The Little Girls (18 page)

“Oh,” said the dulled girl.

“Your father back yet, I wonder?”

“I suppose so. I saw him.”

“Just now? Where?”

“Drawing-room window.”

“Coming out, going in?”

“Standing.”

Major Burkin-Jones’s tendency to do simply that mystified his wife often, his daughter never. It arose not from infirmity of purpose but out of his happening, from time to time, to find himself where he was. Clare collected her books, untwisted her legs. Her mother asked: “Going in?”

The child walked away, then ran. She entered Virginia Lodge not directly, by the verandah, but roundabout by the porch of the kitchen wing. The long service passage, tiled, scrubbed, already heated by cooking, had at its distant end a baize swing door.

She catapulted herself round the swing door, all but into her father—again standing, this time in the hall. (Beyond, through a doorway, appeared the dining-room table, set with trails of smilax for a party of eight.) “Good evening,” he said. “Busy?”

“Yes!” she said wildly.

“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.—How are the girls?”

“All right.”

Glossy-covered, the red and the yellow books slithered against each other under her elbow: she gave them a hitch up. He gave them a glance. “Prep?”

“No.” Taking his measure, not anew only, as though for the first time, she said: “An Unknown Language.”

“Write me a letter in it?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“You never know.”

Clare locked herself up again, more violently, into the Unknown Language, in a wedge-shaped box-room inside one of the gables, under a spike. The place was lit by panes of glass in the roof: when nothing but night came through those, she had to stop. Downstairs, she could have found a bit of candle. But downstairs was all party voices and, worse, laughter.

“What have you written it in?”

“Blood.”

“Good.”

“It should have been all our blood. That is more usual.”

“You were not there.”

The assembly was in the dark of the hollow middle of the thicker of the St. Agatha’s thickets. Electric torches were held downward, nozzles against the ground—now and then a beetle of light escaped. All was ready: out of the dug pit breathed raw, chalky earth—blisters were on the hands gripping the torches. At the pit’s edge, the agape coffer was known to be. They saw it no more than they saw each other. Words had a night sound.

“Read it, then!”

The outside world, when they left it, had been extinct rather than, yet, dark. On the ledged hill, as for the last time they looked down, a rain of ashes might have descended. The steel sea was not yet one with the sky. Glimmer still haunted the panes of the empty greenhouse when, having shut its door for the last time, they looked back once. Even to the last of their laden journeys, it had been possible to see. They had closed the secret entry into the thicket behind them by lacing together branches.
In
here, they were into blackness itself.

“Go on.”

The scroll could be heard being unrolled.

“Go
on
.”

‘Torches!” came the command.

Two torches rose, to bend on the writing.

In Southstone, a celebrity was playing the cello. Everybody was now in that place, listening. St. Agatha’s
was
deserted, not merely looked it. And Feverel Cottage, Virginia Lodge, and 9 Ravenswood Gardens, too, had been emptied of authority. Departing, the concert-goers had asked no question, other than: “You will be good?” Nor stayed for an answer. No lie had to be told.

“Ready?”

The reader’s mask was reflected, monkish, over the lit scroll. The lips parted. One by one, intoned, came forth Unknown syllables. No echoes had they: leaden they sounded. Someone shivered against a small tree: a tennis ball fell. The reader ceased. The ball, startled, fled down the sloping ground. Nobody stirred, neither did the torches. Below, the tennis ball landed on to the croquet lawn with a dead plop.

The reader asked: “Am I to go on?”

“Are you making this up?”

“I
made
it up.”

“But can you read your own blood?”

The shiverer, controlling the shiver, asked: “How are we to know this is what we said?”

“Do you want this Unknown, or do you not?”

“Not.”

“All right. Put out the torches.”

They did. Having vanished, she spoke:

“ ‘
…We are dead, and all our fathers and mothers. You who find this, Take Care. These are our valuable treasures, and our fetters. They did not kill us, but could kill You. Here are Bones, too. You need not imagine that they are ours, but Watch Out. No wonder you are so puzzled. Truly Yours, the Buriers of This Box.
’ ”

Silence, followed by a voice, marvelling: “That is what we said?”

“Yes.”

“ ‘
Truly Yours.
’
 Are we truly theirs?”

“That’s a mocking laugh.”

The tree which again recorded a shiver can have harboured no other tennis ball, for none fell. Instead: “That would still more puzzle them,” was said, “if it wasn’t all in Unknown: they won’t understand it.”

“I dare say. But we said.”

“Yes . , . And it may all be the same, by then? They may have no language.”

“When are we going to put things into the box?”

“Now. Come on.”

“When is each of us to put in her secret thing?”

“First.”

“Now? Then we must stay in the dark. No one must listen, even. Stop your ears!”

When ears were unstopped for the third, last time, there was heard a jagged, over-strained sigh. Emanating from each, it was of all of them. A complaint, almost. Eyes, needlessly tight-shut against the dark during the dark of the three deeds, sprang again open. Blazing back into life, three torches focussed upon the coffer—taking in, on the margin, bits of flint from the pit, glinting fetter-links, sparkle from an acting-box tiara, one of the soil-clotted trowels, a scatter of the vertebrae of some larger mammal… . One torch broke away and played into and round the pit. “Hadn’t we,” asked the bearer, “better put that coffer into this hole now? When we have made it full, it will be heavy.”

“No. Once it’s in there, we can’t get at it.”

“All we have to do is to drop things in.”

“All…?”

“Oo-oo?”

“We are going to seal it up.”

“Going to seal it up?”

“We said.”

“Oh?” inquired the coolest voice, with no great concern. “Are we? Who’s going to seal it up?—What with?”

“Wax.—Red.”

“And a seal?”

“
Seal
? We are going to use our thumbs.”

“Why our thumbs?”

“To leave prints.”

“Hurts,” said a voice literally from the pit (she had climbed down into it: it was by three inches deeper than the coffer). “That hurts.”

“Not if you lick your thumb.”

“I am not going to use
my
thumb.”

“Think it will incriminate you, do you, Dicey?”

“I am not
going
to use my thumb.”

The day after St. Agatha’s broke up for the summer holidays came the Pococks’ picnic, for Olive’s birthday. The place was Wanchurch, known for immense sands which stretch out to and along the sea from under the grass-topped sea wall defending the Marsh. The Pococks were thought highly of for this choice by all children asked. By now, halfway through the long summer, everybody was sated with pebbly beaches. Out there at Wanchurch, with its ghostly name, grew sea pinks and even yellow sea poppies. And the place was your own. Its great distance away to the west of Southstone, twelve miles, made to be going there a great outing. The thoughtful Pococks had overcome what could have been a problem for some guests by chartering a small motor charabanc—open, but having a canvas hood able to be erected in case of rain. The July weather had been causing some though no great anxiety. To be on the safe side, children were asked to bring mackintoshes, on the understanding that their having done so would make it still more improbable that they would need them. Also, own rugs for sitting on. Of all things else, the Pococks took charge.

“The Pococks’ picnic.” “The Pococks’ picnic.” The sound had the spell of alliteration. Or incantation, chanted round and around IV-A classroom while school days ran out and the, weather played cat-and-mouse. Every girl in IV-A had been asked, of course.

Not all the party came in the charabanc. Two or three families from the Marsh, known to the Pococks, who had a wide acquaintanceship, came over on bicycles or in pony traps. The Pococks, with the exception of Olive (who made a queenly journey amid her schoolfellows), came in their large motor car, bringing hampers, napkin-covered baskets, cake-boxes, string bags stretched to bursting-point, and so on. Aubrey Artworth borrowed Cuth’s motor bike and deposited Sheikie—only, then, to tear away somewhere else. Mrs. Piggott, one of the few mothers to be invited, was gladly an occupant of the charabanc. To keep the picnic within manageable size, it had been decided to cut down on parents as far as possible. Mothers here today were old Pocock family friends—not so Mrs. Piggott, who had been asked because Mrs. Pocock often thought she looked sad. “I often wish,” Mrs. Pocock had often said, “one could know her better.” Here was an opportunity.

There were three or four popular fathers, and one uncle, vouched for by his owner as being funny. All were civilians. Clare Burkin-Jones’s father’s joining the party was, alas, known to be unlikely. “Not much hope, I don’t honestly think, Mrs. Pocock,” his sombre child said. As for little boys, they were not in the majority. Most of them were girls’ brothers. There was a small, not highly esteemed representation from St. Swithin’s. Trevor Artworth, met by Olive with Sheila, had chivalrously been invited by Olive— brushed off the Cuth motor bike by his elder brother, who’d asked him if he imagined this was a bus, he had to make a rush for the charabanc, into which he’d succeeded in squeezing himself at the last moment.

Motor conveyances drew up, there to wait for the rest of the afternoon, on the landward side of the sea wall. When the charabanc came to port, the Pococks, like noble humanized ants, still were staggering to and fro with hampers. The children out of the charabanc cataracted down off the wall at another point, shouting—at the foot, however, they fell silent, looking around them, calculatingly, at the large spaces. Mrs. Piggott, wearing the tussore dust-coat and with her hat bound on with a chiffon motor veil, scrambled up the land side of the sea wall among the children, on the heels of her daughter. When she reached the top, wind caught the transparent mauve ends of the veil, sending them flying against the sky— which was so lightly grey as to itself seem a veil over wide light. There she stood a minute, looking down at the sands, smiling at the beginnings of so much pleasure: a weather-signal. She was the first indication that there was a wind, playful so far.

French cricket got going, thanks to the uncle’s being an eager player. Though loose, jumbled, and powdery and swept up into ridges under the wall, sand elsewhere was sleek as a seal, firm underfoot. Younger ones, who’d cluttered the journey with spades and buckets, started digging with senseless enthusiasm. Barefooted escapers, among them Dicey, went wading forward into the sea, girls stuffing their starched frocks into their bloomers of stuff to match—wade as you might, however, mile after mile, the sea was not yet up to your knees. Thinly running over the flats of sand, the water here was as warm as June, warmer than today.

Would the kettles boil, though? Up there in the encampment among the sand ridges, over which rugs were already spread and on which dozens of cups balanced, sounded grown-up laughter bright with anxiety. Little stoves’ methylated blue flames danced sideways, all but flattening out: the enthroned kettles were seeming barely to notice the flames were there—driftwood fires
might
after all have done better? Fathers knelt down like camels, interposing their forms with coats held open, manfully between the flames and the blowy draught. Mothers unpacked scones and potted-meat sandwiches or cut up gingerbread tensely but steadily, as though nothing were happening— or rather, not happening. Mrs. Pocock, imploringly watched by Olive, landed the birthday cake on to its silver platter. “Sand won’t blow on to it, will it?” asked unheard Olive. Holding back her long glossy dark hair, worn flowing today, Olive leaned over the cake, to read her name.

In the valley of the kettles began a humming. Heads turned that way, glances were exchanged—not yet did anyone dare speak. Like a medium giving off ectoplasm, the leading kettle gave off a wandering thread of steam.

Instinct now drew the children towards the camp. The game broke off; waders turned in the water and came back; young diggers stepped out over the battlements they had patted into existence round their castles. Mannerly, not sandily trampling over the rugs, all the assembling children moved one way: they surrounded the cake in a dense circle—those first there giving place that others might see. All in silence looked down upon the inscription, written in curling pink sugar handwriting on the white iced top. Some had to decypher it upside down:

A sort of victory wreath surrounded the words—glaces cherries, crystallized green angelica set like jewels into the icing. Twelve candles rose from the sugar in a coloured, grove.

“Olive,” said the first to speak, “this is your cake?”

“Yes.”

“When are you going to light the candles?”

“Soon,” Olive said, looking apprehensive.

“Twelve…” said another, who, having re-counted the candles, looked at Olive across them not yet with hostility but across a gulf.

“Yes,” Olive said. “Isn’t it extraordinary?” She licked a finger and held it up to the wind.

Turning away, in response to a call to sit down to tea, the children made determinedly for places on the more eligible rugs. The grown-up servitors threw themselves into action. Successful search having been made for tea cloths wherewith to grip the now white-hot handles of metal teapots, a brimming cup, or for juniors a mug of milk, soon found its way into every hand. One of the licences of this feast was that it was to be possible to
begin
with jam: Mrs. Piggott, entrusted by Mrs. Pocock with the jam jar, dealt out dollops on to split buttered scones extended towards her by many applicants, doing so equitably and beautifully. The uncle conjured into existence a mandoline and went on to strum on it, though for some time given no great encouragement. He began to hum, in a manner which made it clear he would later sing—under cover of the uncertain music an almost complete marquee of held-up coats came into existence round Olive and the cake. Ceremonially handed a box of matches, she stretched forth a royal, un-trembling hand: she succeeded not only in lighting all twelve candles but in blowing them out again before the wind could. One whiff came from the charred wicks.