The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  The fourth year (which Maggie took to be their last) Bruce once again sent her home alone with Matt. He was not going to Paris this time; he said he had business in South Africa and she accepted this unquestioningly. She was aching to get home.

  Her mother and Aunt Helen were delighted to see Matt, and all but tore him in two between them. They had planned something special for Maggie’s holiday, which they revealed to her as excitedly as two little girls with a secret surprise. It was a month — her whole time at home — in the Hebrides, on one of the lovelier islands where Helen had an old friend who ran a private hotel. They were not to know how Maggie’s heart sank at the prospect; all she had longed for was to stay in the purlieus of Edinburgh and attend the Festival — she had timed her leave exactly to coincide with it — but looking into the two elderly, eager faces, she knew she must forego her heart’s desire for yet another year.

  And, lying awake at night on the island, listening to the night-birds and smelling the sea, she found comfort in the thought that it would have been a species of torture to sit in theatres ‘on the wrong side of the footlights’ as Tanya used to say, perhaps watching old friends and fellow students whose careers were burgeoning, and feeling her mother’s vicarious disappointment in her… No. Better this way. Better the innocent unsullied fun of the beaches, watching Matt jumping and sliding down the dunes with shrieks of glee, collecting shells, looking for ‘creatures’ as he called every living thing with legs; persuading her two ‘old ladies’ (as they called themselves) into the stretchy bathing suits she had made them buy and which they’d sworn they would never, never wear, and revelling in the sight of them splashing and playing — with Matt and with each other — in the shallows, and even lying in the unpeopled sand to sunbathe their pale city skins and ageing bones, before strolling back to the hotel for wonderful Scottish food. Matt ate scones and bacon and roast lamb and even porridge until great-aunt and granny swore they could see him growing before their eyes. They doted on him, and he rewarded them with gifts of shells, and popping seaweed and ropy seaweed and lacy seaweed, and hermit crabs that Helen carried about with her on the beach, talking to them. For ever after, Maggie was to call a certain kind of nonsense-conversation ‘hermit-crab talk’, in memory of this holiday. Matt, young as he was at the time, never forgot it either. Africa was as if it had never been, and so was everything else; it was just Maggie, her mother, her aunt, and the boy they all loved. Maggie even forgot about not being a good mother. There was no reminder of it, because Matt, being perfectly happy, was perfectly good.

  The only times Maggie really thought about her husband was when she noticed Matt picking up a faint Scots accent. ‘That’ll please Bruce,’ she thought.

  Saying goodbye to Helen and her mother for another whole year, after such an intimate, happy time as they’d had together, was particularly hard. Little did Maggie guess how soon she’d be seeing them again. Nor did she have a clue what awaited her in Nigeria — what Bruce had been up to in her absence.

  The night after her return, he laid on a special, intimate little dinner at home. He had something very exciting to tell her.

  Maggie could scarcely believe her ears. According to Bruce’s plans, they were never going back to live in the British Isles. He loved Africa too much ever to leave it. He had arranged for the Company to post him to South Africa after his tour in Nigeria, and to this end had bought them a beautiful bungalow in Cape Town, and had given orders for its decoration and furnishing, which was going on at this very moment. Within a few months they would move there, into that ‘beautiful country’ with its ‘superb climate’. She would live a life of ease and plenty, looked after by even more servants than they had here; Matt would, of course, in due course be shipped back to Scotland to prep school, but meanwhile would go to school down there and have a wonderful, privileged life.

  ‘There’s a gorgeous garden,’ Bruce enthused, ‘nothing really needs doing to that — you should see the fruit trees, the date palms: oranges, lemons, grapefruit, straight off your own trees — and a far better social life than you’ve had here! Theatres and things, too, of course. You’ll go crazy for it.’

  And at last he stopped enthusing, leaned back in his chair, a picture of self-satisfaction, and waited.

  Maggie thought she might well go crazy right now. She was so angry she could find no suitable expression of her feelings. She wanted to upend the table into his lap, to hurl things at him, to shout, ‘How dare you! How dare you! How dare you!’ at the top of her lungs. Margaret, on the other hand, simply wanted to stand up, drop her napkin on the chair, and walk out into the night without a single word.

  If Maggie did not act out her feelings at once, Margaret usually won, or at least the compromise struck favoured Margaret’s way. Eventually, it was Margaret who said with apparent control, ‘Do tell me, Bruce. Am I a partner in this enterprise — our marriage, I mean — or just some kind of adjunct?’

  Bruce looked very taken aback. After a moment, he leant across the table and put his big hand over hers.

  ‘Oh come on, darling! Of course you’re a partner! I just wanted to surprise you about the house. I took all your little fads and fancies into account in choosing and decorating it. I did it with you in mind every minute. It was all for you. Every bit of it.’

  Maggie thought she might scream. But she held herself in rigidly.

  ‘Well,’ she said when she could speak reasonably calmly, ‘thank you for giving me a peep at the programme. It’s very interesting. But I have to tell you that I don’t appreciate faits accomplis. I don’t like little surprises which affect my entire life. I like to make my own decisions. I see I have some to make very shortly. When I’ve made them, I’ll let you know.’

  The ‘celebration’ dinner ended in frozen silence. Bruce made one or two attempts to thaw her, but she was wholly unresponsive. They did not, that evening, perform the customary ritual of going in to Matt’s room to look at him together, normally one of the few moments of real communion in their day. Maggie silently took some sheets out of the linen drawer and arranged herself on the daybed. Bruce, hangdog, though whether from guilt or simple disappointment she couldn’t say, went to the connubial bed alone and without protest.

  Quarrels between lovers are full of passion, and seldom end without a period of bitter sulking brought on by deep hurt. Maggie was not hurt, only very angry, and she did not sulk. If she didn’t speak much either for the next few weeks, it was not because she wanted to ‘show’ Bruce, or hurt him back; it was because she was thinking, as she had said she would, about his plans for her and how best to extricate herself and Matt from them without depriving Matt of his father. She went back to the double bed the second night because she saw no reason to make a gesture of it; besides, she couldn’t sleep properly on the daybed. Bruce made overtures every night for a week and every night was rebuffed. Finally, he said plaintively, ‘How long are you going to keep this up? I’ll be a nervous wreck.’

  ‘Oh all right, then,’ she said, ‘go on.’

  After a few minutes he said, ‘Not like this. I can’t.’

  ‘Good for you, that’s something in your favour,’ she said acidly, and rolled over and went to sleep without a qualm. It was the first time he had noticed or let himself be aware that she was, from the point of view of pleasure, a non-participant. It was the first time he had ever said ‘I can’t’ because she couldn’t. She felt no remorse at having shown him the real state of the game for once. She’d always acted her way through it before, for his sake. Now the anger got between her and her usual adequate performance.

  No solution to her other problem occurred to her, and she was still brooding over it several weeks later when William brought her in a telegram with her lunch tray.

  ‘Aunt Helen is seriously ill. If you want to see her again you had better come. Ian.’

  Maggie registered the style before the content. Trust Ian not to resort to the demeaning slickness of telegramese — he’d rather pay more. The
n, with a belated pang, harsh as a blow, came a mental picture of Helen tucking a hot water bottle into her bed, followed by a series of others involving Matt… Bruce came home to find her tear-stained and packing.

  ‘You don’t need to go home for her, surely!’ was his thrifty reaction. ‘Good grief, you’ve only just come back! If I rushed to the bedside every time one of my aunties conked out —’

  ‘She’s the only proper aunt I’ve got and I love her,’ said Maggie.

  ‘You’re not taking Matt!’

  Maggie hesitated. The trouble was, she didn’t know whether Helen was in a state to recognise anyone, whether seeing Matt would be a comfort to her. Matt had just started nursery school. It had not been easy to get him settled. To hike him out now would mean ructions later.

  ‘No,’ she agreed reluctantly at last. ‘I’ll leave him with you and Tolly.’

  Tolly, who was handing her things from the wardrobe, beamed from ear to ear at this news. She had not liked to ask.

  ‘Tolly take good care!’ she cried, wringing her hands in a way she had when she was especially happy.

  Bruce took time off work to take Maggie to the airport. This was uncharacteristic, but then he had been behaving with quite unusual punctiliousness of late, rather as he had after their encounter on the pink chenille, and for the same sort of reasons, she supposed. She had not thought about it much, having learnt better in the intervening years than to be so cheaply won over. The house in the Cape had not been mentioned since the fatal dinner party, but it was still there between them, the pain of its unilateral purchase as sore and humiliating to her as had once been the pain of his invasion of her body.

  Still, she allowed him to kiss her at the barrier.

  ‘Take your time,’ he said. ‘We’ll manage fine. I’ll write.’ He looked at her, bit his lip and kissed her unresponding cheek again. ‘Don’t go on being angry,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ Maggie replied. Actually, it was Margaret. Margaret had been very much to the fore these past weeks, all on her buttoned-up dignity where Maggie would have blown up. It was Margaret who stood there letting him kiss her without jerking away. Only deep inside was Maggie, whimpering, ‘I’m saying goodbye to my husband and I can’t feel anything except pain that I don’t care.’

  But she cared about leaving Matt behind. She rejoiced at the strong pangs, and promised lavish presents to quell his tears. In Scotland, she thought suddenly as the plane took off, the residual padding would slip from her heart, leaving its naked skin unprotected. There she might be able to apprehend what she felt for Matt, especially if he were absent. For surely mother-love should have more of anguish in it, be more than a placid contentment underlaid by a stifled unease.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Again, it was Stip who met her at the airport. He was about twenty-five now, but he looked more. His open, snubby face was open and snubby no longer, but somehow closed and rather pinched; his skin had lost the ruddiness she remembered and taken on an office pallor emphasised by strange maroonish circles under his eyes. Even his tuft (she had noticed this last time) no longer sprouted but was trained to lie flat and unobtrusive. There was a sense in which the whole of him looked trained to lie flat and unobtrusive. This was surely Ian’s doing. Ian was the boss since their father died.

  Impulsively, she put her hand on Stip’s knee as they drove through the city in his sober little black Morris. She remembered his dream — how, when he was a successful writer, he would wear flamboyant, dashing clothes (‘No three-piece suits — never!’) and drive a ‘high-powered low red car’. She felt suddenly angry, for him and towards him.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Renal failure.’ He glanced at her. ‘Kidneys. One gone and one on its way.’

  ‘Can she talk? Does she know people?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have let Ian send for you if she couldn’t recognise anyone.’

  The rain was teeming down. Maggie watched the windscreen wipers dealing with it. She wanted to revel in its grey coolness but she felt too sad about Helen to enjoy anything. She had left her hand on Stip’s knee, but so far he had not acknowledged it. She gave him a squeeze, and he glanced at her again and then back to the wet road.

  ‘And how goes it with you?’ he asked.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I still hate the climate. It’s good to see grey stone and green grass and the kind of rain you wouldn’t mind walking through.’ Suddenly she remembered walking toward the theatre in Sheffield that Sunday long ago, her arm linked with Tanya’s and their hands stuffed in their raincoat pockets…

  ‘Stip,’ Maggie said tentatively, ‘could we … could we drive past the theatre?’

  ‘The King’s? But we’ve passed it. Why? Did you want to mark the location of our juvenile escapade?’ He whistled a few bars of the title song of Oklahoma!, but petered out as if embarrassed. Maggie hadn’t, somehow, liked him calling it ‘our juvenile escapade.’ The years had, for her, increased rather than diminished its importance.

  ‘No, I just wanted to see — any theatre would do. What about the Lyceum?’

  ‘It’s a bit out of our way. Are you that keen?’ He looked her in the face and changed his mind. ‘Oh, okay. If you don’t hang about.’

  ‘You thought I’d be over it,’ she said discoveringly.

  ‘Your stage phase? I suppose I did. One grows out of these things. My writing phase has long since passed.’

  She said nothing. She hardly heard, she was straining so eagerly ahead to catch the first glimpse of the theatre. Perhaps it would be ‘dark’. That would be awful. She longed to see it alive, with a title on the marquee and photos in the front-of-house frames, get a glimpse of an open box-office, perhaps a queue, to show that it was all still real, still going on, even though it was lost to her…

  And now she saw it ahead through the evening gloom. Would Stip draw up for her, or only — grudgingly — slow down? It was important to her, a sign that this sense of alienation from him was only superficial. Her hand, still on his knee, clutched it, a convulsive signal. He stopped the car.

  For several minutes she sat still, her eyes roving hungrily. The theatre was not ‘dark’. Suddenly she saw something almost too amazing to credit.

  ‘Wait!’ she begged urgently, because Stip was slipping the car into gear. She flung open the door.

  ‘Mags, we ought to —’

  ‘Just one minute!’

  She jumped out, running across the pavement to the shelter of the marquee as the rain soaked her hair. She stood gaping at one of the photos. Stip called through the car window, ‘Someone you know?’

  ‘Yes —’ she breathed. It was incredible. Swiftly she looked at her watch. Yes, Tanya was in there somewhere, making up perhaps — the performance began in under twenty minutes. ‘Stip — I must —’ she began, turning to him in almost a frenzy of eagerness. But then she saw his face, and her conscience clouted her roughly. How could she be standing here, pushing all else aside? How could seeing Tanya, being in a theatre again, be more important to her than rushing to see Helen and console her mother? In Stip’s eyes she saw the wrongness of her priorities.

  With a wrench that shamed her by the effort it cost, she turned her back on the theatre and got into the car. As it pulled away, she felt as if she were tied to the building. Irresistibly she looked back over her shoulder. As they turned a corner and the theatre was lost to sight, she could still see Tanya’s photo in her mind’s eye — a portrait with that nimbus of light round her head, smiling straight at her, her mouth slightly open as if calling… Maggie sat round, facing through the weeping windscreen, thinking, appalled: Will I feel this pang of loss when darling Helen dies?

  Helen was fully conscious, and chattering, chattering like a starling — her eyes and hands restless, her mind gradually lapsing into confusion but her voice going shrilly on and on, as if, now that she had all the company she wanted and was for once the centre of att
ention, she was getting all the words out that she had stored up in half a lifetime of living alone.

  She talked to them all, by turns and en bloc, but it was Maggie’s hand she held. Helen’s little hand was so dry Maggie half expected to find her own covered with powdery dust each time she had to withdraw it. She did this only when Helen drifted into sleep, at which time her flow of words dried up, only to bubble up again, perhaps as some of the watchers were creeping away, and her hand would begin groping for Maggie’s like a blind person’s.

  ‘…I kept doing that thing, you know, with the Bible… I loved that game, I used to play it for hours… But there are so many verses you can’t find any message in, no matter how hard you try. And sometimes I’d cheat. There were friendly places my Bible fell open at, if I tilted it a certain way, verses I loved, that cheered me up. Like, “Blessed is he who expecteth nothing for he shall not be disappointed”. Not that I stuck to it. Every time the postman came or the phone bell rang, I always expected. But it was always throwaways and election notices or the man to read the meter. Oops! — hold tight, Maggie! Hold me tight, dear, I’m sliding…’ The tension would run through the room like ground-lighting. Was she ‘going’? But no. After a few moments, the innerly-striving old body would relax and she would say, ‘That’s better, I’m back. Well now, what was I saying…?’

  Maggie refused to leave her, even at night, and the hospital staff, seeing the use of her and also out of kindness, fixed up a camp-bed in the ward (a private one — Ian had, quite unexpectedly, insisted on that) so that Maggie could be with Helen all night. Stip would relieve her sometimes during the days but Maggie, briefly at home or eating at some nearby cafe, was never easy. The doctors said it couldn’t be long now.

  Towards the end, Helen got very lively and rather naughty. It happened when most of the family, including Ian’s wife Lilian, were in the room.

  ‘I love phone calls, you know, even those funny ones I sometimes get. I think it’s because I’m listed as “MacFee, Helen”, so they know I’m a female living alone. At first, I thought they were talking double-dutch! I simply didn’t know what it all meant. Then those same words began to crop up in modern novels and I found out their meaning. After that, I learnt to manage those naughty, naughty callers quite well. Only a little while ago one young man phoned me and said…’ She paused, and blushed really rather prettily, so that Maggie wanted to kiss her. ‘Well! Do you know, I can’t bring myself to use those words in the family. But he said he wanted to put his something into my something else. So I said, quick as a flash — they expect you to gibber or burst into tears you know, that’s why they do it, to shock you, but I refused to be shocked. Wouldn’t give the naughty creature the satisfaction. I said, “Well, young man, your offer is appreciated, but as my something-else has been lying about untenanted (yes, I did!) for sixty-five years now, I really think you would do better to put your something elsewhere!”’ She paused for effect. Then came the tag-line, beautifully delivered in a tone of innocent pride: ‘I used the right words to him, of course.’