From the outset — from Matt’s birth — Maggie had had her deep secret doubts about her abilities as a mother. Her dependence on Tolly, of which she had always been guiltily aware, Ian’s caustic remarks, and her own inner conviction that her bent lay elsewhere, had undermined her confidence.
Her mother — in whose conventional view, motherhood was every woman’s birthright, mothering ability as natural a talent as conceiving — was baffled by Maggie’s outbursts of self-laceration when she felt she had mishandled a ‘basic situation’.
‘Darling, you shouldn’t upset yourself over every little thing! Goodness, if I’d eaten away at myself every time I’d been cross with one of you, there’d have been nothing left of me by the time I’d raised you.’
‘But why did I have to smack him? He didn’t mean to break the bloody thing, it was an accident!’
‘You’d told him not to play with it, and he did, and he broke it, and you smacked him. That’s all right, Maggie, it’s within the limits of what you must allow yourself.’
‘I didn’t smack him for disobeying me, I smacked him because of the noise, the mess, because I lost my temper —’
‘Better than hitting him in cold blood. Now go up and cuddle him and read him a story, and I’ll make chips for supper.’
Mrs Robertson became a skilled make-it-up-er; she saw that as her main role. However, there was another side to her. Maggie found her not only a kind and loving companion and helper with Matt, but, in subtle ways, a spur and even a goad.
One evening, about a year after Maggie’s return home, her mother seemed unusually thoughtful.
‘What’s on your mind, Mummy?’ Maggie asked. She herself was restless and nervy as she was so often. Matt was in bed and she should have been able to relax after a taxing day with him, but she couldn’t. She felt like talking.
‘It’s really none of my business.’
‘Is it to do with Matt?’ Maggie asked quickly.
‘In a way. It’s more to do with you.’
Maggie curtailed her prowlings round the room and sat down in one of the big mushroom-covered armchairs.
‘Go on.’
‘Have you thought at all what you’re going to do with yourself?’
Maggie felt an uncomfortable little shock inside her head.
‘I’m going to live here with you, and bring up Matt as well as I can.’
‘Hm.’
‘What’s that supposed to imply?’
‘Is that really going to be enough?’
Maggie said nothing.
‘Are you happy with the local school for Matt?’
‘For the moment.’
‘He’ll be eight soon.’
‘He’s only just turned seven.’
‘When Ian was eight, we packed him off to boarding school.’
‘Yes, and look at him!’
‘You misjudge Ian. I know his faults, but there is a great deal of good in him.’
‘Let’s just say I wouldn’t want Matt to grow up like him.’
‘Matt is an entirely different type.’
‘I really wouldn’t feel right about sending any child of that age away from home, Mummy. Anyway, what would be the advantage of it? Perhaps you think he’d be better off away from me?’
Her mother laid down her work and looked at her over her glasses. ‘Maggie, stop it. You are not to get an inferiority complex about yourself as a mother. If there is one quality above all others that a woman needs to be a good mother, it’s self-confidence.’
‘I thought it was patience.’
‘A poor second, I assure you. Patient women can be cabbages, or rather, doormats. A child needs something to strive with, something which resists and stands firm and even hits back. “Patience” is too flabby a quality to come first.’
‘All right, so say I have no self-confidence. As well as not much patience. Would that indicate that he should go to boarding school?’
Mrs Robertson worked in silence for a while. Maggie grew restless again.
‘I’m much more concerned with you than Matt. I believe a child needs a fulfilled, satisfied mother. I see very little possibility of your being either if you go on the way you are at present.’
This was drawing uncomfortably close to the secret Bluebeard’s chamber in Maggie’s mind, where lurked the fear that, if Matt were somehow off her hands, her undoubted subresponsibility for her mother would not alone be sufficient to keep her from running away to London to pursue her own life — her own career.
‘Didn’t you tell me,’ her mother went on, ‘that Bruce has set money aside and wants Matt to go to his old school?’
‘I’m not bound to do what Bruce wants!’
‘Certainly you’re not. But if what he wants happens to coincide with what’s best for you and the wee boy…?’
‘What do you think is best for us?’
Mrs Robertson crocheted in silence while Maggie watched her with a strange sense of being on a brink.
‘I would like,’ her mother said at last without looking up, ‘to see you on a stage, just once, before my sight totally gives out.’
Then she looked up and their eyes met. The blue of the older woman’s was worn pale with discouragements and lack of fulfilment, while the blue of Maggie’s was still vividly dark and full of fight. Something flashed between them that united them in a complicity of needs and desires, which could once have made them comrades-in-arms against the repressions of their lives; for a painful second, Maggie was angry with her mother, because now it might well be too late — she was spurring a horse securely tied to a post.
‘I’ve no right to advise you,’ Mrs Robertson said. ‘I made a mess of my own life, though I’ve had my satisfactions. But I often wonder if I wouldn’t have had more to give to you children, and even, oddly enough, to your father, if I’d taken more for myself. That’s the only thought I can offer you.’
Maggie thought it over during the next few days. She tasted and tested her restlessness, fearing it like some fledgling wild thing within her, which would, when full-grown, rend her, and through her, Matt… The little town with its parades of shops, its mills, its pubs and garages and bus stops and community hall, without even a railway station anymore to give an illusion of being on a main line to anywhere, proceeded on its bland way, offering no challenge, no satisfaction. It was a backwater, without even the exotic novelty and disquieting foreignness of Africa… Its denizens began to seem close kin to the WC. Maggie knew she couldn’t stand it for ever, not for Matt, not for her mother, not out of a conviction of duty or indebtedness — not to prove to Ian that she was good mother-material. Not even to prove it to herself.
She went to consult Stip.
His house was on the outskirts of town. He was intensely happy, doing it up after work and at weekends. Maggie was astonished by what he had done already. There was no safe Homes-and-Gardens effect here. The hallway and stairs were clad in a napped paper, which drew the hand like fur, in a brilliant burnt orange. The double-ended living-room was to have one black wall. ‘A black wall!’ shrieked Maggie. ‘Horrors! Why?’
‘Because it will look sensational with my new abstracts on it,’ said Stip, unmoved.
His bedroom seemed to be all mirrors, ‘How decadent!’ said Margaret, and Maggie added, ‘— delicious! How can you afford this fin-de-siècle-brothel look, on your salary?’
‘Helen’s legacy, plus savings — Mum would hardly take a penny while I was at home. Besides, all the mirrors are junk-shop gleanings. You’d be amazed the beautiful things people don’t want.’
Maggie looked somewhat doubtfully at the gilded light-brackets. ‘It’s a bit precious, Stip.’
There was a pause. She looked at him quickly.
‘This house,’ said Stip, ‘is going to be me. As much as I can possibly afford to make it. So if you say anything negative about it, kindly remember, you will hurt my feelings.’
‘I’m mad about most of it.’
‘Good.’
/> They went down to the kitchen, which was still in complete chaos. There was only an oil stove to make coffee on.
‘You haven’t been to Sunday lunch for weeks,’ Maggie mentioned.
‘I see enough of Ian at work. Any Sunday he can’t come, let me know and I’ll be round. How’s Matt?’
‘He misses you.’
‘Bring him here one day after school. He can lend a hand with the painting.’
Coffee mugs in hand, they wandered round the derelict garden and Stip enthusiastically told her exactly what he planned for this area of his property. It appeared he had ambitions as a landscape gardener as well. Maggie was amazed. He seemed to have taken on a new lease of life. In the spring breeze, his tuft of hair stood up tentatively, as if raising itself to peep out of its firmly combed-down rut to see if life was perhaps worth taking an interest in again. Strolling out here with Stip, Maggie felt all her restive urgings to be off, her deep fears about herself and even her anger with Bruce, which still simmered only just beneath the surface, not vanishing but at least falling into perspective.
Into this deceptive calm water, she casually dropped her boulder.
‘D’you think I should send Matt away to school and try to go back on the stage?’
It took a moment for the ripple to reach Stip. Then he stopped abruptly and stared at her.
‘You wouldn’t,’ he said at last. ‘You wouldn’t leave her again. You’ve only been back a few months.’
‘It’s a year, Stip. She’s okay. It was her idea actually.’
Stip bent down and dragged an elm seedling out viciously. The basic empathy between them made her aware of his thoughts.
‘You wouldn’t have to go back there, you know.’
He turned on her. ‘Oh! Indeed? What makes you so sure? What if you’d be away on tour or something, and she was ill or had a fall? She’s just at the age when they fall and break their bones, and if they’re living alone they can just lie there for days —’
Now it was Maggie who stared. He looked quite wild, and his voice was pitching up shrilly, as it had when he was a child. He heard it and silenced himself sharply. When he spoke again his voice sounded simply curt.
‘Sorry. But you don’t know what it’s been like. I’ve done a long stint. Now it’s your turn — your turn, Maggie, and you’re not getting off the hook.’
Maggie felt a strange stubbornness creeping over her; the more he opposed her, the more her desire to escape crystallised. She hadn’t realised till now that she hadn’t come for advice at all, but simply to get Stip to ratify what she was subconsciously longing to do.
‘What about Ian? Why can’t she live with him? They’ve got a big enough house —’ Something in Stip’s face gave her pause, but then she rushed on. ‘When they adopt their baby, they’ll need her.’
‘Shut your face, Maggie!’
Maggie shut her face promptly. Stip’s rages, even as a child, had been rare, but cataclysmic and intimidating. ‘You shock me. You selfish little wretch! Would you want to live with Ian, let alone with Lilian? She was always waspish, and if you think somebody else’s baby is going to improve her you’ll believe anything. Mum’d have to watch every step she took and every word she spoke. Why should she, Maggie, why should she, when she’s got her own house and a daughter who owes her everything?’
‘Everything —?’
‘Don’t you know Mum more than half guessed all the time that you weren’t at cooking school, and bore your secret for you, and the guilt of deceiving Dad, and then calmed him down when he found out?’
‘He wasn’t very calm when —’
‘Maggie, listen. If it hadn’t been for Mum, he’d have handed you over to the police.’ She stared at him silently. She didn’t doubt it. ‘And she’s never said a word or laid one wee claim on you, and now you want to run off and leave her to rot with Ian… I can’t believe it, I can’t, Maggie, that’s the truth. Not even of you!’
This last cut swift and deep. Maggie hung her head, crushed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Penicuik is many miles from the epicentre of the London theatre scene, but that would not, of itself, have kept Tanya and Maggie apart. Nor would their ancient quarrel. Scarcely a day — well, certainly not a week — had passed in all the years when Maggie had not thought of Tanya, wondered about her, and missed her vigorous lively companionship.
After Bruce’s decampment Maggie had written, from Port Harcourt, a letter to Tanya, addressed to Spotlight, the casting directory, whose forwarding department had acted with commendable promptness and efficiency. Within a fortnight had come a lengthy reply, which Maggie hungrily devoured:
Darling, darling Maggie,
I must say it: sympathy — horrors — hands thrown up and eyes rolling, for your sake, you poor thing. Remember Miss Pross at RADA who used to say, for anything from a missed appointment to falling over a dead body, ‘Horrors, darling! It’s horrors! No, no dear, don’t just stand there, REACT!’ And ‘react’ with her meant throwing up your hands, rolling your eyes… And that is what I am doing for you. And are you ready to do it for me? Here goes.
When you last saw me, I was in love. With Joel. Right? And he was in love with me. Yes, he was. Perhaps you will say, at the end, well if he had loved you truly, etc., etc. But it is not so simple. Have you read The Heart of the Matter, where that poor Catholic couldn’t make up his mind which of his two ladies to hurt and in the end did himself in and went to hell? (Does Graham Greene believe he went to hell, and if he does — or indeed if he doesn’t — why does he persist to be Catholic?)
Joel was not a Catholic of course, but he proved you don’t have to be one in order to live in a this-world hell for loving two women at once. And in the end I saw it was tearing him into two bits. Besides, like in the song, every time we said goodbye, I died a little.
So I said goodbye to Joel for the last time, and I died a lot more than a little; in fact I went on dying for six whole months. It was tremendously awful — a real illness. Even when I began to recover, I was very sickly and feeble and I think it’s even lucky I was out of work at the time (though then it just seemed to make things worse), because I hadn’t the strength to act. Oh, I did a few bits… Since the new television channel started, the one with commercials, there’ve been lots of jobs, if you have absolutely no professional pride and just want to eat. I reach that point quite quickly, I find. I helped advertise things like Mars Bars and Kellogg’s Cornflakes and was even seen on big posters in the tube, glamorously puffing a Player’s, which I got told off about by my doctor, who said at least Mars Bars only make your teeth drop out, they don’t help to kill you. It was all as unlike acting as could be, but to be frank it was all I was fitted for just then, I was so degraded already with loss-of-Joel.
To think that without a miracle I would never see him again, that was the worst. I felt I could bear giving him up if I could just see him sometimes… Oh, isn’t it trite? Aren’t all one’s truest and deepest emotions just rubbishy-trite? When one is sunk in them or even remembering them, they feel like Dostoyevsky, but trying to tell about them they come out like Barbara Cartland.
And this is where I come back to you and your woe, Maggie, because I am here to tell you that one does get over it. If I can get over Joel so that it hardly ever hurts and I can look at, and go out with, and even go sometimes to bed with, other men, then you can get over your ex-Bruce. Because I still say, and now maybe you won’t be angry at it, that you never were really in it with him, so having been married or not doesn’t affect how long it will take you to get well.
What will, is how quickly you can bring Matt back to England and get on with your life that Bruce interrupted. I will help. Listen to how. I no longer live in a doss-house but a flat. In Primrose Hill, not overlooking but nearly. There’s room for you. The place is always full of actors and other mad, nice people and you will be sure to meet possible lovers/job-givers/playmates, you will have some fun and feel yourself getting back into your own t
rue skin.
As to Matt, you must appreciate the terrible fact that I am now over thirty and bursting with frustrated maternal feelings, so he and I will help each other.
I don’t know how you can bear not to be in England. I love it more and more the longer I live here. Of course I have an advantage over you. I know from experience how much it’s better and more civilised than any other country. You have not tried living in any other country that could be called civilised so you can’t compare. And this is a good time to be here. The war is left well behind and everyone is looking ahead and getting a wonderful excited feeling that stiff-necked and toffee-nosed old rules and patterns are being broken down and that people are at last going to be free to form new ones for themselves instead of accepting hand-me-down ones. You would love that feeling, Maggie. It’s going to be a good time for women, too. Women are doing all sorts of jobs now. I would like you to come back from your exile in the jungle and share this adventurous time with me.
When you come (not if) we will spend several weeks just talking. Oh, I have learnt so much and changed so much since I saw you last! Mostly from Joel. No, I am not hankering, but one should always make an accounting of what one has gained from even very sad and painful experiences, otherwise one feels only diminished. Joel used to say that everything that happened to people was caused by themselves. I got angry and said how could people cause themselves to be put into camps, etc. or be killed, and a lesser arguer might have given up then, in polite deference to my personal experience, but he persisted! Of course he had a most brilliant mind. He would sit there talking about things like personal dialectics and I would stop him irritably and make him translate into simple words (which he later said was good for him because he talked and wrote in such abstruse and erudite terms (!) that most people couldn’t understand him). I remember I said, well how can people will themselves to be caught in an earthquake? And he said people who sit on a fault in the earth’s surface, like in California, are such an obvious example of what he was talking about that he wouldn’t even mention it. I applied this (you may guess how unwillingly) to my parents. It came out that Joel was right, because they too knew that they were sitting on a fault, but they stayed there till it opened up and swallowed them. Because they preferred to believe that they were safe from the Germans, than to move out of their way.
The Warning Bell Page 20