Prisoner's Base (15 page)

“And so really,” Claudia concluded, “this dream of yours is a very encouraging sign. It means that your repressed
guilt-feelings
have broken through into consciousness at last, and from now on you will be able to face them
consciously,
instead of disguising them in the form of an imaginary fear of Maurice. I always knew there was something irrational about that fear. Don’t you see?”

Mavis did; and so, for that matter, did Margaret. She saw that Mavis had succeeded triumphantly in drawing back
everyone
’s attention on to herself; Mavis’ precarious psychic state was once more reinstated on its pedestal at the centre of the household.

The only problem now remaining was that of persuading Mavis to go back to bed. It was nearly three o’clock by now, and Margaret, for one, had no wish to spend the remaining hours of the night listening to any more of Mavis’ guilt-feelings breaking through into consciousness; nor did she wish to lie listening to the muffled highlights of this process chirruping up
intermittently
through her bedroom floor, which was what would certainly happen if she simply went away and left them to it.

“Come along, Mavis,” she kept urging. “You’ll feel better if you can get some sleep”: or “We mustn’t keep Claudia up like this, you know; she leads a very busy life.”

This last, of course, was worse than useless; it simply
provoked
Claudia to an impassioned exposition of her
imperviousness
to such ordinary human weaknesses as needing sleep: while Mavis, with that iron obstinacy of the weak for which one never quite learns to prepare, flatly refused to stir. Nothing, she declared, absolutely nothing, would induce her to set foot again that night in her own room—the room where she had suffered the nightmare. She would not: she could not: “The dream would all come over me again, I know it would!” she pleaded; and in the end there was nothing to do but give in.

“Well—would you be happier in
another
room?” Margaret suggested at last, in desperation. “Shall we make you up a bed on the couch in the dining-room? Just for tonight, I mean,” she appended threateningly. “We’re not having this sort of
nonsense
every
night, I’m telling you now!”

“Oh, Mrs Newman! Oh, thank you! I think I shan’t be scared—hardly at all—now. Not in the dining-room. I really do feel better now, you see; it’s just the thought of my own room—the same room where I had the dream. It sort of clings there, a dream like that. Do you know how I mean?”

I do indeed, thought Margaret disagreeably. You mean you’ve thought up a marvellous new dodge for keeping everybody
fussing
over you all night. First Claudia ministering to your
guilt-feelings
; and now me running after you with blankets and hot-water bottles!

“Well, at least you could come and help me get the couch ready,” she said aloud, and not very graciously; and Mavis followed her meekly upstairs to the chest where spare blankets were stored. Together they collected a sufficient pile of bedding and carted it downstairs. Thus laden, Margaret fumbled at the dining-room door.

“Open it for me, will you, Mavis?” she urged her less-heavily laden companion; and Mavis obeyed, clumsily.

“And the light—put on the light as well,” Margaret
admonished
her irritably; and Mavis did so.

Her screams were like nothing Margaret had ever heard before. They seemed hardly human—without words—beyond all sense or reason.

Or so it seemed. But now, peering round the panic-stricken girl, Margaret could see the sense and the reason. For there, at the bare, polished table, staring in front of him into what, until this moment, had been total darkness, sat Maurice.

“B
UT
M
OTHER
—
CAN
’
T
you understand? He’s a
poet
! Poets do do that sort of thing.”

Claudia spoke wearily. In spite of her brave claims last night, she was not, after all, as immune to the effects of broken sleep as she had supposed, and this morning she was feeling depressed and tired. She had not been able to get to sleep again after all the disturbance till past five, and by then, with light and
bird-song
already tormenting her through the cracks in the curtains, her sleep had been fitful and restless, and she had woken
unrefreshed
, and with an odd sense of foreboding.

Or was it simply that today was her day off from the office? Always on her free day Claudia was aware of a slight lowering of her spirits, a sort of drooping of vitality, which started with getting up at half past eight instead of half past seven, and
grew slowly worse as the day wore on. Often she assured herself that this unpleasant feeling meant that she was relaxing; and this thought always made her feel a little better. For the ability to relax was well known to be a rare and precious gift in this hurried age, and so naturally Claudia was pleased to be the possessor of it. All the same, it wasn’t exactly an enjoyable
feeling
; and as she lay in bed on these free mornings, her alarm clock silent—and its silence seemed, sometimes, like that of an old friend refusing to speak to her—she was accustomed to contemplate the relaxation of the day ahead rather as a
tight-wire
walker must contemplate the sagging of his wire; far from making things easier, it demands of him a new and
terrifying
range of skills.

Also, Claudia reflected, a free day meant that you couldn’t get
away
from anything. If only she had been able, this morning, to dash into the garage and be off and away in her car
immediately
after breakfast, as she did on all other mornings, then this wearisome wrangle with Mother would never have got under way—Mother and Mavis would have worked off their silly nerviness on one another in the course of the day, and Claudia need not have got involved at all. It was unfair that they should both go
on
at her like this; surely she had given them full measure last night of comfort and advice? Claudia realised that she hated people’s worries to be still there the next morning; the evening was the time for problems—long leisurely evenings stretching with black coffee and intimate confidences far into the night. Half past nine on a cool, drizzly morning was as inappropriate for anxiety as it was for love. Mother had no sense of this sort of appropriateness, of course; and on top of everything else, she was ironing while she talked, which she must surely know to be irritating, squeak, squeak, squeak from the protesting wood as she leaned her weight on it.

Claudia yawned, suppressed her irritation, and tried again:

“Most of the great poets did their best work at night,” she pointed out. ‘The imagination is well known to be at its most vivid between midnight and three in the morning. And in Maurice’s case—”

“In Maurice’s case, we don’t know if he’s a poet at all, let alone a
great
poet,” Margaret pointed out tartly. “How do you know, Claudia, that all this poetry business isn’t faked—just a blind, to distract your attention from whatever it is he has
really
come here for? He
says
he has written all these hundreds of poems—have you ever seen them? With your own eyes?”

“Well—honestly, Mother, considering I’ve
typed
them for him—”

“How many of them, eh? Six? A dozen? I’ve listened to that typing of yours, my good girl, and all I can say is, if you’ve ever typed as many as four lines consecutively before the
jabber-jabber
starts, I’ll—”

“Oh, Mother, don’t be silly. Stop it. You don’t know anything about it.” Claudia leaned her aching head on her hand. She felt too tired to argue, or even to work out in her own mind how much foundation there might be for these aspersions. “He
is
a poet, and there’s an end to it,” she declared flatly. “He just simply is. Not a
published
one yet, but that will come—I’m trying to help him about that right now. He deserves it. Look at his persistence! Night after night he reads his verses aloud to me—”

“And night after night you sit there waiting for him to stop! All the time, you’re just watching for a chance to interrupt, and get him talking about something more interesting! Not that I blame you, my dear, I feel just the same myself. I think they’re the most dreadful, boring, incomprehensible poems I’ve ever heard in my whole life, and believe me, that’s saying something. Remember, young men wrote bad poetry in
my
day, too; but at least we didn’t
encourage
them.”

“And so?” enquired Claudia coolly, observing that her mother had somewhat lost the thread of her accusations. “And how does all this prove that Maurice isn’t a genuine poet?”

“Oh. Well. Yes. What I mean is, you have no evidence that he
is.
He reads out this stuff to you every evening—sometimes to all of us; and you don’t listen, and I don’t listen, and I’m very sure that Helen doesn’t listen. It might be the same poems over and over again for all we know. I’m sure I wouldn’t notice, and I don’t believe you would, either!”

“Speak for yourself,” said Claudia crossly, wishing, uneasily, that she could remember one single line of all Maurice’s works, one single poetic idea, with which to refute all this.

“But in any case,” she continued, evading the issue, “all this is surely irrelevant? Even if Maurice’s poems
weren’t
good—and I’m quite certain they are—but even if they weren’t, would
that make it a crime for him to try to write them at night? Would it?”

“Yes, it would!” affirmed Margaret roundly. “Only a genius —an accepted, recognised genius—has any right to such
disorderly
, inconsiderate habits! Sitting up all night, indeed! And in someone else’s house, too—it’s downright bad manners! And then frightening Mavis out of her wits like that! Goodness knows she’s nervy enough at the best of times, without things like that happening to her!”

“But nothing ‘happened’ to her!” Claudia pointed out
impatiently
. “Maurice didn’t do one single thing, now did he? Really, the whole episode had nothing to do with him at all. As I explained last night, it isn’t
Maurice
that Mavis is afraid of, it’s herself, her own inner guilt feelings. Maurice is just the peg she hangs it on—but that’s not
his
fault. All he was doing was sitting there, writing poetry—”

“He wasn’t!” Margaret interrupted belligerently “He wasn’t writing anything. It was pitch dark. He had no pen or paper. I tell you, he was doing
nothing
!”

“You mean it
looked
like nothing, to
you.
But how do you know what was going on inside his head—what ideas he was formulating?”

“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!”