Just before the house was completely razed, the bulldozers went into the scrub at Xanadu. The steel caterpillars mounted the rise, to say nothing of any sapling, or shrubby growth that stood in their way, and down went resistance. The wirier clumps might rise again, tremblingly, on their nerves, as it were, but would be fixed forever on a later run. Gashes appeared upon what had been the lawns. Gaps were grinning in the shrubberies. Most savage was the carnage in the rose garden, where the clay which Norbert Hare had had carted from somewhere else opened up in red wounds, and the screeching of metal as it ploughed and wheeled, competed with the agony of old rosewood, torn off at the roots, and dragged briefly in rough faggots. A mobile saw was introduced to deal with those of the larger trees which offered commercial possibilities. The sound of its teeth eating into timber made the silence spin, and they were sober individuals indeed, who were able to inhale the smell of destruction without experiencing a secret drunkenness. Many of those present were forced to steady themselves. Because most of the inhabitants of Sarsaparilla came down to watch the garden being cleared, just as they had felt the need to assist at the demolition of the house. In time even the indifferent, the timid, the indolent, the unaware, and the invalid had taken part. Only Mrs Godbold appeared untouched by these historic local events, but remained more or less unnoticed, as a person of little substance and no importance. Only dimly was a woman seen to emerge from a shed, and hang out the washing. The thick arms were reaching repeatedly up, and there were the loops of limp, transparent linen, hanging at first so heavy, then twitching at a corner, lifting at last, blowing, in glad, white flags. Mrs Godbold, when she was noticed at all, seemed to live for irrelevance. In the course of her life, she had developed a love and respect for common objects and trivial acts. Did they, perhaps, conceal a core, reveal a sequence? Whatever the explanation, she would go about planting a row of beans, not as though she were covering seed, rather as if she were learning a secret of immense importance, over and over. She would go amongst her pots of ferns, freeing the young crooks from the bonds of spiders. In her later years at least, she might sit for sometimes half an hour beside her ironing table, in the shed where it seemed by then she was ordained to live. Obviously, the scored surface of the yellow board, together with the various vessels and utensils of her office, could not have been housed anywhere else with due sacral dignity. So she and they remained enshrined. There she would sit, at the mercy of the sun, squinting, or it could have been smiling for such glimmers of truth as she had been allowed to glimpse. But then, Mrs Godbold was such a very simple person. Always there. Nobody could remember having seen her except in some such cotton dress, a cardigan in winter, or the perennial flared overcoat. Her massive form had never altered, except to grow more massive in its pregnancies. If she indulged herself at all in her almost vegetable existence, it was to walk a little way down the hill, before the children returned, after the breeze had got up in the south, to walk and look, it seemed incuriously, at the ground, pursued by a galloping cat. Then she might turn, and call. "Tib! Tib! Tib!" she would call, and: "Poor Tibby! Nobody was going to leave you!" And gather up her many-angled cat, into her bosom, and laugh for the joy of giving shelter, holding up her throat to the sun; it was as though a trumpet were being raised. If she had been worthy of notice, Mrs Godbold's simplicity might have become proverbial.
The farthest tables were always the most coveted. There one was in a position to view the room from the slight eminence of a platform, and never be outstared. One of those desirable tables had been reserved for the three ladies advancing down the ash-infested carpet, clinging to the chromium handrail to prevent their heels pitching them head first at their goal. But the handrail, to say nothing of their appearance, lent them a certain crazy dignity. All the cutlery on all the tables seemed to applaud their arrival. If there had been an orchestra, it would have played them down the stairs, but there was never any music at lunch, beyond the sustained pizzicato of conversation; words might ping their way without deflection into the unprotected eardrum. These were obviously three ladies of importance who had reached the safety of the floor after the dangers of the street stairs. They stood around, agreeably helpless, while waiters flew like homing swallows. From the tables, early patrons craned outrageously, which might have been disquieting to the objects of their interest if it had not been desired. For the three ladies were wearing rather amusing hats. The first, and perhaps least confident of the three, had chosen an enormous satin bon-bon, of screeching pink, swathed so excessively on one side that the head conveyed an impression of disproportion, of deformity, of bulbous growth. But the uncertain lady was palpitating with her own daring, and glanced at the closer of her two companions, fishing for a scrap of praise. Her friend would not concede it, however. For the second lady was secure in her own seasoned carapace, and would not have recognized her acquaintance except by compulsion. The second lady was wearing on her head a lacquered crab-shell. She was quite oblivious of it, of course. But there it sat, one real claw offering a diamond starfish, the other dangling a miniature conch in polished crystal. The unconscious wearer had divested herself conventionally of her gloves, and was restoring suppleness to her hands. As she tried her nails on the air, it was seen that those, by some chance, were exactly the same shade of audacious crab. How the waiters adored the three insolent ladies, but it was at the third and obviously eldest that their most Italianate smiles were directed. The third, or by now, the first lady, affected the most amusing hat of all. On her blue curls she had perched an innocent little conical felt, of a drab, an earth colour, so simple and unassuming that the owner might have been mistaken for some old, displaced clown, until it was noticed that fashion had tweaked the felt almost imperceptibly, and that smoke-yes, actual smoke-was issuing out of the ingenious cone. There she stood at the centre of the smart restaurant in her volcanic hat, her mouth crimped with pleasure, for she had reached an age of social innocence where she was again dependent on success. So she smiled, in the abstract, for the blinding bulbs of two photographers, and because she was trying to ignore the arthritis in her knees. Soon the ladies were as comfortably arranged as their clothes and their ailments would allow. All three had accepted advice to order lobster Thermidor, in spite of a heretical _gaucherie__ on the part of the Satin Bon-bon, who had to remark on the popularity of shellfish. "Dare we?" she had sniggered. "Is it tactful?" Too pleased for her provincial joke. The Crab-Shell saw that the Bon-bon had a natural gap between her centre upper teeth, which gave her an expression both vulgar and predatory. But the Volcano no longer had to notice more than she wanted, or needed to. She leaned forward, and said with an irrelevance not without its kind of tired charm, "You are two people I have been longing to bring together, because I feel that you can become an influence for good on the Committees." The Crab-Shell was incredulous, but polite. Even the speaker did not appear to believe entirely in what she had said, for she added vaguely, "What I mean to say is that friendship-the personal touch-is better able to achieve charitable objectives. And I do want the Harlequin Ball to be a great success." "Jinny is a darling. But an idealist. Isn't that pure idealism, Mrs Wolf son?" the Crab-Shell asked, turning to the Bonbon, not because she wanted to, but because it was part of a technique. Nor did she allow an answer, but went off into a studied neighing, which produced in her that infusion of redness peculiar to most hard women. The whole operation proved, moreover, that her neck was far too muscular. The Volcano put her old, soft, white hand on the Crab-Shell's stronger, brownish one. "Mrs Colquhoun and I have been friends so long, I doubt we could misunderstand each other," the Volcano said, addressing Mrs Wolfson. Trying to bring the latter in, though only succeeding in keeping her out. "Idealism again!" neighed Mrs Colquhoun, as if she would never rid her system of its mirth. She had been several years without a husband. "I am an idealist," said Mrs Wolfson carefully, "like Mrs Chalmers-Robinson. That is why I think it is so important to help these little spastic children. Mr Wolfson-who is an idealist too-has promised us a nice fat cheque over and above the takings at the Ball." "Splendid!" cried Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, paying for charity with charity. "Oh, it is most important to do good," asserted Mrs Wolfson, slowly negotiating the fillets of her lobster Thermidor. It was most laudable, but the more carefully Mrs Wolfson rounded out her words, the more Mrs Colquhoun was convinced she could detect the accents of that Dorothy Drury, from whom she, too, had taken a course in the beginning, and almost forgotten. Mrs Colquhoun felt less than ever prepared to endure her neighbour Mrs Wolfson. "Take the Church," the latter continued, "Mr Wolfson-Louis," she corrected, catching sight of Mrs Colquhoun, "my husband is all for assisting the Church. At Saint Mark's Church of England, which we attend regularly, he has given the fluorescent lighting, and although a very busy man, he is about to organize a barbecue." Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had fixed her still handsome eyes on something distant and intangible. "Lovely old church!" she intoned in traditional key. She loved star sapphires, and powder-blue. The remnants of her beauty seemed to demand tranquillity. "Then you will know Canon Ironside." Mrs Colquhoun dared Mrs Wolfson not to. Under her inquisitor's wintry eye, the latter was glad of the protection of mutation mink, and settled deeper into it. "Before my time." She coughed. It was a gift to Mrs Colquhoun. "But I am pretty certain," she calculated, "the canon did not leave for Home above, I should say, six, certainly no more than seven, months ago." Mrs Wolfson contemplated her plateful of forbidden sauce. Food had made her melancholy. "Yes, yes." The bon-bon bobbed. "We did not attend prior to that." At the wretched little impersonal table, her two friends were waiting for something of a painful, but illuminating nature to occur. "I was married in Saint Mark's Church of England," Mrs Wolfson ventured, and showed that gap which Mrs Colqu-houn so deplored, between her upper centre teeth. "And you were not done by Canon Ironside?" Mrs Colqu-houn persisted. "Sheila only recently married Louis Wolfson," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson explained. "He is her second." "Yes," sighed Mrs Wolfson, trying chords on the cutlery that remained to her. "Haïm-Harry passed on." But Mrs Colquhoun might have been unhappier than Mrs Wolfson. In all that restaurant the hour seemed to have hushed the patrons. The eyes, glancing about through their slits, began to accuse the mask of being but a dry disguise. It was too early to repair a mouth that must be destroyed afresh. So the women sat. Even Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, of certain inner resources, it had been implied, though of a fragile nature, had ceased to vibrate. For the moment she mistrusted memory, because she might have remembered men. All the women in the room could have been visited by the same thought: that the men went first, that the intolerable, but necessary virtuosi died of their virtuosity, whereas the instruments they had played upon, and left, continued from habit to twang and murmur. Momentarily the instruments were still. Although they must begin again, since silence is the death of music. So Mrs Chalmers-Robinson listened, and heard herself distantly vibrate. She had fastened on her face the fixed, blue, misty expression, which of all the disguises in her possession had won her most acclaim, and which she would have labelled Radiance. She said, "I was confirmed at Saint Mark's. I can remember the veins on the backs of the bishop's hands. I knelt on the wrong step. I was so nervous, so intense. I think I expected some kind of miracle." "I am told they can happen!" Mrs Colquhoun laughed, and looked over her shoulder at the emptying room. "My little girl was interested in miracles when she was younger," Mrs Wolf son remarked. Her companions waited for the worst. "She had a nervous breakdown," the mother informed. "_Ach__, yes, beginning and ending is difficult for women! But my Rosie is working for a florist now. Not because she has to, of course. (There is her own father's business, which the boy is managing very competently. And Louis-the soul of generosity.) But a florist is so clean. And Mr Wolf son-Louis-thought it might have some therapeutic value." All three ladies had ordered ice cream, with fruit salad, and marshmallow sauce. They were pleased they were agreed on that. "Then, you know Saint Mark's." Mrs Wolfson harked back, and smiled. It was comforting to return to a subject. She would have liked to feel at home. "I have not been for years. Except, of course, to weddings. You see, I became interested in Science," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson said. "In Science!" Now Mrs Wolfson could not believe. "_Christian__ Science, Jinny means," Mrs Colquhoun explained. Everyone listened to the word drop. Mrs Wolfson might by this time have called out: All right, all right, it dogs you like your shadow, but you get used to it at last, and a shadow cannot harm. Instead, she said, "You don't say!" And noted down Science in her mind, to investigate at a future date. "You should try it," suggested Mrs Colquhoun, and laughed, but it became a yawn, and she had to turn her head. "I do not believe Science ever really took on with Europeans," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson earnestly remarked. "I _adore__ Europeans," said Mrs Colquhoun, looking at the almost empty room. She did, too. She collected consuls, excepting those who were really black. It bewildered Mrs Wolfson. First she had learnt not to be, and now she must learn what she had forgot. But she would remember. Life, for her too, had been a series of disguises, which she had whisked on, and off, whether Sheila Wolfson, or Shirl Rosetree, or Shulamith Rosenbaum, as circumstances demanded. So the black, matted girl settled herself inside the perm, behind the powdered cleavage, under the mutation mink. She was reassured. "Speaking of miracles," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson said, "Mrs Colquhoun lived for some years at Sarsaparilla." The informant advanced her face over the table to the point at which confidences are afterwards exchanged. "Sarsaparilla!" exclaimed Mrs Colquhoun with some disgust. "One could not continue living at Sarsaparilla. Nobody lives at Sarsaparilla now. " "But the miracle?" Mrs Wolfson dared, in spite of her foreboding. "There was no miracle." Mrs Colquhoun frowned. She was most annoyed. Her mouth, her chin had almost disappeared. "I understood," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson murmured, her smile conveying disbelief, "something of a supernatural kind." She was too old, too charming, to allow that indiscretion on her part was indiscretion. "No question of any miracle," Mrs Colquhoun was repeating. A stream of melted ice cream threatened to spill from one corner of what had been her mouth. "Certainly," she admitted, "there was an unpleasant incident, I am told, at Barranugli. Certain drunken thugs, and ignorant, not to say hysterical,