Prisoner's Base

by Celia Fremlin

  Something truculent in Daphne’s usually gentle, harried voice caught Margaret’s attention, and she suddenly understood the point of the conversation—and of the foregoing telephone calls. Knowing Claudia, she should have spotted it before. The two of them were competing for the position of Maurice’s most trusted confidante. That was the final object of the game, but the individual moves, Margaret saw, consisted of snippets of information which one knew and the other didn’t. To have had Maurice tell you something that he hadn’t told the other—move one place forward; but if your opponent can then say: ‘Yes, I know, he told me ages ago’, then as you were, one place back. And Claudia was winning this round, just as she had won the earlier one, when Daphne’s move of inviting the gaol-bird to lunch had straightaway been mated by Claudia’s move of inviting him to stay.

  Margaret understood the game and its rules clearly, just as she had understood most of Claudia’s games over the years, yet she was no nearer now than she had ever been to sorting out her feelings about such goings on. Was it a cynical, hypocritical game? How could you say that, when good really was being done? Maurice—and those other unfortunates before him—really had been helped by Claudia: really had been provided with a roof over their heads, and an attentive listener to their troubles. If childish vanity was a part—even a major part—of Claudia’s motive, did this really cancel out utterly the good that she was doing? How could you condemn out of hand the silly rivalry between Daphne and Claudia when Maurice’s welfare really was in the minds of both contestants—genuinely and truly there, for all that they had set it up as a winning post in a game in which acts of kindness were the counters, and sympathy and understanding the scoring board? A heavenly game, in a sense, a game which everyone should be encouraged to play … which everyone perhaps did play, in one way or another…. Margaret’s thoughts blurred into confusion at this point, just as they always did. She could neither judge nor look her daughter in the face without judging. Uneasily she bent to pick up her abandoned shopping.

  “I must go in now and get on with the dishing up,” she excused herself, smiling uncertainly at the pair. They looked up from their game abstractedly, with, it seemed to her, the glazed, fanatical stares of gamblers in their den of vice.

  Or was it their den of virtue?

  CHAPTER XIII

  BY SUCHLIKE REFLECTIONS and painstaking insights did Margaret succeed, that sunny Saturday morning, in finally coming to terms with her daughter’s quixotic enterprise—or at least to imagine that she had done so. It was ironic, then, that it should have been that very afternoon when things began to go wrong.

  It was Mavis, really, who started it all. Mavis was the only member of the household who, right from the beginning, had refused to be reconciled in any degree to the presence of an ex-criminal in the house. Not that she had made any overt protest, after that first tearful scene on the night of Maurice’s arrival. At Claudia’s behest, she had duly dried her tears and ceased from argument; but from that day she had become a shadow of her former—distinctly shadowy—self. A shadow of a shadow —that was poor Mavis now. Her hair grew lanker than ever, and she spoke little. By night she locked her bedroom door against all comers, while by day she crept, bristling and furtive, about the house, like the established family cat when a new puppy is brought home. Often now she went up to her room immediately after supper and settled down to sleep or brooding behind closed curtains while the evening sky was still green and lucent, and the light lay like still water across the field, as if it would never go away.

  Margaret soon decided that it was all sulks and temper. It seemed to her that Mavis was not so much frightened of Maurice as simply jealous of Claudia’s absorption in him and his problems, to the exclusion of Mavis and hers. And it was hard on her, of course it was, to be thus deprived of her cosy tête-à-tête evenings with Claudia talking about Eddie’s personality patterns and about how awful Margaret had been to her during the day. Margaret could well understand how galling it must be, after all this, to be suddenly thrust on one side and ignored while Maurice’s personality patterns, not Eddie’s, filled the twilight hours: either that or his poems, which Margaret would readily have agreed were more boring still. Claudia seemed to have undertaken to type them for him, all eleven hundred of them; but since the tap-tap of the typewriter rarely continued for more than two or three minutes before it was superseded by intricate and discursive soul-searching, it did not need any great arithmetical powers (even Mavis’ would suffice) to deduce that the whole thing was going to go on, and on, and on. The truth was, Margaret suspected, that Claudia was just as bored by Maurice’s poetry as the rest of them were; and the quicker she could get away from the metaphorical imprisonment of his soul, as depicted in many a gloomy sonnet, and on to the colourful drama of his actual imprisonment, the better she was pleased.

  Of course, his soul still came into it, naturally it did; but once divested of the tiresome trappings of versification, it became a soul of a sort which Claudia could understand; a familiar, well-plumbed soul, a soul after her own heart—custom-built, one might almost say, to her own specification. This last thought had flashed into Margaret’s mind two or three times lately, as she sat, unheeded, on the periphery of the evening confidences, learning of the crimes which Society had committed against poor Maurice. It was Society’s fault, all of it. It was Society that had been responsible for the dreariness and squalor of Maurice’s early home; for the deprived and loveless childhood that had driven him to a life of crime; for the emotional starvation that had made him cling so avidly to even the impoverished human relationships offered by a criminal gang. In all this Society had behaved in a manner so much in accord with Claudia’s preconceptions of it, that Margaret found herself, for odd moments, puzzled and uneasy. And that terribly typical Sunday Supplement prison, too, with its homosexuality, its sadism, its corrupt warders; and Maurice himself always coming out of the anecdotes rather well; punching the bully on the nose; protecting the blubbering boy victim from his hardened assailants…. Was he, Margaret sometimes wondered, trying to hide from Claudia the sort of things that had really happened to him in prison?—the small, unheroic failures, the meannesses, the trivial treacheries? Not that one could blame him, exactly, for trying to touch it up a bit; but if he was lying about these details, then why should he not be lying about the nature of his crime itself? It was this possibility that Margaret found, at odd moments, disturbing. The crime he had chosen to confess to them had at least been a straightforward one, with an element of daredevil courage in it. But suppose the crime he was really guilty of was not like that at all? Suppose instead that it had been something utterly mean and sordid; or even something really horrible; something that even Claudia, for all her flaunted tolerance, would not be able to stomach? Sometimes, as she watched the blue eyes narrow in concentration over some knotty detail of the story, Margaret would fancy that she caught once again the sly, calculating look which she had intercepted that very first evening; and at those moments his whole face, in the shadowy evening room, would seem to lose its youthful contours; those blue slits, too bright, too watchful, would be looking out of a face both middle-aged and cunning.

  But always, just before she was sure, just before she had got the imprint of that face firmly etched in her imagination—always something would happen, some little thing, that would make her feel that it had been an illusion. He would smile, perhaps, at some little encouraging comment from Claudia, or he would shift his shoulders, grown stiff with such persistent sitting, and his face would shift with them, out of the light—or into the light, it didn’t matter which, any change seemed to be a change that restored to his features their reassuring youthfulness, and to his manner its disarming, schoolboy zest.

  “And, my God, that was a pickle if you like!” he would rattle on, and his fingers would once again run, boyishly distracted, through his scrub of hair, as he sought for the words to bring home to his hearers the exact degree of pickle-dom to which this particular esc
apade had brought him. And always Margaret would be reassured.

  But it was not the slyness (or otherwise) of Maurice’s demeanour that started the trouble this golden Saturday afternoon. Indeed, Margaret had never felt less bothered by him than she did today, after her amicable conversation with Claudia and the resultant new-found sympathy with her daughter’s point of view. Also, he wasn’t there, always a big point in his favour in Margaret’s eyes. He not only had this wonderful job which kept him out of the house every weekday, but it now seemed that he had somewhere mysterious he went on Saturdays, and didn’t get back till after midnight, which seemed to Margaret a very splendid arrangement indeed. She was the more surprised, therefore, that just as she set off into the garden after lunch, Mavis should accost her, looking more guardedly cat-like than ever, and ask her if Maurice was in his room.

  Margaret stared in surprise. Mavis had spoken to her so little lately—or indeed to anybody: and why should she be seeking Maurice, of all people?

  “No, I’m afraid he isn’t. Did you want him?” enquired Margaret wonderingly. But Mavis shook her head violently, her hair flapping.

  “No! Oh, my goodness, no, not that!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Mrs Newman, you wouldn’t talk like that, if you knew what was in my mind!”

  This might be true. Margaret realised, with a little compunction, that perhaps she did not always allow enough for the possibility that there might be something in Mavis’ mind. But all the same, the communication seemed a trifle obscure. Mavis continued: “That’s just it, you see, Mrs Newman, him being out. I mean, that’s just what I thought. He’s out, I thought, on Saturdays. But, Mrs Newman, there’s someone in his room. Really there is. I heard them!”

  Margaret was half in, half out of the door; the sun was already burning gloriously on her left arm, the warm, scented air was breathing against her legs, stirring her grey hair; had she really got to go back into the sunless indoors with Mavis and look into the wretched boy’s room—Derek’s study, that is —it was awful the way they were all beginning to call it ‘Maurice’s room’. And though, of course, this wasn’t particularly Mavis’ fault, it nevertheless added to the irritation with which Margaret glared into the girl’s defenceless face, with its look of vacant, maddening expectancy; its childlike, tyrannical confidence that now Margaret would have to do something.

  I won’t! Why should I?—Margaret fumed inwardly, all the while knowing that she was going to give in. It would be quicker, for one thing, to go and look in the room and be done with it, rather than to stand here arguing, and having Mavis describe, in tedious and halting detail, just how the noise had gone whoosh-whoosh, or tap-tap, or whatever.

  “Well—come on, then!” said Margaret curtly, and strode back into the hall and along the passage, with Mavis scuttling close behind, giving apologetic little snorts indicative of gratitude.

  For a moment the two stood outside the study door and listened; then, in the continuing silence, Margaret first knocked smartly, and then pushed the door wide open.

  Nothing, of course. Just Derek’s cluttered, heavily over-furnished den, with its books and desk and mounds of learned journals; and in the midst of it, Maurice’s Put-U-Up, neat and trim as a hospital bed. All his possessions must, it seemed, be kept neatly stowed away in his suitcase and boxes, for there was nothing of his to be seen lying about: no book: no hair brush or comb; nothing. It was as if he barely existed in this room, had merely settled here like a moth, blown in by random forces from the darkness, and by morning would be gone.

  “There. You see? You must have imagined it,” Margaret declared, with comfortable finality, backing out of the room and closing the door once more. “And now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a lot to see to outside this afternoon, and so—”

  “Oh, but—! Oh, please, Mrs Newman—!” —Mavis was twirling and twisting on her skinny legs in agonised entreaty—she might have been the feeble, degenerate descendant of some desperate slave-girl dancing for her life before the Great King. “Please, Mrs Newman, do you have to go out? I feel so nervous, all alone in the house, after hearing that noise. It’ll give me nightmares tonight, I know it will, that noise in that empty room. It’s like the dreams I’ve been having…. Ever since, he came, Mrs Newman, I’ve been having the most dreadful dreams—Oh, I daren’t tell you the things I’ve been dreaming, I don’t want to remind myself, because they’ve been better the last few nights, and this is going to start them up again! Oh, don’t go out, please! Couldn’t you stop in just for a bit—just until Claudia gets back from that meeting? Or if it was Helen even—but once she’s off at that Sandra’s there’s no knowing, is there, she might be ever so late….”

  “But, my dear good girl!” expostulated Margaret. “You can see for yourself that Maurice isn’t here. Nor anyone else either. What are you still afraid of? And, in any case, you won’t be really alone—I’ll only be just outside in the garden reading….” She realised her mistake at once, as Mavis brightened ominously. She had meant to cheer Mavis up, certainly, but not as much as all this….

  “Oh, Mrs Newman, then I’ll tell you what: I’ll come out and sit with you; I don’t mind. I like a good read.”

  Margaret set her teeth. She had experienced on all too many previous occasions the thin, discontinuous prattle, the sucking noises, and the erratic blowing about of Amazing Pull-Out Bargain Offers all over the garden, which signified that Mavis was having a good read. Across the hall the door stood open to the summer day; that oblong of golden wallflower-scented warmth lured her like a glimpse of paradise; but now the paradise was tarnished. She felt like the Lord God trying to make Eve get the hell out of the Garden of Eden; but Margaret, of course, lacked the supernatural powers that had made it all so easy on that occasion. Low cunning would have to do instead.

  “Very well,” she replied, re-programming her afternoon to Mavis’ disadvantage with the speed of a computer. “You do that. Perhaps I’ll join you later on, but first, you know, I have a lot to get on with in the chicken runs, while the weather’s dry like this. No, not collecting eggs, Mavis—you may remember that, as I’ve told you many times, I don’t collect the eggs until the evening. But what you could do, since you’re so kindly offering to come with me, is to clean out all the muck underneath the chicken house itself. It’s a slatted floor, you know, so that everything drops through, and every few weeks I have to give it a thorough do. I’m afraid the floor’s rather stiff to pull out, and you have to be careful not to get splinters in your hands, you could get lockjaw. And then you’ll need the big barrow to take all the muck to the far end of the garden, it smells so….”

  It worked. You could see Mavis’ fear of the mysterious noises wilting fast. Very soon she was settled in a deck-chair outside the dining-room window, languidly filing her nails over a copy of Flair and Fashion, which kept slipping off her lap on to the brick paving whenever her attention wandered from its glossy pages for too long. Really, Margaret thought, Mavis seemed quite herself again this afternoon; that little fright must have done her good in some obscure way.

  And so soon Margaret, feeling as gay and mischievous as a child playing truant, was trundling the big barrow through the field, along the path trodden out over the years towards the chicken run. On either side the buttercups bent and swayed to the lumbering impact of the passing barrow, and then stood tall again in the sunshine, unharmed, and firm as little trees, after it had passed on.

  Margaret set it down a few feet from the chicken house, and then began the main part of her task. Everything she had told Mavis was, in fact, true; the ground under the slatted floor was due for cleaning; the floor itself was as awkward and splintery as could be; and as she tugged and twisted at it, working it free, she cursed, as always, the day when she had been persuaded to install it instead of an ordinary solid floor which could be cleaned in the ordinary way. She couldn’t remember now what had been the arguments in favour of the wretched thing. Were the hens supposed to like it better? She hoped they did; already they we
re gathering round her, inquisitive, idly expectant, as they always were when she came into the run. One by one they had left their earnest, self-absorbed little avocations in different parts of their domain, and were now converging upon Margaret, observing her struggles with little, soft, questioning sounds, their heads on one side, their eyes bright with that ‘Perhaps there’s something in it for me?’ look.

  And in the end, of course, there was. After Margaret had cleared away all the sour surface of the ground beneath the house, she got a fork, and proceeded to dig the rich, untouched soil beneath, exposing worms, centipedes, grubs of all sorts to the dozen greedy, joyful beaks whose owners had crowded in out of the sunshine for the kill. Margaret’s back was aching by now, bent nearly double in this cramped space, but still she went on digging joyfully, loving to watch the greedy excitement of her flock at each fresh upheaval of her fork. She couldn’t be bothered to feel sorry for the worms; to die so swiftly, and to provide so much happiness in the moment of passing, was surely not a fate to be mourned.

  Poor Claribel, with her new-hatched family, was missing it all, of course. You could see her, in her special little enclosure outside the main run, flustering back and forth against the dividing wire, clucking vainly to her babies the news of the forbidden treat, stretching her neck this way and that to find a way out. Margaret did not dare let her back into the run with the others, of course, not while her babies were so small, so instead she carried a freshly dug clod of earth over to the frantic bird, and set it, swarming with unseen titbits, in her little domain. Clucking, happy, beady-eyed, Claribel set herself to comb it for suitable morsels for her brood.

  And now, once again, just as it always happened, year after year, Margaret found herself standing enchanted, like a worshipper, in the presence of one of the wonders of the world.