Prisoner's Base (11 page)

“I’d have invited him anyway, whether I knew what he’d done or not!” interrupted Claudia sharply. “
I
don’t wait for a thing to be safe and easy!
I
don’t demand that an unhappy human being should produce his credentials before I consent to do anything about his unhappiness …!”

The sentiments were heroic, genuinely heroic. Margaret felt a tiny bit shaken in the stand she had been taking. But all the same, it wouldn’t do: it really wouldn’t do. No ordinary,
sensible
person would agree to it.

“It’s all very well, Claudia,” she grumbled, but in a
somewhat
gentler tone. “I can see a little bit how you feel, and I certainly admire your courage. Anyone would. But you see, my dear, you’re not living on a desert island; you’re living in an ordinary house with several other people, who all have a right to be consulted before you can bring something like this into their lives. Don’t you see? You’re forcing
us
to have the courage of
your
convictions, and it’s not fair. Why should we?”

“Well, yes.” Claudia’s tone too was much less belligerent. “There is that point of view, of course. The conventional point of view. But surely it is a very paltry one compared with what’s at stake—the whole future life and happiness of a highly gifted young man? Can’t you see at all how terribly important it is—how terribly worth while? By giving Maurice the assurance that in one household at least he is accepted—trusted—regarded as a perfectly ordinary young man—we shall be giving him a real
chance, at last, of turning over a new leaf—of embarking on a useful, honourable career, using all his gifts and talents. Coming to stay with us here—being treated as one of the family—this will be the turning-point of his life. Don’t you think that that would be a worth-while achievement, Mother? Worth just a teeny bit of worry and effort—which is all that is being asked of us?”

Margaret reviewed gloomily all the other turning-points of all the other lives at which she had been compelled unwillingly to assist. They never seemed to turn very far; one by one she had watched these unfortunates shambling out of Claudia’s orbit apparently just as self-absorbed and incapable, just as hell-bent on failure and disaster, as when they had shambled in.

Yet who could say, really? Who could tell, watching them as they staggered subsequently from one self-engendered crisis to another, that they did not carry with them, henceforth, some sustaining spark implanted by Claudia’s kindness: making things for ever after a little bit more bearable, a little bit less perfectly frightful?

Margaret felt both ashamed of her own unheroic
conventionality
, and also sure, deep down in her very bones, that she was right. She listened to her daughter’s arguments uneasily.

“… And it wouldn’t be for long, you know, Mother; just for a week or two, until he’s found his feet.”

“I hope he’ll be gone by the fourteenth of June,” suddenly put in Mavis—and it was quite a shock to hear so business-like a voice suddenly emerge from a figure so limp and sodden with tears. “It’s Eddie’s half-term that weekend, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t
possibly
—have my Eddie associate with a criminal! If the man’s not gone by the fourteenth—” Mavis’ voice gathered depth and intensity as she led up to her final threat—“if he’s not gone by that time, then Eddie won’t be able to come home for his holiday at all!”

Neither Claudia nor Margaret seemed adequately shaken by this awful prospect. Indeed, at Mavis’ words Margaret became aware of the strange, unpredictable sense of family alliance against the outsider, which can sometimes bring down in
amicable
ruins the most fiery of family disputes. It came to her in a little, sharp, surprising stab, and she knew without any doubt that it had come to Claudia too. For a moment, mother and daughter were as one.

It was Claudia who seized on the advantage thus conferred:

“So you see, Mother, that’s why I’ve been counting on you to back me up in this. I felt sure you wouldn’t let me down—especially as Maurice is actually here already—at least he will be any minute, he’s just fetching the rest of his things. I think it’s wonderful of you to take it like this—” Claudia seemed already to be regarding the whole matter as settled—“I felt sure you’d see it my way once you really understood the situation. But, Mother—I don’t really quite know how to put this—please don’t be offended. It’s just—you
will
be nice to him, won’t you? I mean, now that we’re all agreed so nicely about him coming here, it would be
such
a pity, wouldn’t it, if it was all spoilt by—er— Well, by—” Claudia’s eloquence seemed, for once, to be failing her. Margaret drew herself up haughtily.

“And when, Claudia dear, have I failed in civility towards any of your friends—” here she tried to ignore the glances
exchanged
between Mavis and her daughter, and finished more haughtily than ever: “No matter
what
my own personal feelings may have been?”

“Oh, I know, Mother. I know you do your best. Most of the time.” Claudia seemed at a loss for a method of putting across her meaning sufficiently forcibly, and yet not saying
anything
to upset the precarious agreement that had just been achieved. “I only just mentioned it because—well—there
was
that thing about Winnie, wasn’t there? I don’t want that to happen again!”

Margaret scowled. Even after four and a half years, the memory of Winnie, with her vitamin tablets, and her
mother-fixation
, and her unbecoming frilly blouses, could still have this effect on her.

“Poor Winnie is an old friend of mine,” Claudia was
explaining
to Mavis, who had stopped crying some while ago now in order to listen to the quarrelling. “She’d had a terrible time with her husband, she had to leave him in the end, and take the child with her. She was living with her mother when I came across her, and my dear, it was one of those terrible cannibal set-ups—the mother-daughter thing. They both loathed each other really, but the mother was one of those demanding, possessive women, determined to keep her daughter to herself now she’d got her back again. Poor Winnie was trapped—she was utterly unable to escape. Over and over again
she tried to break away—moved into lodgings, took living-in jobs—but always this awful maternal thing dragged her back—a mysterious, irresistible pull that always, in the end, proved too strong for her. She went to a psychiatrist at last, and—”

“And it turned out that the mysterious, irresistible pull was the fact that her mother was paying for all their food and looking after the child while Winnie was out at work!”
declared
Margaret truculently. Claudia regarded her with icy
disfavour
.

“That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean about you, Mother! That was just the attitude that upset Winnie so much. I
daresay
you didn’t mean any harm—I know that your generation can’t really be expected to understand the new, saner approach to problems like Winnie’s; but all the same, couldn’t you at least
try
not to—”

A short, sharp ring on the front door bell brought the dispute to an abrupt conclusion. For a moment all three looked at each other in a tingling unity of tension; and just for one fraction of a second it seemed to Margaret that Claudia looked just as frightened as any of them. It was unnerving—much, much more so, Margaret suddenly realised, than any amount of arrogance and cocksureness. For if Claudia herself was less than wholly confident in this quixotic enterprise then on what—on whom—could they all lean? What safety was there anywhere, for any of them, if they were to be thus cast captainless as well as reluctant upon these awful and uncharted seas? To be
press-ganged
on to the ship was bad enough; but to find, when out of sight of land, that the ship had no captain, was going nowhere —that was the final terror. For the first time, Margaret was aware of Claudia’s self-righteous obstinacy as a support, and not merely as a danger and a nuisance. Oh God, she prayed silently, let Claudia’s pig-headedness not fail us now; not at
this
stage, please, God!

And Margaret’s prayer must have been answered, for nothing could have been more triumphantly confident than the voice in which Claudia was now rallying them to her support:

“He’s come! That’s him!” she cried joyously. “Mother! Mavis! Come along—come down with me! Come and help me welcome him!”

‘Come and
watch
me welcome him’ might have been nearer the mark, Margaret reflected; but she was too much relieved
to see Claudia once again her familiar, vainglorious self to harbour the ungenerous thought for long. Together the three of them went downstairs to confront the new arrival into their home.

I
T WAS ASTONISHING
how quickly Maurice seemed to settle down; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, how quickly the violent feelings generated by his arrival seemed to settle down. Within a very few days, he had already begun to seem a familiar, unremarkable member of the household. “Maurice!” Margaret would find herself calling, as if the name had always been on her lips, “Supper’s ready!” Or: “Maurice, are you going to the library again in your lunch hour? If so, could you get me …?” And as to treating him like an ‘
Ordinary
young man’, as Claudia had urged—why, nothing easier. To Margaret, at least, he
seemed
like an ordinary young man: opinionated, over-full of himself, and given to bouts of gloomy introspection, exactly like all the others, bless them. If
anything
, he was slightly better-mannered than most, jumping up quite often to open doors for her or to offer her his chair. And, above all, he actually seemed to have a job—a real proper, regular job, that got him out of the house before nine in the morning and didn’t disgorge him again till after six. For this, Margaret felt, as she looked back over the vista of former
incumbents
, she could forgive him almost anything. The majority of his predecessors hadn’t had jobs at all; and the rest had tended to go in for those rather depressing, intangible sort of
employments
which can be done at home, in one’s own time. The things they were supposed to work at would arrive by post at irregular intervals and set them moping nervily about the house, explaining to anyone who cared to listen just why it was that they couldn’t seem to get down to it today.

Maurice and his total disappearance from breakfast time till evening seemed to Margaret so vast an improvement on all this that she very soon began to feel quite kindly towards him; and when, in addition, it became clear that he liked to spend his evenings either reading voraciously in his own room or else talking to Claudia about his poetry and getting her to type bits
for him, well out of Margaret’s way—why, Margaret almost found herself wondering why she had ever raised any objections to his arrival in the first place. Think, she reminded herself, who we might have had on that Put-U-Up by now, if Maurice hadn’t been occupying it. A reformed alcoholic, perhaps, who would need to talk out his problems till four or five in the morning, just under Margaret’s bedroom. Or a weeping divorcée, whose ex-husband would keep ringing up with
threatening
messages just when Margaret was busy. There was no end to the variegated nuisances that this apparently
hairbrained
scheme of Claudia’s might have averted.

Only in one respect, as the days went by, did Margaret feel she had cause to complain of Maurice; and that was in his increasing readiness—indeed, his insatiable eagerness—to talk about his crimes and his imprisonment. For her part, Margaret felt that this easy loquacity on such a subject was in poor taste; she would have preferred to have been allowed to ignore this side of their visitor’s character altogether; to carry on with their daily life as if it was not so. This, it seemed to her, was the only civilised way of dealing with an intrinsically awkward and embarrassing situation. But of course Claudia would have none of this; with her passionate belief in the salutary effects of Facing Facts, and Getting it Out of Your System, and such-like uncomfortable exercises, she encouraged him to enlarge on his regrettable experiences on every possible occasion—even at mealtimes, which Margaret thought was really the last straw. Apart from anything else, it meant that Helen, too, was sitting in on these revelations; and more than once, Helen had brought Sandra home, too, at the end of the school day, to enjoy this novel entertainment. There the two girls would sit, side by side at the dining-room table, their eyes goggling and their food cooling on their plates, while Claudia went out of her way to elicit one unfortunate detail after another from Maurice’s all too willing lips.

They all knew the main lines of the story now. He had been involved in a bank robbery, in which one of the bank clerks had died of a fractured skull—the result, it seemed, of a violent push from Maurice as they struggled on the steps. His
punishment
was fair enough, Maurice handsomely admitted; it was right that he should pay the full penalty for such a deed. What
was
perhaps unfair was that he, the youngest of the gang,
should have been allotted the task of tackling this bank clerk until all the loot was safely stowed in the car; this made it almost inevitable that he should be one of the ones to be caught while the car, the bank notes, and the smarter half of the gang got safely away.

Margaret had to admit that the story could have been worse. There was at least nothing sordid—nothing unsavoury—about it; and she supposed that Helen would have to have heard about it somehow, sometime, in any case. No, it was not the bare facts that she felt were so unsuitable for a young girl’s ears; rather it was the manner in which Maurice related them —with a sort of carefree zest, like someone telling an adventure story: not as if he was ashamed of it at all, or regretted it, or had even learnt anything from his long punishment. It seemed wrong that the girls should be encouraged to regard such a serious crime so lightly—which was what they were inevitably coming to do as they listened to the exciting adventure story of his life and plied him with eager questions. Sandra in particular was becoming quite pert and cheeky in her conversations with this morbidly interesting young man, even joking with him sometimes, and laughing merrily, over some episode or other related to his crimes or his life in prison. It was all wrong. If they
must
learn about such unfortunate lives as Maurice’s, the girls should at least be made to treat the matter with becoming gravity.

Of course it was Claudia’s fault really. Instead of discouraging Maurice from bringing up his life story as a light-hearted topic of mealtime conversation, she positively egged him on. At first Margaret suspected mere vulgar curiosity on her daughter’s part—backed up, of course, by lofty psychological principles: that there was more to it than this Margaret only discovered by chance, one Saturday morning—the third after Maurice’s arrival.

Margaret had been shopping, and when she came home, laden with weekend provisions, she found that in her absence Daphne had called. She and Claudia were sitting outside in the garden, heads together over that same little table where Margaret so often enjoyed her lunchtime coffee and sandwich. Margaret caught sight of them as soon as she reached the gate, and at first she thought they must be playing some competitive board game, like chess, or draughts, so absorbed were the bent
heads; so intent, apparently, on winning, on making the correct next move.

But before she had so much as opened the gate, Margaret realised that they were, of course, only talking; absurd to have thought, even for a moment, that someone like Claudia would ever have time for games. Or Daphne either for that matter, though Daphne’s habitual busy-ness was of a rather different kind from Claudia’s. Daphne did not go out to work, having been left comfortably off on the death of her husband several years ago; but—advised thus by her friends after this sad event —she had found herself Interests. With good-hearted,
indiscriminate
fervour, she had taken up painting, pottery, good works, language classes, amateur dramatics, church-going,
embroidery
, and the cultivation of herbs; and had found—possibly rather to her own dismay—that she was quite good at all of them, and so had no valid reason for ever dropping any of them. Moreover, Daphne did not believe in dropping things; she was, as she would have told you, a Sticker. The penalties attendant on this estimable quality were by now plain to be seen: poor Daphne was tangled up in her Interests like a kitten in a ball of wool. Innocently and lightly she had taken up what seemed at first sight like a perfectly simple plaything. You never saw her now, Margaret reflected, without a bundle of leaflets under her arm, or a couple of great pictures that she was taking to be framed. Her small, wiry little body and her sparse, gingery hair were a familiar sight to Margaret, who often met her scuttling about the streets, and usually just managed to smile ‘Good morning’ to her before she dived, laden, into the modest headquarters of some worthy organisation or other. She was not, however, a frequent visitor to the house. Her friendship—such as it was—with Claudia depended less on mutual liking than on the random but nevertheless fairly frequent crossing of their paths among the local activities.

Or so it had seemed hitherto. But this looked more like real intimacy, Margaret thought, still hesitating with her baskets by the gate. Those heads leaning together so intently—those empty coffee cups long forgotten—such obviously intimate talk as this set Margaret wondering how she was to get her shopping
indoors
without seeming to interrupt them. What could it all be about? Maurice again? Probably: Margaret recalled that Daphne had telephoned Claudia several times during the last
week or two, and always the conversation had been devoted to this apparently inexhaustible topic. Not that Claudia had been betraying his confidences during these telephone conversations—if ‘betray’ was a meaningful term to use in connection with confidences poured forth so enthusiastically by Maurice
himself
to an audience of at least four and often five—two of them being schoolgirls with an obvious interest in spreading their findings freely and in every detail among their seven hundred companions. No, far from being over-garrulous, Claudia had usually been—well, not snubbing, exactly, but certainly rather off-hand about the exciting information (unheard by Margaret) which must have been pouring down the wire.

“Yes, of course I knew she was a prostitute!” Claudia would say, in her clear, incisive telephone voice that carried right through the house. “He told me
that
at the very beginning. But she left his father before he was three, and so …” Or: “Yes, of course he’s told me; but practically
every
boy of eleven or twelve has had such an experience: I don’t know why you should sound so shocked …”

In spite of these discouragements, poor Daphne—Sticker that she was—must have ploughed on, and was now venturing a personal visit…. Margaret decided to brave the confidences, if this was what they should be called, and get the shopping into the house before the butter melted and the lettuce lost its
crispness
. Noisily, to give them a chance, she rattled the gate open, and then slammed it shut behind her.

Both communicants looked up.

“Oh! Er! Good morning, Mrs Newman!” exclaimed Daphne. “I do hope you don’t mind my invading like this. You see …”

“But of course not. I’m delighted to see you,” declared Margaret. “You should come more often. I hope you’re getting Daphne to stay to lunch, Claudia,” she added, turning to her daughter. “It’ll be all ready in just a few minutes—I left
everything
cooking before I went out.”

“Yes. Yes, Mother, that’ll be fine,” said Claudia absently, her mind evidently quite elsewhere. “Listen, Mother, perhaps
you
can settle this argument for us—Mother’s a great student of the low-brow papers,” she added laughingly to Daphne. “She keeps us up to date with all the scandal, while we keep her up to date with politics—isn’t that right, Mother?”

Claudia’s tone was unusually friendly and warm, so Margaret was not in the least offended by this imputation, especially as it was perfectly true; she
did
love to read the
Daily
Mirror,
propped up against the coffee-pot in the sunny kitchen.

“That’s perfectly right,” she assented gaily; and, pleased at being thus drawn into their
tête-à-tête,
she dumped her
shopping
on the ground, and sank into the chair that Claudia with one hand had pulled forward for her. “What is it you want me to tell you, my dears—that is, if I can? As Claudia says, I delight in newspaper gossip, but I don’t always remember it very well. The spirit is willing, but the memory is weak, as you might say!” Margaret was charmed at the way they both laughed at the gentle little joke, its near-pointlessness glossed over because of the sunshine, and because it was Saturday morning, and because the May bushes were in bloom.

“The thing is, Mother,” explained Claudia, rather more business-like now, “can you remember—can you by
any
chance remember—how long ago it was that they had that bank
robbery
in Hadley High Street? You remember—the one where one of the assistants was killed, and there was all that rumpus about the collection for his widow—”

“Which could all have been avoided,” put in Daphne
knowledgeably
, “if they’d only been content to organise it through the usual channels. Or if the organisers had even bothered to
tell
the manager before …”

There wasn’t much that Daphne didn’t know about voluntary efforts and their pitfalls; but, as always, there was a great deal that nobody else wanted to hear. She gave up resignedly, and without surprise, while the other two continued the debate.

“Yes, of course I remember,” agreed Margaret. “Certainly I do. But it must be a long time ago now. Years.”

“Yes, yes!” interposed Claudia eagerly. “That’s what
I
say! But how
many
years—that’s what we’re arguing about, aren’t we, Daphne?”

Daphne nodded, and both looked expectantly towards Margaret. Margaret longed to give a verdict on Claudia’s side, in gratitude for this unusual friendliness, for this pleasant moment in the sun. But which
was
Claudia’s side?

“Well,” she temporised. “I’d have to think about it…. Three or four, would you say …?”

“Or even more, perhaps?” prompted Claudia, at the same
moment as Daphne broke in eagerly with: “That’s what
I
said! I
said
it was only three or four—”

Thus provided with her clue, Margaret loyally exploited the vagueness of her memory to its furthest limits short of outright lying. “Yes, now I come to think of it, it might easily have been more,” she corrected herself. “Time passes so quickly at my age. It could easily have been five or six years; or even—”