Not That Sort of Girl

by Mary Wesley

  Rose slid out of bed. ‘Come, then …’

  ‘Stand still a moment, let me see you properly.’ Rose stood in the early light smiling.

  ‘When you are old, you will look no different. Who is here? Are you alone in the house?’

  ‘Yes. For the moment. The Farthings live in the cottage; he gardens, she helps when she feels like it; Ned’s regiment is at Catterick.’ She must mention Ned. He exists, she told herself without alarm.

  ‘Got back from Dunkirk, did he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One wouldn’t want one’s worst enemy to be taken prisoner. I’m glad.’

  Rose pulled on her nightdress and dressing gown. ‘Must you?’ Mylo protested.

  ‘I will take them off when I come back.’ (Mylo lay back.) ‘Don’t you change, either …’

  ‘Hurry back.’

  ‘I will. Come, Comrade.’ Rose ran downstairs with the dog, let her out into the garden, watched her trot through the dew, crouch thoughtfully. I shall tell Ned she is a stray, that I found her lost. The dog scratched the grass, kicking little clods of earth behind her, came back to Rose full of cheer. In the kitchen she put the kettle to boil, opened a tin of dog food. While the dog ate, she laid a tray, made coffee, boiled eggs, made toast, found marmalade, butter and honey, carried the tray upstairs. The dog followed at her heels, ignored the cats staring balefully through the banisters.

  Rose pushed open the door, carried in the tray. Mylo was asleep again. ‘Come in, all of you,’ she said. The dog lay down by the bed while the cats, every hair on end, their tails like bottle brushes, sprang for safety onto the windowsill, baring needle teeth, gaping with silent mews.

  Mylo woke. ‘Rose?’

  She put the tray on the bed. ‘I must keep you secret; I only brought one cup for us.’

  ‘Take those things off.’

  She dropped the dressing gown and nightdress to the floor, rejoined him in bed. They ate breakfast sitting close, sharing the cup. Then they made love again without haste, delighting in one another.

  ‘You would think to see us now that we got it right the first time in that dismal little hotel.’ He stroked her flank. ‘I love you, love you, love you.’

  ‘And I you.’

  ‘You should see the expression of boredom on the faces of the girls I have regaled with my love for you. One yawned in my face.’

  ‘Many girls?’

  ‘You should not ask questions. How is Ned?’ he countered.

  ‘Ned is all right.’

  ‘Isn’t that nice.’

  ‘Now then …’

  ‘You are right, neither Ned nor other girls have anything to do with us.’

  ‘No, nothing.’ (Almost nothing, very little.)

  ‘And do you speak of me?’

  ‘Never. If I did, if I began, I should not be able to stop. I would go on and on and my love might dissipate in the process.’

  ‘There is that risk.’

  ‘Not really,’ she said, ‘how could it?’

  ‘Ah, my love,’ he murmured, kissing her, ‘and yet in the nature of things it is better to keep me secret, nobody must know—my job.’

  ‘What job?’

  ‘To-ing and fro-ing.’

  ‘What? Where? Not …’

  ‘Yes. I shall be going back …’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I must. I shall come back often. Don’t weep, Rose, don’t weep. Nothing is easy.’

  It was later she felt resentful.

  24

  THOSE PRECIOUS DAYS HAD set a standard difficult to adhere to, Rose thought, waking in the hotel bed, listening to the slap of water against the hotel jetty. The weather had been perfect; they had been so happy in their love, finding one another with passion, merriment, satisfaction. There had been no room for doubt or jealousy. They had resolutely shut out fear. The memory of those days in the midsummer of 1940 would endure strongly enough to bring the prick of tears, give courage in times of doubt or boredom, keep hope alive through disappointment, irritation, jealousy and anger. Do I dare hope, she asked herself; is hope a neglected habit which was strong in youth when I feared Mylo was gone from my life, had stopped loving me, loved someone else, was dead? There certainly had been times when hope guttered pretty low.

  As a robin began to sing in a bush outside she looked across at the Bonnard hanging in view of the bed. ‘I hoped you would keep it in sight,’ Mylo had said that summer morning. ‘You guessed that I sent it. You knew, of course?’

  ‘Even though you wrote no word.’

  ‘What is that garment she is wearing? A shift?’ Propped on his elbow, he examined the picture.

  ‘Camiknickers,’ she said.

  ‘Shift is a prettier word.’

  ‘She has broken a shoulder strap.’

  ‘Do you break yours?’

  ‘I remember one snapping when you hugged me in the park. I thought if I protested it would spoil the moment …’

  Mylo had laughed at that. ‘Look at our Comrade,’ he had said and they leaned together from the bed to stroke the dog’s silky ears as she looked up at them, puffing out her lips with a whimper of devotion in the effort to express her affection, poor dumb animal.

  I remember every moment.

  ‘I feel like that about you. I am as inarticulate as the dog,’ he had said.

  ‘You are not doing badly,’ she remembered saying with satisfaction. (Only temporary satisfaction, of course.)

  We walked across the hayfields by the light of the moon. We lay on the grass in the walled garden under the lilac and syringa, we brought our meals out to the garden, we swam naked in the river. Why were we not interrupted or disturbed? I remember. Farthing was busy with his Home Guard; it was soon after that that he got his uniform; and Mrs Farthing had her big wash, an annual event of stupendous dimensions when curtains, covers, even rugs, were scrubbed clean; she probably made the little girls help her, so preventing them spying on us.

  We lay in the bath and I told him about Nicholas and Emily; he said, ‘Do not let them hurt you, keep them at arm’s length; they will try to insinuate themselves into your life.’

  ‘All very well,’ she remembered saying; ‘they have a gift of some sort.’

  ‘A talent for finding your sensitive spot and prodding it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she had said. ‘You put it exactly.’

  ‘Then hide your sensitive spots.’

  ‘I only have the one, you.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I hold my tongue, keep you secret. I shall not bore strange men telling them of you as you did those girls.’

  ‘Now, now.’

  ‘Who were they, anyway?’

  ‘Does it matter? A girl in the Métro, another in a cafe, nothing to worry about—only girls.’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘You must not be jealous; it would make more sense if I were jealous of Ned. I am, come to think of it.’

  ‘How could you be?’ she had said, amazed.

  ‘How can I not be?’

  ‘Oh, Mylo, stop. Ned—well, Ned thinks too much about food; he is afraid of not having enough. He is really only interested in himself, not in me, except as a possession of some sort like the furniture, don’t you see?’

  ‘Nothing to fear, then?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But you have promised him …’

  ‘He was afraid.’

  ‘Hum.’ Mylo was unsure.

  ‘I cherish you, my secret.’

  But was he so secret? She tried to remember. Had there not been a scene with her parents before she got engaged to Ned when she had suggested carelessly, to see what they would say, that she might marry Mylo? Was it imagination? Did she invent her mother’s snobbish put-downs, her father’s acid remarks? If it did not take place, it well might have, so the effect was the same. There might have been a scene even worse than she thought she remembered, blotted from her mind. Why else her mother’s sneering remarks, ‘people affecting workmen’s clothes’, �
�people of mixed descent’, derogatory remarks made by an envious insecure woman. Funny that they ceased when she read an article about Mylo in the newspaper lauding something he had done. But that was years later, just before she died. (I know where her ashes are, thought Rose, I tipped them into the Serpentine.)

  So those few days, if not completely perfect, came pretty close, Rose remembered, stretching her legs in the hotel bed.

  ‘Ow! God! Ow!’ She is seized with cramp in her old age. Cries aloud and struggles out of bed to stop the muscles bunching in her calf, treads down to relax the agonised tendons. I never had cramp when we walked along the hedgerow hand in hand and Comrade startled partridges and their chicks from the long grass verges. She massages her legs to relieve the pain which, stopping as quickly as it came, leaves an echo in her mind. ‘I suppose I am grown old,’ she says out loud. Is joy still possible? There had been so many times when joy was in abeyance. And hope? What about hope?

  Hope had been hard put to it when she had waked to find herself alone in her bed. The silence told her he was gone; only the dog Comrade leaping onto the bed to lick her face and grieve with her proved that he had been there at all.

  25

  PRESUMABLY, THOUGHT ROSE LYING in the hotel bed, the anguish of her cramped calf an echo, presumably it was during the late summer of 1940 that she plotted her future. Whatever she decided had been as deliberate as an act of taking out a life insurance policy. The surprise of finding Mylo there one minute, gone the next was something she was not prepared to endure.

  She had once, as a child, bouncing as children do on her bed, bounced at an angle, hit her head against the nursery wall, concussed herself. Mylo vanishing left her equally stunned, she had not believed him capable of leaving without a word.

  The first thing she had to do finding Mylo gone was to lie about the dog. She had found it, she told the Farthings, collarless, lost. It seemed quite an engaging dog, it did not chase cats.

  ‘Got fleas?’ enquired Mrs Farthing.

  ‘Not so that you’d notice.’

  She drove to the police station on her way to the shops, reported her trouvaille, arranged that if it were not claimed she would keep it. The lies tripped easily.

  ‘That animal?’ The sergeant looked dubious. ‘I like a bit of class myself.’

  ‘I like her.’

  ‘It’ll need a collar and a licence.’

  ‘I’ll see she gets both.’ She drove back with Comrade on the back seat.

  Ned, arriving on a week’s leave, bringing Harold Rhys and Ian Johnson, found Comrade installed. Quiet, house-trained, trotting at Rose’s heels.

  ‘What an appalling mongrel. What on earth can it be? You can’t want a creature like that. I’ve never seen anything like it. Where did you find it?’

  ‘She appeared. I found her in the garden, she attached herself.’

  ‘You can’t want to keep it?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I wanted to give you a decent dog. A labrador or an alsatian. That animal isn’t anything.’

  ‘A lot of things, I’d say,’ said Ian Johnson. ‘It looks like a scruffy sort of beagle mixed with terrier and a touch of spaniel.’ Ian mocked Comrade.

  ‘I wanted,’ Ned exclaimed angrily, ‘to …’

  ‘I know you did.’ Rose smiled at her husband, ignored Ian Johnson (not only boring, tactless also). She would keep Comrade’s heroic retreat across France, her valiant leap from the quay to reach the boat (had Mylo intended leaving her?), her swim in the filthy dark water to be fished out by Mylo, her illegal entry at Brixham, to herself.

  ‘If we were near the coast,’ said Harold Rhys who, never famous for brains, yet had the knack of striking the nail on the head, ‘I’d say it might be a French dog. There are dogs with a strain of hound in them all over France, supposed to be descendants of Wellington’s foxhounds. I read a letter in The Times recently which said the French and Belgian refugee trawlers were bringing dogs and even cats across. Grandmothers too, apparently. It was calling attention to the dangers of rabies. One lot even brought a priest.’

  ‘Rabid grandmothers, promiscuous priests,’ mocked Ian Johnson.

  ‘We are too far from the coast,’ squashed Ned, staring at the dog. ‘It does nothing for my home’ (it was on the tip of his tongue to say ancestral), ‘for Slepe,’ he compromised. He had visualised, when Rose talked of having a dog, something elegant, pure bred, posing for the Tatler, Rose in tweeds, himself with gundog at feet.

  ‘Oh, snobbish,’ mocked Rose. Ned flushed. ‘I was joking, only joking.’ But he failed to keep the anger from his voice.

  ‘Darling, of course. Come with me. I want to show you my war work. You won’t mind, you two?’ She led Ned away.

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘Work. I am helping Farthing on a regular basis in the garden and I’m working on the farm. The Hadleys say they can use me.’

  ‘I don’t think I …’

  ‘It’s so that I shall always be here when you come home, Ned.’ She popped a plug into his objections.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ned, ‘I see,’ mulling the pros and cons. ‘Oh, all right, if it’s not too much for you, if that’s what you want.’ He wasn’t sure he liked this but realised he could not stop her.

  ‘If you don’t approve I’ve been offered a job in the War Office.’ This was a lie, but how was Ned to know?

  ‘I don’t want you in London, you are much better here, safer.’

  ‘That’s what I thought you’d say. And, Ned, when the war is over, we’ll get you a labrador.’

  Is she learning to manage me? Ned wondered as they walked through the vegetable garden. I must have a chat with Uncle Archie.

  And, Rose thought, putting her arm through Ned’s, as soon as I am sure Mylo is gone for good, I shall get myself pregnant. Mylo should have told her more, given her more hope, a child would be a sheet anchor through this dismal war, lessen her fear and insecurity.

  It was years before Rose admitted she had opted as her father would have wished her to for safety, but at the time, since she was not completely ignorant, she also wondered resentfully where Mylo had learned to be such a good lover. She knew such things did not come naturally; had she not herself had to learn the mechanics with Ned? She discounted George, and bitterly resented Mylo’s silent disappearance.

  26

  FAR FROM SUBSIDING, ROSE’S anger grew as weeks turned to months during the long summer of 1940. She resented Mylo’s secretiveness, sneaking off without a word of farewell. He might have trusted her, she thought, as she hoed the vegetables, trundled her wheelbarrow, weeded the onion bed under Farthing’s supervision. I would not have delayed him much, just enough for one last hug. Maybe he was hurrying away to other girls. The thought of other girls filled her with rage as she squatted among the onions, tearing up the weeds, filling her fingernails with grit. She gave small credence to his work, if it existed.

  When Ned telephoned she babbled of her doings, giving him news of the farm, the garden, the village, making him laugh at the advice she received from Edith Malone. ‘She wants to turn me into a lady of the manor; fortunately your uncle set no example. I can’t see myself in the role. Some of her ideas are positively feudal.’ She mocked Edith.

  ‘Then keep a low profile,’ said Ned, laughing, glad that Rose appeared happy, under the delusion that he would shape her to fit Slepe as he wished. And Rose enjoyed those conversations, looked forward to Ned’s distant voice which distracted her from her hurt. But, at night, with her body lusting for her lover, she cursed Mylo, decided to forget him, sweep him clear. Then, leaning from her window at night, she breathed the scent of magnolia, remembered his climb, pushing the dog up ahead of him, heard the stiff leaves clatter and saw his gleeful, exhausted face.

  (Why the hell had he not behaved like an ordinary person and rung the bell at the front door?)

  When in late September Ned came on leave she surprised him with an affection which he took for love, with tenderness he mistook for lus
t, with friendship which was genuine. In her anger and grief for Mylo she saw nothing odd in turning to Ned for comfort. In later years she would consider that she might have exaggerated her search for consolation in the conceiving of a child. She did this on Ned’s last night, simply ceasing to use the outfit provided by Doctor Helena Wright. She deluded herself that a child would erase Mylo from her mind. (Which goes to show, she would acknowledge in old age, what an idiot I was.)

  Ned, driving down from Yorkshire in his large car so hungry for petrol, spent his leave hoisting it onto blocks, oiling and greasing it, disconnecting the battery, covering the whole with tarpaulin. From now on, he told Rose, he would use the railways and her car, should he come home on leave, economise on petrol. ‘Shall you be all right with this little car?’ he had asked. She guessed that he felt a twinge of guilt over its acquisition. (Nicholas and Emily could be seen speeding about the roads in their MG with petrol supplied by the Ministry of Agriculture.)

  ‘I shall be perfectly all right with it,’ Rose reassured him as she walked with him across the fields she had walked with Mylo, paused by the river where they had swum, watched Comrade flush partridges from the long grass as she had flushed them for Mylo. She held Ned’s hand as they walked, daring herself to compare it with her lover’s.

  They sat, Ned’s last evening, on the stone seat where on the morning of their honeymoon they had remembered diversely the winter tennis. Ned was to leave on the evening train. Across the fields John Hadley called his cows for the evening milking, ‘Hoi, hoi, hoi,’ his cry drowned suddenly by the roar of a plane.

  ‘An enemy bomber?’

  ‘No, a fighter. A Hurricane or a Spitfire. I cannot tell the difference.’

  ‘The Farthings’ evacuees can,’ said Rose.

  ‘Ah, children, children …’ Ned looked across the garden where the first frost had yet to nip the dahlias. ‘As soon as this is over I shall want children.’

  ‘And not before?’ Rose found her husband’s selfishness amusing. ‘I might want one before. Or never,’ she teased, catching Ned’s startled eye, ‘or are you leaving me out of this caper?’