The Little Girls (33 page)

“Experience is what counts, in the long run,” meditated Mrs. Coral, “if one has had it, that is—I should probably say.”

“I nursed a friend to the day of his death.”

“Well,”
said Mrs. Coral… . “Well,” she repeated, “as I say, I just looked in for a minute. Already, quite enough excitement for
you,”
she informed the pillow. “Tomorrow, you’ll feel up to seeing the children, who knows? Now I must go and find them.”

“Mrs.
Coral—?”

“Yes?”

“Couldn’t they, though, stay here?”

“Well you see, I am ready for them, now.”

“But their rooms are here, that they always sleep in. Their rooms are here …”

“I’ve got that nice top room, till I replace my Indian.”

“How are you going to get them over?” asked Mrs. Artworth—having by now sized up (as it proved, correctly) the probable income-level of Mrs. Coral.—”Or
have
you got a car?”

“No; and I haven’t got a bike, either, you may be surprised to hear. I prefer my feet,” said Mrs. Coral, throwing a nod down at the trusty pair. “But now, as you say, there’ll arise the problem of getting their luggage and bits and pieces and so-ons to my home. It’s wonderful, the amount and the sort of things children want with them, at the last moment. You should see what Coralie brought; you would almost laugh. And
these
two have quite a pile, as I just now saw. Piled up down there, just inside the door, ready to go out again. Therefore what I wondered was, whether either of their fathers could kindly run them, myself, and their bits and pieces over to Rosebank—which is the name of my house—in their car? Wouldn’t take long. Major Wilkins would have, I’m sure, but I see no signs of him.”

“I can’t see why that shouldn’t be arranged,” said Mrs. Artworth. “I’ll go and see.” She rose. “The next thing that will be coming, Dinah, will be your
bouillon.”

“Will it? I’ve lost count.”

The active women, now about to get going, glanced before doing so at the canopy. Dinah had raised herself on an elbow. Down her white face, under the ignominious bruise, a tear made its bewildered way.

“Now, cheer up!” enjoined Mrs. Coral. “You’ll see them tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

The children, anything but anxious to leave Applegate, had, after all, a reprieve: the fathers, though prepared to transport them to Mrs. Coral’s, set their faces against doing so immediately. “Sorry, Mrs. Coral, but we’re now going up to look in on Mother.”

“Won’t that be nice! But wasn’t that to be later?”

“We’ll be going up later too, I should think.”

“That may depend, rather,” said Mrs. Artworth.

“I’m afraid you may find her a little doleful, just at this minute,” said Mrs. Coral. “Five minutes before, she seemed quite bright. She varies.”

“Most of us do,” said Roland.

“Sorry if this throws you out in any way, Mrs. Coral,” said William, though with no less firmness than that shown by his brother.

“Never you mind!” cried the good woman. “With everything at sixes and sevens, who can wonder? But
I’ll
just be off, I think, to adjust the oven: everything’s
timed
for six. I’ve got a light little tea for them, their first evening, cheese-and-egg flan and baked chocolate pudding; but all the more I shouldn’t care for anything to be spoiled.”

“No, indeed.”

“I could take Coralie with me,” said Mrs. Coral—struck by that good idea, looking about. But the elf was nowhere.

The sons, a phalanx of two, wheeled in the direction of the staircase. Mrs. Artworth already was at its foot, saying: “I think I should go on ahead and tell her you’re coming.”

“Really, you need not trouble. She’s quite used to us.”

Turning her speculative look from one to the other, meanwhile touching around the hair on her pretty head, she thought that over. “Why, yes; I suppose she is… . You’d like her to yourselves?” she asked.

They were stunned by the question. “Well…” said one, “don’t you think?”

“Really, I couldn’t say—who am I to know? Well, if that’s the case, I’ll go out for a bit. I could do with some fresh air.” She drew a breath deep into her bored lungs, at the very thought. “Yes, go for a stretch,” she said, stretching her arms.

“You realize it’s rather dark?”

“Oh, I shan’t go far,” she said, looking as though amused by them, in a small way. “Not outside your gate. I’ll keep near the house. Quite frankly, the country gives me the creeps.—How’s Frank Wilkins standing up to this, by the way? Seen him?”

One of the sons, after an instant, said: “Well, we half-saw him.”

“Oh. He might be able to put you in the picture, I should have thought?”

“Saw him,” said the other son, “for a minute, more or less in the distance. He seemed to be making off somewhere. He made off.”

“Oh,” she said, with her curious inflection. “He can’t have seen you two, then?”

“You’ll ask Francis,” said Roland, “for anything more you want?”

“If it’s there,” she said, “couldn’t I help myself?—Anyway, what I want is a breather, first.”

They said: “See you at dinner, then?”

“I suppose so,” she said tolerantly. “Yes.”

Handing over the stairs to them (as it were), she went away to seek for her mohair coat. She undug it from under their overcoats on the bishop’s chair. Having selected a walking-stick—to remind her of the dog?—she let herself out of the inner glass door of the porch, into the dark.

Yes, there had been something crepuscular, uncomfortable, about the half-seeing of Frank—which, but for Mrs. Artworth and her lightning question, would have been consigned by the two sons to the silence of their in-common memory. It had happened between an hour and half-an-hour before she jumped them into admitting that it had. The drawing-room had been still in that lampless state known as blind-man’s holiday; outdoors, it was drawing towards the end of that hour in which land seems haunted.

Francis got rid of, they had been talking—William still in his mother’s chair facing the bay window; Roland, on the move, from time to time taking a desultory look out of any of the three. Anything but desultory was their talk: a break-through would have to be made and they were planning it. So far, the situation at Applegate made less rather than more sense with every minute—thanks to the bafflingness of Mrs. Artworth, the spider’s-web ambiguities of Francis. The idea (later acted upon) of announcing they were going to see their mother, then walking upstairs, began to commend itself more and more. Having agreed upon it, they drank to it.

A figure came into view through the end window (the window which had no fellow in the room above, that wall being occupied by a canopy). From the figure’s manner of crossing the frame of the window, it might have been that of a vagrant—a vagrant apathetically expecting at any moment to be asked what he was doing or what he wanted. Barely, in the now less than half-light, would the man have been distinguishable from the grass and trees, but that he moved—and there being about his movement some trace of what had been there formerly, he was recognizable.

‘There,” remarked Roland, “goes poor old Frank.”

William, having dodged his head in order to see between or over the various objects interposing between him and the end window, came to the same conclusion. “Yes,” he said.

“What’s he up to?”

“Doesn’t look as though he knew?—Anything one ought to do, do you think?”

“Bring him in?”

“He’d bring himself in if he wanted, wouldn’t he? … He’s probably the one, you know, that one really should be having a word with: he was on the spot. And seeing her as often as he did, he should be able to throw some light— as to whether, for instance, this thing really only did start last Sunday, or whether there’d been any trouble before.”

“Yes.”

Frank, meanwhile, had temporarily disappeared from view. The sons felt a temporary relief—they turned, however, to watch through the windows overlooking the lawn for him to come into view again on that. “Cheer him up in any way, could one?” asked William, while they waited.

“Well, I wondered. Take him out for a drink?”

In reply William, shrugging his shoulders, looked expressively at the crowded drink tray. “Out?”

“I know,” said Roland, acknowledging the tray. “But what I had thought was, change of scene?”

Frank, as foreseen, was in sight again—diagonally, now, making across the lawn towards the orchard. William, having taken another look, said: “I doubt if he’d thank us.”

“What
is
on his mind?” asked Roland, more uneasy than he had probably ever been. “Something that he knows and we don’t?”

“He always has acted up, to give him his due.”

“Yes. But—?”

“And I tell you another thing,” said William, “He easily could be the type who can’t stand illness: resents it, goes to pieces at the idea of it, is panicked by it. That isn’t always necessarily selfishness, it’s a phobia. And that kind of phobia gets worse with age, so would have with him. Naturally, I suppose—when the time’s come when you yourself never know at what moment
you
may not be going to crack?”

“Well,
I
don’t know,” said Roland. “I don’t know.”

While they debated, it became too late. Frank gave a look, so swift as to seem perfunctory, up at the windows above those through which he was being watched, then went off into the ancient darkness between the boughs. “He may, you know,” Roland said retrospectively, “have come over to see whether there was anything he could do, then thought twice about coming in. In that case, I should feel badly.”

“Or, simply have come over to say hullo?”

“Then why didn’t he? … One thing we must on no account fail to do, though, sooner or later, is have a word with him.”

“I agree. It could be a great mistake not to have a word with him.”

“Yes.”

“Look, why
didn’t
he send for a doctor?”

On learning that an extension had been granted, the Delacroix children tried to get hold of Francis, that last August’s gin-rummy sessions around the pantry table might be at once resumed. (Coralie would have to try.) But Francis proved to be in no mood. “Your grandmother will not be the only one,” he prophesied, “to be having a breakdown, if this goes on.” He and Mrs. Throes (the widow) were getting dinner.

“But Fran-
cis
, not until eight?”

“I shall have to shave.”

They watched him bringing rarities out of the glass cupboard. “What are those for?”

“
For?
They’re finger bowls.”

“They’re very dusty, Francis.”

“Well, I should
think
so. Now run along—do you want to get on my nerves?”

So they thought of something to do instead. Taking possession of the empty drawing-room, they extracted the cutting-out scissors of last August from the string drawer in their grandmother’s desk (that was, the children of the house did: Coralie watched), hauled the hoard of slithery magazines out of the hollow inside the spinet, settled themselves down in a row on the sofa, and got down to it—that was, the children of the house did: Coralie, though a pair of scissors had been issued to her, waited. “What are we doing this for?” she wanted to know.

“Because we are,” explained Pamela—scissors already flying around a dinosaur. (Pamela, not called after the book, was five and a half months older than her first cousin.) Emma hummed, busy with an Aztec altar.

“This is a nature magazine you’ve given
me,
isn’t it?” asked Coralie, her suspicions deepening.

“There are coloured birds in it—or there were.” (Truth to tell, that particular magazine had been heavily mutilated last August.) “Don’t you like birds? Or here’s a motoring one. Motor cars are easier to cut out.”

Emma hummed. Coralie, leafing her listless way through a Motor Show now long ago glossily over, seemed to be missing something—her adenoids? Jabbing her scissors into a Jaguar, she said in a lugubrious tone: “Isn’t it awful about your grandmother?”

“What’s awful?”

“I said, isn’t it awful about your grandmother? Disfigured for life
and
her mind gone.”

“Yoo-hoo, Coralie!”

“It’s all round the village.”

“If
you
go all round the village you’ll get smallpox.”

“That’s
a lie!” cried Coralie, tossing back the blonde elf-locks which were her sole claim to be an elf.

“One and one make two, then.”

That was too much. Re-attacking the Jaguar, Coralie recklessly made known: “Everybody’s sorry for the family.”

“What family?” asked Pamela absently, fine-pointing the dinosaur’s tail with an expert snip.

“All of you.”

“We are sorry for
your
family, Coralie.”

“She had a bath,” said Emma. “I turned the taps on.”

The conversation lapsed. Pamela, having completely detached the dinosaur from its former surroundings, placed it beside her on the end of the sofa, anew to behold it. Emma, possibly delayed by her own humming, only now reached the base of the Aztec altar. Coralie wrote off the Jaguar as a total loss and turned her attention to a harmless Austin. Beneath them the sofa and at their feet the hearthrug came to be littered with coils and snippets. Coralie gave, in a general way, an omniscient sniff.