The Little Girls (12 page)

At that, a protesting stir took place deep in the being of Mrs. Piggott. She could be felt battling against reluctance. Alas, now she was in the throes of knowing there was something she ought to do or say. Not going so far as to lower the scarlet book or quite unglue her eyes from the cogent page, she resignedly said: “Oh, Dicey?”

“I’m Clare, Mrs. Piggott.”

“Oh, Clare!—Good evening,” said Dicey’s mother, friendly as ever and made more so by what clearly was a reprieve. She went some way back to her reading, but was less happy. A minute later—holding the book away, this time, at arm’s length, like a banished temptation—she. resumed: “Do you know where Dicey is?”

“No, I don’t.”

‘Then it can’t be helped.”

“Do you want her?” Clare asked, showing civil wonder that even a mother could.

“Sooner or later.” Mrs. Piggott failed to repress a sigh which had, evidently, within her some complex origin. “Have you had a nice day?”

Clare scowled retrospectively. “It was Tuesday.”

Mrs. Piggott, with that blend of boredom and common-sense which made affable her relations with children, did not point out that it was Tuesday still. She was occupied in coming to a decision. She must make a break with the novel—a ruthless, clean one: she did nothing by halves. Using an envelope as a marker, she shut the novel. She then reached round and put it right away, on the far side of a still water-tight
Famille Rose
bowl of wonderfully early and large sweet peas, on a small table. She went on to turn upon Clare the same, whole attention which had gone to her reading. “You don’t think Dicey’s gone to the Beakers’, do you?”

“She didn’t go off on Sheikie’s bike. I don’t see how else she’d get to the Beakers’.”

“For a day or two, I think that is just as well. Don’t you?”

Clare examined the puzzle—had the fall hint it? She volunteered: “She didn’t go to the rink.”

“That I’m glad to hear! She comes back from there black and blue.—Clare, has your mother had a letter from Mrs. Beaker?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Piggott. She didn’t say so.”

“Oh, how I do hope not!—Or hadn’t the post come when you left for school? It hadn’t when Dicey left.”

“I don’t know. I never take any notice.”

“I’m afraid she may; and surely you must know why.— Couldn’t you come out of that lair of yours, don’t you think? From here, I can hardly see you.”

Clare, though perfectly able to see Mrs. Piggott from where
she
was, knew the sound of an order. She withdrew from the curtains and marched out into the open carpet. ‘Trouble again?” she asked, fair and square.

“Well… gelignite?”

“Everything happens on Tuesdays!”

“No, but it was last Saturday you seem to have done your best to blow up the Beakers.”

“Just their bicycle shed. What I mean is, all
rows
happen on Tuesdays.”

“My dear, dear child, it’s just by the grace of heaven— isn’t it?—that nothing’s happened till now. As it was, they came on that box you left not till yesterday afternoon. Think what might have happened in the meanwhile!”

“Gelignite doesn’t just
go
off; it needs a detonator, and a fuse.”

“Then I hope you didn’t have one of those, on Saturday?”

“Oh, yes. But that shed’s miles down their garden.”

“Do try not to be so calm! With any awful explosion, how can one know? There might have been poor Sheila, with no home.”

“It was her idea.—Not,” Clare added indignantly, “that I’d sneak.”

“She is a curious child… . But for you and Dicey,
what
a way to go on—wasn’t it? What a horribly heartless thing—surely?—even to think of doing. And so bad-mannered. And, I think, ungrateful; when the Beakers had so very kindly asked you to tea.”

“I don’t think they did. We stayed because we were there.”

“Mrs. Beaker says, if this sort of thing goes on she’ll have to stop Sheila playing with you and Dicey.”

“She says that, Sheila says, almost every time.”

“I don’t think that’s anything to—to guffaw at.”

Sighing again, Mrs. Piggott dealt with a cushion which was escaping, somehow, from the small of her back. She also looked over her shoulder at the clock: her French one, busy in a small way on the cbimneypiece among idling china. Clare stood around, meanwhile, making a face or two. “Well,” confessed Dicey’s mother, “it isn’t for me to give you a wigging, is it, of course? I don’t see why I should, and I hadn’t meant to—as you know, I didn’t even know you were here, did I? Dicey must have a wigging when she comes in, Sheila’s idea or not. She must go to the Beakers’ properly, wearing gloves, after a day or two, and tell them she is extremely sorry, as I know she will be, once she has thought things over.—Oh dear, what makes you three so rough?”

“We never really much thought it would go off.”

“No, I don’t for a moment suppose you did. But you none of you had any business to even try—had you?”

“We now are rather beginning,” admitted Clare, in a gloomy, deflated voice “to wonder if it
was
gelignite, after all.”

“It was written large on the box, Mrs. Beaker says.”

“Oh, we wrote that!”

“Surely you might find other things to invent and do— I should have thought? You, after all—the clever one— could, I’m sure? Then if you did, the others would be delighted. It would be dreadful to think of you never doing things, you three, but it depends what. Nobody’d ever expect you to be mice, and I’d hate you, I expect, if you were muffs—but do, do try not to be inconsiderate!”

Clare, looking down earnestly at her black sandshoes, vowed: “I honestly, honestly will try, Mrs. Piggott.”

“Yes, but
all
try! You’re only, ever, so tiresome when you’re all together. Then, what comes over you nobody seems to know. It couldn’t possibly be—could it?—that you’re bad for each other?”

“I don’t know,” said Clare, in her unconcerned way.

“I do so always hope not.—Dicey,” said Mrs. Piggott, with a tremble of love in her voice, “is silly. Sometimes she’s very silly.—Clare, she blinks so much more, sometimes, when she’s been out with you other two. You won’t be bad for her—you, I mean, won’t be bad for her ever, if you can help it, will you?”

“No.”

“But I wonder,” cried Mrs. Piggott, “where she
is?”

Restless, she made a motion of the arms, with a tumbledown of summery sleeves, ending by pressing clasped hands to the nape of her neck. Tired out? “I
would
go,” Clare began to explain, “but—” But Mrs. Piggott, by shutting her eyes, signified that she wished for no word more. Clare was glad, on the whole—she had food for thought.

What was clear, now, as to the gelignite situation was that it was likely to go no further than Mrs. Piggott thought well. Not herself adroit, the freak intellectual child saw how everything had been handled, herself included. To no lengths was Mrs. Piggott prepared to go—she might go to some lengths to deter anyone else from going to any. Nor had she any intention of knowing anything, other than how the land lay: that she had wished to know, and very ably indeed had she found out. Otherwise, how masterly had been her nonputting of questions—for instance, how the gelignite or supposed gelignite had been come by, she would go to her grave rather than know. The poser remaining ahead was the Burkin-Joneses. What their attitude would be, had the matter reached them or should it fail to be stopped from doing so, one could predict, alas, only too well. Their unappeasable rectitude was well known.
Could
the matter yet be kept from the Burkin-Joneses, and from Mrs. Burkin-Jones in particular, Dicey’s mother would by any and all means do so
—
though not, it was to be realized,
for Clare’s sake. … It was just possible that Mrs. Beaker’s known regard for the military might restrain her (or have restrained her so far) from worrying Mrs. Burkin-Jones. The more ambiguous, solitary Mrs. Piggott might, at the start, be selected as sole target. Mrs. Piggott, once sufficiently worried, could be counted on—surely?—to speed to the Biirkin-Joneses, as parents of her ewe lamb’s companion in crime. The Burkin-Joneses would thus be worried (which, after all, was an aim) while Mrs. Beaker preserved, with regard to them, a front of forbearance and magnanimity. Might that be the Beaker policy? One dared hope so.

The Beakers seemed, as compared to the Burkin-Joneses, to present no problem to Mrs. Piggott, serene in her reliance on gloves and charm. She seldom spoke of the Beakers without remarking how kind they were. She seldom, however, spoke of them.

One could do nothing but admire.

Yet in spite of all that, now—look!

Clare refused to. She could not feel it was fair to. Instead, she trod with crushing deliberation from one to another and then the next of the carpet’s barely distinguishable roses. The child had been (each time, through inability to get away in time) in the distasteful presence of grownup persons who became “overcome”—whether by heat, sea-sickness, vertigo, stage-fright, or bad news. Of inferior calibre did she find them. With more like sympathy she had watched one soldier after another faint on parade. She had learned through reading that persons are apt to be overcome by joy, jealousy, anger, curiosity, greed, grief, or one or another powerful feeling, including the unspecified one known as “emotion,” and lust, whatever that was. What overcame Mrs. Piggott?—for that, alas, was what was unmistakably going on. To be overcome is, to be got the better of.

What overcame Mrs. Piggott, getting the better of her, was anxiety. Anxiety tortures its prey through the sense of impotence:
that
was the matter with her, too. Many as were her gifts, she was, this minute, impaled on the lack of one—she was not clairvoyant. Had she possessed a crystal, it would have been useless—she would have “gazed” unavailingly, trying to ravish some, any, picture out of the lasting emptiness. One should be able to “see”
—how could one not? How could Mrs. Piggott not, in the case of Dicey? It came hard on her. She had taken her hands from behind her head; now they lay somewhere about her dress, palms turned supplicatingly up. “You don’t know,” she was driven to ask Clare, “if she possibly went to the sugar mouse shop? No; I don’t believe she had any money?”

“They give us tick there.”

“Oh, how greedy she is!—If she has no money, she can’t very well have got on a bus, can she?”

‘They give us tick on the buses—anybody in a St. Agatha’s hat.”

“They ought,” exclaimed Mrs. Piggott, with inordinate anger, “to stop that, it’s very snobbish.”

“Then we might have to walk. Or some of us might.”

‘That’s what she must be doing, mustn’t she, for some reason or other? Dawdling along… Clare, do one thing: look at the clock for me, will you?”

“Want
me to tell you the time?”

“Go on…”

“Five minutes to seven.”

Mrs. Piggott heard: she said nothing.

“—Oh, Mrs.
Piggott
?
”

No answer.

“Oh, Mrs. Piggott, now’s just about the time Father said he’d be here!”

Mrs. Piggott, in her now listless dress, moved on the sofa. “I don’t understand. What about your father?”

“He’s going to come here.”

“Oh.”

“That’s why
I’m
here. I mean, that’s why I haven’t gone. He said, if you didn’t mind he would pick me up here again, like he did last time he was playing tennis at that house. That house close to here, you know. So I’m waiting for him.—Will that be all right?”

“Well, I suppose so,” said Mrs. Piggott, in what was, yet was not, her smiling and teasing voice.

“He said he’d only come
in
if you didn’t mind.” Clare showed, for the first time, signs of misgiving: the announcement properly should have been made before. She already had had one try, but been cut short. “But if you’re tired,” she volunteered, “I can easily wait for him down in the garden, or even outside the gate, then he could pick me up without coming in. Shall I?”

“That sounds a silly plan. No, he must come in. I shall be delighted to see him.”

She was to be delighted almost at once. In what could be called the distance of the small garden, the gate—which was, strictly, an ironwork door in the wall—could be heard to open, then be closed with precision… . Suddenly Clare, turning not pale (she could not) but pale’s equivalent, attacked herself wildly, all over, with both fists. “But he’s talking to someone!”

Less concerned, Mrs. Piggott got off the sofa; chiefly to disinter a letter on which she’d till now sat. She put the letter away in her little desk. Any and all preparations were now over—apart from provision of cake for comers to tea, she put herself out in no way for any visitor. She and Feverel Cottage were to be taken as they were. Not so much as a glance in a looking-glass or cushion shaken or curtain straightened or fallen petal picked from the carpet. She did, however, do as she always did the minute before anyone from the outside came in—cast a meditative, half-solicitous look round at these multitudinous things of hers, not least china, wondering how the stranger might affect them.
In this case, Clare’s father would not be coming here for the first, second, or even third time. But a visitor alters, as each visit becomes one more.