Not That Sort of Girl (16 page)

Edith allowed herself a number of uncharitable criticisms when she thought of Rose’s neglectful parents. If I was her mother, she thought, or if I was her mother-in-law, and she looked reproachfully at her bachelor sons, blaming them. Slow in the uptake, slow off the mark, she thought.

After four days the doctor pronounced Rose out of danger. The elder Malones withdrew with Richard, who was due in Plymouth to join his ship. George was left to fetch, carry and tempt Rose to eat.

George sat with Rose and read aloud passages of
War and Peace.
While she lay ill, one of the telephone calls had been for him; he was posted to Moscow; must leave in two weeks. ‘One should know something of their literature …’

‘Do you speak Russian?’ Her voice was gaining strength.

‘Only French. My French is pretty good. You will not remember, but I had a French tutor.’

‘Did he telephone?’ She raised herself on the pillows.

‘The tutor? Why should he? Oh, you mean Ned. No, he didn’t. Too busy, I expect. If one can believe the news, things are on the move over there or will be soon.’

No telephone. ‘Send me an Astrakhan hat.’ Her voice drooped.

‘I’ll try.’

‘There’s the telephone!’ She struggled to sit up, to get out of bed.

‘Lie still,’ he pushed her back, ‘I’ll answer it.’ George left the room.

Rose listened, straining her ears. ‘Who was it?’

‘Nicholas and Emily asking whether they can come over and have a bath. After much grovelling they’ve got the plumber to mend their burst pipes, but he’s making a meal of it, he’s cut off their water. What shall I say?’

‘Let them come.’

‘Selfish beasts, they could have come before, I told them you were ill.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

George went slowly down again. He did not want Nicholas and Emily to come over. He heard himself telling Nicholas that it wouldn’t be possible for them to come that day: ‘Come when I’m gone,’ he heard himself say. ‘I’ll leave a list of jobs for you with the Farthings.’ This is my last afternoon with Rose, he thought. He was half way up the stairs when the telephone rang again. Rose should get an extension put by her bed; all this haring up and down stairs was ridiculous. ‘Hullo,’ he shouted unnecessarily loud. ‘Who is it? Rose is ill in bed.’

‘Tell her,’ said Mrs Freeling, ‘that her father is dead.’

‘Wolf, cry wolf,’ George murmured as he went back to Rose.

‘Who was it?’

It occurred to George that she was expecting a telephone call; he remembered a lovesick teenage cousin wearing just such an expression. ‘Your mother, she …’ is my father better?’

‘Dead,’ said George, embarrassed.

‘Oh.’ She lay back. ‘Cancer?’

‘Doesn’t sound like it. She said she went into his room this morning with his breakfast tray, his usual lightly boiled egg, and found that he had died in his sleep, a stroke. A coronary, perhaps?’

‘What else did she say?’

George debated whether to gloss over what Mrs Freeling had said. ‘If you give me your hot-water bottle, I’ll take it down and refill it,’ he prevaricated.

Rose fumbled for the bottle, come to rest under the cats, pulled it free and handed it to George. ‘What else did she say, George?’

‘What a waste of an egg when they are in such short supply.’ George snatched the hot-water bottle and left the room. His laughter exploded on the stairs.

Bringing the fresh bottle after a decent interval, George apologised. ‘I should not have laughed. I’m sorry.’

‘How could you help it. Oh, George!’ Rose too began to laugh. She reached up, caught his hand. ‘Oh, ho, ho, ho. Hold my hand a moment. My mother has been hoping for this for so long. What a shock. They are not like your parents, George, they don’t get on, he was so difficult to please. I never—oh, where is my handkerchief?’ She was crying now, her abrupt laughter changed to tears, runny nose, sobs. ‘I never pleased him, I was a rotten daughter. All he ever wanted was for me to be safe, he kept on about it, he was so glad when I married Ned, he thought all that mattered was safety, I never loved him much. I feel so guilty …’ The rest of Rose’s declaration was drowned by sobs. George saw himself gathering her in his arms to comfort her, lashing out with his foot to kick away the scalding hot-water bottle, pushing aside the cats. It seemed simpler to console Rose in her bed; she would not catch cold that way. Rather warm though. Easier if he took off his trousers. This is not really my style, he thought, but all the same it’s pretty good and my word it’s oh, ah, oh. ‘Heavens, Rose, I did not really mean to do that. I hope you don’t think I set out to—I hope I’ve not made your pneumonia worse—here, hang on while I retrieve that hot-water bottle, oh, good, it’s still warm, oh, Lord, look at the cats, what an unfeeling …’

‘Stop burbling.’ Rose straightened the bedclothes as he got back into his trousers, pulled her nightdress down and the sheets up, settled the hot bottle by her feet, reached for a comb, ran it through her hair. ‘Could you bring me a hot sponge?’ She was startled into feeling almost well. George ran the hot tap, squeezed the sponge under it, brought it to Rose, watched her wipe her face, erase the tears, wondered what he should do or say.

‘Oh, George.’ Rose looked up at his anxious face, handed back the sponge. ‘I’m so hungry.’

From time to time through life George would be tempted to tell the tale of how he had found the barrel of oysters left for Rose’s convalescence by his mother. Of how they had feasted together, she in her bed, he sitting beside it. When people remarked jokingly on the aphrodisiac qualities of oysters, George would say he wouldn’t know about that but he had heard they were wonderful for convalescents. In old age, if reminded by the taste of oysters of the episode with Rose, he would puzzle as to whether it had really happened, whether he had mixed fact with fiction to make a good story. Was it likely he would ask himself that he would find oysters fresh in a barrel in such circumstances? Or probable that he would seduce a friend’s wife when she was ill with bronchial pneumonia? In any case it was not the sort of story one could tell anybody. Was I that sort of fellow? he would question, looking at his beloved wife, splendid sons and daughters, charming grandchildren. ‘When I was posted to Moscow in the war,’ he would say, steering his train of thought into safer waters, ‘I spent a lot of time trying to find an Astrakhan hat for the wife of a friend of mine.’

‘And did you succeed?’ one or other of them would ask. ‘Were you in love with her?’

‘I can’t recollect. I don’t suppose so. One had many more serious worries; there was after all the war—no, it wasn’t love.’

But Rose remembered.

When people discussed tonics, pick-me-ups after severe illness, she kept to herself the prescription of a quick dip in bed with someone you liked but were not in love with. A short shock of sexual astonishment which could make you feel surprisingly well and high spirited.

After her little brush with George she found herself well enough to attend her father’s funeral, console her mother for never noticing that he had a bad heart, help her find a convenient flat in which to spend her widowed days.

In actual fact the funeral and Mrs Freeling’s move from Kensington to Chelsea took place over a period of months with many visits from Rose during the summer of 1940. But memory being what it is, her mind concertinaed the funeral and her mother’s move into briefer space. What she chiefly remembered in age was returning to Slepe after the funeral with a sense of liberation, and her extreme annoyance at finding Nicholas and Emily in occupation, having invited themselves while the plumber sorted out their burst pipes.

T
HE FIRST INDICATION THAT
her privacy had been invaded was the sight, as she drove up the drive, of the MG parked askew at the front of the house.

‘Damn.’ Rose parked what she continued to think of as the bishop’s car beside the MG. She hefted her bag and went in. She stood in the hall listening. There was no sound. The bud of a late camellia fell with a plop onto the hall table. The water in the vase was low and the flowers Edith Malone had arranged two weeks before were browning and dead. Farthing had resentfully watched her cut the camellias, making it plain by the twitch of his nose that camellias lasted longer left where they belonged. After the fall of the flower, the silence was absolute.

Rose looked in the library. Nobody. Nor was there anyone in the kitchen.

She carried her bag upstairs, anxious to change from her funeral clothes. She supposed the Thornbys to have gone for a walk while waiting for her. She would offer them tea then pack them off home. They had not bothered to come to her father’s funeral. They could, she thought resentfully, have made the effort. Other people had. Ned’s uncle and aunt from Argyll, for instance, who scarcely knew her parents.

Crossing the landing to her room she saw the door of a spare room ajar and moved to shut it, but first she glanced into the room in case the cats had strayed; shut in, they might make a mess. She was surprised to see clothes thrown casually about, an open book on a chair, brushes and combs on the dressing table. The bed dishevelled. She closed the door, frowning.

Then from across the landing, from the visitors’ bathroom, she heard a gurgle of laughter, Emily’s laugh. What bloody cheek. She strode into the bathroom, furious.

‘Oh, Rose.’ Nicholas reached up from the bath to grip her wrist. ‘So you’re back. How did it go? We knew Ned would want us to make ourselves at home, so we’ve done just that. Sit and talk to us, sweetie. This is the first bath we’ve had for weeks—can’t tell you the bliss of a good wallow after washing in parts and boiling water in a kettle—one gets so cold—one feels so deprived.’ He pulled Rose nearer the bath. ‘Sit down, lovey, while we tell you about our resident plumber; he makes surreptitious eyes at Emily and she encourages him.’ He jerked Rose down onto the chair by the bath.

‘Hullo, Rose.’ Emily lay in the bath facing Nicholas. She had put a cushion from the spare room to protect her head and shoulders from the taps; its fine brocade was soggy. ‘Keep us company,’ drawled Emily, ‘tell us the latest.’ She grinned gleefully up at Rose. ‘Remember how we all had our baths together as children? Pity there isn’t room for you now. Weren’t you a coy little thing!’

‘You cried, didn’t you, Rosie?’ Nicholas kept hold of Rose’s wrist.

Rose remembered her agonised embarrassment when, an only child, she had found herself expected to share the bath with the Thornby children, stranded with them for the night after a party (her father’s car had broken down; he had not been able to fetch her home). She had reacted violently, made a scene, refused to undress, screamed. Nicholas and Emily’s nurse had teased her for hiding her body, mocked her infant modesty. ‘What have you got to hide?’

Nicholas and Emily had followed suit, chanting, ‘What have you got to hide,’ in loud sing-song. ‘Take off your knickers. What have you got to hide?’ They were not hiding much now.

Rose snatched her wrist free, remembering how Nicholas, excited, had threatened to pee in the bath water. The nurse had smacked him twice, once on each buttock; she had been shocked and curiously excited.

She stood up. On no account was she going to betray her surprise at seeing them together in the bath, lay herself open to taunts of lack of sophistication. ‘Ned couldn’t get back for the funeral,’ she Said, not prepared to endorse or deny his possible invitation. (I do not yet know Ned well enough, she thought.) She forced herself to look calmly down as they lay in the steaming water, Nicholas caressing his sister’s neck with his toe, she idly soaping her leg, then her brother’s. Apart from the obvious difference in sex, they were remarkably alike.

‘Ned didn’t exactly invite us—to be honest,’ said Emily, laughing, daring Rose to be shocked. ‘Notice the difference?’ she asked, following Rose’s glance.

Rose realised with fury that one part of her mind had been noting that Nicholas, unlike Ned, was circumcised. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother to be honest, Emily, it’s not you, is it?’ She bent and removed the cushion from behind Emily’s head with a jerk, at the same time pulling up the bath plug. ‘This had better dry off in the hot cupboard.’ She ignored Emily’s squeal of protest as she dodged to avoid the hard taps against her head and neck. She squeezed the cushion over the bath. ‘When did you arrive?’ she asked, keeping her voice casual. ‘Or should I say move in?’

‘Yesterday,’ said Nicholas quickly. ‘Mrs Farthing said …’

Told her we’d invited them, thought Rose. ‘Maybe you’d do better to keep an eye on your plumber,’ she suggested, watching Nicholas get out of the bath, noting his weedy legs, making it plain as she ran her eye over him that his compared ill with Ned’s physique. ‘Ned wasn’t exactly the soul of welcome last time you called, was he, Emily?’

‘Not on
that
occasion.’ Emily got out of the bath, hinting that there had been other occasions (and I don’t care, thought Rose, if there were). ‘Don’t let me hurry you.’ Rose watched Emily look around for a bath towel. ‘I remember now, I told George to tell you you could come over some time. How silly of me to forget. Oh, d’you want a towel?’ she asked, as though to need a towel was somehow remarkable, that ordinary people shook themselves like dogs when they got out of a hot bath.

‘We should have brought our own.’ Nicholas had ceased to enjoy the situation, was beginning to shiver in the prevailing Slepe draught.

‘Oh, no, no, no,’ said Rose. ‘I’ll fetch you some,’ she said graciously as she went out, leaving the door open, letting the draught increase, taking her time to cross the landing, open the hot cupboard door, place the damp cushion to dry, extract two of the least good bath towels. ‘Here you are,’ she said, strolling back. ‘I’d ask you to stay,’ she said, ‘but I’m expecting Ned at any moment and we will want to be on our own, you know how it is—or perhaps you don’t?’

‘Thanks.’ Emily snatched a towel and wrapped herself in it.

‘And Nicholas …’ She held a towel out to Nicholas. ‘My poor Nicholas, you are all goosefleshy.’ She looked despisefully at his exposed person. ‘There,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you tea before you go. I’ll go and put the kettle on.’ She forced herself to walk out of the bathroom slowly, go steadily down the stairs. Half-way down, her rage at their solipsistic behaviour overwhelmed her; she was affronted that they had come uninvited, shared the bath, and by the look of things the bed also.