Odd Girl Out (36 page)

Anne, looking from one to the other for denial, reassurance, for anything she could see that might help her
not
to understand, fell back upon saying, ‘But Edmund loves
me!’

‘I know.
I
love you, too.’

‘You can’t love two people!’

‘Can’t you? How do you feel? Don’t you love Edmund and me? Or have you decided whom you love? Don’t
you
want it both ways?’

Edmund said now, at last, and barely audible, ‘How do you mean – both ways?’

Arabella looked at Anne, but she was speechless now: she was not going to help; she was going to leave it all to her. She answered, ‘While you were away – Anne and I – we
discovered that we also loved each other.’ She looked at Anne steadily for a moment: there was still time for her to have the courage, but as Edmund also stared at Anne, she looked away. Anne
had started to blush, slowly, deeply, as the confusion of jealousy and guilt collided. Edmund looked from Anne back to Arabella, he seemed literally unable to understand either of them.

‘What do you mean, “You discovered that you loved each other”?’

‘Just that. We went to bed with each other.’

Anne, in a voice that neither of them had ever heard before, said, ‘You’ve really torn it now, haven’t you?’

Edmund asked, but in tones of near credulity now, ‘You’ve been to bed with
my wife
?’

‘Yes. Because I loved her.’

‘But you went to bed with
me
! You’re not that kind – ’

Anne interrupted venomously, ‘Behind my back! You did it behind my back!’

Edmund turned upon her furiously, ‘Well, you are hardly in a position to complain about that, are you? After, what is it, five weeks of behaving in this – this disgusting, unnatural
manner?’

‘It is Arabella who has deceived everybody!’

Arabella, her voice shaking, said, ‘I have deceived nobody. And it was
not
disgusting, don’t please say or think that. I have not told either of you lies, if that is what you
mean.’

‘Oh no, but
your
conception of morality is that you don’t have to tell anyone anything unless they ask. As far as I can see, that counts for precisely nothing.’

‘
Anne –
we’ve been talking about love – not morality!’

Before Anne could answer, Edmund said, ‘And in your view, all love is equally immoral – or perhaps amoral would be a better word for it.’

Arabella shook her head: she was finding it more and more difficult to say anything.

Anne, back on the point where her pride had stumbled over her humiliation, said bitterly, ‘How can you imagine that it would ever have occurred to me to ask you, simply because you went to
London for the day with Edmund, whether or not you had been to bed with him?’

Edmund, with equal bitterness, said, ‘Perhaps you’ve noticed, that even when you tell me
several times,
I don’t find it very easy to understand that you and Anne –
how can you ever have thought that it would have occurred to me to ask you about that?’

Anne burst into tears. Both looked at her: neither knew what to do about it. Edmund thought viciously that this was how all women behaved as a way out of anything; Arabella, clenching her hands
together, thought that whatever happened she
must not
cry.

In this she succeeded: as a result of which Anne thought her brazen and Edmund, even more unfairly, thought her callous.

Arabella got shakily to her feet and took some more brandy. Nobody said anything. Anne searched for and found a handkerchief which she held to her eyes as she rocked slowly back and forth in her
chair. This rather operatic picture of unhappiness touched neither of the other two. Arabella thought it was irrelevant, and Edmund, irritating.

Finally, making her last effort that she felt she could ever make, Arabella said, ‘The reasons that I told you this were because it is true about the child, and secondly I thought that
perhaps’ – her voice began to fail her here – ‘perhaps if we
really did
love one another, you would be glad about it: it would just be another good thing in our
lives.’

She sat down again with her brandy, finding herself unable to stand.

Edmund, not for the first time, imagined himself married to her: living with her and their child. He looked expectantly at Anne; perhaps she would provide a way out.

Anne, recovering from the shock of what she recognized to be a single interlude with Edmund, as opposed to her weeks with Arabella, started imagining Edmund permanently in Greece, out of the
way, and she and Arabella bringing up this child. But it was
Edmund
’s: this was what she couldn’t stand. If it had been some anonymous conception – how kind, how protective
and gentle she could have been! But it was not. If anybody was to have Edmund’s child, it must be she.

Arabella imagined nothing: she was simply wondering – for the hundredth time in her life – what anyone meant when they said that they loved anyone. No answer.

‘Anyway,’ she said, being very careful about her choice of words and how she said them, ‘It’s no go. I can see that. I’ll be off, then.’

‘You can’t go at this time of night! There won’t be any trains.’

The confirming blow of what she had always dreaded.

‘Well – I can go first thing in the morning. I’d better go up now, and pack.’

Anne, recovering herself, after Edmund’s – to her – conciliating remark, said, ‘But what are you going to
do
?’

‘I think you have both made it very clear that that is my business.’ She got up; stood for a moment till she felt she would be able to walk, and looked at them: at Edmund who seemed
to her to have no courage of any conviction at all, and at Anne, who had determined to have on her own terms both things both ways and never mind the lies. And she managed to think, Perhaps it
is
all my fault. Perhaps it is I who can’t love anyone: am just a kind of limpet; sticking to whatever seems to be suitable scenery. That’s awful: I must not do that.

‘Good night, both of you,’ she said, ‘and thank you for having me to stay.’

Upstairs, she packed mindlessly for hours: everything she possessed had to go into all the cases. Looking round this room, in which, in fact, she had spent so little time, she had still the
violent sense of loss and fear. She had to start again, somewhere, somehow. It was like being cast into the middle of a wood, or a desert, or a sea, entirely alone, knowing only that those who had
cast her would be glad that she had gone. When the packing was done, she lay, dressed, upon the bed, and tried to think without feeling. The knowledge that absolutely nobody in the world really
cared a damn about her when it came to any kind of point, had to be accepted and dealt with. I have no choice about people, she thought, and then, she thought, yes, she had one choice. That should
be enough for anyone. She could have the child. Nobody on earth could stop that. Discovering this, at last, made her able to weep for everything else she had lost. As usual, she made no sound.

Edmund and Anne, left in the sitting-room, spent some time just being there, their minds charged with separate, unspoken thoughts. Anne, hating it, thought, He can’t make
a decision: it has to be somebody else – usually me.

Edmund thought with that dichotomy between excitement and revulsion, There she is: my wife: she’s had an affair with a woman; but really, she wants to stay with me.
I
am supposed to
protect her from the world.

Both felt that they were there to protect the other: neither wanted the results of the protection. Each thought of what they had to do to sustain life for the other; each considered their
efforts and translated them into nobility and unselfish determination. Neither of them was prepared to consider aloud what their feelings for Arabella had been, or were. Both of them – in
different ways – wanted to regard the situation as an extraordinary, and, because of the other person’s behaviour, nightmarish aberration.

Anne looked round the familiar room that she had decorated, and collected, and made things for: the ten years that had slipped by bringing with them the imperceptible growth of comfort, and
stability and routine. The roses she had first planted had grown high up the walls round the windows; sofa covers had worn out and been replaced; they had gradually collected the pictures painted
on glass depicting the death of Nelson; had more bookshelves built. She had tried and failed to make the lampshades – had covered the chairs and stools with petit point instead. Generations
of kittens who had galloped and scrambled over the arms of chairs that now all bore the marks of their wicked pioneering (the Cornhills are
mad
about cats). The seasons; the log fires and
drawn curtains with supper on a trolley; the cold, blue twilight of the early springs with their own snowdrops or daffodils or forsythia that she arranged so well; the arguments about where they
should go for their holidays and when; looking at maps spread out in front of the fire; the recurrent discussions about whether they should keep a donkey, a parrot, a goat, or a mynah bird (but
never
, not once, a child); Christmas and their birthdays; small sieges of pleasure, and always, in between, the telegraph poles of week-ends that propped up the five weekdays and prevented
any sagging into loneliness. It had been a routine, with small, controllable variations: exactly, in fact, what she had thought she had always wanted. But if everything about it had been so right
for them, how could it be so easily disrupted? If Edmund decided to leave her . . . she would be free to make the other plan. Without looking at him, she got stiffly out of her chair and poured
some more brandy. The coffee was cold, and she did not feel like reheating it. Then she did look at Edmund, sitting with his head in his hands, and thought that they had been ten good years, and
that all that had probably happened was that she had discovered that she loved him, but
in a different way –
which, of course, he must never know, or find out. At least, she thought,
we both understand each other well enough to realize that this is no time for talking, that we both need silence and time to – to understand – get over the shock. She remained
silent.

Edmund felt, in some confused way, that everybody had let one another down: that some reparation, some explanation – but not, of course, in hot blood – was necessary. It seemed to
him that he had been shown up as narrow-minded, blind, and indecisive; and none of these aspects had ever impinged upon his view of himself until now. His old life was gone, as far as he could see:
he could not imagine that his feeling about Anne could ever return to its original state, but he could not envisage what could be put in its place. He still wanted Arabella, but felt that he ought
not to like her; he supposed that he still liked Anne, but he certainly did not want her. He wondered whether she would leave him – free to make some other plan. But would he actually want to
marry Arabella and have their child, if it came to the point? He had a feeling that she was somebody to encounter rather than somebody to live with. She seemed not only to have bad luck, she seemed
to have managed to disseminate it. What he really hated was that she seemed to have
shown them all up.
Nobody was the better for what she had done or been responsible for – he suddenly
remembered Clara on the telephone saying ‘Don’t let her exploit you’ and wondered whether that was what Clara had meant. He and Anne should surely now, be
talking
about it;
not sitting in this tense and dreary silence, which, it seemed to him, simply underlined the dismal fact that when they had something really serious to discuss, they had nothing to say. For surely
it was up to her to begin? What he had done was what any man might have done: fallen for the provoking attractions of a young, and certainly not innocent, but beautiful girl. Once. Only once it had
happened (no thought of that never having been his choice now entered his head). But what Anne had done seemed to him – well, odd, extraordinary; most people’s wives didn’t dash into bed
with other women the moment their husband’s back was turned. (What did they
do
– anyway?) It was up to her to do some explaining. If he had to give up Arabella – he had
swivelled back to this being a sacrifice – then he deserved some kind of – help. The idea that possibly Anne didn’t want to stay married to him recurred. If she didn’t
– well then, then he might do anything. He would have to sort out his feelings afresh, and in a way, that was what he would most like to do. A picture of himself and Arabella sunbathing on
the deckhouse of Clara’s yacht flashed.

At this moment, Anne said, ‘I think we’d better go to bed.’

He looked at her. She was wearing an extraordinarily uncharacteristic dress, or housecoat or whatever. Her hair was longer, and now that her tears had subsided, she was very pale. She was at one
and the same time the person he had thought he knew best in his life and somebody whom he wondered if he’d ever known at all.

‘I don’t mean the same bed,’ she said, and began moving towards the door.

‘Don’t you think we ought to talk?’

‘No. Because I can’t think of anything to say. I don’t like myself much, and I imagine you must feel the same.’

Instantly, he did: he disliked her for this piece of perception, but the echo of some respect for her stirred.

Together, they put out the lights, shut the door and went upstairs.

In their separate beds, a different, but in both cases quite selfish, longing for the girl who was crying silently in hers possessed them.

Arabella, who had slept in the end, woke early. This was because she knew that she was going to have to travel; that she did not know where she would be spending the next
night, and that all her feelings about this place, and her illusions – or delusions? – about its owners had to be dragged up by the roots. Her business was to collect all the luggage,
find a taxi and go to the station, to London. She went down at eight to the kitchen to make herself a cup of Nescafé. Ariadne was there: for a moment Arabella’s determination and
control broke down; she hugged this silky, black, fairly indifferent, but acceptable cat, and then put her down because she could not afford to care.