The Warning Bell

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘Why only two cups, Tolly, aren’t you having tea with us?’

  ‘No, Madam, I go to the shops. Something special for dinner.’ She beamed at Maggie, who suddenly felt better, though why she needed to she wasn’t sure.

  When Tolly had gone in, Mrs Robertson poured tea and said, ‘Now we must get down to business. Matty will be home soon; it’s his weight-training day or he’d be home by now. What do you intend to do?’

  ‘Do? I shall simply tell Ian that I don’t want Matt to go to Glencora. That’ll be the end of that.’

  Mrs Robertson handed her her tea without speaking.

  ‘Won’t it?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘I don’t know, dear, I’m sure.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that Ian is behaving as if the whole matter were settled. And so is Matty.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t. It can’t be, when I don’t approve, and you don’t.’

  ‘My disapproval — very freely expressed, I may say — has made precious little mark on the situation so far. Of course, I’m old. I’m also a woman. And as I’ve spent my life finding out, this is not a country or a society where the views of the female sex are taken much into account.’

  ‘That’s absolute nonsense, Mummy. You must remember that I got custody. My sex is immaterial — the last word is mine.’

  ‘I only hope you’re right, darling, that’s all,’ said Mrs Robertson. But she didn’t sound hopeful, and Maggie was soon to learn why.

  Matthew came bounding out a few minutes later. He had grown yet again since Maggie had seen him during the Easter holidays, or so it seemed — perhaps it was the effect of a new blazer bought prudently a size too big. With his long trousers and his long hair he looked — as he had looked, every time she had re-encountered him since the day she had parted from him six years before — strikingly new, familiar yet different, making an impact on her eyes and heart that thrilled her afresh each time. Only part of the thrill was pride. The other part was disquiet amounting to fear, but that part she ignored.

  ‘Hallo, my darling!’

  ‘Mum! Hey, wow, when did you blow in? I like your dress.’

  ‘First give us a kiss.’

  He kissed her, then turned and kissed his grandmother so she wouldn’t feel left out.

  ‘Did you come by train? Was it the diesel express, the new one? I read they go at ninety or something. Gran, guess what, I did it! Fifty pounds!’

  ‘Darling! Not over your head? You shouldn’t, you’ll strain yourself —’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’re supervised; they don’t let us lift anything over our heads at our age… But I did the fifty up to my shoulders, watch — Ugghhhh —’ Flinging off the blazer and flexing his muscles, he did a passable mime of a mighty weight-lifter hoisting a huge laden bar to shoulder height. He bared his teeth and grunted and all but sweated with the strain. He even managed a realistic stagger or two before he ‘dropped’ it on his toe. Then he danced about clutching his foot and howling. Both women roared with laughter at this comic performance. Good God, he’s an actor! thought Maggie. It was the first time she had seen signs of it — his weight-lifting triumph must have unbuttoned him. She felt a surge of maternal excitement. A new facet, a new development! And yet the pleasure was vitiated because it had happened behind her back. No, that wasn’t what she meant … in her absence.

  He helped himself absentmindedly to every bit of food Tolly had put on the tray, chatting away, chiefly to Mrs Robertson, about his day, and when the plates were empty he excused himself and started indoors. Maggie, watching him as if bemused, would have let him go; his presence had made her forget what she was there for. But her mother gave her a strongly meaning look and she called him back.

  ‘Matt, come back a minute, I want to talk to you.’

  ‘What, Mum? — sorry, but I’ve got to do my homework.’

  ‘Just for a minute. Sit down… Listen. Granny tells me that Uncle Ian’s railroading you into going to boarding-school.’

  He frowned. ‘What’s railroading?’

  ‘Pressuring.’

  ‘Well, he isn’t. I want to go.’

  ‘You used to hate the idea.’

  He looked surprised. ‘When?’

  ‘You remember! When you were living in London.’

  ‘Oh, then… But then I was a baby. Besides, I hadn’t seen it.’

  ‘What’s so attractive about it when you do see it?’

  ‘You should get Uncle to take you there, Mum; it’s fantastic.’

  ‘I’m quite capable of going by myself. And I would, if there were any real question of your going there. But there isn’t.’

  An expression she well remembered settled over his face, a look of mulish incomprehension. It made a greater impact because only a moment before he had been looking so open and happy.

  ‘But I want to go.’ He flashed her a look under his rather beetling red eyebrows, which plainly said, What are you interfering for?

  ‘Why, Matt?’

  ‘Matthew.’

  ‘Sorry. Why, though?’

  He sighed heavily and glanced over his shoulder at the house. Maggie was obliged, by this simple gesture, to realise that within a few minutes of her arrival she had become a bloody nuisance. Only a stubbornness equivalent to his prevented her backing down on the spot.

  ‘Come on, tell me.’

  ‘I like the look of it, that’s all. It’s got a simply smashing outdoor track, and a new gym that’s more like a stadium. You can do squash there and badminton. There’s 9-hole golf, even, and riding. But the main thing is track. They win everything. The hall’s simply full of trophies.’

  ‘I thought the main point about going to school wasn’t running round tracks but sitting on your bottom studying.’

  ‘They get masses of people into Oxbridge every year,’ said Matt defensively. He pulled back his cuff, displaying a rather magnificent watch which Maggie didn’t recognise. ‘Ten past five, Mum, and it’s my heavy maths night. Listen. You should go and see it.’ Then he hurled his dart. ‘You’re just prejudiced because it’s where Dad went.’

  Maggie stiffened. ‘Who said that?’ As if she didn’t know!

  Matt flushed as red as a turkey’s wattle. ‘See you later,’ he said, and bolted.

  ‘Matt, your blazer!’ called Mrs Robertson, but he affected deafness. She bent down, picked the blazer up from the grass and smoothed it across her knee, then met Maggie’s eye and shrugged. ‘See what I meant?’

  ‘How dare Ian tell him I’m prejudiced against the place?’ muttered Maggie. She herself was flushed and prickling with a mixture of anger and chagrin. ‘Where did he get that watch?’

  ‘Ian gave it to him last week.’

  ‘What the hell for? It’s not his birthday! I was going to give him one when he’s fifteen!’

  ‘He really needed one, darling —’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘What, that he needed one or that he’d got one?’

  ‘Why did Ian suddenly give him a watch anyway? What was it in aid of?’

  ‘Well, I rather gathered it was to — to celebrate their agreement that he should go to that school.’

  Maggie stared at her mother. She felt quite winded.

  That evening after dinner, and following another bootless attempt to talk to Matt, Maggie took a taxi to Ian’s.

  Lilian answered the door to her. Their house was new and highly decorated, as befitted a man in Ian’s position. Everything in it bore Lilian’s imprint. There was no sign downstairs of child-occupancy other than a portrait of Anthea Charity, a life-sized studio colour photo printed on simulated canvas to look like an oil painting. It had a gilt frame and a little light over the top of it.

  ‘Come away in, Maggie. Ian’s expecting you,’ said Lilian frostily.

  ‘Is he? How odd, nobody knew I was coming,’ said Maggie, taking off her coat to reveal her fashionably brief dress and long boots. Lilian glanced down and up again so quickly her
eyes practically bumped into her eyebrows.

  Ian was in the living-room, working at his desk — the same rolltop one that had been their father’s. He looked extraordinarily informal. He was wearing a V-necked pullover and an open-necked shirt. His hair (what remained of it, round the back and sides) was neatly brushed, but a shade longer than usual, Maggie thought. He looked distinctly older, and just as distinctly mellower, and when he stood up to receive her she noticed on his face — not the gimlet-eyed challenge she had been expecting to see, but an apparently guileless and even welcoming smile.

  ‘Hallo, Mags. I had a feeling you might come.’ And before she could gather her wits, he had pecked her cheek and was leading her to a chair by the tiled fireplace. ‘Aren’t you a wee bit chilly in that minute garment you’re wearing? Not that it isn’t very fetching, isn’t it, Lilian? I can’t think why you don’t buy yourself a miniskirt.’

  Lilian, seeing he was in one of his rare teasing moods, contented herself with a thin smile. ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ she said, and tactfully took herself off.

  Ian sat down opposite Maggie, who was struggling to recover her poise and her impetus after stepping, so far, up a step that wasn’t there.

  ‘I know why you’re here,’ said Ian.

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘You’re upset that I’ve butted in about Matthew’s schooling, and — wait a sec — I don’t blame you. Now. Would you like to get your say said, and then listen to mine?’

  He was still smiling, not in barely concealed triumph, but in what looked like genuine mollification and even sympathy. Maggie felt nonplussed. She had worked herself up for a real row, and it was all too clear Ian wasn’t going to fight.

  ‘Maybe as you made all the moves, you say your say first.’

  ‘All right. Here goes.’ He leant back in his armchair and folded his hands across his stomach. Maggie, staring at him, seeing him in this conciliatory mood for the first time, also saw him for the first time as rather good-looking, despite his bald head and sharp, narrow features. He was healthy and firmly muscled; his hands were well-kept, the hands of a capable, disciplined man who can turn them to anything within his sphere of action. His forehead and eyes showed signs of stress, but his mouth was neither bitter nor complaining. A man who bore his lot with dignity and even a certain amount of good cheer. There was even a hint of kindness… Luckily for Maggie, she didn’t realise yet that for this, too, her son was responsible. Matt had been putting in quite a lot of adding-unto around Penicuik.

  Ian talked. He talked very seriously and reasonably for about half an hour. He told her how fond he had grown of Matthew, how much he was forced to admire Maggie for the way she had brought him up to the age of eight when he’d come to Scotland. He even confessed some of his own shortcomings, his own regrets for not having recognised the difficulties of bringing up children. Not a word of reproach escaped him for any of her decisions or for any dereliction of duty in recent years, for putting her career first — in fact he said she had done the right thing in realising the impossibility of bring up a child alone in London. Her decision had brought great joy into their mother’s life and — he added with disarming frankness — into his own.

  He confessed that he regarded Matthew more as a son than a nephew. He realised he’d acted high-handedly about Glencora, but he had done it out of genuine concern for Matthew’s welfare, and had not consulted her — he conceded she might well find this unforgivable — for the same reason, perhaps, that Maggie herself had sometimes done things without asking their father: because she knew he would say no.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you,’ he said almost diffidently, ‘how impossible it can sometimes be, to contemplate a blank refusal for something you want very much. A really first-class start for Matthew is — I mean, it’s become, recently — a dream of mine, something very fundamental and very — vital.’

  And then he told her, in the strictest confidence, of his plans for Matt, how he had changed his will, how he hadn’t even told Lilian yet, but that he was telling Maggie because he felt, however impertinent it might seem to Maggie, that he had earned a real share in Matt, that they had something to give each other, he and the boy. He laid no dramatic stress on the magnitude of what he, Ian, had to offer, but it was suddenly crystal clear to Maggie what this amounted to — Ian’s whole past for Matt’s future.

  Maggie sat in Ian’s leather-look wing chair, listening in cynical silence to her brother’s long monologue. She believed the surface things, that Ian wanted Matt to go to public school and on to a good university because he had him in mind to take over the family concern. She had no difficulty in believing that, because she knew Ian’s dedication to the mill and the business and to the family name. (It even occurred to her to wonder at what point he would hint that Matt might alter his surname to Robertson by deed poll.)

  What she couldn’t credit was that Ian had had a genuine change of heart. She could only suppose that he was going through this extraordinarily well-worked-out line of sales talk to get his own way, to undermine her resolve and her hold upon Matt’s life so that he could take him over. He had realised that his previous technique of patronising and belittling her would no longer give results, and was going a more subtle way to work.

  In a word, he was still trying to put her down. The old pattern had shifted slightly; it had not basically changed. The new mellowness and generosity were nothing but a ploy. Maggie had come to do battle for her son, and to win an old war against her brother. This new approach, though it had disorientated her at first, must not be allowed to triumph.

  ‘Have you finished?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want to ask you a question. You’ve taken a flattering interest in Matt, you’ve more or less adopted him, or at least you’re trying to. Would you have done that if you’d had a son of your own?’

  Ian stared at her thoughtfully for some time.

  ‘I’ll be honest,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. It would depend on what sort of boy he was. I know now that there’s no guarantee that children will fulfil the role you have in mind for them. You can’t mould and shape them, as I thought — arrogant as I was, before we got Anthea. Matt, though he’s not mine, is the sort of son I would have wanted. I didn’t mould him, it just happened. I can’t feel proud of him. I’m just grateful.’

  ‘Grateful? To whom?’

  ‘God, and you, I suppose. I’m not even sure in what order!’

  Maggie turned her head away. It damaged her certainties and her resolution to hear Ian talking so uncharacteristically.

  ‘Maggie. Let me take you up to see the school.’

  She swung back to the attack.

  ‘Why should you bother, when I’m “prejudiced” against the place because Bruce went there?’

  Ian had the grace to look heartily embarrassed.

  ‘I’m sorry I said that to him.’

  ‘So you should be! And that’s probably only a fraction of what you’ve said to try to undercut my authority with him.’

  ‘No, Maggie! That wasn’t my motive —’

  ‘Oh, stop it, Ian! Are you trying to fool yourself or me? Of course it was your motive, what other could you have? You have a blueprint for my son which you’re quite determined to carry out, come hell or high water. Well, you’re not going to take him away from me. Legally you haven’t a leg to stand on.’

  Ian looked up sharply.

  ‘Take him away from you! But I haven’t the slightest intention —’

  ‘Oh, not the very slightest! You’re just planning to do the one thing I have set my face against.’

  ‘But why have you set your face against it, without even looking —?’

  ‘I don’t believe in boys’ boarding-schools; it’s a totally unnatural life. It breeds a type of man I can’t bear.’ She said this in the full recollection that Ian had been to one.

  Ian was pacing the floor, looking loose-jointed with agitation. Maggie had never seen him in such a stra
nge state.

  ‘Maggie, no system of education, no sort of upbringing — no family or religious or any other influences — “breed” a particular sort of man. It depends on the basic material you start with. Public school can produce all kinds of men, it always has. If you’re thinking of homosexuality —’

  ‘I wasn’t —’

  ‘— you can forget it in Matthew’s case. That only proves my point, because the most conventional upbringing without a boarding-school in sight can throw up one of those. As you and I know.’

  Maggie stared at him, shocked to dumbness. Could he mean what she thought he did? Not only was that unsayable, it was unthinkable. She had never allowed herself to recognise it. But Ian was going on remorselessly.

  ‘It’s time we faced the fact, even if we don’t speak of it except between ourselves. Personally, watching Steven’s … development, if that’s the word, as a human being, following his own tendencies good and bad, has taught me a great deal. I wouldn’t have believed I could tolerate or accept such a thing in the family — my own brother! Well, it still shocks me, I can’t deny it, but it’s taught me to realise that it’s what a person basically is that counts, and that will out, somehow or other, whatever sort of influences he’s subjected to. Maggie…’ He sat down again, facing her, his knees apart and leaning forward as if trying to contact her physically. ‘Please listen to me. Matt is fourteen. He’s essentially formed. He is what he is. It would take some catastrophe, some tragic cataclysm, to harm him basically now. Not that that means I’d want to send him away to an institution where he’d be lonely or unhappy, God forbid! I honestly believe he’ll love Glencora. It’s his kind of place. Not yours or mine, Maggie — Matthew’s. He’s a real boy, athletic, grubby, independent, physical… None of us is like that. I sometimes think all children are like adopted children. They are all themselves, with little or nothing to do with what their parents bequeathed to them in the way of genes or nurture. You let him go six years ago. You opened your hands, for his sake, and let him go. You did right. Now open your hands again.’

  If I open my hands once more, I will lose him forever, thought Maggie. I’ve nearly lost him already. I saw it, I felt it, in the garden this afternoon, and it is not just a matter of his freedom, his individuality. He’s not yet ready to be his own person, responsible for himself. You want me to open my hands so that he will fall out of them and you will catch him. If I lose him, you will gain him. He will become your son, not mine, and then I will be left with … with nothing. With television news.