Odd Girl Out (12 page)

Edmund, rather dazed, said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Could I have some more of that delicious potato salad, do you think?’

A moment later, her mouth full, but without, mysteriously, seeming to be so, she said, ‘Of course, food’s a very good thing in life, but I suppose when one gets to be thirty –
or old, anyway – you can’t eat what you like because of fatness or middle-age spread. My mother fights the battles of her bulges from morning till night. You quite quickly reach a
conflict between vanity and greed, don’t you? Which would
you
go for?’ She had turned to Anne.

‘Greed, I think. I don’t think I have enough to be vain about.’

Edmund looked prim, which meant, Anne knew, that he was displeased.

‘You have me.
I
don’t want you to get greedy and shapeless. I like a little vanity in women.’

Arabella turned to Anne. ‘You see? It
is
a man’s world. He really thinks he ought to be able to choose your pleasures or vices or whatever they are.’

Anne answered with a hint of tranquil disapproval. ‘I don’t mind a man’s world, you see. I seem to have a very good life in it.’

She was getting, with difficulty, to her feet, in order to change the plates. Her dress was so long that all movement was tricky if one had to use hands to carry things. Edmund sprang to his
feet to help her. Arabella put her elbows on the table and said vehemently, ‘Well, I
hate
a man’s world. There’s absolutely no valid reason for it any more. Men hide behind
us menstruating or having children (which, incidentally, neither you nor I are doing) to try and make us do all the dull things, calling it protection. It’s the biggest confidence trick of
all time. They’ve done their level best to stop us doing anything interesting, and now they say we couldn’t do these things. It’s as bad as people being against Jews in the
eighteenth century for being moneylenders, when that was all they were allowed to be.’

Edmund said mildly, and therefore, to Arabella, maddeningly, ‘Women don’t seem to have written much poetry or music. You don’t get women sculpting much, or conducting
orchestras or being architects.’

‘You get awful houses because of men being architects. And you
do
get women being poets and musicians and Prime Ministers or Presidents. And look at Elisabeth Ney.’

‘Never heard of her.’

‘There you are! A woman sculptress. Granddaughter of Maréchal Ney.’

‘But surely, it’s a point in my favour, that I
haven’t
heard of her?’

Anne said, as though to two children, ‘Have some raspberries. And stop quarrelling.’

‘We’re not quarrelling, but I do hate being wrong about things. No. I do so like being
right
about them. And if I didn’t think there was some cosmic social reason for me
being such a frost, I couldn’t bear it.’

Here the telephone rang. Edmund went to answer it, and Arabella said, ‘It’s my mother: I know it is.’

Anne gave her the cream bowl and said, ‘You aren’t a frost, of course you aren’t. You simply haven’t had time to find out what you really want. Of course it’s not your
mother,’ she added soothingly.

But it was. After what seemed a very long time to Anne, and no time at all to Arabella, he came back into the dining-room saying, ‘Clara. She’d like to speak to you.’

Arabella left the room without a word.

‘Does she know where it is?’

‘If she doesn’t, she’ll come back and ask. Edmund!’

‘Yes?’

‘She’s been having an awful time. She had an abortion yesterday.’

‘Good God! Is she all right?’

‘Seems to be. What I mean is she hasn’t talked about the man or anything, but I think she’s feeling pretty bad, and we ought to be kind to her.’

‘
I’m
not being
un
kind to her, am I?’

‘No. I just thought you ought to know.’

He walked round the table and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Good, kind Anne. You always think about other people. You are being so nice about her.’

‘I think she’s fascinating – very interesting – I mean one doesn’t often meet people of her age, and they’re quite different.’

‘I don’t think that they’re all that different from us – ’ But at that moment Arabella returned. Her face looked as though someone had taken a handful of soft snow
and rubbed it in. She was still pale, but glowing with – fright? – indignation? – resentment? Something certainly unknown to both Edmund and Anne. She said:

‘Look here. She wants me to go to Paris and to
Nice
. She wants me to go on her horrible yacht, and hang about in Paris until I can go on her horrible yacht with her ghastly friends
and one particularly ghastly one who she’ll try and get me married to.’

Anne and Edmund gazed at her, separately unable to deal with this situation.

‘It’s not that she
wants
me in Paris. She just wants me to go to bloody old Cartier and collect her emeralds they’ve been resetting so that she can wear them at least
once in Paris. Can you imagine that?’

Anne said, ‘What did you tell her?’

‘I didn’t
tell
her anything. I can’t, you see.’

Edmund said, ‘Well, really, I should have thought that Cartier could arrange to send her necklace or whatever it is to her themselves.’

‘Yes,’ Anne said, ‘and then you could join her much later if she wants you to go on the yacht.’

Arabella, who had been standing in the doorway, now turned to its post and without the slightest warning burst into wracking sobs. ‘Can’t! You don’t understand! Hates me
– just wants to spoil anything that looks like being all right!’

Anne said gently, ‘But I’m sure you needn’t go tomorrow, just because she says that. Why not agree to go in a week or so when you feel better? A yachting holiday would probably
do you good.’

Arabella turned towards them – tears were streaming down her face like rain on the window of a car with no windscreen wiper. ‘I don’t – oh! well I promise I won’t
stay here more than a week – or ten days at the most? Would that be all right?’

Edmund, who had got to his feet when she re-entered the room, now went towards her. ‘You shall stay here exactly as long as you like. Of course we don’t want to turn you out. Do we,
Anne?’

‘Oh no! I never meant that. We shall both love having you.’

‘You tell her that you are perfectly happy where you are, and that we don’t want you to go,’ Edmund said firmly.

‘Oh
please
!
You
tell her. Tell her that you want me to stay. She might believe you. She never believes me. Unless you don’t?’ She looked frantically at
each of them.

‘Is she still on the telephone, then?’

‘Yes, yes. She’s waiting to be told. Something – by someone. I just don’t want it to be me. She’ll stop my allowance – well, that’s what she’d
start with – you don’t know what she’s like.’

Anne said, ‘You tell her, darling.’

‘What?’ He was clearly uncomfortable at having to take both such a firm and distant line.

‘Tell her that Arabella wants to stay with us, and that we want to have her.’

Edmund squared his shoulders. ‘Right.’

When he had gone, Arabella flew to Anne, knelt by her chair and said, ‘You’re so kind – you don’t
know
how kind you are.’ It was extraordinary how she could
stream with tears and go on looking beautiful and not have to blow her nose, Anne thought. She wanted to feel ‘poor little thing’, but there was something about Arabella’s
appearance and state that went well beyond that. She put out her hand to stroke Arabella’s hair, and touching it, felt vaguely frightened.

In their bedroom, Edmund said, ‘You shouldn’t have tried to make her go on the yacht. She clearly didn’t like the idea, and it made her feel
unwanted.’

‘I didn’t try to do that. I honestly thought that it might be good for her.’

‘She obviously finds Clara impossible as a mother, so how could it do her good? Do you mean that you would really rather that she went?’

Anne had been struggling out of the huge caftan, which now fell in Tiepolo-like folds to her feet. ‘Of course not. No: I was trying to think for her.’

‘Of course you were. You don’t know Clara as I do. That robe is too big for you.’

‘Don’t I know it!’

‘Don’t sound so ungrateful: it was a very sweet gesture.’

Anne said – crossly – for her, ‘After all, it was
I
who told you what to say to Clara.’

Edmund came behind her and undid her brassière. ‘Don’t let’s talk about Arabella,’ he said as he pulled the straps off her shoulders and marvelled and enjoyed how he
could not encompass her breasts with his hands. Her faint, but to him erotic shame that he could always sense from his touch at these moments made it easy not to give the girl another thought.

‘Oh, darling. I’ll get into bed.’

He turned off all the lights, except the usual one, and stripped back the bedclothes. She lay on her side, half turned away from him, waiting; her short, dark hair ruffled: none of her skin
white except her breasts and the soles of her feet: she lay with one knee raised and tucked under the other so that the curves and the straight parts of her body were as clear as a good
drawing.

‘I have always wanted to say, “Have you met Mrs Cornhill? She is at her best without any clothes.”’

‘Do you really find me – all right?’

He lay pressed to her back. ‘You’ve never asked me that since the first time.’

She was so easy, and he wanted her so much that both of them could torment and delight themselves with time. It was strange that, after everything that he had said and done, the thought of
Arabella, alone in her bed, came to Anne, infiltrating the sated, familiar contentment.

‘I do hope she is not too unhappy,’ she murmured, but Edmund did not reply: he was asleep.

In Paris, the Prince said peevishly, ‘I am
not
responsible for this daughter of yours. But if she is to recur in whatever conversations we may have, naturally I am
made provident about trying to settle the situation.’

Clara was in a bath – surrounded by marble and expensive-smelling steam. ‘Well –
why
did you make me call about her? Why ask her on the yacht? Why ask –
beg
for
trouble?’

The Prince, who hated being in bathrooms when fully dressed, and was far too old and experienced to appear in any other way before Clara except at carefully prearranged moments, answered, ‘To
have her on the yacht was not for pleasure, but to get her married. That is what any parent must have in mind. She will soon become too old, too rich, too self-assured – an impossible
combination for any man of taste and discretion. Ludwig would be a match, at least.’

‘He hasn’t got a penny!’

‘There is no need for him to have a little of what she will have so much. We were at school together: his castle is virtually uninhabitable: it would give her something to do.’

Clara did not reply. The fact that Baron Potsdam was a contemporary of Vani’s, and therefore several years older than she herself admitted to being, was not something to bring up. It was
true that she would prefer Arabella to be married, and therefore morally, if not financially off her plate, but the Prince’s notion of parental discipline was fearfully outmoded, like so much
of the rest of him, and nothing but the sternest and most old-fashioned methods would ever get Arabella to the altar with Ludwig, who had absolutely nothing to recommend him except his mouldering
estate, and a title that was hardly recognized outside his own country and deeply resented within it. The trouble was that anybody whom Arabella might want to marry and whom Clara would regard as
being suitable would almost certainly turn out to be somebody she wanted herself, and would therefore probably take. Fortune hunters were out, unless they had such striking compensations that she
would prefer Arabella not to be struck first, so to speak. She yawned.

‘Give me my towel and tell Markham to tell them to bring the drinks next door. We’ll revise the guest list. Dear, dull Edmund seemed charmed to have her under his roof.’

She stood up, and wound the pale pink towel round her like a sarong. She was wearing a turban to match, and held out a tiny, freckled hand with silver-tipped nails. The Prince received it
gallantly enough, but he, too, yawned, and wished for the third time since arriving in Paris that he was dining alone or with some congenial member of his own sex at The Travellers’.

‘Have who?’

‘What do you mean, Vani?’

‘What I have been meaning is who would Edmund be charmed to have under his roof?’

‘Oh Vani! Please do not bore me like that! Arabella, of course.’

‘Sometimes I have noticed that it is as a pig that you treat me.’ He was at the bathroom door, gazing at her with the elaborate reproach that reminded her of a large and stupid
dog.

‘Not a
pig
, darling – never a pig. And I am sure,’ she added with her spasmodic candour, ‘that sometimes I must bore you also. That is what is so dreadful in life
– this continual choice between being lonely and being bored.’

The Prince again lifted her hand – this time to his thin, dry lips. ‘Of course, you are incapable of boring me, my darling.’ He did not believe in candour – never
had.

They lay in the same bed together in the dark, each one rightly sure that the other was awake, each pretending that they were both asleep. Earlier, he had tried to make love to
her – even just to have her – to try and wash some of the guilty, miserable defeat out of their systems. But it hadn’t worked. He couldn’t even get started: her hair smelled
of cooking oil; her body felt both undernourished and flabby, poor and unresponsive to his hands. But it made her cry all right: anything,
anything
could do that, he thought viciously, if
I
come into it. It seemed insulting to him that she should cry, when he was so much – so far more unhappy than she could have any idea of.
And
, when feeling like that, he should
pluck up any courage at all. He gave up fairly soon, said he was sorry, told her not to cry, wiped a bit of her face with the – not very clean – sheets (Christ – you’d think
she’d think of that, when he’d said he was coming home) and then abandoned himself to his private, dull, endlessly repetitive despair.