‘Will he get better?’ Marianne asked. ‘I mean will he be able to walk again?’
‘Yes, the doctors think he probably will,’ Miss Chesterfield said. ‘But it depends very much on what he does in the next month or two. If he really tries, they think he could recover completely perhaps, but of course if he doesn’t try he probably won’t.’
‘But how can he not try?’ Marianne exclaimed, astonished. ‘Doesn’t he want to get well? He can’t want to stay in bed for the rest of his life.’
‘I don’t think he’d say he wanted that,’ Miss Chesterfield agreed. ‘But in some ways Mark is lazy. Of course he’s been ill for a long time now and it’s very difficult for him to get back to ordinary life. He’s a clever boy, too, and he’s always read a great deal, and it would be very easy for him now just to be content to be an invalid, or partly an invalid for a long time -1 really don’t think he’d mind terribly as long as he could get enough books to read.’
‘How extraordinary,’ Marianne said, ‘I don’t feel as if I’d ever get used to staying in bed, and I do quite like reading. But if Dr Burton said tomorrow that I could get up, I would. Straight away.’
‘I think Mark would if it was just a question of getting up,’ Miss Chesterfield said. ‘But you see it isn’t for him. He’s been in bed so long that his muscles have to be trained all over again to do their work properly. He’ll have to learn to walk again, and it’s tiresome and it hurts sometimes, and it all seems more bother than it’s worth when he doesn’t feel very well anyhow.’
‘We’re just the opposites, him and me, aren’t we?’ Marianne said thoughtfully. ‘He’s got to take exercise and doesn’t want to, and I’ve got to stay in bed and I don’t want to do that. It’s a pity you can’t mix us up a bit, Miss Chesterfield, so that I could do his energetic things for a bit and he could lie in bed and read for me.’
‘I dare say you’re each of you better off as you are,’ Miss Chesterfield said. ‘And now stop exercising your tongue, Marianne, and concentrate on your work. You’ve got to find out how long it takes to fill a sixty-gallon cylinder with a pump which produces a quarter of a pint every ten seconds, and it’s a perfectly possible sum so don’t make that face.’
Marianne did the sum - and got it wrong, but that was because she made a mistake in multiplication and not because she didn’t understand the principle of the problem, which was what Miss Chesterfield said was most important. But she did make the face, which meant that it was really very difficult, several times, and she also continued to think about Mark, which perhaps accounted for her making the mistake. But although she tried in every possible way to get Miss Chesterfield to talk about Mark, or indeed about any of her other pupils during lesson time, she wasn’t successful. Miss Chesterfield insisted on keeping very seriously to the time-table she had made out for Marianne and herself, and mathematics was followed by history, and history by French, and then it was the end of the morning’s work, and Miss Chesterfield had to go.
‘But you’ll tell me all about Mark and Robert and the chicken-pox little girls tomorrow, won’t you?’ Marianne urged her, as she put away the books they had been using and tidied up Marianne’s bed.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Miss Chesterfield, pretending to look very stern, ‘I shall probably set you to learn all the dates of all the Kings and Queens of England, and the tables of weights and measures. We shan’t have time for any idle gossip’
‘Not idle gossip, exactly,’ Marianne protested, ‘just tell me a little about Mark. Tell me if he’s good at sums and history and things. Is he better than I am at seeing how to do problems, Miss Chesterfield? Or doesn’t he have to do things like that if he’s paralysed and can’t walk?’
‘Certainly he has to,’ said Miss Chesterfield briskly. ‘And history, and French and Latin as well. And now I must go, Marianne, and you must stop asking questions. Tomorrow we’ll have lessons first and questions afterwards, if there’s time for them. Otherwise I see we shall never get any work done at all, and you’ll go back to school next term knowing as much as I do about my other pupils and nothing about anything else.’
Marianne found she got used surprisingly quickly to having lessons every morning; and her mother had been right about it making the rest of the day seem more interesting. She liked the lessons too, most of them, and she liked Miss Chesterfield, and on the whole staying in bed wasn’t as bad as she had expected. But there were times when she thought of what she was missing, about the school play and the parties she couldn’t go to, and the swimming baths and dancing and the cheerful noise of the cloakroom at school at the end of the day when everyone was dressing to go home and shouting at the top of her voice to make her friends hear the latest news. When she thought about these things Marianne was very sad. Sometimes she cried, at first, secretly into her pillow so as not to let anyone know. Later other things got unbearable, such as not being allowed to fetch her own books and toys when she wanted to, nor being able to go and see who had come to the door when visitors arrived, having to wear the same pyjamas - not the same pair, of course, but the same kind of garment - all the time, and other small but annoying restrictions. She got used to being in bed and seemed almost to forget what it was like to be well and allowed to get up and run about; and yet she was bored. Sometimes she was so bored that she couldn’t think of a single thing she could bear to do. She didn’t want to read a new book or do a puzzle or write a letter or knit or sew or even see a new face. She only wanted to be left to be miserable. But fortunately she didn’t very often feel like this; and when she did, things always improved when Miss Chesterfield came to give her lessons or when her mother was free to read to her or to play games with her. Then, except for being tired of bed, Marianne felt better again, and the time, instead of standing still, started moving again at a reasonable pace, so that the mornings went quickly by and the afternoons and evenings not much slower than afternoons do for well and up-and-about people.
Miss Chesterfield kept quite strictly to the rule of lessons first and questions afterwards, but in spite of this Marianne found out quite a lot about Robert and Mark and the six little girls, who had all been given names beginning with the letter F. This was not so bad, though perhaps muddling, for Frances, Felicity, Faith and Fiona. But Marianne and Miss Chesterfield agreed that it was hard on Fenella and Ferelith to have quite such unusual names just to fit in with an idea of their parents, which really wasn’t such a good one in the first place. Their surname was Frammington, which made it all the worse.
It was on the day when she’d been hearing about the six little chicken-pox girls that Marianne dreamed again. Ordinarily she didn’t sleep in the daytime, but there had been a thunderstorm the night before which had kept her awake, and in the afternoon, after Miss Chesterfield had gone, she was sleepy. She had been drawing again: she wasn’t quite pleased with the house she had drawn before. She found, which was a nuisance, that she couldn’t rub out the marks made by the pencil, although it didn’t look like an indelible one: so all she could do was to add to the picture she had drawn already. She drew a background - a line of hills, dipping and curving into each other like the South Downs, and a narrow road leading up to the top of the hills from somewhere out of the picture.
The garden round the house looked a little empty, so she put in a little apple tree, which came out rather crooked because there wasn’t quite room for it between the fence and the house.
‘On the other side of the hills,’ said Marianne to herself, ‘is the sea.’
She looked at the face she had drawn at the window and remembered how she had dreamed about a boy in this house and how he had said there were no stairs, so he couldn’t come down to open the door. On the opposite page in her drawing-book she drew a flight of stairs. They didn’t look at all convincing. Marianne knew there was a special way of drawing stairs which made them look real, but she couldn’t remember it. To show that her stairs really were stairs, she began to draw the inside of the house round them. She drew a h
all downstairs in which the stairs began, and two rooms leading off it, one on either side. She drew it all flat, as if you were looking into an opened doll’s house. The stairs now quite clearly led up to the first-floor landing, where Marianne drew some banisters and a small clock. Two more rooms led out of this landing, and in one of these she put a very small figure - a sort of pin man, there wasn’t room for more - for the boy.
It was at this point that she became too sleepy to be able to keep her eyes open any longer. She lay back in bed and was asleep, with the pencil still in her hand.
5. Inside
Marianne dreamed.
She was in a room: it was a big bare room, with no furniture in it at all. She was standing in the middle of the room, half-way between the window, which was rather high up, and the door.
There didn’t seem any point in standing still in an empty room, so Marianne went to the window. By standing on tiptoe she could just see out. There was long grass outside, growing from as far as she could see right up to the window, though a little distance away there was a fence. It was not a very interesting view and Marianne turned her back on it and went towards the door. Her shoes sounded horribly loud on the stone floor. They echoed. Even a wooden floor in an unfurnished, uncarpeted room will make a very loud noise when walked on, but the stone floor made much more. It was a little frightening. Marianne wondered whose house she was in and whether anyone would hear her moving about. When she thought of this she walked on tiptoe, but she still couldn’t be completely silent.
She opened the door: it opened easily. Outside was a large square hall, also unfurnished. A flight of wide, shallow, stone steps led up from the hall to a landing above. On the opposite side of the hall, facing Marianne, was another door.
The house was very quiet. If anyone had heard Marianne clattering on the stone floor, they had not taken any notice. But there was not the absolute silence of a deserted house. Marianne, as she came through the door, had felt certain, without knowing why, that the house was lived in. There was something going on, something which at first she couldn’t put a name to, something that went with houses inhabited by families, that went with ordinary life, that went with people; and it was in this house. It might have been a smell - because, although we very seldom realize it, we respond to smells a great deal more than we know; and the smell of an empty house is quite different from the smell of one that is lived in. This house had no smell, and this alone would have been extraordinary. It felt like those imitation houses which are put up for show or advertisement, in exhibitions or on the stage. Those houses have no smell: you could tell with your eyes shut and your hands tied behind you that they are not real and not only are not lived in, but never have been and never will be lived in. There is, or used to be, in London, a row of houses which backed on to a railway, and one of the houses, in the angle where the road meets the rail-track, is a sham and has no thickness at all, although in front it has a door and windows and is got up to look like an ordinary house to match the others in the row. That house, if it existed, would have the same no-smell. It’s a curious sort of flatness which tells you of something not being there.
But it wasn’t the no-smell that Marianne noticed. Something else was contradicting the smell-lessness of the house and the lack of furniture, the emptiness of the room and hall and the echoing sound of her footsteps. The something else was a sound, the regular ordinary tick of a clock.
It had been ticking all the time, of course, saying in its matter-of-fact and comforting way that this house wasn’t completely unreal. Anyone who has a clock with a loud and reassuring tick, and who bothers to keep the clock wound, must be somewhere about and probably worth finding. That was what Marianne felt, with relief. She hadn’t been actually frightened - in fact, at first, finding herself in an apparently empty house, she had been pleased that at any rate there seemed to be no one to be cross with her for being there.
Now she felt even more pleased that there was somebody here, and she decided to go and find them.
The tick came from upstairs, so she went up. The clock stood, she found, on a little shelf just at the head of the flight, on a landing. Below the clock was a door, and because it was under the clock, Marianne decided to try this room first. She knocked.
A voice said, ‘Come in.’
Marianne opened the door and walked in.
This room was unfurnished too, but not unoccupied. Sitting on a low window seat and looking towards her was a boy, and directly she saw him, Marianne knew him. Last time she had seen him she had been outside the house and she hadn’t seen more than his face and hands, but there was no doubt that he was the same boy. He was longer than she had expected, and perhaps a little older, but still pale and freckled and brown-haired.
‘So you got in after all,’ the boy said.
Marianne’s mind did a sort of prodigious leap. It jumped from uncertain ground in the dark to sure-footed certainty. In this moment Marianne understood that she was now inside the house she had before only seen from the outside; that she had got where she felt she must get to and that she was talking to the boy whom she had left before in more or less of a temper. He didn’t seem to be annoyed now, any more than he had been before; only perhaps a little teasing. He hadn’t appeared surprised to see her. He’d spoken almost as if he’d expected her to come, and as if they had only just stopped talking to each other, with her outside in the garden and him inside in the house.
‘I got in,’ Marianne repeated. She was still standing only just inside the door, feeling bewildered by so much going through her mind all at once. She knew she had spoken slowly and rather stupidly, and she wasn’t surprised at the boy saying sharply, ‘Yes, you got in. Now wake up and tell me how you did it?’
‘Did what?’ Marianne asked, still slowly.
‘Got in, silly. How did you get in? I didn’t let you in, so who -? I mean, did anyone else let you in?’
‘No,’ Marianne said. ‘There isn’t anyone else.’ She wondered as she said it, how she was so sure of this.
‘That’s what I thought.’ The boy leant back against the embrasure of the window seat as if he were relieved about something.
‘But there are stairs,’ Marianne said. She shut the door behind her and came over to the window. The boy, now she saw him close to, looked tired and unwell. He was very pale, in spite of the freckles, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. He looked as if he hadn’t gone out into the sunshine or slept properly for a long time. Marianne sat down on the other end of the window seat and looked at him. ‘There are stairs,’ she said again, as he didn’t answer.
‘Oh, are there?’ the boy said indifferently.
‘But you said there weren’t any.’
‘There weren’t when I said so. They must have come since.’
‘But how could they come?’ cried Marianne in exasperation. ‘When the house was built already and you were upstairs? How could you be up here and the stairs come afterwards? It’s nonsense! They must have been here all the time when you said you couldn’t come down because there weren’t any stairs.’
‘Keep your hair on,’ said the boy disagreeably.
‘And anyway,’ said Marianne, ‘they’re old stairs. They’re not new, they’re old. You can see where people have walked on them and worn the steps down, and the banister is all smooth where people’s hands have gone. Come and see if you don’t believe me.’
She jumped up and went towards the door. But the boy made no attempt to follow her and she stopped, half-way.
‘Aren’t you coming?’ she asked.
‘No. I believe you. There’s a complete flight of stairs outside, with old steps and a shiny handrail, and it looks as if thousands of people had been up and down it thousands of times. All right. But it wasn’t there yesterday.’
‘Yesterday?’
‘Nor the other day when you were here. Outside, I mean, saying you’d got to get in.’ ‘But how could it -?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know ho
w lots of things round here work. The stairs are only one of the things that suddenly came. For instance, look out of the window.’
Marianne looked. It was the same view that she had seen from the window below, but now she could remember how she had walked over that long tussocky grass on the endless field outside the garden fence. The garden had the same sort of grass in it, not a proper lawn, and among the long grass grew the same pale flowers she had seen before.
Marianne Dreams Page 3
