Odd Girl Out (28 page)

‘Yes: yes, I must. But the difference is that Clara does seem to be my only living relative, and I think I must secretly be somebody who’s meant to have a lot of them, and if I just
get out as far as she’s concerned, where
to
? I just seem to know a lot of people in the
wrong
way, if you see what I mean. I mean people you go to parties with, or skiing or
swimming or anyway are generally meant to be well with and having a jolly good old expensive time with, but nobody who I could ring and say I just feel awful and I haven’t a penny and
don’t know what to do. Clara has always held money over my head ever since I can remember, and it must have worked a bit, because honestly I don’t know now what I’d do without
it.’

Anne said, ‘When Edmund comes back, perhaps he would be able to find out whether you
have
got any money that is really your own. Then you could claim it, and then you would feel
freer.’

‘And if he found out that I
haven’t
got any money of my own?’

‘Then, at least you would know. You could choose. A lot of people don’t have money, you know. And it doesn’t force them into being unhappy.’

‘Well, I know I’ve got a little. I could probably buy a very small branch-line disused railway station and live in it with some animals.’

‘Have some raspberries.’

‘That reminds me. Hang on a minute.’ She went to the fridge and brought out the bowl of raspberries. Then she fetched a smaller bowl of whipped cream. Encircling its apex was the
crystal and enamel ring.

‘That’s your third, and last present: for the time being. I thought it looked better on cream than cotton wool – even Boots’ best. You take it, and lick the cream off and
put it on,’ she added.

Anne, looking once at the eager, tear-stained face, did simply as she was told. The ring fitted her third finger. It was very beautiful. She said so.

‘It’s nothing. It’s just what money can buy,’ Arabella said in her hard childish voice.

‘Darling Arabella – you don’t feel that you have to bribe me?’

‘No. No, of course I don’t. I just thought that you might like it.’

At this point, Ariadne leapt neady up on to the table beside Arabella and began systematically cleaning the crab from the cloth off her face. Anne looked down at the extremely pretty ring: it
was exactly the kind of ring that she most liked; it only seemed passingly strange that it should have been given to her by Arabella rather than by Edmund. But then, over the years, she had become
used to only being given presents by Edmund. She looked across the table at Arabella whose tears had not stopped, although Ariadne was making pretty good headway with them.

Arabella said, ‘Bribed by crab. It’s because I dried my face with that crabby cloth.’

Anne said, ‘But she also loves you.’

‘Does she? Does she really?’

‘Of course she does. Otherwise she would never have had her children in your bed.’

Arabella put out a hand and stroked Ariadne’s back long and lovingly. Ariadne arched her back, rubbed her cheek against Arabella, and then got on with the job.

‘I love my ring. It isn’t at all just what money can buy. Think of all the awful things that that can do. Horse brasses, and milk chocolate, and dahlias and cocktail cabinets –
’

‘You really
do
like it?’

‘I told you – I love it. Thank you, darling.’

Arabella looked at her so intendy when she asked the last question, and also while it was being answered, that Anne felt suddenly shy – not exactly ill at ease, nor embarrassed, but plain
shy. The silence that followed promoted a feeling of tension which had something oddly exciting about it. We are sitting at the kitchen table having dinner and the cat is here, so why do I wonder
or care about what will happen next?

‘Let’s have some raspberries,’ she said.

‘You have some. I don’t think I want any.’

‘I don’t much, either.’

‘Shall we have coffee, then?’

‘Yes. And I bought a special brandy. We’ll have that.’ Ariadne left her, jumped off the table and walked silently out of the room.

Anne made the coffee, while Arabella cleared away the crab and raspberries and cream. Clearing things up made everything homely again, and they agreed to take the coffee and brandy into the
sitting-room. This was filled with a kind of plush twilight, as though the heat of the sun had actually imprinted a warmth to the colours of the room. It was at the same time romantic and snug.
Arabella, as though she had lived in the house for years, sought and found a record – a concerto of C. P. E. Bach. She played it very quietly. ‘Men always hate to play the gramophone
like this,’ she said, ‘but we aren’t men.’

Anne, pouring out the coffee, said, ‘Do you think we are much nicer than men?’

‘I think we are kinder – and more gentle with people. I don’t think we would make wars or have the kinds of fights that men seem unable to do without.’

‘Perhaps we are
kinder,
anyway.’

‘Men would say it was because we are less intelligent, and therefore have a smaller horizon. It’s easier to operate in a smaller sphere.’

‘Why should it be? I should have thought that that might make it more difficult.’

‘For men it would be. But I think more things please us, and fewer things make us ask questions. That’s probably our bodies – far more time-taking.’

‘How’s your body?’ Anne took the brandy as she asked this. ‘I mean – after what happened in London.’

‘Oh. As good as new. Or bad, as the case might be.’

‘What fascinates me,’ she continued, curling herself up on the sofa, ‘is how men harp on the inferior intellect of women. I mean – honestly – take the average man!
When you get down to average – it’s common sense you’re after – and I should have thought that women have far more of that.’

‘I don’t know. I think the intellect idea comes from women being far worse educated than men for so many years. That’s nearly always been the arrangement – unless you
were a Tudor princess or something rare like they were.’

Arabella looked at her with real pleasure. ‘I do like talking to you,’ she said. ‘None of the over- or undertones one gets so drearily accustomed to.’

‘Like?’

‘Like: “Most women seem to me wholly unintelligent, but you aren’t like most women”.’

‘Oh – that old stuff! Only men who don’t really like women say that sort of thing.’

‘But what I mean is, that we’ve been so accustomed for hundreds of years to
not
having our brains or minds sharpened, that we are at a general disadvantage. I mean there jolly
well
is
a sex structure everywhere – whereas class structures are becoming more and more parochial. You have to be a manly kind of woman to get on professionally speaking, but you can
be any sort of man and be OK.’

‘Well – you used not to be. Think of Oscar Wilde.’

They both thought of Oscar Wilde. Anne thought of John Gielgud’s performance as Jack Worthing, and Arabella thought of staying in the hotel in Sloane Street and having a drink before lunch
and someone telling her that this was where Wilde had sat drinking hock and seltzer and waiting to be picked up by the police.

‘He would have said that he had the bad luck or bad management to live in the wrong country at the wrong time. Anyway, he went through it all for them: it doesn’t count any more and
quite a lot of that is due to him. But all the women who have worked away at equal opportunities for us – from voting onwards – have always been laughed at by men.’ When she said
this Anne looked seriously at the beautiful and very young girl before her and said:

‘You’ve probably got enough money to do something good for yourself that would turn out to be good for other people.’

Arabella sighed. ‘Oh yes. A great many people would say it was the least I could do, and that is such a mothy goal, isn’t it? I suppose you mean, get myself educated –
’

‘Or qualified to do something?’

‘It would have to start with education. You know, like you can’t be a doctor without Latin and mathematics. I feel too old. Too well, too lucky, too lonely and too
far gone
to
do any of that. I expect my mind’s already gone to seed. Some people’s do, you know, at a terrifying rate. I bet that’s the kind I’ve got.’

Anne said, almost timidly, ‘You seem very intelligent to me.’

‘Do I now? Yes, but supposing as
well
as being intelligent I am also rather silly – that’s a perfectly disreputable and usual combination – particularly with
women; it would mean that I’m too silly to understand how to use my intelligence.’

Without asking each other, they both had some more coffee and brandy to go with it.

‘I think,’ Anne said peacefully, ‘that I’m just another of those people with a large amount of common sense. I don’t think I’m intelligent at all – and
certainly not gifted in any way. I’m probably what men mean when they talk approvingly about a feminine woman.’

‘Yes, I think you are. Lucky you.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, it’s much better to be approved of than not. Unless you’ve got a jolly good reason for being disapproved of, of course. Like Florence Nightingale. Or Joan of
Arc’

‘But then there are those maddening in-between women like Jane Austen and Elizabeth Fry who had jolly good reasons for what they did and managed not to get disapproved of too much while
they were doing them.’

Arabella, who did not know who Elizabeth Fry was, thought of asking, but decided not to. There seemed to be so very much to talk about, that there would be plenty of time to find out about her.
What she wanted to do was to find out about Anne. As this curiosity seemed to be mutual, they exchanged confidences, tales of the past, opinions about ideas, God, politics and back to the
differences between men and women.

‘The trouble is,
I
think,’ Arabella said – on her third brandy by now – ‘is that there are quite simply too many bloody people on this earth for them to be
free. I mean they’re bound to be exploited, just because there are so many of them. The trouble about exploitation is that it used to be quite a family or national affair, and now it’s
become a ghastly great international ideological split. It’s much more like the Protestant/Catholic rub that there used to be. I mean when people honestly thought that the other side would go
to hell – which was a real place to them – if they didn’t recant. I’m sure the communists really do feel (I mean the ones who’ve been educated to that way of thinking)
that the rest of us are bound for some kind of material hell. And we think they are. And this means that brave and intelligent people go on being martyred, and everybody puts up with wars because
they feel the other side does represent hell in the old-fashioned sense.’

‘Well – I think communism
would
be hell,’ Anne said.

‘You may be right. What I mean is that most people aren’t given the chance of knowing what anything would be like. There is no sort of free referendum, which in turn means that
millions of people can spend their lives starving or undernourished and certainly not
told
anything at all about any other possibilities for them. These people are all over the place. If you
asked them what they wanted, they’d say, enough to eat.’

‘What about the people who have got enough to eat, and still uphold situations that pretty well ensure that the others won’t have?’

‘That’s the rub. Each side would say that it was the other side who aided and abetted that.’

‘You
seem to have some ideas about what should happen. Why don’t you do something about it?’

‘Because I don’t want to have any truck with any idea unless I thought it had a chance of working. And I can’t think of any idea that would. I keep trying – but I
don’t have that peculiar gift for being actively contained within my capacities.’

‘Drink,’ she added, a moment later, ‘always makes me use longer words in a rather hit or miss manner.’

‘But it would be arrogant, surely, to think you could change the whole world? Surely the most anyone can do, is to make the best and most of whatever their piece of it seems to
be?’

‘There, my darling Anne, is our difference. You have the common sense to see that, and act upon it, and I have simply the arrogance – as you say – and consequent laziness to
think like somebody who I am not.’

The record had long since finished. Arabella got slowly up from the sofa and took it off the gramophone and turned the machine off.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said.

Upstairs, Anne said, ‘I must see Ariadne’s brood.’

They went to Arabella’s room together to find that the kittens and their mother had entirely taken over the bed.

‘Oh really,’ Anne said. ‘You can’t put up with that.’

‘What can I do about it? I know, I could come and sleep in your room. You’ve got a huge bed, and I’m a very quiet sleeper. And if you felt ill in the night, there I’d
be.’

Anne simply nodded. She felt, as it was suggested, that it would be far nicer to spend the night with Arabella than by herself. They got on so well that it could only be comforting and friendly
as an arrangement. ‘You get your night-gown and come along,’ was all she said.

When Arabella joined her some ten minutes later, Anne had arrayed herself in the new present: she was also wearing the ring. Arabella appeared in her green trailing garment, and on being asked,
opened the windows so that the smell of jasmine and night-scented stocks came into the dusky room. She drew the curtains apart, and turned off the light by her side of the bed. Then she pulled off
the green robe under which she wore nothing and slipped into bed.

‘Good night, darling Anne,’ she said, ‘you have made such a difference to my life.’

She put her arms round Anne and again they kissed. This, which now had the charm of being both new and at the same time on the way to being customary, gave each far more pleasure than the times
before. Anne felt a kind of loving admiration for beautiful Arabella, and Arabella was overcome by the warm certainty of being loved. When they had stopped kissing, Anne said, ‘You do smell
nice.’