The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  Matt dashed in and stopped short, blinking at Tanya as if confronted by a sudden blaze of light.

  ‘She is bright red all over!’ he exclaimed.

  The tension broke and Tanya burst out laughing. She went straight over to him as he stood in the doorway and gave him a good hug. He bore it like a man, holding his breath against her strong musky scent. Maggie was staring at Matt, trying to see him through Tanya’s eyes. Was there, objectively, anything special about him? Would he not look to a stranger like any little Scottish schoolboy with red hair and freckles, falling-down socks and a grubby jacket, unique only to her…? His life and hers were already growing apart. He no longer ran directly to kiss her. When had he stopped doing that — only a little while ago, surely? Now if she wanted a cuddle, she had to call him. Soon he would begin to evade questions, close in upon himself, shut her out… Other mothers had told her this was inevitable. That was why it was ‘all right’ to send them away to school, to cut the cord where it lay, withering anyway according to natural laws… Leaving her with what?

  ‘Your hair is a funny colour,’ Matt was saying to Tanya.

  ‘Matt, don’t be personal,’ said Maggie.

  ‘But I don’t mind,’ said Tanya. ‘I dye it this shade,’ she added to Matt.

  ‘How?’

  ‘When I wash it, I put some special stuff on that makes it this unusual colour.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To be beautiful and striking and make people look at me.’

  ‘What colour is your hair really?’

  ‘Oh, white,’ said Tanya matter-of-factly. ‘Come on, Maggie. The hooding will be reduced to a cinder.’

  In the end they all went to the play, even Matt, for lack of anyone to babysit. He slept through most of it, but none of the others did.

  ‘She’s fantastic,’ said Stip.

  ‘Very impressive performance,’ said Ian. ‘I must say. And an excellently written piece as well…’ Ian had stopped doing Malvolio and begun to address himself to fatherhood. Had Maggie loved him more, she could not have failed to find his approach to this watershed in his life very touching. It was clear that his feelings were altogether stronger than he was accustomed to handling, that his inner excitement and, perhaps, a certain unwonted insecurity were making him restless and nervous. This need for some outlet made him far more talkative than usual, more forthcoming. In the normal way he would almost certainly have been disapproving of Tanya’s flamboyant and passionate performance. As it was, his reaction almost seemed to reflect some of her vivacity.

  Lilian was going to the other extreme. She had retreated into herself; she sat through the play like a broody hen, intent not on the stage, it seemed, but on some internal drama. The baby, a girl, would be ready for collection in ten days’ time. No wonder, Maggie thought, that anything as un-earthbound as a theatre meant little to her.

  Mrs Robertson was openly thrilled by the play, though she said little. She clutched Maggie’s arm in spasms throughout the performance, and held it tightly as they came out afterwards.

  ‘Did you enjoy it, Mummy?’

  ‘I loved every minute!’ She leant to Maggie’s ear and whispered, ‘especially when I could imagine you were playing the daughter!’

  Maggie was startled. ‘Darling, I’m far too old!’

  ‘Are you?… Possibly. Well, the wife, then.’

  ‘I couldn’t have done justice to Tanya’s part.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Robertson with unflattering promptness. ‘You’ll never be any good in those glamorous parts. But the down-to-earth characters that we ordinary women can identify with, those will be your forte.’

  Maggie looked at her sharply.

  ‘What do you mean, Mummy? You’re talking as if something had been settled.’

  Mrs Robertson only smiled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Tanya left at the end of the week, blowing kisses and offers with equal spendthriftness. ‘Come to London! Do it Maggie! Nothing adventured … nothing won!’

  Maggie, chasing her train down the platform, cried, ‘But how big is your flat? Where are the keys? How do you work the heeeeating…?’ Gone, with a thumbs-up and a red-lipped Cheshire-cat smile, as the train bent suddenly… Maggie went home on the bus, confused, uprooted, planful.

  Mrs Robertson stood by to continue Tanya’s good work.

  ‘It’s a thing that’s to be done, my dear one, or you’ll go to your grave as bitter as any spinster. That’s what you’ll be, Maggie, an actress-spinster, your talent dried up in you.’ She did not (she never had) mention the money, the deception, the burden of crime upon the soul which Maggie carried, crying out for its own redemption, the fulfilment of the talent so illicitly fostered, which might, in the last analysis, prove a sort of justification.

  They talked ways and means, mother and daughter beside the fire. Other things were happening in the family, and they talked about these, too — Ian and Lilian’s baby, which had arrived: a bald, bland, button-nosed female to be called Anthea Charity Robertson; Stip’s suddenly-announced decision to leave the family firm at the end of the year and embark upon a career as an interior designer, a move that Ian disapproved of almost as much as Stip was going to disapprove of any equivalent move of Maggie’s.

  And they talked about Matt.

  ‘There are three possibilities. Take him with you to London, and find a way to manage — an au pair, perhaps? But that will be very complicated for you. Or you could send him away to school. Or you could leave him here.’

  None of these ideas presented itself to Maggie in any but the murkiest light. Watching her with the sympathy newly-established between them, her mother asked, ‘Which seems the worst in prospect?’

  ‘The school. The idea of Matt at boarding-school appals me.’

  ‘Then we’ll start by eliminating that. Why not leave him here with me?’

  ‘That’s the next-worst, by a small margin.’

  ‘Thanks very much! So I’m as bad as a dreaded boarding-school?’

  ‘The guilt, I’m talking about! I’d feel guilty every moment at wishing such a responsibility off on to you.’

  ‘Ah. Well then,’ said Mrs Robertson quietly, ‘you had better take him with you. Adding more guilt would undermine you, and you’ll need all your self-esteem where you’re heading for.’

  The flat in Primrose Hill, ‘not overlooking but almost’, was, despite its deficient view, a most visually stimulating place for Maggie’s launch-pad.

  It was, of course, redolent of Tanya — it smelt of her for one thing, something Matt remarked on at once, but it also recalled her in many other ways. The shiny bronze wallpaper, the glass-and-bead-and-paper-sculpted flowers. The cushions-of-all-nations filling every oblong surface and corner like an indoor herbaceous border, the crazy sunset-patterned rug on the wall, the green stage drugget, pegged to the floor, representing a lawn — the whole effect was of a garden somehow transmogrified into imperishable materials and brought indoors.

  One of the long windows opened on to a sturdy square balcony over the front porch below, and here Maggie discovered something new and unsuspected about her friend. Those sophisticated scarlet fingernails were the tips of green fingers. Out of a random collection of barrels, boxes and big earthenware pots leapt and cavorted a riot of flowers. They did not seem just to be quietly growing. They resembled a sort of floral Olympics. The lobelias had decided they were a rambling species and were trying to clamber, all but panting with eagerness, up the parapet. Snapdragons opened great citron mouths to bite at geraniums swarming past them. African marigolds glared through the fighting tangle as bright and aggressive as spotlights. Only a pink rosebush, crouching in a far corner, looked pale and weary from the struggle to hold its own.

  ‘Matt, just look at these flowers! They’re all about three times normal size.’

  But Matt had no patience with such trivia. He had found the bedroom — Tanya’s bedroom — and was busy pre-empting the largest bed he had ever set eyes on.r />
  ‘You’ll have to be careful if you’re going to sleep there, darling. It looks like a valuable bed.’ But Matt was bouncing happily with his large teddy (a present from his uncle Stip) and couldn’t have cared less.

  ‘Are we going to stay here long?’

  Maggie was far from sure. She explored, and found one other room, currently cluttered with trunks, rails of ‘wardrobe’, wig-blocks, books, albums full of press-cuttings and stills and costume designs and other ‘impedimenta of illusion’. ‘Well. We’ll stay till Tanya gets back from her tour. I’m blowed if I know where she’ll put us, after that.’

  And meanwhile, for the first time in their joint lives, Maggie and Matt settled down to live with each other in exclusivity.

  It was the summer holidays. July and August stretched before them. Below on all sides of them stretched London, a supermarket of new experiences waiting to be popped in their wire trolley. Maggie had dreamed of it, often — showing Matt all those mind-stretching places that she herself had found so entrancing when she had first seen them… But then, she had been eighteen, and Matt was eight. After a few weeks, Maggie was forced to the realisation that most of the wonderful cultural experiences she was offering her son fell on the stony ground of a child’s innate resistance to everything his mother thinks it would be desirable for him to enjoy.

  ‘But how can you want to go home? We’ve only been here twenty minutes!’ she objected in the middle of the Geological Museum to which they had had recourse after Matt had found nothing appealing in the Natural History apart from the blue whale. ‘But it’s only rocks,’ said Matt reasonably. ‘Can we go home and watch TV?’

  She took him to The Dream in Regent’s Park. It rained patchily. One fairy slipped on the greensward and fell on to her bottom. Matt let out a shriek of glee and announced loudly that he loved Shakespeare, but when nothing else of any interest occurred, began remarking that after all it would be better if they went home and watched TV.

  The same thing happened, with variations, on an indefinite number of other improving occasions. Eventually, Maggie downgraded their outings to places of more hedonistic promise, such as a trip up the Thames to Greenwich. This time the weather co-operated. Matt stood politely at the rail of the pleasure-steamer and turned his eyes wherever Maggie pointed; but after a while he excused himself and was later discovered below with his nose in a borrowed comic. Maggie felt exasperated and dragged him unwillingly on deck again, whereupon it grew dark and cold. By the time they tied up at Greenwich even Maggie was bored stiff. She chucked the return tickets into the river, irritably chalking up another failure, and they got a train back. Not Matt but Maggie sulked all the way. This wasn’t turning out at all as she’d anticipated.

  She took stock that night as she lay on the living room divan among the flower cushions where she slept. Why, when you come down to it, was she dragging Matt out on these educational excursions for which he was evidently too young? Could it be that she was afraid to spend a day alone with him at home, simply messing about together? It was she who needed the distractions, not he; she who needed to feel she was doing right by him, making a great effort to show him all the proper things. The trouble was, she had not grown up with her motherhood from its beginnings eight years ago. She felt she was embarking on it now for the first time. She was aware of her incompetence, her restlessness, her lack of dedication.

  Besides, the flat was, for all its fascinations, an impediment to normality. It was not of her making. She was constantly anxious about looking after it; yet at the same time, there was little to be done, not only to it but in it. She couldn’t even settle with one of the myriad books or records, because Matt found the sight of her sitting down in apparent idleness quite intolerable.

  His eternal cry was, ‘Do something with me!’ That didn’t mean, ‘Take me out somewhere,’ it just meant, ‘Be with me while I do something of my own.’ Even the newly-discovered delights of television paled if she were not watching it with him. His demands were loving, peremptory, ineluctable and ultimately exhausting.

  This sense of being blood-sucked by her own private insatiable leech had further ill effects. Matt had been what is usually called well-brought-up, which is to say he was trained to follow a regime that involved all the proper things: early bed and early up, clean plates and clean teeth… Tolly had achieved all this effortlessly, as if following immutable natural laws — children went to sleep when the sun set and rose when it rose, they ate their food because it was good and any bits left over she scooped from his plate with her fingers and ate herself, companionably. Hard crisp foods took care of teeth-cleaning… Matt had no reason to rebel against Tolly because she made no rules.

  Mrs Robertson had functioned quite differently, of course, but she carried a certain unquestionable authority, and when she said, ‘Bedtime, Matt,’ or ‘What about teeth?’ there was no arguing. As to eating, one murmur about fat on the meat or lumps in the porridge and she would clap her hands and cry cheerfully, ‘Right! Off you go, Matt! Meal’s over!’ In a word, she expected to be obeyed. Maggie saw no reason on earth why Matt should take her word for anything, and sure enough, he didn’t.

  Mealtimes and bedtimes became, for the first time in Matt’s life, battlegrounds. Why should Matt suddenly rebel against habits of a lifetime just because he was alone with Maggie? But he did. As if unerringly sensing her unsureness, he tested her, found her weak spots, and jumped on them.

  Rows, real rows, began.

  Maggie had never in eight years been really, deeply angry with Matt. She had never known what it was to want to hurt him. But when he refused to eat what she cooked for him, making ever more insufferable comments on the good, wholesome food; when he refused to go to bed and her indecision as to how to proceed in the matter led her to allow him to keep later and later hours; when he lapsed wilfully into sloppy, grubby ways, leaving his toys everywhere and refusing to be careful of Tanya’s things — when, in short, she detected in him seeds of destructiveness and saw gleams of real devilment in his erstwhile innocent, beguiling eyes — she felt a deep and increasing franticness, which threatened to turn into violent anger.

  Tolly had never raised her voice to Matt, let alone her hand. She had conditioned Maggie to the realisation that there was scant need of anger and punishment if the inherent expectations of the unborn for continuing love and closeness were fulfilled. But knowing something like that, and having the wellsprings of love and patience to put it into practice, are two different things. Every time Maggie heard herself shouting, every time she laid a forceful hand on Matt to shake or push or even slap him, her conscience would give her a return bout afterwards, which left her feeling shamed and exhausted. After six weeks in Tanya’s flat, Maggie was close to desperation, and Matt was beginning to bite his nails.

  One morning, they woke to the horrendous discovery that he had wet his bed. Tanya’s bed.

  It was no use saying anything. One glance at Matt’s face showed how bad he felt. So Maggie lugged the huge mattress across two rooms and wedged it in the french window, doubled over, to dry and air, hoping against hope that there would be no stain. After breakfast, she took him out to look at schools.

  The local ones seemed to be all old-fashioned, high-walled, graffiti’d and as Matt put it, ‘more like prisons’. He began to talk about Scotland as yet another green meadow left behind.

  ‘You mean I won’t be going back to Breckonridge?’ he said. They were sitting in a local playground, he hot from swinging. ‘Have you told Miss Frith that I won’t be coming back?’

  ‘You won’t mind, will you? You never seemed to like it all that much.’

  ‘I did like it, I did like it, I loved it! You never listen to anything I tell you!’

  This sort of regulation ploy in the good old game of Getting At Mum had power to reduce Maggie, who had never played it and didn’t know the rules, to the point of tears. She had listened to everything Matt said for the past six weeks, anyway, and to very little else because
she had never worked out a way to be parted from him long enough to do or see anything on her own. It was so utterly unfair of him to say she didn’t listen. She wanted to run away and stay away from him for hours, to make him sorry… The mere thought of such a thought frightened her stiff the moment it escaped into her conscious mind, and she battened it down like a savage animal in the hold of her listing but not yet sinking ship.

  Instead of running away, she said grimly, ‘Matt, would you like to go to boarding-school?’

  ‘What’s it like?’ he asked cautiously.

  She told him. She found herself making it sound as frightful as she possibly could.

  But before she’d got beyond the arbitrary food and not coming home even at weekends, the look on his face had so smitten her with shame that she suddenly broke off, pulled him against her, and hugged him as hard as she could, saying, ‘Never mind, you’re not going there. Just don’t say I don’t listen because I do. Now let’s go home and watch TV.’

  As they climbed the stairs and entered the flat, Maggie was thinking, ‘Oh please let there be no stain!’ As the door opened and the sun through the long windows hit her eyes, she blinked. Then she saw Tanya.

  She was sitting on the divan, her face in shadow. Maggie couldn’t suppress a gasp, not just of astonishment but of horror. Needless to say, this apparition was totally unexpected. According to Tanya’s letters, her tour was not due to end till mid-October. Maggie hadn’t even bothered to tidy up before they had gone out. The green drugget was littered with Matt’s Matchbox cars and his plastic race-track, in sections. The breakfast dishes were still on the table. The place had not been dusted or swept for two days. And there was the king-sized mattress, doubled side-to-side, blocking the way to the balcony. Gaping at Tanya, all green-clad, coiled and crested like a beautiful chameleon, Maggie wondered whether she could, if she willed hard enough, make her turn the exact colour of the divan cover (bright orange) and thus disappear.