style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Perhaps, but I don’t think they’re very pretty.’
Celia looked at her reproachfully.
‘I think they’re lovely. Oh, Mummy, do say I can have one when I’m fifteen.’
‘You can have one—if you still want it.’
Of course she would want it.
She went off to look for her idol. To her great annoyance Janet was walking with her French friend Yvonne Barbier. Celia hated Yvonne Barbier with a jealous hatred. Yvonne was very pretty, very elegant, very sophisticated. Although only fifteen, she looked more like eighteen. Her arm linked through Janet’s, she was talking to her in a cooing voice.
‘Naturellement, je n’ai rien dit à Maman. Je lui ai répondu—’
‘Run away, darling,’ said Janet kindly. ‘Yvonne and I are busy just now.’
Celia withdrew sadly. How she hated that horrible Yvonne Barbier.
Alas, two weeks later, Janet and her parents left Cauterets. Her image faded quickly from Celia’s mind, but her ecstatic anticipation of the day when she would have ‘a figure’ remained.
Cauterets was great fun. You were right under the mountains here. Not that even now they looked at all as Celia had pictured them. To the end of her life she could never really admire mountain scenery. A sense of being cheated remained at the back of her mind. The delights of Cauterets were varied. There was the hot walk in the morning to La Raillière where her mother and father drank glasses of nasty tasting water. After the water drinking there was the purchase of sticks of sucre d’orge. They were twirly sticks of different colours and flavours. Celia usually had ananas—her mother liked a green one—aniseed. Her father, strangely enough, liked none of them. He seemed buoyant and happier since he came to Cauterets.
‘This place suits me, Miriam,’ he said. ‘I can feel myself getting a new man here.’
His wife answered:
‘We’ll stay here as long as we can.’
She too seemed gayer—she laughed more. The anxious pucker between her brows smoothed itself away. She saw very little of Celia. Satisfied with the child being in Jeanne’s keeping, she devoted herself heart and soul to her husband.
After the morning excursion Celia would come home with Jeanne through the woods, going up and down zigzag paths, occasionally tobogganing down steep slopes with disastrous results to the seats of her drawers. Agonized wails would arise from Jeanne.
‘Oh, mees—ce n’est pas gentille ce que vous faites là. Et vos pantalons. Que dirait Madame votre mère?’
‘Encore une fois, Jeanne. Une fois seulement.’
‘Non, non. Oh, mees!’
After lunch Jeanne would be busy sewing. Celia would go out into the Place and join some of the other children. A little girl called Mary Hayes had been specially designated as a suitable companion. ‘Such a nice child,’ said Celia’s mother. ‘Pretty manners and so sweet. A nice little friend for Celia.’
Celia played with Mary Hayes when she could not avoid it, but, alas, she found Mary woefully dull. She was sweet-tempered and amiable but, to Celia, extremely boring. The child whom Celia liked was a little American girl called Marguerite Priestman. She came from a Western state and had a terrific twang in her speech which fascinated the English child. She played games that were new to Celia. Accompanying her was her nurse, an amazing old woman in an enormous flopping black hat whose standard phrase was, ‘Now you stay right by Fanny, do you hear?’
Occasionally Fanny came to the rescue when a dispute was in progress. One day she found both children almost in tears, arguing hotly.
‘Now, just you tell Fanny what it’s all about,’ she commanded.
‘I was just telling Celia a story, and she says what I say isn’t so—and it is so.’
‘You tell Fanny what the story was.’
‘It was going to be just a lovely story. It was about a little girl who grew up in a wood kinder lonesome because the doctor had never fetched her in his black bag—’
Celia interrupted.
‘That isn’t true. Marguerite says babies are found by doctors in woods and brought to the mothers. That’s not true. The angels bring them in the night and put them into the cradle.’
‘It’s doctors.’
‘It’s angels.’
‘It isn’t.’
Fanny raised a large hand.
‘You listen to me.’
They listened. Fanny’s little black eyes snapped intelligently as she considered and then dealt with the problem.
‘You’ve neither of you call to get excited. Marguerite’s right and so’s Celia. One’s the way they do with English babies and the other’s the way they do with American babies.’
How simple after all! Celia and Marguerite beamed on each other and were friends again.
Fanny murmured, ‘You stay right by Fanny,’ and resumed her knitting.
‘I’ll go right on with the story, shall I?’ asked Marguerite.
‘Yes, do,’ said Celia. ‘And afterwards I’ll tell you a story about an opal fairy who came out of a peach stone.’
Marguerite embarked on her narrative, later to be interrupted once more.
‘What’s a scarrapin?’
‘A scarrapin? Why, Celia, don’t you know what a scarrapin is?’
‘No, what is it?’
That was more difficult. From the welter of Marguerite’s explanation Celia only grasped the fact that a scarrapin was in point of fact a scarrapin! A scarrapin remained for her a fabulous beast connected with the continent of America.
Only one day when she was grown up did it suddenly flash into Celia’s mind.
‘Of course. Marguerite Priestman’s scarrapin was a scorpion.’
And she felt quite a pang of loss.
Dinner was very early at Cauterets. It took place at half-past six. Celia was allowed to sit up. Afterwards they would all sit outside round little tables, and once or twice a week the conjurer would conjure.
Celia adored the conjurer. She liked his name. He was, so her father told her, a prestidigitateur.
Celia would repeat the syllables very slowly over to herself.
The conjurer was a tall man with a long black beard. He did the most entrancing things with coloured ribbons—yards and yards of them he would suddenly pull out of his mouth.
