The Happy Prisoner (45 page)

Mrs. Ogilvie detached herself from one of the nearest parties and stood below him with legs outthrust like Napoleon on a little mound at Rattigan. “I forgot to tell you,” she called. “I met Mrs. Linneagar by the garage just now when I was getting our tea out of the car. She asked me to tell you they were just going off to their friends and wouldn't be back late. And, Ollie,” as he started to manoeuvre his chair round, “don't go away, I want you to meet a great friend of mine; she writes books. Ollie!” But he pretended not to hear, and although out of the corner of his eye he could see the friend to whom Mrs. Ogilvie was always offering him as copy, approaching reluctantly, he completed his turn and started back for the house. He could not always get up the ramp if the ground was sticky. He could not get up now. He pushed at the wheels until his arms ached, but he kept rolling ignominiously back onto the lower lawn, nearer to the persistent bleatings of Mrs. Ogilvie, who, mercifully, was not agile enough to climb the Ha-Ha.

If only he could kick this blasted chair into a flower-bed and walk up. Elizabeth saw him struggling and came running out of the house. “Wait!” she called. “Don't strain yourself. I'll push you up.”

“I can
do
it,” said Oliver crossly. He gave a final thrust just as she put her hands on the back of the chair and got up the slope with her assistance.

“What's the matter?” she asked, walking behind him.

“Nothing. What d'you mean?”

“I ought to know when anything's the matter with you by now. Your face is as easy to read as a child's.” This did not make him feel any better. He told her what was the matter.

“What do you expect? You didn't really think they would stay, did you?”

“He's supposed to love the child. How can he be so inhuman?”

“He's not. He's just obsessed. That's how it will always be for Evie now. He'll break her heart over and over again, until finally she gets so tough she won't have a heart to break any more.”

The children were being collected for the jumping contest, which was the chief event of the afternoon. Evelyn was to jump fifth. The first pony had already been shooed into the ring and was sulking its way over and through the jumps, when Evelyn realised that her father was nowhere to be seen. She kicked Dandy out of the crowd of ponies in the paddock and quested up and down the field, asking anyone she knew. “Where's Daddy?” she asked Mrs. North. “Where's Daddy? I must wait to jump till he's here. He wants to see me.”

“He should be somewhere around,” said Mrs. North cravenly, looking about her so that she did not have to look at Evelyn.

“Where's Daddy?” Evelyn asked Violet, who was standing by one of the jumps. Violet shrugged her shoulders.

“I'll have to change my place, Vi. I can't jump till he comes. Will it matter if I swop with Michael Roberts?”

“Don't
fuss
, Evie, and take Dandy out of the way. Look out!” Evelyn pulled Dandy back as a roan pony thundered up to the jump with its knees going very high, ears pricked, nose thrust out and quarters gathered for a tremendous leap, and at the last minute stopped dead with its neck still stretched towards the jump, while a very small girl in a blue jersey and a beret described a slow parabola and sat neatly in the brush fence, setting up a wail that brought her mother running flat-footed down the hill. Violet picked her up, plumped her back on the roan pony, said: “You're all right, Amy; take it again and let him see you mean it,” ran back a few yards with the pony, whipped it round and gave it a terrific harroosh which got it over the jump without it or its rider quite knowing how they got to the other side.

“Now what's the matter, Evie?” She looked round, but Evelyn had gone.

“Fred, have you seen Daddy?” Fred scratched his head, tilting his cap to an absurd angle, and looked round, resting one hand on his cob's table-top quarters. “Isn't that him over there?” He pointed to a man whom Bob might possibly have resembled if he had grown a moustache, lost most of his hair and changed into a plus-four suit and a pork-pie hat with flies in the band.

“Elizabeth, where's Daddy? I can't jump till he comes! I promised him he should see me.”

“I expect he's somewhere about. You go ahead and jump, and mind you win. Look, you'd better go back to the paddock; they'll be calling your number soon.”

Could nobody find the courage or the right words to tell her? Oliver thought, but when Evelyn came riding towards him and stared up at him with agonised eyes, all he could say was: “Perhaps he's in the house, watching from a window.”

“Oh, but he must—Oh, hold my pony a minute, could you, please? I must just—” Evelyn jumped off and flung Dandy's reins at a nervous little man who was standing near. She scrambled up the protruding stones which made steps up the Ha-Ha, stumbled at the top, picked herself up and tore up to the house, negotiating the grass bank on all fours.

They had called her to jump twice before she reappeared at Oliver's side. “I've looked in all the rooms; he's not anywhere,” she said desperately. “Oh, Uncle Ollie, he
must
be here. Where is he? It's not even as if he was so small I couldn't see him.”

Violet was beckoning sweepingly at her to come down. The pony in the ring crashed through the last jump and, exalted with
I
having knocked so much over, bolted away to the edge of the field before its rider could stop it.

“Come on, Evie!” called the Master. “You can't keep missing your turn.”

Even he could not deflect her. “Tell them to let me wait till last,” she whispered to Oliver. “I'll go and see if he's at the farm.” She was gone again before he could stop her. “Can she jump later?” he called. “She's gone to get her whip.”

“What's the matter with her?” grumbled the woman in the mackintosh. “She'll miss her chance altogether if she doesn't look out. Come on in then, Stewart, and remember what I told you about your hands.”

The smug little boy in the boots and jockey cap had finished a clear round and cantered out of the ring with his pony flicking its tail in contempt for the size of the jumps, and two other children had bucketed their way round before Evelyn came back, running under the wall, her eyes still scanning the field.

“Seen him?” She wavered uncertainly below Oliver, looking palely up at him like a little pond creature.

“Here, I wish you'd take your horse,” said the little man plaintively, who had been holding Dandy at arm's length, gyrating as the pony moved so as to keep face to face with him.

“Come on, Evie!” They were yelling at her again from the ring, and the children in the paddock were goggling at her like a herd of sheep at a fox.

“What's the matter, old girl, got stage fright? Come on, you go in there and win! Hup, she goes!” Mrs. Ogilvie put her hands under Evelyn's knee and gave her a leg-up that nearly shot her over the other side. Evelyn gathered up her reins, still looking vaguely round. “I was waiting … I couldn't see Daddy … I wanted to …” She stood in her stirrups and craned over the heads of the crowd.

“Gracious heavens, is that all? He's gone out to tea; no wonder you couldn't find him. Get a move on now!” She gave Dandy a slap on his quarters that made him start forward, nearly jerking Evelyn out of the saddle. The crowd made way for her and she cantered into the ring, flopping about like a sack of potatoes. Dandy liked jumping, and he got himself over the post and rails and the two brush fences, but when he came to the wall, which, in practice, had needed all Evelyn's concentration to make him face, he simply stuck his head sideways and down, thrust out his lower jaw and bore her out to the right through a gap in the hurdles, scattering the spectators, while Evelyn sat on him like a passenger, barely pulling on the reins.

“What's the matter with her? What's the matter with her? Oh damn!” Violet danced up and down in her disappointment. She turned her back and slouched away as Stewart trotted smartly back into the ring, was given the red rosette and cantered twice round the ring with it in his mouth, the ripple of applause sounding thin in the open air.

Evelyn and Dandy had disappeared towards the farm. Oliver wheeled himself across the lawn, through a flower-bed and into the kitchen garden, from the far end of which he could see the garages. He had thought he heard a car on the drive, and as he reached the path by the marrow-bed he saw the family car lurch into the yard in the style in which Bob always cornered. He drove into the garage and from within came the destructive crashing which was Bob's way of shutting car doors.

He and Honey emerged and Oliver was just going to call out to them, when he saw Evelyn come walking slowly round the corner of the garage with her toes turned in. “Well!” Bob hailed her. “And did you win, young lady? Don't tell me—I know you did. My family always win anything they want.”

“You
said
you'd be there,” Evelyn said incredulously. “You said you wanted to see me jump. You went out to tea.”

“Sure, sugar.” Honey had her flapjack raised and was twiddling her horns of hair. “Grown-ups have important dates they can't always put off to please little girls, you know.” Evelyn did not seem to hear her. She was still staring at her father.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, busy with the garage doors. “It was just too bad, but I'll see you another time, hm? What d'you think Mrs. Barnet gave me for you? Why, where's she—”? By the time he had finished with the stiff old lock and turned round, Evelyn had gone, back round the corner to the stables.

“Sulking,” said Honey, and linking her arm in Bob's, she smiled up at him as they sauntered into the house.

“But she must go,” Mrs. North said for the twentieth time. “She's his child; I can't interfere. He wants to take her. He must be fond of her; he just doesn't understand children very well.”

“He's not fit to have a child,” Oliver said, also for the twentieth time since his mother had come down in her dressing-gown to hash the matter over. “And it's no good your keeping on telling me that children are better with their own parents, because I shall just keep on saying it depends on the parents.”

“Maybe it will turn out all right,” said Mrs. North, trying to make her voice sound hopeful. “Bob's such a sweet person, you know, even if he is a little thoughtless. He'd never let that woman spoil Evie's life.”

“What's he been letting her do ever since they came here then?”

“That's just infatuation, dear,” said Mrs. North patiently, as if Oliver were too young to understand about sex. “They'll settle down. You wait, in a few years' time Evie will be coming back to see you and laughing to think how she once didn't want to go to New York.”

“‘Didn't want' is putting it mildly. I can't bear to think about tomorrow,”

“There she is, poor little lamb, with her bags all packed; just one left open to put in her golliwog in the morning. She'd never have gone to sleep if I hadn't given her that half aspirin. She never cried though, but it was that lost kind of staring look that got me. And she hasn't eaten a thing all day. She's not fit to travel. Bob will be lucky if he gets to the States without a sick child on his hands.”

“She can't go,” repeated Oliver, who could think of nothing else to say.

“It's no good to keep saying that,” said his mother quite irritably, “and you know it. There's nothing we can do about it, so we might as well stop upsetting ourselves and talking each other into imagining all kinds of things. She'll be all right. She's his child; he's got to take her if he wants to, so don't
let's talk any more about it.” She emptied an ashtray into the paper basket and reversed a few books that Mrs. Cowlin had turned upside down in the bookcase when she cleaned the room. “Of course, it isn't as if she'd enjoy the life,” she said, reopening the discussion she had just closed. “You saw what she's been like all day. This is what she loves. It's too bad she couldn't have spent all her childhood in a place like this, but then again, she'll have opportunities a lot of children would give their ears for.”

“She can't go,” said Oliver flatly.

“You're quite right, she can't go,” said Elizabeth in an unusually masterful voice. It was so unlike her to butt into a conversation that they both turned and stared at her standing in the doorway in a blue and white spotted dressing-gown over pale-blue pyjamas.

“Well, don't
you
start,” said Mrs. North. “We've been telling each other for the last houi he can't go, when we know all the time it's got nothing to do with us. I'm going to bed and take a Slumbello. D'you know, Elizabeth, I never touched drugs till September the tenth, 1944—that was when I got the telegram about you, Ollie—but my nerves have had more shocks in the ten months since then than in the whole of the rest of their life. What a year this has been, Ollie! Everything that had to happen in our family has happened, just about. How's Evie?”

“Sleeping now.” Elizabeth still had that unusually determined look on her calm face. “She sat up a little while ago when I went in, grabbed hold of me as if she was drowning and yelled out that she didn't want to go. She was more or less asleep, of course, but it shows what must be going on in her brain. All those awful things she said to her father when he went to say good night, and he got so silly and shouted—excuse me Mrs. North. I suppose I shouldn't talk like that about your brother.”

“Go right ahead.” She spread her hands resignedly. “Oliver's been slanging him good and plenty for the last hour.”

“He's not fit to have a child,” repeated Oliver, who seemed incapable of making any more than a kind of gramophone accompaniment to the conversation.

“She'll be worse again tomorrow,” said Elizabeth. “How can you send her out to that life? You can't let her go.”