Marianne Dreams

by Catherine Storr; Susannah Harker

  Although Marianne said good-bye in a rather choked voice, she didn’t actually cry till Dr Burton had gone downstairs. But when she was sure he was out of earshot, she hid her face in the pillow and burst into tears. Her mother found her, a minute or two later, with a very red face and a very damp pillow.

  ‘Poor love’ her mother said, sitting down on the side of the bed. ‘I’m afraid you’re very disappointed. But never mind, we’ll think of all sorts of things to do, and the time will go very quickly, you’ll see. I’m going to take out a subscription to the library especially for you, so you can have as many books as you want, and I’m arranging for someone, a sort of governess, to come and see you every day and give you a few lessons.’

  ‘Mother!’ Marianne said, so shocked that she quite stopped crying. ‘Not lessons, when I’m ill!’

  ‘Yes, darling, you’ll enjoy reading to yourself and all the other things you do more if you don’t do them all the time; and you’ll find it’s much easier when you go back to school if you’ve kept up a bit at home. Now, let me clear up your bed; it’s rather a mess, isn’t it? Did you tidy up my workbox? Was there anything interesting in it?’

  ‘Yes, quite. I didn’t finish’ Marianne said listlessly. She looked at the pencil lying on her bedside table, but without the interest she had felt before.

  ‘I found that pencil’ she said, pointing. ‘Can I have it, Mother? It’s not silver or anything.’

  ‘In my workbox? Yes, I should think so’ her mother replied. ‘I don’t remember seeing it before. Is that what you drew with it? It looks a nice house.’

  ‘It isn’t very’ Marianne said, rather crossly. ‘I’m tired, Mother. I want to lie down.’

  ‘Yes, do, my pet. Go to sleep till tea-time and you’ll feel twice the woman. I’ve made jelly for tea.’

  Marianne felt that no jelly could possibly comfort her, but she just managed not to say so. She lay down in a tight, uncomfortable ball, and wondered if she would sleep because she was so tired, or would lie awake and cry because she was so miserable; in fact, she was asleep before the door had shut.

  Marianne dreamed.

  She was in a great open stretch of country, flat like a prairie, covered, as far as she could see, with the long dry grass in which she was standing more than knee deep. There were no roads, no paths, no hills and no valleys. Only the prairie stretched before her on all sides till it met the grey encircling sky. Here and there it was dotted with great stones or rocks, which rose just above the level of the tall grass, like heads peering from all directions.

  Marianne stood and looked. There seemed to be nothing to do and nowhere to go. Wherever she looked she saw nothing but grass and stones and sky, the same on every side of her. Yet something, a nagging uneasiness which she could not account for, drove her to start walking; and because at one point on the skyline she thought she could see something like a faint trickle of smoke, she walked towards that.

  The ground under her feet was rutted and uneven, and the grass harsh and prickling. She could not move fast, and it seemed that she had walked a long way before she saw that she had been right about the faint line in the sky. It was a wavering stream of smoke, rising in the windless air from the chimney of a house.

  It was a curious looking house, with leaning walls, its windows and door blank and shut. It rose unexpectedly straight from the prairie: a low uneven fence separated its small plot from the surrounding ground, though the coarse grass was the same within and without. There were some large pale yellow flowers about, which Marianne could not recognize, growing a foot or two high; they seemed to be as much outside the fence as in, and certainly did not constitute

  a garden. Nothing moved except the thread of smoke rising from the chimney. In all that vast expanse nothing else moved.

  There was a gate in the fence. Marianne pushed it open and walked up the path to the door. She did not much like the look of the house, with its blank staring windows and its bare front door, but she liked the prairie even less.

  ‘I must get in’ said Marianne aloud in her dream. ‘I’ve got to get in’

  There was no knocker and there was no bell. Marianne knocked with her knuckles, but it was a disappointing little noise and she was not surprised that no one answered. She looked around for a stone to beat on the door but the only stones were the great grey boulders outside the fence. As she stood, considering what to do, she heard the distant sound of wind. Across the prairie it blew towards her, and in its path the grass whistled and rustled, dry stalk on dry stalk, and bent, so that she could see the path of the wind as it approached her. Then it was all around her, and everything that had been so still before became alive with movement. The grass writhed and tore at its roots, the pale flowers beat against their stems, the thin thread of smoke was blown out like a candle flame, and disappeared into the dark sky. The wind whistled round the house and was gone, leaving Marianne deaf for a moment, and suddenly chilled.

  ‘I’m frightened here’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get away from the grass and the stones and the wind. I’ve got to get into the house.’

  No voice spoke in reply to her words, and there was no signal from the silent house; but she knew the answer as if she had heard it.

  ‘I could get in’ Marianne thought, ‘if there was a person inside the house. There has got to be a person. I can’t get in unless there is somebody there.’

  ‘Why isn’t there someone in the house?’ she cried to the empty world around her.

  ‘But someone there’ the silent answer said.

  ‘How can I?’ Marianne protested. ‘How can I put someone in the house? I can’t get in myself! And I’ve got to get in!’

  ‘I’ve got to get in!’ she heard herself say, and the words woke her up. With difficulty she struggled back to realize that the house and prairie were gone: she was lying in bed, and the memory of the six weeks more to be spent there was lying in wait for her, to weigh down her spirits as soon as she was sufficiently awake to remember.

  3. The Person in the House

  For a day and a half Marianne was extremely unhappy. Not her mother’s comforting, nor a brand-new and very ingenious bed-table ordered especially for her by her father, nor the knowledge that she was getting better, and would in time be quite well again, were enough to make her anything but miserable. She read, she ate, she played games with her mother, and she slept, in a haze of angry disappointment. It was only towards the end of the second day that she began to feel at all better about Dr Burton’s decree. She had been asleep in the afternoon again - she seemed to spend a great deal of her time asleep - and she lay, after waking up, listening to the new leaves on the trees outside rustling in the wind. Those leaves had been only just bursting out of their buds when she had had her birthday; she wondered if they would be old yellow autumn leaves by the time she was quite well again. The whole summer, she felt, would have gone before she was allowed out of bed; and at the thought of the pleasures of the summer term, swimming baths, and hot, lazy games of rounders on grass, Marianne felt tears begin to prick her eyelids. But she didn’t cry. The idea of staying in bed for so long did not now seem as preposterous, impossible and unreal as it had two days ago: it began to seem unescapable though unpleasant.

  Marianne wondered what she would be like at the end of such a long time as an invalid. Would she be purified by suffering, like the heroines of old-fashioned books, who rose from their sick-beds changed - and always for the better? Or would she be just the same Marianne who had gone to bed on her birthday just over three weeks ago? She didn’t see why staying in bed should alter her character very much, but yet she didn’t feel exactly the same as she had even so short a time before. Somehow the feeling really ill had made a gap between the person she had been then, and the person she felt herself to be now, just as the six weeks which were to come, which were to keep her alone in bed, while everyone else went to school and played games and lived ordinary lives, seemed to separate her from the person she would have been if no
ne of this had happened.

  When she was sitting up in bed after tea, she looked, for the first time for two days, among the litter on her bedside table, with a renewed interest in doing something. She saw the pencil she had found in her great-grandmother’s work-box, and again she felt that it was a pencil of character, a pencil which could draw if only she, Marianne, would let it. She picked it up and opened her drawing book, and saw the house she had drawn while she was waiting for the doctor; it seemed an age ago.

  ‘But,’ Marianne thought, suddenly interested, ‘how extraordinary! It’s the house in my dream!’

  There were the blank windows: there was the rough grass and the great boulders around. There was the pencilled column of smoke, rising from the big chimney. There was the door without a knocker. Marianne’s knuckles ached again as she remembered hammering on that bare front door.

  It was the work of a moment to draw in a knocker, a front door handle and a letter-box on the door of her picture. She hesitated a moment before the next step.

  ‘I said I didn’t know how to put a person in the house to let me in,’ she thought. ‘But I can, of course. Now that I see I was dreaming about my own drawing.’

  The windows were too small for her to draw a whole person looking out. She drew a head and shoulders at one of the upper windows; a boy’s head, with short hair, because it was easiest to draw. It turned out to have rather a sad face, which Marianne hadn’t meant, but she did not know how to alter it.

  ‘There!’ she thought, with satisfaction, as she finished. ‘Now, if I dreamed about this place I would be able to get in, because the boy would come down and open the door. And I could knock properly with the knocker. I almost wish I would dream the same dream again, so that I could get inside and see what the house is like. But I don’t suppose I shall. I wish there was a way of getting back into a dream that’s been interesting.’

  When her mother came up to begin getting her ready for the night, Marianne consulted her on the subject.

  ‘Mother, can you make yourself dream something you want to?’ she asked. ‘I mean, if you’ve had a dream already that you liked having, could you get back into it again?’

  ‘I heard of someone once who could go on in her dreams with stories she told,’ her mother said. ‘But I don’t think I’ve ever actually known anyone who could choose what they were going to dream, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Bother!’ Marianne said.

  ‘Have you had a dream you want to get back into?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Yes,’ was all that Marianne answered. She realized suddenly that she didn’t want to be asked about the dream itself, and she changed the subject abruptly to governesses. All the time that her mother was clearing the room, washing her and brushing her hair, and while she ate her supper, she kept up a fire of questions about the governess her mother had engaged. Was she old? Very old? Was she strict? Would she have to be addressed as Ma’am? Would she insist on all conversation being in French? Marianne had never heard of a governess outside a Victorian children’s book, and she pictured this specimen as an elderly lady with grey ringlets and possibly mittens and a cap, which for some reason made her mother laugh a great deal, though all she would say, in answer to Marianne’s questions, was, ‘wait and see’.

  ‘I should think you’ll dream about governesses tonight’ she said, when Marianne was fed and kissed and tucked up, and she was turning out the light.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Marianne said. ‘Horrible people.’

  ‘Good night, love,’ her mother said.

  ‘Good night, Mother darling.’

  And again Marianne dreamed.

  She was standing in long dry grass which rustled when she moved; behind and on both sides of her, as far as she could see, the same grass stretched, apparently for ever. In front of her, just the other side of a ragged, untidy fence, stood a house.

  The house had leaning walls and a top-heavy chimney, from which a wisp of smoke rose straight into the grey windless sky. Marianne knew it at once.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ she thought; but for a moment she could not remember when or where she had seen this house before. Yet it all seemed familiar - the long grass, the uneven fence, the path that led through the wild garden to the front door. Only the door itself looked somehow strange: and then, in an instant, Marianne remembered. She saw the knocker, the handle, and the letter-box, and she remembered how the last time she had been here she had bruised her knuckles on the door, trying to make someone inside the house hear. She remembered how the wind had blown cold fear all around her, and she felt again that the house was the only refuge she could find from something out here on the prairie which she did not understand. She remembered also that only another person could let her inside. She looked up at the windows on the first floor, and there, looking down at her from one of them, was the boy’s face.

  Marianne was startled. Then she waved. ‘After all,’ she thought, ‘I’ve got to get into the house, so I may as well try to be friendly’

  The face changed, slowly. It smiled a little and a hand waved back. It was rather a feeble wave, but it was not the gesture of an enemy.

  Marianne pushed open the unlatched gate and walked into the garden with its pale yellow flowers. She went up to the front door, confidently put her hand on the knocker, and knocked loudly, ringingly. The inside of the house echoed to the noise as if it were a hollow shell.

  But no one answered the door.

  Marianne knocked again.

  Still no one came.

  Marianne stepped back and looked up at the right-hand window. The face was still there, and its owner had pressed it against the pane of glass so that the nose looked white and flat. The eyes were turned down in a squinting effort to see Marianne. She could now see the boy quite clearly. He had short, thick brown hair and freckles.

  ‘Come down and let me in!’ called Marianne. She didn’t know how much he could hear through the closed window, and her voice sounded horribly loud.

  The boy shook his head. He said something in reply, but Marianne couldn’t hear it. She shook her head in her turn. ‘I can’t hear you’ she shouted.

  The boy began tugging at the window. It seemed very stiff, but at last he managed to move it. He got the lower sash up and put his head a little way out.

  ‘You needn’t shout’ he remarked, in a perfectly ordinary voice. ‘In fact you’d better not. It isn’t very safe round here.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Marianne. A little chill crept down her back and she looked quickly behind her. She saw only the fence, and beyond it the bare tussocky plain. Nothing stirred.

  ‘Oh, well’ said the boy, and then he stopped. He didn’t seem anxious to go on with the subject. Instead, he said, ‘Why have you come here?’

  ‘I don’t know’ said Marianne. She thought, but she could not remember why or how she had come. ‘I had to come’ she said, feeling as if this were true. ‘I’ve got to get into this house.’

  The boy seemed to understand this. He nodded. ‘Why can’t you let me in?’ asked Marianne. ‘I can’t come down.’ ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, there aren’t any stairs, to begin with.’ ‘No stairs! In the whole house? Then how did you get up there?’

  The boy looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know’ he said. ‘I was just here. And now I can’t get down until there are stairs.’ ‘Can’t someone else let me in?’

  ‘There isn’t anyone else’ said the boy. ‘At least I don’t think so. I haven’t seen anyone except you.’

  ‘Do you mean’ said Marianne, trying to be reasonable and friendly, though she felt extremely cross, ‘that you live here, all by yourself, and you don’t know how you got up there, when there aren’t any stairs, or who looks after you, or where everybody else is, or anything?’

  ‘Well, you don’t really know how you got here, do you?’ asked the boy. ‘You don’t know any more than I do.’

  ‘I’ve got to get into the house’ said Marianne. It sounded stupid,
but it was the only thing she felt sure of.

  ‘And I’ve got to get out’ remarked the boy.

  ‘You could almost jump’ said Marianne, measuring the height of the window from the ground. ‘Perhaps I could catch you.’

  ‘It’d probably break my legs and yours too if we tried’ said the boy disagreeably. ‘Anyhow, you don’t understand.’

  ‘How can I understand when you don’t explain anything?’ Marianne cried out angrily. ‘I was only trying to help. You can stay where you are then, I don’t care. I don’t want to have you jumping on top of me. Stay in your beastly house without any silly stairs and I hope nobody comes and you starve, that’s all.’

  She turned her back on the boy and the house and walked off down the path to the gate. The boy’s voice followed her, faintly mocking. ‘It’s not my house, anyway, it’s just as much yours. You’ve got to get in, remember?’

  Marianne took no notice, except that she began to run, to get away the sooner. She ran through the gate and out into the field. Running was hard work; her legs wouldn’t move quickly enough, her feet seemed to stick to the ground. Suddenly she caught her foot in one of the tussocks of grass and fell, with a shock that jolted her whole body.

  She lay awake in bed.

  4. Miss Chesterfield

  Miss Chesterfield, who was the ‘sort of governess’ that Marianne’s mother had engaged, came for the first time the next morning. She wasn’t at all Marianne’s idea of a governess, which was mostly taken from old-fashioned children’s books. Instead of being middle-aged and rather prim and strict, she was quite young and very pretty. She was a little strict, perhaps, in not letting Marianne talk about other things while she was supposed to be doing sums and dictation, but when the two hours of lessons were over, she proved to be very friendly and quite prepared to listen to Marianne and to talk herself. Marianne, who had never met a real live governess before, wanted to know a lot about her: what it was like being a governess, how she had started to be one, whom else she had taught, and what the other children were like. Apparently Miss Chesterfield had never lived with one family for years and years, watching them all grow up from the nursery to the schoolroom and the schoolroom to the grown-up world, as Marianne had imagined -though Miss Chesterfield looked as if she hadn’t been grown up herself for very long. Instead of this, she went round from one family to another, teaching children who for some reason or other couldn’t go to school for a time. She had taught a blind boy called Robert, and a family of six little girls who were in quarantine for chicken-pox, and all got it, one after the other. She had gone on a sailing holiday one summer with a mother and father and three children who were terribly bad at arithmetic and all had to be taught from the very beginnings. She also had one or two regular pupils whom she went to once or twice every week for subjects. One of these, it appeared, was a girl of thirteen called Evelyn, who was learning Latin and French and was rather clever. Another one was a boy called Mark, who was recovering very slowly from a bad illness which had left him partly paralysed. He hadn’t been at school for six months and Miss Chesterfield was keeping him more or less up to standard in all the important subjects, such as Latin and mathematics and French, so that he wouldn’t be too much behind the others when he went back.,