Prisoner's Base (9 page)

All right. So he was sly. What of it? He was probably
dishonest
, too; and selfish, and lazy, and conceited. But this didn’t make him a murderer, or indeed a criminal of any kind. Such qualities passed as normal anywhere.

Out of all these speculations, Margaret now tried to pick the ones that would be most likely to reassure Mavis, sitting there tense and expectant, like a child, who knows that it has a right to be consoled.

“Really, Mavis, you must pull yourself together,” she
admonished
. “There’s no proof—none whatever—that this young man is a criminal. Claudia is only guessing—she’s always had a tendency to dramatise things—and she may be quite wrong.”

“But, Mrs Newman, there
is
proof,” protested Mavis. “He has said so himself. Well, practically. I mean all this about having been shut away from the world for seven years. And now he says that he had no books to read all that time….”

Mavis stopped, confused, evidently realising that she had given herself away. “Or something like that,” she finished weakly, as if this could somehow blur the certainty that she had been eavesdropping. Margaret smiled grimly.

“I daresay
he’s
dramatising himself too,” she said. “He probably means he was brought up in a home where there were no books because his father didn’t believe in education, and used to beat him if he caught him reading. That’s just the sort of extraordinary childhood Claudia’s protegés always
do
have—” Again she stopped, remembering Mavis’ tearful account of a mother who didn’t let her go to ballet classes and made her wear her hair in a plait till she was sixteen.

“So I wouldn’t worry about it any more, if I were you,” she finished. “Just settle down and put your light out and go to sleep. That’s what I’m going to do.” She turned towards the door, but straightaway Mavis called her back, a new ring of terror in her voice.

“Oh, please, Mrs Newman! Please don’t do that! I’m sure you ought to stay up until we know he’s gone!”

Margaret thought so too, really, and had had no intention of going to bed until she had heard the front door close on the
visitor. But equally she had no intention of spending the
intervening
time in here with Mavis.

“Very well,” she assented austerely, “if you feel so strongly about it. I’ll go to my room and get on with some letters. It’s nearly eleven already, he can’t be going to stay much longer unless—”

She wished she had stopped just one word sooner. For Mavis, as if she had been waiting for just this cue, rushed to finish the sentence for her: “Unless Claudia offers to put him up for the night! Oh, Mrs Newman, that’s just what I’m afraid of! She’d be able to find room for him, you know, even with me here in the spare room, she’s still got that awful Put-U-Up in Derek’s study! That’s just what she might do, because you see, if he’s just out of prison he’s probably got nowhere else to go—Oh, Mrs Newman, I can see it all!”

So could Margaret; though it was doubtful if what they were seeing was precisely the same thing. Mavis, presumably, was seeing a shadowy figure flitting on evil bent about the stairs and passages of the house at dead of night. Margaret, on the other hand, was seeing a fifth breakfast to cook; and a fuss about the extra blankets for the Put-U-Up, which had already been stored away in mothballs for the summer. She was seeing, too, a shortage of milk in the morning—all these neurotics of Claudia’s seemed to swill down milk like alcoholics swilling gin. No number of pints you could order from the
milkman
was ever enough; they would help themselves to bottle after bottle from the refrigerator, all day and all night, especially these insomniac ones, they were the worst of all. Margaret recalled (her old, half-forgotten fury arising in her fresh as paint at the memory) the PhD student and his Snacks. She remembered how she used to go to bed leaving the breakfast table laid neat and ready for the morning, as any competent housewife does; and then would come down, morning after morning, to find the whole thing sullied by the traces of this dreadful fellow’s midnight feedings. Such extraordinary things he seemed to have, too—in the intensity of her early morning race Margaret used to identify every crumb. Ginger biscuits—sardines—peanut butter—disgusting malty health drinks—it was no wonder his stomach was in a bad way. And Claudia would never let Margaret speak to him about it, because she said it was Compensatory Eating on account of his wife’s having left
him, and it wasn’t his fault. But then his wife came back, and during that ghastly week before they both took themselves off to stay with her mother, it seemed to Margaret that he ate more than ever. In addition to all the peanut butter and rubbish, his wife used to fry him things, Margaret remembered bleakly. During all that week her nice clean cooker was never free of sputters of burnt fat.

Was this Maurice going to turn out just such another? In rare communion of spirit, Margaret and Mavis looked at one another, each in her own way imagining the worst, scheming to avert it. And then suddenly, into this scene of gloom and
foreboding
, burst Claudia. So light and joyful were her movements that they had scarcely heard her steps on the stairs before she was in the room, beaming at them both.

“He’s just going!” she announced—welcome words these, at least—“Won’t you both come down and say goodbye to him? Oh, Mavis, you’re in bed already. What a pity! I can’t think why you didn’t come and join us, we had such a marvellously interesting evening. Especially after you’d gone, Mother—he really let his back hair down. I was right, you know—he
has
been in prison—” Claudia lowered her voice a little here, but it still throbbed and vibrated with the triumph of her evening. “And it was for something pretty bad, too—I mean, something that
most
people would call pretty bad.” She paused,
significantly
, and the word “murder” hovered in the air between them, unsaid. Then she continued: “He’s been explaining to me how it happened, how he got involved in it, and oh, I do so
understand
! I’m so glad I’ve had this talk with him, I think it’s helped him enormously to know that there is someone who understands—someone who isn’t shocked; who isn’t scared to invite him to their house, or ashamed to introduce him to their friends! That’s why I so particularly wanted you to be there, Mavis, as well as Mother—so that he’d know I wasn’t ashamed to introduce him to you all. I only wish Helen had been in, too! But anyway, come on down now, Mother—say goodbye to him nicely so that he will know that in
my
home at least he isn’t going to meet with disapproval and rejection! My
goodness
!”—Claudia’s expression was now radiant, exalted, like pictures of the saints of old—“My goodness, I wonder what Daphne would say
now
! And that old maid Miss Fergusson! I’m longing to see their faces when I tell them who he is, and
how I had him here for a whole evening, talking to him,
treating
him as an honoured guest—!”

Claudia had to check the flow of her euphoria, for now they were out on the landing; and soon they were down in the hall, and Maurice was politely thanking them for a pleasant evening.

“But you must come again very soon, Maurice, you really must!” cried Claudia. “Shall we fix it now since you’re—well, since you’re not on the telephone? What about Saturday? Lunch on Saturday. Or Sunday if you’d rather, I’m free all the weekend.”

One would have expected—even Margaret, silently
disapproving
of the whole affair, would have expected—that this young man, lonely and friendless and just out of prison, would have accepted the warm invitation with alacrity. It seemed so incongruous as to be almost rude that he should take an
engagement
book from his jacket pocket and study it in a
businesslike
manner before replying.

“Lunch? Afraid no can do,” he said at last. “On Saturday I’m having lunch with your pal Daphne. And on Sunday with Miss Fergusson and her father. Sorry. How about some weekday evening?”

A
GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP
restored something of Claudia’s sense of proportion. Her fury against Daphne and Miss Fergusson was not so much dimmed as focused more precisely, directed into more rational channels. Last night, it had been the blind, instinctive response to a shattering blow. Maurice’s calm announcement that Daphne and Miss Fergusson, as well as Claudia, were inviting him to their homes, had seemed at the moment like a slap in the face so stinging, so utterly unexpected, that for a while Claudia couldn’t reason about it at all. She had even felt for a few minutes that it was Maurice himself who had delivered the blow, purposefully, with the intention of hurting and making a fool of her.

But now, lying here in the curtained darkness, waiting for the alarm to go, Claudia realised that she had been less than reasonable, and she was only thankful that, in the moment of shock, her natural self-command had not deserted her. She had,
she was sure, shown no hint of how deeply she had been wounded, but had simply, pleasantly, fixed an alternative time for Maurice to come and visit them.

Claudia turned restlessly on her pillow, and tried to clarify her feelings. Why was she so angry with Daphne and Miss Fergusson for doing exactly what she was doing herself—offering friendship generously—and, yes, courageously—to an odd and possibly dangerous young man?

The answer flashed, clear as a bell, into her quick, capable brain. The thing that made it all right for
her
to behave in this quixotic way, but all wrong for
them,
was that, for them, it was out of character. It was phony—unreal; and there was nothing that Claudia deplored and despised as much as
phoniness
. Good, honest prejudice and narrow-mindedness, openly expressed, Claudia could, she told herself, understand and almost respect (though how far this new-found respect would extend into her next row with Mother would remain to be seen); but this hypocritical
pretence
of being tolerant and
broad-minded
; this sham benevolence, this play-acting of a rôle that did not belong to them—this, Claudia told herself, was what she could not stand about Daphne and Miss Fergusson. It was this that had made her so angry. To be tolerant, wise,
understanding
; to see the weakness behind the wickedness—this was Claudia’s rôle. To her, it was second nature, it was the way she was made. With these special gifts of hers she could do untold good to Maurice, just as she had to Mavis, and to the many others before her. She could restore to him his self-respect, his integrity; she could rehabilitate him, give him the confidence to face the world once more with head held high. What Daphne and Miss Fergusson were offering him was counterfeit coin—curiosity masquerading as sympathy—exhibitionism
masquerading
as courage. Maurice should be protected from such women.

But the maddening thing was, there was no way of protecting him. After a few minutes’ agonised and fruitless scheming, Claudia had to face this sad fact. There was no way of
preventing
him going to lunch with these women, no way of
undoing
the fact that they had invited him. They had spoiled everything with their meddling! Yesterday was robbed of half its glory, and there was no way of restoring it. No point, now, in ringing Daphne up and saying: “Guess who I had round for coffee last night … turned out to be
such
an interesting young
man … stayed till all hours …” No point, even, in ringing up her other friends, they would only say, now, “Oh, is that the same man that Daphne…?”

Claudia turned once again in her bed, and lay face
downwards
, fists dug deep into the pillow. The infuriatingness of it all! The maddening, unnecessary ruination of everything! There must be
some
way of getting even with the pair of them!

Swiftly, she corrected the childish thought, before it had properly lodged in her brain, before it had to be accepted as irrevocably hers. There must, she reformulated the idea, be some way of helping Maurice more effectively, more immediately; these vague invitations to meals weren’t going to get him
anywhere
. Did he need a job, for instance? Did he need somewhere to live?

Ah, that was it! That was the solution! Neither Daphne nor Miss Fergusson would be able to go one up on
that
! What, you had him to lunch, did you? How nice. He’s staying with us now, you know, we’ve plenty of room, especially now, while Derek’s away. I’ve fixed him up a bed in Derek’s study—poor boy, he was so grateful, he could hardly believe it. He’d been getting desperate, you know; he had nowhere to go …

Or had he? That, of course, might be the snag. Suppose he was already comfortably fixed up in digs found for him by the prison welfare people, with a motherly landlady who knew nothing of his past …?

But Claudia was not one to be disheartened by hypothetical disasters. By the time her alarm clock went off, her mind was already awhirl with schemes; and by the time she was dressed and ready to go downstairs, she had not only worked out how and when to broach the subject with Maurice, but had
composed
such a letter to Derek as would entirely reconcile him to the prospect of finding an ex-criminal installed in his home on his return. Not that Derek was usually difficult about these things; but Claudia had discovered that it was important that he should have them presented to him in the correct light at the very beginning, before Mother had had a chance to get at him. This congress in Oslo was a blessing from that point of view; if Derek’s acquiescence by letter could be obtained before Mother had had a chance to make a fuss, the battle would be as good as over. As she went downstairs, Claudia began mentally
adding to the letter a PS. which should ensure Derek’s reply by airmail, by return, and yet should not throw him into any flurry of anxiety, as urgency of any sort was liable to do. It was important that Derek should be kept very, very calm.

Meantime, while she would, of course, keep in touch with Maurice herself, it would be best if he didn’t come to the house again until after Derek’s letter had arrived. It would be a pity if the show-down with Mother had to take place before Claudia had all her weapons sharpened, all her troops at battle stations.