Not That Sort of Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

seals bobbing innocently below them close to the rocks, their faces turning this way and that on thick necks, rolling their oily eyes.
    In the late afternoon they had clambered down to a stony cove and Mylo said, ‘Let’s swim.’
    ‘No bathing things,’ she objected.
    ‘Naked then, nobody to see us.’
    Greatly daring, she undressed near the water’s edge, waded quickly in, the stones hurting her feet. The water was ice cold. She looked back, saw Mylo naked, magnificent. She had never seen a naked man, was aghast at the size of his sex.
    She swam a few strokes out, turned, came back, climbed up the stones raking up and down in the swell, dried herself inadequately with a handkerchief, dressed.
    But Mylo, confidently treading the cobbles, dived shallowly, swam out strongly. She watched his body gleaming silvery through the green water.
    The seals had gone; she climbed the cliff, watched Mylo swim, waited for him to return.
    He had said ‘You needn’t do anything you do not want,’ but she knew, want to or not, she would do it.
    Oh, poor us, moaned Rose, nearly fifty years later. What a shambles in that lumpy bed. How ironic the ‘tout confort’. How frustrating for Mylo, how painful the whole experience.
    ‘You are nervous, my sweet, try and open up, be happy.’
    ‘Happy,’ Rose murmured, now in recollection. ‘Happy,’ she thought wryly; what was needed was a tin opener. If I was hurt, what about Mylo, what about him? He too must have been sore. Funny, she thought, now in the present lying alone in recollection, I never asked him whether he hurt himself. Eventually he had slept, his head on her breast, his arms around her body and she, wakeful as now, listened to his breathing, as now she listened to the night and smiled at their tragi-comic abortive attempt at making love.
    Mylo had left in the very early morning on the boat to Dublin and she had caught the nine-thirty train to London where three days later Ned took her to Cartier to buy the engagement ring, putting on his glasses to inspect it.
    Three days after that, Mr Chamberlain declared war. They were married at the end of September.

6
    M R CHAMBERLAIN’S DECLARATION OF war delighted Rose, it relieved her mind, put paid to the possibility of questions such as How was the journey to the Wigrams? Had she enjoyed herself? Who else was staying there? Had they been pleased with the grouse? Nobody was interested in her mythical visit, everybody was adjusting to the war; those with the more active imaginations, for imminent death. For Rose the war was of secondary importance; filling her mind was the paramount question—was she or was she not pregnant?
    The relief after ten days of crippling fear at the arrival of her period was so great that she was slow to take in the movement set in train by Ned and his family conjointly with her parents towards a wedding, hers to Ned. Ned insisted on an early date. He was joining his regiment immediately, he would get leave for his marriage then install Rose at Slepe, where she would live while he was away. She was not consulted, her agreement was taken for granted.
    Ned, with his sensible orderly mind, had, it seemed, not only anticipated the war but made his preparations. Deploring the idea of evacuees in his beloved house, he had months before arranged for the greater part of it to be taken over by a branch of the Ministry of Information, only keeping a minimum of rooms for his own use and now, of course, for Rose.
    Emerging from her fog of secret fear, rejoicing over her bloodstained knickers, Rose discovered that a lot had been going on without her. Her parents and the Peel contingent brushed her lovingly aside. ‘We are managing very well.’ The words ‘without you’, while not actually voiced, were implied. The advent of war demanded short cuts, fast action, no hanging about. There was no time for prevarication on the bride’s part; it would be best for her to keep quiet and let those who knew what’s what