The Little Girls (31 page)

“Since this morning.”

“How long have I been here?”

“I wouldn’t worry. What about a cup of tea, now you
are
awake?”

“Am I?”

Just as nothing but silence came upstairs out of the house and in at this door, there had not, either, come through the open window anything but the witless or disenchanted note of a bird. But now, somewhere in the hinterland of the orchard children began inquiringly shouting to one another. Sheila Artworth gave ear. She said: “There they are.”

“What, Sheikie?”

“I said, 
‘
There they are.’ ”

“Yes.” A hand of Dinah’s came out and explored the empty top of the needlework stool. “Where are my books? —Why are they gone?”

“You don’t want them, do you?”

“I want them by me.”

“Well, they’re only over there,” said the accommodating nurse, nodding towards the top of a chest and beginning to get up (even
this
sign of will in the patient was encouraging) . “All I thought was, they rather crowded you up. And with them off it, that makes somewhere to sit for anybody coming to see you.”

“Is anybody coming to see me?”

Down in the drawing-room sat the sons—Roland in one, William in the other of the armchairs facing each other across the fire. Having come far to see what ought to be done, they could so far find nothing to do but this. The tea tray decreed by Francis (they had got here about an hour ago) and shortly afterwards placed between them, was in more than one sense filling a gap. Apart from a certain clear fairness of skin, neither of them had inherited his mother’s looks—which was, as she had pointed out, as they were sons probably just as well. Their marked and pleasing likeness to one another suggested that they had inherited their father’s. They had in common a look of steadiness (though this was by no means a look of heaviness) and of knowing where one was. There may have been truth in her story that each of them, one two years after the other, had, when ceremonially first placed in her arms after his birth, taken in the situation at a glance—not at least without some optimism, and certainly kindly. Had they guided her, rather than she them, throughout the problems of their fatherless childhood and then youth? If she had made a good mother (to the surprise of many) it was owing to them—or so she held. Gratitude mingled with the love she bore them. Their marriages had not only rejoiced her but seemed to allay some fear—had she perhaps feared to outstay her welcome?

William, the one facing the window, saw out into the orchard; for Roland, there was its tarnished reflection (should he wish) in the mirror some way back over his brother’s head. Somewhere out there, long ago lost to view amongst twisted apple trees, each had a daughter. On arrival, the children had instantly taken to the woods— that is, if an orchard can so be called.

Had
bringing the children been a good idea? It had had the hallmark of having emanated from Mrs. Coral. “Don’t be too alarmed,” Mrs. Coral had written, “by anything you may happen to hear. But should you think of coming, which might be well, those two would serve to brighten her up, which is at the root of most troubles, is it not? I shall be glad to have them to sleep with me, that house as one might expect being upset. They would be nice for Coralie, my second daughter’s little girl, that is, who is here with me from Nuneaton after her adenoids and rather a lonely little elf.”

Nothing made sense. Vaguely wild, the early reports from Applegate had been, as Mrs. Coral foresaw, alarming. Later, censorship seemed to have clamped down. What did the doctor say? There had been no doctor; she wouldn’t see one. She was being looked after by people from the village. Somebody, clearly, would have to move in here and take charge. Annie, for instance, or Teresa? Both girls had confessed, so far, to a sort of diffidence. Constantly on the telephone to each other, the two had frantically consulted. Teresa, quite olf her own bat, had got through to that curious old card Frank Wilkins: she had nothing against him. It had not been satisfactory, she had had to admit to the tense Annie. “Do you think,” asked Annie, “they had a fight?” “At their ages—what would they fight about?” “How did he sound, all the same, Teresa?” “Lost.” “
What
d’you say, I can’t hear you?” “Lost.”

Meanwhile, talking of taking charge, a Mrs. Artworth had arrived this morning, with, according to Francis, apparently every intention of doing that. She had arrived, as she had done the time before, in a taxi; this time with a so-called overnight bag which had seemed to him to be of ominous size.

“
Artworth
’
?
”
 repeated the sons, when greeted by the news.

“Curious name, isn’t it?” asked Francis, swivelling his eye from one of them to the other.

“Anyway,” Roland said, ignoring the eye, “this is exceedingly kind of Mrs. Artworth.” (The sons’ adoption of a would-be repressive policy towards Francis was a sign not of overbearingness in their natures but rather of the optimism of which their mother had spoken.) “She’ll ask you for anything she wants, I hope?”

“She’s been doing so.”

“Knows the house, then. Often been here before?”

“Once.”

“Well, thank you, Francis. That will be all.”

Francis dealt the speaker a look of sheer incredulity, and rightly. There’d be far, far more of
him
before they were through.

“At any rate,” they said to him, “for now.”

He inclined his head, professionally, and left them. Tea done, the sons lit cigarettes and looked round the drawing-room. No comment—other than the light patter whenever a desiccated berry fell, from the high bowl of spindle and other berries, on to the satinwood table behind the sofa. Roland got up out of his chair and walked round to examine the small-size record left behind on the player to gather dust. A Children’s Favourite. This waking the father in him, he said: “They won’t have had any tea?”

“Well, they bolted off. Mrs. Coral will give them a feed; won’t hurt them to wait… . What about Mrs. Artworth?”

“A word with her?”

“No harm?”

The moment was psychological. As the two at the bottom looked up the stairs, a lady from the top began to come down. Round the turn of the banisters, she came down towards them smoothly as though descending a waterfall, nonchalantly balancing a tray. The copper beech being now denuded, but for some tatters, evening came freely if faintly in at the staircase window: it silhouetted her—silverly outlining the hair, the strong though light figure, the bare arms.

She was at an advantage. What gleams there were fell, from behind her, down full on their upturned, youthful-looking, Huguenot-descended faces. They knew themselves bare to a cryptic gaze they could not see.

She came to a stop a step or two above them, saying: “You’re the sons, I suppose?”

“Mrs. Artworth?”

“Yes, Look, I wouldn’t go up there just now, if you don’t mind.”

“We wondered if we could have a word with you?”

“Oh, I see. I’d been going to say, she’s a little confused, just now.”

Roland said: “But she does know we’re here?”

“Well, she’s been told.”

William said: “so long as she knows we’re here?”

“She forgets, you see.”

He looked at her with a dismay verging on horror.

Roland said: “And knows the children are here?”

“Well, sitting up there with her,
I
heard them.”

“Mrs. Artworth, have you any idea … ?”

“Sorry,” she said, with, in her mermaid glance, a blend of teasing regret and hospital sternness, “but I can’t stop now—something’s rather urgent. Later, if I can? Had a talk with Francis?”

“But you are the one who now—”

“Yes. But he was the one who found her.”

“If you ask me,” said Francis, “that other one put this Mrs. Artworth up to it.”

He had not been asked. That did not alter the fact that he felt it now to be time for an interrogatory. He was as capable of conducting
that,
as a one-man show, as he was (as his employer had long known) of making a scene without outside aid should he consider one to be due. Now, again, he had got the sons pinned into the drawing-room: he had removed the tea tray, brought in the drink tray. (“Upset”?—the house, on the contrary, ran like clockwork. Any trail of disorder left by its owner had been obliterated —true, there lay corpses of berries on that table: at them, while he spoke, Francis levelled a frown which was partly abstracted and partly not.) Wearing an all but dazzlingly white coat, he had taken up his position near the door—
he
could make an exit at any moment, which was more than they could. Morally, his position was as propitious: he was forcing a duty upon the sons. If they shrank from hearing what had happened, why had they come?

He was moving in on the subject from its periphery; beginning with those birds of ill omen, “those two ladies.” Occasion had been given for his opening remark by Roland’s having told him to take a drink up to Mrs. Artworth. Join them in the drawing-room, it was to be feared that she would not—she was unwilling to leave her patient for so long.

“This one’s object being,” continued Francis, “to succeed in keeping everyone else out. That you will soon see. Gin and tonic is what she drinks, if you want to know: that is to say, so far. I would not put it past her to switch to Scotch as the night goes on… . However, the other is at the bottom of it, if you ask me. Battering and ringing?—she beat the postman; but that her instrument was the telephone.
She
was the one who’d been here with us the Sunday it happened, as you no doubt know? Nor when gone was she gone—anything but! Oh, no. Opened up on the telephone early in the small hours of Monday morning, while the Major and I were getting Mrs. Delacroix into bed. (I’d telephoned to the Major once I took in the extent of the disaster, so round he’d dashed.) Ring-ring-ring-ring that instrument started going, right by the bed.
That I soon put a stop to; I switched off that extension and off it’s stayed, but ring-ring-ring-ring kept on down here. Came to stop for a bit, then struck up once more. ‘Go,’ said the Major, ‘and tell ‘em to go to hell.’ I did better; I told her, ‘You’ve got the wrong number.’ She knowing my voice as I knew hers. Then onward from 8 a.m. there were further outbursts—sleepless night had been had, from the sound. From then on, I adopted a regular procedure. ‘Mrs. Delacroix is unable to speak to you,’ I informed her, each time, previous to hanging up. One time, she succeeded in jumping back on me— ‘
Unable?’
Well, she had asked for it, so she got it. ‘Mrs. Delacroix has nothing to say to you, at the present time,’ I said.

“It was the Major, I’m sorry to tell you, who sold the fort. Yesterday. Roving around this place in the unoccupied way he’s taken to doing,
he
went and answered the telephone—that one, there.
I
arrived on the scene a minute too late. ‘Packed up,’ I heard him telling her. ‘That’s all I can tell you, she’s packed up… . No,’ he said, ‘no one. Who should there be? … Yes,’ he said. ‘Sunday night.’

“Whereupon
she,
if you ask me, went straight off after this other one like a pack of bats.
‘You
go,’ she’d have said to her, ‘my name’s mud there. You’ve still got a toe in the door;
you
get yourself there, p.d.q., and spy out the land.’ Nothing like planting an agent of hers in this house, was there?”

William distastefully asked: “Are you off your head?”

“Six of one of them, half-a-dozen of the other, however, no doubt. What a pair,” Francis said piously, “my goodness! Little did
she
know what she was doing, when she stirred them up.”

“I should shut up, Francis, if I were you.”

“She advertised for them!”

“That’s enough!” Roland said, sharply and with authority. “You’ve got no business to talk like that. What’s come over you? Those are my mother’s guests. Either less of that, or you’d better go.”

Uncertain what might or might not be the connotation of the word “go,” Francis looked thoughtfully, twice, at the senior Delacroix.

“Nor should either of them be ‘she’ to you,” William pointed out. “They’ve both got names, haven’t they?— What’s the other lady’s?”

“Burkin-Jones—Miss. Name mean anything to you?…  No, I thought not.”

“And not only don’t do that but do what you’re told, will you?” Roland requested. Hastily going to the tray, he caused gin to flow freely into a glass, wrenched the cap off a bottle of tonic. Francis, watching, said: “Rather more ice than that; we like plenty of it.
Two
slices of lemon. I shall need a tray to take that on; we are very particular.”

“Go and get one, then.”

“First, you will want to hear about Sunday. I rarely go out, but it happened that that evening I attended a French film with a Finnish friend. Not in this village, I need hardly tell you; no, it was at the Agricultural Institute. They have cultural activities there on Sunday nights, therefore this was a psychological French film,
avant-garde
.
When I returned here all the lights were burning, which surprised me in view of the fact that the house was silent as though empty. I concluded that Mrs. Delacroix must have forgotten and gone to bed—she could not be out, as her car was before the door.
I
had better turn out the fights, I supposed. Only when I came in
here
did I find her.