The Little Girls (9 page)

“Does your butler speak English?” Sheila wanted to know when Francis had reluctantly left them.

“Oh yes. He can do almost everything.”

“Do you have other help?”

“Alternate widows. They clean. But the one here today, by fortunate chance, can cook—at least, I think so, don’t you?” said Dinah, forking away at her share of omelette. “Otherwise, I do. But I can’t cook and talk, so today I thought better not.”

“The situation in Southstone is rather desperate. Fortunately,
we
have Trevor’s devoted nurse.”

“Who does she nurse?”

“She cooks, and muddles around. But one has got to face it, she’ll soon be senile. And then, what?”

“Then you pension her off.—I say, Sheikie, how many children have you?”

“I had, actually, none.”

“How d’you mean, ‘actually’?” pursued Dinah.

“She has two ‘steps,’ ” Clare said, sombre with boredom, raising her muzzle from her plate. She banged round her mouth with her napkin. “Better than nothing. Now ask her if they have children, and we’ll be through.”

“Oh no we won’t!” said Dinah. “I have five grandchildren.”

“What did you start by having?”

“Oh, two sons.”

“Oh, you clever girl, you,” said Mrs. Artworth.

“I wish we could have some wine,” said Dinah to Francis, who had re-entered. Butler-impersonation today had made him banish what was generally on the table, within agreeable reach, to a far-off sideboard. One was bereft of everything but the salt and pepper and a round of butter stamped with a lion’s head. To wait at table, he had discovered, was one form of absolute domination: the waited-on ladies waited upon his will. Dared they rise and make raids while his eye was off them? He defied them to. Also, talk—keeping going, if not swimmingly— tethered them where they were. He had dug out, for the occasion, three large lace mats. He had the interest of noting that formal splendour, topped by his own performance, cast gloom on one of the guests and needled the other—to the blonde it was obviously occurring that the splash being made was not for but at her, less to please than afflict her and get her down. Had that intention been Mrs. Delacroix’s, he would have seen it as rightful and her as human. But the fact was that Mrs. Delacroix, tearing off in her car after doing the flowers, had omitted to tell him anything, other than there being about to be one lady for luncheon and three chops. He’d been left to use his discretion. Well was it that Francis had briefed himself, and thoroughly, as to the psychological background of this luncheon. The cut of the jib of Mrs. Artworth (whom, recall, he’d taken to be the lady) had caused him at once to whisk out the lace mats, then rehearse his “waiting” around the kitchen table, with, as thunderstruck standin, the day’s widow. In him, discretion and malice were identical.

Kicking the door open, to bring a tray in, he had heard the ladies drop the subject of childbirth.

“That will be all, I think, for the time being,” Dinah said—each chop having found a plate and the vegetable dishes completed their jiggling course. “Go and have a rest.” Enraged, Francis left them. Sheila, doubting the door to be truly shut, said: “They say Orientals are all ears.”

“I am, now, all ears.” Clare took one slash at her chop, then, ominously, rested her knife and fork. She looked round the table. “All ears for whatever Dicey has got to say.—So are
you
, or aren’t you?” she rapped at Sheila, who, though not yet fully adjusted, declared: “Of course!”

“Just what have you got to say for yourself, my girl?” the culprit was asked, in what was meant to be an objective manner. “You jolly nearly ran into serious trouble.
What
you thought you were doing, we’d like to know.”

“Some explanation’s due, I honestly think,” supplemented Sheila, though declining to raise her eyes from the lace mat. “I mean, after what we’ve been put through.”

“Well?” Clare boomed. “Come on, Dicey. We’re waiting.”

“Mumbo,
don’t be so pompous!” exclaimed their hostess. “And apart from that, what is all this about—so completely suddenly? I couldn’t be more in the dark if I were Frank. What is this potion you two’ve been brewing up?— And I won’t,” she went on, wonderfully mildly still, “I won’t have you make a scene while you eat my chops.”

“I’ve not eaten your chop!”

“Then it will get cold.” Dinah turned to her other friend. “You’re eating up yours, I’m so glad to’ see, because they are good, I think.—Sheikie, I wonder whether you know you’re said to have said I’ve made your life hell?”

Sheila, ceasing to masticate, turned an annoyed pink. “I’m certain I
never
—” She looked daggers across at Clare, who bellowed at Dinah: “That’s what we’re attempting to
talk
about!”

“Then let Sheikie talk.”

“Sheikie come into the open?” Clare jibed. “Ever been known to?”

“That,” Sheila returned, “I must say, comes nicely from
you.
Who did her best to give me the slip? Who said, ‘Not to worry,’ then went one better—she thought? No, devious-ness is a thing I can’t understand! Nobody would object to your being clever—”

“Good.”

“Oh, have I sown dissension?” their prisoner asked. “No, because look how it’s always been! When you both get into a state, you two have to fight. Look how this always ends?” Yet she faltered, if for less than an instant; or just barely—how barely?—overrode a misgiving. “Or isn’t this ending? Otherwise, I’ll go on.” Her demeanour altered. Her beauty, having been up to now an indeterminate presence about the room, grew formidable and stepped forward. From now on, she spoke to” ignored hearers, not only not looking at them but making it felt that by not looking at them she spared them. “I begin to see what you’re both in a state about. Or could, if it wasn’t so inconceivable. You mean, the means I used to rustle you up? Well? … What else was I to do?—No, more I mean, in what other way should I do it? That was for US. And you two minded—
you two
? Oh, then how pointless to meet again—how you have gone down!”

“Maybe,” Clare assented—collapsed, morose.

Sheila, in this instance the stronger spirit, said: “Yes, I dare say. You don’t happen to have to live prominently in Southstone, or run a fairly well-known shop.”

“Chain of ‘em,” Clare corrected, from depths of apathy. She looked down at her heavy, projecting body. “As we now are, my love, like us or not. As we now are, Sheikie and I felt blown upon.”

Dazed, Dinah marvelled: “Mumbo, what an expression.”

Clare, having asked for that, hugged it with an awful sort of contentment. Mrs. Artworth, however, stepped in to reclaim her property. “Mine, in the first place, I think,” she told Dinah briskly. “Any objection?”

“Not from you.” Dinah shoved her plate off the lace mat, put her folded arms there, and leaned on them, studying them unseeingly.
“I’ll Huff, and I’ll Puff, and I’ll Blow Your House Down —
Eh?
—
That I never thought of. I never thought.”

She suddenly turned to Clare. Down her white face a tear made its bewildered way. One forgets that each tear is shed for the first time. “What do I do?”

“Try thinking. I warn you against the habit, but try it once.” Clare was lightheaded. Within, she trembled and shook. An electrical happiness transformed her. Sighting her chop anew, she fell upon it—tenderly watched by Dinah. Sheila, whose mistrust of anyone’s quoting anything was akin to Clare’s objection to scenery, had since the offence brooded—in particular, for some cause she could not pin down, she misliked those lines Dinah had chosen. Now: “
Macbeth,
I suppose?” she warily asked. She remained unanswered. Tilting that look of hers to and fro, fro and to, she thought: “Who’s now falling under whose spell?” She let a minute go by in regardful silence, before again, more loudly, raising her voice. “
Now
, then, we’re to consider the matter closed?”

Base Clare, mouth full, said: “Sheikie, how sane you are!”

“It’s as well to know. I was feeling a shade at sea. Because, am I wrong or wasn’t it you, Clare, who insisted on bringing the whole thing up,
and
here at Dinah’s own table, which from something she said I imagine she rather felt?—or didn’t you, Dinah? Left to myself, I’d have willingly let the whole thing—”

“To hell with the whole thing, anyway!—which, if I may remind you, was my original standpoint, that day at tea. There’s no such thing as ‘a whole thing.’ Anyhow, court adjourned.”

“What do I tell Trevor?”

“I remember Trevor,” mused Dinah. “Give him my love.” As they should be glad to see, she was feeling better. “You’ll be glad to hear, you obstinate mules,” she said, “you cost me nearly a hundred pounds.”

“Well, you beastly rich girl.”

“You all but beat me. ‘Not a penny over that hundred,’
I said to Packie. ‘Squeak or not out of them by then, we then call it off—they win.’ I’m not mad, after all.”

“You
had
an accomplice?”

“You wondered? Yes. An old friend who’s come back into my life, who knows all the ropes. Johnnie Packerton-Carthew. He’s known to take on so much and be so dependable, most people call him Pack-Horse. I call him Packie.”

Sheila, languidly leaning back, touching around her hair (with both hands, this time), said: “Meaning, he’d do anything for
you?”

“No, I’m afraid he’d do anything within reason for almost anybody. So it’s no compliment.”

“He considered this was within reason, did he?”

“He entered into the spirit of the chase, like anything. And now, naturally, can’t wait to meet you two. We must arrange. Meanwhile let’s drink to Packie, out of full hearts!—Bother Francis, confiscating the wine again! And where’s he gone to, wandering off like this? All this time, there should have been treacle tart. Here we sit and sit, when all we want is the cave.”

“Cave?”

“Cave,
did you say?”

“The
cave,” said the hostess, impatiently starting smoking. Both floored, her guests exchanged blank looks.

Clare said: “Dicey, we really don’t think you’ve told us.”

“But that’s incredible! That was the start of this. No. I mean WE were the start of this, but the cave acted as a— as a precipitant. Though, on the same day, so of course did the swing.”

“Someone precipitate off it?” Sheila tittered.

“No. No more than we did. You idiot, Sheikie.”

Clare remarked: “I took a look at the swing.”

Francis came in, accompanied by the treacle tart. Having slashed it up, he went on to hand it round—the blonde, a slimming demoniac if ever he saw one, would not so much as glance. Meanwhile, he listened to his employer launching off into her well-known preliminary to the Guided Tour —which did not, to his ear, go with quite its accustomed swing. Not having delivered it for some time, she always could, of course, be a trifle creaky. One had, too, to allow for the handicap she was under in having an audience who’d known her long and probably too well. This act of hers certainly had gone better. Her former delirium seemed lacking. Could it be that the cave neared the end of its reign? In that case, some hope for the poor Major’s succeeding in winning her back again to the potager.
Though she kept going, gamely, she seemed by no means sorry to interrupt herself by saying: “Francis, coffee in here—at once, please!”

“I’ll bring it in here,” was the most he could guarantee.

“So you see, now?” Dinah concluded, optimistically turning from Clare to Sheila. “You have, now, grasped the idea? You won’t understand the cave if you’ve not grasped that; though I hope you’ll grasp it still more when you see the cave.” Her cigarette, sketching the final gesture, showered ash on to her helping of tart.

“I expect,” Clare said, civilly, “we may.”

“Full up, is your cave by now, did you say?” asked Sheila.

“Oh, brimming. One can hardly get in.”

“Oh…. You have ever so many friends, then?”

“Hundreds, by now. Hasn’t everyone—haven’t you?”

Mrs. Artworth, for once, looked vague. She did not reply.

From along the serpentine walk, stocks which had breathed wet fragrance on Mrs. Coral were now gone. The turf of the walk was, today, dry and springy under the foot. Hedging the backs of the borders, Michaelmas daisies ran through all purples out into puce and ruby. Due now to be slain any night by frost, dahlias defiantly burned on from noon to noon—fewer, the fulsome staying-on roses looked less mortal. The latening sun lit not only those but the few twisted apple trees of the ancient orchard, some of whose fruit by lying bruised in the grass, not rotted yet, gave a cyder-like taste to the afternoon. The hour was now nearer to four than three.

Shepherded by Dinah towards the steps which were to take them down to the cave, the two strangers to Applegate found or made every reason to dawdle. They examined Dinah’s gaudy autumnal flowers—uncommon, possibly, to them? They had, over the flowers and through the trees, glimpses of kind, unpoetic skylines. Sheila asked: “We’re in Somerset, are we?”

“More or less.”

“But that’s the West, isn’t it? I thought the West was mountains…. Well, it does all seem very far away.”