The Little Girls (25 page)

“Hi, wait a minute!” commanded Clare, withdrawing her muzzle from her glass. “You don’t mean, Young Lochinvar, you’re making a dash back into the West
tonight
?” Sheila, prising open a drum of cocktail biscuits, stated: “I
don’t think that she should.”

“I want to go home.”

“Yes, yes, you shall,” promised Clare. “But do it by stages, why not? Why not Canterbury, or as you say, ‘near Canterbury’ (you are quite near Canterbury now) and Roland?”

“My goodness, Dinah,” cried Sheila, “is that old cousin of yours still going?”

“No, he isn’t. He’s my son—I mean, Roland is. Apart from anything else, Mumbo, he’s in Leeds, and so is Teresa.”

“Then what’s wrong with London: William and Annie?”

“At this hour? Anyway, they’re in Port au Prince.—No, I’d like to sleep in my own bed.”

“You’ll sleep in your own grave if you don’t look out.”

“So why not,” Sheila wanted to know, “calm down?”

The culprit at any rate sat down. She fell silent, from time to time looking from one to another of the three windows, which were heavily curtained in light beige. Clare asked Sheila: “Who is in Number 9?”

“It’s a nursing home. For elderly people.”

“Quiet neighbours, then?”

“Very. Many of them are failing, some rather rapidly.”

“Who’s failing in your room?”

“I haven’t a clue. They’ve installed a lift.”

“Number 10—no longer those Pomeranians?”

“Yappy little beasts. No. He’s said to be a psychologist, or a psycho-something.”

“Convenient neighbour?”

“He doesn’t analyze anyone, just researches. He’s let off his top to friends from London. Trevor handled that; it was rather a tricky lease. One’s a Hindu, I hear.”

“Tut!”

“Well, I don’t know. Sometimes
I
think one might do worse. Living in the whole of an empty house takes it out of one. Of course, there’d be much to be taken into consideration—for instance, our stair carpet shows every mark. And on top of that we now have another facer. Mother had made her home with Irene.”

“Ah. How is your mother?”

“Mother’s wonderfully lively.”

“And so now?”

“That remains to be seen. Any day, of course, she could begin to fail.”

“
You
could install a lift?”

“It may come to that.—Yes, Dinah, what do you want?”

“May I look out of one of your windows?”

“Oh, do.”—But at that the barbarian set about manhandling the nearest curtains, fighting her way through. Sheila, with a patience learned from her husband, said: “There’s a cord you pull.”

The curtains handsomely sailed apart. The maker-free then threw open the window, pushing up the sash as far as it would go. The night, so content to be dark, so moveless and mild, was spilled out upon by this overlit room. Unlike the Blue Grotto man in that she cared what she was doing, Dinah knew herself wickeder than he—it would be pitiable, at this minute, to be a bird in this part of the glade. All the same, the night could not have been done without for a minute more: here it was, understanding something of the good it did, inexhaustible. Changeless and unhauntable. The little low railings along the glade were now painted white, and probably not the same. Ravens-wood Gardens was what it always was: a place to be left to go back to one’s own home.

“
Dinah
, another?”

“What?”

“Drink. Where on earth have you put your glass? And, sorry, but shall you have finished with that window? It’s giving me gooseflesh.—No,
I’ll
shut it (one doesn’t want it to bang).”

Sheila found the glass and purposefully carried it to the cabinet.— “No, please not, Sheikie! I’ve got to drive.”

“Famous last words.”

Clare, from the other end of the room—she had risen from the settee and was standing not actually with her back to the electric log fire (that, its ferocity made impossible) but a little to the left of it—shouted: “I’m not so sure, Sheikie, that she
hasn’t
had enough!”

Dinah was annoyed, and showed it.

Clare said: “Then don’t be a fey bore. Pull yourself together!”

“You’re so military.”

“Such a way to go on!”

“
I
haven’t just been sitting there wolfing magazines and biscuits and taking no interest in my surroundings! All this because I looked out of a window. The thing about you is, Mumbo, you can’t bear to have anybody’s attention off you for a single instant.”

“Speak for yourself.—Have had a shock, have you? So have we all had a shock.”

“Yes, and who kept me out of jug, ha-ha?”

Sheila, giving a light tweak to the top of her dress, said: “Girls, girls …”

“It’s as well for Trevor,” said Dinah, “that he’s at Heme Bay. Which is his chair, though?—Where does he usually sit? What do you and he, Sheikie, generally do up here in the evenings?—He doesn’t bear us any malice, does he?”

“You know,” said Sheila, “you’re still a peculiar colour.”

“He hasn’t gone to Heme Bay because of us?”

“Frankly, he has no idea you are here, either of you.”

“Oh.”

“All very well to say ‘Oh.’ You know as well as anyone else how Trevor puts two and two together. AVell, then? You’d expect him to think you’d come nipping over from Somerset and Mumbo’d left Mopsie Pye to go to the dogs simply to drop in here and have a drink, no more? Well,
then
? Wanted to have him flapping about after us, arguing, while we were digging around for those old bones? Or alternatively, keeping on and on and on, afterwards, till he’d found out all?
Well
—then?”

“I do see. You were right.”

“Well, then.”

“I think I would like that drink.”

Glass in hand, Dinah addressed herself to the picture. “So this will be the Old High Street for evermore—this lie!”

“It isn’t as bad as that, is it?” asked the owner.

“If it’s any consolation, Sheikie, if it were slightly better it would be very likely to be a still worse lie.”

“To me,” said Clare, coming up also carrying her glass, “it appears correct in every detail.”

“Oh, it is—look, you can read the right names over the right shops. And
that’s
not a bit what I quarrel with: don’t think so! It’s just that something has given the man the slip, so in place of what’s given him the slip he’s put something else in.”

Sheila, examining the work of art for the first time, said: “It looks to me like a picture; and I should have thought that was the idea? Pictures are what people go for: who wants a street? Streets are six a penny. Quaint as that old street was, we went there to shop.—Also let me remind you,” she added, with revived animosity, “you two were for ever goggling in at that window at pictures no better than this (
and
not half so big) of the same thing.”

“But then we were
in
the street.”

“Oh,” said the sceptical Mrs. Artworth.

“You say,” asked Clare, rolling her eyes in what tonight were their heaviest pouches round at Dinah, with a blend of combativeness and curiosity, “that this would be a worse lie if it were a better picture?”

“Oh, yes,” said the positive one. “Because this poor chap has at least only been trying to portray what he thought he saw—and as we see, beyond getting the details correct he didn’t see much, and what he did see he didn’t see right. But if he’d been a bit better, then he’d have waded in and started portraying or trying to portray what he thought he felt; and as we know, what anyone thinks they feel is sheer fabrication.—Not that it doesn’t have quite a powerful effect, though: in or out of pictures.”

“What effect?”

“Well, I’m thinking more of what it has an effect
on
.”

“What?”

“Oh, Mumbo—people! People are glad to feel anything that’s already been fabricated for them to feel, haven’t you noticed? And those things have been fabricated for them by people who in the first place fabricated for themselves. There’s a tremendous market for prefabricated feelings; customers simply can’t snap them up fast enough—they feel they carry some guarantee. Nothing’s so fishy to most people as any kind of a feeling they’ve never heard of.”

“What would you say, Sheikie?”

“I’ve no idea what she’s talking about, I’m sorry to say.”

“I don’t think Sheikie does have prefabricated feelings. She simply behaves in a prefabricated way—and indeed why shouldn’t she, if she wishes to?”

“Well, thank you.”

“What bone’s sticking in
your
throat, Mumbo?”

Clare conveyed by a formidable silence that any bone in or not in her throat was her own affair. Shouldering past Dinah, closer to the picture, she read the names over the High Street shops. By no means discouraged, Dinah went on: “And I’ll tell you one great centre of the prefabricated-feeling racket, and that is anything to do with anything between two people: love, or even sex. Except that one knows it’s not, one could at times be tempted to suspect that the entire thing was a put-up job. Look at the complications which go on: they’re totally out of relation with Nature’s purposes. The fact is, many people prefer to be distraught. Even if they don’t enjoy it (and you bet they do, mostly) they feel they ought to be. Nothing more convinces them than a tremendous to-do. If one for an instant says, ‘But couldn’t this be simpler?’ they become furious.— So much is so simple.”

“For you,” said Clare, though not bothering to turn round, “probably.”

“It seems so particularly ridiculous,” said Dinah, “nowadays, with so many new horizons. So much more to get on with. So much more than there used to be to get one’s hands on to. Outer space—”

“Leave
that
alone, there’s a good girl!”

“I’ve no intention of tampering with that; I was merely giving you an illustration. No, all I’m trying to say is this, Mumbo: so many of these fanciful devices by which people have got into the way of keeping themselves going are, now, not only unnecessary but obsolete.”

“Still, you can’t go round pointing that out.”

“I don’t see why not.”

Clare thought. “Disaffecting, for one thing.”

“You’re being military again.”

“Right—then I’ll speak as a shopkeeper. Bad for business. You’d put more than half the world out of business, including novelists. And not to speak of Trevor, insofar as home-seeking is a matter of whimsy.—And then what would become of
you
, Sheikie?”

“If you’ll excuse me,” said Sheila, who lor some time had

been holding the vacuum ice-container to the breast of her dress, “I’d like to go down for more ice; we are running low.”

“Sheikie, I’m going to stop!”

“I’ll believe that, Dinah,” said the hostess candidly, “when I hear you.”

“She only talks,” explained Clare, turning her back on the Old High Street in order to look paternally at the ceasing speaker, “when she has something to say.”

“All I want to add is this, we did
know
those things were in that box. That’s, perhaps, why this evening has been a shock?” About to depart, the guest looked, for the last time, at the water colour. “Also, I owe an apology to this picture. It is not such a lie, really, as lies go. I was too ready to think it must be a lie because of its even attempting to be a picture. Also because it’s here, and the street’s gone-you tell me? It might be better to have no pictures of places which are gone. Let them go completely.”

The Hillman’s tail lights steadied out of a wobble and disappeared out the end of Ravenswood Gardens towards the West—watched from the steps of No. 11. “There
she
goes,” Sheila remarked. She added: “I wouldn’t worry, Mumbo, if I were you. As I see it, her bark is worse than her bite. With no one to argue with she’ll get bored with driving after an hour or so and wander into a Trust House.”

“You could be right,” said the other, willing to think so.

“And now,” said Sheila, turning upon the remaining guest with her coldest nonchalance,
“you
will want to be off. So do make a start as soon as you like. I am not keeping you.”

“You’re not throwing me out?”

“Why, no,” was admitted, with elaborate detachment. “Do as you like.”

“Trevor not back tonight?”

“No. He has a valuation appointment at Heme Bay first thing tomorrow.”

“I’m in no great hurry, then, Sheikie.”

“Aren’t you? Well, as I say, do as you like. But you don’t
have
to stay, let me make that clear.”

“Your point has been taken.”

“Care to come for a turn, then? In Trevor’s absence I have to take out the dog.”

“You
haven’t got a dog?”

“Not actually, no. It belongs, or did, to a patient in Number 9. Trevor and it for some reason best known to themselves took up with each other; and now this has come to be where it lives. It was that, the nursing home said, or putting it down.”