The Happy Prisoner

by Monica Dickens

  Oliver took her hand and put a kiss into it. “Little Annie,” he said. “No one would ever suspect what a nice person you really are. And to think I thought you’d only come down because you’d just finished off a boy friend and looked through your little red book to see who else you knew.”

  “Ollie!”

  He knew quite well now why she had come down. Anne was always either dramatically unscrupulous or dramatically noble. He must stop her saying what she felt she had got to say. He could not tell her that he did not need her now any more than she really wanted him, but he must wean her from the idea that had sent her down to Hinkley in a sacrificial cloud.

  “Good thing we didn’t get married two years ago,” he began.

  “Why? Oh, I wish we had.”

  “No. I don’t want to be married to anyone now. Not ever, I think. I suppose having this sort of thing makes you a complete egoist; I seem to be absolutely self-sufficient. I don’t need a wife, and I shouldn’t be any good to anybody as a husband.”

  Anne looked embarrassed, which was an unfamiliar expression on her insouciant face. “You mean—Ollie, can a man who—” He knew what she was dying to ask him and he laughed and laughed. “Oh, Anne, I don’t know,” he said weakly. “I haven’t tried. I didn’t mean that, anyway. I just meant that I’m happiest like this, on my own. I feel fine.”

  “You really mean,” she said incredulously, “that you’re quite happy, lying here like this?” Her eyes threatened to fill again.

  “I shan’t always have to stay here, of course; but at the moment, yes, I believe I am quite happy.”

  “D’you know, I really believe you are,” she said wonderingly.

  “You are sweet, Anne,” he said suddenly.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You just are.” She was sweet because she was so transparently relieved.

  “Would you like me to read to you, Ollie?” she said presently.

  “Why should you bother? Look, the sun’s out. Go for a walk before lunch; do you lots more good.”

  “I’d much rather read to you, Ollie dear, if you’d like it. Is there anything you want before we Start?” Now that he had let her off dedicating her life to him, she could not do enough for him. There must be something she could do to make up for all the things he had lost. She thought of his loss in terms of all the things they had enjoyed together, and knowing how she would feel in his position, she marvelled that he had said he was quite happy.

  “You have changed, you know, Ollie,” she said again, looking up at him. Her mind had been no more on the book than his.

  “I suppose I have. For the better, would you say?”

  “I don’t know. We did have such fun.… I used to know you so well, and now—” She gave a little laugh. “It’s silly,

  but I feel I hardly know you at all.”

  “Don’t you love me any more?” he teased her.

  “Darling, of course I love you, you know that. I always shall.”

  “That’s good,” he said comfortably.

  “In quite a special way,” she added, to avoid having to say: “like a sister.”

  He could not resist interrupting her reading a moment later to say: “By the way, Anne, you haven’t told me a thing about your love life yet. Who is it at the moment?”

  She gave him one of her candid looks, eyelashes fanned out along her upper lid. “Actually,” she said, “there isn’t anyone at the moment.” And then she looked down and her mouth twitched. “And my address book isn’t red, it’s blue,” she murmured.

  On Sundays at Hinkley, everyone had lunch in Oliver’s room. He often had to take two Veganin afterwards and sleep it off. Even Heather’s baby Susan was brought down in a wicker basket and mulled on a stool in front of the fire. She was growing too big for the basket and she was getting beyond the age when lying down and making faces was enough amusement. She would struggle to sit up and lean over the side, and lunch was constantly interrupted by someone jumping up to stop her falling into the fire.

  While Anne was reading, Elizabeth, in the flowered overall she wore for housework, came in with a tray to set the table. She glanced at the tête-à-tête, and when Anne offered to help, said: “Please don’t let me disturb you,” and started trying to manoeuvre the refectory table from the window to the middle of the room by herself. Anne jumped up and took the other end, and Oliver watched them laying the table, Elizabeth so quick and neat, and Anne slinging the knives and forks about, and sitting down to read the rhymes on David’s mackintosh mat, while Elizabeth finished the work. Sometimes, if Elizabeth were cooking the lunch, Heather laid the table on Sundays, which put Oliver in a draught for half an hour, because she made so many trips to the pantry for things she had forgotten that it was not worth opening and shutting the door each time. Elizabeth, of course, had brought everything she needed, and when she had set the chairs round and put a cushion and one volume of Mr. North’s Oxford Dictionary on David’s, she went out, shutting the door quietly.

  Anne, going out soon after to get some more cigarettes, came back and said: “Darling, there’s a most attractive man in the hall. The front door was open, so he walked in, and he wants to know if you’re visible. Are you?”

  “Depends who it is. If he’s wearing a Gunner’s tie and a moustache the same colour as his plus-fours, no, because he keeps trying to sell me a Ford station wagon to convert into an invalid car.”

  “No moustache, no plus-fours.”

  “Not Colonel Jukes then, thank God. I hope it’s not old Fothergill. He’ll expect to be asked to lunch and I couldn’t stand those castanet teeth now that we’ve got water biscuits.”

  “Sweetie,” said Anne gently, “I said attractive.”

  “You have some odd ideas about men, though. Has he got suéde shoes and a face like Oscar Wilde? I couldn’t bear to have Francis explaining the country customs of Shropshire to me this morning. Oh, I tell you who it might be—that awful man who gets up the local plays.”

  “I don’t think it’s any of those,” Anne said. “I wish I’d asked him his name. I can’t very well go out now and say: ‘If you’re Colonel Jukes or Old Fothergill or Francis or a man who gets up plays, go away; if not, come in.’”

  At that moment, there were cries of hospitable pleasure from the hall and Mrs. North came in, bringing a tall, dark, well-fed young man, whom Oliver greeted with: “Toby! How grand to see you. Why didn’t you come straight in? Anne’s been making me sweat thinking of all the people you might be.”

  “I didn’t know whether you were allowed to see anyone, or which your room was and so on,” said Toby. He had a way of holding his head very erect with the chin tucked into his collar, and speaking in a clipped, half-strangled voice. He had the assured look of a man with an easy life, but his movements were rather formal amd ungraceful.

  “He’s just been demobbed,” said Mrs. North, patting his arm, “and he came straight along to see us. Now wasn’t that nice? You’ll stay to lunch, won’t you, Toby? We have a family party in here on Sundays.” Her eyes roved the table, seeing whether it was properly laid. “Will you be too cold if I open the other window, Oliver dear? The atmosphere’s just terrible. You shouldn’t smoke so much in here, you know, Anne.”

  “Sorry.” She threw the cigarette she had just lit over Oliver’s bed ort to the lawn, where it smouldered, sending up a stalk of smoke.

  When Oliver introduced her to Toby, he laughed inside himself to see them appraising each other. It made him feel very old, remembering the days when he himself had always been on the lookout for new material. How peaceful to be out of the restless, shifting game. Standing by his bed and talking to him, they both centred their attention on Oliver, but he could see that they were very aware of each other. He looked at the scene objectively, seeing it as a triangle of which he formed the apex and they the base. Although he knew both of them well, the lines of contact which they sent out to him were weaker than the line which already joined these two strangers. The
y stood in another world, the old world of drinks and parties and affairs and the extremes of fun and ennui. He was in his own new little world, a vantage-point like a crow’s nest, in which there was only room for himself.

  Seeing Toby eyeing the hump under the bedclothes, Oliver talked about his leg. He found that new visitors were usually afraid to mention it unless he did.

  Heather and David came down at one o’clock, both red in the face from a battle about washing hands. Heather went back for the baby and to powder her nose and do her hair again because she found Toby there. Toby said the correct things about Susan, and Heather fussed because the fire was too high. “You needn’t have made such a furnace, Elizabeth,” she said crossly.

  “Put the child farther away then,” Oliver suggested.

  “Oh, don’t interfere, Ollie,” said Heather, straightening up and pushing up her fringe, and Toby looked at her, turning his neck round inside his collar like a turtle. He had already noticed the difference in her.

  Mrs. North kept pottering in and out of the room to see whether Violet and Evelyn had come in yet, wondering whether to wait or start without them. “It makes such a schemozzle with everyone coming in at odd times,” she said. No one had ever done anything else at Hinkley, but she had never given up trying to make her family as clock-conscious as herself. She had two watches, one on her wrist and one on her chest on a thin chain that got tangled with the chain of her pince-nez. She was always looking at one or the other and she could never pass a clock without glancing at it. As well as the travelling clock on her dressing-table, she had an alarm clock by her bed, which she took downstairs every morning, because she could not see the kitchen clock from the scullery. When she went for a walk, even just down to the village, she timed herself there and back as if she were a train, and sometimes went half a mile out of her way to see the clock in the church tower.

  Violet and Evelyn came in just as she had decided to start without them. They brought with them Fred Williams, whom Mrs. North had forgotten she had asked to lunch. He was always ill at ease in the house, like a yard dog brought into the drawing-room, and he was not helped by the commotion of someone having to lay a place for him and going out to run another plate under the hot tap. He was a short-legged, long-bodied little man with a big head and a face saddened by a tremendous nose, red and shiny as a lobster’s claw. His ears stuck out and his hair had been cut like a footballer’s, clumpy on top and almost shaved round the back of his head. He was not fascinatingly ugly, he was just ugly. He wore an unfortunate suit of emeraldgreen tweed, which his uncle had sent him from the Outer Isles several years ago and which would last for several years to come. On ordinary days, he wore breeches and gaiters and polo jerseys, which suited him, but this green suit was the uniform he wore for sociability and for business in Shrewsbury that involved going into offices. He also wore it on the rare occasions when he went to London, where it must have startled case-hardened waitresses and shone like a spring leaf in outer offices at the Ministry of Agriculture.

  People like Anne and Toby paralysed him. They paralysed Violet too, so she was no help to him. She left him stranded in the middle of the room and went and straddled in front of the fire, biting her nails.

  While everyone was charging in and out with plates and food, and arguing about who should sit where, Fred stood awkwardly with his hands hanging, lunging forward to take a tray from a woman or put a mat under a hot dish just a second after Toby had already done it. Oliver called him over to talk about the farm. Since he had been ill, Oliver had reverted to his boyhood’s inclination towards the land. When he was first grown up, his one idea had been to get away from Hinkley, up to the towns where life moved quickly and there were people to be met and money to be made. Now, his one idea was to keep away from pavements and alert young men in city hats. Fortunately, for his heart would probably never stand a London life again, his enforced tranquillity had given him an appetite for peace. He would have liked to become a retired country gentleman and potter through the Shropshire seasons, if he had any money to retire on. The thought that he ought soon to be earning a living was one of the few things he worried about, particularly when he was depressed. When he tried to talk to his mother about working again, she changed the subject, or told him how well her shares were doing, or what she had read in the paper about Service pensions. She would keep him a drone for the rest of, his life if she had her way.

  Fred told him about his new fertiliser, of which he was as proud as if he and not I.C.I. had invented it.

  “Tell you what,” Oliver said, “I wish you’d lend me some of your books on soil and fertilisers and that sort of thing. If I could learn something about it now, perhaps I might be some use to you when I get up.”

  “That would be fine.” Fred looked uneasily over his shoulder at Mrs. North.

  Oliver laughed. “My mother’s been talking to you, hasn’t she? I believe she thinks I mean to go straight out and push a plough. No, but I thought perhaps I might be some help behind the scenes, take some of the bookwork off your hands and learn more about the job as I go along.”

  Fred’s nose and the line on his forehead where his hat pinched it flushed with pleasure. “That would be grand,” he said. “You could be the brains behind the organisation. I’m planning big things for this next year or two, if only I can get the men and some more machinery. I’m already after that land between here and the Wrekin. It would be a fine help to have you working with me.”

  “Steady on, old boy,” said Oliver. “Don’t forget I don’t know much about the business. I should probably be more of a hindrance at first.”

  “Oh.” Fred looked down, and Oliver, following his gaze, saw that he was wearing brown boots under the emerald-green trousers. “Oh no, it wouldn’t be like that. After all, you’ve been decently educated and that. If chaps like me can pick it up, there can’t be so much to it.”

  He said this without any irony or sense of grievance. He always maddened Oliver by his blatant insistence on being an underdog. He was just going to tell him pithily about his public school and Varsity and explain why Fred was undoubtedly so much better educated than he, when Heather called from the table: “Do come and sit down, Fred, and let’s get on with lunch. It’s always the same in this house; the minute you bring in the food, everybody disappears.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Fred grinned nervously at Oliver and hurried over to the others. Mrs. North was carving at a side table and he hovered by her, wondering whether he were expected to hand things round.

  “Oh, do sit down,” said Heather. “Everything’s on the table. It’s so silly if everyone jumps up and down all the time waiting on each other. Don’t be neurotic, David, that isn’t gristle.” Fred’s nose came round like the beam of a lighthouse as he turned.

  Evelyn patted the chair beside her. “Come on,” she said. “You’re supposed to sit here by me.” Violet, holding her knife like a pencil, was at the end of the table on his other side, but she hardly took any notice of him. On the farm, although he was her employer, he never gave her any orders. She usually knew what had to be done, and if not, he would throw out suggestions rather than commands. He had not liked the idea of her working for him, until it was explained to him as patriotism. Five years of labour and vicissitudes had made them able to work together without words. They were never heard to talk to each other about any subject unconnected with the farm, and then it was mostly in grunts and chin-scratchings. Fred had a slight Norfolk tang to his speech, a suggestion of Oi for I and a reversal of words like move and mauve. His accent was pleasant but slow, and it took a long time for him to tell you anything. He came to these Sunday lunches prepared with a few stories, but he seldom got more than halfway through any of them without interruption. Today, Toby shot a polite question out of his collar at him about the herd, and Fred put down his knife and fork and leaned across the table to tell him about the milk yield, but almost at once David spilled his lemonade, Elizabeth jumped up and scooted round the table to
stop Susan falling into the grate, and Mrs. North went out to see whether she had turned off the oven.

  Violet took advantage of the general commotion to help herself to the last three potatoes. Back from the kitchen, Mrs. North went over to inspect Oliver’s plate.

  “Enjoy your lunch, darling?’ she asked, beaming to see it clean.

  “Always do on a Sunday. Whatever else they may say about you, Ma, you certainly can roast beef.”

  “As a matter of fact, Elizabeth cooked the lunch today,” she said. “I was doing out my larder.”

  “Well, I expect you taught her.”

  “Oh, sure I taught her. Won’t you have a little more, darling? It’s cutting so rare now.”

  “Couldn’t.” Then, as her face fell: “All right, I’ll have another potato if you like.” She hurried joyfully back to the table and halted, crestfallen, as Evelyn sang out: “Vi’s just pinched the last three!” She was a silent and businesslike child at meals, but she never missed a thing. Her pale, well-bred little face concealed a mind quite Cockney in its observation.

  “Oh, Violet, really,” said Mrs. North. “You are—” She was going to say greedy, but she altered it to thoughtless. It was bad enough to have a daughter who behaved childishly when visitors were there, without calling attention to it by treating her as a child as well. To cover her, she tried to turn it into a joke by saying with a smile: “I suppose you couldn’t ask whether anyone wanted any more, hm?”

  “Thought you’d all finished,” said Violet, putting down the gravy boat so that it dripped on to the table. “I was starving. Didn’t have any breakfast.”

  “Not much you didn’t,” said Heather. “I saw you in the kitchen with a great hunk of bread, and some of the children’s milk and the golden syrup tin out, and you were dipping your buttery knife into it.”

  “Saves the washing up,” retorted her sister.

  “As if you ever did any,” said Heather bitterly. David gave a scream of laughter and knocked over the salt. He loved quarrels; they excited him. Oliver had heard this kind of conversation a thousand times since his childhood. It was very dull. He saw Anne and Toby exchange amused glances. Fred was looking embarrassed. He kept clearing his throat as if he were going to say something and then being unable to think of anything to say. When he saw Heather, still muttering, begin to clear away the plates, he jumped up so quickly that his chair fell over backwards and nearly decapitated the baby. Heather gave a little scream and the knives on top of the plates she held clattered on to the floor. Violet’s old Labrador inched her way out on her stomach from her hiding-place between Violet’s spreadeagled feet and began to lick the knives. When Heather had picked up the chair and moved Susan farther away from the table, she looked up flushed from her kneeling position by the basket and worked off her shock in anger at Fred.