Read Online The Little Girls by Elizabeth Bowen - Free Book Online

but then so had you been.”
    “Just this minute, you told me you’d never heard from her.”
    “Don’t be dense: I told you she’d never answered. Never answered the one I wrote in answer to hers. As I say, the letter I had from her was quite merry. Said, to think of me being still around, what fun. Asked what my name is nowadays, and where I’m perching—meaning, living? Told me what hers now is, and where she perches—pretty permanently, I thought it sounded. Only two doors, apparently, from the old Beaker mansion in What-d’you-callums Gardens. Geographically she hasn’t got far, has she! Something a bit wrong about that, surely? What became of her dancing, I do wonder. What she chiefly wanted to know was, whether I’d heard from you, whether you and I had made any plan and, if so, what, and for what day. I naturally told her.”
    “Damn Sheikie! Sly is her second name.”
    “Why?” queried Dinah. “Why shouldn’t she? Three it was meant to be—I thought. Anyway, as I say, I jolly well told her. Told her the day (today), the train, and where to get off. Told her to keep an eye out for you on the train, as you’d have the further secret instructions—couldn’t be fagged to go writing everything out all over again. You, I thought, could scoop her into the taxi. … I did, though, particularly ask her to let me know whether she would be coming along, or not. Not simply because of how many chops; more, because I have to picture a thing. I have to picture everything in advance. It’s by picturing things that one lives, I completely think. Which,” added Dinah— turning on Clare a not so much reproachful as exploratory glance (should reproach be risked, how far dare it go?) — “is, I expect, probably just as well. Because when, usually owing to someone else, something one’s pictured does not, after all, work out, one has at least had one tremendous pleasure.”
    “True, I’m sure.”
    “Oh, but you sound so glum!—Anyway, as I began by telling you, not another squeak out of her, from that day to this. Gone to ground again, as though she had never been. That I do call mysterious: wouldn’t you?”
    “No. To me, her motives are clear as glass.”
    “Mumbo, I don’t see why she wouldn’t come. Or couldn’t. Or why she shouldn’t come, least of all.”
    Clare snorted. “Nor did I, at the start. ( Listen , Dicey, will you!) On the contrary, what could be jollier, thought I. If you want to know, in the first place I put it up to her, over that scrumptious tea she and I had. ‘You come along too,’ I said, ‘why not?’ She was not on to.”
    “Not keen to?”
    “Since you ask, she said she would rather die.”
    “Oh!” The wound made-the crier-out not know where to be. She blinked at and beyond Clare, then turned in the other direction, to blink alone. “Then why did she ever write to me?” she asked miserably. “What made her?”
    “Second thoughts.”
    “I don’t see—I don’t understand!”
    ‘Thought again. That should be clear, should it not?”
    “No. What’s she up to?”
    “Sabotage. Who’s being dense now?”
    One way and another, this was not to be borne. Dinah’s scream rose. “Oh, bother, bother you two! Cawing away at each other—you beastly bothers!”
    “Boohoo, boohoo.—And if we’re going to ask who’s been up to what,” went on Clare, with cannibalistic glee, “I’ve got various questions to ask you.”
    “I say, Mumbo, let’s go home and have lunch!” In a flash, Dinah was off the wall. Whistling, she walked ahead, back to the cars, the prospect of a processional drive home less distasteful to her, apparently, than it had been. Clare was the one thwarted. And back Clare had to dart, to recover a dropped good glove.
    Waiting, Dinah held open the Mini’s door. “Hop in. I’ll just go ahead and turn.”
    “At lunch, then?”
    “Except for Francis.”
    “Francis?”
    “You’ll soon see.—One thing there won’t be,” Dinah said, walking