The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  Yet somehow the fight went out of her. Querying it in her mind afterwards, she realised it was because she was forced to acknowledge that she had begun the process of forfeiting Matt long ago. Not just six years ago, when she had chosen to have a career instead of being a full-time mother, but fourteen years ago, when she had let that black nurse, in the hospital in Lagos, pluck him out of her arms. Or before that, even — when she had gone limp on the pink chenille and yielded herself instead of yelling, ‘Stop!’ and meaning it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  After Maggie returned from losing her battle with Ian, she tried to plunge into work, discovering only then how profoundly unrewarding TV news reporting is. Her days’ routine, formerly so ‘glamorous’ and ‘prestigious’, suddenly seemed to her meaningless, trumpery and boring. Not for the first time, perhaps, but for the first time maddeningly, she became aware of the long hours of idleness she whiled away with newspaper reading, newsroom gossip, crosswords or drinks in the pub, during alleged working hours, waiting to be sent out on a story. She went off all her colleagues, with the exception of Mac, her news editor. And even he…

  ‘Mac, I’m fed up.’

  ‘What’s wrong, love?’ (He happened to be in remission between bouts of bulletin, and therefore inclined to be mellow enough to endure female reporters’ whims and whinings.)

  ‘I get nothing but trivia.’

  ‘What total balls. You’re an unappreciative silly bitch. I gave you a strike story only last week.’

  ‘Last month.’

  ‘Was it? — Well, what about Sir Laurence and Lady O? You had hot pants for that.’

  ‘I’m sick and tired of theatrical stories.’

  ‘Oh, come on. After you campaigned for months to have West End first nights treated as new-stories on a par with local wars, Middle East assassinations and international Cup Finals?’

  ‘I was wrong.’

  ‘You, dear? Wrong? What’s this, the change before the death?’

  ‘Don’t be horrible to me, Mac. I need to get my teeth into something. I’m bored.’

  Mac bridled visibly. Then his eyes grew small and malevolent.

  ‘If by that enigmatic remark you happen to mean, bored with your job, Maggie dear, I would, in your size fives, keep quiet about it. If you care to glance through the newsroom windows, you will doubtless see crowds of wild-eyed women tearing each other to pieces for your job. Also, you might ask yourself how sure you are that the Great British Public isn’t getting just a shade bored with you after six years of seeing you on their screens, not to mention the big boys Upstairs who — it’s just possible — might at this very moment be remarking through the cigar smoke round the board table that that Robertson girl is getting a bit past it for a “girl” reporter.’

  That shut Maggie up. The mere thought of losing her job had the power to terrify her. Being an actress out of work is bad enough. Being a no-longer-girl reporter on one of only two television channels is very much worse. There is little question of moving sideways, and Maggie did not flatter herself that she was fit to move up to some more demanding job such as production or newscasting. It was a one-off job which, by incredible good fortune, had lasted until she had become a fixture. How long it could go on lasting, before she was really too old or until she made some blunder which gave the ‘big boys Upstairs’ an excuse to replace her with someone younger, more nubile, better educated or just better at the job, she dared not think. She told herself that she’d just been letting off steam to Mac, that there was no excuse to be bored or dissatisfied and that, therefore, she wasn’t.

  But she suffered increasingly from malaise.

  She began to live not in the present but in the past. She had chucked Derek (or he her, it hardly mattered anyway) and not replaced him, so she was alone at home a good deal more than previously. Of course, there were the usual press parties and she still went to the theatre, but in the mornings before she went in to work or on her days off she did a good deal of just sitting about. The balcony, once Tanya’s floral Olympic stadium, was now just a balcony with some window-boxes sporting an ordinary assortment of unambitious geraniums. Only the pink rose in its corner looked happier than it had, now the fervid competition had gone. Maggie would sit out there by the hour when the weather allowed, gazing over the rooftops and the trees, the lady rose nodding its commonplace blooms sympathetically at her shoulder. She reflected endlessly on the months she had spent in the flat with Matt when he was little.

  Even their fights she relished in retrospect. The disharmonies and discords of her brief motherhood solo had a kind of nostalgic echo.

  Then a new memory was added. In the summer holiday prior to Matt’s first term at his faraway highland school, she took him to France. They drove to Brittany where they lazed on the beaches, went sailing, ate divinely (though Matt was rigorously conservative at first) and in sum, had what might seem to have been a very successful holiday.

  But, however oddly, Maggie tried not to think about it as she sat on her balcony in the September sun. Matt had been a good companion. He was charming in his schoolboy way, his manners were good and he’d been quite chatty and appreciative. She had enjoyed showing him things and sharing new experiences, tastes and places with him. But she hadn’t been able to feel any intimacy with him. She had felt like his aunt or his godmother, taking him out for a special treat. At the time, she had thought she was enjoying it as much as possible, having looked forward to it with all a child’s devastating nervous excitement. But looked back on, it had the aura of a heart-breaking failure — a spiritual disaster.

  Her son stood on the verge of manhood; Glencora (Ian had said characteristically) would ‘make a man’ of him. Each future holiday would bring her an expanded human being of whom she knew less and less. Effectively, when she kissed him goodbye on that same damned platform at King’s Cross, she had kissed her ‘little boy’ goodbye forever. She had lost him. Given him up. And for what? For his own wellbeing, Ian would say. And certainly Matt didn’t seem to be the worse for the lack of her. He was fine. Who knows how much less fine he might have been, had she kept him close to her, seen him every day of his growing-up, been his mother in the real meaning of the word, instead of … farming him out? He might have been a neurotic, a misfit, a delinquent… At least she hadn’t given herself the possibility of damaging him… And for herself, she’d been free, she’d had a good time, she’d made a name of sorts for herself. She’d made a good living, had ‘kept’ Matt and herself, depending on no one in that way. Now, in her mid-thirties, she had no actual need to feel so empty and ashamed, such a failure. Why did she?

  Brooding at home, slacking at work, relishing nothing, not even the primitive pleasures of food and drink and sun and sleep that had so often consoled her at bad times in the past, she felt herself dwindling in her own eyes into a sort of premature decline — mental, moral and physical. She wondered who she should take her trouble to — a doctor? A psychiatrist? Neither appealed. Her mother…? No. Her mother was now to see as little of her grandson as, for years now, she had of her daughter. When she did see her, she had a right to expect a smiling face and no deep discontents. So Maggie went to Tanya.

  Tanya was between productions. This was fortuitous from her point of view as well as Maggie’s — it had afforded her the time not only to have an abortion but to rest a little after it.

  ‘Thirty-nine, I have to get myself pregnant… No, darling, I couldn’t. One is enough. Besides, I am on the brink of a breakthrough into the legitimate fully paid-up Equity-blessed West End in the best new play for a generation. And besides…’ Here she stopped. She was sitting up in her luxury double bed — actually a four-poster she had commissioned and paid £1,000 for. Well, Oliver had paid the £1,000. That was somehow in Maggie’s mind as she sat under its red silk canopy and looked at Tanya propped up on pillows, looking a bit like Elizabeth the First, with her red hair very short and roughish as if she’d just removed a magnificent wig.

  ‘Besides
what?’

  ‘I gave you all the besideses.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, there was going to be one more. Not that you need to excuse yourself to me. I won’t reproach you.’

  ‘So why are you looking so funereal?’

  ‘It just seems a little sad. Ginny’s such a beautiful creature. Obviously you and Oliver are the sort of couple who should be paid a bounty by the state for every child you give birth to.’

  ‘Ah. But then, the one I just got rid of would not have attracted the bounty.’

  It took Maggie a minute to figure that one out.

  She was not as naive and easily shocked as she had once been, Even Margaret had evolved with the naughty times. But this did shock both of them. They tried not to show it. Tried, and evidently failed. Tanya smiled somewhat wanly.

  ‘Oh, Maggiekins, your face! — Don’t tell. Nobody knows. Not even him.’

  ‘Who —?’

  ‘Oh, darling, does it matter? It was a bit of an accident, I mean in more ways than one. He is not important. Just as well, perhaps, or it might have hurt more to give up having his baby.’

  ‘Does Oliver guess you had an affair?’

  ‘There is nothing to guess at now. It’s all over. All, all over. I will never be a bad girl again.’

  ‘Why were you?’

  Tanya looked away and shrugged, ‘I can’t answer. Things can happen that you don’t plan, but they don’t just erupt out of nothing. There is always subtext. The subtext of this was to do with me and Oliver.’

  ‘You were never really “in it” with him, were you?’

  Tanya shook her head slowly. ‘We married to fill out the missing bits of ourselves. That doesn’t have to be a bad reason. But you see, I’d been “in it”. The contrast between that infernal blaze of feeling and keep-the-home-fires-burning was just too much. It’s why one mustn’t start taking Lucy.’ Lucy was the current slang for LSD. ‘Everything seems drab after it. Probably if I hadn’t been so busy with the company and Ginny and everything, something like this would have happened long ago.’

  ‘Does Oliver know you had an abortion?’

  ‘No, Maggie. Oliver doesn’t notice things like that.’ Things like what, thought Maggie. Were there any ‘things like that’? ‘Oliver thinks I’ve got flu. He doesn’t even notice the wastepaper baskets aren’t full of Kleenex.’

  This was supposed to raise a laugh, and when it didn’t Tanya turned her antennae in Maggie’s direction and at once realised she had not come to console her on her bed of pain.

  ‘What’s your trouble, Maggie?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t want to hear —’

  ‘Yes, I do. Distract me from my remorseful thoughts.’

  So Maggie did her best to explain. Tanya knew about Matt, and about Maggie’s feelings, more than anyone else did, anyhow, but it was all so amorphous and hard to express in words that it was hard for her to be wise and helpful about it. For her part, she could not but think Maggie had made the correct decisions all along, and as she was herself a natural-born decision-maker she had learnt early that even right decisions brought their own inevitable clawback in the form of fruitless regrets or disadvantages.

  ‘Listen, Maggie,’ she said at last when Maggie stopped talking. ‘If you want my opinion, your trouble is not with Matt at all. It’s not even with your work, though perhaps that has been dragging on too long until it’s not a proper challenge to you anymore — you are just getting stale, like in a long run. That’s a practical matter which you’ll just have to tackle one way or another. But your “malaise” as you call it is caused by something you’re not even thinking about, which in my present dubious situation perhaps it’s indelicate to mention, but it’s actually sex.’

  Maggie heaved a profound sigh. ‘Tanya, it is time you knew. I don’t really like sex.’

  ‘Oh, I know you think you don’t.’

  ‘Isn’t that the same as not?’

  ‘In my view, like in Tea and Sympathy, “with some people there has to be love”. You’ve never been “in it”, Maggie. Admit.’

  ‘I admit… Too late now.’

  ‘No, darling, it isn’t. You’re a late developer.’

  ‘Oh, Tan, I’ve been comforting myself with that old bromide since I was twenty-seven!’

  ‘Well, just look how long it took to turn you into a smartly-dressed, self-confident, sophisticated woman of the world!’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘Of course I know it’s all an act, but it’s a wonderful performance.’

  ‘It’s a performance I’d love to bring down the curtain on forever. I despise myself in it. It’s nothing to do with me at all.’

  ‘What does that matter? You’re an actress.’

  ‘No. It’s time you knew that about me, too. In your terms I’m a rank amateur.’

  It was still September — the end of it — when Mac called her in to the office on her day off and said, without preamble. ‘You wanted a story to get your teeth into, so here is one.’

  Oh, make it abroad! thought Maggie. The trip to the sheikhdom had been total bliss, taken her right out of herself, but it had only lasted three days, and coming down off that ‘high’ had been almost worse than not going at all.

  But Mac was not talking about Roving Reports or anything glamorous of that sort. What he was talking about sounded incredibly dull and heavy to Maggie.

  ‘…isolated on estates,’ he was saying, his eyes aglow with enthusiasm. ‘Not just council estates, private estates too, even very posh ones. There they all are, poor cows, no grans and aunties anymore to share the load, thigh-deep in kids, and they’re getting fat through eating their heads off for lack of something more interesting to do. So their doctors put them on these pills. They’re supposed to be appetite suppressants, but they actually make you high. So instead of taking one a day or whatever, some of these women are stuffing them down like Smarties and winding up in funny-farms. There’s a big scandal about it in today’s Express.’

  Oh gawd, thought Maggie, and she would have groaned aloud and tried to wriggle off the hook, only nowadays she was inhibited from complaining.

  ‘So who am I to interview?’

  ‘Well, I’ve found you a couple of women who’ve been taking these things, one’s just getting over a breakdown, another’s being divorced. But what we really need is an expert on the social side of pill-popping. An egghead of some sort.’

  ‘How shall I find —’ began Maggie lethargically.

  Mac abruptly lost patience.

  ‘Maggie, you’ve been at this job for six bloody years,’ he shouted, attracting the attention of all the subs, reporters and script-writers in the newsroom. ‘If you still expect to be tit-fed, I’ll ask the editor to advertise for a wet-nurse, but I don’t think he’s going to like it, somehow!’

  ‘I only meant —’

  ‘Oh, piss off out of here, will you? Pretend you’re a real reporter for a change and do a little of your own digging!’

  Maggie crept home with her tail between her legs, humiliated by Mac’s public outburst. She took her usual remedy and phoned Tanya.

  She had no real hope — she was only ringing for comfort — but to her incredulous relief Tanya, after only a moment’s hesitation, said, ‘Yes, I do know someone in that field. Now there is a coincidence.’

  ‘Oh, Tan, thank God, I’m saved! Who?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ Tanya’s voice sounded odd.

  ‘No?’

  ‘It’s Joel.’

  ‘Joel?’

  ‘Yes, Joel. My ex Joel. He has a Chair at London University now, in sociology, and that happens to be his speciality — drugs and alcohol.’

  Maggie was so relieved she didn’t stop to think too deeply. ‘Can you put me in touch with him?’

  ‘Me? Are you mad? Of course not. You must do it yourself. I have not been anywhere near him for twelve years.’

  ‘So how do you know he’s moved from Sheffield?’

  ‘One gets to kn
ow these basic things, that’s all. One has to know the places to avoid. It was comparatively easy to avoid Sheffield. It’s much more inconvenient to keep outside a two-mile radius of London University.’

  Maggie thought this was a sort of wry Tanya-joke, and laughed. ‘Okay, I’ll phone him now.’

  ‘Now?’ Tanya sounded startled, almost frightened.

  ‘Yes, now, this minute! I’ve got to lay him on for tomorrow morning.’

  Tanya didn’t say anything for a moment, and then she muttered, ‘How — unimaginable.’

  ‘What?’ asked Maggie, impatient to get on.

  ‘That I am talking to you and that in a few minutes, you will be talking to him.’

  ‘Well, I see nothing unimaginable about that,’ said Maggie with marvellous crassness. ‘Shall I ring you back later and tell you how it went?’

  Another long, unaccountable pause, and then Tanya said firmly, ‘No. Thank you. Please don’t tell me anything about it except when not to switch on television. Do you know his surname?’

  ‘Oh my God! No.’

  ‘It’s Langham.’

  ‘Professor Langham. Nice name.’

  ‘I always said so, even before the professor was added.’

  Maggie quite easily located Joel’s office, or rather the university switchboard did. It gave her a strange feeling, listening to the ringing, and when she heard him say, ‘Hallo, Langham here,’ she realised why. For many years this man had lurked in her subconscious at myth-level. What she was doing now was akin to dialling Olympus, or perhaps the nether world. This man, this presumably quite ordinary, quiet-voiced man, had extraordinary power, the power to inspire passionate, lasting adoration. In Maggie’s love-starved life, this invested him with a quality she couldn’t pin down, something — rarefied, almost fabulous. She found her breath fluttering; she felt like a young girl talking to a famous man, and when she began the conversation she stammered. Then she pulled herself together firmly.