The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  Besides, Maggie could not keep Margaret quiet about that one sun-sodden postcard with its scribbled message:

  ‘No houses — ghastly weather — landlady’s a witch — but I’m happy.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  There followed one of the most traumatic periods of Maggie’s life — nine months of living alone in London, out of work and steeped in guilt and sorrow.

  At first, she tried to regard it (Margaret’s idea, of course) as a punishment, so deserved as to be almost desired, for her part in Mrs Dalzell’s suicide. Now she was sharing her ordeal: the cup of idleness and unwantedness was passed on to her to drink, if not to the dregs — at the worst Maggie could not conceive of not wanting to live — at least deeply enough to expiate her sin of selfishness and letterlessness. Part of the punishment, and not the least part, was the fact that a lot of the offices that her job-hunting obliged her to visit regularly were in or around Leicester Square. She could never go there without physical pangs.

  Altogether apart from that aspect, being out of work proved to be one of the side-chambers of purgatory. To begin with, she was constantly aware that within her lived some imprisoned entity, as real and tangible as a baby in the womb, struggling to get out. This she could not call her talent, because as long as she wasn’t acting (and the longer, the more so) she couldn’t be sure that she had any. The only thing she could be certain of was that the desire to act was there, all the time, every waking moment, no matter whether she was lying in bed late because she lacked a motive to get up to another day of defeats and disappointments, or whether she was active, marching in and out of agents’ offices, or writing to managements, or hanging around the Salisbury or the Buckstone Club or the snack bar at the Arts, hoping for the rumour of a rumour of casting, or just bemoaning her lot with fellow-sufferers. Or, indeed, doing what she knew she ought to be doing in order (as Mrs Dalzell had used to say) to ‘deserve success’, not to mention keep sane: learning parts, practising vocal and physical exercises, doing trial make-ups or sitting in the theatre, watching others in the throes of that joy of joys which was denied to her.

  This last was a refinement of torment. Occasionally, Maggie had to sit and watch one of her former classmates playing a part she believed she could have played better. However, this was rare, since on the London stage at that period sub-standard performances were few. More often the acting was so good that Maggie was humbled, dismayed. How, she would muse, dared she aspire to this shrine of professional perfection? The answer was, she didn’t, not yet. She craved only the equivalent of what she had had in Tenby, in Ilfracombe. The shortcomings of these companies became blurred in memory as the months passed; she remembered only the essence, which was that the struggler-within had been free. Sitting in the gods, Friday after Friday as winter budded into spring and spring opened into summer, she suffered a raw and bitter envy, which had nevertheless at its core a fiery molten kernel of pure bliss. Because after all, if she couldn’t enjoy theatre, even from the wrong side of the footlights, even sunk in general misery, then what was all her suffering about?

  Idleness became the very quintessence of her existence. After the first sustained and hopeful burst of job-hunting had spent itself, it took more and more willpower, greater and greater expenditures of energy, to overcome the inertia that was seizing hold of her, in order to do anything at all.

  If such a procedure did not sicken any normally vital and life-affirming personality, then the most attractive course would have been to lie in bed all day in the dark, getting up only to eat, answer the phone and go to the lavatory. Maggie tried that, once or twice at her nadir. But it proved self-defeating. An idle mind breeds dreams — taunting dreams of letters or phone calls bringing good news, which she well knew would transform her instantly from this flaccid, hopeless, tousled wreck into a being alive with purpose, excitement and confidence.

  Like anyone in pain, she sought alleviations and distractions. But what is there, she asked herself, if there isn’t that? Friendships? An ambivalent comfort at best. People outside the business have no inkling of what one is feeling; those inside are either in work and thus intolerable to be with, or, like oneself, insects struggling in the mud, reflecting back an image of worklessness that one dreads to look at. In all their varied moods of depression or anger, or even hope, they are faithful mirrors of one’s own conditions.

  Diversions of the sort people are supposed to resort to in bad times — drink, sex, books — counted for nothing. Maggie resorted to none except, occasionally and futilely, the last, because she knew she must emerge from any surrogate occupation into the same barren, pointless aridity: the unstructured days, the shapeless evenings, the dreaded mornings when there was nothing for it but to discipline herself to get dressed (and dressed properly — ‘An actress is never off duty’) to face, yet again, those outer offices… ‘Keep in touch dear, something may come in…’ Those words came to seem so cruel. Maggie found herself almost hoping that some power-wielder, someday, would drop the pacifying smile, turn on her and snarl: ‘For you, ducky? Nothing, not today or ever. Forget it. Get lost. Drop dead.’

  But even idleness was not the worst.

  The worst was fear, fear that it would never end. She knew there was no reason why it ever should. She would sit alone in the evenings, with only five bars of the gas-fire lit to save pennies, and brood upon the ultimate horror that lay at the end of the tunnel if no phone call or letter ever came. The horror of having to give up, leave the business — emerge from the rich, warm world of theatre, her only natural element as she then profoundly believed, into a grey, formless vacuum.

  ‘Keep at it!’ Mrs Dalzell had once written. ‘Keep acting. Act into your mirror, act in your bath, act in your sleep.’ But she should have known better. What would she have felt if Maggie had turned round, last September, and said, ‘Teach in your bath, teach into your mirror?’ Can one teach without an audience? Perhaps, but only in the same way that one can rehearse, and on the same condition — that tomorrow, others will be there to see.

  Maggie was so deeply miserable as the months dragged on that only the sheer necessities of life kept her going. She learned now (and this hooked the tapeworm of bitterness deeper into her gut) that her father had been right. She was not independent except when she was happy and fulfilled. Frustrated, lonely and hopeless, she longed for home, for the undemanding safety and comfort of it, for her mother and brother at least, and the gentle easily-fulfilled regime she had so staunchly marched away from. A dozen times she nearly capitulated. Had the scene in her parents’ bedroom been open to the slightest reinterpretation, had it left even a narrow crack through which she could have crawled back without her own wilful rebel pride blocking her way, she would have found herself on the train to Edinburgh without knowing how she got there. Only the most rigorous and conscious restraint prevented it from happening, the more so since her mother and Stip in their letters eroded her determination by begging and imploring her to give up and come home. Ironically it was her father, his past words and his present austere silence, which kept her in London and on the battlefront.

  Miss Brenda and Miss Roberta were kind to her in their buttoned-up, respectable way. They let her pay for her room and board partly in kind, by helping with the housework or taking the dog for walks when their rheumatism kept them at home. For the rest, she did what others did: late-night dishwashing and waitressing, manning a stand at the Ideal Home Exhibition in March, baby-sitting — anything that paid and yet allowed time during office hours for job hunting.

  And then, during the summer holidays, a friend who worked at the Players’ Theatre — not on stage but at the sandwich bar — arranged for Maggie to stand in for her while she went on holiday.

  That was almost fun. The show, Late Joys, was delightful, the customers were characters, the ‘artistes’ friendly and sympathetic. She was allowed a free drink and a sandwich in the evenings and was usually stood a few more. After the show, it was her additional duty to put rec
ords on the panatrope for dancing, and sometimes men asked her to dance, though she hadn’t much heart for it. But it passed the evening and earned her a bob or two.

  The mere proximity of a stage had an invigorating effect, and from time to time she felt almost happy in the purlieus of the theatre itself. She would cheer herself on the long walk home to Bloomsbury by singing the songs from the current show. It was quite safe, in the early fifties, to walk the night streets of the West End alone. Occasionally a man would approach her, but, seeing his mistake, would usually say ‘sorry dear’. ‘That’s all right,’ she would say, and walk on singing softly: ‘Oh, father, dear father, come home to us now, for the clock in the steeple strikes one — BOING!’

  The walk home was, of course, to save the fare. All these odd bits of employment barely served to feed and clothe her. Apart from half-a-crown for her seat in the gods once a week, there were no luxuries whatever. And nothing put aside for the repayment fund.

  As September put the first nip into the air, Maggie wincingly turned to face the unfaceable — the long winter, alone, without work, with the bogey-man of ultimate defeat leering down the tunnel at her from what looked to be none too great a distance. But the influx of friends back into town after summer seasons brought distractions, which mingled pleasure with pain. London seemed a ferment of actors urgently striving to place themselves for the winter season, and Maggie was revitalised by their hope, which she was free to share — having not had a job in the summer did not necessarily put her behind those who had, in the race to get a job for the winter.

  Pantomimes were being cast, and tours. Gossip reported and speculated on forthcoming films, reps new and old, and West End productions in prospect. Surely, thought Maggie, she would get something now — there seemed to be no end of work in the offing. She almost ran from office to office. She wrote new letters, sent out new photos, to practically every management, agency and casting office in Britain. To pay for the photos she had to borrow money, and at this critical moment Tanya reappeared.

  Tanya had kept in touch with Maggie, undismayed by her gloomy or non-existent replies. She had thrived at Sheffield and risen to playing second leads; not for her the job queues and the angst, for she was merely enjoying her first ‘play-out’ break for months, before returning for the winter season of lovely plays and two-week rehearsal periods. She was also in funds, and cheerfully lent money to Maggie for her photos. Maggie repaid her by asking the M’Crimmonds if her friend could share her room for a couple of weeks.

  The twins conferred, then consented. ‘As long as she’s a dog-lover,’ they said. ‘Oh, she is!’ lied Maggie earnestly. Tanya had acquired an almost pathological hatred of dogs, big dogs anyway, in the camp, which had been patrolled by Alsatians. But the Jack Russell could by now scarcely move off his cushion, let alone patrol anything, even the railings outside — he had to be tenderly carried to a lamp-post — so Maggie felt the lie was justified.

  Tanya arrived one rainy afternoon and stood on the threshold of Maggie’s room, looking round in some dismay.

  ‘God, Maggie! How do you stand the gloom?’

  ‘I’m used to it.’

  ‘Couldn’t you jazz it up a bit with a coat of paint or some flowers?’

  ‘You’re kidding. I can’t afford a bunch of dandelions. No, now Tanya, come back —!’

  But Tanya had rushed out of the house, returning ten minutes later with two huge bunches of yellow and white pompom chrysanthemums, one for the M’Crimmonds, who fell about with excitement so that Maggie cursed her parsimonious Scots self for never having thought of it, and one for their now shared bedroom. The big glowing blooms were startlingly effective, seeming almost to shed their own light.

  ‘You shouldn’t!’ said Maggie, nonetheless. ‘You can’t afford —’

  ‘There is for everyone something that they can always afford, until they are actually starving. With you it’s theatre seats. With me it’s flowers.’

  ‘You mean, if you only had half-a-crown, you’d buy flowers with it and not a seat in the gods?’

  ‘Depends what was on,’ Tanya temporised. ‘What is on? We must see things together. I’ll pay,’ she said quickly, ‘look what I’m saving on somewhere to live.’

  Maggie’s heart lifted at the thought of extra playgoing. ‘Well, there’s a good production of The Merchant,’ she began — and at once, as if the title had flicked a switch, they were back at RADA.

  ‘Remember Dickie —? How he clowned around as Gratiano and corpsed us all? And how mad Hugh Miller got?’

  ‘“Typical transatlantic lack of reverence!”’ thundered Tanya, in imitation of the professional producer of their student production.

  Maggie, with an American accent, proclaimed: ‘“In future, I will fear no other thing, so safe as keeping sore Nerissa’s ‘ring’!”’

  ‘“Richard, if you cannot take Shakespeare with a little more seriousness, I shall fling you out of the cast!”’

  ‘“Aw, please, Mr Miller, sir, don’t do it, sir! It would be too humillerating —”’

  They collapsed on the pink chenille, muzzling their shrieks with their hands.

  ‘And what about that mad Greek who did Antigone with us?’ Maggie spluttered. ‘Remember?’

  Tanya abruptly stopped laughing and looked at her. ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘Wasted half our rehearsal time forcing us to relive our most traumatic emotional experiences.’

  ‘And got more and more exasperated because no one had had any.’

  ‘Except you.’

  ‘And Dickie sent him up rotten by pretending to break down and sob about his mother taking his rocking-horse away when he was four.’

  ‘He fell for it, too. No sense of humour, these Greeks. You know, you could have had a chunk of Antigone if you’d wanted it.’

  ‘I wanted it,’ said Tanya.

  ‘If you’d told him about the camp, and your parents —’

  ‘That would have earned me the whole part,’ Tanya said. She stood up, heaved her case on to the bed to begin unpacking.

  ‘So why didn’t you tell? Couldn’t you bear to?’

  ‘I’ll tell you why. Because his motive in asking us to spill our guts for him was false. He didn’t do it to find out if we had the emotional depth to handle Greek tragedy. He did it to confirm his prejudice against the British. The fact that seventeen-year-olds in post-war England hadn’t usually had many traumas was proof to him that you were all repressed and shallow and emotionally backward —’

  ‘Which we were.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Tanya with sudden sharpness. ‘If you had ever seen traumatised adolescents, crippled by emotions experienced far too early in their lives, you would realise that your state was normal and desirable and only what every right-thinking mature person would want to see. That little black satyr wasn’t really exasperated as you all stammered out your tales of Mummy getting cross because you wouldn’t eat powdered egg or your little trials as evacuees or whatever. He was revelling in his smug convictions of Levantine superiority. Didn’t you notice how he mocked, all through the rehearsals, saying outright that us girls were all sexually repressed and the boys were “not men”, whatever he meant by that? I suppose he meant they didn’t measure their manhood by the number of young girls they had seduced, like him —’

  ‘I remember he made us all play a kissing game at a party, and French-kissed us all —’

  Tanya snorted. ‘Greek-kissed more like, dirty little man!’

  ‘You do have it in for him,’ remarked Maggie, her curiosity, like her sense of humour, stirring from its long torpor. ‘What’s the difference?’ she added. Her own sexual experience, despite a few rep flirtations, hadn’t effectively advanced since she had been startled by the strange sensation of the saturnine little Greek’s tongue piercing her prim, purse-lipped defences.

  ‘Greek kissing includes what you used to call organ-grinding.’

  Maggie burst into a shriek of laughter. She had onc
e unwarily remarked that one of the boys at a party (he was Icelandic, and very heavy-breathing around women) danced like an organ-grinder, meaning that he whirled her arm like a handle. Of course, she never lived it down.

  ‘Maggie, are you still a virgin?’ asked Tanya suddenly.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, with none of the ambivalent feelings a twenty-two-year-old might have now about such an admission.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Because I — aren’t you?’

  Tanya gave her an amused, wry look. ‘No. Not by a good bit.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Are you shocked?’

  ‘Of course not. Just interested. Who was it?’

  ‘Who were they, do you mean?’

  ‘Crumbs. How many?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Goodness.’

  ‘Does that seem a lot to you? I’m twenty-six.’

  ‘When did you — you know —’

  ‘Start? When I was sixteen.’

  ‘In that camp?’

  ‘No. It was before the war, when I was a student in France. God, no, not in the camp! Those English women, my fellow-inmates that the Germans put in charge of us, watched us young ones like hawks. They were far worse than the guards, who, poor devils, were only interested in keeping their heads down in case their superiors sent them to the Russian front. They were as keen on staying put as we were. It was those WVS types who bossed us around unmercifully and weren’t above telling on us to the Germans if we showed the slightest signs of getting out of hand… Running around with the male inmates would practically have got us shot. No. I lived a life of active celibacy for four years in that place, and after having had a lover already, I am telling you, it wasn’t so easy. You hang on to your virtue, Maggie, as long as you can.’

  ‘Go on about you. Your Frenchman was one. Who were the other two?’