Odd Girl Out (9 page)

Arabella sat back on her heels and thought. ‘I simply don’t know.’

‘What about yours? Your childhood, I mean?’

There was a long pause. ‘I moved about so much, you see. I never had time to have any friends, or
haunts
– you know, like apple trees or favourite chairs for reading in
– because we were always going to some other place.’

‘That must have been exciting.’

Arabella said flatly, ‘Yes; I suppose it was.’ She thought about some of it, trying to choose something about it that Anne would be shocked by but in an understanding way. ‘All
those stepfathers. Sometimes they made passes, and sometimes they didn’t, but they never really
liked
me.’

Anne rose to this. ‘But that must have been when you were older.’

‘You’d be surprised. I was ten when
that
began. Well, anyway, I hadn’t even started the curse. The kind of men Clara goes in for are pretty decadent, if you ask me.
Horrible
casual
old Humberts: they weren’t in the least obsessed, just experimenting.’

There was another pause, and then Anne said softly, ‘Poor Arabella. How awful for you.’

Somehow, that had been too easy: she wanted Anne to be too sorry for her to be able to say so. ‘It didn’t matter at all, in fact. I soon got the hang of things. I used to steal back
money that Clara had given them. Even if they found out, they couldn’t say.’

‘I suppose you went to school?’

‘I went to – let me think’ (she didn’t need to, in the least – this was routine) ‘ – fourteen schools in different places. Not always different
countries:
sometimes I ran away, or got expelled. I speak three languages and I can’t spell in any of them.’

Whether this was meant to be a boast, or a derogation, there was something dull, or stock, about it; it sounded as though Arabella had often made it before. But then, Anne considered, if one
kept moving about and meeting new people, one would be likely to go through the same hoops with them. She licked the juice off her fingers and got to her feet. ‘I’ve finished, and I
should think we have enough.’

‘Let me see yours.
Far
more than I’ve got.’

‘I’ve just had more practice. I don’t suppose you were an expert when you were four.’

‘I ate most of them. Has the bird got out?’

‘Can’t hear him, so I think he must have. Remind me to find out how he got
in
.’

‘Do you do all the gardening?’ Arabella asked, as they walked back up the path.

‘A very old man called Leaf comes once a week. Otherwise I do.’

‘Is he really called that? Mr Leaf?’

‘Well, people who’ve known him for more than forty years call him Ken, but I’m not in that privileged position. He’s very good at fruit and vegetables, but otherwise he
only likes dahlias and chrysanthemums the size of soup-plates. Size is what he goes in for.’

They had reached the kitchen. It was completely tidy and there was the sound of a Hoover from upstairs. Ariadne had gone.

Anne explained that she had to go to collect some fish (tact forbade her saying ‘a fish’); she would not be long, she said, implying that she did not wish Arabella to go with her,
and Arabella, whose manners for all occasions of this kind were excellent, said she would love to go and look at the books and records in the sitting-room, if that was all right. Mrs Gregory,
upstairs, was apprised of Arabella, and Anne set off for Henley with feelings of some relief. It was oddly tiring, being all the time with somebody whom you did not know at all. In a way, you were
forced to find out too much about them too fast. But then, I am used to and happy about being alone, except for Edmund, she reflected.

Mrs Gregory left quite soon, and the moment that she had done so, Arabella rushed to explore the house properly. She started upstairs on the basis that Anne would not get back
for at least another twenty minutes, and she could presumably be anywhere on the ground floor with impunity. But not in their bedroom. This was the place that she most wanted to see, and she found
it easily – it being the opposite end of the small house to hers. The walls were covered with a Morris wall-paper of tiger lilies: the curtains were pale-green raw silk, the carpet looking
like gros point of fleur de lys. They had an enormous bed, covered with a patchwork quilt, and very pretty, if sparse, furniture. There was a photograph of Anne, in trousers, on some sort of yacht,
on what was clearly Edmund’s chest of drawers, and a picture of Edmund, looking incredibly inexperienced, sitting in a deckchair with a drink in his hand, on Anne’s dressing-table. The
bathroom led off the bedroom, and this was a little den of luxury, Arabella quickly observed. Thick white carpet, sunken bath, shower, mahogany and gilt fittings, and a shelf of books by the loo.
She looked:
Diary Of A Nobody, The Specialist,
Giles’s cartoons and a Penguin book of crosswords: the stock shelf for lavatories, she knew. There was a Venetian blind over the window,
and a huge, old print of Oxfordshire hung on the wall over the bath. There were also some dull, cautiously green, plants on a shelf near the window. There was Guerlain soap and Weil oil and an
electric toothbrush. On the back of the door hung white and blue peignoirs of rich towelling. There was a basket rocking-chair covered with the same Morris pattern of lilies as the paper in the
bedroom. What did she
expect
to find? Because all of this was neither surprising nor
un
surprising: it didn’t tell her anything, and she had told herself that her curiosity was not
idle: she needed to
know
what they were like, these people she was going to live with. Back in the bedroom, she opened a few cupboards and drawers. Everything lay or hung in perfect order.
Anne seemed to go in for conservative, rather mannish clothes, and Edmund just for Englishmen’s suits: dull and expensive and well cared for. No powder was spilt, no dirty clothes tucked
away, each shoe was shining, the drawers were all lined with flowered paper or felt; everything was comfortable and all
right.
She thought about Anne. Small, boyish, except for her breasts,
very short hair, little make-up, pleasant, not a
sexy
character at all. She thought about Edmund. He had the slightly haggard, unfinished appearance of somebody who ought to be twenty years
younger than he was. Did they have a smashing time in bed together? Perhaps they had neither of them ever considered that there were lots of different kinds of people, and so, once committed, they
had simply settled down with each other. Perhaps that was the way to make the best of anything. A kind of desert island outook – only first you choose the island: living in that sort of
geographical emergency, you would have to make the best of it. She tried to imagine being on a desert island with Edmund … Then she heard the car, and ran quickly downstairs to the
sitting-room.

While Anne drove to fetch the fish, she found herself thinking exclusively of Arabella. Poor child! The idea of her being molested by a series of spiderish old stepfathers
filled Anne with protective revulsion. It was a wonder the child wasn’t a neurotic wreck: stuck in the amber of some interminable analysis. Clara must – apart from anything else that
she was – be a really wicked woman, or at least a wicked mother, which, if you
had
a daughter, came to much the same thing. Arabella’s offer to go out on this particular evening
was especially endearing: after all, she had hardly arrived, and had clearly spent most of her life feeling that she was not wanted. ‘Casual old Humbert’, she had said. Anne read a good
many novels, and this allusion to
Lolita
had not escaped her. Obviously, Arabella must read novels too. It was something they had in common. She shall have a lovely time with as, anyway,
Anne decided, almost reaching the flesh-on-her-bones colour-in-her-cheeks attitude. People
could
be helped, or changed.

She remembered what a tense, panic-stricken wreck she had been when she had first met Edmund. She had only been on her own for about three months, sharing a dark, beetle-infested flat in
Earl’s Court with two other single working girls. The relief of getting away from Waldo, of his really not knowing where she was, and therefore unable to manifest at any old hour, drunk,
aggressive, maudlin or often just plain frightening, had been so great at first that the very dullness/simplicity of life with two bachelor girls had seemed wonderful. But they were all short of
money: the other two vied with each other for getting taken out in the evenings, and there seemed to be an unspoken rule that if this was happening (to them, not Anne at that time), whoever it was
could borrow anything from the others, could have the only hot bath the flat grudgingly afforded its occupants every twenty-four hours, had the run – later on in the evening – of the
only sitting-room (the others would have gone to bed or pretend to be out), and could expect breakfast made for her in the morning because she would have been so late the night before. After a few
weeks of Diana and Mary taking turns with these privileges (and clearly despising her for not seeming able to compete), Anne had grown to dread coming back from her dull job as an assistant’s
assistant on an eccentric magazine devoted to warning people of the dangers of chemicals in all fields of life, to either eating a chop with whichever envious flatmate had
not
got
‘something on’, or boiling an egg entirely alone and listening to the indifferent radio. Sometimes, she wrote letters to the Aunt in Leicestershire, saying how all right, or much
better, she was without Waldo. The flat had really been a kind of displaced persons’ camp: that is to say that nobody intended staying there a moment longer than they could help, and
meanwhile it had all the air of temporary marking-time squalor. Furniture that managed to be uncomfortable, rickety and hideous: people’s smalls always hanging in the dank bathroom or
steaming readily in front of the only efficient gas fire – in the sitting-room. She used to live on novels from the public library, on the vicarious excitements of the evenings spent by the
other two, and occasionally, on going to the local Odeon by herself.

She met Edmund because he had been brought back to the flat by somebody who had obviously not dared face it alone with Mary. Edmund had been very shy: had sat on the edge of a chair that all
three girls knew was on the last of one of its precarious legs, twisting a glass of lukewarm beer in his hands and smiling when anybody looked at him. He had been at school with Mary’s dinner
partner; but once this fact or explanation had been exposed, nobody had very much to say. It was clear to Anne that Mary had not wanted him to come back at all: had meant to have her Noel all to
herself. This made her embark upon a highly coloured and completely untrue account of what mad times the three girls had in the flat together – the never-a-dull-moment,
who-knew-what-would-happen-next stuff – with Diana loyally supporting her, Noel feeding the right questions, and Anne neutrally silent. She had not known either of these girls before: her
joining them had been the result of an advertisement. Eventually, exhaustion, boredom and embarrassment had made her decide to smoke one of tomorrow’s cigarettes (the ration was ten a day).
Instantly, Edmund began to get up to light it for her, and as he did so, the leg of the chair broke and he and it subsided ungracefully on the floor. This caused a disproportionate fuss of several
kinds. Edmund apologized without stopping while Noel plied him with the kind of badinage only tolerated by people who have been forced to live together in an institution, Mary giggled
uncontrollably, and Diana exclaimed incessantly how furious the landlord would be. Anne began telling Edmund that it wasn’t in the least his fault, discovered that her voice was trembling
with the strain of disliking her flatmates, and finally fled to the bathroom just before she burst into tears.

That had been the beginning of several things. The start of her realizing how awful she felt about the break-up with Waldo – how hopeless, how guilty, how despairing. Plenty of people had
had far more to bear than she and for far longer: she was weak, ungenerous, and incompatible. No wonder she had failed: had left someone badly in need of help because she was too selfish to care
enough to help them. But it had also been the beginning of a relationship with Edmund. He had arrived two days later with another chair – far better than the one that had collapsed under him:
had caught Anne in one of her blackest and uncontrollable moods of depression: had been kind enough to her to make her cry and had then spent weeks of evenings trying to make her feel better. In
the face of her unhappiness, his shyness left him: able to comfort, he became unafraid in her company. Discovering that he always seemed to know what was best for her was the best thing that could
happen to either of them: she admired and depended upon him: he relied upon her admiration until he was sure that he could only marry a girl of such discernment. The romance grew to this point and
Edmund proposed in Boulestin’s restaurant after a performance at Covent Garden of
Rosenkavalier.
Anne’s divorce was on its way, Waldo having obligingly provided her with
straightforward means, to this end, but it was not through, nor would it be for several more months. Anne, who by then longed for Edmund with a violence that both delighted and frightened her,
began to propose in her turn that they should, sexually speaking at least, anticipate her freedom, but Edmund would not hear of it. Passionate embraces in cabs, outside front doors, even in cinemas
were as far as he would go, and it was some difficult weeks later before Anne began to understand why. He was actually afraid. He had told her repeatedly that he had never loved anyone else, and
she realized that if this was indeed so, then he had almost certainly never been to bed with anyone. This touched her in a completely new way; the dimension of a protective tenderness was added to
her desire. It was then that she really fell in love with him, and by the time they married, understood how to seduce him without his knowing it. They had lived together now for ten years in a
state of comfort and harmony that – judging largely from what she read about them – few people seemed to enjoy. If she could change from what she had been ten and a half years ago (and,
after all, she had been through some pretty shocking experiences during her Waldo period), surely if she was loved and understood, if she really felt that they were concerned about her, Arabella
could also be helped. She was much younger now than Anne had been when she met Edmund. They must unite in helping her. She drove back from the fishmonger’s with that slightly priggish feeling
of euphoria that very general, benevolent decisions are inclined to produce.