The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ croaked Maggie.

  ‘Make it eleven and I’ll take you to lunch at the Wig and Pen afterwards, to celebrate. You were my candidate, after all, and you’ve done me proud.’

  Maggie turned away from the phone and found Tanya staring at her from across the room.

  ‘You got it.’

  Maggie nodded, speechless.

  ‘Congratulations, darling, I’m so glad for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Tanya.’

  Tanya hesitated, then approached her, almost shyly.

  ‘Let me touch you, for luck.’

  She touched Maggie’s hand, which was still resting on the telephone. Maggie turned up her hand and grasped Tanya’s and held it tightly. Suddenly all the joy, all the excitement, all the triumph and relief were gone, submerged and drowning in Tanya’s ruin.

  In all the weeks since the day she’d returned in disgrace, Tanya had not cried, or if she had there had been no sign nor sound of it. But now her great grey eyes overflowed with tears and she collapsed into Maggie’s arms, weeping rawly and bitterly.

  ‘Oh Maggie! Maggie! I am finished!’ she sobbed.

  ‘No, Tan, you’re not. You’re not. Nobody on earth is nothing but an actress; there’s always an alternative. You must try. You could have had this, but I’ve taken it, and I know that hurts like hell, but there are other things.’

  ‘Name one. Just one!’

  Maggie wracked her brains in vain for something that would not infuriate and insult Tanya. In the end, all she could think of was Joan’s words: A woman who works is by that alone better than one who doesn’t. ‘You must work at something. It doesn’t matter what it is. You’ve got to prove to yourself that you can do something other than act.’ A fresh outburst of sobbing interrupted her, but she held Tanya tighter and forced herself to go on, throwing tact and gentleness to the winds.

  ‘Take over my job as a market researcher. Shush, listen. You’d do it standing on your head. Act it. I did. All jobs are partly acting if they’re not natural to you. Do it for a few weeks. Keep your ears and eyes open. Once one is out on the work-beat, other things come along, openings, opportunities… Watch the newspapers. Put the theatre right away from you.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t! It’s all I am, it’s all I know, it’s all I want!’

  ‘Tanya, listen to yourself. You sound like a tragedy-queen. You’re saying what flatters you, what keeps you inert. What makes it pointless for you to fight, to try, to keep going. If you keep saying things like that to yourself, you really will be finished; you might as well kill yourself and have done with it.’

  Tanya abruptly stopped crying and, after a moment, extricated herself from Maggie’s arms. She looked a wreck, and a middle-aged wreck at that. Maggie felt shocked, partly at her own brutality. But something wilful and angry and loving in her kept her from withdrawing a word.

  ‘How did you know I was thinking of it?’ Tanya asked.

  There was a silence. Then Maggie said, quite untruthfully, ‘I just did.’ In fact, she had not consciously had a notion of it, and the thought that Tanya had been considering such a thing shook her to the core. But she maintained a calm face and turned the admission to the advantage of her main thrust: ‘That’s why I’m talking like this. A drastic remedy for a drastic situation. It’s kill or cure, Tanya. You’ve got to move away from where you are now, right in the opposite direction.’ She had a fleeting memory of Aunt Helen, saying, ‘Pull me up, dear, I’m sliding!’ She had not been able to save Helen. And had Helen’s disease, in fact, had more of a grip on her body than Tanya’s had upon her psyche?

  Tanya, after staring at her through that ravaged mask for another few moments, turned abruptly and walked the length of the big room and out on to the balcony, ignoring the fact that it was dark, that it was raining and that she was not wearing much. Maggie let her go, lit the gas fire and had a drink waiting for her when she returned, after a quarter of an hour, damp and shivering but with a better colour. Maggie wrapped something round her friend’s shoulders and sat her in the warmth and put the scotch in her hand. She had one poured for herself and sat on the sofa with it.

  ‘Well?’ she said after they’d both had a swig.

  ‘I decided not to throw myself off.’

  ‘Just as well, you’d only have managed to break a leg from that height.’

  ‘Of course, I could climb up on the roof.’

  ‘The roof! Are you trying to kill yourself, or what?’

  Tanya managed a faint snort of laughter. She put the rest of her drink away and set the tumbler on the coffee table with a little bang.

  ‘I was acting my socks off, wasn’t I? And not very well. But the awfulness of my position is not put on, Maggie.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t realise that?’

  Tanya leant back in her chair and stared at Maggie.

  ‘I am in your capable hands. What do I do first?’

  ‘Go into your room and do something firm about your face.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Go to the bathroom and ditto-ditto your hair.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you how to do market research. You’ll have to start tomorrow.’

  Tanya sat up, aghast. ‘Tomorrow! I can’t!’

  ‘If you don’t take over my workload, you’ll lose the job. You’ll have to work double to make up for the last two days when I haven’t done one interview. I’ll come out with you tomorrow afternoon and show you the ropes and do a few with you. Maybe we’ll fake a few more tomorrow evening — I’ve never faked, but lots of the other girls do if they don’t get their quota done. Tanya, I promise it’s not so bad. If I can do it, you can.’

  ‘Maggie, will you hate and despise me if I say it is different for you?’

  ‘Because I’ve never known success on the stage?’ said Maggie calmly. ‘Believe me, I’d swap my whole life so far, except Matt, for just one week of being you, playing leads at the Vic. You’ve had all that in both senses. Lucky you, in one way — bloody unlucky you, in another. That’s it, chum, that’s life. Now get off your royal arse hortillery and get on with it.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Maggie and Ronnie Makepeace went to the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street to celebrate Maggie’s maiden appearance on the bulletin. It had been broadcast at 5.55 to approximately three million viewers. So, when Ronnie led her into the main bar, she was faintly surprised that nobody seemed to recognise her, let alone give her a standing ovation.

  Ronnie sat her in a booth and ordered them both a scotch.

  ‘Very good little piece for starters,’ he was saying for the fifth time. His cherubic face beamed at her across the checkered tablecloth. ‘Editor was quite chuffed. Word came back from the crew that you were at least sufficiently professional about it to escape their scorn, and that’s quite something. The cameramen all dread new reporters and think it’s their task to break them in.’

  ‘Oh? I thought they were being rather helpful.’

  ‘Any marked eye-rolling or speaking to you very slowly as if you were half-witted?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Great! Good sign, means they’ve taken to you. That’s a big hurdle. And nearly three minutes’ air-time on your first story!’ He rubbed his hands gleefully. ‘Maggie, you’ve taken off.’ He grinned at her and put his warm, chubby hand over hers for a moment. ‘Having lit the blue touchpaper, I’ve got nothing to do but stand well back from now on.’ She saw a slight alteration to his expression: a sort of interrogative look came into his eyes as if he’d heard some odd sound or had a sudden, unexpected pain. She was to remember it later, that first little indicator of impending love, like the first throat-tickle heralding a fearful cold.

  They got down to ordering dinner, and while waiting for it he began talking, very tentatively, about her personal situation.

  ‘How are you managing about your boy? Is Tanya looking after him while you’re at work?’

  ‘Well, sort of. I don
’t like to impose on her, she’s got her own problems. When she’s going to be in, she babysits…’

  ‘And the rest of the time?’

  ‘Catch as catch can with various makeshifts,’ said Maggie evasively. The truth was that when she had to, she left Matt in the flat alone with the television and left her key with a woman who lived in the basement — quite a decent sort, but old and with a gammy leg. She was not happy about it, as was proved by her unwillingness to tell Ronnie she did it. ‘Anyway,’ she went on hurriedly, ‘it’s not for long. Matt’s old nursemaid that he had in Nigeria is flying over next week, and after that they’re both going up to stay with my mother.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Outside Edinburgh.’

  Ronnie was frowning. He looked down at his potted shrimp, squeezed his lemon wedge over it, and then looked up again. The frown was still there.

  ‘Isn’t that an awful long way away?’

  ‘Yes, of course it is, but what else can I do?’

  After a few moments Ronnie said bluffly, ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of in wanting to be free to work.’

  ‘Do I sound as if it were only that?’

  ‘How long is it since you had a job you cared about?’

  ‘I quite cared about my teaching.’

  ‘But you’re really an actress.’

  ‘It’s been years since I had an acting job.’

  ‘You’re entitled to a career.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Besides, you have to earn a living.’

  ‘Yes, that’s for sure.’

  ‘So it’s all right, then.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Except that naturally you’re dead worried about what’s going to happen to your relationship with Matt.’

  There was a startled silence from Maggie. Then she said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m worried about whether I’m doing the right thing by Matt just now, but nothing can harm my relationship with him.’

  Ronnie looked at her very seriously. He didn’t often look serious, despite his owl-like features, but when he did — at that moment and later — Maggie was instantly put on the alert. Ronnie might be somewhat gauche, even lightweight most of the time, but he could grow quite steely when he felt sure of his ground.

  ‘Listen, Maggie,’ he said. ‘I’m not married and I haven’t any kids, but I know this much: it’s bloody rubbish, what you’ve just said. Surely you’re not kidding yourself that just because you’re someone’s mother, they’ll always love you and be close to you. You’ve got to keep working at it, steadily, or you risk losing it.’

  Ronnie was ringing the bell. He rang it loud and clear, but Maggie chose not to hear him. There was no sense or truth in crying later, ‘It wasn’t fair, I didn’t know!’ And when the bills did come in, years later, she wouldn’t have dared to mention the man — a total stranger — who at that moment in the conversation, walked past the booth, paused, turned, came back, and, leaning over the table, remarked, ‘Didn’t I see you on the box tonight? Nice story if I may say so!’ — smiled pleasantly, and went on his way.

  A week later, Maggie saw Matt and Tolly off at King’s Cross.

  She had tried to have a talk to Matt the night before, but he had been so excited about Tolly’s arrival, due at ten the next morning, that he couldn’t think beyond that. She had said, ‘We’ll see each other often, and if you ever need me —’

  He had said, ‘Will she be the same? Will she bring me some coconut? Did you get her a fur coat?’

  Maggie said, ‘I’ll love you every minute and you can phone me whenever you like.’

  Matt said, ‘Which room at Granny’s will she sleep in? Will I sleep in the same room with her? Can she really read now?’

  They met her at the airport. She took their breath away, both of them — Matt’s because she was just the same in his eyes, Maggie’s because she was utterly changed. She walked differently, talked differently, met the eye differently. Joan had ‘grown her up’, firmed and extended her. She was strong enough to have mastered the ways of white men without losing what was essential of herself. One hour with her, and Maggie knew she had done well to bring her — well from the viewpoint of her own selfish purposes. She had come a very long way from the shy, half-wild girl who had struggled to save her babies in the forests of Nigeria.

  But she was nowhere near sophisticated enough to resist the delights of London, especially culinary ones. Maggie had arranged a meal in Fortnum’s restaurant, which climaxed with a Knickerbocker Glory apiece. Tolly was so excited, so beset by newness, that she glowed, and wrung her hands so much that Maggie had to keep disengaging one to clasp it round the long spoon and guide its probings through the rainbow layers of exotic sweetness.

  ‘I’m so happy! I’m so happy!’ Tolly kept saying.

  ‘You used to say, “Tolly so happy”,’ said Matt, teasing. He, too, was glowing.

  ‘Mrs Joan teached me not to talk so pidgin,’ Tolly said proudly.

  She leant over again and again to kiss Matt, until he told her strongly to stop it. Then she turned to Maggie.

  ‘You didn’t forget me,’ she said, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘I always think, soon you forget, but you remember.’

  She had brought them presents. There was even a gift from some of Maggie’s old pupils, two little wooden candle-holders. She brought love and a letter from Joan. Joan, too, was a bell. Her letter read, in part, ‘Now don’t you let Tolly take Matt over from you altogether. She will, you know, given half a chance.’ But Maggie only glanced once at this letter, in Fortnum’s ladies’ room, and promptly lost it. The bell was deafening her as it was; she needed no amplifier.

  They went to an early matinee of a children’s film, which Tolly adored, and then by taxi to the station.

  At King’s Cross, Maggie was suddenly faced with the separation as an actuality. Halfway to the buffet for sandwiches, chocolate bars and apples, she stopped cold. The concrete under her feet struck a deathly chill up her legs as if she were barefoot; the gloomy brickwork and the smell of diesel oil and beer filled her eyes and nose with desolation. What am I doing? she asked herself. I’m sending him away. I won’t see him again for weeks. I won’t see him ever again as he is at this moment. He will change and I won’t know him. I’ll recognise him but I won’t know him. I must be mad. All this so that I can cover fashion-shows and interview dozens of nine-day-wonders on the box?

  But a voice inside answered her firmly. No. You’re doing it to be free, to make up for your lost life, for the satisfaction of independence. To give yourself a person and a story you can look back on when you’re old. When Matt has grown up it will be too late for you. You have to do it now. He won’t suffer for it — look at him, he’s in love! And you’re not and you never have been and soon you’ll be thirty.

  It was Margaret. Incredibly, for once, Margaret gave her, not the advice of the puritan conscience she bore like a burr embedded in her flesh, but the advice of clamouring egoistic selfhood that she wanted to hear. Their roles were reversed; it was Margaret’s turn to be afraid of the future. So, ironically, while Maggie was listening to the warning bell, it was Goody Two Shoes Margaret who muffled its clapper.

  Maggie got to the buffet, bought the provisions, added magazines and pencils and jotters, and rushed back to Tolly and Matt, who were already climbing into the Edinburgh express. Tolly, enchanted by all she saw, was running her hand over the moquette seats and admiring the other occupants of the carriage openly. Matt was suddenly silent. The facts of the situation were not so clear to him as to Maggie, but he too had been hit by the impending parting.

  Maggie sat by him and resisted the temptation to take his hand.

  ‘Matt —’ she began.

  He turned to her with abrupt determination.

  ‘I want to be called Matthew,’ he said. He pushed his voice out so hard that it shrilled, and he flushed under his freckles.

  Maggie was dismayed. ‘Why, darling? We’ve always calle
d you Matt.’

  ‘I don’t like it. It sounds like a doormat. It sounds like what the cat sat on.’ She tried to laugh but stopped — he was utterly serious. ‘It’s babyish,’ he finished.

  She looked at his small red head outlined against the moving platform bustle through the train window. He was turned in profile to her and she saw that there was nothing babyish left about him, even the tears he was holding back; he was all boy now and had inherited his parents’ strong will to fight for all the wrong things.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘When I write my first letter to you tonight, I’ll begin it, “Darling Matthew”.’

  ‘And Tolly mustn’t call me Matty.’

  ‘That’s between you and her.’

  It was time. She gave him the permitted goodbye kiss, and suddenly he flung his arms round her and she thought, It’s wrong. I can’t. This is what matters — I don’t matter except to him. But it was too late. The train was about to start. The pre-programming took effect. She hugged Tolly, scrambled off the train and stood with the noisy door-slams up and down its length, crashing in her head with the finality of little deaths.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tanya flopped at market research. She hated the part too much to play it well. All she succeeded in doing, in the few weeks she kept at it, was to prove her original contention that in hard times, aristocrats can more easily move into the gatekeeper’s lodge and breed cocker spaniels than leave their manor altogether and take up factory work in the city.

  So, first, she married Oliver, and threw herself into the role of appendage to a successful actor. Hopeless, of course; her ego wilted and she saw more disaster up ahead if she did not take urgent action. So, next, she had a baby, and tried to be satisfied with sublimation.

  The baby, Imogen, was an excellent child in every way, who would have afforded full satisfaction to her mother if anyone could. But as Tanya confessed to Maggie, ‘She’s not a human being yet. I love her and she occupies me, but it is no substitute for acting, only an excuse for not. An excuse which is wearing thin now she is weaned — thank God… And you, Maggie,’ she added severely, ‘you are not helping me. Having you in my old flat living a life of bells, balls, balloons and tinsel in something suspiciously like the limelight is driving me to desperation.’