‘Look down and a bit to the side,’ said the boy.
Marianne peered downwards and sideways. There was nothing very startling or even interesting to be seen. Close to the side wall of the house was a little stunted apple tree with some apples on it. They didn’t look ripe, but yet they also didn’t look exactly unripe, and Marianne wondered for a moment if they were real. They looked almost like artificial fruit which never goes bad but also never ripens and can never be eaten.
‘Do you see that tree?’ asked the boy.
‘Yes. There’s nothing very special about it, is there?’
‘Only that it wasn’t there just now.’
‘What do you mean, wasn’t there?’
‘Just what I say. It wasn’t there. There was just grass and those flowers. And then next time I looked, there was the tree’
‘Had someone come and planted it?’ Marianne asked.
‘No, I’d been sitting here all the time and never heard a sound. And anyhow there wasn’t time. It just appeared.’
‘How long have you been here?’ Marianne asked. She wasn’t sure how much she believed the story about the tree, but she was definitely interested in the boy himself.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered shortly.
‘Well, about?’
‘I don’t know, I tell you.’ He sounded angry. ‘Is it a long time?’ Marianne persisted. ‘I mean is it weeks or days?’
‘I haven’t counted,’ he said.
‘But you can’t live here,’ said Marianne, struck by a new idea. ‘There isn’t any furniture. Or are the other rooms properly furnished? You can’t go to bed here. What do you do at night?’
‘You ask an awful lot of questions,’ the boy said, scowling.
‘Well, you’re so mysterious. I don’t believe you know anything more than I do about this place. I believe you’ve only just come here and you’re pretending to be very wise and clever and making me seem stupid and inquisitive and really you don’t know anything at all.’
She stopped. ‘Temper,’ said the boy. ‘Well, what do you know?’
‘You’re right in a way,’ the boy admitted. He turned his face away from her and looked out of the window. ‘I don’t know much about this place.’
‘What do you know?’
‘Well, I don’t know where we are, and I don’t know how we got here. Look, if you’ll calm down a bit, and sit down again instead of standing in the middle of the floor and stamping, I’ll tell you.’
Marianne came over to the window seat and sat down. She tucked her legs underneath her comfortably, and said, ‘Well, go on then.’
The boy seemed to hesitate. He looked round the empty room - empty except for themselves - and out of the window.
‘I don’t know much more than you do,’ he repeated, at last. ‘I just found myself here. In this room. Like you found yourself out there, didn’t you?’
Marianne nodded.
‘I didn’t know what the place was like. I mean, I could look out of the window, in fact that was the first thing I found myself doing; but I didn’t know, still don’t, what the outside of this house is like. All I could see was the grass and the daisies, or whatever those flowers are, outside. And you. And you said you’d got to find your way in.’ He stopped.
‘Well?’
‘Well, I thought that was funny because I’d got the same sort of feeling, only different.’
‘But you were in,’ said Marianne.
‘Yes, but I felt - well, anyway, that doesn’t matter. Then you ran away and I don’t remember any more. Of that time, at least.’
‘How d’you mean, of that time?’
‘I’m not here all the time’ the boy explained. ‘Sometimes I find I’m here, sometimes I’m not. When I am here I sit on this window-sill most of the time. But I’ve never spent a whole night here.’
‘How often have you been here?’
‘I don’t know. Five or six times, I think. Whenever I get back I sort of know I’ve been here before, and I seem to know something about it, but I never know when I’m coming.’
‘No, I don’t either,’ Marianne said. ‘But I still don’t understand about the stairs.’ ‘What about them?’ ‘You said there weren’t any.’ ‘There weren’t, either.’ ‘How do you know?’
‘I did know when you asked me,’ the boy said, slowly. He sounded slightly puzzled. ‘But I’m not sure how I knew. Afterwards I went and looked and there weren’t any - in fact there wasn’t anything. It was rather beastly.’
‘How do you mean, there wasn’t anything?’
‘No stairs, nothing. Just empty.’
‘But there’s a clock, and a hall downstairs and other rooms. How could there be nothing?’ The boy shook his head.
‘I don’t know. But there wasn’t. It was dark and I didn’t like it.’
‘But I still don’t understand how you knew about the stairs,’ Marianne persisted. ‘Before you looked, I mean.’
‘I don’t know quite how I knew,’ the boy said. ‘It’s something to do with being here. It’s like your knowing you’d got to get into this house.’
‘Oh, yes, and you said something about that, too. Wait a moment,’ said Marianne, though the boy hadn’t spoken, ‘I’ll remember in a minute. You said you’d felt something too, but you didn’t say what. You said it was the same as my feeling only different.’
‘Yes,’ said the boy, but he said nothing else. ‘Well?’ said Marianne impatiently. ‘Well what?’
‘Your feeling. What was it? I don’t see how you could feel you’d got to get in when you were already. What did you feel?’
‘It’s silly,’ said the boy, wriggling a little on the window seat, as if he was embarrassed.
‘Never mind,’ said Marianne encouragingly. ‘Perhaps my feeling was silly, but I did tell you and I did get in.’
‘I don’t suppose it’s anything, really,’ the boy said.
‘But you do feel something,’ Marianne urged.
‘I just feel as if I’d got to get out. Mind you, it’s being cooped up here, I expect, and getting tired of one room and a bit bored with having nothing to do except look out of the window. It’s just an ordinary sort of feeling anyone might have who’d been in the same room for a long time.’
‘Why don’t you go out?’ asked Marianne reasonably.
‘Well, I couldn’t when there weren’t any stairs,’ the boy answered quickly.
‘Yes, but now? The stairs are there now and you could just walk down them.’
‘I can’t,’ said the boy. He flushed.
‘You can’t?’
‘I can’t walk.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Marianne cried out in exasperation. ‘What on earth is the matter? First of all you say you can’t go down to let me in at the door because there aren’t any stairs, and now you say you can’t walk, so you can’t use them now the stairs are there!’
‘Shut up!’ said the boy.
‘And anyhow,’ said Marianne, far too much excited to shut up at this point. ‘If you can’t walk, how do you know there weren’t any stairs before? You said you went and looked. How could you, if you can’t walk?’
The boy flushed more than ever.
‘I did look. I got to the door and opened it and I looked.’
‘How?’ jeered Marianne. ‘If you really can’t walk, how did you get to the door? I suppose you crawled there?’ She was scornful.
The boy didn’t answer. His head was turned away and he was apparently looking out at the garden. Marianne looked down, for the first time, at his legs. They were thin, terribly thin, not at all like the stout, well-muscled, grey-stockinged legs of her young brother, Thomas. These legs looked as if they had not been used for a long time - might perhaps never be used again.
‘Have you been ill?’ she asked at last, gently.
The boy nodded, but didn’t speak. Nor did he turn his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ Marianne said. ‘I didn’t know.’ ‘It’s all right,’
the boy said.
‘I’m afraid I was beastly,’ Marianne said apologetically.
‘It’s all right,’ the boy repeated. He looked round at Marianne and gave her a half-smile.
‘Were you always -1 mean, could you walk all right before you were ill?’ Marianne asked, emboldened by the smile.
‘Yes, of course. It’s only this foul disease that made my legs go wrong, and my back. I was perfectly all right before.’
‘Isn’t it just weakness after being ill?’ Marianne suggested.
The boy shook his head.
‘It’s the disease itself,’ he said. ‘It does something to your muscles and then they don’t work properly. I got over the feeling ill part of the thing ages ago - months. But I still can’t walk properly, or hold myself up like I used to’
‘But you will,’ Marianne cried.
‘They don’t know. No one knows. They say if I practise, probably, perhaps. But no one can be sure. And I hate the exercises, they’re boring and I get tired and they don’t seem to do any good.’
Marianne, suddenly struck by inspiration at the word exercises, said, ‘You’re Mark. I can’t remember your other name - Miss Chesterfield never uses it. But you are Mark, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said the boy. He looked surprised. ‘I’m Mark. Who are you?’
Marianne opened her mouth to answer, but as she did so the clock on the landing outside began to strike, and the sound, growing mysteriously louder and louder, drowned her voice saying her own name. She could see from Mark’s face that he couldn’t hear her. She leant forward, she raised her voice, she shouted. And still the clock struck. She made a tremendous effort, stretching her mouth and cracking her lungs in an effort to make herself heard.
And woke.
6. The Row
Before she had been ill Marianne had seemed to herself (and, it is fair to say, to most other people) to be a good-tempered child. That is not to say that she never got angry, or smacked Thomas, her young brother, when he annoyed her: but on the whole she very seldom really lost her temper, and on the rare occasions when she did, she had recovered again very quickly.
But now she had had to stay in bed for so long, Marianne found it increasingly difficult to feel or to be agreeable. A great many things seemed to annoy her which she had never noticed as being at all annoying before, but which had now become unbearably irritating. She hated people being later than they had promised in coming to see her, or stopping downstairs, after they had arrived, talking to the rest of the family before coming up: she hated having to wait for the things she wanted which were out of reach and had to be brought to her. She hated hot sunny days when her bed got warm and sticky and there wasn’t a cool place to lie on or a comfortable position to get into, and flies buzzed in and out of the window and round and round the electric-light bulb ungetatably. She hated waking in the middle of the night and not being able to go to sleep again, a thing which had never happened to her before, but quite often occurred now she couldn’t go out or take any sort of exercise to make her comfortably tired. And she hated also the bored sort of tiredness which she seemed to have for such a lot of the time - not good, after-exercise, sleepy, healthy tiredness which is cured by a hot bath and a long night’s sleep in bed, but the unpleasant tiredness which is known and dreaded by anyone who has had to stay in bed for any length of time. It was this feeling that made Marianne wonder sometimes if she had suddenly become a bad-tempered sort of person or whether she had really always been like this but it hadn’t shown before. It seemed to need an effort, quite a lot of the time, to behave with quite ordinary politeness, and it was an effort she had never before needed to make.
And then one day she just couldn’t make the effort any longer, and the storm broke.
It was a day that had begun with high hopes, which made it all the worse. Marianne had discovered, about a week earlier, that this day was Miss Chesterfield’s birthday, and she was going to give her a present. After a good deal of discussion, and changing her mind several times, she had made up her mind that what Miss Chesterfield would like best would be roses: so she had commissioned her father, who passed a wonderful flower-shop on his way to and from work every day, to buy as many as he could for two shillings and fourpence, which was all the money she could raise at the time. And the evening before, Marianne’s father had brought home nine perfect roses - and a penny change - four dark red and five golden yellow, and they were in a jug of water in Marianne’s bedroom, hidden behind her bed so that at the right moment she could bring them out and present them to Miss Chesterfield.
She had also done some rather difficult problems in mathematics which Miss Chesterfield had set her the day before, and she had a feeling that she had done them right, which was satisfactory. But it made her all the more anxious for Miss Chesterfield to appear, and before half past nine, which was her usual time for arriving, Marianne was listening to every footstep on the pavement outside the house, wondering if this one was Miss Chesterfield; or this, or this, or this or this.
But for almost the first time since she had started coming to teach Marianne, Miss Chesterfield was late.
At about a quarter to ten the telephone bell rang. Marianne hardly noticed it. She was still listening for the sound of footsteps coming up to the front door, but a moment later her mother came to the door of her room.
‘Marianne, that was Miss Chesterfield on the telephone. She’s very sorry she’s late, but she was asked especially to go round to one of her other pupils on the way here, and she got held up there. She was just ringing up to say she would be here in ten minutes and to apologize for keeping us waiting.’
Marianne didn’t reply.
‘Didn’t you hear, Marianne?’ her mother asked. ‘Miss Chesterfield has got delayed and -‘
‘I heard the first time,’ Marianne interrupted crossly. ‘Why should she go somewhere else on the way here? She’s supposed to be here at half past nine and it’s nearly ten o’clock. She hasn’t any right to do that.’
‘I suppose if these other people asked her to go in on her way here, she thought it wouldn’t matter very much to us,’ Marianne’s mother said reasonably. ‘After all, if she starts half an hour later here, she can go on half an hour extra at the end of the morning. It doesn’t make any difference to you.’
‘It does’ Marianne said indignantly. ‘I hate being kept waiting any morning, but it’s especially annoying this morning because of the flowers and it being her birthday’
‘But she couldn’t know you are going to give her anything’ Marianne’s mother argued. ‘And anyhow she obviously didn’t think she’d be kept so long, or she’d have rung up before she started, to say she’d be late. I’m sorry you’ve had all this waiting, darling, but don’t be cross when she does come. After all, it is her birthday, and you’ve got a very nice present for her and I’m sure she’ll be awfully pleased.’
Marianne looked down at the jug of roses by her bed and felt more cheerful.
‘I wish I’d been able to get more of them, though’ she said, in quite an ordinary voice again. ‘It’s a pity they’re sold in such an expensive way - separately, I mean, not for so much a bunch. Still, they are beautiful, aren’t they, Mother? I do hope Miss Chesterfield won’t mind there being only nine, but you can see they are specially good ones, can’t you? So she wouldn’t expect a whole big bunch, would she?’
‘No’ her mother began, but then the front door-bell rang, and she said, ‘I expect that is Miss Chesterfield now. Bridget will let her in and I must go out. I’ve got to go into town and I shan’t be back till this afternoon. Have a nice morning, my poppet, and I hope all your sums are right and that Miss Chesterfield loves the roses.’
She disappeared. Marianne could hear the sounds of Miss Chesterfield being let in downstairs, and after a moment or two she heard her coming up. She had planned in her own mind what she was going to say, ‘Many happy returns of the day’ the moment Miss Chesterfield opened her door, but her door was alre
ady open and Miss Chesterfield was speaking before she could say anything.
‘I am so sorry I’m late, Marianne. I know how annoying it is to be kept waiting, and that’s why I telephoned. Mrs Grantham, Mark’s mother, rang me up very early this morning and wanted me to call in on my way here, as she knew I practically pass the door, and then it took longer than I expected.’
‘What did?’ Marianne asked suspiciously.
She was inclined to be a little jealous of Mark in any case, in spite of her interest in him, and she felt sore and angry now that Mark should have had Miss Chesterfield first on this special morning when she had so much wanted her.
‘It was Mark’s idea’ Miss Chesterfield said. She sounded embarrassed and pleased. ‘He knew it was my birthday, and as this isn’t one of the days I go there in the ordinary way, he wanted me to go in extra for just a moment so that he could give me - wait, I’ll show you’
She ran out of the room and down the stairs, leaving Marianne curious, exasperated and anxious. She hated being left like this - why, oh why, couldn’t she just run after her and say, ‘I’ll come and look myself,’ as she would have been able to a month or so ago? And she had a horrid feeling that she knew what Mark had given Miss Chesterfield and she didn’t want to see it. Yet it was even worse than she’d feared. Miss Chesterfield came in smiling, a little out of breath from her run upstairs, holding out in front of her for Marianne to admire, a really enormous bunch of roses. And they were beautiful roses too, quite as good as Marianne’s and about six times as many.
‘There,’ said Miss Chesterfield, ‘aren’t they lovely? My favourite flowers, and such beauties! Look, I’ll give you some, Marianne. Would you like one of each colour?’ She started gathering them together as she spoke. There was a silence.
‘You’d like them, wouldn’t you?’ Miss Chesterfield repeated, surprised at getting no answer. ‘I’m sure Mark wouldn’t mind and I can easily spare you some out of such a big bunch.’
Marianne Dreams Page 4
