"But gor' love a duck, guv'nor, I'm not on today, I'm tellin' yer."
"I spoke up to tell her, and then that silly ass of a prisoner's friend, Dakers, asked if he should go to find you, even went on to say he happened to know you had slept in after all. But it passed, anyway for a time. The thing is, my lad, I think you ought to put in an appearance."
"That goes for the two of us, then," Mr Birt said in a last attempt to keep up his attitude. "I seen you dashin' about the grounds."
"I made my excuses prettily," she answered, again with some impatience. "There's one of the girls still loose, after all."
"Oh it's my fault," Elizabeth broke out in a wail, while Miss Winstanley observed, not for the first time, how a person's lipstick, when it was smudged halfway to her nose, wounded the whole face like a bullet. "We took what's her name back, you see, then we thought, well it was only natural really, my grandfather's all alone, I had to get dinner, so the thing is, and of course we didn't know they were coming, we just began to walk along but as a matter of fact it was my fault. I know I'm silly but you've heard, haven't you, I haven't been really well, and I asked Seb to see me to the cottage, so foolish when you come to think, as though it was dead of night, in time of course, but then I have been made rather nervous. What I mean is, we none of us know, do we?"
"Don't you fuss, my dear," Mr Birt said in his natural voice, which Winstanley heard so seldom that she was not sure to recognise it, "I'll take you, then I'll nip along and go on duty," he ended, lamely.
"Look Sebastian," the other woman said, "If I were you I'd get there right away. Make some excuse to show yourself."
"But gor' love a duck, what went on, then, at their extry special meeting you're so wrought up about?" he asked, returning to his best cockney, which he knew only from books.
"It was old Edge, "Winstanley told him. "Studying her as I have to I think it was to set her mind at rest. Baker's not much in a crisis. She wanted our support, or so she said. If you ask me, I think she just had us all in to explain what she intended not to do. In other words, to cover herself by being able to say she'd had a staff meeting to discuss 'this unprecedented occurrence', and that we'd all decided, in an ad hoc committee, to proceed on a certain course."
"Which is?" he enquired, in his ordinary voice.
"Why to do nothing at all," she answered. He came out with a disgustingly high, screamed laugh.
"Seb," Miss Rock protested sharply. He broke off at once.
"Well Sebastian, I don't know what else they, or we, can be about. They can't set the girls on to search," Winstanley said. She was distressed. "Well now we're not sure what they'll find, are we? We don't want general hysterics. And they've told the police. Dakers has it for a fact the roads are to be watched within a radius of twenty miles. The sergeant left an hour ago after he'd seen Edge. Besides I believe Merode's told some story which doesn't sound too improbable and is reasonably reassuring." Most of this was false, if Miss Winstanley had only known. The child had said nothing. "But you'd better make a show. I would if I were you. We're all to keep our eyes sharp open, she says."
"I won't ask what else I'm a'doin' of," he commented, "an' in their Park into the bargain, where it will likely do most good," he said.
"No Seb," Elizabeth Rock spoke out. "You're not to… I can't imagine why. . it's so silly after Miss Winstanley's been so kind. Go back at once, I'm sure Gapa would say that, yes, at once, don't clown."
"Look here, let me walk you back," the other woman offered.
"All right then," Birt said, and went off fast towards the Institute, without another word.
"I haven't been quite well, I had a breakdown at work," Elizabeth told Miss Winstanley, as they set out along a great hill of rhododendron twelve foot high with flowers the colour of blood, and the colour of the flesh of bathers in open air in sunless country. Winstanley, as she bent her head to listen, took her companion's hand in hers as a sort of tribute to this woman's being drenched with love. But after a few yards she let go of that hot hand.
"Would you like my mirror?" she asked, and rummaged in her bag.
Lunch at the Institute this day was cold, to allow Mrs Blain time to prepare the buffet for their dance. The students waited at long linen covered trestles for Miss Baker and Miss Edge. The noise of their talking was a twitter of a thousand starlings.
The hall in which they took their meals was that used whenever there was an entertainment. The tables could be removed, were lightly constructed, as also High Table, on a dais at which the staff were served, and which could be taken to pieces although built to a massive, shining, mahogany front. Behind it, neatly stacked in a great pile or pyre on the floor, was a mass of cut azalea and rhododendron the seniors had gathered to decorate the room later, but in time for their gramophone when this was set to endlessly repeat one valse. When the staff filed in, Edge and Baker bringing up the rear, that clatter of conversation stilled as, with a rustle of a thousand birds rising from willows about a warm lagoon, the girls stood in silence to mark the entrance. Then, after Miss Edge had been last to sit down, the three hundred budding State Servants, with another outburst of talk as of starlings moving between clumps of reeds to roost, in their turn left to collect plates of cold meat and vegetables ready laid out in the kitchen.
"Ah Marchbanks," Miss Edge called out above the bustle, "I see they have not neglected our tamasha." She was looking at the mass of flowers.
"I'd thought pine branches with salt," that woman answered with a blush. "So cool, in this hot weather, for the Dance. A soupcon of snow," she elaborated.
"Indeed," Edge said, unenthusiastic, while conversation, for the moment, became general around High Table.
"In their white dresses," Marchbanks explained, painting the picture.
"I hesitate to think what our Supervisor would say," Edge objected, referring to a Government Inspector whose visits, in order to check up, were exhaustive and unannounced.
"Yes, there is that of course," Marchbanks agreed.
"What a time they are being, Baker, with our luncheon," said Miss Edge. And her confidence was now such that she continued, having for the moment forgotten, "What can have happened to Mary and her girls?"
It was Mary whose privilege it had been to serve them, each day almost. Right from the very first she had shewn such diligence.
Miss Baker winced. Once more she closed her eyes. There was a noticeable pause.
Winstanley offered up a topic to bridge the awkwardness.
"Ma'am," she said. "Have you ever thought of Chinese pheasants for our grounds?"
"Chinese?" Miss Edge enquired.
"The plumage," Winstanley explained. "A perfect red and gold. They aren't any trouble either, they live off the land."
"I seem to remember Mr Birt telling us there was no such thing," Edge expatiated, with a glance of malice at this man.
"Ah," he said, bowed in her direction, and assumed a close imitation of Mr Rock's party manner which they could all recognise. "We admit of no domestic animal as self sufficient under the State. But it would certainly add a touch of Babylonian splendour to the walks."
"It might startle his goose," Edge objected with a knowing look. All laughed at this allusion, Sebastian Birt excessively.
"They need no attention, ma'am, for sure," Winstanley insisted. "They roost in the nearest tree, and feed off acorns."
"Like cats and pigs then," Miss Edge said, with a smirk benign.
"Where I was brought up there used to be a black and white farm," Baker announced. "A half timbered place, piebald horses, black and white poultry and so on."
"I often wish I had been reared in the country," Edge said, throwing a bright smile at her colleague to mark this lady's return into the fold of conversation. "Sometimes I wonder if our girls appreciate how fortunate they are to find themselves in magnificent Parks and Woodlands."