Prisoner's Base

by Celia Fremlin

  “Well, of course it is!” agreed Mavis vehemently. “And I can see just how it happens! Just because your mother does most of the housework, and looked after Helen so much when she was little, she thinks she can interfere with everything! And it’s not only Helen, either, that she thinks she knows best about. She’d like to tell me to get out of the house. That I do know!”

  Mavis took another sip of her coffee: aggrieved and exultant, she peeped under her eyelashes, awaiting confidently Claudia’s response.

  “No! But the cheek of it!” cried Claudia. “How dare she—a friend of mine—whom I’ve specially invited! Do you mean—has she said anything?”

  “No. Oh no.” Mavis seemed to bask in Claudia’s indignation like a lizard in the sun. “She doesn’t say anything—she wouldn’t you know. It might be better if she did, really, then we could have a flaming row, and it would clear the air—” Although Mavis had never been known to venture so much as an argument with the laundry about a lost pillow slip, she had nevertheless adopted wholesale Claudia’s belief in the salutary nature of flaming rows, and now quoted it—most flatteringly—as if it was her own. “But of course, your mother would never speak out plainly,” she finished, confident of Claudia’s approval, “She’s too repressed.”

  “I know—that’s part of the trouble,” agreed Claudia. “And since she can’t be honest and direct, she has to be spiteful. There’s not much you can tell me about Mother’s devious methods! But what has she been doing, exactly? Hinting? Being beastly?”

  “Well—I suppose it’s silly of me” began Mavis, assured that Claudia would think it nothing of the kind—“But I did think, this afternoon—well—I don’t quite know how to put it, but she did make me feel awfully unwelcome at lunch today. And it’s not as if she’d had to cook it for me. I kept telling her I hadn’t expected it—I was as nice as I could be about it. I don’t know, I suppose I must have upset her in some way. I suppose it must have been my fault somehow.”

  Again a safe supposition: smugly expectant, Mavis sipped her coffee and waited for Claudia’s denial.

  “Of course it wasn’t your fault, Mavis! I know just what she’s like! And I think I know what started her off, too—it was a row she had with me in the morning. No, nothing to do with you or Eddie, Mavis, nothing at all. She wouldn’t dare start that again, after what I told her last time. No, it was just this business about selling the field. She knew really that she was in the wrong, of course, and naturally that made her feel all the more frustrated, and determined to take it out on somebody! And I’m afraid that the somebody was you, this time, my poor Mavis. I’m so sorry! What did she do, exactly?”

  “Oh—it’s hard to explain, really—you know how she can be. Sort of cold. Scornful. Nothing I could do or say was right. She even bit my head off when I remarked what a fine day it was! Of course, I know you warned me when I first came that she was bound to be a bit prejudiced against a woman in my position—but I’d never have believed it could go on like this! For months and months! It’s—it’s …”

  “Obsessional!” Claudia supplied the word eagerly. “Of course it is. She is obsessional. And that’s why you mustn’t ever let yourself be hurt by it, Mavis, because you see—”

  “Oh, I know, Claudia. I’m not hurt! Not a bit. I understand absolutely. I’m like you—when she attacks me in that unreasonable way, I just feel terribly sorry for her. Just the way you do.”

  She paused to sip her coffee, and the ensuing silence was electric with them both feeling terribly sorry for Mother, with tiny, satisfied smiles on their faces. It was like a moment of religious communion, so complete was their spiritual accord.

  “Well. Anyway.” Claudia yawned, tired suddenly, but with a pleasant, satisfying tiredness. Her day had been well spent. “I suppose we should be going to bed, really. Work tomorrow! For me, anyway!”

  “Yes, oh yes. I mustn’t keep you up!” Mavis scrambled apologetically to her feet, and began conveying the cups, the milk jug, the coffee pot, one at a time, across to the sink. Claudia meantime moved briskly from room to room, plumping up cushions, emptying ashtrays, closing windows.

  “Aren’t you going to bolt the front door?” enquired Mavis anxiously, just as Claudia set off up the stairs.

  “Why—no,” said Claudia, “I think I’ll leave it tonight—just in case Helen still isn’t in.”

  “But I thought you said she was?” objected Mavis, a little stupidly, Claudia thought.

  “Well—yes. I do think she is really. I’m almost sure she is. But she just mightn’t be, you know, and it would be an awful pest to have to get up and let her in, now wouldn’t it? Apart from the fact that if she has to ring the bell, Mother will wake up, and note the time on her watch, and spend the rest of the night in prurient speculation! She knows Helen has been out with Clive, you see, and you can just imagine what her repressed old mind is going to make of that if she hears her coming in after midnight. I’d never hear the last of it—and nor would poor Helen. So I propose to leave well alone, and just pray that Helen will remember to come in quietly. I expect she will—she’s got the measure of her grandma, has our Helen, for all her pretty ways with the old dear!” Claudia laughed, softly, and turned to continue her way up the stairs; but again Mavis called her back.

  “But Claudia,” she urged, still hovering uneasily in the hall. “Couldn’t you go to Helen’s room and see if she’s in or not? Then we could bolt the door as usual. I wish you would. Please!”

  “What, and have Helen think I’m spying on her comings and goings, just like her grandmother? No, thank you, Mavis, dear, not even for you! Besides, Mother would be bound to hear me going to Helen’s room and she’d jump to the conclusion that I’m secretly just as anxious about Helen as she is! I’m not going to give her a feather like that to wear in her cap for the rest of our lives! So do come on and go to bed, and stop hovering there like that. What are you worrying about, anyway? It’s often been left unbolted before.”

  Mavis looked up at her, hesitating. If there were such a thing as a colourless blush, then that was what you would have said was suffusing her white, exhausted face.

  “But tonight, Claudia! Just tonight. I mean—that peculiar young man this evening, now that he knows our address …”

  “Oh, Mavis! I don’t know how you can be so stupid! What would he come for? Even criminals have to have a motive, you know; so unless you’ve got the Crown Jewels hidden away in that hatbox of yours, and have told him so into the bargain …! I mean—honestly!”

  Mavis positively shrank down there in the shadowy midnight spaces of the hall. You could see that she was appalled at the way her ill-timed timidity had broken the rapport that had been flowing so pleasantly between her and Claudia over coffee this evening. Serve her right; she must learn to be a little bit tougher thought Claudia, and then relented.

  “Never mind. Cheer up, Mavis,” she called softly over the banisters. “I promise you nothing will happen.”

  It was more than half an hour later, and Claudia was just on the point of dropping off to sleep, when the faintest of faint sounds impinged upon her consciousness. Something was going on downstairs; a faint scratching; a scraping; the squeak of metal; and the faint pad-pad of footsteps on the stairs.

  Bother! That fool of a Mavis must have crept down and bolted the front door after all! And now, supposing Helen wasn’t in—now what? Sleepily, irritably, Claudia fumbled with the problem in her mind. She would have to go down, of course, and unbolt the door again … what a pest … what a bore … why must Mavis be such a fool? … the thoughts churned over in her brain, over and over, jumbled together, appearing and reappearing like garments through the window of a washing-machine … and in less than five minutes Claudia was asleep, her last, muddled thought being: I do hope Helen will remember not to disturb anyone!

  CHAPTER VII

  CLAUDIA NEED NOT have worried; Helen was quite as anxious to get in unnoticed that evening as Claudia could have been on her behalf. She had,
indeed, gone to the trouble of avoiding the front of the house altogether, coming instead across the field at the back, slipping along under cover of the hedge, as wary, as purposeful, as any other of the creatures of the summer night. The long grass was already soaked with dew, and the wet, stiff roots felt squeaky against the crepe rubber soles of her sandals. But they did not actually squeak, and if they had they could hardly have given her away, amid the myriad other squeakings and tiny wailings of the night. No one but herself would hear them; indeed, no one, in all probability, could hear any of the night sounds as she heard them. At fifteen, she could still hear the squeaking of the bats as they darted and swooped above the hedge. “By the time you are grown up,” Granny had once told her, “you won’t hear them any more. Your ears will be less acute for the high sounds”—and ever since then, the sound of the bats on summer nights had held for Helen a beauty so magical, so agonising, that neither words nor tears could begin to touch it. Just sometimes, during the English lessons at school under Miss Landor, the answer seemed momentarily within reach:

  “She dwells with Beauty; Beauty that must die;…”

  Helen tiptoed on, through the long grass and the motionless, closed buttercups. The quietness of her movements seemed now to be less a precaution against being observed than a tribute to the loveliness of the summer night, and to the poem which swirled and throbbed in her mind—no, more in her throat, really, not her mind….

  But all the same, she did need to be careful. It would never do to be discovered coming in at this hour. Helen paused at the gate into the garden, and reviewed the back windows of her home.

  The whole of the ground floor was in darkness. Well, that was all right, then. She could just walk in through the back door, and slip up to her room, and no one need know anything at all about her outing this evening. No one would be able to ask her any questions—nothing.

  But as she approached the darkened house, Helen began to feel qualms of doubt. True, these back windows—the kitchen the dining-room, and Daddy’s study—were all dark—but what about the front? Suppose they were all in the drawing-room for some reason this evening—visitors or something—and had simply forgotten to put on any of the hall or passage lights yet? And supposing, just as she was slipping through the hall towards the stairs, the drawing-room door were to burst open, with a great surge of noise, and light, and fuss; and to the ordinary fuss would now be added the fuss about why she was creeping in so furtively; and the visitors would all gather round, bright and grinning, so that for their sakes the disapproval and the questions would all have to be couched in the form of banter and spiky little jokes; but the flashing eyes and the tight lips would tell her that the real reckoning was still to come.

  No. Some risks are not worth taking. And there were plenty of other ways, for one who had known the house all her life.

  The ladder had not been used since last autumn. Since then it had lain its full length, neglected, against the wall under the kitchen window. As she eased it jerkily from its embedded position, the scent of the wallflowers she was disturbing was almost dizzying on the night air. She lifted the ladder clear, and then, very softly, began to manoeuvre it into an upright position. It was quite a heavy ladder, but Helen was skilful, after all the years of helping Granny with the plum and apple picking. Each year the knack came back to her as soon as her hands touched the rough curve of the rungs, and with a wonderful sensation of power she raised the unwieldy thing lightly, firmly, and set it with precision, and still silently, against the sill of the open landing window.

  Lightly, a little out of breath, and full of triumph, she scampered up it, eased herself over the window ledge, and soon was standing safely on the upstairs landing, not two yards from the door of her own bedroom. Nearer still was the door of Granny’s room, and the white crack of light shining beneath it told her that her grandmother was within. But that was all right. Granny wouldn’t be shocked that a girl should be home as early as twenty past nine after a date with her boy friend; she would even conceive it right and proper that a girl should be back at such an hour. If only she’d been quite absolutely sure that her mother was out, Helen would have gone in then and there to tell her grandmother all about her evening—because really, Clive had been so awful, she was longing to get some sympathy from someone. But if Mummy was somewhere downstairs, she would be sure to hear them—Granny’s cackling laugh carried all over the house, even when she tried to suppress it, with a hand over her mouth, like a schoolgirl: For that matter, Helen knew that her own voice, when she was amused and excited—

  “Helen? Is that you?”

  Margaret’s voice calling from inside the lighted room put an end to Helen’s deliberations. She opened the door and put her head round. “Hullo, Granny? Are you busy? I’ve been out Weeding again.”

  This was really Helen’s and Sandra’s own private word, but for some reason it seemed all right to use it in talking to Granny, too. Not because Granny approved of it particularly—she didn’t even approve of Helen’s referring to unattractive young men as ‘weeds’ at all, let alone coining a verb from so slangy and unkind a noun. And yet Granny’s faint disapproval of such language was not in the least destructive; on the contrary, it added a sort of extra piquancy to Helen’s use of such terms, which somehow they could both enjoy.

  “You’ve been out with that boy again, do you mean? That Clive somebody? Did you have a nice time?”

  Granny was smiling wickedly over her sewing. You could see that she knew Helen hadn’t had a nice time, and was dying to hear all the story, but nevertheless she crushed all her speculations and inquisitiveness into the decorous and conventional ‘Did you have a nice time?’ It was comfortable, somehow, to have her ask about it like that; it made the story seem absolutely new, and all Helen’s. If it had been Mummy, she would have set to work to interpret it all, to make Helen understand exactly why she had felt the way she did. And somehow, in the process, none of it would have been Helen’s any more—not the events, not the feelings—nothing. All would have been swallowed up in Mummy’s wisdom; there would have been nothing left of the evening but the interpretations.

  But on the other hand, of course, Mummy would probably never have asked her any questions about the evening in the first place; she didn’t believe in prying into a teenager’s private affairs. Granny did. With a lovely, cosy feeling of being the source of desired information, Helen curled herself up in her grandmother’s big, comfortable armchair—the one Granny herself never sat in because it got in the way of her elbows when she sewed or knitted—and began to describe her evening—as amusingly as she could, and yet to bring out its awfulness as well.

  Because it really had been rather awful. Clive had taken recently to meeting her every Wednesday as she came out of school, instead of arranging some meeting place somewhere in town; and this new system had for Helen two major disadvantages—no, three. First, it meant that the whole thing started impossibly early—a quarter past four: after three whole hours in his unrelieved company, it was still only quarter past seven, with the whole evening still looming hideously ahead. Second, it meant that she couldn’t go home and change; and though Clive had assured her, with many gulps of embarrassment, that he thought she looked just as pretty in her school summer dress and sandals, she naturally couldn’t believe that he meant it: or, if he did mean it, then (as Sandra had pointed out during one of their long discussions of the problem), then he must be a lunatic, and who wants to spend the whole of every Wednesday evening in the company of a lunatic?

  The third objection was less tangible, but to Helen’s mind exceedingly strong. It was that she didn’t want Clive to impinge on her school existence at any point. Helen loved her school life, and this year her love of it had become a sort of intoxication. The brand-new subjects—Greek, chemistry, Roman history: the polished parquet floors, of which she seemed suddenly, after all these years, to have become aware: the strange dawning of the realisation that she could now understand algebra: the Englis
h lessons with Miss Landor: the amusing, lively set of which she and Sandra were now the ring-leaders: and now, in the summer term, there was added to all this the smell of mown grass on the tennis courts, and the enchanted ping of balls … all this was welded into a world of such enclosed, such magical happiness that the sight of Clive, ill at ease, nothing to do with any of it, standing first on one foot and then on the other outside the bicycle sheds while he waited for her, filled Helen with a peculiar intensity of dismay.

  Leaning out of the fourth-form window, high up in the building, she and Sandra would watch him, when the last lesson of Wednesday afternoon ended, and would make elaborate, impossible plans about how Helen could get out of going out with him.

  “I’ll go down and tell him that you’ve not been at school today, and I think you must be ill?” Sandra would propose hopefully; but all that that could lead to would be that Clive would telephone Helen at home, and she’d have to sound ill on the telephone—Oh, she’d be so feeble at that sort of thing she’d never manage to make it sound convincing. And then to have him ask her, next time they met, if she was better—ugh!