The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  With Matt evidently in such good hands, Maggie had no excuse not to return directly to the hospital, but Stip took pity on her.

  ‘Get to your bed now, Mags, you must be played out. I’ll come and fetch you in the morning.’

  She saw him to the door. She wanted to talk to him, but suddenly she felt so exhausted there were no words. She simply leant against him and hid her face. He put his arms round her. He smelt different, and he was broader, stronger than she remembered — he had always been so slight, like the proverbial reed that might break. ‘You’re an oak-tree now,’ she murmured.

  He gave a little chuckle and patted her.

  ‘How’s your life, Stip?’

  He was silent and his hand was still.

  ‘You’ve been away a long, long time, Maggie. Maybe we can talk about our lives when we’ve dealt with Dad’s death.’

  ‘Do you love him? Will you miss him?’

  He shook himself and let her go. ‘I don’t like such questions. I don’t look into myself much. I just try to “walk in quiet through the days”… That’s why I hate dramas. They break that — concentration I try to keep, on the path just ahead of my feet. Do you understand what I’m blethering about?’

  ‘Yes. And it’s just as bad a way to live as mine.’

  ‘How’s your way?’

  ‘Remember my skimming dreams? Feet just above the ground, no effort, no resistance, once you’ve taken that deep breath and levitated yourself… It’s like that. And it’s bad. I felt my feet touch ground when the plane landed. It was the first time for an eternity, Stip.’ Since Matt was born. That was real enough.

  ‘Are you not happy in Africa, then?’ He sounded afraid of her answer.

  She stared at the light from the street-lamp that penetrated the coloured panels, set in lead, in Helen’s front door.

  ‘No. What I have isn’t happiness. It’s not real enough,’ she said at last. ‘Don’t tell Mummy, will you?’

  Stip heaved a very deep sigh. ‘Oh God,’ he said hollowly. ‘We are a pair of failures, aren’t we?’

  He opened the door and walked down the path without saying goodbye. Maggie felt mortally alone suddenly. She crawled up to bed, and for once there was nothing to prevent her taking Matt in beside her. He cuddled close like a big warm bed-toy. She dropped asleep, consoled by love, not thinking of her father at all.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next few days were frightful. The frightfulness was not so much caused by sorrow and morbid apprehension — that would have been easier to bear because of the feeling of ‘rightness’ that would have accompanied it. The reason they were frightful for Maggie was because of how little real dread she felt about her father’s death. Because, a lot of the time, she felt empty of all but guilt.

  Hour upon hour she had to spend sitting by the bedside contemplating that corpse-like figure, aware of her mother’s anguish and totally unable to share in it. ‘I don’t care about him,’ she kept thinking. ‘I don’t honour him.’ The biblical phrase, oddly, tormented her conscience more than the other.

  But something else tormented her far worse. The money.

  How could it be that, throughout the soporific years in Africa as Bruce’s appendage and Matt’s mother, she had been able to push aside the urgency of this debt? It became, as the never-ending days crept past, a token of the whole inexplicable syndrome of her escape from every aspect of reality and of herself: her career (which had been her fundamental motivation until the night of Matt’s conception), her sense of responsibility for herself, her talent — even her mistakes.

  Bruce had entered her, and as he broke her open and planted her with his seed, so he breached her walls of selfhood. He had taken her over, and, mysteriously — she couldn’t fathom it, sitting here in her home-place, breathing her native air — she had gone limp, as she had allowed herself to go limp that night on the pink chenille, let him have her, then let him bear her away to a form of personal oblivion. The fact that she must now sit beside her dying father, and be unable to say to him, even in her thoughts, ‘I’ve paid my debt to you. I worked for it and saved it and denied myself things and it is paid,’ seemed to her the main device on the tarnished banner of her situation.

  She dreaded his regaining consciousness. She sat with her eyes fixed on his closed, sunken ones, willing them not to open. She could not face him. Yet she knew the awfulness of her wish. Her mother, sitting opposite, holding the cold, vein-strung hand and gazing at the dwindling face, must be willing the opposite — that the eyes would open just once more, and the voice speak a few words to her that she could carry with her on the relentless long march of the rest of her life.

  To resolve this unbearable dichotomy, Maggie’s newly-activated brain, revitalised by proximity to the source of guilt, began clicking, like a machine left well-oiled and ready but needing to be run in. Bruce had given her a generous allowance to spend on her leave. Enough to go to London if she liked, to stay in a hotel… Of course, it was not her own money, not her own money. Nothing you hadn’t earned by your own work could ever be your own. But still, it was hers to spend, hers to forego… Yes, she would do it, it was better than nothing; it would end part of the discomfort. It was nowhere near enough, but it was something.

  ‘Mummy.’

  ‘Yes, dear.’ (They were whispering — why?)

  ‘I’ve got some of the money.’

  Her mother looked at her blankly. ‘What money?’

  ‘The money I … stole from Dad.’

  The look became darkling, unreadable. ‘Is it not a bit late to be bothering with that?’

  ‘I couldn’t before. I’ve not been earning.’

  ‘No. It’s a great pity.’

  ‘What is?’

  Her mother looked surprised. ‘Why, that you didn’t go on with your career. The money…’ She shrugged.

  ‘Did he ever mention it?’

  ‘Neither it, nor you.’

  Somehow, despite everything, these words struck her heart cold. ‘Never?’ All these years…

  ‘I would tell him news. Read him letters. But he didn’t respond.’

  ‘But he listened. He knew about Matt.’

  ‘He knew. He was waiting.’

  ‘Waiting?’

  ‘I thought so. That was my impression.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I thought you would know that. I wasn’t in the room that last time.’

  Maggie said no more. She was too startled. All traces of boredom vanished as she sat thinking, reliving. Oh yes, she knew what he had been waiting for. Now she suffered — not ‘properly’ from love and sorrow — but from the old guilt, more clearly rationalised. A strange thought came to her in its midst: If I had to be so wicked, why couldn’t I have had a less sensitive conscience? Or, being cursed with one, why couldn’t I be a better human being with less to feel guilty about?

  Staring at her father’s dying face hour by hour had a hypnotic effect. She knew it was overdoing it; she was punishing herself almost consciously, as one does for a guilt that it is too late or impossible to assuage in any way that will do the wronged person any good. But nevertheless, she saw her father as someone who had slaved all his life and off whose sweat she had scraped her chance. Not the least of the guilt was having failed to make use of that chance, to have stolen, and then thrown the stolen treasure away.

  She contemplated never going back to Africa. Staying here. Trying to get back to work. But there was Matt. Matt tugged her back from this idea like a leg-iron. She hardly thought of Bruce; Bruce melted out of her calculations. But to Matt she returned every night. Matt was utterly, ineluctably real.

  Mr Robertson died a week after Maggie’s return to Scotland, without regaining consciousness.

  Mrs Robertson’s collective noun for relatives was ‘a descent of vultures’. They never came to happy occasions like weddings — they were not invited. But funerals are come-all-ye occasions, which exclude no one.

  The phone at home rang at inter
vals for three days and nights. ‘It’s yer Auntie Fiona from Fife — can ye no’ come to meet a body at the station?’

  ‘It’s yer second cousin Donald — not the Robertson Donald, the Reid Donald. Tell yer mother I’m the eldest of her step-cousin Fanny. We’ve come down for the funeral from Inverness and we’ve nowhere to stay, can ye find a corner for us for a couple of nights…?’

  Maggie, Stip and Ian had, perforce, to work side by side, even Ian had to do his share — there were not enough women to make beds, do shopping, slice the funeral baked meats (very thin) on to ritual dishes.

  Lilian, Ian’s fiancée, came to help. She was a tall, thin-lipped, almost but not quite elegant girl (she missed through being too rangy and not dressing well enough to hide it) with very short hair like a man and a maddening reluctance to wear the glasses she desperately needed so that she kept fumbling and bumping into things. Maggie, watching her put the salmon sandwiches on the same dish with the beef ones, reflected that if Tanya or someone she loved had had this foolish vanity she might have found it endearing. But Lilian was going to marry Ian. And Ian was making her life a misery.

  Once, in a brief intermission in the frenzied preparations, he came upon her — caught her, rather — coming out of the lavatory with the local paper turned back to the entertainment page.

  He spoke to her for the first time, apart from essential domestic exchanges. ‘Why not do the crossword while you’re about it, or read the comic-strips? That would just about sum you up, with your trumpery concerns! Perhaps you’d prefer to scamper off to a play or a cinema tomorrow instead of attending our father’s funeral? You’re certainly dressed for some kind of frivolous outing,’ he added, indicating her perfectly ordinary summer dress.

  ‘Do you expect me to dress in black?’

  ‘It would be more fitting,’ he retorted. He himself wore a black arm-band, which presumably Lilian had stitched to the sleeve of his sombre grey worsted suit. Lilian had worn the same navy-blue dress, unadorned, for the three days Maggie had known her.

  ‘Mum isn’t.’

  ‘Our mother’s mourning is in her heart,’ Ian actually said.

  Such sententiousness put Maggie past all patience.

  ‘You pompous ass!’ she burst out. ‘Do you think you’ve got a monopoly on grief because you wear yours literally on your sleeve?’

  He regarded her with narrowed eyes. ‘Of course, you never had a very strict regard for the truth,’ he said slowly. ‘But surely even you would find it hard to look anyone in the eye and say you feel anything very much about the fact that our father is lying down there in his coffin?’

  She flushed, gripping the paper in a spasm that made it crackle revealingly.

  ‘My feelings are my business,’ she said.

  ‘Very small business, then.’

  She started to turn away angrily, but he caught her arm. They were standing alone on the upstairs landing. It was rather dark, but she could see his eyes, the bright points of piercing light in them, and smell his breath. It bore a trace of whiskey.

  ‘I’d rather be pompous than be what you are,’ he said with deliberate provocation.

  ‘And what am I, according to you?’

  ‘An immoral woman,’ he said. ‘Without principle or a sense of purpose. You go where every wind blows. I’m sorry for a certain someone, for I don’t think you’re fit to be a mother.’

  Maggie stared at him, winded.

  ‘How dare you say that —’ she gasped.

  His fingers still biting her arm, he said, ‘I know what you and Steven think of me. I know you’ve always despised me. I know my own faults, but despite them I know I’m more of a man than he is, and I’ll be a better parent when the time comes than you. I’m honest, and I accept my responsibilities. And I don’t let myself hanker after what I can’t pay for myself. Nor do I lash out at people as you lashed out at Father, throwing his little weaknesses in his face so that he never got over it — when you were unrepayably in debt to him.’

  After a terrible, paralysed moment, Maggie tore herself away. Like a hurt child, she rushed straight to her mother.

  She was in the bedroom she had shared with her husband for thirty-five years, sitting on the double bed sorting her husband’s clothes. She looked up, white-faced, as Maggie burst in. Maggie stopped short, realising with deep embarrassment that she was interrupting something as private as parental love-making. She started to back out again, but her mother said, ‘Come along in, Maggie, what’s the matter? More “vultures” in the offing?’

  Maggie went and joined her on the bed. Around them were piles of dark suits — each suit divided into its three components: here the trousers folded into squares, here the waistcoats, here the jackets, turned inside out except for the sleeves — all dark.

  Dark brown, dark blue, dark grey. Black. Some with fine pinstripes, which emphasised rather than relieved the sombreness. On the floor beside the huge old-fashioned open wardrobe lay a row of shoes, only four pairs, good quality, very old, scrupulously maintained and still on trees. What would happen to them now?

  ‘Why are you doing this now, Mummy? Why aren’t you resting?’

  ‘This is a kind of resting,’ she said. She laid another jacket on the pile, its worn shiny lining reflecting the dim light. Both curtains were drawn.

  ‘Must you sit in the dark?’

  ‘My eyes ache,’ she said. ‘I can do this in the dark, anyway. I know every fold of all these garments by heart. He hadn’t bought anything new for years. I used to give him sweaters and shirts at Christmastime, but I couldn’t give him suits; he had to be measured for those. He didn’t treat himself to a new suit for about — oh, it must be five years.’

  ‘Was he — so hard up?’

  ‘Well, things had begun to pick up. After the big mill closed, we got a lot of their business. Ian’s done wonders, you know. But we had our own private austerity.’ Maggie said nothing. She was looking at her mother’s dress. Even in the dark she recognised it as the one she had been wearing that last day, at the wedding — mauve crepe, with a pattern of drab-olive leaves. She had rushed into the room with the rhetorical question on her lips: ‘It wasn’t all my fault, was it?’ Now she feared the answer, or the evasion, too greatly to ask it. Tears rolled. Her mother, for once misunderstanding her, took her in her arms almost gratefully.

  ‘There, there, darling. You see, you did love him really! These things are so painful. Don’t make it worse for yourself!’

  In the very midst of being comforted, Maggie froze and withdrew herself. She took refuge in extreme practicality. Blowing her nose, she said, ‘Mummy, what’s going to happen now? Are you going to be all right financially? I’ve got some money, as I told you. And I can get more —’

  ‘Oh, no, dear,’ her mother said instantly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I really couldn’t take your husband’s money. I don’t know him.’

  There was a silence. Maggie empathised so perfectly with this reaction that it was useless to argue.

  ‘Besides,’ Mrs Robertson went on, ‘it’s unnecessary. The business will run on much as usual. Ian and his staff will see to that.’ Maggie noted that Stip was not mentioned. Was he then such an inconsiderable factor in the ongoings of the firm? It shamed her somehow that Ian was the rock to whom her mother now clung, not herself or Stip.

  ‘But Ian’s going to be married.’

  ‘What has that to do with it?’

  Maggie didn’t know exactly what had made her say it. In her subconscious, marriage equalled desertion of her mother. But Ian was not going to Africa. Ian would be living nearby. Lilian, purblind and bony and uptight and with whatever other faults she might prove to have, was already down in the Robertson kitchen in an apron boiling tongues. She was not removing Ian from the clan, she was joining it. She would be more of a comfort and a help to Maggie’s widowed mother than Maggie would.

  ‘I wish I didn’t have to go back!’ she
burst out. She had not known till that moment that it would not matter to her, deep down, if she never saw Bruce again. She had everything here that counted. That other world, that steamy, disorientating, debilitating other life, yawned like a pit.

  ‘Maggie, you mustn’t say that on my account. You’ve your own life to lead.’

  Maggie stared at her.

  ‘It’s not only for you,’ she said at last, her tongue clumsy with unspeakable thoughts.

  Her mother’s face changed. She seized Maggie’s hand in a fierce grip. ‘Oh, my dear! Don’t say all my loneliness has been for nothing! Don’t tell me you’re not happy!’

  And she meant, Maggie saw, precisely that — that if Maggie were not happy, she was to spare her mother knowing it. So she hugged her, and lied, and said of course she was happy, that Bruce gave her all she wanted and was never unkind to her and was every bit as nice as ever she could have hoped. And so the dangerous corner was passed and they began to talk about Matt.

  Mrs Robertson had not been able to stand out against Matt’s charms, and even if she had, Helen’s besotted enthusiasm would have won her over. Helen had been almost as loth to be relieved of him as Tolly, when the time came for Maggie and Matt to move back into the family home; she had insisted on coming with them in Stip’s car, holding Matt possessively on her knee, and when they arrived, it was she who had borne him into the house, crying out his praises so loudly and continuously that even Ian had not been able to avoid looking at Matt, though he had drawn the line at touching him.

  But Mrs Robertson had him thrust into her arms before she knew what was happening.

  ‘Ah, here’s your Granny, then! What a lucky Granny! Look at him, Mary, only look at his darling face — isn’t he just the spit of Maggie when she was that age?’ He was perfectly unlike Maggie at any age and in every particular, but the discussion that followed on this contentious topic between the two sisters tided over the awkward moment, and throughout it Matt sat beaming in Mrs Robertson’s arms and doing himself no harm at all by saying ‘Gran-gran-gran —’ and patting her face. Helen had probably conditioned him to the belief that all grey-haired wrinkle-faced humans were benign to the point of slavishness, and here was another of them, soon reinforcing the lesson by jogging him up and down and letting him play with her necklace. Nobody, and certainly not Matt, noticed Ian stalking furiously from the room.