The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  Tanya was silent for a long time, putting her things into drawers, and finally she said in rather a casual tone, ‘I have a very sweet fellow in Sheffield now.’

  ‘An actor?’

  ‘No. He’s a lecturer at the University. He is divine. But alas, married.’

  ‘Oh, Tanya.’

  ‘Yes, you are right, it is “Oh Tanya”. But what can I do? I love him, she said simply,’ she said, not simply at all.

  ‘Really love him?’

  ‘Yes. His name is Joel. Isn’t that a beautiful, unusual name? And he is a beautiful person, just to be touched by him dissolves all the rest of the world.’ Maggie stared at her, startled and envious. Tanya gave her a quick, wry look, and added prosaically, ‘There is no future in it, so don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘But you’ve missed somebody out. Who was the second one?’

  Tanya started to chuckle. ‘Can’t you guess? Damned little opportunist! He saw I was starving for it so he gave me a Greek kiss, all the way down.’

  Maggie gaped at her. ‘Heavens! I never dreamt — you really were ahead of us!’

  Tanya sat down on the bed and looked affectionately at Maggie. ‘Maggie, don’t take this as a criticism, but you know you are very naive. I was not the only one. The girls in our class were going down before his classical Greek sex-appeal, and his taunts, like victims of some epidemic.’

  Maggie was silent. Now she was shocked, shocked and confused, and somehow, obscurely, belittled. Not that anything would have persuaded her to sleep with the little Greek director — she could imagine nothing more horrid — but that she should have been so childish, so unworldly as not to be in on what was going on… To what extent was she even now a victim of her parents’ constricting upbringing, being shut off from what everyone else could see, comprehend and accept? She remembered how, in both the Tenby and the Ilfracombe companies, she had been the butt of jibes and teasing because she was, as Tanya said, so unsophisticated that often she would fail to grasp innuendo or would come out with something (like the organ-grinder business) apparently quite extraordinary in its naivety. She felt now, not so much that Tanya was ‘ahead’ of her, as that she was somehow left behind, held back by powerful strings still attached at their farther ends to the house in Penicuik.

  ‘Do you think there’s something wrong with me?’ she asked.

  ‘Wrong with you? What do you mean?’

  ‘Being a virgin, and — and naive, and all that.’

  Tanya lit a cigarette, and blew out smoke. ‘Life is long, Maggie. Feelings are what count. You are only wasting yourself, and wasting time, if you are not feeling anything. It is not always pleasant or improving to have a lover, still less to understand every smutty joke you hear. There’s a right time for everything. Your time hasn’t come yet, and that’s all.’

  That evening, Maggie took Tanya with her to the Players. Tanya bought herself a seat and sat through the show with a glass of beer at her elbow, helping Maggie to serve sandwiches in the intermission. And when the compere announced at the end that the audience might stay, and dance, and eat, and drink till midnight and very welcome too, Tanya sat with her by the panatrope and chose records and they talked on and on. Maggie confided in Tanya her worst fear.

  ‘What if I never get work again?’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘How can you know?’

  ‘It’s a matter of holding out. Think of our class at RADA. Five have dropped out already — got married, gone abroad, got other jobs — and more and more of them will. If you can hold out, and keep trying, you are bound to get work eventually.’

  Maggie well realised the total fallaciousness of this, but Tanya said it with such assurance that she allowed herself to imbibe from it a little hope, however false.

  ‘It’s terrible, though — waiting.’

  ‘Yes. Waiting is always terrible. To wait hopelessly is worse than never arriving.’

  ‘Clever —’

  ‘There’s a chap there noticing you.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the stage.’

  Maggie looked up from the records she was sorting. Among the few dancers was a tall, good-looking, red-haired man, staring at her over his partner’s shoulder. When she met his eyes, he smiled straight at her and she gave him a rather muted smile back.

  ‘Choose the next record for yourself, because he will ask you to dance,’ Tanya advised. ‘After that he will offer you a drink, and eventually he will take you home in a quite nice car, probably a Rover. Or a Vauxhall. Such fellows always drive one or the other. So now I’ll go home while there is still a tube, because I make a poor third man. Look what happened to him in the film.’

  ‘Don’t be silly —’

  But Tanya, as usual, was not being silly, because what she predicted came about, except that the quite nice car was a beat-up Morris Oxford. However, on the way to Bloomsbury the red-headed young man announced that he was planning to buy himself a new car, probably a Vauxhall Velox.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When Maggie first met Bruce Macrae, he was twenty-three, a big, booming, handsome, over-confident, going-places young Scot preparing to be a city oil-slicker. His red hair was brushed into a quiff in front and darkened with Brylcreem (which, despite a superficial belief to the contrary, was by no means exclusively a working-class emollient). Six feet of height, broad shoulders, good clothes and large allowance from his father. He made an excellent impression, and no bells rang.

  In any case, Maggie was ripe for the picking. She had only just begun to realise, partly through Tanya and partly through inner stirrings which were no less strong for having been so long suppressed, that she had been starved all her life of something essential to her — the kind of affection that shows itself in ways all but unknown in her family. Except, perhaps, Stip…

  Once, just once, Stip had come down to see her during that miserable out-of-work period. He had sat in the M’Crimmonds’ front parlour, brooding into the fire, his knobbly boy’s hand toying with the ears of the Jack Russell. They had run out of conversation alarmingly quickly and were just sitting there, balancing their teacups, testing the distance that was growing up between them. And suddenly Maggie couldn’t bear it. She put her cup on the floor, jumped up and ran to hug and kiss him. And although he had looked amazed, he was not abashed.

  ‘That’s grand,’ he said, ‘like in “Jenny Kiss’d Me”. No, now don’t go running off again, sit beside me.’ And he’d caught hold of her and made her sit on the arm of his chair and had actually let her fiddle with his hair and tease him, and then they had really begun to talk. Their renewed, now adult, physical closeness made it possible.

  It was nevertheless a painful conversation, because it became clear at once that Stip had given up his dream of becoming a writer and knuckled under, but one thing that soothed the pain was that Maggie found she loved him just the same and didn’t judge him as she might have done once; she knew that whatever happened he would never be like conformist, priggish Ian, but would always be Stip, her darling brother.

  At the station, they had hugged and kissed again, and as the train was pulling out Stip had suddenly begun to whistle, ‘Oh what a beautiful morning’. It was then, watching with stone-dry eyes and sinking heart the withdrawal of the train carrying Stip back to his self-chosen sentence in the family paper-mill, that Maggie fully accepted that any emotion, even piercing sorrow and loss, is healthier than banked-down feelings, and that this tangible love she felt for Stip with all its pain of empathy was just a token of what she would one day feel for a lover.

  It was from then on that she began to be aware of the starvation symptoms. A desire to touch even people she hardly knew — to ruffle heads passed finding a seat in the cinema, to rub the backs of necks in buses, to take the arms of strangers crossing the street, to hold out a hand to people coming through doors — and to kiss everybody. Everybody. At meeting, at parting, and in between. Of course she knew she mustn’t, and she didn’t, but she longed to, and
worried about her longing. So it was not surprising that she fell into the arms of the first attractive warm-blooded man who made a serious pass.

  He made it on the night they went out to celebrate the fact that her long exile from happiness was over. She had a job.

  Of course no one really wants to understudy, but after nine months out of work, who refuses? A beautiful theatre in the heart of the West End, steeped in tradition, a lovely play spangled with august names, and a very good little part, should she ever get to play it. And it was work, paid work! The stalled career-train was off its dismal siding and back on the main track, getting up steam… The bogey-man and his tunnel had vanished as if they had never been. She was euphoric, feet clear off the ground, and Bruce was just the boy to spot her vulnerable state and turn it to his advantage.

  He laid on a glamorous evening with all the trimmings: soft lights, sweet music, good food. Dancing. Waiters wafting. Fingers touching in the candlelight. Elaborate eye-play. Sweet words and sweeter silences. And quite a lot to drink.

  Then home in a taxi afterwards.

  A taxi, to Maggie, was, and still is, a highly erotic vehicle. Isolated in a little glass house, sealed off from a driver who knew how to keep his eyes on the road, they glided through the lamp-lit night (proper, pale gold lamps — none of your sulphurous horrors that reduce skin tones and your favourite dress to the colour of a dead toad’s underbelly). The motion was in itself arousing, but even more so was the sensation that she was neither here nor there, but part of some sensual continuum that no one, from here or from there, had any jurisdiction over nor right to expect her to resist.

  As Maggie sat, bolt upright, her hands tense in her lap and her whole body simmering with awareness of Bruce beside her, she felt stirrings, interior volcanic seethings and swellings, like slow-bursting lava bubbles. And when he took her hand and kissed the back of it, then kissed it again on the palm, and then touched the hard trembling point of his tongue between each pair of fingers, her long-banked-down sensuality erupted in rapids of fire.

  When they arrived at the M’Crimmonds’ he handed her out of the taxi, not knowing that without his help she could scarcely have moved. Words from a recent novel of what in those days was considered the more explicit kind were raging through her head: clean, fiery lust. Could lust be clean? Till now the word had always been inextricably associated with moral squalor.

  With buzzy-tipped fingers, she unlocked the front door. The M’Crimmond sisters no longer kept their ears open for her solitary return, nor did the dog rouse them with his senile yapping at her step — or even, it now appeared, the step of a male intruder on the stairs. Tanya had long ago returned to Sheffield. There was no one to stand at the doorway of her room brandishing a blazing sword.

  As soon as the door had closed behind them, Bruce picked her up manfully and deposited her on the pink chenille, where, having divested himself (as the Players Compere was wont to say) of his upper and outer garments, he shortly joined her. She had never lain on a bed with a man before. That, and some kisses (the Scots kind were much like the Greek, she found, but nicer because she was helping) would have sufficed her for that night; in those days it was received opinion that softly softly catchee the slippery monkey of sexual bliss. But Bruce was born before his time — ‘having it off’ was his style, long before that expression was thought of.

  As long as Bruce proceeded slowly and seemed in control, Maggie, and even Margaret, went along gladly. It was only when his carefully acquired technique lapsed and he began to pull and pant and grapple, that Margaret reasserted herself and began to resist.

  It had never occurred to her that anyone of her ‘own sort’ would not stop when a woman said ‘Stop’. She did not know that a man may find it impossible to stop, or find himself so unwilling to that he will call it impossible. Bruce was well roused and rather drunk, and he had spent a week’s salary on her; he had no intention of stopping. Her increasingly panicky struggles to free herself and regain control of the situation only goaded him on. At the very end, at the point when, had he been a stranger, had the past evening not been as happy and exciting as it was, Maggie would have screamed and scratched, she suddenly went limp and let him have her — not because she any longer wanted him but because some deep female honesty informed her that having come this far, to disgrace or mark him would be a humiliation and a shame on her, worse than submitting. So she submitted.

  Afterwards, of course, he was full of remorse — genuine enough, though it showed itself in the form of reproaches.

  ‘You should have told me.’

  ‘You knew.’

  ‘I swear I didn’t!’

  ‘Why should you think I wasn’t?’

  He had no answer for that. They sat in silence. He gave her an occasional under-the-lashes glance to see how she was taking it. He was relieved that she was not crying, but in fact she was well beyond tears, and for the moment quite numb.

  At last some feeling trickled through, mainly of anger.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop, anyway, when I asked you to?’

  ‘I didn’t think you meant it,’ he said sullenly. ‘Lots of women like to be — well, overpowered. I thought it was a sort of game.’

  ‘You couldn’t have thought that,’ she said blankly after a long moment.

  He stood up and began to pace about. She watched him, trying to recover some of the feelings she had had about him before, to see at least his physical attractiveness, even though, she supposed, she would never like or trust him again. She was looking for justification of what she had allowed to happen — encouraged to happen.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry anyhow,’ he burst out at last. ‘I am, I’m extremely sorry. And if you think I’ll chuck you now or anything like that, you’re wrong about me. I want to go on seeing you.’

  ‘How very decent of you!’ she said shrilly. ‘Is there no limit to your chivalry?’ His big handsome face under the tousled hair turned a dull red. She thought he looked horrible — not a civilised young man any longer, but like some uncouth country lout caught tumbling a girl under a hedge. This sudden revulsion from him shocked her almost more than what had happened.

  She told him to go away and leave her alone, and he went out looking crushed, but then kept her in a panic for twenty minutes by standing outside her door, beseeching her in a low voice to let him in again, ‘just for a minute’… Luckily the M’Crimmond sisters were sound sleepers (and the Jack Russell deaf).

  By ignoring him she eventually got rid of him, and only then was she free to go to the bathroom and finally crawl into the crumpled, and now suggestive, bed. She was physically sore, mentally disgusted and spiritually profoundly lonely. She wanted someone to comfort her, but she couldn’t even imagine who. Stip would be shocked; she could lose his respect. Her mother —? Never in this world, not about this. Tanya might have been the right person, but she was, at this moment, probably in bed with her adulterous lecturer. In desperation, Maggie let her trapped thoughts throw themselves, as impulses travel from the brain toward a severed limb, against her old leaning-post, Mrs Dalzell.

  And now, for the very first time, Maggie found herself living imaginatively through that hideous death. The frank, disarming look into the lorry driver’s face as he drove toward her, the mind behind that look giving the impossible order: Wait till he’s almost here, give him no time to stop — poor wee man, he must have nothing to reproach himself with — then the bold, unhesitating, perfectly timed step off the kerb. The ghastly shock, hurling her backwards, the sound as she hit the road. A last coherent thought? God forbid. No last moment of clarity inside the broken body. Maggie, weeping, spared herself that.

  But the tears, which seemed to be all for the dead, aided the living. By morning she felt a bit better. The inevitable guilt had started, but she had been prepared for that. Even in the beginning, when Bruce’s love-making had seemed ‘right’, she had not hoped, with her puritan conditioning, to escape guilt-free, but she had meant to fight it by offsetting i
t against the joy and pleasure of love. Now she felt — what? Defiled? Sullied? Too ridiculously old-fashioned and melodramatic, but it was something like that; so the guilt was far more difficult to fight. Mrs Dalzell had once told her that an unbridled conscience can do as much damage as any of the passions. Maggie, mindful of this, was determined to do her best, because she was simply not prepared to have her whole view of love, men and sex ruined by one incident, however upsetting.

  Maggie was deep in understudy rehearsals by this time, managing to be almost perfectly happy during her hours at the theatre; this positiveness gradually crept, like a healing tide, over the area of trauma and washed the inflammation out of it to some extent. To advance this healing process, she decided, two weeks after the incident in her bedroom, to spend a Sunday with Tanya in Sheffield.

  Tanya met her at the station and, after a typical digs lunch with two amusing fellow members of the company, they went out for a walk in the rain to look at the theatre.

  Till then the talk had all been shop, but Tanya’s intuition was an acute instrument. As she closed the front door behind her, she instantly said, ‘What is up? Or should I say, what has recently been up, and who put it there?’

  Even Margaret was constrained to smile at this, and Maggie giggled outright. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You have the look of one who no longer doesn’t know what it is all about. Welcome to the club.’

  ‘Thanks very much. If my initiation ceremony was anything to go by, I’d rather be blackballed.’

  Tanya gave her an appreciative look. ‘You are beginning to be far too articulate and even witty for our profession. That is the sort of line we actors expect to have written for us. So tell.’

  Heads well down, arms linked but hands in gabardine pockets, they walked into the wind-driven rain and Maggie told.

  ‘So now do you loathe him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Could you possibly like him again?’