The Happy Prisoner (21 page)

“My babies!” she gushed, with clasped hands. “The darlings, How are they?”

“David's fine. He was in here till half-past seven. The other reature's been giving Elizabeth an awful time—screamed till bout one o'clock.”

“Pooh,” said Heather. “She can't be such a wonderful nurse s she thinks if she can't manage an angelic baby better than that. She's probably made her uncomfortable. I'll go up and see.”

“No you don't,” he said. “You're sleeping in Elizabeth's room. She's looked after your brats for you, so you might at least give her some peace.”

“But, Ollie,” she wailed, “I must go and kiss them good night.” “And anæsthetise them with gin fumes and Stanford Black's faun-like breath? Not if I have to get out of bed to stop you.” presently, she fell asleep in the chair by his bed. He watched her for a while, seeing in her again the young, untroubled girl who used to fall asleep wherever she happened to be when at last her vivacity was exhausted. Then his eyes closed too and he went to sleep with the light on, to wake again at five o'clock and find her groaning and stiff and shivering. She left her shoes where she had kicked them off and crawled upstairs, cursing him for letting her go to sleep.

“You thought I was tight last night,” she told him when she came to see him later in the morning.

“I hope you were,” he said. “I should hate to think you talked such rot when sober.”

“I was only pretending, you know, like I used to sometimes when I was young and feeling excited, and Ma used to say: ‘You're either plastered or plumb hysterical,' remember? I don't feel very young this morning, though,” she added, rubbing her forehead until her fringe stood on end, “or excited. How is it that you can go to sleep feeling wonderful and wake up to find nothing's any fun any more? I thought sleep was supposed to do you good.”

“Never heard of a hangover, I suppose,” he said. “Go on, you'd better go off and confess it, if you're going, or the priest will be having his lunch.”

“Don't be blasphemous,” she said primly.

“That's what you said last night.”

“I didn't, you said it. I remember wondering why people who haven't got any religion themselves always have to jeer at someone else's.”

“How do you know I haven't got any religion?” “You never go to church.”

“How can I?”

“No, of course not; but would you, if you could? You never used to unless you were dragged.”

“I wouldn't unless I knew why I was going and what I hoped it would do for me. Do you know why you pedal off to Mass so earnestly every Sunday? If you don't go, you feel as uncomfortable as if you walk under a ladder without crossing your thumbs, isn't that it?”

“Oh, Ollie, don't let's have a religious argument at this time in the morning, I don't feel up to it. Why can't you leave me alone?”

“Well, you'd better be prepared with a few arguments before John comes home. You know what he is; he never accepts anything unless he's sure he understands it. Look what he was like with that radiogram—charts and diagrams and most of its inside strewn about all over the place, when the thing was doing perfectly all right on its own. He'll want to thresh this out with you, and you've got to justify yourself.”

“And I suppose everyone will back him against me,” she said, “the same as you all do that prig Elizabeth. I'm sorry, Ollie, because she belongs to you, more or less, but I do not like that girl. I can't think why Ma's so keen on her. I'm sure she doesn't like any of us; she's too damned aloof. Look at her, she's been here nearly eight months and she still goes about as though she didn't belong. She wouldn't think twice about walking out whenever it suited her, without consulting us. You wait; she's just the type to disappear suddenly in the night, and I must say I wouldn't be sorry if she did.”

“You would,” said Oliver, “considering how much she does for you.”

“Only because it suits her. It's part of her game to make people think she's indispensable. It's no good being saintly at me, Ollie, I don't like her. I don't like anybody this morning. Oh God, look, there's Vi, going for a jolly tramp with the dogs. Look at her going all across that wet plough instead of going round by the hedge. Doesn't it infuriate you? Fred must have some sort of perversion, I think, to want to marry her.”

“You're vile,” he said.

“I glory in it,” she told him, and went out, jingling her charm bracelet round until she found the faun and making an affectionate grimace at it, looking at Oliver to see if it was annoying him.

What was John going to make of her? Having no guile himself, he took everyone at their face value and he would never understand that Heather said half the things she did for effect, to liven her tedium. Oliver could picture her in her present restless, dissatisfied state making rings round a bewildered John. Perhaps there was more hope for them now that she was playacting so much. If she wanted to, she might play-act herself into being sweet with John. Or she might be poisonous.

People sometimes said to Oliver: “You must get bored to death lying here all day,” and when he denied it they only thought
he was showing fortitude. But he was only bored when he did not feel well enough to take an interest in anything that went on outside his own body. Mostly, the days passed so quickly that night was sometimes upon him long before he was ready for it. With all the day in which to write letters, he would find that he had not had time to write one, or to finish his library book, or a plasticine animal he was making for David. One of the charms about being an invalid, however, was that you could go on doing things far into the night without suffering for it next day. His nights had been revolutionised since an Army friend of his, a simple youth called Teddy Beare, who had probably never done anything so opportune in his life, had brought him a large thermos flask. This was filled with tea every night by Mrs. North, who trusted no one else to screw the lid down tightly enough, and it lasted for two wakings at two cups a time. As he dozed off in the evening, he almost hoped he would wake again soon, and on nights when he slept right through and woke to find Elizabeth replacing the untouched thermos with a freshly made cup, he felt quite cheated.

Having lost his dread of wakeful nights, he scarcely ever had one, and when he did, instead of tossing and fidgeting and sighing and turning the light on and off and wondering who would feel worse, he or Elizabeth, if he rang the bell, he could sit up calmly, drinking scalding tea with no regrets for the horrid night nurse with the teeth and her stewed, tepid cups. Refreshed, he would read or write letters until he fell asleep again, the thermos standing by his bed like a guardian angel with two more cups of tea in it.

If he woke within waiting distance of half-past seven, he did not drink any more tea, because it would spoil the cup Elizabeth brought him. She made better tea than anyone, even than his mother, who claimed to have become so Anglicised that she could make better tea than the English. Elizabeth did not turn the light on when she came in, so that, against the darkness of the rest of the room, the light from the window showed up the spiral of steam rising from the cup. A Spode cup in a deep saucer like a bowl, with a grey and white cow and a farmhouse on one side and a woman feeding hens on the other, it stood steaming there like a tempting-advertisement for something that could not possibly taste as good as it looked:

Outside in the garden the birds were liquid with song, squandering all their music on this immaculate hour. As the freshness of the day wore off they would lapse into chirps and monosyllables, unless it rained and washed them a clean page of air
to trill on again. Two or three thrushes—he liked to think it was always the same ones—were hopping on the lawn with a capricious air of not looking where they were going that was belied by sudden stabs into the grass. Working both legs together, they might just as well have had only one; and Oliver thought that if he were out there hopping with them, his action would be very much the same. Just as when he imagined what the floorboards would feel like if he could cross the room, the naked sole of the foot that was not there curved itself to the tickle of the wet grasses that were springboards for the clammy little feet of the birds.

Curiously, unless he were having one of the increasingly rare moods of depression in which he longed to be anywhere except where he was, it never irked him that he could not get out into the singing, pearly morning. He had been a spectator for so long now that he thought he could enjoy the garden just as well by looking at it as by taking part in its early-morning life. This room and his bed were the only tangible world. The garden outside, with its lawns stepping down to the bottom of the meadow that rose opposite in the hill with the clump of trees on top, obscuring half the hazy Wrekin, was a picture no more tantalising than a landscape on a wall. One might trifle with the fancy of getting inside a picture, as Alice got into the looking-glass, but one's enjoyment of the picture was not spoiled because this was impossible.

So when people said: “How dreadful for you to look at that lovely view and not be able to go out, especially in the spring,” he did not feel a pang. He did not try to explain, because he realised that nobody who had not been in bed for a long time or in prison could understand how one grew used to the egocentric shrinking of one's habitable world.

“I hear you may be up and about soon,” they said. “How wonderful that will be.” He did not try to explain that the wonder might be offset by the insecurity of being jolted out of cloistered habits. It was habits that made the day pass so swiftly, handing him on from event to little event like a bucket at a fire. His day was posted with landmarks. Meals, of course, always on time, thanks to his mother's clock mania; three pipes a day, after breakfast, lunch and tea; the papers, the postman, the family to say good morning, Elizabeth in a white overall to rebandage his leg. David darting in after his walk instead of going to wash his hands for lunch, clattering across the floor in the clumsy shoes which Heather's latest doctor had built up to correct his pigeon toes. Elizabeth in a flowered overall and a
cooking apron that never showed any traces of cooking, bringing and fetching trays; Cowlin with logs, for it was still cold enough for a fire, especially when your bloodstream had been short-circuited; David for his supper, the six o'clock news, the family for drinks, Evelyn for halma, a recent passion strong enough to lure her in from the farm. Black coffee after lunch and white after dinner, in accordance with his mother's convictions about caffein and sleep; his hot milk, his heart pills, his ginger biscuit, his washings, his bed-makings, his back-rubbings, all the little paraphernalia which keep an invalid too busy to lose his grip, which bolster his self-importance as a solace for the loss of his liberty.

Elizabeth's own love of routine and order made her pander to his habits. He had become so much attached to them that he wondered how he was going to shed them when he started to get up. Even if he did shed these, he would probably never shed the habit of having habits. As a young man, who thought nothing such fun as things arranged on the spur of the moment, who switched his tastes on impulse, who would not be pinned down to dates and hours and never come to a meal on time, he had despised old men who built themselves a protection of habits against the increasing precariousness they found in the world.

He knew that he would never go back to being a young man. His illness stood like a wall at the end of his youth. Ahead, at thirty, lay a quiescent maturity. He would probably become very soon an old man who walked the house like a rumbling lion if his meals were not on time, who changed his underwear at the same date each season, who lunched every day at the same table in the same club off an identical mutton chop and scoop of Stilton, who would not go anywhere abroad where he could not have bacon and egg for breakfast, by the sounds of whose morning toilet you could set your watch, who slit his letters with a paper-knife, who read
The Times
in the same order every day and would not allow himself to put pencil to the crossword puzzle before lunch, even if a solution leapt at him from the page.

Besides the trivia of his day, of course, there were bigger landmarks to keep him going, seeming disproportionately large in the confinement of his existence. There was Violet's wedding, more of a menace now than a landmark; there were visitors to see him, occasionally friends to stay. There were Elizabeth's week-ends, with the disruption of Mary Brewer, and the fun of plaguing Elizabeth when she returned clam-like from the arms of Arnold Clitheroe. Larger than anything at the moment,
because it was exciting not only him but the entire household except Violet, loomed the homecoming of John. Oliver was very much looking forward to seeing him again, although he had never known him well. He had played golf with him and drunk beer with him and talked about things which put no strain on the mind, and had accepted him, as everyone else did, as “suitable”, without more than a passing wonder as to why Heather was in love with him. Oliver, at the time of their engagement, had been preoccupied with himself as an officer in the Shropshire Yeomanry. As he had been a Territorial, he got his commission at the beginning of the war and went early out to France. On his last week-end at home, Heather brought John Sandys to stay at Hinkley. John was still a civilian and did not count in those gallant days when Oliver thought it was all going to be like what one had heard of the last war. He was posing about fatalistically and planning a few last riotous days in a London teeming with girls eager to let him drink champagne out of their slippers before going out to mud and blood. He had been in camp near Blackpool for a few months, and Blackpool was gay. He had brought a girl from there to stay at Hinkley, a curving blonde in what was then the fetchingly new uniform of the A.T.S. Heather, as always when she had an admirer around, was at the top of her form and it had been a gay week-end with barely time to notice John as more than an inoffensive chap so madly in love with Heather that he laughed at everything she said. Oliver remembered how nice John had been to his mother. He had put it down at first to strategy, but realised afterwards, when John went on standing up for her and fetching things and asking her what she had been doing all day, to which she was not accustomed, that he was really like that. Oliver, excited, on the verge of something new and tremendous, who had never in his life known what it was like to be left behind, jollied his mother along for fear of a sentimental lapse, but she was gallant and corseted and self-possessed. She had not been so fat at the beginning of the war, which proved, she said now when they told her not to eat chocolates, that it was glandular.