Odd Girl Out (5 page)

‘It’s the weather, you see; there’s been a run on them. Everybody’s been wanting salmon trout – can’t get enough of them.’

‘Have you any salmon, then?’

The Carpenter turned to the back of the shop, where the Walrus was scaling sole under a running tap. ‘Any salmon left, John?’

The Walrus shook his shaggy head. ‘Might be a bit of frozen Canadian.’

‘Have some nice sole, madam. Lovely, they are.’ He picked one up and slapped it invitingly on the marble slab.

Anne picked out two soles and bought a pint of prawns to dress them. Edmund was very fond of
sole normande.
That would have to do.

‘Tell him not to drive at such
breakneck
speed, Vani!’

After he had picked up the speaking-tube and done so, the Prince said, with what was becoming his customary, faded malice, ‘I have again and again said to you, my darling, that to choose
chauffeurs for their appearance is a grave error.’

‘Don’t be so silly. Heythrop-Jones is
utterly
gay. Just what one needs. Concentrate on the game.’

The game was Scrabble, but as, from his point of view, he was playing it in yet another of his foreign languages, and Clara played her transistor rather loudly at the same time, the journey used
up far too much of what remained of his energy. The Prince sighed, and wondered whether Heythrop-Jones would kill them on one of these travellings.

Heythrop-Jones, who had slowed from eighty to seventy kilometres an hour, looked at the massive, waterproof watch given him by an ageing ski instructor (running to fat, poor Rudi was, and he
dyed his hair), and wondered whether he’d make Paris in time to collect that charming young waiter who worked the afternoon shift before he had found something – not better, but else,
to do. He increased their speed again with imperceptible cunning. No good arriving much after seven. He might as well be driving a
hearse.

Edmund lunched with his Senior Partner – an arrangement he had not the heart to get out of more than seventy per cent of the times he was asked. The old man was afflicted
with a deafness particularly noticeable in restaurants, which meant that Edmund had to shout, which in turn made him sound banal and tedious while everybody else listened. Sir William was a very
engaging old man, but he unwittingly touched continuously upon that chord of pathos that inhibited Edmund with an admixture of irritation and pity that does not make for a comfortable luncheon. His
wife, to whom he had been absolutely devoted, had died some years ago, leaving him with two sons (Army and Foreign Office, and chronically abroad), and nothing else at all except his office. He was
no longer really active there, but used it as a kind of club, where he read
The Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
from cover to cover; had a secretary who bought him razor-blades and
Floris toilet water and typed long letters to his sons and the editors of both newspapers that he read. He tried extremely hard to have lunch with Edmund (cheery little last-minute traps, like
coming in at five to one rubbing his dry, mulberry-coloured hands and saying, ‘What about a spot of lunch? Miss Hathaway tells me you are free’) at least twice a week, apart from the
formal engagements he made (‘Lunch on the 16th, my boy. Few things we ought to discuss’). ‘Ought to
discuss
,’ he would repeat more loudly, his once hawk-like Lord
Kitchener eyes now watery and pleading. He always repeated things more loudly because he thought that Edmund was deaf. If these ploys failed, he went stoically to Brooks’s, where he had a
drink with anyone who recognized him, and did the crosswords. If he succeeded, he took Edmund to Wheeler’s, or Wilton’s, or Prunier’s, and lapsed into an almost agonizing
nostalgic gaiety, ordering Krug and Yquem, which he invariably said had been Irene’s favourites, and eating dressed crab and raspberries, neither of which he’d really liked when she had
been alive, but which he ate now – in spite of indigestion from the first, and terrible plate trouble from the second – because
they
had been her favourites, too.

‘Funny thing,’ he would explain interminably to Edmund. ‘It’s a kind of link, though. Trying to find out what she saw in the stuff.’ He would poke at his crab with
heroic joviality: ‘Looks like dog’s vomit to me, I always used to say to her. Never put her off, though. She had a marvellous sense of humour.
Dog’s vomit
,’ he would
enunciate more clearly, and Edmund, touched, nauseated and embarrassed, would cringingly change the subject.

Today, they were in Wheeler’s, in St James’s. Edmund was eating his
sole normande
– off the bone – and pretending to consult Sir William about Lea Manor. It was
very hot, and he knew that the champagne would make him first sleepy and then give him a headache on the train. Sir William sometimes made a pertinent and shrewd remark or suggestion that turned
out to be invaluable, but today his mind was not so orientated. He wanted to convince himself – and Edmund – that life had been worth living, and this took him well back into the
’twenties. Yachts, actresses, wild weekends all over the place; tailors’ and wine-merchants’ bills; pawning his guns just before the Twelfth; private rooms, a girl he had thought
he would have to marry, all these lasted them right up to what Sir William called pudding (black coffee and raspberries). ‘Then, of course, I met Irene. But you know about that,’ he
ended, or, as Edmund could see, rather hoped that he had begun.

‘Yes,’ Edmund said loudly.

‘An Englishman’s home is his castle, they say. Don’t know who they are, or were, but
I
always say that the sexual equivalent to one’s castle is one’s wife.
Marry the right girl, and you’ll never look back. You’re impregnable. I was incredibly lucky.

Lucky.
I often wonder,’ he continued, at top-volume rumination, ‘whether sex hasn’t got duller than it used to be – now that it’s all over the place. You see
three-quarters of a gal the moment you set eyes on her nowadays, and the whole lot, they tell me, at the drop of a mini-skirt. We used to find ankles exciting. I’m not talking about the gals
one picked up, d’you know – tarts and all that sort of thing – I mean the ones one
fell
for.’

By now, the three remaining couples in the small top-floor room had dropped all pretence of attending to each other. Sir William took a hearty swig of Yquem and alarmingly changed his tactics
from personal reminiscence to a loud, innocent, and to Edmund deeply embarrassing, cross-examination of Edmund’s love/sex life. As Edmund had never been to bed with anyone except Anne, this
should have been a simple conversation, but he discovered, as, indeed, any man might, that he was loath to tell Sir William and the entire company that he had only had one woman, and her
legitimately. He parried, and Sir William, full of wine now, thrust, and the couples didn’t pay their bills and listened.

‘Terribly sorry, m’boy, to have embarrassed you,’ Sir William shouted, far too long after he had done so. ‘Had no idea. In my day we used to call a spade a spade, and a
you-know-what a you-know-what. Men together, of course. Didn’t talk to gals like that, and certainly not a lady.’

Edmund, sweating, said that he really ought to be getting back to the office. Sir William insisted on paying, and outside the restaurant, said, ‘You’ve no idea how much I enjoyed
that. Have the TV in the evenings of course, but I do like a spot of conversation now and then. Anyway – take my advice, old boy. One rattling affair never did anyone any harm. Only enhances
the real thing when you get it.’

Edmund reminded him of Anne, who, it turned out, had completely slipped Sir William’s memory. ‘Gad! And I went to your wedding. I’ll tell you something – I’m
getting old. Just as well poor Irene isn’t here, I’d have started boring her to death.’ He then insisted on buying a large bunch of carnations for Edmund to take to Anne with his
kindest regards, and so it came about that Edmund had to struggle in the rush hour with this wilting bundle to Paddington.

‘We don’t
repair
lamps, madam, I’m afraid. Oh no – we’ve never done that.’

‘Well, could you recommend someone to me who could?’

‘It’s hard to say, madam. We don’t like recommending people, and I would question whether it was worth it. Nowadays people patch this sort of thing up themselves, or they buy a
new one.’ He looked hopefully at the rows of – to Anne – awful little bedside lamps arrayed in his shop. His face, Anne thought, was unctuous with trying not to seem too
unhelpful. All the lights on in the shop seemed to make it hotter than anywhere else.

‘Well, thank you,’ she said. For nothing, she thought.

‘Thank
you
, madam.’

‘Don’t you want any?’

‘Any what?’

‘Corned beef.’

‘Have you got a cigarette?’

‘Of course not!’

‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

‘I mean, that I had to pay the electricity bill, I’ve got to buy food, and I didn’t know how long the money had to last. Of
course
I couldn’t buy fags.’

‘Oh God!’

She stared at him, determined not to ask why oh God and feeling so awful she wanted to shriek.

‘I wonder why you always manage to say the thing that will make me feel worst.’

Silence.

‘Well you see what I mean, don’t you?’

‘About what?’

‘About the fact that money is always left out of this sort of mess. There are those two snivelling kids upstairs – that, incidentally, I never wanted in the least – and
you’ve saddled me with having to ruin my life to continue a situation that neither of us gets a bloody thing out of. What about my art? What about my career? What the hell do you think is
going to become of that if I have to take every job that radio or TV care to offer?’

Very different pictures of a succession of waiters, police constables, cab-drivers and the ‘Sir John, Mr X will see you now’ kind of bit part that was all he ever
did
get
offered crossed both of their minds. The difference was that she couldn’t see why on earth being married and a father made the slightest change in what parts he
was
offered, and he
couldn’t see why he need ever accept them if he was free of a family. He’d hold out for something really big.

‘I don’t know.’ It was defeat, or agreement, or acceptance of something worse and larger than anything she could deal with. In any case, she could not think of anything else to
say.

Suddenly he put his head down upon his arms on the table.

‘Jan – I feel so awful about her. You wouldn’t understand how awful I feel.’

Losing one’s love for someone was like an internal haemorrhage – nothing seen, just a slow dripping away, becoming weaker and weaker with pity and disrespect. ‘I’m very
sorry,’ she said. She really was – for all of them.

Arabella spent more of the afternoon than she had intended in the cinema near Paddington Station. She went because it was dark and cool and she could sit down, and then, later
when she had seen the programme, catch a train without any more travelling. In fact, she fell asleep, and only woke up when, she realized, the documentary film about some South American and
exceedingly primitive tribe was nearing its end for the second time. People, whose gentle faces were daubed with fiercely unbecoming streaks of blue and yellow paint, were slowly filing through
tropical forest – the men carrying weapons, the women everything else. ‘… and so, we must reluctantly leave these primitive and fast-becoming-extinct Indians as they wend their
simple way to yet another temporary home farther into the interior where white man has yet to tread …’

Someone was pinching her thigh. That was why she had woken up: someone was pinching it again. She glanced to her right, where the pinch came from, and the old brute was staring stolidly ahead at
the screen, while his agile, creepy fingers worked their way steadily upwards. A left-handed Karate chop would hurt her hand, and probably thigh, far more than it would damage him – she was
too much out of practice. So she leaned towards him and said in a piercing whisper, ‘If you don’t do up your flies and leave yourself alone, I’ll call the attendant.’

His hand shot back from her leg as though burned: plenty of people had heard her and she decided to leave quickly to the left before he did. She stumbled out over people’s legs and
umbrellas and handbags to the rustle and murmur of people muttering to one another versions of what she had said. Outside, she wiped the silly expression of wounded disgust off her face, put on her
dark glasses, and almost ran to the station Ladies. There was a queue, and a beefy, drab woman was taking pennies, pulling plugs and flicking lavatory seats with a much-used cloth. Arabella put
paper all over hers as Nannie had taught her to do. It did not seem to be getting any better; in fact, it seemed to be worse. She walked out of the Ladies feeling distinctly weaker. She would have
a strong drink before she caught the train, and as she was josded, pushing her way to the bar counter, remembered how paltry drinks in England were. ‘Two double vodkas, please, with ice.’

The barman pushed two glasses over to her. ‘Fifty-five.’

‘And ice?’

‘Ice in the bucket.’ He took her pound, slapped back the change and turned to the next customer.

The ice proved to be three tiny, fast-melting cubes. She poured the vodkas into one glass and only succeeded in manoeuvring one piece of ice into it before the bucket was swept away from her.
She drank the barely cold liquid fast: it was to do her good, and nothing to do with enjoyment. Then she went into the front of the station in search of a porter to help her with all her luggage on
to whatever would be the next train.

‘The trouble is, you see madam, that we could
wash
it, but we really couldn’t undertake to
set
it. Not now. The girls will all be going home, you see.
And also, madam needs a trim if I am not much mistaken.’

‘Well, do you think you could just trim it, then?’

He gave a little prance of dismay.

‘Ah now, madam, don’t be hard on me. You know my little ways. Wet, with a razor is how I’ve always worked on your head, and it
is
a weeny bit late to make a great change
like that now.’