She did as she was told, however reluctant her feet were to move away from Charles and the heavenly blue car. Inside the house, voices were raised. Dimity knocked, but could tell that she hadn’t been heard. She edged cautiously into the kitchen just in time to see Élodie, so much taller than she had been, stamp her foot on the floor, fists clenched at the ends of rigid arms. Her black hair was cut into a shoulder-length bob that swung around her jaw as she yelled.
“I’m eight years old and I will wear what I like!” she said, her voice piercing and loud. Celeste turned from the sink and put her hands on her hips.
“You are eight years old and you will do as you’re told. Fais-moi des vacances! That is your best dress and those are your best shoes. We are in Dorset, by the sea. Take them off and find something more suitable to wear.” Celeste’s blue eyes were even more arresting than Dimity remembered. In anger, they seemed to glow.
“I hate all my clothes! They’re so ugly!”
“C’est ton problème. Go and get changed.”
“I will not!” Élodie screamed. Celeste fixed her with a look that would have made the blood run cold in Dimity’s veins had it been directed at her, even accustomed as she was to Valentina’s sudden assaults. Slowly, Élodie’s hands went limp, and her mouth opened a little, and a scorching blush flooded her face. She turned to run from the room and bumped straight into Dimity. “Oh, great! You’re here again. How simply marvelous!” she said, pushing past her.
“Merde. That child, she will fight me all the way!” Celeste sighed, pushing a hand through her heavy hair. “She is too much like me. Stubborn as a mule, and just as bad-tempered. Mitzy! Come and say hello.” She held her arms wide and Dimity stepped into a quick, surprising embrace. Delphine got up from the table, grinning. “How are you? You’ve grown! Even prettier than you were,” said Celeste, holding her at arm’s length. How could that be? Dimity thought of the long, biting winter; the chilblains on her toes, the way the wind chapped her cheeks and how long she and Valentina had gone without a decent, filling meal. Delphine was hovering excitedly next to her mother, and as soon as Celeste released Dimity, she stepped in to hug her, too. Dimity felt a rush of happiness, and something like relief; so powerful she thought for a second she might cry. Their affection was like a language she hardly knew, like occasional words emerging clearly from a confusing babble of sound.
She quickly rubbed at her eyes with her fingertips, and Delphine, seeing how moved she was, laughed with delight.
“It’s so nice to see you! We have so much to catch up on…” she said.
“Have you eaten, Mitzy?” asked Celeste.
“Yes, thank you.”
“But I bet you could eat more, right?” said Delphine, taking Dimity’s arm and looping it through her own. Dimity shuffled her feet and didn’t like to answer, when in truth the kitchen smelled wonderful, as usual. Celeste smiled.
“Don’t be polite, Mitzy. Say if you would like some,” she said.
“Yes, please. I would.” Celeste cut two thick slices of yellow cake and wrapped them in a napkin.
“I’ll have some, too-now I’ve finally stopped feeling sick from the journey. Daddy drives the new car so fast we get thrown about in the backseat like pinballs! We drove into the hedge at one point-there was a tractor coming the other way around a corner. You should have heard Élodie scream!”
“I saw you had cow parsley stuck under the metal at the front,” Dimity said, and Celeste smiled.
“So Charles introduced you to his new baby before he even let you come in and say hello? This is no surprise. I’m afraid he loves that thing more than he loves any of us,” she said.
“Not really, he doesn’t. Not more than us,” Delphine said, nudging Dimity’s shoulder when she took these words seriously.
“No. Like a child with a new toy. The thrill of it will start to fade before long,” said Celeste.
“Come on-let’s go down to the beach! I’ve been dying to go paddling. I thought about it all the time at school. They make us wear these awful itchy socks, even when it’s sunny.” Delphine towed Dimity towards the door.
“Ask Élodie to go with you,” Celeste called after them.
“Oh, all right.” Delphine sighed, leaning around the banister to shout up the stairs. “Hell-odee!” As they left the house and crossed the garden, Dimity turned to look for Charles. The car sat gleaming on the driveway, but there was no sign of its owner anywhere. Reluctantly, she looked away.
They spent that afternoon and the next catching up on all that they had seen and done in the intervening ten months since Delphine and her family had left Dorset. They roamed the fields and hedgerows picking herbs and spotting fledgling birds; keeping Élodie appeased with long loops of daisy chains around her neck and twisted garlands of poppies for her hair. They sat on the beach, at the high-tide line where a boundary of cuttlefish bones and dry, weightless fish eggs split the sand from the pebbles, watching Élodie do cartwheels and scoring her out of ten for each one, until she was breathless and red in the face, tired and dizzy enough to settle to some quiet task like drawing in the sand, collecting sea glass, or popping the blisters on a sheaf of bladder wrack. Delphine was particularly interested in hearing about Wilf Coulson, even though Dimity was deliberately vague on the subject of him.
“So, is he your boyfriend?” she asked, in hushed tones. She glanced up at her little sister, who was a silhouette against the sparkling sea, trailing a stick across the sand in ever-increasing circles.
“No! He’s not that!” said Dimity.
“But you’ve let him kiss you, you said?”
“Yes, I have. Not very often, just once in a while. When he’s been kind to me. Really he is just a friend, but you know what boys are like.”
“Do you think you’ll marry him?”
Dimity laughed easily, and for a while tried to pretend she had many offers, many alternatives. Plenty of time to wait. “I doubt it. He’s a bit skinny, and his mother hates my guts and no mistake. I don’t think he’d even dare tell his pa he goes about with me sometimes. Though I may tell him myself one day-he comes down to see my ma often enough.” As soon as she spoke, Dimity regretted the words.
“Why does he do that?”
“Oh, you know. To buy remedies and the like. To hear his fortune,” she invented hastily, the lie making her face flush.
“I know who I’m going to marry,” said Delphine, lying back with her hands clasped behind her head. “I’m going to marry Tyrone Power.”
“Is that a boy at your school?” Dimity asked, and Delphine laughed.
“Don’t be daft! There are no boys at my school. Tyrone Power! Haven’t you seen Lloyd’s of London? Oh, he is just divine… the most divine man who ever lived.”
“Is he a movie star, then? However will you meet him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. But I will-and I will marry him or die alone,” Delphine declared with quiet certainty. They paused to reflect on this, listening to the scratching sounds of Élodie’s spiraling, the constant susurration of the restless water. “Mitzy? What’s it like? Kissing a boy?” Delphine asked at length. Dimity considered this for some time.
“I don’t know really. I thought it was disgusting at first, like having a dog push its wet nose into your face. But after a while it’s okay, I suppose. I mean it’s nice.”