The Little Girls by Elizabeth Bowen Read Free Book Online

pensively: “It’s surprising, though.”
    “Nothing surprises me.”
    “Not when you come to think of her? Looking back, she was rather an awful child. Blinkety light-red eyelashes, and quite pudgy.—You were the skinny one.” (Sheila’s glance of renewed incredulity at Clare’s torso was so artless as to be without offence.) “And scream and moan and create: I can hear her now! And bossy … wasn’t she related to a baronet?”
    “No idea.”
    “No, that used to be Olive Pocock. No, what she had in her family was a bishop: much good that did her character! You know, Clare, thinking her over as I’ve done lately—did she so suddenly leave because of the war, or under a cloud? What has dawned on me is, why should it have been the war when she had no father? Supposing,”
    Sheila proceeded, with growing caution, “she never did have a father, at the best of times? There they used to be, simply she and her mother, stuck down in that cottagey house with no explanation. Things one may see as a child but not then think anything of seem peculiar later. That drawing-room of theirs smelled like a hothouse, always— who sent those expensive flowers? They never grew them; think of their garden! Then there were those pictures they had which made me giggle (I now see why) hanging right on the wall. Mother’d have had a fit. Her mother wore tea gowns. They had no gong. Those Saturdays you and I went to tea there—”
    “Mrs. Piggott always laid on the most stunning cake. You got outside plenty of that, in your quiet way.”
    “I dare say; but did she seem like a widow?”
    “Nothing fishy about the Piggotts. My mother knew them.”
    “Oh.—They were none of them mental, by any chance?”
    “Not that I heard, ever. The bishop may have been.”
    “Not an Atheist, are you?—Anyway, in that case, there goes heredity!”
    “Don’t follow?”
    “You tell me her mother was moral, and her family normal. Yet in spite of all her advantages, look at her now!”
    “You know, I can hardly wait to!” burst out the incautious Clare.
    Mrs. Artworth lightly frowned, as though vexed by deafness. “Sorry—say that again?”
    “You heard me. Aren’t you mad with curiosity?”
    “You mean, see her?”
    Clare puffed her cheeks out, then sucked them in. Pinned by Sheila’s considering, mermaid gaze, she became delinquent: over-bold first, then shifty. She mumbled something.
    “I beg your pardon?” asked Sheila.
    “I said,’Why not?’”
    ” ‘Why not?’ Because that is what she wants.”
    Clare looked at once hangdog and unresigned.
    “You astound me rather, Clare, I can only tell you. You’d really dream of playing into her hands? There you go again, then—falling under her spell!”
    “If anybody exerted a spell, I did.”
    Inclining her head in its pink bower, Sheila let herself smile. She said: “So you thought.” Dibdabbing with her spoon at the disc of lemon afloat in her teacup, she smiled again. “She, though, was a born ringleader. She only did not succeed in ringleading us because, unfortunately for her, we were you and me. The two of us being us was just too much for her. So we know how that always ended: with her screaming—oh, I can hear her! But she never learned: it was try, try, and try again. Next time, she’d be back at her old game. And here she now is, trying it on once more.—Do as you wish, if you want. I simply instinctively warn you, if I were you I wouldn’t go near her without me.”
    “Come along too, then?”
    “Thank you, I’d rather die.”
    “If that’s how you feel—”
    “That is how I feel. Any objection?”
    Tea-logged, the disc of lemon submerged—the point of the spoon, however, ran it to death at the bottom of the cup, goring away at it without mercy. Here and there a shred rose to the surface. “Well?” asked Mrs. Artworth, when that was over.
    “Though,” tendered Miss Burkin-Jones, a gleam in her eye, “it could be the one way of stopping this. However