Free Something in Disguise by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page A

although she hadn’t been, much. Holidays were always difficult if you were on your own. How had he known that? He could
tell. He was bronzed which made his eyes look bluer, more piercingly kind. She had had drinks with him and his friend (who’d been best man at the wedding), and then lunch.
    After that, they had met every day until her holiday time was up. He had proposed to her their last evening among the floodlights, red gravel and green hillocks of the miniature golf course. She
had admired him; she was deeply flattered by his attentions to her (nobody had ever treated her like that in her life; or anything like that when she came to think of it, which during the holiday
she unceasingly did); he was all masculine steadiness and assurance and she imagined that he understood her. She was nearly twenty-six and nobody had ever proposed to her before, or for that matter
got anywhere near it. She had said yes and found she was trembling so much that he had given her a brandy before walking her home to her hotel. On the way back, he’d found a dark archway and
kissed her in an exploring kind of way. Distaste and gratitude and the odd tremor of nervous curiosity. ‘You’re shy – you’re very tense,’ he’d murmured.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll always be kind to you.’ Gratitude had welled over everything else: indeed, now, when she remembered his voice saying that, she was back to her nearest
point of loving him, of knowing now, that then she had thought it was the beginning of love. Perhaps if they’d gone back to Sitges for their honeymoon it would have been better? But he had
said it was too early in the year; they wouldn’t be able to bathe, and the golf course in Cornwall was a very good one. And the hotel, he had assured her, would be first class – nothing
on the cheap and much more reliable food. She had had a couple of lessons at golf, but she was absolutely no good and uninterested in the game: so then she’d walked around with him for a day
or two, and then, because she felt tired nearly all the time, she’d simply stopped walking round. ‘Have a nice rest,’ he had said: he seemed very much in favour of that. So
she’d tried, but lying down in the afternoon simply made her feel restless and a bit guilty. (Daddy would have roared with laughter at a healthy woman mollycoddling herself.) So she used to
go for walks on the cliffs above the sea, making sure that she got back to the hotel before Leslie returned from his afternoon round. Once she wrote a poem about a seagull and being lonely, and
this made her feel much better for a day or two. When, at tea, she told Leslie that she had been for a walk and watched this seagull he said he was glad she had been amusing herself, so she
didn’t tell him about the poem. He frequently asked her if she was happy and she knew that he felt sure she was, so of course she said yes. She supposed the sex part of marriage got better as
you got used to it. It couldn’t possibly go on being like it was in Cornwall, because otherwise people surely wouldn’t stay married even the amount that they did. Once she had rung up
home, and May had fortunately answered (she’d picked the afternoon when Daddy would be having his rest) and apparently Claude was perfectly all right except that he’d given the window
cleaner an awful fright by jumping on to the top of a sash window while it was open and being cleaned so that it slammed down on the man’s arms and nearly knocked him off his ladder. He was
marvellously agile for his weight and age, Alice thought, and he’d always liked giving people surprises. His canker was worse, and when May had managed to get a few drops in his ears,
he’d gone on shaking them out for hours over all kinds of things . . . Her father was fine, May had volunteered, adding, ‘He keeps buying things for the lawn. You know how the moment
he’s stopped worrying about the Budget, he starts on the lawn.’ She had not said anything