Something in Disguise (5 page)

Oliver opened his eyes.

‘Dearest Liz. You look as though you’ve got indigestion; remorse, I bet. Cheer up. It was all my fault: that’s why I did it at dinner. If we’d given them too much notice,
I was afraid of Daddo working on May to stop you: he’s going to wake up tomorrow and kick himself for letting all that free labour go. Cheer up: think of spending two weeks in Cornwall with
Leslie.’

‘I have. I am.’

They smiled at each other; then she laughed.

Leslie had just said, ‘Excuse me, dear’, and gone to the magnificent peach-tiled bathroom that was part of their suite. A bedroom and the sitting-room – where
they were now sitting – was the rest of it. They had arrived at the hotel rather late for dinner in the dining-room, and so Leslie had ordered supper in their suite. The head waiter had been
able to let them have consommé – hot or cold – cold chicken and mixed salad, pêche melba and cheese. Leslie had ordered a bottle of sparkling burgundy with this repast, and
brandy and crème-de-menthe afterwards. (Alice had had hot consommé and crème-de-menthe, Leslie had had three brandies – he had told the waiter to leave the bottle when he
had brought the weak but bitter coffee.) Hours seemed to have gone by since then, and they were still sitting at the small round table with the pink-silk-shaded lamp on it. At the beginning of the
meal they had not said much: each of them had made a few desultory remarks about the wedding which the other had instantly agreed with. But when his second brandy was inside him, Leslie had become
more expansive. He thought the time had come for a little plain speaking. He was funny that way, but he couldn’t stand dishonesty. He looked at her for approbation of this curious and unusual
trait. Alice looked seriously back.

‘What I want you to know,’ Leslie went on, ‘is – well it’s a bit difficult to put it in the right way. I’m forty-two as I
think I told you –’

‘Yes.’

‘Well – it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect me to be completely inexperienced at my age – now would it?’

‘No.’

‘I’m not – you see. Not at all inexperienced: quite the reverse – you might say. I’ve been – intimate – with quite a number of women. I’ve never
known them
we,
’ he added hastily, ‘you understand what I mean, don’t you Alice?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean, naturally, they weren’t the sort of women you’d expect me to have known well. That wasn’t their function if you take me. But it
does
mean that I know a
good deal about a certain side of life. That’s necessary for men. For women – of course – it’s different. I don’t suppose – well I wouldn’t expect you to
know anything at all about that.’ He finished his brandy and looked at her expectantly.

‘No.’

‘Of course not.’ He seemed at once to be both uplifted and disheartened by this. ‘But naturally I’ve got about a good deal. The war – Belgium – you get all
kinds of women there –’ He poured some more brandy: his forehead was gleaming. He started to tell her about Belgian women . . .

By the time May had cleared up the supper, wedged the larder door so that Claude could not possibly open it, opened him a tin of cat food that, naturally enough, he did not
feel inclined to eat although he had made it plain that he was unable to be certain about this until the food was on his soup plate, put on a kettle for hot-water bottles (the house was never
really warm and May felt that she got colder there week by week), turned off some passage lights that her children had left on, and conducted a tired and abortive hunt for her spectacles, all she
wanted to do was to go to bed. But Herbert, she knew, would be waiting for her. Usually Alice had played backgammon with him after dinner while she pretended to do
The Times
crossword puzzle
or got on with her patchwork, but from now on there was no Alice, and Herbert needed her company. Perhaps they could just have a cosy post mortem on the wedding, which now seemed an age away.

The colonel stood with his back to the small coal fire and was gazing reproachfully at the door through which she came.

‘What on
earth
have you been doing?’

‘Just clearing up supper.’

‘Why don’t you leave that sort of thing for Mrs what’s-her-name?’

May cast herself into the one comfortable chair. ‘She may not come tomorrow. Tomorrow isn’t her day.’

‘She didn’t come today, did she?’

‘No. Today was supposed to be her day, but she wouldn’t come because of the caterers. In any case there is far too much for her to do.’

The colonel grunted. ‘The woman’s getting above herself. Why don’t you fire her, and get somebody else?’

May kicked off her shoes. ‘Because there isn’t anybody else. Who would come, I mean. We’re not on a bus route, so it means nearly two miles walking or on a bicycle. People
won’t do that nowadays. We’ve plenty of room: we ought to have somebody living in – a couple.’

The colonel looked wounded: then he stalked slowly over to his filing cabinet, took an immense bunch of keys from a pocket made shapeless by them and unlocked a drawer. He was going to mix his
nightcap: a small whisky and soda. They both spoke at once. Then the colonel said, ‘I beg your pardon, my dear. What did you say?’

‘Just that I thought I’d like a whisky tonight: a small one.’

She knew that he had strong views about what women should, or should not, drink: he particularly disliked her drinking whisky.

‘Are you
sure
?’ He surveyed her with as broad-minded disapproval as he could muster.

‘Just tonight, darling. It’s been such a day.’

He mixed her a small weak drink in silence, handed it to her, made himself one, looked disparagingly at the bottle which was only about a quarter full, put it away and locked up the cabinet. All
this seemed to take a very long time, and May resisted the impulse to gulp her drink. Then, when the colonel had made his way, as it were, blindly to her chair, discovered that she was in it, and
remained standing (it was
his
chair she was lounging in, and nothing else would do), he said, ‘You must realize, my dear, that we cannot possibly afford a couple living in. The
expenses of this house are – ah – stretched to their fullest extent; their fullest extent. A couple would land us with heavy expenses that with the best will in the world they could not
justify.’

‘Perhaps we ought to sell the house then, and find something smaller.’ She had finished her whisky, and now wanted a cigarette, but as she only had ten a week and had already smoked
two that day she knew there were none left.

‘My dear May! You surely cannot mean what you say!’

‘Well I did – actually.’

‘Part with our
home
!’

‘Only to get another one, dear.’

‘You speak as though homes are a mere matter of exchange and barter.’

‘Well they are really, aren’t they? I mean, we bought this one.’

The colonel sat suddenly down on quite an uncomfortable chair. He was speechless, absolutely speechless, he repeated to himself. To justify this situation, he said nothing, he simply stared at
her.

‘Darling, don’t look so appalled! It just seemed to me that with Alice gone, and my two in London, perhaps we don’t need all these rooms’ – she pretended to count
– ‘what is it? Nine bedrooms we aren’t using.’

As he still kept silent, she added, ‘Not counting all the other rooms.’

He perceptibly found his voice. ‘My dear May, this house was an absolute bargain – dirt cheap – an absolute bargain –’

‘Goodness,’ May thought as she stopped listening, ‘you couldn’t call it that. Or perhaps I’ve been poor too many years to think that spending eleven thousand pounds
on
anything
would be a bargain.
My
eleven thousand pounds,’ she also thought, and then felt thoroughly ashamed of herself . . .

‘. . . simple chap,’ the colonel was saying, ‘can’t be said to have expensive tastes – moderation in all things – but all my life – serving my country
and all that –
all
my life, I’ve looked forward to settling down – in a simple way – my one piece of land – a comfortable home – somewhere that I can call
my own – chopping and changing difficult for a feller my age –’

The upshot of what, at their time of life, amounted to a scene was that she was forced to recognize what he said the house meant to him. Her private dream of a cottage in the country and the
half of Lincoln Street that was now let being their homes vanished for ever that evening. If she would leave the management of the house to him – not upset her head about it –
he
would keep the whole thing within bounds of their income. She thought at one moment that he was trying to get her to sell the London house (because Oliver and now Elizabeth were to live in it rent
free) but, strangely, he seemed most anxious that she should keep it. What it was necessary to review, he said, was their remaining free capital. Here she sensed danger: she did not want to have to
discuss Elizabeth’s allowance or anything that she gave Oliver with him, or indeed with anyone. She was awfully tired, she said at this point. They would both be the better for a spot of
Bedfordshire, he said. But the most incongruous aspect of the whole argument or discussion or whatever one could call it was that he had been really upset; eyes moist, stuttering slightly,
repeating phrases more than usual: she honestly hadn’t realized that this house meant so much to him. He said, too, that he wanted to be alone with her – to have her to himself. She did
not trust him enough about things: if she would leave it all to him everything would work out. He had blown his nose for a long time on one of the handkerchiefs she had given him for his birthday
and this had touched her much more than anything he had actually
said
(which had left her not so much unmoved as indefinably depressed). It was the house that depressed her, but now she
would just have to make the best of it.

Elizabeth lay in the dark in bed in the tiny top-floor back bedroom at Lincoln Street. The room had no curtains, because May had sent them to the cleaners and Oliver
hadn’t bothered to put them up when they came back, so light from a street lamp patterned the ceiling and some of the walls. The bed was familiar and uncomfortable – she had had it as a
child; indeed, for a short time – the blissful period after Aunt Edith died and before May married Herbert – this had been her room. Now the basement and ground floor were let and they
only had the first and top floors. It was wonderful to be here – with Oliver. She wondered what
sort
of sharp practice he had in mind . . .

Alice lay very still on her back in the dark. The twin bed beside her was empty. Leslie had passed out (there was no other word for it) in the sitting-room. After a time, she
had lifted his legs – unbelievably heavy – on to the other end of the sofa from his head: it hadn’t seemed to make any difference to him. He was clearly alive because his
breathing was so noisy. She had stood looking down on him for a bit without thinking or feeling anything very much. Any fear or excitement that had lurked in wait for the end of this day had long
since gone. By the time he had finished telling her how many women he had known, he had drunk nearly all the brandy. She had left the pink silk lamp lit in case he woke up and wondered where he
was, and retired for the night. No problem about undressing, she had thought with bitter exhaustion. She wished one could stop being a virgin without noticing it . . .

By the end of a week in Lincoln Street, Elizabeth was thankful that she had found some sort of job. Living with Oliver, though tremendously exciting, disconcerted her: it was
like having a very exhausting holiday, or the last week in someone’s life, or before they were going to be caught by the police, or one’s birthday every day; really she didn’t
know
how
to describe it. To begin with nothing ever happened when she expected it to; meals, getting up, parties, conversations, all occurred with consistent irregularity. The first day had
been lovely. They had got up very late and had boiled eggs and warm croissants that Oliver had fetched from a shop, and strong coffee and then a kipper each because she had found them in the fridge
and they found that eating was making them hungrier; and Oliver had had two very intelligent conversations with friends on the telephone – one about Mozart and one about the Liberal Party.
Then Oliver had said, ‘How much money have you got?’ and they had looked at her cheque book and it didn’t say because she was bad about her counterfoils, so she had rung up and
the bank said eleven pounds thirteen and fourpence. ‘Oh well,’ Oliver had said, ‘we’ve no need to worry.’ And he had stretched out his legs – he was wearing
black espadrilles over purple socks. She had suggested that she should clean up the house, it was pretty awful, really, but he had said no, no; he was going to cut her hair and then they’d go
to the cinema. He’d tied a tablecloth round her neck and cut her the most expert fringe. ‘Now you look much more as though you’re lying in wait. For something or other,’ he
added. They’d cashed a cheque for five pounds and gone to
Mondo Cane
in Tottenham Court Road – a simply extraordinary film, but Oliver laughed at it quite a lot. Then they had
walked to Soho, and Oliver had made her buy fresh ravioli and a pair of black fishnet tights.

‘Why?’ she had said both times. ‘We might have a party in which case it would come in handy,’ he said about the ravioli; and, ‘I haven’t been through your
clothes yet, but what
ever
you’ve got will look better with tights.’ Then it had begun to rain, and Oliver bundled her into a taxi. Awful extravagance. She mentioned then that she
thought she ought to think about getting a job, and he stopped the cab and bought an
Evening Standard
. ‘I’ll look through it in the bath for you,’ he had said.

While he was doing this, she set about the living-room. There was so much dust in it that everything
was
actually dust-coloured. The room had been painted entirely white, but the walls
and woodwork were now, as Oliver had remarked, the colours of old cricket trousers. ‘I take refuge in calling it
warm
white,’ he had said: ‘but really redecoration does so
go with being pregnant or homosexual or in love, and my emotional life never seems to reach any such peak – just tidy it up, love. That chest of drawers is for tidying things into.’ He
had disappeared into the bathroom for about an hour and a half where she heard him having conversations on the telephone – a frightfully angry one about D. H. Lawrence and some much
friendlier ones to people called Annabel and Sukie. She cleaned away – with a carpet sweeper that didn’t really work, until she found that it was entwined and choked with fantastically
long auburn hairs, and a duster that was so dirty she used one of her handkerchiefs.