Complete Short Stories (VMC) (40 page)

‘I wish
we
could go to a ball,’ said Lucy, one of the twins.

‘Your time will come,’ their mother said. She laid her hand to the side of the silver tea-pot as if to warm and comfort herself.

‘Oh, do you remember that boy, Sandy, in the elimination dance?’ Katie suddenly exploded.

Frances, who was all beaky and spectacly, Mrs Pollard thought, exploded with her.

‘The one who was wearing a kilt?’ Natalie asked, with more composure. She wondered if Charles was thinking that she must be older than the other girls and indeed she was, by two and a half months.

‘Will Mrs Frensham-Bowater be there?’ Lucy asked.

Her sly glance, with eyelids half-lowered, was for Caroline’s – her twin’s – benefit.

‘Of course, Mrs Frensham-Bowater always organises the dance,’ their mother said briskly, and changed the subject.

Charles was grateful to her for keeping her promise; but all the same he had had an irritating afternoon. The twins, baulked in one direction, found other ways of exasperating him. When he came out of the house with his gun under his arm, they had clapped their hands over their ears and fled shrieking to the house. ‘Charles is pointing his gun at us,’ they shouted. ‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ he shouted back. ‘Charles swore,’ they cried.

‘What an unholy gap between Katie and me and those little perishers,’ he thought. ‘Whatever did Mother and Father imagine they were up to? What can the neighbours have thought of them – at their time of life?’ He shied away from the idea of sexual love between the middle-aged; though it was ludicrous, evidence of it was constantly to be seen.

‘Did you shoot anything?’ his mother asked him.

‘There wasn’t anything to shoot.’ He had known there wouldn’t be and had only walked about in the woods with his gun for something to do until the taxi came.

‘And the girl next door?’ Frances asked. ‘I have forgotten her name. Will she be going to the dance tonight?’

‘Oh, Deirdre,’ said Caroline to Lucy.

‘Yes, Deirdre,’ Lucy said, staring across the table at Charles.

‘No, she has gone to school in Switzerland,’ said Katie.

‘Poor Charles!’ the twins said softly.

‘Why not try to be your age?’ he asked them in a voice which would, he hoped, sound intimidating to them, but nonchalant to everybody else.

‘Have you had nice holidays?’ Mrs Pollard asked, looking from Frances to Natalie, then thinking that she was being far too hostessy and middle-aged, she said without waiting for their answer, ‘I do adore your sweater, Natalie.’

‘Jesus bids us shine, with a pure, clear light,’ Caroline began to sing, as she spread honey on her bread.

‘Not at the table,’ said her mother.

‘What shall we do now?’ Katie asked after tea. She was beginning to feel her responsibility again. There was no doubt that everything was very different from school; there were Frances and Natalie drawn very close together from sharing the same situation; and she, apart, in the predicament of hostess. It was now that she began to see her home through their eyes – the purple-brick house looked heavy and ugly now that the sun had gone behind a cloud; the south wall was covered by a magnolia tree; there were one or two big, cream flowers among the dark leaves: doves were walking about on the slate roof; some of the windows reflected the blue sky and moving clouds. To Katie, it was like being shown a photograph which she did not immediately recognise – unevocative, as were the photographs of their mothers in the dormitory at school – they seldom glanced at them from the beginning of term to the end.

They sat down on the grass at the edge of the orchard and began to search for four-leaf clovers. Their conversation consisted mostly of derogatory remarks about themselves – they were hopeless at dancing, each one said; could never think what to say to their partners; and they had all washed their hair that morning and now could do simply nothing with it.

‘So lucky having red hair, Katie. How I envy you.’

‘But it’s horrible. I hate it.’

‘It’s so striking. Isn’t it, Frances?’

‘Well, yours is, too, in a different way. It’s this awful mousiness of mine I can’t abide.’

‘You can’t call it mousy: it’s chestnut.’

It was just a game they played and when they had finished with their hair they began on the shape of their hands. There was never any unkindness in anything they said. They were exploring themselves more than each other.

The twins wandered about the garden, shaking milk in jars to make butter: every few minutes they stopped to compare the curd they had collected. They had been doing this tirelessly for days, but were near the time when that game would seem dull and done with and they would never play it again. This evening, they marched about the lawn, chanting a meaningless song.

The older girls were discussing whether they would rather be deaf or blind. Frances lay on her stomach watching the children and wondering if they were not lucky to be so free of care and without the great ordeal of the dance ahead of them.

‘Deaf any day,’ said Katie.

‘Oh, no!’ said Natalie. ‘Only think how cut off you’d be from other people; and no one is ever as nice to the deaf or has much patience with them. Everyone is kinder to the blind.’

‘But imagine never seeing any of this ever again,’ said Frances. Tears came up painfully in Katie’s eyes. ‘This garden, that lovely magnolia tree, sunsets. Never to be able to read
Jane Eyre
again.’

‘You could read it in Braille,’ Katie said.

‘It wouldn’t be the same. You know it wouldn’t be. Oh, it would be appalling … I can’t contemplate it … I really can’t.’

Anyone who reminded them that the choice might not arise would have been deeply resented.

‘I suppose we had better go in and iron our frocks,’ Katie said. No one had found a four-leaf clover.

‘Where is Charles?’ Natalie asked.

‘The Lord knows,’ said Katie.

Frances was silent as they went towards the house. She could feel the dance coming nearer to her.

‘The house is full of girls,’ Charles told his father. George Pollard left the car in the drive and went indoors. ‘And steam,’ he said.

Natalie, Frances and Katie had been in the bathroom for nearly an hour and could hardly see one another across the room. Bath-salts, hoarded from Christmas, scented the steam and now, still wearing their shower-caps, they were standing on damp towels and shaking their Christmas talcum powder over their stomachs and shoulders.

‘Will you do my back and under my arms?’ asked Katie, handing to Frances the tin of Rose Geranium. ‘And then I will do yours.’

‘What a lovely smell. It’s so much nicer than mine,’ said Frances, dredging Katie as thoroughly as if she were a fillet of fish being prepared for the frying-pan.

‘Don’t be too long, girls!’ Mrs Pollard called, tapping at the door. She tried to make her voice sound gay and indulgent. ‘The twins are waiting to come in and it’s rather past their bedtime.’ She wondered crossly if Katie’s friends were allowed to monopolise bathrooms like that in their own homes. Katie was plainly showing off and would have to be taken aside and told so.

‘Just coming,’ they shouted.

At last they opened the door and thundered along the passage to their bedroom where they began to make the kind of untidiness they had left behind them in the bathroom.

Yvette, the French mother’s-help, whose unenviable task it now was to
supervise the twins’ going to bed, flung open the bathroom window and kicked all the wet towels to one side. ‘They will be clean, certainly,’ she was thinking. ‘But they will not be chic.’ She had seen before the net frocks, the strings of coral, the shining faces.

She rinsed the dregs of mauve crystals from the bath and called out to the twins. The worst part of her day was about to begin.

‘This is the best part of the day,’ George said. He shut the bedroom door and took his drink over to the window. Myra was sitting at her dressing-table. She had taken off her ear-rings to give her ears a little rest and was gently massaging the reddened lobes. She said: ‘It doesn’t seem a year since that other dance, when we quarrelled about letting Katie go to it.’

‘She was too young. And still is.’

‘There were girls of thirteen there.’

‘Well, that’s no affair of mine, thank God.’

‘I wonder if Ronnie what’s-his-name will be sober. For the MC of a young people’s dance I consider he was pretty high last time. He always has drunk unmercifully.’

‘What the devil’s this?’ George asked. He had gone into his dressing-room and now came back with his safety-razor in his hand.

‘Oh, the girls must have borrowed it.’

‘Very hospitable guests they are, to be sure. They manage to make me feel quite at home.’

‘Don’t fuss. You were young yourself once.’

She dotted lipstick over her cheekbones and he watched her through the looking-glass, arrested by the strange sight. The incredulous expression made her smile, eyebrows raised, she was ready to tease. He tilted her face back towards him and kissed her quickly on the mouth.

‘You look absurd,’ he said.

As soon as she was released, she leant to the mirror again and began to smooth the dots of colour over her cheeks until they were merged into the most delicate flush. ‘A clever girl,’ he said, finishing his drink.

The girls were still not dressed when a boy called Benedict Nightingale arrived in his father’s car – and dinner-jacket, George decided. ‘Katie’s first beau,’ he told himself, ‘come calling for her.’ He felt quite irritable as he took the boy into the drawing-room.

‘They won’t be long,’ he said, without conviction.

‘Don’t be too long, girls,’ Myra called again in her low, controlled and unexasperated voice. She stopped to tap on their bedroom door before she went downstairs; then, knowing that Charles would be having trouble with his tie, she went in to his rescue.

‘What about a drink?’ George asked Benedict reluctantly.

‘No thank you, sir.’

‘Cigarette?’

‘No thank you, sir.’

‘I don’t know what they can be doing all this time. Now what the hell’s happening up there?’

The twins were trying to get into Katie’s bedroom to pry into adolescent secrets, and the girls, still in their petticoats, held the door against them. From the other side of it Lucy and Caroline banged with their fists and kicked until dragged away at last by Yvette.

‘Now we shall be late,’ said Katie.

They lifted their frocks and dropped them over their heads, their talcumed armpits showed white as they raised their elbows to hook themselves at the back. Frances tied Natalie’s sash, Natalie fastened Katie’s bracelet.

‘Is this all right? Does it hang down? You’re sure? Am I done up?’ they asked.

‘Oh, yes, yes, yes, I mean no,’ they all answered at once, not one of them attending.

‘
This
is what
I’m
allowed,’ said Katie, smudging on lipstick, stretching her mouth as she had seen her mother do. ‘So pale, I’m wasting my time.’

Natalie twisted her bracelet, shook back her hair: she hummed; did a glissade across the clothes-strewn floor, her skirts floating about her. She was away, gone, in Charles’s arms already. She held her scented arm to her face and breathed deeply and smiled.

Frances stood uncertainly in the middle of the room. ‘I am the one who will be asked to dance last of all,’ she thought, cold with the certainty of her failure. ‘Katie and Natalie will go flying away and I shall be left there on my own, knowing nobody. The time will go slowly and I shall wish that I were dead.’ She turned to the long looking-glass and smoothed her frock. ‘I hate my bosoms,’ she suddenly said. ‘They are too wide apart.’

‘Nonsense, that’s how they’re supposed to be,’ Katie said, as brisk as any nanny.

‘Give those girls a shout, Charles,’ George said and helped himself to another drink.

But they were coming downstairs. They had left the room with its beds covered with clothes, its floor strewn with tissue-paper. They descended; the rose, the mauve, the white. Like a bunch of sweet-peas they looked, George thought.

‘What a pretty frock, Frances,’ Myra said, beginning with the worst. ‘Poor pet,’ she thought, and Frances guessed the thought, smiling primly and saying thank you.

‘And such a lovely colour, Natalie,’ Myra went on.

‘But is it, though?’ Natalie asked anxiously. ‘And don’t my shoes clash terribly? I think I look quite bleak in it, and it is last year’s, really.’

Myra had scarcely wanted to go into all that. ‘Now, Katie,’ she began to say, as soon as she could. ‘I don’t think your friends know Benedict. And when you have introduced them we must be on our way. Your father and I have to go out to dinner after we’ve taken you to the dance. So who’s to go with whom?’

That was what Frances had wondered. The worst part of being a guest was not being told enough about arrangements. One was left in a shifting haze of conjecture.

Benedict had come to attention as the girls came in and now he stepped forward and said with admirable firmness: ‘I will take Katie in my car.’ Then he was forced to add: ‘I would have room for someone else in the back.’

‘That’s me,’ thought Frances.

‘Good! Now don’t crush your dresses, girls,’ said Myra. ‘Gather them up – so – from the back of the skirt. Have you got everything?’

‘Of course, Mother,’ said Katie. ‘We aren’t children,’ she thought.

Four hours later, Charles let go of Natalie’s hand and took a pace forward from the circle of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. ‘Three cheers for Mrs Frensham-Bowater,’ he shouted. ‘Hip, hip, hooray!’

Myra, standing in the entrance hall with the other parents, tried to look unconcerned. She knew that Charles had been nervous all along of doing that little duty and she was thankful that it was safely over. And that meant that the dance was over, too.

With the first bars of ‘God Save the Queen’, they all became rigid, pained-looking, arms to their sides and heads erect; but the moment it was over, the laughter and excitement enlived their faces again. They began to drift reluctantly towards the hall.

‘How pretty the girls are,’ the mothers said to one another. ‘Goodness, how they grow up. That isn’t Madge’s girl, surely, in the yellow organza? They change from day to day at this age.’