Odd Girl Out (19 page)

The pub that Edmund chose, or found, was one of those awful ones where the brewers had done everything, with power and no imagination whatsoever, to entice the young. This
meant Musak: horrible sub-fluorescent lighting; a kind of hygienic olde-worldeness that was neither comfortable nor intimate. It had, in fact, a small proportion of the regulars it had always
enjoyed, plus a few people – like Edmund – who didn’t know what they were in for. The landlord had Second World War moustaches, and his wife looked as though nothing good had
happened to her since the late forties. It was difficult to get food: ‘We don’t do snacks in the evenings: there is the Tudor Lounge.’ This meant ploughing through a three-course
meal of the kind that has rightly made Britain infamous on the Continent. The menu was written in Continentalese: everything upon it turned out to be canned, frozen and overcooked. But there was a
Magicoal in the huge neo-Tudor fireplace, and they had a Cherry Heering each to warm them up. Arabella stood in front of the Magicoal, lifting her white cardigan to get her jeans warm, and Edmund
sat very near her, simply enjoying her presence. At this point, neither of them had discovered that snacks at night were unavailable, and for different reasons, neither cared. Edmund had veered
from not wanting Arabella to take him seriously to not wanting to spoil what seemed to him the most serious day in his life. He had drunk enough throughout the day to feel able to cope with this
unfamiliar kind of euphoria. It was not that all feelings of responsibility had left him, so much as he realized that as he had so many, he was due for a change. It would be madness to throw away
the chance of dinner alone with Arabella when the – as far as he knew – only opportunity for it occurred. He also felt – rather defiantly – that his recent behaviour in the
car warranted some return. He felt that now there were a thousand things he wanted to ask her, to know about her, nearly all of them neither the kind of questions that could be asked unless they
were alone, or if asked, not answered. Her abortion: the man concerned had begun to concern
him.
He must be a rotten creature, or else the kind of competition – i.e. with a licence to
be rotten and get away with it – that Edmund did not at all care for. She must be protected from such ventures. She stood now, four feet away from him, her legs apart, her hands lifting the
jersey, her little glowing drink upon the phoney oak table. A spotted, rather nasty, timid and pathetic waiter (the very combination of person that Edmund could not bear) had now arrived with the
menu.

‘Darling,’ he read aloud, ‘Scampi à la Provençale. Escargots. Smoked salmon. Vichyssoise.’

She made a friendly, delicious intimate face. ‘Oh dear. Smoked salmon sounds the safest.’

‘Two smoked salmon.’

‘Right. Now, listen:
Coq au vin. Rognons sautés avec le vin rouge. Canard à l’orange. Turbot Hollandaise.’

‘Duck, please.’

‘Two duck, then.’

‘And vegetables, m’sieur?’

‘Mushrooms and a green salad,’ she said before he could read anything.

The waiter bowed: ‘Here is the wine list.’

The wine list was not very long, and, as far as Edmund could see, filled with uninteresting and overpriced wines. He decided to decide without asking her upon a St Emilion, which would probably
turn out to be dull, but which, he felt, they would not notice.

‘Have another drink,’ he said; he wanted one himself.

She drained the small glass and held it out to him.

‘Yes please. It’s delicious.’

At the bar, the landlord’s wife served him enviously. Whatever her idea of fun might be she clearly wasn’t having it, and did not much enjoy seeing other people full of any kind of
cheer. When Edmund remarked upon the filthy weather (he had to say something) she said give her Majorca any day, and this was England for you. He decided against offering her a drink; she simply
wasn’t nice enough.

‘I’ve stopped actually steaming, so I might as well sit down. How long do you think dinner will be, because I’d better make this drink last, and they are a bit like chocolates,
you drink them without noticing enough?’

‘Long enough for them to unfreeze the smoked salmon.’

She giggled and said, ‘And warm up bits of tepid duck. I don’t mind how awful it is, I’m famished.’

For some reason, this made Edmund look at the time. It was just after eight. He knew that Anne would be wondering what on earth had happened to him; he was never late without telling her –
she would be worrying, she might even be thinking . . .

‘Back in a minute,’ he said to Arabella, putting the cigarettes and his lighter on the table.

He had seen where the telephone was as they had come in. It was in a box and conveniently situated just outside the Gents. He went into the box and stood waiting to see what he felt he ought to
do and what he felt he could bear to do. It was the kind of decision that he was utterly unused to and found that he very much disliked. He would far rather have done nothing at all about it, but
he recognized that even doing nothing at all would, in fact, be doing something. It would be leaving Anne in the dark as to his whereabouts. He’d have to telephone her. So he did.

‘But where
are
you?’ she said, at least twice. She sounded either cross, or a bit drunk, or both.

‘At a pub. We had this awful puncture, you see, and I simply couldn’t get the wheel off and had to walk miles to get help, and Arabella got soaked to the skin, so I really had to
take her somewhere to dry off.’

‘Well – when
will
you be back? The duck’s ready now.’

‘We can’t just yet, I’m afraid. She – she wanted a bath, and somehow we couldn’t do that without agreeing to have a meal here.’

‘I can’t see what on earth having a bath has got to do with a meal. I – ’

‘Well, I can’t explain now. It’s the
place.
They aren’t exactly cooperative. But I thought she’d get pneumonia if she didn’t have a bath and get her clothes
dry, and you can’t just march in anywhere and ask for that.’

‘But where
are
you?’ she asked for the third time.

‘It sounds extraordinary,’ he said, making it sound just like that, ‘but I really don’t know. I just took the first pub that came along.’

‘But – ’

‘We’ll be back as soon as she’s bathed and we’ve eaten something. Don’t worry, darling.’

‘But where did you
get
the puncture?’

Edmund waited one second, and then cut them off by putting his finger firmly on the receiver rest. Then he replaced the telephone, stood for a moment, and went to wash and think what lies he
would have to ask Arabella to tell. The fact that they were a bare seven miles from Mulberry Lodge was bad; that could not be told: therefore they must not have had the puncture where they had in
fact had it. God, he thought, and this is only the beginning, or possibly, the
end
of something. He was in a state (his, and most people’s usual one) of not in the least wishing to
have to decide something that would radically alter his life. He would have liked to feel that he had simply acquired another dimension, as it were; not a matter of conflict, or alternatives, just
an enrichment.

When he returned to Arabella, she said, ‘They’ve been to say our dinner is ready.’

They finished their drinks and went into the dining-room. This was a mixture of what is laughingly known as roughcast, imitation beams and hideously expensive flock and gold wallpaper. They sat
at a small, round, oak table with uncomfortable oak chairs. There was a plastic rose and sprig of lily of the valley in an earthenware juglet. There were paper napkins and cutlery of the kind that
you could take anywhere and do anything to without impairing its original and barely functional appearance. Forks with two prongs, blunt knives and spoons with so small a declivity that you would
rather have drunk your soup from a bowl.

The smoked salmon arrived with a tiny wedge of lemon, and curling pieces of brown bread and butter.

‘Could we have the wine now?’ Arabella asked. ‘I simply love wine with smoked salmon.’

Throughout the – expectedly terrible – meal she was very gay and entertaining, telling him stories about holidays spent with Clara in various emotional and geographical
circumstances. It all started with her saying how funny it was that the only, what she described as serious, men in her mother’s life whom she had not known had been Edmund’s father and
her own. ‘Mine died in a matter of weeks, leaving her pregnant with me – I bet that made her furious . . .’

‘Why do you bet that?’

‘Well – she’s never had any others, has she? And it can’t be for want of opportunity. Well, so my poor father passed on as Nan put it, and yours, I suppose, was far too
dignified ever to come trying to have reconciliation scenes and borrow money.’

‘No – he would never have done either of those things.’

‘Well – the ghastly violinist did: he never stopped: cables, flowers, awful scenes like silent films with him on his knees with his arms round her crying and screaming in Hungarian.
Saying she’d ruined his art. It’s funny how often people say that to each other. It’s about the most difficult thing to ruin, I should have thought, if one had any in the first
place. Anyhow, I always seemed to be about, and my mother learned to say “not in front of the child” in about six different languages, but as the situations were practically identical,
of course I always knew what she meant.’

‘Weren’t any of them nice to you?’

‘Oh –
nice.
They thought they were: they all tried to kind of bribe me or show how good they were with me until they realized that my mother didn’t care a damn what they
were like with me, and then, of course, no holds were barred. For them, that is.’

‘Didn’t your mother mind? Or find out?’

‘Only once: with Greg. But I think she sort of knew, because I kept suddenly being sent off to Summer Schools and courses and awful group holidays, and it was usually after someone or
other had made a pass. This duck is awful, isn’t it? I don’t care though: I wasn’t being rude, just saying what it is.’

Edmund, who had long ceased feeling at all hungry, had finished the wine, and was wondering whether to get at least a half-bottle more, began to feel that time was running out, nothing that he
wanted to say had been said, and worse, nothing that he
had
to say was getting said either.

‘Then there was this awful old thing called Jean-Pierre Louis. Le Comte de Rossignol. He looked like a dirty old lithograph of someone: kind of grey and dry and full of dull good manners
and no feeling at all. He had a vast château somewhere in the middle of France that he’d inherited really because nearly all of his family were mad. Actually, he could easily have
murdered them. He had frightfully thin lips with lines going vertically down on to them, and his eyes were so close together that I honestly thought they might run into each other one day. His nose
was very long and pointed and he could wriggle it like a rabbit: he was always doing it when things weren’t in good taste which they hardly ever were. He was foul to servants and animals, and
he collected seventeenth-century pewter – very pretty – and all his cousins were spotty and speechless and they loathed me and I loathed them. Clara did up the house, and gave parties,
and to begin with he liked it, but then he got fussy about who she asked. He had very bad breath – I should think it was constipation – it often goes with meanness, have you noticed? He
was incredibly mean. He crept about turning off the heating and the lights. It was a jolly good thing he mostly kissed people’s hands or they would have fainted. Could I have a cigarette now?
I’ve just about got to the end of this athletic duck.’

Edmund gave her one, asked for coffee, and while it was coming, took a deep breath and said, ‘Arabella! Arbell! What are we going to do?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well – oh, you must know what I mean.’

‘I won’t be sure till you say it.’

‘After today – this afternoon – it’s not the kind of thing I usually do. I can’t – ’

She put a hand out over the table and touched his. ‘Don’t. You’ll simply foul everything up with plans and promises and lies. Just leave it.’

‘But it isn’t as simple as that. You might like it to be and it may well
be
so for you, but I’m married.’

‘Well, that makes things simpler for you than for me, doesn’t it? I mean, you love Anne, and there she is. By the way, did you ring her up?’

‘Yes. And immediately I found I was lying to her. That’s what I mean. You’re not a child. You must understand some of what I’m talking about.’

‘I’m certainly not a child. Well – what lies did you tell her?’

The coffee arrived at this moment, and they waited in silence while it was poured out.

‘I told her – I implied – that the puncture had taken place miles away, and that you got so wet you had to go somewhere to dry your clothes and have a bath. And we
couldn’t do that without having dinner in the place.’

‘Why couldn’t you just say that we had a puncture and I got wet and then we got hungry?’

‘Because we’re about fifteen minutes’ – no less – drive from home, and there was no reason why we shouldn’t have gone there.’

‘I didn’t know that. Well, why didn’t we?’

‘Because,’ he said, feeling both angry and enslaved, ‘I
wanted
to have dinner alone with you. I thought you wanted that too.’

‘Oh,’ she said wearily. ‘Want. In my experience, men want things to happen, make them happen, and then tell lies. I just
let
things happen. I don’t tell
lies.’

‘For God’s sake, I didn’t take you to that house in Barnet to – I’m not
trying
to put any onus on you: I’m just trying to explain that, for one reason
or another, you
are
going to have to tell lies.’

‘Anne isn’t going to say, “Have you had a fuck with Edmund?” She’d never do that.’

Edmund, shocked by this expression, said, ‘You don’t understand.’

‘I understand very well. Isn’t this situation all the wrong way round? Oughtn’t you to feel jolly glad I’m not picking the whole situation over, today, and the future,
and making some sort of horrible mincemeat of it? I’m not, you see. I don’t expect anything of people. I don’t live with a kind of emotional security, like cash in the bank. We
probably shan’t ever do that again. There it is. You can’t have it both ways, and most of the time most people don’t have it any way at all. I
do
know that, I can tell
you.’