Free The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden

for me, but she got up from the bed. She looked so determined that I asked, “What are you going to do?”
    “Go to the party,” said Joss.
    “But we haven’t been asked.”
    She did not answer that. She looked over my head and said, “I tried to be nice. I found my own thing and kept out of the way. Now I won’t.”
    “Suppose they don’t ask you?”
    “I shall make them. I can make people do what I like.” By ‘people’ I knew she meant men.
    “But, Joss”—I produced this hesitantly—“if you make them won’t it seem that you might . . . might be what Mademoiselle Zizi says you are?”
    Joss’s chin went even higher. “She thinks I am what she is,” she said with disdain. “All right. I shall be, only worse.” Perhaps she saw the doubt on my face, for
she asked, “What else am I to do?”
    That sounded like Joss, not Joss cased in this proud hardness, and I said, “Go on painting.”
    “Without Monsieur Joubert?”
    “That’s what he would have done.”
    I thought I had won, but when I looked at her I saw it was no use saying anything more. She had on that look again, her mask look, her eyes almost like slits as if she were calculating, her
nostrils pinched and her lips set. “I shall go to this party,” said Joss, “and I shall wear Sin.”
    It was called Sin because she had had no right to buy it. A year before Uncle William had given Joss money to buy a new raincoat; her old one was up to her knees and showed inches of wrist, but
she had gone into a dress shop and bought a dress. That was in the sales too, “and it had been marked down from ten guineas,” said Joss.
    “Ten guineas for a dress!” That seemed fabulous to us—except Willmouse.
    “A dress can cost a hundred pounds,” said Willmouse.
    “But . . . when will you wear it?” Mother had asked, bewildered.
    “Perhaps never,” said Joss, “but I had to have it.” It was ivory silk, stamped with roses. “Not many roses,” Hester had said critically, “and not much
silk.” There did not seem much of anything to cost all that money; it left Joss’s neck and arms bare and the skirt was narrow. “It’s the cut,” Willmouse had explained
and examined it carefully. “It is influenced by the Chinese,” he pronounced, “which is why it suits her.”
    For a year it had hung in Joss’s cupboard. Now, after she had washed her face and brushed her hair, she took it out of the wardrobe. I had opened the door into my room to let the others
come and we watched while she put it on.
    Beside Sin our seersuckers looked very ordinary and homemade, and, in spite of the Black Virgin, the old envy came back. “It’s too tight,” I said spitefully. “You show .”
    Joss looked at herself in the looking-glass and smiled. “All the better.” she said and laughed at my scandalised face. I had noticed while she washed that the dark tufts of hair
under her arms were gone. “I have a little razor,” said Joss. She had a lipstick and powder too. When she had bought these things I did not know, but watched, divided between marvelling
and fright while she made up her face. “Don’t put on too much,” said Willmouse.
    “I’m not Mademoiselle Zizi,” said Joss witheringly.
    When she was ready her glance fell again on me. “What’s the matter with you, Cecil?” she asked.
    “I have pains.”
    “Where?”
    “In my arms and legs—everywhere.”
    “Growing pains,” said Joss.
    I suppose now it was only an ordinary bourgeois party such as would be held anywhere in the provinces of France, but to us it seemed resplendent and exciting, though we had to admit the guests
    were not as elegant as the flowers and food. “I think I shall go for my evening walk,” said Willmouse after we had seen the first few people arrive. I could tell he was disappointed.
    We had not taken it into account that they were working people not quite at home in their Sunday best. The men were in dark suits, too heavy for the hot evening, and they