Not That Sort of Girl (4 page)

Ned had proposed to her the evening before, walking along the river valley. Weighed down by her father’s cancerous wish Rose had accepted him to the sound of curlews crying in the bog further up the hillside.

It was not an entirely fraudulent thing to do, thought Rose, lying alone in the strange hotel, part of me wanted to marry Ned. Much of me longed for the security, a house in London, the house in the country; the big wedding was tempting, the clothes I had never been able to afford. I was almost in love with Ned in August 1939 in Scotland at the house party for the grouse shooting, surrounded by his approving relations who thought I would do very well for Ned. (A nice little thing, quite pretty, she’ll shape.) They had known, those relations, what was required of Ned’s wife. At eighteen, thought Rose, I hadn’t the remotest idea.

Lying in the dark Rose thought she heard a curlew cry and into her mind’s eye came Ned’s face, not as it had been when he died, but as he was in 1939 before his hair thinned and greyed, before his face grew lined. He was an awfully nice man, she thought. I was very fond of him, what a lovely friend he would have made; I must have been mad to marry him. I did not hear a curlew cry, I imagined it.

Ned had driven her to the boat at Dunoon, giving up a day’s shooting to do so. Her future aunt- and uncle-in-law had pressed upon her two brace of grouse to take to her imaginary hostess, Mrs Wigram. Rose remembered gulping back laughter, a tearful attack which was assumed to be sorrow at the parting with Ned. ‘No need to cry, dear, you will see him in a few days.’ Her future aunt-in-law had pressed her against her large and rather squashy breasts, smacking her lips in the air with a parting kiss. ‘There!’

Nicholas and Emily had come for the drive and to do some desultory shopping in the town. Even then, thought Rose amused, they were prying inquisitively into my life. Ned’s relations had stood on the front steps waving goodbye, pleased that Ned’s future was settled, regretful that she must depart a day early but, good manners apart, impatient to be off for the day’s shooting; a group of ghillies and beaters were waiting. And who else, thought Rose, peering back down the years, who else was there?

Ned’s cousins, two soon to be killed in the war, and yes, of course, Harold Rhys and Ian Johnson, jolly high-spirited bachelors in those days, Ned’s friends. It would not be long before they too married and began the long decline towards arthritis, piles, deafness, obesity, operations for this and that, collections of grandchildren, irritating sons-in-law, the decline which turned them into what they were now, dull old men. But, in those days, Rose remembered, they felt it their right, their duty, too, to make a pass at every girl in the house party and they expected the girls to be flattered.

Why did I tell Nicholas this morning that I did not know Harold and Ian until after Ned and I were married? He was hinting, was he not, that I might have flirted, had an affair with one or both of them. Poor Nicholas, he is obsessed, as is Emily, with my secret life for which there is no evidence. They sniff the air, they ferret from force of habit. I was careless, upset thinking of the dogs, my dear dogs crushed by the lorry. He will remember Ian and Harold were there in Scotland, for he was there too. My mind slips as I grow old.

She saw herself sitting beside Ned in his open car driving over the hills to Dunoon. She watched herself boarding the boat carrying the grouse, the boat drawing away from the quay; Ned, Emily and Nicholas waving; Ned shouting that they would choose the engagement ring when they met soon in London; she had waved back, and then alone at last on the boat she had faced the day-long journey to Holyhead with a mixture of trepidation and joy.

Only a very naïve person would get away with what I did, thought Rose. It would not have occurred even to Nicholas and Emily that I was not on my way to stay with the Wigrams, a duty visit to my father’s friends, but that I was travelling to meet Mylo.

The charm of the situation had been that Nicholas and Emily hardly knew of Mylo’s existence in her life, and neither did Ned. Remembering the journey Rose relived her fears. The fear of discovery by her parents or Ned, but principally the fear that at the end of the journey Mylo would not be there.

Rose remembered putting the grouse on the rack on the train from Glasgow to Crewe. At Crewe she had deliberately left them there, but a fellow passenger had shouted as the train drew out of the station, gesticulated, thrown the dead birds to a porter. Oh, those bloody birds, thought Rose, and tried to remember how she had rid herself of them, and could not. (The gaps in the memory as one grows old.) My fears, thought Rose, remembering vividly, my fears were so great.

And then at the end of the everlasting day as the train drew into the station at Holyhead, Mylo was on the platform, his face drawn and strained: ‘I thought you might not come,’ he had said, and later in the awful little Commercial Hotel they had gone through the brownish hallway which smelled of stale tobacco and beer, of years of vegetables cooking and failure, up the straight stairs to a room with a double bed. He had shut the door. ‘It’s pretty shoddy, I’m afraid.’ Then holding her, sitting on the bed, bouncing to test it, he had said, his voice rasping, a little husky,
‘Tout confort,’
trying to lighten their situation, their love, their fear, their ignorance.

Who in these days, Rose wondered as she listened to the night sounds, the small breeze which now whispered through the reeds by the water, who in these days would credit that a girl of eighteen and a boy of nineteen should both be virgin? For that fear, the exquisite fear of the actual act of making love, terrified them, she remembered, though Mylo who assumed he knew how to set about it pretended not to be afraid (and so to be fair, did she).

‘What did the man at the desk think?’ Rose had whispered. They had signed the register with trepidation.

‘Thinks us a honeymoon couple,’ answered Mylo stoutly.

‘Arriving separately?’ Rose had jeered. ‘Oh, Mylo.’

‘It doesn’t matter, forget him. You are here now. Kiss me.’

They had hugged and kissed. Then, Rose remembered his arms round her, that his ribs were quite painful against her chest. They had drawn apart breathless, laughing.

‘The bed’s pretty lumpy,’ Rose had said. Then, ‘Shall we go out before it gets dark, go for a walk along the cliffs?’

They jointly put off what was to come.

I have never been back, thought Rose, the town must have doubled, trebled in size, perhaps even the cliffs where we walked have changed since that summer nearly fifty years ago.

They had wandered along the clifftop hand in hand, listening to the seagulls, meeting no one, leaned over looking down and watched the seals bobbing innocently below them close to the rocks, their faces turning this way and that on thick necks, rolling their oily eyes.

In the late afternoon they had clambered down to a stony cove and Mylo said, ‘Let’s swim.’

‘No bathing things,’ she objected.

‘Naked then, nobody to see us.’

Greatly daring, she undressed near the water’s edge, waded quickly in, the stones hurting her feet. The water was ice cold. She looked back, saw Mylo naked, magnificent. She had never seen a naked man, was aghast at the size of his sex.

She swam a few strokes out, turned, came back, climbed up the stones raking up and down in the swell, dried herself inadequately with a handkerchief, dressed.

But Mylo, confidently treading the cobbles, dived shallowly, swam out strongly. She watched his body gleaming silvery through the green water.

The seals had gone; she climbed the cliff, watched Mylo swim, waited for him to return.

He had said ‘You needn’t do anything you do not want,’ but she knew, want to or not, she would do it.

Oh, poor us, moaned Rose, nearly fifty years later. What a shambles in that lumpy bed. How ironic the
‘tout confort’.
How frustrating for Mylo, how painful the whole experience.

‘You are nervous, my sweet, try and open up, be happy.’

‘Happy,’ Rose murmured, now in recollection. ‘Happy,’ she thought wryly; what was needed was a tin opener. If I was hurt, what about Mylo, what about him? He too must have been sore. Funny, she thought, now in the present lying alone in recollection, I never asked him whether he hurt himself. Eventually he had slept, his head on her breast, his arms around her body and she, wakeful as now, listened to his breathing, as now she listened to the night and smiled at their tragi-comic abortive attempt at making love.

Mylo had left in the very early morning on the boat to Dublin and she had caught the nine-thirty train to London where three days later Ned took her to Cartier to buy the engagement ring, putting on his glasses to inspect it.

Three days after that, Mr Chamberlain declared war. They were married at the end of September.

M
R CHAMBERLAIN’S DECLARATION OF
war delighted Rose, it relieved her mind, put paid to the possibility of questions such as How was the journey to the Wigrams? Had she enjoyed herself? Who else was staying there? Had they been pleased with the grouse? Nobody was interested in her mythical visit, everybody was adjusting to the war; those with the more active imaginations, for imminent death. For Rose the war was of secondary importance; filling her mind was the paramount question—was she or was she not pregnant?

The relief after ten days of crippling fear at the arrival of her period was so great that she was slow to take in the movement set in train by Ned and his family conjointly with her parents towards a wedding, hers to Ned. Ned insisted on an early date. He was joining his regiment immediately, he would get leave for his marriage then install Rose at Slepe, where she would live while he was away. She was not consulted, her agreement was taken for granted.

Ned, with his sensible orderly mind, had, it seemed, not only anticipated the war but made his preparations. Deploring the idea of evacuees in his beloved house, he had months before arranged for the greater part of it to be taken over by a branch of the Ministry of Information, only keeping a minimum of rooms for his own use and now, of course, for Rose.

Emerging from her fog of secret fear, rejoicing over her bloodstained knickers, Rose discovered that a lot had been going on without her. Her parents and the Peel contingent brushed her lovingly aside. ‘We are managing very well.’ The words ‘without you’, while not actually voiced, were implied. The advent of war demanded short cuts, fast action, no hanging about. There was no time for prevarication on the bride’s part; it would be best for her to keep quiet and let those who knew what’s what to get on with it. Rose could usefully answer the telephone and relay messages, said her mother. So she fidgeted about the house waiting for the telephone to ring, answering it breathless in case the caller was Mylo: it never was.

If Mylo had got in touch, if I had heard his voice, Rose asked herself fifty years later, would I have gone to him?

The question nagged intermittently over the years, receiving no clear answer. A second question for which she had no answer was how and why had she so weakly—as she thought in the strength of old age—allowed herself to be steam-rollered by that inexorable tide of goodwill? Why had she not spoken up loud and clear, said quite simply, ‘I do not want to marry Ned’?

While dallying with the idea of getting engaged to Ned she had dreamily anticipated a long engagement during which there would be pleasurable shopping for a trousseau, time to acquaint herself with Ned’s friends and relations, time to decide whether his ideas and hers agreed in principle (did I have any ideas?). Whether their tastes were similar, time to get to know each other. Above all, time to change her mind, time to break off the engagement.

It seemed, though, that during the ten days of what she later thought of as her phantom pregnancy an unstoppable juggernaut of family custom had started to roll. She and Ned would be married in the church where all Peels got married (no time for the banns to be called, a special licence was obtained). A bishop who was also a Peel would officiate, on condition he skipped the reception and caught the train at Liverpool Street to dash back to his diocese. She was to wear a veil of Peel family lace and round her neck the Peel diamonds whipped out of the bank for the occasion. Ned’s Aunt Flora’s French dressmaker was willing to run up the wedding dress in record time provided the design was plain (Rose later had it dyed black and wore it for years). The honeymoon would not be spent in some exotic location but at Slepe, the marriage beginning as it must go on, at home.

Rose spoke up once, her voice squeaky with nerves, to her mother busy writing the wedding invitations; ‘I can’t think what you want
me
for, couldn’t you hire a model for the day?’

Without looking up, her mother had replied, ‘Don’t be difficult, darling. If you’ve got a pain go and lie down with a hot-water bottle; if not, you can make yourself useful addressing these envelopes. Here’s the list.’

I lacked gumption, thought Rose in old age, I dithered. The parents and Ned were so enjoying it all it would have been wicked to spoil their pleasure, deny them their wedding.

And still during those long hot September days, while Whitehall wrapped itself in sandbags and the population of London began to dress in khaki and blue, the telephone rang, but it was never Mylo.

Hard as it is to credit now, thought Rose, I was moulded by custom and family pressure, by what was right and proper for them, by what was expected of me from the moment of my conception: not unlike an animal, a pig, a racehorse, a prize winner at Crufts.

Yet there was Mylo who did not conform, and Nicholas and Emily who even then could scarcely be accused of conformity.

Rose turned on her side in the strange bed, pressed her cheek into the pillow remembering Emily’s sharp nose, bright enquiring eyes when she pottered in to ask, ‘What are you going to do in the war?’

‘I’m getting married.’

‘I know that, I mean war work.’

‘I hadn’t thought. What shall you do?’

‘We are considering possibilities, finding out what will be the most amusing for us.’