The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  She put Flare Path aside long enough to write a joyous letter of acceptance to the Welsh company. Then she picked it up again. She lay on the pink chenille (soon she would say goodbye to it, and this house, for ever) and sank herself into the part and the play. In the back of her head a voice was saying, ‘This is me, this is my life, they have no right to stand in my way or deplete me with fear…’ And quite abruptly, she put Flare Path down again, left the room, went straight downstairs and put through a person-to-person call to her mother.

  ‘Mummy?’ Her voice was high with defiance. ‘It’s Maggie.’

  ‘I thought it must be,’ said her mother drily. ‘Nobody else phones from London reversing the charges. When can we expect you home?’

  ‘I’m not coming home yet.’

  ‘Indeed, are you not? And why is that?’

  ‘Because I’ve got a job.’

  ‘A job! Doing what?’

  ‘Acting.’

  ‘Acting,’ repeated her mother, without a question-mark.

  ‘Mummy, I’ve got something to confess to you.’ She had used this formula in childhood. Now as then, she felt frozen as she said it.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve deceived you and Dad for two years. I’ve been going to drama school — the Royal Academy,’ she added with pathetic bravado, as if the royal charter made it all less heinous. From there she heard herself babbling on, trying to explain, suddenly knowing that this was the wrong, the coward’s way to do it, over the phone instead of face to face, but as with so much else, it was too late now.

  In the end she stopped talking in mid-sentence and a long, long pause ensued. The hairs of her flesh stood erect.

  ‘Where is your job?’ her mother asked at last.

  Maggie felt as if she’d turned over two pages at once. Something was seriously missing from this conversation.

  ‘It’s in Tenby,’ she whispered. ‘South Wales.’

  ‘Is it a good job? Are they to pay you properly?’

  ‘Mummy, have you understood what I’ve just told you?’

  ‘I understand your words. I haven’t yet comprehended them. I haven’t yet come to grips with them. I know you said them and that, unlike everything else I’ve heard from you for two years, they are true. Reproaches and tears may come later, but they won’t change what’s past. I must try to arm myself with some practical details in case your father asks practical questions.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell him, Mummy! I will.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Well … my job starts next week, I don’t want to come home before it starts…’

  ‘…if ever! And I am supposed at this stage to join you in your conspiracy, to invent something to explain your non-appearance? I’ll not entertain it, Maggie.’

  Maggie was silent, crushed. She was weeping.

  ‘What I will and must do is tell him for you if you don’t come to tell him yourself. I cannot keep such a secret from him, now that I know — for sure.’

  The ‘for sure’ passed Maggie by at the time. She was to remember it later.

  ‘No, Mummy! You don’t have to do that — don’t do it —’

  But the connection was broken. Whether Mrs Robertson, too upset to say more, had hung up, or whether they’d been cut off, Maggie didn’t know. She lacked both the resolution and the shillings to ring back — somehow she knew she could never telephone home reversing the charges again.

  That night Margaret and Maggie lay in their joint bed, in their joint head, and fought it out for the first time. It’s a poor lookout for any woman if her first profoundly honest look at herself doesn’t come till she is twenty. Maggie’s, when it came, was like Faust’s into the pit. She had the classic disadvantage of a strict religious upbringing: those unavoidable occasional glimpses of her true nature compared so irreconcilably with the model she had been conditioned to believe was attainable.

  Reviewing her deeds in the light of her mother’s reaction, she felt her beetle-strength fail: the dungball of guilt rolled slowly back and crushed her. Her father might be joyless, oppressive, rigid; as his mahogany furniture absorbed light and would not reflect it back again, so he and his religion drained life of its fun and spontaneity. But what was that compared to being a liar and a thief? She had used her father, and fraudulently converted his money. Bad enough. But there was a deeper pit of her own iniquity to peer into. For now she was leaving it to her mother to tell him the truth, while she, cravenly, fled to her world of pleasure and make-believe, the tinsel world of play-acting.

  It was not Maggie-as-actress that would make it impossible for her father to endure her perfidy, she realised. It was the awful spectacle of his own ruthlessness carried to the level of a fine art in his daughter.

  Her long anger against him was avenged — played out. She was left with what he had bequeathed her through blood and nurture — the morality that lies, like bedrock, under all that the devious mind of the runaway can lay on top of it, waiting to prevent descent past a certain point … a point that Margaret, and, with grudging reluctance, even Maggie, knew by the end of that night she had reached.

  Next morning she got up early, and, leaving the house before the M’Crimmond sisters were up, went off to catch the businessmen’s train to Edinburgh.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Five hours on the train, half an hour on the bus, all filled to bursting by her overheated imagination with ever more harrowing apprehensions, were not enough to prepare Maggie for what she had to face at the end of it.

  Exhausted from the journey and the preceding all-but-sleepless night, she dragged herself up the steps to the black front door and rang the bell. It was Ian who opened it. One look was enough to show her that he knew what she had done, and furthermore, considered that nothing more iniquitous lay within the bounds of human frailty.

  Yet there was something in his look of disgusted astonishment at the sight of her that gave her back a little of her fighting spirit. First, because she did not regard him as worthy to judge her, and second, because he was obviously dumbfounded to see her there at all, proving that, in respect of her courage at least, he’d underrated her.

  In any case, far worse for her than anything Ian might conceivably have to say to her was the realisation that his knowing meant that her mother had blown the gaff. Why? Perhaps she had shown her distress and Maggie’s father had ‘got it out of her’. In any case, to some extent Maggie’s gesture in coming was vitiated. The deed was done, the first shock absorbed — the worst perhaps over. Maggie suffered a sense of failure and anti-climax.

  The first thing, however, was to go at once into the offensive with Ian, as the best means of defence against the outrage in his eyes.

  ‘Yes, I’m home,’ she said.

  Ian simply glared at her.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’

  ‘Well may you ask!’ he burst out. ‘He’s taken to his bed.’

  Her heart stopped, as he had meant it to; he paused, but then went on, ‘It’s his ulcer playing up. Small thanks to you it’s not a heart attack.’

  She pushed past him into the house. Ian was close behind her, like a bloodhound.

  ‘I can’t get over it, the brazen cheek of you, walking in here like this! I personally thought you’d never dare come home again.’

  Maggie’s overwrought nerves twanged, but she kept her voice down. ‘Shut up, Ian, it’s nothing to do with you. Where’s Stip?’

  ‘At college, of course. And while we’re on that subject, one word of advice.’ He pulled her none too gently into the front parlour and shut the heavy door. ‘If, as I strongly suspect, Steven knew all the time what you were up to, tell him to keep his mouth shut. Not for his own sake, for Dad’s. If Dad knew there were two rotten eggs in the nest, it’d be the death of him.’

  Maggie stared at him. Behind the facade of defiance, tears were coming. Act, she ordered herself, act! Don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing he can hurt you.

  ‘Will you kindly go up and tell D
addy I’m here?’

  ‘What do you take me for, your messenger boy? He’ll not see you anyway, I’m sure of that!’

  ‘I’ve come four hundred miles to see him and I’m not leaving until I do.’

  Ian stared at her for a moment. Then he turned on his heel and left her.

  She stood motionless, feeling very sick. He came back. ‘You’re to go up,’ he said shortly.

  Her mother met her at the top of the stairs. She looked distraught; her usual tidiness was blurred at the edges. She made no attempt to kiss Maggie.

  ‘Mummy… I wish you’d waited! How did he take it?’

  Her mother looked at her dumbly.

  ‘Is he really ill?’ asked Maggie, her throat dry.

  ‘That’s the least of it — a minor business reverse can bring on worse than this. He stayed home because he can’t face people. He’s convinced the whole town knew you duped him.’

  ‘Nobody knew! How could they?’

  Her mother gave her a strange sideways look. For a moment a crazy thought crossed Maggie’s mind, an answer to the nagging question of why her mother had not seemed more surprised by her announcement last night on the phone. Why she had not demanded more detailed explanations. But that was absurd — unthinkable. For if her mother had even begun to guess, that would have been collusion.

  ‘If you’ve made up your mind to take what’s coming to you,’ she was saying, ‘get away in. It won’t improve with keeping.’

  Her father was not in bed. He was sitting on the edge of it, his bowed head in profile against the massive mahogany bedhead, wearing a dark dressing-gown. His shoulders were stooped. He had a look of defeat, which simultaneously relieved her fear and increased her guilt. But the look was deceptive.

  He turned slowly to face her. In his eyes she read the reproach due to a child who has fallen into some irretrievable disgrace.

  ‘Have you anything to say to me? Anything at all to make me feel less ashamed of you?’

  Maggie opened her mouth to deliver the speech of mingled contrition and self-justification she had prepared. But nothing came out — not a word. An old, old wound was breaking open again, old, bad blood welling up… Eighteen years of repressed resentment can’t be wiped away, after all, by two years of purloined freedom and fulfilment. The rest of her life ahead was calling her, and she knew suddenly that if she knuckled under now — even to the extent of admitting she had wronged him — it would be inconsistent and impossible to fight her way back.

  At last she said gauchely, ‘I had to do what I did. I have to be an actress, I have to live my own life, and you’d never have let me. If you’re determined to feel ashamed, feel ashamed that you drove me to deceive you.’

  Her father rose to his feet. She saw such sudden menace in his stance that she had to hold herself from cringing.

  ‘You dare to turn it all back on me, do you? I might have expected it. I gave you a chance in my thoughts. I decided, if you came to me humbly, if you seemed truly sorry —’

  Margaret choked out: ‘I’ll pay back every —’

  ‘Aye,’ he shouted, ‘you will! But not as you think. It’s not money I want from you. It was into other hands I entrusted that, and it’s from them I shall require repayment.’ A livid line round his thin mouth made Maggie shudder for Mrs Dalzell, although she had said she was safe. ‘What I want from you, my girl, is evidence that you recognise the sheer badness of what you’ve done, the slippery chute you’ve set your feet on. Oh, yes, I know — you’ll soon be of age, and you’ve a job, of sorts. For a derisory sum you’re prepared to disport yourself before a lot of idle lascivious beer-swilling Welsh troglodytes —’ (Maggie, despite the sheer paralysing awfulness of the scene, could scarcely help smiling at this description of Tenby audiences). ‘But if you think either of those facts spells independence, financial or emotional, the next year or so will teach you otherwise! You imagine you’ve broken away from your background, but I know you. You’ll need your home and your family before you’re much older. You’ll need a shoulder to cry on and a pocket to dip into, and probably a roof and a bed into the bargain. Well, don’t think you can come crawling back here when you’re jobless and homeless — or worse. I know what actors are. When next your mother comes to me with that look of anguish on her face that twists my heart to breaking, no doubt it will be to tell me that you’ve followed your bent of depravity to its ultimate —’ Suddenly his face darkened with an uprush of blood so that he looked as if he might have a seizure. ‘Margaret! I warn you! If you laugh at my words, I shall not be answerable!’

  Maggie had not known that her smile, which was more than half hysterical, was getting the better of her rigid face-muscles. But when she saw his hand upraised she instinctively cringed, and in this position she quite unwittingly laid balm to his fury. The choleric purple subsided from his face and his arm relaxed.

  But she knew, then, what he had in him, and in the sudden answering wave of her own anger, she had further proof of how alike they were in their worst aspects, and thought frantically: ‘I must guard myself! I must change my nature somehow, not to be like this, like him!’ Because it was not Mr Bennett she saw, so much as Capulet, Juliet’s father, who cries out in his rage at her disobedience: ‘Hang, beg, starve, die in the streets!’ This was not mere rigidity or misguided religious principle. It was the despotic cruelty that demands the right to mould his children or reject them.

  I was right, she thought fiercely. Remorse — humility — those were only the outward signs of the total capitulation he wanted. One sign of recantation, and she would never get back on her own feet.

  She straightened up, trembling all over, and faced him as well as she could for her sudden deep fear of him.

  ‘I’ll not give way to you! Mind that. You’ll beg for me to come back before I’ll crawl as you said! I’ve got to live my own way. Maybe I am wicked, but not the way you think. It’s not in disobedience or wanting to lead a bad life, it’s that I can be as ruthless and single-minded as you! If I’m bad it’s your badness, I get it all from you!’

  He did hit her then. Her defiance broke the remains of his control and he slapped her face. Then her mother rushed into the room and got between them, and after a few inarticulate words to her father, half of reproach and half of a sort of muffled pity, she dragged Maggie away.

  ‘She’s to get out of my house! Out! Out of my house!’ she could hear her father shouting almost insanely as her mother hurried her to her old room.

  ‘You’ll have to go, at least for tonight,’ her mother muttered, hastily cramming things back into the small suitcase Maggie had brought and which her mother had begun to unpack. ‘You can go to Aunty Helen’s, she knows all about it. I won’t say she condones what you’ve done, but she’s my sister, and she’ll put you up if I ask her.’

  Still with her mood of hysterical defiance upon her, Maggie protested: ‘Nobody has to go against their consciences for me — I’ll go back to London!’

  ‘You will do as you’re told for once. You don’t want to lose your family altogether, do you? We’ll see if he feels differently in the morning.’ Standing before her with the case in her hand, her mother looked at her directly. ‘Maggie, could you not say you’re sorry?’

  ‘I wanted to. I meant to. I am sorry in a way. But not after this! Not after he hit me —’ Against her strongest intentions, she lost hold of herself and began to cry.

  Her mother didn’t move to comfort her, but her voice softened. ‘I won’t ask it of you tonight. He’d not accept it anyhow. Maybe tomorrow. No, now don’t say you won’t. Maybe you will. Maybe he’ll see it differently… If not tomorrow, sometime. I couldn’t lose you, Maggie.’

  Through her own emotional storm, Maggie felt her mother tremble, heard her voice break. She looked up, quickly, incredulously. She was crying, too. Her mother, crying! Unwillingly, she remembered the only part of her father’s speech of accusation that had not made her want to shout at him or laugh in his face: ‘…that look of ang
uish on her face that twists my heart to breaking…’

  ‘I can say it to you!’ she burst out. ‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry —’

  Her mother speedily pulled herself together, getting one of her small linen handkerchiefs from the pocket of her long cardigan. She had always dodged any hint of sentimentality, however truly felt.

  ‘Not now. We’ll talk some other time. Now be off with you to Helen’s.’

  Maggie’s Aunt Helen was a spinster, and she looked it. As a child, Maggie had not liked to visit her — loving and playful though she invariably was — because she looked like a dry old version of her mother. Later, she was able to separate the two in her mind and became fond of Helen for her own sake. She no longer begged her mother after each visit, ‘You’ll never, never let yourself get like Aunty, will you?’ Perhaps because, in some odd way, her mother already had.

  Helen was at the door to meet her, and welcomed her in, wordlessly but not without a kind of furtive warmth. Her habitual kiss on the cheek was firmer than usual, and her faded eyes had a faint but unmistakable gleam. Just plain curiosity, thought Maggie wearily, or probably an unfightable enthusiasm for anything that broke the monotony of her solitary existence. She had always relished a bit of family scandal.

  She gave Maggie an omelette and some tinned fruit, saying, ‘You’ll not be wanting anything heavy after all that upset.’ Maggie’s mother had evidently telephoned a bulletin, in some sisterly code, while Maggie was walking the three blocks to Helen’s little house. While Maggie ate, or rather picked, Helen sat across the table, her hands folded under her chin, those unusually eager eyes fixed on her. She looked like an elderly child, confronted by a thrilling example of adult transgression.

  Those eyes, though not overtly reproachful, made Maggie in her present conscience-flayed state very uncomfortable.

  ‘Do you think I’m awful, Aunty?’ she asked at last, laying down her fork.