Odd Girl Out (17 page)

When he returned to the car, Arabella was asleep. He remembered then that she had also wanted cigarettes, and so went off to find a tobacconist. But there was a nearby pub, and as it was nearly
six, he decided to blow the Gauloises, and buy any old fags and half a bottle of brandy. They might both need it before the day ended.

She was still asleep. Asleep, she looked like an eighteenth-century sculpture. He wondered then about the different ways of depicting women in art. Paint them in clothes, draw them naked, and
sculpt them in repose seemed a satisfactory formula – at least for Arabella. He got into the car, and touched her right cheekbone with his hand. As he did this, and she awoke, he trembled,
with a renewed and agonizing longing.

He said with tentative daring, ‘Here are your clothes, my darling Arbell.’ He thrust the paper carriers into her lap. ‘But how are you to get into them?’

‘Oh – that won’t be difficult: I can change in the car, without anyone noticing.’

Can you indeed! he thought, but he said, patiently, ‘Do you mean while I’m driving, or while we’re parked here?’

They were in a back street, but it was only a little past six and the sun had not set. ‘Oh – here. I’d better see what you’ve brought me, and then I’ll think of the
cleverest way to put them on.’

‘Although, really,’ she added, as she undid all three carriers, ‘as I’m getting from indecent to decent, people ought to be grateful: policemen and so on.’

She was pleased with the trousers and delighted by the colour of the shirt to go with them. The white cardigan she liked, she said, but it would not last on her for five minutes. ‘The
moment I wear white something happens to it.’ She wrapped it round her shoulders, and began undoing and wriggling her arms out of the white crêpe top.

‘Would you undo the buttons on the shirt for me?

‘You see? I’m awfully good at this. Do you know why?’

When he didn’t answer, she said cheerfully, ‘Because my Nan used to dress all inside her dressing-gown with her back turned to me in the mornings. Then I thought it was just a
Nannie’s thing. She was being decent, of course.’ She had fastened the shirt now, and put the cardigan over her knees. ‘This is going to be worse, because they’ve shrunk so
frightfully, and
I
can’t stand up. Oh – new pants as well! That was thoughtful of you.’

Edmund, to give himself something to do, and to take his mind off the relentless feeling that he was parting from her body exactly when he couldn’t bear to, lit one of the cigarettes, and
took a swig of brandy.

‘Oh! Light me one! Surely you didn’t get brandy and them at Marks?’

‘No. I went to a pub. You said cigarettes, and I felt like the brandy. Do us both good. Stop us catching cold.’

‘Do us good all right. But you needn’t worry about colds: we shan’t catch them. Not in those circumstances.

‘You see – if the hood was
down
, I could have stood up to get the jeans on. As it is, I’ll have to get out of the car. Still, thanks to the pants, it’ll only be
decent exposure.’ She opened the door, thrust her feet into the jeans and drew them up her. He handed her the cigarette he had lit for her as she got back into her seat, and then thought that
if he took his jacket off, at least his shirt would dry.

‘Do you know what I would like now?’

He handed her the brandy bottle. She drank some and said, ‘Well that, certainly, but what I feel like now is a ham sandwich. Shall we go to a pub, do you think, on the way home?’

‘All right.’ He wanted, or felt that it was essential, to talk to her, to define in some way their state, and difficult though this might be in any circumstance, it would clearly be
worse while he was trying to drive through the rush-hour traffic. ‘Here’s your money: I owe you for the brandy, I’m afraid.’

‘No you don’t. Think of all the booze I’ve consumed during the last week.’

He took her to a pub on Campden Hill, that he knew had a back garden where one could drink in summer. It was early enough for them easily to find a bench and table, but full enough for him to be
conscious of the way in which other people looked at Arabella. This filled him with pride and at the same time caused him embarrassment: he simply was not accustomed to being either envied or
speculated upon. It would make talking to her even more difficult, he thought.

‘What would you like to drink?’

‘Just a ham sandwich. Oh yes, and a Bloody Mary. Or can’t pubs make them?’

‘I should think they could. I’m awfully sorry to ask you again, but could I borrow another of your fivers?’

‘Course. I’m dying for a loo. Where do you think it would be?’

‘I’ll ask for you while I’m ordering. You stay here and keep our bench. Don’t let anyone else take it.’

Edmund ordered, went to the Gents where he also combed his hair. This made him look at himself – trying to imagine how a stranger would see him, and also to see whether he seemed to have
changed at all on the outside. His clear-cut, rather sombre face looked back at him: the morning’s razor cut was now scarcely visible. He wondered whether his entire life had been changed, or
whether he had simply impersonated someone – to himself – or, worse, to her. Simple, she had said things should be, not easy, but simple. As he went back to the bar, he thought rather
grimly that perhaps they had had the simplicity and were now to embark upon the unease.

Arabella had collected a young basset-hound, who stood on her hind legs with her head upon her lap and her ample ears draped upon her knees. She was talking to her, and Edmund could immediately
spot the owner from his smug and indulgent expression.

‘The Ladies is inside on the right,’ he said, taking no notice of the hound, who gave him a mournful, bloodshot glance and ambled off to her owner.

Arabella took her bag and left him. Edmund had decided to drink beer as he had the drive (and God knows what else) before him, but he, too, had found that he wanted to eat. The garden had that
curious smell of wet soot that so often occurs in London after heavy rain. Occasionally, drops fell from the trees in next-door gardens. He drank some of his bitter and had a momentary feeling of
pure and carefree happiness. Here he was, in a pub on a summer evening with a beautiful girl whom he hardly knew, but with whom he had had the most extraordinary and exciting experience of his
life: without warning, too; suddenly, he, who had spent ten or more years of pleasant but naturally familiar routine, had been violently and completely moved from it. Moved, he supposed, rather
than removed. For what did she expect? Arabella? She had not so far behaved as though she expected anything, but this might simply be because she was so sure of what she expected. For her to think
that what had happened by the lake was a mere, isolated incident was intolerable for him, but anything else she might think could well prove to be that too.

When she returned, nearly all the dozen or so people in the garden either stopped talking to each other, or continued with their heads turned in her direction. She sat down and immediately
attacked the plate of sandwiches. ‘Some are for me,’ Edmund said in the kind of way that he hoped would publicly establish that they were simply very old friends.

‘All right. Eat away. They are good, aren’t they?’

When the sandwiches were gone, they had cigarettes and drank their drinks in a silence that Edmund broke, rather desperately, by saying, ‘I’m sorry if this seems to you idiotic and
naive and all that, but how do you feel – about me – I mean?’

She turned to look at him and said, ‘How do
you
feel about
me
?’

‘I can’t tell you here. At least, I’m not even sure if I know: what I mean is, what did you
want
out of the situation?’

‘I just wanted you to love me more.’ And when he didn’t reply, she said, ‘Has it made you do that?’

There was a pause: he shut his eyes, because again, for a moment he felt dizzy, aching for the need of her, but lightheaded with some nameless relief: then he answered, ‘Yes. Yes, it has
made me feel that.’

‘Oh good!’ she said warmly; like someone admiring some public, athletic, or artistic achievement. ‘That’s the thing. We mustn’t be late for dinner, because Anne
will have made a super one, I bet, so shouldn’t we go?’

Jettisoning his view of guilt, alternatives, relative values and responsibility, Edmund decided to take what seemed to him an extraordinary (and probably false) attitude at its face value, and
said with what sounded to him like totally false sophistication, ‘Yes, we’d better.’

So they went: down Church Street and Wright’s Lane on to the Cromwell Road in order to reach the M4. The weather was changing again. The sun, surrounded by livid colour, was sinking, but
clouds were crowding it, and it was clear that there was going to be another storm. Driving was slow: they were scarcely out of London before the rain began again, this time with a fierce,
professional insistence. They had hardly gone ten miles before the puncture occurred. Edmund, who had been in the fast lane, had with difficulty to manoeuvre himself to the left and hobble to the
hard shoulder. The tyre was absolutely flat. For a moment, Edmund simply sat cursing. Punctures were sufficiently rare to seem an outrage. The rain drummed down on the canvas roof; the huge road
was glistening and roaring with traffic; he knew that the jack was a brute to use, and that the wheel, originally put on by a garage, would be horribly stiff to get off. So ‘Damn the bloody
thing,’ he said again.

‘I’ll help you.’

‘Oh no you won’t. There’s only one mac, and not a single Marks and Spencer between here and Henley.’ He got the macintosh from the back of the car, found the torch that
he kept for map reading, and got out. The boot opened, but he had then to lever up what felt like an asbestos sheet with nothing to get hold of, under which would be the spare and tools. Lorries,
which were sticking more faithfully than usual to the nearside lane, drove past in an irregular stream, but regularly spraying him with water. He got out the tools and began struggling with the
jack. Unfortunately for him, it was a nearside back tyre, so that he did not even have the intermittent advantage of the headlights of the deluging lorries. The skies were so dark with the storm
that the kind of evening summer light that in any other circumstance there would have been, was not there. The jack slipped twice after he had begun to wind it. He began to realize that he would
probably have to ask Arabella to help in the end, as he would not be able to undo the incredibly tight bolts unless he had someone holding the torch. He got the jack properly into position and
wound it laboriously to the required height. By now, the lorries were unnerving him: they made so much noise, and seemed to come so near that it was hard to believe that he was really out of their
way. Arabella opened her window, stuck her head out, and said, ‘Are you OK? Sure you don’t want any help?’

‘Not yet, anyway. Thank you,’ he said.

But the real troubles were to come. He got the hub-cap off the wheel, but then found that he was utterly unable to move a single one of the bolts. He heaved, and turned, and half strained his
wrist, but nothing moved at all. The lorries went rolling by. Trust them not to stop, he thought, and then thought that if he saw a man changing a tyre on a pouring night, the chances were that he
wouldn’t, either. He had one more go, and gave up. He’d have to get help of some kind, although God knew how far he would have to walk down this murderous road to find it. He went back
to Arabella.

‘It sounds feeble, I know, but I can’t shift the bolts on the wheel at all. I’ll have to get help.’

‘There was a sign saying “telephone half a mile” a little way back.’

‘Well – you stay here: you’re quite safe, and I’ll go and telephone. I’ll leave you the cigarettes and the brandy.’

‘Poor you,’ she said, ‘what a ghastly bore.’ She smiled at him, and it lasted him for at least fifty yards. After fifty yards there was no chance of a telephone, and he
had the choice of walking down the slope or upon it, and running the risk of being run over by a lorry. Quite an easy choice to make, he thought, lurching down the slope, and as he thought this,
stumbled, turned his ankle and fell full length on to what seemed like oily grass. When he got up he could only limp, with pain. There were lights of a housing estate below him. He decided to make
for them.

It was curious, Anne found, how her mind ran on Waldo, about whom she tried, and usually successfully, never to think. It was all right while she was shopping. She bought a
duck for the evening meal, cod’s roe, various cold meats and salamis from the shop that had such things; cheeses in different stages of ripeness, an ox tongue to cook; some ox liver for
Ariadne, who adored it, and certainly would need good food for the next few weeks; some crabs from the Walrus, who was alone, the Carpenter being on holiday: ‘He can’t stand them:
it’s the wife who makes him do it. Comes back a wreck. He’s never known what to do with himself without his TV and the fish. There you are, madam. Three lovely young crabs. I’ve
removed the parts we can’t fancy. Going away this year, are you? Oh well – there’s nothing like home. Brian says the one thing he can’t stand is a new experience.’
Anne also went to buy selected tins, pimento, anchovy, sardine, tomato purée. Then she got herself a new comb and some sandals and returned to silent, sunlit Mulberry Lodge.

For lunch she had a picnic under the cedar and read
The Wedding Group.
At half past two, she reluctantly abandoned this pleasure, got into her jeans and started weeding the main
herbaceous border. She had not mulched it enough: weeds were rampant: phlox needed staking: dead heads of roses had to be cut: the spin trim to be used for the grass borders. But once she had
stopped shopping and reading, her thoughts ran alternately upon Arabella’s day in London, and her own brief and horrible life with Waldo. She had met him in a pub; she remembered how he had
been surrounded by a circle of acquaintances who were being entertained by him. He had never been a good or successful actor, but remembering that night, she realized why he had wanted to be one at
all. He was at his best with people he hardly knew; met casually with drinks available. Then he could make a remarkable impression as, indeed, he had upon her. He had had, no doubt still had, a
beautiful voice; he was a good, if repetitive story teller (oh, how she had got to know those set pieces that seemed to occur so casually, by heart), and he treated all women he met, irrespective
of their age or appearance, with a courtly admiration. If, as she was, they were clearly unattached, he treated them to even more of the same, and on this evening, Anne had felt dazzled by seeming
to have attracted more of his attention than at least three other girls more obviously attractive than she. It was long afterwards she found that he had slept with two of them, and that the third
was a lesbian. When they had married, she had thought of their lives in terms of her looking after a potentially great artist, hitherto incapacitated by lack of the right care and feminine
background. He had encouraged her in this, and the first bad moment had come when he said, waving a huge, unpaid telephone bill, ‘But you have four thousand a year. This little thing will be
nothing to you.’ Of course she had had nothing of the kind. She had come into a small legacy of fifteen hundred pounds, and being young, and covertly underprivileged as she had always been in
the rectory in Leicestershire, she had launched out into a new wardrobe, a holiday in Italy, and a few objects that made her look as though she was financially comfortable. When she told him, he
pretended that it made no difference, but from that moment, that was exactly what it did. It must, she felt, be pretty awful to feel that you have been married for your money if you’ve got
it, but somehow it was worse, feeling this when you hadn’t. You had no choice, she discovered. If she had had money, she could perhaps have paid for his good humour; as things were, she could
do nothing of the kind. When she had thought herself pregnant, she had thought he would be pleased: he took it so operatically in his stride that she did have fleeting anxieties. But, when she had
married and had found herself, as it turned out,
not
pregnant, his attitude had quickly reverted to what, she then understood, it must always have been. His attitude was that she had trapped
him – in more ways than one. They had a very small, but mercifully rent-controlled flat in Fulham: he took to using it simply as somewhere to sleep things off, change his shirts, and
occasionally, if he felt like it, eat a meal she had prepared. She soon found that if ends were to meet at all, she must get some sort of job, and so took manuscripts home from an agency and did a
good deal of exceedingly hard underpaid work. Waldo’s behaviour to her, she realized afterwards, had, from the moment he had discovered that she was as poor as he, been designed to get rid of
her at almost any cost. Eventually, having spiritlessly endured his indifference, sneering (her class, her appearance, her total lack of artistic talent all came in here) she was galvanized by his
unexpectedly knocking her across the room when he came back one night angry-drunk and she had not made him a meal. The shock, the cut on her forehead, the feeling of sick fright that she could ever
have tried to spend her life with someone so alien and hostile, forced her to escape. She remembered now rinsing the dishcloth under the kitchen tap and holding it to her forehead for what seemed
ages until it stopped bleeding, and then, early the next morning, while he was still asleep, packing one case and leaving. She had had breakfast at an A.B.C. near South Kensington, and then,
feeling that she was still far too near his territory, had walked all the way up Exhibition Road to the Park, and had sat on a seat by the Serpentine. ‘He might have killed me,’ she had
kept thinking. Indeed, had she stayed, there was a very good chance that he might do just that, by mistake, of course, as he seemed to do most things.