The Little Girls (26 page)

“And the patient said?”

“Oh, that patient is failing rapidly.—Why don’t we get our coats, and I’ll root it out. I must warn you, it’s no prize-winner.” At the back of the hall, a push-back given by Sheila to a swing door revealed a flash of pastel kitchen, one tubular light on over the frigidaire. “Come on,” said Sheila neutrally, “buck up.” The dog came out. It was an Airedale model with something wrong with it, bleached to the colour of a soiled sheep and resigned, evidently, to its own lack of temperament. Sheila, having slid into a mohair coat (no call for the black mack on
this
expedition) swiftly selected a walking-stick from the closet. “You don’t,” Clare asked, “flog the thing along with that?”

“No. Just attract its attention—it’s somewhat wanting. It would take Trevor to land us up, at the end, with a dog like this.”

“You never embarked on a dog you could fancy more?”

“They get run over.”

Number 11 had, since Dinah’s departure, relapsed into a tomb-like silence. Clare, struck by a thought, asked: “Where’s the old woman?”

“What, Trevor’s nurse? Out bowling.”

“Wha-at?”

“Well, watching her great-niece. That girl’s building up into a champion, by all accounts. I’d like,” Sheila admitted, “to see her.”

They set out. Clare, in passing, looked into the cream coupe. “Yours?” “Yes. Trevor’s is on the firm.” Leaving Ravenswood Gardens, they entered another area of the plateau. Once into here, the atmosphere altered. Roads were wide, gloomily tree-infested, empty, and much alike. Massive houses, built rather far apart, loomed up into the night out of evergreens—their forms being, where visible, of that hue in which dark red brick invests itself after dark. Within one dim-lit porch could be numbered many electric bells. Tops of boundary parapets were pitted where fanciful ironwork must have been snatched out during the frenzy following 1940. Gateposts were gateless or else had flaccid gates propped back with a look of desuetude. Leaves deadened the pavements; here or there a late-fallen chestnut fled from under the foot. The dog probed ahead through a slight groundmist.

Clare asked:
“Have
we been here before?”

“I don’t know—weren’t we?” It’s been here since the Flood.”

“You know every stick and stone?”

Sheila hit hard with her stick at a stone parapet, to recall the dog and remind it what it was out for. She said: “It’s always pretty in spring.”

“Chestnuts flowering, may, lilac, and so on?”

“And so on, All the works—every spring. I
should know.”

The dog came back into view, selected a lamppost, slowly went through its performance, looked round to make certain this had been noted. “That’s
that,
anyway,” Sheila said. The dog, with an air of heightened prestige, resumed the lead, conducting the women out of the road they’d been in into another exactly the same. Clare said: “What I don’t see is, why you never got out.”

“
You
mean, don’t you, what became of my dancing?”

Clare, starting as though Dinah were at her elbow, said: “Right—what did?”

“That’s the world’s shortest story. It came to nothing.”

“But you were good?”

“Never saw me, did you?”

“Only on that breakwater.”

“What breakwater?—You heard I was good. I was better than they said. I could have been twenty times better than they said.”

“I knew you were good.”

“I could have been better than you knew. I had it in me. That is, I
had
it in me.”

“Well? And so then?”

Sheila, slowing down only very slightly as she lightly stepped beside Clare, who pounded along, started tapping ahead of her with her stick, as though doing a heartless parody of a blind man. “Daddy and
Mother
, of course, wouldn’t have heard of my doing it for money; professionally, that was. It would have shocked them out of their skins—in those days. But I wouldn’t have hesitated, Clare, to have done that to them, or indeed worse, when it came to the point.
Had
it come to the point—which it did not.
Till I could see my chance, I wasted no words; keeping on meanwhile dancing away at charity performance after charity performance. Oh, such showers of bouquets! All that time, though, I was casting round, keeping an eye out: finally, I
did
find where I should go.
The
place, in London it was, that was tops then. The place there could be nothing possibly better than, for anybody going truly to be a dancer. The real works. By then I was eighteen. So I took myself up there. ‘Dance,’ they said. Dance I did. They watched me. Then, ‘Stop,’ they said, after a short time— and didn’t they say it kindly. For a bit after that they said nothing. They then said, ‘No, it’s a pity.’ I said, ‘What’s a pity about my dancing?’ They said, ‘You’ve got into certain ways.’ Vulgar they meant I was, Clare; I mean, my dancing. Vulgar was what they meant.—They said, ‘You’d have too much to unlearn.’ ‘Why too much?” I asked. They said, ‘More than you could by now.’—I can’t say they sent me away; I took myself off.”

“May they for ever rot.”

“They were right, Clare.”

“I expect they were. May they for ever rot.”

Sheila said, almost with triumph: “So back I came.”

“With flying colours. Yes.—But you stayed
on
?”

Sheila, turning her face scornfully, primitively, and blankly towards Clare, asked: “Why would you suppose?”

Clare hazarded: “A man. Man here?”

“Where else would you suppose?”

“I see. Well, there’s always something,” said Clare, “thank God.”

“I’m not so sure that I do. I was eighteen. And
you
ask
me
what happened to all those years!”

“Not Aubrey, then, or any of those?”

“Aubrey’d been killed.—And I said a man, didn’t I? I didn’t say a boy.”

“Didn’t marry him?”

“Marry
him!” Sheila gave an unheard laugh, of the kind probably best unheard. Then she reflected. “Yet what else had I but that, with my dancing gone?”

“What else had you but him?”

“Getting deaf, Mumbo? I said, what else had I but that?”

“That being so,” said Clare, looking away, “what ended it?”

Sheila whistled twice—once to herself, softly, once aloud to the dog. “His death.”

“I see. Shouldn’t you—couldn’t you, though—have got out
then?’

“Where to—
by
then? And Trevor had come along. One prefers to marry.”

Clare said dubiously: “Well…”

“Come,” cried Sheila, impatiently, not unkindly, “you had a try yourself!—Well, so here I am. Surrounded”—she looked round her, whether inimically or mockingly, at trees, houses made phantasmagoric by the hour—”by tender memories. There are two things, curiously enough, which I can’t stand: one’s spring, and the other’s this time of night.”

“Well, I’m glad I’m here.”

Sheila extra slightingly said: “Well, drop back in spring! —Now the dog’s done, what about homeward bound?”

“And I
shall
now, Sheikie, have to be getting on the road.”

“Then one for the road first!” Mrs. Artworth said. Suspecting herself, rightly, to be unlistened to, she got a hold on Clare’s elbow and wheeled her round. “Home!” she loudly said (as though to the dog) to her big, slow-motion, unheeding friend. No response came. The dog, demonstrating its better sense, had dodged round and was heading the movement back. Sheikie gave a lobster-nip to the elbow. “Say what you like,
you’re
worrying!”

“Where Young Lochinvar
has
got to, it would be nice to know,” Clare admitted.—”This,” she burst out, suddenly loud with anger, “is how I saw her send her mother nearly off her head!”

“Well, you’re not her mother. Far from it, I should have thought.”

Clare made no answer.

Sheila remarked: “She has everything, hasn’t she?”

“Don’t know what you mean by ‘everything,’” said the other, defensively.

“I do. Notice how she gets everything she goes out for? (“You’re as wax in her hands, as I told you you would be.) Still, let
that
go—one could call it a gift. What makes me so mad is the way things are showered on to her that she hasn’t the sense to value or understand. Showered. That man Frank, now, to give you an example—I wouldn’t want him because I don’t, now, want anyone; but he’s a man anybody would look at twice. (You didn’t see him?) He’s a selfish man, and he acts up more than a bit, but in his own way he is nuts about her. Being nuts sometimes does more to a selfish man, when it’s once got him. And she?— Oh, she likes to have him around. At times. When not, does she ask what he does with himself? I could tell you. Loafs about on his own in that stuffy cottage with that vile-tempered dog-r—my goodness, I ‘d rather have this poor chump 1 No, she’s never yet outgrown being a selfish child.”

“Look, Sheikie, give her a chance!”

“You give her too many.—Frank’s, however, the least of it. If it were that only—”

“What more?” asked Clare, weariedly.

Sheila paused, to adjust her voice to a not unfair mimicry of Dinah’s. 
“ ‘
Oh, two sons!
’ ”
 she announced, with an audible smirk—then returned to her own furious tone. “Want them?—She hadn’t had time to want them. Oh, no. Along they came, like everything else. There they were, and so that was very nice. Very nice and such fun, like everything else: is. What did she want two boys for—to play house with?”

Clare made no answer.

“Eh?” Sheila demanded.

“Look, we’re none of us perfect.”

“We are
some
of us human!—Apart from that, she’s perpetually flinging them in one’s teeth. ‘My son this,’ ‘My son that.’ You may notice, not one opportunity does she miss.”

“No now, Sheikie, really, that is unfair! Those two sons don’t crop up for hours together.”

“Expect
me
to be fair?” Sheila was thunderstruck by Clare’s stupidity. She waited till she could speak more calmly before saying: “I could have done with them.”

Clare, heavily startled, rolled her eyes round. “I didn’t know.”

“What do people expect to have when they marry? I wasn’t old; I was thirty-two. And Trevor, as had been demonstrated, could have children. What else do you think I thought there would be, when I went into that?”

“I hadn’t any idea…” declared Clare, sorrowfully and humbly.

‘That’s good news, in its way,” said the other, crisply, “You were not intended to. Nobody was intended to.”

“Thirty-two,” pondered Clare. “Then you’ve been married to Trevor a long time?”

“Why not?”

“Never looked sideways?”

“No, thanks—never,” said Sheila lifelessly. She added, as though in extenuation: “You have to watch your step in a place like this.”

“Did you formerly watch your step?”

“Not so successfully as I’d thought, as it turned out.”

“Still,” said Clare, “with time, and so on, one lives things down?”

“With time
and
patience, yes. If one gives one’s mind to it. And that Trevor did me a good turn, coming along when he did, I cannot deny. I’ve returned, I think I may claim, Clare, to being as Daddy would have liked to see me.”

“I congratulate you, Sheikie.”

“Well, thanks. That is the one thing that I
have
done.”

“You hit it off all right with Trevor’s children?”

“Phyllis’s children? Yes, they were nice kids. They were all right.”

“Where are they now?”

“Married.—However, there are times,” said Sheila, returning to Dinah, now more genially, “when one has to laugh. For instance, this evening. No sooner was she into the house than like a wild animal in captivity she went on, didn’t she? You saw the way she went for my curtains? One might have thought she’d know: she must have spent quite a bit on those Applegate curtains, to do her justice—surely they would have cords?”

“There was a time when curtains were drawn by hand. This evening she may have become confused.”

“If she didn’t know what century she was in, she could have asked. Couldn’t she, instead of savaging all before her? Yes, and then did she keep on, talking, once she
had
wound herself up! Yes, and where did she get all that from? As a child, as you often so truly used to say, she mentally used to be something of a baa-lamb. Now, to hear her talk one would think she had invented the world.”

“She thinks, therefore it is?”

“I shouldn’t have thought
thought
was her strong point.
Yet in her own way she’s quite sharp. You heard that question she asked me over the telephone?”

“Well, yes.”

Sheila merely repeated: “She’s quite sharp.” Going in, as she spoke, at a gateless gateway, she threshed about in evergreens with her stick, “Come out, you fool!—It goes into there every time. What gets into animals?—Knows I can’t stand that house?”