The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  Oliver’s play in the West End ran and ran and he became somewhat famous. His little lapse in Birmingham was forgotten. Tanya’s was not, and it looked as if it never would be. One night Tanya was in the Buckstone Club behind the Haymarket, having a drink by herself at the tiny bar while waiting for Oliver. It was one of her exercises in self-torture. All the members of the club were theatre people and the atmosphere was pure theatre. It was akin to a starving pauper sitting in a hotel grillroom, watching people eat and smelling the rich food. Some old friends spoke to her and other old friends avoided doing so.

  But one perfect stranger who had drunk too much lurched against her and said, ‘Oops! Sorry, darling. Well! — if it isn’t Little Miss Blacklist herself! What are you doing in here? You’re not in the business anymore.’

  When Tanya recovered herself she was out in the street, running, with some recollection of red wine pouring down a puffy white face and a sense of a wild release of energy.

  That night she didn’t go to her own home in Oliver’s flat, but went to Maggie’s flat, which had once been hers. She drank scotch and wept and raged and drank coffee and calmed down and then drank more scotch and wept and raged some more. Maggie was dumbfounded and appalled, and yet, oddly, relieved. This was Tanya, the real, disabused, fighting Tanya. In the early morning she thanked Maggie, had a bath and went home. And from there she swung into action.

  She began gathering around herself a group of actors she had known since RADA, whose talents she had registered in her efficient personal filing system. With them she formed an ad hoc commonwealth company. It mounted economical productions of small-cast plays with good parts in them for Tanya. There was no way she could get legitimate theatrical dates, but there were plenty of venues that could be booked for a few nights. She got Oliver, who was in the money, to buy her an old reconditioned motor-caravan, painted the name of her company — ‘TANTOURS’ — on its sides, and drove her troupe around the Home Counties, often with Imogen in her carrycot in the crowded body of the van amid the wicker costume skips and makeshift scenery. They shared the take, dossed down wherever they found themselves, and worked like slaves.

  Things were very tough for the first two years. Equity did its best to delegitimise the company completely, and there were professional risks involved in being a member of it; but though there was a lot of fluidity, some of the originals stuck as a nucleus. The standard was quite high to start with and improved steadily. They began to get bookings in fringe theatres around London and to be offered new plays by aspiring young writers. One of these, in their third year, transferred, although without Tanya.

  But Tanya’s name was no longer mud with the theatrical establishment. The unofficial ban on her company was quietly dropped, and it was bruited in the Equity Council that she herself might be re-embraced into membership if she played her cards right.

  When she got wind of this, she let it be known that the Equity Council could get stuffed.

  Oliver was horrified, and not only because he rather saw himself on the Equity Council some day; he badly wanted Tanya to come in out of the cold because until she did, he foresaw that he would stand precious little chance of a normal home-life. Oliver was not a self-sufficient being. Maggie sometimes suspected that he might not have married Tanya had he not had good reason to suppose that her career as an actress was at an end, freeing her for a new one as adoring helpmate. Perhaps, by the same token, Tanya would not have married Oliver, had she realised that her need of a port was only to be temporary, until she had navigated herself clear of the storm. At least, so Maggie privately thought. She had no confirmation. Tanya was not as free with her confidences as she had been when she was single.

  Television news reporting was a glamorous, well-paid and prestigious occupation, excellent for the ego and the appearance. Over the next six years, it made a new woman of Maggie. She left behind her careless, rural ways and became crisp and smart. She exuded an air of self-confidence, even of sophistication. All obvious traces of the old naivety, the undermining guilts and self-doubts, had vanished.

  In her thirst for the deeper satisfactions, she sucked her situation dry. She convinced herself that she had reached a level of fame and status higher than anything she could have achieved as an actress. After all, she was at the hub of affairs, or at least the reporting of them. What comparison could there be between arousing phantom emotions in audiences of hundreds, and imparting solid, vital information to millions? She even assured herself that in her small way, she was helping to mark the beat of history.

  With all this ego-boosting, it was easy to ignore the all-obliterating drawback of her metier and her medium, the fact that it was all entirely ephemeral.

  Theatre at its best can leave a mark on the memory that is indelible. Television news — however dramatic or brilliantly presented — leaves no mark whatsoever. It flicks past the eyes and is irretrievably, almost instantaneously, lost.

  During her time at ITN, Maggie did many interesting, and even some seemingly significant, things. She forged her way intrepidly through crowds of angry strikers, set the scene at disasters, delivered hard-hitting questions to politicians, trade unionists and princes of industry, and more ingratiating ones to film stars, authors and ballerinas. She conducted innumerable fearless vox populi interviews on burning (or lukewarm) topics of the hour. She even — her greatest coup — waylaid, outside the Mother of Parliaments, a certain Mighty Russian visitor, whom no other reporter, male or female, had got anywhere near.

  What it all added up to, actually, as she was soon to realise, was no more than a damned good job that afforded her a lot of fun and kudos. As to doing any ultimate good, or earning an honourable place in anyone’s memory or in any annals whatever, she would have done better to tour in an underpaid, understaffed theatre company playing village halls and schools before audiences that would not otherwise see any live entertainment. That was what Tanya did. And whatever Tanya lacked, then or later, it was not job satisfaction.

  As to Maggie’s love-life, that, too, was on a superficial level. Since Tolly’s arrival, Maggie had been, to all intents and purposes, a single, unencumbered woman. Tanya’s flat, which Maggie had taken over, was a suitable background, and she made the most of it, entertaining quite extensively. Her new status and neo-sophisticated exterior inevitably attracted men of all sorts, some of whom were quite interesting and some quite attractive. Occasionally Maggie encountered one who was both, and when that happened, she felt duty-bound to embark on an affair. After all, this was the swinging sixties. She could scarcely eschew sex totally for fear of seeming, even in her own eyes, a freak.

  But it took more than the pressures of the permissive era to convince Maggie that she was actually in love with anyone for longer than a few weeks. Margaret, tense and wary, stubbornly refused to swing. Every time Maggie let a man make love to her, Margaret curled herself up tight, muttering grimly, ‘This is all wrong. How can you? No, really! Well, don’t expect me to respond.’

  To compensate, Maggie put on a tremendous act of glossy worldliness. So convincing was this act that it got her into quite a few tight corners; but after a while she developed a means of categorising men, which saved her from the grosser encounters and blunders.

  Her method evolved from a chart-thing that she’d filled out during her market research days, aimed at giving her ‘instant perception of motivating factors’. Briefly, it assigned colours to people’s characters. She had always thought of Tanya as red; she was intrigued to discover that the makers of the chart agreed with her. Red women, then, were all right from Maggie’s point of view, but she learned to avoid red men like the plague. Red men were domineering, flamboyant, go-getting, macho. Like Bruce. They scared the wits out of her, not least for the insecurity often lurking pinkly beneath the red surface. Maggie preferred green men.

  Green men were quiet, self-sufficient, intelligent, analytical — often shy, usually gentle. They needed bringing out. The trouble was, when she had brought them out
she usually wanted to put them back in again, because brought-out green men can be very hard to control.

  Blue men, she realised ruefully, were the ones she ought to aim for. Ronnie, for instance, was very blue. He was neither aggressive nor withdrawn. He was caring kind, outgoing, never really happy unless he was doing something for somebody. Kind and generous to a fault, he could not credit that anyone could be less so, which meant that if Maggie was impatient or ill-tempered he could not just let it roll off him, but was profoundly hurt. Ronnie became a problem.

  At first, he was content to look after her within the company. He virtually nursed her through her first year at ITN, steering her past the dangerous shallows of cameramen’s temperaments, news-editors’ callousness, fellow-reporters’ suspicions and jealousies, subs’ cattiness and newscasters’ rapier wit. He covered up for her initial ignorance or occasional blunders, took her part in editorial meetings, and when she was ready to handle them, pushed some serious stories her way to build her reputation. In short, he was her staunch friend, and she was touched and grateful. But when he began to show signs of a different kind of caring, she had to control the urge to flee.

  Not that it was possible to flee far. She saw him nearly every day at the office. By the time their ‘affair’ (which wasn’t one) became the gossip of newsroom and viewing theatre, Maggie was already an entrenched feature of the ITN scene, onscreen and off, and people who had taken the trouble to get to know her at all well shook their heads over Ronnie’s misplaced passion.

  ‘Hasn’t a hope, poor bugger,’ was the general opinion. ‘Just not Maggie’s type.’

  It ended in Ronnie leaving ITN and moving sideways into television drama. This unfortunately meant that for much of the time, he was still working in the same large building as Maggie; for months after his removal from ITN, he seemed to go out of his way to bump into her in lifts and foyers. His round face would always light up, his mouth stretching into a happy and forgiving grin. These encounters upset and irritated Maggie terribly. The truth was, she longed only to be shot of Ronnie and his doting love. She knew she didn’t merit him, and was almost maddened by her inability to love him even a little. The sight of him stirred deep unfaced fears in her heart.

  Was she never going to fall into the pit, as Tanya had called it? Had it been writhing with snakes — as, to watch others struggling in the devastating toils of love, she realised it probably was — she would still have longed with all her being to jump down there, where Margaret would be crushed to speechlessness by some emotional boa constrictor and where Maggie could, not despite but because of her sufferings, emerge from her heart-frozen isolation and join the human race — or even the animal kingdom.

  Sometimes, she tried to convince herself that she was lucky to be above the scrum, but this was like a deaf person trying to feel lucky because he is spared all ugly or distressing noises. Maggie felt, knew, herself to be subnormal, emotionally stunted, physically deprived. Sometimes she would lie in bed, after some profoundly unsatisfying sexual encounter, and while her satiated partner snored at her side try to trace this unfillable emptiness in her loins to its source. Was it Bruce? Was it her father? Or was it just some ineffable, basic coldness in herself?

  Ronnie’s eventual departure for the BBC relieved only the surface anguish of these gnawing doubts. But in any case they were nothing to the doubts that, as the years went by, increasingly and excludingly plagued her about her son.

  Matt was by now a stocky, well-built Scot of fourteen. He had turned out to be a sensible and pragmatic child, who had adapted admirably to the various twists and changes in his fortunes. He managed to enjoy himself tolerably wherever he happened to be — in his grandmother’s home, his base, as solid with love and routine as with old, weathered stone; at school, where, though no one could have called him a brilliant scholar, he had loads of friends and could always shine at sports; in his mother’s London flat, where he could have a healthy wallow in treats and hedonism from time to time; and at his uncle’s. Not his Uncle Steven, oddly enough — his Uncle Ian.

  Ian was now smoothly bald, but otherwise little changed to look at. Inwardly, however, he was a very different man. And this deep modification was due in large part to his once-despised nephew, a turn-up for the books that had caused quite some subterranean bother in the family.

  Lilian resented Matt. She felt, not without cause, that Ian favoured him over their own child. Anthea Charity, now a tubby six-year-old, regarded Matt as a god. Matt, naturally, had no time for her, which fuelled Lilian’s dislike. Her feelings toward Maggie, who had dumped this little cuckoo, if not right into, at least adjacent to her nest, were less than sisterly. She was quite incapable of watching her on television without giving vent to some spiteful remark, which in turn irritated Ian, who was secretly rather proud of Maggie’s renown.

  Stip was also upset by Matt’s orientation toward Ian. Before the boy had come back to Scotland, Stip had cast himself firmly in the role of favourite uncle, but it hadn’t worked out that way.

  Matt, to tell the truth, found Stip at close quarters strangely off-putting. His increasingly colourful clothes, language and manner created deep embarrassment in Matt, made him squirm somehow. Stip liked Matt to come to his house to visit him, and Matt hated Slip’s house. He hated all the bright colours and exotic touches. He once told Maggie that it was like being shut into the parrot house at the zoo. Considering that Matt had been surrounded by vivid colours and people all his life, it was surprising that Stip’s brand of extravagance grated when Tanya’s, for example, didn’t. But it was different with Tanya. Matt could only explain it to Maggie by saying, ‘Well, but she’s a woman’. Had he met Stip in London, he might not have reacted against him; in a small town outside Edinburgh, a come-lately exotic like Stip did not fit.

  Ian, on the other hand, did. He fitted perfectly. In his three-piece suits, with his rather strict old-fashioned manner and his conventional household, Ian fulfilled some deep longing in Matt for order and solemnity, which he had probably been born with and never had a chance to fulfil.

  His own home with his grandmother and Tolly was a strange mixture of cultures and influences. His grandmother satisfied his notion of what grandmothers ought to be. She, too, fitted. Tolly was something else. She didn’t fit at all; she never really tried to, and nothing could have been more exotic and extraordinary than a beautiful black girl in those surroundings. If the neighbours turned to glance at Stip in his espadrilles and his yellow linen suits, how much more did they gawk at Tolly, who, when she first came and for some time thereafter, was the only black person for miles. But in Matt’s eyes Tolly was beloved beyond criticism, all the more because for so long he had lost her and then, miraculously, had her restored to him, in a new setting but in herself unaltered, immutable, like gold. Like gold she had lain buried for an aeon of his short existence, and been rediscovered as bright as if new-minted.

  Mrs Robertson had taken one look at Tolly in the flesh and realised two things simultaneously. One was that she was going to love her like a daughter, and the other was that to put her into any kind of maid’s uniform, as she had vaguely planned, would be a travesty. She knew from the photographs that Tolly had submitted to a type of servant’s dress in Port Harcourt, but here in Scotland she must be as she was born to be: African.

  But Tolly had brought only the subdued quasi-European clothes she had had to wear until now, and certainly nothing more ethnic was available in Edinburgh at that time. Stip came to the rescue. He returned from his next trip to London with great swathes of Liberty prints in silk and cotton and fine wool. With these he draped Tolly, pinning and tucking as if she were a suite to be upholstered or a rather complicated window to create exquisite curtains for. Soon she was delighting the eye of all beholders — all unbiased ones, anyway.

  And if these did not include Ian and Lilian, Tolly remained happily unaware of it.

  By one of life’s odd twists, the unhappiness, the disorientation Joan and Stip had for
eseen for her, caused by the beastly climate, the measureless gulf between this life and the one she’d been born to, scarcely touched her. The long flight that she’d endured in silent, stoic terror was to her a sort of magic carpet ride to another planet. To find, when she got there, that not only could she still breathe and move normally, but that the inhabitants of this strange alien world were not odd-shaped and hostile but familiar and gentle and funny, was enough for her at first. And hard on this relieving discovery came wonders. Great buildings and shops and films and delicious confections, huge lumbering buses, a swift, exciting train (no real travel-fears could affect her after the agony of being suspended far above the ground).

  And Matt. Her child in all but the flesh. The miracle of seeing him again, being given him to care for… She would have lived in an igloo menaced by howling demons for that privilege, that bliss.

  Besides, she knew that what she had left behind was — despite all Joan’s efforts to integrate her and give her purpose and a wider horizon — the eternal status of an outcast. Here on her new planet she still had no tribe, no people of her very own, but not only did this represent no actual change in her fundamental condition, it was less gnawingly painful to her than to see her own constantly around her but to know herself forever cut off from them.

  All this would have been enough. But there was more. Her new family was extremely good to her.

  Mrs Robertson, settling delightedly into a new lifestyle based upon cossetting, was increasingly her own woman, indifferent, or at least indulgent, towards Ian’s prejudices. (This in itself was a secret source of pleasure to her. He was so like his father! — and she had never been allowed to distance herself from his bigotries.)