Something in Disguise by Elizabeth Jane Howard Read Free Book Online

finished her whisky, and now wanted a cigarette, but as she only had ten a week and had already smoked
two that day she knew there were none left.
    ‘My dear May! You surely cannot mean what you say!’
    ‘Well I did – actually.’
    ‘Part with our home !’
    ‘Only to get another one, dear.’
    ‘You speak as though homes are a mere matter of exchange and barter.’
    ‘Well they are really, aren’t they? I mean, we bought this one.’
    The colonel sat suddenly down on quite an uncomfortable chair. He was speechless, absolutely speechless, he repeated to himself. To justify this situation, he said nothing, he simply stared at
her.
    ‘Darling, don’t look so appalled! It just seemed to me that with Alice gone, and my two in London, perhaps we don’t need all these rooms’ – she pretended to count
– ‘what is it? Nine bedrooms we aren’t using.’
    As he still kept silent, she added, ‘Not counting all the other rooms.’
    He perceptibly found his voice. ‘My dear May, this house was an absolute bargain – dirt cheap – an absolute bargain –’
    ‘Goodness,’ May thought as she stopped listening, ‘you couldn’t call it that. Or perhaps I’ve been poor too many years to think that spending eleven thousand pounds
on anything would be a bargain. My eleven thousand pounds,’ she also thought, and then felt thoroughly ashamed of herself . . .
    ‘. . . simple chap,’ the colonel was saying, ‘can’t be said to have expensive tastes – moderation in all things – but all my life – serving my country
and all that – all my life, I’ve looked forward to settling down – in a simple way – my one piece of land – a comfortable home – somewhere that I can call
my own – chopping and changing difficult for a feller my age –’
    The upshot of what, at their time of life, amounted to a scene was that she was forced to recognize what he said the house meant to him. Her private dream of a cottage in the country and the
half of Lincoln Street that was now let being their homes vanished for ever that evening. If she would leave the management of the house to him – not upset her head about it – he would keep the whole thing within bounds of their income. She thought at one moment that he was trying to get her to sell the London house (because Oliver and now Elizabeth were to live in it rent
free) but, strangely, he seemed most anxious that she should keep it. What it was necessary to review, he said, was their remaining free capital. Here she sensed danger: she did not want to have to
discuss Elizabeth’s allowance or anything that she gave Oliver with him, or indeed with anyone. She was awfully tired, she said at this point. They would both be the better for a spot of
Bedfordshire, he said. But the most incongruous aspect of the whole argument or discussion or whatever one could call it was that he had been really upset; eyes moist, stuttering slightly,
repeating phrases more than usual: she honestly hadn’t realized that this house meant so much to him. He said, too, that he wanted to be alone with her – to have her to himself. She did
not trust him enough about things: if she would leave it all to him everything would work out. He had blown his nose for a long time on one of the handkerchiefs she had given him for his birthday
and this had touched her much more than anything he had actually said (which had left her not so much unmoved as indefinably depressed). It was the house that depressed her, but now she
would just have to make the best of it.
    Elizabeth lay in the dark in bed in the tiny top-floor back bedroom at Lincoln Street. The room had no curtains, because May had sent them to the cleaners and Oliver
hadn’t bothered to put them up when they came back, so light from a street lamp patterned the ceiling and some of the walls. The bed was familiar and uncomfortable – she had had it as a
child; indeed, for a short time – the blissful period after Aunt Edith