Prisoner's Base

by Celia Fremlin

  “I’d dislike extremely to know what was going on inside his head!” declared Margaret. “I’m sure it would all have been most unpleasant and distasteful. Sitting there in the dark like that! Frightening everybody! There’s something unhealthy about it, poet or no poet. There is, Claudia; I know it. And you know it too, really. Claudia, you must get rid of him. Find him somewhere else to go. I don’t mean you should be harsh with him or let him down in any way—but surely you could help him to find some more suitable lodgings? He wasn’t expecting to stay here for ever, was he, in any case?”

  “Of course not. Just for a few weeks—I told you! But don’t you understand—these few weeks are going to be the most important of his whole life—this is his one chance—his one and only chance—to regain his confidence in his fellow men—to feel himself trusted, welcomed, treated as an ordinary member of a family! If we turn him out now, all this will be destroyed, he will be right back where he started—back in a life of crime! And it will be we who will have driven him there! How will you feel with that on your conscience?”

  “Very relieved,” declared Margaret unrepentantly. “If it means that he goes away somewhere else. Whether he turns back to crime again or not is surely his responsibility, not mine. But in any case, Claudia, what makes you think that ours is the only home where he will be decently treated? There must be plenty of good-hearted landladies who would be willing to take him in—women whose menfolk aren’t away from home as much as Derek is, and who haven’t a young girl in the house to worry about—”

  “And you call that trusting him!” cried Claudia—though in fact her mother hadn’t—“He’d know at once why he was being sent away! And where do you propose to look for all these ‘good-hearted landladies’? Don’t you know how suspicious —how narrow-minded—how cowardly—people are? Damn it, you should know—you’re like that yourself—!”

  Claudia checked herself. She had not meant to quarrel with her mother over this—until such time as the business of the field was safely signed and sealed, she had planned to keep other disagreements to a minimum. But really Mother was going too far now, in her heartless indifference to Maurice’s plight. Claudia felt herself shaking with an anger which was somehow revivifying: her headache and her tiredness were suddenly gone, and she felt energy, in a furious flood, coursing through her veins. ‘Plenty of good-hearted landladies’ indeed! The outrageous implication of the words—namely, that there might be thousands of women just as broad-minded and courageous as Claudia herself—roused in her a sensation of such choking fury that for a few seconds she really could not speak. It was so unrealistic! So stupid! Stupidity was something Claudia had never been able to endure; it was potentially so dangerous, so destructive. Stupidity could be worse than wickedness in its effects; it was right to be outraged by it.

  “Nothing—nothing will persuade me to betray Maurice like that!” she managed to say at last; and was aware that she was speaking from her innermost heart. For the thought of letting him down now was truly intolerable to her: after such a volte-face she would never be able to look herself in the face again; or into the faces of her watching friends. How they would laugh and sneer behind her back at such a cracking of her courage! And suppose—dreadful thought—that Maurice then took refuge with one of them—with Miss Fergusson, perhaps, or with Daphne! And suppose that out of sheer exhibitionism his new protector was to put on a display of broadmindedness apparently exactly like Claudia’s own!—she wouldn’t put it past either Daphne or Miss Fergusson to play a trick like that: they were phonies, both of them. In their different ways they were both so alienated from their real selves, so unconscious of their true motives, that a deception of this kind would come horribly easily to them—they would not even be aware of being insincere; it would be self-deception, the most destructive deception of all.

  “I won’t send him away!” she repeated passionately. “Nothing can make me!”

  “Very well, Claudia. If you won’t, you won’t. I have no authority over you.” Margaret had laid down the iron and was speaking quietly. “But I think you may regret it, my dear, and sooner than you think. I know you are acting according to your principles; I know how you always want to help these unfortunate people—how you do help them—don’t think I don’t realise that. But I have the feeling that this time, Claudia, you have taken on something beyond you; you are moving into deeper waters than you quite understand. There is something not right about this young man—and I don’t mean just the fact of him being a criminal. It’s something else. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to know, but I would rather he was out of this house. That’s all.”

  “Well, of all the cruel, underhand accusations!” cried Claudia. “‘Something not right’ about him—what exactly do you mean? Why can’t you put it into plain words? If you like, I’ll tell you why you can’t—it’s because you have nothing concrete to say against him—nothing at all! That’s why you have to resort to these sort of spiteful insinuations—because you have nothing real to accuse him of, and you know it! Really, Mother, I’d never have believed it of you. Goodness knows we’ve had disagreements enough in our time, but they’ve always been straightforward and above board. I’ve never—never—known you to sink to a low sort of trick like this before.”

  “I’m sorry. I see I must have expressed myself badly.” Mother was not going to give an inch, you could tell; her obstinacy was terrifying. “But it’s difficult, Claudia, to know how to make you see the thing as I—as any ordinary person—would see it. You are all the time looking at Maurice as if he was a sort of toy—your toy, all new, and shiny and perfect. Yes, that’s just how you talk—as if being a murderer somehow made him perfect in all other respects. As if having this one big flaw in his character necessarily immunises him from having any others. In your eyes, he consists of saving graces, and nothing else. You won’t look at him as he really is. That’s what frightens me, Claudia; the way you deliberately shut your eyes to the odd things about him—the disturbing things…”

  “Such as?” Claudia was cool, hostile; and yet an uneasy worm of curiosity forced her to keep the conversation alive.

  “Well—” Margaret seemed to have difficulty in assembling her charges in coherent form. “Well, to start with, I don’t like the way he talks so freely about his crimes. It doesn’t seem natural. And he never displays any sign of feeling in the least bit ashamed of what he’s done; he—”

  “You mean you want him to feel guilty!” snapped back Claudia, on to it in a flash. “You want him to suffer—to be punished by his conscience as well as by society! The old, retributive idea of punishment—make the guilty one suffer, and suffer, and suffer! But don’t you see—it’s their feelings of inner guilt and inadequacy that drive people to crime in the first place—so where is the sense of forcing them to feel even more guilt afterwards? More guilt … more crime … in a vicious circle, for ever more—Is that what you want? It seems to me that Maurice’s freedom from guilt is a marvellous thing—a healthy thing! It’s one of the most hopeful signs you can possibly look for. Any psychiatrist would tell you!”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” Margaret contradicted her. “They wouldn’t dare tell me such rubbish, not at my age. They might to you, because you stick out your neck and ask for it—people who are prepared to believe nonsense will get told nonsense—it’s one of the laws of life. But I’m not just talking about guilt feelings in Maurice’s case—though I have to admit that, with me, a little more humility on his part wouldn’t come amiss; I can’t feel that all this boasting and bumptiousness is quite the appropriate demeanour for a young man in his position. But that isn’t what I mean. It’s something else. It’s—how can I put it?—it’s the way he tells the story of his crimes as if it was just that—a story. Unreal. Remote. Nothing to do with him.”

  “Well, I expect he does feel like that by now,” Claudia pointed out. “It was seven years ago, after all, and he’s naturally doing his best to put it all behind him, and to start a
n entirely new life. It seems natural to me that he should speak of that period of his life in a rather detached sort of way.”

  “But there is no need for him to speak of it at all,” Margaret pointed out. “Nobody asks him to. If he wants to dissociate himself from his past life, then surely the sensible thing to do would be to try to forget it: to think—and certainly to speak—as little as possible about it. That I could understand. But he doesn’t do that. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to recount his exploits in the greatest detail and with the utmost zest—and yet, all the time, it’s as if he felt no personal responsibility—no involvement—of any kind. He seems so untouched by it all, that’s what frightens me. All those years in prison—they should have affected him somehow—moulded him —for better or for worse, I wouldn’t know, but there should be something. It’s not right—it’s peculiar—for a person to remain so untouched—like a child, almost—after going through all that….”

  “In fact—you want him to suffer. That’s what you’re saying, Mother, all over again, only in different words. You don’t want him to have got away unscathed, that’s what it amounts to. It’s just the primitive notion of retribution again….”

  Claudia had scored her point; and yet somehow her victory in the battle of convictions failed to bring with it the usual glow of triumph. She watched her mother uneasily as, with closed lips, the older woman arranged the sleeve of Helen’s blouse carefully on the board, and, still without speaking, reached for the iron.

  “Isn’t it?” urged Claudia sharply. For some reason she wanted urgently to provoke Margaret to contradict—to defy—to plunge into the battle again with one of those familiar, acidulated, slightly off-centre come-backs which Claudia usually found so irritating. How she would have welcomed one of them now—but why? Why did it give her no satisfaction to have defeated her mother in argument thus completely—for it must, surely, be an awareness of complete defeat that was keeping Mother so silent?

  Claudia was aware of a strange uneasiness of the spirit; something unfamiliar, long forgotten; something she could hardly name.

  “Your attitude is simply punitive!” she cried; and she felt like a cat trying vainly to stir its victim to one more show of life after playing with it, carelessly, for too long. “You believe in retribution! … In punishment!”

  She flung the phrases like missiles, right at their target; yet Mother still did not answer. Plainly she had accepted her defeat, and had nothing more to say. Claudia was free, now, to deal with Maurice exactly as she chose.

  And now, suddenly, she knew the name of the uneasy, half familiar sensation that had been troubling her during the last minutes. It was Fear.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  DEEP IN THE summer grass, Helen lay staring up at the sky, and its blueness was framed all round by buttercups, tall, like forest trees. She had never noticed before how exactly like trees they were; with branches forking this way and that from the main stem, each ending in a gigantic flower. This, of course, was unlike any known tree—there are no trees anywhere, now, that bear at the end of each bough a vast, single flower, five feet across, and golden like the sun. But there could have been such trees once, brilliant among the coal-forests, battling with the tree-ferns for living space under the ancient sun. Almost, as she peered through the pale stems into the impenetrable jungle only a few inches away, Helen expected to feel the ground tremble beneath the ponderous stirring of some giant reptile uncoiling in the sun; to hear across the millennia the distant, unimaginable cry of the pterodactyl.

  Actually, of course, she was listening for Sandra. Any minute now Sandra would whistle their special whistle from the field gate, and then come bounding through the long grass to join Helen in her hiding place; and there, together, they would make plans about how Helen should cope with Clive’s visit this evening. Sandra, alas, wasn’t going to be able to stay until he came because of her piano lesson; but this only made her advice and moral support before-hand the more indispensable.

  For Clive, at last, had been invited to supper, just as Granny had advised; and with both Granny and Mavis there to help entertain him, it mightn’t be so very ghastly. Not nearly so bad, anyway, as going to that awful Wimpy Bar again, and racking one’s brains single-handed for a new topic of conversation. Not that Mavis would be much help; but at least she would be there, an extra person; and Granny, of course, would never let one down. She had promised that she would help entertain Clive as well as cooking a nice supper for him, and so this she would certainly do, bringing up one topic of conversation after another, unflaggingly, until something took root and flourished in the little gathering; or, if the worst came to the worst, until it was time for him to go home. And Mummy wouldn’t be there. Helen had carefully chosen a day when Claudia would be out at some meeting or other; and with any luck Maurice would be out too. So far, he always had been on Saturdays. Although Helen herself found Maurice’s conversation thrilling after a fashion, she felt overwhelmed with embarrassment at the thought of explaining him away to Clive. And embarrassed about her embarrassment, too, for ought she not to be at least as broad-minded as Mummy about it all? Each generation was supposed to be more broad-minded than the last, and Helen felt that by feeling as she did about Maurice, she was obscurely letting down the side.

  But what side? Which side was she really on? Why did Mummy’s kindness and sympathy so often give her this awful feeling? Because Mummy had really been awfully kind and nice about Clive being invited for just the evening when she, Claudia, wouldn’t be there; lots of mothers, Helen knew, would have been most put-out and offended at such an arrangement. But Claudia had seemed sincerely delighted to hear of the invitation, and had declared that she understood completely Helen’s wish to have her mother out of the way.

  “But of course, darling! Naturally you want to have him to yourself—and I promise I’ll keep right away the whole evening. I don’t mind how late he stays, I’ll just slip up to bed when I come in and leave you to it. Mavis must stay up in her room for the evening, and I’ll drop a hint to Granny, too—she doesn’t always think of these things for herself. She doesn’t really understand, you see, what it is to be young—how an evening like this, at your age, with your first boy friend, can be the most wonderful experience of your whole life.”

  After all this, of course, Helen hadn’t dared to mention to her mother that it had been specially arranged that Granny was to be present, the whole time; and she hoped, uneasily, that her mother would never find out. She wouldn’t be cross, exactly, but she would be surprised, in that awful, pitying way; and Helen would know that once again she had been a failure, a disappointment. And her failure would have been that most ignominious of all failures—the failure to feel wonderful feelings in a situation which demands them.

  And yet Helen did have wonderful feelings—a strange secret pride stirred in her now, as she gazed into the blueness of the summer sky, and felt herself once again in touch with a secret source of glory, of which her mother knew nothing. Could be told nothing, either, for it was bound up, somehow, with all the things that Claudia thought a normal young girl should be bored by: with school, with poetry learned by heart for homework, and with the thud of tennis balls on summer turf; with giggling schoolgirl friends, and the sense of the summer term still only just beginning…. As Helen lay there, happiness flooded in from every corner of the sky, she could feel it pressing in on her from all directions; more and more of it in an unimaginable overflowing…. Top in English … top in Greek … perhaps to be chosen as Viola in the school play … and added to all this, in almost manic prodigality, Fortune had thrown in as well the deep grass, and the buttercups, and Granny’s baby chickens cheeping; and over it all the sky, all that boundless blue, a fitting lid for Helen’s happiness.

  And in the midst of all this, here was Mummy thinking that the most wonderful experience in Helen’s life was going to be Clive’s dreadful visit this evening. She thought of his awkwardness, his paralysing inability to think of anyt
hing to say, and felt a familiar, terrible remoteness from her mother, like homesickness. She wished Sandra would come. Sandra had always been able to save her from this sort of feeling, as far back as she could remember; indeed, for so long had she and Helen been companions and playmates, far back into their childhood, that by now she was more like a sister than a friend. And yet it was the very fact that Sandra was not her sister—that Claudia was not her mother as well as Helen’s—it was this very fact that made her such a tower of strength when Mummy was being awful in this special way.

  The apple blossom had all fallen now, and Helen turned on her side to gaze beyond the tops of the grass and buttercups towards the two gnarled trees, where the tiny knobbly new fruits were just beginning to form. It was in the nearer of these trees, Helen remembered, in the worn, kindly crook of its old branches, that she and Sandra used so often to sit, long ago, and play Blow up the World. They blew it up with hydrogen bombs, of course, which you were always reading about in the papers, and at once it was gone, there was no one left anywhere; no houses, no people; nothing; just Sandra and Helen. And it was then, in this empty world, that the game really began.

  For, of course, the first thing they had to do was to build themselves a house each; even now, years later, Helen felt her heart beat faster as she recollected the delight of searching for building materials among the ruins of the world. Sometimes their tastes were simple and modest, and they would simply drag planks and joists and doors from the shattered houses of some nearby town, and reassemble them into a little hut in some sunny glade, with a stream tinkling through it, and berries nearby for the eating; but sometimes a savage architectural passion, akin to lust, would seize them, and they would piece together dwellings of fantastic splendour. Great oaken doors and marble pillars from the shattered mansions of the great they would drag, light as thistledown, across the jagged miles of ruins, and set them up afresh on their chosen site. Gorgeous fragments of stained glass, blue, and gold, and ruby red, they would pick out from the rubble of smashed cathedrals, and glue miraculously together to fit vast window-frames purloined from some broken palace. Once they even found the Marble Arch itself, lying miraculously intact across the ruined junction of Park Lane and Oxford Street; and they carried it home, effortlessly, on their shoulders, right across the ruins of London, and set it up as the portal of their newest and most glorious dwelling place. Oh, and the furnishing of these palaces! The carpets, and the cushions, and the dark, shining tables, that they dug up out of the ruins of Heal’s and Selfridges! And the tins of peaches, of apricots, of pineapples, that they found scattered along the deserted streets! Whole sweet shops they sometimes unearthed beneath the dust and broken bricks, filled with chocolates, and marsh-mallows, and jelly-babies. They found great hams, too, and sausages, and deep-frozen turkeys that only needed to be warmed up at their never-failing camp-fire, which burned brightly, and for ever, without ever scorching the flowers or the bright grass which grew, fresh and spring-like, to the very edges of the red-hot coals.