The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [16]
They promised.
‘Say, cross my heart straight dinkum.’9
The little girls said it.
Pip took something out of his pocket, rubbed it a long time on the front of his jersey, then breathed on it and rubbed it again.
‘Now turn round!’ he ordered.
They turned round.
‘All look the same way! Keep still! Now!’
And his hand opened; he held up to the light something that flashed, that winked, that was a most lovely green.
‘It’s a nemeral,’ said Pip solemnly.
‘Is it really, Pip?’ Even Isabel was impressed.
The lovely green thing seemed to dance in Pip’s fingers. Aunt Beryl had a nemeral in a ring, but it was a very small one. This one was as big as a star and far more beautiful.
V
As the morning lengthened whole parties appeared over the sand-hills and came down on the beach to bathe. It was understood that at eleven o’clock the women and children of the summer colony had the sea to themselves. First the women undressed, pulled on their bathing dresses and covered their heads in hideous caps like sponge bags; then the children were unbuttoned. The beach was strewn with little heaps of clothes and shoes; the big summer hats, with stones on them to keep them from blowing away, looked like immense shells. It was strange that even the sea seemed to sound differently when all those leaping, laughing figures ran into the waves. Old Mrs Fairfield, in a lilac cotton dress and a black hat tied under the chin, gathered her little brood and got them ready. The little Trout boys whipped their shirts over their heads, and away the five sped, while their grandma sat with one hand in her knitting-bag ready to draw out the ball of wool when she was satisfied they were safely in.
The firm compact little girls were not half so brave as the tender, delicate-looking little boys. Pip and Rags, shivering, crouching down, slapping the water, never hesitated. But Isabel, who could swim twelve strokes, and Kezia, who could nearly swim eight, only followed on the strict understanding they were not to be splashed. As for Lottie, she didn’t follow at all. She liked to be left to go in her own way, please. And that way was to sit down at the edge of the water, her legs straight, her knees pressed together, and to make vague motions with her arms as if she expected to be wafted out to sea. But when a bigger wave than usual, an old whiskery one, came lolloping along in her direction, she scrambled to her feet with a face of horror and flew up the beach again.
‘Here, mother, keep those for me, will you?’
Two rings and a thin gold chain were dropped into Mrs Fairfield’s lap.
‘Yes, dear. But aren’t you going to bathe here?’
‘No-o,’ Beryl drawled. She sounded vague. ‘I’m undressing farther along. I’m going to bathe with Mrs Harry Kember.’
‘Very well.’ But Mrs Fairfield’s lips set. She disapproved of Mrs Harry Kember. Beryl knew it.
Poor old mother, she smiled, as she skimmed over the stones. Poor old mother! Old! Oh, what joy, what bliss it was to be young…
‘You look veiy pleased,’ said Mrs Harry Kember. She sat hunched up on the stones, her arms round her knees, smoking.
‘It’s such a levely day,’ said Beryl, smiling down at her.
‘Oh, my dear!’ Mrs Harry Kember’s voice sounded as though she knew better than that. But then her voice always sounded as though she knew something more about you than you did yourself. She was a long, strange-looking woman with narrow hands and feet. Her face, too, was long and narrow and exhausted-looking; even her fair curled fringe looked burnt out and withered. She was the only woman at the Bay who smoked, and she smoked incessantly, keeping the cigarette between her lips while she talked, and only taking it out when the ash was so long you could not understand why it did not fall. When she was not playing bridge – she played bridge every day of her life – she spent her time lying in the full glare of the sun. She could stand any amount of it; she never had enough. All the same, it did not seem to warm her. Parched, withered, cold, she lay stretched on the stones like a piece of tossed-up driftwood.