At the start of their second winter one of the Laceys came down to investigate. This was Ron, the hotelkeeper. He had dark hair and was thin and pale and walked softly. When he understood that what Barbara had written about servants and dollars was true, he asked to see the accounts. There were none. He talked to Barbara without raising his voice; that day she let everyone working for her go with the exception of the cook, whom Ron had said she was to keep because of Alec. He seemed to feel he was in a position of trust, for he ordered her — there was no other word for it — to place the children at once in the Rivabella town schooclass="underline" Lou Mas was costing the Lacey brothers enough in local taxes — they might as well feel they were getting something back. He called his sister “Bab” and Alec “Al.” The children’s parents suddenly seemed to them strangers.
When Ron left, Barbara marched the children up to Rivabella and made them look at the church. They had seen it, but she made them look again. She held the mistaken belief that religion was taught in French state schools, and she wanted to arm them. The children knew by now that what their mother called “France” was not really France down here but a set of rules, a code for doing things, such as how to recite the multiplication table or label a wine. Instead of the northern saints she remembered, with their sorrowful preaching, there was a southern St. Damian holding up a blazing sword. Any number of persons had seen him; Mademoiselle had, more than once.
“I want you to understand what superstition is,” said Barbara, in clear, carrying English. “Superstition is what is wrong with Uncle Ron. He believes what he can’t see, and what he sees he can’t believe in. Now, imagine intelligent people saying they’ve seen this — this apparition. This St. George, or whatever.” The church had two pink towers, one bearing a cross and the other a weather vane. St. Damian usually hovered between them. “In armor,” said Barbara.
To all three children occurred, “Why not?” Protect me, prayed the girl. Vanquish, said Will. Lead, ordered the youngest, seeing only himself in command. He looked around the square and said to his mother, “Could we go, soon, please? Because people are looking.”
That winter Molly grew breasts; she thought them enormous, though each could have been contained easily in a small teacup. Her brothers teased her. She went about with her arms crossed. She was tall for her age, and up in the town there was always some man staring. Elderly neighbors pressed her close. Major Lamprey, calling on Alec, kissed her on the mouth. He smelled of gin and pipe smoke. She scrubbed her teeth for minutes afterward. When she began to menstruate, Barbara said, “Now, Molly, you are to keep away from men,” as if she weren’t trying to.
The boys took their bicycles and went anywhere they wanted. In the evening they wheeled round and round the church square. Above them were swallows, on the edge of the square men and boys. Both were starting to speak better French than English, and James spoke dialect better than French. Molly disliked going up to Rivabella, unless she had to. She helped Barbara make the beds and wash the dishes and she did her homework and then very often went over to talk to Mr. Cranefield. She discovered, by chance, that he had another name — E. C. Arden. As E. C. Arden he was the author of a series of thumbed, comfortable novels (it was Mrs. Massie who lent Molly these), one of which, called Belinda at Sea, was Molly’s favorite book of any kind. It was about a girl who joined the crew of a submarine, disguised as a naval rating, and kept her identity a secret all the way to Hong Kong. In the end, she married the submarine commander, who apparently had loved her all along. Molly read Belinda at Sea three or four times without ever mentioning to Mr. Cranefield she knew he was E. C. Arden. She thought it was a matter of deep privacy and that it was up to him to speak of it first. She did, however, ask what he thought of the saint on the church roof, using the name Barbara had, which was St. George.
“What,” said Mr. Cranefield. “That Ethiopian?”
The girl looked frightened — not of Ethiopians, certainly, but of confusion as to person, the adult world of muddle. Even Mr. Cranefield was also E. C. Arden, creator of Belinda.
Mr. Cranefield explained, kindly, that up at Rivabella they had made a patron saint out of a mixture of St. Damian, who was an intellectual, and St. Michael, who was not, and probably a local pagan deity as well. St. Michael accounted for the sword, the pagan for the fire. Reliable witnesses had seen the result, though none of these witnesses were British. “We aren’t awfully good at seeing saints,” he said. “Though we do have an eye for ghosts.”
Another thing still troubled Molly, but it was not a matter she could mention: She did not know what to do about her bosom — whether to try to hold it up in some way or, on the contrary, bind it flat. She had been granted, by the mistake of a door’s swinging wide, an upsetting glimpse of Mrs. Massie changing out of a bathing suit, and she had been worried about the future shape of her own body ever since. She pored over reproductions of statues and paintings in books belonging to Mr. Cranefield. The Eves and Venuses represented were not reassuring — they often seemed to be made of India rubber. There was no one she could ask. Barbara was too dangerous; the mention of a subject such as this always made her go too far and say things Molly found unpleasant.
She did remark to both Mrs. Massie and Mr. Cranefield that she hated the Rivabella school. She said, “I would give anything to be sent home to England, but I can’t leave my father.”
After a long conversation with Mrs. Massie, Mr. Cranefield agreed to speak to Alec. Interfering with other people was not his way, but Molly struck him as being pathetic. Something told him that Molly was not useful leverage with either parent and so he mentioned Will first: Will would soon be fourteen, too old for the school at Rivabella. Unless the Webb children were enrolled, and quickly, in good French establishments — say, in lycées at Nice — they would become unfit for anything save menial work in a foreign language they could not speak in an educated way. Of course, the ideal solution would be England, if Alec felt he could manage that.
Alec listened, sitting not quite straight in his chair, wearing a dressing gown, his back to a window. He found all light intolerable now. Several times he lifted his hand as if he were trying to see through it. No one knew why Alec made these odd gestures; some people thought he had gone slightly mad because death was too long in coming. He parted his lips and whispered, “French school … If you would look after it,” and then, “I would be grateful.”
Mr. Cranefield dropped his voice too, as if the gray of the room called for hush. He asked if Alec had thought of appointing a guardian for them. The hand Alec seemed to want transparent waved back and forth, stiffly, like a shut ivory fan.
All that Barbara said to Mr. Cranefield was “Good idea,” once he had assured her French high schools were not priest-ridden.
“It might have occurred to her to have done something about it,” said Mrs. Massie, when this was repeated.
“Things do occur to Barbara,” said Mr. Cranefield. “But she doesn’t herself get the drift of them.”
The only disturbing part of the new arrangement was that the children had been assigned to separate establishments, whose schedules did not coincide; this meant they would not necessarily travel in the same bus. Molly had shot up as tall as Will now. Her hair was dark and curled all over her head. Her bones and her hands and feet were going to be larger, stronger, than her mother’s and brothers’. She looked, already, considerably older than her age. She was obstinately innocent, turning her face away when Barbara, for her own good, tried to tell her something about men.