Not That Sort of Girl (33 page)

‘You said we’d have to wait.’

‘So you married boring old Ned and are stuck with him and protect him and mother him and defend him from blackmail.’

‘Oh.’ How it hurt to hear this. ‘Oh.’

‘If it’s not Ned’s, whose is it?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘No.’

‘Secretly Ned worries but she’s the spit of Emily and Nicholas. The bishop eventually baptised her; she’s called Laura.’

‘I’m not interested. Where shall we go and fuck?’

‘I was going home on the night train …’

‘Shall I come?’

‘Of course.’

‘What about Ned?’

‘Working.’

‘Why are we wasting time, then, in chitchat?’

‘There is so much I want to tell you …’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘I suppose it can …’

‘Let’s be on our way, then.’ He pulled her to her feet. ‘I can’t really concentrate properly with people around staring.’

‘Comrade will be so glad to see you.’

‘Then I shall start believing I am really back.’

T
HE WIND WAS COLD
at the top of the hill. She looked out across strange country. There is something daunting in a view seen for the first time, its concealments manifold, a challenge that mocks. She turned away, retraced her steps. As she walked she retraced her life.

Why had she not told Mylo, during those days and nights they spent together, about her miscarriage? It should have been easy, but for four days, while their love bubbled and boiled, frothed and spilled over, distilled into an essence of happiness, she could not risk spoiling it.

When Mylo left, she retreated into the familiar minutiae of everyday life at Slepe, drowning herself in domestic detail, relying on it for consolation until he would reappear.

He told her hardly anything of his part in the war; she accepted that he to-ed and fro-ed to France, that other lives would be risked if she talked. Ned, too, made a mystery of his work; secrecy was normal at that time. With the bulk of the population, she relied for news on a diet of newspapers and radio, remained in virtual ignorance. When, after the war, she read its history, she was amazed at what had been going on, that dull men like Ian Johnson, Ned and Harold Rhys had performed feats of courage while she and thousands like her stayed at home complaining of draughts and minor deprivations.

She had told Mylo about the miscarriage when she saw him next. He had telephoned, suggesting blithely that she drive him into Cornwall ‘for a job’, that they picnic on the way, possibly spend the night together, that they use some of the petrol set aside for emergency. (The days when the Germans were expected to invade were long gone; the boot was now on the other foot.) Ned was in London. Rose leapt at the chance. She filled the car with petrol, packed an overnight bag, met Mylo off the train and drove off.

Comrade stood on the back seat, her head thrust through an open window, ears flapped back by the wind, a long and perfect day stretched ahead.

They drove across Devon, left Exeter behind, took the high road over Dartmoor. They were happy; there was no need to talk; sometimes they sang, pleased at the sound of their own voices. They stopped at a moorland pub for a drink, ate their sandwiches in the car near a high tor, watched Comrade chase a rabbit.

‘Where are you going in Cornwall?’

‘Newlyn. We could spend the night in Penzance. I may find I have to go on to the Scillies.’

‘Why?’ she had asked stupidly. ‘Whatever for?’

‘To catch my boat.’

‘A boat? You didn’t tell me you were off again—you said a job. A boat?’

‘’Fraid so.’

Taken by surprise she had heard herself whine, ‘I don’t want you to go.’

‘Don’t be silly, darling. It’s my job.’

‘Must you? I shall never get used to this constant wrenching apart.’

‘I must.’

‘Can’t somebody else go?’

He had said harshly, ‘Shut up, don’t spoil our day. If I’d thought you would be difficult, make a scene, I wouldn’t have suggested this outing. I thought it would be wonderful to be with you. I was supposed to go down by train anyway, not joyride with a girl.’

‘If you want to go by train, I can drop you at the station at Plymouth,’ she had said acidly, ‘and go home.’

They had glared at each other, fearing and hating each other and what they did. She remembered screwing the top of the thermos on so hard she had difficulty in getting it off later. Mylo had walked away from her. When she looked after him he was urinating in the bracken. She packed the picnic basket, called Comrade sharply, sat waiting for him in the car with the collar of her coat turned up. When he rejoined her she slammed the car into gear and drove on. Neither of them spoke for some miles.

When the road forked and turned south to Plymouth, she asked neutrally, ‘Plymouth, then?’

Mylo said, ‘Not unless you want it that way.’

‘I don’t.’ She drove on west through Tavistock. After some more miles they both spoke at once, saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ Laughter eased their gloom slightly.

Going over Bodmin Moor, Mylo said, ‘I’m sorry I was so short. I was told some lousy news yesterday.’

‘What?’

‘Victoria. You know, the girl in Pye’s office?’

‘What about her?’ She remembered Victoria’s disturbing eyes all too well.

‘She got news that both her fiancé and her brother have been killed.’

‘On the same day?’

‘The news was on the same day. They were both in submarines. No great future in them.’

‘Oh, poor girl …’

‘It casts a cloud. She’s such a splendid girl.’

A splendid girl, a splendid girl, a splendid …

‘Is there anything one can do?’ she said.

‘You could ask her down for the weekend or something, if your house isn’t too full.’

‘I’ll ask her to dinner next time I’m in London.’ (I could not bear those eyes at Slepe.)

‘She’d probably like that,’ he said.

‘Is she fond of that French friend of yours?’

‘Picot?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s not keen on him. I believe he made a pass and got rebuffed …’

How ungenerous I am, she had thought. ‘What a horrible war this is,’ she had exclaimed.

‘But today is not horrible, is it? We haven’t spoiled it insuperably, have we?’

‘No, no.’

But it was spoiled. Victoria’s sorrow intruded on their day and as she drove over the rise and could see Mount’s Bay she matched Victoria’s grief with her own, told Mylo about her miscarriage.

What a time to choose; Mylo had gone quite green.

That night they lay in an hotel bed clutching each other, unable to sleep, unable to comfort, unable to make love. In the morning she had driven him to Newlyn. ‘Wait a moment,’ he had said. He had gone through the gate onto the quay, returned carrying a box of live lobsters and crawfish. ‘Take these home with you. They are off a Belgian boat.’ He put the box on the back seat with Comrade who sniffed, recoiled, jumped into the front of the car in alarm. ‘Go now, darling, don’t look back.’ He had taken her face between his hands and kissed her fast—eyes, nose, forehead, mouth. ‘Go, go, go.’

Walking back down the hill by the way she had come Rose remembered those kisses, his hands salty from the box of lobsters, his mouth salty from her tears. She had driven as far as Truro before noticing where she was; for the rest of the drive she tormented herself with visions of Mylo crossing to France on a trawler or a submarine or a motor-torpedo boat; getting drowned, shot, disappearing for ever.

Ned had been at Slepe when she got back. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he had shouted. ‘Where have you put my corkscrew? I can’t find it. I’ve a bottle of decent wine and I can’t find …’

‘It’s there, under your nose,’ she had said and it had been there under his nose, giving her a shot of one-upmanship (what silly things one remembers) and ‘Lobsters for dinner,’ she had said. Ned, seeing the lobsters and hearing where she had been and how much petrol she had used, had said admiringly, ‘You must be out of your tiny mind.’

After the invasion of Normandy a year later, she lay in Mylo’s arms in a small flat he had been lent in Chelsea. A new and sinister noise disturbed their copulation. They stood on the balcony and watched the first V I rocket doodling its noisy way across London to explode in Harrow.

That summer of 1944 he brought her Aragon’s poems from Paris, told of the explosion of talent from people bottled up under the Germans, talked to her of Sartre and Anouilh. Growing restless in the country she came often to London, drawn by the fear and excitement of the bombing, the feeling that the end of the war was in sight, the need to walk recklessly on the broken glass in the gutters. Then Mylo was off again, to Northern Italy she was to learn later, where he spent the winter with the Partisans and she, with no news of him, grew melancholy, pacing in the park with Comrade where German prisoners of war swept the dead leaves of the plane trees in a grey drizzle, in their grey uniforms, with long grey sweeps of their reluctant brooms, watched by indifferent guards while the wet heavy air pressed the smoke of aromatic bonfires down to nose level.

She went back to Slepe for the coldest winter of the war yet, where she was for once without visitors, they naturally preferring warmer London. Ned, who was by this time in France, complained of the cold, wrote frequently asking for comforts from Fortnums, cigars and coffee. He gloried in his staff job, his authority and the power he dared not use as he was unable to sort collaborator from Resistance fighter when working with the French. He could not speak the language. He was happily moved to Paris to liaise with the Americans, among whom he made contacts useful to him later in peacetime business.

At Slepe the pipes froze. Rose fetched drinking and cooking water from a well; Christopher caught measles, Farthing slipped on ice and broke his leg, Edwina fell ill with shingles, and Emily, sensing that she might be asked to come and help, dumped Laura at Slepe (‘It would be a good thing if she could get measles, save an awful lot of trouble later.’) and moved to London to live with an American colonel who had a centrally heated flat off Grosvenor Square. Nicholas sulked, closed the Rectory and moved into a pub close to the Min of Ag.

Struggling with the children, the farm, the shortages and the cold, Rose should have had little energy to pine for Mylo, yet still she watched for the postman, ran whenever the telephone rang, dreamed of a time when worries would evaporate and they would be together.

It was during that horrible winter, Rose remembered as she retraced her steps downhill, that Ned, coming home on leave, extracted yet another renewal of her promise. Finding
Horizon
and the
New Statesman
in the house he accused her of having a ‘Pinko lover’. She would not, he reasoned, have discovered such reading matter for herself, thus insulting her intelligence. ‘It will be that bugger J P Sartre next or the cad Kafka …’ He had raised his voice (he had not in fact said the cad Kafka, Rose added it later to make a better story), made a scene in front of Christopher and Laura. There had been other indications of infidelity listed but Rose forgot them. She remembered, though, doing something she had never thought to do: she hit Ned, made his nose bleed. Poor Ned. She realised later that he was shaken by Emily’s deviation from her norm of availability and infected by a malaise rife among his associates who, returning from the war, found their marriage ties loosened, in some cases bust. While applying ice to his nose she had apologised; by hitting him she was diminished, weakened, more closely tied to him and he, putting his arms around her, had said, ‘Of course you have no lover. How could I suggest such a thing? You are not that sort of girl. You promised never to leave me; to suggest you sleep around is idiotic. A girl like you would not dream of it.’

Instead of being uplifted by Ned’s estimate she had been irritated. What did he know of her dreams? Did he take her for gormless, dreamless? (In this mood of irritation, having run out of clothes coupons, she helped herself to his dinner jacket suit and had it cut down by her own tailor into a coat and skirt which she wore with white hat and blouse at George Malone’s wedding and later at Richard’s.) That she was too meek to be suspect rankled, put ideas into her head which had not been there before, ideas which she was later to put into effect.

Remembering that period, Rose chuckled as she walked downhill. The wind was freshening, stirring the treetops, making her eyes water. In tandem with her irritation she had developed a fondness for Ned and he for his part stopped his nervous requests that she renew the promise. She reviewed life as it might be without him and shied away.

About that time Emily parted with her American colonel, returned to live with Nicholas. Thinking about it in old age, Rose wondered whether her decision to grow up, shut up and stick to Ned was arrived at partly to thwart Emily taking over her husband and home (the idea was there in Emily’s mind; one could not be certain whether, given the chance, she would have acted upon it) or had she been daunted, just as minutes ago she had turned away from the unknown, retraced her steps to the known path she had climbed that morning rather than explore new country?

Dogs in the manger are presumably lying comfortably.

L
EAVING THE OPEN GROUND
Rose re-entered the wood, treading now on beech mast which split crisply under her shoes. Often in woods similar to this she had stood with Ned whistling, then listening for the sound of Comrade hunting with her pup, for the betraying yelp which would signal their whereabouts, their ineffectual effort to capture rabbit, fox or badger. Ned, his patience matched by his admirable labrador’s, would stand beside her. ‘They will find their way home,’ he would say. ‘They always do.’

‘They may get trapped or shot,’ she would answer. Never once did Ned say, ‘Serve them right, if they do,’ although he must have felt it. She remembered his tolerance; her dogs were always naughty, his well behaved.

It was easier to remember the Ned of the early days of marriage than of later years. Her memory of him in youth was much clearer than that of the middle past when time concertinaed into old age until finally death reduced him to ash, releasing her from her promise.