Not That Sort of Girl (13 page)

‘But there is no dog …’ protested Ned.

‘There will be …’

‘She’ll grow up,’ said Farthing, taking time off from the garden to help his wife stack the stores in the pantry cupboards. ‘Fact is, her’s begun.’ Farthing liked to talk yokel on occasion.

‘My poor back!’ Mrs Farthing straightened up, groaning. ‘We’ll teach her when he’s gone to put butter down in salt and pot eggs
and
he’s made no provision for ham and sides of bacon.’ Mrs Farthing eased herself, her hand pressed against the small of her back.

‘A pig?’ suggested her husband.

‘Too soft-hearted, I’d say.’

‘Um. Farm pig, then?’

‘That’ll do.’

‘Who’s it all for? Won’t have evacuees.’

‘Wants to have his fellow officers to stay. Heard him telling her.’

‘What did she say to that?’

‘Yes, Ned, why don’t you. As though she’s not to live here herself.’

‘She’s only half here. Think she’ll settle when he’s gone?’

‘Dare say she will find her own way; hers is not his, that’s for sure.’

On the last evening of Ned’s leave he led Rose to an outbuilding in the copse behind the garages. ‘It’s in here,’ he said, unlocking a padlocked outhouse. ‘I will show you where I keep the key. The petrol is in those tanks.’ He showed her two large galvanised iron receptacles. ‘You will see, if you climb up those steps, the petrol is in the jerrycans stacked inside them, a hundred gallons.’

‘Golly!’ Rose peered down from the steps. ‘What a lot.’

‘I got one of the chaps from the regiment to help me put it there; the Farthings do not know, of course.’

No ‘of course’ about it, thought Rose, watching her husband lock the door.

‘You are only to use it in case of dire emergency,’ said Ned, ‘it’s not for joy-riding.’

‘What would dire emergency be?’

‘A German invasion.’

‘So I could hop it to Scotland?’ Rose was amused.

Ned did not care for her frivolity. ‘It’s more than a possibility, from what I hear from the War Office.’

‘Do you have a direct line?’ Rose teased.

‘One gets one’s information,’ said Ned.

Does one indeed? thought Rose.

‘Should I be posted overseas, I shall lay up my car; it eats petrol; I am getting you a small Morris of moderate consumption.’

‘Oh. How moderate?’

‘It’s a surprise. The garage will bring it tomorrow.’

‘I am surprised. Thank you, Ned.’

‘It’s not new, it’s second-hand.’

‘Good enough to bolt from the Germans in a dire emergency.’

Ned was not sure what to make of his wife’s tone. He looked at his bride sharply, trying to read her thoughts.

A dire emergency, Rose was thinking as she turned smiling eyes on her husband, would be if I had to rush to Mylo, but I cannot rush as I do not know where he is; I cannot rush into a void.

‘I am sad,’ she exclaimed with sudden passion.

‘I am only going as far as Aldershot.’ Ned misunderstood her. ‘I am, too, but I shall be home whenever I can. One gets leave. I shall bring people to stay. You will not be lonely long. I will ring up.’

‘You will ring up?’

‘Of course I shall. I shall telephone often, every day probably.’

‘Oh, Ned. Yes, of course. I had not thought of that.’ (And Mylo? When will he telephone?)

‘If you find you’re lonely, there’s your family. The …

‘I shall be all right, Ned, I am looking forward to being alone,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I don’t want …’

‘That’s nice!’ exclaimed Ned, hurt.

How did I let that slip? ‘You know I don’t mean looking forward to being without you. I mean that I am quite happy on my own, I am used to my own company. I am an only child, Ned.’

‘Dear,’ said Ned, ‘it’s my last evening.’ He put his arm around her. ‘Come to bed.’

Tomorrow, thought Rose climbing upstairs, when he is gone, I shall open the parcel. Perhaps it will tell me where Mylo is. There will be a message. There is bound to be a message. ‘All right, hurry up,’ she said to Ned to hasten his departure.

Ned took her hand and ran up the last few steps with her, misunderstanding. In the large rather lumpy fourposter Ned took Rose then, assuaged, lay sleepily considering his honeymoon which had passed so swiftly and busily. He was content as he reviewed the rearrangement of the rooms, the storing of the stores, the plans of what he had yet to do when he came on leave. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he said drowsily, ‘how well you fit in to Slepe, it’s as though you had been here for ever, you belong here.’

Rose gritted her teeth, biting back the rejoinder, I am not one of your Regency commodes. ‘I think one of the things I must do is get a new mattress for this bed,’ she said. ‘It’s bloody lumpy.’

‘It seems all right to me.’ Ned was nearly asleep (he must teach her not to swear).

Rose lay wondering what was in Mylo’s parcel. Perhaps there would be a message to come at once and she had already waited seven days to open it. Perhaps she would go in the car Ned was giving her, treating her flight as a case of ‘dire emergency’. But I cannot, I promised not to leave; promises cannot be broken. Had Ned, poor kind Ned, sleeping now, an inkling of what he had done by extracting that promise?

Do I like or loathe Ned? Rose asked herself, and unconsciously kicked her foot towards him, jerking as a dog jerks in his dream, withdrawing her foot in shame as her toenail grazed his calf. Ned did not stir.

In the morning when he had dressed in his uniform, buckling his Sam Browne belt, brilliant with polish, when he had jerked the tunic down to lie flat over his chest as yet bare of medals (those would come), put on with the uniform his military air, driven away in his car to join his regiment, and with it after many false alarms the war, Rose, barely waiting for him to be out of sight, bounded upstairs three at a time to take from where it lay hidden in a drawer under her nightdress Mylo’s parcel.

Mylo had sent her a Bonnard lithograph.

Tearing away the wrappings, turning it over, she found no message, no hint of an address.

She sat staring at the picture, disappointed. Then as she looked she became aware that there was no need of written word. The tenderness with which the lover in the picture encircled the girl with his arm, the way she looked down into his face told her all that was needed.

Thus we sat in that glade in Richmond Park, so we lolled on the lawns of Hampton Court, it was like that in the gardens of Kew, in the country round my home, so it will be, said the picture Mylo had sent her, for us two, for our lives, for ever.

Her promise to Ned must be kept, but it would in no way alter the love she had for Mylo.

Presently, carrying the picture, she went down to the kitchen to borrow a hammer and beg a nail from Mrs Farthing. Then to her bedroom to hang the picture where she would see it last thing at night and first thing on waking.

‘Looks happier now,’ said Mrs Farthing to her husband. ‘Don’t bring in all that mud, wipe your feet.’

‘Hang that picture?’ asked Farthing, aware as was his wife of everything new coming into the house.

‘Looks so,’ said Mrs Farthing.

‘M-m-m …’ muttered Farthing, satisfied that his swift brain and x-ray eyes had deduced the content of the foreign parcel to be a picture.

T
HE PROSPECT OF EXPLORING
her new home without Ned held considerable allure. There were parts of the garden where he had prevented her lingering, a room opening out of their bedroom she would like to turn into a sitting-room for herself and furnish with small pieces of the furniture he had covered with dust sheets; she would extract them from the sad mass in quarantine for the duration. There was also the Farthings’ pregnant cat to be visited.

When the car Ned had promised her was delivered she would drive up to London to choose a new mattress for the bed. I have nothing against the bed per se, she told herself, it is the mattress which is bloody awful. I want to be rid of the mattress Ned just fucked me on. (I will use words he deplores if I wish; he is mealy-mouthed.) All the same he is thoughtful to give me my own car, I should be more grateful. The sooner the car is delivered, the better.

As she waited for the car she wandered about the garden, then sat watching a pair of blackbirds gorging on fallen mulberries scattered like clots of blood under a tree. ‘What a mess,’ Ned had remarked disgustedly, ‘something must be done about that.’ The blackbirds were doing something.

The driver of the car hooted as it drew up at the house. Rose ran to meet it. She was disappointed to see Emily; she had expected a mechanic from the village garage. ‘Brought your surprise.’ Emily stepped out of the car which had been her father the bishop’s. ‘Ned’s present.’

Hard on Emily’s heels came Nicholas driving a shiny MG. ‘Hail the bride!’ Nicholas shouted, bringing the MG to a halt beside his sister. ‘Is Ned gone? Does the bride grieve for her groom? Actually,’ he said, stepping out of the car, ‘we know he is gone, we passed him on the top road.’

‘He looks very fine in uniform,’ said Emily. ‘Larger, somehow. Don’t you find him larger than you expected, Rose?’

‘No,’ said Rose, watching her neighbours’ (she did not at that moment look on them as friends) faces. This is some trick on somebody’s part, she thought, but I shall not delight them by letting on and rising to their bait. ‘I see you have acquired your slice of vulgarity,’ she said, gathering her nonchalance about her, managing to ignore Emily’s double entendre. ‘I trust you have filled the tank with petrol, topped up the battery, checked the tyres? Have you brought its insurance papers and so on?’ she asked coolly. ‘Or did you give them to Ned?’

She walked round patting the bishop’s car as though she was pleased with it. ‘Dear old thing,’ she said, ‘it reminds me of the Malones’ winter tennis where I first met Ned’ (and my darling Mylo) ‘and we fell in love. If you didn’t know Ned as well as I do, you would not credit him with sentimentality, would you?’ Rose looked smiling at Nicholas and Emily standing now by their red sports car. She began to laugh, forcing herself. ‘Sorry I can’t ask you in,’ she said, ‘I was only waiting for you to bring it to be off to London. Let’s see you drive away in your new-found vulgarity—oh, I must not be unfair to the car. I have a whole day’s shopping and I’m late already. We were expecting you earlier, but Ned couldn’t wait.’ (How am I doing?)

Nicholas and Emily’s eyes met.

They were not expecting that, thought Rose, they now don’t know whether I knew what Ned had done or not. Maybe I shall like the bishop’s car, he is a rather nice old man. Later I may be able to work out whether Ned tricked me, or they tricked Ned.

‘Are those its papers? Thanks, Nicholas.’ She took the car papers from Nicholas.

The way Ned smacked Emily’s bottom has something to do with this, she thought, but it doesn’t matter, it is not as though I were in love with Ned, none of them know how safe I feel.

Rose stood contemplating Nicholas and Emily, who growing uneasy under her amused scrutiny now wished to be away. What had seemed a splendid jape had in some peculiar way backfired. It was not Rose who stood surprised, disappointed and cut down to size, but themselves.

From the open window of the library, the telephone pealed. ‘I must answer that, it will be Ned,’ Rose exclaimed. ‘Goodbye, thanks, see you soon.’ She leapt up the front steps into the house and shut the door, leaving them in the drive.

‘Oh, God, let it be Mylo,’ she prayed as she ran, but God was not answering prayers that day; it was Ned.

‘Rose, I should have told you about the car.’

‘Should you?’

‘It occurred to me as I drove that I should have explained to you that I had bought the Thornbys’ car.’

‘Did it?’

‘Yes. I thought you might …’

‘Might what?’

‘Might have expected something better, I …’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s in frightfully good nick. The bishop …’

‘And ultra respectable.’

‘What?’

‘Everyone will expect me to wear gaiters.’

‘What?’

‘What?’

‘Are you disappointed? I rather wondered as I drove along whether you were expecting something better.’

‘Oh, no, Ned. Why do you repeat yourself?’

‘They had set their hearts on …’

‘I know, Ned.’

‘So you don’t?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Well then, I …’

‘Where are you, Ned?’

‘Half way to Aldershot, why?’

‘Then go the whole way. I am going to London to buy a mattress and swop a few wedding presents.’

‘Oh, Rose, which? We didn’t discuss …’

‘Nicholas and Emily’s, for a start; they charged that lamp to Mrs Malone’s account.’

‘I can’t believe …’

‘I can.’

‘Your time is up,’ said the operator, bored. ‘Oh, Rose!’

And did they charge the MG to your account at the garage? Rose replaced the receiver.

L
IFE WHICH HAD BEEN
as it were nibbling at Rose’s edges took off. During the first six to eight months of the war she grew up.

The tide of evacuee children from London which engulfed the neighbourhood at the outset of war ebbed and retreated as the expected mass bombing and poison gassing of major cities failed to materialise. Of the first exodus, only two waif-like children remained to lodge with the Farthings and grow, by 1945, as countrified and robust as any local child.

Ned, who his neighbours had been inclined to vilify for his selfishness (and foresight) in making over the major part of his house to the Ministry of Information, was now envied for his perspicacity in avoiding the problem of giving houseroom to children who might have infested heads or wet their beds. That nobody had actually had experience of such children was neither here nor there. The whole country was rife with horror stories of evacuees, just as later it would be with personal bomb experiences. During the lull known as the phoney war householders with spare rooms filled them with old aunts or maiden cousins who would join the Red Cross or WVS and make themselves useful to their hosts, as domestic servants vanished.

Rose, new to her role in the neighbourhood, was barely aware of the discussion and general upset, accompanied by self-justification, that went on; she was occupied learning to run a house as large and inconvenient as Slepe, catering for Ned’s friends when he brought them on leave clamouring for drinks, hot meals, hot baths, warm beds. At night Ned would expect what he called his ‘roll in the hay’, regimental life having the effect of making him much randier than had been his pre-war mode.