The Little Girls (5 page)

“Yes,” she announced.

“What?” asked Sheila, called away from her compact.

“You asked if I’m still clever.”

“No, I didn’t; I said I supposed you must be. Well, suppose you clever us out of
this
!”

Undeflected, the boaster went on: “I’ve managed to live!”

“You have had to, have you?” Languid, the daughter of Beaker and wife of Artworth, of Beaker & Artworth, Southstone, turned her head away to look for her waitress —nor had she far to seek. Their tray was wafted into the space between them, teapot towards the hostess—by whose order eatables were restricted to a smallish plate of minuscule cress sandwiches, strewn with more cress, at which Clare looked glumly. “Lemon?—or do you take milk?” asked Sheila, pouring. “I see,” she went on, given countenance by her task, “you still sign yourself Burkin-Jones?”

“For the best of reasons.”

“Then you never—?”

“Oh
yes I did! Mr. Wrong came along, all right. That was a mess. So when I wrote that off, I took back my name.”

“Oh.”

“Or rather, my father’s.”

“Yes, you were Army, weren’t you? You Army children were always moving along, and then on the top of that there was 1914. What a clean sweep that made at St. Agatha’s, looking back! I suppose it must have felt curious, though I don’t remember, when school began again after those summer holidays. You so suddenly gone, off into the blue…
and
her. After that, not a clue, not a word, from that day to this. Once war broke out, was your father ordered abroad?”

“Killed at
Mons.
August 23rd, 1914.”

“Oh. Still, by now I suppose you must hardly miss him. Anyway, it seems late to say ‘so sorry.’ “

“Don’t bother!”

“Don’t bite my head off!” Sheila bit into a sandwich, then put it down. Nothing more was
she
going to ask; it was up to Clare—who, sure enough, banged back into the talk with: “So you married into the firm, like a good girl?”

“Mr. Artworth’s second son; yes. The elder was killed.”

“You might have travelled farther and fared worse.”

“I did. I married Trevor eventually.”

“You don’t mean
Trevor?”

“Why?” asked the wife, curiously raising her tilted eyelids.

“I stuffed sand down his mouth and trod on his spectacles.”

“So you did. He may not remember.”

“I bet he does.”

“He has never said so.”

“You chased him up that sewer.”

“No, that was Dicey.—Anyway,” said the wife, “that was the past.”

“They say, little girls and boys these days are little sweethearts.—Where’ve you been all this time, Sheikie, when not in Southstone?”

“Southstone. More goes on there than they suppose.”

“Evidently.”

“Just what do you mean by that, Clare?”

“What you mean, don’t I?”

“I wondered.—
Don’t
call me Sheikie!”

“Saw no harm.”

“Sorry; but don’t you see—it’s this dreadful thing. Hanging over us. Really I dread to speak of it.”

“But isn’t that why we’re here?”

“It could have been nice, meeting,” said Sheila crossly.

“Come on, though,” bullied Clare. “No more beating about the bush!”

“Then suppose you stop.”

“Buck up. Come on. Cards on the table!”

Mrs. Artworth allowed herself one doomed shiver. Then, rallying, she unwedged from inside her handbag a manilla envelope: before handing this over she examined it, warily, on both sides (nothing was, in fact, written on either). “Here are mine—where are yours?” Miss Burkin-Jones extracted, from her more angular, larger black calf handbag, an envelope of considerably greater bulk. Sheila at once cried: “Where did you get all
those
?”

“Press-cutting service.”

“Then they’re all over England?”

“Not quite, yet. Give her time, though!”

Mrs. Artworth put her hands to her face, forcing them up her cheeks, pushing up the roses. So nearly hysterical seemed the gesture that one or two women glanced her way from other tables. She did, however, know when to stop—having withdrawn her fingertips from her make-up,

one by one, she composedly glanced at each to see whether anything had come off on them. While thus engaged, she asked in a deadened tone: “Why is she doing this to us?”

“Oh, don’t act up, Sheikie! The thing’s a joke.”

“For you, perhaps,” the other said, with a bitterness which, if tinted by envy, was chiefly slighting. “You don’t live anywhere.”

Clare commented only with her eyebrows—given their expressiveness, was more needed? They shot up so high, and with such force, as to drive her turban further up her skull. She peeled open then shook her envelope, causing cuttings to shower, as from a cornucopia, on to and round her plate. “Well, here we are,” she declared, in a lordly way. “Now let’s match up with yours. Ten to one they’re identical, but let’s make certain.”

“You are methodical,” said the other languidly.

“That’s gone far to making me what I am.”

“By the way, what
are
you? I’ve no idea.”

“Goodness, haven’t you?” Clare asked, almost with awe.

“Don’t be so pompous at me. You never said.”

“Hardly thought that was necessary.”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing you’re not, Clare, from the way you go on, and that is, a prominent local family. Because clearly you seem to form no idea what these last weeks have been like for me in Southstone. And not me only; Trevor’s been losing sleep. And how Daddy’d have felt, if he’d lived, I don’t like to think. A thing like this could reflect on the firm. Beaker & Artworth, you may not realize, have not only been going more or less ever since the place was a place at all but have done as much as any firm in the place to make the place what it is today. Anybody in Southstone would tell you that.”

“And be right, I’m sure.”

“And never has one of us been remotely blown upon.”

“And who is remotely blowing on you now?”

Mrs. Artworth opened her eyes. “You
are,”
she said, “—aren’t you?—really very extraordinary.” Pointing a frosted-rose fingernail at Clare’s dreadful plateful, she inquired: “You have read those, I suppose? I at least imagine yours are the same as mine. Yes, go on, do what you said: compare them—here are mine, right under your nose! Go on, shove them round as much as you like—only don’t ask me to! A, I know them by heart; B, I could no longer touch them with the end of a barge-pole.” Her voice thinned to a species of shrieking whisper or whispered shriek— “If you don’t consider those damaging what is?”

Clare pulled yet another face, this time sideways. She conceded: “Make us look a bit silly. Could do, and since you feel they do, do do. But that’s the worst”

“You think so?” asked Sheila, marvelling.

“That’s my view,” said Clare, with defiant firmness. But her pug nose seemed to tickle; she rubbed it suddenly.

“That hasn’t been Trevor’s view. Or anybody’s who’s in their right senses.”

“Trevor’s now out of his senses, from what you tell me,” Clare remarked—though abstractedly: she was busied to and fro between the two hoards of cuttings. Unexpectedly quick of eye and nimble of finger, she picked, glanced, sorted. Finally she gave out: “Look here—these shockers of Dicey’s reduce to five, or so I make out. You seem to have no variants, and I haven’t, certainly. Five are enough, I grant. They’ve mounted into the number we have here thanks to her having seeded them far and wide, also to sheer non-stop pigheaded repetition. Won’t take no answer for ‘no,’ or ‘no’ for an answer. Never did, did she? I’ll tell you one thing—”

“I’ll tell
you
one thing: if Trevor’s not quite himself, there is every reason. Night and day our telephone keeps ringing. Everybody who’s anybody in Southstone wanting to know what we intend to do, saying how they feel for us, asking, do we realize it’s more than a laughing matter? Saying they’ve spotted another, have we seen that, or shall they bring it round or send it along? I am worn down.”

“Wonderful friends, however.”

“I am not so sure.”

“Who got on to this first?”

“Trevor’s office-boy. In the
Southstone Herald,
in the ‘Miscellaneous,’ among the rabbit advertisements. The chief clerk found him sniggering over something, so took it away and of course looked. He then of course thought it right to bring the matter to Trevor’s notice. Needless to say we promptly rang up the editor, whom we have both of us known since the year one, who said he’d had no idea and would do his best. Next morning, however, three people sent us the one from The Times.”

“That was where I lit on it, first of all. Happening to
be on the hunt, as I now am, for a good-looking fur coat from a good home, I’d been running my eye down the ‘Personal’ most mornings.”

“Another woman’s? Oh, I don’t think I
could
!”

“Then you couldn’t.”

“The nerve of her, Clare—an enormous paper like that!”

“The cash of her!—Now I’ll tell you what I was about to tell
you:
wherever she may be and whatever up to, she’s in the money.”

“Why?” asked Shelia malignantly.

“Why, I’m unable to tell you. She clearly is, though. These,” stated the self-made woman, indicating the bevy of cuttings, “cost. Run her into three figures, if she keeps going. Money, and more where it came from. To go bashing around like this, just for a whim—”

“They say sadists spend thousands, sometimes, torturing people.”

“Those particular Piggotts, it’s known, never had a bean.”

Fortified by studying her own bracelets, Sheila asked: “Imagine she married a rich man?”

“Two, three, by now: who knows? She’s had more than time to. And one leads to another, I’ve often noticed—I should argue, the last is dead and she’s on her own.”

“Don’t try to make out to me that she’s lonely!”

“Gay as a lark. But completely out of control.”

Sheila remarked, pensively: “It’s surprising, though.”

“Nothing surprises
me.”

“Not when you come to think of her? Looking back, she was rather an awful child. Blinkety light-red eyelashes, and quite pudgy.—You were the skinny one.” (Sheila’s glance of renewed incredulity at Clare’s torso was so artless as to be without offence.) “And scream and moan and create: I can hear her now!
And
bossy … wasn’t she related to a baronet?”

“No idea.”

“No, that used to be Olive Pocock. No, what
she
had in her family was a bishop: much good that did her character! You know, Clare, thinking her over as I’ve done lately—did she so suddenly leave because of the war, or under a cloud? What has dawned on me is, why should it have been the war when she had no father? Supposing,”

Sheila proceeded, with growing caution, “she never did have a father, at the best of times? There they used to be, simply she and her mother, stuck down in that cottagey house with no explanation. Things one may see as a child but not then think anything of seem peculiar later. That drawing-room of theirs smelled like a hothouse, always— who sent those expensive flowers?
They
never grew them; think of their garden! Then there were those pictures they had which made me giggle (I now see why) hanging right on the wall. Mother’d have had a fit. Her mother wore tea gowns. They had no gong. Those Saturdays you and I went to tea there—”

“Mrs. Piggott always laid on the most stunning cake. You got outside plenty of that, in your quiet way.”

“I dare say; but did she seem like a widow?”

“Nothing fishy about the Piggotts. My mother knew them.”

“Oh.—They were none of them mental, by any chance?”

“Not that I heard, ever. The bishop may have been.”

“Not an Atheist, are you?—Anyway, in that case,
there
goes heredity!”

“Don’t follow?”

“You tell me her mother was moral, and her family normal. Yet in spite of all her advantages, look at her now!”

“You know, I can hardly wait to!” burst out the incautious Clare.

Mrs. Artworth lightly frowned, as though vexed by deafness. “Sorry—say that again?”

“You heard me. Aren’t
you
mad with curiosity?”

“You mean, see her?”

Clare puffed her cheeks out, then sucked them in. Pinned by Sheila’s considering, mermaid gaze, she became delinquent: over-bold first, then shifty. She mumbled something.

“I beg your pardon?” asked Sheila.

“I said,’Why not?’”

” ‘Why not?’ Because that is what she wants.”

Clare looked at once hangdog and unresigned.

“You astound me rather, Clare, I can only tell you. You’d really dream of playing into her hands? There you go again, then—falling under her spell!”