The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  By 11 a.m., Maggie was at ITN as usual. Having recovered her normal spirits, she was prepared to put her back into her day’s work; she didn’t notice Mac’s expression, nor his unwonted silence, and when the editor’s secretary found Maggie at her desk and said the editor wanted to see her, not a moment’s apprehension crossed her mind. She supposed he wanted to congratulate her on that rather good little story she’d done on Friday.

  What he actually wanted to tell her was that she was sacked.

  Powerful as her happiness was, the shock of this news stripped it at once to the bone, like the stroke of a grizzly’s claws. She sat there, aware of the soft carpeting under her shoes and yet feeling as if the ground had fallen away beneath her. The editor, a kindly man, was explaining that for his part he wouldn’t have taken the matter so seriously but that evidently there were other forces at work. When Maggie, with dry lips, asked what there was to take seriously, he pushed across his desk at her a piece of paper torn off an expenses pad with her signature across the bottom. Higher up, in a very good imitation of her scrawl, was the most inventive list of fiddles that even Mike and Joe had ever devised.

  She burst into a strained laugh. ‘But this is nonsense! I didn’t write this — it’s a cameraman’s idea of a joke. I can sort it out in five minutes!’

  The editor went on looking at her out of sad, shrewd eyes.

  ‘Maggie, I wouldn’t stir up a hornet’s nest about it. All you might do is get one of our best crews into trouble, which frankly wouldn’t please anybody. I’m afraid this is only an excuse. Somebody up there has had a down on you for a long time. They want a new face.’

  Maggie couldn’t take this in at first. ‘But — but I’ve never fiddled my exes in my life —’

  ‘I know that. It’s bloody unfair. Look. How would it be if we just took you off the road? You might like to script write for a bit, while you look round —’

  ‘Script write!’ Maggie exclaimed violently, in an unconscious echo of Tanya. ‘After reporting! No thank you!’ What, sit at the scriptwriters’ table in its backwoods corner, with everyone knowing she was in some kind of disgrace? Despair made her reckless. ‘How can you let this happen? You’re the editor! Why didn’t you fight for me?’

  He looked down at his folded fingers.

  ‘I did. But to be brutally frank, Maggie, I haven’t been too satisfied with your work lately myself. I think you may be getting a bit stale. Mac agrees, though reluctantly, because like all of us he’s very fond of you. I think you’re right about scriptwriting. Make a clean break. I promise you, nobody who doesn’t have to will know what’s happened. Put a good face on it in the newsroom, and no one’ll know you’re not just off in search of fresh fields. After all, you weren’t an actress for nothing.’

  Mac, shifty-eyed with embarrassment and inexpressible sympathy (‘I’ve had the push so often myself I know what it feels like. You just have to say fuck ’em and go on to the next thing’) gave her the rest of the day off. She marched out with head high but a dangerous hot lump in her throat and shaking knees. Going home on the bus and then toiling up Regent’s Park Road through the rain, battling with her shock, she laid this blow against Joel’s name for comfort, but it gave her none. The relationship was too new. She felt she couldn’t, at this delicate stage, bring him a desperate need, an insoluble dilemma. She didn’t see how, in the near future, she could offer him herself at all, for now she would be jobless. She shuddered as she thought of it, for, as she only too well remembered, without a routine, a sense of worth and purpose to hold her together, she became hollow, insecure, terrified. The very person who had attracted him initially would turn to mush and rubble when the armour of her work had been broken off her. One needed stamina and confidence to conduct a love affair.

  No. The most comforting name she could think of now was Tanya’s. She had seen Tanya through the initial stages of her professional disaster; now Tan would surely do the same for her. And she was not far to seek.

  Maggie entered her flat in a rush, hungry for the sanctuary and succour of home. At first she thought the place was empty, and paused, horribly disappointed not to find Tan waiting. ‘Tanya? Are you here?’

  She heard a movement out on the balcony and saw a shadow. She started in that direction, and was startled to come face to face with Oliver. He held Imogen by the hand. His narrow, goatish face looked statuesque with outrage.

  ‘Hallo, Maggie,’ he said grimly.

  ‘Oliver! What are you doing here?’

  ‘An odd question, under the circumstances… Did you suppose I’d just sit back while my wife and daughter walked out on me? I’ve come to take them home.’

  ‘Oh…’ Maggie slowly took off her wet coat and hung it up. ‘Well! Where is she?’

  ‘In the bedroom. Re-packing.’

  Maggie looked from Oliver to Imogen. She was wearing dungarees and so looked less than usual like one of those precocious and un-child-like Victorian children, but her elfin face was huge-eyed and stricken, her mouth pinched. Maggie felt an uprush of love and sympathy for her, as another like herself whose world was abruptly tottering, and crouched to face her.

  ‘Hallo, Gin-gin,’ she said tenderly.

  The child didn’t answer. Tension was crackling through the air; she seemed frozen by it. The realisation of the likely effect of all this on Ginny ejected Maggie, for the moment, from the plummeting cockpit of her own crisis.

  ‘Would either of you like anything?’ she asked briskly.

  ‘Thanks, no,’ said Oliver austerely. ‘We’re leaving at once.’

  ‘Well, I want to talk to Tanya first.’

  Oliver opened his mouth as if to object, then shrugged. ‘Your privilege,’ he said shortly.

  Maggie went into the spare bedroom. Tanya was indeed packing. She was also crying.

  ‘Tan, what’s going on?’

  Tanya threw herself into Maggie’s arms.

  ‘Oh God! It was so horrible — stamping in here, behaving as if he owned us —’

  Maggie gripped her sharply. ‘Shh! Keep your voice down, you don’t want Ginny to hear.’

  Tanya stared at her wildly.

  ‘Ginny knows all about it!’

  ‘You’ve told Ginny?’ Tanya nodded fiercely. ‘What have you told her?’

  ‘Everything. That I’m leaving Oliver. That I’ve got a lover.’

  Despite all she knew of Tanya, despite all that had happened, this shocked Maggie.

  ‘Tanya, darling, she’s only six!’

  ‘She’s a human being, she’s my daughter, she’s shared everything with me so far — why shouldn’t she share this?’

  Maggie looked into her friend’s eyes, saw argument was useless, and turned away.

  ‘All right. So what’s happening now? Are you going back with him?’

  ‘Ginny is. It’ll be better. I’ll be freer. I was wrong to bring her, only I love her so much, it’s such agony not to have her with me. I’m just putting her things into a bag and then Oliver can take her —’

  ‘He’s under the impression you’re going home with him too.’

  ‘He can’t drag me! I don’t want him. I can’t bear to be with him. I want Joel, and I’m going to him. This time, there’s nothing in the way.’

  Maggie sat down on one of the pine beds. Tanya turned from her and went on frenetically throwing things into the hold-all, sniffing deeply every few seconds as the tears kept coming. Maggie’s life seemed to flash before her, or at least, her life as it had involved Tanya. Had it all led up to this, that she must crush her utterly or else give up her own hopes?

  ‘Tan, how can you say there’s nothing in the way?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What about Ginny?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘If you leave her father, what effect will that have on your relationship with her?’

  ‘Nothing I do can affect Ginny and me. That’s inviolable. We’re a unit, forever.’

  ‘Don’t, Tan!
’ Maggie said sharply.

  ‘Don’t what?’ Tanya asked.

  ‘Make the same idiot mistake I did! You leave her now to run after Joel, and you’ll lose her as surely as I’ve lost Matt.’

  A shadow of fear crossed Tanya’s face, ousting, for the moment, the ruthless defiance and determination.

  ‘What are you talking about? You haven’t lost Matt!’

  ‘Yes. I have.’

  Tanya shifted the bag and sat beside her.

  ‘You’ve never said that before.’

  ‘But it’s true. Effectively, I have no son. And if you do this, you’ll have no daughter. She’ll belong to Oliver or whoever replaces you in her life. And there’s a difference between us. I’ve got time to replace Matt, to have another baby. But you’re that much older than me. By the time you make the fatal discovery I’ve made — by the time you realise that you’ve forfeited Ginny by putting your own needs before hers — it’ll be too late for you.’

  Tanya was now looking at her piercingly, listening to and weighing every word.

  ‘Replace Matt…’ she repeated slowly. ‘Maggie. Have you finally found someone?’

  Maggie stood up and went to the window. Here it came.

  ‘You have,’ said Tanya’s astonished voice from behind her. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘How can you care at a moment like this?’

  ‘I do care, Maggie! You’re my dearest friend. I’ve waited years for this; I’ve longed for it for you.’

  Oh my God, thought Maggie. Now the knot must be untied, not by time but by me.

  She turned, and in that second had proof of her closeness to Tanya, because Tanya took one look at her and knew. Her face contracted.

  ‘It’s not Joel,’ she whispered. ‘Please, Maggie. Say it isn’t.’

  ‘It is,’ said Maggie.

  ‘Oh, you poor —’ Tanya began, starting towards her in a movement of pity.

  ‘Tanya, don’t be sorry for me! It’s not hopeless as you obviously imagine. It’s only just starting, but I know this much — he doesn’t love you.’

  The tender, pitying look dropped off Tanya’s face like a mask, leaving it bone-white. She clenched her teeth, and showed them bared to the gums. It might have been a look of menace, but Maggie thought it was simple shock.

  ‘What are you saying?’ Tanya asked under her breath.

  Maggie sat down by her and tried to touch her, but it was like touching a block.

  ‘Just that we met again, at his invitation, we’ve spent two evenings together, and I know, quite certainly, that there is something between us.’

  ‘How could you?’ said the death’s-head version of Tanya, which was staring at her.

  ‘How could I know? — Because —’

  ‘I don’t mean that! How could you — see him? When? It must have been after you’d had my letter!’

  ‘Yes. His letter, asking for a meeting, came at the same time.’

  Tanya sat rigid.

  ‘You read my letter and then you read his letter and you decided quite coldly —’

  ‘Coldly! — No —’

  ‘— to meet him, when you knew how I felt?’

  ‘Tanya, you have got to face it. I’m afraid what matters now is what he feels. And whatever you imagined he felt, when you met him again, wasn’t true, because he told me —’

  She stopped. She thought Tanya was going to hit her.

  After a long, long silence, Tanya dropped her head, shook it violently, swallowed noisily, and then stood up with a jolt.

  ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘We’re going to settle this here and now.’

  ‘How?’ asked Maggie in bewilderment.

  ‘How? By phoning him. By asking him.’

  Maggie jumped up. ‘Tanya, stop! You can’t! You are crazy!’

  Tanya spun round and faced her. Her face was frenzied. ‘I know!’ she shouted. ‘For years I’ve been crazy! I went crazy in the war. I went crazier after it. I sublimated it into my acting, and that was fine until I met Joel. Then all my craziness, or let’s call it by its proper name, my psychosis, my insanity, came out, and luckily it took the form of a passionate devotion, which he accepted from me as long as it didn’t go too far. But love is one thing and insane love is another and in the end he … he “put me away”. There’s an irony! He put me away from him and I put myself away, into my career. And that was fine too, in its traumatic way, till the theatre blew up in my face like the minefield it is, and spewed me out again… Well, you were here and you saw me at the time, you saw how I was, you shouldn’t look so surprised to discover I’m mad. Then I took refuge with Oliver, that’s all it was —’ And here, to Maggie’s horror, she threw open the bedroom door and shouted the words out — ‘I didn’t deceive anyone about it; I told him that’s what I needed and what he was to me. Didn’t I tell you that, Oliver? Did I ever, ever pretend that I loved —’

  Maggie broke from her horrified stupor and sprang at the door, slamming it sharply. She caught Tanya by the arm to drag her further from it, but Tanya, with the strength of fury, broke free.

  ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t interrupt me. I’m telling you. All right. I’ll keep my voice down. But there were no lies. Next, I channelled my madness into having a baby. As a matter of fact, that turned out to be the sanest thing I ever did. But when it was done, it proved not to be enough to use up all this — this — furious, mad, irrational energy I have. So, I let it rip. I used it. I used it to get my career back. To make sure my daughter would be a mensch with some understanding of life, so she would never be shocked into lunacy like I was. But most of all — at the bottom — I fought to be sane, to be normal. To be like other women who simply do not go on yearning for some man they haven’t seen for years and years, but forget him at last and all the other damaging things as well, who can shake off their scars and come up clean and whole.’

  Suddenly she sat down on the floor. She did not put her face in her hands. She sat there between the beds, crumpled, panting. The choleric colour faded from her face. Maggie went down beside her, speechless. After a while, Tanya went on in a tired voice, as if she had to finish but was almost spent:

  ‘And through a lot of it, I had you, Maggie. My good friend that I loved. I didn’t tell you everything. Of course not. One can’t tell anybody everything. There’s so much one doesn’t know oneself.’ She looked at Maggie piteously. ‘Do you think I knew, when I gave you his name and address? Do you think I was aware that all that suppressed feeling was still alive and kicking down there in my guts? I thought it was dead, I did, Maggie. It wasn’t a trick on you. It was a trick on me. And now look how it’s turned out. I’m going to lose him again. It will be so different from before. Before, I knew he belonged to his wife, that I was on the wrong side of the blanket. I deserved to lose him. But now — he’s free — he’s free — and he doesn’t want me. The only thing that could be worse for me than that is if he is now going to fall in love with you. Because I’m mad, such a thing would make me hate both of you to the point of wanting to kill somebody.’

  Maggie sat silent on the floor.

  Suddenly both women became aware that someone had come in to the room, and looked simultaneously over their shoulders as they sat half-hidden by the beds. It was Ginny. She stood there in her red dungarees, looking down on them with that expression of what Tanya — in RADA days — had used to call ‘appalment’, which children naturally adopt when adults are frightening them out of their wits with unadult behaviour.

  The sight of Ginny galvanised Tanya as the sight of Matt, with the same expression, had once galvanised Maggie. She leapt to her feet and, wiping her eyes hastily with the heels of her hands, picked up the little girl in her arms.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mummy?’ Ginny asked shrilly.

  ‘Nothing now, darling. You know me. I have to burst sometimes, and shout and cry a bit, but then I’m better.’

  ‘Are you better now?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tanya with commendable conviction. Maggie was al
so on her feet by now, straightening the beds inanely and closing up the holdall with Ginny’s things in it.

  ‘Daddy’s out there. He said to tell you it’s time to go home.’

  Tanya put her gently down. She glanced at Maggie, and for a moment the vital energy left her and she seemed to sag. But then she took a deep breath. It was the kind of deep breath actresses often take just before they go on stage, a therapeutic sigh that at once relaxes tension and tanks up on oxygen.

  ‘Okay, darling. Go and tell Daddy I’m nearly ready.’

  Ginny ran from the room, leaving the door open. Maggie closed it. Tanya said, ‘No more, Maggie. No more, ever. Will you go now, and leave me to pack? Go — right away, please. I don’t want to see you anymore. I’ll be gone in half an hour.’

  Maggie didn’t take in the ‘anymore’, or if she did she didn’t take it to mean anything but ‘anymore today’. She started out of the bedroom. Tanya’s voice caught her for a moment at the door.

  ‘Maggie.’

  She turned. Tanya was standing straight, looking at her. She was never to forget that look, although she didn’t then grasp its valedictory quality. It was the look of the friend in the sea at the friend in the lifeboat. Although not a forgiving look, it was at least hate-free.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ Tanya said.

  Maggie half opened her hands in a gesture of mutuality. Then she went out of the room.

  Oliver was not visible in the living-room, so she didn’t have to speak to him. She just took her coat and went out. She felt profoundly shaken. The scene with Tanya, and Tanya’s sudden uprush of courage in recovering, had knocked the edge off Maggie’s shock at the loss of her job. She walked to the top of Primrose Hill with her head down, reliving the two scenes of the morning — her own in the editor’s office, and Tanya’s in the bedroom. She wasn’t consciously comparing them, but she was aware in her depths that Tanya’s sorrow outweighed hers. It didn’t make hers unimportant, but it put it back into proportion.