The Little Girls Read Free

mean something different to different people. Look, this pair has its tip broken: that means something… .” Exhausted, Dinah’s voice ran down to a pause. Then, rallying, she declared in a firmer tone: “Will be a tremendous eye-opener, this cave—won’t it?”
    “I only,” Frank informed Mrs. Coral, “brought in my stuff just now. Thought I’d think for a bit, look before I leaped. That’s my stuff over there, if it interests you. On the whole, I’ve kept to the simple side. One oughtn’t, in my view,” he warned Dinah, “to be too upstage with posterity. Not too highbrow.”
    “I don’t expect to deal with absolute fools.”
    “You’ll be sitting up on a harp, playing a cloud—beg your pardon, I mean the other way round… . Well,” asked Frank, shedding charm upon Mrs. Coral, “glad to have taken a look at our little circus?”
    Mrs. Coral asked Dinah: “Who’s going to seal it up?”
    The effect of the question was out of all proportion with the question itself—and, as the minute lengthened, became still more so. Dinah first stared right through Mrs. Coral, then shut her eyes—which she opened only to stare in other directions, in none of which did the eyes light on anything they appeared to focus. Showing frantic estrangement from all surroundings, she beat one fist, irregularly and slowly, on the palm of the other hand. She seemed by turns to be seeking, listening, or dazedly simply waiting for some answer—that being far from any kind of answer she had been asked for. Among the cave’s deepening shadows, her face looked white—not, by its expression, from distress: here, rather, was some consuming excitement. It hardly needs to be said that she said nothing.
    “Well, that’s not my business,” said Mrs. Coral.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Merely wondered, who’s going to seal it up?”
    Back to herself (as quickly as she had gone), the organizer replied gladly and glibly: “Oh, whoever’s the last!”
    This was Frank’s cue for another repeat-remark. “We may all go out with the same bang.”
    “Then the bang would certainly seal it up. You do make difficulties,” she told him—setting to work to unloop the tarpaulin curtains. “The thing now is,” she told Mrs. Coral, “to shut it up for the night—apart from anything else, it’s extremely cold. Now we’re all going to go in and have a drink. Drink in front of the fire, I do hope—if it’s been lit. Did you say there was anyone in the house?”
    “That young man who sometimes answers your bell did so.”
    “Good. Come on!”
    “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me.”
    “Oh no, you must, Mrs. Coral! Sherry.”
    Mrs. Coral, implacably raising the mesh bag, said: “There still are these other magazines.”
    Pulling, then tying the cave’s curtains together was a ceremony amounting to locking up. That over, the owners left, to accompany Mrs. Coral across the garden. As they mounted the steps, the temperature rose. Above-ground, steamy flower-smells filled the air (more, still, that of a lingering August than of September) as the three followed a spongy serpentine grass path towards the house. On each side, the path was overflowed by a crowded border. Mauve, puce, and cream-pink stock, double, were the most fragrant and most crushingly heavy; more pungent was the blue-bronze straggling profusion of catmint. Magnificently, gladioli staggered this way and that—she was an exuberant, loving, confused and not tidy gardener; staking and tying were not her forte. Roses were on enough into their second blooming to be squandering petals over cushions of pansies. Flowers in woolwork or bright chalk, all shades of almost every colour, zinnias competed with one another. And everywhere along the serpentine walk where anything else grew not, dahlias grew: some dwarf, some giant, some corollas like blazons, some close-fluted, some velvet, some porcelain or satin, some darkening, some burning like flame or biting like acid into