The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  At first Maggie found this irksome.

  ‘I thought you were in such a hurry to move out,’ she said, when he brought home his third or fourth consignment of wallpaper books and carpet samples, colour charts and swatches of chintz and velvet and brocade.

  ‘Am I getting on your nerves?’ he asked cheerfully.

  ‘I just like to know what’s going on.’

  ‘Well, what I thought was that I’d stay on a bit, and help with the redecorations. I’m quite handy in my modest way, only I’ve never had a real chance to practise. You’ve no idea how expensive it is to get the so-called experts in, nowadays. Let’s have a try at doing it ourselves.’

  ‘What, all the painting and papering, you mean?’ asked Maggie, appalled and intrigued.

  ‘Why not? I did Matt’s nursery by myself. It’ll save a fortune. I’m even prepared to have a go at laying the carpets, if you’ll make the curtains.’

  Mrs Robertson found the prospect of a pair of rank amateur decorators messing about in her house daunting, to say the least, but when she’d had a couple of estimates that nearly made her hair stand on end, and Stip had dashed off a comparative costing, she yielded with good grace. This was well before middle-class do-it-yourself really set in, and Ian and Lilian condemned the project as not only wildly impractical but faintly scandalous; manual work was for menials and that was the bottom line of their objections. But by the time they got wind of it, Stip and Maggie were already up ladders in their dungarees, and refused to come down.

  It was just as well that they liked the position, because they had to maintain it for many months. They made endless blunders to begin with; many a job had to be done twice or even three times before Mrs Robertson would agree to pass it. She helped on the sidelines, setting the standards and learning all the terms (‘That strip will have to come down again, Steven — it’s not random-match, you know!’). And it was she who made most of the curtains in the end, because her ageing Singer treadle defied Maggie’s infuriated attempts to master it.

  Besides, Maggie was into stripping. She began with a fire surround, which had been chocolate brown for as long as anyone could remember, but which, with the layers of paint scraped off, proved to be beautiful dove-white marble. Maggie had it dismantled, took it out into the back garden piecemeal and worked on it with a vicious mixture of her own invention of which the main ingredients were pure caustic soda and wallpaper paste. She used the hose a good deal, burned through three pairs of overalls and five of rubber gloves and killed a whole row of her mother’s pansies with the run-off; but when she’d finished, the fireplace was a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Reassembled in the drawing-room (hors de combat for weeks) against Stip’s magnolia wallpaper, it gave Maggie such immense, almost sensual satisfaction that she at once began on the hall panelling.

  For this she invested in half a dozen scrapers of eccentric shape to dig into the crevices of the moulding, as well as an array of wire brushes and other implements. She even invested, to her mother’s horror, in a blow-lamp. Here, too, there were blunders; the golden pine panelling, a hundred years old, revealed by her efforts, bore in burns and gouges the proof of its first-ever stripper’s inexperience, but the overall effect when sanded and polished with beeswax was both aesthetically and psychologically profoundly satisfying.

  At least Maggie and Stip thought so. Mrs Robertson was dubious — ‘a nice coat of white gloss’ was murmured about — but when she saw Maggie’s look of outrage, she resigned herself. And she did get her own way about several other features of the house. She, like the others, learnt that the skilled piper can call his own tune. She chose the curtain material because she refused to use her sewing-machine on any other.

  Stip was as good as his word about the paperhanging and carpet-laying. And his taste astonished both his mother and sister. When Edinburgh’s shops failed to provide designs or shades that pleased him, he took money from their ‘float’ (all accounts were strictly kept — Mrs Robertson insisted on that) and took the train to London, whence he returned after three entrancing days with an assortment that left the women speechless. ‘I don’t know!’ Mrs Robertson kept saying, fingering the new synthetic velvets in shades of mushroom and eau-de-Nil, the wallpaper samples with their silky eggshell finish from which infant finger-marks could be wiped. ‘I just do not know at all!’

  ‘Well, I do,’ said Stip firmly, ‘and I’ve placed orders for this, this, and this. They’ll arrive on Friday, so let’s clear the decks in the bedrooms and alert the upholsterer to collect the dining room chairs and the sofa.’

  Mrs Robertson looked dazed. But she was willing to try anything. Both Stip and Maggie were very proud of her, and, increasingly, fond and proud of each other.

  ‘You’re getting really good!’ exclaimed Maggie, sometime later, watching Stip bearing lightly-pasted wallpaper, folded over on itself, swiftly up the ladder and affixing it to the twelve feet of the stairwell without wrinkle or tear. ‘You’ll be able to do up your own place, when you get it.’

  ‘Don’t think I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Stip. ‘Why do you think I’m making all my mistakes here?’

  Matt was settling down all right. He liked his school; he liked the town with its modern shops; he loved his room with its gas-fire and fender you could sit on, and the big, exciting toy-cupboard. He liked all the bustle of having a family, though the ritual Sunday lunches bored him. He sensed Ian’s innate disapproval and he cordially hated Lilian. But he wrote every week to Tolly and slept with her blouse to his face and the little wire-and-fur creatures on his bedside table. And he talked all the time about going back to Africa. No gentle off-putting remarks of Maggie’s shook him in his conviction that all this, pleasant as it was, could conceivably be anything more than an interlude.

  For Maggie, things were not so easy. She had always recognised that she didn’t know the half of motherhood, the good side or the bad side; she had always been cushioned against its sharper realities and had felt guilty that she was not fulfilling the pattern of parenthood that she had been conditioned to believe was the only right one. Now this guilt, at least, was removed. Matt was all Maggie’s. She was responsible for everything about him, from seeing that he brushed his teeth and moved his bowels to keeping him fed, clothed and entertained. If she could see that he was getting in the way, or getting tired and fractious, she had to drop everything and take him out, or alternatively, get strict with him. She soon realised how very little practice she had had in being strict.

  One Sunday, the whole family was sitting round the lunch-table. Lilian was being more unbuttoned than usual. She was beginning to see, through the rough-and-tumble of the redecorations, how efficient Stip was getting, and how much money he was saving by this novel do-it-yourself approach.

  ‘You’ll make some lucky girl a wonderful, handy husband,’ she remarked waggishly as she helped herself to more peas.

  Stip crossed his eyes behind Lilian’s back as she leant forward. Matt saw this and burst out laughing. Lilian looked round sharply and Ian raised his eyebrows. Matt began to act up, snorting and giggling, trying to involve Stip in an eye-conspiracy against his uncle and aunt.

  Maggie could usually be fairly patient with Matt when it was only her mother or Stip, but when his behaviour gave Ian and Lilian an opportunity to exchange looks, as they were now doing, she became unwontedly furious.

  ‘Matt,’ she said, in her special tone of warning. But instead of responding he slithered down in his chair, almost disappearing under the table. He must have been sitting on a corner of the cloth; everything began to slide dangerously. Mrs Robertson gave a little cry and grabbed the cloth, but too late — Matt’s plate crashed to the carpet.

  ‘Matt! Look what you’ve done! Stop it and sit up properly!’ exclaimed Maggie, hot with shame, hiking him upright. He was boneless. He hung his head like a badly-made Guy Fawkes, uttering idiotic sounds. Ian rose with dignity and left the room, evidently finding the whole scene intolerable. Lilian sat still,
watching with a sort of detached curiosity. She seemed to be deriving some inner pleasure from Maggie’s struggles.

  Stip stood up, lifted Matt bodily from his chair and carried him out of the room, feebly kicking and hiccupping. There was a pause. Maggie was too sunk in embarrassment and anger to speak, but she picked up the fallen plate which luckily was still in one piece, and the knife and fork. Then Ian made a studied re-entry.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, swept his napkin across his knee with a speaking gesture, and went on with his lunch.

  ‘Poor wee boy,’ said Mrs Robertson. ‘It’s not his fault.’

  Maggie knew what that meant. It meant, ‘He needs a father’s hand.’ But Ian interpreted the remark according to his own ideas.

  ‘Of course it’s not the boy’s fault,’ he remarked tartly.

  ‘I suppose you mean it’s mine,’ said Maggie.

  ‘If the cap fits,’ said Ian maddeningly.

  ‘Ian, don’t,’ said Mrs Robertson.

  ‘In what way is it my fault? Not that he did anything so terrible.’

  ‘You should try harder to civilise him.’

  ‘To what?’

  Ian laid down his knife and fork.

  ‘Children are born in a state of nature,’ he said loftily. ‘They have to be civilised by their parents, otherwise they’re nothing but intolerable little savages.’

  If Stip had been there, Maggie wouldn’t have felt the need to defend herself — his simple presence had come to have this beneficent, relaxing effect. Now, stupidly, she felt she had to give battle, and on Ian’s own ground — a fatal error, always.

  ‘You saw me doing my best —’

  ‘I saw you shake his arm and say “Stop it”. But you didn’t mean it. When you say “no” to a child, he’s got to know you mean it.’

  ‘How the bloody hell am I supposed to convince him that I mean it? By beating him up?’

  Ian and Lilian exchanged looks. Ian said with infinite and lofty calm, ‘All right, Maggie. Let’s leave it. I suppose all things considered, it’s not your fault that you can’t handle basic situations.’

  Maggie saw bright red. She picked up her glass of water and threw its contents in his face.

  Lilian got splashed and jumped up and backwards, knocking her heavy chair over. Ian also jumped up with an inarticulate shout, brushing the cold water out of his eyes. The water-stains spread on the white Irish cloth. Mrs Robertson, at whom Maggie cast an instinctive, frightened glance, sat perfectly still, her hands clenched in her lap, her eyes behind her glasses tightly shut. Maggie wanted to die, she was so profoundly in the wrong and so conscious of it.

  ‘Are you mad?’ Ian shouted. Her aim had been excellent, her glass full, and he was thoroughly soaked.

  ‘If I’m not I soon will be, with you around! Try bringing up a child yourself and see if you’re so good at “basic situations” before you start on me!’

  ‘I’m happy to tell you,’ Ian said, very quietly though his narrow face was dark with outrage, ‘that your nasty little crack about our childlessness falls upon stony ground. Lilian and I have decided to adopt a child. I was going to tell you all after lunch. We expect to hear quite soon that we have a child of our own, and then we shall see whose theories of child-rearing are right, and whether self-control and a good example don’t produce better results than random fits of anger interspersed with spoiling! I think we’ll go home, Mother, if you’ll excuse us. I couldn’t eat any more and I’m really too angry to paper over cracks.’

  Mrs Robertson didn’t move or look up. Maggie didn’t follow Ian’s and Lilian’s departure with her eyes or her mind; she sat at the devastated lunch table staring at her mother until they heard the front door shut and Mrs Robertson’s eyes opened. Maggie waited as if for sentence.

  ‘Maggie dear,’ said her mother. ‘Just use the napkins to put under the cloth so the water won’t mark the polish, will you? Where have Steven and Matt got to? I’ll just go and bring in the apple pudding. It’s Matt’s favourite. Do you think I ought to whip the cream or serve it as it is?’

  ‘Whipped,’ muttered Maggie, shaking suddenly. ‘Shall I —?’

  Mrs Robertson laid an unexpectedly firm hand on her shoulder. ‘No, dear. You sit still and rest. One needs to, after an upset, or it takes all day to get over it.’

  She went out. Maggie stood up and began carefully bunching up the linen napkins and inserting them under the wet cloth. Abruptly, her mother returned. Maggie, nerves on edge, swung round guiltily.

  Mrs Robertson stood in the doorway.

  ‘You can handle basic situations,’ she said firmly, ‘Ian had no right to say that.’ Then she went again, calling, ‘Steven! Matt! Pudding!’

  Maggie stifled the onrush of sudden tears with a sopping napkin.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It took many months — nearly a year, in fact — for Maggie to realise why it was that she did not feel a great deal better in the redecorated house than she had when she first came home.

  The improvement in her surroundings was startling and undeniable. By the simple device of substituting pale colours for dark, the whole aspect had changed. The great gilt-framed mirrors, which had previously only emphasised the gloom, now expanded the vistas of the square high-ceilinged Victorian rooms; the finer points of period — the panelling and the mouldings, the picture rails, turned bannisters and fireplaces — had been brought out. Stip had an instinctive feeling for such things. He had spent hours at a neck-ricking angle up ladders, chipping the deadening layers of smoked whitewash off the central roses, revealing delightful bacchanalian designs… And his colour sense proved impeccable.

  Everyone who came into the house reacted more or less gratifyingly. Ian always narrowed his eyes against what he called ‘the glare’; Lilian surreptitiously twitched the new curtains in an abortive effort to make them do the office of the lace ones that had been ceremonially burnt in the back garden, with Stip, Maggie and Matt dancing round the pyre and Mrs Robertson handing out libations. Maggie’s and Stip’s contemporaries performed stranger antics, rolling about on the pale velvety carpets and demanding extra-mural showers in the new bathroom. In short, the whole enterprise was justly regarded by its perpetrators as a success.

  And Stip, his apprenticeship complete, took a last satisfied look around at his handiwork, packed his things with his mother’s help, and decamped to his own little house, new-bought and all but derelict.

  ‘My God, Stip! Are you sure you can handle it?’ Maggie had gasped on first seeing it.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ said Stip with that new air of self-confidence he had begun to display, and that was the last they saw of him for some time.

  Thus Mrs Robertson, Maggie and Matt had the reborn family house to themselves, and Maggie began to savour the reality of her life-change for the first time. While the house had been upside down and she had been working on it, there had been neither routine nor time in which to reflect on what her new situation was going to be like. It was only now that she began to realise, not just what Bruce had done in leaving her, but what he had done by taking her to Africa.

  Africa had wormed its way into her blood like bilharzia. The effect was nothing less than the distortion of all her visual and sensual perceptions. Once upon a time, these light, bright rooms would have wholly charmed and satisfied her. But it came too late. At eighteen, she had yearned for ‘contemp’. In her early twenties, struggling with the foreignness of Nigeria, she would have adored this. Now, she felt that all this pallor, this restraint, this essentially northern-hemisphere good taste was no longer a reflection of her present self. She had been seduced away from its essentially moderate pleasures. Needing the bite of strong, rich colours and rough textures, she found herself surrounded by a bland diet of pastel shades, quiet designs; when her hands reached out for tactile stimulus, the fabrics were all smooth, the wood polished, the carpets soft, the walls slippery. Nothing resisted. There was no friction, no salutary sudden shocks.

 
; Sometimes she would sit amid the pale beauty of Stip’s drawing room, all magnolia and ash green, and imagine Tolly. Blue-black Tolly, dazzling the eye. Maggie looked at her mother’s flower arrangements (daffodils, pink roses, lilac, apple blossom) and remembered the hibiscus and jacaranda, the bougainvillaea in all its splendid vulgarity, and wondered what her mother would say if she were able to effect a sudden complete substitution. What an effect it would make, what an impact!

  But it wouldn’t do. She proved it one day by bringing down her African souvenirs from her bedroom and scattering them about — an ebony statuette with metal neck-rings and down-pointing breasts, an oval shield carved in dark wood hung on a regency-striped wall, a big brazen dish glinting luridly, a brilliant body-wrap with geometrical designs — blood-red, purple, acid green, mustard yellow and a harsh, equatorial blue — draped over the old piano.

  The effect was stunning — in the pejorative sense. Even Maggie could see that. The two styles fought for supremacy; the more primitive won, almost at a blow, and stood crudely dominant against a background suddenly washed-out and defeated. Maggie felt disloyal to it. She hurriedly collected up all her alien trophies and bore them back to her room, before her mother could see and be shocked by the contrast they made with her pretty, tasteful interior.

  But on Maggie the imprint had been made. She kept seeing the things where she had momentarily, treacherously, arranged them. She kept seeing Tolly moving through the house, not at all like a ghost but as if she were really there, bringing Africa and Maggie’s past — her failed but married past — with her.

  And on a practical level, Maggie often longed for her. When Matt behaved in some incomprehensible fashion or went into one of his moods, Maggie wondered why on earth it had seemed so impossible to bring Tolly here. Sometimes she dreamed of sending for her, dreams almost as compelling as (she knew) Matt’s of returning to Tolly…