Sensible Life (18 page)

“Let’s go back.” Cosmo stood and dived into the river. The cows, standing hock deep in mud, jostled in alarm. Cosmo shook the water from his hair and trod water until Hubert joined him. “You may not realise it,” he said, as they let the current sweep them downstream, “but both Mabs and Tashie have been brought up to make suitable friends; they wouldn’t know what to do with an unsuitable one, and that particularly goes for marriageable men.”

“Is that so?” Hubert drifted beside his friend, and as he drifted, remembering the straying fingers of the night before, he thought that he could guess the role in store for the “unsuitable.” “Do you suppose they have slept with Nigel and Henry? Tried it out?”

“Oh, no, no. They wouldn’t know how to set about it, not those two.”

“Really?”

“I mean they are quite interested, or I take it they are, but they are like us, Hubert. Virginal.”

“I seem to remember you full of passionate zest in our spotty teens—”

“Of course. Dead keen. Still am, but who does one start with? I simply can’t fancy what’s offered so far.”

“No hurry,” said Hubert. “Oxford inclines to chastity regarding girls. The inclination seems to carry on from school, stick to what you know-boys.”

“That’s no help. I don’t like boys.”

“Me neither,” said Hubert. “Time enough. I say, didn’t we leave our bathers behind that rock?” Paddling towards the shore, Hubert regretted an exploratory plunge into sex recently made. It had been an expensive experiment; he had learned nothing he was not already aware of, and lost something he could not retrieve. Watching Cosmo climb nimbly up the bank, he felt envious of his friend’s inexperience. “I should have thought,” he said, “that by now you would know all about it.”

“All about what?” Cosmos was searching for the bathing trunks. “Here they are.”

“Girls, women. You used to say you couldn’t wait.” Hubert pulled on the trunks Cosmo handed him.

“The trouble is, girls can,” said Cosmo. “The girls who attract me are great little waiters. Kisses, yes, but anything more there’s nothing doing, the shop’s shut.”

“Suitable girls,” murmured Hubert. Then, remembering Mabs, “Do you really believe—”

“Listen.” Cosmo held up his hand. Round the bend in the river there was the sound of splashing, girls’ voices, a man’s laugh. Cosmo hitched on his trunks. “Let’s creep up on them.” He slipped back into the water and Hubert followed; keeping close to the bank they swam to the bend. In a large pool Mabs and Tashie swam. Mabs wore a red bathing dress, Tashie a blue; both wore white rubber caps. They were encouraging Nigel and Henry with cheerful cries. On the opposite bank Nigel and Henry debated whether it would be possible to climb along the overhanging branch of a beech tree and dive.

“Easy if they knew their way.” Cosmo trod water. “Ah, Henry’s found the way up.” They watched the two men climb the tree and set off hesitantly along the branch. Nigel, the least agile, wobbled and dived clumsily into the pool; Henry followed with a neat dive.

“Spectacular,” shouted Mabs. “Do it again!”

Hubert gripped Cosmo’s arm and pointed.

Above them on the bank Flora was undressing. “Come on, Flora, it’s wonderful,” shouted Mabs. “Do hurry.”

Flora had taken off her frock and stood with her back to Cosmo and Hubert, dressed only in knickers. She held the end of a large towel with her teeth. Protecting her body from view of the bathers, she stepped out of her knickers and stood screened by the towel. She pulled on her bathing suit; she did this slowly as she watched the capering bathers, then let the towel drop, tied her hair back, took three steps towards the water and dived.

Cosmo and Hubert let out their breath. “We’d better wait a minute,” said Cosmo, “she might guess we’d seen her.” Hubert, clinging to the river bank, nodded.

I
T WAS RELATIVELY EASY
for Flora, sitting at the bottom of the Leighs’ dining-table, to keep quiet, eat what was offered, and deduce by watching her neighbours the correct order of knives and forks. She was relieved to find that it differed little from recollections of her parents’ dining table in India.

Sitting between Nigel and Henry, who either talked to each other across her or to Mabs and Tashie on their other sides, she was saved by their absence of manners from the necessity of speech. She hoped to get through the meal without spilling food on the dress Mabs had lent her, or catching the eye of Cosmo or Hubert, who sat across the table. She was content to stay quiet and assimilate the pleasurable shocks her system had received since Mabs and Tashie had pounced on her at the station.

In India she had kept out of her parents’ way and lived with the servants; her period with governesses in Italy and France had been dull; the last five years at school had been of stultifying mediocrity, spent with people she often actively disliked. She knew nothing of the outside world. The brief glimpse of family lives during the Easter holidays at Dinard had shrivelled into a dream. She was unprepared to meet the people she had dreamed of in the flesh, and astonished by the quality of love and good-humoured affection they seemed to feel for each other, and the manner in which they quite naturally appeared to include her.

Sipping her wine, she was careful not to look across the table and meet Cosmo or Hubert’s eye, fearing that if she did she might blush or look confused. Although she had been expecting to meet Cosmo and possibly Hubert, she had not bargained for their sudden appearance in the river. They had surprised her coming up from her second dive by grasping hold of her, having swum underwater round the bend, and bobbed up gripping her tightly between them. “Bags I” and “She’s mine!” Whether it was Cosmo who had said, “Bags I,” or Hubert who said, “She’s mine,” she did not know, but their hard bodies encasing hers in watery intimacy had been both frightening and exciting as her breasts and thighs bumped against them. Cosmo had kissed her mouth as she opened it to cry out and Hubert her throat, bumping it with his teeth. Flora hoped, as she ate her dinner, that they had not noticed that her immediate reaction had been to return the kisses. Instead she had vigorously kicked free.

Swimming to the bank, she had joined Mabs and Tashie to unpack the thermoses and sandwiches for the picnic. Eating her sandwiches and drinking her tea she had noted the change in Cosmo and Hubert. Just as Felix had seemed smaller when he took her out to lunch, so Cosmo and Hubert, changed from boys into men, had grown larger. Hubert’s nose was dominant; his eyebrows, nearly meeting above it, combined with his black eyes to give him an almost sinister air. Cosmo’s face had thinned, his fair hair coarsened; his chin was bristly when he kissed her and his mouth formed a tighter line when shut. They had not meant anything particular, she decided as she listened to the talk; their behaviour was commensurate with the general good-humoured atmosphere of this beautiful place.

From the moment Mabs and Tashie had hailed her at the station she had encountered friendliness. If the two girls had overwhelmed her by their kindness, so had meeting her hosts been a surprise. Milly, kissing her, had exclaimed: “My dear, you’ve grown up pretty,” as though this gave her personal pleasure and put her in the charge of Molly, a smiling housemaid. Molly took her to her room, unpacked her suitcase, ran her bath when she returned from swimming, helped her into the dress she now wore, brushed her hair and sent her down to the drawing-room.

Angus, grown greyer, had come forward with apparent delight, pouting out his moustache, reminded her of her langoustes at the picnic, enquired after her parents and introduced her to fellow guests, none of whose names she now remembered except a very thin Miss Green. “And
this
is Miss Green.” Offered her sherry. She had refused the sherry but was put almost at ease, sufficiently so at least to watch the arrival of other guests, all of whom were greeted with great largeness of heart by Angus and Milly.

It was a big party: nine in the house, another eleven to dinner. “I expect you will enjoy playing Sardines or Murder after dinner; that’s what seems the mode at the moment,” said Milly. “Or perhaps they will want to dance. Angus doesn’t mind what they do as long as there isn’t too much noise. We keep the drawing-room out of bounds. If you want to escape you will know where to run to. You don’t look as though you will, though—”

She was not really talking to me, thought Flora. The butler was announcing dinner. She was looking over my head. She had never played Murder or Sardines, but she was ready to chance her arm; at school girls talked of these games. This was the first time she had been on a visit or stayed in a country house; the contrast with school and its inmates was intoxicating. She did not wish to miss a moment. Eating her dinner, she listened to the talk.

Mabs and Tashie’s contribution seemed to consist of amiably teasing Nigel and Henry. There was talk of farming further along the table, and discussion of a law case. A man said, “The report in
The Times
was excellent, I thought, absolutely fair. Does anyone know who wrote it? One should keep track of these journalists, one never knows—”

“Do you read the papers?” Nigel, remembering his manners, turned a benign gaze on Flora. “Do you keep track of what’s going on?”

Flora said: “We never see the papers at school. We do something called ‘current affairs’, but it’s so dull I never listen.”

“I suppose you bone up on the news in the holidays?” said Nigel kindly.

“I spend the holidays at school.”

Nigel said, “Oh,” nonplussed. “Ah.”

Flora felt she should apologise for her oddity but Nigel said, “One way to get round that would be to take a newspaper of your own. When I was at Eton I read
The Times
so that I wouldn’t look silly in the holidays.”

Flora said: “I feel rather silly now.”

Nigel said: “Actually, my interest was racing. I say, what’s going on over there?” Flora followed Nigel’s glance to where at the head of the table Angus Leigh had been holding forth to the lady on his right. Now he had turned his attention to Miss Green on his left. Miss Green had, like Flora, hoped to get through dinner without talking much; she was cursed with a stammer, unmarried, but far from stupid. She was a friend of the Wards and was staying with them.

Introduced to Hubert before dinner, she had said in Flora’s earshot: “F-Freddy s-says I shall have to s-sit next to our host. W-what s-shall I talk about? Can you s-suggest a t-topic? I hate t-talking.”

“Try the League of Nations and Stanley Baldwin,” said Hubert. “That usually works wonders.”

Now there was the kind of silence one gets in the middle of a windy night before an increase to gale force. Miss Green, having taken Hubert’s advice, looked up at her host.

Flora, sensing that nobody would be looking her way, risked looking up. All around fellow diners hushed. Across the table Hubert looked bland. Behind his master’s chair the butler raised his eyes to the ceiling. General Leigh, face flushed red, said,
“What?”,
glaring at Miss Green, who in an almost inaudible voice was heard to repeat her remark. “D-don’t you think the L-League of N-Nations wonderful, General Leigh? W-what do you think of it vis-a-vis B-Baldwin?”

“It is a club for Frogs and Wogs,” said Angus loudly. “It bodes nothing but ill, it will bring disaster. That bugger Baldwin pretends to go along with it, but he secretly despises it, as I do openly. The League of so-called Nations is an international mafia of ill repute artfully concocted by political lounge lizards and communists at somebody else’s expense. Who is going to pick up the bill for all their tommy rot and skulduggery, Miss Green? Tell me that.”

“Angus darling,” said Milly, from her place half-way down the table next to Freddy Ward, “please.”

“The British taxpayer pays. You and I.” Angus ignored his wife. “I take it you pay taxes, Miss Green?”

“Certainly,” replied Miss Green.

“Then vote, Miss Green; denounce as I do these impossible Bolshie foreigners building palaces of peace in Geneva with your money, or never come to my house again.”

“I shan’t,” said Miss Green quietly.

“Angus! Apologise,” Milly’s voice cut through the gale. “At once!”

“I apologise,” said Angus unapologetically.

“You must know one of the children will have put her up to it. Look at their faces!” cried Milly. “Miss Green is our guest; you have insulted her, this is a tease, darling.”

Angus glared at his wife. “One of the children? They look pretty grown-up to me. Bolshies, are they? All Bolshies leave the room.”

Cosmo and Hubert pushed back their chairs and stood up. Mabs, Tashie, Henry, Nigel and Flora stood too. The girl sitting between Cosmo and Hubert looked bewildered. The butler signalled to the parlourmaid to open the door.

“Have you heard of Adolf Hitler?” Miss Green’s voice was stammerless.

“No. Does he belong to the League Of Nations?” Angus was still suspicious.

“No, he doesn’t. He’s German.”

“Then tell me about this sensible fellow. Oh, come back, all of you, try not to be so ridiculous,” Angus shouted after the departing young, then turned to Miss Green. “You must forgive me, Miss Green.”

“What a performance,” said the girl sitting between Cosmo and Hubert as they regained their seats.

Hubert caught Flora’s eye and smiled. Nigel and Henry leaned towards her and said, “And what do
you
think of the League of Nations, Flora?” But Flora was smiling back at Hubert, remembering the incident in the river.

“Is this Hitler chap the sort of fellow we will get to hear of?” Angus enquired of Miss Green.

“Quite possibly,” said Miss Green.

“ARE YOU GETTING THE
feel of Coppermalt?” Mabs and Flora lay under a fourposter bed. The young of the party had chosen to play Sardines while their elders played bridge. Mabs wriggled herself into a comfortable position. “Lie between me and the outside world, then if Nigel finds us he can’t—” Her voice was inaudible.

“What?” Flora whispered.

“He’s a bit of a fumbler, that’s all. Now come on, tell me what—”

“This isn’t going to do this dress much good.” Flora had been doubtful of joining Mabs.