Arthur had been right, Waldo realized. Dulcie would probably grow a moustache.
Although they had almost reached the group of guests there was one more question he wanted her to answer before he could feel satisfied.
“Do you know my brother?” he asked.
“No,” said Dulcie.
Surprise had turned her reply into a query. But of course you could never tell. A spasm of malice made him want to shout: I bet you don’t, he’s only that ginger dill who serves you with the sugar down at Allwrights’!
He was safe, though. You could always control your own impulses, if it was important enough to control them, and perhaps Dulcie Feinstein would continue in ignorance of his uncontrollable twin.
Mrs Musto’s tennis party was going limp by now. She herself had the air of wanting to put up her feet and enjoy a boiled egg on a tray. So she was giving her last commands.
“Stubbens will run down to the station with those of yer who aren’t motorin’.”
Of course most of them were motoring. They were of the very best, though none could compete with Fairy Plain and Self-Raising Flour.
While the motorists were disguising themselves their hostess approached Waldo as though to conspire with him.
“You,” she said, clearing her throat, because, he was sure, she had forgotten his name, “wouldn’t mind, I know, walking across with the Feinstein girl. It’s not very far out of yer way.”
Since their return from the garden Dulcie had disappeared, and he rather hoped he had lost her. He had had enough of a good thing. Nor did he feel he might impress her more on that occasion. But here she was, coming out of the house, smoother than before, and in the lesser light, her dress a deepening coconut ice. Carefully she looked away, to show she did not understand what was being arranged.
“That will be nice!” she said at once, however, and so brightly it could have meant more.
Her hitherto moony brown eyes could also flash, he observed.
Yet as soon as Mrs Musto had dismissed them, he and Dulcie began to behave mechanically. While the charge of the motor brigade suggested that the others were exercising their own free will, the two on foot could only accept their portion of dust. They looked at their fellow guests as though they had never seen them before, nor did the motorists attempt to wave, the acquaintanceship was so obviously closed.
Dulcie walked without giving much thought to grace.
“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked. “I am! I’m looking forward to a good tuck-in. All that stuff at Mrs Musto’s, I hardly dared touch a thing!”
“Food isn’t so important,” said Waldo.
“Mmmmm,” she answered on a high note.
He was afraid his remark hadn’t sounded too effective, so he had to try to improve on it.
“We could exist on a handful of dried dates if we were Arabs.”
“But we’re not. And aren’t you a gloomy old thing!” Dulcie replied.
Was she laughing at him?
“You needn’t tell me we’re not Arabs,” he said, even surlier. “But we might be before we’re finished.”
“I shan’t. I shall work. You can always live simply, but well, if you want to.”
It sounded so plain and sane his throat contracted as it did sometimes on his going into the kitchen and smelling an ovenful of Arthur’s bread. He was glad he didn’t have to answer Dulcie.
Objects were growing fuzzy in the fading light, a dark green to greenish black. Dust was whiter for the shadows. The silence might have lain heavy, but Dulcie didn’t give it a chance.
She almost burst.
“You know what — oh, I shouldn’t!” she giggled.
“What?” he asked.
“Just before we left,” she said, quieter, looking behind her, “I went up to the bathroom. Beautiful bathroom — all blue and white — a big bowl of powder … ”
“Go on!” he said. “Sure it wasn’t flour?”
She nearly split.
“Aren’t you awful!” she giggled. “No, though. This is what tickled me.” She could hardly say what she had to. “There was a big bottle of scent, and you know what it was called — l’Amour de Paris!”
Dulcie Feinstein was enjoying her good giggle, and his rather tinny laughter was genuine enough, except that it disguised a certain envy and admiration. She had pronounced the French words in a way which sounded real French.
“There was a pierrot” — Dulcie was busting herself — “sitting on the moon!”
She dabbed and mopped.
“On the bottle of scent!” She shrieked.
It was strange, when he had decided she should be a serious-minded girl, that she should show this other frivolous side.
“Oh dear!” Dulcie moaned.
But she could not quite destroy his vision, to which the dusky trees pandered with broken hints.
“Do you learn foreign languages?” he asked, with a casualness to hide his interest.
“We have to,” she said. “One of the grandmothers was, well, not exactly French, but lived for some years in France.”
He might have caught her off her guard.
“And German?”
“Daddy,” she said soberly, “is fluent in German.”
Sobriety descended quite. And very soon they were approaching what could be the lit house. It was less impressive than Mrs Musto’s, far less, but neat and solid, a villa more suited to a town, trimly finished, painted up. There was a pepper-pot tower at one side.
“Is that your room?” he asked. “You could write up there.”
“But I couldn’t.”
“Letters?”
“I’m a terrible correspondent. The girls at school are always complaining.”
An elderly gentleman of bald head was putting back his watch and looking out from a lower room, trailing a newspaper after him. Those outside felt safe, knowing the darkness favoured them.
A lady was bringing in a huge tureen.
“Anyway, there’s soup,” Waldo said.
“Yes,” replied Dulcie in her most practical voice. “Mummy lives to make us eat.”
He wished she would go inside because departures always embarrassed him.
“Thank you,” she said.
Oh, Lord.
“And don’t remember the worst things about me.” Again she was giggling, splitting, bursting. “That pierrot on the moon!”
She just wouldn’t go. And he stood rooted in the dust.
Suddenly she stopped. “Your brother,” she said, calm and serious, “is he anything like you? Is he older?”
“No,” he said.
After that she was saying good-night and running up some steps set in a grass bank.
He went away quickly, and decided before reaching home he would think no more about Dulcie Feinstein, whom he didn’t understand in any case. On the whole, though he would only have confessed it to himself, he did not understand people, except those he created by his own imagining. If it hadn’t been for his own visions he might have felt desperate.
“Did you enjoy yourself?” Mother asked.
“Oh, all right.”
“Meet anyone interesting?”
“A mob of kids.”
Nothing annoyed their mother more than what she called a “sloppy Australian vocabulary.” She was wearing her best blue dress for his return.
“Any girls?” Arthur asked.
“Oh, yes!”
He was too tired.
After that Waldo became so thoroughly occupied he hadn’t the time to give thought to Dulcie Feinstein. In any case, he convinced himself Dulcie was de trop. That was one of several phrases he had picked up recently as weapons of defence. He would have liked to use this one on Dulcie, with her Frenchy, foreign airs, if he had been certain how it ought to be pronounced.