Snow White and the Giants Read online

  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 figur
e. 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.

  Grimly I forced myself to work. But my heart wasn't in it.

  Chapter Two

  Business with an agent kept me at the office until about seven, and when we were through I took him for a drink. Since he didn't like noisy pubs we went to the new cocktail lounge, The Copper Beech.

  The place was empty when we entered. People going for a drink on their way home went to the pubs. The Copper Beech, all glass and chromium end plastic and inflated prices, catered mostly for couples and parties having a night out, from eight o'clock onwards.

  The agent gulped his beer and departed, and I finished my pint of bitter in more leisurely fashion. I was downing the last drop when a party of kids in their late teens came in, quietly for kids, looked around and marched to the far end of the lounge.

  They were all in shorts and blouses, end for a moment I thought they were Grammar School seniors. Then I saw that they were all about eighteen or over, too old and far too tall to be school kids. All the men were over six feet, and the girls not much less.

  With merely a glence at them I was rising to go. In Shuteley in summer we saw hundreds of campers, hikers end cyclists.

  Then I saw that one of the girls was the girl in the green dress, and another, the only one who was not tall, had blue-black hair.

  I ordered another pint end sat down again. The bartender rapped on a partition behind him and a waitress in a black frock came to attend to the new customers.

  There were eight boys end eight girls. They weren't noisy and they evidently intended to keep strictly to themselves, for they sat together in a corner round one table and only one of them spoke to the waitress, giving the order. The others didn't even talk among themselves until she left them. Then they started talking and laughing like any other kids, only more quietly, as if afraid they'd be overheard.

  The girl I had seen wearing the extraordinary green dress was now clad like the others. She had not looked at me and perhaps wouldn't have known me if she did, because earlier, in the afternoon, she had gone to a lot of trouble not to look at me at all.

  Now I saw that they weren't exactly like any other group of young campers after all.

  I wouldn't have noticed anything out of the ordinary if I hadn't had a spur to my curiosity. Nobody else did. As it was, I saw for the second time a curious immaculacy which seemed to be common to them all. Every one of these kids was a glossy, spotless, highly-polished model of a teenage camper.

  I thought about that and remembered where I'd seen the same kind of glossy unreality before.

  A pretty girl really on a jungle safari might conceivably spend most of her time in a leopard-skin swimsuit or a white suntop and shorts, though it's unlikely. But unlike actresses in safari movies, she simply could not go on day after day looking as if she'd just stepped from her dressing-room.

  That was it. That was exactly it. The boys in this group had every hair slick in place. Their shirts were dazzling. There wasn't a spot even on their shoes. The girls weren't in the usual motley collection of loose sweaters, tight sweaters and rumpled shorts. Everything anyone wore had been made to measure, and there wasn't a crease to be seen among the lot of them.

  A small thing? Certainly -- a small impossible thing. Did these kids have dressing-rooms right outside The Copper Beech?

  Two or three of the girls were pretty, and one had a one-in-a-million face. Out of any large group of girls you could pick a dozen of more or less uniform prettiness, attractive through the possession of firm young bodies and regular features, well-shaped eyebrows, small noses, soft mouths. But it would be a matter of chance if, even in a hundred thousand girls, you'd find one with both the individuality to make her unmistakable and unforgettable and the beauty to go with it.

  One girl had the kind of face that could launch a thousand nuclear submarines.

  She had blue-black hair, very white skin, and was probably the girl who for me had started it all, the girl in the pink suit. But I couldn't be sure. Apart from her beauty, other things set her slightly apart from the rest. She was only about five feet four, easily the smal
lest in the group. She was pale and all the others were tanned. She might have been a little older than the others. She was treated with a certain slight deference. And despite what I've been saying about them, she made the others look untidy.

  I sipped my beer, not inviting conversation with the bartender, who was busy anyway. As it happened I'd been sitting facing the far corner when the kids entered, and could therefore go on looking in their direction without showing undue curiosity.

  I managed to pick up a few words. They were talking about a "duel." A duel, they thought, would be fun. Some argued, said it was a crazy idea.