Prisoner's Base (5 page)

A sudden roar of laughter filled the room, and Claudia started upright in her chair. What on earth …? People were absolutely rocking in their seats … tears of laughter were in their eyes … and in the midst of it all, modest but a little pink, sat Miss Fergusson, clutching her precious manuscript, with becomingly downcast eyes, nursing her delight.

So it has been a
funny
poem, and a highly successful one at that! Claudia felt cheated, made a fool of; as if someone should have warned her that
this
one was going to be worth listening
to. How on earth could she have known, after all those others? However, she hastily put a smile on her face and laughed with the rest; and for the next two or three readings she even found herself listening a little, uneasily, for fear of missing something, and of being seen to miss it.

But of course there wasn’t anything else worth hearing; and her face must soon have settled back into its old expression, because here was her hostess whispering anxiously to her, under cover of a burst of general discussion: “I do hope you’re not too bored, Claudia? I feel awful having asked you to come since he hasn’t turned up. I feel such a fool, now, ever to have thought that he might …” and even as she spoke, the door of the sitting-room opened silently, and a slight, furtive figure sidled into the room.

T
HE FIRST THING
that startled Claudia was that he was so short; the second that he was so young. It was odd that she should be startled, because she had not, in fact, had any picture in her mind at all of Daphne’s intruder. Her imagination had been entirely engrossed by the picture of herself—talking to him, drawing him out, coping with the situation—while a shadowy audience looked on admiringly. But the man himself, she realised now, had not come into the picture at all as a visible presence. Tall or short—dark or fair—young or old—she simply hadn’t thought about it. And now here he astonishingly was—young, small, mousy-fair. All absolutely wrong.

Wrong for what? By what standard? Claudia abandoned introspection, and instead leaned forward to study the boy more intently as he slipped into a vacant chair quite close to her.

No, he wasn’t as young as all that, after all; not a boy at all, in fact. It had been the unlined, unused look of his smooth, pale face that had misled her; but she could see now, as the light from the standard lamp fell across his features, that this was not the smoothness of extreme youth. Rather it was the face of someone who has remained untouched, unaware, for too long; someone who has led so sheltered a life that no powerful emotions, no stresses, no anxieties, have ever come his way. Or
could it be, perhaps, the face of someone who had led so terrible a life that he has learned to
have
no emotions—to turn a blank, impassive front to the whole world? Something stirred in Claudia—some tiny, warm knot of feeling that she could not identify. She wanted to reach out across the intervening
persons
and touch his hand. Almost at the same time she became aware, disconcertingly, that the whole room was staring at the newcomer just as she was. Even the hostess, whose business it surely was to greet him in some way, seemed struck dumb like the rest. Clearly, it was Claudia who must save the situation.

“Hullo,” she said vivaciously, leaning across her unresisting neighbour in his direction “You’ve missed quite a bit of the reading, I’m afraid, but ….”

You would have thought, you really would, that Claudia’s presence of mind in being the first to open her mouth would have entitled her to at least a few words of conversation with the young man. But oh no; the moment that her voice had broken the paralysed silence for them—before she had
completed
so much as five words of her sentence—everyone else must needs break in; pushing, clamouring their way into the interchange like ducks after a crust of bread. Did he write much poetry? What was his name? He’d been here before, hadn’t he? Was he living in the neighbourhood? Was he a student, then? Or working at the aircraft place? Did he write the
modern
kind of poetry? Did he like it? Would he be coming regularly? Had he had anything
published
? Had he brought a poem to read?

Up to this point the young man had submitted to the volley of questions in dazed silence—a sort of drowned, bewildered look, as if someone had turned the garden hose on him; but at this last question he seemed to come alive. He still did not speak, but bending down to the suitcase at his side, he heaved deftly out of it a wad of manuscript so gigantic that even this company, with all their experience, were taken aback.

“Well—how splendid!” faltered Daphne, eyeing the pile
uneasily.
“Er—you must have got quite a number of poems there?”

“Just over eleven hundred,” answered the young man
immediately
; and now that they had heard his voice at last Claudia noticed, with a curious sense of self-congratulation, how well it suited his appearance; it was light, lacking in warmth, guarded. Yet he did not seem shy, exactly. In fact, he was already
shuffling through his mound of papers purposefully, snatching at the invitation to read, determined that it should not be allowed to lapse.

“I wonder which you’d like to hear?” he mused loudly,
stilling
the voices in his vicinity. “It’s a bit difficult to choose. They’re all on the same subject, you see.”

Eleven hundred poems all on the same subject. The company stared in awe. “Well I never,” observed Miss Fergusson at last, summing up the general feeling as best she could; and amid the soft murmurs of assent to this sentiment, the young man launched into his poem.

“Bars!” it began—and it was not clear if this was the title or the first line, but naturally nobody would ask such a question, especially of a new member:

There were eight more verses in similar vein, and Claudia knew at once that they were good, even though they rhymed. She could tell they were good not by listening to them (always a wearisome and uncertain criterion) but by looking at the reader; the anxious, defensive flicker of his eyelids as he tried to assess his audience’s reaction without raising his eyes from his MS.; the aggressive lift of the otherwise feeble chin at the beginning of each verse, as much as to say: ‘I
will
make you listen; you’ve
got
to know what I have to say’; and then, at the very end, the hurt, defensive shutter that closed over his face: All right, then; say what you like: I’m past caring.

“I thought that was absolutely marvellous!” said Claudia, leaning forward, her voice vibrant. “I thought it gave such a marvellous picture of .. of …”

The fact that she couldn’t for the life of her think
what
the picture was of didn’t seem at all to detract from the sincerity of her communication. She felt the warm waves of sympathy flowing out from herself towards the stranger, and as she watched his face she fancied that he was responding; the shutter was lifting a little … he was going to speak … and then, of course, everyone else had to spoil it all. They squealed in
cacophonous chorus, like a litter of pigs. “Yes, it was
marvellous
!” “Really a wonderful poem!” “Such a lot of feeling!”

“Oh, but so sad!” came Miss Fergusson’s voice from across the room. “Have you really written eleven hundred poems all as sad as that? Don’t you ever write
happy
poems?”

What a question to ask of a real poet! Claudia tried to meet the young man’s eye with one of her wryly humorous glances, but he was still looking down at his poem; she had to keep the wryness and the humour in position for so long that her eyelids felt quite stiff by the time he looked up. He didn’t smile, but she felt sure that he had got her message. Not that she was sure herself what the message was exactly; but it was something rare, sophisticated; something that dissociated her utterly from these moronic old tabbies….

“After all—” Miss Fergusson was still questioning him with gentle, unremitting tactlessness—“you’re young; you must have quite a lot of happiness in your life. Aren’t you ever inspired to write about it?”

The young man looked at her cautiously.

“It depends what you mean by happiness,” he said at last; and for some reason the remark seemed to glitter with
originality
and wit. Claudia felt like clapping, as if he had scored the winning point in a long and closely reasoned debate. Once more she tried by glances to show her sympathy and
appreciation
; but such subtle methods of communication were utterly swamped now as the rattle of tea cups signified that the meeting could now break up into general conversation. Once again the young man was a target for questions and chatter.

He was answering politely enough now, and it was only after several minutes that Claudia began to notice that he was managing to do so without actually conveying any information of any kind. No, he wasn’t a student, exactly; and no, he didn’t have a job around here, not at the moment. No, he couldn’t really quite say yet what sort of work he was looking for, it was all rather difficult; and well, actually, he hadn’t had a job for some time, not that you could call a job; what with one thing and another, everything was a bit in the melting pot.

But of course he couldn’t keep this up for ever. Like a troop of huntsmen, the questions were closing in on him, closer and closer, cutting off his retreat, blocking one escape after another, slowly forcing him back and back to some central core of
secrecy … something he was trying to keep hidden. Ruthless as birds of prey, thought Claudia, these nicely dressed women would peck and peck until the skeleton was laid bare.

Claudia felt righteous anger, like an illness, rising in her throat, behind her eyes. She stepped forward and touched the victim’s arm. “Come over here—I have something to show you,” she announced, clearly, and completely on the spur of the moment; and the voice of the woman who was currently badgering him faltered to a stop. A great sense of victory flooded Claudia’s soul; no St George could have led his princess more solicitously off her rock than Claudia led her protegé over to an alcove by the piano. The dragons meantime fell back in disorder, murmuring, glancing inquisitively towards the alcove, putting their heads together in greedy speculation, but knowing all the time that they had been defeated. It was Claudia alone, now, who was going to find out the young man’s secret—who was going to win his confidence, rather, because of course Claudia would respect his secret, whatever it was:
she
wouldn’t pry and pester after it like the others.

“I’m sorry—I haven’t really anything to show you,” she murmured, apologetic and half laughing. “I just thought you’d like to be rescued. They
are
the limit, aren’t they? I’m Claudia Wilkinson, by the way.”

“Oh.” For a moment Claudia thought he would say nothing more; but then he seemed to grasp the significance of her
expectant
look, and added: “I’m Maurice.” He was watching Claudia carefully while he spoke, as if daring her to ask for his surname as well. She smiled reassuringly right into his eyes.

“Maurice. Well, Maurice, I feel I must apologise for my fellow-members, bombarding you with questions like that! Such a cheek! And particularly when they’d just been listening to your poem—so obviously based on some sort of unhappiness….”

Claudia stopped, terrified that she had gone too far; but when she ventured to glance at him again, she saw to her delight that the blue eyes were looking into hers, and his face was beginning to quiver into response.

The response when it came, however, was disconcerting.

“
Unhappiness
? Is that what it conveyed to you? But that’s not what I meant at all! It was
solitude
that I was describing in that poem—in all my poems, actually. Wasn’t that clear?
Which were the lines which made you think I mean
unhappiness
?”

He seemed really anxious to know, and Claudia was taken aback. She had thought that they were going to discuss his poem on some soulful plane which would not involve actually remembering what it was about, let alone quoting bits. She evaded the situation as best she could.

“Solitude. Yes. That’s what I meant, really. But I’d have said that solitude—loneliness, that is to say—is almost the same thing as unhappiness. Wouldn’t you?”

“Oh
no
!” He seemed to be looking beyond her, far away, at some vision of his own. “No, you’re quite wrong. I’m a happy person—very happy in my own particular way—but
nevertheless
I’ve experienced great solitude. Isolation, perhaps I should say. Isolation from my fellow-humans—I don’t suppose you can understand what I mean.”

The word “understand” was, as always, like a match to the tinder of Claudia’s soul.

“
Of
course
I understand,” she exclaimed excitedly, “I’ve often felt isolated like that myself. I—”

“Oh, but I don’t think you have, Mrs Wilkinson,” he
interrupted
her gravely. “I don’t think you can mean what I mean at all. I mean
actual
isolation. You see, I’ve been pretty well out of human circulation for the best part of seven years.”

“A
ND SO THAT’S
exactly why I offered him a lift!” declared Claudia, with a toss of her head, which was perhaps lost on Mavis in the darkness of the car. “But I suppose he was too embarrassed to accept, with all those censorious women looking on—I could have killed them! But anyway, he’s got my address, and he knows he can come round for a talk any evening.
Any
evening. You heard me inviting him, didn’t you? Didn’t you, Mavis?” she repeated, taking her eyes off the road for a moment to glance at her companion.

For Mavis was looking away from her, out through the car window at the dimly lit streets, where there could be nothing to see anyway. She wished Mavis would not seem so detached
tonight, so apathetic. Why could she not share Claudia’s
excitement
over what had happened? Because it
was
exciting—even alarming, in some ways, though of course not to Claudia; for Claudia possessed that sympathy with the wrong-doers of the world which casts out fear.

“You see,” she continued, “it stands to reason the poor boy must have been in some kind of trouble, and I could tell that he was longing to confide in someone, someone he can trust. If only it hadn’t been for that nosey old fool coming up with her ears flapping, just at the wrong moment, then he would have confessed to me the whole thing, then and there. I could sense that he was going to, and it would have been such a relief, such a comfort to him. He’s kept it all bottled up for too long!”

Mavis turned her face from the window at last, but still she did not quite look at Claudia. Instead, she looked ahead of her through the windscreen.

“Kept what bottled up?” she asked, a little flatly. “I do think, Claudia—I mean, I know it isn’t my business, of course, because it’s your house, not mine—but I do wish you hadn’t given him our address like that. After all, you don’t know
anything
about him—he may be a criminal or something. That’s what they were all saying after he’d gone—that he must be a criminal. That he must have been in
prison
!”

All Claudia’s affection for Mavis returned with a rush at these words; though why this should have happened just now, just when Mavis was being really rather stupid, she could not imagine.

“But of
course
he must have been in prison!” she cried. “What else could he possibly have meant—‘More or less out of human circulation’? And for seven years! It must have been something pretty bad. ‘Bad’, I mean, in the conventional sense. As you know, Mavis,
I
don’t recognise
any
human behaviour as ‘bad’. Such a word doesn’t exist for me. Human beings are driven by their weaknesses—by the misfortunes of their
childhood
—by impulses that for one reason or another they cannot control. There is no such thing as badness—”

In the fervour of her disquisition Claudia had almost failed to notice the red lights. She brought the car to a stop with a flourish, just in time. “So you see, Mavis, that’s why it’s so
very
important that he shouldn’t be made to feel rejected. That’s why I felt so furious with all those smug women, shrinking away from him, rejecting him, the way they did, after he’d said—
that.
”

“I didn’t think they were rejecting him, exactly,” said Mavis timidly, anxious not to displease Claudia further. “I thought they seemed rather interested, really, sort of flocking round. And talking about it afterwards, too, after he’d gone—that woman with the fat arms and the bangles—don’t you
remember
?—‘I may have been sitting next to a
murderer
all evening!’ she kept saying. She seemed thrilled to bits!”

“Oh, but that’s just morbid,” explained Claudia briskly, starting up the car again as the lights changed. “A morbid, vicarious thrill—of course. That’s typical. But how many of them have invited him to their homes, I’d like to know? Or offered him a lift in their cars?”

Elation was beating in Claudia’s blood now, sparking off her senses in little jets of excitement; it was like being in love. She could do so much for this young man, this outcast of society. Whatever he had done, however wicked, shocking, it might be in the eyes of the world, she, Claudia, would not be shocked. He could lean on her as on a rock; she could protect him,
inspire
him, infuse new courage into him, just as she had infused it into Mavis.

Though in Mavis’ case, a new infusion must be sadly
overdue
, it seemed. She had gone quite white in the shadows of the car.

“But, Claudia,” she was weakly protesting, “I know it’s
terribly
brave of you, and all that, and I do admire you for it, you know I do. But wouldn’t it have been wiser to have found out a
little
about him first? I mean, if he’s been in prison, the Prisoners’ Aid Society, or someone, will know about him, won’t they? Then you could at least be sure that it wasn’t
murder
!”

Claudia could have hugged her—though again she could not have explained why. How conventional poor Mavis was at heart, in spite of everything!

“And suppose I found that it
was
murder?” she demanded exultantly. “What then? Do you really, think, Mavis, that that would make any difference to me? If anything, it would make me
more
anxious to help him, to offer him friendship, trust. The worse his crime, the more he would need it. Don’t you understand?”

Mavis looked up at her, helplessly.

“Yes. Oh yes, of course!” she answered, after a moment. “I think you’re wonderful, Claudia, quite wonderful! So brave!”

Now at last Mavis’ light eyes were raised to Claudia’s face
in the familiar admiration. Claudia smiled in the darkness as she slowed down, and then drew up outside her home with a feeling of satisfaction so deep as to be total happiness. It was a pity that Mavis had to spoil it. As she scrambled out of the car she remarked, with a little shiver, looking up at the dark house:  

“The only thing is, Claudia, have you thought of the rest of us at all? Especially just now, while Derek’s away. You’re not always in, are you: suppose this man were to come some evening while your mother’s alone in there? Or me, for that matter? Or Helen? Had you thought about Helen?”