The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘Tanya — why didn’t you —’ she began on a bleat.

  Tanya, her eyes gone small and reptilian, said, ‘You didn’t tell me Matt is not house-trained.’

  Maggie felt Matt shrink at her side and for a full long moment, hated Tanya.

  The two women stared at each other with livid faces. Total strangers. Antagonists… It was a terrible moment. Then Matt pulled his hand free and started to run back down the stairs. At the bend he was heard to collide with someone. Through a sort of haze, Maggie heard a murmur of words. A few moments later he came back, slowly, carrying a telegram.

  Stupidly, Maggie read it. ‘Cataclysm. Coming home Sunday. Lay in whisky in magnums. I need it. Tanya.’

  She looked up. Tanya still sat there on the divan, but her reptilian look had gone. Maggie could recognise her now, although the sudden change from fury to vulnerability — also highly uncharacteristic — unmanned Maggie even further.

  ‘Tanya — what’s happened? — I didn’t know —’

  Tanya’s face, so austere with anger only a few moments before, abruptly crumpled. Matt took one appalled look and vanished into the bedroom, letting the door slam in an eloquent comment on grown-up women.

  Tanya was hiding her face in a flower-cushion. She wasn’t sobbing, just sitting there, green and poised, quite still with the cushion pressed to her face, the back of it indented by her tense red-tipped fingers. Suddenly she threw it down, turned her stretched eyes on Maggie and said, ‘Christ! I’m ashamed! I hurt him. I’m a wicked, wicked cow. It was not being able to get out on to the balcony to see my flowers as soon as I came home. You’ve no idea what’s happened — the most terrible, ghastly thing — Maggie — I have broken my contract!’

  Maggie crossed the drugget, stepping over the toys, and sat beside her. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said slowly. ‘How could you? Walk out? You’d be finished.’

  ‘I know.’ Tanya stood up. She was as taut as a wire. She evidently needed to walk about, but the whole place was so cluttered that she couldn’t. Maggie fell on her knees and began jerkily raking the little cars towards her and tipping them into their box. As fast as she cleared a space, Tanya used it for pacing.

  ‘Listen. I’ve upset your son. That’s more important than me… No, it isn’t. I’ve wrecked my career… Oh my God, Maggie, what possessed me? What possessed me?’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Maggie, from the floor. She was torn between worry about Tanya, anxiety for Matt, locked in the bedroom with his shame, and her own shame at the state of the flat. Looking up at Tanya with all the insight and affection of their long friendship, however, she felt her priorities fall into place. If Tanya had broken her contract — unthinkable, unheard-of! — then it was entirely probable that she would never work in the legitimate theatre again because she would be blacklisted. Maggie swept the boy-rubble ruthlessly to one end of the drugget and got up and went to the cupboard where Tanya kept her few bottles. There was some vodka in there. She poured it out neat and gave it to Tanya, who merely stared at it with glazed eyes and then shook her head.

  ‘I can’t now… I thought I would need to drink, but it’s too awful for comfort… Maggie, go to Matt, tell him I didn’t mean it. Let me just get hold of myself a little, I seem to have lost sight of myself altogether…’

  Maggie hesitated, then obeyed. She shut the bedroom door behind her. Matt was sitting on the big bed with his back to her, his head bent, the exposed springs digging into the backs of his bare legs, holding his bear.

  ‘Darling…?’

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ he mumbled. ‘It just came out in my sleep.’

  She ran to comfort him, holding him tightly. ‘Of course you couldn’t. Of course you couldn’t! And Tanya knows it too, really. She’s awfully sorry she said that, she didn’t mean it.’

  ‘You talk about housetraining dogs.’

  ‘I know. Please forgive her. It is her flat, and her bed, and we let her find everything in such a mess. It’s my fault, not yours.’

  A sob shuddered up his back and she felt tears, hot and salt, on her neck and shoulder.

  ‘Will we have to leave now? Why did she have to come back?’

  Maggie couldn’t answer. She was struggling with her own tears. She just stroked him soothingly. The bear’s rather hard nose was sticking into her ribs.

  ‘Teddy’s getting squashed.’

  Matt pulled away and attended to his bear. A small movement in the doorway caught Maggie’s eye and she turned. Tanya was standing there, looking, if possible, even more stricken than before.

  ‘Matt. I’m sorry. I peepeed my bed once when I was twelve.’

  Matt blushed deeply and did not turn. The two women exchanged signals: ‘What can I do?’ ‘Nothing. Leave him now.’

  Maggie kissed Matt. ‘Darling, I’m going to talk to Tanya. Don’t sit on those springs too long, you’ll have knitting marks up the backs of your legs.’

  Maggie and Tanya cleared up the flat in silence. There seemed no point in apologising for its state, and no way to do it anyway. When they got to the mattress, they stood one on each side of its arched bulk and their eyes fell, simultaneously and irresistibly, on the exposed hump. A faint brown line wavered round a slightly bleached patch. Maggie looked up at Tanya in a sort of anguish of apology, but Tanya said briefly, ‘It couldn’t matter less. Possibly.’

  They lugged it back to the bedroom and on to the bed. Matt had slipped out somewhere, leaving the bear lying on the springs. Tanya found clean sheets and they made the bed together, a thing impossible to do without a kind of intimate domestic orchestration. Then Tanya sat the bear on the pillow.

  ‘Look at the reproach in those beady eyes…’ She sat down. ‘Maggie, can I talk about me now?’

  ‘Shall I make coffee?’

  ‘I would choke… You know I have eaten and drunk quite normally for three days since it happened, and done my performances, everything — even laughed and joked. But on the train down, it hit me, right in the middle of a cheese sandwich, and I had to go and be sick.’

  ‘You played to the end of the week?’

  ‘Yes. To give the understudy time. It’s such a huge part. I had nothing against her. I wanted to leave that same day, the day of the row, but she begged me, she was in panics… So I had to play three more nights and a matinee with the whole company knowing I was going to break my contract. They didn’t speak to me, not a word, except Oliver of course, he had to, but you know, even he —’

  They were sitting on the bed looking out at the rooftops at the back of the house. The garden, as in many houses ‘gone to flats’, was nobody’s responsibility, and the sycamore seedlings had run wild; the tops of the young trees were now over the first-floor window sill. Maggie was struggling to catch some elusive memory. At the same time, she was concentrating upon Tanya, empathising with her and yet somehow repelled, not any longer by what she had said to Matt (she fully understood that) but by the mere proximity of an actress who had broken that deepest of taboos. So she didn’t have to ask why Tanya had been ostracised. Actors are creatures of instinct; in this sense, they are primitives, whatever veneer of worldliness they’re thinly coated with.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ she said once more.

  Tanya heaved a profound sigh. She stood up and went out of the room, returning a moment later with a suitcase, which she laid on the bed and began to unpack. Some activity seemed essential. Her hands busy with underwear and spongebag, a crumpled cotton peignoir and nylon balls of stockings, she told her sorry tale.

  ‘It was all because of the way they were treating Oliver. The management. He was engaged to play the lead — my lover. Then during rehearsals, they changed their minds and said they had to have a big television star in it because these days it is important for the box-office to have at least one TV or movie star. They offered to buy him off, but he refused and insisted on his contractual rights to the lead and star billing, and then they started. Started to make his life a misery.


  ‘When we began the tour, every time there was a poor house there would be loud remarks about how much better we would be doing with George Berridge, the one they still wanted to put into it. Representatives from the management came up from London to try to persuade Oliver to get out of the cast, and they would creep round the company doing him dirt and trying to convince everyone that his selfishness and stubbornness were spoiling our chance of coming into Town. Rumours started that we would have to cut the tour short and we would all be thrown out of work because there was no big name in the cast — I mean, no name that meant anything in the provinces, because there, really, it is beginning to be all movies and television, and a London reputation cuts no ice.

  ‘Of course I was completely and utterly on his side, and I would get very abusive when this little creep from the management came sniffing around to my dressing-room. After a while, someone must have gossiped to him that I and Oliver are living together because the creep kept away from me, but then I noticed everyone else was avoiding me too, and Oliver, and we realised that the message was getting to them. It was a strain. But still it was tolerable. At least, I thought so.

  ‘That is, till last Wednesday. We were in Birmingham, doing three weeks there at the Alhambra, and to the Hippodrome came this other company, and who should be the star but George Berridge. And we had different matinee days, so of course, though without telling each other, every last one of our company went to their matinee. And although it was a fine afternoon, it was a full house. A full house, Maggie — Birmingham — in the middle of August! We hadn’t had a full house, even in the evenings, for months.’

  Maggie could not suppress a groan.

  ‘That night, Oliver was late in. He’d left our digs before me on some pretext, which like a fool I believed — I knew he was feeling terrible and he hadn’t said a single word to me since we all came, very silent and downcast, out of the dreadful play — and it was dreadful, a rubbish, a nothing, with just this one big name. And at our theatre they called the half, and then the quarter, and still he wasn’t in, and the stage manager came rushing to me, where was he, and I didn’t know. I was so frightened… And at the five, he suddenly reeled in. Maggie!’ She put her red head in her hands.

  ‘Drunk?’

  ‘Yes. Terribly. The S M ordered him not to play, but he just shoved him to one side and went on just as he was, no makeup or anything, in his ordinary clothes. Luckily most of his scenes were with me and I could help him, but the girl playing his daughter was such a little bitch, she did everything she knew to show him up. When he was slow on his cues she would turn her head to the prompt corner, or turn away upstage as if unable to cope with this drunken fellow, and everyone was lurking about in the wings watching him… Once he started to talk nonsense, and I could see the S M was getting ready to bring down the curtain — imagine it, Maggie! I got to the wings and signalled him and then I surged back and started saying all Oliver’s lines as well as my own, you know, that technique we practised at RADA, “I know what you’re going to say…” The end was practically a monologue, but all the time I was thinking, what’s the use, this is all they’ve been waiting for, he’ll be sacked, and it was so bloody unfair because never, ever has anything like it happened before.’

  She straightened up and closed the empty suitcase. ‘Well, you can guess the rest. They jumped on him the next morning and sacked him, and I said if he goes, I go, and they told me if I did that I would never work in legitimate theatre again and I said to hell with the lot of you. And that’s it.’

  ‘The last three days must have been purgatory for you.’

  ‘Worse, in fact. Because purgatory is temporary and when I came out of my anger, around Friday, and found everyone treating me like a leper, and Oliver gone, and realised these were probably the last nights I would ever spend on the stage, I realised this terrible feeling was forever.’

  They sat back to back on the bed for a long time. Maggie captured the vagrant memory like a flittering butterfly and gave it a scant glance — of course. The time she was sacked in Devon and cried all the way home on the train. But that was nothing. She had not been an established actress. And she was able to push it behind her and try again. For Tanya it was, indeed, a catastrophe. Unimaginable.

  Tanya said, in a voice so weary that Maggie’s heart smote her, ‘I wanted to go on to the balcony and see my flowers. Have you been watering them?’

  ‘Yes. They hardly seemed to need anything I could do for them. How do you make them grow like that?’

  ‘I brought sacks of leaf mould from the country. It has never grown anything before. No, don’t come with me, Maggie, please. I want to be alone for a while.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Maggie found Matt sitting on the bench at the top of the Hill, cutting at the wood with his penknife, not savagely but concentratedly, the way Tanya had unpacked. Maggie didn’t restrain him. She sat with him till he’d finished the full-stop after the M.

  ‘Let’s go to a film.’

  He stood up obediently but without looking at her, and they walked down the Hill and into the ‘village’ in Regent’s Park Road. At the very bottom of this was a Marine Ices place, which sold ice-creams of every imaginable flavour. When Matt noticed that they were heading there, he perked up a little.

  ‘Why did she have to come back?’

  Maggie attempted to explain something of Tanya’s dilemma in terms he could understand, but his mind was on ice-cream and a movie and pee’d mattresses and the possibility that he would not be sleeping in his king-sized bed that night, so he didn’t listen much.

  ‘Will she let us stay?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What if she doesn’t?’

  ‘We’ll find somewhere else.’

  ‘Where? Scotland?’

  ‘No. London.’

  ‘But where in London?

  God alone knows! ‘What flavour?’

  ‘Green.’

  After the film they retraced their steps up the street, stopping for fish and chips for three, though Maggie was fairly sure Tanya wouldn’t feel like her share.

  In the doorway of the flat, Maggie stopped. They had been gone no more than three hours, yet the flat was transformed.

  For a start, the main room was restored to its original stylish neatness; all child-traces had been expunged, and Maggie’s heart sank. But Tanya’s voice issuing from behind the bedroom door instructed them to go into the spare room, and there marvels awaited them.

  Gone the impedimenta of illusion, the general clutter, and in its place, two small pine beds, a chest-of-drawers and a washbasin (which must have been lurking there all the time). It was not a large room and two of them would find it restrictive, but it was a welcome and welcoming sight to the eyes of Maggie whose fifth viewing of Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs had been marred by frantic thoughts of bed-and-breakfast digs at extortionate prices, or a total retreat.

  Matt, however, had other views.

  ‘It’s wee,’ he exclaimed in dismay. ‘I’ll fall right out of that wee bed! And where can I keep things?’

  ‘I’ll buy you a toy-box!’ Maggie hissed. She headed for Tanya’s room. ‘Tanya! You’re incredible! How in God’s name did you —?’

  ‘Don’t come in just now, darling,’ came the voice from the bedroom. ‘The lock’s bust.’

  But Maggie was already halfway in, in enough to catch a glimpse of Tanya entangled in a sheet with a long angular other body, which had its face coyly turned into the pillow.

  ‘God! I’m sorry —!’ she gasped, retreating.

  ‘Never mind, love,’ Tanya called equably after her. ‘Put the kettle on, will you?’

  Maggie, hot with embarrassment, did so. Matt edged round the partition into the kitchen area.

  ‘There’s someone else in my bedroom,’ he said. ‘I heard him.’

  ‘Yes. It’s a friend of Tanya’s.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. Getting dressed,
perhaps,’ she added boldly. ‘They’ve been resting.’

  ‘Resting! Are they babies?’

  ‘No, indeed.’

  The resters soon emerged, Tanya first, resplendent in a red velvet negligee. Her hair was no longer in its crest but suggestively tousled, her face, cleared of its make-up, looking a bit bald, except that her eyes really needed no enhancement. They were no longer tear-bruised but almost manically brilliant.

  ‘Talk about coitus interruptus!’ she grinned. ‘What’s that delicious smell? Oliver, come on, don’t be shy, it’s only Maggie, and I do believe she’s brought us fish and chips!’

  Poor Oliver had no recourse but to creep forth, looking as if violence had just been done to him. He hadn’t changed much since RADA days. Still the same tall, rangy figure, topping Tanya by a good foot, dark hair neatly combed around the long intelligent-goat face — just now, an intelligent, bright red goat. Maggie felt sorry for him. They shook hands, with much mutual avoidance of eyes. But Tanya was heartlessly laughing at their embarrassment.

  ‘Oh come on, you two, it’s nothing so dreadful! We should have put a sign up. Where’s Matt? Listen, Matt, I want to say something private to you. Come with me.’ And before he knew it he was being led away into the spare room, leaving Oliver and Maggie alone, heartily wishing themselves elsewhere.

  ‘How have you been, Oliver?’ asked Maggie with bright inanity, busying herself with trying to turn three portions of fish and chips into four.

  ‘Okay till recently,’ said Oliver. ‘Er — I didn’t mean — just very recently, of course.’

  They both tried to laugh, then stopped. They met each other’s eyes for the first time. Oliver’s eyes were rather goat-like as well, a sort of topaz. There was no humour in them. They were the bruised ones now, and the shock they showed had little to do with Maggie’s barging in.

  ‘I was so upset by what Tanya told me,’ Maggie said quietly. ‘You must have been through a horrible time — both of you. Specially her.’