‘No I don’t,’ said the other Lieutenant, who did. So she invited him in for the following afternoon, quite sure that once he had seen the child, he would understand.
He saw her and he did understand. Not the child, nobody understood her; it was the mother’s feelings he understood. Janie stood straight up, with her shoulders back and her face lifted, legs apart as if they wore jackboots, and she swung a doll by one of its feet as if it were a swagger-stick. There was a Tightness about the child which, in a child, was wrong. She was, if anything, a little smaller than average. She was sharp-featured and narrow-eyed; her eyebrows were heavy. Her proportions were not quite those of most four-year-olds, who can bend forward from the waist and touch their foreheads to the floor. Janie’s torso was a little too short or her legs a little too long for that. She spoke with a sweet clarity and a devastating lack of tact. When the other Lieutenant squatted clumsily and said, ‘ Hel- lo, Janie. Are we going to be friends?’ she said, ‘No. You smell like Major Grenfell.’ Major Grenfell had immediately preceded the injured Lieutenant.
‘Janie!’ her mother shouted, too late. More quietly, she said, ‘You know perfectly well the Major was only in for cocktails.’ Janie accepted this without comment, which left an appalling gap in the dialogue. The other Lieutenant seemed to realize all in a rush that it was foolish to squat there on the parquet and sprang to his feet so abruptly he knocked over the coffee table. Janie achieved a wolfish smile and watched his scarlet ears while he picked up the pieces. He left early and never came back.
Nor, for Janie’s mother, was there safety in numbers. Against the strictest orders, Janie strode into the midst of the fourth round of Gibsons one evening and stood at one end of the living room, flicking an insultingly sober grey-green gaze across the flushed faces. A round yellow-haired man who had his hand on her mother’s neck extended his glass and bellowed, ‘You’re Wima’s little girl!’
Every head in the room swung at once like a bank of servo-switches, turning off the noise, and into the silence Janie said, ‘You’re the one with the—‘
‘ Janie! ’ her mother shouted. Someone laughed. Janie waited for it to finish. ‘—big, fat—’ she enunciated. The man took his hand off Wima’s neck. Someone whooped, ‘Big fat what, Janie?’
Topically, for it was wartime, Janie said, ‘—meat market.’
Wima bared her teeth. ‘Run along back to your room, darling. I’ll come and tuck you in in a minute.’ Someone looked straight at the blond man and laughed. Someone said in an echoing whisper,’ There goes the Sunday sirloin.’ A drawstring could not have pulled the fat man’s mouth so round and tight, and from it his lower lip bloomed like strawberry jam from a squeezed sandwich.
Janie walked quietly towards the door and stopped as soon as she was out of her mother’s line of sight. A sallow young man with brilliant black eyes leaned forward suddenly. Janie met his gaze. An expression of bewilderment crossed the young man’s face. His hand faltered out and upward and came to rest on his forehead. It slid down and covered the black eyes.
Janie said, just loud enough for him to hear, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’ She left the room.