Prisoner's Base

by Celia Fremlin

  At this point Helen, seeming to come to a sudden decision, blurted out: “Mummy, I—it was—”

  Like a flash, Claudia turned on her daughter with a dazzling smile, a huge, arresting glitter of white teeth. “What, dear?” she interrupted rapidly. “Helen, just look at the time! Surely you should be getting ready for school?”

  “All right. Yes.” Helen, looking both relieved and surprised, left the table with alacrity; and before any of the remainder of the party had time to comment on the little episode, Claudia began to talk, in a loud, clear voice about the rise in the price of petrol and the effect it might be expected to have on the traffic blocks in the main road.

  I wonder what she’s up to, Margaret mused. If it was Helen who put the ladder up, why is Claudia so anxious to prevent her saying so? Perhaps she thinks that Helen came in very late last night, after the doors were locked, and that I shall make a fuss about it? But Helen was in early—Ah, so that was it…! The real truth of the matter dawned on Margaret, and she nearly burst out laughing; but then, taking pity on her two anxious companions, she restrained her amusement, finished her breakfast as quickly as possible and went off upstairs, leaving Claudia free to soothe Mavis’ nervous suspicions about the ladder in any way she chose.

  The voices from the dining-room below went on for quite a while, rising and falling; then a door opened, and shut, and then another … footsteps were hurrying this way and that, voices were calling; the morning scramble for school and office was in full swing. The sounds rose to a peak, and then, suddenly, silence filled the house once more—a silence made more beautiful even than usual this morning by the fact that Claudia, for some wonderful reason which Margaret hadn’t bothered to comprehend, was taking Mavis with her to the office for the day.

  A whole golden morning stretched ahead, in which Margaret could get on with her work exactly as she pleased, without Mavis hanging around, muddling wetly about in the freshly tidied bathroom, dropping curlers all over the place, and feebly offering to help with things. While the sun broke slowly and gloriously through the mist outside, Margaret, as if in partnership with the summer day, set herself indoors to make the house shine in its fullest splendour. She rubbed up the brass ornaments and candlesticks in the dining-room; she polished the long table and the knobbly, carved backs of the chairs which had been old when she was a little girl; moving on into the hall, she washed the tiled floor, wiped down the banisters, and was just about to start on the red tiles round the front door, when the telephone rang.

  It’ll be Claudia, she thought, with a sudden sinking of the heart; it’ll be Claudia saying that Mavis will be coming home for lunch after all. My day, my lovely day, will be spoilt. I shan’t be able to sit in the basket chair by the wallflowers with my coffee and my sandwich; I shan’t be able to listen to the bees, or read my library book, or lie basking in the long sunshine between lunch and tea….

  Her relief at hearing a strange voice when she picked up the telephone was so great that it must have quite surprised her unknown caller. He sounded somewhat taken aback. “Is that Langley 2344?” he asked twice, each time more doubtfully, as if he could not really believe in her assent; and then: “Does a Mrs Claudia Wilkinson live there?”

  “She does: but I’m afraid she’s not in just now. Can I give her a message?” asked Margaret, her heart still singing with friendliness towards her interlocutor simply because he couldn’t possibly be anything to do with Mavis coming back for lunch. “Or can I do anything myself? I’m her mother,” she added chattily, in case it might be any help to him. “I live here.”

  “Her mother. Oh.” The voice sounded young, awkward, unaccustomed to dealing with social complexities. There was quite a pause. Then: “Oh, well. Perhaps—er— Look, do you think I could come round and see her this evening? About eight thirty? Will she be in then?”

  “Why—yes—I think she will—she hasn’t said anything to me about going out,” said Margaret uncertainly. “Shall I try to get in touch with her at the office—get her to ring you back?”

  “No! Oh no!” The voice sounded quite agitated. “I—you see, I’m not really on the phone. No, I’d sooner just take a chance on it. Can I do that? Can I come at half past eight, and if she’s not there—well, I’ll just go away again? Is that all right?”

  “Well, yes, we’d be delighted, of course,” said Margaret, somewhat bewildered. “That is, if you don’t mind the risk of wasting your journey. Do you live far from here?”

  “Oh. Well.” Again he seemed a little flustered. “Not actually. No, not all that far. It’ll be O.K.”

  “Well, then, we’ll look forward to seeing you, Mr—er—” and it was only then, just as they were both about to ring off, that Margaret realised that she still did not know the young man’s name.

  “Just a moment—what was the name?” she asked apologetically; and then, when she couldn’t hear properly what he said, she asked again. Maurice something. Or was it something Morris? She couldn’t possibly ask a third time, so saying “Goodbye, Mr—er—” she laid down the receiver, trying to place either name among the business acquaintances of whom Claudia occasionally spoke; but without success. Oh well; she would soon know: lifting the receiver, she dialled Claudia’s office number.

  Claudia’s delight at hearing of the arrangement seemed to Margaret excessive. It made her uneasy. Who could this person be who could put such a lilt of excitement into her daughter’s usually business-like voice?

  “But who is he, Claudia?” she asked, at the risk of seeming inquisitive. “Have I heard of him before?”

  “Oh—I can’t quite tell you over the phone,” Claudia answered rapidly, her voice still full of inexplicable excitement. “It’s a bit complicated, in a way … I’ll tell you all about it tonight. And, Mother—” her voice had changed now, there was a note of anxious sharpness behind the jubilation—“You will promise not to be difficult, won’t you? Please! Promise me!”

  She means she’s going to invite him to stay the night, Margaret thought darkly; and he will never go away again, never. Like Mavis. Like that man two years ago, that PhD student with the stomach ulcer whose wife had left him for an actor, only by the mercy of Heaven she came back to him, disillusioned about actors, before his diet, and his insomnia, and his views on the American Way of Life had driven Margaret stark, raving mad. Why couldn’t Derek put his foot down? Was he a man or a mouse? A mouse, of course, was the answer, but he would have described it as ‘trusting Claudia absolutely’. And anyway he was away until at least the end of the month, which no doubt was why Claudia had schemed this up just now, so as to present him with a fait accompli. That the recent innocent-seeming telephone call had been part of some complex machinations on Claudia’s part, Margaret did not now doubt. Promise not to be difficult she would not.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, dear,” she answered her daughter blandly. “You can tell me all about it when you come home. I suppose, coming at half past eight, he’ll have had supper, won’t he …?”

  The conversation petered out in trivialities; and as she laid down the receiver, shutting off the whole problem for at least another six hours, Margaret felt all the happiness of the sunshine and the quiet house flooding back into her soul. It was nearly half past twelve by now, time for lunch. She cut herself a beautiful sandwich of cold beef and white, crusty bread, squashy with newness, and dabbed liberally with mustard. Then she made a cup of coffee, exactly as she liked it, with top-of-the-milk zestfully filched from one of the new bottles; and then, like a homing pigeon, like a creature slithering back into its native element, she carried the tray carefully out into the still, shimmering noonday sun.

  CHAPTER IX

  THIS ONE SUFFERED from insomnia, too. Well, from writing poetry, anyway, which came to practically the same thing, it seemed to Margaret. She was sitting, quiet and inconspicuous, in the corner of the sofa, listening to this peculiar young man holding forth to Claudia, while his coffee cooled on the little table at his s
ide, about the sort of ideas that came to him at two in the morning.

  They weren’t the sort of ideas that appealed to Margaret at the best of times, and she was sure they would appeal to her even less at 2 a.m. They sounded, to her experienced ears, the sort of ideas that would involve the endless brewing of black coffee, with spills all over the kitchen table; and she was only thankful that, so far, there had been no suggestion that the visitor was to stay the night. Surely even Claudia would draw the line at that, considering what she knew about the young man’s background.

  He wasn’t Margaret’s idea of a murderer. She had—naturally enough, after Claudia’s shocking revelations—been eyeing the visitor surreptitiously all the evening, and by now she knew his features by heart; and they weren’t, somehow, the features she had been expecting. What had she been expecting, then? What should a murderer look like, and in what ways did this young man fall short of—or rise above, perhaps one should say—the conventional image? Was it that he had that pasty, inactive look which one associates with sedentary, monotonous employments—in which category crimes of violence can surely not be included? Or was it that he looked too young? Too young for what, though? It was well known that a large proportion of criminals are barely out of their teens. Too young, anyway, to be wearing that neat, middle-aged suit of navy blue. Why, he ought to be in a shaggy polo-necked jersey and jeans! But even as this thought passed through Margaret’s mind, the young man shifted his position in his chair, leaned forward—and now, suddenly, as he sat forward like this, looking so intently into Claudia’s face, and with the light falling right across his brow, something was revealed that was not quite youthful. Not wrinkles, or crowsfeet, or anything as simple as that; more a dull, tarnished look, as of energies frittered away—and it clashed strangely with the almost unnatural brightness of his blue, darting eyes. And there was a slyness, too, that you noticed just now and then if you kept watching him; it would flash for a second as the blue glance slid sideways; it would quiver momentarily in the movement of his mouth as he pronounced some quite ordinary word. Oh, it was so slight, so indefinable … and now, here he was again, guileless and eager as an undergraduate, laying down the law about existentialism, and about the outdatedness and futility of all the ideas mankind has travailed over right up to the moment in history when he, Maurice, began to put forth his ideas.

  And Claudia hers, of course. Claudia, you could see, was loving it: her very own murderer; and flattery thrown in as well. No wonder she looked like the cat with the cream. She hadn’t yet switched on the main light; instead she had put on the little low lamp by the bookcase, and as she sat forward on her stool, her face in shadow, and the light just glinting on her burnished hair, she looked statuesque, benign. Not silly and conceited at all. It gave Margaret a little jolt of surprise to see her looking like that; half pleased, half bewildered, she wondered if she understood her daughter at all; if, perhaps, she had misjudged entirely her motives in taking up with this young man?

  He was talking about his poems now, quoting bits unforgiveably, and Margaret suppressed a yawn. His poems were not nearly as interesting as his conversation, and the staccato, aggressively anti-sing-song manner of his recitation tended only to obscure what sense there might otherwise have been. Margaret fancied that Claudia was bored by them, too, for although her air of rapt attention, her little murmurs of interest and sympathy, were maintained as before, to Margaret’s sharp observation they now seemed a little forced. There was restlessness now, rather than absorption, hidden away inside her still sustained and graceful pose.

  But it was difficult to do anything to redirect a conversation in which so many commonplace topics must by tacit agreement be avoided. Claudia had briefed Margaret beforehand, with great explicitness and urgency, about all the questions she mustn’t ask their guest for fear of embarrassing him. His surname—his lodgings—his friends—his family—his job—all were taboo; and with the banning of these, of course, went automatically the banning of a number of innocuous topics which might prove to be tenuously related to one or other of them. Hobbies? But these implied a settled way of life, such as he had presumably never had. Plays, films? But if he had been in prison for seven years, he would have missed them all. Books? Did they have anything to read in prison, apart from the Bible and improving works? Maybe they did, nowadays, but Margaret didn’t know, and wasn’t going to risk it. If either of them were going to put their foot in it, let it be Claudia.

  “You see,” the young man was saying, still riveted to the subject of his poems, “I’m not saying they’re any good. I don’t suppose they are. They may be quite horrendous—don’t be afraid to say so, if that’s what you think, I shan’t be offended. But one thing I think you must admit, they’re not derivative. Are they now?”

  Thus appealed to for a personal opinion Claudia at once made herself alert and vivid again.

  “Indeed they aren’t!” she assented eagerly. “They seem to me to be absolutely original—fresh—”

  “Because some people have said—” the poet pursued doggedly, “that they owe something to the influence of Patmore. But you didn’t think that, did you? From the ones you’ve heard so far?”

  He looked tense, anxious, leaning forward in his chair to receive Claudia’s verdict as if it mattered to him most seriously. To Margaret, watching her daughter racking her brains to think who Patmore could be, his anxiety seemed rather pathetic.

  “But no, Maurice! Not in the least!” exclaimed Claudia confidently, after a pause so short that only her mother was aware of it. “Anyone who could think such a thing can’t really have understood your poems at all! You and Patmore—?” Claudia gave her little laugh, to emphasise the absurdity of the comparison—“Why, there is no resemblance! The style is different—the rhythms—the whole attitude to life, to the Human Condition…”

  Margaret was torn between admiration and horror at her daughter’s polished hypocrisy. But was it hypocrisy, in any real sense? What Claudia was really saying to the boy was: ‘I am on your side about everything. Because you are an outcast from society, I will fight your enemies for you, whether they be self-righteous old women, Society itself, or even poets I have never heard of. Down with them all!’ And this message was genuine enough; perhaps Maurice understood it. He seemed satisfied, anyhow, for he was smiling now, running his fingers through his stubbly fair hair.

  “Do you really think so? I’m glad. And you’re absolutely right, too. Because what makes this accusation such arrant nonsense is that I had never even read Patmore at the time when I wrote most of these poems. People don’t believe this—and it’s a little difficult to explain—but you see, situated as I have been … For quite a slice of my life I’ve been cut off from books almost entirely. I’ve had to exist on what I could remember—on passages I learned by heart long ago—that sort of thing. I’m not complaining, you understand. On the contrary. It gives me, I think, a very special sense of the value of words—”

  Was he repenting of these revelations? A slow,’ bright pink spread over his face as he stopped speaking, and at the same time the slyness, it seemed to Margaret, came back into his eyes. It was as if he was testing his hearers in some way: his blue, brilliant glance darted, swift as a lizard, from one to the other of them.

  But whatever the test might be, Margaret knew that she for one was going to fail it. This was the point at which she had better go away, and leave Claudia to pass with honours, a star first. Murmuring something about having some letters to write she stood up and prepared to leave the room; and from Claudia’s quick smile of approval she gathered that she had, for once, done all the right things; stayed with them for the required length of time, and gone away at the required moment.

  Margaret had intended going straight up to her room—she really had got some letters to write—but it was not to be. Even as she closed the drawing-room door behind her and stepped into the hall, she was aware of a little flurry on the stairs—a swishing, a rustling, and then a weak little tap
—tap—tap. A pink plastic hair-curler rolled almost to her feet.

  So Mavis had been eavesdropping. Picking up the roller by its extreme edge, and holding it distastefully between finger and thumb, Margaret set off in pursuit. All was silent by now, of course, but Margaret marched grimly up the stairs and along the passage to Mavis’ room, and knocked.

  Mavis, in dressing-gown and hair-net, appeared to be settled in bed, though somewhat out of breath. Unable to sustain effectively the smallest deception (Margaret noted scornfully) she simply sat bolt upright, clutching the hem of the bedspread, and stared at her visitor, her eyes wide with guilt.

  “You dropped this, I think,” said Margaret, with grim relish “When you ran off upstairs just now. Why didn’t you come and join us, if you wanted to hear what was going on? Claudia invited you—in fact she begged you to come. I heard her.”

  “I know. I—Oh, Mrs Newman, isn’t it awful! Can’t you do something? Can’t you stop her? You’re her mother—”

  The direct, tearful appeal knocked all the fight out of Margaret. To her own astonishment, she felt a pang of what could only be called sympathy with the wretched girl, caught like a fish, gasping in the meshes of her own silliness. Margaret moved farther into the room, and laid the roller without further comment on the powder-strewn muddle that was Mavis’ dressing-table.

  “Don’t upset yourself so,” she said, quite kindly. “Claudia’s always done this sort of thing. Nothing will come of it. She’s always picking up lame ducks and then—” She stopped, realising her tactlessness. Unwonted concern for Mavis’ feelings made her rephrase the sentence. “I mean, you know yourself how Claudia is. If anyone’s in trouble, she always wants to help them. That’s all it is with this young man; she thinks he’s in some sort of trouble, so she’s having him round to see what she can do. That’s all. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Margaret was speaking more confidently than she felt, and Mavis must have sensed it.