The Little Girls (17 page)

Now she
had
got the girls here, her manner towards them became critical. “Why can’t you tuck your blouse in?” she asked Mumbo; who, having made for the magazines, was banging pages over with a stare or a whistle; and who, at this, stuffed some part of the garment in offhandedly, absently, not caring either way. She proceeded to frown up, and round her, at Sheikie’s swallows. “Flying lower, today. Looks like a storm.”

‘Thank you.”

Clare transferred her frown from the swallows to

Sheikie’s middle: here was reason to ponder. “Where do we put it, next—once it’s off you?”

“
Get
it off me first, then!—I’m sore, I tell you!”

Investigation. Scissors would be required. “In my
work
-basket!” fumed Andromeda, chafing. “You haven’t got a workbasket!” “Yes, I
have
!” And so she had—sticky wicker, plump inside, satin-padded with scarlet. Loops for thimble, and so on. Thimble, and so on, right-and-tight in their loops. Goodness … “You never said,” Dicey, viewing the basket. Having ascertained that the flea was no longer with her—it had got off, somewhere—she was back again into the picture; indeed its forefront. The flea was probably driving, now, back again across Southstone in the victoria. She bore it wonderfully little malice, in view of the gluttonous bites it left behind. Abstractedly scratching at them, she directed: “Into that nice coffer.”

“Which?”

“The one on the landing. It had more nails, I thought.”

The scissors sawed at the obdurate ribbon knot. The chain fell from Sheikie, noisily, on to the carpet. It—they (fetters)—was taken down the flight and a half of stairs and consigned to what by this very act came to be recognized as
the
coffer. Clare, even, said nothing. The house, with the dead man down at the bottom, was conspiratorially silent. “I expect,” said Dicey, as they returned upstairs, “your father
would
give it to you, without asking?”

“I told you.”

“Yes. You could give him another kiss.”

That hour at Ravenswood Gardens was to prove fateful. Things having gone Sheikie’s way through the first decision, she forced a second way. By the time her friends left, to walk to the bus (no way out of this), an addition to the first project had been accepted. Each girl was to place in the coffer, before its burial, one undeclared object, of which the nature was to remain known to herself only.

“What’s she got in her head, that she’s keen to put in, would you say?” Dicey asked, as they waited about at the bus corner.

Clare wore her thought-inflated look: she refused to answer.

“If one of my kittens died, I could put that in—I suppose? But I hope it won’t, though.”

“Well, don’t
talk
! Don’t
tell
me!”

“You think this extra-secret is good, then, Mumbo?”

“It’s an idea—”

“
I
think it’s a good idea. We shall see, though.”

“No, we shan’t.” Clare, turning her back, made a show of scanning in the distance for a bus. None came.

Where they waited, a hedge protected a corner garden. The privet, just into bloom, had been clipped today—perhaps rather cruelly? It gave off a knife-freshened but injured smell. Here, too, was a scarlet pillar box. Dicey leaned up against it, to ask: “Why shan’t we?”

“Because that is the idea. We shall never know.”

In the next days, not much was outwardly done. Dicey devoted her evenings to Cousin Roland; Mumbo, at work on the Unknown Language, was seeing no one; Sheikie simply went off to the rink and tore round and round. Anyone might have thought they had broken up. Summer-evening concerts began in the Pier Pavilion, which like a lit-up musical box admired itself in the glass of the darkening mauve sea—above, the chains of lamps along the Promenade etherealized strollers in evening dress, from the big hotels, bright-ghostly baskets of pink geraniums, and the fretwork balconies they were slung from… . What was important was that St. Agatha’s, at its foot of the hill, was at such an hour extinct completely. To Dicey it fell to make sure of that—she accompanied her mother and their cousin on one of their after-dark turns in the open air, on his last evening. A taxi, part of the celebration, wafted the Feverel Cottage party to the fashionable scene — “Like a ship’s deck,” Cousin Roland said, looking up and down. His friend had gone down on the
Titanic
. They went across to the rail, to look out at what the Promenade lamps had now transformed into utter darkness: nothing was left but the pier below. The throb coming up—was that the concert? Wanting company, Dicey nested a hand in a pocket of her mother’s tussore dust-coat. They joined the procession, taking no part in its night-hushed laughter: with it, they attained to the far end of the Promenade, turned, and came back. They ascended some marble steps into the Grand’s palm lounge, where they sat down. Over them was a great chandelier. “You look lovely, but shabby,” said Cousin Roland, turning his uncle’s eye upon

Mrs. Piggot, who answered: “Yes, I am.” He and she each drank a glass of hock, the rest of which misted from view in the slender bottle—iced lemonade with two long straws was brought for Dicey. Talk turned, desultorily, to plans for the later summer. The child, when she had syphoned her glass empty, left them: she went down the marble steps, outdoors. This very grand, high-up Grand was at the St. Agatha’s end of the Promenade—mounting one rung of the horizontal railing, she crooked her stomach forward over the top, searching round and into the gulf where the school must be. There was nothing
but
gulf….

Reported, next morning.

Clare merely said: “All went to a ball.”

“Miss Brace—and Miss Kinmate, and Mademoiselle, and Matron, and Miss Coots-Wray, and the cook, and—?”

The joke’s maker cut that short. “What I mean is, last night was a fluke, who knows?”

“That was what I saw.”

“Miss Ardingfay,” Sheikie gave out, “has a secret husband. She loves him.” She went off into giggles.

“
You
see for yourself then, one night, Mumbo.”

“Me go and spy about on that old Promenade? And, when? My mother doesn’t go and sit in the Grand. No, there’ll never be any night when we
can
be certain. We’ll have to chance it.”

By Friday, an otherwise empty greenhouse, halfway up the St. Agatha’s garden, contained the coffer. Swaddled in magazine pages, corded up with a skipping rope, it had been transported thither at dead of tea-time by a hanger-on of Aubrey Artworth’s, Cuth Barnes, who believed it to be a ferret cage—true, a heavy one. Secret ferret-keeping and still more girls’ schools were ideas which excited Cuth Barnes deeply and strangely: he was a well-found agent. Not otherwise highly thought of, he owned a motor bike. Though to be a chartered accountant, he looked by nature much like what he’d been told to look like—someone delivering something at the back door. Anonymous, uncomplaining, and, best of all, challenged by nobody, he heaved his burden uphill behind St. Agatha’s and kicked it into its designated place. The greenhouse, it being one of several, wore on its doorknob Sheikie’s pink-dotted hankie, with a pink “S” swanning across one corner. Cuth Barnes pocketed the hankie—whether from knightly love, out of fetishism, or with some idea of blackmail, who was to say? Not he. He further, before leaving the premises, treated himself to a sideways squinnie in at the dining-room window. Munching in long rows, or talking at one another menacingly with their mouths full, the girls of St Agatha’s at this hour failed to stir up erotic thoughts. He banged his bike back into action and chuffed away. “That, let us
hope
, was the plumber,” said Miss Kinmate. There’d been a vexing stoppage in the staff bathroom.

Clare had been kept in the dark as to this transaction. She could know later: that had been thought better. Anyway, she was incommunicado. By as soon as was humanly possible after six o’clock she was back home—glued to work on the syntax, under a monkey puzzle near the end of the garden of the house at present tenanted by her family. Rather deep in a valley running inland, overhung by the hill topped by the Camp, Virginia Lodge looked old enough to be almost permanent. The creeper which named it draped the verandah, on to which gave french windows —this evening open. Above, lightly streaked by the creeper, were gables, each with a dark-green spike. Since the Camp had come into being, this residence had had but one function—that of being let furnished to married officers. Nice for children, convenient for entertaining, it engraved itself pleasantly if dimly on the memories of successive regiments. It was a trifle large for the Burkin-Joneses, except when their son returned for the school holidays, bringing with him usually a friend or two—boys, as a rule, whose families were on service abroad. He had been their elder, now was their only boy. The blow was, poor fellow, he had bad eyesight: not a hope for the Army. The other, of bright and unblemished promise, had died of meningitis in England while they were in India.

Flat as a carpet along the floor of the valley, the unen-chanted garden was set out (as were the rooms indoors) rightly, if with no great inspiration. Ornamental trees, various shrubs, and some clumps of pampas dotted the lawn. When Clare with her two exercise books (red for grammar, yellow for glossary) first settled down on the ground, in what felt like hiding, nobody had shown signs of being about. But Mrs. Burkin-Jones, having in her the makings of a gardener, had this year planted annuals in the flowerbeds; and this was to be one of her evenings for tending them. In black sand-shoes similar to her daughter’s, the necessary number of sizes larger, she was now stepping about purposefully with a watering can. The evening, though warm and tranquil, was overcast, which gave a peculiar glare to her very clean though last summer’s white pique skirt, as it dipped in and out of the margin of Clare’s vision. Not till she reached the flowerbed opposite the monkey puzzle did the mother realize the child was near her. Just possibly, could she have wished things otherwise? Solitude gave her an opportunity to muse. However … “Prep?” she cheerily called across. “What a lot they give you!”

Clare chawed on her pencil. Honour was in the air. “Gnagna,” she restricted herself to saying.

“Look up, when you answer,” advised her mother.

The child looked up, looking terrible.

“These nasturtiums are not doing very well.” The can, having been giving warning by growing lighter, of a sudden declared itself all but empty. Tilted at whatever angle, it barely dribbled. Mrs. Burkin-Jones shook the final drops, fair-mindedly, over the defaulters—more than they deserved! She then put the can down, looked back at the house, and waited: by clockwork, out came the soldier servant bearing a can of the same size, filled to a nicety. Exchange was effected. “Too much in the shade, here?” she went on to speculate. “I wonder. They ought to be doing better.”

“I hate nasturtiums.”

“You can’t ‘hate’ a flower. No one ‘hates’ any flower.” Yet, before moving on with the can, Mrs. Burkin-Jones took thought. Could Clare be, possibly, doing too much brainwork? She took a look. “Try not poke over what you’re writing. Mightn’t you be better at a table?—Your eyes,” she asked, with unavoidable coldness, “aren’t beginning to worry you, Clare, are they?”

“No.”

“ ‘
No
’
 what?”

“No, Mother.—Thank you.”

“Which reminds me, you have to go to the dentist.” Mrs. Burkin-Jones, further along the flowerbed, was cheered by a thriving patch of love-in-a-mist. Freely she showered that: the prettiest blue! Everything early this summer, except nasturtiums… . “Would you like to ask the others to tea tomorrow?”

“Why?”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.” Certainties, of this calibre, had supported Clare’s mother through changing scenes. As she spoke, she detected a shoot of groundsel amidst the fuzz of love-in-a-mist—shelving the can, catching her skirt up with her left hand, planting her right foot forward into the flowerbed, she stooped to pluck the intruder out. That done, straightening her back again, she went on: “Surely, by now, it must be your turn to invite them here?”

“We don’t take turns.” Clare spoke more than half absently. Her eyes flickered sideways, covertly, up the garden, dodging pampas and shrubs. They rested, less than an instant, on the verandah. They flickered back again. “Ever,” she added, “Mother.”

“I think you ought to.
I
should like you to ask them— this or next Saturday. It’s not fair to be always round there at Feverel Cottage. Or, for that matter, at Mr. and Mrs. Beaker’s, wherever they live.”

“I don’t want them. I’m busy.”

Nobody seemed to hear.

“Besides, I’m tired of them.”

Mrs. Burkin-Jones, not particularly tall, had stature. In a way, she was “character” embodied. Her grey-blue eyes were honesty’s very colour. They gained extra lightness, bottomless clearness also from the ruddy weathering, round them, of her face. Her forehead was fearless. Plus all this, she turned to regard Clare. She had paused, before turning. She paused again. She then said: “What a way to talk about friends….”

Clare was stunned.

“They may not be very clever little girls, though Diana has very good manners (it would be better, sometimes, if yours were better) like all the Piggots; and Sheila seems very energetic. But that’s not the point; that’s not what we’re talking about. They are your friends. You never must say anything like that again, you know. Do you understand?”

Clare was intent on trying to drive her pencil, point down, into the ground beside her.

“What are you doing to your pencil?”

“Nothing,” said Clare, stopping.

“No wonder you never have anything to write with,” Mrs. Burkin-Jones remarked—but remarked only. She had done. It was over. No passion having, ever, been in her voice, nothing was left to die down when the voice ceased. It knew when to—not by persistence was it that she successfully cauterized her loved ones. She swished the can about again, evenly, at arm’s length. “Really rather annoying,” she told her daughter, in a woman-to-woman tone, “earwigs have begun again in the creeper. And on the deck chairs, some are walking about. Many people don’t like them.”