Prisoner's Base (13 page)

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.

For they were still not three days old, these nine survivors of
Claribel’s clutch of twelve eggs. Survivors? How misleading, how inadequate a word for those tiny, golden distillations of life, the pressures of new growth concentrated within them like the pressures at the centre of the sun. Fluffy as thistledown;
immortal
as the Old Masters; the proud originals of all the Easter cards that ever were, they moved as conquerors, in tiny erratic triumph, through the towering blades of grass. As she stood there, leaning against the henhouse, Margaret felt the stored heat of creosoted wood beating up against her spine: and it was the stored heat of so many afternoons, just like this one, back, back over the years. Always like this, the deep, sun-soaked wood, the soft, questioning, clucking of the hens, generation after generation of them, yet always the same; and the immortal, new-hatched chickens, cheeping away cheekily at the eternal heart of life.

“Why, aren’t they pretty! Aren’t they ducky! Tweet-
tweet-tweet
, then, there’s a boy….”

Mavis’ meagre figure, clad still in winter wool, was suddenly interposed between Margaret and the baby chickens, and for a moment Margaret felt as if the sky had fallen, just as it so nearly did on Chicken-Licken in the story. But this apocalyptic sensation, she quickly realised, was only the effort of readjusting her soul for communion with Mavis—who had evidently
calculated
that the heavy work would be done by now, and she could safely come out and offer to Help with Something, for the sake of company.

“Tweet-tweet-tweet,” Mavis repeated doggedly, when
Margaret
still did not speak. “Tweetums, then! Good boy!” Inanely, she was now poking a blade of grass through the wire into the already grass-filled enclosure.

Margaret roused herself.

“Don’t!” she said ungraciously. “Don’t do that, you’re frightening them. What is it? What have you come for? Am I wanted on the telephone or something?”

“No. Oh no.” Mavis looked vague, as if racking her brains to think what she
had
come for. “No. I—I just wondered if
anyone
was making tea, you know. It’s gone four. I wondered if I could give you a hand, or anything.”

“No, I’ve just exactly finished, as I daresay you’ve noticed,” said Margaret crisply. “I’ve cleaned the ground thoroughly and I’ve scrubbed the slats—see how clean and tidy it looks
now!” With justifiable pride, she directed Mavis’ gaze towards the interior of the newly cleaned house.

“Goodness! Has that taken you all afternoon?” exclaimed Mavis staring vacantly, and in total ignorance of what had been involved, through the henhouse window. “My goodness, though, they are a lot of work, aren’t they, one thing and another? I wonder you don’t get fed up with it, I know I would.” Mavis, in her desire for companionship, was waxing quite sympathetic on Margaret’s behalf over these imagined ills. “I expect it’ll be a relief to you, won’t it, when the field’s sold and off your hands next month. Will they be buying the
chickabiddies
with it, or are you going to get rid of them separately?”

Margaret felt the blood draining away from her face—her limbs—even from her mind, and storing itself up, concentrating itself, in some savage, unfamiliar centre deep in her vitals.

“What—what do you mean?” she half whispered. “Sold next month …? What do you mean?”

“Why, didn’t you know? I thought—that is—Claudia said …” and only now did the realisation of the hugeness of the brick she had dropped seem to dawn on Mavis;
comprehension
spread over her face in a series of little jerks and
flutters
, almost as if she was crying. “Oh dear! Oh my! Oh, I’m sorry—I suppose I shouldn’t … Oh, Mrs Newman, where are you going? Oh—”

But already Margaret was almost out of hearing, pounding blindly, planlessly, towards the house.

“Claudia,” she gasped, hoarse, out of breath, in scarcely more than a whisper; and then, more strongly: “Claudia!
Claudia
! Where are you?
Claudia
!”

A
S SOON AS
Helen came home that evening, she knew that something had happened. It was nearly seven o’clock, yet there was no appetising smell coming from the kitchen; no familiar, inviting clink of saucepan lids and colanders to indicate that Granny was bustling comfortably about in her flowered overall, prodding potatoes, dishing up greens, getting the family meal, hot and welcoming, on to the table. Just to make sure—although
she could already feel the emptiness within—Helen pushed open the kitchen door, and stared at the bare table, the cold, lifeless cooker, and the scrubbed draining-boards. Where was Granny? Where was everybody? Helen was dismayed by her own
dismay
; she had never realised till this moment how much she relied on the fixed routines of her home—had never realised, indeed, how fixed they were. She would have said, if asked, that there
were
no routines; that her home was a thoroughly disorganised one, with Daddy away a lot, and odd people in and out all the time, and no one ever knowing who was going to be living here next. But the household must, all along, have had a core of stability that she had never noticed, never
questioned
; a stability that this evening, for the first time, and
unaccountably
, had been shaken.

“Granny? Mummy? Where are you?” The words were rising in Helen’s throat, poised on her tongue, all ready to be
discharged
in a hearty shout as soon as she came back into the hall; but something in the quality of the stillness silenced them. There was a tension in the house, a dreadful coiled spring of expectancy, that might be fearfully released by such careless, random shouting, echoing unchecked through the empty spaces of the stairs and passages.

And then, suddenly, as she stood there hesitating at the foot of the stairs, the drawing-room door burst open, and Granny hurried out.

“Oh,
Granny
!” cried Helen, in relief and surprise, “
there
you are! I thought …” But the words tumbled to a dead stop as she caught sight of her grandmother’s face. Its usual healthy rosiness, firmly criss-crossed with lines of frowning and of laughter, had changed to a blotchy red, flabby and swollen with crying,
Crying!
Granny!
And worse than all, she did not seem to notice that her granddaughter was there at all; she just hurried on, as if blind and deaf, right past Helen and out through the front door, without a word or a glance.

Helen stood aghast, too shocked either to call out or to try to follow; and as she stood there, Claudia, too, appeared at the drawing-room door. Even she was looking shaken, not quite her usual self; but her voice, when she spoke to Helen, was calm and confident as ever.

“Ah, Helen; there you are. I thought I heard you come in. Come in here, dear, a minute. I’ve got to talk to you.”

Slowly—almost unwillingly in spite of her frantic desire to comprehend—Helen followed her mother into the
drawing-room
and sat down, mechanically, in the chair, still warm, which her grandmother must have just vacated. Claudia sat opposite her, leaning forward solicitously, her expression smooth, and kind, and thoroughly prepared.

“I’m afraid, Helen,” she began, “that Granny has been rather upset this evening. She has very unfortunately come to hear of a piece of news that I was trying to protect her from … I’d hoped to be able to break it to her more gently … at some more suitable time…. Your grandmother isn’t as young as she once was, you see, Helen. She gets upset more easily….”

“But—what is it, Mummy? What’s happened?” Helen sat tense on the edge of her chair, braced for she knew not what. She wished her mother would stop studying her face so
carefully
; it made her feel as if she was already wearing a mask; already hiding her emotions, even before she knew what they were going to be.

“Well, dear, first of all let me say that I am going to talk to you quite, quite honestly, just as if you were a grown-up woman. You
are
a grown-up woman—you’re fifteen—and I’m sure you are going to be very, very sensible, and try to
understand
. It’s the field, Helen dear. Daddy and I have decided we will have to sell the field.”

Helen stared at her mother for a minute in total incredulity, while the meaning of the words slowly sank in.

“But you can’t!” she got out at last, hoarsely. “You
can’t
! It’s the
field
! It’s ours. We’ve always had it.”

“Now, darling!” Claudia interposed—kindly, bracing, but already with a gentle flicker of rebuke. “I’m trusting you to be sensible—to be really
grown-up
about all this. I know you love the field—we all love the field, but we have to be practical as well; and now that the new road is to be built along Haddow’s Bottom, it simply won’t be
practical
to keep the field as it is now. It will become building land once the road is there—very, very valuable building land. It will be worth eight thousand pounds, Helen; eight
thousand
! As I’ve been trying to explain to Granny, it would be mad to turn down such an offer just for the sake of her hens! What it would amount to would be that we’d be paying eight thousand pounds for a
dozen bedraggled hens! It just isn’t sane. You must see that, Helen, surely? Eight thousand pounds for twelve hens! More than six hundred pounds each! Think of it!”

Helen thought. Dazed, shocked, and baffled as she was, she still knew that there was a fallacy somewhere; knew, in a way, exactly what it was, but the words that would have shown it up escaped her.

“But it isn’t just the hens!” she protested feebly. How to explain what else it was? Even the hens weren’t just the hens; but how could such a fanciful paradox ever hope to survive the onslaughts of her mother’s cutting logic? “There’s the
buttercups
,” she floundered on. She was choking, almost drowning, under the weight of superior knowledge for which she could find no words. For she realised, wonderingly, that it was
ignorance
that made her mother calculate like this. Mummy simply didn’t know about that day in February each year, when the pale sunshine was suddenly strange with warmth, and you
discovered
a coltsfoot, the first of all the flowers, pushing up through the white winter grass. Nor had Mummy ever dawdled with Granny through the sparkling mornings, stockings wet with dew, naming the wild flowers in the hedges; the
cuckoo-pint
, the ragged robin, the wild geranium. She had never lain deep in summer grass, staring up into the heat and blueness of an endless afternoon; had never rushed, wild with wind, through the early November twilight, leaping from tuft to tuft across the bleached, quiescent ground. If only her mother had known about all this, then she and Helen together could perhaps have weighed it thoughtfully against the eight thousand pounds; they could have argued together over the toppling scales with some sort of sense and meaning. But her mother didn’t know; and unless Helen could tell her, now, she never would. Oh, for words, for words! Once again Helen groped despairingly into the whole rich treasury of the English language, and came up, once again, with nothing; with worse than nothing:

“But I’ve always played in it,” was all she could say; and it sounded like the grumbling of a spoilt child. It was no wonder that Mummy smiled in that awful, pitying, understanding way.

“Well, I know, dear; while you were a child it was very nice for you to have plenty of space to play in. I always liked to see you romping in the field with your friends, and having a good time. But, Helen, you’re not a child any more. It’s silly to
talk of ‘playing’ these days, now isn’t it? Silly, and irresponsible too. Because have you thought, Helen, how
selfish
it is, to keep all this space just for ourselves, when there are thousands of people needing homes? If we refuse to sell—if
everybody
who owns property alongside the new road refuses to sell—it will mean that about three thousand people will remain homeless who might otherwise have had houses or flats. Think of it, Helen.
Three
thousand
! Try to imagine it!”

Helen tried. She tried really hard, because she could see that what Mummy said was true; three thousand people
must
be more important than one little family of four—of two, really, for it was only herself and Granny who were going to mind. The happiness of two people set against that of three thousand —anyone could see that it was fifteen hundred times less
important
. So Helen tried, most earnestly, to imagine the homeless three thousand, to call them up before her mind’s eye; but all she could see was a greyish blur of skirts, and dim, belted coats. No faces, no colours, no arms or legs even, broke the dim vista of the three thousand. They had no voices; they were neither men nor women, neither old nor young. And it was to them, to this grey, speechless horde, that Granny was to be sacrificed: Granny, bustling out to her chickens on crisp winter mornings, cosseting them with hot, savoury mash: Granny in summer time, in her bright print dress, reading, basking, loving the buttercups and the sun: Granny in the autumn apple trees, sturdily balanced half way up the ladder; basket after basket of red apples stored lovingly away in the loft, not one allowed to bruise or fall under her deft, experienced hands. Granny with her
egg-book
and her careful records of her laying hens … Granny with her bottled damsons… Granny arranging violets in a little jar … Granny digging paths aggressively through the deep winter snow… and now, Granny crying. The shadowy three thousand faded in Helen’s mind, sank away out of sight with faint twitterings, like Homer’s Shades fluttering back into the Underworld. Helen, at least, would sacrifice to them no drop of real, live blood.

“You
can’t
sell it,” she repeated doggedly. “It’s Granny’s.”

She meant only that the field was Granny’s in some profound, spiritual sense; that it belonged, by right, to that member of the family who loved its every blade of grass, and whose life was illumined by the loving.

But she realised, as soon as she had spoken, that her words were also quite literally and prosaically true. The field
did
belong to her grandmother.

“So Granny has been telling you
her
side of it, has she?” said Claudia, frowning; and then, ignoring Helen’s bewildered disclaimer, she continued: “It was a little bit naughty of Granny if she’s given you the impression that the field is
exclusively
hers; because really, you know, it’s only true in a very legalistic sense. Strictly, it
is
her property, and so is the house; it was all left to her in your grandfather’s will. But the point is, Helen, that Daddy and I have been maintaining it for her all these years; every penny that’s been spent on repairs and
upkeep
has been spent by us. Not that we grudge it, not in the least; but you must see, surely, Helen, that this ought to give us—Daddy and me—some sort of say in what is to happen to the place. Legally, the property is in your grandmother’s name; but morally it belongs to all of us. Don’t you see?”

Helen did see; but somehow it didn’t seem to be relevant. Legally? Morally?—all this didn’t touch her argument at any point. How could she make her mother understand?

“But Granny
loves
the field,” she tried to explain … and then stopped, her whole soul seeming to cower back into itself; for now Mummy was laughing her little laugh; the one that meant that the thing you thought, and felt, and believed in, was about to be cut down to size.

“Darling, I do understand how you feel,” declared Claudia leaning forward and laying her hand tenderly on her daughter’s knee. “I know how fond you are of poor Granny, and I can understand that you feel you must stand up for her even when she is being unreasonable. But, Helen, don’t you think perhaps you’re being just a wee bit childish about it all? Because it
is
childish, you know, to allow yourself to be swayed by this rather sloppy type of sentimentality. You say Granny loves the field: but she doesn’t you know. Not really. She just feels sentimental about it. Old people are like that.”

“She isn’t! It’s not! Granny’s not like that! She does love it—she really does. You don’t understand….”

“Understand?” Claudia laughed her little laugh again. “But, Helen, that’s just the whole point—I
do
understand! I understand your grandmother, as a matter of fact, a great deal better than she understands herself! All this ‘love’ of fields and
hens and what-have-you isn’t love at all; it’s an inverted form of hate. Hatred of human beings often manifests itself as an obsessive love of animals and inanimate things,” continued Claudia, with the serene authority of one who allows no shred of evidence, either way, to sully the smooth contours of her conclusions.

“But Granny
doesn’t
hate human beings!” cried Helen. “She has lots of friends—she loves all of us! There’s hardly anyone she hates—”

“Ah, not
consciously,
of course not!” explained Claudia eagerly.
“Consciously,
she wouldn’t hurt a soul, I’m sure. But
unconsciously
—and you must remember, Helen, I’m not
criticising
your grandmother when I say this, I’m only feeling very, very sorry for her—
unconsciously
she’s crammed full of the most tremendous aggression and hostility. It comes out now and then in her manner—surely you must have noticed it?—and in the way she treats poor Mavis. That sort of thing. I’m not blaming her in the very least; on the contrary, the more I
understand
her the more I pity her. ‘To understand all is to forgive all’—that’s the motto, Helen, that I’ve always tried to live by.”

Helen listened drearily, making no more attempts to argue, to defend her grandmother. Her mother’s understanding, like a blank stone wall, seemed now to block every possible avenue of communication. Serious conversations with Mummy always seemed to go like this. Some lovely and undoubted truth would be dragged from Helen’s mind, to be examined, and turned this way and that beneath the microscope, and finally to be handed back to her at the end of the conversation twisted and shrunken, labelled with some strange and repellent name. And the title of this process was Understanding.