Odd Girl Out (14 page)

Edmund, unable, or unwilling, to take in the implication of this last remark, accelerated: they were approaching the roundabout for the M4. People aren’t
what
? he thought. Hunters
or hunted, or divided into the sexes? He had an uneasy feeling that she meant the latter: he also felt in the uncomfortable position of being knocked off his avuncular pedestal – which would
never do. He began to drive fast to take their minds off anything that they might have been on.

Arabella threw back her head, saying, ‘I love speed. I don’t mean drugs,’ she added quickly (and to Edmund incomprehensibly), ‘I mean going fast. I had a dear little car
once – hotted up and all – but I fell into a ravine with it. Had to have twenty-three stitches, but no amount of cobbling would do the poor car any good.’

‘You
do
drive well,’ she said some miles later, as she took out a brush from her yellow bag and began brushing her hair. ‘What are you going to do all day?’

‘The usual things. Go to the office. Dictate letters. Answer the telephone. Go and see a probably frightful house somewhere in Hertfordshire. What are you going to do?’

‘Nothing much. Mooch around. I’ve got one or two things to get and do, but not much.’

He wondered, not for the first time, why she had been so anxious to come to London at all. ‘Does that mean that you would like me to give you lunch?’

‘Yes. That’s what I was hoping you would say.’

‘Where would you like it?’

‘A surprise. I would like to come to your office and see you doing your stuff and then you take me somewhere I don’t know.’

‘I don’t know what you don’t know.’

‘Well then, you’ll simply have to guess, won’t you? Things shouldn’t be easy. Simple, but not easy.’

‘All right.’ Edmund suddenly felt his best: in command of what he felt was a worldly situation that he understood. He could easily take the girl somewhere really good that she
wouldn’t know. It would be fun. It would save him from Sir William. That was the thing. That, of course, was the main thing.

‘Where do you want me to drop you?’ he asked as they approached Chiswick.

‘Oh – anywhere: King’s Road would be super.’

So he dropped her, as she asked, near Oakley Street. She had brushed her hair and covered it with a dark-blue silk scarf. It was only after he had dropped her that he began to wonder and worry
about whether she knew the name of his office or where it was. His mind alternated between delightful places to lunch and the likelihood of her not finding him.

Anne went shopping in Henley. She decided that she would do a great deal of this; stock up for at least a week, and then have a picnic lunch in the garden with the newest
Elizabeth Taylor novel, and
then
get down to a good afternoon’s gardening. When she went back to Arabella’s room, Ariadne had eaten the sardines, but made it plain that she did
not wish to be moved. Anne, who loved her, and also had a fear of what primitive persons might do to their young if too much pressed, left her to her own devices, which was really the best, if not
the only, thing to do with a cat. She thought of Arabella having a turgid lunch with ex-lover (he
must
be that, surely?), awful silences, and nobody eating anything, but working themselves
up to saying the unsayable.

‘I’m sorry about it all.’

‘Oh well – there it is. People don’t plan to ruin one another. They just do it.’ (In the past week, she had picked up a good deal of Arabella’s idiom.)

Entirely by herself, and much influenced by the past week, she – certainly didn’t indulge, but nerved – herself to remember what life with Waldo had been like. Full of drink,
casual unfaithfulness, never knowing when, and worse still how he would return: total insecurity: emotional, financial, and, if, indeed, that came into it, spiritual. Waldo had not noticed, or even
cared a damn what she felt, or whether she ate or drank, or was lonely, or frightened, or unfulfilled. His answer to all this had been – quite rightly – that he wasn’t cut out to
be a husband at all. They had only married because Anne honestly thought she was pregnant, and because she had felt that abortion was wrong, and going back to what wasn’t really her family
would be insupportable. So she had married Waldo and
that
had turned out to be both wrong
and
insupportable. Edmund had saved her. If it wasn’t for Edmund, she could imagine
turning on the gas in that awful flat one night, or throwing herself into the river, or something of the kind. She had been so lucky that she could only hope that – in the end –
something of the same sort would happen to Arabella.

The reasons that Arabella had wanted to be dropped off in the King’s Road were that she thought she might like to buy something stunning to have lunch in, and also that
she had the uncomfortable feeling that Neville’s flat might have been left in a state that would preclude his ever offering it to her again. She decided to get this over first.

‘Well, dear, it
was
rather a complete and utter shambles, and a weeny bit naughty of you. I had the impression’ – his brilliantly blue eyes were fixed upon her face
– ‘that either a good time had been had by everybody, or that nobody had enjoyed themselves the teeniest bit.’

‘They hadn’t much, I’m afraid.
I
didn’t, anyway.’

He brushed his thick, silver hair with a sensitive hand. ‘Did you simply hop it and leave Mr X in charge?’

Arabella nodded.

‘I guessed it. Well, he was certainly no home-maker, if you’ll forgive the expression.’

‘Look – I really want to pay for the damage and all that. That’s really what I came about.’

‘That’s simply sweet of you, darling, but Rodney and I both felt the whole thing was getting a trifle
vieux jeu
: we wanted to do it over, and this gave us a lovely
excuse.’

For the first time Arabella actually looked at the small sitting-room in which she had spent what now seemed so much time, and where Neville was kindly giving her coffee in a wobbly Spanish cup
and saucer. It did not seem very different – simply a slightly more cramped open space in her life than she had imagined. Neville’s pretty prints and china were back on the shelves: the
books looked the same; there were some beautifully arranged flowers, but the gramophone and curtains were absent, she saw. Oh, God! He’d probably burned holes in them and broken the
machine.

‘Don’t worry, dear. I’ll send you a tiny bill for Mrs Hotchkiss’s spring-cleaning, but otherwise, as I say, we’re quite excited at our new plans. Rodney has done
some fabulous drawings, and he’s happy as a lark out matching things all day. Have some more coffee?’

‘No thanks. I really ought to be going: I’ve got to shop.’ She put a dutiful, household expression on her face, but he was not deceived.

‘Darling, you’re just like your mother: you know you adore it. Like most of us.’

‘Well, you like it, too.’

‘Oh no, dear – I like
collecting
things – that’s entirely and utterly different. I’d far rather come by them, you know, like dear Queen Mary, than have to go
about writing cheques or carrying wads of dreadful dirty paper money that you don’t know who’s touched it. What are you going to buy?’

‘A clothe. Do you know anywhere good?’

‘Just one clothe? Oh well, you won’t mind what it costs. Shall I come with you, dear?’

‘It’s awfully kind of you,’ Arabella said hastily. ‘But I’m meeting someone jolly soon, so I’ll have to do it far too quickly. I’d love you to come when
it’s a serious buy: you’ve got such marvellous taste, Mummy says.’

‘Say no more. By the way, your dear mother called from Paris yesterday to know if the flat was all right.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said
perfect
, dear – not a hair out of place.’

‘You
are
kind.’ Arabella said this with sincere gratitude: he was.

‘I know, darling. It’s my reputation: I like to keep it up. It takes such years to acquire that one mustn’t let one’s behaviour slip for a second – or bingo!
– goes the lot. And then what have you? Like black people, and women, and ugly people, I have to try harder, as they say in America.’

‘But you are all right – aren’t you, Neville? I mean – Rodney – ’

‘I worship him, and he’s really very fond of me. But the simple fact is that Rodney is fifteen years younger than me. One day, he’ll be off, and I’ll have nobody’s
shoulder to cry on but my own. It’s not like marriage, you see, dear: it’s far more precarious. None of the kiddywinks lark, or any moral brakes on that straight people have.’

‘People
can
be married without children and be all right.’ As she said this, she was conscious of feelings composed of, or perhaps confused by, envy, and a sense of
challenge.

‘Ah, but if people do that, they have to live on some kind of island. Rodney would hate that. He adores meeting new people all the time.’ For a moment, his chubby, rubicund, gentle
features became something quite different: had momentarily the sternness of dignified anxiety – something always to be faced and eventually to be encountered, grappled with, and accepted.
Arabella got up and kissed him.

‘I’ve got a shoulder or two,’ she said.

‘Dear girl, I
know
you have,’ he answered with the utmost emphasis, and, behind it, lack of conviction.

She managed to get him to let her write a cheque for Mrs Hotchkiss, and they parted with mutual affection and relief.

Edmund spent a morning entirely on edge. Everything seemed to be going wrong. Advertisements in two reputable papers were proving to have contained misprints that inaugurated a
spate of angry telephone calls. He had a row with a rival firm with whom they had hitherto amiably collaborated. Miss Hathaway had a summer cold of the most noticeable nature. The
drilling in the square seemed incessant, and to belie any jokes people made about British workmen. Either one hundred and two workmen were drilling for forty seconds each in quick succession, or
they had got hold of some blackleg obsessed maniac who was prepared to drill himself to Australia. The heat and now certainty of thunder made everybody irritable. The office boy had an appalling
sty, that made his cheeky ineptitude verge upon the pathetic. Edmund hated having any of his feelings about people confused in this way. Sir William could talk – or shout – about
nothing but Greece, and the villa possibility, and how important it was that Edmund should go there and see what might be done. ‘
Islands –
even!’ he thundered. ‘We
can’t let the matter drop.’ Edmund went through the old rigmarole about nobody who wasn’t Greek being allowed a house (he refused to call it a villa) with any coast-line at all.
‘There are ways of getting round
that
,’ Sir William had replied, knowing that Edmund knew that there were, but that they were not ways that had ever been a practice in the firm.
A junior partner’s wife was having a baby, and he seemed to consider that this amounted to a qualification for sick leave. He told Miss Hathaway to book a table for two, at three –
carefully considered – restaurants for one fifteen, and her lack of both initiative and demur about this maddened him. He might easily end up having a miserable lunch at one of them alone. He
told Sir William that he was lunching with a client, and then going to Hertfordshire to look at the house near Barnet. Sir William had tried – quite unforgivably, in Edmund’s view
– to share the lunch. So when Arabella turned up at one fourteen in a white crêpe trouser suit, he really didn’t know whether to scream with self-pity or shout for joy. The whole
office would realize that he was having lunch with her: it would have been unspeakably awful if she hadn’t turned up.

Arabella’s late arrival meant that she had no opportunity to see Edmund at work, which, in fact,
he
found unexpectedly disappointed him: it also cut down the choice of restaurants
to the only one they could get to without being unreasonably late. And so, and perhaps it was the best of the three, they found themselves at Prunier’s.

‘Of course you must have been here before.’

‘No. Only in Paris. They have two there – both awfully delicious, I must say. I do love seafood, don’t you?’

Edmund agreed. He also liked the excellent waiters and not being jammed against everybody else. It was not an original, but still perfectly sensible choice. Arabella drank some Chambéry,
and he had – uncharacteristically – a Gibson. Menus were brought. Remembering that it is more difficult to talk to someone if you sit side by side, he had opted for the chair opposite
her banquette. The restaurant was only half full and they were well separated from the other people lunching. They both looked at the menus for some moments and then at each other. There was a
certain, to Edmund, delightful constraint.

‘Not the time of year for oysters,’ he said.

‘I don’t like them. Savarin put me off. You know – the people not being able to open them fast enough for him.’

‘Foie gras?’

‘Oh no! All those wretched geese with their feet pinned to the ground and awful collars round their necks so that they can’t be sick or regurgitate or whatever. You should
never
eat that.’

‘What else shouldn’t you eat?’

‘Veal – certainly. They make them have such awful lives nowadays.’

‘But you’re not a vegetarian?’

‘No. I just don’t think anyone has the right to make animals have a dreadful life and
then
kill them for food. I think they ought to think about that. It’s quite all
right to eat meat, but people ought to mind about how it has lived and how it’s killed.’

‘Bernard Shaw said that for all we knew vegetables had just as much sensitivity.’

‘He wouldn’t have cared, though, would he? Anyhow, he ended his life on whisky and liver injections, which seems a bit out of place if you are keen on no alcohol and being a
vegetarian.’

‘What extraordinary things you know!’

‘It’s not that. It’s just that there is so much to know, that anything might turn out to be relevant and sound extraordinary.

‘The pâté Traktir is delicious.’

‘Yes – I know: I’d love that.’