“No, I definitely mean to stay up until he goes,” Margaret affirmed. “I’m sure he’ll expect it—they’ll both expect it. It would look very odd, his very first visit…”
The argument was cut short by a polite ring at the front door, and there followed a dreadful unrehearsed moment of paralysis, while Claudia waited for Helen to rush downstairs with lover-like eagerness, and Helen meanwhile lurked ingloriously in her bedroom waiting for her grandmother to cope: while Margaret, under Claudia’s eye, dared make no move that might look like forestalling love’s young dream in this moment of reunion.
In the end, everyone took action at once; and soon Clive was in the drawing-room, safely introduced to everybody, and listening somewhat dazedly to Claudia’s apologetic and slightly over-emphatic account of how immediately she had to go out and how very late it would be before she could be back; while Helen hovered quaveringly in the background, looking, Margaret thought, like a little ghost; one that had departed this mortal life while saying ‘cheese!’ into a camera, and had got stuck that way for all eternity.
Once they were sitting down to the meal, things began to go a little better. Clive was most appreciative of both the roast lamb and the meringue tarts, and quite won Margaret’s heart by his enthusiasm for second helpings of both. He wasn’t bad looking, either, she decided, with some surprise. After listening to Helen’s despondent accounts of him all these weeks, she had been expecting to see a little runt of a fellow, stoop-shouldered and spotty. And now here was a pleasant, fresh-faced youth, of average build and bearing, and with an endearing mop of reddish hair. Was this what was meant by a ‘weed’ nowadays? Fancy belonging to a generation that could afford to be so choosy, she reflected enviously, looking back on the man-starved twenties in which she had grown up. Clive would have been accounted quite a prize in those days, conversation or no conversation.
And at least he was doing his best; and so was Helen. Although neither of the young people seemed capable of addressing a remark of the smallest interest to one another, they were both pathetically grateful for every crumb of small-talk that Margaret could offer; they seized on each topic in turn, worried at it, and then turned trustfully to her for another one. It was like throwing buns to the bears at the zoo.
Mavis, of course, was no use at all. She sat looking dull and preoccupied; if anyone addressed a remark to her she started, as if they had thrown a pellet of bread, answered briefly and confusedly, and then lapsed once more into her musings.
Margaret began to feel cross. Admittedly one hadn’t expected Mavis to be the life and soul of the party, scintillating with wit and amusing stories; but surely she could say something? It didn’t have to be anything sensible—the sort of senseless prattle she kept up all the time when she shared Margaret’s solitary lunches would have done perfectly well.
“Mavis,” she murmured when the meal was at an end, and the young ones were moving towards the door, “what’s the matter with you—are you tired? Can’t you brighten up a bit—or do you want to go off to bed?”
Mavis took this solicitous enquiry as the threat that it was meant to be: pull your weight or get out. Her eyes widened in dismay.
“Oh, Mrs Newman, I’m sorry. I know I’m being rather dull, but you see—” She stopped. “I’ll try, though; I really will!” She put on a bright, forced smile. “What do you want me to do?”
“Well—talk, of course,” Margaret told her. “Say something!” She glanced round to make sure that Helen and Clive had indeed left the room, and then went on:
“Can’t you see how sticky it is—this party? They’re so shy and hopeless, both of them—but you’re a grown woman, surely you could help me a bit to keep things going?”
“I’ll try,” agreed Mavis contritely. “But what am I to talk about? I don’t know what boys that age are interested in.”
“Just anything!” Margaret urged her. “Anything at all. Whatever you usually talk about.”
What did Mavis usually talk about? The weather? The whereabouts of the scarf she thought she had left on the hall table? Lamentations about how she couldn’t do a thing with her hair? She couldn’t either, Margaret reflected sombrely. The lank, limp locks on which so much fruitless endeavour was expended were looking worse than ever.
“Tell them about Eddie!” she suggested, with sudden, despairing inspiration. “Never mind whether they’re interested—just tell them!” and with these cavalier instructions she shoo-ed Mavis after the other two into the drawing-room, and returned herself to the kitchen.
And Mavis did exactly as she was told. When Margaret rejoined them, she found a surprised but by no means uninterested Clive listening to an account of how unfair the history master had been about Eddie’s essay on Thomas à Becket three weeks ago; and how the games master didn’t allow for the fact that Eddie was only nine and three-quarters, whereas most of the boys in the class were already ten; and didn’t Clive think it wrong that a boy should be forced to go to church twice on Sundays when his mother was an atheist?
It had never occurred to Margaret that Mavis’ bottomless ignorance of religious matters could be dignified by such a title; but Clive took it all very seriously, and backed up her point of view with quite touching vehemence; though his ensuing attempt to lead her into a discussion of Christianity in the modern world proved somewhat abortive. All she could contribute to the argument was that their vicar at home only used to preach on alternate Sundays. He used to grow dahlias, too, but always had a lot of trouble with earwigs. She had an aunt, she added, who also used to grow dahlias, but whether she, too, had trouble with earwigs or not she, Mavis, could not say.
But at this point Helen, too, seemed to recover the power of speech, and threw out a shy, excited little opinion about school prayers—and from then on, the evening was saved. Religion, life-after-death, D. H. Lawrence, character-reading from handwriting—Margaret, dispensing coffee and tiny macaroon biscuits, felt as proud as any theatrical producer watching a successful first night from the wings.
And it was all thanks to Mavis, really. Amazing.
It was past eleven before the conversation began to flag, and Clive, glancing at the clock, began to say, Well I suppose…. Margaret supposed so too, and since the visitor did not seem to know what further steps to take to bring about his own departure, she helped him on his way by pointing out that the last bus passed the bottom of the road at twenty past eleven.
The goodbyes were cordial on both sides; and Margaret deliberately kept herself in grandmotherly evidence throughout, so that Clive’s non-kissing of Helen should seem to be due not to cowardly incompetence on his part, nor to childish lack of allure on hers, but simply to the exigencies of the situation.
“What did you think of him, Granny? Did you think he was terribly wet?”
Bright-eyed and anxious, Helen drank in eagerly Margaret’s assurances: that yes, she did like him: that he seemed a very nice boy, quite intelligent, and not nearly as unattractive as Helen had given her to understand.
“Yes—he really doesn’t seem so bad, now, does he?” ventured Helen. “He wasn’t nearly so boring this evening as he usually is. I wish he could be like that when we go to the Wimpy Bar—”
“Who was that man? What has he been telling you?”
Without warning, Maurice was suddenly there, in front of them—darting in out of the darkness like a stray cat, just as Margaret was shutting the front door. He stood now in the hall, blinking, screwing up his eyes against the light as though he had been long in darkness. Had he been lurking in the laurels by the front door, or what? There had been no sign of him coming up the path, or round the corner of the house. He had just simply appeared.
“Really, Maurice! What in the world do you mean? That was just a friend of my granddaughter’s—”
“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.” Maurice had the obsessed, blank look of one who simply cannot take in words or events that have no bearing on the thing that fills his mind. “It wasn’t anything to do with me, then?
He wasn’t saying anything about me?”
“No, he was not! And, Maurice, may I suggest something to you, entirely for your own good? Will you kindly stop behaving in this disconcerting, uncivilised manner that you have adopted in the last few days? This is the third time you have popped up in some extraordinary fashion, startling everybody, and upsetting the whole household. No doubt you are in some sort of trouble that you don’t wish us to know about—and about which, I can assure you, we have no wish to know—but nevertheless I do advise you, most strongly, not to allow your problems to interfere with ordinary, civilised good manners. It’s always a mistake: always. And particularly when you are living in someone else’s house. My daughter, I know, will stand for any sort of behaviour from you; but I won’t; and I think it is only fair to let you know.”
Maurice was gazing right into Margaret’s eyes. He looked tense, and concerned, as if her little homily had struck home.
“He didn’t leave any message for me, then?” he asked, when she had finished speaking. “Or say he was coming again, or anything?” And when Margaret marched angrily off, without another word, he stared after her in surprise, as if hurt and bewildered at her refusal to answer his perfectly simple question.
CHAPTER XX
IN THE NIGHT it rained, and Sunday morning dawned grey and gusty, with spatters of light rain against the windows of rooms that seemed suddenly dark, after all these days of sunshine. The air indoors was damp and heavy, taking the gloss off the polished furniture, and making the banisters faintly sticky to the touch. And on top of all this, Mavis was roaming about the house trying to find someone to listen to her dreams.
She was wearing her dressing-gown, of course, it being only eleven o’clock, and her grubby mules went slip-slop up and down the stairs and passages, pausing for a while at each room where a preoccupied person might be cornered and made to attend.
It was hard on the wretched girl, Margaret thought, that even Claudia seemed to be taking no interest—Claudia, who had taken Mavis’ earlier dreams with such flattering seriousness. But Mavis must be reasonable; she could hardly expect a box-office success like that every time, and in any case she should know by now that Claudia never liked this sort of thing in the mornings. Go off your head at midnight, and no one could be more interested and sympathetic than Claudia; but do the same thing at breakfast time, and she would elbow you and your ravings absently to one side, muttering about how long the posts might take to Amsterdam, and whether a stout roneo’d memorandum could be sent by book-post.
But Mavis could never learn. Twice since breakfast she had wandered into the dining-room and leaned, breathing, over Claudia’s desk, and tried to engage her interest.
“I was thinking it might have been a phallic symbol?” Margaret had heard her pleading hopefully, in a pathetic bid for Claudia’s attention; but all to no avail. Claudia had settled down to write letters today, and write letters she would, even if Mavis had dreamed the whole of Freud, Jung and Adler rolled into one.
Margaret, too, had proved a poor audience, for she had much on her mind this morning; indeed, she had suffered something of a shock, from which she was slowly recovering. Getting up long before the others, as usual, and going out into the wet, silvery morning to feed her chickens, she had come across unmistakable evidence that the chicken run had been tampered with. The wire gate of the run hung open; the slatted floor of the house itself had been pulled half out, and then left, wedged crookedly, so that it would move move neither out nor back. And beneath this floor, where Margaret had cleared and dug a few days before, the ground had been disturbed again—hasty, clumsy digging had flung clods of earth this way and that, and had left deep, untidy holes all over the ground, interspersed with random hillocks of upturned soil and clay.
Yet the birds were all right. All twelve of them were roaming contentedly—and a little puzzled—in the long grass of the meadow—a treat usually reserved for the last hours of the afternoon. As they gathered round Margaret, hungry for their breakfast, she observed them anxiously for signs of injury or fright; but there were none. Whoever the senseless marauder might be, he seemed to have done no harm.
It was a nuisance, though, as well as unnerving. What in the world had been going on? At breakfast, Margaret held forth to the family about her annoyance and puzzlement, but no one seemed to know anything more about it than she did, or to have any idea of what had happened. No sensible idea, anyway.
“I expect it was rats,” suggested Claudia comfortably. “I always said you’d get rats there sooner or later, one always does with chickens. Nasty, unhygienic creatures—I don’t know why people are allowed to keep them. Poultry-fanning should be left to the professionals.”
“Rubbish! We’ve never had rats! Not in twenty-five years. You only get rats if you neglect the birds—overfeed them and then leave the food lying about. Besides, whoever heard of a rat unlatching a wire gate! Or pulling out a slatted floor!”
“I expect you pulled it out yourself and forgot about it,” surmised Claudia blandly. “And rats do unlatch gates. I’ve read about it. There was an article in Reader’s Digest which—”
It did not seem worth while to refute such rubbish. Claudia was only doing it to be annoying, anyway, so why give her the satisfaction of seeing that one was annoyed?
“Oh well. It can’t be helped,” said Margaret. “None of you seem to know anything about it. I wonder if Maurice knows anything? Is he up yet—?”
“Oh!” suddenly shrieked Mavis; and then clapped her hand to her mouth while they all turned and stared at her.
“I’m sorry—it was just a thought I suddenly had,” she explained confusedly, in answer to the enquiring looks. “Just something that struck me—it’s silly, really. It was this dream I had last night, you see, and so when you said ‘Maurice’—”
But Mavis, it seemed, had dreamed about Maurice once too often; everyone was beginning to be tired of her nightmares, and of the monotonous predictability of the conversation that they led to. Even Claudia didn’t welcome it at breakfast time. Thus snubbed on all sides, poor Mavis was compelled to postpone her confidences till some more favourable occasion. Such an occasion she sought doggedly, but with decreasing success, throughout that grey, drizzling Sunday morning; and it was not until the afternoon, when silvery streaks of sunlight began to break through the clouds, and a slow, steamy warmth to beat up again from the drenched earth, that her opportunity came. It was provided, surprisingly, not by Claudia (who was still busy at her desk) but by Margaret.
This had not, needless to say, been Margaret’s intention. In fact, it had been specifically to discourage Mavis’ confidences that Margaret had suggested briskly that as soon as the rain stopped Mavis should come out and help her to un-wedge the chicken-house floor. She had taken for granted that this proposal would rid her of Mavis’ company (if such it could be called) for the rest of the afternoon. But no: to her astonishment, Mavis accepted the ill-natured invitation with something like alacrity, and after a prolonged fuss and upheaval about coats and boots and slacks (Mavis really possessed no garments in the least suitable for this kind of task, and the decision about what to borrow from whom took her a very long time) she appeared at last clad as if for a Polar expedition, and paddled in Margaret’s wake out into the brightening afternoon.
“No, don’t lean on it, Mavis, that makes it stick worse. Get right down and pull—like this….”
Margaret was as patient as possible with her inept assistant, whose native incompetence was further augmented by wellington boots too large for her and an old overcoat of Derek’s that tangled with her feet in the slippery ground whenever she bent forwards.
“I can’t,” she kept saying: and: “I’m pushing as hard as I can, I mean pulling, isn’t that right?” and then “Oh!” as a sudden jerky movement loosed her hold on the wedged floor, and she toppled backwards, a bundle of heavy, flapping garments, into the muddy chicken-run. Squawking, outraged hens flew in every direction from this bomb-like i
ntrusion into their midst.
“Oh!” cried Mavis again; and Margaret hurried to her side.
“You aren’t hurt, are you?” she enquired, anxious and irritable. “You can’t be, padded up in all those clothes—and the ground’s as soft as can be. Here—let me help you up.”
“No, it’s all right. I’m all right, Mrs Newman.” But still she sat on in the mud, as if settled for a picnic, and with no intention of moving. And then, as quietly and undramatically as an ice-cream beginning to melt in the sun, she dissolved slowly into tears.
It was no good: you had to ask her what was the matter: and then, of course, she told you. Margaret sighed, leaned her elbow on the roof of the chicken-house, and stood listening resignedly to Mavis’ latest dream. To her surprise, and somewhat to her dismay, it seemed to be about the chickens.
“I seemed to be half awake at the beginning,” Mavis explained. “And I lay there in bed thinking to myself: ‘This is a funny time for them to be cackling like that, in the middle of the night … and then, suddenly, I saw that it wasn’t the middle of the night at all, it was day—but such a queer sort of day, as if the light wasn’t real, somehow. So I went to the window in my dream and oh, it was so queer—this strange, bright daylight. The garden was there, and the road, and the houses opposite—and yet somehow they weren’t real any more. They were all bright, and small, like toy houses; and bright little stiff toy trees. Yes, that was it, it was like looking at a toy country, so bright, so pretty—and so weird. And then suddenly it came into my head—in words, as if someone had said it: ‘The title of this is Nightmare’—and then I knew it was coming. The chicken was coming, the tall chicken, I could hear its feet like metal feet, and its cackling, coming nearer, round the corner of the house. It was tall, right up to the upstairs windows, I could see its beak and its great comb, and then I realised it wasn’t really tall, it was walking on stilts, great high stilts … and suddenly it wasn’t a chicken any more, it was Maurice, high up on those stilts, clucking and gobbling. And the toy houses were his, he’d made them, and all that toy landscape, to be instead of the real world, and he was telling me about it, that was the awful clucking sound, because he only had a beak to talk with, and only a tiny brain, a bird’s brain, behind it all….”
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