The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘I want to. It would make it all seem less awful.’

  ‘So give him another chance.’

  Maggie stopped dead, swinging Tanya almost on to her face.

  ‘Another chance —!’

  ‘To be the gentleman you obviously want him to be. Let him take the bad taste out of it with a few nice evenings.’

  ‘How do I know they would be nice? Am I supposed to ask for more trouble?’

  ‘It’s up to you to keep out of dangerous situations. If he gets sulky about that, you can drop him. He can’t rape you in a restaurant or a theatre.’

  They walked on. Maggie was silent, approaching this new concept. Had she been raped by Bruce? She remembered the sharpness of the pain, the show of blood on the pink chenille. She remembered the humiliated, soiled feeling. Margaret, left to herself, would have fought this as her mother fought cockroaches — with a scrubbing brush and Jeyes Fluid — but Maggie took a more tolerant view. She recognised that she had wanted sex, been ready for it, and although God knows she had had something gentler and more — well, gradual in mind, her main objective now must be to feel better, to get over it. Maybe Tanya’s advice, disturbingly worded, was nonetheless sound.

  After all, for the past fortnight Bruce had been turning up day after day at the stage door, wanting to take her home, or out to dinner — wanting to make it up, with her and to her. Each time she saw him standing there by the stage doorkeeper’s window, something in her felt relieved, if only because his hangdog stance and eager, apologetic expression showed that he, too, knew that something had happened which required therapy. He was ashamed, which meant he was not unprincipled after all, only uncontrolled. She felt inclined to forgive him.

  Besides, Tanya advised it. Tanya the wise, the intuitive, the well-versed, advised her to give Bruce another chance. Maggie was not to know that Tanya was herself destined to blunder from mistake to mistake. None of her wisdom or experience kept her from falling for the wrong men. Maggie met one of them that very day — Joel, the adulterous lecturer.

  He was standing outside the locked glass doors of the building, sheltering under the marquee. Maggie’s first impressions of him were vague; she was not paying him close attention. But she registered lean height, soft floppy hair, glasses on a typical academic’s face. When Tanya introduced them and Maggie shook his hand, she noticed it was warm for such a chilly day, and that his forehead bulged intelligently. ‘A bit like the Mekon in Dan Dare,’ she teased Tanya later. Tanya was not amused. Her sense of humour, which had proved itself equal to a great deal in her life so far, stopped short of jokes about Joel.

  ‘In my eyes he is perfect,’ she was to say tersely. ‘If you see any flaws, spare me your myopic misobservations.’

  All this occurred later, after the three of them had had a rather uncomfortable tea together in one of the few places in Sheffield that offered such a thing on a Sunday — the station hotel.

  The tea-service was heavy, scratched metal and the cups thick white china bearing the hotel’s crest in navy blue. The tea was bright orange and none of them exactly fancied Kunzel cakes, especially yesterday’s, but only Maggie noticed any of this, or the gloomy, silent lounge in which they sat at a small table. Though Tanya and Joel tried to include Maggie in their conversation, they failed. They were discussing Joel’s prospects of a Chair at the University — a perfectly unprivate topic, but their tones were so passionately intimate, so somehow mellifluous with love, that they might have been opera singers, rehearsing some tragic recitative in a public place where they didn’t want to be overheard.

  Maggie, watching them, was smitten with irrational envy. Of course she was romanticising stupidly; she should have stopped to think how hopeless it is for a woman to be in love with a married man who does not intend to leave his wife. It seemed to her that Tanya’s love was mature and rather splendid, far above her own inept coupling on the pink chenille…

  Covertly watching Joel’s warm hand creep forward under the table, yearning towards Tanya’s knee, Maggie felt something else — an unexpected, but very strong and sharp, prickle of desire. It was as if she felt those fingers touching her own knee. For a split second, before a startled Margaret took control and stifled the thought, they started to slide upwards toward that acutely vulnerable line where her nylon stocking stopped… Bruce’s hand had paused there, fumbling with the maddening suspenders, bringing Margaret out of her trance. What if a man like this, a gentle man, but with magic in his hands, had been on the pink chenille with her instead of…?

  But this would not do. Rigorously, Maggie helped Margaret by deflecting the lust back to Bruce. ‘I must,’ she thought, ‘I must make it right with him, or it will cripple me and I’ll never be able to love anyone properly, even a worldly other-worldly man like Tanya’s.’

  By the time Joel had taken leave of them (he didn’t, of course, kiss Tanya — illicit affairs were much more circumscribed and discreet in those days — but held her upstage elbow and gazed at her for so long that Maggie had to cough to remind them it was time for her train) she had made up her mind. She had time for only a short conversation with Tanya on the platform — ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ — ‘Very clever-looking, like the Mekon,’ etcetera as already related — and then, as she got aboard the London train, Maggie said, ‘I’m going to take your advice.’

  Tanya, who had a grey, pinched look as if she’d just been woken at 3 a.m. with bad news, said, ‘Good, although I fear I shall be in need of some myself if I stay in this damned town much longer.’

  She never spoke a truer word. But by the time her need had become desperate, Maggie was even further from her side than Tanya had been in Maggie’s hour of need.

  Bruce, reinstated within strict if undefined limits, was restraint its very self.

  He would meet her outside the theatre after Maggie’s principal had made her last entrance, at which time she was free to leave. Then he would either take her for dinner somewhere pleasant, or drive her straight home. He had recently moved into a new flat, and when, her wall of mistrust already breached, she agreed to go there to inspect it one morning (not at night, of course) he behaved with such meticulous propriety that she found herself wondering whether perhaps he didn’t find her attractive anymore.

  When three weeks had passed in this staid fashion, with no physical contact whatever, the tension began building up again.

  The volcano started to emit hissings and bubblings and little premonitory jets of steam.

  Isn’t he being good, thought Maggie. Almost too much? Maybe he didn’t enjoy it either and doesn’t want to risk a repetition. She wondered if it would be very imprudent to give him a twinkle of the old amber light — naturally not the green — just to see. More and more, Maggie found that she was counting on his presence in her life, if only to compensate for the revived shortcomings of her career. Understudying had begun to pall.

  For the first couple of weeks after opening night, it was thrill enough to hurry through the stage door every evening, to be greeted with impartial courtesy by the door-keeper, to glance at the notice-board and exchange a few words with any of the company’s lesser lights who happened to be around at stage-level. But then — up the endless flights of stone steps to her dressing-room under the eaves, there to sit out her mandatory three hours, reading, mending, doing cross-words, listening to the play on the Tannoy…

  Within a week, Maggie knew the entire play by heart and could have gone on for any of the cast. She yearned to do so. She would sit in her distant eyrie mouthing the lines as the actors spoke them far below, interspersing them with the understudy’s prayer: ‘Please God, let her break a leg!’ But her principal was a robust girl with a ruddy complexion and sturdy, unbrittle limbs like her own, who irked her by saying brightly each time they met: ‘Sorry! — still alive!’

  Understudy rehearsals continued, but only once a week. They were high-spots — she stood on the hallowed stage and spoke her lines — but it was a low sort of high-spot, after all. Mos
t of her fellow understudies were ‘professionals’. They ‘walked’ their parts at rehearsals and smiled indulgently at Maggie for really acting hers.

  ‘Don’t throw yourself about, ducky,’ advised one old pro. ‘Save it for “the night” — and pray it never comes.’

  ‘Have you ever played?’

  ‘Oh, a night here and there. Had to do a whole week once — ghastly. Played havoc with my turn, I got through it on Bismuth. I was so relieved when she came back, I gave her a lovely box of liqueur choccies.’

  A new bogey began to leer down a new tunnel. What if she, Maggie, were to get like this? Everyone said you mustn’t understudy more than once or no one ever considered casting you in a real part. The thought of spending months and years in a ‘dead’ dressing-room, one without costume, make-up, or ultimate purpose, soon came to seem little less horrendous than spending it at home hoping for and striving to secure a proper job.

  Such is an actor’s natural ingratitude. Thus Maggie began to look more and more towards Bruce for distraction and comfort.

  Alone in her bedroom, she took stock. The pink chenille had lost its suggestiveness and become its dear, common old self again. Maggie began to view the whole thing differently. Bruce was proving himself such a master of self-control that Maggie even began to wonder who had seduced whom. Her determination to resist his advances at all costs was proving so dauntingly unnecessary that a distinct sense of disappointment was intruding on her guilt. Cautiously, tentatively, the amber light blinked on — low wattage, but on.

  Then, with its usual impeccable timing, fate presented each of them with a startling piece of information, which radically altered everything.

  Maggie’s wouldn’t have startled anyone less naive than herself. As for Bruce’s, that was more in the nature of an exciting surprise than a ghastly shock: his firm was offering him a long posting in Nigeria, with a sizeable rise in salary and status, and free accommodation for ‘self and wife (if any)’.

  And it so happened that Bruce, big bad Bruce, for all his steam-roller tactics and bluff overconfidence, was scared witless by the challenges and changes that lay ahead of him. He needed someone, and looking at Maggie, he noticed — not the amber light so much, though that registered, but a well-brought-up, capable girl whom he was quite attracted to, who would adorn his little colonial bungalow for him better than most and keep him out of trouble with — well, whatever kind of women chaps like him tended to get into trouble with if they were imprudent enough to go to Africa without a wife.

  So he proposed. Lots of camping about, in case she should snub him, whereupon he could have passed it all off as a gag. It was hardly the kind of proposal one dreams of, but Maggie hadn’t a snub left in her by that time. The spectacle of Bruce on one knee crying ‘Ma bonnie Maggie — ma Scots bluebell — be mine!’ triggered off two almost instantaneous reactions.

  The first issued from her true self and was the correct one: pure contempt, a desire to tell him precisely where to put his frivolous and undignified proposal and the entire African continent with it, if room were found. It was this first and honest response, instantly stifled with the second, which made it so difficult later to cope with Tanya’s reaction, and later still with the inevitable results of her not having heeded that, either.

  But looking into Bruce’s bland, fatuous, but undeniably handsome face, seeing in his eyes and in his blush that the proposal was for real and that in his way he was as insecure and terrified as she was, Maggie saw her father loom before her again, his expression one of naked triumph. She had fulfilled his prophecy. The ultimate degradation was upon her. The only possible escape route lay in marriage and flight — and Bruce was offering her both.

  She heard herself accept him. Felt herself being embraced and kissed for the first time since that fatal night. Sensed the recoil in some deep inner place that she could neither reach nor control. Told herself — loud and clear, while his lips and hands were still on her — ‘You can’t do it!’ Answered herself: ‘I must! Besides, I love him in a way. I do love him. I must love him.’ Even while her loins were shrinking in that most fundamental denial.

  That same night, at the theatre, the girl she was under-studying failed to say, ‘Sorry! — still alive!’ In fact she looked decidedly wan. Halfway through the show there was a knock on the door of Maggie’s attic dressing-room and in she came.

  ‘Listen, darling. Something ghastly’s happened. I’ve got a bun in the oven.’ Maggie stared at her. ‘I’m going to have to leave the show anyway in a couple of months, and a lot sooner if I don’t stop feeling so rotten. I had to dope myself to the eyeballs to go on tonight. Just thought I’d warn you. Don’t start jumping about till I’ve gone, will you? I feel so absolutely suicidal about it…’

  Far from jumping about, Maggie burst into tears on the spot. It was the first time she’d cried since she found out about her own bun. During the previous week, she’d been so numb with shock that the relief of tears had been beyond reach.

  The other girl was naturally bewildered. ‘What’s this? Tears of bliss?’

  Maggie put her face down on the place where her make-up would have been, had the dressing-room been a live one. ‘I’m going to be married!’ she sobbed despairingly.

  Tanya, when she heard about the engagement, didn’t improve Maggie’s mood by rushing down to London to try to talk her out of it.

  ‘I never said marry him! God in heaven, Maggie, he’s not for you! For life, darling? You are mad! And Africa? What about your career? What about yourself?’

  Maggie, who had had time to recover a little, returned a wry smile and retorted, ‘I love him, she said simply.’

  Tanya stopped cold and looked at her. She, Tanya, had lost weight. She had also finally cut her beautiful long chestnut hair very short. She had written that it was better for wigs, but Maggie suspected Joel. When rendezvous are too curtailed to allow for the taking-down and pinning-up again of long hair, a man may prefer something he can run his fingers through. The short crop destroyed Tanya’s premature matronly look at a stroke, making her seem younger than her age if anything, and very vulnerable. At the same time she could still look fierce, almost vulpine.

  ‘I don’t believe you love him,’ she said harshly. ‘You haven’t the look.’

  ‘And you have, I suppose!’ said Maggie sharply, knowing that she did.

  ‘Yes. I wouldn’t wish it on you, what I have to go with it, but at least I do love. And you don’t.’

  The old cruel anger spurted up in Maggie’s throat, as always when she was made to feel shallow, feeble, inferior.

  ‘Well, it’s none of your business, actually!’

  ‘Don’t say that. It is my business. Friends are just as important as lovers and as a rule, last longer. So now listen to me. You wait until you are sweltering in one hundred degrees of wet heat with no theatre worth the name for miles and miles and that big gingery highland bull jumping on top of you every night!’ She took Maggie’s limp hands and squeezed them strongly, compelling her with her eyes. ‘If you were really in it, Maggie, in the love-pit like I am, I wouldn’t say a thing because then it’s hopeless, one can’t help oneself then. But you are free! You can give him the busman’s sign and go off and work and make love with different men and make choices for years yet until you finally fall in the pit. Don’t marry this one, Maggie! Don’t go to sodding Africa. Stay here, and be an actress!’

  Maggie struggled with herself, with her anger. Because now it was settled, and once something is settled, the battle lost or won, it takes immense courage and energy to re-open it again. She had decided not to tell Tanya, or anyone, about the prime reason for her decision. But when Tanya said, ‘You are free,’ she changed her mind.

  ‘I’m not free,’ she said at last.

  ‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ responded Tanya. She sat down. After a long time, she could restrain herself no longer and burst out, ‘Get rid of it, Maggie!’

  ‘What?’ cried Maggie, aghast.

  �
�Come on, you are not that naive! Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of it.’

  ‘No! I couldn’t!’

  Tanya looked at her. The tension, the persuasion, went out of her, and she slumped. ‘I believe you. But you will be sorry.’

  ‘Could you do it? Joel’s —’

  ‘I am not so stupid to let it happen!’ Tanya was suddenly shouting. ‘And that would anyway not be in the least the same!’ She had a wild, almost crazy look and her English had gone funny. Maggie understood at once that it was all she longed for, a child from Joel; yet at the same time, she felt Tanya’s words as a blow, calling her stupid, putting her down, and she felt trapped, not so much at that moment by her situation as by her own shortcomings that had landed her in it. And the hate always lurking for those who showed her herself in a poor light lashed out of her before she could muzzle it.

  ‘I may be stupid, and naive, and perhaps I don’t even know about real love, but at least I’m not stealing somebody else’s husband.’

  Tanya turned white to the lips, stood up, picked up her coat and bag and left Maggie alone. And that was the last they were to see of each other for many years.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER NINE

  It might be supposed that Bruce would be a bit put out by Maggie’s announcement, three weeks after their hasty wedding and two after their arrival in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, that she was two and a half months gone. Expressions such as ‘You trapped me into it’ or ‘I had a right to know’ had been haunting Maggie’s fevered expectations. But oddly enough, he didn’t seem to mind, and adjusted to rather too-imminent fatherhood very quickly. One advantage of a phlegmatic temperament — you don’t cry over spilt sperm. Of course, it helped that they were far from the Presbyterian Ayn Folk, and that none of the members of the WC (as Maggie soon came to call the white community among whom they lived) knew the date of the marriage.

  ‘Would you have married me if you’d known beforehand?’ Maggie asked once.