And then, without warning, Mavis screamed. Even though she muffled the sound almost at once, clapping her hand to her mouth and applying grimaces of self control like brakes to a skidding car, the sound still seemed to ring back and forth from the cooking pots and preserving pans hanging around the walls, on and on, long after Mavis had gone white, and then red, and had finally taken her hand from her mouth and plunged into a hopeless tangle of apologies and explanations.
“I’m sorry, Mrs Newman! Oh, I’m so terribly sorry. Oh, I never meant to startle you so; but you did give me such a shock. You see, trying the door handle, that was the start of my dream! Really it was! There was this room, you see, I don’t know what room it was, but in my dream I knew I had to get into it. So I got hold of the handle and turned it, but it wouldn’t open; and then—Oh, Mrs Newman, I don’t think I can tell you the rest…!”
“Whatever’s going on? What’s happened?”
Claudia, stately in her long housecoat, was standing in the doorway. Mavis ran to her like a child to its mother, clutching at her sleeve, pulling her into the room. “Oh, Claudia!” she kept ejaculating; and Margaret resignedly took over the task of explaining the situation, in so far as so typical a Mavis-predicament was susceptible of rational explanation.
“And now Mavis says she’d rather not tell us about this nightmare,” Margaret finished crisply. “And I don’t doubt that this is very wise; she will do better to put it out of her mind. So there is no reason, really, why we should not all go back to bed now and get some sleep.”
Margaret had not really supposed—or, in her heart, perhaps, hoped—that the episode would end thus tamely. As might have been expected, Claudia’s principles combined with her curiosity to produce a compound of irresistible power.
“Mother! But that would be repressing it! That’s the worst thing she could possibly do! Don’t take any notice of Mother, Mavis, she doesn’t understand. Of course you must talk about your dream—talk, and talk, and talk—get it out of your system! There’s no such thing as ‘forgetting’ in a case like this. To ‘forget’ just means to ‘repress’—to push it all back into your subconscious again, where it will grow, and fester, and break out again at last in some dreadful neurosis—just when you are getting so much better, too, Mavis! Don’t do it! Don’t risk it! Tell us the whole thing, now.”
“Hadn’t she better finish wiping up the Horlick’s first?” enquired Margaret, observing that Mavis still had the wet floor cloth, like a stage property, dangling from her hand. “Or would a job like that do something dreadful to her subconscious?”
“Why, Mother—thank you! That was really perceptive!” said Claudia with such naive and unexpected gratitude that Margaret was greatly ashamed of her intended sarcasm. Taking the cloth from Mavis’ inert fingers, she herself got meekly down on to her knees; and as she wiped, and rinsed, and wiped again, she heard the whole story of Mavis’ dream.
“There was this room, you see,” Mavis began again, in tones of almost religious awe as she contemplated the uniqueness of her creation, her very own unaided nightmare—“There was this room, and I knew, somehow, that I had to get into it. I don’t know why I had to—you know how in dreams there sometimes aren’t reasons for things, but you just simply know?—Well, that’s how it was; I just knew that I had to get into this room. So I reached out, in my dream, to turn the handle of the door; but the minute I did that—I don’t quite know how to explain this—but the minute I touched that handle, and heard the little noise it made—I somehow began to be frightened. Not of anything—do you know what I mean?—it was more that the sound of that handle had changed the dream into a frightening dream. All at once, I knew that something terrible was going to happen—”
“Aha! You felt there was going to be something terrible inside the room? You didn’t want to open the door—?” interposed Claudia, evidently already agog with some interpretation. Margaret felt that she would have been annoyed, if she had been in Mavis’ position, to have Claudia practically dreaming her dreams for her like this; though really, the girl had rather stuck out her neck and asked for it. A dream that started off like that was a sitting duck to any amateur psychoanalyst. And, in fact, Mavis appeared to be rather pleased at the interruption.
“That’s right!” she agreed eagerly “That’s exactly how I felt! That something more dreadful than I could possibly imagine was going to be inside that room. And yet I still knew that I had to open that door—do you understand?”
Claudia nodded her head violently, in paroxysms of understanding; evidently each item in the dream was fitting into her interpretation like a set of Russian dolls. “Go on!” she urged Mavis excitedly; and Mavis continued: “So I tried the handle again … and again … and each time the nightmare feeling got worse. The horrible thing inside that room … I knew it was going to be more horrible than I could bear … I knew I was going to go mad when I saw it, yet still I knew that I must open that door, I must … I struggled and wrenched at that handle, and then—suddenly—the door came open!”
Mavis paused, and gulped: whether from horror or for dramatic effect it was impossible to say. Even Margaret could not hide her curiosity now.
“What happened then? What did you see?” she asked impatiently; but Mavis, apparently determined now to squeeze the utmost dramatic effect from her experience, paused for several seconds before answering.
But was it just for dramatic effect? Mavis’ face gleamed deathly white under the bare kitchen bulb, and her grey eyes were brilliant with a strange light.
“Go on, Mavis! You’ll feel better when you’ve got it out into the open,” urged Claudia eagerly. “What did you see?”
“Absolutely nothing!” declared Mavis—and yet somehow, horribly, the words conveyed no sense of anti-climax; you felt as she spoke that this nothingness was just one more inevitable step downwards into the black centre of the nightmare: “I couldn’t see anything because the room was dark, you see, absolutely pitch dark; and somehow I hadn’t expected that. I don’t know what I had expected, but not that. There was a terrible nightmare feeling about it being dark—I knew it shouldn’t be—mustn’t be—that there was something all wrong. I reached for the light, to switch it on, but there was no switch there—the wall was soft, and rotten—it gave under my hand like some horrible, soft thing … and then, suddenly, I knew that it was Maurice who was in that room. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there, just sitting, all alone in the dark, staring at nothing, like a dead person, and that was why the walls had gone soft and sick like that—it was something to do with him … Oh, Claudia, send him away! Send him away! I can’t bear to have him in the house … He gives me such terrible dreams …!”
Mavis was sobbing hysterically now—victim, Margaret suspected, largely of her own eloquence—and Claudia was consoling her with many long words. Depersonalisation—infantile regressive fantasies—sado-masochistic delusions of omnipotence … gradually the soothing patter of polysyllables, familiar as nursery rhymes, began to have their effect. Mavis’ sobs subsided, and she began to listen with interest to her case. Yes, she agreed, with a sniff and a gulp, it probably did mean that she was developing some sort of subconscious fixation on Maurice. Well, naturally it did. It was perfectly obvious that if you dream of a person with terror and loathing, it must mean that you really love them; Mavis declared herself amazed that so self-evident a proposition hadn’t been obvious to her from the start. Thus encouraged, Claudia offered yet further illuminations. Mavis’ subconscious guilt-feelings, of course, were all tied up with this subconscious love for Maurice; and although Margaret could not help feeling that Mavis’ guilt feelings might have been better employed in offering to replace the broken Wedgwood mug, she nevertheless listened fascinated to Claudia’s authoritative account of the death-wishes that the four-year-old Mavis must have entertained towards her mother. Or perhaps her father; either way, it seemed to fit perfectly with Claudia’s interpretations.
“And so really,” Claudia con
cluded, “this dream of yours is a very encouraging sign. It means that your repressed guilt-feelings have broken through into consciousness at last, and from now on you will be able to face them consciously, instead of disguising them in the form of an imaginary fear of Maurice. I always knew there was something irrational about that fear. Don’t you see?”
Mavis did; and so, for that matter, did Margaret. She saw that Mavis had succeeded triumphantly in drawing back everyone’s attention on to herself; Mavis’ precarious psychic state was once more reinstated on its pedestal at the centre of the household.
The only problem now remaining was that of persuading Mavis to go back to bed. It was nearly three o’clock by now, and Margaret, for one, had no wish to spend the remaining hours of the night listening to any more of Mavis’ guilt-feelings breaking through into consciousness; nor did she wish to lie listening to the muffled highlights of this process chirruping up intermittently through her bedroom floor, which was what would certainly happen if she simply went away and left them to it.
“Come along, Mavis,” she kept urging. “You’ll feel better if you can get some sleep”: or “We mustn’t keep Claudia up like this, you know; she leads a very busy life.”
This last, of course, was worse than useless; it simply provoked Claudia to an impassioned exposition of her imperviousness to such ordinary human weaknesses as needing sleep: while Mavis, with that iron obstinacy of the weak for which one never quite learns to prepare, flatly refused to stir. Nothing, she declared, absolutely nothing, would induce her to set foot again that night in her own room—the room where she had suffered the nightmare. She would not: she could not: “The dream would all come over me again, I know it would!” she pleaded; and in the end there was nothing to do but give in.
“Well—would you be happier in another room?” Margaret suggested at last, in desperation. “Shall we make you up a bed on the couch in the dining-room? Just for tonight, I mean,” she appended threateningly. “We’re not having this sort of nonsense every night, I’m telling you now!”
“Oh, Mrs Newman! Oh, thank you! I think I shan’t be scared—hardly at all—now. Not in the dining-room. I really do feel better now, you see; it’s just the thought of my own room—the same room where I had the dream. It sort of clings there, a dream like that. Do you know how I mean?”
I do indeed, thought Margaret disagreeably. You mean you’ve thought up a marvellous new dodge for keeping everybody fussing over you all night. First Claudia ministering to your guilt-feelings; and now me running after you with blankets and hot-water bottles!
“Well, at least you could come and help me get the couch ready,” she said aloud, and not very graciously; and Mavis followed her meekly upstairs to the chest where spare blankets were stored. Together they collected a sufficient pile of bedding and carted it downstairs. Thus laden, Margaret fumbled at the dining-room door.
“Open it for me, will you, Mavis?” she urged her less-heavily laden companion; and Mavis obeyed, clumsily.
“And the light—put on the light as well,” Margaret admonished her irritably; and Mavis did so.
Her screams were like nothing Margaret had ever heard before. They seemed hardly human—without words—beyond all sense or reason.
Or so it seemed. But now, peering round the panic-stricken girl, Margaret could see the sense and the reason. For there, at the bare, polished table, staring in front of him into what, until this moment, had been total darkness, sat Maurice.
CHAPTER XVII
“BUT MOTHER—CAN’T you understand? He’s a poet! Poets do do that sort of thing.”
Claudia spoke wearily. In spite of her brave claims last night, she was not, after all, as immune to the effects of broken sleep as she had supposed, and this morning she was feeling depressed and tired. She had not been able to get to sleep again after all the disturbance till past five, and by then, with light and bird-song already tormenting her through the cracks in the curtains, her sleep had been fitful and restless, and she had woken unrefreshed, and with an odd sense of foreboding.
Or was it simply that today was her day off from the office? Always on her free day Claudia was aware of a slight lowering of her spirits, a sort of drooping of vitality, which started with getting up at half past eight instead of half past seven, and grew slowly worse as the day wore on. Often she assured herself that this unpleasant feeling meant that she was relaxing; and this thought always made her feel a little better. For the ability to relax was well known to be a rare and precious gift in this hurried age, and so naturally Claudia was pleased to be the possessor of it. All the same, it wasn’t exactly an enjoyable feeling; and as she lay in bed on these free mornings, her alarm clock silent—and its silence seemed, sometimes, like that of an old friend refusing to speak to her—she was accustomed to contemplate the relaxation of the day ahead rather as a tight-wire walker must contemplate the sagging of his wire; far from making things easier, it demands of him a new and terrifying range of skills.
Also, Claudia reflected, a free day meant that you couldn’t get away from anything. If only she had been able, this morning, to dash into the garage and be off and away in her car immediately after breakfast, as she did on all other mornings, then this wearisome wrangle with Mother would never have got under way—Mother and Mavis would have worked off their silly nerviness on one another in the course of the day, and Claudia need not have got involved at all. It was unfair that they should both go on at her like this; surely she had given them full measure last night of comfort and advice? Claudia realised that she hated people’s worries to be still there the next morning; the evening was the time for problems—long leisurely evenings stretching with black coffee and intimate confidences far into the night. Half past nine on a cool, drizzly morning was as inappropriate for anxiety as it was for love. Mother had no sense of this sort of appropriateness, of course; and on top of everything else, she was ironing while she talked, which she must surely know to be irritating, squeak, squeak, squeak from the protesting wood as she leaned her weight on it.
Claudia yawned, suppressed her irritation, and tried again:
“Most of the great poets did their best work at night,” she pointed out. ‘The imagination is well known to be at its most vivid between midnight and three in the morning. And in Maurice’s case—”
“In Maurice’s case, we don’t know if he’s a poet at all, let alone a great poet,” Margaret pointed out tartly. “How do you know, Claudia, that all this poetry business isn’t faked—just a blind, to distract your attention from whatever it is he has really come here for? He says he has written all these hundreds of poems—have you ever seen them? With your own eyes?”
“Well—honestly, Mother, considering I’ve typed them for him—”
“How many of them, eh? Six? A dozen? I’ve listened to that typing of yours, my good girl, and all I can say is, if you’ve ever typed as many as four lines consecutively before the jabber-jabber starts, I’ll—”
“Oh, Mother, don’t be silly. Stop it. You don’t know anything about it.” Claudia leaned her aching head on her hand. She felt too tired to argue, or even to work out in her own mind how much foundation there might be for these aspersions. “He is a poet, and there’s an end to it,” she declared flatly. “He just simply is. Not a published one yet, but that will come—I’m trying to help him about that right now. He deserves it. Look at his persistence! Night after night he reads his verses aloud to me—”
“And night after night you sit there waiting for him to stop! All the time, you’re just watching for a chance to interrupt, and get him talking about something more interesting! Not that I blame you, my dear, I feel just the same myself. I think they’re the most dreadful, boring, incomprehensible poems I’ve ever heard in my whole life, and believe me, that’s saying something. Remember, young men wrote bad poetry in my day, too; but at least we didn’t encourage them.”
“And so?” enquired Claudia coolly, observing that her mother had somewhat lost the
thread of her accusations. “And how does all this prove that Maurice isn’t a genuine poet?”
“Oh. Well. Yes. What I mean is, you have no evidence that he is. He reads out this stuff to you every evening—sometimes to all of us; and you don’t listen, and I don’t listen, and I’m very sure that Helen doesn’t listen. It might be the same poems over and over again for all we know. I’m sure I wouldn’t notice, and I don’t believe you would, either!”
“Speak for yourself,” said Claudia crossly, wishing, uneasily, that she could remember one single line of all Maurice’s works, one single poetic idea, with which to refute all this.
“But in any case,” she continued, evading the issue, “all this is surely irrelevant? Even if Maurice’s poems weren’t good—and I’m quite certain they are—but even if they weren’t, would that make it a crime for him to try to write them at night? Would it?”
“Yes, it would!” affirmed Margaret roundly. “Only a genius —an accepted, recognised genius—has any right to such disorderly, inconsiderate habits! Sitting up all night, indeed! And in someone else’s house, too—it’s downright bad manners! And then frightening Mavis out of her wits like that! Goodness knows she’s nervy enough at the best of times, without things like that happening to her!”
“But nothing ‘happened’ to her!” Claudia pointed out impatiently. “Maurice didn’t do one single thing, now did he? Really, the whole episode had nothing to do with him at all. As I explained last night, it isn’t Maurice that Mavis is afraid of, it’s herself, her own inner guilt feelings. Maurice is just the peg she hangs it on—but that’s not his fault. All he was doing was sitting there, writing poetry—”
“He wasn’t!” Margaret interrupted belligerently “He wasn’t writing anything. It was pitch dark. He had no pen or paper. I tell you, he was doing nothing!”
“You mean it looked like nothing, to you. But how do you know what was going on inside his head—what ideas he was formulating?”
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