Something in Disguise by Elizabeth Jane Howard Read Free Book Online Page B

really redecoration does so
go with being pregnant or homosexual or in love, and my emotional life never seems to reach any such peak – just tidy it up, love. That chest of drawers is for tidying things into.’ He
had disappeared into the bathroom for about an hour and a half where she heard him having conversations on the telephone – a frightfully angry one about D. H. Lawrence and some much
friendlier ones to people called Annabel and Sukie. She cleaned away – with a carpet sweeper that didn’t really work, until she found that it was entwined and choked with fantastically
long auburn hairs, and a duster that was so dirty she used one of her handkerchiefs.
    The party had been a success in the end, but it took a long time to start. Sukie and Annabel arrived in a Mini each. Neither of them had auburn hair. They wore clothes like string vests and
feather boas and striped plastic boots, so Elizabeth was glad about her tights. Apart from their striking appearance they seemed awfully intelligent and knew all Oliver’s other friends and
whom they were talking about. A lot of them had been to Oxford, and some of them had gone to Spain together – apart from innumerable parties like these where they all knew all the records
they were playing – and she felt rather out of it. She tried to be helpful about the food and what drink there was. Sukie had brought a bottle of Scotch, and Annabel a nearly full bottle of
Cointreau which a friend of Oliver’s insisted on mixing with Coca-Cola and soda. ‘It’s absolutely foul, Sebastian.’ But Oliver had said nonsense; all drinks were foul
till you got used to them. Afterwards she found that Sebastian had mixed them up like that – with Oliver’s approval – to make them last. The Gauloises ran out after the pubs had
shut, but somebody produced some sort of sticky wodge in a cold-cream jar that he said was hashish, and one or two people tried a spot of that on Annabel’s nail file. By then, everybody was
very friendly and there was a competition to gauge what hashish was most like. Stuff from between tremendously wide floorboards, Elizabeth had thought aloud, and all the people who had said worse
than school jam and scrapings off the lids of chutney bottles agreed with her, so warmly that she blushed with her sudden notoriety. Thereafter, whenever she had said anything, people stopped
talking and listened kindly for another mot, but she never said anything else that was any good. Nothing seemed to happen to anyone as a result of the hashish, except for someone called
Roland who was sick, but he said that that was something he had for lunch. By then they were drinking Maxwell House in the whisky-Cointreau-Coke glasses, the gramophone had been changed from jazz
to Monteverdi which Oliver said could be played at a mutter (people had banged on the wall and finally rung up), and a – to her – incomprehensible, but frightfully interesting argument
had broken out about the time-lag of influence that philosophers had upon politics and religion. Kiyckerkgard, Neecher, Marks, Plato (at least she’d heard of him ) were being bandied
about and words like subjective and relative were in constant use. It seemed generally agreed that it was all right for things to be relative, but not at all all right for them to be subjective.
She noticed that nearly everyone could squash anyone else by calling them that. She felt terribly sleepy by then and was quite glad when Annabel said she must get out of her eyelashes they were
weighing her down so, and they went upstairs. They stayed in Elizabeth’s bedroom, talking about eye make-up and really good second-hand clothes’ shops and what it would be like to marry
an Asian or African, and Annabel said how much simpler everything would be if everybody was sort of fawn-coloured, but this would probably take a million years and they wouldn’t live
to see it; and it was very cosy being with Annabel in such eugenically difficult