The Little Girls (27 page)

“You don’t think, a bitch?”

“It’s got no sex.—Well, I should
think
so,” Sheila said as the dog came out. The dog and its two women shortly afterwards crossed the dividing line (a substantial avenue) between the Poor White swamps and Ravenswood Gardens. Seldom had the latter appeared more spruce: in the comparatively copious lamplight brass door knockers and knobs shone, steps were solid white, and the doors themselves, enamelled, as dark as gems. There appeared to be, however, one disadvantage. Sheila Artworth stopped dead, shut her eyes, and said: “Lookl”

“What?”

“Well,
look!
 
That is Trevor’s car. Trevor’s home.”

“Aha.”

“I don’t know what to say, Clare. I do feel bad! But all things considered—?”

“I’d better be off?”

“I do feel bad.”

“High time I
was
on the road.—
Pssst!
You and the dog go in.”

Mrs. Artworth drew a hand over her brow.
“What
we’ve all been through …”

Clare got herself into the Mini, slid back the window. The dog, followed by Sheila, went up the steps. The about-to-depart one put her head out and said in a hoarse whisper: “Good night, Sheikie!”

The woman on the steps turned. “Good night, Mumbo. Good journey. And, oh—thanks!”

The Mini left Ravenswood Gardens, in the direction of London.

“What’s this?” asked Frank, picking up the butter knife.

“I couldn’t tell you,” said Francis.

“What’s it doing here?”

“Looks mummified to me, doesn’t it to you?”

“How did it get into the house?”

“It’s for butter, according to Mrs. Delacroix.”

“But how did it get into the house?” Frank liked the knife less the longer he looked at it. “Looks like something intended for the cave.”

“Far from it.
It’s
in high favour—it’s to go on her tray.”

“Where did it come from?” asked Frank, altering his tactics.

They were in the pantry, Francis’s headquarters. The butter knife, till Frank interfered with it, had been seated on a satirically bright, clean fragment of green baize, dug out by Francis from somewhere. No wonder it had not failed to catch Frank’s eye.

Francis launched into an account of his relations with the postman. “I cured him of battering and ringing when it was a parcel. What’s a porch for? I pointed out to him. ‘You leave whatever it is there—what do you think it’s going to do, blow away? You ought to have more sense, at this hour of the morning.’ That, as you’ll understand, Major Wilkins, was at the beginning of the summer, when Mrs. Delacroix’s personal circle were so lavishly responding to her appeals to stock up the cave. There were mornings when I thought the postman would tear the house down—sleep as she may at the other side of the house, Mrs. Delacroix was showing signs of alarm. Therefore I finally spoke to him about it. I can’t say he took it with good grace. If you ask me, that battering and kicking and ringing was his revenge for having to carry the parcels—many of which, I must fairly say, were of a size to rightly have come by rail. However, if post offices
had
accepted them, that was his trouble. Since then, he appeared to have subsided: as it turns out, he was merely biding his time. A registered packet, requiring not only to be taken in personally
but
signed for, gave him exactly the opportunity he’d been waiting for. Such a renewed outbreak as we had this morning! Worse than any poltergeist, I can only tell you.—And now, this voodoo.”

“What voodoo?” Frank asked—tossing the butter knife, negligently, back on to the piece of baize.

“Looking for a sixpence. It’s now hoped, Major Wilkins,
you
will be able to provide one. Mrs. Delacroix’s discovered she once again has no money of any kind in the house, and I have no silver smaller than half-a-crown.—You’re with us early, this morning,” remarked Francis, glancing at the pantry’s electric clock.

“Touch of frost’s what we’ve been wanting for the celery.”

“Quite a tingle in the air, isn’t there? Rather a sharp frost, I should say, to have come so suddenly.—Which reminds me,” Francis went on, at this point turning his eye on Frank at once impressively and cautiously, “with winter descending upon us at such a rate, what’s going to be done about the cave?”

Frank, shrugging his shoulders, extracted two boxes of matches then a third for luck from the supply drawer (quest for these having been in the first place what had brought him padding into the pantry). He grunted: “Better ask Mrs. Delacroix.”

Francis accentuated the look he had given Frank, then diplomatically withdrew it. Galvanized by the briskness of the morning he was about to make a tour of Applegate, indoors and out, oiling all the locks, so was busy getting his kit together. Meanwhile, from the end of the kitchen passage could be heard the opening-then-shutting of a glass door. This would have signalized nothing more than the arrival of today’s widow from the village, to be about her duties—but no. It was Mrs. Delacroix, in again from the garden. Francis whisked the butter knife out of view: baize and all, it vanished into the cutlery drawer. Any further to-do about this newcomer he was not, for some time to come, prepared to abide.

The chatelaine, framed in the pantry doorway, wore two jerseys: heavy, high-necked, pulled on one on top of the other. Gardening gloves crammed bulkily into a pocket distended one hip of her narrow slacks. Raked into tails by the battle into the jerseys, her hair hung round a particularly shining morning face, etherealized rather than clouded by a look of grief. “Well, it’s come,” she told Frank. “The frost’s got the dahlias!”

“My dear, I’m sorry.”

“Now I must spend this morning cutting them down.”

“But look here, I’d rather thought—” he objected.

“It’s cruel to leave them looking as they are this morning. You should see them—no rather you shouldn’t: nobody should. It would be kindest to burn them at once, I think.”

“Autumn’s autumn.” Rubbing the palm of a hand against the back of his handsome head, Frank contemplated her. “Not the end of the world.”

“Madam was away when this happened last year,” remarked Francis.

“Otherwise,” cried Dinah, either revivified or bent on seeming so, “it’s a heavenly morning!” She looked from one to the other. “Now, what’s going on?”

“Francis,” said Frank disloyally, “is wondering what’s going to be done about the cave.”

“Oh,
Francis,
do mind your own business!”

“I should be glad to,” said Francis, “but that the matter forced itself on my attention, as sooner rather than later it will be doing, I should imagine, on that of others. Happening to be strolling in that direction, the other evening, I was met by a really nasty and musty smell, coming out from behind those mackintosh curtains.”

” ‘Strolling’?” jibed his employer. “Poking about!”

“Like it or not, you know, Dinah,” moralized Frank, “you can’t leave all that junk you’ve collected in there to rot. It was sent to you for a specific purpose. And—judging at least by my own experience—quite a bit of trouble was gone to hunting it out.”

“Everyone concerned thoroughly enjoyed themselves, rooting about in their personalities,” declared the cave’s organizer, mutinously. “You included. If what you’re in a fuss about is your grandmother’s fan, go and take it out.”

“If the collection
is
to be considered to be complete,” interposed Francis, meanwhile testing the quill he was proposing to stick into the locks, “why not regard the matter as closed, twice over? Wasn’t somebody then going to seal it up?”

“Get a mason in,” the rash Frank said, going one better. “There’s that chap in the village I can get hold of. And the sooner the better: the masons are pretty busy.”

“
Mason?
”

“Well, it’s no good counting on a bomb, as I always said.”

“Wall
up my cave? Then where would my cave be?— gone.”

“Pity you didn’t think of that in the first place.”

“I didn’t expect to survive it, I suppose,” admitted the miserable one.

Francis, kit now got together, was ready to leave the pantry for his round of the house. He lingered, however, to offer further advice. “Why not make something of a ceremony of it? Invite the donors. And there would be no harm in having a representation from the village. And without attempting anything too formal, a few words probably should be said? With any further arrangements, I’d gladly charge myself. It’s coming to be a considerable time, madam, now that one comes to think of it, since we had a party. It’s a pity to drop into being too much of a recluse.”

“You know, he’s got something there—or wouldn’t you say?” Frank wanted to know, though guardedly. He rather liked society.

“Nobody,” said Dinah, “yet seems to have said anything about a band. Where are we going to get the band from?”

“Now, now!” warned Frank—for him, rather sharply.

“What
you
secretly want,” cried Dinah, turning on Francis, “is to be a barman. Oh, very well then. I know three or certainly two people who are looking for a barman. Sorry as we shall be to say goodbye to you—”

Francis, disdaining to reply, quitted the pantry. “And don’t go dripping that oil all over the carpets!” she hurled after him. “Oh,” she said in a general way, “how he can annoy one!—Well,” she told Frank, “I must be going out again. Coming? What I can’t remember is, why I came in.”

“I’d thought,” he said, “I’d take a look at the celery.” But he spoke, if not gloomily, uncertainly.

“What’s up, Frank?” she instantly asked.

“You’re very jumpy, you know. Nothing’s happened, has it?”

“Only the dahlias. Did I cut up? I’m sorry.”

“You’ve seemed to me jumpy ever since I got back. Nothing frightened you or gave you a shock of any kind while I was away?”

“Perhaps I missed you?” she asked.

“I should like to think so.”

“It’s lovely that you are back.—Come out. What are we doing standing about in here?”

“Wait a minute,” he commanded, sliding a hand down into his money pocket. “You want a sixpence?”

“Indeed I do.—Oh,
good!
 
Thank you, darling Frank. You see, I must immediately send it off: Mumbo’s sent me a butter knife from her symbol shop. Oh, where is it?—Oh, where
has
Francis hidden it? I want to show you.”

“I took a look at it,” he said, “I may as well tell you.” Together they went down the passage towards the glass door dazzingly at its end, out into the yard, out through the yard door into the garden, into the vindictive and sparkling beauty of the first frosty morning.

Applegate.
 

“A pilot’s thumb, wreck’d as homeward he did come.” That’s what it is. I saw what it was the instant it came, this morning. And why I wanted it. The most overlooked line in that whole play. DON’T miss the 6d, will you? It’s in this envelope, but might wedge itself down into a corner and get thrown away. Thank you very much; I can hardly wait for tomorrow and my tray. Will not write more now, as we have got an enormous bonfire going in the garden. A woman near here makes extraordinary masks, at a great rate. Why not for Mopsie Pye? They would catch on. It would be the greatest help to this poor woman, who has to support not only a mother but an abnormal brother. Any Sunday, we could take a look at them. Which Sunday?

Yours affectionately,

D.

Sunday church-bells started their work on the tawny evening while goodbyes were being said to the mask-maker at her gate. She conveyed by a gesture at once resigned and fanatical that everything else must be now suspended. She cast a look upward, as well she might.

Her village (no great distance frome Dinah’s) was famed in this part of Somerset, and indeed beyond it, for its ringers. Rooks, evidently familiar with the bells, streamed through the sky filled by the pandemonium, and villagers, facelessly there in their darkening doorways or stuck in groups outside the blinded shops, seemed as inured. For non-natives, the disturbance was elemental. The village was hard to get out of—the frantic Hillman darted hither and thither, a thing trapped. One had been caught in a raid.

This seemed no fair way to announce Evensong—and continue doing so, as the ringers in their frenzy of virtuosity were intending, for the next half-hour. It was a half-diabolical way to announce Evensong. Holy-unholy changes, slicing and climbing on one another, no one wholly to be driven out of the air, followed the fleeing car into open country, loudening over fields made hollow by dusk and coppices made hollow by autumn. Nothing was left to slumber: from tracks and field-paths and wells and the scars of quarries rose everything latent and unremembered, till the centuries were as opened wounds. This beset tract was landlocked, no aid from the sea. The hour was one which should have drowned soundlessly when the sun set. The sun had set—though by glimmering as they ran past the car windows stone walls and gateposts still were memorials to the space of light which had been today.