Something in Disguise

Contents

When Oliver saw his sister in her bridesmaid’s dress he laughed so much he could hardly stand.

‘I’ve never looked my best in pink.

‘Oh shut
up,
it’s not as funny as all that.’

‘You look like a sort of elongated Shirley Temple. Or a chimpanzee at a Zoo tea-party: yes – more like that, because of your little hairy arms peeping out from all that dimity, or
whatever it is –’

‘Organza,’ she said crossly; ‘and it’s quite pale on my arms.’

‘What is? Your fur? Don’t worry about that. Lots of men love hairy women, and if they turn out not to, you could always fall back on another chimpanzee in a sailor suit. Turn
round.’

‘What for?’ she asked when she had done so.

‘Just wanted to see if the back was as funny as the front.’

‘Is it?’

‘Not quite, because one misses your face. Do keep that expression for the wedding photographs.’

‘You are being beastly.
Anyone
would look awful in it.
You
would.’

‘Let me pop it on. I bet I could bring tears to your eyes. The tragic transvestite: a sort of leitmotif for Colin Wilson. Come on, Lizzie. I’ll go mincing down to Daddo, and send his
old blood coursing through his veins –’

‘Get dressed, you fool. The whole day’s going to be quite awful enough without you doing a thing to make it worse. It is poor old Alice’s day, after all.’

‘I haven’t had any breakfast.’

‘Well you won’t get any now. You’ll get buffet lunch in –’ she looked at her man’s watch strapped by black leather round her wrist – ‘just over an
hour and a half.’

‘You’ll have to take that watch off. You might as well be carrying a tommy-gun. I promise I’ll be nice to Alice. I
like
Alice. I like
Alice,
’ he added going
to the door. ‘And May. And you. I shall always remember the first time I saw you like this.’

‘You’re not going to see me like it any other time. Really be nice to Alice.’

‘Really being nice would entail a kind of Rochester wedding. Finding that Leslie had a mad wife shut up in one of his building estates –’

‘Who’s Shirley Temple?’ Recognizing
Jane Eyre
reminded her that she didn’t know that one.

‘An infant prodigy who looked her best in pink. Honestly, you don’t know
any
thing.’ He slammed her door so that it burst open. She shut it, and turned sadly to the
pointed satin court shoes that had been half-heartedly dyed to match. They’d be too uncomfortable to wear in ordinary life anyway.

Alice sat in front of her stepmother’s dressing-table wondering whether she could improve her hair. She couldn’t, she decided: it had been back-combed with such
obsessional care by the local hairdresser, that any interference with it now would probably be disastrous. ‘My wedding morning,’ she thought, and tried to feel momentous and festive
– somehow more worthy. It was April; the sky was overcast in slate, and livid green trees waved wildly in the gusty wind. Ordinarily, by now she would be feeding the dogs which Daddy would
not have in the house, and cleaning out their horrible kennels that smelled like animal public lavatories however often you cleaned them. It wasn’t at all a nice day from the weather point of
view. ‘I’m leaving home,’ she thought; but even that seemed a bit hopeless as they’d only lived there for two years and she’d never liked it anyway. Daddy had bought
the house when he married May: it was large and ugly, and Alice knew that secretly May didn’t like it either – she was always too cold, she said. ‘I
want
to leave,’
she thought more vehemently. Then she thought what a good man Leslie obviously was, and that she would miss May who’d been much nicer to her than her other stepmother – nicer even than
her own mother who’d always seemed to be what Daddy called failing. He loathed ill health.

She opened her dressing-gown to see whether her skin had subsided from pink to white after her bath. May had insisted on her using this room with its bathroom attached; had insisted also upon
giving her the last remaining bath salts, had offered to help her dress, or keep out of the way – in fact was behaving with effortless, model kindness. It was amazing that anyone could be so
practical about feelings when they weren’t at all about things. ‘Weren’t at all
what
, Alice?’ Daddy would say, with his pale bulging eyes fixed upon her (when she was
little she had thought he did it to bully, when she was a young girl she had thought it was because he was stupid – now she thought it was a bit of both); ‘Practical, Daddy,’ she
would always have replied in a small uninteresting voice used only on him. Oliver and Elizabeth hated him. It was only affection for their own mother, May, that prevented them from being rather
horrible to poor old Daddy. As it was, Oliver called him Daddo – in quotes –and gave him earnest, frightfully unsuitable Christmas presents which he then kept asking about. He’d
made him a Friend of Covent Garden, for instance, and given him a whole book of photographs of ballet dancers and books about pygmies and Kalahari Bushmen which said how wonderful and civilized
they were when Oliver must know perfectly well that Daddy thought black men and ballet dancers were the
end
. . Elizabeth was not so bad, but she thought that everything her brother did was all
right, and they were always having private jokes together and May just laughed at them and said, do be serious for a moment, not really wanting them to be at all.

I
must be. I’m getting married. I must get dressed. She got up from the dressing-table and slipped off her multi-coloured Japanese kimono. All her underclothes were new. Her skin
had now reverted to milky-whiteness. She was tall, big-boned and an old-fashioned shape. She had, indeed, the heavy brows, beautiful eyes, slightly Roman nose and square jaw that were typical of du
Maurier. Modern underclothes did not suit her – the gaps were not alluring, but faintly embarrassing – they embarrassed
her,
at any rate. She suffered intermittently from hay
fever, mastitis and acne, and anti-histamine, unboned bras and calamine lotion fought an uneasy battle with the anxieties of her nervous, gentle temperament. Today it was the mastitis that was
giving her trouble; her brassière was too tight, but it was the one she had worn for fitting her dress – she couldn’t change it now. All the dressing and undressing in marriage
must be so difficult – if one hated doing it even in shops when trying on clothes, what would it be like in a bedroom with a man, an audience of one? And the
same
one at that? Not that
she meant . . . Poor Alice had an unfortunate capacity for confounding herself – even when alone, even with what could fairly be described as innocently random thoughts: she conducted a great
deal of her spare and private time (and there had been a good deal of that because she was rather shy) with some anonymous, jeering creature who seemed only to exist in order to trap her with some
inconsistency, some banal or lewd or plain dotty remark which it waited for her to make.
She
was the last person in the world to want hundreds of men watching her take off her clothes . . .
Sneering, incredulous silence.

She walked over to her wedding dress which hung stiffly with the long sleeves sticking out, not looking as though it could fit anyone. The trouble with satin – even cut on the cross
– was that it fitted you as long as you didn’t move at all; the moment you did, great rifts and creases and undercurrents of strain determined themselves: this had happened at every
fitting, and an angry woman in mildewed black, who combined a strong odour of Cheddar cheese with the capacity to talk with her mouth bristling with pins, had stuck more pins into the dress (and
Alice) with no lasting effect.

The veil would conceal a certain amount. It had been carefully arranged in an open hat-box which now lay on May’s bed, but on approaching the box, she discovered that it was entirely full
of her cat, Claude, who lay in it like a huge fur paperweight. She mentioned his name and he opened his lemony eyes just enough to be able to see her, stretched out a colossal paw and yawned. He
was an uneasy combination of black and white: on his face this gave him an asymmetrical and almost treasonable appearance. His pads were the bright pink of waterproof Elastoplast, and between them,
the thick, white fur was stained pale green. He’d been hunting, she told him as she lifted him off her veil, and he purred like the distant rumble of a starting lorry. He was heartless,
greedy and conceited, but the thought of going to Cornwall (the honeymoon) without him made her feel really sad. She had not liked to ask Leslie whether he could live with them in Bristol, and,
indeed, it had crossed her mind that even if Leslie agreed, Claude might not. His standard of living in Surrey was exceptionally high – even for a cat – as apart from two large meals a
day that he ate primly out of a soup plate, he procured other, more savage snacks such as grass snakes and rabbits, that he demolished on the scullery floor at times convenient to himself. Enough
of him, she thought, putting him tenderly on the bed. He got up at once, shook his head – his ear canker rattled like castanets – and chose a better position eight inches from where she
had put him. Her veil was quite crushed and spattered with his hairs – he moulted continuously in all his prodigious spare time. ‘What on
earth
am I doing?’ she thought as
she hung the veil on the back of a chair. ‘Starting a new life without Daddy, I suppose.’

There was a whimsical fanfare of tapping on the door, and before she could answer, Leslie’s sister, Rosemary, came in. She was dressed from head to foot in pink organza: it was she who had
chosen the bridesmaids’ dresses. Pink, she had said, was her colour, and it certainly provided a contrast to the dark, wiry curls and the mole on the left side of her face. She was older than
Leslie, unmarried, and with a robust contempt for all Englishmen. When younger, she had been an air hostess, and so was able to back up this contempt with many a passing romantic interlude in which
men, generically described by her as continental, invariably demonstrated their superior approach to ladies. She regarded her brother’s marriage to Alice with almost hysterical indulgence,
and had arranged so much of the wedding that Alice felt quite frightened of her.

‘Here I am!’ she exclaimed. Her nails were far too long, thought Alice as Rosemary twitched the wedding dress off its hanger.

‘In view of the time, I think we ought to pop this on – why – whatever
has
happened to your veil? That awful cat!’

Alice, inserting her arms into the tight, satin sleeves (it was rather like trying to put back champagne bottles into their straw casings), mumbled something defensive about Claude and at once,
without warning, her eyes filled with tears. Rosemary, like many obtrusive people, was quick to observe any such physical manifestations of dismay and to rush into the breach she had made for the
purpose. She would get the veil ironed; Sellotape was wonderful for removing hairs; Alice must cheer up – it would not do for her to meet Leslie at the altar with red eyes. But at least she
went, leaving Alice to struggle with the tiny satin buttons – like boiled cods’ eyes – that fastened the sleeves at her wrists. ‘Something borrowed,’ she thought
miserably. She would far rather borrow Claude’s hairs than anything else she could think of. If only May would come; would stop being tactful, and come, and just stay with her until it was
all over . . .