He wakened in the middle of the night and also of the heat with the notion that Dorothy had grown an unreasonable number of legs. He raised himself on his elbows to peer sleepily about, and realized she was staring at him. Of course it was her oval photograph, except that there was no picture of her in the room. As he jerked upright he saw her face balanced on the marble hands, crammed into the mirror. She looked outraged, unable to believe her fate.
Lionel snatched at the overhead cord to drag light into the room. The mirror was deserted apart from a patch of wallpaper whose barely discernible pattern gave him the impression of gazing straight through the frame at the wall. When the illusion refused to be dispelled he turned the light off, trying not to feel he’d used it to drive Dorothy into the dark. She was gone wherever everyone would end up, that was all; how could dreaming summon her back? Nevertheless he felt as guilty as the only other time he’d seen her in the mirror.
It had been the year when she’d kept being late for dinner. One evening her mother had sent him to fetch her. He’d swaggered into Dorothy’s room without knocking; they’d never knocked at each other’s doors. Although it wasn’t dark the curtains had been drawn, and at first he’d been unsure what he saw— Dorothy stooping to watch her face in the oval mirror as she’d squeezed her budding breasts. While she hadn’t been naked, her white slip had let the muted light glow between her legs. The smile of pride and quiet astonishment she had been sharing with herself had transformed itself into an accusing glare as she’d caught sight of him in the mirror. “Go away,” she’d cried, “this is my room.,” as Lionel fled, his entire body pounding like an exposed heart. He hadn’t dared venture downstairs until he’d heard her precede him.
The breakfast gong quieted his memories at last. In the bathroom he was relieved to find the tights had flown. He showered away most of his coating of mugginess. and thought he was ready for the day until he opened the kitchen door to hear Carol tell Helen “You’re not to go anywhere near him, is that understood?”
Surely she couldn’t mean Lionel, but he would have been tempted to sidle out of reach of the idea if she hadn’t given him a wink behind Helen’s eloquently sulky back. “A boyfriend she’s too young to have,” she said. “Do you mind sitting where you did again?”
Lionel had hoped they could have breakfast together, but tried to seem happy to head for the dining room. “Morning all,” he declared, and when that stirred no more than muted echoes “I’m her uncle, should anyone be wondering.”
Did explaining his presence only render it more questionable or suggest he thought it was? He restrained himself from explaining that Carol had divorced her husband once she’d resolved to move in with her aging mother. He made rather shorter work of his breakfast than his innards found ideal so that he could escape to the kitchen. “Are we going for a roam?” he asked Helen as he set about washing up.
“Too many rooms to change,” Carol said at once. “Maybe we can let her out this evening if you can think how to occupy her.”
He strolled up to the elongated Victorian garden that was the promenade and clambered down a set of thick hot stone steps to the beach. The sand was beginning to sprout turrets around families who’d staked out their territories with buckets and spades the colors of lollipops. He paced alongside the subdued withdrawn waves until screams rose from the amusement park ahead, and then he labored up another block of steps to the Imperial.
The theater was displaying posters for the kind of summer show it always had: comedians, singers, dancers, a magician. It took the mostly blonde girl in the ticket booth some moments to pause her chewing gum and see off a section of her handful of paperback, which was proportionately almost as stout as its reader. When she said “Can I help you?” she sounded close to refusing in advance.
“Could you tell me whether there are any, you won’t take offense if I call them dwarfs?”
She met that with a grimace she supplemented by bulging her cheek with her tongue. “Any…”
“Small performers. You know, a troupe of dinky fellows. They used to perform here when I was a child. I don’t know if you’d have anything like them these days.” When she only tongued her cheek more fiercely he grew desperate. “Tiny Tumblers, one lot were called,” he insisted. “Squat little chaps.”
“The only little people we’ve got are Miss Merritt’s Moppets.”
“That’s fine, then,” Lionel said with an alacrity she appeared to find suspicious. “Any chance of a pair of your best seats for tomorrow night?”
“Best for what?”
For persuading Carol to give Helen an evening off. he hoped: she was working the child harder than Dorothy had ever worked her. “For watching, I should think,” he said.
From the theater he wandered inland. Behind the large hotels facing the sea a parallel row of bed and breakfast houses kept to themselves. Victorian shopping arcades led between them to the main street, which was clinging to its elegance. Among the tea shops and extravagant department stores, not a pub nor an amusement arcade was to be seen. Crowds of the superannuated were taking all the time they could to progress from one end of the street to the other, while those that were wheeling or being wheeled traversed the wide pavements more slowly still. When Lionel discovered that matching the speed of the walkers made him feel prematurely old, or perhaps not so prematurely, he turned aside into the park that stretched opposite half the shops.
Folding chairs could be hired from a spindly lugubrious youth decorated with a moustache like two transplanted eyebrows. Lionel plumped himself and the swelling that was breakfast onto a chair close to the bandstand. The afternoon concert was preceded by an open-air theater of toddlers on the lawns and secretaries with lunch-boxes, a spectacle he found soporific. By the time the elderly musicians in their dinner jackets assembled on the bandstand, he was dozing off.
A medley of Viennese waltzes failed to rouse him, as did portions of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was past being able to raise his head when the orchestra struck up a piece he would have thought too brash to win the applause, much of it gloved, of the pensioned audience. Though he couldn’t name the opera responsible, he recognized the music. It was the Dance of the Tumblers. Far from wakening him, it let a memory at him.
A few days after he’d seen Dorothy at the mirror, her mother had taken her and Lionel to the Imperial. She’d made them sit together as if that might crush whatever had come between them, but Dorothy had sat aside from him, knees protruding into the aisle. She had seemed to take half the evening to eat a tub of ice cream, until the scraping of the wooden spoon had started to grate on his nerves. As she’d lifted yet another delicate mouthful to her lips, the master of ceremonies had announced the Tiny Tumblers, and then her spoon had halted in mid-air. Two giant women had waddled onstage from the wings.
He’d never known if Dorothy had cowered against her seat because of their size or from guessing what was imminent. The long-haired square-faced figures had swayed to the footlights before the flowered ankle-length dresses had split open, each of them disgorging a totem-pole composed of three dwarfs in babies’ frilly outfits. The dwarfs had sprung from one another’s shoulders, leaving the dresses to collapse under the weight of the wigs, and piled down the stairs that flanked the stage. “Who’s coming for a tumble?” they’d croaked.
Lionel had felt Dorothy flinch away from the aisle, pressing against him. If she’d asked he would have changed places with her, but he’d thought he sensed how loath she was to touch him after his glimpse in her room. As two dwarfs had scurried towards her, swivelling their blocky heads and widening their eyes, he’d dealt her a covert shove. Her lurch and her squeak had attracted the attention of the foremost dwarf, who’d shambled fast at her. She’d jumped up, spilling ice cream over the lap of her skirt, and fled to the sanctuary of the Ladies‘. Her mother had needed to ask Lionel more than once to let her past to follow, he remembered with dismay. Part of him had wanted to find out what would happen if the dwarfs caught his cousin.