The Happy Prisoner (3 page)

“Oh yes. Mrs. Sandys was at lunch with her little boy, and Miss North met me at Shrewsbury station. She didn't come to lunch. She came in after we'd started and cut herself a cheese sandwich to take out. She said she hadn't time for any more.”

“That sounds like old Vi,” said Oliver. “She works like a black. She's a great soul; you'll like her.” He fixed Elizabeth with his eye, daring her to judge by appearances.

“She seems very nice. Well, if you're sure there's nothing you want …” She started towards the door. He liked the pert little point of her cap at the back.

“Nothing, thanks. I say—Nurse!” She turned, brightly prepared to hand him something or fetch a glass of water or shake up his pillows.

“Look, I don't think I'll call you Nurse, if you don't mind.
It seems silly when you're going to be more or less one of the family. I think I'd better call you Elizabeth, don't you?”

“Yes, whatever you like, Major North.”

“Sandy—that was the last nurse I had—used to call me Oliver, except when she called me Boysie. That was hell.” Elizabeth waited to see if he had anything more to say, and then went out, shutting the door carefully and quietly behind her.

.…

Since Oliver had come home from the hospital, it had become the family custom to forgather in his room for a drink before dinner. At six o'clock, before she padded home to her cottage in the valley, Mrs. Cowlin, looking ill-suited to anything so modern, would push open the door with her knee and bring in a tray of glasses, ice cubes, and gin, whisky, beer, or whatever Mrs. North had managed to get in Shrewsbury from the grocer, who had known Oliver for years and was sorry about him. Then would come Oliver's younger sister Heather, with her small son David in pyjamas and a Jaegar dressing-gown, and a nursery tray containing his hot milk and one
petit beurre
, and a mug of cold milk and sandwiches, cake, or whatever wanted eating up, for Evelyn to have when she could be dragged indoors from the farm. Evelyn was the daughter of Mrs. North's widowed brother, and had been staying at Hinkley during the war.

Heather would pour Oliver a drink and usually have one herself while David had his supper, but she did not stay long unless there were someone amusing to talk to. After five years of living at home during the war, it did not amuse her to talk to her family, and Oliver had now been home long enough for the novelty to have worn off. Mrs. North would come in, have one sip of a drink, go out to do something to the dinner, come back for a nip, go out again, come back, like a bird making sallies at its drinking basin, or, rather, like a hippopotamus constantly being interrupted at its water-hole.

Violet usually managed to come in, unless they were working late in the fields. Sometimes Fred Williams came in with her to see Oliver. Mrs. North did not like him very much and pretended that the room smelled of manure after he had gone. Sandy had always been there, with little finger crooked over a glass of sherry, making gay conversation to anyone who would listen, the furbelowed and trinketed silk into which she changed for dinner more unalluring even than her uniform.

Oliver liked to be washed and have his bed made before six so that he could be presentable for his At Home. He could
enjoy his dinner more, too, if he was rid of the stickiness and creases and aches that had accumulated during the day. Elizabeth worked in silence, answering his remarks politely, but volunteering none of her own. He enjoyed her deft, assured touch. She never knocked him by mistake where it hurt, and although he was heavy for her, she had a knack of lifting and managed to make him very comfortable. She was slightly built, but her arms were firmly rounded and strong, with a bloom of youth and health. They looked nice coming out of the short sleeves of her white overall.

“You'll come back and have a drink, won't you, when you've changed?” Oliver asked when she had finished.

“I ought to be helping Mrs. North with the dinner as soon as I've taken off my overall.” She was folding towels and gathering up his dirty pyjamas.

“Well, you don't have to brood over it like a witch, do you? You can come in and out. Ma always manages to. Come in!” he bellowed to a scrabbling at the door. The latch jumped madly and there was a thud and a precarious tinkle as Mrs. Cowlin entered bowed over the tray of drinks. She put it down on a table, glanced furtively at Elizabeth from under her arras of hair and crept out as if the floor of this room were made of thin ice.

“There you are,” said Oliver. “Have one before you go.”

“I don't drink, thank you, Major North.”

“Why not? Taste or principle?”

“I won't have one, thank you. I don't drink,” she repeated, not answering his question. She took the washing-bowl out to the downstairs cloakroom to empty it. Oliver hoped she was not going to turn out to be like the nurse in hospital who was always smiling because she was pleased to find herself so holy. She used to tell him he must be born again, and he had caught her praying over him once when she thought he was asleep.

.…

A miniature oak armchair, relic of some Elizabethan nursery, was kept in Oliver's room for David. At supper-time, he would carry it over to the bed and drag up the stool which he used for a table. As the window recess into which Oliver's bed was built was a step higher than the floor of the room, he had a bird's-eye view of the little boy on his low chair. He could see the cow-lick on top of his head, where the black hair gave a swirl before it shot the rapids of his forehead. When David's head was bent over his biscuit or the knot hole in the stool, Oliver could see
the arc of his lashes lying on the bulging, boneless cheeks; when it was tilted back to obey his mother's interjections of “Drink up,” most of him was hidden by the big white china mug, except for two wet black eyes, which stared and stared and went on staring after he had lowered the mug and let out the breath he had been holding while he drank.

“Wipe your moustache,” said Oliver, throwing down his handkerchief.

“Yes,” said David, thinking of something else. “Uncle Oliver, I want to tell you something. How do you cut your toe-nails, if you haven't any toes?”

“I don't. I file them usually. It's safer, when you can't see them.”

“I want to tell you another thing—”

“You mean ask,” said Heather, from the table where she was mixing Oliver a drink.

“How do you know if you've got a hole in your sock if you can't see your big toe sticking out?”

“I can feel it. The edges of the hole cut into my toe when I wiggle it.”

“You shouldn't stuff him up, Ollie,” Heather said, bringing his drink over. “It's going to be awfully awkward when you get up and he sees you really have only got one leg.”

“Perhaps I shal.' have my cork one by then. That'll be a great thrill. He'll be able to kick it as much as he wants.”

“Yes, till he kicks the good one by mistake.”

David had got up and gone to stare at the tent of bedclothes between the cradle and the foot of the bed. “Are you wiggling them now? Are you? May I look under the sheet?”

“You may not,” said his mother, and bent to pick him up. “Come on, you can go to bed if you've finished your milk. I've got heaps to do before dinner.”

David's face went scarlet and began to disintegrate. He beat his mother off with both hands. “David—stop it!” She jerked her head away, her face as red as his from the same quickly-roused temper. “Look what you're doing to my hair, you little fiend. You are
not
to kick me! Oh, Ollie—what does one do? I'm always having these struggles—stop it, David!” She managed to catch hold of both of his wrists in one hand and they stood breathing heavily at one another, furious. Heather's right hand looked as if it wanted to smack the child.

“Couldn't he stay a bit?” suggested Oliver mildly. “It's early yet, and he hasn't had any reading.” David looked from one
to the other judicially, wondering who would win, and saw Heather make a face at Oliver.

“Oh, Ollie,
really,
” she said. “Why suggest it? I did want to get him settled early. I've got Susan to feed, and I must change and do my face. Stanford's coming to dinner.”

“Surely you don't have to bother for him. He'd think you marvellous whatever you looked like—even first thing in the morning.”

“Don't be silly,” she said, rather snappishly. “David, now look; are you coming without a fuss? I've had just about enough of you today. You've absolutely worn me out. I do think you're an unkind little boy, when I've got so much to do.”

She made a great mistake, Oliver thought, in appealing to his better nature. It never worked. As David's face began to go red again, he said: “Why don't you go up and leave him here to keep me company? I'll send him up when I get sick of him.”

“If you're sure he won't be a pest. I wouldn't have said that David was the ideal company for someone with a bad heart.” She picked up the mug and carried the stool and chair back to their place under the wall table where the drinks were. “There's a piece of apple pie here for Evelyn—if and when she deigns to come in. If she wants anything else, there's some cake in the big green tin. Tell her not to dare touch the fruit salad; it's for tonight.”

As she was going out, she heard David say in what was meant to be a whisper: “Can I look under the sheet
now!
”

“If you're going to pester Uncle Oliver, you'll have to come up with me,” she told him.

“Once,” he said, ignoring her. “I looked under Evie's sheet, and there was a little dog in there, and a kitten.”

“How cosy,” Oliver said.

“Revolting,” said Heather, and went out.

While he was reading to David, Oliver let his mind stray and thought about his younger sister. What would John think of her when he came home? He had not seen her for more than a year, and before that, only in infrequent snatches since they were married in the first year of the war. Oliver had seldom seen them together. It was an accepted thing that they were very much in love, so he supposed they were. When Heather was touchy, people nodded at each other as much as to say: “We must make allowances for her. She misses John.”

John had not seen his wife in the full tilt of motherhood. He had never seen this baby that she overdressed, overwashed, overfed and generally overdid. The war had changed everybody,
but Heather more than most. She still looked the same: baby-faced, a little too fat, primrose-coloured hair so curly that she pretended she would prefer it straight, always something jingling at her wrists—and now, of course, that little gold crucifix round her neck as well—plump calves and small feet, but she never used to be so reckless and excitable. She was inconsistent too, fickle to her own personality. Sometimes, she was almost liquid with motherly love; at others, she was as shrill and exasperated as a slum mother boxing her child's ears in the street. David never knew where he was with her. Sometimes she treated him like a grown-up, sometimes like a baby in arms, sometimes like a show-piece, sometimes almost like a juvenile delinquent.

She seemed permanently wound up, as if she had lost the ability to relax, even after the children were in bed. She would sometimes come and sit in Oliver's room with her mending basket, but she fidgeted all the time; jumping up because she thought she heard the baby crying, putting down a sock half finished and starting on a vest, hopping from subject to subject, not interested in anything Oliver had to say and too distrait to say anything interesting herself. She had been lively and high-spirited enough in the days when her biggest worry was in which dress to go to what with whom, but she had usually been good-tempered and she had punctuated bouts of terrific energy with sudden periods of inertia, when she would fling herself down and fall asleep wherever she happened to be. She could dance all night in London, drive up to Shropshire through the dawn in somebody's sports car, drive off with somebody else to swim in the Severn, play tennis all afternoon, and then suddenly, when there were people in for cocktails, she would be missed and discovered unconscious on a sofa, pretty in sleep as a child.

She never cast herself down to sleep now, and did not appear to sleep much at night, for Oliver, lying awake, could often hear the floor of her room creaking as she moved about overhead, doing probably quite unnecessary things to the baby.

Any comment on Heather's behaviour usually ended with: “I expect she'll be all right when John comes home.” He had been a Japanese prisoner of war for nearly a year, and since his release was waiting in Australia for a passage home. Oliver had not been at home during John's last leave before he went to the Middle East, but it was always spoken of as a halcyon time. He and Heather had left David with Mrs. North and gone up alone to a tiny fishing hotel in the Western Highlands. “Whatever happens,” Mrs. North used to tell Heather, “at least you'll have that fortnight to remember.”

It was after Heather came back from the nursing-home where Susan was born that she started this business of going to church. Religion was a subject not often discussed by the Norths, but they gathered that Heather had made friends with another patient, a Roman Catholic, who had persuaded her to go to Mass. Mrs. North had written to Oliver in alarm, telling him that Heather had taken to going off on her bicycle before breakfast—even on weekdays—that she had mysterious appointments after dinner in the evening, known as “going out to coffee with someone”, whom Mrs. North suspected of being the priest, and that she had bought a Madonna, and a crucifix to hang round her neck.

“I believe she thinks of Turning,” his mother wrote. “Can you imagine Heather, who never seemed to give religion a thought! Still, I shall try not to mind, even though I was raised as a good Presbyterian, if it's going to make Heather happy.”