Marianne Dreams

by Catherine Storr; Susannah Harker

  ‘I don’t see that that proves anything,’ Mark objected. ‘You could just as well say you dreamed about things after you’d drawn them, as that you made them come because you’d drawn them.’

  ‘But you said yourself that first time there weren’t any stairs, and then after I’d drawn the inside of the house and the stairs, they were there,’ Marianne said triumphantly.

  ‘They might have been there before,’ Mark said.

  ‘You said they weren’t. You said you’d looked and there weren’t any. And then after I’d drawn them and the rest of the inside of the house, they were there. And I was inside the house. And it’s just like I drew it. And this time I did draw sort of scribbles across the window, and now they’re there.’

  She stopped, quite out of breath. Mark said nothing.

  ‘Well,’ said Marianne impatiently. ‘Don’t you see? Surely you must believe it now?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Mark unexpectedly. ‘It all sounds nonsense to me. You think you built this house and furnished it and put in stairs and rooms and things just by drawing pictures at home and then dreaming about them. What about me? Where do I come in? I suppose you think I shouldn’t be here if you hadn’t chosen to draw me in the first place?’

  ‘No,’ said Marianne boldly. ‘I don’t think you would.’ ‘Where would I be then? I suppose you think I shouldn’t exist at all? You’ll be saying next that I’m just part of your dream and if you chose not to draw me or dream about me, I wouldn’t be anywhere at all.’

  ‘No,’ said Marianne. ‘I wouldn’t say that because I know you do exist. Outside my dreaming about you, I mean. And anyway when I drew somebody to live in the house I didn’t know it was going to be you. I just drew someone to have a person there. Only - I can’t explain very well - I’ve got a sort of feeling that I couldn’t draw things that weren’t right to be here -1 mean as if things that wouldn’t fit in properly just wouldn’t get drawn or would turn out looking like something else. So if I drew anyone, whatever it looked like, it would have to turn out to be you because somehow or other you’re already here - I mean, you were here before I ever drew you, only I couldn’t see you till I’d drawn it. Oh, don’t you see, Mark?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mark stiffly. ‘It’s decent of you to allow that I may be a real person after all, and not just part of your scribblings.’

  ‘Don’t be beastly,’ Marianne said, energetically. ‘I always said I knew you were real. And, anyway, I was only explaining because of the bars. I’m afraid they probably are my fault - you see I was furious with you about the roses, you know, so I scribbled all over the window, and I’m afraid it’s made bars. I’m very sorry -1 didn’t know or I’d have been more careful.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Mark said. ‘Don’t be so beastly apologetic and so sure you’ve done everything. You seem to think this world belongs to you and that everything that happens here happens because you’ve made it. I don’t believe it, anyway. Look at you - you’re only a little girl. You aren’t all that clever. Why you can’t do anything about it now you are here - you can’t get us out of here and you can’t make it light again. You’re no better off than I am except that you can walk and I can’t. If I could, I wouldn’t be here long, I can tell you. But you - you come here in the dark and you want me to tell you all about the place and where we are and who we are and everything, and then when I’ve told you all I know, you start saying you made it all happen and you invented this and made that. You want to run the whole show, that’s what you want, pretending it’s all part of your beastly little drawings.’

  ‘It is!’ Marianne said. She was furious.

  ‘All right, then, prove it! Go and draw something useful with that drawing book. Draw us both outside the beastly house, or get me walking again. Then I’ll believe you. But you can’t, and you know you can’t. You’re showing off. Just like a girl.’ He spoke with bitter contempt.

  ‘All right,’ said Marianne. ‘I will show you. First of all I’ll rub you out so I never have to see you again, and then I’ll scribble over the whole house so it’s dark all the time and you’ll never get out, and then I’ll stop dreaming about you and you’ll die! You’ll be dead if I won’t dream about you, and I won’t! There won’t be any house and there won’t be any you and then perhaps you’ll believe me’ She knew that what she was saying didn’t make sense, but she was far too angry to care.

  Try’ said the boy, and the disbelief in his voice was the final insult.

  ‘All right,’ Marianne answered. She stood up. ‘I won’t dream,’ she said. ‘I won’t, I won’t, I won’t! I’m not here, there isn’t a house, there isn’t a room with me in it and Mark, there’s nothing but me. I’m in bed, dreaming. I’m going to wake up. This is a dream and I’m going to wake up’

  She woke. It was morning, and outside the dull windows summer rain dripped steadily as it had dripped all through the night.

  8. Mark in Danger

  Marianne, when she was properly awake, felt almost as angry and miserable as she had in the dream. She sat up in bed and pulled the bedside table towards her so that she could reach her drawing book. She opened it at the drawing of the house and looked at it again.

  I can make things happen there,’ she said to herself. I did before. The lines I drew across the windows are exactly like the bars there. I’ll get rid of Mark. I won’t ever see him there again.’

  She had picked up an india-rubber and had started trying to rub out the face at the window before she remembered that the pencil was apparently an indelible one, and couldn’t be rubbed out. Sure enough all her rubbing had no effect except to make the paper rough and dirty.

  ‘I’ll get rid of him somehow,’ she thought. She took her thickest and blackest black crayon and scribbled busily over the lower part of the window. Soon there was no face looking out: only the black window. On the opposite page she did the same over the little figure in the upper room in the inside view of the house.

  ‘I won’t have that beastly Mark,’ Marianne said, ‘I’ll have someone else - I’ll have a little girl - I’ll have Fiona!’ Fiona was the one of the six little chicken-pox girls she had felt most attracted to, probably because she had also been ten when Miss Chesterfield had taught them, and had been, Miss Chesterfield said, very pretty.

  She drew, in one of the downstairs rooms, a little girl. She came out rather too big for the room, owing to Marianne’s attention to detail in her clothes: she gave her to wear everything she most hankered after herself, including proper riding breeches and riding boots, and - as a great refinement - spurs.

  ‘Oh dear, if I ever do meet her she’ll be a sort of giantess,’ Marianne thought disconsolately, looking at her picture. ‘But perhaps I shall be too, so as to fit. I’m sure she’ll be nice and believe in my being able to do things by drawing, and then if she likes I’ll draw a whole lot of horses and we can ride on them in my dreams. I expect she could teach me. If she can ride herself, at least. But she ought to be able to if she’s got proper riding breeches. I wonder if I could draw her somehow or other so she looked as if she was a frightfully good rider already? Perhaps if I drew her just a tiny little bit bow-legged like jockeys are supposed to be -‘

  She was contemplating this happy idea when the door opened and her mother came in.

  ‘How are you this morning?’ she began, but when she saw Marianne’s bed already strewn with crayons and pencils and paper, she said quickly, ‘Oh, Marianne, what a mess! Already! And here’s your breakfast arriving. We’ll have to clear up very quickly and really tidy out this room today. It’s getting disgracefully piled up - there isn’t room to move.’

  She managed to make room for the breakfast tray by bundling everything on the bed off on to the bookcase: and after the breakfast for which Marianne, feeling strangely tired, was much less hungry than usual, her mother came up and did a little perfunctory tidying before Miss Chesterfield’s arrival, promising that in the afternoon she would come up and spend a long time there and really
make the room more like a room to be lived in and less like an old junk shop.

  Meeting Miss Chesterfield was embarrassing after the incidents of the day before, but not as embarrassing as it would have been if Marianne hadn’t known that Miss Chesterfield knew nothing except that she had felt ill yesterday and was better today. She felt sleepy and slow, however, which she was told was the result of the new medicine she was taking, and although Miss Chesterfield made every allowance for this, she couldn’t help being irritated sometimes by Marianne’s inattention, and showing her annoyance. Altogether it was not a very successful morning and Marianne was glad when it was over.

  ‘And now lunch, and then I go to Mark,’ Miss Chesterfield said, as cheerfully as she could, as she put away the books they had been using. Marianne’s suspicious ear heard in her tone the suggestion that going to teach Mark would be a pleasant change from Marianne.

  ‘You went to see Mark yesterday as well,’ she objected.

  ‘That was extra. I always go on Thursdays,’ Miss Chesterfield replied, ‘and Fridays and Mondays. And you know that quite well, Marianne, so don’t pretend you’ve forgotten. I’m expecting to find Mark rather cross this afternoon because I told him yesterday he’d got to learn some poetry for a change.’

  ‘A change from what?’ Marianne couldn’t help asking, though she didn’t really want to hear anything about Mark.

  ‘Oh, from arithmetic problems, and Latin exercises and geometry and that sort of thing. He’s a clever boy, Mark, and he’ll lap up all the more difficult stuff without turning a hair. But things like poetry get rather left out, and he doesn’t like being made to stop being clever and just listen.’

  ‘But I thought you said he was lazy.’

  ‘Not in his work. Perhaps about trying to do things he doesn’t do well straight off, like learning to walk again, poor boy. Good-bye, Marianne. I must fly I hope you feel better tomorrow.’

  Marianne did feel better the next day. The medicine, although so brightly coloured, certainly seemed to have a calming effect. She felt dull sometimes, but not cross, and although it was maddening to feel that she had added on to the length of her stay in bed by losing her temper, she didn’t feel any the worse for the outbreak after a day or two. The days went smoothly by - her room looked a great deal tidier and she and her mother made a great many good resolutions about not letting it get so littered up again. But as Marianne was embarking on patchwork as a useful way of passing the time, these resolutions didn’t seem very likely to be strictly kept.

  Rather to Marianne’s surprise, she had no dreams. But this suited her. She wanted to forget Mark and it was easier if she could also forget the house and her dream and everything to do with him. She was also in no great hurry to meet a giant Fiona in riding breeches.

  It was about a week after the great row that Miss Chesterfield was late again. Not nearly as late as she had been the first time, only about five or ten minutes late, in fact, and Marianne had hardly noticed that it was after her usual time of arrival when she came in.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said at once. ‘I had to call in on the way here at -‘ She stopped.

  Something in her voice made Marianne take especial notice. She said immediately, ‘You went to see Mark.’

  ‘Yes. At least, not Mark himself. But I did go to his house.’

  ‘Why didn’t you see him, then?’ Marianne asked suspiciously.

  ‘Because he’s not there.’

  ‘Has he gone away?’ Marianne asked, pleased that Mark should be well out of Miss Chesterfield’s way.

  ‘Yes.’ Miss Chesterfield hesitated, and then said, ‘He’s in hospital.’

  ‘In hospital? Why?’

  ‘He caught a cold and it got much worse and he had to go to hospital for special treatment.’

  ‘Just for a cold!’ Marianne said scornfully. She thought to herself that Mark must be a miserable mollycoddle if he had to go to hospital to be nursed for something as ordinary as a cold.

  ‘It started by being a cold, but then he got bronchitis and pneumonia and, you see, some of the muscles he can’t use properly yet are the muscles you breathe with, so it’s very dangerous if he gets any sort of infection in his lungs and he has to go into hospital where they’ve got the right sort of apparatus to help him to breathe.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ said Marianne, suddenly alarmed.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ Miss Chesterfield said. ‘That’s why I went round to see his parents this morning, to ask what the news was. He went into hospital two days ago and I wanted to hear what the latest report said.’

  ‘You mean really dangerous? Like dying? He isn’t going to die, is he, Miss Chesterfield?’

  ‘I hope not,’ Miss Chesterfield said, but she didn’t sound very hopeful. ‘They say there’s quite a chance that he may be all right, but they just can’t tell yet.’

  ‘But there’s all sorts of things they could try,’ Marianne urged. ‘Penicillin and that sort of thing, that cures everything.’

  ‘I’m sure they’re doing everything they can,’ Miss Chesterfield said. She looked at Marianne anxiously. ‘You mustn’t worry’ she said. ‘After all, you don’t know Mark. I shouldn’t be making you anxious, only I couldn’t help telling you as I’ve told you so much about him before. But don’t worry, Marianne. It’s a very good hospital and he’s got one of the best doctors in the country and I expect he’ll be all right. After all, they do say there’s quite a chance he’ll recover.’

  ‘But -‘ Marianne began, but Miss Chesterfield interrupted her.

  ‘I think we’d better not go on talking about it, Marianne,’ she said. ‘It will only be upsetting for both of us. And we’ve got plenty of work to do, without discussing something that doesn’t depend on us. Show me your composition homework.’

  Marianne, reluctantly, had to agree. But she found it very difficult to think about her lessons. Her mind would keep wandering away to Mark in hospital, Mark in one of those breathing machines - she had seen pictures of them - Mark perhaps dying now, this minute - and all because of her.

  Miss Chesterfield said it was something that didn’t depend on them, Marianne and herself. But didn’t it? Marianne remembered uncomfortably, miserably, that she had told Mark in the dream that she would stop dreaming about him and he would die. And she had stopped dreaming. And she had said she would scribble his face out of her pictures, and she had. She had blacked out Mark, out of her house, out of her dream life, out of her mind. And now he was dying, perhaps this minute he was already dead.

  But wasn’t this doing just what Mark himself had accused her of - making herself too important? If it really was Mark she had dreamed about, the real live Mark whom Miss Chesterfield taught and who had a home and parents and a life quite apart from her dreams about him, was it likely that he would just cease to exist because she stopped dreaming about him? Or die because she made black marks on a picture? It didn’t seem possible - and yet it had all happened just at the right time - it all fitted in horribly well.

  ‘Oh, I don’t understand,’ Marianne said, and she said it aloud, in her grief and despair. Miss Chesterfield, who was waiting for her to finish working out a complicated sum in long division, looked up.

  ‘What don’t you understand? It’s not really so very difficult, it’s just laborious. Can I explain anything to make it clearer?’

  ‘No,’ Marianne said drearily, ‘thank you. I expect I’ll be able to do it soon - but I don’t feel awfully clever this morning, Miss Chesterfield. I can’t help thinking about Mark, though I know you don’t want us to talk about him.’

  Miss Chesterfield simply said, ‘No,’ which might have been an answer to any part of what Marianne had said. But she did explain the sum to Marianne, and made her do the working out aloud, which made it easier to concentrate, and then very soon afterwards she left, saying she would try not to be late the next day and hoped she’d be able to bring better news.

  When she had gone, Marianne lay and thought. She
couldn’t make up her mind about Mark, whether she was responsible for his illness or not. She felt sure that if she suggested that she was responsible to anyone else, any grown-up person especially, they would say that it was a ridiculous idea and would think she was being self-important and silly.

  ‘And yet he was a real person in my dream,’ Marianne thought, ‘and I was beastly to him. And he was beastly to me,’ she added honestly. ‘But it does seem awfully queer that he should start being ill just when I’d done that to my picture of him and said I wouldn’t dream about him and that I wished he was dead and all that.’

  She felt guilty about it. Even if it wasn’t at all her fault, she felt miserable, and exactly as if she had done her best to kill Mark.

  Suddenly she had what seemed a brilliant idea.

  ‘If I could make him ill by scribbling over him I could make him better by doing the opposite. Only I can’t rub that pencil out. Bother! But perhaps I could do something to make it go, or draw another picture or have a different kind of dream. After all, if I can make bad things happen I ought to be able to make good things happen just as much. I’ll draw a picture of Mark feeling quite well again. Only I suppose then I’ll have to dream about him again, and I don’t want to. I don’t see why I should have to dream about him - why can’t he get well without my having to see him? Perhaps I could just draw him looking quite well, but not in that house, which is where I always seem to get to. And then he probably wouldn’t believe I’d done anything about it, he’d think it had all just happened, and what I’d done didn’t make any difference at all!’

  She stopped to consider this. Although she definitely didn’t want Mark to die, particularly didn’t want to feel that his death was in any way connected with what she did or didn’t do, she also didn’t want Mark alive and cocky and sneering, in her dreams, telling her that she was no use and hadn’t any influence on what happened to him.