Not That Sort of Girl (7 page)

‘It’s an indoor court, Ned, marvellous to play on. It’s wood, makes the game very fast, even quite poor players put up a good show. When you are playing in there and it’s blowing and sleeting outside, you will be pleased you came. See more of the girls than muffled up to the eyes and miserable on a shooting stick or bouncing along on a horse they can’t hold when all you see is their bums. I’ve nothing against bums, of course, but a tennis dress in the warmth shows them off better …’

‘Honestly, Uncle Archie …’

‘I shall accept for you,’ said Ned’s uncle. ‘I have to ring him up anyway. You get a good lunch,’ he added consolingly, ‘as well as the exercise, and there’s a dance in the evening for those who stay on.’

There had been a men’s four, Ned remembered; he had been partnered by Richard Malone against Nicholas Thornby and a visitor from London. The court, as his uncle had said, was marvellous; he found himself playing well.

There were, beside himself, George and Richard Malone, three men from London staying in the house, four vivacious girls, friends of the Malone sons, Emily and Nicholas Thornby, and a very young, very shy Rose, brought in as a stop-gap to fill the place of a girl cousin who was down with flu. Ned enjoyed himself presently, partnering Emily in a mixed doubles. She played a spirited game. Ned noticed that she did not wear a brassière; he was used to girls wearing brassières and found its absence a little disturbing. Twice he missed an easy backhand while thinking about this. Nevertheless, or because of it, he later suggested she might come out to dinner when next she was in London, he not yet being properly installed at Slepe; would she like to dine and dance or go to a theatre?

Later, when Emily and three of the girls from the house party played a women’s doubles, Ned watched while Richard Malone sat whispering into his favourite girl’s ear, reducing her to fits of giggles. Of the women’s four, Emily had been by far the keenest player, leaping up and showing a lot of leg as well as the disturbing breasts, reaching up to smash difficult balls which did not necessarily land in court and might well have gone out if she had left them. Ned noticed Emily again when partnering one of the girls from London; he played against her and her brother Nicholas. They made a curiously cohesive team, giving no quarter.

Of the girls from London, Ned got to know two, later taking them out and receiving invitations back into their milieu. Emily came to London often and when she did she rang him up so that over a period of months he grew to know her fairly well. Imperceptibly she latched on to the group of friends he now saw most often.

It was quite untrue that he had, as he now told Rose, fallen in love with her at the winter tennis party. He had barely noticed her. In any case, during much of the tennis Rose, already rendered invisible by shyness, had absented herself.

It was much later, at another party—Ned had by this time become friends with the Malones—that Ned overheard Mrs Malone say to a friend, ‘Isn’t it extraordinary that a plain little thing like Rose Freeling should suddenly blossom into a positive beauty.’

‘She must be in love,’ said Mrs Malone’s friend, staring across the room at Rose.

‘The boys say not. They say she has no one in particular; both George and Richard find her unapproachable; they both find her extremely attractive.’

‘Who is she?’ asked Mrs Malone’s friend.

‘Nobody much,’ said Mrs Malone, ‘the family is all right, I suppose, but there’s no money. The father is a solicitor, not successful, rather ill, on the way out, they say. The mother is a stick. One feels sorry for the girl, she doesn’t have much fun. We asked her to the tennis last Boxing Day when some girl fell out. She didn’t seem to make much of a mark, but we thought we’d give her another chance and then the boys found her quite ravishing.’

Mrs Malone’s friend said, ‘Being ravishing isn’t everything. One needs money to carry it off.’

‘True,’ said Mrs Malone, watching Rose across the room standing with a group of men. ‘It’s funny, though, she was so shy as a child, she was quite ugly, but now …’

‘I thought Emily Thornby was supposed to be the local beauty,’ said Mrs Malone’s friend, ‘not that she is exactly beautiful.’

‘There’s not much money there either,’ said Mrs Malone, ‘but she and that brother of hers have lots of push.’

Ned, overhearing this conversation, began to watch Rose and presently took the opportunity of asking her to dance, preparatory to getting to know her better.

Rose was not wearing anything under her dress, neither brassière nor knickers, but since she did not think about it Ned did not notice, yet he was suddenly anxious to make an impression. The ease with which Rose had stood among the group of men had annoyed him.

So it came about that when for their annual house party for the grouse shooting in Argyll, Uncle Archie and Aunt Flora invited two of Ned’s friends, Harold Rhys and Ian Johnson, to form a leaven of young people among their middle-aged friends, Aunt Flora added two of Ned’s cousins and let Emily and Nicholas fish successfully for an invitation. It was Uncle Archie who had noticed Rose at the Boxing Day party and been astonished that Flora had not added Rose’s name to the list. Although getting to know Rose, Ned was not moving fast enough. ‘Quiet girls like Rose Freeling slip through your fingers,’ he said, ‘get her under the same roof as Ned.’

‘But she has no money,’ said his wife, who had had none herself and knew this disadvantage.

‘In Ned’s case it doesn’t matter. I thought we were agreed.’

‘Very well, I’ll write,’ said Flora, who had only brought up the lack of money to test her husband. ‘You may be right,’ she added. ‘Ned is the sort of man who gets hooked by an unsuitable girl; I am not sure I should have invited the Thornbys.’

‘I find them a lively pair,’ said Archibald Loftus, ‘the girl makes me laugh.’

‘A bit too lively,’ said Flora, ‘though I can’t put my finger on why I think so.’

Touched by his relatives’ machinations for his welfare, telling himself that their anxiety was superfluous, Ned after considerable havering had decided to pick Rose from the choice presented to him. He was never in any doubt that she would accept him.

Thus, sitting on the stone seat in the garden at Slepe, the morning after their wedding, Ned honestly believed himself when he told Rose that he had fallen in love with her nine months before at the Boxing Day tennis party.

R
OSE’S RECOLLECTIONS OF THE
winter tennis party bore little relation to Ned’s; perhaps all that they had in common was their initial reluctance to go to it.

Mrs Freeling had answered the telephone and accepted Mrs Malone’s last minute invitation on Rose’s behalf.

‘That’s extremely kind of you,’ she enthused. ‘I am sure she will be delighted. Oh, yes, she plays a reasonable game, though that sounds boastful on my part. Be there by eleven-thirty? Yes, of course she can. The Thornbys will give her a lift? How kind of you to arrange it. Of course, my husband would have brought her, but he’s not very well at present. Rose will be thrilled.’

‘I am not thrilled,’ said Rose, overhearing.

‘You should be, you have never been invited there before. The Malones’ winter tennis is an event,’ said Rose’s mother.

‘As a stop-gap,’ said Rose. ‘Barrel-scraping only.’

‘What does that matter?’ snapped her mother, who felt perpetually guilty that she had not got what she thought to herself as the nerve to launch Rose socially. Rose made no effort herself. ‘You make no effort, here’s a chance to meet new people. You know how difficult it is for me to give parties for you with your father so unwell and …’

‘So little money.’ Rose knew the litany.

‘Really, darling!’

‘I don’t want to go,’ said Rose. ‘Tennis in midwinter is ridiculous.’

‘It’s a covered court. I’ve heard it’s beautifully warm. There will be a house party from London. Nice young people.’

‘Don’t I know it.’ Rose already felt her toes curling with horror at the prospect of meeting sophisticated strangers from London.

‘And the Malone boys, Richard and George, you hardly know them since they’ve grown up. This is a chance to get to know them better.’

‘They have had every chance to get to know me all these years, Mother, and they haven’t bothered.’

‘Rubbish, Rose.’ Mrs Freeling stifled her agreement with this statement. When they were little she had invited the Malone boys to the children’s party she forced herself to give once a year for Rose, her only child, an enormous effort this, after which she would relapse into her habitual lethargy, feeling that she had done her duty.

‘The only time they ever came to this house George Malone threw jelly at the other children and shouted that this was the bloodiest party he had ever been to,’ said Rose.

‘Well, yes, darling, but he was very young, only eight or ten. Mrs Malone rang up and apologised. She did. I remember it well. The poor little boy was over-excited and had a temperature.’

‘Ho!’ said Rose. ‘Ha!’

‘Rose!’

‘They made excuses for ever after when you invited them, they never came again.’

‘Well, darling, they are grown up now, it’s quite different.’

‘So am I,’ said Rose. She had admired George’s action, remembered it with glee, pink and yellow jellies had flown through the air, splattering against the walls of the dining-room, and lodged in nice little girls’ hair. George had been right: her mother’s parties were of an extreme awfulness. ‘He’s grown up jolly boring,’ she said, ‘more’s the pity.’

‘You don’t know him well enough to judge,’ said her mother.

‘I have no tennis clothes,’ said Rose.

‘That is not true, you bought new shoes in July.’

‘No dress.’

‘Rose, you are being difficult.’

‘No racquet.’

‘You can borrow mine,’ said Rose’s father, looking up from
The Times,
hoping to put a stop to the argument. ‘I shall never use it again,’ he said with self-pity.

‘Oh, Father,’ cried Rose, ‘don’t!’

‘Just go to the party; please your mother; you will find you enjoy it.’

‘So you want me to go?’

‘I should like to think that my racquet is being used,’ said Rose’s father, spoiling his otherwise generous offer by his tone of voice, wringing his daughter’s heart.

‘All right, I’ll go,’ said Rose. (And why must he wring my heart with his bloody racquet? Why must he thrust his cancer down my throat, she cried to herself as she watched her father fold his newspaper and limp from the room. Why does supposed cancer of the stomach make him limp?) ‘I am not going to wear white,’ she told her mother.

Mrs Freeling did not answer. Let Rose go wearing every colour of the rainbow, so long as she went. People as rich as the Malones did not invite inconspicuous, shy and—let’s face it—moneyless girls like Rose a second time. It was not often one of their guests went down with flu at the crucial minute, leaving a heaven-sent gap: Fate, Mrs Freeling told herself as she made her way to the kitchen to make her shopping list, was not always malign.

If there should be some personable young man at the Malones’ party, he might just possibly be attracted to Rose. Ask her out when they got to London. Perhaps Rose was not destined, as she felt herself to have been destined, to be crushed by life. I never had any real opportunities, Mrs Freeling told herself as she planned the day’s meals; I have always been crushed.

Mrs Freeling at that time felt particularly harassed since the specialist had said that her husband’s only chance was an intensive course of treatment in London. In a week’s time they were to move into an expensive flat for half of every week so that Rose’s father could receive this treatment, returning to the country at intervals to keep a toehold in his ailing practice.

What harassed Mrs Freeling even more than her husband’s probable cancer (there was no certainty yet that he had it), their impecuniosity and Rose’s rebarbative shyness was her subconscious wish that her husband would quite simply drop dead, that her long sad unsatisfactory marriage would come to an end while she was still of an age to have some fun. Naturally Mrs Freeling did not know she harboured such thoughts; they milled about in the recesses of her unconscious.

Sulkily, Rose went to the cloakroom where her father’s racquet hung in its press. She took it out and twanged the strings.

Upstairs, she fished her tennis shoes out from the back of her cupboard. She had put them away dirty, they were stained green; she laid them aside to blanco. She pushed aside her winter clothes, and pulled out the only summer dress she liked, a simple cotton dress in a deep rose colour made by the village dressmaker the previous summer. Her mother had misjudged the amount of material, bought too much; there had been enough left over from the frock to make matching knickers; it was this that made the dress her favourite. Her mother had bought the material for her and for once she had not questioned her mother’s taste. Laying the garments on the bed to be washed and ironed, Rose almost began to look forward to the party.

‘My mother,’ she said to her reflection in the glass, ‘hopes I shall meet Mr Right. God, my hair’s a mess!’ She went to the bathroom to wash it. ‘It’s greasy and the ends are splitting.’ She was still at the age when girls dramatise their hair; her hair was not in the least greasy, nor were the ends split.

‘What are you doing?’ Her mother’s voice floated up the stairs.

‘Washing my hair,’ Rose shouted, her head in the basin.

‘Don’t use all the hot water.’

‘It’s automatic, it’s automatic, she doesn’t even think!’ Rose plunged her head down in the basin so that water sloshed out onto the floor. As she came up for air, she heard her mother’s voice again. ‘What?’ she shouted. ‘Can’t hear. What did you say?’

‘I said,’ Mrs Freeling stood in the bathroom doorway, ‘I said Ned Peel is going to be at the tennis party. Oh, look what a mess you’ve made of the floor. You will mop it up, won’t you?’

‘Who is Ned Peel?’ Rose worked shampoo into her hair.

‘Is it good for your hair to wash it so often? You only washed it two days ago. Ned Peel is the man who has come into Slepe, old Mr Peel’s heir.’