Not That Kind of Girl

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘Benji’s in the bath. D’you want me to get him?’

  ‘No, no, it’s not urgent. It’s just – well, Mum rang and asked me to come over. She seemed quite upset, and I wondered if you’d seen her?’

  ‘Today, of course,’ said Francis, surprised. ‘We always have her to lunch on a Sunday, and no, she seemed fine. A bit quiet, obviously, but no tears. I think it’s …well, not exactly a relief, but a release for her. I’m surprised she’s having a downer. D’you want Benji to pop over as well?’

  ‘No, don’t worry, I’m sure she’s fine. Maybe just having a glum moment. Sunday nights can be a bit depressing, whether you’ve just lost your husband or not.’

  ‘Well, quite. Songs of Praise can have me in floods, and when they get to “Fight the Good Fight” I’m reaching for the nearest sharp knife. Ring us if you need us, sweetheart.’

  ‘Will do.’

  When I’d walked up the Finchley Road and got to Mum’s road – my old road, its redbrick mansion blocks with their distinctive white trim marching smartly up the hill towards Hampstead like a row of soldiers, I thought how strange it was that Dad would never come back here. We’d always said, when he was in the Nursing Home, ‘when Dad comes back’, even though we knew he probably wouldn’t. We’d always pretend he’d mend that window lock, or see to the fuzzy television, when he was better. Now, of course, he never would. Would never walk up these stairs in his tweed overcoat and tie, raising his hat with one hand to Mrs Spira as she popped nosily out of her ground-floor flat to see who was going upstairs, holding junk mail in the other having picked it up from the mat to throw away whilst everyone else just ignored it, and glancing appreciatively at the watercolours he’d put in the stairwell for everyone’s benefit, to brighten it up.

  A lump came to my throat as I climbed. Good, I thought. Good, I was remembering that father. The one who’d lived here. And it was a comfort. I’d tell Mum that, when I saw her; encourage her to do the same. Maybe we’d get some photo albums out? Remember all those family holidays in Northern France, making sandcastles on Omaha Beach whilst Dad stood on the cliffs above us, amongst rows of war graves, tears in his eyes; Benji and I trying not to show our impatience as he pored over war records in yet another cemetery. And then there was that funny bed and breakfast we always stayed in, where Dad was convinced the landlady was a transvestite.

  ‘Look at the size of her feet!’ he’d hiss as she brought in the croissants. ‘Must be!’ Mum, frowning as Benji and I corpsed into our jus d’orange.

  Yes, there were plenty of funny moments and happy snaps from those days, and we’d get them out, I determined, as she opened the door. Have a laugh, and then a cry, and then blow our noses and eat scrambled eggs in front of Monarch of the Glen. Perfect.

  ‘Hello, darling.’ She leaned forward to kiss me.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’

  I was relieved to see she looked absolutely fine. Her hair was immaculate, perhaps with even a few more blonde streaks at the front, her make-up full on, and she was wearing a beige rollneck sweater, camel skirt and black patent heels. She smelled subtly of Chanel No 5.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked anxiously, standing back to survey her face for a moment when I’d kissed her. ‘I have to say, you look terrific.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m fine actually. It comes over me in waves, obviously, but I’ve been there and done that earlier this morning. Had my usual weep, and very therapeutic it was too. Do remember that, darling, if you’re feeling sad about Daddy. Have a little cry, it works wonders. Don’t hold it in. Find some old photos or something, and let it out.’ She ushered me into the hallway.

  ‘Yes, I …I know. I was going to tell you to do the same, but – hang on, Mum. I thought you were depressed?’ I followed her down the passage into the drawing room.

  ‘No, that was a bit of a ruse,’ she said carefully. ‘I’m afraid I got you over here on false pretences. But I was worried you might not come, otherwise.’

  ‘What d’you mean, I might not come otherwise? Of course I’d have come.’ I followed her, blankly, into the drawing room.

  ‘Well, would you, dear? Bearing in mind where I dragged you away from?’

  She turned to look at me and I caught her eye, horrified. How the hell …but as I was taking this in, I was also taking in the reflection of the man standing with his back to me, facing the fire at the other end of the drawing room. Even if I didn’t know that pale-green cashmere jumper and that greying swept-back hair, I’d know that familiar, ramrod-straight back anywhere. Apart from anything else, I could see his reflection in the overmantel mirror.

  ‘Andrew.’

  He turned. ‘Hello, Henny.’

  I stopped midway into the room. Turned to Mum, bewildered. ‘What’s going on? What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Andrew’s come for a drink, that’s all,’ Mum said easily, crossing to the drinks tray on the sideboard and freshening his whisky glass as he passed it to her. ‘Although he might stay to beat me at cribbage later, as is his wont.’

  ‘Nonsense, your mother’s a mean card-sharper as I’m sure you know, Henny. I’ll be lucky if I get a game off her.’

  Mum smiled as she passed his drink to him. Turned to me. ‘Drink, darling?’

  I perched, slack-jawed, on the arm of a convenient chair, neglecting to answer or to take my coat off.

  ‘Cribbage?’ I echoed.

  ‘Or a film,’ put in my mother calmly. ‘If the mood takes us. And if I can persuade Andrew to see something slushy. I’m not as keen as he is on scary thrillers.’

  ‘I can’t think how you know that,’ he said, ‘since we’ve only been allowed to see one of those. Everything else has to have a huge dose of saccharine poured over it, and preferably with Jack Nicholson rejecting the younger dolly bird for the older woman of substance.’

  Mum laughed. ‘As Good As It Gets.’

  ‘Something’s Gotta Give, actually.’

  Mum’s eyes widened in surprise and she laughed again. ‘You’re quite right,’ she said. As the laughter faded, they both turned to look at me.

  I stared. Realized my mouth was open. Shut it, and licked my lips.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Mum gently. ‘It’s surely more believable than Howard Greenburg downstairs, with his incontinent dog and dental hygiene problem.’

  ‘The dog has a dental problem?’ enquired Andrew mildly.

  ‘No, no, Howard does.’

  ‘Ah.’

  There was a silence. I remained speechless.

  ‘Sorry,’ commented Andrew, at length. ‘Am I so very unsuitable?’

  I opened my mouth. Shut it. Tried again. ‘No, you’re not,’ I croaked. ‘But I never in a million years would have thought …’

  ‘That I was his type?’ put in my mother smoothly.

  I flushed. ‘I didn’t mean that. It’s just so unexpected, that’s all. Rupert said –’ There, I’d said his name. But then we all knew, didn’t we? Of course we did. ‘He said you’d met someone in Annabel’s,’ I said in a rush, turning to Andrew almost accusingly.

  ‘And so I did. Your mother.’

  I turned, aghast. ‘What! What the hell were you doing in Annabel’s? Dancing round your handbag?’

  She laughed. ‘Hardly. No, the Pipers had their sixtieth there. Just a dinner-party for ten – you can eat in there, you know, it’s not all dancing the night away. But it was a ridiculous venue, we’d have been much better off in a quiet restaurant, but Donald Piper’s always flaunted the fact that he’s a member, so there we were. And there was Andrew, too, skulking in a corner as I came out of the Ladies.’

  ‘I was at some terrible military stag-party. A mate of mine in the Battalion was getting married for the third time, to the latest in a succession of increasingly younger wives. A pathetic attempt to recapture his youth – hence Annabel’s. It was a relief to see your mother, I must say.’

  ‘A relief? But – hang on.’ I clutched my head. ‘Because of
a certain family feud fifteen years ago, a certain Montague and Capulet situation with pistols at dawn, one might reasonably assume you couldn’t stand the sight of each other! Wouldn’t cross the road to spit at each other, or so I presumed.’

  ‘That’s not quite true,’ Andrew said carefully. He cradled his crystal glass in his hand. Gazed down as he swirled the amber liquid. ‘After you and Rupert …’ He paused. ‘Well. After Rupert left you in the lurch like that, I felt very badly. Whatever I might have felt about you both being too young –’

  ‘Or too unsuitable.’

  ‘I never thought you were unsuitable, Henny.’ He looked up. ‘Although I was aware you felt that.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I muttered, biting my thumbnail savagely.

  ‘Whatever I might have thought, I still felt his treatment of you very keenly. Thought it was shameful.’

  I nodded, accepting that. ‘Yes, I know. Dad told me you wrote to him. Came to see him.’

  ‘I did, in this very flat. In that study through there. A very long talk we had. He was an extremely sympathetic, intelligent man, your father.’

  ‘Yes, he was,’ I said, surprised. Not surprised that he was, but that Andrew should have been alive to that.

  ‘After I’d gone, he wrote to me, thanking me for coming to see him. Said it was a decent thing to do, and I needn’t have, and he was sure some men wouldn’t. Said he appreciated the gesture.’

  I nodded cautiously again. Yes, Dad would have done that too.

  ‘I wrote back and said it was the least I could do under the circumstances, and I apologized again for the hurt caused. I also enclosed a little known publication by Edgar Morrison on the Normandy landings; I could tell from the books which lined his study walls that it would interest him. Said that I didn’t want it back. He did send it back a couple of months later though, saying he’d found it fascinating and wouldn’t dream of keeping it, and did I know, incidentally, that Edgar Morrison was lecturing on the very subject at the British Museum a few weeks hence.

  I didn’t, but was pleased to be informed. I went along. Your father was there. He raised his hat to me from one side of the room, and I raised mine from the other. That was all.’

  I looked at Mum. Her face was impassive.

  ‘Six months later,’ Andrew went on, ‘there was another lecture. This time in Boulogne, which I attended with a group of military friends. Your father was there too, with a party of North London ex-servicemen. Naturally we couldn’t avoid talking then, and anyway, a year had passed since the wedding fiasco. He said you’d met someone else, someone at work. Said you were getting married. I was relieved, and told him Rupert was throwing himself into his work, was serving abroad. We parted, both slightly encouraged, I think. Then there was a dinner at the Mansion House, to which wives were invited. Audrey came to that one.’ He nodded at Mum.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘And you came here the following Sunday to look at some documents Gordon had found that he thought might relate to Waterloo. You stayed to lunch.’

  ‘I think I do need that drink,’ I said, getting up and moving to the sideboard. I poured myself a gin and tonic with a shaky hand. ‘What – you’re saying you became friends? With Mum and Dad?’ I turned to look at Andrew, then at my mother, astonished. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because you would have looked at me with the same mixture of horror and disbelief you have on your face now. You were so hurt, Henny. So – demeaned. Naturally. It would have seemed like such a betrayal of trust to admit we liked Andrew and saw him occasionally. That your father, in particular, got on very well with him. Shared interests. We decided not to mention it.’

  ‘Did Benji know?’

  ‘I’m not sure. There wasn’t really anything to know. No big secret.’

  ‘No.’ I nodded. ‘I suppose not. And I suppose …’ I hesitated. ‘I might have been hurt.’ I looked at her guardedly.

  ‘Exactly. And then,’ she sighed, ‘well, then we rather lost touch. Andrew travelled so much in the Army and Dad became ill, so …’ she tailed off. ‘We sent Christmas cards, of course, and when Andrew found out about your father’s condition, he was kind enough to write to me and tell me how sad he was. How sad that such a fine, academic man should lose the faculty he most valued, and was valued for. I remember the letter very well,’ she said quietly. ‘ “A pernicious disease”, you called dementia. A cruel one, but one that Gordon would want me to spit in the eye of and march on regardless, as if he were still beside me.’

  I glanced down at my drink.

  ‘And I did,’ Mum went on. ‘Spit at it. I really did – for years. I wouldn’t accept that it had taken my husband. Wouldn’t give in to it. Until he just wasn’t there any more. Wasn’t the Gordon I knew.’

  There was a silence. Mum regarded the bottom of her glass. Then she glanced up. ‘Andrew and I only met again a few months ago,’ she said, almost defiantly. ‘This isn’t something that’s been going on for a while.’

  ‘But that night in Annabel’s,’ Andrew conceded with a wry smile, ‘we were both extremely pleased to happen upon each other. We both decided our respective evenings were disastrous. A classic case of sixty-somethings trying to be thirty-somethings and failing dismally. We talked for a while, and your mother kindly agreed to make up a bridge four the following evening at the Chelsea Arts Club. Someone had dropped out with flu.’

  ‘That was a lovely evening, wasn’t it?’ She turned to him and I saw a light in her eyes I hadn’t seen for years. I was aware too that she was trying to mask it, in front of me.

  Andrew smiled. ‘It was. We sat in the garden and played cards. It was so hot inside, and then when Martin and Pamela had gone, we went for a walk down by the river.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Mum agreed. ‘Past Albert Bridge …’

  ‘And on past Cleopatra’s Needle.’

  ‘Almost to the Temple.’

  For a moment, it was as if I wasn’t there. They were both far away, remembering some magical evening when they’d walked together under a velvet sky, the lights from the bridges reflecting in the water, the river lapping darkly at the shore, the soft night air enveloping them. An evening when they’d discovered one another, and thought, Yes, he’s a nice man, a good man, underneath that chilly, pompous façade. And likewise, Yes, actually she’s a very brave, resilient woman, whose initial silliness has been tempered by the cards life has dealt her. And she’s become a finer woman because of it, although no one wants to be told that. No one wants to be told that the slings and arrows are the making of one in the end, and that, as Nietzsche said, whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. But it was true of Mum. A jilted daughter, a gay son and a very sick husband had turned her into the sort of woman she was today. The sort of woman Andrew could not only respect, but could fall in love with, too.

  I got off the arm of the chair and went to sit on the sofa, in front of the fire. I slipped out of my coat, and Mum and Andrew sat opposite me. I stared at their feet. Andrew’s cashmere socks and shiny brown brogues appeared from his moleskin trousers, crossed at the knee, one foot bobbing slightly: Mum’s particularly good legs in their sheer stockings, neat ankles tapering into expensive Italian shoes. And suddenly, it didn’t seem so extraordinary. Why, after all, would someone of Andrew’s intelligence and standing, a well-respected Brigadier in command of a Battalion, want a twenty-something nymphet beside him? Why did one automatically assume the worst of men? Why not a companion of his own age who could still turn heads, was still irrefutably elegant, dressed as she was from head to toe in Bond Street’s finest, and who was still regarded as a very good-looking woman?

  I wasn’t surprised at Mum though, I thought guiltily. Hell no. Andrew Ferguson was a strikingly attractive man, but I was surprised …that he’d considered our family again. That he’d come back for more. Hadn’t we given him enough grief? And hadn’t we once, despite his protestation just now, been not quite good enough for his son? At least, that was the impression I’d
got. But was that me, being over-sensitive at the time? Too busy wondering if I’d gone to the right schools? The right house-parties?

  I remembered our first meeting in the Albany flat all those years ago: Andrew’s chilly reticence at the breakfast-table. Was he shy? Shy, because his son had brought home a pretty girl and he was unused to female company at his breakfast-table, in that exclusively male flat? And had he covered his shyness with pomp, and I’d mistaken it for disapproval? Were we both so full of our own insecurities that we’d failed to rumble each other?

  I glanced up. Andrew was watching me carefully. My mother’s hands were clasped tightly in her lap, her rings gleaming, her knuckles white. Suddenly I realized with a jolt that the tables had turned. That this was a couple sitting before me, hoping for my permission. For my approval. I smiled nervously. Made a helpless gesture with my hands.

  ‘Well, what can I say? Of course I’m delighted you’ve found each other. Of course.’

  Mum smiled faintly. Leaned back against the sofa cushions. Andrew nodded briefly, and a glimmer of a smile reached his lips too.

  I got up quickly. Walked to the window and gazed out. But where does this leave me, I wondered nervously, running my finger along the white gloss paint. Me and Rupert? In a foursome, for heaven’s sake? With parents as gooey-eyed about each other as their children? Golly, Benji would have a field day. I could see us being the butt of endless jokes, except …no. No jokes. I saw Benji’s face, suddenly. Appalled. And not at this union. At mine.

  ‘So is this why you asked me over here, Mum?’ I turned, defiantly. ‘Was this the point of the ruse? To let me know you were seeing Andrew? Ask me to sanction your private life?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. It was to talk about you, my love. Because for obvious reasons, I know a certain amount about your private life, too.’

  I blushed, and turned back to the window to hide my burning face. It hadn’t escaped me when I’d walked into the room, that the last time I’d seen this man I’d been naked in his son’s bed. But I’d managed to blank that for the last ten minutes. Managed to blank that night, when Andrew had appeared unexpectedly from his girlfriend’s flat. From Mum’s flat. This flat, I thought with a jolt. When a relative of the girlfriend had been taken ill. Of course – it was Dad. Dad, who’d been taken ill. And Andrew would have been here when my mother was telephoned by the Nursing Home to say Dad had been rushed to hospital, had suffered a heart attack. I remembered Andrew’s words to me in that sitting room as I dashed through to retrieve my coat, turning to see him sitting there in the dark, on the other side of the room.