Prisoner's Base (17 page)

“You can’t expect Granny to understand as
I
understand,” Mummy was explaining benignly, “but I mean to have a little talk with her, and I can promise you that from now on you will be allowed to play your game as much as ever you like, anywhere, at any time, and no matter
who’s
listening! No one is going to say it is naughty, or try to stop you playing it. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mummy. Thank you.”

Helen hung her head, so that her mother should not see the slow, painful tears. The permission just granted was futile,
useless
, relevant to nothing; for Helen knew already that they would never play their game again. Never again, through all the long summers that were to come, through all the vista of the years, with leaves, and fruit, and blossom coming and going on the old apple tree, would she and Sandra sit together among the benign old boughs and Blow up the World.

A stirring of sound, a swish of footsteps through the long grass, roused Helen from her reverie. Sandra must have located her without the usual exchange of whistles; eagerly she rolled over and raised her head with a welcoming, conspiratorial grin.

But it was Maurice who was looking down at her, his eyes like blue slits against the bright afternoon. The smile that had been for Sandra was suddenly shocking, like wearing a bathing dress for an interview with the head-mistress. Appalled, Helen swiftly changed her expression to one of distant politeness.

“Hullo,” she said cautiously. “I thought you were Sandra.” Let him at least understand that that appalling unguarded smile hadn’t been meant for him.

But now she realised that he had never noticed it; was
listening
to nothing of what she was saying. He was staring down at her with an obsessed, unseeing look which somehow wiped out all her feelings of embarrassment; they were replaced, instead, by a tiny flicker of fear.

His first words took her utterly by surprise.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he burst out. “Why are you hiding here—spying on me?”

“I’m not! I didn’t—! What on earth are you talking about?” Helen sat bolt upright, scared and indignant: and now, to her inexpressible relief, she saw the grey and white zigzags of Sandra’s new summer dress flashing between the currant bushes in the garden just beyond the gate.

“Sandra!” she cried joyously “Sandra! I’m here! I’m in the field! Here!”

She kept up the shouting and waving far more assiduously than was necessary partly in order to make her friend hurry, and partly to avert the necessity for further conversation with Maurice until Sandra had joined them and made everything seem all right and ordinary again.

Always Sandra could do this. It was a gift, Helen often felt, greater than wit, or beauty, or brains; and it did not fail them now. Within less than a minute of her arrival, the three of them were sitting in a companionable little circle, talking about food. The food they liked, and the food they didn’t like, and in
particular
the mince that had appeared for school dinner
practically
every Monday this term.

“I’m sure it’s worse than anything you ever had in prison, Maurice,” declared Sandra provocatively. “Bread and water would be
nectar
in comparison!”

Helen had often envied Sandra her ability to talk so easily and unselfconsciously to Maurice about his criminal past. She was almost as good at it as Claudia herself, and it was certainly an unfailing recipe for putting him in a good mood. His strange, sombre look had vanished completely, and he answered Sandra with boyish zest:

“Bread and water?” He laughed at her good-humouredly. “That’s not what you get in modern prisons! At least, only in Punishment Block, and, believe me, I wasn’t daft enough to get myself in
there
very often. Only once, in fact, and then it wasn’t really my own doing. There was this chap, you see, and he’d got himself mixed up with a couple of other blokes who were smuggling cigarettes; and so when he and another fellow, this first fellow’s pal—”

“Maurice! You make my head go round, you really do, with all these chaps and fellows and blokes! Can’t you give them
their names? We can never make out who was which, can we, Helen, in half your stories!”

“O.K.,” said Maurice obligingly. “Tom, Dick and Harry, then. Dick and Harry were—”

“No, what were they
really
called?” persisted Sandra. “And”—a new idea suddenly occured to her—“what did they call
you
? Don’t tell me they called you ‘Maurice’!” Her shrill cackle of schoolgirl laughter brought a sudden frown to his face.

“Well? And why not? What’s wrong with it?” he asked sharply: and Sandra hastened to quell her merriment and explain.

“Oh—I don’t know. It’s just funny, that’s all, it’s not
like
a criminal’s name, now is it? Criminals are called things like Jake, or Pete, or Dodger…. Not
Maurice
…!” and again she relapsed into helpless giggles. “It’s all wrong, Maurice, it really is,” she resumed her teasing. “You don’t
look
like a criminal either, if you don’t mind my saying so. The way you talk, too—the way you say things like ‘O.K.’ and ‘Righty Oh’. Whoever heard of a murderer saying ‘Righty Oh’! I don’t believe you’re a murderer at all, Maurice! I think you’re just pretending!”

Maurice had gone deathly white. The blue slits of eyes fastened themselves on Sandra until the teasing words faltered on her lips, and all the giggling drained out of her.

“And why the hell else would they have shut me up for seven years?” he lashed back at her, the words darting from his lips like a whiplash, like a striking snake: and before the startled girls could say another word, he was on his feet, he had left them, an undersized, somehow venomous figure striding,
stumbling
, and finally running out of the field and out of their sight.

For nearly a minute Helen would not look at her friend. She stared down at the crushed grass praying to herself: let Sandra not be as frightened as I am: everything will be all right, so long as Sandra isn’t frightened too.

And sure enough, Sandra wasn’t.

“Well, gosh, he’s a proper nut-case, isn’t he!” she observed respectfully; and somehow, within a minute, they were both blessedly giggling about Maurice and his weirdities. And about Mavis, too, and about all the other Poor Things, the whole
hilarious
procession of them, past, present, and to come. The whole silly, comical world seemed at this moment to be spread out
before
them in the golden afternoon sunshine like an amusing story book, for the exclusive delectation of Sandra and of Helen.

“W
HY
DON
’
T
YOU
ever use that egg-separator I bought you?”

Margaret was just cracking her second egg as Claudia spoke, expertly running the white through her fingers into the basin while retaining the yolk in her hand; and whether it was the irritation she felt at the interruption, or whether it was sheer, devilish bad luck—it had to be
this
yolk that suddenly broke in her hand. Faint but irrevocable streaks of yellow slid through with the egg-white into the bowl awaiting whisking; and Margaret could have flung the whole thing across the room, so great was her annoyance and humiliation. A hundred times—a thousand—had she separated eggs by this old and trusty method, and it had to be now, under her daughter’s censorious gaze, that it should fail her.

“There you are, you see!” moralised Claudia “If only you wouldn’t be so prejudiced, Mother—if only you’d
try
these labour-saving devices sometimes—”

“The only labour-saving device I’d welcome would be one that prevented people hanging about in my kitchen, distracting me, when I’m trying to cook!” snapped Margaret. “What’s the matter with you, Claudia? Anyone would think you were five years old, hanging about pestering like this. Do you want to lick the basin, or something?”

“Now, now, Mother. Relax! There’s nothing to get so hot and bothered about! Why all these elaborate preparations, anyway, just for one schoolboy? Anyone would think you were preparing a dinner party for royalty!”

“I’m only making a meringue top for the tarts,” retorted Margaret. “There couldn’t be anything simpler than meringue—or cheaper, either, since we have unlimited supplies of our own eggs.”

Margaret could never resist these little opportunities for harmless boasting about her well-managed flock; but on this occasion it was a mistake. Ever since the still-unresolved dispute about the fate of the field, Claudia had become as sensitised to this sort of topic as an asthmatic to cats or horsehair.

“Cheaper!” she jeered “Do you realise those eggs are costing us roughly nine shillings each? Twelve hens, occupying a field
worth eight thousand pounds, and each laying say a hundred eggs a year—”

“Rubbish! You know as well as I do that you can’t calculate things that way. If you did, you’d never be able to afford to get dressed in the morning, with your time worth fifteen shillings an hour! Twenty minutes every morning at that price —think what it would come to by the end of the year! And in any case, the hens lay far more than a hundred eggs each in a year—even my poorest layers produce nearly two hundred. Those birds have paid for themselves over and over again. If you like, I’ll show you my egg-books—”

“Please, Mother! At least spare us that!” groaned Claudia. “If there’s one thing more awful than arguing with you, Mother, about this poultry-complex of yours, it’s going over your
egg-books
. And if anything was needed to prove that the whole thing is just an obsessional neurosis, those books of yours would do the trick! All set out in red and black ink, and lines ruled with a ruler, and never a mistake in the addition during
twenty-five
years! If a school-child turned in a piece of work as
obsessionally
correct as that, he’d find himself in a child-guidance clinic!”

“I should hope so!” retorted Margaret. “Still at school after twenty-five years, there’d certainly be something the matter with him! Now, do, please, Claudia, take yourself off out of my kitchen and let me get on. Anybody would think it was
your
young man coming tonight, not Helen’s.
She’s
not hanging about fussing and bothering me like this.”

“No.” For a moment Claudia seemed almost nervous, and Margaret suddenly realised that her daughter’s uneasy presence in the kitchen had not been fortuitous; she had come there with a purpose, and was even now nerving herself to accomplish it.

Margaret waited; meanwhile she separated and whisked up a fresh bowl of egg-white—the first lot and their yolks she set on one side for scrambled egg in the morning.

“Listen, Mother,” Claudia blurted out at last. “You won’t—will you—do anything to spoil this evening for Helen? We want her to make friends, don’t we, like other girls of her age.
Real
friends. Remember, things are different from when you were young …”

“If you’re trying to soften me up, Claudia,” interrupted
Margaret tartly, “so as to get me to promise to go to bed and leave Helen and this young man alone downstairs for just as long as ever they please, then the answer is no. It isn’t even what Helen wants, I happen to know—”

“Does it never occur to you that Helen mightn’t tell you everything that’s in her mind?” retorted Claudia. “Even I, her mother, don’t expect her to tell me
everything.
Her feelings about Clive are very special, private feelings.”

They were indeed: Margaret could almost feel them herself, pulse for pulse, as her granddaughter suffered them right now, sitting all dressed and ready up there at her bedroom window. First the fear that perhaps, after all this preparation, he wouldn’t come: then the fear that perhaps he would. Then the fear that the family wouldn’t like him—it was all right for
Helen
not to like him, but that was quite different. Then
suppose
he should stay too late, and she wouldn’t know what to do with him? Or suppose he should go too early, and her mother would be shocked? And lastly, worse than all the rest, there was the fear that it would be discovered that Clive had never, so far, attempted to kiss her goodnight. Tonight he would actually be
seen
not attempting it, by the whole household—perhaps even by Claudia herself! Better by far that it should seem that he had been deterred only by the stern presence of the grandmother….

“No, I definitely mean to stay up until he goes,” Margaret affirmed. “I’m sure he’ll expect it—they’ll both expect it. It would look very odd, his very first visit…”

The argument was cut short by a polite ring at the front door, and there followed a dreadful unrehearsed moment of paralysis, while Claudia waited for Helen to rush downstairs with lover-like eagerness, and Helen meanwhile lurked
ingloriously
in her bedroom waiting for her grandmother to cope: while Margaret, under Claudia’s eye, dared make no move that might look like forestalling love’s young dream in this moment of reunion.

In the end, everyone took action at once; and soon Clive was in the drawing-room, safely introduced to everybody, and listening somewhat dazedly to Claudia’s apologetic and slightly over-emphatic account of how immediately she had to go out and how very late it would be before she could be back; while Helen hovered quaveringly in the background, looking,
Margaret thought, like a little ghost; one that had departed this mortal life while saying ‘cheese!’ into a camera, and had got stuck that way for all eternity.

Once they were sitting down to the meal, things began to go a little better. Clive was most appreciative of both the roast lamb and the meringue tarts, and quite won Margaret’s heart by his enthusiasm for second helpings of both. He wasn’t bad looking, either, she decided, with some surprise. After listening to Helen’s despondent accounts of him all these weeks, she had been expecting to see a little runt of a fellow, stoop-shouldered and spotty. And now here was a pleasant, fresh-faced youth, of average build and bearing, and with an endearing mop of reddish hair. Was
this
what was meant by a ‘weed’ nowadays? Fancy belonging to a generation that could afford to be so choosy, she reflected enviously, looking back on the man-starved twenties in which she had grown up. Clive would have been accounted quite a prize in those days, conversation or no conversation.

And at least he was doing his best; and so was Helen. Although neither of the young people seemed capable of
addressing
a remark of the smallest interest to one another, they were both pathetically grateful for every crumb of small-talk that Margaret could offer; they seized on each topic in turn, worried at it, and then turned trustfully to her for another one. It was like throwing buns to the bears at the zoo.

Mavis, of course, was no use at all. She sat looking dull and preoccupied; if anyone addressed a remark to her she started, as if they had thrown a pellet of bread, answered briefly and confusedly, and then lapsed once more into her musings.

Margaret began to feel cross. Admittedly one hadn’t expected Mavis to be the life and soul of the party, scintillating with wit and amusing stories; but surely she could say
something
? It didn’t have to be anything sensible—the sort of senseless prattle she kept up all the time when she shared Margaret’s solitary lunches would have done perfectly well.

“Mavis,” she murmured when the meal was at an end, and the young ones were moving towards the door, “what’s the matter with you—are you tired? Can’t you brighten up a bit—or do you want to go off to bed?”

Mavis took this solicitous enquiry as the threat that it was
meant to be: pull your weight or get out. Her eyes widened in dismay.

“Oh, Mrs Newman, I’m sorry. I know I’m being rather dull, but you see—” She stopped. “I’ll try, though; I really will!” She put on a bright, forced smile. “What do you want me to do?”

“Well—talk, of course,” Margaret told her. “
Say
something!” She glanced round to make sure that Helen and Clive had indeed left the room, and then went on:

“Can’t you see how sticky it is—this party? They’re so shy and hopeless, both of them—but
you’re
a grown woman, surely you could help me a bit to keep things going?”

“I’ll try,” agreed Mavis contritely. “But what am I to talk
about
? I don’t know what boys that age are interested in.”

“Just
anything
!” Margaret urged her. “Anything at all. Whatever you usually talk about.”

What
did
Mavis usually talk about? The weather? The whereabouts of the scarf she thought she had left on the hall table? Lamentations about how she couldn’t do a thing with her hair? She couldn’t either, Margaret reflected sombrely. The lank, limp locks on which so much fruitless endeavour was expended were looking worse than ever.

“Tell them about Eddie!” she suggested, with sudden,
despairing
inspiration. “Never mind whether they’re interested—just
tell
them!” and with these cavalier instructions she shoo-ed Mavis after the other two into the drawing-room, and returned herself to the kitchen.

And Mavis did exactly as she was told. When Margaret rejoined them, she found a surprised but by no means
uninterested
Clive listening to an account of how unfair the history master had been about Eddie’s essay on Thomas à Becket three weeks ago; and how the games master didn’t allow for the fact that Eddie was only nine and three-quarters, whereas most of the boys in the class were already ten; and didn’t Clive think it wrong that a boy should be forced to go to church twice on Sundays when his mother was an atheist?

It had never occurred to Margaret that Mavis’ bottomless ignorance of religious matters could be dignified by such a title; but Clive took it all very seriously, and backed up her point of view with quite touching vehemence; though his ensuing attempt to lead her into a discussion of Christianity in the
modern world proved somewhat abortive. All she could
contribute
to the argument was that their vicar at home only used to preach on alternate Sundays. He used to grow dahlias, too, but always had a lot of trouble with earwigs. She had an aunt, she added, who also used to grow dahlias, but whether she, too, had trouble with earwigs or not she, Mavis, could not say.

But at this point Helen, too, seemed to recover the power of speech, and threw out a shy, excited little opinion about school prayers—and from then on, the evening was saved. Religion, life-after-death, D. H. Lawrence, character-reading from
handwriting
—Margaret, dispensing coffee and tiny macaroon
biscuits
, felt as proud as any theatrical producer watching a
successful
first night from the wings.

And it was all thanks to Mavis, really. Amazing.

It was past eleven before the conversation began to flag, and Clive, glancing at the clock, began to say, Well I suppose…. Margaret supposed so too, and since the visitor did not seem to know what further steps to take to bring about his own departure, she helped him on his way by pointing out that the last bus passed the bottom of the road at twenty past eleven.

The goodbyes were cordial on both sides; and Margaret deliberately kept herself in grandmotherly evidence throughout, so that Clive’s non-kissing of Helen should seem to be due not to cowardly incompetence on his part, nor to childish lack of allure on hers, but simply to the exigencies of the situation.

“What did you think of him, Granny? Did you think he was terribly wet?”

Bright-eyed and anxious, Helen drank in eagerly Margaret’s assurances: that yes, she did like him: that he seemed a very nice boy, quite intelligent, and not nearly as unattractive as Helen had given her to understand.

“Yes—he really doesn’t seem so bad, now, does he?” ventured Helen. “He wasn’t nearly so boring this evening as he usually is. I wish he could be like that when we go to the Wimpy Bar—”

“Who was that man? What has he been telling you?”

Without warning, Maurice was suddenly there, in front of them—darting in out of the darkness like a stray cat, just as Margaret was shutting the front door. He stood now in the hall, blinking, screwing up his eyes against the light as though he had been long in darkness. Had he been lurking in the laurels by the front door, or what? There had been no sign of him coming
up the path, or round the corner of the house. He had just simply appeared.

“Really, Maurice! What in the world do you mean? That was just a friend of my granddaughter’s—”

“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.” Maurice had the obsessed, blank look of one who simply cannot take in words or events that have no bearing on the thing that fills his mind. “It wasn’t anything to do with me, then? He wasn’t saying anything about me?”