pretend to that extent; it’s an absurd exaggeration – just because you don’t want –’ but she interrupted him:

‘They can pretend and most of them do. And most of them get away with it. You can always get away with it, in fact, except in one situation.’

‘And what’s that?’ He thought he was speaking calmly and merely folded his arms to stop himself shaking.

Ginny had got off Millie now and was back in her original leaning position in the doorway. ‘If the man is really, honestly, completely in love with you, you couldn’t cheat,’
she said, ‘it wouldn’t work and you wouldn’t want to anyway. There’d be no need.’ Her voice went back to what it usually was. ‘But oh brother – it’s
the way to find out whether a man loves you. It’s the – big – infallible test. It always works.’

‘You mean you pretend, and if he doesn’t catch on it means he doesn’t love you?’

She gave a little nod, and then slid slowly down with her backbone against the frame until she was sitting on the floor. Then she said again, ‘It always works.’

Whether it was her pretty, clownish clothes, or her disconsolate position, or feeling that she meant what she said – and more, that what she said meant something – he didn’t
know, but he had suddenly a quite different feeling about her; as though she was Elizabeth, or a child, or somebody in some way poor who needed affection and protection and pity . . .

‘Ginny, now you’ve said all this, couldn’t we try again –’

‘Oh don’t say
that
! Let’s both have another drink quickly before I have to tell you something else.’ She sprang effortlessly to her feet and dodged round him to
the tequila table. When she’d helped herself, she said. ‘The test, you see, is that the other person doesn’t know they’re being tested. If they knew, then all that would
happen is that we’d both be cheating.’

‘But if you found someone who passed the test – would you marry them?’

‘Oh that. I don’t know. I never have found anyone and it’s a private rule not to cheat about the test.’

‘But surely – that’s the point of the test, isn’t it? That you’d marry them if they passed?’

She took another glass of neat tequila and then threw her head back to squeeze drops of lime juice into her mouth. At last she said,

‘If you swear – I mean seriously swear – not to tell anyone, I’ll tell you something.’

‘All right.’

‘No – seriously.’

‘I am serious,’ he said – sounding merely peevish as people do when pressed on this point.

‘I couldn’t marry you – or anyone. I
am
married.’

He stared at her while she composedly selected and lit one of her small cigars. When, eventually, he said,
‘What?’
she went on as though she had always been going to:
‘My father fixed it when I was fourteen. He disapproved of my mother’s morals, you see: she got sort of custody of me and he was afraid I’d get like her. Whenever she
“knows” any man in the Old Testament sense for more than a few months she
always
marries them: my father says that she is incurably middle-class in this way, so he decided to
queer my pitch in that direction which what with money
and
my mother has been a godsend.’

‘Who are you married to?’

‘Oh – some boring old man on my father’s estate. He’s about a hundred years older than me so my father said he’d probably die about when I got sensible. I only saw
him that once. But my father keeps an eye on him, of course.’

‘I’m glad to hear that.’

‘You’re rotten at sarcasm. You mean, you’re shocked. You’re British to the backbone – except for about an eggcupful of Scots blood I’m not British at all. My
father’s hacienda is about the size of Ireland.’ She thought for a moment: ‘Well – perhaps not the size of Northern and Southern Ireland – just Eire.’

‘So what? There’s no point in showing off about that now. I’m clearly not going to profit by it.’

That made her laugh. ‘Good for you. I wasn’t showing off. What I meant was that on his land my father is a kind of king. He can do what he likes. But he’s
not
been
beastly to José at all. I promise. He gave him a house and enough land to grow food for his huge family and he more or less bought José a much younger and prettier woman than
he’d ever have got on his own. Of course he made José mark a document saying he’d always leave me alone and had no claims on me and all that. But I promise you he likes Lola and
she’s all right because he’s got more of everything than anyone else she might have taken up with –’

‘But supposing they want to get married!’

‘Oh Oliver! They wouldn’t want to do that! It’s far too expensive – hardly anyone does. Extraordinary the way you
harp
on marriage! I warn you, you’d better
not meet my mother, she’s taken to marrying people younger and younger than she is and she’s just about got to your age –’

‘I don’t care about your mother!’

‘Well I often think that I’m tremendously like her so I bet you’re well out of me. Look – if I’m going tonight, I simply must pack.’

‘
Are
you going tonight?’

‘It’s too depressing staying after one of these conversations, I find.’

‘You do, do you,’ said Oliver hopelessly, but she had already vanished upstairs. In a messy, multi-horrible way he’d never felt worse in his life. The whole evening had been a
bit like being at the wrong (receiving) end of some major character’s revelations in a play of Shaw’s. It wasn’t that his heart was broken, exactly; there was little or no good
clean misery about it: he felt angry, sad, disgruntled, shocked (he called that astounded) a bit miserable, a bit humiliated, rather anxious, considerably depressed, slightly overwhelmed: his pride
was hit, his self-confidence dented . . .

‘What will you do if you never meet someone who passes the test?’ he asked when she staggered down with the smallest black and white suitcase.

‘Never marry,’ she answered with such weary practice that he had to go on:

‘Am I
exactly
like everybody else you’ve ever met?’

‘Not abso
lutely exactly
like everybody I’ve ever met.’

Which was really only half withdrawing the barb – and twisting it to boot.

He brought all her other cases down at once, partly not to prolong the agony, and partly to show her, but she didn’t seem to notice and he broke a banister. ‘My taxi should be
there,’ was all she said. She had changed out of her Pierrot clothes and was back in the mustard coat.

He stared stupidly at her: the whole thing was getting worse than a play and more like some boring – and fairly bad – dream.