Imogen

by Jilly Cooper

  Imogen lay shivering with terror in bed. And every time Nicky tried to steal down the passage, the vicar, who had ears on elastic, called out, ‘Is that you, my dear?’ So Nicky had to bolt into the lavatory. By one o’clock, mindful that he might rot up his chances in the Scottish Open tomorrow, he gave up and fell into a dreamless sleep. Imogen, who didn’t sleep at all, could hardly bear to look at his sulky face next morning.

  ‘Well that was a lead balloon, wasn’t it?’ he said, getting into his car. Tears filled Imogen’s eyes. This was obviously good-bye for good. Then, noticing the violet shadows under the brimming eyes, Nicky relented. It wasn’t her fault. If the vicar hadn’t come home unexpectedly, she’d have dropped like a ripe plum into his hands. ‘You couldn’t help it. I shall be much freer once the American Open’s over. Would your parents ever let you come away for a week-end?’

  Imogen shook her head. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Have you got any holiday left?’

  ‘A fortnight in September.’

  ‘Anything planned?’

  ‘No – nothing really.’

  How few girls would have admitted it, thought Nicky, taking her hand. She was as transparent and as wholesome as Pears Soap.

  ‘Well the only answer’s to go on holiday together then.’

  All heaven seemed to open. ‘Oh, how lovely!’ gasped Imogen. Then it closed again. ‘But my father would never allow it.’

  ‘H’m . . . we’ll see about that.’

  Chapter Four

  A fortnight later, during Wimbledon week, Nicky had a drink with his friend Matthew O’Connor in Fleet Street. He had known O’Connor on and off for a number of years. They bumped into each other abroad – Nicky playing in tournaments, O’Connor covering stories – and they had got drunk together and been slung out of more foreign nightclubs than they cared to remember.

  ‘Are you going to France this year?’ said Nicky.

  ‘In September. Why?’

  ‘Any room in your car?’

  The big Irishman looked at him shrewdly. ‘Depends who you want to bring.’

  Nicky grinned. ‘Well, I met this bird in Yorkshire.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Got a pair of knockers you can get lost in.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Well she’s adorable, like a puppy. You want to pick her up and cuddle her all the time. But terribly naïve. Dad’s a vicar and a bloody tartar – like that Mr Barrett of Walpole Street.’

  O’Connor grinned. ‘And you see yourself as Robert Browning?’

  ‘Well something of the sort. Anyway, I can’t get within necking distance on home ground.’

  ‘Green is she? So you fancy an away fixture?’

  ‘An away fixture is what I fancy.’

  O’Connor ordered another round of drinks.

  ‘I’ve always believed,’ he said, ‘that if a bird’s worth doing, she’s worth doing well. But a fortnight’s a hell of a long time. Don’t you think you better take her away for a week-end first?’

  ‘I’ve got tournaments every week-end for the next two months. Besides I doubt if the old vicar would let her.’

  ‘Well, he’s not likely to let her go on holiday, is he?’

  ‘He might. I can say we’re going in a large party. Parents seem to have some totally mistaken idea that there’s safety in numbers.’

  ‘Will she fight with Cable?’ asked O’Connor.

  ‘You’ve never allowed me to meet Cable.’

  ‘No more I haven’t. Come and have a drink with us this evening.’

  The next day Nicky wrote to Imogen’s parents. He was planning to go to France for a fortnight in September with a couple of friends who were engaged, and there would also be another married couple in the party taking their own car. He’d thought Imogen was looking tired last time he’d stayed. She needed a holiday. Could she join their party?

  To Imogen’s joy and amazement her parents agreed. Even her mother had noticed how down she was, and her father, who was looking forward to his three weeks’ exchange stint in the North Riding in September (the golf course was excellent there), had no desire to have his elder daughter slopping around with a February face spoiling the fun.

  ‘I’ll never, never be unhappy again,’ vowed Imogen. She dialled Nicky’s number in London to give him the good news.

  All the same, it was a very trying summer. Wimbledon fortnight came, and Imogen and Gloria spent most of it with the transistor on or with a pair of binoculars surreptitiously trained on the television in the Radio Rentals shop opposite the library. Nicky was in coruscating form, reaching the last eight of the singles and only being knocked out after a marathon match, and the semi-finals of the doubles with Charlie Painter. Everyone commented on his improved game. And whenever he appeared on the television screen, clothed in white tennis clothes, mystic, wonderful, whether he was uncoiling like a whiplash when serving or jumping from foot to foot as though the court were red hot beneath his feet, waiting to whistle back a shot, he seemed a God infinitely beyond Imogen’s reach.

  She had also seen him in the players’ stand, laughing with some of the more beautiful wives. Nor could she miss the way the tennis groupies (pert little girls with snake hips and avid eyes) made every match he played a one-sided affair by screaming with joy whenever he did a good shot, even cheering his opponent’s double faults, and mobbing him every time he came off court. Could this really be the man who’d eaten her mother’s macaroni cheese and wrestled with her on the sofa?

  After Wimbledon he moved on to ritzy places all over the world and Imogen found that a diet of almost illiterate postcards and occasional crackling telephone calls was not really enough to sustain her. Oh ye of little faith, she kept telling herself sternly, but found herself increasingly suffering from moodiness and then feeling desperately ashamed of herself.

  Even worse, everyone at work, having glimpsed Nicky and learnt they were going on holiday together, had turned the affair into a sort of office Crossroads. Not a day passed without someone asking her if she’d heard from him, or how long was it until her holiday, or how was he getting on in Indianapolis. Gloria’s attitude was ambiguous too. On the one hand she liked to boast, when out, of how her greatest friend Imogen was going out with a tennis star, and let slip crumbs of tennis gossip passed on by Imogen. But on the other she was wildly jealous, particularly when the word got round and several of the local wolves started coming into the library asking Imogen for dates.

  ‘They ought to provide wolf hooks as well as dog hooks outside,’ Gloria said, with a slight edge to her voice. ‘Then they wouldn’t be able to come in here pestering you.’

  Stung by Gloria’s sniping (You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. I bet Nicky’s playing round with all those foreign birds), Imogen gritted her teeth and went out with one or two of the wolves. But when the evening ended, remembering Nicky’s beautiful curling mouth, and the caressing deftness of his touch, she couldn’t even bear to let them kiss her; then felt mean when they stormed off into the night.

  Finally, the weather had been terrible. Throughout July, August and early September, it deluged without stopping. The River Darrow flooded the water meadows and the tennis courts, and endangered the lives of several flocks of sheep. Imogen’s hair crinkled depressingly, and she had absolutely no chance to brown her pallid body before her holiday. And the vicar, whose garden and golf had been almost washed away, was in a permanently foul mood and vented most of his rage on Imogen.

  At last September arrived. By scrimping every penny, she’d managed to save a hundred pounds. Nicky had told her not to worry about money, that he’d take care of everything, but she knew France was terribly expensive, and she wanted to pay her way. As most of her wages went towards the housekeeping, it didn’t leave much for her wardrobe.

  ‘What am I going to do about beach clothes?’ she said.

  ‘You won’t need much in a small fishing village,’ said her mother. ‘Which reminds me, Lady Ja
cintha sent a lovely red bathing dress for jumble. Red’s in this year, isn’t it? It’s perfect, except for a bit of moth in the seat.’

  The jumble was also deprived of two of Lady Jacintha’s wide-bottomed cotton trousers, which didn’t really fit, but Imogen thought she could pull long sweaters over them. Her mother bought her two kaftans in a sale in Leeds.

  ‘This phrase book isn’t much good,’ said Juliet, lounging on Imogen’s bed the night before she left. ‘“My coachman has been struck by lightning,” “Please ask the chambermaid to bring some more candles.” I ask you!’

  Imogen wasn’t listening. She was trying on Lady J’s red bathing dress for the hundredth time and wondering if it would do.

  ‘My legs are like the bottom half of a twinset and pearls,’ she sighed.

  ‘You ought to get a bikini. Bet it’s topless down there,’ said Juliet. ‘I think Mummy and Daddy are so funny.’

  ‘Why?’ said Imogen, folding up a dress.

  ‘Thinking you’ll be safe because you’ve got a married couple in the party to chaperone you. Ha! Ha! To egg you on more likely. I hope you’re on the pill!’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ snapped Imogen.

  ‘Well, you won’t be able to hold off a man like Nicky once he gets you in France.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Imogen, storming out of the room.

  But it was all too near the knuckle. Nicky’s last letter – the only one he hadn’t written on a postcard – had ended . . . and, darling, for goodness sake go and get yourself fitted up. We don’t want to spoil the whole fortnight worrying about you getting pregnant.

  Time and again during the past month Imogen had walked up and down in front of Dr Meadows’ surgery, and each time she had funked it. Dr Meadows was one of her father’s oldest friends and well over sixty. How could she ask him?

  In the end, once more egged on by Gloria, she had gone to a family planning clinic in Leeds on the pretext of looking for holiday clothes. Unfortunately her two brothers, Michael and Sam, still home for the holidays, had insisted on coming with her, in the hope of catching a Gillette Cup match at Headingley. But this, predictably, had been rained off, and Imogen had great difficulty shaking them off, even for a couple of hours.

  ‘I’ve got to buy lots of boring things like underwear,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll come too,’ said Sam, who at fourteen had only recently become interested in girls. ‘We might be able to see into some of the changing rooms.’

  ‘I don’t like people hanging round when I’m buying clothes,’ said Imogen quickly. ‘It muddles me. Look, here’s a fiver. Why don’t you go and see the new James Bond? I’ll meet you at the barrier at five o’clock,’ and, blushing violently, she charged through the glass doors of Brown and Muff. Rushing straight through and out the other side, she set off at a trot towards the clinic.

  ‘Where’s old Imo really going?’ said Sam, as they shuffled off to the cinema.

  ‘F.P.A.,’ said Michael, who was concentrating on lighting a cigarette in the rain.

  ‘Blimey, is she pregnant?’

  ‘Course not, just getting fixed up before her holiday.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘Left the address lying around in her bedroom.’ He began to cough. The cigarette went out.

  ‘Hope to Christ Dad doesn’t find it,’ said Sam. ‘Fancy old Imo getting round to sex at last.’

  ‘Just as well she’s taking precautions. They’re randy buggers these tennis players, even worse than rugger players.’ Michael’s cigarette, sodden now, obstinately refused to be lit. ‘I hope she’ll be all right, won’t get hurt I mean,’ he went on, throwing it into the gutter.

  ‘Do her good to grow up,’ said Sam, who was staring at a couple of giggling typists who, under one umbrella, were teetering by on high heels, heading towards the pub. ‘I say, shall we skip James Bond and go and have a drink instead?’

  ‘They’d never serve us.’

  ‘It’s pretty dark in there; you’d pass for eighteen anywhere. Fancy old Imo going on the pill.’

  ‘Buy anything good?’ said Sam innocently, as Imogen came rushing up to the barrier with only a few minutes to spare.

  ‘I’d forgotten the sales were on. There’s nothing nice in the shops,’ stammered Imogen, failing to meet either of her brothers’ eyes.

  ‘Got your ticket?’ said Michael, waving his. ‘We’d better step on it; they’re closing the doors.’

  ‘Oh goodness,’ said Imogen, ‘I’ve got it somewhere.’

  And as she was nervously rummaging, her shaking hands slipped, and the entire contents of her bag, including six months’ supply of the pill crashed on to the platform.

  ‘I wonder if scarlet women are called scarlet because they blush so much,’ said Sam, bending down to help Imogen pick everything up.

  And now on the eve of her holiday, the mauve packets of the pill were safely tucked into the pocket of her old school coat hanging at the back of her wardrobe. She’d been taking it for eight days now, and she felt sick all the time, but she wasn’t sure if it was side effects or nervousness at the thought of seeing Nicky. It was such ages since their last meeting she felt she’d almost burnt herself out with longing. Then she was worried about the sex side. She’d been taking surreptitious glances at The Joy of Sex when the library was quiet, and the whole thing seemed terribly complicated. Did one have to stop talking during the performance like a tennis match, and wouldn’t Nicky, accustomed to lithe, beautiful, female tennis players, find her much too fat?

  She put her hot forehead against the bathroom window. In the garden she could see her father talking to the cat and staking some yellow dahlias beaten down by the rain and wind.

  ‘That’s what I need,’ she thought wistfully. ‘I’ll never blossom properly in life unless I’m tied to a strong sturdy stake.’

  She wondered if Nicky was really stake material. Her father was coming in now. He looked tired. He’d been closeted with members of his flock all afternoon.

  She went back to her room and found Homer dispiritedly pulling her underwear out of her suitcase. He hated people going away. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she said, hugging him.

  She also packed a pile of big paperbacks she’d never got round to reading, Daniel Deronda, Lark Rise To Candleford, Scott Fitzgerald and Tristram Shandy. On the bed lay a box of tissues (they don’t have the kind of loo paper you can take your make-up off with in France, Miss Hockney had told her), a cellophane bag of cotton wool balls and a matching set of Goya’s Passport she had won in the church fête raffle. They didn’t look very inspiring as beauty aids. She imagined Nicky’s other girlfriends with the whole of Helena Rubinstein at their disposal.

  There was a knock on the door. It was her mother.

  ‘Hullo darling, how are you getting on? Daddy wants a quick word before he goes down to the jumble sale pricing committee.’

  As she went into the vicar’s study, Imogen started to shake. He was sitting behind his huge desk, lighting his pipe, a few raindrops still gleaming on his thick grey hair. All round him the shelves were filled with Greek and theological books, which the vicar never looked at, and gardening and sporting works which were much more heavily thumbed. On one ledge were neatly stacked volumes of the Church Times and the parish magazine. On the wall the vicar allowed himself one modest photograph of himself surrounded by the England team. On the desk was a large inkwell. He despised biros.

  Now he was looking at her over his spectacles. Was his jaundiced air due to the fact she’d been wearing the same skirt and sweater all week to save her best clothes for France, or was he remembering all the countless times he’d called her in to lecture her about inglorious reports, or misbehaviour at home?

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Are you looking forward to your holiday?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Imogen.

  ‘Wish I’d been lucky enough to gallivant off to the sun when I was your age,’ he went on heavily, ‘but times were harder then.’r />
  Oh God thought Imogen, he’s not going to start on that one.

  But instead her father got to his feet and began to pace the room. ‘I don’t think your mother and I have ever been oppressive parents – we’ve always tried to guide you by example rather than coercion.’ He gave her the chilly on-off smile he used for keeping his parishioners at a distance. His flock-off smile Michael and Juliet always called it.

  ‘But I can’t let you depart without a few words of advice. You are going to a foreign country – where there will be temptations. I trust you follow me, Imogen.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘We are letting you go because we trust you. We know Nicky is an attractive young man, and a celebrity, used to getting his own way in life, but we still trust you.’

  He stopped by the window, absent-mindedly stripping yellow leaves off a geranium on the ledge, testing its earth for sufficient moisture.

  ‘It’s been a trying afternoon,’ he went on. ‘Molly Bates and her daughter Jennifer were here for over an hour. Poor Molly. Jennifer suddenly revealed she was three months pregnant and the young man concerned has disappeared. Of course every attempt will be made to trace him and persuade him to marry the girl, but if not, she will spend the next months in an unmarried mothers’ home – not the most attractive of dwelling places – but Molly Bates feels, as a member of the Parochial Church Council, that Jennifer cannot have the child at home. Whatever the outcome, the girl’s life is ruined. She is second-hand goods now.’

  Poor Jennifer, thought Imogen, perhaps she’ll be sent off to the jumble sale.

  ‘When you’re in the South of France,’ said her father, ‘remember the fate of poor Jennifer Bates and remember you’re a clergyman’s daughter, and they, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion.’