Mr Wrong (18 page)

They came back to supper in high spirits with half a bottle of gin. She didn’t dare have a drink, but he made Shirley and himself a couple of John Collins with a tin of grapefruit juice
and soda. Supper was cold, so it didn’t matter when they had it, and she did Percy’s tray while they finished their drinks. Brian was in his entertaining, expansive mood; taking off the
little girls he taught to ride; ‘Oh – Cuptain Ewbunk!’ He was a good mimic – could do all the various off-white upper-class vowel sounds; could indicate the braces on their
teeth, their stiff little pigtails below their hard velvet hats. He finished with a telling imitation of a fat and frightened girl being taught to jump. The sports mistress had many times told Kate
how popular he was with the girls. And, of course, someone at the pub had thought Shirley was his girlfriend: Shirley thought that madly funny. She ate like a school-girl – three helpings of
new potatoes and home-cooked tongue: ‘It’s so marvellous not cooking. I’m simply not the domesticated type, I’ve decided.’ It wasn’t until she returned from
taking Percy his strawberries that she heard Brian say casually:

‘There’s no need for you to go back on Tuesday. Stay and help me knock some sense into that new pony. He’s not safe for the children and he’s not up to my weight.’

And Shirley, seeing her mother, said automatically: ‘Oh – I couldn’t. I’ll have to go back.’

‘Why not? If you stay a little extra, you might also knock some sense into that husband of yours.’

Kate said: ‘Brian! Of course she must go back.’

‘I don’t see that. He shouldn’t go flouncing off – out all night – that’s no way to treat any woman – let alone your wife. Do him good to worry about
her for a change.’

Kate turned to her daughter: ‘Shirley, you don’t really feel that you can –’

But Shirley, pouring cream on to her strawberries, said quickly: ‘I was talking to Dad in the pub about it. I thought it would be interesting to know what another man thought, you know
–’

‘Damn right! Well, I think the sooner he learns that life doesn’t entirely revolve round his blasted television the better. I mean, he’d made a plan with Shirley, and he ought
to have stuck to it, that’s what he ought to have done. I mean, she’s never going to know where she is, is she? One minute he makes a promise – the next minute he breaks it.
That’s no way to treat
any
girl – let alone
my
girl. Well?’ Magnanimity was momentarily extended to her: ‘What do you think?’

She took a long breath trying to control her anger at his outrageous attitude and said coldly, ‘I think you should mind your own business.’

Before she had finished speaking, the telephone rang, and Shirley, glad of the escape, ran to answer it. A second later, she was back: ‘It’s Douglas. I’m going to take it
upstairs. Will you put the receiver back for me?’

When she had done so, and returned to the kitchen determined to stop the irresponsible mischief he was making, Kate found him on his feet, cramming hunting flask, pipe and tobacco into his
pockets; his face suffused, set sullen, avoiding her eye.

‘I’m off. Forgot to fetch that liniment from the vet. The grey’s been knocking herself. Forgot it earlier.’

‘Don’t bother to tell me a pack of—’

‘Tell her not to wait up. I’ve promised her a ride in the morning.’

‘Brian, listen to me. Don’t you dare interfere any more with her marriage. It’s not fair: it’s very wrong.’ It sounded weak as she said it, and he seized the
advantage.

‘
I’m
not interfering. She asked me what I thought, and I told her. That’s natural, isn’t it? She’s only a child. And why should my opinion be any more
interfering than yours? Tell me that.’

‘You know perfectly well why it is. And she’s no longer a child. She’s a married woman.’

‘I
don’t
know. And I don’t care. I do – not – care a bugger – what you think – about anything at all.’

He went, shutting, nearly slamming, the kitchen door behind him.

The telephone conversation seemed to be going on for ever. She supposed drearily that it must be a good sign they were talking at such length: she was sure Douglas cared. Poor boy, he was only
twenty-two, had his way to make, and although he was reputed to be clever, cleverness was not particularly helpful when it came to making a marriage work – especially with someone as
self-willed as Shirley. Could they, she and Brian, as parents, have stopped her marrying so young? If they had been united about it and had wanted to, she supposed they might just have – have
made her wait longer, anyhow. But they were not united, and for different reasons neither of them had seen fit even to try. Brian had always thought that Shirley should have whatever she wanted,
and she . . . she was ashamed of her reason – it wasn’t even a reason really, just a hope, forlorn as it had turned out, that Brian would be – easier, a bit nicer to her, if
Shirley simply wasn’t there.

Her head felt as though someone had bruised something inside it rather badly, but she decided not to take any more of the migraine drug. When she had finished clearing supper, she noticed
Shirley’s cigarettes, and took one for something to do.

She heard Shirley ring off, and minutes later she strolled into the kitchen, cool, expressionless, clearly pleased with herself.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He’s gone out – said don’t wait up.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of going to bed yet. Whew! It’s hot!’ She sat on the corner of the table, kicked off her shoes and put her bare feet on the arm of her father’s
chair. Her toenails were painted a pale, pearly pink.

‘Well – is everything better now?’

‘Douglas? Oh – fine. He’s coming down tomorrow.’

‘Shirley, I am glad. How has he managed to get away?’

‘Oh – some change in the shooting schedule – I didn’t bother. The point is, I’ve won!’

Kate looked at her. ‘How do you mean?’

She repeated impatiently, ‘I’ve won! He wanted me to go back – to meet him at the flat, but I told him come down here or else.’ She leaned across the table to take a
cigarette.

‘I took one, I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Feel free. Got a light?’

Kate struck a match and held it out, watching her daughter’s face as she bent her head, cigarette poised in the wide Cupid’s-bow mouth, heavy lashes lowered over the violet eyes,
calmly intent upon her first puff.

‘But he’ll have to go back again on Monday night, won’t he? It hardly seems worth it for such a little time.’

‘He thinks it’s worth it. Any case, he had no choice. Daddy was quite right. He’ll think twice before he ever walks out on me again. I haven’t even told him I’ll go back with him for sure.’

‘Shirley! You can’t behave like this! You’re just
playing
at being married! You can’t be so—’

‘I can! I can! I’m perfectly serious. He wants far more from me than I want from him. He’s more turned on than I am. Let him sweat.’

There was a brutal pause, then she added with some feeling: ‘I
hate
being alone. I
hate
that flat. I
loathe
being tied down. Daddy said I could stay as long as I
like.’

Then, perhaps aware of some fractional discomfort from her mother’s silence, she rose from the table and began looking for her shoes.

‘Where’s he gone to at this time of night?’

‘To put some liniment on a horse.’

‘In the stables?’

Kate hesitated only a moment: ‘I expect in the stables.’ After she had gone, Kate remained, completely still: why had she done it? But she refused to consider why – simply sat
at the table and followed Shirley: down the garden path to the gate, along the drive to the archway; she might pause there to see if there was a light in the stables, but there would be no light
since none was needed. Would she go on, as Kate had done that first time, long ago, because there had been an urgent telephone message? It had been autumn then, and dark, but some instinct had
driven her to the stables door, undone at the latch and ajar. The horses had shifted softly in their straw; moonlight, like a shaft of lemonade, had lain across the little empty coal-grate in the
tack room and the place had the affectionate, sweet smell of warm horses and hay. She had stood there wondering (where could he have gone?), when, with shocking suddenness, and from just above her
head, had come a high-pitched, explosively ugly and frightening laugh. Dead silence: she had heard her own heart beating . . . then a man’s inaudible protest and heavy, sibilant, thrashing
commotion. They were in the hayloft; she had turned to see the ladder set squarely to its open trap. The laugher had begun moaning and she had fled. Since that first time, she had returned once or
twice when he had hired new girls, but only enough to feed her reason, to keep her fearful hatred sane, because she had known that if there was no reason for feeling as she did, she must be
mad.

She had done nothing. Shirley had been determined to go – she had simply not prevented her.

She became aware of Percy calling. He might have been calling for some time; for once she had forgotten him, and she hurried, with a feeling of shame, to his room. She had got him undressed and
into bed before his supper, but had not even fetched his supper tray, let alone settled him for the night.

He gave her his gentle lop-sided smile as she came in; he had been sticking things into his scrap-book and seemed not to have noticed the time. As soon as he saw her, he began hunting through
the back pages.

‘You haven’t eaten your strawberries!’

He gave her a reproachful look. ‘Too many stones.’ He was still searching in his book. ‘Here! Found Douglas. Douglas and Shirley marriage.’ It was the wedding picture cut
out of the local paper. ‘Douglas,’ he explained again, in case she wasn’t sure.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. She helped him out of bed to the lavatory, and got his pillows right for the night. His sheets seemed always to be covered with toast crumbs. She filled up his
water-carafe, opened his window and put the box for his false teeth handy. When he was in bed again, she bent to kiss his cold, papery-dry forehead and he closed his eyes as though for a
benediction. She picked up the supper tray and was turning to go when he suddenly thrust a screwed up piece of paper at her, pushing it into her hand as though he was stopping up a chink.

‘For you. To read.’

‘All right, Father dear.’ He sometimes wrote lists of what he needed: glue, fruit-drops, aspirin – that kind of thing.

‘Read later.’

‘Yes. I will.’

In the kitchen, Shirley stood heating something on the stove. She must have heard her mother come in, but neither turned round nor spoke.

Kate said: ‘You’re back.’ She had begun to feel afraid.

‘So it would seem.’ Hostility was naked. She poured the contents of the saucepan into a mug and turned off the heat. ‘Why did you let me go to the stables? You knew what was
going on, didn’t you? What made you do that?’

Kate tried to say something, but she was not a liar, and could not.

‘I suppose you thought it would turn me against him, and make me sorry for you! Well it hasn’t. I suppose you thought that as you don’t enjoy screwing, you’d put me off
it! It’s him I’m sorry for – having to go to those lengths. I despise you – more completely than I’ve ever despised anyone in my life! Letting me go out there was just
typical of how horrible you really are. Drab, and smug and self-righteous. Underneath it – you’re just nasty. Nobody could love you – not a single person in the world!’ Her
hand holding the milk was shaking, but she didn’t spill any – just walked out of the room, shutting the kitchen door behind her.

Kate stood, heart hammering, listening to the steps going away from her to the bedroom above. She put up her hand, to hold her face together, and the piece of screwed-up paper fell on to the
table. When she smoothed it out the note, written large and quavering with a black felt pen, read: ‘Thank you, my Darling, for the Lovely Outing in your Motor Car. Today.’

She read it for a long time. The message, with its drops of grateful love, made a slow, unsteady course, until eventually, in the end, it reached her.

‘
Must
you go?’ they said at intervals. They said it often enough for it to cease seeming like a rhetorical question. In fact, it was, and always had been,
but each refusal from Harriet strengthened their, or rather Mrs Mouncey’s, theoretical hospitality.

The villa had new guests pending; from England, America and Italy. They were all the kind of people that Mrs Mouncey was glad, afterwards, to have had. She mixed or alternated them with a few of
the wild, incomprehensible young, who were the sons and daughters of other famous international acquaintances. Mrs Mouncey had no friends, which she equated in her mind with broadmindedness. She
did not in the
least
want Harriet to stay. The girl had not been a ‘success’, although she had the kind of prim beauty that put her in some unknown category – certainly not
the ‘you can’t take your eyes off her’ class, but she was not ‘good fun’ either. Harriet had been explained simply as the goddaughter of a long-dead friend, Lady
Stanhope. This served Mrs Mouncey very well, putting her into a vague but kindly light which she seemed so often to be behind, or beyond.

Harriet’s manners were that of the perfect, passive guest. She seemed to have no particular, tiresome requirements – like wishing to shop in Cannes, or sight-see, or indeed do
anything at all. She bathed obediently at the ordered times, she sun-bathed, but judiciously – her skin was the kind that went with copper-coloured hair. She drank Campari sodas, Paradis,
Pernod, or Cinzano of any colour. She looked good in a bikini, and changed in the evenings into Liberty voiles: washable and uncrushable described far more of her in these circumstances than Mrs
Mouncey knew.

She had always been going on Friday, in a train along the coast, to spend one night with her friend, Susan Cole, who had a villa inland of Marseille. ‘A friend’ she had simply
explained as a girl whom she had gone through college with in America. Mrs Mouncey, who did not like to waste a moment of her worthless time, embraced her wearing an aquamarine
peignoir
beneath which her corsets felt like a salad basket, and also equipped with an enormous amount of Femme and some oil on her face that had none of the unobtrusiveness that those embracing her might
have hoped for. However, she sent her maid to pack Harriet’s cheap suitcase, and her chauffeur to the little railway station that looked like a millionaire’s child’s toy, with its
small, neatly placed palms, its clean and empty ticket-office, its hanging baskets of bright pink geraniums, and its glaring white platform. The sky was perfectly and entirely blue, the railway
track like the back of a bluebottle. The chauffeur, who was French, put her case on the edge of the platform and stood as though he was waiting for something. Harriet told him haltingly not to stay
(her French was almost nil) and then, after he had gone, wondered whether she ought to have tipped him. Life at Cap Ferrat had been fraught with these problems. Anyway, she hadn’t, she
pointed out to herself, and this made her look in her pocket-book. She had enough for her second-class train fare back to England, and a hundred francs plus some small change that she had
difficulty in sorting out. An official put in an appearance at the ticket-office, so she was able to buy her
billet
. The train was coming. There was nobody else on the platform at all, and
when the little train came puffing round the bend, it seemed to Harriet as though only the sight of her stopped it. She opened the nearest coach door, and dragged her suitcase in. She wore a cream
linen suit with a dark brown shirt, and as soon as she was in the train, took the jacket off. She was too hot, and she still felt Mrs Mouncey’s oil and Femme on her face. She wore her hair
with a centre parting and coiled round her neck. This was also too hot, but she had not felt equal to leaving the villa with her hair down or plaited. One of the most extraordinary weeks of her
life, she decided, and at once began to imagine telling Sue about it all, while they sat in Sue’s kitchen, or the village restaurant. She had never seen Sue’s house, and as Sue hardly
ever came to England, and Harriet could hardly ever afford to leave it, their communication had been confined to letters in which Susan’s writing had never changed from the bold upright
script taught to rich girls in America, although her sentences were childishly short and assumed in Harriet a knowledge of French village life that Harriet certainly had not got. She had left
America earlier than Sue, and had sent herself to an art school in London. She got into it easily enough, but it took her three years to discover that she was not, and never would be, the kind of
painter that she had always imagined herself becoming. By the time she reached this point, the legacy was spent, and ever since she had had to do one boring thing after another for a living, until
a very charming middle-aged interior decorator had invited her to help him with colour schemes for those clients who had no views on this matter excepting what they didn’t like, which was
practically everything. Harriet had an excellent sense of colour (this capacity had been a main part of the trap that had sprung her into art school). But she had also a wonderfully calm,
apparently passive approach to people; the clients loved her, since she made it so easy for them to say that they had thought of, bought and collected everything for themselves. Mr Crane had been
delighted with her, and he and Rudolph had both decided that she was the perfect link with difficult clients. So, more money after two years, and time to save up for a holiday, until Mrs Mouncey,
looking for some fabric to stick on the walls of her downstairs john, had encountered her, uncovered the tenuous link with ‘poor Meg Stanhope’ and invited her for a free week in her
villa at Cap Ferrat. Harriet had accepted with a sense of excitement; some mirages turn out to be real, after all, but loyalty and curiosity compelled her to combine this holiday with a visit to
Sue. It was then that she realized that Sue had never invited her to her home, although she had written an ecstatic and ill-spelt reply to Harriet’s letter inviting herself.