Not That Sort of Girl by Mary Wesley Page B

and a girl in a punt. They get in the way of a barge and the bargee shouts, “Seeing as how you’ve a cunt in your punt, I won’t say what I was going to say but what I will say is …” I really have forgotten the rest …’
    (Liar.) ‘But you told your parents, you remembered it long enough for that.’
    ‘Yes. They had some people in for drinks.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘My father whipped me, and my mother kept me in my room for two days.’
    ‘So the nuns never heard it?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘The nuns might have been kinder.’
    ‘They might not have known the words either.’ (It’s a funny thing that my mother did.)
    ‘And you were still expected to play with these charmers?’
    ‘Of course. My parents thought I’d heard the story from a rude Catholic child; they complained to Reverend Mother and took me away; there was a hell of a shemozzle.’
    ‘And you never let on?’
    ‘I couldn’t let Nicholas and Emily crow.’
    ‘What charming innocent children.’
    ‘Perhaps they did not cry at their baptisms,’ said Rose.
    ‘Perhaps you will get your revenge one day.’
    ‘Perhaps I shall,’ said Rose, grinning. ‘It would be worth my sixpence.’
    ‘I love you.’
    ‘Pulling my leg.’
    ‘No.’
    Rose turned again to go. It was too early to tell him that she still did not know the meaning of the offending words; she had not been able to locate them in a dictionary. She had risked her naïvety far enough.
    Mylo watched her move towards the door; by the door she looked back. It struck them both that they had not touched, their hands had not even met when he gave her the blotting paper.
    ‘Later?’ she said, looking across the space between them.
    Mylo nodded.
    ‘And the dangers?’ she asked, as though she had previous experience of love, of life.
    ‘We brave them together,’ he waved her on her way with his book, ‘all of them, Emily and Nicholas, the lot.’
    Rose laughed.
    ‘Tell them, out there at the auction, that you have a reserve on you,’ said Mylo.
    ‘Then I shall not mind the dangers,’ she said. Then, ‘Is the reserve a large one?’
    ‘Limitless.’

12
    M YLO TRIED TO SWITCH his mind back to his book but it was no use; he laid it down. I will make George read it aloud, he thought, pounce on his terrible accent. While he reads, I can dream. He stood up and paced the room; he felt threatened. A hitherto independent future had become in one instant fused, interlaced with that of the girl in the rose-coloured dress who had burst into the room, disrupting his solitude.
    As he paced Mylo remembered his father philosophising on love, on its aspects tragic, comic, pleasurable, painful. A lecture on love as they sat at a café table under plane trees in Provence, his father drinking pastis, his mother stitching to mend a rent in his shirt, his best, which he hoped to wear at the fête that evening. Now and again she stopped stitching to bite a thread and smile quizzically at her husband lecturing their son of ten years on the pitfalls and delights of love, urging him to enjoy but to take it lightly. He must have been a little drunk, thought Mylo, remembering the clouded pastis in the glass, the dappled sunlight slanting across his father’s face, lighting his mother’s eyes. ‘Beware,’ his father proclaimed, ‘love can alter your whole life, make you change direction, trap you.’
    ‘C’est juste,’ said the café owner, pouring his father another drink.
    ‘Your father, of course, never changes direction,’ Mylo’s mother said, mocking her husband whose chief characteristic was volatility.
    ‘There you go, mock me, sweep the ground from under my feet,’ Mylo’s father had caught his wife’s eye, smiling at her with complicity over the rim of his glass, ‘as usual.’
    Mylo’s mother blushed, returning his father’s glance. The café proprietor flapped his napkin remarking, ‘C’est un beau discours,’ and went back inside the café chuckling. Watching his parents Mylo had