The Happy Prisoner (46 page)

“Well, really, Elizabeth,” said Mrs. North with the coldness arising from an uneasy conscience, “I think it's hardly your business.”

“It is my business,” said Elizabeth firmly and shut the door. “That's why I came down. I want to tell you something.”

“I don't want to hear any more about Evelyn going to New York,” said Mrs. North wearily. “It's settled she's going, so there's no need for everyone to get so dramatic about it. Really, the way you two go on, one would think no one had ever had a stepmother before.”

“Oh yes, people have had stepmothers,” said Elizabeth bitterly. “I'm not going to talk about Evie, I'm going to talk about myself. I wasn't ever going to tell you. I wasn't going to tell anyone, not ever; but perhaps if I do now, I can make you see, and you'll have to do something. You can make most people do what you want, Mrs. North, so surely you can manage your brother.”

“Don't give me that line of talk,” said Mrs. North. “I'm much too tired to go for flattery. What do you want to tell me? Make it snappy, whatever it is, because I want to get to bed. Believe it or not, but I, even I, have had enough talk for one night.”

“I wasn't ever going to tell anyone,” repeated Elizabeth. She sat down on the footstool, crossed her feet neatly, arranged her dressing-gown over her knees and linked her hands round them, leaning back and staring before her. “When a thing as shattering as that happens, you don't tell anyone, because it's part of you. It's the things that haven't really gone deep into you that you tell, and pretend they're your innermost feelings.”

Mrs. North looked at Oliver and raised her eyebrows. Elizabeth had never talked so introspectively before.

“I hope you don't mind my talking about myself,” went on Elizabeth, with the deference born of habit, because she had every intention of talking about herself, whether anyone minded or not. “It won't take long. It's quite an ordinary story, I suppose. It must happen to lots of people, though that's no reason why it should happen to one more—Evie, I mean.

.…

“You know, I think, that my mother died when I was quite young—twelve and a half, to be exact; two days before I was going to be twelve and a half. We always celebrated half-birthdays in our family. We loved anniversaries and celebrations and presents, so we found every excuse to have them. My mother and father celebrated everything: not only their wedding day, but the day they met, the day he first kissed her, the day he proposed by letter, and the day he got her answer back. They always gave each other something—flowers or sweets—not anything much, you know. We weren't terribly well off, but comfortable enough. We had a little house in Wimbledon, with dahlias in the front and a coco-nut for the birds and a lawn at the back
where you could sit and watch people driving off the fourteenth tee of the golf-course. I expect Oliver would say that's typically suburban, because he's rather a snob about things like that, but nobody who hasn't lived there can possibly know how nice it was. I don't know if you think so, but it always seems to me as if the sun used to shine more in those days. Surely we had whole weeks of it in the summer, but now we get excited about two sunny days running.

My father worked in London and always, if we were not going to be back before him—if I had a dancing class, or we were going out to tea—my mother would leave a present on the hall table for him to find when he got home, or if not a present, a note. Always something. Then when we got home he'd have done something: laid out my night clothes—probably the wrong ones—or cleaned the shoes, or made something for supper. I dare say it all sounds rather ingenuous and silly told like this, and I don't care if you think so, because it wasn't.

I loved my mother. She was like me, and always understood what I was getting at, but I think I loved my father more. He was a sort of hero and God to me, like Evelyn's father used to be to her. He was gay. He wasn't big or boisterous or jolly; he was quite a little man really, with a soft moustache and brown eyes, and he was just quietly gay. He didn't sing about the house; he hummed. He had his own tunes, about two or three of them, so you always knew who was coming. It reminded me so much of him when I read that book about Gerald du Maurier: how his father was always singing
Plaisir d'Amour
, so you could hear him before he turned a corner. My father made his songs his own, just like that.
Greensleeves
, one of them was. For a long time after—but I haven't got to that yet—I couldn't bear to hear it played or sung, but I've got over that long ago. I've got my life very well ordered. Things don't upset me.

We none of us thought about our life ever changing. We never visualised getting any older or richer or poorer, or living anywhere else, or being turned upside down by a family crisis. Our life was just us, just right. We were never deliriously happy or miserably depressed. We were content, secure and snug. Smug, you'll say, I suppose.

My mother died having a still-born baby, which she hadn't wanted, because the three of us had been so happy we didn't need anyone else. They didn't want another child but me. I can say that now without conceit, because it's like talking about another person. What I was then, I'm not now. After she died, I remember being ashamed of a thought I had. I remember thinking that
I'd rather it was her than my father. If he had died, it would have been the end of everything. As it was, I still had him, and I had a sort of new pride in looking after him all by myself. I must have been quite grown up for my age, to be able to run the house. My mother had taught me how to cook and clean and do accounts, and although we had a morning maid, I used to find plenty to do when I wasn't at school. My father used to let me miss school often, so that we could do things together. That's probably why I'm so badly educated.

Quite soon, surprisingly soon, he started humming
Greensleeves
again, and we realised we had made a life for ourselves. A different sort of life, of course, and one always had the feeling in the back of one's mind that there was something missing, but we were more intimate, and we enjoyed feeling responsible for each other. We still stuck to the present-giving, though we left out my mother's anniversaries; we weren't quite all that sentimental. Before, it had been my mother who bought the things for him; now it was me, and I loved that. He paid for them really, because if I wanted to give him a present he had to give me more pocket-money, but that didn't matter.

At the week-ends we used to go for long walks with our dog. He was my dog really, but he liked my father better. We were both mad on walking, and my legs got frighteningly well developed. I was rather thick and square in those days, but it all went afterwards in hospital, because of the food. Sometimes we walked over Wimbledon Common, across Robin Hood Corner and through Richmond Park to that hotel—fancy forgetting its name—all green tiles, where you used to be able to get stone ginger and pickle sandwiches. Sometimes we'd take a bus or a train into the country and walk all day. Hiking, they call it now.

Am I making my life sound frightfully dull and goody-goody? I don't think I was really a prig; I was just rather ingenuous and unenterprising. I had no ambition, absolutely none. I never wanted anything but that life in Wimbledon. The other girls at school used to plan how they were going to be famous, but I didn't even want to have a job. I just wanted to stay at home and be the perfect little housekeeper. My father was very interested in food, not greedy, but keen on it in the right way, and he was fun to cook for. I can remember holding my breath sometimes when I put a dish on the table—
Œufs mornay
perhaps—oh yes, we'd been to France in the holidays—in case when he tried it the eggs would be hard and he'd be so disappointed. I'd rather have it that way than someone like Lady Sandys. Remember how she used to smoke during meals and never notice what she was eating?

I didn't want to marry either. We talked sometimes about a mythical husband for me, with a kind of patronising pity for any man who thought he could possibly intrude. I didn't see now I was ever going to like anyone as much as my father. I suppose psychologists would say I had a father-complex. I dare say I had, but it made me jolly happy.

It was when I was nearly sixteen and going to leave school in a few months' time that he met my stepmother. He'd been out to dinner without me and I was in bed when he got home. On the hall table I'd left him one of those twopenny packets or biscuits you used to be able to get—remember? Four biscuits with a bit of cheese in the middle; he loved those. I heard him humming as he opened the front door. I called out to him to come up and laugh about the people he'd, met, but he didn't hear. I heard him go into the sitting-room, and make up the fire, and I heard him move his armchair in front of it and creak about geting his pipe and things, and I fell asleep before he came up.

When I went down the next morning to get the paper for him to read in bed, he hadn't touched the biscuits. I know that doesn't sound so important. You could say he hadn't seen them, or he had had a good dinner and wasn't hungry, or he was leaving them there to take to work. I told myself all that, but it didn't help. I left them there and he didn't take them to work, so I threw them away. He'd never snubbed me before. I couldn't say anything to him about it, and that was the first secret we ever had.

Well, the rest of the story is the usual Wicked Stepmother saga, and full of self-pity on my side, so I won't dwell on it. She was very domineering and completely selfish and he loved her. That was all, but it was enough to change our whole life. You wouldn't think that a man could possibly change so much, but he could and did, and the whole of my world changed with him. It all went, everything, even the humming, because she didn't like his tunes. She liked modern music, and she said
Greensleeves
reminded her of singing classes at school. She didn't like walking, because she had varicose veins, and she always wanted to do indoor things at week-ends. We didn't have things like
Œufs mornay
any more, because she was a food crank and wanted salads and nut cutlets and wholemeal bread. She would hardly let me into the kitchen after she saw me once testing the heat of milk for junket with my finger—well, you
have
to, don't you, Mrs, North?—because she said I hadn't been scientifically trained in the preparation of food.

I know I said just now that I was grown-up for my age, but actually I don't think I can have been. I didn't understand the
first thing about love or sex. I couldn't understand, I just simply couldn't begin to see why he wanted her. He had always been enough for me, and he still was, but suddenly I wasn't enough for him; that was what shook me. I kept asking myself how I'd failed him, and I used to think of petty little things—that I wasn't a good enough cook, or that I never starched his shirt collars right, and try and put it down to that. Until I remembered that she would never wash anything; she used to send even handkerchiefs to the laundry because of spoiling her hands, and that her ideas of cooking were most certainly not his, although she was rapidly converting him. They used to take in a dreadful little paper called
The Dietician
, and it was agony to me to see him poring over this little pamphlet affair with its cheap type, instead of the daily crossword puzzle which we'd always done together.

When I tried to get him back to me by leaving things for him in the hall, she'd take them away before he could see them, and say: ‘I won't have your rubbish lying about.' He thought that I was sulking because I never gave him presents. He was getting so changed that he thought that
I
was changing, and she was always having digs at me to him: saying I was a moody adolescent, and how queer it was that I hadn't made any close friends at school. I hadn't needed any before.

I couldn't even talk to him. Of course he'd asked me whether I was happy about it and told me how nice it would be for me to have a mother, and I thought, if you really think that, it's no good trying to make you understand. I resolved never to get so attached to anything or anybody again, because I could never be so hurt. I'd die if I was hurt like that again. I never want to get so fond of one person, or even a set of people, or a place, or a way of living, that I should mind losing them so terribly. I know people sometimes think I'm disinterested and detached, but I'm sure it's the best way to live if you want any peace of mind. It's not safe to have all your eggs in one basket; a platitude, I know, but it's surprisingly true, like all platitudes.

I had to get away. I couldn't bear the house so changed. She moved all the furniture and had the wallpaper stripped off and the walls distempered and the carpets taken up and slippery mats put down and the boards stained with varnish that smelled of fish. She spent twice as much money as I used to when I ran the house, and I wondered how my father was managing, but I couldn't ask him. They used to give a lot of parties and ask people they didn't really care for, just because they were people. My stepmother was crazy about Bridge, and she taught him to play Contract, though he'd always sworn he'd never learn any
thing but Auction, and they were for ever having parties with refreshments standing about on dumb waiters and cider and lemonade and tea brought in at nine o'clock.

A friend of mine had left school to be a nurse, and when I was sixteen I left, too, and went to a children's hospital. You can start there before you're old enough to start your general training. When I was old enough I went to a larger hospital which was a training school. At first, I used to go home on my day off each week, but each time there was less and less of me in the house, until in the end it didn't seem like my house at all. I used to think of it as her house. It didn't even seem like my father's. It didn't smell of him and his things any longer. It smelled of her.