Marianne Dreams

by Catherine Storr; Susannah Harker

  ‘I can’t ask that’ Marianne answered. ‘Miss Chesterfield would think it was extraordinary, and I couldn’t possibly explain.’

  The summer was coming to an end when Marianne went out for her first walk. The leaves which had been so new and green when she had gone to bed, were dusty now and hung liked tired banners on the trees. The town was hot and the air smelt used-up and exhausted. People complained of the drought and the heat, and Marianne’s mother was surprised to see how little it affected her convalescent daughter: she had no idea that at night Marianne walked on the cliffs and drew in lungfuls of fresh salt wind from the restless dancing sea.

  ‘I’ve filled my drawing book’ Marianne said triumphantly to Mark one night as they sat in the upper tower room. ‘I’ve drawn so much to put in here, that I haven’t got room for a single thing more.’

  ‘You’ve filled the tower, too,’ Mark said, looking round the room, which certainly had a cluttered look. ‘If you put in any more we shan’t be able to get up and downstairs. I’ve had to put the last lot of books on the steps as it is, since you drew in that model railway all round the walls. You know we really didn’t need that.’

  ‘No, but it’s fun,’ Marianne said, unrepentantly. ‘I saw one in a house we went to tea at the day before yesterday, and I thought you’d like to play with it.’

  ‘I do. It’s a smashing one. But don’t draw any more, or we honestly shan’t have room to move.’

  ‘All right. Or I’ll only draw little teeny things that won’t get in our way, like chewing-gum or pencils or india-rubbers.’

  ‘Marianne!’ said Mark suddenly, after a brief pause. ‘Yes, what?’

  ‘Have you thought at all how we’re going to get out of here?’

  ‘No. Why should we get out? We’re all right here, aren’t we?’

  ‘No!’ Mark said. ‘I’m not. I don’t want to stop up here for ever. It’s not dangerous like the house was, I know that, but there isn’t enough room.’

  ‘I know the rooms are a bit crowded,’ Marianne admitted, looking round. ‘But we don’t have to stay in here in the daytime. We can always go out on the cliff.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But we’ve done that so often. I want something different now.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ Marianne asked, irritated and hurt by his not finding her tower and her cliffs good enough.

  ‘I want to get down to the sea’

  Directly he had said it, Marianne recognized with the most inside part of her that he had said what she wanted too. Suddenly the tower became to her too only a resting place, a place to stop at and go on from, not the final refuge it had seemed before.

  ‘Yes’ she said, ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I think I do, too. But how can we? The cliffs are much too steep to climb down. Perhaps I could draw a ladder?’

  ‘My good girl, you couldn’t possibly draw a ladder long enough to reach a quarter of the height we are above the sea. And if you did, we couldn’t manage to let it down from here. It’d be much too big to handle’

  ‘A rope ladder?’ Marianne suggested.

  ‘I don’t fancy climbing down a rope ladder that isn’t fastened at the bottom, for about 500 feet, myself’ Mark said coldly.

  ‘Perhaps if we walked far enough along the cliffs we’d find a way down’ Marianne said.

  ‘I don’t see any sign of it, do you? All along as far as you can see it’s just these enormous great cliffs without any way down. And we’ve walked quite a distance both ways and never seen a sign of a possible way to the beach.’

  ‘Well, you suggest something then’ Marianne said crossly.

  ‘A helicopter’ Mark said promptly. It was obvious that he had thought about the problem and had the answer ready.

  ‘A helicopter! Oh, yes, that’d be marvellous. But do you know how to fly one?’

  ‘Oh, no. There’d have to be a pilot in it already. But I thought it’d be like this lighthouse. You drew it as a lighthouse, and there was someone to make the light work. We didn’t have to bother about that.’

  The children, though they could get out on to the battlements round the glass dome which enclosed the light, had never penetrated into the dome itself, and had not discovered how the beam was thrown, or what or who set the mechanism working at night.

  ‘Ye-es,’ Marianne said. ‘I suppose that would be all right. If I drew it up in the air already it would have to have a pilot, wouldn’t it? But, Mark, I don’t think I could draw a helicopter. I don’t know what it looks like properly.’

  ‘I could,’ Mark said promptly.

  Marianne stared at him.

  ‘But I’ve got the pencil!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘You could let me have it for that.’

  ‘But it’s mine! I mean, what I draw with it comes true here. You came because I drew you. If I gave you the pencil perhaps I wouldn’t be here myself’

  ‘Well, if I am when you draw, why shouldn’t you be when I draw?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t know whether I was going to be here or not, if I couldn’t draw something to make sure of coming.’

  ‘Well?’ said Mark. ‘I’ve never known.’

  ‘It might not work if you did the drawing even if I did give you the pencil,’ Marianne argued.

  ‘Well, are you prepared to try?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I think I could draw a helicopter myself,’ Marianne said. Mark looked at her.

  ‘I expect I could find a picture in one of Thomas’s books and copy it’

  ‘Well, don’t make a mess of it’ Mark said, with a sigh. ‘We don’t want some infernal machine hovering over us and dropping bombs on us or something, just because you can’t draw a helicopter and are too beastly bossy to let me have any say in what goes on round here.’

  These words were still ringing in Marianne’s ears in her real-life day following the dream. To make sure that she did not incur the risk Mark had spoken of, she practised drawing helicopters with an ordinary pencil, not The Pencil. Thomas’s books had not yielded anything she could copy: and her attempts at drawing an aeroplane with a fly-wheel spinning on top - Thomas’s description of his idea of a helicopter - looked more like enormous angry insects or indeed infernal machines, as Mark had suggested. Marianne did not want any of the objects she had drawn hovering over the tower.

  ‘You look tired,’ said her mother, coming into the sitting-room where Marianne was resting. ‘It is terribly hot and muggy today, even in here and this is the coolest room in the house.’

  ‘I’m all right!’ Marianne said wearily. She pushed her drawing book and pencils away from her and, leaning her head against a cushion, shut her eyes.

  ‘Poor girl,’ her mother said. ‘You are a limp rag in this heat. Never mind, I’ve got good news for you. Dr. Burton says you’re well enough to go away now, so I’m going to take you out of this stuffy town to get some fresh air.’

  ‘Where?’ said Marianne, only half listening.

  ‘To the sea.’

  ‘The sea!’ Marianne sat upright, awake instantly. ‘Where? When? How soon can we go?’

  ‘Next week,’ her mother said, smiling to see Marianne’s excitement. ‘I couldn’t get the rooms any sooner or I’d have liked to take you now, straight away. But if you can hang on for another few days without collapsing, my darling, the sea winds will soon make you feel more lively.’

  ‘So I shall get to the sea,’ Marianne thought, ‘even if I can’t draw a helicopter. I don’t need to bother about trying any more. I expect Mark’s mother and father will take him to the sea to recover, too.’

  ‘It’s my pencil,’ she thought. ‘I found it. It was in my great-grandmother’s workbox. I’ve done everything with it.

  I’ve got all sorts of things specially for Mark with it that I didn’t want myself. I haven’t been selfish.’

  ‘Lots of times I’ve drawn things he suggested’ she thought. ‘I haven’t always done just what I wanted and not what he did. And anyway I’ve
managed very well. I got Mark out of that house, and I got us both up the hills to the tower. He couldn’t possibly have done that by himself. I had to be bossy then, as he calls it, or we’d never have reached the top. I don’t see why I should let him arrange everything now, and perhaps make things different from how I’d like them.’

  She tried again to draw a helicopter, but rubbed it out impatiently.

  ‘Anyway, if I did want to give him the pencil I don’t know how to do it. I couldn’t ask Miss Chesterfield to take it, she wouldn’t understand: and, anyhow, the real Mark she knows mayn’t remember the dream and wouldn’t know what it was for. I can’t do it, even if I wanted to, so I’ll tell Mark that. He’ll have to think of some other way of getting out. I’ll just put in the chewing-gum to make sure I get back there tonight.’

  She took up the pencil and drew a small packet of chewing-gum in the very small space remaining to her. She remembered that she had said she would draw something else.

  ‘I said pencils’ she thought. ‘I will. I’ll draw pencils. Ordinary pencils, not this pencil.’

  But one pencil is very like another. It is difficult, when you are drawing an ordinary lead pencil, not very long, and nicely sharpened, to make it look very different from any other, not so ordinary pencil, also not very long and nicely sharpened. The pencil Marianne drew in the upper room in the tower was indistinguishable from the pencil she held in her hand. It was The Pencil.

  ‘I’ll rub it out’ Marianne thought, and remembered immediately that The Pencil could not be rubbed out.

  ‘I’ll think of it as an ordinary pencil, and then it will be’ she thought. ‘After all the pack of cards had the right number of cards in it because I thought it.’

  She looked at her drawing sternly, and tried to think the pencil ordinary. But it wouldn’t do. She knew, she had known as soon as she had drawn it, that it was her own pencil she had put in the tower room, and that whether she liked it or not, she had got to let Mark have it. The pencil had done its last piece of magic for her; it had as it were, deliberately drawn itself, and so said good-bye.

  Marianne sighed.

  ‘Perhaps it is his turn to have it’ she said, and sighed again.

  That night she put the pencil in a prominent place on her bedside table.

  ‘I wonder if you’ll be here tomorrow morning’ she thought sadly.

  In the tower - it was daylight there - something had changed. Marianne could not make up her mind whether it was her imagination that made her feel an alteration in the atmosphere, or whether it was fact. Mark was preoccupied and rather cross; it appeared that he did not want to talk. They went out and walked along the short springy turf that crowned the cliffs: the seagulls screamed above them, and the sea, very blue and green and white, crisped on the stones far below on the beach: but Mark did not talk much and answered Marianne only by ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Marianne was at last provoked into saying. ‘Are you feeling ill, Mark? Or are you cross with me about something?’

  ‘I’m thinking’ Mark said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Oh!’

  After a pause, Mark said, with difficulty, ‘It isn’t my being cross with you. The thing is, aren’t you cross with me?’ ‘What for?’ Marianne asked in surprise. ‘I was beastly last time. About your pencil. Of course you keep it. It’s yours, and I didn’t mean that I wanted to have it as a present, you know. I only thought perhaps I could borrow it so as to get us out.’

  ‘It’s quite all right, Mark. Please don’t -‘

  ‘No, it isn’t. I’ve been feeling beastly ever since. I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About your being bossy. You’ve been jolly kind and I shan’t ever forget how you wouldn’t go without me, out of the house and up the road, when THEY might have got you because of me. I wanted to say, I’m sorry. There!’

  For a moment Marianne couldn’t say anything. Then she said, ‘It’s jolly nice of you to say so, and it’s quite all right. I haven’t been thinking about it at all. Anyway, you’re quite right, I was being bossy.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Mark said.

  ‘I must. Because I wanted to tell you that I’ve brought it with me. There. It’s for you.’

  She held out her hand. When she had woken into the dream she had found the pencil in her hand, and she had kept it there ever since.

  ‘What is it?’ Mark said, in surprise.

  ‘The pencil.’

  ‘That? It looks just like an ordinary one.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Marianne said, a little hurt. ‘It’s The Pencil. I know it doesn’t look very special, but it’s awfully nice to draw with.’

  ‘Yes, it does look as if it would write well,’ Mark said quickly. ‘But I can’t take it. What would you do if I couldn’t get it back to you?’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ Marianne said. ‘I want you to have it. You’re quite right, Mark. I can’t draw a helicopter so that it looks like anything. You draw one and then we’ll be able to get away.’

  ‘I don’t know what to draw on,’ Mark said, hesitating. ‘We’ve got lots of paper in the tower: don’t you remember there’s a drawing block we used for playing Consequences? Come on! Draw it now.’

  They went back into the tower. Marianne found the drawing block, but Mark still held back.

  ‘Come on,’ she urged.

  ‘But if I take your pencil, perhaps you won’t be able to get back here.’

  ‘I don’t want to get back. I want to get out, like you.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but you’ve got to get back here so that you can get out. I mean, if you just stay away in what you call real life, you’ll never know whether you’re really not still here. Not free. See what I mean?’

  ‘Yes. But in my real life I am free, and I’m going to the sea,’ Marianne said.

  ‘I still think this counts, too,’ Mark said. ‘I think you ought to be able to get to this sea as well as the other one. Anyway I want to.’

  ‘I tell you what,’ Marianne said. ‘You draw me in the tower. After all, you were in the house when I drew you, so I’ll be here if you draw me. Then you can put in a helicopter and we’ll both get out.’

  ‘All right. If you’re quite sure about letting me have the pencil’

  ‘I’m quite sure.’

  ‘It’s jolly decent of you,’ Mark said. He took the pencil and sat looking at the blank sheet of the drawing block.

  ‘Go on, draw,’ said Marianne impatiently.

  ‘I can’t with you looking,’ Mark said. ‘It’s too embarrassing. I don’t want to be rude, but couldn’t you go out, or something, while I’m doing it?’

  ‘All right,’ said Marianne, and went.

  She lay down on the top of the cliff and looked out to sea. It was as real as any sea she had ever seen, full of changing colours and laced with little white waves racing across the surface. The lisp of the water on the stones below and the tinkle of the stones falling back into place as the waves receded was just as Marianne remembered the sea of her other life. Only this scene was uninhabited, except for herself and Mark. No bathers ever shouted on the beach, no ships ever crossed the expanse of water or broke the perfect curve where sea met sky.

  Marianne lay and looked at the sea and the sky, which was bright and decorated with little flounces of cloud, until her eyes ached. She closed them and slept on the top of the cliff in her dream.

  19. The Empty Tower

  Preparations for going away went on enthusiastically all round Marianne: she was even considered well enough to help in some of them. She had grown so much longer with being in bed, that she had to have an almost completely new outfit of clothes, which was amusing. She helped her mother pack luggage, and tidy the house, take down curtains for cleaning and sort out the winter clothes they would need when they came back. It was delightful to find that she could do all these things without being tired: that the more she did, in fact, the more energetic she felt. Dr Burton had given
her permission to do anything she felt like and had stopped visiting the house. ‘You can run, you can swim, you can play leap-frog or cricket or do anything within reason,’ he said. ‘Don’t go and try a two-mile marathon, or let yourself get absolutely tired out. You’ve done very well, and I’m very much pleased with you. Now go away and forget that you ever had this illness and had to be careful and stay in bed. Just do whatever you feel you can and you’ll be all right.’

  So the days passed, actively and agreeably. But for some reason or other, at night Marianne did not dream. At first she had hardly noticed, she was too much occupied with other things: but when she had time to remember, she wondered what was happening in the tower by the sea and why she had not found herself there before. She had no means now of getting herself back: the pencil had gone, as she had known it would. She searched half-heartedly in her pencil-box and even looked again in the workbox in which she had first found it. But it had disappeared and Marianne felt it was for good.

  Miss Chesterfield was also leaving. She was going to Dartmoor where, she told Marianne, her parents had a grey stone house on the moors, just above a little river which ran shallowly over brown stones and was full of lazy spotted trout. Wild ponies came often to the garden walls, and there were tors to climb and moors all round, where you might walk for a day and never meet another soul.

  ‘It sounds lovely’ Marianne said, when Miss Chesterfield described it to her on their last morning of lessons. ‘But I’d rather go to the sea’

  ‘That’s what Mark says’ Miss Chesterfield said, packing her books away in her case for the last time.

  ‘Mark? Why? Is he going to the sea, too?’

  ‘Yes. In a day or two. He’s so much better than the doctors ever thought he could be in such a short time, that he’s going away tomorrow or the next day - I can’t remember which - and they think he’ll be able to do everything quite normally. Especially swim, of course. That will do more than anything to get his legs absolutely strong again.’

  ‘Where’s he going?’

  ‘Down to Cornwall, I think, or it may be Devon. His mother did tell me, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten. It’s somewhere where there’s a warm salt-water swimming bath I know, so that Mark can bathe even if it’s too cold to swim in the sea.’