The Little Girls (2 page)

“That’s what
I’m
always telling her!”

“All I hope is, you may not suffer from mildew on your exhibits.”

Dinah, at the very idea, half-sneezed, dived for the trailing handkerchief, dabbed her nose. “It will soon be airtight: we’re going to seal it up.”

“It won’t, then, be a public museum, will it?”

“It’s not a museum—or really anything like. If you’d like to know, I’ll try and explain. It’s for someone or other to come upon in the
far future,
when practically nothing about any of us—you or me, for instance—would be otherwise known. We’re putting these things in here to be deduced from. And by that time, hundreds or perhaps thousands of years hence, think what a shattering discovery! Imagine the theories it may revolutionize!”

“Why, yes,” Mrs. Coral agreed, “I suppose it might do. —Which theories are you referring to, Mrs. Delacroix?”

“Any, of any kind, about us. Look what a fuss is made in newspapers, nowadays, about any odds and ends that are come upon—one or two sad beads, or splinters of pottery! Enormously learned theories are based upon them. Then of course there are arrowheads, daggers, and dinged-in skulls; but they give such a fractious, bad-tempered pic
ture of life, I feel they must make one unfair to the vanished races. So I’m looking ahead to when
we
are a vanished race.”

“Well, I never!” said the awed Mrs. Coral.

“Oh, yes. But now we come to what is really the point! I don’t know how you feel, Mrs. Coral, but I should imagine the same as I do—now would
you
wish, simply because you’d vanished, simply to be thought about as a race —all, I mean, stuck together in one lump? I do think we deserve to be thought of as personalities: you as you, Major Wilkins as Major Wilkins, me as me. So for that, you see, one’s got to arrange. Those early races probably never thought; or what I suppose is still more likely, never really expected they would vanish. But we should be odd —don’t you agree?—if the idea’d never occurred to us.”

“Though, little is gained by brooding,” said Mrs. Coral.

“How I agree! But the thing is, one should give posterity a break. One must leave posterity some clues!”

Mrs. Coral coughed. She then said: “Should there
be
any posterity.”

“You won’t get her to listen to a word of that!” remarked Frank, from a little distance away. Having moved off outdoors to light his pipe, he remained in the courtyard background, pacing and pausing, now and then looking up as rooks crossed the sky. For emphasis, he made a gesture at Mrs. Coral with his pipe. “She won’t hear a word of it!” Mrs. Coral, looking from Frank to Dinah, for the first time in her visit appeared to dither—upon which Dinah, by dint of placing a hand on their visitor’s mackintosh, at the elbow, confidently and swiftly reclaimed her audience. She went on: “Clues to reconstruct
us
from. Expressive objects. What really expresses people? The things—I’m sure—that they have obsessions about: keep on wearing or using, or fuss when they lose, or can’t go to sleep without. You know, a person’s only a person when they have some really raging peculiarity—don’t you notice that, Mrs. Coral, with all your friends?”

“Most of us have our little ways, I dare say.”

“And the point is, all are completely different! … At least,” said Dinah, looking with faint discouragement, or at least misgiving, at the clumps of objects, “so I’ve always believed. So you see now, don’t you, what the idea’s been?

I’ve been asking people for things (a dozen from each) which they couldn’t have normally borne to part with. I started, of course, with friends; but I hope to be going much further afield.”

“Found they could spare them, did you?”

“Oh yes,” said Dinah, once more slightly depressed. “Some were glad, I expect, to get them out of their systems. One or two at first were a little bashful; some had difficulty in making the dozen up—expressive things do get lost these days, with all this moving about, like my silver pencil with the tooth-marks. I said it must be a dozen, as less than that could hardly give an all-round-enough idea. Personality’s so extremely complex.”

“Seem,” remarked Mrs. Coral, tentatively, “to be quite a number of strings of pearls. None of them would be genuine, would they?”

“No, all fakes—but do look, though: one is a rosary. And you might say, numbers of pairs of nail scissors; but the same things mean something different to different people. Look, this pair has its tip broken: that means something… .” Exhausted, Dinah’s voice ran down to a pause. Then, rallying, she declared in a firmer tone: “Will be a tremendous eye-opener, this cave—won’t it?”

“I only,” Frank informed Mrs. Coral, “brought in my stuff just now. Thought I’d think for a bit, look before I leaped. That’s my stuff over there, if it interests you. On the whole, I’ve kept to the simple side. One oughtn’t, in my view,” he warned Dinah, “to be too upstage with posterity. Not too highbrow.”

“I don’t expect to deal with absolute fools.”

“You’ll
be sitting up on a harp, playing a cloud—beg your pardon, I mean the other way round… . Well,” asked Frank, shedding charm upon Mrs. Coral, “glad to have taken a look at our little circus?”

Mrs. Coral asked Dinah: “Who’s going to seal it up?”

The effect of the question was out of all proportion with the question itself—and, as the minute lengthened, became still more so. Dinah first stared right through Mrs. Coral, then shut her eyes—which she opened only to stare in other directions, in none of which did the eyes light on anything they appeared to focus. Showing frantic estrangement from all surroundings, she beat one fist, irregularly and slowly, on the palm of the other hand. She seemed by turns to be seeking, listening, or dazedly simply waiting for some answer—that being far from any kind of answer she had been asked for. Among the cave’s deepening shadows, her face looked white—not, by its expression, from distress: here, rather, was some consuming excitement. It hardly needs to be said that she said nothing.

“Well, that’s not my business,” said Mrs. Coral.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Merely wondered, who’s going to seal it up?”

Back to herself (as quickly as she had gone), the organizer replied gladly and glibly: “Oh, whoever’s the last!”

This was Frank’s cue for another repeat-remark. “We may all go out with the same bang.”

“Then the bang would certainly seal it up. You do make difficulties,” she told him—setting to work to unloop the tarpaulin curtains. “The thing now is,” she told Mrs. Coral, “to shut it up for the night—apart from anything else, it’s extremely cold. Now we’re all going to go in and have a drink. Drink in front of the fire, I do hope—if it’s been lit. Did you say there was anyone in the house?”

“That young man who sometimes answers your bell did so.”

“Good. Come on!”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me.”

“Oh no, you must, Mrs. Coral! Sherry.”

Mrs. Coral, implacably raising the mesh bag, said: “There still are these other magazines.”

Pulling, then tying the cave’s curtains together was a ceremony amounting to locking up. That over, the owners left, to accompany Mrs. Coral across the garden. As they mounted the steps, the temperature rose. Above-ground, steamy flower-smells filled the air (more, still, that of a lingering August than of September) as the three followed a spongy serpentine grass path towards the house. On each side, the path was overflowed by a crowded border. Mauve, puce, and cream-pink stock, double, were the most fragrant and most crushingly heavy; more pungent was the blue-bronze straggling profusion of catmint. Magnificently, gladioli staggered this way and that—she was an exuberant, loving, confused and not tidy gardener; staking and tying were not her forte. Roses were on enough into their second blooming to be squandering petals over cushions of pansies. Flowers in woolwork or bright chalk, all shades of almost every colour, zinnias competed with one another. And everywhere along the serpentine walk where anything else grew not, dahlias grew: some dwarf, some giant, some corollas like blazons, some close-fluted, some velvet, some porcelain or satin, some darkening, some burning like flame or biting like acid into the faint dusk now being given off by the evening earth.

This had been an orchard. Twisted, old but only too fruitful still, such trees as had not been cleared away were to be seen in the near distance, their boughs weighted. Already an apple or two had begun to drop: it was felt that a week or two more of sun would be needed, however, before the picking. In an abundant year, indecision as to what to do with the apples became a burden. More interesting to greed were the vegetable plots, laid out in squares where trees were no longer. These looked almost professional—trenched where necessary, dotted with bell-glasses, frames, and, where frames gave out, sheets of cracked glass supported on bricks. Frank, at the price of a liberal rake-off from the produce, came over most days from his cottage and worked here: with his own garden he seemed to be less successful. Thanks to his and her industry, together with the prevailing mildness of the climate and excellence of the soil, her table and his were provided for most of the year round, nicely. They arrived, even, at raising Provencal and other exotic vegetables, the “musts” of the better cookery book. Little wonder that Frank, lagging behind Dinah and Mrs. Coral, now and then cast an eye gloomy with worry in the direction of what he was learning to call the potager.
To pot it would all be going, before long, if Dinah’s craze for the cave failed to abate.

Ahead, conversation came to its last lap. “And how are you?” asked Dinah, somewhat belatedly.

“I don’t know whether you heard, but I lost my Indian.”

“Oh, what a bother; how?”

“Took off on his bike one morning, not saying anything, then sent round for his things. Since then, not a word; just a postal order. Took offence, I can only imagine; but what at?”

“He must be dotty.”

“He may not have hit it off with my Finn.”

“What does your Finn think?”

“I didn’t ask him. Or of course may have found something to suit him better.”

“Has your Indian a girl, do you think?”

“I make a point of not hearing anything. Well, there it is: now I have a vacancy.”

“Oh, but you’ll only have to raise a finger to fill
that!”

“So I’m generally told; in fact that I know. As to that I’m not worried; but I have been worried since it happened. It seems inhuman.”

Dinah paused, plucked a Caroline Testout rose and silently gave it to Mrs. Coral—who, having looked at it for a moment in some dismay, stuck it into an upper buttonhole of her mackintosh. They walked on. “I have any number of vacancies,” admitted Dinah, looking between the apple trees at her house. “But the inhuman thing is that I prefer them: when I can’t have my grandchildren I’m happy knocking about with nothing but Francis.”

Mrs. Coral was startled into glancing over her shoulder, with a query-mark. Dinah, putting the matter right, said: “No, Francis is my house-boy with the squint, who as you were saying sometimes opens the door. He’s a Maltese orphan. Major Wilkins’s name is nothing but Frank. He’s got used to knocking about in a vacuum too, I think. He is so very lucky, there in that nice cottage.”

“Something of a hermit?”

“Oh, yes. He’s a little upset just now—becoming a grandfather at any minute.”

“That should brighten him up?”

“Oh, yes.” Dinah stopped in her tracks, in order to stand on one leg, draw up the other foot, and dismally study the soaking espadrille. “It never occurred to me it would rain. Also perhaps you’re right about that cave; one does get forlorn down there, though without noticing. If Francis hasn’t lit that fire, I shall die! Do you see any smoke?”

“Not from here, no. … A boy doesn’t always think.”

“That is a little beast I could sometimes kill; yet in his own way one is fond of him. He does
think
; he cerebrates like anything, one can see.” They walked on again.

“I could get you a fire going, in half a minute.”

“Not unless you’re going to have a drink.”

“No, you will have to excuse me, as I said.”

The path brought them out on to a lawn, into uninterrupted view of Dinah’s house—it was not easy to look at anything else. Applegate had been erected in 1912, by a retired haberdasher from Bristol. A substantial villa, it was built (like almost everything else round here, new or older) of stone, of a kind slow to weather or mellow. The house bespoke the sound workmanship which had gone into it; nothing had so far blunted the cut angles, gables, or mul-lions of the plate-glass windows (of which several projected into bays) or modified the new-quarried glare of the whole—which, by contrast, the lush green, wooded and pastoral, rolling Somerset landscape round it enhanced. Applegate promised to be much the same within as it was without, and was. Nothing rattled at night, even in a gale: the windows fitted, the doors shut properly. Neither the staircase nor any floor creaked. That may have been one of the reasons why she had bought it; another was the cave.

This was that only hour when land looks haunted. A farmhouse, to which the orchard belonged, had after many generations burned to the ground, just here, the year before Applegate was built, taking with it its hopeless, son-less master—thought to have upset a lamp when he came home drunk. Now the sun had diluted into a misty film, and this curious substitute for a sunset imparted a tinge of yellow to the successor’s stone, or drew out an undertone that was there, Applegate stood up to the hour, as it had to others. Through a window, Francis could be seen moving about in his white coat, bringing in the drink tray. The lawn-the women were crossing was scarred with outlines: crescent-and-diamond-shaped and circular ornamental flowerbeds, in other Septembers gorgeous with begonias, had been turfed in.