by Nina Bawden
It was difficult to control my voice. It came out squeakily. “What is there to miss?”
The colour heightened on his cheekbones. He raised his hands before his face in a gesture of mock defence.
“Only this sort of thing, my darling. This touchiness. We’re both on edge with each other, you’re prickly as a hedgehog. It’s partly because you’ve been ill, you’re still not well, but she might think there was more to it. You don’t want to upset her, do you?”
It was unbelievable that he could be so blind, could comfortably tell himself and me that there was nothing wrong between us, nothing that could not be traced to my recent illness, my nervous state.
“So it’s all my fault?” I said.
“Hell. No, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry, I put things badly, don’t I?”
My legs were shaking. I sat on the arm of a chair and smoothed my skirt over my knees. I must be careful now, control myself, say the right thing. Her coming was suddenly immensely important. James did not want her to come. His reasons I could only guess at: I was sure they were not what he had said. He wanted me to be alone with only a child for company; to him, my mother’s visit would be, in some way, a danger.
“I’d like her to come. She’d be much more worried if we put her off. And hurt.”
“Would she be hurt if you said you would rather she came another week-end? Say in a week or two?”
“Perhaps not. But I want her to come.” Watching his quiet, unyielding face, panic took hold of me. “I miss her dreadfully. I want to see her.”
His face was thoughtful. “All right, sweet, I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it.” He got up from his chair and came over to me, tilting my face between his hands; he looked into my eyes.
“Harriet, you’re all right, aren’t you? Not still worried about your health?”
“Not any longer.’”
“Would it help if you saw another doctor?”
“But I’m quite well.”
“Are you?” He hesitated. “I can’t help you, can I? I’m no use to you any longer. It’s as if there were a wall between us. I don’t pretend to know anything about the workings of the mind, but a specialist might be able to help you. Someone trained to understand. …”
On the surface, there was only concern for me. Beneath it, beneath his anxious face, his searching eyes, I saw danger of a new kind.
“Are you trying to tell me that I’m mad?”
His hands were shaking. “My darling; no. Don’t wilfully misunderstand me. Of course you aren’t mad. Just troubled a little. …”
I said steadily, “And you can honestly say that you don’t know why?”
He stepped backwards as if I had slapped his face. I stood up, praying for self-control. “Please, please, may I write to Mummy and tell her she can come?”
He said with sudden, vicious bitterness, “Must you ask me that as if I were your jailer?” His face was twisted. He swung round on his heel. At the door, he turned; with a tremendous effort he forced a smile. “If I was tactless, I’m sorry. I only wanted to help you.”
His eyes were the most helpless things I had ever seen.
Maggie stood at the end of my bed. There was a fuzz of pale sunlight in the room.
She said, “Daddy has had his breakfast and gone out. Are you coming, Harriet? I’ve put the water on for the eggs.”
She smiled at me briefly and left the room.
I dressed and washed and went to the kitchen. I boiled the eggs and made toast. The porridge was already cooked. James was very fond of it and we made it with oatmeal, overnight, in a cool oven. I spooned out two helpings into blue, china dishes, and carried them into the dining-room. The porridge was very hot; I sat down, opened the newspaper, my plate untouched before me.
Then Maggie said, “Someone is trying to poison me.”
I crumpled the paper in my lap. She sat opposite me, staring at her plate of porridge. Her eyes were enormous in her face, the pupils dilated so that there was only a very narrow strip of colour round the blackness.
“I knew it,” she said, “I knew it.” And she buried her face in her hands.
I remember that I felt no alarm, only irritation. “Don’t be an idiot. Why should anyone poison you? Look, your porridge is the same as mine.”
I picked up a spoonful and carried it to my mouth.
“No,” she said, “no. Look at it.” Her eyes were blazing bright.
I wondered if she were ill. I stirred at the grey stuff to humour her.
“Don’t you see?” she said.
Small fragments glinted on the surface, splinters, diamond sharp. It was like an illness or a nightmare but there was no hope of recovery or waking.
“You made it,” she said. “You made it last night.”
I took her plate and mine and carried them to the kitchen. I opened the oven door and got out the casserole. She followed me, fearfully peering over my shoulder. There was not so much glass in the casserole; it had been sprinkled over the surface and stirred in lightly.
“James, oh my God,” I said.
She started at me like an idiot.
“Did Daddy eat any porridge?”
“Daddy?” She shook her head wonderingly. “I don’t know. He had eggs and bacon. He left his dirty plate on the table and I cleared it away.”
I picked up the casserole and threw it into the bin. Something tinkled beneath it. I took it out and saw, among the orange peel, and the screws of paper, the remains of a light bulb.
“You made it,” Maggie said. “You made the porridge last night. You broke up the glass and put it in the casserole. Why did you do it, Harriet?”
Her voice was quiet and reasonable as if she were asking an ordinary question. I stared silently at the lovely, narrow face, the honey-coloured hair. The thick lashes outlined her eyes like smudges of dark paint. There was a glowing, excited colour in her cheeks.
She said, “You had the light bulb, don’t you remember? It was the one from my bedside lamp. After I’d gone to bed, the light wouldn’t turn on and you came and put in a new bulb. You had the old one in your hand when you kissed me good night.”
She began to tremble. Her hands moved aimlessly, like moths. “Harriet, why did you do it?” she whispered. “Did you want to kill me?”
I said incredulously, “Oh, Maggie. Oh, my poor, poor darling. Of course not. I don’t know what happened but it must have been some dreadful mistake. I didn’t want to kill you, no one wants to kill you.”
“But it was in my porridge,” she insisted quietly. Her eyes were enormous.
“It wouldn’t have hurt you. If you swallow something sharp by accident, you eat porridge or something like that afterwards to stop your inside being hurt. It’s thick and sticky and wraps round the sharp edges.”
I wasn’t sure whether that was correct medically or not. Anyway, she didn’t understand me. She went on looking at me with her wide, luminous eyes and repeated plaintively:
“Why did you break up the light bulb and put it in my porridge?”
“I put the bulb in the dustbin. I’m sure I did.” I looked into a pit of fear. I couldn’t remember. She was right: I had changed the bulb in her lamp before I went to the kitchen to make the porridge. If the bulb had broken before I threw it away some of the splinters might conceivably have got into the casserole. But I would have remembered, I would have cut my hands.… I spread them out in front of me, palm upwards.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Try to forget about it, there’s a good girl.” I went on with an awful jangling brightness. “We’ll throw it all away, even the casserole and the dishes, so that we can forget about it, shall we? We’ll find out what happened some time and it’ll probably be something quite simple and silly, and we’ll laugh about it. But no one means you any harm, my sweet, I promise you. Wasn’t I going to eat it too?”
… Even if the bulb had cracked before I threw it away, only a very little glass could have got into the porri
dge without my noticing it. Two or three splinters, perhaps, no more. And all that was left of it in the bin was one large piece and the jagged edges round the fitment. …
She said, “Someone meant to kill me.” Her voice broke in a wail. “Harriet, you must believe someone meant to kill me.”
Sprawled on her face was the panic that comes to a child faced suddenly by a grown-up’s disbelief in an imminent and fearful danger. I could think of no way to reassure her.
“I’m a dreadful cook, aren’t I? Maggie, you’ll have to do the cooking now, no one will eat anything I make again. No one will believe us. What will Daddy say when we tell him? Won’t he laugh?”
The fluttering hands were still. Her voice was husky.
“You won’t tell Daddy. Please, Harriet, you won’t tell Daddy?”
… I could never tell him. The quiet, gentle questioning— what did you do with the light bulb, Harriet? Tell me, it will help you if you tell someone. Help you to straighten out the twists in your poor, tired mind. Try and remember, Harriet, we only forget things when we want to forget them.
“No, I won’t tell him. It’ll be a secret between us. Come and eat the rest of your breakfast. The eggs are all right except that they’ll be cold by now.”
I thought she would refuse, but she went meekly into the dining-room and sat down in her chair. I took the casserole and the pretty blue dishes down to the field and put them in the dustbin. When I came back she had finished her egg; she was spreading her toast with marmalade.
Ann poured hot chocolate into china mugs. They were blue, the same colour as the dishes I had thrown away. Perhaps they were part of a set that had belonged to old Mrs. Random, shared out at her death between brother and sister.
What, I wondered, would she say if I told her: Ann, last night I put glass into the porridge before I put it in the oven. I don’t remember doing it but no one else could have done it except me. No one else could have done it— that is something I must be sure about because any other thought is too terrible to be borne.…
Ann dropped the sugar basin on the carpet and flopped forward on her knees, gathering up the lumps with mittened fingers. She grumbled, “If only these chilblains would go, I’d be happy.” Her mouth stretched in a grin. “Every winter I say that and in the spring, when they clear up, I’m grateful for perhaps a day. Drink your chocolate while it’s hot.”
… Did James have any porridge this morning? He loves porridge, it’s an obsession with him. He eats it because his mother used to make a ritual out of it and he adored his mother. Perhaps he looked at the casserole in the oven and saw the broken glass. But then, surely, he would have thrown it away.
“The wireless says the cold weather is going to continue. It’s odd, isn’t it, but they’re always right when they forecast bad weather? As I get older, I see the winter as a kind of vindictiveness directed personally against me. Harriet, is anything the matter?”
She was watching me curiously. She looked thin and pinched as if the bitter cold were indeed the enemy she pretended it to be. But her voice was light, almost joyful, younger than I remembered it to be.
“No,” I said. “Nothing’s the matter. Tell me—Cyril says your friend has gone.”
“Yes.” Briefly her face clouded. “I had a letter this morning.” She reached for a pile of papers in the chair behind her. “Look,” she said, and handed me a letter.
It was written, not printed, but there was no mistaking the turgid, theatrical scrawl. The signature was underlined and almost obscured with flourishes: Maud Désirée Beach. Désirée, indeed, what a wealth of sham, shabby gentility it conjured up. She said that she had felt for some time that Ann and she were not in sympathy. After many a night of deep and anxious self-examination she thought it better that they should part. She felt she must say that she could not part in friendship, before she had left Ann had shown to her a degree of coarseness, hitherto unsuspected, from which she could only shrink. She trusted that Ann would live to regret the things she had said. She would, she ended, pray for her.
I said, embarrassed, “Ann, I’m so sorry. You must be very hurt.”
But Ann was laughing. “Hurt? My dear if you knew. What a strain it has been all these years. And to think I was sorry. Sorry for that evil little creature. All she means is that she’s found someone who can support her in greater luxury, phony little tramp.”
I said, “She wrote me letters. Oh, she didn’t sign them. They were nicely anonymous, I never guessed …”
“But why didn’t you say?”
“To you? But I’ve only just realised that she wrote them.”
“You told James, of course.”
“I—no, I didn’t.”
Her eyes met mine, frankly incredulous. “But Harriet— why not? You mean you kept them to yourself? What an extraordinary thing to do!”
I thought: yes, of course, it must seem extraordinary. To hide anonymous letters from your husband, what curious depth of abnormality did this conceal?
“They were obscene letters,” I said.
She nodded wisely. “They would be. I can guess the sort of thing Maud would write, you don’t have to tell me. She resented other people’s happiness deeply, she hated to think that anyone could be married happily, she would try to spoil it if she could. She was clever, you know, she had a good brain but it had got twisted. Perhaps clever people rot more easily, do you think, than stupid ones? In spite of her intelligence—and her background was one in which brains were important, poor, middle-class family, scholarships to grammar school, to university—she had achieved nothing, not even a husband.” She looked at me, puzzled. “All the same, I don’t understand why you didn’t show them to James.”
I said slowly, “I think, perhaps, I was ashamed.”
Her glance was sharply inquisitive, as if she suspected there was more to it than that. But she did not pursue the matter, to do so might involve her more deeply than she cared to be involved.
Instead she said, “I want your advice.” She made an aimless, awkward gesture with her hands. She sat on the hearth rug, legs sprawled like a schoolgirl. Beneath her woollen stockings the skin was patched with red burns where she had sat too close to the fire. She went on hastily, “You don’t have to give it. It’s about Cyril.”
“Yes?”
“He wants me to marry him. You were wrong, you know.…” She paused, her eyes were shy. “I didn’t marry him before, because of Maud. I don’t have to explain to you how she came into the picture: my feeling of responsibility towards her, the poor, delicate, misunderstood creature, relying on me utterly; Cyril’s frank dislike, his refusal to see what I thought I saw in her.… If we had been desperately, physically in love, she would have made no difference, but our marriage was simply an agreement between two old friends, settling down to a cosy middle-age together. Not a fiery enough affair to persuade one to put one’s responsibilities aside.” She looked at me. “But if you still think that what he said about James was inspired by malice, then it’s a different matter.…”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think that any longer.”
When I got home, Maggie was standing in the stable-yard. She ran to the side of the car, her hair bouncing on her shoulders. Her face was bright.
“Daddy’s back. There’s a surprise for you, Harriet.”
The terror of the morning was quite forgotten. She danced with pleasure like a child. James came, smiling, across the yard. He led me to the stable door. A bay mare blinked lazily at us with large, soft eyes.
“Isn’t she lovely, Harriet?”
They watched me, fair heads close together, grey eyes smiling. Both of them natural and normal, a father with his daughter, pleased, waiting for me to show my pleasure.
I was detached, surrounded by a wall of glass. I put out my band and the gentle nose tickled my palm.
James said, “I’ve had her out in the field. She’s got a beautiful canter. We’ll make a horsewoman of you, Harriet.”
“Thank y
ou.” There was a pain in my throat. I stroked the smooth, arched neck. A chain rattled on wood. The stable smelt sweet and warm.
We walked back to the house. Between the cobblestones the grass was brown, a pale green fern grew in the damp angle of the wall. As we climbed the stairs, James held my reluctant hand.
“Maggie has made lunch while you’ve been gallivanting.… We’ll have a drink. You must name her. Harriet …”
“I’ll only be a minute, I’ll take off my things.”
I closed the bedroom door behind me, felt my face pucker with despair. I took off my coat and hung it in the wardrobe. I sat on the stool before the dressing-table and combed my hair. My fingers were thick and clumsy. I stared at my white, strange face, motionless in the glass.
The smell was sweet and cloying. I breathed it in unwillingly, like an anæsthetic. The bottle of Arpège that I had bought in Paris was broken, stamped into the carpet. I moved the stool and saw the extent of the destruction: bottles of face-cream, hand lotion, smashed to pieces, smeared on the rug.
James said, from the door, “Is there anything wrong? I thought …”
He crossed the room and stood beside me. “Darling, what have you done? All your precious scent …”
“They’re broken.” I stared at him dully, saw the alarm cloud swiftly over his face.
I put my hand up to my cheek. “I didn’t do it.”
His voice was soothing, gentle. “All right, darling. It was an accident. What a shame.…”
He crouched on his haunches, picking up the pieces.
“I’ll see to it. Go and have your drink.”
“But I didn’t do it.”
“Oh, Harriet.” He stood up, put an arm round my shoulders. “Would you like to lie down for a little while?”
“I’m not ill. There’s nothing wrong with me.” From a great distance I heard my own false, tinny laughter. “James, did you have any porridge this morning?”
“Porridge?” His look was one of cold exhaustion, eyelids lowered, he gave me a forced, concerned smile. “Yes I had some porridge. You know I always do.”