Read The Happy Prisoner Online
Authors: Monica Dickens
The Happy Prisoner
Monica Dickens
To
CHRISTOPHER DICKENS
Chapter 1
The moth, which had been clattering frantically inside his lampshade for the last ten minutes, suddenly dropped onto the open page of his book and lay there stunned, only a slight questing of the antennae showing that it was still alive. Because he was enjoying the book, Oliver went on reading until he came to the words which the moth obscured. He was just going to lift the book to shake it out of the window, when his eye was caught by the pattern on its wings and the needless perfection of its unimportant little body.
It was lying with wings half spread, the corners of the lower ones just showing inside the upper. They appeared to be made up of thousands of tiny fibres, weaving a pattern in browns and fawns that was like a priceless shawl or a piece of tapestry. At the edges, which were shaped like shells, with a tuft of down between each scallop, the fibres blended into a frieze of darker brown, which was continued at exactly the same point on the lower wings, so that when the two were spread the pattern would be continuous. This moth, which had seemed such a nuisance when it was trying to batter itself to death round his light, was really a show-piece, a miracle of skilled craftsmanship prodigally squandered on a single night's existence. (Was it only a single night? He must get someone to bring him a book on moths from the library. It would be a fascinating study on these September nights under the open window.)
If this pattern had been on a shawl or tapestry, it would have taken months or years of painful, eye-straining toil. It might have been someone's life-work, someone who would go blind over it and die without ever knowing that it was destined to endure and be treasured for hundreds of years. But Nature, who could mass-produce this kind of thing millions of times a day, could afford to squander it on an ephemeral thing like a moth, which, far from being treasured, was discouraged with camphor and closed windows. This moth, in fact, Oliver thought, was very lucky to be getting so much attention.
It had a velvet head and a dusty body. Its tail was a sandy tuft of finest hairs. Incredible that anything so soft could make such a metallic clatter against the ceiling and the parchment
lampshade. It seemed to be rested now and was starting to weave its head about as if it meant to take off. Oliver lifted his book and shook it out of the window. Perversely, the moth clung. He slapped the book underneath, and then it was gone, although it would probably come in again to join the rest of the suicidal company whirring and slapping about his bedside light. Something horrid fell onto his sheet and crouched there, looking at him. It was a greenish-black flying beetle, with patent-leather scales, and claws, and a malevolent, hooded head. Moths were all right, but things like this were the drawback of having one's bed under the open window. He shook the sheet and it bounced into the air and fell on its back on the polished bedside table, where it squirmed, helpless as a sheep, with all its legs going in a frenzy of useless effort. He watched it until its agitations took it to the edge of the table and it fell off.
Glancing at the clock, he saw that he had frittered away nearly half an hour on moths and beetles. Before this new phase of his life, he had never had much time for idle musing. Thoughts which occurred to him he voiced in the first words that came into his head. Aspects of nature or the human character were noted by his mind only
en passant
. Their impact might be provocative enough at the moment and give rise to lively emotions or the embryo of an idea, but there was always something else clamouring for attention, and he passed on, dropping the thought undeveloped, like a new-born chick fallen from its nest. He realised now how much his superficial eye had missed and was surprised to find that his mind had nevertheless recorded and stored away many things behind his back. Now that retrospection was one of his favourite ways of passing the time, he often found himself remembering things of which at the time he had been only half aware.
If anyone had told him in the old days that it was possible to spend half an hour quite happily in contemplation of the veining on a rose petal or the pattern of a moth's wing, he would have dismissed it as not for him. Yogis and poets and philosophers did it no doubt, but not active young men who found it difficult to sit still long enough to see a play through to its end. It was different now. He had got past the time of fret and exasperation, of refusal to relax and resign himself. He had gone through all that in hospital: nights and nights of lying fiddling with the sheet, with his mind going round like a caged squirrel, lighting one cigarette after another, following the night nurse with wide-open eyes, until at last, as much in
exasperation for herself as in pity for him, she would give him the tablets from which he was supposed to have been weaned. He did not want them anyway. What use were they, he would argue in a cross mutter, which would make her glance apprehensively at the other sleeping patients. Oh, certainly, they made you sleep, but everything was twice as bad in the morning when realisation, absent at the first moment of waking, came rushing back with the increased momentum of distance. On top of which, you had a headache and a taste in the mouth.
His transition to this comparatively contented, contemplative state had been so gradual that it was hard to say just how it had come about. It had crept on him with the lessening in intensity and frequency of his attacks of pain. When it was possible to be comfortable in one position for more than five minutes, it also became possible to read more than one chapter of a book at a time. As his preoccupation with himself diminished, he began to take a sympathetic interest in the working of someone else's mind, instead of becoming so irritated that he wanted only to have the author standing on the other side of the ward so that he might sling the book at his head. He went back, distrustfully at first and then with growing enthusiasm, to authors to whom he had thought himself permanently antagonised at school. He discovered that Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray and Stevenson could transfigure the dreary waste between lunch and tea in which everyone but he seemed able to sleep. He had held out for a long time against Jane Austen, whom he had mistrusted ever since he had seen a performance of
Pride and Prejudice
at his sisters' school. He was reading
Emma
now, and the moth had fallen onto a piece of Woodhouse hypochondria.
He was just going to pursue this, when the door in the shadows on the other side of the room opened and his mother came in with his hot milk on a tray. She was a specialist in things like laying tables and arranging trays and dishing up delicate little helpings in separate dishes. It took time, but she did it quite beautifully: a spotless tray-cloth, glass, china and silver polished to the last degree of sparkle, nothing forgotten, hot things sizzling and cold things iced, not too much of anything but more in the kitchen, butter not in a lump but in dewy curls, the morning paper crisp and unfolded instead of inside out with a smear of marmalade on it from someone else's breakfast. Often there were flowersâa few pansies, or a sprig of stock, or one perfect rose in the little cut-glass vase she kept especially for Oliver's tray.
Whenever possible, she liked to bring him his meals herself. She did not trust anyone, even the nurse, to do it properly, and if she went out to lunch, her enjoyment of it was quite spoiled by the thought of Oliver's. If Mrs. Cowlin was ever left in charge, the poor woman was so frightened by all the instructions and warnings she had received that it seemed she would never get from the door to the bed without dropping the tray. She always forgot something, and went scurrying out for it in terror, to come creeping back with the knife, or mustard, or whatever it was, held placatingly out before her. Oliver's sisters forgot things too, but would suggest hopefully how he could manage without. “You can stir your coffee with the handle of the jam spoon, can't you, Ollie? And have you got a hankie? I've forgotten your napkin.”
His mother came heavily and carefully across the room carrying the glass of milk on a little round tray with a lace cloth. She never came blunderingly, like Violet, with a cracked cup slopping into an odd saucer, or hastily, like Heather, as if she grudged the time, with a glass only half full of milk only half warm.
“Nearly time to settle, darling,” Mrs. North said, using a word from his childhood, “Is there anything you want?” She put down the milk, picked up his empty coffee-cup and stood over him, watching him, stouter than ever in the dress into which she liked to change for dinner: sea-green silk, with bands of large white flowers running round all the ellipses of her body. She wore rimless pince-nez on a thin gold chain hooked behind one ear, and her grey hair, which was very mauve when she first came back from the hairdressers, but faded to a pleasing tint as the week went by, was swept smartly across the back of her head into a wig-like arrangement of waves and curls. Although she had lived twenty years in England, she still would have passed unnoticed among a crowd of matrons in her native Philadelphia.
“Is there anything you want?” she repeated. “Did Sandy leave you quite comfortable before she went?”
“Yes, thanks. I think I'll read a bit longer.”
“Well, don't settle late, dear. Oh, these awful moths! Don't they drive you crazy? Let me shut the window.”
“No, please, Ma.” He lifted a hand nervously as she bent forward. The thought of anyone leaning over his bed made him shrink with the fear of being hurt. “I can shut it myself if I want to. I'm not
quite
paralysed, you know.”
“You must remember what Hugo said about the least possible
movement. I don't trust you entirely. Goodness knows what you get up to when you're alone in here.”
“Oh, of course, I get up and dance round the room. You ought to look through the keyhole some time.”
“I'm sure you do too much. You hardly ever ring your bell for anything. I don't know what you think I gave it you for:”
“I hate that bell,” he said shortly.
“Well, for Heaven's sakes, darling, why? It's a very charming bell.” She picked it up and rang it. “It's a cow-bell; one of the girls brought it back that time we went to Davos.”
“I don't knowâit's silly, I suppose. I just hate it.”
“There's that dinner-bell we used to use when we had a parlour-maid. You could have that if you like. Or maybe we could have someone come out and fix you an electric buzzer.”
“No, Ma, thanks, it isn't that. It isn't
the
bell, it's any bell. I just hate the idea of lying here and summoning people like a sultan clapping his hands.”
“But that's ridiculous, dear. How are we to know when you want anything? Of course, we know you're very sweet and considerate, but we all understand, and you must too, that you mustn't do one thing for yourself, not one thing. You're the most important person in this house. I want you to have everything. I only wish there were more I could do ⦔ Her round, powdered chin quivered in its bed of soft flesh, her busy, decisive mouth weakened.
Oliver put out a hand. “You do too much already,” he said. “Forget about the bell; I was only drivelling.”
The door opened just far enough to admit the craven face of Mrs. Cowlin, her cobweb of hair tied round with a baby blue ribbon. “Oh, pardon,” she breathed. “I thought I heard the Major's bell.”
“You took long enough to answer it,” said Mrs. North, her self-control immediately restored by the necessity for militant action against inefficiency. “I'm sorry, but I rang the bell by mistake. It's all right; he doesn't want anything.” Mrs. Cowlin blinked and withdrew her head, shutting the door so that it opened again in a moment.