The Happy Prisoner (18 page)

“If she's able to go out, she could have got me some more coke,” said Mrs. North, who looked tired and had a smudge on one side of her small, squashed nose. “I told her to make the boiler up, but of course she's let it go nearly out. I've had a terrible job to get it going again.”

“I wish you'd try and get a maid,” said Oliver. “I hate you having to do these dirty jobs. And I can't do anything except just lie here like a parasite—”

“Hush, dear,” said his mother. “You know I wouldn't let you do it even if you were up. I can manage fine. It's only at week-ends when the Cowlins don't come. We should be quite
all right if only everyone would co-operate. It is a bit depressing to come back to a cold house with no curtains drawn and the back door swinging open. I shall be glad when Elizabeth gets back.”

“So shall I,” said Oliver, whose back was still sore from Mary Brewer's zealous rubbing.

“I can't find the children's milk jug
anywhere
.” Heather came in wearing a damp flannel apron with her hair dishevelled, the fringe parted in the middle and standing up on either side like two little horns.

“Why, I've just found it in the scullery, soaking in the floor bucket. I thought you'd put it there.”

“I? Why on earth should I—”

“Well, it's black, you can't use it.”

“That's Vi,” said Heather bitterly. “She doesn't care a hang about anyone else's things. Honestly, Ma, it's a bit thick. She can't even be trusted on her own for an afternoon. What's she been doing with my jug, Ollie?”

“Search me,” he said.

They kept finding things that Violet had or had not done. As they got more and more irritated with her, the chances got less and less of her news being received sympathetically, if and when she chose to break it.

When his mother told him that he did not look well, Oliver realised that he did not feel so well tonight. His eyes felt heavy and he was conscious of his heart beating. He took his pulse. The rate was all right, but he did not think the slight irregularity was purely imagination. Was the thing never going to right itself? There were times when he despaired of ever being anything more than a bath-chair nuisance.

His box of heart pills was empty. The new box was in the cupboard, but he did not want to ask his mother to get it, because she would fuss about him needing them. The longing to get out of bed and walk across the room was almost unbearable. If only he could do just that, he would ask nothing more, would stay in this room for the rest of his life. Just to be able to walk across the floor to the corner cupboard. Imagining himself doing it, he could actually feel the floor under the sole of the foot that was not there. His stump twitched. With the weight of the leg removed, the big nerves in it were too powerful. It was always making involuntarily movements, even in response to no conscious thought, as readily as an eyelid blinks.

He began to realise that one of his moods of depression was hovering over him. Either because of this or because he had eaten too much toast and dripping, he could not eat his supper,
which made his mother anxious and his mood worse. His head started to ache and the dressing on his stump, which Mary Brewer had insisted was loose so that she could rebandage it, was now too tight.

Violet had not come back to supper. His mother kept coming in to ask if he thought she had gone to see Joan Elliot, or had taken her bicycle out and had an accident, or had gone to the cinema, and should she ring up Joan and find out?

Perhaps she had thrown herself into the pond in an agony of indecision. As the self-absorption which always accompanied his fits of depression grew, he began to lose interest in Violet's
amour
. The idea, which had seemed so promising this afternoon, began to pall. He tried to see it as he had before, as the best thing for Vi, her one chance of being married to a man with whom she could be happy, and who seemed quite satisfied with her as she was, but he could not make the affair seem anything but dreary and rather squalid, nor Fred anything but a bore and a prospective blot on the family. This afternoon it had not seemed to matter that he spoke with a Norfolk accent, was paralytic in company and a head shorter than Violet. Oliver wished now that he had not tried to persuade her. Sentimental, meddling fool. Heather made him feel worse by saying cheerfully: “I hear you're having a mood.”

“Who says so?”

“Ma told me in confidence.”

“Well, I'm not,” he said crossly.

“Please yourself,” she said, “but I would just like to know what Vi's been doing with the kettle. She boiled it up on the fire in here, didn't she?”

“Why ask, if you know she did?” said Oliver.

When his mother came in to say good night, she stood by his bed, folded her arms and said: “Violet's back, and where do you think she's been? Having supper with Fred. I was very cross. People will talk, you know, even about her. You know what she is, she's got no idea of what one can and what one can't do. Darling, you don't think she's running after that dreadful little man, do you?”

“He's not a dreadful little man,” said Oliver.

“Don't get me wrong, dear, you know I'm very fond of Fred, but he's not quite—I mean, one couldn't—” Mrs. North had been in England long enough to know beyond what point democracy was impracticable. “I mustn't imagine things,” she went on. 𔄘Violet never thinks about men; I often wish she did. And the way she treats this house like a hotel! I'd kept
her supper hot and you can guess how mad I was when she came in and said she'd had ham and eggs at Fred's, although, needless to say, she ate her own supper as well later on. No wonder we got so few eggs from the farm. All this about the hens not laying.”

“Ma,” said Oliver, “you're tired. Go to bed.” Violet was certainly making things very difficult for herself.

An hour later, when he was lying in the dark wondering whether, if he did eventually go to sleep, he would wake up feeling as bad as he did now, the door opened an inch and Violet said in a raucous whisper calculated to wake anybody up: “Are you asleep?”

“No,” he said resignedly. She came into the room, and by the dying glow of the fire he could see that she was wearing her Jaegar man's dressing-gown and plaid felt slippers. She came up to the bed and stood with her hands in her pockets looking down at him, her cigarette end glowing in her unseen face. “Thought you'd like to know,” she said. “I took your advice.”

He, did not know whether to be pleased or sorry. Six hours ago he would have been genuinely enthusiastic, but so much had been said and thought since that he had to whip some conviction into his: “Oh, Vi, I'm so glad. You mean you're going to marry him?”

“Mm-hm.” She had caught that expression from her mother. “I'm awfully bucked I did, Ollie. I believe you're right; he really did mean it. I didn't know what I was going to say. I just charged in before I could change my mind. He was sitting there looking awfully browned off, and I thought: ‘Oh hell, I'd better get out of here,' but, luckily, he seemed to know what I'd come for. I didn't have to say anything; he just sort of took it for granted. We've been making loads of plans. It's going to be rather a lark really, but gosh—the thought of telling Ma!”

“She won't jump at the idea,” Oliver warned her, “but you'll probably bring her round.”

“
I
never will. You've got to help me, Ollie. After all, it was you made me do it.”

He groaned. “Oh, Vi, I can't.”

“Rot. Look, be a sport, break the news for me tomorrow after I've gone out. I'll stay out to lunch and they'll have simmered down a bit by the time I get back.”

“I wish you'd do your own dirty work.”

“Don't be a swine. I thought you were on my side. I do think you're a twerp, Ollie, honestly.” She had started by whispering, but her voice had risen by now to its normal pitch. He was
afraid his mother or Heather might come down to see what was happening.

“Oh, all right,” he sighed.

“Thanks loads. That's got that off my mind.” She sank into a chair and lit a cigarette from the stub of her last one. “Gosh, I don't feel a bit sleepy, do you? I could talk all night. D'you know what Fred's going to do? He's going to register half the herd in my name and let me do what I like with them. He's going to buy me a bull, as good as Tartar. He's—”

“Tell me about it tomorrow, old girl. I've got a headache.”

“Oh Lord, you're not going to have a mood, are you?” That would upset the household, upset her chances.

“Of course not. It's enough to make me, though, the way everybody keeps asking me if I've got one. Go away now, there's a good girl, and let's get some sleep.”

“O.K.” She got up and tightened the dressing-gown cord, which she wore round her hips, like a man. “Never mind, you'll have your Elizabeth back tomorrow, that'll make you feel better. Night, night.” Halfway to the door, she turned with a giggle. “Tell you what, I wonder me and Fred don't give you ideas. They say one wedding makes another.”

Oliver was sickened. “Go away,” he said.

“'Sfunny,” mooned Violet, “I do feel bucked now that I've taken the plunge. You ought to try it. I feel as fit as a flea. I could go out and take Jenny round the National course. I feel just as if I'd had a couple.”

Violet's engagement was going to be a little trying if it was going to make her moonstruck. Oliver had not bargained for this. And to compare her happiness with Fred to anything what he would wish for himself—it was fantastic and presumptuous, it was almost profane. Violet swam blissfully out. Was it his imagination, or was there already an increased assurance in her walk and manner? As she went upstairs, he heard her singing adenoidally about roses and Picardy. Did she want to wake the whole house? Anyway, if she were going to get above herself, the family would soon take her down.

He heard her door bang, then he switched on the light and began to read, but he could not concentrate on the book. He could hear Vi moving about, although she was two floors above him. He pictured her in her attic room with the cistern, their old playroom, which she clung to because it had a trapeze swinging from the centre beam. She could only walk upright in the middle of the room, and after all these years she still sometimes came down to breakfast with bumps on her head where she had sat
up unguardedly in bed. Oliver hoped she was not wearing his old striped pyjamas tonight. It would be too incongruous to wear men's pyjamas on your engagement night. But there was something so incongruous about Vi getting married at all that his imagination sheered away whenever he tried to picture it. And this air of gay girlish rapture was going to be the most incongruous thing of all. Poor old Vi, he would try and put her case as well as he could tomorrow to make up for the things he was thinking about her tonight.

He thought of Fred, going to bed in his little stone, slate-roofed cottage, furnished with throw-outs from the house. He had been into Fred's bedroom and knew that he slept in a sagging brass bed with one knob missing and did his footballer's hair at a mustard-coloured dressing-table with a mirror that swung itself back to front. He knew that he kept the green suit behind a curtain hung across one corner and his other clothes in a tallboy with huge knobs and sticking drawers, and that he washed his vermilion face in an enamel basin at a washstand that smelt of wet wood. Fred did not seem to notice any of these things, and neither would Vi, although her mother would want to have the cottage done up for her. He pictured Fred lying neatly right in the middle of the bed, with his gaudy nose outside the sheet. Although he knew it was unlikely, he imagined him in a nightshirt and when he got out of bed he would look like someone in an unfunny farce. Oliver wondered whether he were feeling elated or nervous or proud, or simply dazed at having brought the thing off. If he had been scared of coming to the house before, what would he feel like now? Oliver wondered whether he intended to get married in the emerald-green suit.

Susan was crying. After a few minutes he saw the square of light from Heather's window appear on the lawn and heard Heather get out of bed. Susan went on crying. Why didn't she give her a dummy or something? Why did women get married, anyway? Vi didn't know what she was in for. The thought of Vi with a baby was so comic that it made him feel better.

He went to sleep with his book open and the light on, and woke in a panic from a dream of terror, thrashing about and hurting his stump. He was sweating and his heart was thudding. Hugo was right in what he implied, though the soft-voiced old devil would not say it right out. He was net getting any better.

Chained to the bed. If only one could get up and have a walk on the lawn, or heat some milk or make a pot of tea. Better almost to be in hospital; at least there was always a night nurse about. He believed he would even welcome that horrid girl
with the teeth who used to try to wash him at five o'clock, pretending it was six, as if she did not credit him with the sense to look at his watch. At least she had sometimes made tea for him—if she happened to want some herself. If Elizabeth were here, he might have rung the bell and asked her to make some. She would not mind; she would take it as all part of the job to be woken at two o'clock to make tea for a melancholic. But she would not sit with him and drink tea and talk to him. She would give him his tea, ask briskly if there were anything else he wanted, and go back to bed in her neat blue-and-white spotted dressing-gown.

He saw Heather's light go out and heard her get back into bed. He wondered if she had said her prayers to the Being whom she seemed to regard more as a sparring partner than a God, and whether they had done her any good. He wondered whether they had made her feel holy enough to make him a cup of tea. If he rang the bell, it would irritate her as much as it irritated him. He ought to have a long stick, so that he could tap on the ceiling.