Odd Girl Out (16 page)

‘There’s a broken down old greenhouse with a lot of grapes. Mildewed, though. Shall we explore?’

‘I must do the house first, ‘I’m afraid.’

She started towards him, and he said, ‘You really had better wear shoes in the house. With the carpets up, the floors will have horrible headless nails.’

‘OK.’

When he opened the black back door, they found themselves standing in a square, dark hall from which there seemed to be two staircases and a number of doors. It was much cooler in the house than
outside it. Edmund had a bunch of keys and began opening the doors, but little more light emerged until Arabella undid some shutters in one of the rooms. There were three sets of these, and they
undid them all. A large and beautiful room, looking out upon the garden where he had just found her, was to be seen. The room was – not exactly dirty – but the pile of soot in the
fireplace, and the floorboards, waxed at their surround and dry and bare in the centre, gave the place an unkempt and vulnerable air. The paint was an ugly grey-green and also dusty. In one corner
of the room was a dirty white telephone resting upon dog-eared old directories. There were the usual bleached gaps on the walls where pictures had hung, and a huge spider’s web had been woven
from a pelmet board to its pulleys. Dead flies lay on the window-sills in their dozens, and the windows themselves were dirty. Edmund got out a steel rule and began measuring the dimensions of the
room.

‘Have you got to do that to all the rooms?’

‘I ought to. Usually, I have a junior with me for that kind of thing, but his wife is having a baby.’

‘What a bore for you.’ She stood at the window looking out on the garden.

What a bore for
her,
he thought, is what she really means. He wondered if he could really go through with the whole laborious business: measuring each room and listing it in his book for
reference when it came to advertising the house for auction. Better not, he decided suddenly: get a general impression of the place: count the bedrooms and so forth, note salient features, and send
young Geoffrey up to do the donkey-work next week. There was plenty of time – in one way – for that, anyhow.

So, in the end, they tore through the house in an almost cursory manner. Arabella was fascinated by what few things had been left. A bottle of Dettol in one bathroom. ‘How can
anyone
have wanted black baths and salmon-pink tiles?’ A straw hat and some tennis shoes in an upstairs passage. In one or two of the minor bedrooms, curtains still hung, bleached and
dirty with the sun and neglect. One lavatory smelled of seaweed, and Edmund said he thought there was wet rot. In the kitchen was a plastic bowl full of sprouting potatoes and a calendar about the
beauties of Scotland. It had not been turned since February, where there was a dramatic and sinister picture of Loch Ness. There were a number of good rooms, but one end of the house had been
recently and horribly built. Bits of underfelt lay obscenely on some bits of floor, like horizontal fungus. There were yellowing piles of newspapers, a croquet mallet – split – a
photograph album, very small and old, with Victorian ladies sitting on basket chairs out of doors, parasols poised. Under one was written ‘Miss Fawcett?’ in pale ink.

‘You’d think they haven’t been here for
years
! Oh, do let’s explore the garden.’

Edmund agreed to this. He knew that it was large, and that he ought to walk the boundaries with the map he had with him, but he also knew by now that he would do no such thing. He and Arabella
would simply go about looking at it as though they were prospective buyers at their first viewing. By now, he did not mind this at all.

The garden was in a jungle state of desuetude: weeds were everywhere. The top lawn descended to a second, where was a tangled rose garden and sun-dial: thence further descent, past more noble
trees to a third lawn in the middle of which was a pond, or miniature lake. It had an off-centre well-scaped island, containing one weeping willow and some iris out of flower. Pigeons flew heavily
out of bushes like people leaving a play of which they disapproved. Rabbits cavorted and then escaped their attention just in time. A huge old buddleia was spattered with either tortoise-shell or
Painted Lady butterflies. Arabella seemed delighted by the whole thing. ‘But the lake’s the best,’ she said. It had stone coping round it, warmed from the recent sun, and she lay
down to look through the water-lily leaves for fish. ‘There must be fish,’ she said. Edmund sat beside her reclining body.

‘There
are
fish! It’s marvellous, isn’t it?’

‘It is a remarkable property to find so near London.’

‘Oh, God! Do stop being a surveyor.’

There was a particularly violent streak of lightning, followed at once by a tremendous crashing of thunder just overhead.

‘Do you mind thunder?’

‘Not if I’m with someone. It’s exciting, so there must be some fear in it.’

She was very close to him: he noted her heavy, curved eyelids, her pale well-boned face, her hair that he wanted to touch, because its appearance made one want to feel it, her half-serious, half
he-didn’t-know-what expression. She had kicked off her shoes again, and her feet, also pale, but the colour of parchment, with white insteps, made a deep and, to him, extraordinary
impression. She leaned towards him and said, ‘Light me a cigarette. There’s going to be the most awful storm – you’ll see.’

There was. The lightning and thunder followed at louder and more frequent intervals. Single, large drops of rain fell upon them freakishly, but each thought the other had not noticed. Arabella
had turned on to her back; had undone the top of her trouser suit for Edmund to discover that there was nothing beneath it but her flesh – her breasts and the surrounding skin. A sense of
unreality and longing for that overcame him. He would have her if it was the last and only thing that he did.

She was not unwilling. Precarious sensuality, incredible promise and opportunity fought with his desire – to be the best she had ever had, without knowing what that could possibly be. By
the time she was naked, the rain had begun to fall, but seemed only an erotic chorus – necessary, but unimportant. Once he had begun to make love to her, to discover and tell her how
beautiful she was, she was utterly silent: still, almost relaxed, open to him, but leading nothing – almost waiting – for anything. Her cigarette lay upon the grass, unsmoked and
quickly put out by the rain.

When he could wait no longer, Edmund flooded her as though all the years of his life had been saved for this moment. Then she put her arms slowly round his neck and kissed him. Afterwards, he
propped himself up to look down at her face to read and remember it: her eyes, the colour of the deepest, dark, still water, as unfathomable, looked back: he felt that he would never forget her and
that he knew nothing. He started to ask her something, and she put her cool, rain-soaked hand over his mouth – for a moment – long enough to stop him. Rain was now pouring, beating down
upon them, her hair was stranded and dark with it; sometimes drops fell upon her eyes and she shut them so that the drops rolled down like tears.

The storm was passing, over them towards the east; meanwhile they were both, he realized, without dry clothes of any kind, except for a macintosh he kept in the boot of his car. As he thought of
this, Arabella sat up, clasped her hands round her knees, and said, ‘It will stop in a minute.’

She was right. A ragged streak the colour of old lemon peel appeared in the sky. The rain became slower; the air was refreshed.

‘We should have put our clothes under the cedar; then, at least, they would have been dry.’

She seized the trail of her hair and wrung it out and the water ran down each side of her spine. The sun came out of the passing cloud and shone suddenly in a shaft upon the weeping willow on
the island. Each side of the shaft seemed a curtain of mist and dusty shadow. Sunlight broadened across the small lake and after a moment or two, the steam began to rise and there was a steely
peacock-coloured dragonfly. Arabella saw him first. Edmund had put most of the clothes he had taken off on again, and very uncomfortable they felt. She had made no move to dress, and he wished, as
many people have done at such moments, that he could draw, or have a drawing of her as she was now. As he was thinking this, she said, ‘I suppose the poor old Gauloises are wet
through?’

‘They were in your bag.’

‘They were – in the car. I just put them in my pocket when I got out. Oh yes – they’re done for.’

‘What about your suit?’

‘I expect it’s shrunk like mad.’

He watched, as though he was parting from her, while she pulled the trousers up her, stood, and struggled with the zip. ‘Can’t do it up: it’s stuck, somehow.’

‘Let me try.’

‘No. It doesn’t matter. The top half will cover the worst of it.’ She thrust her arms into the crumpled, clinging stuff. ‘It feels lovely and cool.’ The sun was now
everywhere, and birds no longer silent. She put a bare foot upon the stone coping and said, ‘Stone cold: that didn’t take long.’

The grass was steaming now, the daisies opening to the sun, but the buddleia, bowed down with its weight of rain, had lost its butterflies. The house, with its shutters closed, looked both blind
and anonymously dull. He wanted to take her in his arms, to make all kinds of promises, declarations, reassurances: to hold her and ask her all the things that he did not know about her, to set
some seal upon this – to him – unprecedented experience. But she gave one more look at the lake and turned towards the house saying, ‘Do you think I could pick some of the roses?
Nobody wants them, do they?’

He followed her, carrying her shoes. The rose garden was overgrown with bindweed and thistles and in the end she picked only three roses, carefully chosen different-coloured buds. ‘They
will come out if I put them into hot water when we get home.’

This simple remark staggered and confused him so much that he found himself literally unable to consider its implications. Instead, he made sure that he had locked the black back door properly,
got his macintosh out of the boot; decided that although he could have done with it himself, she needed covering more than he, and so offered it to her.

‘By the way, what became of your other clothes? I mean the ones you came to London in?’

‘I left them at the shop where I bought this. They’ll send them home. It was easier than carting them about all day.’

There it was again. Home. Mulberry Lodge: Anne – his wife.

‘I tell you a good thing we could do. You stop at a Marks and Spencer and buy me a dry outfit. I know my size: it’ll be quite easy. And we could get some more cigarettes.’

He looked once more at her before starting the car. Her head was thrown back against the seat: she had a very long, and round, white neck and he remembered that all her limbs were so formed;
that her slenderness was made of lengths and never interrupted any curve. He wanted to kiss her once more, before they left this place, after which he felt that everything he had always known might
become
un
known, and that everything he had found in her might recede or vanish into a myth of his life, but looking at her calm face whose expression was still – and indeed had never
stopped being – mysterious to him, he did not dare. He sighed, started the car, and backed it out of the rotting gates.

He drove down the hill through Barnet and turned right into Barnet and Totteridge Lanes. The sun was now steady; there were lakes beside the lane with swans on them. When he reached the main
road, he said, ‘Are you always called Arabella? Do you have no other names?’

‘
She
used to call me Arbell: you know, like Arbell Stuart.’

He didn’t know. But then she said, ‘My middle name is Flora. After my father’s mother. Awful name – I never use it.’

Flora. That was it. The Botticelli picture ‘Allegory of Spring’. She was girl, nymph, goddess, barefooted, beflowered, casting them random upon the dark ground where they grew as
they fell. He had never in his life seen anyone who sang, as it were, from a picture. He wondered whether to tell her this, and decided that it should be his secret about her. He needed one: there
might be no other.

‘What about Marks and Sparks?’

‘We’ll have to go to one in London. We’d have to go that way more or less so we might as well find a good one.’

‘The best ones are Oxford Street and Edgware Road.’

‘Look: I may not be able to park. Wouldn’t
you
rather choose the things and I’ll drive round the block?’

‘I don’t mind in the least about choosing things, and honestly, I don’t think I’m decent enough for a respectable chain store.’

Her nipples showed through the damp and shrunken white crêpe, and he saw what she meant.

‘We’ll try Edgware Road first as it’s nearest.’

‘You are nice not to ask too many usual questions.’

He thought about that all the way to a parking meter, which turned out to be miraculously easy.

‘What do you want me to get?’

‘I’m a twelve. Either trousers and a shirt, or a trouser suit or a dress or a skirt. Not black – I look awful in it – like a scarecrow. I wouldn’t mind a long
woollen jacket – haven’t got one.’ She was fumbling in her yellow bag and produced a wad of five pound notes. ‘Here.’

‘It’s ungallant to take them, but I’ll have to because I didn’t cash a cheque this morning.’

‘Even if you had, it wouldn’t be ungallant. Go on: choose something pretty and a surprise.’

Marks and Spencer was not Edmund’s milieu; that is to say, he had never been in one of their shops in his life; he had never casually, as it were, outfitted a girl, and was anyway in a
condition that was variously composed of euphoria, anxiety, and above all, a feeling that everything that was happening was either unreal, or extremely frightening. The brilliantly lit shop, with
its multitude of goods, its scores of customers all looking as though they knew exactly what to do and how to do it, almost paralysed him, and for some moments he stood just inside the doors gazing
at the enormous scene. He pulled himself together through years of practised and therefore mechanical effort, and set about finding the section or sections that had women’s clothes. After
some searching, the feeling intervened, God knew where from, that he must get back to her or she would not be there, would have vanished or simply walked out of the car, and he hastily bought some
orange velvet jeans, a pink shirt made of some mysterious modern material but, he thought, a good colour, and a long white cardigan. She had not said anything about underclothes, but he bought her
a pair of pants in case she had taken that for granted. He was astonished at how cheap and how simple it all seemed to be, and by the time he had finished, he was almost enjoying it. ‘My girl
got soaked to the skin, so I had to pop into Marks and Sparks and fit her out,’ he heard himself thinking of saying but then, there was nobody to say that sort of thing to. He didn’t
know anyone who would receive the information with the slightest interest or admiration. Or at least, nobody like that whom he would
want
to say it to.