Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2. Ray Bradbury

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СКАЧАТЬ and from time to time going to the front door, hoping to catch those insolent fiends on their laughing excursions through the late day. But if they had appeared, what could she say to them, why should she worry about them?

      ‘The idea!’ said Mrs Bentley to her dainty, rose-clustered teacup. ‘No one ever doubted I was a girl before. What a silly, horrible thing to do. I don’t mind being old – not really – but I do resent having my childhood taken away from me.’

      She could see the children racing off under the cavernous trees with her youth in their frosty fingers, invisible as air.

      After supper, for no reason at all, with a senseless certainty of motion, she watched her own hands, like a pair of ghostly gloves at a séance, gather together certain items in a perfumed kerchief. Then she went to her front porch and stood there stiffly for half an hour.

      As suddenly as night birds the children flew by, and Mrs Bentley’s voice brought them to a fluttering rest.

      ‘Yes, Mrs Bentley?’

      ‘Come up on this porch!’ she commanded them, and the girls climbed the steps, Tom trailing after.

      ‘Yes, Mrs Bentley?’ They thumped the ‘Mrs’ like a bass piano chord, extra heavily, as if that were her first name.

      ‘I’ve some treasures to show you.’ She opened the perfumed kerchief and peered into it as if she herself might be surprised. She drew forth a hair comb, very small and delicate, its rim twinkling with rhinestones.

      ‘I wore this when I was nine,’ she said.

      Jane turned it in her hand and said, ‘How nice.’

      ‘Let’s see!’ cried Alice.

      ‘And here is a tiny ring I wore when I was eight,’ said Mrs Bentley. ‘It doesn’t fit my finger now. You look through it and see the Tower of Pisa ready to fall.’

      ‘Let’s see it lean!’ The girls passed it back and forth between them until Jane fitted it to her hand. ‘Why, it’s just my size!’ she exclaimed.

      ‘And the comb fits my head!’ gasped Alice.

      Mrs Bentley produced some jackstones. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I once played with these.’

      She threw them. They made a constellation on the porch.

      ‘And here!’ In triumph she flashed her trump card, a postal picture of herself when she was seven years old, in a dress like a yellow butterfly, with her golden curls and blown blue-glass eyes and angelic pouting lips.

      ‘Who’s this little girl?’ asked Jane.

      ‘It’s me!’

      The two girls held onto it.

      ‘But it doesn’t look like you,’ said Jane simply. ‘Anybody could get a picture like this, somewhere.’

      They looked at her for a long moment.

      ‘Any more pictures, Mrs Bentley?’ asked Alice. ‘Of you, later? You got a picture of you at fifteen, and one at twenty, and one at forty and fifty?’

      The girls chortled.

      ‘I don’t have to show you anything!’ said Mrs Bentley.

      ‘Then we don’t have to believe you,’ replied Jane.

      ‘But this picture proves I was young!’

      ‘That’s some other little girl, like us. You borrowed it.’

      ‘I was married!’

      ‘Where’s Mr Bentley?’

      ‘He’s been gone a long time. If he were here, he’d tell you how young and pretty I was when I was twenty-two.’

      ‘But he’s not here and he can’t tell, so what does that prove?’

      ‘I have a marriage certificate.’

      ‘You could have borrowed that, too. Only way I’ll believe you were ever young’—Jane shut her eyes to emphasize how sure she was of herself—‘is if you have someone say they saw you when you were ten.’

      ‘Thousands of people saw me but they’re dead, you little fool—or ill, in other towns. I don’t know a soul here, just moved here a few years ago, so no one saw me young.’

      ‘Well, there you are!’ Jane blinked at her companions. ‘Nobody saw her!’

      ‘Listen!’ Mrs Bentley seized the girl’s wrist. ‘You must take these things on faith. Someday you’ll be as old as I. People will say the same. “Oh, no,” they’ll say, “those vultures were never hummingbirds, those owls were never orioles, those parrots were never bluebirds!” One day you’ll be like me!’

      ‘No, we won’t!’ said the girls. ‘Will we?’ they asked one another.

      ‘Wait and see!’ said Mrs Bentley.

      And to herself she thought, Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.

      ‘Your mother,’ she said to Jane. ‘Haven’t you noticed, over the years, the change?’

      ‘No,’ said Jane. ‘She’s always the same.’

      And that was true. You lived with people every day and they never altered a degree. It was only when people had been off on a long trip, for years, that they shocked you. And she felt like a woman who has been on a roaring black train for seventy-two years, landing at last upon the rail platform and everyone crying: ‘Helen Bentley, is that you?’

      ‘I guess we better go home,’ said Jane. ‘Thanks for the ring. It just fits me.’

      ‘Thanks for the comb. It’s fine.’

      ‘Thanks for the picture of the little girl.’

      ‘Come back – you can’t have those!’ Mrs Bentley shouted as they raced down the steps. ‘They’re mine!’

      ‘Don’t!’ said Tom, following the girls. ‘Give them back!’

      ‘No, she stole them! They belonged to some other little girl. She stole them. Thanks!’ cried Alice.

      So no matter how she called after them, the girls were gone, like moths through darkness.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ said Tom, on the lawn, looking up at Mrs Bentley. He went away.

      They took my ring and my comb and my picture, thought Mrs Bentley, trembling there on the steps. Oh, I’m empty, empty; it’s part of my life.

      She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, ‘Does it really belong to me?’

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