The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  Tanya sipped her drink and considered. ‘Does saying “bloody” shock you?’

  ‘Oh, good heavens, no! I’m far past that.’

  ‘Saying “Jesus Christ” as swearing?’

  ‘Well, I won’t say I like it, but it wouldn’t keep me away. It’s not words so much. It’s moral attitudes. And ugliness. And being cruel.’

  ‘There’s no cruelty in this. But perhaps you would think it immoral.’ She sat down and crossed her beautiful legs. Her skirt slid back to mid-top-thigh. Ian flushed and looked away. ‘The girl I play is the hero’s mistress, and he brings her into his home, and she tries to win the love of his daughter. I mean, the one he had with his wife.’

  ‘And what is the wife doing meanwhile?’

  ‘She is away. The daughter’s supposed to be away too, but she comes back unexpectedly and catches her father with me. I’m very sexy and unprincipled, but I am truly in love with this man and so I pretend to myself that I am his wife and the mother to this young girl. The man watches me talking to her and hugging her and trying to do the cooking and so on, and he gets angrier and more mixed up and in the end I go that bit too far by wearing the wife’s clothes. There is a fearful row. The girl calls her mother on the phone —’

  ‘It sounds,’ said Ian with unexpected joviality, ‘not so much shocking as rather tedious!’

  Tanya gave her lashes the tiniest flutter in his direction and said, ‘I tell it better when the author is helping.’ She turned back to Mrs Robertson. ‘Do you think you would find it — tedious?’

  ‘Not with you on the stage,’ she answered promptly. ‘In any case, I usually find I can sympathise with things people do if they are, as you say, truly in love. However bad. Because after all, they are not responsible, are they, when they are in that condition.’

  ‘You make it sound a bit like getting drunk!’ said Ian in the same uncharacteristically jolly tone.

  ‘No one chooses to fall in love the way you might choose to have too many sherries,’ said Mrs Robertson meaningly. Ian’s hands, engaged in pouring his third, paused fractionally but then continued. ‘It’s not the same at all. People in love are — not themselves. Anyone who has ever been in love knows that.’

  There was a surprised silence. Mrs Robertson had replaced Tanya as the centre of attention. Maggie suddenly remarked, ‘I’d always supposed the ability to fall in love as thoroughly as that had been left out of our family genes. What a relief to hear that there’s hope for all of us yet.’

  Stip abruptly flushed to the roots of his hair, and Ian suddenly cried, for no apparent reason, ‘Bravo!’ and cocked his sherry-glass stiffly in the air before throwing its contents down his throat. Maggie gazed at him in astonishment. So did Lilian.

  Tanya was saying interestedly, ‘Does that mean you would have sympathy with someone who committed a crime of passion?’

  ‘Ah well now, you mustn’t push my one little provocative view to extremes. Shooting people is one thing. Consoling yourself for a sad and futile situation as a married man’s mistress by trying to make his child love you, and feeling at home in his house, that seems to me no more than an extension of wanting his arms around you.’

  Maggie was to remember this scene all her life, and even then, at the time, she thought, ‘When I am in my sixties I must remember to say something which forces my child to realise that I am a person, with a past and an inner life about which he guesses nothing.’ And then she thought, ‘If only, by then, I have had a past and an inner life worth talking about, and am not obliged to make it all up.’

  The room was strangely silent. Maggie said, ‘I must go and dish up lunch.’

  Tanya tipped down her drink. ‘I’ll help. Do you use those place-tickets to show where everyone is to sit? I would like to arrange those.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Stip.

  ‘Because I want to sit next to your mother,’ said Tanya. She kissed Mrs Robertson. ‘I love her and I am going to cry in a minute. You had better let me make the hooding, Maggie.’

  In the kitchen, Tanya sank into a hardbacked chair and lit a cigarette. Maggie noticed that her hand was shaking and that she didn’t look at Maggie straight away.

  ‘Well,’ said Maggie. ‘Come on. First impressions.’

  Tanya blew out smoke, sighed profoundly and pushed her fingers through her hair, making herself look, at a stroke, like her young, untidy, student self. ‘My God, what a mixture of a family you have! But not at all as you described. That Ian. He is not the grim puritan as advertised. He is bubbling.’

  ‘You noticed? But Tanya, he’s behaving very oddly! I think he’s a bit tight. All that grinning and rocking on his heels, like Malvolio cross-gartered … and speaking of bubbles —’ She had opened the door of the old-fashioned fridge to get out the milk. Lying awkwardly on its side was a bottle of Moët and Chandon. She drew it out in disbelief.

  ‘Can this be in your honour?… Never! Something’s happened, what can it be? Oh, wait! I think I guess.’

  ‘What, what? Tell! I love it when people behave at a tangent from their normal selves!’

  ‘It would explain Lilian, too, looking like Sarah after the angel’s visit… You see, they’ve been trying to adopt a baby, and they’ve had no luck so far, and I’ll bet you anything there’ll be an announcement at lunch!’

  Tanya stared with her mouth open.

  ‘Do you mean that some adoption agency would hand over to that thin-lipped, thin-hipped creature in there, the fruit of “full thigh and flowing breast?”’

  ‘I think.’ Maggie bent to open the heavy old oven door, sniffed the roast, and ladled some hot dripping into another pan for the Yorkshire pudding.

  ‘Can I help?’ asked Tanya. ‘Give me an apron.’

  Maggie gave her one, and also a bowl, an egg, some milk, some flour and a wooden spoon. Tanya got to work without much concentration.

  ‘That mother of yours,’ said Tanya slowly.

  ‘You brought out something in her, within five minutes of meeting her, that I don’t think any of us have ever suspected was there.’

  ‘She and I are kith and kin,’ said Tanya. ‘Oh yes! Apart from age, nationality, race, religion and our entire life histories, she and I are basically the same.’

  ‘Mix the egg in more before you add any milk. What do you think of Stip?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. He has this naked feel about him. I’m not normally scared of naked men, only when they think they are fully dressed.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Tanya looked at her sideways. ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Darling Maggie, naive as ever. Never mind. God, this is hard work, haven’t you a machine? Where is Matt?’

  Maggie blushed. ‘At Sunday school, actually.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t make too much of it.’

  ‘Seriously, Maggie, I am shocked! Whose idea?’

  ‘His. His friends mostly go, so he goes.’

  ‘You amaze me. This is going to be lump-hooding. Please let me use a whisk, at least.’

  ‘Hoodings may be made with the aid of modern technology. Puddings are made with a wooden spoon. Here, give it to me. You decorate the trifle.’

  ‘Ah! Glace cherries and angelica — heavenly… I am longing to meet Matt. Are you a good mother?’

  Maggie was silent, beating. After a while, she said with some difficulty, ‘I find I can’t… I can’t love Matt all the time.’

  ‘I know mothers who hardly seem to love their children any of the time, except maybe when they’re asleep.’

  ‘But it’s terrible, Tanya! I loved him every minute of the day and night in Africa.’

  ‘But then you were not with him every minute.’

  ‘It shouldn’t matter. Now he’s dependent on me for all his love, it’s more important than ever that the supply should never fail.’

  ‘It’s impossible to love anybody all the time.’

  Maggie straightened and
said casually ‘What about Joel, didn’t you —?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tanya after a pause. ‘Joel. Well, but I was in love with Joel, and as your sweet and intuitive mother pointed out, in-loveness holds all rules in obeisance.’

  ‘Abeyance.’

  ‘What’s obeisance then?’

  ‘Bowing down in worship.’

  ‘So, that wasn’t much of a mistake.’

  ‘Did you really,’ asked Maggie, in childish curiosity and envy, ‘worship him?’

  Tanya smiled and put the trifle, gloriously over-embellished, onto the middle of the kitchen table. ‘Much more than God, anyway. I still think Joel was worthier of worship than that cruel bastard-god Matt’s off learning about. You see, Maggie, although the heavens rained thunder-bolts and the ground opened up under my feet because of Joel, it wasn’t he who made it happen. It was our situation, which I always knew. I always knew it must punish me terribly in the end, if I didn’t run away in time.’

  ‘But you don’t wish you’d run?’

  There was a long silence. Tanya sat on the table edge, one glossy leg swinging meditatively. Maggie sensed she was trying to project herself, actress-like, back into past emotion.

  ‘Yes,’ she said at last.

  Maggie’s heart lurched, then sank. It was profoundly important to her that Tanya should not regret this experience.

  ‘I can’t believe you! It must have given you so much — added to your armoury as an actress, if nothing else.’

  Tanya looked at her enigmatically. ‘I see you actually envy me that violent soul-shaking… Maggie, believe me, you might as well envy me the war, that filthy camp, my terrors and hunger and losses, my hatred of the Germans, and the awful, awful loneliness… Love for me in the end was pure pain, and something worse — shame. You don’t know all that happened.’ She lit a new cigarette and asked, without looking at her, ‘When are you coming to the play?’

  ‘Tomorrow night, of course.’

  ‘I am good. It’s a very well-written play and I am very, very natural in it. Do you understand why?’

  She looked into Maggie’s eyes challengingly through the smoke.

  ‘You mean, you did something like the character? Going to Joel’s home and trying to — get into his wife’s skin?’

  ‘I did that and a lot more. A lot worse. This shocking modern drama is a thin watery pastiche of the things I did in real, real life. I wonder what your sweet tolerant mother would say if she knew what ruthless and immoral things I did because of how much I wanted — how did she put it — his arms around me.’

  Now, through Tanya’s smoke-narrowed eyelids, Maggie saw the tears well out. She was appalled, and ran to hug her, thinking it was just an after-spasm that would be quickly over. But it was not just an after-spasm, because Tanya was weeping from her guts and couldn’t stop. In the end, Maggie had to get her up to her room, first going ahead to see that the coast was clear. By the time the guestroom door closed behind them, Tanya’s eye-black was smeared all over her face and the spectacular false eyelashes had come adrift. Later, Maggie was to find one like a crumpled spider in the folds of a tea-towel in the kitchen.

  ‘This is the last,’ Tanya gasped finally, sitting on the edge of the bed with a wet face-flannel pressed to her flushed and ravaged face. ‘The very last time I shall ever cry over him. I am amazed at myself, Maggie, really — shocked at myself. Because it is, as I told you, long ago over, and this — disgusting display of female feebleness is nothing but a fluke. It is like when those stage hypnotists tell you that even after you wake from your trance you will react in a certain stupid way, quite unrelated to your true self, when you hear this tune or that phrase… It was just the phrase your mother used. I won’t say it in case it sets me off again… Oh, really! How silly! How idiotic! And just when I am seriously thinking of marrying a proper, available, unmarried man.’

  ‘Oliver…?’ asked Maggie slowly.

  Tanya blew her nose for the tenth time and went to the dressing-table to put repairs in hand.

  ‘Only now you will never believe that my love for him is genuine and that it is not just a sort of delayed bounce. There are different kinds of love. Nothing would lure me into that pit of snakes again! I don’t want to be in love with Oliver. He is a good companion. He is intelligent — do you know how rare, for an actor? And in bed he is good enough so I forget everything but my body. That has never happened to me before.’

  ‘Not even with Joel?’ Maggie was ashamed of asking. But, sexually unfulfilled as she was, she couldn’t help wanting to pry into the secrets of those who were not.

  ‘With Joel I thought of Joel, and of what pleasures his body was getting from mine. It adds a dimension, no doubt. With most men one is thinking of one’s lines or that one wishes one had left the heating turned on. Something goes off pop just below the navel and one thinks, “Nice!” and then goes on thinking of the other things.’

  Indeed? Still, even a pop below the navel would be a fine thing, thought Maggie with a heavy sigh. This was not lost on Tanya.

  ‘May one ask a deeply religious lady how Bruce was in that department?’

  ‘A bit … samey, really,’ Maggie said evasively. ‘I’ve nothing to compare him with.’

  ‘Maggie? Have you never come?’

  Maggie blushed. Suddenly it seemed her failure. She had a surprising need to defend Bruce over this. To be uninventive is not the same as being inconsiderate or untender. She was by no means sure, now, that another woman would not have found his love-making perfectly satisfactory.

  ‘I’m probably — you know — frigid or something,’ she said awkwardly, twisting her hands. ‘I think I ought to go down and see to lunch.’ She stood up, but Tanya stood up too. She put her hands on Maggie’s shoulders and looked into her eyes.

  ‘This is a very serious thing,’ she said. ‘I will ask you. Though I see you want to escape. When I said, have you never come, I meant literally — have you ever had an orgasm?’

  ‘A what? — Oh. Is that what it’s called?’

  Tanya released her and turned away. ‘Maggie, Maggie! Don’t you even read?’

  ‘The wrong books, perhaps,’ Maggie said, smiling, faintly through inner upheaval. It really felt like an earthquake, which brings long-buried objects to the surface to lie horribly exposed.

  Tanya turned back to her. ‘Yes, that is what it’s called. Have you never, never had the feeling that something like a white pleasure-balloon was blowing up behind your pubic bone?’

  ‘Yes, but only when I was asleep. Never in — in connection with anything physical.’

  ‘Then you are not frigid. Do you masturbate?’

  ‘Tanya! Heavens! Do you all really ask each other such questions nowadays?’

  ‘If you are thinking such thoughts about frigidity, it is time you learnt to be more open. Do you?’

  Maggie struggled with the newly-uncovered look of things.

  ‘Do you mean… Does sort of scratching count?’

  Tanya’s mouth twitched, but she bit her lips firmly. ‘Yes, if the “sort of scratching” produces that white bubble.’

  ‘Well… Perhaps. Sometimes. By accident.’

  ‘Oh my God, Maggie! You are a little bit incredible.’

  Maggie shook herself free. ‘Don’t! Don’t patronise me. I can’t help it.’

  ‘You were in the theatre for so long, and married for so long, and you don’t even know the words for things… No. You are wrong, I am not a bit patronising you, but Maggie, listen. You must come to London. You must have some love, and some life. You must have some affairs, or one anyway. What is wrong with these Scots? A year, nearly, of being a grass widow, and — nothing?’

  Maggie, still feeling prickly with embarrassment and inadequacy, moved to the mirror and combed her hair with a shaky hand, not noticing she was using Tanya’s comb.

  ‘My brothers are fairly typical of the sort we specialise in around here. Puritanical, or shy, or both, and then there’s also the kind that dr
inks too much, and the rest seem to be either profoundly married or crippled with rheumatism.’

  Tanya laughed her bawdy laugh. ‘So the Scots’ ardour is damped by the weather. One would expect the same to apply to London, but all that is changing. When are you coming, Maggie?’

  ‘I don’t think ever. How can I, with Matt?’

  ‘How were you able to come back to England for visits, while you were in Nigeria?’

  ‘We had servants there, one in particular, a lovely girl called Tolly who was a better mother to Matt than I could ever be.’

  ‘And you left her behind because that made you feel inadequate.’

  Startled, Maggie said, ‘No! Not because of that.’

  ‘So why? Why didn’t you bring her and make yourself free?’

  ‘You don’t know her. She’s — she’s a tropical person. She would have been totally out of her element.’

  ‘She didn’t want to come?’

  ‘She nearly killed herself because she wasn’t coming.’

  ‘Are you crazy, Maggie? Do you want to be tied for years to this house, to miss everything that is going on now? To miss your own life?’

  ‘This is my own life. Being a mother and a daughter.’

  ‘Oh! What a show of virtue! But you have just finished telling me you are a bad mother, and that this lovely tropical black girl is a good one. And as to your mother, she is self-sufficient, essentially. But perhaps she is against your being an actress?’

  ‘She is very much for it.’

  ‘I see. So who is against it? Stip?’

  ‘Yes. As a matter of fact.’

  ‘Stip doesn’t want you to be a success because he isn’t,’ said Tanya shrewdly. ‘Yet. But he may surprise you all. Don’t be held back by him, Maggie! Be a little ruthless for once. A little selfish!’

  ‘For once?’ Maggie burst out. ‘I’ve been being ruthless and selfish since I was eighteen.’

  ‘You were a little of both at eighteen. At twenty-two, you changed into a doormat. Now your husband has wiped his feet on you and walked off. You are not going to lie there forever with his boot prints on your stomach, are you? Stand up and be yourself! Matt will thank you for it later.’

  At that moment, they heard the front door bang and Matt pounding up the stairs. Maggie leapt up guiltily, glad to escape from the welter of confused feelings Tanya had evoked. ‘My God, look at the time —’