The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘Of course I would!’ Bruce answered heartily. ‘What do you take me for? Anyway, I couldn’t have managed in this heathen wilderness without you.’

  But this turned out to be untrue. Bruce took to Africa. His new surroundings, and his job, supervising the establishment of this important new African oil source, accorded splendidly with his secret image of himself. The very primitiveness of their situation — the brand-new concrete house in a clearing, the stifling air, the tropical lushness and noisy wildlife, the highly restricted facilities — especially, perhaps, the masses of black faces everywhere and the strange language and stranger culture of the Ibos — all excited him. In fact, they, together with his work, soon absorbed him so totally that even if he had not brought Maggie with him he would probably have managed perfectly well. That, at least, was how it seemed to Maggie, cast adrift on this ancient continent without the slightest preconception or preparation.

  Looking back, it would seem as if she took one look at the whole set-up and fell almost at once into a lethargic, dim-witted trance. From the moment she stepped out of the plane she felt somehow stunned, as if the top part of her consciousness had been sliced off with one of the machetes that the natives used to clear the jungle around their encampment. She felt cut back, pruned of her alertness, her resilience, the life-affirming quality that had sustained her since childhood.

  Part of this was the numbing effects of fear, though she didn’t acknowledge it as such. She had been prepared to find the black people hostile and sinister, but they proved quite otherwise. Her little posse of servants — steward, houseboy, cook and gardener — welcomed her with broad, artless smiles, and thereafter went about their tasks if not with any great zeal or efficiency, at least without any indication of sullenness or ulterior design.

  So it was not them she feared. Nor was it the surrounding bush, for all its inimical denizens, its ear-piercing nightsong and its exhalations of primordiality that hung tangibly in the wet, heavy air. All this she could have accepted, and perhaps even learnt to love, as others apparently did, for there were women here, widows of colonial civil servants, who had come back alone to serve the new oil-based community in the modest role of governesses and teachers. No; the thing she feared deep down, the thing that had such a devastating effect on her own will, was that she was being sundered from herself. It seemed as if Africa were a different planet where she breathed rarer air and ate less nourishing food and spoke a deficient language, and thus barely subsisted, barely kept alive.

  Most of this degutting effect was the result of her decision to marry a man she didn’t love. But she could not face that yet, and so blamed Africa.

  Bruce, supposing that her pregnancy combined with the rainy season, which was upon them, were responsible for her filleted manner, encouraged her to lie in bed as long as she felt like it, and be waited on. The novelty of this lasted some time, and was exacerbated by the white community wives. These gave the impression of latching, like leeches, to anyone new who offered the prospect of a little temporary stimulation. Dripping, mud-spattered and twittering like sparrows, they would scurry indoors out of the persistent rain, all alike in their vapidity and limitedness… If Maggie had hoped to find friends here of a calibre to replace Tanya (the breach with whom was still raw and rankling) she was disabused inside the first few days.

  There was one woman, and only one, who at all took her fancy, and she could, presumably, never be an intimate friend, being thirty years older than Maggie. Beyond some indefinable and (initially) superficial affinity, they had almost nothing in common. Her name was Joan Hillman and she was one of the civil service widows.

  ‘Halla-o!’ she boomed, marching in toward the end of the first week. She was an instant relief after all the twittering and scurrying. Big and broad-shouldered, with the leathery look white women get after years of punishing equatorial heat, she plonked herself down on the edge of the daybed where Maggie had her feet up in the living-room. ‘Feeling under the weather?’ she asked, after introducing herself. ‘Ruddy rain getting you down?’

  ‘Yes, it’s wearing,’ said Maggie, and anyone who had known her in England would have been shocked at the lack of vitality in her voice, the languidness of her movements. ‘Would you like something to drink?’

  ‘One always would at this hour. No, don’t move, just give a shout for your boy.’ Seeing Maggie’s fleeting grimace, she grinned knowingly. ‘You’ll have to get used to it — shouting for the boy, I mean, not just the rain.’ She peered at Maggie narrowly from under a somewhat eccentric hat from which she had just removed a dripping piece of waterproofing. It was an old solar topee: a large crownless straw brim was pressed down over the top. ‘No servants at home, probably? Eh? Used to doing things for yourself? Like me. Well … we had a cook-general in Wiltshire, fairly useless, worse than the fella I’ve got here now if possible — both quite feckless. This one churns out the same four recipes in remorseless rotation and pinches more than his share of my supplies… By the way, may I give you a tip? Never expect them to serve meals made of leftovers. No matter what you send back uneaten from one meal, forget it. It all goes out at once, to the relatives in the hutches.’

  Maggie did not need to ask what the hutches were. Everyone in the WC seemed to have his or her own name for the wooden and tin huts built a garden’s length away from the house, where the servants lived. Bruce called them the kennels. Maggie didn’t call them anything and tried not to think about them or about the squalor that must characterise the life inside them.

  Joan seemed to guess what she felt, because she immediately said, ‘And that’s another thing. Don’t start wasting pity on the Ibos. They’re damned lucky to be here and they know it. Queueing up at the work-manager’s office, day after day, hoping to get jobs with the likes of us.’ She paused to light the first of the innumerable cigarettes she was to smoke in Maggie’s presence. ‘Their tribal life’s breaking up, you see. They’ve more or less begun to accept it, and they want “in” on the only advantage they can see to our arrival, which one can sum up as better grub and possessions. Imagine living on a diet of yams and watching your children dying of attritional diseases for generations and then you start getting your teeth into some good meat and fruit and chocolate; suddenly you’re getting paid in actual money and can go to market and buy yourself all sorts of miraculous things like bicycles. Damn it, you’re not going to risk losing your job and having to push off back to the bush with your tail between your little black legs, now are you? So you won’t have any real trouble, apart from perks and a bit of very natural laziness. What’s your boy’s name?’

  ‘William.’

  ‘WILLIAM!’ Joan roared.

  Maggie jumped. William, unused to commanding contralto bellows, came running. He wore the blue uniform shirt with big collar and open neck and long shorts that all the servants wore.

  ‘What Madam want?’ he asked, rolling his eyes to indicate he’d been given a fright.

  ‘Tea, please,’ said Maggie.

  ‘And biscuits — lots of biscuits!’ boomed Joan. The moment William had gone, she continued, ‘If you want to feel bad about the blacks, blame the missionaries. Are you religious?’ she asked in her direct way.

  Margaret hesitated, but Maggie shook her head.

  ‘Good. Most of them here are, you know, in a silly, unthinking way. I chucked all that nonsense long ago, when I saw what Christianity has done to these poor people. It’s a most fearful responsibility, breaking up traditions and a whole way of life which fitted their bit of the biosphere like a glove. Mark you, I’m not saying nothing was wrong with it. They had and still have some pretty hair-raising customs. But at least arrogant interference and the ultimate destructions of an entire social structure weren’t among their little foibles… They leave that to us civilised folk.’ She puffed, and seemed to watch Maggie, who simply lay looking back at her. ‘Look my dear, you mustn’t mind me doing a bit of interfering, but you shouldn’t lie around too much unless you’re really
ill. You know the old song, “Old Rocking-Chair’s Got Me?” Well, here it’s a matter of old daybed getting you. You must try to be active, as active as you’re allowed to be, anyhow.’

  ‘How do you manage?’ asked Maggie, wondering who it was this woman vaguely reminded her of.

  ‘Me? Oh, I teach.’

  Of course. Fiona Dalzell. Maggie at once sat up, as if it were Mrs Dalzell’s eyes reproving her limpness.

  ‘White or black children?’

  ‘Both. The black ones belong to the Nigerians working for the Company. Any bits of education the others get comes exclusively from the Mission. They don’t do a bad job, only they make all the letters spell Jesus Christ, in a manner of speaking… Ah, here’s tea! Well done William, that was quick.’ She laid hands on the teapot, but then drew back. ‘Here, Joan old girl, what are you doing? Taking charge again! Sorry, my dear. Your job, come along, up you get and do the honours.’

  Overcoming inertia (had old daybed already begun to get her?), Maggie obeyed. She and Joan asked and answered questions about each other’s past. Joan was impressed to learn that Maggie was an actress.

  ‘What an asset that training would be if you turned to teaching!’

  ‘What’s the connection?’

  ‘My dear…! To be a good teacher one has to be able to act, sing, preach … and if possible tap-dance, juggle, eat fire and swallow swords. Anything to keep the little varmints entertained. That’s the basis of teaching, you know, keeping them amused, and hence on your side. They’ll forgive you a lot if they’re laughing while you push the boring facts into ’em. Maybe I could persuade you to come along sometime and give me a hand.’

  Maggie vaguely said of course she would. But she didn’t. The same terrible disease of idleness, contracted against her will and nature while jobless in London, now broke out again. She used her pregnancy as an excuse, and indeed her genuine tiredness and lethargy much of the time may have had a physical basis. The climate didn’t suit her; the humid heat had a really crushing effect on her system. But the other side of it was that her domestic situation took the guts out of her.

  Bruce’s passion for his work and for the country and, in fact, for everything about this new life, made her feel relegated to the position of a mere facet of it all, rather a small and lustreless one at that. He seemed to love her as a part of his Nigerian experience, rather than as the most vital person in his world. Only this might have reconciled her to the heat, the narrowness of the society, the subtle unease she felt at being waited on by pidgin-speaking black people still more than half immersed in a culture so alien to her own that she realised without even having to think about it that no more than a skin-deep relationship could ever exist between her and them.

  In the months of waiting for her baby to be born, she consoled herself with the hope that when it was, the deepening sense of uselessness, disorientation and — this was the worst — diminution as a person, would be done away with. Other women of the WC had evidently found motherhood a complete justification for their existence; yet, except for Joan (who had married young and whose children had both grown up) she saw nothing in any of them, or in their lives, which she could respect enough to want to emulate, and the consolation of hope turned to apprehension. What if motherhood, instead of ratifying her dwindling sense of her self, simply sank her further into the vapidity and drive-less languor that she observed in the women around her, and which she realised she was well on the way to sharing?

  As she grew heavier and lazier, her guilt awoke to join the other forces that were bowing down her spirit. Yet whenever Joan tried to do her some real, active good, Maggie backed away.

  ‘When are you coming down to give us a talk about theatre?’

  ‘I can’t come like this.’

  ‘My dear, they won’t even notice. Most of them are taught at home that ladies get fat tummies if they pick their noses. Come along, you haven’t been out of the house for a week, have you? Not since Molly Harrington’s bridge do.’

  ‘Wasn’t that deadly…’

  ‘If people aren’t doing anything interesting, their level of conversation is bound to be lamentable. Where did you learn to play bridge?’

  ‘It was one of the few things my brothers and I were allowed to do on Sundays.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘My brothers? In Scotland. They’re both in my father’s paper business.’

  ‘Bet you miss them!’

  ‘Well… Only the younger one. And my mother. I miss her a lot.’

  ‘Couldn’t she come out to be with you when you pop?’

  ‘I … I don’t think she’ll be able to.’

  Naturally Maggie had no intention of telling her family the exact date of the birth. She would send them a cable two months late. That was the plan, and Bruce had agreed to it.

  When he first learnt that he had a son, Bruce’s overwhelming self-satisfaction deprived him of his wits. He rushed out of the hospital into the streets of Lagos, sought out the post office and began firing off cables in all directions. Thus, Matt’s life began as the focal-point of the first really devastating row between his parents.

  ‘What do you mean, you forgot?’ Maggie stormed at him from her hospital bed. ‘Forgot that it’s only seven months since the wedding? Forgot what kind of parents I have? Forgot everything I told you about my father?’

  ‘Shhh! Well, what if I did? What does it really matter? We married in plenty of time. It’s not as if he’d been born in the vestry.’

  Maggie felt herself powerless and betrayed and close to hysteria. ‘You — you idiot!’ she shouted. ‘You smug bloody halfwit! Why didn’t you wait? Why didn’t you ask me?’ She sank back in bed panting and white-faced, imagining her father’s grim satisfaction masked as holy horror, her mother’s simple shock, Ian’s sense of outraged propriety, Stip caught in the middle…

  But Bruce had consciously shed a lot of his very similar background in the freedom of this new place. ‘Oh, rubbish!’ he said, with bluff incomprehension of Maggie’s anguish of mind. ‘It’s all rot, really. It’s all ended well. That’s what counts. If the old people can’t see it like that, it’s as well they’re a few thousand miles off, that’s all I’ve got to say.’

  It was not all Maggie had to say, but she had exhausted herself with her first outburst and now fell silent. She lay with her head turned away from Bruce, staring at the little white box on wheels that contained her baby. It had not been a very easy birth and her stitches were biting. This peculiarly sharp and localised pain reminded her of Matt’s beginnings in a way she had so far managed to avoid.

  ‘Dinna be fashed,’ Bruce said jocularly. ‘Look at all the flowers I brought you.’

  ‘I hate mimosa,’ said Maggie sullenly. ‘All the damned pollen makes me sneeze.’ She didn’t want him to come round to the other side of the bed and see her tears.

  He kissed the side of her head and left, taking the flowers with him. Maggie hoped she’d seen the last of them, but the nurse soon bustled in with them in two ugly vases. She was an English nurse, and she said with coy reproachfulness, ‘Weren’t very nice to poor hubby, were we? Never mind, I told him it’s nobody’s fault, just a touch of the old post-natals. Soon as we start suckling, all that bad temper will melt away.’

  It proved less simple.

  When Matt lay in her arms, she trembled with an indefinable anxiety. He was beautiful, with his faint silky auburn thatch pulsating over the soft spot, the pink mark of the ‘stork’s beak’ still smudged between his eyes giving him a scowly look, and his tiny fists not much bigger than new bracken shoots on the moors at home. He looked to her like a little baby-shaped lump of some infinitely malleable substance, so impressionable she hardly dared to hold him close or press him with her fingers. Putting him to her breast on the second day, she experienced such a painful clutch at the heart that she felt a sudden panic. She called a passing nurse.

  ‘My chest hurts — I can hardly breathe!’

  Look
ing back years later on this vital turning-point, Maggie was to wonder what would have been changed if that black nurse had rung the warning bell by smiling and saying, ‘That’s your mother-love, lady. It comes in with the milk. You’ll have to bear that for a long time.’ Instead, she whisked Matt away, snatching the nipple from his eager gums, and Maggie heard him break into a wail — a sound which, from the first time she ever heard it just after he was born, never failed to pierce her like the thrust of a sword. The nurse put him into his box-bed and left him to scream while she sounded Maggie’s heart, felt her pulse and forehead and generally fussed about her.

  ‘I call the doctor,’ she pronounced at length. ‘You sit quiet. Don’t move now!’

  ‘I’m all right. I’m better — it was probably nothing —’

  But she was gone. Maggie half-lay against her pillows, her eyes fixed to the box from which Matt’s cries issued piercingly. Her instincts urged her to get out of bed and go and fetch him, hold, comfort and nourish him. But something — some deadly conformity, some built-in obedience to rules dating back to her own pre-childhood, kept her there, stiff-muscled and motionless, staring at the box, whose contents she could not see but could sense deep within her, moulded from the timbre and volume of his shrieks. They were cries of outrage, even of torment. Yet she sat for minutes on end, listening and doing nothing, till the crying stopped. It was the sudden silence that galvanised her.

  She almost leapt out of bed, and had Matt in her arms before she felt the blood begin to flow. There was some pain, but it was nothing compared to the agony of hearing him cry. When the nurse brought the doctor, Maggie was weeping aloud.

  The doctor was taken back by the state she was in, and when he discovered she was suffering a mild haemorrhage he was also alarmed. The nurse got her back into bed and they both tried to prise Matt out of her arms, but she held him so tightly and cried so much that eventually they left him at one end, while they dealt with the other. She tried to feed him, but it didn’t work. He wouldn’t suck at first, and when they had both calmed down a bit and he tried, nothing much came. He threshed about and shouted with frustration and hunger.