Odd Girl Out (32 page)

‘Why did you, then? To get me to admit?’

‘No. To get you to see.’ She lit another small cigar and leaned forward. ‘Look: I’m not a bitch or full of prurient curiosity. But if in one evening – in a few
hours – I can tell what the situation is, what do you think will happen when Edmund gets back?’

‘Men don’t notice the same things as women,’ Arabella said weakly.

‘No: not always, but it does depend on the thing. I think Edmund is very devoted to Anne, and I know she has been very happy with him, so I don’t see much future in subterfuge there,
do you?’

‘I have never been in favour of subterfuge,’ Arabella said coldly.

‘Oh. Just in favour of messing up other people’s lives.’

‘
No!
I
don’t
want to do anything to hurt Anne – or him. I just want a peaceful happy life with – people who want that too – with me in it.’

There was a short, painful silence, while the hopelessness of Arabella’s desires sank deeply into her, leaving a gap between her conscience and her heart.

This white-haired woman, who looked much older than she can have been, knew far too much too easily and soon, and the implications of this were obvious.
Anyone –
or almost anyone,
would know. A wild vision of taking Anne away with her to some little croft in Scotland where they could live on the practically nothing that five hundred a year seemed now to her to be, with
Ariadne, perhaps; there would be fish in the sea and she would not be expensive to feed . . . the whole vision went out too soon like a damp firework, leaving the desert dark.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t thought properly about it: although I know I’ve got to,’ she said at last, unaware that her voice was shaking.

‘Look, Arabella, if I may call you that, if you’re stuck, you could always come and stay with me, I’ve got a flat in London with a spare room of sorts. I won’t complicate
your life, but it might come in useful.’

‘It is very kind of you, but I am quite all right. My mother, who has a lot of money, has rented a yacht and wants me to go on a Mediterranean cruise with her. So you see, I don’t
need anyone’s help. Thank you,’ she added. Tears were burning in her eyes, and she longed more than anything to get away from this kind, perceptive stranger. I’m just
waiting,’ she went on almost inaudibly, but not realizing it. I’m just waiting until I’m out of danger from Anne’s fever – that’s all.’ She turned her back
on Len as she leaned against the fireplace and drank all the rest of her drink as quickly as possible.

Before Len could reply – if, indeed, she was going to do that – Anne returned. Almost at once, Arabella said, ‘I’m off to bed. Good night everybody.’ She gave a
general, unseeing nod to the others and left.

She undressed in what had always been supposed to be her room, went to the bathroom, got enough kittens off the bed and into an open suitcase with a cardigan in it, and got into bed. All this
time she did not put on any light in her room. She had shut the door, and the moment that she lay down, she wept. She dimly heard the others come upstairs, their exchange of good nights, and could
tell by the crack under her door that landing lights were put out. Still, she cried. From sheer practice, she had learned to cry silently: it was too long since the bitterness of being unhappy had
ever been assuaged by the presence of anyone else. I am a crier, she told herself. I cry about anything: it’s a kind of reflex – doesn’t even count. And all the times when matrons
at schools had assumed her to be homesick (homesick!) – or sickening for something; or people whom she had thought she might come to know and who had turned out to be total strangers when it
came to the frightening point, or her mother had told her to pull herself together, or her mother’s men had lied, first to her, and then to her mother – infatuation – very young
– been spoiled – (how?) – oh yes, far too much money too young: a change of scene would make all the difference, and by God, it had, but not of the kind they had in mind: all
these times had taught her secrecy and silence that only broke down when her mother assailed her in front of other people. Then she could not contain herself. But it was all frivolity; it must be:
nobody went through life with such an anonymous undercurrent of unhappiness unless there was something missing in
them.
So the bitterest tears were private ones: music was the only thing
that made her cry
and
feel joy – as though her heart was growing and the tears a release. It was not being different from other people that frightened her, it was being worse. Churches
that she had so often gone into alone at different times of the day in different countries – they had all made her weep from feeling this. Even Christ had had friends – even though they
temporarily let Him down, none the less He had them. She did not seem worthy of a friend.

She must have wept for the best part of an hour, until her eyes were nearly closed from the burning flow, and the rest of her body cold with the effort of trying to bear it or stop, before the
door opened and Anne came in. She shut the door at once, got straight into bed, and feeling the soaking pillow and wet hair, took Arabella in her arms. For a long time she didn’t say
anything, simply comforted; she didn’t ask questions or assume that she knew why Arabella was unhappy, and these two omissions made everything much better. It was as though Anne was talking
to her through her gente hands: saying that she loved her, and that everything was all right, that there was nothing wrong about any kind of true love. The only thing she said in the end was,
‘I
do
love you, and if you love me, it must be all right.’ They kissed then, and touching Arabella’s salty, soft mouth, Anne felt a tenderness, a sense of exaltation that
she must, at all costs, protect. ‘I love you also,’ was all that Arabella managed to say. They slept in each other’s arms in the same position for the rest of the night.

The next morning, Anne, kissing Arabella once more, slipped out of bed and left to make breakfast and behave as though nothing had happened. She had wondered, the previous evening with Len,
whether Len had had anything to do with Arabella’s state, but had concluded that she couldn’t have. Len had spoken of her with merely objective, intelligent kindness. Anne had known Len
during the one great affair of her life, but the man had died of throat cancer, and Len, having seen him through that with all her heart, had nothing left that she felt like giving to anybody else.
She had therefore concentrated upon her career: she was extremely good at it, and consequently reached a position that most women with careers cannot reach, since too much of their emotional energy
is siphoned off by whatever man they are involved with. To women writers, she was a mother, or very good schoolmistress, to men, a mother and a very good agent. It worked, and she was not unhappy
now. Nothing she said to Anne could give the latter any idea that she had tried to or had inadvertently upset Arabella. All the same, Anne was relieved when, after coffee and orange juice, Len
climbed into her little red car and made off for London and her office.

By the middle of his fifth week in Greece, it became clear to Edmund that there was really going to be nothing more that he could possibly do after the following week-end. The
week-end was, or had become, that admixture of business and pleasure in which Mr Andros so much excelled. They were to go out in a caique with a suitable accompaniment of pretty girls, to places
that Edmund could not possibly see without the caique. Edmund, by now, looked forward to it with simple pleasure. His life, he felt, had either been corrupted or enlarged by Mr Andros, and
whichever this might turn out to be was at the time so enjoyable that he did not much care. He had had one letter from Anne in which she had said that she had glandular fever, and that Arabella was
dealing with it admirably, and the whole thing seemed distant, and immediately distasteful. He loved his sense of not being responsible. He loved the late hours, the fact that he need only look at
and enjoy things without having to make decisions about them, and he reflected, with a touch of self-pitying defiance, that it was high time something – of this sort – happened to him.
The last night of all, Mr Andros took him to Turkoleimon, where the clam merchants with their suitcases, and the children with their gardenias and jasmine, gave him a feeling of wellbeing and
excitement that was by now familiar. This was the life: this was the country for the life. He ate clams and lobster (Mr Andros kept explaining that if only he stayed a few more weeks there would be
quail) and drank a great deal of retsina, ate a very good salad and delicious grapes. The evening blood heat of the air, the violence of the lights installed by the new mayor, the stench from the
water that the mayor had not somehow begun to work upon, all made him feel at home. The dark-haired girl with whom he had spent one – not entirely satisfactory – night, seemed on this
evening to promise better things. He was due to fly at midday on Sunday. Make the most of it. He bought a sponge for Anne and a Greek bag for Arabella, and a bottle of Citro from Naxos for himself.
He decided that in future, he would ask Sir William to send him anywhere. This was far more interesting than catching the commuter train to and from Paddington. And he felt, by now, that he could
view both Anne and even Arabella in their proper perspectives. The girl came back with him to his hotel, and they spent an enquiring night with some good moments.

Mr Andros insisted on seeing him off. His pale, rather greasy face was contorted with dismay at Edmund’s departure. They embraced awkwardly. ‘Bring back your wife. Or anyone at
all,’ was Mr Andros’s open and warm invitation. But after this time there, Edmund could not imagine being in Greece with one’s
wife.
Arabella, perhaps, but she had had none
of the – almost indigenous – desire to please that Edmund had encountered with the girls Mr Andros had provided. He got into his aeroplane, feeling heroically injured by he didn’t
know who.

When he reached Heathrow, he rang Anne, who answered almost at once. She sounded nearly aggrieved that he hadn’t given her more warning. ‘I’ll be back in about an hour, I
expect,’ he had concluded. Actually, it would be far more than that. The sun seemed muted after Greece, the sky far more compromising, and he felt almost cold until he had put on his
macintosh. He had to go to London to fetch his car, which he had left there, stupidly as he now saw. The alternative was to take a taxi from the airport home: somehow this did not appeal to him. He
decided that he needed the time the bus and fetching the car would take to adjust himself to whatever he was going to find that he felt on returning to Mulberry Lodge. How dull and ugly England
looked, he thought, as he gazed out of the airport bus window. As it was a fine Sunday, there was a good deal of traffic into London. He wondered what Marina would be doing now. Stretched on her
bed with the shutters drawn, or sitting in her office – a tourist bureau – answering telephones and foreigners, switching from her rapid, husky Greek to her enchantingly halting
English, or, indeed, probably several other languages for that matter. He remembered giving her the gardenia he had bought for her, and how she had cupped it in her hands – not olive,
nobody’s skin was the colour of any olive – more like parchment with a faindy green tinge to it. She had taken the flower, enjoyed its smell, smiled and thanked him in Greek because she
knew that he understood that word, and then with a single, most graceful movement, fastened the flower in her hair. English women would have been hopeless at that, fussing away with pins etc. and
getting it in the wrong place and having it fall out, but Marina seemed always to make only the necessary, successful movements – like a cat. He wondered whether she was missing him at all;
even giving him another thought as he was now giving her; then he stopped thinking about her. She was somehow not the kind of girl one saw again: next time he went to Athens he would find that she
was engaged or married even, and mournfully at home with children while her husband went out with girls such as she had been. On the whole, everything had turned out for the best: if he had to
confess anything to Anne, he had now a suitably distant, passing, and unreturnable-to infidelity to confess.
Much
easier than the other one: the nearer he got to that, the less he wanted to
think about it.

The bus was rushing down Cromwell Road at last: stopped at the Earl’s Court lights, but nearly there. Passengers began fidgeting with their hand luggage on the racks, putting on coats and
hats, telling each other that they were nearly there, wondering whether Marion, or Ernest, or Paul would meet them, and, if they were obviously foreign, staring ahead with that compound of apathy
and panic that the end of any hiatus in a strange country usually induces. They were safe in the bus, need do nothing about it; in a few minutes they would be called upon to struggle with the
language, find their luggage, get taxis and tell them where to go. For the first time, Edmund felt glad that he was returning home, rather than departing from it.

Edmund’s announcement of his return – unheralded by any cable – had affected both Anne and Arabella, although in different ways. In Anne it induced a kind of
nervous bustle, in Arabella a kind of clumsy aloofness. She was never to be found; did anything she was asked very slowly, dropped things, even broke a pudding-basin. Just about the time that
Edmund was due (they thought) to arrive, she said she thought she would have a bath. Anne, who was putting aspic on to eggs with a leaf of tarragon, looked up, surprised.

‘Couldn’t you have it later? I mean, after he gets here: there’s an awful lot to do.’

‘Not things that I’m much good at.’

‘Well, you could do the flowers; you’re marvellous with them, and you know what not to pick. I’ve got the fish salad
and
the bloody old raspberries to pick.’

I’ll pick the raspberries, then,’ Arabella said, almost sulkily.

‘Let’s do it all together:
please.
Darling – I know you’re worried that everything won’t be all right, but I
know
it will be. If only we –
’