The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  In a way, perhaps, her adoption of Tolly and her refusal to modify her or force her into any kind of conventional mould was a gesture of independence toward her own, and indeed her clan’s history, and it was one she enjoyed so much that she could not maintain a shadow of disapproval for Maggie, who was the author of this new chapter in her life’s story, which she had been sure was — in terms of change — ended. Of course she knew, and if she hadn’t Lilian would constantly have reminded her, that Maggie was being selfish and unmaternal. But she didn’t care. She adored Matt in a way she had never adored either of her own sons; after a few months of having him in her home, she could no longer imagine it without him. Ian’s constant solicitations during the first months about ‘how she was managing’ and ‘whether it wasn’t all too much for her’, she turned off with increasing vehemence.

  ‘He is not the slightest trouble in the world,’ she kept saying, and when the enquiries were irksomely repeated, she lost her temper at last and said tartly, ‘I wish you and Lilian would stop implying that I am making some heroic sacrifice in having Matt. I will begin to think your own child is not making you happy if you go on behaving as if children are such a monstrous burden.’

  Perhaps this was part of what caused Ian to look with new eyes at Matt. For the truth was that Anthea Charity, as she emerged from babyhood, was not proving the unmixed blessing, or affording her parents the unblemished reflection of themselves, that they had naively anticipated. She was actually quite a handful, combining all the less endearing wiles of femininity with an iron stubbornness, which could drive her father into a fury. It was on the day when he actually heard himself shout at her — she was barely four years old at the time — ‘We should have chosen another wee girl, I can see, and left you where we found you!’ that Ian realised he had never really known himself or what cruelty he was capable of.

  The awful remorse he felt after this episode led to a whole reassessment. He had been so certain of himself all his life, so sure he knew what was right and could do it at all costs, so confident in advance that he would be a better parent than those he saw around him, and better than Maggie in particular.

  Now, in his shame at having allowed himself to be so savagely cruel to Anthea (not that she had been noticeably affected) he was further tormented by memories of the open contempt he’d shown over the years for Maggie. One episode in particular returned to sting him — the occasion when Matt had pulled the tablecloth. In daily contact with the ineluctable realities of infant villainy — the pulling of the odd tablecloth was as naught to some of the devilments Anthea got up to — his native honesty showed him up as having been a prig, and an uncharitable prig at that.

  He couldn’t make it up to Maggie. Even if she had been around, that would have been asking too much of him — his relations with her were long ago fixed and to unfix them now would have meant humbling himself, even in his own eyes, more than he could bear. But he could salve his conscience in another way. He could withdraw his personal doom of excommunication from Matt, forget the near-shame of his birth, the true shame of his parents’ divorce, and his semi-orphaned status in Scotland. He could start treating the boy as a human being and, incidentally, as his own close kin.

  The moment he began to do this, he found in Matt, if not a kindred spirit, at least a personality he could easily respond to, and in his own way, in due course, grow very fond of. He liked Matt’s unmistakable maleness, his affinity for boys’ toys and boys’ concerns. He approved of his love for games and especially running. But it was when he took him down to the family mill and showed him over it that Matt, all unwittingly, forged a true bond with his uncle.

  Ian was oddly moved by Matt’s immediate interest in the great pulp-vats and rollers and drying rooms, his sensible questions about how the watermark got into the paper and where the raw materials came from. The paper trade was falling off sadly at the time; there was a huge drop in demand, especially for quality paper, and with lumber climbing steeply in price Ian was going through a period of intense anxiety about how to maintain the family concern — not just at its former level, but at all. It was a terrible thing for him to contemplate — the possibility that, of the several generations of Robertsons who had owned and steered the mill through many vicissitudes, he should be the one at the helm when it foundered.

  The eagerness of this boy, the nearest thing to a male heir he would ever have, raised his spirits. He took him down to the mill often, made him familiar with it, let him play there. He introduced him to his staff and workers as ‘my young nephew Matthew’. These visits had a fundamental effect on Ian, which for years he never confided to anyone. For some time before they began, he had been angered and dismayed to find that every time he approached the mill, or looked down on it from the road above its riverside position in a fold of the hills as he had done since childhood, his imagination — which had certainly never caused him any problems before — showed him the building stark and empty, its windows out, its chimneys cold, the pointing on its brickwork crumbling … deserted, in fact, like so many other mills of various kinds whose dead hulks littered riversides all over Scotland and the North.

  But for some reason Matt’s advent and interest, his small sturdy figure meandering about the place, chatting curiously, drawing on the scrap, gazing at the machinery as if willing it to go on working, heartened Ian. From then on, the unpleasant dreamlike affliction he had experienced looking down on his mill no longer troubled him. He was able to recover his normal phlegmatic and pragmatic approach to his difficulties, and though these grew worse, not easier, the future had become a matter for practical endeavour, not a waking nightmare. He was working now to keep the enterprise going, not just for his own pride and the family’s, but for a solid, practical reason of the sort he was well constituted to act on. He had decided to hand it on to Matthew.

  He said nothing about this intention. Although with some unease of conscience, he didn’t even tell Lilian. He just quietly altered his will. He left Anthea well provided for, but he bequeathed the business to Matt.

  And having done so, it became necessary to interest himself in the boy’s education. While Maggie’s back was turned (which of course it usually was) Ian took Matt up in the car to the Open Day of Glencora, Bruce’s old school in the Highlands, and successfully sold him on the place, lock, stock and playing fields.

  Mrs Robertson was furious, and in her new mood of independence none of her customary inhibitions restrained her.

  ‘How precisely like you, Ian! A typical piece of Robertsonian high-handedness. And under-handedness as well, which is less typical.’

  ‘I thought the boy should have a chance to make up his own mind about the possibilities. After all, it was his father’s wish —’

  ‘Don’t add sententiousness to your faults! His father’s wish, indeed! What value have the wishes of an absconder? Besides, what is weighing with you is not his wishes but his money, and don’t tell me that hadn’t come into your considerations!’

  ‘In fairness, Mother, I would have contributed if it had been necessary. I was willing to show him other good schools if he had hated this one, but he didn’t.’

  ‘You saw to that!’

  ‘The school itself saw to it. It’s a marvellous place. Any boy would think himself fortunate —’

  ‘Especially if he had an uncle at his elbow, brainwashing him!’

  ‘I’ll not deny I wanted him to take to it, but I’d very little persuading to do, I promise you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask me first? Why didn’t you ask Maggie? You know she hates the idea of him incarcerated in that dreadful place!’

  ‘It’s not a dreadful place at all, Mother. I’ll take you up there to see for yourself. And Maggie too, of course, in the unlikely event of her being able to spare the time,’ he added, with more than a glint of his old edge.

  When her mother’s SOS reached her, Maggie was in the throes of preparations for her first trip abroad for ITN. She had been manoeuvring for
it for months. Her male colleagues seemed to go abroad constantly, and not just to war zones — Maggie hardly aspired to be a war correspondent; her news editor was reluctant to send her out even on industrial stories if there was a male reporter available. But when it came to a film-star wedding in a minor but charismatic sheikdom, she felt her moment had come.

  The male reporters, despite their Pavlovian sneers about the wedding, were jockeying for the assignment, which promised all the hedonistic delights reporters love to hate. Battle was joined. In those pre-Lib days, a woman worth the name instinctively knew how to balance her disadvantages by turning on the charm. Maggie shamelessly wheedled the news editor, snoozled up to the head producer and boldly bearded the editor in his lair. To the undisguised disgust of her male colleagues, these tactics triumphed. She got the story.

  Filled with glee and anticipation, Maggie rushed out to shop and organise her journey and have her shots. She booked a hair appointment and then rang her friends with the news. One of the foremost of these was a man called Derek, a film publicity director who was doing his best to get her into bed, so far without success, chiefly because he was too ‘red’ (or rather, reddish-blue, sort of mauve in fact). But that didn’t mean she didn’t like him and was not quite pleased by the prospect, which he promptly offered her, of an evening out to celebrate.

  It was when she was going to have her bath that she found the morning’s letters, jammed into her dressing-gown pocket earlier and forgotten because she had slept in and been racing to get ready for work. She sat on the loo-seat while her bath ran and opened the one from her mother.

  As she read it, she stiffened, and rose slowly to her feet. So it had come to this! — Ian had dared, behind her back, behind their mother’s back, to coerce Matthew into opting for Bruce’s bloody school!

  ‘Ian has been in touch with the solicitors,’ Mrs Robertson had written, ‘about the trust, and there seems to be no impediment there — they are in touch with your ex-husband [she never referred to Bruce by name] and he has written to the trustees, to Ian and to the school, from some address in Minnesota. He is in full agreement with Ian’s plan. Darling, I don’t want to worry you, I know how busy your life is, but frankly I am afraid … I seem to have lost control of things … my nightmare is that the doorbell will ring and I will go out to find him, come back from America to take my darling Matty away. If not him, then Ian will do it. It is as if they were in league to rob us, you and me. I don’t want him to leave home and go to that horrible, spartan place. Do you? If not, please, my dearest, come and try to stop it.’

  Maggie looked up from the letter and the steamy old-fashioned bathroom was jittering before her eyes. She was to leave for the Gulf in three days, for two of which she was on duty. Perhaps she could arrange a swap? Pulling the plug on her bath, she threw on some clothes and drove down to the office.

  Mac, her male-chauvinist news editor, was in the thick of preparation for the evening bulletin, but he accorded her a short, sharp two minutes.

  ‘Listen, Mags,’ he said before she could pass the halfway mark in her appeal, ‘this is not some pissy office where you can drop off the roster for a week and no one will notice. It’s a news organisation. I wish I could say I cared a bugger for your sob story but I don’t — I haven’t time or energy. You’re on duty tomorrow and Saturday, and if you don’t show, no one’ll make allowances. You scraped home for the wedding story by a whisker. This is not the time to put yourself in wrong with the editor, or with me either.’ He spent several moments irritably shifting papers about his desk, while Maggie, who knew him of old, stood waiting, and then he snapped, ‘Look. I’ll pull Wally in tomorrow for the demo at Dagenham — he’ll do it better than you anyway — and I’ll scrub the auction story. That’s all you were down for. Of course if anything urgent comes up, I’ll be in the shit and you’ll be right beside me.’ He submitted to Maggie’s hug with apparent impatience, patted her bottom affectionately, and told her to piss off.

  Maggie rushed home, threw some things into a case and took a taxi to Kings Cross. She forgot all about poor Derek.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Sitting in her first-class compartment, watching the countryside flash past, Maggie steadily — almost deliberately — worked herself up into a fury of indignation against Ian.

  How dared he! How dared that toffee-nosed, canting prig, who had done his level best to put her down all her life, try to take over her son! It almost passed belief. It was as if Ian felt himself in loco parentis. She’d noticed signs of it when she’d been up on visits; she had noticed, with narrowed eyes, Matt’s increasing mention of Ian and the mill during his stays with her in Town. Their obvious and deepening affinity baffled her, she disapproved instinctively, but under prevailing circumstances there was little she could do. In fact, Margaret tersely hinted that she should be grateful. In all honesty she could no longer hide from herself the fact that Stip was not well cast in the role of surrogate father. But she didn’t fancy Ian in the part either, she never had, and if he was going to assume parental rights, she was not going to stand for it.

  As she stepped out of the taxi at the front door of her old home, she looked every inch the successful career woman, as smart, if not flamboyant, as ever Tanya had. Well-coiffed, high-heeled, immaculately suited and with her war-paint refreshed in the back of the taxi, she marched up the swaybacked stone steps, with strong-principled purpose and the full anticipation of moral victory in every line of her. The contrast to a previous occasion, when bedraggled and guilt-ridden she had dragged her scuffed suitcase up the steps after a night of terror on the train, flashed across her memory and lifted her head a fraction higher. She was her own woman now, self-made, confident and free. She could cope with brother Ian with one hand tied behind her. That was her honest opinion, and Margaret didn’t contradict her. The long, commanding ring she gave the brass-rimmed doorbell sounded nowhere but inside the house. Yet again, she ignored the one that was jangling in her head, struggling to warn her.

  Tolly answered the door. Her face lit up and she threw her arms round Maggie.

  ‘How good you’ve come! Madam will be so happy!’

  Maggie of course was no longer ‘Madam’ to Tolly; that prime courtesy was reserved for Mrs Robertson. She hardly knew what to call Maggie. She called her ‘Mummy’ in front of Matt and ‘you’ to her face. Their relationship was a little strained nowadays. If Tolly allowed herself to disapprove of Maggie in her secret soul, it was not something either of them was prepared to acknowledge.

  ‘Where’s Matthew?’

  ‘Of course at school.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Of course.’

  ‘Madam is in the garden. You go, I bring tea.’

  ‘Coffee for me, please, Tolly.’

  ‘Madam doesn’t like coffee only after dinner.’

  She said it with great firmness, and then turned and walked away, carrying Maggie’s overnight bag. Maggie watched her go, her beautiful graceful hips swaying unselfconsciously in their bright folds of cloth. She wanted to call after her plaintively, ‘Couldn’t I have a cup of coffee?’ but somehow she didn’t. It was extraordinary that this tiny incident should have made the first small hole in her full-bellied sail of self-righteousness. She almost felt the wind leaking out of it, though she couldn’t yet begin to understand why.

  She walked through the quiet house, through the kitchen and into the back garden. It was looking its best, full of all the spring flowers that were over in London, especially the parrot tulips, always her father’s pride and now a self-renewing memorial to him. Her mother was moving about the paths with a pair of scissors, dead-heading the narcissus and daffodils. Maggie stood watching her. She had taken on a new lease of life. Her figure looked more pliant, her hair was more softly arranged; she no longer wore the dark dresses she had always favoured, but paler ones, as if to match the decor of her house, or perhaps her changed life… Today she wore a very pretty pale lavender skirt and matching blouse, with its sleeves casually t
urned back on her forearms. From a short distance, one couldn’t see their wrinkles. Her feet were bare and thrust into mules… Maggie couldn’t remember ever seeing her mother outdoors without stockings. It gave her a strange turn to see her looking so youthful. It made one think of Sarah in the Bible. The miraculous gift of a late-coming child… Was it really Matthew, Maggie’s son, who had achieved this? If so, in adding so much to his grandmother, what must inevitably have been subtracted from his mother…?

  ‘Mummy.’

  Mary Robertson looked round, unstartled. She must have been half expecting Maggie’s arrival. In her face Maggie could see that all was not well with her; the anxiety in her letter was repeated in her eyes and around her mouth.

  ‘Darling! You came! How good of you…’

  They embraced. Maggie smelt the light scent in her mother’s hair.

  ‘It’s not good of me at all. You smell lovely, Mummy.’

  ‘Well, when one has a child around, one has to be careful. I read the most awful article in a magazine about how old people often smell. It was actually called “Stinking Grannies”. Can you credit it? It upset me so much, I started having two baths a day and dousing myself with perfume until Steven told me I smelt like a — well, that’s quite enough of that! You must be tired, darling. Do you want to sit indoors?’

  ‘No, out here. It’s looking so beautiful.’

  ‘Tolly does it, all but mowing the lawn, Matthew does that. What a feeling she has for flowers! And just look at Dad’s tulips, they get better every year…’

  They walked round and round the little garden, arm in arm, and spoke of unimportant things until Tolly had brought out the tea and arranged it on the garden table. She had brought a cardigan for Mrs Robertson, and when she put it round her shoulders Mrs Robertson caressed her hand fondly, calling her a dear thoughtful creature.