With the house to play with, it was not too hard not to worry. After Hattie had had her glimpse of the town they settled down to arrange and inhabit. Hattie’s trunk and box of books had come. They set out books and hung up clothes. They moved the furniture about. Hattie placed on her chest of drawers the brown china rabbit scratching his ear, the sleek black slug-like Eskimo seal, and the little pink-and-white Japanese vase, into which she put some primroses which she had intrepidly picked down at the Forum Way end of the garden. They had run about everywhere and opened every drawer and every cupboard and swung out every painted shutter. In a room downstairs they had been startled to open a cupboard door and be confronted by a staring bevy of little gods, made out of clay and papier mâché and painted in gaudy colours. These were Alex’s old ‘fetishes’ which she had meant to remove, but had forgotten when she ‘gave up’ the Slipper House after learning that it was not destined to contain John Robert. She had removed the paint and brushes, sad picturesque reminders of her old life as a failed painter, but she had left the little gods behind. Hattie had carried one of them, a red dog-headed thing with staring eyes, up to her bedroom to join the rabbit and the seal and the Japanese vase, but some superstitious scruple soon made her return him to his cupboard. On her first night alone Pearl had elected to sleep in the smaller bedroom which faced Belmont (which Alex had destined for John Robert’s study) rather than the larger room (with the dog and the airship) which looked down the rest of the garden toward the back gate. But Hattie, when she came, had preferred the view towards Belmont because it contained a birch tree and the copper beech and the ginkgo.
‘I suppose I really ought to go and see Mrs McCaffrey tomorrow.’
‘The professor said not to bother her. I told her we’d come. We’ll meet her in the garden.’
‘I suppose we can go in the garden.’
‘He didn’t say anything about the garden.’
‘How near the trains sound in the night air. Did you lock the door?’
‘Yes.’
They were sitting in Hattie’s bedroom, Hattie in her mauve-and-white long-sleeved school nightdress. Pearl in a dark blue petticoat and dark blue stockings. Hattie sat on the bed, Pearl in one of the oriental bamboo chairs. They sat up straight, intent, alert, as at a meeting. Hattie’s almost silver hair was in a long thick plait down her back; it had a strange sleek vegetable look, like something which might be found growing in an exotic tree. Her marble-pale eyes roved anxiously as if she might suddenly see, in what surrounded her, some unexpected fault or void. One hand was at her lips, while the other touched her brow as if settling or adjusting some dim turban-like aura which hung about her head. Her childish complexion was smooth and translucent, unmarked by any line. Tonight Pearl did not look her stern age. She had just washed her dark brown hair, bringing out reddish lights in it, as it hovered for a brief time buoyant and frizzy about her face. Even tomorrow it would be darker and straighter and stiff once more. Sometimes Pearl’s sallow brow and the thin nose which ran from it so unwaveringly straight, like a line drawn down to point to her thin straight mouth, had a brownish puckered look which could almost be described as ‘weather-beaten’. Today, Pearl’s brownness was waxen, handsome, slightly burnished, touched as by a southern sun, and her brown-green eyes were pensive and not fierce.
‘I must mend this nightie. Look, it’s tearing at the shoulder.’
‘I’ll mend it,’ said Pearl, ‘just leave it around tomorrow.’
‘No, why should you mend my clothes?’
Pearl did not answer this question. A kind of unnerving background to such questions had been assembling itself for some time. She said instead, ‘It’s time you bought some more clothes. You are a funny girl, most girls are mad about clothes.’
‘I’m not,’ said Hattie. Then she said, ‘We must save money.’
This gave another of those unnerving vistas.
‘We?’ In fact Pearl was saving money, she saved a lot of her own salary, and she had also saved Hattie’s money in that it had so far proved difficult to persuade Hattie, who was still remarkably indifferent to clothes and ‘good living’ generally, to spend much of it. ‘The professor’ (as Pearl always called him) did not inquire, and Pearl did not feel it her duty to tell him that Hattie’s allowance was piling up in the bank. One day Hattie might need that money. Pearl, with her straight thin nose and her straight thin mouth, kept her head, and this ‘keeping’ included not speculating too much about the giddy-making openness of the future. She was glad that the money, hers and Hattie’s, was there; and this, her relief, and Hattie’s, in all the circumstances so puzzling and question-raising ‘we’, brought up for them something which was distressing. Although they never said so, neither of them altogether trusted Rozanov, so powerful, so unpredictable, so extremely peculiar.
‘Wouldn’t you like to go to London to buy some clothes? We could make a sensible list. There are things you need.’
‘No, Pearl, no. I want to stay here.’
‘Then we could go to Bowcocks, that’s the big shop in Ennistone.’
‘No. When I say here I mean here. I want to stay in this house and hide. I’m so happy here with you. Let’s not get involved with other people and going about.’
‘Hattie, dear heart, you mustn’t hide, it’s bad for you. Now you’ve left school.’
‘Oh I know, I know — ’
Tears were suddenly in Hattie’s eyes.
Pearl ignored them. ‘You must come into the town, you must come swimming, you know you love swimming.’
Hattie had heard about the Baths. The idea of the hot spring tempted her.
‘But people would see me. Well, I suppose they wouldn’t bother because they wouldn’t know who I was, and why should they bother even then? But I don’t want to be looked at. I couldn’t wear a bikini.’
‘Why not? People do here!’
‘I’ll get a proper costume, I don’t want to wear a bikini any more anyway.’
‘So we’ll have to go to the shops!’
‘I think I won’t go to the Baths, it must be so public.’
Pearl recalled Ruby’s remarks about ‘people laughing’. Of course the news about Rozanov’s granddaughter must be all round Ennistone. The curiosity about Hattie would be intense, and not altogether benevolent. Hattie’s fear at being looked at was prophetically just. Pearl said, ‘Oh don’t be so silly.’
‘Pearl.’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘About sex.’
‘Oh!’
‘I know we’ve talked about it and I didn’t want to ask you what you didn’t want to say.’
Pearl did not help Hattie out with her questions.
‘Pearl, whatever is it like?’
Pearl laughed. ‘You mean — ’
‘Oh, you know I know everything - but - don’t laugh - I know - and I’ve read - but what is it really like?’
‘You mean, is it nice?’
‘I just don’t see how it can be. Am I very odd? I find the whole idea absolutely disgusting.’
Pearl did not say, as she was suddenly tempted to, that that was exactly how she had found it. She said, ‘You’re not odd, just childish, like a girl from the past. Most girls of your age - Hattie, don’t worry about it. It all depends on people. If the man is nice sex is nice, I daresay.’