At the top of the hill she sat down on the bench where, years ago, Matt had carved his initial. She looked for it and found it among all the others. She wondered if they ever replaced those benches, and was glad that they hadn’t replaced this one so far. She traced the M with her forefinger and then cleaned the dirt out of the full stop with her little fingernail. Then she laid her hand gently over the M and leaned on it, feeling the cool wet autumn air on her hot eyes and face. After a while, a stiff wind got up. The sunlight came and went through some lumbering clouds, and Maggie watched the leaves being blown off the trees below her.
She must face facts, just as she had watched Tanya face them. She needed time to settle her soul into this new situation. There was no way to evade the horrors of tomorrow and the next day and the next, for a whole month, going in to the office and ‘putting a brave face on it’. She must pass through that particular fire and try to make sure it tempered and did not scar her. If she could cope bravely and efficiently with this situation, she would have earned the right to claim Joel’s support afterwards.
Fine, noble thoughts.
She even reflected that it would be a sort of double betrayal, to rush now straight from Tanya’s despair to the cause of it. With the empathy that had grown so strong between them, she could feel Tanya’s pain, and for a while it crushed down the volcanic eruption of love and joy in love — the sensation of being ‘in the pit’, which to Maggie felt like a crater, long regarded as extinct but now abruptly hot and heaving premonitorily. But when a little more time had passed, enough so that she could contemplate going back down the hill to her empty flat to face what had to be faced, Maggie’s good intentions began to crumble.
She lifted her hand and stared at the worn initial.
Of course it was all nonsense, what she had said to Tan about another baby. Looking at the M that Matt, in his moment of isolation, had carved so savagely, she saw only the full stop. She felt she would rather die than go through all that again, than risk hurting and failing another child and bearing a new set of scars herself.
If she and Joel were to become lovers — and unless she stuck to her wavering resolve to stay away from him for a season, it could well happen this very night — they would have to focus solely on each other. They would have to seek and find in themselves the resources to be each other’s prime satisfaction.
Maggie suddenly felt certain that if she drew back, gave herself even a week in which to consider at any depth whether she was fit for the undertaking of making a man like Joel happy, she would inevitably decide that she wasn’t. Every day that passed — especially such as lay immediately ahead — would diminish her short supply of confidence. Before she knew it, she would have shrunk back into her cold, safe, de-sexed hermit shell, there to cower unloved and unloving, probably forever.
She sensed Margaret, ever-ready with her trenchant, cruel honesty and its attendant guilt. What do you add up to? she asked scathingly. What have you to offer after thirty-five years of living, what have you to display on your banner? You who stole from your father, neglected your benefactress, welched on your career, married out of cowardice and made a rotten wife? You who misjudged your brothers, disappointed your mother and, worst of all, jettisoned your son out of pure funk and selfishness? Now you’ve lost your job and brought your best friend to the edge of desperation. Well done. And you think at this point you merit a great come-lately love? Don’t make me laugh.
Maggie jumped up furiously from the bench, as if confronting an actual accuser. Then she thrust her hands into her coat pockets and stared defiantly over the zoo. The wind blew in her face, bringing her the faint sound of lions roaring… It must be feeding time. She wished with all the ferocity in her nature that she could tear Margaret out of her and throw her to the lions so that they could devour her and silence her accursed nagging voice forever.
But all she really wanted was to obliterate her past mistakes, to have a new, unmarked person to offer to Joel. That was only what every woman wanted when she fell in love. Even Portia — rich, beautiful, intelligent — was filled with a sort of hysteria of humility when it happened to her, craving to be trebled twenty times herself so as to be worthy. And Portia was young. She’d never harmed anybody. More pertinent still, she had never faced the dreadful possibility that she was incapable of love. She’d seen the gates opening on the magic landscape, but she didn’t have to weigh her own merit and the cost to a friend against the incredible relief of that hot trembling in the loins and the heart, proclaiming the possibility of a fulfilled and happy normality when she had secretly abandoned all hope of it.
Standing there in the wind, Maggie conjured up her injured flock.
She begged pardon of her father as sincerely as she could, and he shrugged and vanished, leaving her unshriven. She faced Fiona Dalzell and couldn’t utter a word, but her old teacher patted her shoulder and said robustly, ‘Nonsense, it wasn’t you at all! Don’t you dare burden your conscience with me, my girl!’ Next, with deep reluctance, she produced Bruce, but when he appeared he was a stranger — long-haired and weird (she’d heard that he was living in a mid-west commune, and this must be her subconscious image of him). He looked at her, as she at him, incredulously, and said, ‘Do we know each other?’ Her mother swam in front of him and blotted him out with a hug, saying, ‘Darling, don’t be so silly, you gave me my life’s greatest treasure. Don’t repine!’ and swam away.
Ian rose before her in his open-necked Sunday shirt, also with hands in pockets, and they gazed at each other with the still strange, unwonted absence of antipathy that had developed between them, since his transformation-by-Matthew. Finally, he said gruffly, ‘I suggest we forget it, Maggie. Matthew’s going to be all right — he’ll probably turn out better than Anthea. I’m no great shakes as a father. Maybe you should have taken her on in exchange; you’d have been better with a girl.’ And Stip appeared dressed like a harlequin and whirled her round briefly in a dance, after which he said, before vanishing in a grand balletic leap: ‘I’m going to be the family success, after all, but I know I’m a disgrace to the clan. Don’t hate me.’ So she knew they each had their own guilts to contend with.
And at last came Matt, sturdy in his tracksuit, pounding up the hill from the corner gate toward her, his eyes and mouth grinning, not so much with pleasure at seeing her as with the sheer joy of being alive and able to run up a hill without strain. When he reached her he stopped. He was puffing slightly, and his face was flushed — how bonny he looked! At least for his handsome young body she could take some credit, for she had bred it and fed it, though the splendid red hair and broad shoulders were Bruce’s legacy. ‘Hi Mum,’ he said, and she at once asked, as one only can in day-dreams, ‘Have I been a rotten mother? You can tell me the truth.’ And the transparent Matt of her conscience replied, ‘I suppose a bit, I mean when I think about it, but at least you were never there to nag me or screw me up like a lot of chaps’ mothers I know. Anyway I’m okay, so you don’t have to worry.’ And he gave her a brief wave and gave himself up to the delights of skimming down the hill without touching, having forgotten to give her a kiss.
She did not dare summon Tanya to exonerate her, because she knew she wouldn’t. She would have to trust her, or rather her basic attachment to life, not to poison everything with some fatal denouement… And now, irresistibly, Maggie veered toward Joel. Now she could ‘warm her thoughts against his name’ because he too had done terrible things in his life, and left pain behind him. When (tonight — tonight!) he had finished making love to her, when he had filled her body’s empty places with himself and released the pent-up molten flow of her sexuality, they would lie in his bed and talk. He could not shrive her (no-one really could) but he could partner her with his attention, and while he listened Margaret would have to keep quiet. Because if Maggie had deserved Joel, she could not be all bad.
She wiped her face and gave a deep sigh. The lions were quiet now. They must be momentarily content in their cages, oblivio
usly gnawing their carrion… Maggie found she, too, was hungry.
She left the old bench with the M on it and walked slowly down the hill through the blustery wind. Halfway down, she realised that she knew Joel’s number by heart. She began to run.
***
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OTHER NOVELS BY LYNNE REID BANKS
The Bronte Sisters Saga:
Dark Quartet
Path to the Silent Country
Other Novels:
Casualties
Fair Exchange
Children at the Gate
All in a Row
The End to Running
House of Hope
Defy the Wilderness
The L-Shaped Room Trilogy:
The L-Shaped Room
The Backward Shadow
Two is Lonely
Published by Sapere Books.
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United Kingdom
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Copyright © Lynne Reid Banks, 1984
Lynne Reid Banks has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are purely coincidental.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-913335-64-9
The Warning Bell Page 38
