Not That Sort of Girl (19 page)

‘I only have the one, you.’

‘So?’

‘So I hold my tongue, keep you secret.
I
shall not bore strange men telling them of you as you did those girls.’

‘Now, now.’

‘Who were they, anyway?’

‘Does it matter? A girl in the Métro, another in a cafe, nothing to worry about—only girls.’

‘But I do.’

‘You must not be jealous; it would make more sense if I were jealous of Ned. I am, come to think of it.’

‘How could you be?’ she had said, amazed.

‘How can I not be?’

‘Oh, Mylo, stop. Ned—well, Ned thinks too much about food; he is afraid of not having enough. He is really only interested in himself, not in me, except as a possession of some sort like the furniture, don’t you see?’

‘Nothing to fear, then?’

‘Of course not.’

‘But you have promised him …’

‘He was afraid.’

‘Hum.’ Mylo was unsure.

‘I cherish you, my secret.’

But was he so secret? She tried to remember. Had there not been a scene with her parents before she got engaged to Ned when she had suggested carelessly, to see what they would say, that she might marry Mylo? Was it imagination? Did she invent her mother’s snobbish put-downs, her father’s acid remarks? If it did not take place, it well might have, so the effect was the same. There might have been a scene even worse than she thought she remembered, blotted from her mind. Why else her mother’s sneering remarks, ‘people affecting workmen’s clothes’, ‘people of mixed descent’, derogatory remarks made by an envious insecure woman. Funny that they ceased when she read an article about Mylo in the newspaper lauding something he had done. But that was years later, just before she died. (I know where
her
ashes are, thought Rose, I tipped them into the Serpentine.)

So those few days, if not completely perfect, came pretty close, Rose remembered, stretching her legs in the hotel bed.

‘Ow! God! Ow!’ She is seized with cramp in her old age. Cries aloud and struggles out of bed to stop the muscles bunching in her calf, treads down to relax the agonised tendons. I never had cramp when we walked along the hedgerow hand in hand and Comrade startled partridges and their chicks from the long grass verges. She massages her legs to relieve the pain which, stopping as quickly as it came, leaves an echo in her mind. ‘I suppose I am grown old,’ she says out loud. Is joy still possible? There had been so many times when joy was in abeyance. And hope? What about hope?

Hope had been hard put to it when she had waked to find herself alone in her bed. The silence told her he was gone; only the dog Comrade leaping onto the bed to lick her face and grieve with her proved that he had been there at all.

P
RESUMABLY, THOUGHT ROSE LYING
in the hotel bed, the anguish of her cramped calf an echo, presumably it was during the late summer of 1940 that she plotted her future. Whatever she decided had been as deliberate as an act of taking out a life insurance policy. The surprise of finding Mylo there one minute, gone the next was something she was not prepared to endure.

She had once, as a child, bouncing as children do on her bed, bounced at an angle, hit her head against the nursery wall, concussed herself. Mylo vanishing left her equally stunned, she had not believed him capable of leaving without a word.

The first thing she had to do finding Mylo gone was to lie about the dog. She had found it, she told the Farthings, collarless, lost. It seemed quite an engaging dog, it did not chase cats.

‘Got fleas?’ enquired Mrs Farthing.

‘Not so that you’d notice.’

She drove to the police station on her way to the shops, reported her trouvaille, arranged that if it were not claimed she would keep it. The lies tripped easily.

‘That animal?’ The sergeant looked dubious. ‘I like a bit of class myself.’

‘I like her.’

‘It’ll need a collar and a licence.’

‘I’ll see she gets both.’ She drove back with Comrade on the back seat.

Ned, arriving on a week’s leave, bringing Harold Rhys and Ian Johnson, found Comrade installed. Quiet, house-trained, trotting at Rose’s heels.

‘What an appalling mongrel. What on earth can it be? You can’t want a creature like that. I’ve never seen anything like it. Where did you find it?’

‘She appeared. I found her in the garden, she attached herself.’

‘You can’t want to keep it?’

‘I do.’

‘I wanted to give you a decent dog. A labrador or an alsatian. That animal isn’t anything.’

‘A lot of things, I’d say,’ said Ian Johnson. ‘It looks like a scruffy sort of beagle mixed with terrier and a touch of spaniel.’ Ian mocked Comrade.

‘I wanted,’ Ned exclaimed angrily, ‘to …’

‘I know you did.’ Rose smiled at her husband, ignored Ian Johnson (not only boring, tactless also). She would keep Comrade’s heroic retreat across France, her valiant leap from the quay to reach the boat (had Mylo intended leaving her?), her swim in the filthy dark water to be fished out by Mylo, her illegal entry at Brixham, to herself.

‘If we were near the coast,’ said Harold Rhys who, never famous for brains, yet had the knack of striking the nail on the head, ‘I’d say it might be a French dog. There are dogs with a strain of hound in them all over France, supposed to be descendants of Wellington’s foxhounds. I read a letter in
The Times
recently which said the French and Belgian refugee trawlers were bringing dogs and even cats across. Grandmothers too, apparently. It was calling attention to the dangers of rabies. One lot even brought a priest.’

‘Rabid grandmothers, promiscuous priests,’ mocked Ian Johnson.

‘We are too far from the coast,’ squashed Ned, staring at the dog. ‘It does nothing for my home’ (it was on the tip of his tongue to say ancestral), ‘for Slepe,’ he compromised. He had visualised, when Rose talked of having a dog, something elegant, pure bred, posing for the
Tatler,
Rose in tweeds, himself with gundog at feet.

‘Oh, snobbish,’ mocked Rose. Ned flushed. ‘I was joking, only joking.’ But he failed to keep the anger from his voice.

‘Darling, of course. Come with me. I want to show you my war work. You won’t mind, you two?’ She led Ned away.

‘Your what?’

‘Work. I am helping Farthing on a regular basis in the garden and I’m working on the farm. The Hadleys say they can use me.’

‘I don’t think I …’

‘It’s so that I shall always be here when you come home, Ned.’ She popped a plug into his objections.

‘Oh,’ said Ned, ‘I see,’ mulling the pros and cons. ‘Oh, all right, if it’s not too much for you, if that’s what you want.’ He wasn’t sure he liked this but realised he could not stop her.

‘If you don’t approve I’ve been offered a job in the War Office.’ This was a lie, but how was Ned to know?

‘I don’t want you in London, you are much better here, safer.’

‘That’s what I thought you’d say. And, Ned, when the war is over, we’ll get you a labrador.’

Is she learning to manage me? Ned wondered as they walked through the vegetable garden. I must have a chat with Uncle Archie.

And, Rose thought, putting her arm through Ned’s, as soon as I am sure Mylo is gone for good, I shall get myself pregnant. Mylo should have told her more, given her more hope, a child would be a sheet anchor through this dismal war, lessen her fear and insecurity.

It was years before Rose admitted she had opted as her father would have wished her to for safety, but at the time, since she was not completely ignorant, she also wondered resentfully where Mylo had learned to be such a good lover. She knew such things did not come naturally; had she not herself had to learn the mechanics with Ned? She discounted George, and bitterly resented Mylo’s silent disappearance.

F
AR FROM SUBSIDING, ROSE’S
anger grew as weeks turned to months during the long summer of 1940. She resented Mylo’s secretiveness, sneaking off without a word of farewell. He might have trusted her, she thought, as she hoed the vegetables, trundled her wheelbarrow, weeded the onion bed under Farthing’s supervision. I would not have delayed him much, just enough for one last hug. Maybe he was hurrying away to other girls. The thought of other girls filled her with rage as she squatted among the onions, tearing up the weeds, filling her fingernails with grit. She gave small credence to his work, if it existed.

When Ned telephoned she babbled of her doings, giving him news of the farm, the garden, the village, making him laugh at the advice she received from Edith Malone. ‘She wants to turn me into a lady of the manor; fortunately your uncle set no example. I can’t see myself in the role. Some of her ideas are positively feudal.’ She mocked Edith.

‘Then keep a low profile,’ said Ned, laughing, glad that Rose appeared happy, under the delusion that he would shape her to fit Slepe as he wished. And Rose enjoyed those conversations, looked forward to Ned’s distant voice which distracted her from her hurt. But, at night, with her body lusting for her lover, she cursed Mylo, decided to forget him, sweep him clear. Then, leaning from her window at night, she breathed the scent of magnolia, remembered his climb, pushing the dog up ahead of him, heard the stiff leaves clatter and saw his gleeful, exhausted face.

(Why the hell had he not behaved like an ordinary person and rung the bell at the front door?)

When in late September Ned came on leave she surprised him with an affection which he took for love, with tenderness he mistook for lust, with friendship which was genuine. In her anger and grief for Mylo she saw nothing odd in turning to Ned for comfort. In later years she would consider that she might have exaggerated her search for consolation in the conceiving of a child. She did this on Ned’s last night, simply ceasing to use the outfit provided by Doctor Helena Wright. She deluded herself that a child would erase Mylo from her mind. (Which goes to show, she would acknowledge in old age, what an idiot I was.)

Ned, driving down from Yorkshire in his large car so hungry for petrol, spent his leave hoisting it onto blocks, oiling and greasing it, disconnecting the battery, covering the whole with tarpaulin. From now on, he told Rose, he would use the railways and her car, should he come home on leave, economise on petrol. ‘Shall you be all right with this little car?’ he had asked. She guessed that he felt a twinge of guilt over its acquisition. (Nicholas and Emily could be seen speeding about the roads in their MG with petrol supplied by the Ministry of Agriculture.)

‘I shall be perfectly all right with it,’ Rose reassured him as she walked with him across the fields she had walked with Mylo, paused by the river where they had swum, watched Comrade flush partridges from the long grass as she had flushed them for Mylo. She held Ned’s hand as they walked, daring herself to compare it with her lover’s.

They sat, Ned’s last evening, on the stone seat where on the morning of their honeymoon they had remembered diversely the winter tennis. Ned was to leave on the evening train. Across the fields John Hadley called his cows for the evening milking, ‘Hoi, hoi, hoi,’ his cry drowned suddenly by the roar of a plane.

‘An enemy bomber?’

‘No, a fighter. A Hurricane or a Spitfire. I cannot tell the difference.’

‘The Farthings’ evacuees can,’ said Rose.

‘Ah, children, children …’ Ned looked across the garden where the first frost had yet to nip the dahlias. ‘As soon as this is over I shall want children.’

‘And not before?’ Rose found her husband’s selfishness amusing. ‘I might want one before. Or never,’ she teased, catching Ned’s startled eye, ‘or are you leaving me out of this caper?’

Ned flushed. ‘You know I …’

‘Should the war stop procreation?’ Rose’s voice was suddenly harsh, shouting at her husband.

‘It’s hardly the moment—with this battle going on—there’s another plane, is it in trouble?—to my mind there is still danger of invasion …’

‘Churchill is saying the battle is won …’

‘So many pilots lost. I wish I had learned to fly.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t.’

‘I am too old.’

‘Are you too old to have a child?’ Rose snapped.

‘Don’t let’s squabble my last evening.’

‘All right.’ Partly she regretted her impulse of the previous night (perhaps nothing would happen). ‘You will be on leave again soon.’

‘I didn’t want to spoil our time together so I did not tell you that I am on embarkation leave.’ Ned stared at the dahlias, orange and red.

‘What?’

‘We are under orders for the Middle East.’

‘Another one who does not trust me.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing, nothing. When do you go?’

‘We don’t know; it may not be for weeks, but tomorrow in London I must kit myself out with light uniform, visit my lawyer …’

‘Lawyer, what for?’

‘To check my will.’

‘Oh, God, you could have trusted me not to spoil your leave,’ she was bitter, ‘you treat me like a child, a thing …’

‘I am sorry …’

‘I should bloody well hope so …’ A future without Mylo and now Ned. ‘I like you, Ned,’ she said ruefully.

‘And I love you.’

‘I said like, not love.’ Rose was sharp.

‘I heard you. It’s important to like the person you love. I both love and like you, dear.’

Rose breathed in, let speech out in a rush: ‘I know it’s silly, I know I should have told you before, but I cannot bear being called dear, Ned, it makes me feel quite sick.’

Ned looked at Rose astonished; in a secret crevice of his mind there wriggled the suspicion that she did not love him. Rose went on, flushing as she spoke, ‘Dear is what nurses call their patients, dear is what my parents called each other in hatred, dear to my ear is horrible. I’m sorry, Ned, but I simply can’t stand being called
dear.’

Across the garden the dahlias glowed orange and blood-red. ‘I’d better get a move on,’ said Ned, ‘or I shall miss my train. I had not realised …’

Rose stood up, ashamed. (What a moment to choose.)

Ned went to fetch his luggage, his mind full of doubt. He had assumed that his feeling for Rose was reciprocated. Not usually given to introspection, he nevertheless thought as he drove Rose’s car to the station that liking lasted longer than love, which to hear people like Uncle Archie talk was a flash-in-the-pan business. He was glad that Rose liked him, the thought amused him, and he laughed out loud. Rose forbore to ask, What’s the joke? The train was puffing into the station; they had to run to catch it, Ned scrambling aboard with barely time to kiss goodbye.