them. They had left it too long and too late, and now they were trapped—just as the old couple had been.
'Up the stairs—' Wimpy pawed at him '— carry me!'
Bastable bent down automatically at the word of com mand, and Wimpy followed it himself by flopping down across his shoulder in obvious preparation for a fireman's lift.
'Okay— oof!!' The next part of the command was cut off as Bastable stood up and Wimpy's head crashed against the barometer.
Bastable found himself staggering round in a circle. It wasn't that Wimpy was too heavy—he was actually much lighter than he looked ... but there was a mouthful of sausage stuck in Bastable's throat which he had forgotten about, but which now refused either to go down or come up while all his muscles were concentrating on holding his burden in position: he gagged and choked, and Wimpy's head hit something else—either the newel-post or the hat-stand—or maybe it was Wimpy's feet. . .
The sausage went down with a painful gulp; the stairs reared in front of him and he took them at the double, in a rush, driven upwards by the sound of the tanks outside. It occurred to him as he went up that the cellar—if the house had a cellar—would be a safer place in which to take refuge, But then, of course, that would probably be the first place the Germans would look.
The rush took him to the top of the stairs—and also to the dummy4
bleak thought that if the cellar wasn't safe, the bedrooms were hardly likely to be safer; he had come up here simply because Wimpy had told him to, and he was now accustomed to doing whatever Wimpy ordered for lack of any initiative on his own part. But unless Wimpy had another bright idea to go with his last order they were even more hopelessly trapped up here than at ground level.
There were only three doors to choose from on the tiny landing, and he was just about to ask if Wimpy had a preference when he caught sight of another stair through a gap in a curtain which at first glance he had dismissed as concealing a cupboard. Of course—the house had another floor above this one!
Driven by the same instinctive obedience which had taken him up the first stair, he plunged through the curtain up the second. It was much narrower and steeper—so narrow and steep that with Wimpy on his shoulder he could only keep his balance by accelerating up it with his face only inches from bare wooden treads in front of him, until he issued out through the square hole of a trap-door and fell sprawling on to the floorboards of the attic above.
The sole contents of the attic were two large tin trunks, wide open, with clothes strewn around them.
In between them, crouched under the eaves, was a little girl.
XIII
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Harry Bastable and the little French girl stared at each other in dumb horror.
Little girls, of all the different species of children, were tht worst, the very worst—
LOST CHILDREN ... in the case of female children, male staff will at once summon a lady assistant to deal with the child. On no account—
The very worst. Where he hated the mindlessness of babies he actively feared little girls—had feared them ever since that hideous occasion during his time as a trainee manager in London when one irate mother had reclaimed her lost child not with gratitude but with foul suspicions and wild threats—
Stop pawing at 'er, you dirty rotter — I saw you! I'll report you, I will—I know your sort—I'll report you, I will!'
He had only been trying to comfort her. She had put her arms round his neck, and she had seemed to like him, and he had only been trying to comfort her—he hadn't known what else to do to stop her crying.
In Bastable's of Eastbourne it had been different, it had been easy:
'Miss Brown! Miss Gartland! Mrs Summers—see to this child, please — at once!'
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The little French girl's chest inflated with one long shuddering breath, and Harry Bastable didn't know what to do—was incapable of either words or action—to stop her from crying it out, to quench the sound before it burst forth from her.
Miss Brown, Miss Hartland, Mrs Summers—
'Sssh! Sssh, ma petite—nous-somme-der-amis— sssh!'
Wimpy had rolled off him like a sack of potatoes, as though half-stunned, as he collapsed on to the attic floor a moment before. But now, incredibly, Wimpy was on his hands and knees—or on one hand and two knees, the other hand lifted into a finger at his lips cautioning the frightened child into silence.
"Sssh!'
The child lifted her hands to her face—two small, grubby hands tipped with black finger-nails—and subsided noiselessly through them. Bastable looked quickly from her back to Wimpy, and back to her again, and back to Wimpy, torn apart by relief, and by contempt for himself— Sssh! was a universal round: why hadn't Sssh! come to his lips?—and admiration for Wimpy's astonishing resilience in adversity, which made time stand still when there was no time left.
'Clothes!' said Wimpy.
'What?'
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'Clothes, man—clothes!' Wimpy rummaged in one of the tin trunks. 'Clothes, by god!'
He was ignoring the child now: he was kneeling beside the trunk, holding up one garment after another, throwing this one aside, measuring that one against himself, feverishly, as though his life depended on outfitting himself.
'What?'
'Look in the other one—don't just lie there, old boy—find yourself some togs . . . Ah! Now that's more like it ... and that
— go on, man, for Christ's sake—look in the other one!'
Wimpy spread his arms, crucifying himself against a blue-striped shirt as he spoke, then throwing the shirt down in a growing pile beside him. 'Yes—? No . . . Ah—'
It was unreal—it was a nightmare. Bastable rose to his knees and swivelled to the second trunk. He knew what Wimpy was about, but he didn't want to do what Wimpy intended, yet there was nothing he could do to stop the blighter, he knew that too: the nightmare wasn't unreal, it was truly and irrevocably what was happening to him.
An overpowering smell of camphor assailed him.
Layers of tissue paper, crumpled and uncrumpled—
A feather boa—long cylinders, which he knew contained ostrich feathers: his mother had ostrich feathers in cylinders just like that— ostrich feathers— from grandmother's day.
Dresses ... he tore the tissue paper from them. White silk—
white, but with a touch of yellowing age: white silk and lace dummy4
fluffed up ... It was a wedding dress—a wedding dress—
The old woman lay in the road in her black coat with the fur collar, her thin legs in their black stockings—and the carpet slippers, the carpet slippers —
The camphor-smell sickened him, and he felt his throat contracting and rising, summoning up the undigested garlic sausage from his stomach.
The wedding dress between the tissue paper—the carpet slippers in the dusty road, beside the ridiculous hand-cart piled with bundles—and the sweat cold on his forehead, and the vile garlic in his mouth— nightmare!
'You've got the woman's trunk—there'll be nothing in there . . . Here—try this ... try these, Harry—go on, take them, man—' Wimpy thrust garments into his hands.
Bastable looked down at what he had been given: a jacket of some sort... or more like a tunic ... of coarse blue denim cloth, old and patched and faded to a pale indeterminate blue-grey, with trousers to match. He had seen French labourers, wearing clothes like these in Colembert; if they belonged to the old man downstairs—the old man lying dead in his parlour, in the ruin of his home, with his wife lying dead in the road outside—they must date from another age, another time, many years ago, before the old man had come up in the world to the dignity of this ugly little house; and yet, for some reason, the old woman hadn't thrown them away, but had washed them and ironed them, and stowed dummy4