The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  Lilian stood there breathing noisily through her nose. Maggie caught her mother’s eye. Her mother was staring at Helen as if seeing her anew. Later, she was to say, through bitter tears of grief such as she hadn’t shed — at least not publicly — even for her husband, ‘Helen was always such fun when we were young; she loved to make people sit up — oh, the little parties! She used to do the most wicked imitations of our elders, she had us in stitches — no one could ever make me laugh as Helen could! What a waste — what a terrible, terrible waste!’ Only then did she reveal that Helen had been engaged to a boy who was killed at Ypres. And the reason no one had ever mentioned it before was because she was also engaged to another one who was killed at Verdun, and a third, who vanished without trace on the Somme. It had caused a shocking scandal because all the mourning parents had come to the house to commiserate with Helen as the affianced of their dead sons, all within a few months of each other. ‘Any one of them would have done. Any one of them would have saved her. Oh, damn their hideous wars! Damn their hideous wars!’ It was the first time Maggie had ever heard her mother swear.

  The night Helen’s slide had grown too steep for her to pull herself back up by Maggie’s hand, Maggie slept at home in her old bed and had a tangled dream — tangled almost literally in the worn twists of the dun-coloured counterpane which, for once, she had neglected to fold before falling into bed. She dreamt Helen was sliding down to the front door at the M’Crimmonds toward a dark shadow beyond the coloured glass panels. She herself was at the top by the majolica pot calling, ‘Come back, Aunty darling, it’s curtain-up in a minute!’ Then she dreamt other dreams, with Tanya mixed up in them. In one, there was a man standing outside a theatre with the rain beating down, staring at Tanya’s photo. She drifted nearer and he turned, and it was Joel. He said, ‘She’s perfect in my eyes. Look, she’s got a halo.’ Maggie said seriously, ‘Oh no, that’s Landseer of Leicester Square, he does it with back lighting.’ He reached his hand towards her without touching her and said, ‘I hate Leicester Square, don’t you?’ And Maggie felt suddenly very warm toward him and said, ‘Yes.’ The prickle of desire was there and turned into a bright white bubble, which swelled and burst blissfully. Then Tanya came out of her photo and said, ‘Whose fault is that? Look out, his fingers are magic.’ And Maggie awoke with a strange sense of disloyalty.

  The Vultures descended again relentlessly, and since they had all seen each other relatively recently they took even more liberties than before. They pottered in and out of the kitchen to make themselves cups of tea at all hours. Some of them hardly seemed to know whose funeral it was. Auntie Flora from Fife remarked, ‘Helen… She was the little dark one with the squint, wasn’t she?’ Mrs Robertson actually barked at her, ‘No, she was not! I would have thought you could keep track of your own cousins, even though you never bothered to send them so much as a Christmas card!’ This uncharacteristic outburst had a most beneficial effect. Flora had never been spoken to like that in her life (she said), took umbrage, together with her two infinitely stuffy elderly sons, and went home. Ian was very fussed, but ‘Good riddance!’ said Mrs Robertson, put more tongues on to boil, and then went back up to her room to cry some more.

  Maggie worked side by side with Lilian and tried to find something in common with her but couldn’t. Lilian had been a high-grade secretary with ‘a great deal of responsibility’ but had stopped work on her marriage and very clearly disapproved of women who didn’t. This made it impossible to talk to her about teaching. Since Lilian had clearly imbibed from Ian his feelings about Matt as a bastard-by-conception, she couldn’t talk about him, either. In fact, Lilian appeared to find any kind of conversation in the shadow of a funeral faintly improper, unless it dealt with practical concerns, or with the dead. And as Helen had gone out of life on a scandalous note, Lilian’s response to any loving comments about her was purse-lipped silence, or, pressed (for she made Maggie angry), with the remark, ‘Yes, a very lively old lady. I wonder that she could not have employed all that mental energy to do something useful.’ Maggie had always secretly felt that Helen had wasted her life, but had never blamed her for it; still, she found it hard to refute this priggish accusation. She had been won over to Joan’s creed: that all able-bodied women should work and that those who did ‘were, by that alone, better than those who didn’t’.

  If the Vultures had come for pickings, they were disappointed. Helen had left whatever she had — her house, essentially — to Ian, Maggie and Stip equally, plus all her books to Maggie. There were an astonishing number of these, including some that bore unmistakable traces of having been borrowed, over many years, from various libraries. Ian, of course, insisted on these being returned, and was furious to learn that Boots had stopped its library facility and would not take theirs back.

  ‘You’ve no right to these, you know,’ he said to Maggie as she sorted through them on her knees in Helen’s parlour while Ian took an inventory of the furniture. ‘They were not rightfully hers to leave. You ought to give them to charity.’ But Maggie without a word packed them all into a box, sealed it with broad strips of brown sticky tape and labelled them with her name and the legend: ‘To Await My Return. Do Not Open.’ Then she obliged Ian to help her transport them to the attic of their own house.

  Helen’s house went on the market, and was bought at once. It fetched £3,500. Not much, split three ways, but Maggie sent a little message of gratitude across the Great Divide. It was the first lump of money of her own she had ever had and it gave her a wonderful feeling. Brooking no refusal, she put the whole of the sum she still owed her father plus interest into her mother’s bank account. The gesture gave her immense relief, because her mother needed it. As Stip had said, he and Ian ‘saw her right’, but that was not the same as independence; her mother had hinted several times at the irksomeness of having to ‘ask’ every time she needed some little extra. Now at least she had something of her own.

  Maggie and Stip went out for walks when they could get away, and sat in the little park they had played in as children. It was autumn and all the shrubs and bushes were at their best; the air had a pale fragile coldness like golden glass, especially in the early mornings before the taint of chimney-smoke took the sharp edge off things and gave an acrid bite to breathing. There was no Clean Air Bill yet; the ‘turning’ bushes had soot on them and Maggie’s white slips needed washing every night if she’d been out, to rid them of their grey borders. But Maggie and Stip were used to it; it didn’t spoil their pleasure in the old localities or in each other, or in getting away from the house and its cross-currents for half a stolen hour now and then.

  ‘With your thousand you could leave the firm, strike out on your own,’ Maggie said as they sat trying to lure sparrows to their hands with crumbs.

  Stip was adding to the gathering smoke. He smoked a lot now. He stared across the grass for a while and suddenly burst out, ‘I wish she’d not left me a penny!’

  ‘Why on earth do you wish that?’

  ‘Och, Maggie, how can you understand? If it had come sooner, I might have — but then again, I might not. Dreams are dreams. Help in realising them isn’t so welcome when you’ve long given them up.’

  ‘Is it really too late, Stip? You’re only young. There’s time —’

  ‘For what? To go down to London, to live in my garret, to write…?’ He gave a short, harsh laugh. ‘Look at me. Look at my haircut, my waistcoat, my neatly-polished shoes — he’s very hot on shoes, is Ian. Look at my blasted socks, for the Lord’s sake…!’ He hiked up his neatly creased trouser legs and displayed socks with ‘clocks’ down the sides. She tried to laugh but she knew what he meant. ‘Besides,’ he added, with a trace of reproof, ‘someone’s got to live at home with Mum.’ He was silent, frowning. ‘You know what, Mags? I don’t think Mum would mind so much you not being around, if you were still acting. She often talks about “your career” the way… Well. I imagine she’ll use the same tone, now, when she talks about Aunty Helen.’ Maggie
went cold, as if his words had rung a knell. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘living in indolence in the tropics with just the one child she hardly ever sees and a husband she doesn’t know, well, I think it’s fair enough if she resents that a bit. I won’t pretend I’m entirely free of resentment myself.’

  Maggie stared unseeingly at a sparrow, hopping toward her limp hand, its head cocked. She was still as a statue, her spirit absent, but it returned with a painful jolt when Stip went on hesitantly, ‘I know you think I’ve been weak-kneed and taken the line of least resistance, but there’s more than one kind of weakness. You didn’t exactly chase your dream either, not when comfort and safety beckoned.’

  ‘I was going to have a baby.’

  Stip actually blushed.

  ‘Yes, old Ian worked that out in a flash, of course. I remember thinking I must have been dim-witted or abnormally naive not to have realised it till he told me. Still, Mags, that — that’s not something that can just happen, like falling downstairs, is it? You must have willed it, some way or other. Maybe, like me, you were afraid of failing, subconsciously looking for a way out.’

  So this time it was her younger brother’s words that were etched in her brain when she returned to Nigeria.

  She never got to the theatre to see Tanya. She phoned, once, but Tanya was on stage. It was only afterwards Maggie let herself wonder why she’d phoned at 8 p.m. instead of at seven. And why she hadn’t left her name.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Well? How was it?’ Bruce asked when she had cleared customs. He was loading luggage into the car. She had bought a fairy-cycle for Matt, with stabiliser wheels; she thought Bruce would say something about this — either that it was the wrong thing or the right thing — but he didn’t remark on it at all, humping it into the boot like another suitcase. His kiss seemed more perfunctory than usual, and his answers to her questions — fired at him the moment she had arrived — were the briefest possible.

  ‘Very, very sad and upsetting.’ She had cabled him when Helen died.

  ‘Naturally. I told you not to go.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m glad I went! It would have been awful, not to have gone.’

  ‘See anyone you liked better than yourself?’ He always asked this, even if she’d only been shopping.

  ‘I nearly saw an old friend of mine. She was playing in Edinburgh. But in the end, I didn’t have time.’

  ‘You should have stayed longer. There was no hurry. You know everything runs like clockwork here without you.’

  Stung, she asked, ‘Didn’t Matt miss me at all?’

  ‘Not noticeably. He’s got Tolly, after all.’

  She felt an authentic stab of jealousy through the African padding that was already threatening to creep round her, like the jacket on her mother’s boiler, holding out cold but vital feelings.

  ‘Why didn’t you bring him to meet me?’ she asked with unwonted sharpness.

  ‘He was playing. He didn’t want to come.’

  She turned in the car to look at him. Was he hurting her on purpose, to get back at her for her behaviour about the house in Cape Town? His bland, blunt profile gave nothing away.

  ‘Did you tell him where you were going? I mean, so that he realised it was to meet me?’

  He shrugged. ‘You know how he is when he’s absorbed.’

  Not the lie direct, then, but a lie by implication, and Maggie reacted with astonishment. Was she being punished? But it was unlike Bruce to punish her, and certainly not so subtly. Well! Maggie thought. We’ll see soon enough what’s at the back of this. But the pain of thinking, even for a second, that Matt had not wanted to come lingered, even after she’d dismissed the idea as ridiculous. The aeroplanes would have fetched him, even without her!

  Sure enough, when they got into the bungalow and Matt saw her, he flung himself on her with such unstinted enthusiasm that the residual ache was assuaged.

  ‘Why didn’t you come with Daddy to meet me?’ she asked when she had surfaced. He was sitting astride her hips, his arms round her neck, his damp little face pressed to hers.

  ‘He didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Of course I did, old boy!’ said Bruce forcefully. ‘You never listen to your poor old Dad.’

  He went through into the bedroom, carrying suitcases. Mother and son looked into each other’s eyes.

  ‘He didn’t tell me,’ Matt repeated earnestly.

  Maggie believed him. She felt relieved, and at the same time most uneasy. She couldn’t recall Bruce ever lying to her before. How like him to begin with one so inept! Tolly came through from the kitchen, all one big body-smile. How beautiful she would look in the new red dress Maggie had brought her! She came to Maggie for a kiss, and Matt put an arm round both their necks, making a human bridge between them.

  ‘Come and see your present!’

  They went out to the car, parked beyond the front lawn. Matt, on his feet now, pulled her in a curve so that the whirling spray dappled them as they crossed the grass — his favourite joke. The boot was open, the bike exposed.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Tolly, wringing her hands. ‘Lucky Matty!’

  Matt just gazed. Then he began to dance about. ‘Get it out!’

  ‘Daddy will, he’s just coming.’ And he was. Quickly, Maggie asked Tolly, ‘Did my husband tell Matt he was going to the airport?’

  ‘Master not be here all day,’ Tolly said. Which wouldn’t have been so very odd except that it was Sunday.

  Basically, Bruce had no duplicity in his nature, and had to adopt it to meet his situation, wearing it like an ill-fitting suit of clothes belonging to a much lither and more sinuous man. His natural artlessness bulged through the fabric of lies at every seam.

  A wife with a sharper — that is, more loving — eye, would have spotted at once where the danger lay. Almost as soon as she got back she met the girl, striding on long American legs through Port Harcourt market, shopping for vegetables. Maggie happened to be with Bruce on the same errand, and she even noticed his sudden flush and the stumble in his voice, but attributed it to some remark of her own. The girl saw Bruce and waved cheerily, and Maggie noticed her (who could help it? She was just as pretty as they’d said) and remarked, ‘That must be the Zuleika Dobson of the mission.’ Bruce gave her a puzzled glance. ‘Her name’s Angela Milston.’

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘We’re acquainted.’

  ‘Oh ho!’ said Maggie in one of those meaninglessly roguish ripostes. And she smiled in a friendly fashion at the girl (after all, everyone was being so spiteful behind her back) and passed on without giving her another thought.

  From this time on, Bruce’s behaviour caused Maggie a great deal of bewilderment. He treated her with consideration and courtesy, much more than before. He brought her a regular weekly present, usually flowers (which she didn’t need or like — she felt smothered by the extravagant scents of tropical flowers and longed for the cool subtle fragrances of daffodils). He took a studied interest in her teaching, and invariably attended any shows she put on with the children, though she could tell he was bored and rather embarrassed. He inflicted his colleagues and their wives on her much less than he had once done, and when they did have to entertain he would help her as much as possible with the arrangements, even to making the coffee for the guests after William had gone off duty. Maggie never even noticed that he had taken to percolating coffee the American way. She really was quite dead to feminine intuition, but no doubt that useful faculty does not function fully where love is absent.

  Joan did try to warn her. She skirted round it several times, as Maggie was to realise in retrospect, but hesitated to come right out with it. Her way was to talk a lot more than ever before about her own husband — her ‘ould-fella’ as she affectionately and wryly called him.

  ‘He was always very good to me, in his way, my ould-fella,’ she said once in what was apparently a mood of reminiscence. ‘But you know what men are. He had the faults of his gender.’

  ‘What, for instance
?’ Maggie asked idly. Joan’s ould-fella had been dead and gone these ten years. Maggie was marking exercise books and not listening very carefully.

  ‘Oh, my dear! Need I specify? Who knows what he’d have been like if we’d stayed in a temperate climate? This damned wet heat has a staggering effect on some people, you know, not only the men! Well, you’ve been out here long enough to know that.’

  ‘Mmm,’ murmured Maggie. Scandals did not exactly abound among the WC, but an occasional bit of hanky-panky went on, which one got wind of. Maggie wondered remotely what Joan was bringing it up for; gossip usually filled her with scorn.

  ‘Had a spot of bother with a black girl once,’ Joan suddenly said.

  Maggie looked up.

  ‘Yep. Wouldn’t have credited it if he hadn’t admitted it. Poor old Jimbo! Didn’t seem to know what had hit him.’ She puffed away on her ‘fag’, staring at the low ceiling where a small pink lizard was resting upside down.