standing up in wild, fluffy curls all over his head. “Mummy, there’s something I want to talk to Dad about, seriously. I’ve got to tell him—”
It was no use, she rode over him. “You’re not going to talk to anyone about anything tonight. We’ve both had enough of you. Get into bed!”
“But it’s awfully important—”
“Get into bed!”
“But,
Bunty reached for the hairbrush. Dominic gave it up. He made a small noise of despair, not unlike a sob, and leaped into the bed and swept the clothes high over him in one wild movement, leaving to view only the funny fuzz of his hair, soft and delicate as a baby’s. Under the clothes he smelled his own unimaginable cleanness, revoltingly scented. “The wrong soap,” he muttered crossly and inaudibly. “Beastly sandalwood! You did it on purpose!”
Bunty stooped over him, and noticed the same error in the same moment. He hated a girl’s soap. She wished she had noticed in time. She kissed the very small lunette of scented forehead which was visible under the hair, and it and all the rest of Dominic’s person promptly recoiled in childish dudgeon six inches lower into the bed, and vanished utterly from view in one violent gesture of repudiation. Unmoved, or at any rate contriving to appear unmoved, Bunty put out the light.
“Don’t let me hear one word more from you tonight, or I’ll send your father in to you,” she warned.
“I wish you would!” muttered Dominic, safely under the clothes. “At least he’d listen to reason.”
When she was gone, he lay clutching his treasure for a few minutes, and then, mindful of the danger of bending its thinness if he fell asleep and lay on it, and so losing perhaps the most vital aspect of his clue, he sat up and slipped it into the near corner of the little drawer in his bedside table. Then he subsided again. He was still very angry. He lay tingling all over with hot water, and scrubbing, and slaps, his mind tingling, too, with offended pride and slighted masculinity. He was too upset to sleep. He wouldn’t sleep all night, he would lie fretting, unable to forgive her, unable to settle his mind and rest. He would get up pale and quiet and ill-used, and she would be sorry—
Dominic fell off the rim of a great sea of sleep, and drowned deliciously in its most serene and dreamless deeps.
Five
« ^ »
When he awoke it was to the pleasant sensation of someone rocking him gently by the toes, and the gleam of full daylight, with a watery sun just breaking into the room. He opened one eye into the rays, and closed it again dazzled and drowsy, but not before he had glimpsed George sitting on the foot of his bed. He lay thinking about it for a moment, trying to orientate himself. Around his snug and blissful sense of immediate well-being there was certainly a hovering awareness of last night’s upsets, but it took him an interval of thought to remember properly. He opened his eyes, narrowly against the glare, and yawned, and stared at George.
“Come on, get out of it,” said George, smiling at him without reserve, but he thought without very much gaiety, either. “I’ve given you a shake three times already. You’ll be late for school.”
“I didn’t hear you,” murmured Dominic, with eyelids gently closing again, and nose half-buried in the pillow.
“You wouldn’t have heard the crack of doom if it had gone off this morning. That’s what you get for staying out till half-past eleven. Remember?”
He did remember, and became instantly a shade more awake; because a lot of uncomfortable trailing ends from yesterday suddenly tripped his comfortably wandering mind, and brought him up sharp on his nose. He sat up, fixing George with a sudden reproachful grin.
“You’re a nice one! Why didn’t you help me out last night?”
“More than my own life was worth,” said George. “I’d have been the next to get my ears clouted if I’d interfered. You be thankful you got off so lightly.” He gave his waking son a nice smile, full of teasing and reassurance in equal measure, the intimate exchange between equals which had always been an all-clear after Dominic’s storms. “Now, come on, get up and get washed.”
“Don’t need washing,” said Dominic, reminded of his many injuries, and looking for a moment quite seriously annoyed again; but the morning was too fine, and his natural optimism too irrepressible to leave him under the cloud any longer. He slid out of bed, and stuck his toes into his slippers. A slightly awed, pink grin beamed sideways at George. He giggled: “If you’d seen what she did to me last night, you’d think I could skip washing for a month. Anyhow, I haven’t got a skin to wash, she jolly well scrubbed it all off.”
“She had to relieve her feelings somehow. If she hadn’t skinned you with washing, I dare say she’d have had to do it some other way. You be thankful she only used a loofah!”
“She didn’t,” said Dominic feelingly, “she used a hairbrush, too.
George, thus appealed to, allowed that he did not, that there was, somewhere in that disconcerting head, the germ of a sense of responsibility. Dominic, vindicated, completed the interrupted shedding of his pyjamas, and turned to reach for his clothes in the usual place. A clean shirt, his other flannels, the old blazer; Bunty had laid them there with a severe precision which indicated that some last light barrier of estrangement still existed between them, and it would behove him to set about the process of sweetening her with discretion rather than with audacity. There is a time for cheek and a time for amendment; Dominic judged from the alignment of his clothes upon their chair that this was the time for amendment. He sighed, a little damped. “Is she still mad at me?”
“No madder than you were at her last night,” George assured him comfortably. “Just watch your step for a few days, and be a bit extra nice to her, and it’ll all blow over. Now hurry up! Go and wash the sleep out of your eyes, at least, and brush your teeth. Your breakfast’s waiting.”
“But I want to talk to you. I still haven’t told you about it.”
“You can talk through the door, I’ll stay here.”
Dominic talked, and rapidly, between the sketch of a wash and the motions of cleaning his teeth, and padded
