The Little Girls (29 page)

“Back.”

The way was short. Two minutes after leaving the cottage, the car turned into the home lane; four more minutes, then there would be the white gate. Never much used after dark, the lane was empty—never had it led, beyond Applegate, to anywhere but another farm. And last week’s frost had terminated the season for outdoor lovers, though tonight again was no more than chilly. Some few trees, so far as it could be seen, posted the way.

A cat came out of the ditch, conspiratorially turning the lamps of its eyes to meet the car’s—it shrank back, just not too late. Dinah said hurriedly: “May I ask one more thing?”

“That depends.”

“Now that it’s all over—”

“What’s all over?” (Clare steadied the masks, which had given a wobble on her knee.)

” What
did you put into the bottom of the coffer?”

Clare seemed to be bargaining in her mind. “You won’t get anything out of Sheikie,” she pointed out.

“No—but what did you put in?”

“Oh, all right. Shelley.”

“You don’t mean
Shelley?”

“What’s the good of asking if you don’t believe me? I’d given him up.”

“You must have been mad?”

“I thought he was WRONG.”

“You must have been mad! I put in a gun.”

“Nonsense.”

“What’s the good of asking if you don’t believe me?”

“I didn’t ask.—What on earth do you mean, though?”

“What’s now called a gun. A pistol—or could it have been revolver? Somebody’s shooting somebody else with it now, probably. I told you two I knew there was one, but you took no notice.”

“Expected us to believe you?”

“That’s a mistake you may make once too often, Mumbo. Still, that’s that—here’s my nice white gate!”

There it was: bland if phantom. For ever open. As large as life.
“No,”
Clare cried, again restraining the masks, “you crook, you don’t get away with that! Wait a minute, can’t you?—Pull up”

“No,” said the driver, driving on in. “Frank will have heard the car.”

He had not; he was playing a loud record. It rather than he came out to meet them. In the hall, Dinah flung her overcoat at a bishop’s chair, then waited to do the same with Clare’s. They harkened.

The runaway train came down the track,

She blew, she blew,

The runaway train came down the track

And she blew, she blew,

The runaway train came down the track,

Her whistle wide and her throttle back,

And she blew, blew, blew, blew—

Dinah, going ahead of Clare round the drawing-room door (which had been ajar), said, “Oh, really, Frank!” though in a pacific tone.

“Makes a change,” he said, stopping it not without regret—he was on his feet anyway, near the player. “Well, here you
are.
I was beginning to think you’d gone to church.” He then looked civilly, if not exactly expectantly, towards Clare. Dinah introduced them: making their way towards each other, they shook hands. “Missed meeting you the other day,” he told her, “by a few minutes.” She said, yes, she had heard that that had been so.

“If we didn’t go to church, it wasn’t for lack of asking, was it, Mumbo?” recollected Dinah, shuddering. “Oh my heavens!—Frank, what did you have for lunch?”

“Pheasant, chiefly.”

“Oh, then you didn’t miss much. Who was there?—No, that can keep,” she told him, on second thoughts. “You can imagine what Mumbo and I need, first of all.—I say,” she asked, looking about, “where’s your drink?”

“I was waiting for you,” he said with unusual formality. “What may I get you?” he asked Clare.

She told him; then, looking at Mrs. Piggott’s clock, remarked: “We are quite late, I see.”

“All the nicer to be home!” sang out the homecomer, contentedly coiling into her chair. “
Perch
yourself somewhere, wouldn’t you, Mumbo; or not yet? As you know, everything here’s yours.” She went on: “This is a fire!” gazing at it with love and awe.

“Not bad, is it?” asked Frank, turning his head—he was at the tray at the other end of the room. “You told Francis to go to some French film?”

“I did, but I hardly believed he would—has he? On his own, or who with?”

“Mrs. Coral’s Finn.”

“Oh, good.”

“This as it should be?” Frank asked Clare, entrusting to her the well-filled glass.

“By the look of it, exactly, thank you.” She tried it, it was. She said: “I met your dog.”

He said: “I don’t understand. Where?”

“Yes, Frank,” cried his neighbour cheerfully, “we went round by the cottage—into it, for a minute.”

“I’m afraid you didn’t see it at its best, then,” he told Clare—speaking from a distance: he was back at the tray. Standing there frowning at a decanter, he said, as much to it as to Dinah: “If I’d known, I could just as well have been there as here.”

“Naturally,” she said, a little irritated by having to say anything so simple—dodging her head to see him between or over the various objects interposing between them, cushions along the top of the back of the sofa, lamps, a high bowl of spindle and other berries, and so on—”it would have looked nicer with you in it.”

That’s being true did not reflect particularly upon the cottage—almost any surroundings would gain by surrounding Frank: this room was doing so at this minute. Still wearing and strikingly well become by the suit in which he had been over to Shepton Mallett or its neighbourhood, he looked like Sunday, a Sunday of an enjoyable, by which need not be said wholly secular, kind. Any slight touch of fantasy about his appearance he could carry off. This fortunate man not only liked his clothes but was liked by them—not always is the liking reciprocated. Whether or not (Dinah said, not) in his life Frank had had the recognition he deserved, he looked fortunate, and how far better that is than to look deserving.

“I dare say it might have,” he said, “that is, I hope so. But that’s not the point. I left the place in a mess, and as cold as the tomb.”

When all three of them were provided for, and Clare had decided upon a place on the sofa, he settled, finally, into his usual chair—from which he returned his attention to the visitor. “I hope,” he said, “this afternoon went to plan? As I understand, you were to pay your respects to our local witch. Find her congenial?”

“Largely, it was a business trip,” said Clare. Facing the fire, she unbuttoned her coat—the tweed of her suit, this time, was more sombre and less aggressive in pattern than the tweed last time: with the same sardonic discretion she wore a dark silk shirt, high at the neck. Her being without the turban made no great change, since her hair had been moulded by successions of turbans into their shape. What more seemed unusual was her wearing iearrings: square, big, good-looking pearl stud ones. She looked handsome— there was a slight touch of fantasy about her appearance. She added: “Nothing like talking shop.”

“I agree with you. And you had a march past of the masks? My idea is, she gets many of her ideas from living under that belfry. Result is, I shouldn’t care to live with one of those things. Come home late, open the door, and find one of those grinning at me?—no, thank you.”

“Oh, Frank—now you
have
put your foot in it!”

“What on earth do you mean, Dinah?”

“Wait till you see. Oh, dear!”

“Short of talking shop,” he went on, to Clare, “provided there’s anybody to do it with, there’s nothing like talking over old times, is there? Those, one never gets to the end of, still less the bottom of. Seen Mrs. Artworth lately?”

“You unfortunately
haven’t,
have you, Mumbo?” interposed Dinah hastily.

“Too bad, her living so far away.” He brought out his pipe, considered it, put it back again.

Clare, changing her attitude on the sofa, knocked a cushion overboard with her elbow. Dinah, in an outburst of loving showmanship, pointed out: “Mumbo always does that.—Frank, having by now met us all three, wouldn’t you say St. Agatha’s was to be congratulated on the way we’ve turned out? We may not be much, but we could have been far worse. Looking back, I think Miss Ardingfay had ideals.”

Frank, having waited to see whether more was going to come, and if so what, said: “Good.” Clare recovered the cushion and put it back again. Dinah, evidently disappointed with both of them, turned away and looked into the fire: she continued to do so. Frank fixed his eyes on her: “Tired?” he said accusingly—for one or another reason she failed to hear.

“What
do you think can have tired her?” Clare asked— with, for the first time, a mocking deference.

“Overdoes things,” he said—for the first time, curtly. “She overdoes everything.”

“What I was thinking,” said their friend, coming to the surface, “was, wouldn’t it be better, later, to have an omelette? There’s that other pheasant, cold, but that might be stupid. But soup could be nice, from the bones of the first? If so, the bones ought to start now.”

“Now?—nothing easier,” Frank exclaimed. With alacrity, taking his glass with him, he rose and left them.

“Can cook?” asked Clare, looking after him.

“Everyone can now, can’t they?”

“I couldn’t tell you: I eat out.—
Now,
what about that gun?”

“It was at the bottom of Mother’s glove drawer.”

“In Feverel Cottage? I don’t believe you.” “There you go, again! Yes—I was looking for some place to stow sugar mice: wherever I had them in
my
room that odd maid we had detected them out and ate them, and it was no good tale-telling to Mother because she said they gave me spots. But I happened to know there was that drawer full of I don’t know how many pair of long, long gloves, folded up and beautifully put away. As at Feverel Cottage she no longer wore them, why should she go to that drawer? So then I lifted the gloves up, to stow my sugar mice underneath, and there was the pistol or revolver. That was how, as I told you, I knew there was one.”

“Taking it was another thing,” said Clare.

“I don’t see why, when she never used it.”

“Nevertheless, you robbed her.”

“Everything that was hers was mine, she told me.”

“What about everything you had?”

“I was hers.”

Clare sat scowling, thumping a knee with a fist thoughtfully. “What can have been its history—
why
was it there?”

“Cousin Roland thought of it as a thing no widow should be without? No, he couldn’t have been so silly. Not only was she not nervous but there was nothing—
then,
if you remember?—to be nervous about. More likely, it was one of the things she’d inherited that she didn’t exactly know what to do with. Not that it looked antique; it was fairly new-looking.”

“Loaded?”

“I thought it was safer not to look.”

“My heavens, and you dragged it round in that thicket!”

“Well, it didn’t go off… . It may, of course, have been Father’s; but if it was he can’t have been keen on it. I mean, if he’d been keen on it he’d have used it, wouldn’t he, instead of going under that train?”

Clare’s “
What?
”
froze on her lips.

“I’m sorry—I’m terribly sorry, Mumbo!” cried Dinah, shaken. “I thought you knew; I imagined everyone knew.”

“You were how old?”

“Shortly to be born.”

“What
a thing to do to her, to do to
her!”

“There was some reason, something he couldn’t bear. Something gave way underneath him, all of a sudden.
And
I expect some worry, partly money? Nothing to do with her. They’d been so happy.”

“Too happy, possibly?”

“How could it ever be possible to be that?—Anyway, that was how Cousin Roland came to take us on.”

“Who was that man?”

“Cousin Roland? Mother’s first cousin. He thought of everything. He paid my school bills, I
think
; but also, which was still nobler, all those years he kept Mother in flowers and new novels. From which I suppose there may have been those who manfully tried to argue he kept Mother: if he had, she could hardly have cost him more—those were the only two things she wanted; but those she could do with any amount of, and did. Otherwise, she was very independent.”

“All she wanted?”

“Poetry, but those books she already had: they were up in her room.”

“She should have married again?”

“Again
?
—Even I have never wanted to do that. Oh, no. No. There are shocks you don’t take the risk of twice.”

“You didn’t, though, have her kind of shock?”

“No, but it was
a
shock… . Bill died. That happened while the boys, still, were little. Widows,” said Dinah, “run in families.” She rose from her chair and went to the door, calling: “Is that you, Frank?”