Not That Sort of Girl Read Online Free PDF

married? He was hinting, was he not, that I might have flirted, had an affair with one or both of them. Poor Nicholas, he is obsessed, as is Emily, with my secret life for which there is no evidence. They sniff the air, they ferret from force of habit. I was careless, upset thinking of the dogs, my dear dogs crushed by the lorry. He will remember Ian and Harold were there in Scotland, for he was there too. My mind slips as I grow old.
    She saw herself sitting beside Ned in his open car driving over the hills to Dunoon. She watched herself boarding the boat carrying the grouse, the boat drawing away from the quay; Ned, Emily and Nicholas waving; Ned shouting that they would choose the engagement ring when they met soon in London; she had waved back, and then alone at last on the boat she had faced the day-long journey to Holyhead with a mixture of trepidation and joy.
    Only a very naïve person would get away with what I did, thought Rose. It would not have occurred even to Nicholas and Emily that I was not on my way to stay with the Wigrams, a duty visit to my father’s friends, but that I was travelling to meet Mylo.
    The charm of the situation had been that Nicholas and Emily hardly knew of Mylo’s existence in her life, and neither did Ned. Remembering the journey Rose relived her fears. The fear of discovery by her parents or Ned, but principally the fear that at the end of the journey Mylo would not be there.
    Rose remembered putting the grouse on the rack on the train from Glasgow to Crewe. At Crewe she had deliberately left them there, but a fellow passenger had shouted as the train drew out of the station, gesticulated, thrown the dead birds to a porter. Oh, those bloody birds, thought Rose, and tried to remember how she had rid herself of them, and could not. (The gaps in the memory as one grows old.) My fears, thought Rose, remembering vividly, my fears were so great.
    And then at the end of the everlasting day as the train drew into the station at Holyhead, Mylo was on the platform, his face drawn and strained: ‘I thought you might not come,’ he had said, and later in the awful little Commercial Hotel they had gone through the brownish hallway which smelled of stale tobacco and beer, of years of vegetables cooking and failure, up the straight stairs to a room with a double bed. He had shut the door. ‘It’s pretty shoddy, I’m afraid.’ Then holding her, sitting on the bed, bouncing to test it, he had said, his voice rasping, a little husky, ‘Tout confort,’ trying to lighten their situation, their love, their fear, their ignorance.
    Who in these days, Rose wondered as she listened to the night sounds, the small breeze which now whispered through the reeds by the water, who in these days would credit that a girl of eighteen and a boy of nineteen should both be virgin? For that fear, the exquisite fear of the actual act of making love, terrified them, she remembered, though Mylo who assumed he knew how to set about it pretended not to be afraid (and so to be fair, did she).
    ‘What did the man at the desk think?’ Rose had whispered. They had signed the register with trepidation.
    ‘Thinks us a honeymoon couple,’ answered Mylo stoutly.
    ‘Arriving separately?’ Rose had jeered. ‘Oh, Mylo.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter, forget him. You are here now. Kiss me.’
    They had hugged and kissed. Then, Rose remembered his arms round her, that his ribs were quite painful against her chest. They had drawn apart breathless, laughing.
    ‘The bed’s pretty lumpy,’ Rose had said. Then, ‘Shall we go out before it gets dark, go for a walk along the cliffs?’
    They jointly put off what was to come.
    I have never been back, thought Rose, the town must have doubled, trebled in size, perhaps even the cliffs where we walked have changed since that summer nearly fifty years ago.
    They had wandered along the clifftop hand in hand, listening to the seagulls, meeting no one, leaned over looking down and watched the