Not That Sort of Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ned would take it, read it, but more probably not since he read with difficulty without his glasses and with luck would have left them upstairs. With her heart in her throat, Rose gambled on Ned’s eyesight and good manners.
    ‘Of course you must go,’ he had said, ‘but this means I cannot drive you home.’
    ‘Oh,’ she had said, ‘I’ll take the train—she says I have to change at Crewe.’
    ‘I promised to give Nicholas and Emily a lift home and we cannot make them cut their visit short, they are relying on me.’
    ‘Of course. Never mind. It’s not for long. You can’t let them down, they can’t afford the train.’ Gratefully she thanked God for the Thornbys’ sponging habits, their continual cries of poverty.
    ‘Poor you. How boring for you.’ Emily with her usually needle eye had noticed nothing. ‘The separation,’ said Emily, ‘will add spice to your engagement and, who knows, some good may come out of your duty visit, a sumptuous wedding prezzie, perhaps?’
    Ned had proposed to her the evening before, walking along the river valley. Weighed down by her father’s cancerous wish Rose had accepted him to the sound of curlews crying in the bog further up the hillside.
    It was not an entirely fraudulent thing to do, thought Rose, lying alone in the strange hotel, part of me wanted to marry Ned. Much of me longed for the security, a house in London, the house in the country; the big wedding was tempting, the clothes I had never been able to afford. I was almost in love with Ned in August 1939 in Scotland at the house party for the grouse shooting, surrounded by his approving relations who thought I would do very well for Ned. (A nice little thing, quite pretty, she’ll shape.) They had known, those relations, what was required of Ned’s wife. At eighteen, thought Rose, I hadn’t the remotest idea.
    Lying in the dark Rose thought she heard a curlew cry and into her mind’s eye came Ned’s face, not as it had been when he died, but as he was in 1939 before his hair thinned and greyed, before his face grew lined. He was an awfully nice man, she thought. I was very fond of him, what a lovely friend he would have made; I must have been mad to marry him. I did not hear a curlew cry, I imagined it.
    Ned had driven her to the boat at Dunoon, giving up a day’s shooting to do so. Her future aunt- and uncle-in-law had pressed upon her two brace of grouse to take to her imaginary hostess, Mrs Wigram. Rose remembered gulping back laughter, a tearful attack which was assumed to be sorrow at the parting with Ned. ‘No need to cry, dear, you will see him in a few days.’ Her future aunt-in-law had pressed her against her large and rather squashy breasts, smacking her lips in the air with a parting kiss. ‘There!’
    Nicholas and Emily had come for the drive and to do some desultory shopping in the town. Even then, thought Rose amused, they were prying inquisitively into my life. Ned’s relations had stood on the front steps waving goodbye, pleased that Ned’s future was settled, regretful that she must depart a day early but, good manners apart, impatient to be off for the day’s shooting; a group of ghillies and beaters were waiting. And who else, thought Rose, peering back down the years, who else was there?
    Ned’s cousins, two soon to be killed in the war, and yes, of course, Harold Rhys and Ian Johnson, jolly high-spirited bachelors in those days, Ned’s friends. It would not be long before they too married and began the long decline towards arthritis, piles, deafness, obesity, operations for this and that, collections of grandchildren, irritating sons-in-law, the decline which turned them into what they were now, dull old men. But, in those days, Rose remembered, they felt it their right, their duty, too, to make a pass at every girl in the house party and they expected the girls to be flattered.
    Why did I tell Nicholas this morning that I did not know Harold and Ian until after Ned and I were