The Little Girls (35 page)

But someone else, having once set foot on the stairs, hesitated no longer but came up warily. The step, as it neared the open door, not so much lagged as gave itself time. It seemed to be listening to itself—only waiting to be what it was counting on being, recognized. Wonderful how that hope persisted, in view of how many times the step had had to turn and go away again. This time, would there be any sign? Today was Wednesday.

Frank came to a halt where he had before, as he had before—a short way on to the carpet, across the threshold. He said tentatively: “Here I am?”

Waiting, he noted that her books were gone, since yesterday. No, there they were: stacked on top of the chest— why? He came forward by a rose or two, swaying his lowered head, looking exploratively under his eyebrows. What was the foreigner on the dressing-table? A sound, however, began to come from the pillow.—”What?” he asked, furrowing his forehead.

“I said, ‘There you are.
’ ”

“I thought I would just look in,” he explained. “How are you?”

“How are you?” she wanted to know.

“What’s that pot of jam doing over there, Dinah?”

“Jelly. Mrs. Coral. Where have you been?”

Crying out only inwardly “Where have
you
been?—where are you now?” he went over to verify the Coral jelly, before answering: “Oh, I’ve been about, you know. Round about.”

“Keeping an eye on things?”

“You might say so—yes.”

“Dear, don’t stand right over
there
. Shouting wears us out.”

“Whatever you like,” he said. He came down the room and stood at the foot of the bed. He asked: “Put up your head for a minute, if you can, will you? I can hardly see you.”

She raised herself on an elbow.

Awestruck, Frank more deeply furrowed his forehead. “All colours of the rainbow….”

“Yes. Have
you
ever seen such a beautiful bruise?”

“You don’t look too bad otherwise, Dinah. Resting and sleeping have done you good?”

“Frank, I hope I didn’t give you a fright the other evening?”

“You couldn’t help it,” he said—turning white, looking away.

“Yes, I could have—it was stupid of me. I had no notion her masks scared you.”

“Masks?” he echoed—demented, and who would blame him? He rubbed the back of his head. “Oh, what—that? It seems a long time ago. What I thought when I saw it was, you were angry with me.”

“How could I—why should I be?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I don’t know, what I haven’t known. But you’ve been against me.”

“Darling, dear Frank,” she said, with a tremble of love in her voice, unavailingly reaching a hand towards him (the bed was as long as it was wide), “don’t be a donkey.”

“I wish to God I were one!”

“Now, now, now, now.”

Without warning, he left the foot of the bed for its empty side, on to the edge of which he cast himself down, 

lying face buried in the pillow on which her head was not, in a sort of rigor. Between them existed the great distances. She again reached a hand out—this time sideways. But the bed was as wide as it was long.

“Frank, cheer up.”

No stir, no sound.

“Frank, there’s only one thing …”

No sound, no stir.

“Only one thing—if you would put the swing back?”

He made some sound of denial, into the pillow.

“Yes, I do know,” she said. “I mean, I’m not asking— but if you
would
put it back? Straight, if you’d rather; though you’d be jolly clever. If you’d just put it back? . .. They’re so disappointed.”

“Cutting out?” Clare senselessly asked the children.

They did her the honour of not expecting she could expect them to answer: nonetheless they punctiliously all looked up. Three of them: three other children. Down there in the pit, that bucket of dusk, she had not counted them—on the flit, they had been innumerable. They had answered from all over the place. They had cast looks rather than shown faces. Their hands had joined hers in the battle against the knots—but that had ended. Now, all was altered. Here, lined up on the sofa, they were Three, no less excluding than had been the cave. The big old pouchy wrecked-looking outsider had the greater capacity to see herself as she now was from having been once otherwise.

Light fell on their heads from the big lamp on the table behind the sofa, photographing them clearly. They could be identified as quite unfamiliar. In the middle Emma, the robin’s nestling, even her hair plump as it rebounded from under the snood. On her right Pamela, lucid Delacroix brow and brushed-upward curls; and on her left Coralie, looking respectably out through her Caliban fringe. A mistake to have seen them again—a mistake to
see
them.

However, there were flocks of magazines. Clare, barricading the children from the fire by standing on the hearthrug, bulkily stooped to pick one up.—”I’m afraid,” said Pamela, scissors pausing, “you won’t find very much left in
that
one.”

She was right: many of the pages had been torn out, jaggedly; others were gaping with excisions. But it was interesting to look through and see what was still there because it had not appealed to them, and to speculate as to the nature of what was gone because it had.

Emma, though she had finished work on the altar, still treasured the altar on her bare knee. She reached out, however, for the nature magazine fought shy of by Coralie, to see whether one might not yet rustle up a coloured bird. “No good starting anything else,” Pamela warned her, “we’re only going to have to go. We’d better clear up.” Herself having done with the heart-shaped lady, she began suiting the action to the word.

“
I
 don’t want to go,” complained Coralie, making it clear that her grandmother’s machinations were no fault of hers. Also, she was a space snob: the lounge in which she was now seated, whether or not she might be in danger here from the mad lady, seemed to her the thing. “You’re going to sleep where that Indian was,” she informed Emma.

Clare disencumbered the hearthrug of herself. But Pamela, a minute or two later, came after her down the haunted room, holding the dinosaur between finger and thumb. “Would you like to see this? It’s prehistoric.”

“My goodness, yes,” said Clare, looking at the dinosaur with sympathy. The other children, seeing no real reason why Francis should not finish the clearing-up (serve him right), set out to wander around the drawing-room, picking things up and putting them down again. “Those are pictures of us,” said Emma, looking into the snapshot bowl.

“I tell you what
may
be here!” shouted Clare suddenly. This excited the children, who followed her to the table in the window. She slid a drawer open, slid her hand quest-ingly into the very back of it. “Yes!” she announced. Out came the Chinese ivory puzzle. She gave herself up to it, scowled over it, was altogether obsessed by it, scarcely breathing. Intricate, interlocking ivories gave their clickety-click. She negotiated them with blundering semi-skill. Then, though, came the stop—the breath she’d either been holding or forgotten to draw went in and out of her loudly, exasperatedly. “To
this
point, I’ve always got it. Never beyond, though, never!—Now
you
try!”

She turned round, holding the puzzle out.

But the last of the courteous children had walked away.

They were in the hall, giving a look over to their bits and pieces. The fathers also were to be heard, coming downstairs again from their mother’s room. Clare wondered what to say to the sons if they should come in— however, they did not. Now having the drawing-room to herself, she returned the puzzle to where it lived, then stood there looking at Mrs. Piggott’s clock, not to see the time.

She had no way of telling, therefore, how much later it was or was not when Sheila came into the drawing-room, pink blouse and all. “Hullo,” Sheila asked, “how are
you
surviving?”

“I should imagine I’d better go?”

“All the way back?”

“I’ve got a room at the pub. White Hart.”

“And what will you do when you get to the White Hart? What anyone does who hasn’t got anything to do but be at the White Hart?”

“I’m not a drunk, yet.”

“I wouldn’t blame you,” said Sheila, heading for the tray. “My Lord, what a Bedlam! Frank’s been up there also, just now, making a scene.”

“Well, to think of that.”

“Yes; I soon got him out.—I’d been doing my nails,” added Sheila, eyeing the results.

“Sheikie, this is how people live.”

“Oh?”

” ‘Enter these enchanted woods, you who dare.’”

“Will they give you anything to eat at the White Hart?”

Clare was not to be deterred:

“Each has business of his own;

But should you distrust a tone,

Then beware.

Shudder all the haunted roods,

All the eyeballs under hoods

Shroud you in their glare.

Enter these enchanted woods,

You who dare—

—I had better go,” she concluded, looking about.

“And what a mess in
here
,” Mrs. Artworth declared, surveying it. “Children, and everything—incidentally, you realize those berries could be poison?” She swept from the satinwood table as many as the cup of her hand would 

hold, and, whistling, tossed them into the fire. “How any survive,” she said, “is a mystery to me.”

“Children or berries, Sheikie?”

“Why, children, naturally.”

“Berries are said to mean every sort of thing.”

“Oh, are they?”

“I
had
better go, hadn’t I?” repeated Clare.

“I can’t say I see any future for you at the moment, Mumbo,” said the other, with not uncompassionate frankness.

“Fine. Well then off I go, heel-and-toe.”

“Where’s that Mini of yours?”

“There in the village.”

“I ought,” said Sheila, “to offer to run you there in that Hillman she’s left lying about. But the fact is, I can’t stand touching anybody else’s car: no. Doing that makes me nervous.”

“
You
?’

“I won’t touch anybody else’s car, so it’s no use arguing.”

“I am not,” said Clare, buttoning her coat. “Because I am looking forward to my walk, and that lane and all its works. I may meet the cat.”

“I wrecked a car once. I wrecked somebody’s car for him. ‘Let her out! let her out!—let her
out
!’ he kept on saying into my ear. Let her out I did: I did what he told me. I’d never handled a great big brute of a big-powered car like that new one of his before. Neither was it his, as I might have known. He was a car salesman, doing a bit of racing on the side. However, anything for excitement. He always was all shot up, at the best of times. He’d been through that war. One lung left, coughing his guts out. Still, there we were.”

“That smash,” Clare said, “wasn’t the way you killed him?”

“No. I broke up that car, and broke up my nerve. Wasn’t that enough? No, that wasn’t the way I killed him.”

“You now hate driving?”

“I have for years—years.”

“Waste of that dashing little run-about you’ve got.”

“Yes. I always have had a car; Trevor thinks I should.”

“Stop driving!”

Sheila stared. “
That
would seem rather peculiar, would it not?”

“Do you want to tell me what happened after?”

“Why not? Well, he had worries. Some a hang-over from that smash, some not. When I say he became a sick, dying man, what I mean is, he no longer was able to keep the show on the road. No longer able to go on holding himself together. His sickness, I mean, got the upper hand. One had to know him to see how frightened he was. No doctor needed to tell him how bad he was. There he lay, in his room at the top of that house I couldn’t get the dog out of the garden of the other night, saying: ‘Stay with me. Stay with me,’ he said, ‘you never loved me, but stay with me; don’t go. Stay with me, after all these years. That’s all I ask,’ he said, ‘it’s not much to ask, is it? You never loved me.’—Till the day came, Clare, when I said to him: ‘That is all you know,’ and went out of the room. Went out of the room, leaving him. I was not to know, but that was to happen to be the day he died. Therefore die he did.”

“Oh, I see,” said Clare.

“I doubt if you do. I’d loved him. I’d never ceased to. I loved him.”

“Shouldn’t he have known?”

“Ask me another,” said Sheila Artworth. “What did he think, all those years, if he’d never known? All gone for nothing, those years—he
had
never known.”

“You never show much, Sheikie.”

“Love’s what you feel,” said Sheila, “or so I’d thought. What more
can
you do? If anybody doesn’t understand, what more
can
you do? Show?—showing’s another thing. I did have something to show when I had my dancing.”

“I still don’t see—”

“Well, there you are,” sad Sheila. “Never have I told that story, and now I do it doesn’t make sense—does it?”

“Never expect that.—I wish I could set eyes on her,” said Clare.

“What a mess,” said Sheila.

“Yes. Mistakes have histories, but no beginning—
like
, I suppose, history?”

“How long,” asked Sheila, “can you hold out without anything to eat?”

“Why?”

“Because if you waited a bit longer, somewhere …”

“Hid for a bit longer, you mean?—Don’t be refined,

Sheikie. And don’t worry. I’ve found out how to hide. Well, what?”

“You could make your way up there while we’re at dinner. I wouldn’t wonder if by then she mightn’t be asleep; she’s inclined to drowse off if nobody stops her; mostly she seems to want to be left in peace. The door’s open, so you could take a look at her.—If she
should
be awake, though, Clare, I wouldn’t go in….”

“I quite understand.”

Sheila took her glass back to the tray. (“What about you?” she asked, looking at Clare. “N’thanks.”) She measured herself out another drink, but then paused. She’d had a second thought. The drawing-room curtains had, at some time during the ins-and-outs since tea time, been drawn by Francis—Mrs. Artworth, going to a window, parted its curtains by inserting an arm between them (not wasting a glance by searching for the cord) and, pushing the sash up, emptied her glass out on to the grass.