The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  He ignored it.

  ‘You’re not going to get off quite so lightly, you know.’

  She dropped her hand and stared at him. She could think of no response. She couldn’t even ask him what he meant because she knew.

  ‘I’m terribly afraid you’ve misunderstood the situation,’ she said at last.

  ‘I haven’t misunderstood it, or understood it. I am very curious about it. Are you sure you haven’t got a few minutes?’

  After a moment’s meeting of eyes, Maggie silently took her coat off again and he hung it up. He led the way, not back into the living-room, but into the kitchen. It was an expensive modern one, which must go with the flat — it wasn’t his taste, she knew at a glance. It had a sort of bar jutting out into the room, with two high stools and a bright red tiled top. She sat on one of the stools while he went behind the bar to the cooking area and plugged in a kettle.

  ‘What precisely is it you’re afraid I’ve misunderstood?’

  She licked her lips. ‘I’m in a very awkward position.’

  ‘I can’t quite see why.’

  ‘Tanya’s my best friend. Now as then.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to think — because, in all honesty, it wouldn’t be true — that Tanya, who is now married and who long ago — well —’

  ‘Recovered from me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maggie firmly. ‘It would hurt her to think that you might think she was — very subtly trying to…’ She stopped, unsure whether she was clarifying things or making them worse.

  ‘Re-establish contact,’ he finished for her. ‘I don’t think that would have occurred to me.’

  There was a silence for some moments. His hands were busy with mugs and spoons.

  ‘Has she any children?’

  ‘A little girl. Imogen.’

  Joel put a mug of coffee in front of her. ‘She always said she would name her daughters after Shakespeare’s heroines, but I understood the first in line was Perdita,’ he said ironically.

  He hiked the second stool round the end of the bar and sat facing her, their faces about a foot apart. Across the aroma of coffee she could smell him. She was very sensitive to men’s smells. Bruce had smelt of sweat and brilliantine and tobacco and sometimes scotch. Joel smelt of shaving soap at the moment. What was there in that to make her lean backwards in case she should lean forwards and kiss him?

  ‘It is quite uncanny,’ he said slowly, ‘how well I feel I know you. Perhaps I have seen you on the screen. While you were doing the cut-aways I was watching you. It can’t possibly be that I’ve only seen you once. You’re familiar.’

  ‘And you to me. No doubt because of Tan.’

  ‘No doubt.’ He continued staring at her for a moment, then took a drink from his mug. ‘I can’t help wanting to know about Tanya, though of course it’s all so long ago now. She was a very important part of my life.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you get in touch with her? After all this time, what harm could it do?’

  ‘Probably none at all, but personally I’m not prepared to take the slightest risk.’ His expression and his voice were tinged with wryness. ‘We really caused each other a great deal of anguish. In addition, she wrecked my marriage, albeit by remote control. I’ve no desire to do the like for hers.’

  ‘Wrecked your marriage?’ asked Maggie. ‘That wasn’t my impression.’

  ‘Or mine — at the time. But by an irony of monumental proportions, some years after Tanya’s departure from my life, my wife…’ He abruptly stopped talking, and sat for some moments looking out of the kitchen window. Maggie didn’t move. She knew exactly what was happening. He had caught himself talking too freely to her. She had had this experience before with green men. She longed for him to decide to trust her, and to go on. At the same time she hoped he would stop, because here it started: the putative treachery to Tanya. If Joel’s wife had, for example, found some letters, or in some other way discovered about Joel’s long, fraught affair with Tanya, and had left him on that account, it was something Maggie would have the greatest difficulty — given the quintessential openness that had always characterised her relationship with Tanya — in keeping back. It was too interesting, too — germane. She actually thought the word ‘germane’ and then realised she had learnt the word, indirectly, from Joel, for it was one of Tanya’s Joel-words. So was ‘putative’… She felt the laugh breaking out again and buried her nose and mouth abruptly in her hands. He looked swiftly back at her. ‘Now what’s amusing you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know! This whole situation is — one must laugh so as not to cry.’

  He stared at her with his lips parted in astonishment, as if he’d heard an echo.

  ‘That’s Tanya,’ he said. ‘That expression. Straight from her Jewish half.’ And she realised that it was. Tanya was like a shuttle, passing back and forth between them as they wove their own bit of cloth. A bit which, as abruptly he looked at his watch, seemed destined to be too short to make any warming garment out of.

  ‘I’m late for my first lecture,’ he said. ‘I must go.’

  It was over. Maggie tried to feel relieved that they hadn’t really touched on anything dangerous — she could tell Tanya all of this, if she asked. All except, of course, Maggie’s inner turmoil. The situation was too difficult for her; she was out of her emotional depth, she who had never learnt to swim. She found herself hurrying into the hall, as if eager to escape.

  Now it was he who put out his hand, and she took it, and he instead of shaking it normally simply held it in a way that sent a shaft of physical feeling straight through her to her loins. She became motionless to experience this better. I have only just met him, she thought. How can it be that I am feeling for him something I never felt for Bruce or any other man in my whole life? I want him. I would go to bed with him this instant, if he showed me by the slightest hint that he wanted me. But he is, she realised suddenly. That’s just what he is doing.

  And at this, Margaret came to her aid, pulled her hand out of Joel’s and said, with commendable briskness, ‘Well, it’s been very interesting to meet you again. I’m sorry for the small deception; it had something to do with loyalty, I hope you understand.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said evenly, still gazing with a cool green hunger into her eyes. ‘I understood that part from the outset.’

  Margaret contrived an almost formal smile and got her out to her car. Maggie, like Lot’s wife, could not resist the urge to look back. He stood in the doorway at the top of the steps and did not respond to her falsely insouciant little wave. It was Margaret who got the car moving and drove it away. Maggie was still stunned by the first heavy blow of desire.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Maggie reached home that evening after a long but by no means exceptionally heavy day, in a state bordering on exhaustion. Not for a minute, even while interviewing, had Joel Langham been absent from the forefront of her mind. The realisation that she would never, other than by some crude manoeuvre or unimaginable accident, see him again, was what had tired her to the point of making her unsafe behind the wheel of her own car, barely able to climb the single curving flight of stairs to her flat. Even the sound of the phone ringing shrilly and demandingly behind her front door did nothing to galvanise her. Indeed, she half-hoped it would stop before she could reach it and moved so slowly that she expected it must. But it didn’t.

  ‘Hallo.’

  ‘Maggie. Where in the name of God have you been? I’ve been phoning you all the damn day.’

  A pang shot through her at the sound of Tanya’s voice, an all-too-familiar pang of guilt. There was no opportunity to analyse it, only to feel an answering, and equally profound, resentment at it, for whatever had happened this morning had not been her fault and she had done her best.

  ‘Just working,’ she answered. It sounded, even in her own ears, like a retort. ‘Why didn’t you ring me at the office?’

  ‘Do you think I didn’t? I rang there four or five ti
mes this morning. Maggie, you don’t know what a terrible day I’ve had.’

  Stupidly enough, she had a sudden hope that all this had nothing to do with Joel, and said, ‘Why, what’s happened?’

  There was a silence, and then Tanya said slowly, ‘Don’t drive me mad, Maggie, please. Did you see him or didn’t you?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to know anything about it.’

  ‘I thought I didn’t, but I do. I’ve been half crazy all day, thinking about it. Tell, Maggie. Tell.’

  ‘Let me get my coat off.’

  She did this, her mind racing. Tanya knew her so well. She knew every intonation in her voice, every nuance in her behaviour. If Maggie were not the very soul of caution at this point, Tanya would guess at once. No. Not caution. Deceit.

  ‘He was absolutely right for the story. I’m really grateful to you for putting me on to him.’

  Tanya emitted an exclamation that was like a gasp of passion.

  ‘What are you talking such nonsense for, as if he were anybody? Tell me about him, will you?’

  ‘I am. He was very n-nice.’ She found herself stammering, the word was so inept. ‘I got there early and we had a pleasant talk —’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘On, just — a preliminary chat —’

  ‘Maggie,’ Tanya said tensely, ‘you’re frightening me. What’s wrong? Is he ill? Has he got old? You’re keeping something back.’

  ‘He’s perfectly okay. He lives in a very nice flat off the Finchley Road. His hair is white, but other than that he doesn’t look old at all. He has a garden and a rather swish kitchen, and he obviously looks after himself very well.’

  ‘Looks after himself?’ And then it came, like the crack of a whip. ‘Where’s Sonia?’

  ‘Who?’ (Though she knew.)

  ‘Sonia! His wife. Wasn’t she there?’

  She had to be truthful — or nearly. ‘He’s living alone.’

  Tanya let out her breath with a long hissing sound.

  ‘That means she’s gone!’ she whispered. ‘She would never have let him move down to London without her. She’s gone, dead, divorced, what does it matter? He’s free.’

  ‘But you aren’t!’ cried Maggie. It came out louder than she had intended, and with an almost harsh edge. Not that it mattered — Tanya didn’t hear it.

  ‘Maggie, tell me the absolute truth! Did he mention me?’

  ‘Why should he?’ Maggie heard the lie-by-implication emerge and knew she had entered the web and was already stuck fast to it.

  ‘I thought he would recognise you and realise the connection.’

  Oh! So that was the plan. Subconscious, maybe, but a plan.

  And during this long day it had surfaced. Tanya was now hiding nothing from either of them.

  ‘Absent-minded professors don’t tend to recognise people they’ve met once, a hundred years ago, when they see them again in a totally different context.’

  ‘Joel is not absent-minded in the least.’

  ‘Well, his mind, on the occasion I met him, was certainly absent from me, being focused exclusively on you. I never supposed he even glanced at me in a seeing way.’

  There was a long pause. Maggie felt electrified by her deceit.

  ‘Well,’ said Tanya, sounding a fraction less tense, ‘So that’s good, really. It would have been awkward if he had recognised you; he might have thought we’d cooked up the whole encounter between us… You’ve managed to find out what I most wanted to know without in any way compromising me. It’s I who have to be grateful, Maggie. And I am.’

  Maggie felt suddenly aware that she was frightened. The fear had started at the very beginning of the conversation.

  ‘Wait a minute, Tanya! What difference does it make to you, whether he’s still married or not?’

  ‘Let’s just say that I no longer have to keep outside the two-mile limit,’ said Tanya. ‘Goodnight, Maggie. And thanks.’

  Maggie sat still, with the receiver unhung-up in her hand. The purring sound of the dial tone stopped after a bit, and then she remembered to put it back on its cradle, very carefully, as if it might break. She crossed the room to sit on the flower-sofa. She was empty, and she tried to contemplate food or a comforting hot coffee, or a proper drink, but she couldn’t face any of it. She simply sat there, quite limp, until it grew completely dark outside. She had never in the whole of her life felt so forlorn or so afraid of the future. Her eyes were open and fixed on the opposite wall on which hung one of her African souvenirs: a round, blackwood shield with a crudely-carved face as a boss in the middle. It had eyelids but no eyes, just slits. After darkness fell and she could no longer see the shield or the face properly, the wooden eyelids opened and the eyes began to stare at her, gleamingly. When that happened, she got up quickly and went to the phone and phoned her home-number in Scotland. Tolly answered.

  ‘Mrs Robertson’s home.’

  ‘Tolly, it’s me.’

  ‘Yes. I was thinking about you.’

  ‘Were you, Tolly? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Are you well?’

  ‘Tolly… I need you. I want you to come down here for a week or so. Can my mother spare you?’

  There was a silence, and then Tolly said, ‘I like to come. But Madam very sad now Matty go to the big school.’

  ‘I only want to borrow you, Tolly.’

  ‘If I could come, I come. But Madam need me more.’

  They talked for a few more minutes, exchanging news about Matthew, who had written a special letter to Tolly. She fetched it and read it slowly and proudly to Maggie. It was a most intimate and funny letter, full of detail, much more so than the brief one Maggie had received. Maggie tried desperately to keep control until the phone-call came to a natural end, and she succeeded, more or less; but as soon as she hung up she burst into a storm of weeping. She had no idea why she was crying, except that she felt utterly wretched, ashamed and alone. She felt robbed, but that was absurd. What she lacked, she had given away. And now — this. Joel. Tanya’s Joel.

  Her tears come to a hiatus, rather than an end, and she went round into the kitchenette and bathed her face at the sink. Then she went out on to her balcony. The pink rose alone still had a flower on it; all the other plants were dying back. Maggie thought of the time Tanya had come out here and used her flowers to help her decide that life was still worth living. Maggie touched the face of the rose, which glimmered palely in the semi-darkness, and smelt it. Its perfume was so gentle and so sweet, it consoled her a little. It restored to her some sense of proportion.

  ‘I can’t have fallen in love with him,’ she said aloud to herself. ‘And even if I have, it can’t go very deep. It has no roots, so it will soon die of neglect.’

  But, in the first place, she knew that in some strange fashion her relationship with Joel did have roots. That they went down through Tanya and not through herself did not invalidate their strength. Next, she did not get any comfort from reflecting that if she never saw Joel again, that aberrant feeling she had conceived for him on sight would wither. No doubt it would — nothing lives unfed. But she felt she would rather go through any pain than relinquish it. She wanted it, she wanted it to develop; she felt, even at this nadir, that something had become part of her that made her more alive and more in touch with herself than she had ever been in her life, except, perhaps — and here was a queer thought — in the moment of giving birth to Matthew. The raw pangs had cut straight through the padding layers of her civilized conditioning and united her with the primitive sources of feeling and being. Thinking about Joel was an emotional equivalent to that agony, and welcome to her in precisely the same way. Something was being born that tore her but that would make her normal. No longer acting life, but living it. She wanted it. She wanted it, no matter for the pain. Her whole soul and body cried out, not even so much for the particular man, but for the feelings he had woken in her, the commitment to life that he had seemed to promise she might find through him.

&nb
sp; And she was not going to get him. There was no way she could see that it could happen. She was going to be this hard-edged, enviable, empty failure for ever.

  She stood straight in the darkness of the balcony with the night wind in her face and understood what had brought Fiona Dalzell to the pavement’s edge.

  Maggie got through the next three days with difficulty. Mac, the allegedly tough, crass, insensitive newsman, noticed almost at once that something was wrong.

  ‘You’re very lacklustre these days, Mags. What’s eating you?’

  ‘Nothing, Mac. I’m okay.’

  ‘Well, if that’s the case, cheer up, for God’s sake. You’re droopy-drawersing about the place looking like a wet week in Wigan. Even the editor’s noticed.’

  ‘That I don’t believe.’

  ‘Why not? He’s very much on your team.’

  ‘My team? What on earth does that mean?’

  Mac turned evasive. ‘We all need a team in this harsh world, Maggie.’

  ‘Which harsh world are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, I might be talking about the world at large, it would still be true.’

  ‘But you’re not, you’re talking about our little world right here on the seventh floor of Television House.’

  ‘He who runs, as they say, may read. Now pull your socks or any other garment that happens to be down, up, and get yourself out and do some sparkling street interviews on the prospect of yet another election.’

  ‘Another election! God, what a bore!’

  ‘Now, now, Mags, mustn’t get peevish. And if we’re really bored, we must hide it. Must we not, Maggiekins? Don’t say I didn’t tip you off to the need to be an extra-good little girl reporter just now.’

  The bell rang, but it was muffled. It wasn’t just the prospect of a new election that was making Maggie feel up to her knees in a bog, unable to respond energetically or with her old enthusiasm to anything. Nothing seemed to matter, if she couldn’t have what she wanted. And what she wanted — the only thing that mattered — was to see Joel again.

  She had seen him of course in the rushes theatre, when the pill story was being cut. He looked so wonderful on screen, he spoke so well — she marvelled that the film editors and producer didn’t break into applause. She had sat riveted to the monitor in the newsroom during the relevant bulletin. But then it was over. Even his shadow had vanished. Turning from the set to a Joelless life, she suddenly knew how Tanya had felt about little deaths at parting.