Odd Girl Out (4 page)

She combed her greasy hair (blonde hair, especially if it was very fine, always got greasy quickly anyhow), put on some lipstick and changed into a black sweater: black was always better on the
skin if you’d been crying a lot and not sleeping much. There were two eggs left, half a pint of milk and a tin of corned beef. That would have to do, because, she now realized, she could
neither go out to shop nor start washing her long hair in case the doctor came.

She climbed the next half flight to see why Luke was screaming.

After Edmund left for London, Anne realized that tomorrow – Thursday – was the tenth anniversary of their marriage. This meant that all her usual plans for the day
must be changed. No gardening: no pottering about: no making those time-taking, minute alterations to the house that added up to all the difference in the end. She would have to go into Henley, and
possibly Maidenhead – to buy interesting food and a present. It was going to be a very hot day; she hated shopping for food, but on the other hand, she loved buying presents. Edmund, unlike
most husbands, was a most rewarding recipient. He liked clothes, antiques, wine, silver, glass, cufflinks, snuffboxes, primitive paintings – there was really an enormous choice. Both Henley
and Maidenhead were expensive for most of these things, but she certainly hadn’t time to go to London. Anyway, she enjoyed spending most of her tiny legacy upon these occasions. Edmund was so
generous to her; had so much changed her life from miserable and anxious poverty to comfort and stability, that in a way, she felt she owed him anything that was privately hers. Last year, she had
found a beautiful pair of ship’s decanters, with their original stoppers, into which she had carefully decanted bottles of Cockburn ’27 and Taylor ’29. But perhaps for a decade of
marriage one should get something more personal. Edmund took snuff: a good snuffbox would be suitable. His favourite summer dinner of cold avocado soup, salmon trout and raspberries would be easy:
there would be time to have her hair cut. Anne wore hers cut as short as possible – had always done so from the moment Edmund had suggested it and then indulged in one of those nights of
sensuality as satisfactory as it was startling to them both: a time that she could, and did, frequently recall, to conjure the first purely physical pleasure she had ever known. She had many times
since had reason to be grateful to Edmund about her hair. But he was extremely fussy about its shape, and as it was both thick and dark and fast-growing, she had to have it trimmed every three
weeks. She picked up the wine-merchants’ catalogue and searched for another blank space on which to make a more urgent list. Perhaps she should get Edmund a gramophone record. He was
particularly fond of opera and Strauss, but the only name of an opera she knew by him was
Rosenkavalier
which they already possessed. Still, the shop would know, and there would be
catalogues. Anne was not particularly fond of music, but she did a great deal of gros point while Edmund listened to it, and she admired him for being interested in so many different things.
Brahms, Elgar, Tchycovsky, she wrote. This last looked wrong, but she knew what she meant. When she got up, Ariadne raised her head and gazed, or rather stared, at her in a manner both meaningful
and enigmatic. I might do it while you are out, and then I can do it where I please, was what it occurred to Anne that the stare might mean. When she had bathed and dressed in her blue linen
trouser suit that became her rather straight – and, as Edmund had remarked once, below the waist rather boyish – figure, she lifted Ariadne off the bed and into the box in their
bathroom that had been carefully prepared for the confinement. Ariadne got out of this immediately, shaking the fluff of a newly washed blanket delicately from each paw. They both raced for the
bed. In the end, she had to be shut out while it was made; Anne shut the bedroom door, and the communicating door between bedroom and bathroom, so that only the public way to this bathroom was
available. Ariadne thudded sulkily downstairs after her and waited for her breakfast to be served in order to refuse it until Anne had left.

It was going to be a
very
hot day. Anne loaded the MG with the bedside lamp, shopping baskets, and crates of empty lemonade bottles. Tonight they would have Pimm’s under the cedar:
they might even have dinner out if she bought something to burn against the midges. Poor Edmund got dreadfully bitten, and she not at all: his skin was far more sensitive, or attractive, than
hers.

Driving to Henley, she had a spasm of anxiety about this unknown girl coming to stay for an unknown amount of time. She herself had almost no separate friends from Edmund: half a dozen couples
and a few other single people came and dined and stayed a night or for the week-end; she was an only child, both parents dead, and the only friend who had survived from her former (and to her now
frightful) life was a woman – a literary agent – considerably older than Anne, with whom Edmund got on extremely well. The few social occasions of her life were enjoyable, and probably
necessary to preserve and sustain the delightful, domestic/married/erotic life that she and Edmund had somehow discovered or made or were subject to. She never felt lonely, even when Edmund was
away, as there was always a great deal to do, and she was by nature a doer. She preferred to be doing something with – preferably – Edmund there, to simply being there – even with
Edmund. Still – if one was so lucky and happy oneself one ought to be able to have something to spare for any other person less fortunate. Anybody who had been brought up by Clara had
probably been paralysed, made inarticulate with the constant frenzy of luxury travel and Clara’s overwhelming personality. The thought of Clara with a daughter induced feelings in Anne that
were as near maternal as she had ever become. She and Edmund had never had children, although they had never planned not to, but neither of them had felt any gap in their lives that people like
Ariadne had not been able to fill. But to be Clara’s daughter was a fate that Anne was perfectly able to recognize, although discretion would prevent her pointing it out to Edmund. The great
thing about living seriously with one other person was to tell them very nearly, but not quite, everything …

After the taxi-driver had asked her several times, Arabella, feeling weak and awful, said crossly, ‘Oh – anywhere you like. The Zoo, for all I care,’ she
added, and much too soon later, the man announced that they had arrived.

‘Where?’ She didn’t at all want to get out of the cab.

‘Where you said. The Zoo.’

She had to take off her dark glasses to find her purse in her bag, and took so long over it that the man finally turned round to face her with his resentment, but by then she had found the money
and handed it through to him. Then she
had
to move. Oh God. Better to have gone to an hotel. But it was difficult in England just to go to an hotel for the inside of a day – wanting a
bedroom, that is.

‘Are you all
right?
’

‘Never felt worse. Don’t worry: you don’t know me.’

‘Are you famous then? Ought I to?’

She put on her dark glasses again. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know.’ The remark reminded her of one of the innumerable schools that she had experienced. She climbed stiffly out and
found the driver, whose face, she now saw, was of a complexion on to which you could have dropped a fried egg without anyone noticing, regarding her closely with very small, very brandy-coloured
eyes. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling quite famous now.’

‘I only asked.’ He drove off, conscience relieved by resentment. He’d pop off to Warwick Avenue for his dinner: the cabman’s Ecu de France, he called it. He’d got
his Dick Francis, and he’d get a
Standard
in Clifton Road. She’d given him a big tip; she might be somebody.

Arabella found yet more money to get her into the Zoo (Christ: every time she
moved
it cost something) and sat down as soon as possible on a wooden bench. She ought to have gone to
Candida’s flat. She couldn’t have, without going into everything. Candida was arriving – would probably by now have arrived – back from Sardinia. She simply didn’t
know anyone well enough to make use of them unless she was feeling well enough for it not to matter whether she made use of them or not. She wished it was not so hot: that she had a cool drink, and
that she knew where the lavatories were. This last became an essential desire – so she got directed to it. After a long time there she felt that she probably wasn’t going to die, and
unsure of what this meant to her, decided to practise getting through the day in an ordinary manner. She bought a bag of peanuts and went to see Guy, the gorilla. As it was a fine day, he was in
his outside cage. He, alone, of all the apes, preserved a statuesque and regal gloom. He sat – like someone trying to bear the indignities of the world with comprehending majesty.
His
life was awful, too: or at least, he seemed to think it was, and that came to much the same thing. She tried to think of being a gorilla in the good old days – thousands of miles of territory
upon which to prey, but herbivorously – and wondered whether Clara enjoyed being her age. He can’t do anything, because he’s shut up, but what am I supposed to do? If you
weren’t shut up, you made contact – with someone, somehow. But
you
always seemed to last longer than
it.
I really do feel shut up, but I also feel that I have total,
terrifying freedom. I can go anywhere, do anything that comes into my mind, and it doesn’t matter in the least. Words like ‘committed’, ‘viable’, and
‘relevant’ veered drunkenly through her mind. I can’t do anything for people if I don’t know anyone. And only one person has ever known me, or wanted to. She put that
thought away into some grave that she had dug for it, but never covered, left open for grief. She wished that she was four times as stupid, and twice as unattractive and eight times nicer. What did
nice mean? Caring about others. Working for World Peace; the poor; the diseased, the old and the mad. The trouble was that she had never found time to care about others. She thought it was sweat,
but found she was crying, or at least that there were tears on her face as well. I’ll turn over a new leaf, she said inside herself to Guy. I’ll be marvellous where I’m going. If
I feel like this, everybody must feel it a bit, and as I feel so awful I’ll understand them like most people don’t.

Guy hunched his immense shoulders and redirected his contemplation a fraction away from her. He knows it won’t work, she thought. If she could have shared her peanuts with him, he might
have been more cooperative. But ‘Do not feed Guy’ was on all the notices.

A keeper came along with a truck full of fruit and vegetables. Guy observed him without turning his head. As the keeper began selecting oranges, cabbage, carrots and lettuce, she said,
‘Couldn’t
I
give him something? Something you’d be giving him anyway, I mean?’

The keeper looked at her and then held out a banana. ‘You can try him with one of these. He won’t take no notice though. You’ll have to come round this way.’

When she held out the banana, Guy, without otherwise moving at all, put out the one arm, on the end of which was a gigantic and exhausted-looking work-worn hand, and took it.

‘He doesn’t mind you, then.’

Guy examined the banana carefully, and then, with an absent-minded but dismissive gesture, put it down.

‘He knows it’s your banana, though. He knows it isn’t a present.’

‘We’ve had to put a stop to all that. In the old days, people could feed nearly all the animals. But these days – you get some very funny jokers …’

‘How do you mean?’

‘One give an orange to a young African elephant. Stuffed full of razor-blades, it was. After that we had to tighten up the rules.’

Arabella began to think of the elephant with the orange, and without the slightest warning, was sick. This made her cry.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she gasped, leaning against Guy’s cage and groping for a handkerchief.

The keeper gently moved her from Guy’s possible reach, opened her bag for her, and took out the handkerchief.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again.

‘Don’t you worry. We’re used to cleaning up. Don’t worry about that. Sorry I upset you.’ He led her back to the public fairway and put her on a bench.

‘Look at the old boy,’ he said as though to a child. ‘Look at Guy, now. He’s eating your banana, see?’

Guy, who had turned to watch her when she had been sick, had now picked up the banana and was peeling it with careless virtuosity. In between each piece of peel, he watched to see whether she
was watching, but as he stripped each piece he was intent upon the banana. This dual intensity was somehow comforting: he
made
her watch him, and not think. When he had eaten it, the keeper
said, ‘Feeling better, are you?’

Realizing he meant her rather than Guy, she nodded.

‘I should have a nice cup of tea and go home. You look a bit off colour to me.’

‘You’ve been very kind.’

‘That’s all right,
madam,
’ he said, with an emphasis both kind and jaunty, and went back to Guy.

Feeling that she should move, so that at least she looked as though she was taking his advice, she got up and wandered past the ape house. People kept advising her to go home. Perhaps a cup of
tea would make a difference of one kind or another. ‘How can you spend one hundred and fifty pounds and have nothing to show for it?’ ‘That’s just the point, you see,
Mummy.’ But Clara wouldn’t go as far as that. She gave Arabella a good deal of money, and when Arabella had spent it, and needed some more, she usually just provided it. Only sometimes,
she had a frenzy of going through Arabella’s bank statements or travellers’ cheques and complaining that she couldn’t understand how Arabella got through it so fast with so few
visible results, but this was usually only when she was tired of whoever she was living with – was venting some general discontentment about life upon her daughter.

Well, she needn’t spend much in the country. She’d simply live on yoghourt, and take health-giving walks and help about the house or be nice to the servants whichever was applicable
and try to find out what the – what was their name? – Cornhills – were interested in and talk about it. She would play with their children and get them all to love her. She had
decided not to arrive until the evening to give herself more time to feel better, and although there seemed to be no signs of
that,
she always kept such promises made to herself. She’d
taken all her luggage to Paddington before going to that doctor, who even now was probably eating a hearty lunch in his rubber gloves to save time. It was only half past one. She decided to try and
find something to eat, and then to sit somewhere dark and cool like the Aquarium, or Reptile House, or that place where all the nocturnal animals had had their time shifted round for them, to get
through the next few hours. Self-pity was
absolutely
disgusting: it had no saving grace at all. Holding this firmly in mind (it was the only firm thing about her), she walked tremblingly to
the cafeteria.