Prisoner's Base (16 page)

“No, they wouldn’t,” Margaret contradicted her. “They wouldn’t dare tell me such rubbish, not at my age. They might to
you,
because you stick out your neck and ask for it—people who are prepared to believe nonsense will get told nonsense—it’s one of the laws of life. But I’m not just talking about guilt feelings in Maurice’s case—though I have to admit that, with me, a little more humility on his part wouldn’t come amiss; I can’t feel that all this boasting and bumptiousness is quite the appropriate demeanour for a young man in his position. But that isn’t what I mean. It’s something else. It’s—how can I put it?—it’s the way he tells the story of his crimes as if it was just that—a story. Unreal. Remote. Nothing to do with him.”

“Well, I expect he
does
feel like that by now,” Claudia pointed out. “It was seven years ago, after all, and he’s
naturally
doing his best to put it all behind him, and to start an
entirely new life. It seems natural to me that he should speak of that period of his life in a rather detached sort of way.”

“But there is no need for him to speak of it
at all
,” Margaret pointed out. “Nobody asks him to. If he wants to dissociate
himself
from his past life, then surely the sensible thing to do would be to try to forget it: to think—and certainly to speak—as little as possible about it. That I could understand. But he doesn’t do that. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to recount his exploits in the greatest detail and with the utmost zest—and yet, all the time, it’s as if he felt no personal
responsibility
—no involvement—of any kind. He seems so
untouched
by it all, that’s what frightens me. All those years in prison—they should have affected him somehow—moulded him —for better or for worse, I wouldn’t know, but there should be
something.
It’s not right—it’s peculiar—for a person to remain so untouched—like a child, almost—after going through all that….”

“In fact—you want him to
suffer.
That’s what you’re
saying
, Mother, all over again, only in different words. You don’t want him to have got away unscathed, that’s what it amounts to. It’s just the primitive notion of retribution again….”

Claudia had scored her point; and yet somehow her victory in the battle of convictions failed to bring with it the usual glow of triumph. She watched her mother uneasily as, with closed lips, the older woman arranged the sleeve of Helen’s blouse carefully on the board, and, still without speaking, reached for the iron.

“
Isn’t
it?” urged Claudia sharply. For some reason she wanted urgently to provoke Margaret to contradict—to defy—to plunge into the battle again with one of those familiar, acidulated, slightly off-centre come-backs which Claudia usually found so irritating. How she would have welcomed one of them now—but why? Why did it give her no satisfaction to have defeated her mother in argument thus completely—for it must, surely, be an awareness of complete defeat that was keeping Mother so silent?

Claudia was aware of a strange uneasiness of the spirit;
something
unfamiliar, long forgotten; something she could hardly name.

“Your attitude is simply punitive!” she cried; and she felt like a cat trying vainly to stir its victim to one more show of
life after playing with it, carelessly, for too long. “You believe in retribution! … In punishment!”

She flung the phrases like missiles, right at their target; yet Mother still did not answer. Plainly she had accepted her defeat, and had nothing more to say. Claudia was free, now, to deal with Maurice exactly as she chose.

And now, suddenly, she knew the name of the uneasy, half familiar sensation that had been troubling her during the last minutes. It was Fear.

D
EEP IN THE
summer grass, Helen lay staring up at the sky, and its blueness was framed all round by buttercups, tall, like forest trees. She had never noticed before how exactly like trees they were; with branches forking this way and that from the main stem, each ending in a gigantic flower. This, of course, was unlike any known tree—there are no trees anywhere, now, that bear at the end of each bough a vast, single flower, five feet across, and golden like the sun. But there could have been such trees once, brilliant among the coal-forests, battling with the tree-ferns for living space under the ancient sun. Almost, as she peered through the pale stems into the impenetrable jungle only a few inches away, Helen expected to feel the ground tremble beneath the ponderous stirring of some giant reptile uncoiling in the sun; to hear across the millennia the distant, unimaginable cry of the pterodactyl.

Actually, of course, she was listening for Sandra. Any minute now Sandra would whistle their special whistle from the field gate, and then come bounding through the long grass to join Helen in her hiding place; and there, together, they would make plans about how Helen should cope with Clive’s visit this evening. Sandra, alas, wasn’t going to be able to stay until he came because of her piano lesson; but this only made her advice and moral support before-hand the more
indispensable
.

For Clive, at last, had been invited to supper, just as Granny had advised; and with both Granny and Mavis there to help entertain him, it mightn’t be so very ghastly. Not nearly so bad,
anyway, as going to that awful Wimpy Bar again, and racking one’s brains single-handed for a new topic of conversation. Not that Mavis would be much help; but at least she would be
there
, an extra person; and Granny, of course, would never let one down. She had promised that she would help entertain Clive as well as cooking a nice supper for him, and so this she would certainly do, bringing up one topic of conversation after another, unflaggingly, until something took root and flourished in the little gathering; or, if the worst came to the worst, until it was time for him to go home. And Mummy wouldn’t be there. Helen had carefully chosen a day when Claudia would be out at some meeting or other; and with any luck Maurice would be out too. So far, he always had been on Saturdays. Although Helen herself found Maurice’s conversation thrilling after a fashion, she felt overwhelmed with embarrassment at the thought of explaining him away to Clive. And embarrassed about her embarrassment, too, for ought she not to be at least as broad-minded as Mummy about it all? Each generation was supposed to be more broad-minded than the last, and Helen felt that by feeling as she did about Maurice, she was obscurely letting down the side.

But what side? Which side was she really on? Why did Mummy’s kindness and sympathy so often give her this awful feeling? Because Mummy had really been awfully kind and nice about Clive being invited for just the evening when she, Claudia, wouldn’t be there; lots of mothers, Helen knew, would have been most put-out and offended at such an arrangement. But Claudia had seemed sincerely delighted to hear of the invitation, and had declared that she understood completely Helen’s wish to have her mother out of the way.

“But of
course,
darling! Naturally you want to have him to yourself—and I promise I’ll keep right away the whole evening. I don’t mind
how
late he stays, I’ll just slip up to bed when I come in and leave you to it. Mavis must stay up in her room for the evening, and I’ll drop a hint to Granny, too—she doesn’t always think of these things for herself. She doesn’t really
understand
, you see, what it is to be young—how an evening like this, at your age, with your first boy friend, can be the most wonderful experience of your whole life.”

After all this, of course, Helen hadn’t dared to mention to her mother that it had been specially arranged that Granny
was
to be present, the whole time; and she hoped, uneasily, that her mother would never find out. She wouldn’t be cross, exactly, but she would be surprised, in that awful, pitying way; and Helen would know that once again she had been a failure, a
disappointment
. And her failure would have been that most ignominious of all failures—the failure to feel wonderful
feelings
in a situation which demands them.

And yet Helen
did
have wonderful feelings—a strange secret pride stirred in her now, as she gazed into the blueness of the summer sky, and felt herself once again in touch with a secret source of glory, of which her mother knew nothing. Could be told nothing, either, for it was bound up, somehow, with all the things that Claudia thought a normal young girl should be bored by: with school, with poetry learned by heart for
homework
, and with the thud of tennis balls on summer turf; with giggling schoolgirl friends, and the sense of the summer term still only just beginning…. As Helen lay there, happiness flooded in from every corner of the sky, she could feel it pressing in on her from all directions; more and more of it in an
unimaginable
overflowing…. Top in English … top in Greek … perhaps to be chosen as Viola in the school play … and added to all this, in almost manic prodigality, Fortune had thrown in as well the deep grass, and the buttercups, and Granny’s baby chickens cheeping; and over it all the sky, all that boundless blue, a fitting lid for Helen’s happiness.

And in the midst of all this, here was Mummy thinking that the most wonderful experience in Helen’s life was going to be Clive’s dreadful visit this evening. She thought of his awkwardness, his paralysing inability to think of anything to say, and felt a familiar, terrible remoteness from her mother, like homesickness. She wished Sandra would come. Sandra had always been able to save her from this sort of feeling, as far back as she could remember; indeed, for so long had she and Helen been companions and playmates, far back into their childhood, that by now she was more like a sister than a friend. And yet it was the very fact that Sandra was
not
her sister—that Claudia was not her mother as well as Helen’s—it was this very fact that made her such a tower of strength when Mummy was being awful in this special way.

The apple blossom had all fallen now, and Helen turned on her side to gaze beyond the tops of the grass and buttercups
towards the two gnarled trees, where the tiny knobbly new fruits were just beginning to form. It was in the nearer of these trees, Helen remembered, in the worn, kindly crook of its old branches, that she and Sandra used so often to sit, long ago, and play Blow up the World. They blew it up with hydrogen bombs, of course, which you were always reading about in the papers, and at once it was gone, there was no one left anywhere; no houses, no people; nothing; just Sandra and Helen. And it was then, in this empty world, that the game really began.

For, of course, the first thing they had to do was to build themselves a house each; even now, years later, Helen felt her heart beat faster as she recollected the delight of searching for building materials among the ruins of the world. Sometimes their tastes were simple and modest, and they would simply drag planks and joists and doors from the shattered houses of some nearby town, and reassemble them into a little hut in some sunny glade, with a stream tinkling through it, and berries nearby for the eating; but sometimes a savage architectural passion, akin to lust, would seize them, and they would piece together dwellings of fantastic splendour. Great oaken doors and marble pillars from the shattered mansions of the great they would drag, light as thistledown, across the jagged miles of ruins, and set them up afresh on their chosen site. Gorgeous
fragments
of stained glass, blue, and gold, and ruby red, they would pick out from the rubble of smashed cathedrals, and glue miraculously together to fit vast window-frames purloined from some broken palace. Once they even found the Marble Arch itself, lying miraculously intact across the ruined junction of Park Lane and Oxford Street; and they carried it home,
effortlessly
, on their shoulders, right across the ruins of London, and set it up as the portal of their newest and most glorious dwelling place. Oh, and the furnishing of these palaces! The carpets, and the cushions, and the dark, shining tables, that they dug up out of the ruins of Heal’s and Selfridges! And the tins of peaches, of apricots, of pineapples, that they found scattered along the deserted streets! Whole sweet shops they sometimes unearthed beneath the dust and broken bricks, filled with chocolates, and marsh-mallows, and jelly-babies. They found great hams, too, and sausages, and deep-frozen turkeys that only needed to be warmed up at their never-failing camp-fire, which burned brightly, and for ever, without ever scorching the flowers or
the bright grass which grew, fresh and spring-like, to the very edges of the red-hot coals.

Sometimes, as they wandered on their plundering expedition among the ruined cities, they would meet two boys, survivors from the other side of the world; but the game was never quite the same when that happened. The boys were so dim, and faint, and characterless compared with Sandra and Helen; they
contributed
nothing. When they spoke, they spoke as Sandra or Helen would have spoken; they thought of nothing that Sandra and Helen had not already thought of; altogether, they might just as well not have been there at all. Only once had such a meeting been any real fun, and that was when they had come across two Chinese boys sitting on the ruins of the British Museum, piecing together the lost literature of their land by reciting to each other the bits they each remembered by heart. This set Helen and Sandra doing the same thing for the English speaking world, and soon they had restored the complete texts of Shakespeare, the Bible and the William books. They had been just about to revive the entire history and geography of their country by a similar method when Granny had called them in to tea, and it all had to stop. It was impossible to
continue
the talk over tea, because Granny always hated them playing Blow up the World in her presence. “It’s a
dreadful
game!” she used to remonstrate with them, “Really dreadful! ‘Blow up the World,’ indeed! What about all the rest of us, I’d like to know? And what do you suppose anybody would think if they were to hear you? They’d think you were a
dreadful
pair of little girls, quite horrid. Of course they would! Now, you just stop it, and come along and play something sensible …” and she would shoo them along into her room, and play ludo with them, or snakes and ladders … and somehow even these games were lovely too, in their way, especially with Granny playing as well, with such zest to win: clutching frantically at her grey curls when one of her counters was sent back to base, and murmuring magic spells into the dice box to make it give her a six.

So Helen and Sandra did not usually resent these arbitrary interruptions to their favourite pastime; particularly as they knew, and Granny knew, that as soon as they were on their own once more they would start Blowing up the World all over again, just as if nothing had happened. And so
it had gone
on for years—or could it actually have been only months? —until the dreadful afternoon—even now, Helen could hardly bear to recall it—when Mummy had found out about it all.

Not about the game itself; that wouldn’t have mattered at all, because Mummy wouldn’t have minded a bit, and anyway it was against her principles to interfere with children at play. No, what Mummy discovered was far more shattering; she discovered that Granny disapproved of the game: she actually caught Granny in the very act of telling them they were a pair of naughty little girls, and couldn’t they think of a
nice
game to play for once?

Mummy hadn’t said very much at the time; she had even smiled, and made some chilling little joke; but Helen had seen, with terror, that she had gone white and pinched round the lips, as she did only when she was very, very angry. And a few minutes later she had called Helen down to the drawing-room.

“Helen, darling,” she had said gravely, putting her arm round the child’s shoulders, “I don’t want you to be upset by what Granny said just now. It’s
not
naughty to play that game, you mustn’t ever think it is. Granny should never, never have told you that it was, but you must remember that she’s an old lady now, and has rather old-fashioned ideas. We musn’t blame her, but I’m more sorry than I can say that she should have put it into your head that such a game could be naughty. It
isn’t
naughty; it’s right and healthy that you should sometimes feel hate and aggression towards us all, that you should wish us all dead at times, and that you should act out your hostility in play. It’s right and natural; it’s what play is
for.
You must never, ever, feel guilty about having such feelings, or about expressing them….”

Even now, all these years later, Helen could still remember the sick, soiled feeling that had enveloped her as her mother finished speaking. Never, till that moment, had it occurred to her that one
could
feel guilty in this sort of way. Granny’s
reprimands
had conveyed nothing more than that grown-ups didn’t like the game, just as they didn’t like you dropping cups or walking mud into the sitting-room.
Of
course
they didn’t like it—they shouldn’t like it—it wasn’t a grown-up’s game. Mummy oughtn’t to like it either—there was something weird, and sickly, and awful, about her elaborate approval of it.

And she was wrong—wrong—wrong! Wrong in her approval
and also in all this about hate and hostility—of these, Helen knew instinctively, even then, the game contained nothing. It had needed no hatred, no aggression, to destroy the world, just its it had needed no strength to lift the Marble Arch on to their shoulders while the soft wind played among the leaves of the old apple tree. Nothing, nothing of these real-life qualities had been needed for their golden, fragile game, light as
gossamer,
and innocent as the summer air.