"Sheila here," said the phone, rather starkly.
"Yes, honey?"
"Dina has locked herself in her room."
I didn't manage to place the crisis, though clearly there was one. "What
about it?" I said.
"Have you forgotten, Val? The electrician's here. Mr. Jerome. He has to
get into Dina's room."
"Well, tell her to come out."
Sheila sighed in exasperation. "There is now no further
competition for the silliest suggestion of the month."
"Well, I suppose you did tell her. Tell her again. Make her come out."
"Break the door down?"
I was exasperated too. "If you have to."
"A great heavy teak door? With my own fair hands? Hardly, Val. Mr. Jerome
would have to do it. And then -- "
"Yes, yes, I know." And then it would be all over town that Dina Mathers
had tantrums and locked herself in and doors had to be burst open. "What
did she say," I asked, "when you told her to come out?"
"She said," Sheila said evenly, "that she was scared of the fairies."
"The what?"
"You heard. Last night she saw fairies at the bottom of the garden. So
she's staying in her room. They may be good fairies, but she isn't taking
any chances."
I didn't prolong the discussion. "All right," I said. "I'll come over."
Sheila and I got along no worse than most imperfect marital partnerships.
We might have got along a lot better -- Sheila certainly thought so --
but for Dina.
Dina was my kid sister, tiny, seventeen, as pretty as a picture and
sunny-tempered with everyone but Sheila. One reason why I cracked
down so hard on anyone who made fun of Tommy Hardcastle was because,
although Tommy and Dina couldn't be more different in every other way,
they had one thing in common . . .
I slipped out as quietly as I could, because it never does an office any
good when the boss goes out and everybody knows it isn't on business. I
took the car from the firm's car park and drove out past the Grammar
School . . .
. . . And stopped. A hundred or so boys between thirteen and fourteen,
all wearing blue shorts, filled the road.
The Grammar School was four hundred years old. The school field was a
hundred yards along the road, on the other side of it, and there was no
changing accommodation. So the kids changed at the school, crossed the
road to the field, and came back after sports.
The arrangement, or lack of same, was typical of Shuteley.
After all the boys had crossed, I drove past the castle across the Old
Bridge and turned into the track which led to our Queen Anne house about
a quarter of a mile beyond the town boundary. The track also served a
few farms farther on.
Sheila, in a paint-speckled sweater and jeans powdered with plaster,
had evidently been tidying up after the electrician. She was a slim
twenty-four-year-old blonde, and I had not married her because she was
the ugliest girl in Shuteley.
"All right," she said grimly. "You shift her."
"You didn't . . . say anything, honey, did you?" I asked tentatively.
She knew what I meant. "I told her the electrician had to work in her
room, that's all. And she talked about fairies."
I sighed. Dina just couldn't see why I wanted Sheila around, and never
would. What did I want with another girl when I had her? And Sheila,
though she had no deficiency of understanding, was driven quietly
desperate by the way Dina, the moment my back was turned, became as
mulishly, deliberately obstinate as ouly a grown-up child could be.
I didn't see Mr. Jerome, who had found a job to do elsewhere in the
house. I went up to Dina's room, Sheila at my heels, and tapped on
the door.
"Dina, honey," I said.
"Val?" came Dina's voice, surprised and slightly, but only slightly,
apprehensive. "What are you doing home at this time?"
"You have to come out, honey," I said patiently.
"No. I'm scared of the fairies."
"Fairies don't do you any harm."
"How do you know?"
"Dina, you didn't really see anything at all, did you?"
"I saw the fairy ring. In the wood. Didn't Sheila tell you? I'd have
told you this morning, only you were gone before I got up. I thought
Sheila would have told you."
No one could be as innocent as Dina when she was trying to make trouble
for Sheila.
"Anyway," I said, "you've got to come out."
A brief pause, then: "I can't. I'm not dressed."
"Then get dressed."
Triumphantly: "Sheila took all my clothes away."
Sheila's eyes met mine. She didn't have to tell me that any clothes
she'd taken were to be washed.
"Come out, Dina," I said more sternly.
There was silence.
Sheila held my gaze steadily. "This is what I have to put up with all
day and every day," she was saying, without uttering a word. I didn't
say anything either. She knew what I was thinking too. What could a
man do? There wasn't anywhere else Dina could go. Our father was dead,
and our mother . . . well, to give Sheila her due, even in our bitterest
rows she never brought up the subject of Mary, who was in an institution,
who was the reason why Dina was the way she was, who was the reason why
Sheila and I had no children and never would have.
At last the door clicked and Dina came out. Exactly five feet,
dark-haired, she had the unsophisticated beauty that sometimes occurs
in the feeble-minded. She also had a highly provocative body that would
create a lot of problem soon, though they hadn't caused trouble yet. Not
all men could he expected to keep their hands off such an attractive
creature simply because there was a short-circuit in her head.
She wore a faded cotton dress far too small for her, split down the
front and unfastened at the back, because there was no possibility of
getting the buttons to close. Her feet were bare.
"Now listen," I said more harshly than usual, "I have to get back to
work. Will you promise, Dina, word of honor, to go to the summerhouse
and stay there till I get home again?"
"But the summerhouse is near the wood."
"Fairies only come out at night. You never saw fairies
in the daytime, now, did you?"
She frowned. It was quite true that she had never seen fairies in the
daytime,
If she gave her word she would keep it. She was trying to figure out
a loophole that wguld enable her to do what she liked without exactly
breaking a promise. If she could find one, she'd promise.
"Word of honor?" I insisted.
"Oh, all right," she said. "Now?"
"Now."
She scampered downstairs, quite content again already. She would be able
to stay in the summerhouse all afternoon, talking to herself or playing
with the dolls she had there, without any feeling that she was being
confined, or even that she'd done anything to be confined for.
On the point of telling Sheila that Jota was coming, I decided it would
be wise to wait for a better moment. "See you, honey," I said, and leaned
forward to peck her cheek.
She leaned back, avoiding me. "Honey," she said. "Everybody is 'honey.'
I'm 'honey,' Dina's 'honey.' Am I like her? Do you think of me like her?"'
I didn't want to get involved in anything. "Bye, Sheila," I said, and
went back to the ear.
I had just crossed the Old Bridge when the engine coughed and died. I
cursed silently. When I had left the car in the lot I had known
perfectly well I'd have to stop at the filling station on my way home,
and I would have, if I hadn't been called out unexpectedly to deal with
a domestic crisis.
I was about as far from a garage as I could be in Shuteley. The street
I was on was so narrow that planning permission for garages had been
refused, there being no room for cars to stop and fill up. I'd have to
walk back to the office and phone a garage to pick the car up.
I left the key in the car and started walking. No one would touch the
car, not in Shuteley. Kids might, but the car would be picked up before
the Grammar School came out.
In the early afternoon, on the outskirts of town, there was very little
traffic and few pedestrians, for there were no shops out here and Shuteley
was not on the main route from anywhere important to anywhere else. In
fact, there was nobody else in sight but one girl, and my eyes rested
on her and didn't register a thing, because I was thinking about Dina
and Sheila and me and wondering gloomily if there was any solution to
the age-old problem of two women in one house.
I was also envying Jota, who got his girls on a conveniently temporary
basis (invariably stunning and wildly cooperative girls at that) and
who got them in every country on the map, plus a few that weren't.
All in all, I was pretty sorry for myself. It wasn't my fault that my
father had married a woman who was already close to insanity and went
closer. It wasn't my fault he escaped the problems he had created by
dying. It wasn't my fault Dina was the way she was. It wasn't my fault
Sheila and I didn't dare have children.
It seemed to me that my problems, unlike those of everybody else, had
been created for me and were no fault of mine.
Suddenly I blinked and looked again at the girl coming toward me.
She was not the girl in the pink suit. Although I had seen that girl
only across the street and from a second-story window, one thing I was
sure of was that she had blue-black hair. This was a near-blonde of
about eighteen, wearing a green dress.
Or was she?
At the moment, beyond all doubt, she was. She was very tall and not
particularly attractive -- just a girl who would not as a rule attract
a second glance, unless on account of her height.
She came level with me, not paying the slightest attention to me -- and
that must have been an act, because when a girl passes a man goggling
at her with all three eyes, it just isn't possible for her not to notice.
And as she passed me, it happened again. Not the same thing -- it never
seemed to be the same thing. This time, side-on, I saw palely tanned
flesh from ankles to armpit, uninterrupted.
When she had passed, I swung round, of course. However, whatever I'd seen
or thought I'd seen, all there was to be seen now, though I watched her
out of sight, was a very tall girl in an ordinary green dress, wearing
ordinary shoes. The only thing that was slightly unusual was that I
could swear she wasn't wearing nylons.
She did have, too -- and this was the first time I noticed it -- a
certain baffling elegance, or smartness, or neatness. As I said, she
wasn't a particularly pretty girl, and though not fat, she didn't have
a sensational figure. Yet there was something about her that reminded
me of the difference I had vaguely sensed when Sheila had pointed out
to me a woman in a Paris creation and a woman trying hard to look as if
she was in a Paris creation.
Whatever it was that women wanted to have when they dressed up, this
girl had it -- even if she had very little else to contribute.
As I walked on, for a moment an old shadow darkened my mind. Mentally I
was normal, indeed well above average. I'd been told after physical and
psychiatric examinations that there was no trace of psychosis or anything
in that terrifying area, no brain damage, no malformation. Yet no one
with a background like mine could escape occasional grim doubts and fears.
I dismissed the idea for a moment, only to find it creeping back when I
remembered that the only other person who had seen this kind of phenomenon
was Tommy. Maybe this was something that happened only to people like
Tommy and Dina and me.
Tommy had seen something -- once. I had seen something -- twice. And
Dina had seen something. Fairies, she said. Or rather, a "fairy ring."
Nobody else, apparently, had seen anything.
I went back to the office, called the Central Garage and gave instructions
about my car. Then I worked hard for all of an hour.
When the phone rang I answered absently, still able to concentrate fairly
successfully on insurance -- for the last time in weeks.
"Val," said Sheila, "now the electrician has to get into the summerhouse."
"Oh, hell," I groaned.
I should have known. The wiring in our house dated back with the rest of
the house, I strongly suspected, to the time of Queen Anne. I'd probably
have let it be as long as it worked, but a FLAG executive from London,
paying a semi-social call, happened to notice the wiring in the house
and hinted strongly that it was hardly the thing for the tocal insurance
manager to have an electrical system in his own house that constituted
a greater fire risk then a moat filled with crude oil. So we had called
in Mr. Jerome.
The cable out to the summerhouse was probably more dangerous even than
enything in the house itself.
Obviously Sheila had already asked Dina to let the electrician in. In
childish triumph, Dina saw how to score over Sheila after all. Dina had
promised to stay in the summerhouse till I got back. So she'd keep her
promise. Come hell or high water, she'd barricade herself in and stay
where she'd promised to stay.
"I can't come again," I said. "Can't he come back tomorrow?"
"He says if he doesn't finish today he won't get back for a week."
"Well, get her out," I said in sudden irritation. "Don't keep calling me."
"She's your sister."
"Sure, but you're there and I'm here. Surely you can outsmart someone
like Dina?"
"Get her out, you said?" Sheila retorted in a hard voice. "Okay. I'll get
her out. I'm bigger then she is, and older, and much tougher. I'll get her
out. And I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to have the time of my life."
There was something unusually vicious about the click as she hung up.
I didn't care. I was fed up with Sheila end Dina. Why couldn't either
of them, just once, in their different ways, leave me alone? Sheila was
always with me, Dina was always with me. I couldn't settle down to my work
any morning or any afternoon with the slightest confidence that I wouldn't
suddenly be called upon to deal with a Sheila problem or a Dina problem.
Rather wildly, I thought: why couldn't Sheila and Dina fight to the
death so that there. would be only one of them left? I could render unto
Sheila the things that were Sheila's only if Dina didn't interfere --
and vice versa.
But could I put Dina in an institution? No. Apart from anything else,
she was too innocently reasonable. Even if I wanted to do it, I doubted
if Dina could be certified. She wasn't even feeble-minded in the usual
sense. In many ways she was quick end shrewd. In no way was she slow. She
was quite a bright eight-year-old -- only she happened to have a body
nine years older.