Not That Sort of Girl Read Free Page B

composure. Then, remembering Nicholas and Emily’s expressions of pain as she let the telephone ring loud, intermittent, unanswered all through lunch, she began to laugh so that under her the bed shook. The probability was that all the messages would have been more or less identical, safe enough for the pricked ears of Nicholas and Emily. Yet one of the callers might have been Mylo. The risk of its not being Mylo had been so great that she had left the telephone unanswered.

4
    ‘H AVE YOU DEFINITELY MADE up your mind?’ Mylo held her against him, teasing her hair through his fingers, bending to nuzzle her neck. ‘Snuggle up close, then you won’t feel cold.’ He leaned back against the tree, feeling the bark rough against his spine. ‘Answer me, Rose.’
    ‘No, no, oh, Mylo.’ She put her arms round his neck, reaching up to him. ‘It’s so difficult, so hard.’ She pitied herself.
    ‘No, no, you won’t marry him, or no, no, you haven’t made up your mind?’ He pulled away from her, trying to see her eyes in the dark. ‘It’s not hard. You don’t love Ned Peel, you love me. He’s an old man, you can’t …’
    ‘He’s only thirty-one.’
    ‘And you are eighteen. It makes me ill to think of him touching you; you can’t possibly marry him,’ said Mylo violently.
    ‘My father …’
    ‘Your father thinks you will be safe with him. I bet that’s what he says.’ (He would say: I want to die feeling that you are safe, that you are provided for. Were it not for this ‘cancer’ I would not press you to make a decision. I am anxious for you. There is going to be a war. Married to Ned, you will be safe and with my ‘cancer’ I cannot ensure you will be. And so on and on, with the repetition of the dreaded word in inverted commas, the stress on security.) ‘He knows the man,’ Mylo went on, ‘he has this house in the country, he knows he is well off, he will have informed himself, spoken with Ned of marriage settlements. Of course he has, I’ve heard of his kind. He knows Ned’s job, knows what he earns, knows the form. Has he any idea what being in bed with Ned will be like? Has he put himself in your shoes?’
    Rose giggled. ‘I can’t see Father and Ned tucked up together.’
    Mylo shook her. ‘Rose, stop it. You know you love me, me .’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do.’
    ‘So what’s so difficult?’
    ‘It’s all difficult,’ weakly, for she was tired. Rose began to cry. Impossible to repeat her parents’ opinion of Mylo. (A nice boy, of course, but only nineteen, no prospects, no money, no family, no job, hasn’t even been to university, good looking in his way, speaks French. The speaking of French was somehow derogatory, louche, dangerous.) Their argument had gone on the whole evening, all through dinner in the restaurant and in the car driving out of London to the relatively quiet spot where they now stood on Wimbledon Common. She felt that all she wanted was to go to bed and sleep, forget her father, forget Ned Peel, even forget Mylo. ‘He is dying,’ she said, as she had said several times before, ‘he has cancer.’
    ‘I don’t believe he has cancer. I think he is using a rather unsubtle blackmail. I think your father is a snob. He is impressed by Ned Peel and his worldly goods. It’s a very old story. He’d like to boast about “my son-in-law, Ned Peel”, look him up in Who’s Who.’
    ‘He’d never say that.’
    ‘Not in so many words. It’s the elevation by implication …’
    ‘Anyway,’ Rose said bitterly, ‘he couldn’t say it, he’d be dead.’
    A car passed along the road; the tears on Rose’s cheeks glittered in its headlights. The driver, a happy man, seeing the lovers, gave an appreciative toot on his horn.
    ‘I bet you he will live for years and years,’ said Mylo nastily, ‘the old fraud.’
    ‘Mylo!’
    ‘He will, like to bet?’
    ‘You are calling my father a liar.’ She swung away angrily.
    ‘I am. You wouldn’t be so angry if you