The Happy Prisoner

by Monica Dickens

  “Terribly sorry, terribly sorry,” he stammered, hovering on the outskirts of the circle that was trying to jolly Susan out of her fright. “But it didn’t touch her, did it? Is she all right? Ah, there’s a good little girlie!” She screamed louder as he bobbed his great nose down at her. In desperation, he tore off his wrist-watch and held it to her ear, as he had seen people do.

  Heather knocked his hand aside. “Don’t be a fool,” she said. “She’s much too young for that. I do wish you’d be more careful, Fred. You might have killed her. You’re as clumsy as Vi.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Violet from the table, where she was leaning back, cleaning out her mouth with her tongue. Toby had risen to help, but Anne pulled at his sleeve and told him to sit down. “She won’t feel any better if she sees that yellow tie,” she said, and he laughed his austere, choked laugh. He thought her amusing. They talked to each other while they waited for the Norths to settle their troubles and get on with the next course, and then Anne remembered Oliver and went over to the bed to see how he was getting on.

  “Gives one a bit of a head, you know, this kind of thing.” He nodded towards the group at the fireplace.

  “Poor darling,” she said vaguely, “it must do.” She played a scale down his pyjama sleeve, watching her fingers, and then looked up at him with one of her sudden rippling smiles. “Did you really mean it, darling, what you said before lunch about being perfectly happy?” She wanted to make quite sure that she had done all she could to fulfil the obligation which had sent her down here. She felt she had got off too lightly. Oliver laughed at her, kissed her hand and sent her back to Toby. Mrs. North saw the hand-kiss and stood for a moment in thought, turning her pince-nez from one to the other of them. Anne had certainly seemed much nicer this time. “A very sweet person,” she had told Oliver last night when she came in to try and find out whether he were still in love with Anne. Oliver should not love anyone just now, but if he had to, it could be worse. Prepared to make the best of anything that would make him happy, she gave a little shrug and set herself in motion again to organise the next course.

  Oliver’s headache was becoming worse. “Take it away,” he said, when Elizabeth brought him his treacle tart, but seeing his mother looking anxiously over her shoulder at him from the serving table, he changed his mind. Elizabeth laid a finger on his pulse for a moment and went away without saying anything. She seldom asked him how he felt or told him what she thought of him. She formed her own judgment and acted on it without comment. If she had been Mary Brewer and had thought the lunch party was tiring Oliver, she would have said matily: “Now, I’m going to ask all you good people to bolt your dinners and let my patient settle down to his rest.”

  Elizabeth, however, particularly when outsiders were there, gave the impression of “knowing her place” far too well ever to say anything like that. She would simply be so brisk about the serving and clearing away, whisking up people’s plates before they had a chance to ask for a second helping and brushing off crumbs while they were still wondering whether to have cheese, that they would find themselves finished and on their way to the drawing-room where she had firmly taken the coffee tray. Oliver thought that it was not so much for his sake, as a relic of her hospital training of “only two visitors to each patient and kindly leave the ward when the bell rings”, that she disapproved of these family gatherings in his room. She had been very brisk and efficient today; she always was when there were visitors, managing, by her politely impersonal air, to convey that although she was among the family she was not of it.

  Her back view, where she sat at the table between Anne and Violet, looked a little constrained, as if she were the parlourmaid, who had unwillingly accepted an invitation to sit down with the family. Yet she was not so much ill at ease as deliberately not at her ease. She looked like someone whose bags were ready packed upstairs and who would at any minute get up and go away, leaving no mark of her stay either in the house or in her own heart. It was extraordinary that after three months at Hinkley she still was so little at home. She seemed quite content, but it was as if she purposely refrained from making a niche for herself or forming any ties which she could not break at a moment’s notice. Although she followed a routine, she had not formed any habits. She had no favourite chair, never spoke of a favourite walk. She had established no harmless little personal indulgences, nor did she seem to have attached herself to any one member of the family. Mrs. North was friendly and appreciative and would have liked to be affectionate, had not any attempts at affection slid off Elizabeth’s oiled surface. Heather was as casual and inconsiderate as if she had been a sister; Violet made clumsy gestures of friendship, warily, like a large dog bouncing round at a distance, afraid of reproof if he jumps up with muddy paws, yet ready to knock you over at the slightest encouragement. The children liked Elizabeth and trusted her. She could be relied on not to smother them with love one minute and with curses the next. She never gave them curses, but neither was she ever seen to give them any demonstrations of love. Towards Oliver himself, in spite of their inevitable intimacy, she was still detached. She was the first nurse he had met who had no grating mannerisms, but she often annoyed him by her refusal to accept gratitude, praise or criticism. Sometimes, feeling cosy and comfortable after she had settled him for the night, he would give her a warm sentimental smile and put out a hand to squeeze hers and tell her she was a darling, but she invariably put on that maddening air of “what I do, I do because it is my duty”. It piqued him to think that she took so little interest in him as a man and expected him to take no interest in her as a woman. He did not want to make love to her, or enter into a kind of “Farewell to Arms” liaison between nurse and patient, but her behaviour was a challenge to his technique, which had been considered quite good in the old days. It would be interesting to see whether he could break her down.

  He lay and toyed with his treacle tart, and watched the group round the table. Since they were there for his benefit, they kept trying to include him among themselves by glances and smiles, or questions thrown, or remarks repeated that he had not heard, yet he felt withdrawn from them, and looked at them objectively. He found it less tiring not to try to follow a conversation which he could only hear imperfectly. Odd remarks and exclamations, free of their context, reached him as titillatingly as snatches of talk from passers-by in the street.

  By half shutting his eyes and ears, he made it seem like someone else’s family lunch, more remote, but more interesting, like other people’s domesticity seen from the street. From his bed, he saw the nine people round the table as on a stage set. Under the centre light, which had to be lit even in the morning in this low, dark room, their hair shone: his mother’s with its blue-mauve iridescence, Toby’s jet and sleek, the filigree fairness of Heather’s curls so different from the pure polished gold of Elizabeth’s head.

  Here were all the ingredients of a happy family picture. The benign mother, smiling fatly to see everyone enjoying the food she had cooked; the pretty young matron, bending to the bright-eyed little boy in the high chair; the ruddiness of outdoor health on Fred’s and Violet’s skins; Evelyn, the little befriended waif with the blue bow on the end of a lock of ginger hair dangling over her plate. Anne and Toby to keep the comedy sophisticated, looking as if they might at any.moment speak a line by Noel Coward. The clatter of knives and forks, and the murmur of conversation, highlighted by laughter.

  Then someone called to him, another turned in her chair and asked him a question, and by drawing him into the scene they broke the spell of their own charm. He was aware now that his mother was still annoyed with Violet, that Heather was nagging David to eat his pudding, that Fred was being a bore, that Violet ate with her mouth open, that Evelyn was not pathetically thin, but just naturally skinny, and that Anne and Toby were discussing someone called Puffy Bates of whom nobody else had ever heard.

  Is it something humdrum in oneself, Oliver wondered, that makes a scene lose its glamour the minute one step
s inside it, that dulls Someone Else’s family lunch as soon as it becomes One’s Own family lunch? In the same way, a village on the side of a hill, seen from a train, may look like the perfect place to spend the rest of your days, yet if you were to get out of the train and go into the village you would find that the magic had escaped from it to settle on the tail of the departing train which had so bored you as you sat in it and yearned towards the village.

  “I knew a man once,” Fred was saying, “who kept a pig in his kitchen, tied to the leg of the table.”

  “Now say, isn’t that interesting,” said Mrs. North. “Don’t you like your pie, Oliver? I could get you something else.… Do go on, Fred. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “And at every meal he used to feed it off his plate, all the best bits, until in the finish the pig got so fat—” Mrs. North half rose. “Would you like an apple, darling? Or some cheese—a piece of cake?” Toby had half risen too, and been pulled down again by Anne, and Fred had got up, holding tightly to the back of his chair.

  “Can I fetch anything?” he asked. He would love to do something for Oliver, and his story was not coming off; he did not want to finish it.

  “If you wouldn’t mind, Fred. There’s a green cake tin in the larder. You know where that is.”

  “Oh, Ma, I don’t—” began Oliver, but Fred had already gone. He was away quite a time and returned empty handed, as flushed as if he had been burrowing for the cake in the boiler.

  “Oh God.” Heather pushed back her chair. “Much quicker to go oneself. Eat up, David.” She pushed a spoonful into his mouth on her way out.

  “Sit down then, Fred, thank you all the same,” said Mrs. North kindly. She was always particularly kind to him, because she felt bad about not liking him. “Do go on with your story.”

  Fred, who had just picked up his spoon, put it down again, gulped and said: “Oh yes, what was I—?”

  “About the pig.” Anne smiled at him charmingly.

  “Oh, it was nothing really. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Say about the pig,” said Evelyn remorselessly.

  “Pig, pig, you pig,” shouted David, beating with his spoon. Everyone except Violet, who ate steadily on, was concentrating on Fred. He looked round in a trapped way, hitched his finger under his collar and said unhappily: “Where had I got to?”

  “The pig got so fat,” prompted Anne.

  “Oh yes, and—er—well, the man got so thin, you see.” They waited politely for a moment to see if there was any more. Fred, taking refuge in treacle tart, made a loud squeak with his spoon on the plate.

  Heather came back with the cake tin and said: “You can’t have looked very far. It was on the bottom shelf. Oh, sit down. I’ll cut a piece for Ollie.”

  “But, Heather, I don’t want any.” Oliver had been trying to say so for some time.

  “Well, of all the—” Heather bit her lip. Mrs. North looked at her. Surely, in front of visitors, she was not going to commit the cardinal sin of being unkind to Oliver?

  “Does anyone want any more treacle tart?” Violet asked.

  “Oh, take it for heaven’s sake,” said Heather. Violet took it.

  .…

  Although Elizabeth had taken the coffee into the drawing-room, Anne and Toby drifted back with theirs to talk to Oliver. Toby, in his new grey suit which was just a little too smart, like clothes on the stage, told him about mutual friends he had seen in London. “A lot of the old gang are back. If you sit in the Berkeley for long enough, you see everyone you know. Peter and Betty have got their flat again. Bob’s bowler-hatted. The Horse is still at the Air Ministry; he’s been leading a squadron from there for the last four years, the intrepid fellow. And Nigel—remember the parties he used to give with his father’s money? They’ve lost most of it and the old man died and so on. Sobered the poor chap up a bit, you wouldn’t know him really. Still, he did get into a fight with a Yank in Denman Street.”

  Anne laughed. She knew all about Yanks in Denman Street. Oliver still had that feeling of being in another world. He could picture Toby and the crowd having drinks at the Berkeley, dancing while their dinner cooled on the table, fighting Yanks, getting sentimental round about two o’clock in the Four Hundred, and discovering inner meanings to life and depths of soul which vanished with the daylight, but he could not see himself there, although he always used to be there.

  When Toby said: “Tell you what, we ought to get you back to town as soon as they let you up—give you a bath chair, or a stick or an Alsatian or something—and I’ll organise one hell of a party, do you all the good in the world,” Oliver agreed hollowly, secure in the knowledge that he would not go.

  “I must get cracking,” Toby said, shooting his cuff back from a gold wrist-watch. “It’s the last day of a film in Shrewsbury I simply must see. Why don’t you come along?” He looked down at Anne, throwing out the invitation casually, as if he did not care whether she went or not.

  She patted the bed. “Thanks very much, but I’m going to stay with my little Ollie. We’re going to play chess.”

  “No we’re not. You go to the cinema, Anne. I shall be quite happy. I’m supposed to sleep, anyway.”

  “Not really. You’re just saying that.”

  “No, honest. Do go.”

  “Oh, but I said I would—” She looked from one to the other of them doubtfully. Oliver looked sleepy and owlish, the room was stuffy and she did not much care for chess. Toby was attractive in a restrained way, with possibilities, and he had a Lagonda. They would probably go and have drinks somewhere after the cinema.

  Fortunately, Elizabeth came in at that moment in her white overall and cap, and said: “I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid I have to do Oliver’s dressing now, and then he ought to have a sleep.” Anne and Toby went off like children let out of school and Anne came back in a few minutes looking like a Spectator sports advertisement in a chunky tweed coat and a bright yellow scarf. She came no farther than the door, as Elizabeth was already busy with Oliver’s leg. “Sure you don’t mind if I go, darling?” she asked, leaning on the latch and swinging one leg.

  “Not a bit. Much more fun for you than being cooped up in here with me all the time. Be nice for Toby too. How d’you like him?”

  “Oh, all right,” said Anne cautiously. “He’s rather fun really.” A horn pipped outside. “My God,” she said. “The arrogance of these males.” She lingered a little longer deliberately, and when she had gone Oliver said to Elizabeth: “Poor Anne.” She went on bandaging him in silence.

  “I said, ‘Poor Anne’,” he repeated.

  “I heard you.”

  “You’re missing your cues. You’re supposed to say: ‘Why poor?’ so that I can let the audience know what I’m thinking. I’m getting so old and stuffy, Elizabeth, that it rends my heart to see the wretched girl off again on the old roundabout. You know how it goes—attraction, pursuit, capture, intimacy, familiarity, boredom, rows, and then all the bother of disentangling oneself. To think she’s got all that to go through, and then after this time another and then another, always looking for something you never find.” He yawned. “It exhausts me even to think of it. Funny, it used to be the breath of life to me, but I doubt if I could cope now.”

  “I thought she was in love with you” said Elizabeth bluntly, tucking in the sheet.

  “Which shows, my darling, either that Anne is a better actress or you are less intelligent than I thought.” He suddenly got tired of this kind of talk. “My God, I’m weary,” he said. “I say, Elizabeth,” he looked at her seriously, “I don’t seem to be getting much better, do I?” He quickly held up a hand as she opened her mouth to answer. “No, don’t say: “Of course you are!’ brightly, because I’m not. I know how I feel.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” she said. “I was going to say you’re not really fit yet to have so many people in here all at once.”

  “I know,” he said. “I love my family, but—Sunday lunch.… However, there’s no stopping a habit lik
e that once it’s been started, is there?” They looked at each other for a moment, linked by a common appreciation of the delicacy of family relationships. “D’you know,” he said suddenly, “I believe if I could go somewhere with you, quite alone, I should get perfectly well. And that’s not a compliment, just a tribute to your professional qualities.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and picked up her tray.

  “But I expect I should get awfully bored really,” he said. “Go away, I want to sleep.”

  .…

  Anne came back after dinner in a highly excitable state, with profuse apologies and explanations about where they had been and whom they had met. “Darling, I do wish you’d been there,” she said, sinking into the chair by his bed and lighting a cigarette. “We had such fun. But it’s mean of me to say that. We’ll have some fun tomorrow, shall we, you and I? What shall we do? We could play some games—backgammon or something, or whatever you like. What does one do with a man in bed?”

  “You should know,” said Oliver, and Mrs. North, coming in with his hot milk and finding that her infectious giggle had set him off, reproved Anne for exciting Oliver at bedtime. He could remember her using almost the same words to an uncle who used to hurl him up to the ceiling in his childhood.