Prisoner's Base
Page 11
“And it turned out that the mysterious, irresistible pull was the fact that her mother was paying for all their food and looking after the child while Winnie was out at work!” declared Margaret truculently. Claudia regarded her with icy disfavour.
“That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean about you, Mother! That was just the attitude that upset Winnie so much. I daresay you didn’t mean any harm—I know that your generation can’t really be expected to understand the new, saner approach to problems like Winnie’s; but all the same, couldn’t you at least try not to—”
A short, sharp ring on the front door bell brought the dispute to an abrupt conclusion. For a moment all three looked at each other in a tingling unity of tension; and just for one fraction of a second it seemed to Margaret that Claudia looked just as frightened as any of them. It was unnerving—much, much more so, Margaret suddenly realised, than any amount of arrogance and cocksureness. For if Claudia herself was less than wholly confident in this quixotic enterprise then on what—on whom—could they all lean? What safety was there anywhere, for any of them, if they were to be thus cast captainless as well as reluctant upon these awful and uncharted seas? To be press-ganged on to the ship was bad enough; but to find, when out of sight of land, that the ship had no captain, was going nowhere —that was the final terror. For the first time, Margaret was aware of Claudia’s self-righteous obstinacy as a support, and not merely as a danger and a nuisance. Oh God, she prayed silently, let Claudia’s pig-headedness not fail us now; not at this stage, please, God!
And Margaret’s prayer must have been answered, for nothing could have been more triumphantly confident than the voice in which Claudia was now rallying them to her support:
“He’s come! That’s him!” she cried joyously. “Mother! Mavis! Come along—come down with me! Come and help me welcome him!”
‘Come and watch me welcome him’ might have been nearer the mark, Margaret reflected; but she was too much relieved to see Claudia once again her familiar, vainglorious self to harbour the ungenerous thought for long. Together the three of them went downstairs to confront the new arrival into their home.
CHAPTER XII
IT WAS ASTONISHING how quickly Maurice seemed to settle down; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, how quickly the violent feelings generated by his arrival seemed to settle down. Within a very few days, he had already begun to seem a familiar, unremarkable member of the household. “Maurice!” Margaret would find herself calling, as if the name had always been on her lips, “Supper’s ready!” Or: “Maurice, are you going to the library again in your lunch hour? If so, could you get me …?” And as to treating him like an ‘Ordinary young man’, as Claudia had urged—why, nothing easier. To Margaret, at least, he seemed like an ordinary young man: opinionated, over-full of himself, and given to bouts of gloomy introspection, exactly like all the others, bless them. If anything, he was slightly better-mannered than most, jumping up quite often to open doors for her or to offer her his chair. And, above all, he actually seemed to have a job—a real proper, regular job, that got him out of the house before nine in the morning and didn’t disgorge him again till after six. For this, Margaret felt, as she looked back over the vista of former incumbents, she could forgive him almost anything. The majority of his predecessors hadn’t had jobs at all; and the rest had tended to go in for those rather depressing, intangible sort of employments which can be done at home, in one’s own time. The things they were supposed to work at would arrive by post at irregular intervals and set them moping nervily about the house, explaining to anyone who cared to listen just why it was that they couldn’t seem to get down to it today.
Maurice and his total disappearance from breakfast time till evening seemed to Margaret so vast an improvement on all this that she very soon began to feel quite kindly towards him; and when, in addition, it became clear that he liked to spend his evenings either reading voraciously in his own room or else talking to Claudia about his poetry and getting her to type bits for him, well out of Margaret’s way—why, Margaret almost found herself wondering why she had ever raised any objections to his arrival in the first place. Think, she reminded herself, who we might have had on that Put-U-Up by now, if Maurice hadn’t been occupying it. A reformed alcoholic, perhaps, who would need to talk out his problems till four or five in the morning, just under Margaret’s bedroom. Or a weeping divorcée, whose ex-husband would keep ringing up with threatening messages just when Margaret was busy. There was no end to the variegated nuisances that this apparently hairbrained scheme of Claudia’s might have averted.
Only in one respect, as the days went by, did Margaret feel she had cause to complain of Maurice; and that was in his increasing readiness—indeed, his insatiable eagerness—to talk about his crimes and his imprisonment. For her part, Margaret felt that this easy loquacity on such a subject was in poor taste; she would have preferred to have been allowed to ignore this side of their visitor’s character altogether; to carry on with their daily life as if it was not so. This, it seemed to her, was the only civilised way of dealing with an intrinsically awkward and embarrassing situation. But of course Claudia would have none of this; with her passionate belief in the salutary effects of Facing Facts, and Getting it Out of Your System, and such-like uncomfortable exercises, she encouraged him to enlarge on his regrettable experiences on every possible occasion—even at mealtimes, which Margaret thought was really the last straw. Apart from anything else, it meant that Helen, too, was sitting in on these revelations; and more than once, Helen had brought Sandra home, too, at the end of the school day, to enjoy this novel entertainment. There the two girls would sit, side by side at the dining-room table, their eyes goggling and their food cooling on their plates, while Claudia went out of her way to elicit one unfortunate detail after another from Maurice’s all too willing lips.
They all knew the main lines of the story now. He had been involved in a bank robbery, in which one of the bank clerks had died of a fractured skull—the result, it seemed, of a violent push from Maurice as they struggled on the steps. His punishment was fair enough, Maurice handsomely admitted; it was right that he should pay the full penalty for such a deed. What was perhaps unfair was that he, the youngest of the gang, should have been allotted the task of tackling this bank clerk until all the loot was safely stowed in the car; this made it almost inevitable that he should be one of the ones to be caught while the car, the bank notes, and the smarter half of the gang got safely away.
Margaret had to admit that the story could have been worse. There was at least nothing sordid—nothing unsavoury—about it; and she supposed that Helen would have to have heard about it somehow, sometime, in any case. No, it was not the bare facts that she felt were so unsuitable for a young girl’s ears; rather it was the manner in which Maurice related them —with a sort of carefree zest, like someone telling an adventure story: not as if he was ashamed of it at all, or regretted it, or had even learnt anything from his long punishment. It seemed wrong that the girls should be encouraged to regard such a serious crime so lightly—which was what they were inevitably coming to do as they listened to the exciting adventure story of his life and plied him with eager questions. Sandra in particular was becoming quite pert and cheeky in her conversations with this morbidly interesting young man, even joking with him sometimes, and laughing merrily, over some episode or other related to his crimes or his life in prison. It was all wrong. If they must learn about such unfortunate lives as Maurice’s, the girls should at least be made to treat the matter with becoming gravity.
Of course it was Claudia’s fault really. Instead of discouraging Maurice from bringing up his life story as a light-hearted topic of mealtime conversation, she positively egged him on. At first Margaret suspected mere vulgar curiosity on her daughter’s part—backed up, of course, by lofty psychological principles: that there was more to it than this Margaret only discovered by chance, one Saturday morning—the third after Maurice’s arrival.
But before she had so much as opened the gate, Margaret realised that they were, of course, only talking; absurd to have thought, even for a moment, that someone like Claudia would ever have time for games. Or Daphne either for that matter, though Daphne’s habitual busy-ness was of a rather different kind from Claudia’s. Daphne did not go out to work, having been left comfortably off on the death of her husband several years ago; but—advised thus by her friends after this sad event —she had found herself Interests. With good-hearted, indiscriminate fervour, she had taken up painting, pottery, good works, language classes, amateur dramatics, church-going, embroidery, and the cultivation of herbs; and had found—possibly rather to her own dismay—that she was quite good at all of them, and so had no valid reason for ever dropping any of them. Moreover, Daphne did not believe in dropping things; she was, as she would have told you, a Sticker. The penalties attendant on this estimable quality were by now plain to be seen: poor Daphne was tangled up in her Interests like a kitten in a ball of wool. Innocently and lightly she had taken up what seemed at first sight like a perfectly simple plaything. You never saw her now, Margaret reflected, without a bundle of leaflets under her arm, or a couple of great pictures that she was taking to be framed. Her small, wiry little body and her sparse, gingery hair were a familiar sight to Margaret, who often met her scuttling about the streets, and usually just managed to smile ‘Good morning’ to her before she dived, laden, into the modest headquarters of some worthy organisation or other. She was not, however, a frequent visitor to the house. Her friendship—such as it was—with Claudia depended less on mutual liking than on the random but nevertheless fairly frequent crossing of their paths among the local activities.
Or so it had seemed hitherto. But this looked more like real intimacy, Margaret thought, still hesitating with her baskets by the gate. Those heads leaning together so intently—those empty coffee cups long forgotten—such obviously intimate talk as this set Margaret wondering how she was to get her shopping indoors without seeming to interrupt them. What could it all be about? Maurice again? Probably: Margaret recalled that Daphne had telephoned Claudia several times during the last week or two, and always the conversation had been devoted to this apparently inexhaustible topic. Not that Claudia had been betraying his confidences during these telephone conversations—if ‘betray’ was a meaningful term to use in connection with confidences poured forth so enthusiastically by Maurice himself to an audience of at least four and often five—two of them being schoolgirls with an obvious interest in spreading their findings freely and in every detail among their seven hundred companions. No, far from being over-garrulous, Claudia had usually been—well, not snubbing, exactly, but certainly rather off-hand about the exciting information (unheard by Margaret) which must have been pouring down the wire.
“Yes, of course I knew she was a prostitute!” Claudia would say, in her clear, incisive telephone voice that carried right through the house. “He told me that at the very beginning. But she left his father before he was three, and so …” Or: “Yes, of course he’s told me; but practically every boy of eleven or twelve has had such an experience: I don’t know why you should sound so shocked …”
In spite of these discouragements, poor Daphne—Sticker that she was—must have ploughed on, and was now venturing a personal visit…. Margaret decided to brave the confidences, if this was what they should be called, and get the shopping into the house before the butter melted and the lettuce lost its crispness. Noisily, to give them a chance, she rattled the gate open, and then slammed it shut behind her.
Both communicants looked up.
“Oh! Er! Good morning, Mrs Newman!” exclaimed Daphne. “I do hope you don’t mind my invading like this. You see …”
“But of course not. I’m delighted to see you,” declared Margaret. “You should come more often. I hope you’re getting Daphne to stay to lunch, Claudia,” she added, turning to her daughter. “It’ll be all ready in just a few minutes—I left everything cooking before I went out.”
“Yes. Yes, Mother, that’ll be fine,” said Claudia absently, her mind evidently quite elsewhere. “Listen, Mother, perhaps you can settle this argument for us—Mother’s a great student of the low-brow papers,” she added laughingly to Daphne. “She keeps us up to date with all the scandal, while we keep her up to date with politics—isn’t that right, Mother?”
Claudia’s tone was unusually friendly and warm, so Margaret was not in the least offended by this imputation, especially as it was perfectly true; she did love to read the Daily Mirror, propped up against the coffee-pot in the sunny kitchen.
“That’s perfectly right,” she assented gaily; and, pleased at being thus drawn into their tête-à-tête, she dumped her shopping on the ground, and sank into the chair that Claudia with one hand had pulled forward for her. “What is it you want me to tell you, my dears—that is, if I can? As Claudia says, I delight in newspaper gossip, but I don’t always remember it very well. The spirit is willing, but the memory is weak, as you might say!” Margaret was charmed at the way they both laughed at the gentle little joke, its near-pointlessness glossed over because of the sunshine, and because it was Saturday morning, and because the May bushes were in bloom.
“The thing is, Mother,” explained Claudia, rather more business-like now, “can you remember—can you by any chance remember—how long ago it was that they had that bank robbery in Hadley High Street? You remember—the one where one of the assistants was killed, and there was all that rumpus about the collection for his widow—”
“Which could all have been avoided,” put in Daphne knowledgeably, “if they’d only been content to organise it through the usual channels. Or if the organisers had even bothered to tell the manager before …”
There wasn’t much that Daphne didn’t know about voluntary efforts and their pitfalls; but, as always, there was a great deal that nobody else wanted to hear. She gave up resignedly, and without surprise, while the other two continued the debate.
“Yes, of course I remember,” agreed Margaret. “Certainly I do. But it must be a long time ago now. Years.”
“Yes, yes!” interposed Claudia eagerly. “That’s what I say! But how many years—that’s what we’re arguing about, aren’t we, Daphne?”
Daphne nodded, and both looked expectantly towards Margaret. Margaret longed to give a verdict on Claudia’s side, in gratitude for this unusual friendliness, for this pleasant moment in the sun. But which was Claudia’s side?
“Well,” she temporised. “I’d have to think about it…. Three or four, would you say …?”
“Or even more, perhaps?” prompted Claudia, at the same moment as Daphne broke in eagerly with: “That’s what I said! I said it was only three or four—”
Thus provided with her clue, Margaret loyally exploited the vagueness of her memory to its furthest limits short of outright lying. “Yes, now I come to think of it, it might easily have been more,” she corrected herself. “Time passes so quickly at my age. It could easily have been five or six years; or even—”
“There you are!” cried Claudia triumphantly. “I said it was six or seven, and now here’s Mother thinks so too! So you see, it does fit, exactly….”
So they had been talking about the eternal Maurice, just as Margaret had surmised. They now had his crime fixed in space and time, as well as in every juicy detail … but no, here was Daphne still arguing the toss:
“I’m sure it wasn’t as long ago as all th
at. Certain sure! Sorry and all that, but I am! Besides, it doesn’t fit in other ways. I seem to remember that the whole lot of them were caught that time, whereas Maurice says that half his lot got away—”
“Oh, I can see how that confusion can have arisen!” interrupted Claudia gaily. “You see, in the Hadley High Street one, they weren’t caught straightaway—not all of them, that is. It was only later, when they went back to wherever they’d hidden the money—that’s how the police caught them. I remember an article about it, how the police had muddled it somehow so that they caught the men but never found the money. Something like that. I remember thinking that it served them right—the police, I mean—for delivering up those poor boys to such awful long sentences. But the point is, don’t you see, that all that would have been after Maurice was already in prison. So he wouldn’t have known about it. He probably doesn’t know to this day that the rest of them were caught. Don’t you see?”
“I’d have thought that the Underworld kept its members better informed than that!” sniffed Daphne, losing ground but not giving up. “Well, that’s what I’d have thought, but there you are. Unless,” she went on, looking up shrewdly, “he just hasn’t told you what he knows. I don’t suppose he tells you everything.”