Evidently they'd seen the plaque on one of the old houses round the green. One of the last duels in England had been fought on the village green, between the squire and a wealthy traveller who both fancied the same serving wench. Neither of them got her. They were both fatally wounded, and for thirty years or so (until the incident became romantic, quaint, something to be proud of), the affair was hushed up.
There was some reference to "Greg," who was not present. (So there were more of them.) And glances were cast at Snow White when he was mentioned, puzzling glances which I couldn't fathom.
Snow White and the giants, I thought. 'Snow White is the fairest in the land.' She had blue-black hair, too. Snow White, dwarf among giants.
Watching as casually as I could, I noticed something else.
Nobody smoked. And nobody drank beer.
It makes sense not to start smoking now that we know what we know. But could you get sixteen sensible kids all in one group?
As for the beer question . . . Quite a few of the youngsters had soft drinks. Others had what looked like cocktails, sherry, port, whisky, rum. Obviously they were not teetotallers.
Out of sixteen campers, surely at least three or four would drink beer on a hot summer evening?
I had finished my beer again. It was a small moment of crisis. Was I to walk boldy up to Snow White and the giants and say: "All is discovered. You are not what you seem," or buy another beer and stay quietly watching them?
I did neither. I stood up to go.
And as I stood up, Snow White glanced at me and recognized me. I saw it in her face, although the moment after recognition she looked casually around as if she'd merely been giving the place the once-over.
But I knew I wasn't mistaken.
One thing was certain -- that expression, half startled, half interested, had not come over her face simply became she had seen me in the upstairs window of the Red Lion. For one thing, I hadn't seen her look up. For another, it wasn't just an I've-seen-you-before-somewhere expression.
She knew me. She hadn't expected to see me, but the moment she did, she thought at once: 'That's Val Mathers . . . ' and a lot more,
I wished I knew what the lot more was.
I'd certainly have gone over and spoken to her, but for the fifteen giants. You don't use the "Haven't we met before?" routine when the girl has fifteen friends with her.
Instead, I went home.
As I closed the garage door after driving home, Dina rushed up to me. She was still in her Cinderella dress, but her arms and legs were swathed in bandages which she had obviously put on herself.
"She hit me," Dina panted. "She hit me and scratched me and threw me out."
"Now, Dina -- " I began.
"She got in through a window and pushed me and hit me and scratched me, pulled my hair and I couldn't stay in the summerhouse."
"Forget it, Dina," I said wearily.
"It was her fault I couldn't keep iny promise. She -- "
"Dina, I'm not interested," I said firmly. "You knew there was a man working in the house. You knew he had to get into your room and the summerhouse later. There was no need for any trouble if you'd done as you were told."
"I do what you tell me, don't I? You told me to stay in the summerhouse, only she wouldn't let me."
At that moment Sheila came round the front of the house. She looked at me uncertainly, ready to explain, or fight, or refuse to say anything, depending on my attitude.
"Dina," I said, "go and get dressed."
"Aren't you going to -- "
"I'm not going to do anything. Go and get dressed. Now. And no argument."
Hurt, Dina not only went but stayed in her room the rest of the evening, sulking.
Sheila and I had an unusually pleasant evening on our own for once. I opened a bottle of Rüdesheimer and then a bottle of Niersteiner, and we got pleasantly merry.
At last I thought the circumstances were right, and told Sheila that Jota was coming back to Shuteley.
They weren't right enough. Sheila's face set hard and she said: "For how long?"
"He didn't say."
"He's not staying here."
"No. He's going to ask Gil -- "
"If he visits this house, I'll stay in my room till he's gone."
"Sheila, he promised -- "
" He promised," she said fiercely. She stood up and began to prowl about, clenching and unclenching her hands. Sheila didn't often hit the roof, but when she did she was inclined to go right through it. "I never told you why I was so wild that time, Val. Not because Jota made a pass at me. If a man like him never made a pass at me, I'd know I'd better take up tatting. Not even because he used your trust to get me in a situation where those horrible things could happen . . . But because when you came back, when you walked in on that . . . "
She had worked herself up to such a pitch that for the moment she couldn't go on. Her color was high, her chest was heaving, and I thought it was a long time since I had seen her look so marvellous.
Of course I'd never forget that time when I found Jota quite crudely trying to rape my wife. It had been horrible and it had been incredible. I'd always thought, not so much that Jota would never touch Sheila because she was my wife as that if he did feel it coming on, he'd tell me. "Val, I want Sheila. I'm going to have her." That was Jota's way. I'd been afraid of that.
I'd never thought for a moment it would happen the way it did -- Jota, having got me out of the way by a brazen lie, which I discovered only because the person I was going to see happened to meet me in the street, fighting coarsely with his best friend's wife, his cousin's wife, like a sex criminal.
Sheila, under control again, broke into my thoughts. "You were surprised, weren't you?" she said.
That was an understatement. "I couldn't believe it," I said. "But when I did, I -- "
"Yes, we're not talking about that. That was all right. You threw him about so effiently I was quite cheered up. Never thought you could do that son of thing, Val. I was proud of you then. And I didn't mind seeing Jota hurt, not in the slightest. That bit of it was fine . . . Let's go back a bit. You were surprised."
I waited uneasily, vaguely sensing what she was getting at.
"You were surprised became I was fighting," Sheila said. "You were astonished because I was being half killed and still went on resisting. You were certain that Jota merely had to cast a lustful eye on any girl, and she'd immediately surrender with a sense of profound gratitude."
It was true, but I couldn't admit it. "I never said -- "
"Val, I know perfectly well what you never said. I also know what you did say. Afterwards, when we had to talk, when we had to pretend to be civilized again and work out whether Jota was to be charged with assault, or what -- that's when you gave yourself away: All you were concerned with was Jota. He had to promise. He_ had to go away. _He_ was the one to be convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that nothing remotely like that must ever happen again. And when he accepted all that, you were satisfied."
I just looked back at her.
"Nothing about me," she said bleakly. "You couldn't trust me. If Jota tried again, next time I'd obviously leap into his arms -- "
"I never said -- "
"Oh, Val, who cares what you never said? Your whole attitude made it a hundred per cent clear. Jota was the one to handle somehow. I didn't matter at all. Whatever Jota decided was as good as done. You had to work on Jota. I was merely a pawn in the game, if that."
I couldn't argue convincingly, because she was working a vein of truth. No girl ever said no to Jota. No girl ever could, whoever she was, whatever the circumstances. And it was entirely correct that my surprise on that horrible night had been due largely to Sheila's desperate resistance. I frankly couldn't understand that. It wasn't as if Sheila and I were all that close, even then. Why had a girl who had never resisted me resist Jota?
A diversion was available. "Why did you wait two years to tell me this?" I asked.
She sighed and sat
down, crossing her legs. All the fire had gone out of her. She wasn't going through the roof this time. "Some things you can't take back, not ever, even if you want to. Two years ago, we might have been on the threshold of a great new understanding . . . Now we know we weren't. You won't have children, though I ache for them. And Dina's getting worse every day."
I was grateful to her for phrasing the problem of Dina like that. "Dina's getting worse every day." If she'd wanted to be venomous, there were a thousand other things she could have said about Dina, seven hundred of them not unjust.
"Sheila," I said, "I like you."
She smiled faintly. "I know. You couldn't quite say 'love,' because you're being sincere tonight. And then, I put you off your stroke earlier when I stopped you saying 'honey.' You'll never call me 'honey' again. You'll be careful, cautious, like a good insurance manager, and from now on you'll call Dina Dina and me Sheila."
There wasn't much to say to that, so I went for a brief stroll round the house.
Remembering Dina's story about fairies in the wood, I walked down the garden, not expecting to see anything at all.
The river Shute, meandering tortuously across flat country and through woods, half enclosed our house in the inner walls of a W bend. As far as I knew the house had never been flooded, though the river had been known to reach the garden.
Behind our garden, in the apex of the W, was a small patch of trees and scrub which would have been very popular with courting couples but for the fact that they couldn't get into it. The river curved round it, and on the land side the only entry was through our garden. And we had high, thick hedges.
It was a piece of wasteland which was of no use to anybody. The local landowner had tried to sell it to us, but we didn't want it. Anyway, as Dina had said with childish shrewdness: "Why buy it when it's ours anyway?"
At the fence at the bottom of the garden I stopped.
Was it imagination, or was there a faint glow in the copse?
It wasn't a fire, there was no moon, and it could hardly be fairies -- though I now understood Dina's story. To her, what else could a glow in the copse at night mean but fairies?
I climbed the fence and advanced slowly.
The glow was very faint and would never have been noticed on a night which was not completely dark. The odd thing about it was, it didn't seem to have a source. There was nothing but the glow. I walked through it, stood in the middle of it, looked in all directions, and there was nothing but a faint blue radiance.
I ran back to the fence, climbed it and hurried back to the house.
Sheila was in the bedroom, in a shortie nightdress (in this extraordinary summer, most people wore less than that at night), about to go to bed. We had left a very important discussion hanging in the air. But this was something I had to share with somebody, and Sheila was my wife.
"Sheila," I said breathlessly, "I want you to come and look at something outside."
"Where? Not in the garden, for heaven's sake?"
"In the copse."
She laughed in protest. "Like this?"
"It'll cool you down. And no one can see."
On the point of protesting further, she saw I was deadly serious and realized it would probably be quicker in the end to humor me than to argue with me. She put on shoes and we went down the garden.
I was afraid it was going to be like those frustrating incidents in detective stories where the hero takes the cops to the murder apartment, only to find the body's gone, the signs of a struggle have been removed, and even the bloodstains have vanished.
However, as I helped Sheila over the fence she saw the glow and suddenly became reluctant to go further because she thought there was something instead of because she thought there wasn't.
"What is it?" she whispered, making no move forward.
"I don't know. YoU do see it?"
"Of course I see it. But what is it?"
After a moment or two she came further into the copse with me, and together we tried all the things I had already tried alone -- looking among the branches for the source of the light, at the sky through the leaves, at the still river beyond, under the bushes.
Sheila's reaction was exactly the opposite of mine. The less I understood the glow, the more I wanted to find out about it. More practically, perhaps, Sheila satisfied herself that it was a mystery and was then quite prepared to give up.
"Well, we've looked," she said reasonably. "There's nothing else to see. Whatever it is, it's staying put. Let's go to bed and look in the morning."
And that's what we did. I wasn't sorry, though, that I'd made Sheila come and look. I wasn't imagining things. There was a radiance in the wood with no source.
Later, Sheila wanted to talk about something, but it wasn't the radiance.
"I did hurt her, Val," she said, watching me. "I'm bigger than she is and a lot stronger. I thought, well, after all, she's a naughty kid and she needs a lesson. I meant to beat her up and I thought it was going to be fun, like that time when . . . "
She stopped, and although I had followed her thought I said nothing. She was thinking of that other time when I had thrown Jota all over the place, fighting mad, hardly knowing what I was doing, and Sheila had watched and been quite happy about it, because it was me who was doing the throwing and Jota who was being thrown, and because of what had happened before that.
But Dina wasn't quite the same.
"It didn't work?" I said.
"No."
"I didn't think it would."
"Well . . . don't you mind? Was I terribly wrong to . . . to do what I did?"
"I don't know. I don't suppose so. When any kid's on the wrong track you talk to him, try to persuade him; and I guess if you don't try giving him a good hiding you're missing a bet . . . But you can't beat sense into Dina."
"But you don't mind?" Sheita insisted.
"I don't see that it's anything to do with me," I said.
When we got to bed, more friendly toward each other than for a long time, I thought it would be a good idea to do something about it. But nothing happened, and Sheila made no move, merely saying "Good night" in a tone which seemed to contain finality. So a chance was lost, like a thousand others.
Chapter Three
Before breakfast next morning I was back in the wood. Sheila didn't come with me. She said that if I found anything I could tell her and she'd take my word for it.
I found absolutely nothing. The copse was exactly as it had always been, and in daylight no radiance could be detected. By the time it occurred to me to look for footprints or other signs that people might have been there recently, I'd done so much stamping around that the search was futile. Besides, hardly anything grew under the trees, and the thick, springy leaf-mold did not retain tracks well.
When I got back, Sheila merely said: "It must have been some kind of natural phosphorescence. One egg or two?"
"Phosphorescence has a source, like any other light," I insisted.
"Well, look again tonight. I wonder if Dina will be down in the next ten minutes? It's no use calling her, of course."
Nobody at the office mentioned any unusual incidents the day before. Being the boss, I didn't hear the gossip. If Sally Henrey, my secretary, hadn't been on holiday I could have asked her about the morning's topics. Wilma Shelly, who was standing in for her, was too junior for me to confide in her.
I wasn't a confident boss. I was efficient, of course, or I'd never have reached my present position. But I didn't possess the sheer self-assurance that every good boss has to have, the feeling that he's a boss by right, the unquestioning, unquestioned conviction that things will always be done his way, the right way, the only way.
After an hour's correspondence there was a lull, and I considered phoning Gil Carswell. But Gil, far less self-confident than me, had not become the boss, and I didn't like to call him at the bank unless the matter was really urgent. That was why I'd sent the message the day before by a girl who had to go to the bank anyway. Gil wa
s terrified of the bank manager, who had always seemed singularly inoffensive. But then, Gil was terrified of everybody and everything.
While I was still thinking about Gil, the phone rang. Aloud I muttered: "Oh, God, not Dina again."
It was Jota. "I'm at London Airport," he said. "Be with you this afternoon sometime. Have you seen Gil since I phoned yesterday?"
"No, but I sent him a message."
Snow White and the Giants Page 3
