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Overview
Col. Herbert Brown-Lacy’s daughter, Alice, is getting married—more to escape her father than anything else. Though in truth Alice’s stepmother May has been nicer than her previous stepmother—and even her own mother. But May’s grown children, Oliver and Elizabeth, are certain their mother made a terrible mistake in her marriage to the dull-as-dishwater Herbert. May clearly didn’t marry him for his money or intellectual prowess—and at her age sex appeal was out of the question—so why did she marry him? That’s something May, whose first marriage ended in tragedy when her husband, Clifford, was killed during the war, is starting to wonder herself. Maybe she’s a woman who needs to be married.
With Oliver and Elizabeth in London discovering life on their own terms, Alice is also questioning her impulsive marriage to Leslie Mount. As crisis draws the disparate members of this patchwork family together—and apart—from the English countryside to the Cote d'Azur to Jamaica, a shocking occurrence will shatter lives.
From the bestselling author of the Cazalet Chronicles, Something in Disguise is a story about familial love, married love, love at first sight, and love that isn’t love at all.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504035309 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 06/07/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 338 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Something in Disguise
By Elizabeth Jane Howard
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1969 Elizabeth Jane HowardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3530-9
CHAPTER 1
Wedding
When Oliver saw his sister in her bridesmaid's dress he laughed so much he could hardly stand.
'I've never looked my best in pink. Oh shut up, it's not as funny as all that.'
'You look like a sort of elongated Shirley Temple. Or a chimpanzee at a Zoo tea-party: yes – more like that, because of your little hairy arms peeping out from all that dimity, or whatever it is —'
'Organza,' she said crossly; 'and it's quite pale on my arms.'
'What is? Your fur? Don't worry about that. Lots of men love hairy women, and if they turn out not to, you could always fall back on another chimpanzee in a sailor suit. Turn round.'
'What for?' she asked when she had done so.
'Just wanted to see if the back was as funny as the front.'
'Is it?'
'Not quite, because one misses your face. Do keep that expression for the wedding photographs.'
'You are being beastly. Anyone would look awful in it. You would.'
'Let me pop it on. I bet I could bring tears to your eyes. The tragic transvestite: a sort of leitmotif for Colin Wilson. Come on, Lizzie. I'll go mincing down to Daddo, and send his old blood coursing through his veins —'
'Get dressed, you fool. The whole day's going to be quite awful enough without you doing a thing to make it worse. It is poor old Alice's day, after all.'
'I haven't had any breakfast.'
'Well you won't get any now. You'll get buffet lunch in –' she looked at her man's watch strapped by black leather round her wrist – 'just over an hour and a half.'
'You'll have to take that watch off. You might as well be carrying a tommy-gun. I promise I'll be nice to Alice. I like Alice. I like Alice,' he added going to the door. 'And May. And you. I shall always remember the first time I saw you like this.'
'You're not going to see me like it any other time. Really be nice to Alice.'
'Really being nice would entail a kind of Rochester wedding. Finding that Leslie had a mad wife shut up in one of his building estates —'
'Who's Shirley Temple?' Recognizing Jane Eyre reminded her that she didn't know that one.
'An infant prodigy who looked her best in pink. Honestly, you don't know anything.' He slammed her door so that it burst open. She shut it, and turned sadly to the pointed satin court shoes that had been halfheartedly dyed to match. They'd be too uncomfortable to wear in ordinary life anyway.
Alice sat in front of her stepmother's dressing-table wondering whether she could improve her hair. She couldn't, she decided: it had been back-combed with such obsessional care by the local hairdresser, that any interference with it now would probably be disastrous. 'My wedding morning,' she thought, and tried to feel momentous and festive – somehow more worthy. It was April; the sky was overcast in slate, and livid green trees waved wildly in the gusty wind. Ordinarily, by now she would be feeding the dogs which Daddy would not have in the house, and cleaning out their horrible kennels that smelled like animal public lavatories however often you cleaned them. It wasn't at all a nice day from the weather point of view. 'I'm leaving home,' she thought; but even that seemed a bit hopeless as they'd only lived there for two years and she'd never liked it anyway. Daddy had bought the house when he married May: it was large and ugly, and Alice knew that secretly May didn't like it either – she was always too cold, she said. 'I want to leave,' she thought more vehemently. Then she thought what a good man Leslie obviously was, and that she would miss May who'd been much nicer to her than her other stepmother – nicer even than her own mother who'd always seemed to be what Daddy called failing. He loathed ill health.
She opened her dressing-gown to see whether her skin had subsided from pink to white after her bath. May had insisted on her using this room with its bathroom attached; had insisted also upon giving her the last remaining bath salts, had offered to help her dress, or keep out of the way – in fact was behaving with effortless, model kindness. It was amazing that anyone could be so practical about feelings when they weren't at all about things. 'Weren't at all what, Alice?' Daddy would say, with his pale bulging eyes fixed upon her (when she was little she had thought he did it to bully, when she was a young girl she had thought it was because he was stupid – now she thought it was a bit of both); 'Practical, Daddy,' she would always have replied in a small uninteresting voice used only on him. Oliver and Elizabeth hated him. It was only affection for their own mother, May, that prevented them from being rather horrible to poor old Daddy. As it was, Oliver called him 'Daddo' – in quotes – and gave him earnest, frightfully unsuitable Christmas presents which he then kept asking about. He'd made him a Friend of Covent Garden, for instance, and given him a whole book of photographs of ballet dancers and books about pygmies and Kalahari Bushmen which said how wonderful and civilized they were when Oliver must know perfectly well that Daddy thought black men and ballet dancers were the end ... Elizabeth was not so bad, but she thought that everything her brother did was all right, and they were always having private jokes together and May just laughed at them and said, do be serious for a moment, not really wanting them to be at all.
I must be. I'm getting married. I must get dressed. She got up from the dressing-table and slipped off her multi-coloured Japanese kimono. All her underclothes were new. Her skin had now reverted to milky-whiteness. She was tall, big-boned and an old-fashioned shape. She had, indeed, the heavy brows, beautiful eyes, slightly Roman nose and square jaw that were typical of du Maurier. Modern underclothes did not suit her – the gaps were not alluring, but faintly embarrassing – they embarrassed her, at any rate. She suffered intermittently from hay fever, mastitis and acne, and anti-histamine, unboned bras and calamine lotion fought an uneasy battle with the anxieties of her nervous, gentle temperament. Today it was the mastitis that was giving her trouble; her brassière was too tight, but it was the one she had worn for fitting her dress – she couldn't change it now. All the dressing and undressing in marriage must be so difficult – if one hated doing it even in shops when trying on clothes, what would it be like in a bedroom with a man, an audience of one? And the same one at that? Not that she meant ... Poor Alice had an unfortunate capacity for confounding herself – even when alone, even with what could fairly be described as innocently random thoughts: she conducted a great deal of her spare and private time (and there had been a good deal of that because she was rather shy) with some anonymous, jeering creature who seemed only to exist in order to trap her with some inconsistency, some banal or lewd or plain dotty remark which it waited for her to make. She was the last person in the world to want hundreds of men watching her take off her clothes ... Sneering, incredulous silence.
She walked over to her wedding dress which hung stiffly with the long sleeves sticking out, not looking as though it could fit anyone. The trouble with satin – even cut on the cross – was that it fitted you as long as you didn't move at all; the moment you did, great rifts and creases and undercurrents of strain determined themselves: this had happened at every fitting, and an angry woman in mildewed black, who combined a strong odour of Cheddar cheese with the capacity to talk with her mouth bristling with pins, had stuck more pins into the dress (and Alice) with no lasting effect.
The veil would conceal a certain amount. It had been carefully arranged in an open hat-box which now lay on May's bed, but on approaching the box, she discovered that it was entirely full of her cat, Claude, who lay in it like a huge fur paperweight. She mentioned his name and he opened his lemony eyes just enough to be able to see her, stretched out a colossal paw and yawned. He was an uneasy combination of black and white: on his face this gave him an asymmetrical and almost treasonable appearance. His pads were the bright pink of waterproof Elastoplast, and between them, the thick, white fur was stained pale green. He'd been hunting, she told him as she lifted him off her veil, and he purred like the distant rumble of a starting lorry. He was heartless, greedy and conceited, but the thought of going to Cornwall (the honeymoon) without him made her feel really sad. She had not liked to ask Leslie whether he could live with them in Bristol, and, indeed, it had crossed her mind that even if Leslie agreed, Claude might not. His standard of living in Surrey was exceptionally high – even for a cat – as apart from the two large meals a day that he ate primly out of a soup plate, he procured other, more savage snacks such as grass snakes and rabbits, which he demolished on the scullery floor at times convenient to himself. Enough of him, she thought, putting him tenderly on the bed. He got up at once, shook his head – his ear canker rattled like castanets – and chose a better position eight inches from where she had put him. Her veil was quite crushed and spattered with his hairs – he moulted continuously in all his prodigious spare time. 'What on earth am I doing?' she thought as she hung the veil on the back of a chair. 'Starting a new life without Daddy, I suppose.'
There was a whimsical fanfare of tapping on the door, and before she could answer, Leslie's sister, Rosemary, came in. She was dressed from head to foot in pink organza: it was she who had chosen the bridesmaids' dresses. Pink, she had said, was her colour, and it certainly provided a contrast to the dark, wiry curls and the mole on the left side of her face. She was older than Leslie, unmarried; and with a robust contempt for all Englishmen. When younger, she had been an air hostess, and so was able to back up this contempt with many a passing romantic interlude in which men, generically described by her as continental, invariably demonstrated their superior approach to ladies. She regarded her brother's marriage to Alice with almost hysterical indulgence, and had arranged so much of the wedding that Alice felt quite frightened of her.
'Here I am!' she exclaimed. Her nails were far too long, thought Alice, as Rosemary twitched the wedding dress off its hanger.
'In view of the time, I think we ought to pop this on – why – whatever has happened to your veil? That awful cat!'
Alice, inserting her arms into the tight, satin sleeves (it was rather like trying to put back champagne bottles into their straw casings), mumbled something defensive about Claude and at once, without warning, her eyes filled with tears. Rosemary, like many obtrusive people, was quick to observe any such physical manifestations of dismay and to rush into the breach she had made for the purpose. She would get the veil ironed; Sellotape was wonderful for removing hairs; Alice must cheer up – it would not do for her to meet Leslie at the altar with red eyes. But at least she went, leaving Alice to struggle with the tiny satin buttons – like boiled cods' eyes – that fastened the sleeves at her wrists. 'Something borrowed,' she thought miserably. She would far rather borrow Claude's hairs than anything else she could think of. If only May would come; would stop being tactful, and come, and just stay with her until it was all over ...
May, wearing an anonymous macintosh over her wedding clothes, was mixing the dogs' food in the scullery. Biscuits – like small pieces of rock – a tin of animal meat and last night's cabbage lay in a chipped enamel bowl, and she was stirring it with a wooden spoon. It smelled awful and did not look enough, but she did not notice either of these things because she was trying to think about the Absolute – a concept as amorphous and slippery as a distant fish and one that she feared was for ever beyond her intellectual grasp. 'The Whole,' she repeated dreamily: at this point, as usual, the concept altered from being some kind of glacial peak to an orange-coloured sphere – a furry and at the same time citrus ball; but these visual translations interrupted real understanding of the idea – were nothing, she felt, but childish cul-de-sacs, the wrong turning in this cerebral maze. She tried again. 'God,' she thought, and instantly an ancient man – a benign King Lear and at the same time Father Christmas in a temper – was sitting on a spiky, glittering chair. 'Absolute Being'; the chair wedged itself on the glacial peak. She sighed, and a bit of cabbage fell out of the bowl. A very interesting man she had met recently had told her to live in the present. She picked up the piece of cabbage and put it back into the bowl. The trouble with the present was the way it went on and on and on, and she found it so easy to live in, that when the man had suggested to her that she wasn't doing it the right way, she had felt sure he was right.
It was so easy to be a vegetable, she thought, staring humbly into the bowl, and somehow or other the amount more that was expected of one must be achievable by slow degrees: it was not necessary to jump straight from a cabbage to God. It was worse than that really; babies, for instance, were all right; even children – 'little children' – were spiritually acceptable; but somewhere along the line leading to adolescence people got demoted from being children to being vegetables, and often wicked vegetables at that. The Christian world blamed a good deal of this on carnal knowledge. This seemed, to her, to be an over-simplification, because even she could think of a lot of dreary and comparatively unevolved people whose carnal knowledge seemed to her nil ... Anyway, this interesting man had said that sex was a good thing – if properly approached – but he had added that hardly anybody understood how to approach it properly. The only time she had thought about sex had been the gigantic months after Clifford had been killed, when underneath or inside her misery had continued her aching unattended body that simply went on wanting him, that seemed no more able to recognize his death than some poor people could recognize that a limb that itched and twitched was no longer there because it had been cut off. Several of her friends had lost their men in the war, but she quickly discovered that the plane on which such losses were touched upon was the empty-chair-beside-the-fire one: the empty body in the bed was never admitted in the social annals of bereavement. She hadn't 'approached' sex before Clifford, and she hadn't approached it with him. He and it had arrived together; she had loved him almost at once and remarked – breathlessly soon afterwards – how lucky it was that when you loved someone there was so much to do about it. They had had four years of interrupted, but otherwise splendid pleasure, but always with the war lying in wait – at first, hardly mattering, seeming distant and unreal and vaguely wicked as a child's view of death. After Oliver was born there were a few more months when Clifford – doing navigation courses at a Naval Training Establishment – worked harder, but was still able to get home more often than not. Home was then a two-roomed flat at the top of a non-converted house in Brighton. They were poor – a sublieutenant's pay and her fifty pounds a year was all they had – but Clifford had a second-hand bicycle for getting to work, she became extraordinarily good at vegetable curries and, as Clifford had pointed out, a baby was one of the cheapest luxuries currently available. Then the war had pounced: a fine spring afternoon, and he had come back early – she heard his step on the linoleum stairs and ran to meet him trembling with unexpected delight ... Next morning he left her at five, a full lieutenant newly appointed to a frigate. She had sat in the tiny blacked-out kitchen staring at his half-drunk cup of tea and wondering how on earth she could bear it. To be in love, to say goodbye for an unknown amount of time (weeks? months? years? she would not imagine further) only to know that he was to be put professionally in danger somewhere, and that, worse, this was fast becoming the accepted, general situation, was the beginning of the war for her. She had sat in the kitchen hating men for devising, allowing, lending themselves to this monstrous stratagem, which seemed to her then as evil and pointless and heartless as the origins of chess. Even he – she had sensed his professional excitement, his pride in that wretched piece of gold lace, his complete acceptance that the Admiralty could, at a moment's notice, break up his private life and send him anywhere to fight and perhaps be killed ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Something in Disguise by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Copyright © 1969 Elizabeth Jane Howard. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
PART ONE: APRIL,One Wedding,
Two Flight,
Three Marking Time,
Four A New Life,
Five The Garden of England,
PART TWO: AUGUST,
One First Sight,
Two Côte d'Azur,
Three Surrey Blues,
Four Blue for a Boy,
Five One Fine Day,
PART THREE: DECEMBER,
One Jamaica,
Two Ginny,
Three An Old Devil,
Four Christmas Eve,
Five Oliver and Elizabeth,
About the Author,
