The Pyramid by William Golding Page B

said— I wasn’t! I said our Olly here—”
    The tapping stopped. My father was gleaming and glinting sideways at me.
    “I said that he had his faults of course, lots of them; but he wasn’t a beast.”
    Then there was a pause. My mother looked straight at him and spoke in a still voice.
    “What did she say?”
    My father had turned back from me and was looking at his plate. He answered her vaguely.
    “You know how it is, Mother. I get to thinking, and they—I can’t remember.”
    My mother stood up, took the teapot and marched with it into the kitchen, banging the door to behind her. There was another pause; then my father spoke to me, softly.
    “It’s the wedding, you see. After she’s been to the wedding, she’ll be—better.”
    By the end of surgery I was waiting in the clump. Evie was late, but still she came, cotton dress and all, strolling up the path. I had pictured her in my feverish lubricity, humble and anxious and aware of her new status. But Evie was smiling , triumphantly, if anything, and she was exhaling again. She walked past me, securely, went through the bushes, through the alders, and sat down among the scrapes at the top of the rabbit warren. I hung behind, looking from her to the town and back again.
    “Come back here, Evie!”
    She shook scent out of her glossy bob and lay back in the sun. She stretched her arms wide, stretched her legs down together and the cotton dress rearranged itself. She laughed at the sky.
    “Come on, Evie!”
    She shook her head again, and tinkled a laugh, girlishly. I went and squatted by her.
    “Look—what’s the matter?”
    Evie turned on all the works, glinting at me and flickering her tangle of eyelashes. She sank her chin, stretched even further so that the top half of her body lifted away from the earth and I caught my breath. There was scent in it.
    “Let’s go in the clump—and have some fun!”
    Evie shut her eyes and collapsed. She lay like that, unsmiling .
    “Here, or nowhere.”
    “But—that’s the town!”
    She lifted her head and stared at it, grinning on one side of her face.
    “So it is—Mr. Clever!”
    I cajoled, ordered, pleaded. Evie would not budge. She lay slack, unsmiling, stretched out and answered me always with the same phrase.
    “Here or nowhere.”
    In the end I fell silent and stared moodily at the brown earth and the dry pellets of rabbit dung. Evie got up and picked things off her dress.
    “Evie—tomorrow—”
    Tomorrow was the day of the wedding. I knew already what I should need, to stick like a plaster over the thought of it.
    “See you here—in the afternoon.”
    Evie smiled sideways at me.
    “Of course, Olly. Why not?”
    Then she went away, secure and perfect as a ripe nut.
    It wasn’t until we were all three at the table and having an early dinner so that my mother could catch the bus into Barchester, that I understood. My mother was amiable and excited and talked as much as her food would let her.
    “—and you needn’t worry about that girl any more, Father. She’s going away!”
    “Oh?”
    “Going to her aunt at Acton. She’s been promised a job in a firm. They import timber, I’m told. A good thing too!”
    “Good thing?”
    “For her, I mean.”
    My father masticated, gazing heavily before him. He wrinkled up his brow and shook his head.
    “London. I don’t know. It’s a long way; and a young girl—”
    He went on masticating and shaking his head forebodingly as if he were envisaging an endless line of young girls throwing themselves off London Bridge.
    “Nonsense, Father!” said my mother, glittering and laughing . “She’s going to stay with her aunt!”
    My father changed his shaking to a nodding, masticating slowly meanwhile, thirty-two times, or it may have been sixty-four. My mother stopped laughing and glittering and stared at the wall. When she spoke, she used something like the voice with which she announced her unnerving, her diabolical perceptions or intuitions; a voice