The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘Yes. If I’d been there, I’d never have let her do it,’ he said stalwartly. But the histrionic note in his tone made Maggie suddenly doubt that. If women secretly like men fighting over them, how much more must men like women hurling themselves on to their funeral pyres? Maggie frowned, ashamed of jumping to such a conclusion. She had nothing against Oliver, except that it was through him that Tanya had immolated her career.

  She changed the subject. ‘Was it you who helped her transform the room while we were out?’

  ‘Not only. She had a gang of us at it. That’s typical of her, of course. Anyone else would be prostrated, but Tanya just gets to work.’

  ‘What happened to the others?’

  ‘Dismissed! She suddenly had a sort of — collapse of energy. I felt she wanted us to be alone, so I shoved them all out.’

  ‘I’m sorry I came bursting in on you.’

  ‘Well! Shouldn’t have been at it at this hour — very antisocial. We knew you might appear.’

  Maggie warmed to him a trifle, even though he was standing hands in pockets letting her do all the table-laying. There was very much a man-of-the-house feeling about him. She put the plates of fish and chips on the table and then said, ‘Oliver, may I ask you something? Are you going to be living here with Tanya?’

  ‘Sort of, probably, though I’ve got my own flat. Why?’

  ‘Well, because —’

  Just then, Matt and Tanya returned, hand in hand and looking very conspiratorial. Matt was grinning.

  ‘Ah! Bisto!’ Tanya cried. ‘Well, anyway, ketchup. Can we have Naafi-type tea with it, and bread-and-scrape? Matt, you can have all my chips if I can have half your fish, without the batter. We actresses must watch our figures!’ There was a sort of hiccup in the atmosphere, like an engine ‘missing’, and then she sailed round into the kitchenette. ‘I’ll make the tea. Do you like your new room, Maggie? Of course you’ll need shelves and things, but it will do for the moment, won’t it?’

  ‘It’s wonderful. But we’ll have to talk about this matter of us staying on,’ said Maggie.

  Tanya’s head popped over the partition. ‘There’ll be no talk — you’re staying. That’s settled. The only thing to decide is about jobs for all of us.’ She glanced at Oliver. Fear flashed across her face for a split second and was gone, as if wiped off fiercely with a hot cloth. When she disappeared again, Maggie risked another look at Oliver. Tall and masculine-looking though he was, Maggie wondered how safe it would be to lean against him — really lean, with all the weight of one’s troubled life. In her limited experience of actors, they were not, as a breed, much good for leaning on. Their preferred world was not the real one.

  Throughout their supper (‘Fit for a common man!’) they all, including Matt, chatted quite cheerfully of unimportant things, the undercurrents of deep anxiety held in abeyance. It was clear that Matt and Tanya had made it up. At bedtime, Matt kissed her of his own volition and asked her to go and read him a story. This she did, while Maggie washed up the dishes and meticulously dried and tidied them all away, something she had never done after Matt’s and her meals. Oliver, meanwhile, sat and listened to an LP of Fauré, limp as a cat with his feet up on a big square pouffe.

  Then the three of them talked. Or rather, Tanya talked and the others listened, in Maggie’s case quite bemusedly. It was not only the flat that had been transformed. Tanya had gone from an all-time low to a high. She was behaving weirdly as if nothing serious had occurred, as if she herself were quite likely to take off at any moment on some glamorous tour, while Oliver was perfectly sure of a job soon. As for Maggie, well, that might not be so simple, but Tanya had plans. She would introduce her to her own agent, get her into Spotlight, guide her back into the well-worn job-getting paths, and, though nothing could be guaranteed, there was every reason for optimism.

  Throughout this monologue Maggie kept trying to catch Oliver’s eye, but he was minutely examining the embroidery on an oriental cushion; when appealed to by Tanya for endorsement of one of her wilder flights of fancy, he obliged with affirmative grunts. Maggie began to feel she was the only sane one, the only one who realised it wasn’t going to work, the four of them living together in a flat gone suddenly small. Especially with all the adults out of work and one at the point of ultimate professional crisis.

  When Tanya flitted off to the loo, Maggie grabbed the brief opportunity to lean over, remove the cushion from Oliver’s beautiful long fingers, and say, ‘Oliver, why do you keep agreeing with her? She’s talking pie in the sky.’

  He glanced at her between narrowed lids, like one of Helen’s hermit crabs peeping warily at the world from its haven-shell.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘Better than sinking into a slough of despond.’

  He reached for the cushion but Maggie held it away from him.

  ‘Oliver, listen to me! To begin with we can’t all live here together. Matt’s only a child; he’ll drive both of you crazy. As for jobs, maybe you’ll get one, though word will get round about what’s happened, but Tanya’s going to be blacklisted by Equity, and I haven’t worked for nearly ten years. Imagine the three of us trying to maintain our morale, or even our physiques… How long is it since you were seriously out of work?’

  Oliver shrugged uncomfortably. ‘I’ve been pretty lucky.’

  ‘Then let me inform you, it’s hell,’ said Maggie tersely. ‘It’ll be double hell for you if you’re not used to it.’

  ‘Charming of you to cheer me up,’ said Oliver, rising as if to get away from her and going to put another record on. Maggie, remorseless now, followed at his heels. She was about to harangue him further when Tanya came bounding back.

  ‘What are you two talking about behind my back?’ she asked waggishly.

  Suddenly Maggie felt defeated. If Tanya had anaesthetised herself with sex and false optimism, Maggie decided it was not for her to bring her back to agonising consciousness; yet she felt bereft. To see Tanya in this happy trance of unrealism was more alarming than the sight of her a few hours ago, feeling all the pain of her situation and reacting to it healthily. Maggie wondered when and why the change of direction had happened… Out on the balcony, among the flowers, perhaps. Or making love to Oliver… Making love properly, the way other people did, often seemed to have the effect of rendering all the problems of life somehow unimportant — irrelevant. But Maggie had always thought that this was a temporary dispensation.

  Oliver took his leave at about midnight, well tanked-up and feeling no pain. None of them were by that time. Even Margaret had cast herself adrift from her normal anchorage to the bedrock of ineluctable fact. Margaret didn’t often succumb to drink, staying obstinately sober on the side-lines hissing imprecations at Maggie. But tonight she lapsed, and Maggie was glad of it.

  She washed up the glasses muzzily while Tanya lay draped on the settee, looking more than ever like some exotic species of lizard sunning itself amid heaps of bright flowers and stones. Maggie kept eyeing her warily. She was suddenly irremediably foreign, despite her addiction to English sayings and food… Maggie felt her drifting away into her alienness at this critical moment and didn’t know how to call her back.

  They said goodnight to each other and Maggie repaired to her new bedroom. Matt was sound asleep, but he had left his teddy in Maggie’s bed to welcome her. Suddenly she felt quite maudlin. She picked the bear up and walked about the little room on tiptoe, cuddling him to her face. Her throat ached from holding back tears. The only person she could fix her mind on with any sense of comfort was — Tolly. Tolly! Tolly! she kept crying silently, as if the black girl had been her nanny.

  Maggie and the bear went to bed together, and in the night he came to life and she felt him standing by the bed, his beady eyes buttoned to her closed ones, waiting for her to wake up. In her dream she looked up at him and there he was with a shiny black face and a cup of tea in his paw, wearing a red dress and saying, ‘Time to go to work, Madam!’ But Maggie groaned in her sleep and
hugged the real bear closer, because she didn’t want to wake to such impossible challenges.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Maggie found a local school for Matt. It was not ideal, but then, neither had the school in Scotland been ideal. It was a school, it was close by — close enough for him to walk there by himself after the first week — and it would have to do. Maggie did not precisely turn a deaf ear on his grumbles nor petrify her heart against his new-boy horror stories and occasional tears, but there is a certain subcutaneous toughness produced by the knowledge that there is no viable alternative. This second skin, below the very sensitive top layer, protected her from deep pain. Boarding-school would have been worse; they both knew that. Maggie found herself no longer entirely sorry she had burst out with that bogey-story that day in the park.

  Matt’s daily 8.30 to 4 absence undeniably relieved the pressure, both on Maggie and on the flat. Oliver, whether from tact or inclination, had refrained from taking up residence. He seemed to spend most of his days in the West End, job-hunting in whatever less than full frontal ways actors in his position did (‘Ear to the ground in pubs and clubs mainly,’ said Tanya). This all meant that the two women had opportunities for some of the ‘weeks of talking’ that Tanya had forecast in her letter.

  Maggie had forgotten what unbuttoned confidences could do in the way of untying deep, griping inner knots. Curled up on the orange flower-cushion sofa, consuming endless mugs of coffee and glasses of cheap wine, she serviced Tanya’s knots and let Tanya do a like office for hers.

  She heard the full story of Tanya’s Joel-misery, her struggles to recover, her slow recognition — due mainly to propinquity, for they happened to do two consecutive tours together — that Oliver might be, not a surrogate Joel, that was out of the question, but a pleasant, personable port in a storm. ‘I need that more than anything now. A harbour. I am so very fond of him, Maggie, honestly! Well, haven’t I proved it? People who love each other properly have to make sacrifices for each other, don’t they?’

  Maggie, deep sunk into her role of uncritical friend (one she didn’t play very well, and couldn’t for very long) nodded sagely, careful, this once, to say nothing. Inwardly, she thought that this was the key to the whole Birmingham incident. Tanya had evidently been proving something to herself about her commitment to Oliver. This somehow made a bad situation worse.

  When Tanya ran temporarily dry, she leant back and listened while Maggie unburdened herself of the Bruce years, the traumas attending Matt’s birth, Tolly, the African padding, the WC, Joan, and her teaching.

  ‘How astonishing you succeeded so brilliantly at that,’ Tanya said, musingly. ‘I mean, astonishing to me because I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Of course you could, if you had to.’

  Tanya shook her head. ‘I would rather be idle.’

  ‘Why? Do you think there’s something degrading in it?’

  Tanya frowned. ‘No… Not for other people. For me — well, I suppose it’s a kind of inner, completely personal snobbery. I am a sort of theatrical aristocrat. I couldn’t do any other kind of work without feeling degraded. But I don’t flatter myself that is a good way to be. I admire you for the way you threw yourself into whatever came to hand.’

  ‘At the same time, suppressing a profound organic contempt!’

  Tanya chuckled ruefully. ‘I can’t help it, Maggie. You should have been an actress. I still think of you as one, I mean, manqué. If there is contempt in my feelings for you, it goes further back than your teaching career in Nigeria. Do you remember your understudy job, that you had before you married and left England? Well, your principal was in a company with me later, and she told me all about how she got pregnant and was about to leave the company when one of the leads in the play fell ill and she was offered to move up into that very good part. Do you know what she did?’

  ‘I can guess.’

  ‘You guess right, because you know how ruthless are true actors. She got rid of the baby and took the part and she has never looked back.’

  ‘Are you saying that I should have got rid of Matt?’

  ‘One cannot have everything in this life.’ Tanya was silent for a moment and then added, ‘You know, I’ve often thought that if I’d been willing to give up the theatre and settle down in Sheffield, where I could really have got to work on Joel — been available all the time — I could have got him away from his wife. I didn’t, and not from any deep-grained morality in my nature either. I was prepared to break up ten marriages, to see her drop down dead, to do anything — except give up acting.’

  And now it’s given you up, Maggie thought. She had good reason to know it, better perhaps even than Tanya. In a typically generous gesture, Tanya had written some letters of introduction for her to managements and even to her own agent. The managements maintained a frosty silence. The agent had written back, not to Tanya but to Maggie. The letter had been brief and to the point.

  Dear Miss Robertson,

  I have received, to my great surprise, a letter concerning you from Miss Tanya Zandler.

  This actress no longer being on our books, however, I find myself unable to act on any recommendation of hers.

  Yours sincerely.

  Mercifully, Tanya was sleeping when this letter came and never saw or knew about it. But it had given Maggie a plumb-line with which to sound the depths of Tanya’s professional disgrace.

  Something of her thoughts must have shown on her face now, because after a short meeting of eyes Tanya turned hers away abruptly and got up. She often moved about during their talk-sessions. Now she drifted about the big room, finding small things to tidy, watering her plants with a long-spouted can… Yes, thought Maggie, she has the look of a gracious, indolent lady of the manor. But what happens to the aristocracy when their stately homes are sold from under them to pay for their own improvidence or recklessness?

  ‘I’d do any work in the world,’ Maggie said suddenly, ‘rather than be deeply out of work ever again.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Tanya, ‘but how are you going to manage about Matt?’

  After a pause, Maggie said, ‘Well, I’ve been thinking about Tolly.’

  ‘The black nursemaid you had in Nigeria?’

  ‘Yes. If I were to get her over here, I could send Matt up to my mother’s. He could go back to his old school and Tolly would take care of both of them, and I could have him in the holidays. And then I could work. Properly.’

  ‘“Properly” meaning in the theatre?’

  ‘In it. Around it. Or not in it. I don’t know. I just know I can’t sit at home much longer. I’ll go crazy. I need to work, Tan — almost anything, it seems to me, that disciplined me, that gave my life a shape, that satisfied my need to earn my own living in some sensible, productive way, would do. Not as well as acting, but as a better-than-nothing.’

  ‘How could you bear to part with Matt for months on end?’

  ‘I could. That’s all. I could bear it better than feeling I was nothing but his mother and that I wasn’t earning my own living. I’ve got to do that, in any case. Unless I’m prepared to send him to Bruce’s old boarding-school, which is a spartan hellhole, I soon won’t have a penny of Bruce-money left.’

  ‘Come out on the balcony with me while I water.’

  Maggie stood well out of the way in the corner by the rosebush, which was still sad and palely loitering. The rest of the strange jungle of flowers gurgled audibly as they drank; Maggie half expected to see them surge into renewed growth before her eyes.

  ‘Do you think your Tolly would leave her little wooden hut for you?’

  ‘It’s more a matter of whether Joan would part with her, at this stage. I hear Tolly is invaluable as an assistant, especially with the younger ones. But I’ve been seriously thinking about writing to ask her.’

  ‘How would you pay her fare?’

  ‘I’d have to earn it.’

  Tanya caressed the face of an angry-looking zinnia soothingly while she thought. />
  ‘What does your mother say to all this? What would your very white brothers say to a black home-help?’

  ‘I don’t know. My mother’s view matters, my brothers’ ultimately don’t. I’ll have to investigate.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tanya, ‘I would do it fairly soon. It doesn’t do to postpone essential decisions.’

  Look who’s talking, thought Maggie.

  Maggie did two weeks’ night-time washing-up in a trendy bistro in Chelsea to earn the money to buy a new outfit for Matt, a new blouse for herself, and the coach fares up to Edinburgh for a weekend. Perversely, Tanya saw nothing ‘degraded’ in washing-up. It was the sort of job actors do, when they’re hard up; it wasn’t a competing career. There was no question at all of Tanya joining her, however; she was too well-known. ‘It would be death if someone recognised me.’ But she always had a hot meal waiting when Maggie came home, late and tired and with shrivelled fingers, and it was Tanya who forced her to wear rubber gloves. ‘You must take care of your hands,’ she said. ‘You may not be an actress just at present, but you are not to look like a washerwoman.’

  At the end of the fortnight, Maggie and Matt went up to Scotland on the coach.

  A tempered welcome awaited them. The whole family came to drinks on the Saturday, lunch on the Sunday. Anthea Charity, now ten months old, crawled straight to Matt, clutched at his knees, hauled herself upright and then let go. For several seconds, she stood unsupported with a rather smug look on her little dumpling face before landing on her padded behind with a thud.

  This was certainly the high spot of the weekend for Ian and Lilian, and for the first time they unbent a trifle toward Matt, who was materially associated in their minds with this singular triumph. Maggie actually heard Lilian say, ‘Seemingly she’s taken a fancy to you, young man,’ in a less than usually buttoned-up tone. The ice thus at least cracked, Ian directed a dignified word or two to him about school; his manner was schoolmasterly rather than avuncular, but at least he didn’t ignore him. And Matt, happy to see his grandmother and Stip again, behaved impeccably, so that Maggie was proud and not too tense.