The Little Girls (30 page)

“Coming,” came his voice from the hall. “Are we in the kitchen?”

“We like eating in the kitchen, Mumbo—if you don’t mind?—when Francis is out of the way: he so rarely is.”

The Applegate kitchen had a substantiality given it by its 1912 builder and not made less by any few changes, such as the substitution of a white Aga cooker for a probably larger iron-and-steel range, and of chromium taps over the sink for brass ones. Round the walls ran racks, brackets, and shelves; there were ample cupboards and, in the middle of the red tiled floor, an abiding-looking, heavy, clean-scrubbed deal table—with, now placed ready upon it, a basket of eggs, a mixing bowl, pots of pepper and salt, and a large pat of butter stamped with a lion’s head, on a willow-pattern plate. Other preparations were on the dresser. A steam of pheasant came from the simmering bones.

“All very snug,” said Clare, at a halt as much in the 
middle of everything as the table permitted. Frank clattered two omelette pans out of hiding, to compare them for size; while Dinah, dark-purple sleeves pushed up, set about compounding a dressing for the salad. The guest added: “Nothing I can do, I expect?”

“No. But why don’t you come and live here too, Mumbo?”

“Thanks very much.”

“It would,” said Dinah, methodically busy with the wooden spoon, “be very nice.” Frank left the kitchen for the pantry, where, not too far away down the passage, he could be heard getting silver, glasses, and so on together on a tray. Dinah continued: “If you retired?”

“Couldn’t afford to, thank you.”

Dinah added a pinch of something to the dressing. “It
would”
she repeated, “be very nice.”

“Why?”

“We should have more time, then. Plenty of time.”

“ ‘
Make
me
a willow cabin at your gate?
’ ”

The spoon stopped. Dinah went white.—”How
dare
you? As a matter of history, Frank bought that cottage before he met me—before he had any notion that I existed, and why should he? Why do you try and ruin
everything
—why?”

“Only for myself.”

“Trouble-making, wherever you go!”

“Sorry.”

“And
you
had the nerve to criticize Shelley!”

Timely return of Frank, carrying the tray… . Supper, when ready (which it was not immediately), went surprisingly well. Dinah added a tinful of ready-made pheasant soup, and later sherry, to the liquid from the bones. The omelette, as sometimes does happen with those made under unfavourable conditions, turned out to be one of her best. Claret was enjoyed. “You’re not,” Frank asked Clare, as the meal drew to a close, with mellow and genuine if not deep concern, “really taking the road again tonight, are you?”

“Yes, she is—she says. She likes dashing about.”

“Got to get back, unfortunately,” said Clare. She looked stoically at her watch.

“That, I am greatly against,” said Frank.
”

“What
are you greatly against, Frank?”

“Dashing about.” He dealt Dinah a look, and more than a look, from under his eyebrows. “Life’s too short.—You got that sixpence all right?” he asked Clare.

“Yes. You put it up?”

“I was glad to.—I’d better make up that fire, in there, again,” he told Dinah, “before
I
go.” He left them. She lit the burner under the coffee. “Everybody’s going away now, I suppose,” she said, though as though to herself.

Somewhat faintly, music came from the drawing-room:

The runaway train went over the hill,

And she blew—she blew.

The runaway train went over the hill,

And she blew—she blew.

The runaway train went over the hill,

And the last we heard she was going still,

And she blew, blew, blew, blew, blew—

They harkened. Dinah, waiting for the coffee, stacked some plates up and landed them in the sink, saying: “Doesn’t waste a minute, does he?”

“This
is a blazing fire to be left alone with,” she said, coming back from having seen off Frank. “Or, to be going to be left alone with.” Clare, standing about, was studying some curled-up family snapshots, found in a bowl. Many of them featured the same five children, some of them small; others, the same two girls (or quite young women). “Which is Annie,” she asked, “and which is Teresa?”

‘Teresa’s the one with the hangdog smile: she
is
the more fascinating, I suppose. But Annie goes to one’s heart 
for some different reason. She has always been plump, see?
—plump as a robin. And her back’s all right now.”

“No longer goes to the osteopath?”

“Thanks to the osteopath, no.—You would love them, both of them,” said Dinah timidly. “Anybody would love them. I do wish that we—I do wish that you—?”

Clare, as though not hearing, re-examined the children,
one by one. “None of them are like you, either now or, then.” She dropped the snapshots back into the bowl. “Well, you need never lack for company’”

“No, oh, no. No, I never need lack for company.” One log’s giving way under the weight of the other logs,

consumed, causing the fire suddenly to blaze higher. “How good he is,” mused Dinah, reminded, isn’t he …” Then she struck her cheek with her hand, crying out:
“Oh,
and I never warned him about that mask! How could I not have? What had I better do—telephone?”

“Too late, I should have thought.”

“I could say I’m sorry.”

“If that’s how the man feels, why put it there?”

“Mumbo, he’d never
said
so, until tonight! How was I to know?—at the worst they bored him, I thought. What an idiot act of mine, all the same! I wanted a reason to go into that cottage.”

“You need a reason?”

“I thought you might laugh at me.—But
now,
what a thing to have done to him, when he’s worried anyway! He’s less happy, and I’m making him less happy. Everything I’ve done’s been stupid and wrong: I should never, for instance, have lent him
The Midwich Cuckoos
.
— You’ve read
The Midwich Cuckoos
?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, that’s the
last
straw!—How am I to explain? Frank’s terrified of children. Otherwise, he’s the bravest, most fearless man; but he has, perhaps, got a conspiracy complex slightly. He’s terrified that some terrible Hostile Race, which will go on to drive everyone else out, is at any moment going to begin to be born. He was highly suspicious of his own grandchild, even: convinced that
that
poor little thing would have Yellow Eyes—which was why he wouldn’t go next or near it (last week, he finally did, I’m glad to tell you). When I went and lent him that book, the damage was done.—Yet, was it only The
Midwich Cuckoos
?”

“You welter in superstition down here in Somerset?”

“Oh, no.—Though it
was
no book for a pending grandfather, I admit. When I tried to argue him out of it, things went worse. ‘If one’s a Hostile,’ I said, ‘one is that at any age.’ He gave me a long, rather searching look, saying, ‘Well, perhaps you’re right.’ What am I doing, when he’s so dear and good to me, as you see? And apart from that, also, I often bore him—nor, I may say, is he the first I’ve bored. But then, boredom is part of love.”

“That I deny!”

“Well, of affection.”

“That
I doubt.”

“Then you’ve no affections.—Mumbo, are you a Lesbian?”

“Anything else, would you like to know?”

“I only wondered.”

“You ‘only wondered’ whether Sheikie had killed anyone.”

“She said, ‘not exactly.’ “

“Shall we leave this at that?”

“Are you annoyed?”

“Why?” asked Clare imperturbably. “As you remarked at that same time, ‘People like to be taken an interest in.’ That is true of all of us.” She paused. “All the same, you know, one can injure feeling. You are worse in saying that I have no affections.”

“
I
don’t care what you are!”

“That is the worst thing you have said yet.”

“But I care
for
you!” cried the bewildered one. “And you care for me—or so I had thought? I wanted you. I wanted you to be there—
here
, I mean. Whatever you think of yourself, you are very strong; and also, I thought you would understand. Who else am I to talk to, without frightening them? Stay with me for a little, can’t you?”

“Look, Dicey, what
are
you frightened of?”

“I hoped—” said the other, but broke off, hopelessly.

“All your life, I should think, you have run for cover. ‘There’s Mother!’ ‘Here’s my nice white gate!’ Some of us have no cover, nothing to run to. Some of us more than
think
we feel.”

“That’s not kind, is it?” asked Dinah, puzzled.

“What makes you expect me to be kind?
Was
I ever, particularly?”

“Your father was.”

“Whatever you have become,” said Clare, angered, “and what you have become is in many ways very wonderful, as you do know, you are what you were always, and that’s a cheat. A player-about. Never once have you played fair, all along the line. Simply, you play your particular kind of game better than you did; so well, by now, that you probably hardly know that you
are
playing it when you are. Nor have you learned, it seems, after all these years, that it’s a game you can play too often. Well, now I am telling you: you can.
This
is once too often. Frightened? I believe you—you enchantress’s child!”

Dinah was at the far end of the room. Target, she like a target, flattened against a wall with, behind her one of the pictures Sheikie had giggled at. She found ing to say but: “But you loved her?”

“Yes. But once is enough.”

“I am also—”

“Well, what?”

“I am also my father’s child.”

Nothing from Clare.

“Like a drink?”

“I’ve done well, thank you.”

” ‘Famous last words’?”

“Well, I can’t stay here,” Clare said, slapping a pocket of her coat. “It’s late, and I have to go.”

“It
is
late to start. If you slept here, you could start tomorrow at cockcrow—cockcrow?”

“I have nothing with me,” said Clare, buttoning her coat.

“If I gave you a toothbrush, a new toothbrush?”

“No
—Circe.”

“Very well,” said Dinah gently, turning away.

The room was over the drawing-room, and of the same size—it appeared longer. There being no end window, that wall was occupied by a canopy into whose curtained distance the bed ran back, drawing the room with it. From the foot of the bed, a carpet with roses stretched to the door at the other end of the room: yet, coming in, one was struck by the austerity of the perspective. Why?—for the bed was as wide as it was long, which is voluptuous. But it was the marriage bed of an early widow, having about it, whether or not since visited, a look of unbanishable half-emptiness. And, these last days, a growing remoteness from all things else had caused it to take on the look of a death bed—or more, perhaps, one for lying in state? The woman on it lay unlivingly still, straight, her narrow form outlined by the covering which it hardly lifted. She lay along the edge, close to which was pulled up a needlework stool—on her other flank extended the desert. Her eyes (so far as could be known in that tent of shadows) remained closed. The one sign she gave of sickness was this indifference, but it was an indifference so great as to be a sickness in itself.

The windows there were looked out, as did those below them, across the lawn into the orchard. One, a wide bay, held the dressing-table; the other, nearer to the bed, was open at the top. The early-November day, having been since morning resigned and sunless, was now drawing to a close: what was left of it came through the big panes. The room was warmed by a fire kept burning in the grate, at the door end: the door stood half-open, a darkening oblong.

In a chintz armchair by the fire sat Sheila Artworth, knitting. Now, after a second cautious glance at the patient, she risked switching on the table lamp at her elbow—perhaps for company?—so tipping the shade down as to protect the bed.
She
was framed, thus, inside a circle of light: now and then flashes came from her crystal needles or violet sparkles from her three-strand necklace. In the warmth she had taken her jacket off; she was sleeveless in a pleated orchid blouse. Her head of blue-blonded hair stood out clearly—above it, and above the circle of light, the china-crowded chimneypiece was spectral.

“You
can’t knit?” came a voice from the distance, faintly.

“Oh, hullo, Dinah.”

“Hullo.”

“Lamp worry you?”

“How long have you been here?”