The Little Girls (3 page)

To reach the gate to the lane, it was necessary to skirt a side of the house. Out from this at a distance welled up a copper beech, under whose crimson-black canopy dangled a child’s swing—unevenly, one rope being a trifle longer than the other. It caught Dinah’s eye as though for the first time—turning her head as they walked, she continued to watch the swing in a peculiar, vacant yet intent way (the way in which she had looked at space, in the cave), which attracted notice. “Perfectly safe, is that?” asked Mrs. Coral.

“Oh, yes. Just, when it swings it twirls.” Dinah answered —as though from another planet.

“So long as it’s safe… . Oh!” Suddenly Mrs. Coral thwacked at the air with her mesh bag, magazines and all. Terrified, the rose leaped from her buttonhole.
“There
now!” Vexation, mortification reddened her face. “I went and never made you out your receipt!”

“Oh, have we to bother about that?”

“I believe in being particular, Mrs. Delacroix. But the truth is, you gave me such food for thought.”

“I’m so glad. I mean, I am so sorry.”

“I’ll be dropping you your receipt in first thing tomorrow.” They had come to the white gate, which stood hooked open. Regretfully, Dinah held out a goodbye hand, but her friend had not by any means done.
“Or tonight my Finn might, if he’s out on his bike. It would make an object for him. I expect he’d like to. The way I shall be situated is, I have jam to cover—and label, naturally. I should hardly like to tell you how many pounds! Plum. They are anxious to have it, so may be calling. Otherwise … Well, I am very much obliged to you, Mrs. Delacroix. I’ll say good evening.”

She put the resolution into effect. Dinah stood in the lane, unheedly waving, then came in—shutting the gate, with some idea of safeguard against the Finn. This gate was shut only very rarely, when there were cattle about. When Frank took off in his car, he would be dumbfounded. One cannot at once please everyone and be pleased oneself. This was a time when she could have done with a vacancy. Francis, when he had brought the drinks in, often either lay down or took a short walk, to refresh himself for the remainder of his evening duties. Or he might, with any luck, be shaving. If he were around, it would be necessary to make a scene about the fire—if she did not, Frank would on her behalf; if she restrained Frank, Francis, thwarted, would be well up to making the scene himself. She felt out of key with anybody likely to be tempestuous.
She
had food for thought.

Indoors, Frank had given himself his drink and was pottering round the room with it, watching Francis, who, crouched in front of the grate, was stimulating the new-lit fire by poking in small wads of newspaper soaked in paraffin. These he had carried in with him in a plated soup tureen, which, not yet emptied of them, sat on the hearthrug. “I shouldn’t let Mrs. Delacroix catch you doing that,” Frank was advising Francis, as Dinah entered: not only did there not seem to be bad blood, there was, if anything, an alignment. The situation between the three of them altered daily, one might say hourly—just now, if anybody was in anybody else’s bad books, she was. Moreover, she saw in whose.
“
That
seems to be going nicely,” she tendered mildly; but Francis, reclaiming the soup tureen, rose to his feet theatrically and left the room, without so much as a glance her way.

Frank, seeing her, now observed: “There you are.”

“Here I am.”

“Mrs. Coral gone?”

“Mrs. Coral gone.”

“Your feet look wet.” (He had already changed into some slippers he kept here.)

“You’re telling me,” she said, kicking off the espadrilles. “And I could do with—”

“I
needed
this,
I can tell you.” He stared sombrely into what remained in his glass, then roamed away to the tray, to provide for hers. In the distance, he uttered a slight groan.

“Dear,” she urged, “try and stop brooding about that baby. One must let Nature just take its course, like it or not. And a birth is one of the few things which
can be normal. And Joan, I’m sure
—
”

“Oh, Joan is as tough as a rhinoceros: do her good! What’s not normal is what it’s doing to me.”

“Oh, dear.” She settled into her chair, looking across at him unresignedly.

“Oh, I’m a monomaniac, I know!”

“Don’t begin to be furious, like Francis.—Oh good, thank you!” she said, taking her drink. But, holding the glass carelessly tilted, she forgot to drink—staring, instead, out of a window into the darkening orchard. ” ‘A thousand ages in Thy sight are like an evening gone,’ ” she meditated aloud.

“I’ve never somehow quite known what to make of that.” Glass replenished, Frank headed for his accustomed chair.

“Frank, do you
know,”
she suddenly cried out—drawing
her bare feet up under her, rearing up in her chair at him— “I’ve been having the most extraordinary sensation! Yes, and I still am, it’s still going on! Because, to remember something, all in a flash, so completely that it’s not ‘then’ but ‘now,’ surely is a sensation, isn’t it? I do know it’s far, far more than a mere memory! One’s right back again into it, right in the middle. It’s happening round one. Not only that but it never has not been happening. It’s—it’s absorbing!”

“Should be,” said Frank, guardedly.

“They say—don’t they?—one never is doing anything for the first time. I’d say, there’s been
a
first time—I’m perfectly sure! Did you know I had a predisposition to bury things?”

“Not me, I hope.”

“No, no, no—I mean, for a purpose. One of the things that’s happened to me this evening is, I see what I’ve been up to down in that cave.”

“Ah!”

“That cave idea’s been nice, and I’d never call it a fake, but of course it’s been really only a repetition.—No, perhaps not so much exactly that as a going back, again, to something begun. Anyway, now I know.”

“And for that you’ve taken everyone’s favourite toothbrushes.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said, though without animosity.

“Fact is, Dinah, I don’t quite follow you.”

“Try to! … I called this ‘a flash,’ did I? More, it was two flashes. First one, a question. Second one, the answer. The first happened—would you remember?—down in the cave, when Mrs. Coral asked, ‘Who’s going to seal it up?’ What made me then go so blah and go round in circles was, knowing I had heard that: but how, why, when? …
Then the second flash was, when Mrs. Coral and I saw the crooked swing.”

“My dear girl, you see that swing every day.”

“Yes, I know I do.” Dinah paused, frowned, again looked out of the window. She drank down most of her drink as though in a hurry to get it out of the way.— “Frank?”

“Well, go on.”

“At the school I went to, there was a crooked swing.”

He found nothing to say.

Francis’s eye-defect was in fact not a squint but a cast— one eye stayed riveted to his profile, leaving the other to dart where it would. The arrangement seemed, if anything, to suit him: he saw the more. Nor, and least of all here at Applegate, where there was so much vanity in the climate, did his vanity suffer: he met himself constantly in the mirrors and looking-glasses about the house not only without turning a hair but with, by all signs, fortified self-esteem. But if neither his vision (so far as one could make out) nor his looks (at least in his own view) were impaired by his peculiarity, he did yet feel that it narrowed his future. In this day of the career open to the talents, the career for which he deemed himself truly fitted, and to which he fanatically aspired, was closed to him, talents and all, by his mischance. What gnawed at Francis was, how far he might have gone in the Secret Service. He had renounced his intention of entering the Secret Service for this reason: it would be impossible for him to assume disguises—that was, effective ones. Agent X must not be an identifiable man.

Origin need not have stood in his way; though Maltese by descent on both sides of his family, he looked (as people who came to Applegate who had been to Malta at once said) so Maltese that it was nobody’s business. More than one of his parents’ relatives had perished in the bombing of their heroic island: these two gratuitously met then-end in a Bank Holiday seaside boating fatality. Luckily for Francis, he had been left on shore in charge of unwilling friends—so thoroughly had he blighted his parents’ outing that they were sick of the sight of him: hence their seagoing. The tragedy attracted to the then infant an interest Francis never afterwards forfeited—since then, he had never not been taken an interest in, in one or another quarter if not several. He’d acquired a ring of adoptive uncles and aunts, together with sympathizers, legend-creators, sponsors, and would-be organizers—it had been from one of their number that Dinah’d heard of him. He was then seventeen. It had been considered he might do worse than be under her roof for a month or two, while he thought over his future and looked round. Country air, and fare, could be beneficial. Of course he must very shortly do far better. She had been awarded Francis on the understanding that this was to be temporary, only. “He won’t mind doing a certain amount,” she had been told, “so long as you take an interest.” Resignedly, at the outset, she had done so. She now could not cease to. Francis was habit-forming.

He now was nineteen, and still at Applegate. Everybody told him, he told her, that he was throwing himself away. She assented fervently. However, no suggested alternative had, so far, been by half dazzling enough. No attempt to lure him out of the place, or to boot him out of it from within, had so far succeeded. Francis preferred, it seemed, to continue to entertain frustrated ambitions. And the longer he did so, the more swollen the ambitions became. He fed them by heady reading, lying on his bed, took them out for exercise with him on country walks, and altogether nursed, promoted, and petted them. Where they were not his masters, they were his protiges.

As an employee, Francis chose to vary. There were times when he staged a parody of his role here, travestying the impeccable house-boy. There were times when he flattered and cheered Dinah by seeming to manifest a bitter devotion. There were times when he took little notice of anyone, still less of his duties, for days together. There were times when breathless attention, punctuated by cries of rapture or awe, had to be gummed by her to all things he did. Or he would devote days to some special skill, such as worrying at the inlay in her furniture with a toothbrush steeped in linseed oil. When he was into one of his talking phases, that could seem ceaseless: he dogged his employer’s footsteps, stood over her, drilling in with his conversation, wherever she was, whatever she did. He seemed to her menacingly well educated. His vocabulary, in these two years, had enlarged hers—by nature adventurous, she took chances with hitherto alien words. He whisked newspapers away as soon as they came (she had often to borrow Frank’s copy of the Daily Express) and evidently in-gorged them: an inflammatory effect on his talk they did often have. Frank opined that Francis was somewhat politically confused.