The Happy Prisoner (37 page)

Her voice wobbled on the last word and she bit her lip and rushed out, fumbling in her sleeve for a handkerchief.

“Well, goodbye, Mrs. Ogilvie,” said John, with the false geniality of relief that she was going. He pumped her hand. “Hope you enjoyed the party. Forget that it ended like this. I need hardly ask you,” he said pompously, “not to talk about it. My mother doesn't like people to think she's not strong, you know.”

“But my
dear
John!” She raised her eyebrows at him. “What
do
you take me for?”

“We take her for what she is,” said Oliver gloomily when she had gone. “Can't you imagine how she and Stan are getting down to it now in the car? They'll probably call in on a few people on the way and tell them. Jonathan, why do you let Heather go out with that bounder?”

“Oh—” John made a harassed gesture.

“Sorry, forget it. You don't want to be badgered now. I say, I—I'm most terribly sorry about all this. I suppose she'll be all right, will she? Has she been like this before?”

John shrugged his shoulders and turned away as if he did not want to talk about it. He looked drawn and old, much older than forty-three. He didn't look like Max Baer any more. If he looked like a pugilist, it was a
passé
, retired pugilist, who had taken a lot of beatings and given up fighting.

Much later that night John wandered back into Oliver's room. Dr. Trevor's partner had been, and taken Lady Sandys away to a Birmingham nursing-home where, he said with empty cheerfulness, he could get sympathetic nursing for her and arrange for suitable psychological treatment. Miss Smutts tried to tell him what had happened last time a psychologist had tampered with Muffet's libido, but the doctor, who thought Smutty was the old family nurse, had said: “Yes, yes, yes, Nanny. Now don't you worry yourself; everything's going to be all right.”

Elizabeth had gone with him to Birmingham and had not yet returned. Heather had gone defiantly to her party with Stanford. Oliver noticed that she was not wearing the bracelet; she would probably never wear it again. Mrs. North had gone to bed early with sleeping pills. She had cried when they told her what had happened and had insisted on blaming herself for not having been in the room to prevent it. Miss Smutts, too, had gone to her room early to pack. She was going to stay with her sister at Malden, until she should be needed again. “And the dear knows
when
that
will be,” she had prophesied gloomily, “now that you've let the medicals get their hands on her. Much better have left her to me.” At about eleven o'clock Oliver heard her come downstairs again, and heard her shuffle along to the kitchen in her bedroom slippers to put the kettle on for peppermint water for her indigestion.

When she had creaked upstairs again all was quiet. A dead weight of fatigue hung over the house and it was difficult to imagine that the rooms had so lately been filled with noisy, happy people. Oliver was playing the wireless softly to keep himself awake until Elizabeth came back, so that he could hear about Muffet. John opened the door just wide enough to admit his shaggy head. “D'you mind if I come and smoke my last pipe in here?” he asked. “I saw your light on when I was in the garden. I can't sleep yet and the house gets on my nerves when it's so quiet. D'you mind? I won't talk if you don't want to.”

“Come in, old boy. We'll wait up for Elizabeth together, and hear how your mother's settled in. Get yourself a drink. There should be some whisky in the cupboard.”

“No, thanks. Oh well—perhaps it might pep me up a bit.” Oliver heard him pour a long drink, with only a splash of soda, which he took over to the armchair by the fireplace. When he leaned back behind the high side of the tapestry chair, Oliver could only see one trouser leg crossed over the other, and one slipper swinging from his toe. He remembered the first time he had sat out of bed in a chair, how funny it had felt not to be able to cross his legs.

For a while neither spoke. The only sound was the gentle strum of the wireless and an occasional bubbling whistle from John's pipe, which had been mended with sticking plaster after David had knocked it out of John's face, leaping up to hug him. Presently John crossed over the other leg and swung the other slipper. He stirred and gave one or two deep sighs and Oliver, who did not want to talk, took pity on him and said: “If I was Mrs. Ogilvie, I should say: ‘A penny for them.'”

John was not sensitive to platitudes. He said: “I was thinking about poor old Heather.”

“Oh, her,” said Oliver. “I should have thought you'd got troubles enough without thinking about her. Personally, I'd rather not think of her floating ecstatically over the floor in the arms of Squadron-Leader Black.”

“It's different for you; she's your sister. I can't help feeling miserable for her. You see, this whole business is worse for her than anyone.”

“I don't get it.”

“But don't you see, Onions, it's worse for her because she thinks it's her fault. Of course it isn't; it would probably have happened, anyway, sooner or later. Nobody's blaming her, but she's got it into her head that we are. She'll hardly speak to anyone because she feels so sensitive about it. She wouldn't even say good night to me, and I heard her say to that Black fellow: ‘Thank God to get out of this house; they all look at me as though I was a criminal.'”

“Poor old Heather,” said Oliver. “She does love to see herself as the black sheep.”

John leaned forward and knocked out his pipe in the empty grate, a habit which always annoyed Heather. “Who d'you think's going to clear it up?” she would ask. “Or do you think it can be left there until the fire's lit next autumn?” He sat for a while with his hands between his knees, turning the pipe round and round, and then suddenly looked sideways at Oliver from under his puzzled brow. “What can I do?” he asked helplessly. “How can I get near her? She won't even let me try to explain that I'm not blaming her, just takes it for granted that I am, and shies off accordingly. God knows, we were getting far enough apart before; this'll just about finish it.” He put the pipe between his teeth again and leaned back again, hugging one knee, sucking gloomily on the empty pipe.

“D'you know what she told me once?” Oliver said. “She said you made her feel inferior because you had a much nicer nature than she has.”

“Oh rot,” said John. “What a damn fool thing to say. She's worth ten of me. And if it's a question of being pi—look at the way she's always rushing off to church. I never go more than once a week.”

“Perhaps why she rushes, why she took up this Catholic business in the first place, is because you made her feel there was something lacking in herself and she wanted to find it.”

“It doesn't seem to have made her very happy.” The evening's troubles seemed to have weakened John's loyal refusal to discuss his wife. Once having started, he unburdened himself now with relief. “D'you know what,' Onions, I wish she hadn't done it; I think it was a great mistake. One ought to stick to what one was brought up to. It's only unsettled her more than before to go floundering about among all these mysteries which the priests can't possibly explain properly. I think that's why they go in for all this incense and fancy dress and
omnia saecula saeculorum
, to cover up the fact that they don't really know who they're chanting
and mumbling at. I wish Heather had listened to me. If only I'd been at home …”

“Mm,” Oliver felt drowsy. He let John ramble on, catching desultory remarks here and there. Dimly, half listening to the wireless, he heard John say something three or four times, before his brain registered it as something worth paying attention to. “And she thinks I'm criticising her,” John kept saying. “Me, of all people. If she only knew, my God, if she only knew!”

“If she only knew what?” asked Oliver, opening his eyes.

“Oh, nothing. I wouldn't bore you with it. It just”—John gave an unamused laugh—“it just seems so fantastic you telling me she thinks I'm too good for her, when all the time …”

“Spill it,” said Oliver, for John obviously wanted to be pressed into the luxury of confession. “What have you done? Robbed a bank?”

“Wish it were as simple as that. I could tell her that, but this—I could never make her understand. She'd be terribly hurt.”

Oliver turned off the wireless. “If you want to talk about it,” he said, “get on with it. If not, shut up.”

“I haven't told a soul,” John said. “I could never tell Heather, yet I feel such a swine keeping it from her. It's been preying on me ever since I got back.” Oliver could not see his face. His voice came disembodied from the armchair in the panelled dimness at the other side of the room. Up and down swung the heel of John's slipper, while the other foot tapped on the floor, a tom-tom accompaniment to his words.

.…

“It was when I was in Australia, waiting to come home, after the cruiser had got us away from Burma. I hadn't seen Heather for nearly two years; I'd never even seen Susan at all. There was a bit of a hold up about getting home. I knew I might have to wait an age for transport—well, that was understandable; there were sick and wounded to be thought of first. In any case, the Jap war wasn't over then, and there was a chance I might be drafted to some other regiment out there. There wasn't much left of mine. They gave me indefinite leave and a certain amount of back pay and told me to stick around and get myself fit. I was a bit moth-eaten.

I was dying to get home. We'd all talked of very little else since we were captured—that and food. And yet I was dreading it too, in a way, because when Heather and I had been together last we hadn't been making much of a go of it. You weren't at home, of course, so you wouldn't know, but we had a holiday up in
Scotland, a second honeymoon, it should have been, but I couldn't do a thing right. Heather didn't enjoy herself. I bored her—made an awful ass of myself.

You ever been to Melbourne? Pretty fine town. There's something invigorating about the air of that country too; you feel you can tackle anything. That's why I want to go back. Heather doesn't want to, and I suppose it is asking rather a lot to make her uproot herself, especially when I bore her. She'd be even more bored with me if she hadn't got her family and friends to fall back on. Of course she'd make new friends; Heather is pretty quick at making friends, I don't know how she does it, but it would all be very strange at first.

When I first got there I wasn't feeling too good—starvation mostly, I suppose, and I'd had the inevitable dysentery. Of course I made a beast of myself on the food, and got gastric trouble. I went to a doctor and he put me on a diet, gradually increasing—you know the kind of thing—and soon the boy began to feel pretty fit. They've got steaks out there as big as your head, and as much butter as you can eat, real farm butter, and cream with everything, thick, yellow cream. There was a place I often used to go to lunch, Charlie's Buttery, it was called, where you sat up on stools and this chap Charlie would knock you up bacon and eggs and then sling you a great lump of pie with about half a pint of cream on it. He knew where I'd come from, so he always did me extra well.

It was there it started actually, in Charlie's Buttery, at lunch-time—no, half a sec—or was it dinner? No, it was lunch, because I remember how dazzling the sun was when I went out into the street afterwards. The pavements there are very white, you know, and the sun just bounces off them and hits you smack in the eye. A hat doesn't help much because the glare comes up underneath.

Well, this girl—but I haven't told you about her yet, have I? She was on the stool next to me, and I'd noticed she'd done herself pretty well. You know what ridiculous little appetites most women have, always thinking about their figures. This girl had had a hamburger. I watched Charlie frying it on the griddle behind the counter; it always fascinated me to see him flip them over. She had fried potatoes with it and then she had two helpings of raisin pie and ice cream, and then she asked for a second cup of coffee. Then she put on some lipstick, like girls always do automatically after a meal, whether they need it or not, then she climbed down off her stool—she was only a little thing—and went to the door. Of course old Charlie called out to her, quite politely, to remind her she hadn't paid. She turned round and
smiled. She had a funny, crooked smile, with a dent in one corner of her top lip where she'd fallen off a bicycle when she was a kid.

I'm sorry,' she said, ‘I haven't any money.' Just like that. Some nerve, you know. Charlie didn't know what to do; in fact, he was much more embarrassed than she was. He was a softhearted chap who hated any trouble. If a drunk ever came in, he used to sweat blood in case they started any funny business and he'd have to call the police. I felt an awful ass. I mean, it was no good pretending I couldn't hear what was going on because I was the only other person in the place. It was late for lunch. So then this girl tells him she'll stay if he likes, while he calls the police. She didn't look much more than a kid, you know, but full of spunk.

I thought I might as well have one good meal,' she said, ‘before I was arrested for vagrancy!'

‘Are you sure you haven't any money?' Charlie asked her. She came back to the bar to show him inside her purse, and it was then I noticed how shabby all her things were. She gave the impression of being smart; you know how some women can wear any old clothes and make them look pretty good. She was very thin and pale too, and I saw then that she was older than I'd first thought her.

Well, what could I do? You'd have done the same, any mug would. Of course I paid for her lunch. She didn't want me to, but, in a queer way, she didn't seem interested enough to protest much, as if things like money weren't important to her any more. It wasn't a lot in all conscience; Charlie's wasn't the Ritz, where you pay for the furniture and the waiters' laundry as well as your food. I was terrified she was going to be horribly grateful and cling to me or something, but she was grand. She just thanked me very prettily and walked out. Wouldn't even let me see her home, though I'd have liked to.