Could she have seen Dorothy chased by the dwarfs? “I don’t,” Lionel said warily, “ah…”
“We saw you at the concert yesterday.”
“Heard me. you mean.” When that fell short of earning him even a hint of a grin, Lionel said “I expect I’ll be able to contain myself.”
The man jabbed a stubby finger at the empty seat. “On your own?”
“Like yourselves.”
“Our granddaughter’s one of Miss Merritt’s Moppets.”
His tone was more accusing than Lionel cared to understand. “Good luck to her,” he said, indifferent to whether he sounded sarcastic., and turned his back.
As the curtains parted, the child beside him turned her volume up. He put the empty seat between them, only to hear the sharp-nosed woman cough with displeasure and change seats with her husband. Before long Lionel’s head began to ache with trying not to wonder how Helen and her boyfriend were behaving, and he couldn’t enjoy the show. He squirmed in his seat as the moppets in their white tutus pranced onstage. At least they weren’t dwarfs, he thought and squirmed again, growing red-faced as another cough was aimed at him.
He had no wish to face the couple at the end of the show. He remained seated until he realized they might see Helen outside and mention it to Carol. He struggled up the packed aisle and succeeded in leaving the theater before they did. Helen was waiting on the chipped marble steps. She half turned, and he saw she was in tears. “Oh dear,” he murmured, “what now?”
“We had a fight.”
“An argument, I trust you mean.” When she nodded or her head slumped, he said “I’m sure it’ll turn out to be just a hiccup.” She only turned away, leaving him to whisper “Shall we hurry home? We don’t want anybody knowing you were meant to be with me.”
They were opposite the ramp down which she’d vanished with her boyfriend when she began to sob. Lionel urged her over to the far corner of her street while Carol’s guests passed by. Once they’d had ample time to reach their room and Helen’s sobs had faltered into silence he said “Will you be up to going in now, do you think?”
“I’ll have to be, won’t I?”
Her maturity both impressed and disconcerted him. Each of them pulled out a key, and he would have made a joke of it if he’d been sure she would respond. He let her open the front door and followed her in, only to flinch from bumping into her. Carol and the couple from the theater were talking in the hall.
They fell silent and gazed at the newcomers. As Lionel struggled to decide whether he should hurry upstairs or think of a comment it would be crucial for him to make, the sharp-nosed woman said “I see you found yourself a young companion after all.”
Her husband cleared his throat. Presumably he thought it helpful to tell Carol “My wife means he was on his own at the show.”
Carol stared at Helen and then shifted her disapproval to Lionel. Her face grew blank before she told them “I think you should both go to bed. I’ll have plenty to say in the morning.”
“Mummy…”
“Don’t,” Carol said, even more harshly when Lionel tried to intervene.
“I think we’d better do as we’re told,” he advised Helen, and trudged upstairs ahead of her. Just now his room offered more asylum than anywhere else in the house., and he attempted to hide in his bed and the dark. His guilt was lying in wait for him—his realization that rather than make up for anything he might have done to Dorothy, he’d let down both Carol and Helen. He heard Helen shut her door with a dull suppressed thud and listened apprehensively for her mother’s footfall on the stairs. He’d heard nothing further when exhaustion allowed sleep to overtake him.
A muffled cry roused him. Heat and darkness made him feel afloat in a stagnant bath. As he strained his ears for a repetition of the cry he was afraid that it might have been Helen’s—that he’d caused her mother to mistreat her in some way he winced from imagining. When he heard another sound he had to raise his shaky head before he could identify it. Some object was bumping rhythmically against glass.
He kicked off the quilt and stumbled to drag the curtains apart. There was nothing at the window, nothing to be seen through it except guest-houses slumbering beyond a streetlamp. He hauled the sash all the way up and leaned across the sill, but the street was deserted. He was peering along it when the muffled thumping recommenced behind him.
As he stalked towards it he refused to believe where it was coming from. He took hold of the mirror by its bunch of wrists, which not only felt unhealthily warm but also seemed to be vibrating slightly in time with the sound. He gripped them with both hands and turned the glass towards him. It was full of Dorothy’s outraged face, glaring straight at him.
She was so intensely present that he could have thought there was no mirror, just her young woman’s face balanced on the doubly paralyzed hands. More and worse than shock made his arms tremble, but he was unable to drop the mirror. In a moment Dorothy’s forehead ceased thudding against the glass and shrank into it as though she was being hauled backwards. The ankle-length white dress she wore—the kind of garment in which he imagined she’d been buried—" bulging vigorously in several places. He knew why before a dwarf’s head poked up through the collar, ripping the fabric, to fasten on Dorothy’s mouth. His outline made it clear that he’d shinnied up by holding onto her breasts. Her left sleeve tore, revealing the squarish foot of a dwarf who was inverted somewhere under the dress. Then she was borne away into darkness so complete she oughtn’t to be visible, even for Lionel’s benefit. He saw a confusion of feet scurrying beneath the hem. One pair vanished up the dress, and her body set about jerking in the rhythm of the dwarf who had clambered her back.
The worst thing was that Lionel recognized it all. It had lived in his mind for however many years, too deep for thought and so yet more powerful, and now Dorothy had become the puppet of his fantasy. He supposed that to be at his mercy the dwarfs were dead too. He didn’t know if he was desperate to repudiate the spectacle or release the participants as he flung the mirror away from him.
It was toppling over the windowsill when he tried to snatch it back. He saw Dorothy’s face plummeting out of reach as though he’d doubled her helplessness. As he craned over the sill, the button at the waist of his pyjamas snapped its thread. The mirror struck the roof of his Mini, which responded like a bass drum. One marble finger split off and skittered across the dent the impact had produced. The mirror tottered on the metal roof, and Lionel dashed out of the room.
He was scrabbling at the front-door latch while he clutched his trousers shut when he heard the mirror slide off the car and shatter. The chill of the concrete seized his bare feet like a premonition of how cold they would end up. The marble hands had been smashed into elegant slivers surrounded by fragments of glass, but the oval that had contained the mirror was intact. He hardly knew why he stooped to collect the glass in it. When his trousers sagged around his ankles he had no means of holding them up. Not until lights blazed between curtains above him did he realize that several of Carol’s guests were gazing down at him.
* * *
In the morning Carol said very little to him beyond “I’m sorry you’re leaving, but I won’t have anyone in my house going behind my back.”
This reminded him of his last glimpse of Dorothy, and he had to repress a hysterical laugh. He bumped his suitcase all the way downstairs in the hope that would bring Helen out of her room, but to no avail. “Shall I just go up and say goodbye?” he almost pleaded.
“Madam isn’t receiving visitors at the moment.”