The Little Girls (34 page)

“She
didn’t take the swing down,” Emma told Pamela. “Someone did.”

“As soon as her back was turned.”

“That lady was disappointed, too.”

“She couldn’t have swung on it, though; she is too heavy.”

“If you mean that person,” said the now helpful Coralie, “what do you think she did? She walked up your lane. She had her car, but she left her car in the village.
She’s
funny, isn’t she?—What’s she doing out there? Coming up and trying to speak to us. ‘If anybody comes trying to speak to you,’ Mum says, ‘you take no notice.’ You went and gave her encouragement. ‘See the cave?’ she said, ‘I’ve never seen the cave. Let’s try!’ Had she any business to? She looked funny.”

“Mrs. Frog,” said Emma, who liked frogs.

Pamela had picked up a bygone
Vogue.
She pored over corset advertisements, tore a page out, and set her scissors to work round a heart-shaped lady. “Wanted to know how Grandmother was, I expect,” she said.

“Then why didn’t she go to the door and ring and ask? That’s what Gran does when anybody’s ill—goes to the door and rings and asks.”

“She asked me,” said Emma, in a satisfied tone. “I said: ‘She’s in bed.
’ ”

Coralie acted nervous. “Where’s that person gone off to
now,
do you think?”

“Grandmother’s friend?” said Pamela. “I suppose she’s somewhere.”

Clare had been grateful to the children. She’d been sorry to hear they were to be exiled from Applegate that night—her fault. But again, if it hadn’t been for her they wouldn’t be here now, in the middle of term. “Where,” it had come into her head suddenly to ask Pamela, while the two of them were breaking their nails over the same knot, “did your grandmother afterwards go to school?” She had struck lucky—the history-loving child beamed. “After St. Agatha’s? No school: she did lessons with some children in Cumberland. Then, after that war was over, Cousin Roland said she must go to France.”

“You
ever set eyes on Cousin Roland?” Clare asked. “No, I suppose not.”

“He was dead,” said Pamela petulantly, as though mentioning some rather tricky peculiarity of her relative’s. “So my father’s called after him. Why—did you?”

“Once or twice, in the distance.” Clare added: “That, he preferred.”

“His brother was Cousin Claud. Cousin Claud
was
a bishop.”

“My goodness, yes—yes, there
was
a bishop!”

“But that isn’t why there’s that chair in the hall. She only bought that at an auction.”

“You know a lot, you know,” granted the big other one, half-grumpily—sucking at the nail split to below the quick, making faces at the knot which had done it. “No good,” she said. “No, we must give up. Another time, you’ll have to have a knife.”

“Men have knives. If only we had Major Wilkins.”

Then it was (Emma having come humming up) that Clare boasted of knowing a knife which was like a thumb. “Though it couldn’t cut knots, only cuts butter.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. It came from my shop.”

She went away, up the steps cut in the rock.

Somewhere, the orchard had Frank at large in it. Clare knew, scarcely though footfalls were to be heard on the nerveless grass, sodden with November and rotted apples. To be seen was an occasional flicker of thicker darkness in and out of the gaps between tree and tree. She stood, trying to guess his course: random and bough-hampered it seemed to be. No track ran from where she stood—she struck out blind, decided and reckless in what at least ought to be his direction. In the clearing, Dinah’s and his
potager
, he had come to a stop. It was here that she brought herself face to face with him. “What, you?” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“Yes. Me.” Stare him out though she did, in her stony way, favour and disfavour had alike evaporated from between them. She asked: “What has happened?”

“Dinah’s ill. I told you that, on the telephone.”

“I know. But what’s the matter with her?”

Frank said: “I’m not blaming you—altogether.”

“Thanks. Why?”

He thought, with difficulty. “This whole thing’s been a bit beyond you, I’m beginning to see. Not that you weren’t the cause—that, I think you were. However, I dare say you were not to know: who
was
to know? Sunday, you two girls had a row, eh? And then I suppose she banged about and crashed her head. But as she is—or as she has come to be?—there was more to it than that.” He looked away from her, at two or three of the
potager’s
bell-glasses, misted by condensations of the autumn. “An amount more than that,” he added, “you might say. That’s what’s been the trouble. That
is
the trouble.”

Clare dug her hands into her pockets. She asked him squarely: “What do you mean, though? That’s what I want to know—or don’t
you
know?”

“Yes, I think I do,” he said, soberly. “Or at least, can make a pretty good guess. To begin with, see the way this has taken her. She doesn’t give a damn. Doesn’t care a damn. Any more. Now.”

“Doesn’t care a damn for what?”

“Any of us, any of us round her. This life of hers here. This place. She’s come unstuck.”

“Unstuck’s not ill,” argued the other.

He again looked at her. “I say ‘ill,’ because what else am I to say? And there’s this: in a woman who cared so much, not caring a damn
is
an illness, isn’t it? Yet it’s not that she ceased caring: she’s switched her caring. Simply ceased to care for anything since
then
.”

“Since when?”

“You ought to know,” he said. “Or oughtn’t you? That time you three had, God knows how long ago.
That’s
what she latched on to. She switched back to you two. Don’t think she meant to—didn’t know it had happened to her, perhaps. But right back to you two. You more, though. You, yes. You mean more than you know. You did not altogether know, did you?” He frowned at Clare, for emphasis, not in anger. “That’s why I don’t altogether blame you.”

“No, I didn’t know, I suppose. Or I didn’t see. I was thinking of something else.”

“I took it you were.”

“You were right.”

One way or the other, he didn’t care. “But what does matter,” he drove in, “is what’s happened now. Now, something has knocked the bottom out of all
that.
Late Sunday night, after Francis called me, she didn’t know what she was saying. Or rather, didn’t know that she was saying. He and I were getting her into bed, and she was in terrible distress, crying, ‘It’s all gone, was it ever there? No, never there. Nothing. No, no, no.’… And so on. Terrible to hear her. So something
had
knocked the bottom out of that, eh? So, where is she now? That is, what has she—now?”

“I wish I could tell you,” Clare said.

“
I
wish you could tell me… . Well, there you are. At any rate, that’s my guess.” Frank turned away, went away —she watched him stepping over the subsided furrows of the
potager
.
She then turned and went back the way she had come, into the orchard. She continued to shelter in its hiding. From where she stood, later, she watched Emma make her way round the house towards the front door. That’s a game two can play, the emboldened Clare thought. After another suck at the split nail she, therefore, risked it —making a detour round the defoliated and swing-less beech, lest anybody be looking out of the stairs window. In front of the front door, still, remained Dinah’s car. That had been Sunday, and this was Wednesday. So far, in the confusion, no one had thought of putting away the Hillman. That, might she do? No. Instead, seized suddenly by the bravado of fatigue, she tried the door by the passenger’s seat: it opened. She got in, sat, and, beside an imaginary driver, fell asleep. Days had been long, nights none.

In the dark, Sheikie woke her by tapping on the window. Sheikie then wrested open the door, saying: “Well, I
must
say…”

“Oh, hullo. Where’s
your
dog?”

“You’re not drunk, are you?”

“Nn-nn. How’s everything going?”

“She’s all right. The sons are up there with her—why don’t you slip into the house? Nobody’s in the drawing-room but the children.”

“They were in the garden.”

“I can’t help that: they’re in the drawing-room. They’ll be going to Mrs. Coral’s at any minute, when the fathers come down.”

“Fathers?” asked Clare, puzzled by the Biblical sound.

“The sons.”

“Oh, all right.” Clare got out of the car. “Sheikie, you won’t let her know I’m here?”

“Wouldn’t like me to try?”

“Not unless she asks.”

The nurse, about to go back on duty, said: “One never knows, with her, from minute to minute. Just now, she was asking for curried eggs.”

The nurse had her patient to herself again. She removed from the bedside the empty bouillon cup, made up the fire, arranged some mustard-yellow chrysanthemums, sent by a sympathizer in the village, in a crystal vase. “Turning up trumps, aren’t you?” said the admiring patient, faintly, watching.

“What?”

“Turning up trumps, Sheikie, aren’t you?”

Sheila (wearing the blouse into which she had changed for dinner, on her return from her stretch) looked at herself speculatively in the dressing-table glass. ” ‘East, West, Old Friends are Best,’ they say.”

“Oh,
true.
What about Trevor, though?”

“What about Trevor?”

“All by himself?”

“He was among those who considered I ought to come.”

“He’ll never know how much it has meant to me, Sheikie, to find him alive and safely married to you.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Artworth, not seeming flattered. She asked: “Why should he be otherwise?”

“For years—years—I’ve been afraid that his whitened skeleton still was stuck up there in that drain-pipe. You know that dreadful Mistletoe Bough story?”

“No.”

“He was
not
in the charabanc on the way home. Everybody preserved a complete silence on the subject. Mother was thinking her own thoughts. Then early next morning we went away to Cumberland—if you remember, we went away for ever. And then the war came, showing one nothing was too bad to be true. There were hundreds of reasons why I advertised for you, Sheikie, but among them certainly one was, you’d be the first person I had a hope of seeing whom I could ask, ‘Did Trevor ever come out?’ For
how
many years I needn’t tell you, because you know, I thought about Trevor and his wedged-in bones. As time went on, I almost imagined I had succeeded in reasoning

myself out of that—but no. Because, when in 1940 Mr. Churchill gave us that splendid, rousing talk about probably fighting on the beaches, do you know what my first reaction was? ‘Now they’ll blast open that drain-pipe, and there’ll be Trevor.’”

“The things you think of!”

“Does he still hate matches?”

“Did he?” asked Sheila.

“He does bear me no malice? No, Trevor would never be a malicious man; but… ?”

“He sent you his kind regards.”

“I wish he was here,” said the patient, with a beatific sigh, staring serenely up from her pillow into the canopy.

“I can tell you who is here, though.”

“No, don’t do that—you needn’t tell me. I know.”

“Oh, you
do
?”

“She must go away. Please make her go. She must go.”

“She
is
in a state,” said Sheila, tentatively.

“And what about me? Laid low.”

“It was she who got me to come here, Dinah.”

“I wonder if you are a very good nurse?”

“You know, you go on as though she’d hit you.”

“She did.”

“You don’t mean—you can’t mean?” cried Sheila Artworth, questioningly touching her own forehead.

“No, no, no,” said the patient, impatiently banishing that small matter. “I knocked against something.”

“Oh, you did? Well, meanwhile she’s in a bad way. A bad way.”

“And what am I in? Tell her, I’d rather have every devil out of every church-bell loose in this house than ever see her again. No, she must go away. It’s too late.”

“Never too late to mend.”

“I besought her to stay. I, I needed her. She said, ‘No, Circe.’”

“She always did swear like a trooper.”

“She’s been always going away. She can stay away.”

“You’re not being fair, Dinah.”

“I never have been.”

Nurse Artworth resumed her official sway. “Before I go down to dinner, I’ll take your temperature.”

“I should think you’d
better!’

Sheila popped the thermometer into Dinah’s mouth. Dinah whipped it out again, to say hurriedly: “Just a minute—who was it, Sheikie, you didn’t actually kill?”

“That’s a long story, rather,” said Sheila thoughtfully.

“Tell me tomorrow?—That’s a very pretty blouse, Sheikie.” (It was: being of what other than the Orient knows as shocking pink, it was of sari material, so had gold in it.) “It will cheer the boys up,” their mother continued. “They’re electrified by you, I know, already. They asked me about you.”

Mrs. Artworth showed surprise.

The dutiful patient popped the thermometer (silencer) back into her mouth.

The long room remained empty, but for the patient. The fire burned ceremonially in the shapely grate; the dark she liked was allowed to stay pressing against the panes. Roses, roses all the way, some visible under the tilted lamplight, some not, could be known to stretch from the distant door to the distant bed. Back again into the unexpectancy which had reigned since Sunday lay the patient, not for these minutes having to arouse herself for anyone, like someone uncaringly being carried out to sea; or, still more, as though she were herself the outgoing tide.