The Happy Prisoner

by Monica Dickens

  If she happened to be in the room when John came in with the daily telephone bulletin from Birmingham, Heather would walk out, or deliberately pick up something to read. John, who would never learn, tried sometimes to draw her into the conversation. “Sounds better that, doesn’t it, Heather Bell?” he would appeal. “If she’s enjoying her food, there can’t be much wrong with her.”

  “It’s no good asking me,” Heather would answer. “I’m not supposed to know anything about psychology, that’s quite evident, isn’t it? You’d better ask Elizabeth.”

  No one had thought that they would miss Violet so much. There could be no finesse or innuendo when Violet was around. Her noise and downrightness had a harsh, carbolic effect on an unhealthy atmosphere.

  Poor Mrs. North was always saying: “I do miss Violet, d’you know it?” Violet had often been trying, but at least she could understand her uncomplicated nature, and when she was difficult it was in a straightforward way that could be dealt with by straightforward talk. Violet had so far sent one postcard with “X marks our window” and a picture of their farmhouse hotel on which she had forgotten to put the “X”.

  The only person to whom Heather would talk was Oliver, and even with him she still maintained her defiant attitude.

  “This house is getting impossible to live in,” she said, roaming round his room in her restless way. “It beats me how you can lie there so contentedly in this depressing atmosphere, but then, of course, they like you; that makes a difference.”

  “But, ducky, we all adore you,” said Oliver lightly.

  “Like hell. Disapproval simply shrieks at me every time I come into a room, thinly veiled under a patronising tolerance which is worse. If John thinks I’ve behaved so badly, why doesn’t he say so? I wish Vi were here. If I said something foul to her, she’d say something foul back, instead of turning the other cheek for more, so as to put me in the wrong. And look at the way John never asks me who I’m going out with. He just sits there dumb and hurt, but you can see accusations steaming out of the top of his head. And why shouldn’t I go out? He never takes me anywhere. He always wants to sit at home and read. Why shouldn’t I have a little fun?”

  “Oh, quite, quite,” murmured Oliver.

  “D’you know what he said to me today? He said”—she mimicked John’s slow voice—“he said: ‘Heather Bell, why don’t you occasionally read something else besides magazines and library novels? You get much more relaxation from a good book.’ So that’s to be the latest thing! He’s going to educate me. But if being educated means you’ve got to spend all day over one chapter of those dreary books of his where the footnotes take up half the page—no, thanks. D’you know, Ollie, I wish he’d just once do something really awfully wrong, something that was crazy and impulsive. I wish it had been him who sent Muffet off her rocker, I do honestly. I shouldn’t bear a grudge against him like they do me. I’d think all the better of him for showing a little human weakness.”

  John and Heather’s marriage was going to pieces in their hands. Oliver was furious with them, and furious with himself for being a bedridden spectator, condemned to watch helplessly the disintegration of something that could have been built into happiness. Go on, he told himself. Do something; help them, since they’re incapable of helping their own silly selves. You always pride yourself on handing out such wise advice. Hand out some now, now when it really matters.

  He got to work again on John. “John, I wish you’d tell Heather what you told me the night when—on the night of Vi’s wedding. I’m sure it would help. It’ll give her a shock, maybe, but it might shock her out of this absurd behaviour—give her something else to think about besides herself.”

  “It won’t,” said John mulishly. “It’ll make her think about being jealous, and I wouldn’t blame her; she’s have every right to be.”

  “All right then, but at least that would be a normal, healthy reaction, and you could get your teeth into a good old normal row, instead of this futile, concocted antagonism that has to be fostered because there’s no real cause for it.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” said John. “I haven’t the nerve. She’s fed up enough with me already; this would only make it worse.”

  “It wouldn’t. It would give her quite a new idea of you. I told you what she said about wishing you’d show a little human weakness, didn’t I? Well, if your little interlude with Sylvia isn’t human weakness, what is?”

  “Ste-lla,” said John absently. “But Heather didn’t mean that. She doesn’t mean half she says.”

  “I tell you what; if you won’t tell her, I will. Yes, I would; I’ve got interfering enough for anything these days since I’ve had nothing else to do. And I warn you, I’ll probably tell it all wrong.”

  “You wouldn’t honestly?”

  “I swear I will if you won’t.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think.…” Oliver did not wonder that Heather got irritated with John when he put on that baffled, ox-eyed look, behind which you could almost see his mind wavering about like a piece of cobweb. “Of course,” he said presently, “I suppose she couldn’t really be jealous of someone who’s—who isn’t alive?”

  Couldn’t she? thought Oliver, but he said: “No, no, of course not,” to encourage John.

  “And I have felt the most frightful cad keeping it from her all this time. It would certainly take a load off my mind. You really think I should—?”

  “Oh, Jonathan, I’ve said so. I’m not going to say it again; I haven’t the breath to waste. Look, there’s my ultimatum. If you don’t tell her tonight, I will.”

  “She’s going out tonight,” said John, seizing hopefully on the excuse.

  “Oh yes, to Stanford’s birthday party. I thought he’d asked you both.”

  “I won’t go to that man’s parties,” said John sulkily. “I said I didn’t feel up to it.”

  “Well, tell her before she goes. And look here—I’ll bet you a quid she doesn’t go. She’ll forget all about that facetious little Air Force tyke and stay home to argue it out with you.”

  John squared his shoulders and looked like Churchill in Britain’s darkest hour. “I’ll tell her,” he said grimly.

  Oliver spent the rest of the afternoon and evening chuckling inside himself to think how he had managed the affair. He was getting pretty good; first Violet and now Heather and John. What should he turn his master mind to next? He felt despotic, positively matriarchal. He felt he ought to have a lace cap and a parrot that swore like a sailor and an ebony stick to rap on the floor when he wished to give orders to his satellite household.

  He woke early the next morning to the immediate knowledge that he was pleased about something. He had been enjoying one of those vaguely romantic dreams where nothing happens on which you can put your finger when you wake. You know that you enjoyed the dream, but you can’t remember why. It hovers like a forgotten tune just out of reach, while you clamp your eyes shut and try to go to sleep again to find the wistful sweetness in which you have been basking all night, and in trying too hard wake yourself thoroughly and lose the dream beyond recapture.

  But it was not the dream that contented him this morning. He knew why he was pleased: it was about John and Heather. His mother had come in last night to tell him that they had both gone to Stanford’s party after all. Heather had gone with Stanford, since he arrived to fetch her, and John had asked permission to use the family car and followed them shortly afterwards.

  So it had worked. The matriarch had been right again. Lying watching his early-morning birds, Oliver wished very much that he could have heard what passed between John and Heather. It was none of his business, but he had been such a busybody all along that he was rapidly losing all delicacy. It was an immense satisfaction to know that he had been right. If this were the beginning of a new understanding and they were going • gradually to come together again, what a glow he would feel to have had a hand in it! He lay and glowed already, his brain maundering on ahead into a rose-t
inted future, and when Elizabeth came into the room, which was filled with a dusty gold by the sun shining through the drawn curtains of the side window, he turned on her a beaming smile.

  “Morning, Liz!” he called. “Morning’s at seven, etc. Look at that sun on the dew. All’s very much right with the world this morning.”

  She came towards him and put down the cup before she spoke. “I’m afraid all’s very much wrong with the world,” she said seriously.

  “Oh, that’s only liver. You should take a—”

  “Listen, Oliver,” she said, and something in her face reminded him suddenly of the face of the M.O. with the pink cheeks and the little black moustache who had told him he had got to lose his leg. It was the bad-news face of someone who wished they did not have to be the one to break it.

  “Listen,” Elizabeth repeated. “Heather hasn’t come home. What shall we do? Do you think I ought to tell someone?”

  “She and John were probably so late at the party that they decided to stay the night somewhere,” Oliver said, not worrying. Rather a good sign this.

  “But John didn’t go to the party.”

  “He did. Ma told me he’d taken the car out.”

  “Not to go there. He told me he was going to the pub. He looked rather queer; I didn’t want him to go.”

  “My God,” said Oliver slowly. His glow was rapidly chilling into an icy apprehension.

  “And when I dressed this morning,” went on Elizabeth, “I found this note in the pocket of my white overall. Heather had evidently put it there knowing I wouldn’t find it till the morning. It says: ‘Be a brick and look after the children for me for a bit. Give the enclosed to John,’” She showed Oliver a folded square of paper.

  “Typical Heather dramatisation,” said Oliver, trying to speak lightly. “Have you read the note?”

  “The note for John? Of course not.” Elizabeth looked offended.

  “No, I suppose not. I’d love to know what’s in it, though.” He squinted at it against the light. “What a temptation for an honest man. Liz, you don’t think—no, she couldn’t have. She wants to give John a fright, I suppose. Silly, dramatic little fool, acting like someone in a film, and calmly landing you with the children. You wait till she comes back. I’ll sober her up.”

  But Heather was not coming back. John came downstairs heavily, with his eyes fixed on space, dropping a foot on to each stair like a very old man. He came straight into Oliver’s room moving like a sleepwalker. “Onions,” he said, and had to clear his throat because his voice was hoarse, “Heather has gone off with Stanford Black.”

  Oliver expostulated, argued, refused to believe it, long after his brain had accepted it as true. All the time, there hammered at the back of his mind the insistence that it was his fault. It was a terrible thought, and it began to blot out all other thoughts, even his anger with Heather and his pity for John. He knew now how Heather had felt about Muffet. No wonder she had harped on it. He could imagine a thought like this haunting one’s waking hours for ever and shadowing one’s dreams. It was quite an effort to bring himself back to John.

  John stood hunched like a bear in his dressing-gown, staring out past Oliver at the long shadow of the tree clump, pointing diagonally down the sparkling hill. The letter dangled from his finger-tips. “I don’t blame her,” he kept saying. “How could I expect her to do anything else after what I told her? Selfish idiot that I was, kidding myself it was fairer for her to know, when all the time it was because I wanted to get it off my chest and stop feeling guilty.”

  “But what happened? What did she say when you told her?”

  “She’ll come back, of course.” John reassured himself, nodding. He went on with his soliloquy, while Oliver went on with his question.

  “But what did she say?”

  John looked down at him in a tired way. “She was furious,” he said simply. “She wouldn’t listen properly at first, because she was dressing to go out, but when she realised what I was trying to say she swung round on that tapestry stool of hers with her hairbrush in the air and stared at me as if she thought I was mad. Maybe I am. She let me finish—of course I told it all in a muddle, leaving out half the things I meant to say—and then she turned round with her back to me. I could see her face in the glass. You hear about people’s faces being livid. Hers was—a sort of greyey-white.”

  “But what did she say?” Oliver almost screamed.

  “She said,” recited John in a flat voice, “she said to think she’d been faithful to me all these years and led a deadly life, when all the time I’d been gadding about—you know the kind of thing. She said I was a hypocrite, pretending to be so virtuous. She called Stella a tart. I tried to explain about it not making any difference to her and me. I reminded her that Stella was dead. That made it worse.”

  “Why?” Oliver tried to probe him out of the musing silence into which he had fallen. “Why worse?”

  “She said it was disgusting of me to try and excuse myself by pitching a sentimental story. She said why couldn’t I just say I’d had a mistress in Australia and leave it at that. She said she supposed the next thing I’d tell her would be that I only did it out of kindness. She wouldn’t talk any more after that, wouldn’t answer me. She finished her hair—I could see her hands were trembling—got her coat and bag and went downstairs, to write the note, I suppose. I went into the kids’ room; David’s bedclothes were all on the floor. While I was tucking him up I heard her come back into our room and rummage around. I thought she’d come back for something she’d forgotten, but she must have been packing a bag. I didn’t dare go in again; I wish I had. Perhaps I could have stopped her. That swine Black—he must have asked her to do this long ago, you know. Then I heard his car come up the drive—that foul car of his with the outside exhaust—and she rushed out to him before he had time to come into the house. You want to see her note?”

  “Not much.” Oliver took it. It said: “Have gone where I’m more appreciated. Will write to you. E. will look after the children until I’ve calmed down a bit and decided where to take them.”

  “She can’t do that.” Oliver looked up. “She can’t have the kids.”

  “What should I do with them?” John spread his hands helplessly.

  Sooner or later they had to tell Mrs. North. She took this enormous catastrophe far better than she took minor ones, but later in the day she suddenly felt so tired that Elizabeth put her to bed.

  Elizabeth was a rock. She made no comment on Heather. She was so busy looking after the children, Oliver and Mrs. North, helping Mrs. Cowlin in the kitchen, putting food before John I in the hope that he would eat it, dashing off in the car to do the shopping, answering the telephone, cancelling Mrs. North’s bridge date with Mrs. Ogilvie and fending off Mrs. Ogilvie from coming round instead, that she had no time to talk to anyone. John did nothing but talk. Oliver grew so weary of hearing him go over and over the same ground that he had to get Elizabeth to manoeuvre him out of the room. John went upstairs then and talked to Mrs. North, hour after hour.

  Oliver thought he felt worse than at any time since his illness. He had certainly never felt so unhappy. That night he lay wide awake, cursing himself for a meddling fool, seeing how he had been carried away by his vision of himself as an oracle. Seeing that he had spoken from theory, fitting the thing together mathematically instead of humanly, so pleased with himself for being so wise that he had never paused to consider just how wise he was.

  He heard the stable clock strike one and two, and by the time it struck three the gathering cloud of black depression had submerged him completely. But no one was going to pander to his ego if he had a mood’now. No one was going to be bothered with his whims and try to coax him with special food and ask him whether he would like a bottle of wine opened. He would not even get the gratifying appreciation of a relieved household when the mood lifted. Probably no one would know he had had one. Serve him right. He wished that he was older, now that he appeared to be doomed for
the rest of his life to useless introversion, since what he had thought was useful extroversion had failed so miserably. He would never get better, of course; that always went without saying when he had a cafard, and he would grow into a querulous old man who was bandied around the family, a nuisance to everybody, unable to die, and when he did, without even any money to leave to the people who had looked after him.

  On top of all her other extra work, Elizabeth had remembered to make his tea. Oliver eyed the thermos sourly. Trust her not to forget a thing. What right had anyone to be so perfect? It seemed almost like an accusation. He was beginning to understand more and more how Heather had felt after her disastrous mismanagement of Lady Sandys. How could he go on living in the same house with John? But he had no Stanford Black to run away to. Perhaps he would run to Mary Brewer’s pub—run on one leg and go hopping into her bedroom that would have dark leaning furniture with big knobs, and a rush mat by the washstand. Mary Brewer would sit up in a narrow bed in pleased surprise, wearing green stockinette pyjamas and a hair-net. Her underclothes would be lying over a chair. He could see the suspender belt and the black woollen stockings she wore with her uniform.