Free Not That Sort of Girl by Mary Wesley

there.’
    Rose said nothing, rinsing her hair, rubbing her head with a towel, jerking a comb through the wet hair. ‘Don’t do that, darling,’ said Mrs Freeling, ‘let your hair dry naturally; wet hair is so brittle.’
    ‘Mother!’
    ‘All right, darling, I will leave you. I only want you to enjoy yourself …’ Mrs Freeling retreated. Rose ran after her, flung her arms around her and hugged her. ‘Oh, darling, you are making me all wet,’ said Mrs Freeling.
    ‘Oh, oh,’ whispered Rose, watching her mother go down the stairs, ‘neither of us ever gets it right.’ She watched her mother’s diminishing back with pity. ‘Poor Mother, am I supposed to be gobbled up by this Ned Peel?’ She began filing her nails, waiting for her hair to dry. I’d better shave my armpits, she thought. And what about my legs? She pulled down her stockings and eyed the soft almost invisible hairs on her legs. No, leave the legs hairy. She went back to the bathroom and stole one of her father’s razor blades. After shaving her armpits, she took the blade out of the razor and put it in her purse. A desperate idea had occurred to her.

11
    O NE OF THE MYSTERIES about Nicholas and Emily was that in spite of their perpetual cries of poverty, they always managed to look chic; they exuded an aura of confidence and one-upmanship which Rose found unnerving. Arriving to fetch her in their father’s respectable old Morris, wearing immaculate white tennis clothes under twin camel-hair coats, they jumped out to greet her, showing themselves off.
    Rose often thought of them as saplings planted too close together, growing up entwined. She grinned at them posing, their arms round each other’s waists. ‘Willows,’ she said, ‘wandlike, unpollarded.’
    ‘What?’ asked Emily.
    ‘Nothing,’ said Rose.
    Nicholas cried, ‘How pretty you look, Rose,’ meaning: look at us, are we not pretty?
    ‘Shall I sit in the back?’ asked Rose, drawing her old school coat around her, muffling it over the pink dress. ‘What are the suitcases for?’ she asked, squeezing into the back seat, pushing aside tennis racquets and suitcases.
    ‘There’s usually a dance in the evening,’ said Emily, getting back into the car. ‘We’ve brought our evening clothes to change into.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Rose, surprised.
    ‘It’s for the house party, but we are prepared, if asked, to stay on for it,’ said Nicholas, settling himself in the driver’s seat. ‘Come on, you old rattler.’ The car shot forward.
    ‘I see you’ve got your father’s racquet,’ said Emily, whose beady eye missed nothing, ‘his new Slazenger. What happened to yours?’
    ‘Bust,’ said Rose, feeling inferior. If they had told me about the dance I would have cried off, she thought, seeing in her mind’s eye people dancing in evening clothes while she still wore her pink cotton. (She would have sweated under the arms by then, or spilt something down her front.) She said, ‘Nobody said anything about dancing to me.’
    ‘Never mind,’ said Emily, who had discussed with Nicholas whether to tell Rose and voted not to. (Nothing worse than an odd girl to upset numbers.) ‘Nicholas or someone can run you home. We got our racquets in the end of summer sales,’ she said, ‘they are brand new.’
    ‘They smell nice.’ Rose sniffed the leather on the racquet handles. ‘Delicious.’
    ‘Father is letting us have this car for ourselves from now on; the diocese are providing him with a new one now he is a bish,’ said Nicholas.
    ‘Oh,’ said Rose, impressed. ‘A car for nothing.’
    ‘We will swop it soon for something more dashing; it looks a bit too churchy, don’t you think?’ said Emily. ‘We want a red sports.’
    ‘One could have guessed,’ said Rose.
    ‘A soupçon of vulgarity suits,’ sang Nicholas.
    ‘And,’ said Emily, leaning over from the front seat, ‘Father is sinking his savings in the Rectory.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘The new parson wants a