Marianne Dreams

by Catherine Storr; Susannah Harker

  Marianne screamed. She felt that she was screaming with the full power of her lungs, screaming like a siren: but no sound came out at all. She wanted to warn Mark, but she could not utter a word.

  In her struggle she woke.

  12. The Tower

  When Miss Chesterfield had gone, the next day, in the brief interval before lunch, Marianne got out her drawing book and looked at her drawings of the stones round the house. Seen in flat pencil on paper they were not very alarming: they looked absurd, but not as threatening as they had appeared from Mark’s window in the house. Marianne considered what she could do to make them less horrible, but nothing seemed right. She wondered whether to scribble them out with the pencil; but she had an uncomfortable feeling that if she did they would be there just the same under the scribble. And it would be no better if they were really there just the same, and if she and Mark were unable to see them. She thought of adding mouths, noses and hair to the eyes, to make them more human; she tried this experimentally with an ordinary pencil, one which she knew she could rub but. The effect was grotesque and somehow more horrible. Marianne decided that though the stones with eyes were bad enough, the stones with faces were worse, and she rubbed them out vigorously, thankful that she hadn’t drawn them with The Pencil first.

  All that day, and all the next, Marianne considered the problem: but no answer presented itself. Meanwhile she slept without dreaming, which was a relief, although she felt guiltily that perhaps she ought to have managed to get back to Mark in the lonely little house to cheer him up, even if she couldn’t see how to set him free.

  ‘But is he there now?’ she wondered. ‘After all, I’m there when I’m dreaming, but I’m here when I’m awake. I suppose Mark is awake now, so he’s here in this life. And perhaps I really don’t need to go back, because after all it is only a dream, and the real Mark isn’t in a house with beastly Things all round it, he’s safe here.’

  But this reminded her that the real Mark wasn’t so very safe. He was in hospital, in an iron lung, being watched by nurses and doctors and his parents for signs of getting better: or worse.

  ‘But I can’t do anything about that’ Marianne protested to herself. ‘It isn’t my fault he’s in hospital, it’s because he caught a cold, Miss Chesterfield said so. And nothing I can do now can possibly make any difference to how he gets on there. And anyway I can’t think of anything to prevent those beastly stones being there or watching the house all the time. So I’m not going to bother about it. Dr Burton said it was bad for me to worry, so I won’t.’

  So Marianne shut up The Pencil with the other ordinary pencils, and put the drawing book under a pile of other, less disturbing books and concentrated on not worrying. This is not an easy thing to do: and whether she was sewing her patchwork, or listening to her mother reading aloud, or reading herself, or working with Miss Chesterfield, Marianne had at the back of her mind an uneasy niggle of a thought, that there was something she ought to be thinking about and wasn’t.

  Other people noticed it in different ways.

  ‘Yes, she’s getting on,’ Dr Burton said to her mother, after one of his twice-weekly visits. ‘Of course it’s slow, very slow. It may be more than six weeks in bed at this rate, but still she’s young and she’s plenty of time, and we know that it’s only a matter of time till she’s absolutely right again. I’m going to change her medicine again today and see if we can give her a bit more of a will to get better’

  ‘Getting on quite all right’ was Miss Chesterfield’s report to Marianne’s mother. ‘I don’t know if she has got a little bored with being all alone in her work, or whether it’s that she’s feeling the strain of being in bed for so long: but she’s not getting on quite as quickly as she did at the beginning. I think she finds it difficult to concentrate sometimes.’

  ‘Yes, she’s bored all right,’ said Marianne’s mother to Marianne’s father. ‘Something seems to have gone wrong for the last week or so. At first she was getting on so well, and seemed to have settled down quite contentedly to the routine of being an invalid. But just lately she’s been irritable and difficult to amuse and restless, as if she was worrying about something. And if I ask her if there’s anything wrong she always says no, there isn’t.’

  ‘No, of course, there’s nothing wrong,’ said Marianne disagreeably the next day, when Miss Chesterfield asked her the same question. ‘I’m not worried about anything. Why on earth should I be worried? And I wish you wouldn’t keep on asking me when I’ve said I’m perfectly all right twenty times already’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Miss Chesterfield peaceably. ‘I didn’t realize you’d been asked before. But you know, Marianne, you aren’t working as well as you were a short time ago, and I know perfectly well it isn’t because you can’t, so I thought perhaps you were bothered about something.’

  ‘I haven’t got anything to bother about,’ Marianne said sulkily.

  ‘Well, I’m very glad to hear it. Now turn to page 118 and we’ll -‘

  ‘What did you think I might be worried about?’ Marianne interrupted.

  ‘I suppose anyone who has to stay in bed might worry about how long they’d got to stay there,’ Miss Chesterfield said reasonably. ‘Or I thought perhaps you were worried about Mark again. I noticed you hadn’t asked about him and I wondered if you were frightened to’

  ‘Why should I be frightened?’ Marianne asked quickly.

  ‘In case he was worse. But he isn’t, it’s quite all right.’

  ‘Is he better?’ Marianne demanded. It was somehow an enormous relief to be talking about the real Mark: almost as much as to have been helping the Mark in the dream.

  ‘Yes, a little. He’s holding his own quite well and they think that if he goes on as he is now, he’ll be able to come out of the lung in a week or two.’

  ‘Do you mean he’s still in that beastly machine?’ Marianne asked, sitting bolt upright in bed in surprise.

  ‘Yes, of course. He’s never come out of it since he started being ill. But he’s very good about it - his mother says he never complains.’

  ‘No, Mark doesn’t complain.’ Marianne remembered how it had been she who had told him how uncomfortable the window seat and the bare room were. Mark had been angry sometimes, and sometimes irritating, but never complaining.

  ‘You sound as if you knew him,’ Miss Chesterfield said, surprised by Marianne’s statement.

  ‘I almost feel as if I do from your talking about him,’ Marianne said carefully. ‘But why is it so awfully slow, Miss Chesterfield? I thought he wasn’t going to have to stay in hospital so very long - after all, he only had a cold.’

  ‘With bronchitis. That’s what made it such a long business,’ Miss Chesterfield said.

  ‘And is he getting better as quickly as he could?’ Marianne persisted.

  ‘I’m not quite sure. His mother says he seems rather depressed, and she can’t make out whether that is because he’s not getting better as quickly as they’d hoped, or whether he’s being slow getting better because he’s depressed.’

  Marianne did not ask any more questions. Part of her mind now told her that she ought to be satisfied about Mark, who was, after all, doing quite well and was safe in hospital. But another part, a niggling, tiresome part that wouldn’t quite keep quiet, told her that Mark was alone in a house watched all round by THEM, and that she had left him there and had never even tried to help.

  ‘He’s perfectly all right,’ most of Marianne said to the rest of Marianne. ‘There’s nothing for you to bother yourself about. All that business about the house and THEM is just a dream.’

  ‘But he was there in my dream’ the small persistent part of Marianne said. ‘And I said I’d help him and I didn’t. I left him there more than a week ago with all those eyes looking at the house.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you do in dreams’ the sensible, comforting voice said. ‘They don’t count for real life.’

  ‘They are real themselves’ said the other v
oice: and Marianne knew it was true. ‘How you behave in a dream is just as real as how you behave when you are awake.’

  ‘Oh dear’ said the whole of Marianne miserably. ‘I shall have to go back into the house and I don’t want to. I don’t want to’

  She got out her drawing book from under the pile later in the day and looked at what she had done again. She could still see no way of making the stone figures less terrifying. She could, however, give Mark his bicycle, she thought, and she decided to put it in one of the empty downstairs rooms. She was very uncertain exactly what a bicycle looked like, but, ‘After all’ she thought, ‘when I drew Mark it wasn’t

  any more like a real boy than my pictures generally are, and he came out looking quite ordinary’

  So with The Pencil, she drew something with two wheels and handlebars and a saddle, standing proudly by itself in a downstairs room. Pump, chain, and brakes Marianne wisely left to the imagination, and when she had finished, it really did look like a real bicycle.

  ‘What else might we need?’ she thought. ‘Food. Mark must have almost finished the food I drew before. There wasn’t very much. And I must put in lights somehow for when it gets dark.’

  She drew electric lights hanging from the ceiling of each room and in the hall; and then in case they might not work without her drawing the means by which electricity came into the house, a task quite beyond her, she also drew a candlestick and candle on the floor beside the bicycle. She was proud of herself for remembering to add a box of matches. She added some more eggs in egg-cups and what she hoped looked like a roast chicken on a plate.

  ‘He’s got enough books’ she thought, looking at the drawing of the bookcase, which was indeed as full of books as she could make it. ‘And chess, and draughts, and cards. I can’t think of anything else.’

  She turned her attention again to the outside of the house. The hills in the distance looked bare. Marianne added tiny trees and a sort of thick pencil fuzz for bushes at the foot of one or two of them. On the top of the highest hill she drew a tower, round and squat, with battlements on top. She had had no idea of what sort of building it would be, but when it was finished it reminded her of a stubby lighthouse. She put slit windows up the walls and an extra dome-shaped top above the battlements, where there could be the light.

  ‘It shines out to sea’ she said to herself. ‘Everyone can see it for miles around.’

  Somehow it was a comforting thought that the sea was the other side of the hills. She had forgotten that when she had been concentrating on the house and its immediate surroundings. The house, and the stunted garden, were hemmed in, too cramped and small: and the evil, watching stones made it seem even more of a prison. But to know that not far away, along the road and beyond the hills was the sea, free and salt and without bounds, was like having prison gates opened, even if it was not yet time to go out.

  ‘I’ll tell Mark’ Marianne thought. ‘I know he’ll be pleased. Perhaps he knows already. I’ll tell him about the sea.’

  She had no doubts that she would be with him again that night, her thoughts had been so much with her drawings. So it was no surprise, after she had gone to sleep, to find herself standing at the bottom of the stairs in the nearly empty house, listening to the tick of the clock on the landing upstairs. It was not very light, about dusk, Marianne judged, and in case it became too dark to see her way about, she turned first into the room on her right. There, to her immense satisfaction, was the bicycle, oddly surrounded on the floor by egg-cups, a candlestick and a roast chicken.

  She walked round the bicycle several times, admiring its shiny black and silver newness and its completeness of equipment with the pride of a creator. If she had put it together herself, piece by piece, instead of having only drawn it, she could hardly have been more pleased.

  Having satisfied herself that it had everything a bicycle ought to have, she picked up the candlestick and the roast chicken and went upstairs. To her knock on Mark’s door, an impatient voice called, ‘Come in’

  He was still in bed, still propped rather listlessly on pillows. He had put down the book he had been reading and was looking at her with an expression she could not fathom. Marianne remembered, with shame now, how she had screamed when the stone eyes turned towards her, how she had run away and left Mark alone. ‘Not that I can help waking up, at least I don’t think I can’ she thought. ‘But then I didn’t try to come back to see how he was or what was happening.’

  She had meant to greet Mark with the news of his bicycle downstairs: she was longing to hear his grateful thanks. To her surprise she said what she hadn’t meant to, or even thought of. ‘I’m sorry, Mark’

  ‘It’s all right’ he said, sounding embarrassed. ‘You didn’t do anything.’

  ‘I didn’t come back.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you couldn’t.’

  ‘Yes, I think I could. And you aren’t any better. Oh, Mark, I am so sorry. Do say you forgive me.’

  ‘Oh, don’t fuss’ was Mark’s answer. ‘You’re back now, aren’t you? Don’t get so excited.’ Suddenly he laughed, unexpectedly. ‘If you only knew how funny you look, standing there saying, ‘do forgive me’, with a candlestick in one hand and that great plate in the other. What on earth is it? A duck, or something?’

  ‘It’s roast chicken’ Marianne said eagerly. 1 thought you might be hungry.’

  ‘Jolly good idea. I am a bit hungry. The trouble is I got a bit sick of eggs and sausages. The fruit was jolly good, though.’

  ‘But you can’t have been eating eggs and sausages ever since I was here last’ Marianne said, surprised.

  ‘I have, though. Why not?’

  ‘I didn’t think I’d drawn enough.’

  ‘There always seems to be some more, however much I eat’ Mark said indifferently. ‘Look round this side of the bed and you’ll see. Put the chicken down, silly, you can’t carry it about in one hand all the time.’

  Marianne put the chicken on the floor - the table was still overloaded - and came round to the window side of the room. The floor was indeed still covered with eggs, and the string of sausages was also still there. Near the bed was a neat pile of empty eggshells.

  ‘I say, you’ve eaten quite a lot’ Marianne exclaimed. ‘But I’m sure there are just as many as I drew at first. Why do you keep the shells there?’

  ‘No waste-paper basket. One of the things you forgot when you furnished this room’ Mark said, grinning.

  ‘Why didn’t you throw them out of the window?’

  Mark only looked at her for reply. The look reminded Marianne for the first time of what was outside the windows.

  ‘Are THEY still there?’ she asked, in a low voice. ‘Are they still watching?’

  ‘I haven’t looked lately’ Mark answered in the same tone. ‘Last time I did, they were.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes, all of them.’

  ‘Let’s eat the chicken’ Marianne said abruptly. She picked up the dish and put it on the end of the four-poster bed. ‘Where are the plates?’ she asked, looking round. ‘You tell me’ Mark said.

  ‘Oh! I didn’t draw any! Oh, I am stupid! Nor knives or forks or anything. I am so sorry, Mark! What shall we do?’

  ‘Stop apologizing and eat with our fingers. I’ve done it before on picnics, and I’ve been eating the sausages without anything like that all this time. Give me the cockatoo - I’ll carve.’

  He did, with great dexterity, separating the chicken into neat manageable joints. Marianne found she was hungry; hungrier than Mark, in fact, who, in spite of having admittedly got tired of sausages and eggs, ate very little, and before Marianne had finished was leaning back on his pillows, watching her.

  ‘This is the only way to eat a chicken’ Marianne said, cleaning up a drumstick in a most satisfactory way. ‘I never can get all the bits off with a knife and fork. Aren’t you going to eat any more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You didn’t eat very much.’

 
‘I’m not hungry’ ‘You said you were.’

  ‘Well, I thought I was, but when I start eating I’m not. Not as much as I expected.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like something else? A banana or something?’

  ‘What else is there?’ Mark asked lazily.

  ‘Well, I don’t think there is anything else. You see I didn’t realize that the food you ate didn’t sort of get used up so I’m afraid I drew some more eggs.’

  ‘More eggs? Where are they? I don’t see them.’

  They’re downstairs. Oh, Mark! I’d forgotten! Your bicycle.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s here. It’s downstairs. I drew it and it’s here, like the other things.’.

  Mark lost all his appearance of indifference. He sat bolt upright in bed and looked really animated.

  ‘Well, I must say, that’s jolly decent of you’ he said. ‘One of the things I really wanted was my bike.’

  ‘One of the things? What else do you want?’

  ‘Oh, nothing you can draw. Just to be able to walk again. That’s all. Tell me about the bike. What colour is it?’

  ‘Black. And silver. And I think it’s got all its bits, Mark. I looked very carefully’

  ‘All its bits?’

  ‘Well, all the things like brakes and chains and the little wheels that make it work. I couldn’t draw it very well, but it’s come out all right.’

  ‘Does it go? That’s the thing’ Mark said.

  ‘I didn’t try. I’ll go down and see - only it’s getting awfully dark.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter’ Mark said, throwing himself back on his pillows. ‘It won’t make any difference. I shan’t be able to ride it anyhow.’

  ‘But, Mark, you will!’

  ‘Not for ages. Perhaps not ever’

  He shut his eyes. Marianne did not speak. When he opened them again and saw her face, he said quickly, ‘But it was jolly decent of you to get it for me. Thanks.’