Prisoner's Base

by Celia Fremlin

  Each member of the family in turn had laid down the letter at this point: the last three pages were perfectly unread and smooth. Poor Derek’s painstaking and exact descriptions of the places he travelled in never received the interest they deserved, and on this occasion there was even less attention than usual to spare for them. With tight lips, Margaret refolded the letter and handed it back to her daughter: and then the two faced each other across the breakfast table, both knowing that the battle had now begun in earnest; that Claudia’s handing round of Derek’s letter for general perusal had been the first move in what was to be a major campaign.

  “For two pins,” began Margaret ominously “I’d write to Derek myself and tell him what’s really going on. I’d—”

  “But of course, Mother! I’m sure he’d like to hear your news as well as ours,” cut in Claudia, her voice bland and yet steely: and with the tiniest lift of her eyebrow she managed to call attention to the fact that she, Margaret, was provoking a family row right under Helen’s nose. No doubt Claudia had stage-managed the whole scene, Margaret thought furiously, with this very object in view: that Margaret should be obliged to stifle her first, splendid indignation because of the unsuitability of the audience. And what made it doubly infuriating was that it was Margaret’s susceptibilities that were being employed to this end, not Claudia’s own: Claudia herself did not mind what was said in front of Helen, and was always pooh-poohing Margaret’s old-fashioned scruples.

  Margaret finished her breakfast in silent fury, and afterwards she hung about the hall and stairs, trying to catch her daughter alone.

  But Claudia was too clever for her. As she bustled about getting ready for work, she contrived to have Helen following her around discussing some problem about getting a skirt altered and back from the cleaners in time for the weekend: and after this Providence decreed that Mavis should take over—inept and half asleep, but still purposeful—about some setting lotion that she had bought last week and might have left on the back seat of Claudia’s car. By the time it had been established—quickly to Claudia’s satisfaction, and some while later to Mavis’—that the setting lotion was neither on, under, nor down the sides of any of the seats: and that Mavis had, in fact, come back by bus from that particular shopping expedition—by this time, it was no wonder that Claudia should have no time to do anything but drive swiftly away.

  And so it came about that the showdown about Maurice was delayed: delayed through all the long, hot, sun-drenched day, while Margaret’s first bright anger—and indeed her interest—waned hour by hour as she worked, and basked, and worked again, putting her multifarious tasks and enjoyments one after another satisfactorily behind her. By evening she was feeling too content, too pleasantly tired, to contemplate a quarrel with Claudia about anything.

  And in any case, by then it was too late, for Maurice was already there.

  Margaret had not heard him arrive. The first intimation she had that something was afoot came while she was out in the field, shutting up the chickens for the night; and it was less a sound than a sudden sense of urgency that made her look up from latching Claribel’s coop. There, at the gate from the garden into the field, stood Helen, gesticulating wildly and incomprehensibly to her.

  Margaret did not call out in response. It was clear from Helen’s conspiratorial manner, as well as from her silent, frantic mouthings, that the matter was by way of being a confidential one; so Margaret simply gesticulated too, and waved; and finally, as no intelligible communication emerged from all this, and she was consumed with curiosity, she beckoned peremptorily to her granddaughter. And now Helen was bounding towards her, leaping like a wild creature through the long grass already grey with evening, although the sun was not quite gone, and the tops of the hedges were still touched with rosy light.

  “Granny!” exclaimed Helen, as she came near enough for a breathless stage-whisper. “Such weird things are happening! Daddy’s study is all full of luggage and things, and somebody’s pulled out the Put-U-Up! What on earth is happening? Who’s supposed to be coming?”

  Helen seemed intrigued rather than dismayed by the news she was bringing, and Margaret recollected quickly that this was natural enough. She was of an age to enjoy excitements and upheavals, and so far she could have no reason to suppose that there was anything unwelcome about this particular visitation. Unwilling to damp the girl’s innocent anticipation, Margaret tried to hide her own vexation—indeed her horror. For she knew without any doubt who the visitor must be. It was too bad of Claudia; it really was. Shiftless unmarried mothers and neurotic nincompoops were all very well; but a self-confessed murderer was surely rather a different matter?

  Margaret raised herself creakingly from her crouching position over the coop, stood up straight, and regarded her granddaughter helplessly for a moment. How much to tell her? The truth, her old-fashioned instincts told her, was unsuitable for Helen’s ears. The girl might be shocked and frightened beyond what was right—or, worse still, she might be evilly fascinated. On the other hand, ignorance might be dangerous—even more dangerous, that is, than the situation seemed likely to be anyway. Damn Claudia! She should be laid over a chair and spanked! Spanked and spanked until she shrieked for mercy! If only Derek had done just this right at the beginning of their marriage … or if only Margaret had done it a bit more when Claudia was a child…. Oh, well, no use bemoaning these lost opportunities. What had to be dealt with now was the grown-up Claudia—clever, determined, and self-appointed now to a position of near-totalitarian bossiness and self-righteousness. And, more immediately, here was Helen, agog with curiosity, and already puzzled, no doubt, by her grandmother’s delay in replying. Pusillanimously, Margaret played for time.

  “I suppose it must be something your mother is arranging,” she suggested, carefully off-hand. “She hasn’t told me about it. Why don’t you ask her? She’s somewhere about indoors.”

  “I know. I did ask her, but she was being a bit snappy and mysterious about it, because Mavis was there. I don’t think she wants Mavis to know about it, or something. One thing and another, I thought I’d better disappear before I put my foot in it any worse. But I’ll tell you what I think it is, Granny. I think it’s another of Mummy’s Poor Things. A new one! Do you think it might possibly be the one Daddy was going on about in his letter—the writer person with the unfortunate past? He sounded as if he’d make the most marvellous Poor Thing, didn’t he?”

  It was a splendid term, really, for Claudia’s assortment of spongers and derelicts, but nevertheless it was hardly a respectful one, and disrespect towards adults, however idiotic, should not, Margaret felt, be encouraged in the young. She felt in duty bound at least to make a show of disapproval.

  “These people that your mother tries to help, do you mean, dear? You mustn’t forget, Helen, that it really is very kind—very charitable—of your mother, and she really does succeed in doing a lot of good—”

  “Oh, I know, Granny!” Helen flung her arms round her grandmother, half embracing, half impatiently shaking her, as if she was a tiresome child. “Of course I know. It’s marvellous of Mummy, and all that. But I hate it when you think you have to go all prissy like this, and stop some lovely conversation, when all the time you agree with me absolutely. Now, don’t you, Granny? Admit it! Admit that you think the Poor Things are as funny as can be. Remember the one who’d chucked up his job because he thought the end of the world was due, and then …”

  In spite of her lofty principles, Margaret was soon laughing as heartily as her granddaughter. She finished off the last of her chores in the chicken run, refilling the water bowls and setting to rights the food-tray, trampled to a strange angle and half filled with mud, and then she and Helen set off for the house. Once there, Helen made straight for her father’s study, presumably to see if any clue as to its future occupant were to be extracted from the unfamiliar baggage therein, while Margaret set off, full of grim purpose, in search of Claudia.

  She found her upstairs, in Mavis
’ bedroom. Although the room faced due west, right into the glory of the sunset, Mavis had her curtains already drawn, shutting it all out. If it had not been for this—the first thing that she noticed as she came into the hot, cluttered room—Margaret might have felt a good deal of sympathy for Mavis’ woebegone looks as she sat on the extreme edge of her bed, arguing, tearfully and ineffectually, with Claudia. But a woman who could thus blot out the unearthly splendour of that sky deserved all she got, Margaret decided; and thus it was with the feeling of the fight being a threesome, all against all, that she planted herself into the middle of it. Had she controlled her feelings, and diplomatically recognised Mavis as an ally (albeit a feeble one, sadly demoralised by tears and lack of vocabulary) the outcome might have been different.

  “Oh—Mother—I’m glad you’ve come!” declared Claudia unconvincingly, and with a brittle edge to her bright tones. “I’ve been trying to explain to Mavis that it’s going to be perfectly all right having Maurice here—he’ll be no trouble at all—it won’t affect her in any way. Or you, Mother. It won’t affect either of you. He’s my guest. I will look after him.”

  Margaret tried to remember just what she had been going to say in that first, fine flush of anger this morning when she read the letter from the poor bamboozled Derek. But it was all gone: the whole, splendid tirade lost for ever. The arguments were blurred now, the passion ironed out by the soothing pressure of a single golden summer day. All that was left was a resentful, imprecise sense of outrage.

  “Really, Claudia, I do think,” she began, trying, at short notice, to reassemble her point of view, “I do think you are being quite insanely rash in rushing into this. You don’t know the man: you don’t even know exactly what he’s done. It may have been the most dreadful kind of murder. And to have him staying here—staying in the house! Inviting him in for a meal now and again would be another matter—though even that, I should have thought, with a young girl like Helen in the house—”

  “For Heaven’s sake!” cried Claudia, as if already at the end of her patience. “Why does everyone have to drag Helen into it? Why should she be in any more danger than anyone else? Why?”

  “Well—I should have thought it was perfectly obvious!” said Margaret impatiently. “A young, inexperienced girl—”

  “You mean you think Maurice is going to rape her!” snapped Claudia, two spots of red appearing, bright and menacing, on her cheek bones. “Then why can’t you say so? Why can’t you put it into plain words instead of these mealy-mouthed euphemisms—‘Young, inexperienced girl’!—” Claudia quoted Margaret’s phrase in a sort of clipped, nasal falsetto to indicate the ultimate in old-maidishness and repression. Not altogether realistically, Margaret thought: never in all her life had she come across an old maid with a voice anything like that at all. “Well, go on! Say it!” Claudia was challenging her. “Say: ‘I think Maurice is going to rape Helen.’ That’s what you mean, isn’t it? That’s what you think he’s going to do!”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what this young man is going to do or not do,” retorted Margaret. “And neither have you. That’s my whole point—none of us know what he might, or might not, do. All we know for certain is that he has been convicted of at least one crime of violence in the past. We don’t know what it was, exactly; we don’t even know—”

  “Speak for yourself!” cried Claudia. “As it happens, I do know what he’s done. He’s told me everything—in confidence, naturally, so I’m afraid I can’t satisfy your curiosity. But I can tell you, Mother, for a positive fact, that it wasn’t rape. That disappoints you, doesn’t it?”—she turned on Margaret venomously: “You think you’re frightened on Helen’s account, don’t you: but subconsciously you’re revelling in the idea! Women of your age always do. Fantasies of vicarious sexual assault are the commonest—”

  “Shall we save the clinical diagnosis for another time?” suggested Margaret coolly. “Some time when there are more people listening, for example—eh, Claudia? It’s wasted on me and Mavis: she doesn’t understand your long words, and I don’t understand how you can be so stupid, so between us we make a pretty poor audience for you. But I must say I’m glad to know that you’ve at least exerted yourself to find out something about this boy before imposing him on us. Your folly has some bounds, after all! Perhaps—”

  “I’d have invited him anyway, whether I knew what he’d done or not!” interrupted Claudia sharply. “I don’t wait for a thing to be safe and easy! I don’t demand that an unhappy human being should produce his credentials before I consent to do anything about his unhappiness …!”

  The sentiments were heroic, genuinely heroic. Margaret felt a tiny bit shaken in the stand she had been taking. But all the same, it wouldn’t do: it really wouldn’t do. No ordinary, sensible person would agree to it.

  “It’s all very well, Claudia,” she grumbled, but in a somewhat gentler tone. “I can see a little bit how you feel, and I certainly admire your courage. Anyone would. But you see, my dear, you’re not living on a desert island; you’re living in an ordinary house with several other people, who all have a right to be consulted before you can bring something like this into their lives. Don’t you see? You’re forcing us to have the courage of your convictions, and it’s not fair. Why should we?”

  “Well, yes.” Claudia’s tone too was much less belligerent. “There is that point of view, of course. The conventional point of view. But surely it is a very paltry one compared with what’s at stake—the whole future life and happiness of a highly gifted young man? Can’t you see at all how terribly important it is—how terribly worth while? By giving Maurice the assurance that in one household at least he is accepted—trusted—regarded as a perfectly ordinary young man—we shall be giving him a real chance, at last, of turning over a new leaf—of embarking on a useful, honourable career, using all his gifts and talents. Coming to stay with us here—being treated as one of the family—this will be the turning-point of his life. Don’t you think that that would be a worth-while achievement, Mother? Worth just a teeny bit of worry and effort—which is all that is being asked of us?”

  Margaret reviewed gloomily all the other turning-points of all the other lives at which she had been compelled unwillingly to assist. They never seemed to turn very far; one by one she had watched these unfortunates shambling out of Claudia’s orbit apparently just as self-absorbed and incapable, just as hell-bent on failure and disaster, as when they had shambled in.

  Yet who could say, really? Who could tell, watching them as they staggered subsequently from one self-engendered crisis to another, that they did not carry with them, henceforth, some sustaining spark implanted by Claudia’s kindness: making things for ever after a little bit more bearable, a little bit less perfectly frightful?

  Margaret felt both ashamed of her own unheroic conventionality, and also sure, deep down in her very bones, that she was right. She listened to her daughter’s arguments uneasily.

  “… And it wouldn’t be for long, you know, Mother; just for a week or two, until he’s found his feet.”

  “I hope he’ll be gone by the fourteenth of June,” suddenly put in Mavis—and it was quite a shock to hear so business-like a voice suddenly emerge from a figure so limp and sodden with tears. “It’s Eddie’s half-term that weekend, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t possibly—have my Eddie associate with a criminal! If the man’s not gone by the fourteenth—” Mavis’ voice gathered depth and intensity as she led up to her final threat—“if he’s not gone by that time, then Eddie won’t be able to come home for his holiday at all!”

  Neither Claudia nor Margaret seemed adequately shaken by this awful prospect. Indeed, at Mavis’ words Margaret became aware of the strange, unpredictable sense of family alliance against the outsider, which can sometimes bring down in amicable ruins the most fiery of family disputes. It came to her in a little, sharp, surprising stab, and she knew without any doubt that it had come to Claudia too. For a moment, mother and daughter were as one
.

  It was Claudia who seized on the advantage thus conferred:

  “So you see, Mother, that’s why I’ve been counting on you to back me up in this. I felt sure you wouldn’t let me down—especially as Maurice is actually here already—at least he will be any minute, he’s just fetching the rest of his things. I think it’s wonderful of you to take it like this—” Claudia seemed already to be regarding the whole matter as settled—“I felt sure you’d see it my way once you really understood the situation. But, Mother—I don’t really quite know how to put this—please don’t be offended. It’s just—you will be nice to him, won’t you? I mean, now that we’re all agreed so nicely about him coming here, it would be such a pity, wouldn’t it, if it was all spoilt by—er— Well, by—” Claudia’s eloquence seemed, for once, to be failing her. Margaret drew herself up haughtily.

  “And when, Claudia dear, have I failed in civility towards any of your friends—” here she tried to ignore the glances exchanged between Mavis and her daughter, and finished more haughtily than ever: “No matter what my own personal feelings may have been?”

  “Oh, I know, Mother. I know you do your best. Most of the time.” Claudia seemed at a loss for a method of putting across her meaning sufficiently forcibly, and yet not saying anything to upset the precarious agreement that had just been achieved. “I only just mentioned it because—well—there was that thing about Winnie, wasn’t there? I don’t want that to happen again!”

  Margaret scowled. Even after four and a half years, the memory of Winnie, with her vitamin tablets, and her mother-fixation, and her unbecoming frilly blouses, could still have this effect on her.

  “Poor Winnie is an old friend of mine,” Claudia was explaining to Mavis, who had stopped crying some while ago now in order to listen to the quarrelling. “She’d had a terrible time with her husband, she had to leave him in the end, and take the child with her. She was living with her mother when I came across her, and my dear, it was one of those terrible cannibal set-ups—the mother-daughter thing. They both loathed each other really, but the mother was one of those demanding, possessive women, determined to keep her daughter to herself now she’d got her back again. Poor Winnie was trapped—she was utterly unable to escape. Over and over again she tried to break away—moved into lodgings, took living-in jobs—but always this awful maternal thing dragged her back—a mysterious, irresistible pull that always, in the end, proved too strong for her. She went to a psychiatrist at last, and—”