The Happy Prisoner (6 page)

Hinkley was a small manor farm, four hundred years old in places. Oliver's room, like most of the ground floor, was panelled in dark oak, with two blackened old beams crossing in the centre of the ceiling. It was not self-consciously period; it had never been restored or preserved or quainted up with spinning-wheels and wrought-iron lanterns. Since Tudor times, people had lived in it and furnished it according to the fashion of their day, but incongruities, as long as they were comfortable, did not spoil the atmosphere of the dark little parlour. Its chief charm was its air of sheltered relaxation and it could stand any furniture that was content to do its job without calling attention to itself. That tall tapestry armchair by the fireplace, for instance, looked nothing until you sat back in it and found yourself in a nest, coddled against draughts and disturbances. The footstool to which you instinctively raised your legs was a square of tough red leather, stretched tightly between stubby trestles. It was not beautiful, but the fact that it had stood up so well to the weight of the hundreds of feet which had scarred its brass studs had earned it its fireside pitch.

The fireplace itself, a Tudor arch of the sandy Shropshire stone, with an iron basket inside and a chimney in which David could see the sky as through a telescope, was the only part of the room that had been tampered with. It had been half the size when the Norths came to Hinkley, with a painted mantelpiece, and a black hooded grate baring its teeth between glazed tiles. Mrs. North, far more attuned to Old England than her husband, had done a lot of tapping and listening and prodding her cushiony thumb into the plaster. When he came home from work one day, Mr. North found that she had torn away a whole panel of wood and crumbled off enough plaster and hairy felt to make it simpler to go on with the demolition than patch it up again.
With cries of triumph, she had encouraged the men who pulled the Victorian camouflage down on to dustsheets, and when at last the wide hearth was exposed, wrote many letters to the States and one to the local paper in strains that would have done justice to the finding of a Roman bath, complete with skeletons. Mr. North did not say that it used twice as much coal, nor that he had preferred the wide mantelpiece to the ledge of beam which was too narrow to hold his photographs. When the fire was first lit, he did not complain of the smoke, but opened all the windows and sat in a draught, hoping that it would escape before it disappointed Hattie. Eventually, a lead cowl was fixed inside and the fire now burned well, consuming great quantities of logs from the osier basket, the refilling of which gave Cowlin an opportunity to see Oliver. One of the times when Oliver longed most to get out of bed was when the fire needed poking and he wanted to kick the logs and send a fountain of sparks up the chimney.

On the left of the fireplace was the door into the hall, which had heavy iron hinges and an old wooden thumb-latch. On a little shelf above it rested two Quimper peasant plates which were only taken down at spring-cleaning and never failed to surprise Mrs. Cowlin with the amount of dust they had accumulated in twelve months. On the other side of the fireplace, the room ran back into a shadowy little corner with cupboards built into the panelling and shelves for Mr. North's sober textbooks which nobody opened now. Oliver's books stood between the Dolphin book-ends he had had at Oxford along the back of the solid refectory table under the east window.

All the features of this room combined to make it dark. Oliver's bed itself held the light until the end of the day, but his pillows and the hump of the bedclothes cut off some of the daylight from the room; the small-paned east window was low and shadowed by the roof, which came, right down at this end of the house like an overhanging eyebrow. The ceiling was low and, for no apparent reason, on two levels, which corresponded to the fact that you had to go down two steps from the corridor above into the south bedrooms.

But there was nothing gloomy about the darkness of the room, nothing sinister about the shadows which gathered there. It was a darkness like the cosiness of a cottage parlour, with a little window made even littler by lace curtains and potted plants. Oliver loved the sun, but he almost resented the freak summer of this October, which was postponing the time when his room would be lit every evening by his lamp and the fire,

and he would go to sleep to the jigging pattern on the ceiling of the old nursery guard which Mrs. North insisted on putting there at night.

Oliver liked his room. He had always liked this room, long before it became the cocoon inside which, like a grub, he must stay until his body was ready to try its wings in the outside world. As a boy of ten, when they first moved to Hinkley from London, his bedroom had been the odd little room up it's own short flight of stairs, halfway between the first floor and the attics. It had the only west window in the house above the ground floor, a miniature oriel, supported outside by sloping timbers. House-martins used to nest in the angle between the joist and the wall on one side. They would never build in the other side, although he used to climb up the pruning ladder to bait it with bits of wool and felt. Back to this little room he had come from school and from Oxford and, not quite so regularly, when he was feeling his feet in London and Paris as the cocksure young representative of a firm who made wireless sets that looked like clocks, bookcases, cigar boxes—like anything, in fact, but wireless sets.

This ground-floor room that was now his bedroom had been his father's library and study then. Mr. North had been a house agent. He had always been a house agent; he was a man who stuck like glue to anything on which he once embarked. Someone had told him that nobody could be a success who had not studied Real Estate in America, so, as he was a modest man who was always ready to believe that other people knew better than he did, he had gone to America. There he had met the plump and smiling Hattie Linnegar, best waffle maker for her age in Philadelphia, who had known quite soon that they ought to get married and had no difficulty in bringing it about. Soon after Violet was born, the two years' grace which his English firm had allowed him being expired, he had come back to London to go on being a house agent in exactly the same way as before he went to America.

He was a man who did not easily assimilate new ideas. He was non-porous to the changes of the world, and lived among them without absorbing them. Being country-bred, he had never absorbed London, and so, when the manager of the North Midland branch died, it was Mr. North who offered, without pushing himself, to go to Shrewsbury.

The Norths had never worked the land at Hinkley. They had always rented the farm buildings and most of the property to a bad tempered man who had a stroke in the rick yard, and
after him to Fred Williams, who had been to an agricultural college and had progressive ideas. As a boy, Oliver had wanted to be a farmer, but he grew away from the desire. Mr. North was quite ready to believe that his son knew better than he about not wanting to be an estate agent and had remained until the day of his death uncomprehending and slightly dazed by the job into which Oliver had slipped through one of his Oxford friends.

“Do you remember, Ollie, when this room was Daddy's study? What did he study, I wonder, when he shut himself away in here? He can't have been writing his book on Shropshire Seats
all
the time, because there was hardly anything to show for it when he died.”

“He probably wanted to get away from us.”

The two sisters were sitting in Oliver's room after dinner. Heather, in one of her qualms that she was not doing enough for Oliver, had brought in her mending, and Violet, looking in for a dog she had mislaid and sensing a promise of intimacy and comfort in the lamplit room, had stayed. She had put a cushion on the floor and sat with her head resting against the bed, her legs in a trousered position that was not doing the shape of her skirt any good.

“His desk was under that window.” Heather bit off a thread, nodding towards the east window which looked out on to the rose garden, with the yew hedge and tennis-court beyond.

“Wasn't,” scoffed Violet. “It was between the fireplace and the wall. That table's always been under that window.”

“Don't be more ridiculous than you can help,” said Heather, whose opinions were not tempered by the fact that she was invariably wrong about things like this. “I can
see
his desk under that window. And he had all his little pots of cactuses and acorns and things on the window-sill above it.”

Violet snorted. “You are a futile ass.” Like her old clothes, she clung to the epithets she had acquired when schoolboy magazines were her favourite reading. “That was in London, in the dining-room. He never had his pots indoors here. What d'you think greenhouses are for?”

“He
did
.” Heather, getting cross, sewed faster, pricked her finger, said “Damn”, and shook it, saw a spot of blood on the baby's nightgown, said “Damn” again, rolled up the nightgown and stuffed it in the work-basket, took out a vest and made a face at it, selected a piece of wool and a needle that was too small, sucked fiercely at the wool, scrabbled for another needle, threaded it, sighed and started to darn with jabs. The
mutter with which she had accompanied these actions rose to the surface. “How could you know, anyway?” she asked. “You hardly ever came indoors except when you smelled food. He had his desk under that window. When you came in at the door, you could see the back of his head, with that bald patch he used to brush the hairs across.” She darned in silence for a moment and then added challengingly: “That table was in this window where Oliver's bed is now.”

Violet let out a loud hoarse laugh, kicked her heels in the air and thumped them down on the floor. “That's a good one! That table—this window— Oh, that's rich!” Her tanned face became suffused with convulsive mirth.

“What's so funny about that? Don't rock against Oliver's bed like that, you jackass, you'll hurt him. I don't care what you say, that table was in this window, wasn't it, Ollie?”

“It wasn't even in this room,” said Violet, prolonging her laughter beyond the limit of her amusement, and coughing. Sometimes, if she were having a good time with a joke, she would laugh until she became black in the face and choked. “Tell her, Ollie.”

“What? Oh, I don't know.” He had hardly been listening to what they were saying. He was lying looking out of the window, letting the familiar crescendo act as a background to his thoughts. His sisters' arguments had been a background to his life ever since Heather was old enough to say “shan't” and “isn't”.

They were both wrong about the table. He knew quite well that it had stood in the middle of the room, because he used to sit at it occasionally to fill in the stamp album which it pleased his father to see him keep up, but he had learned long ago not to interfere or take sides. It only prolonged the argument, which would otherwise peter out eventually in favour of another which one hoped would be less boring. His sisters' squabbling dated from kicking the furniture nursery days. It had increased in intensity and shrillness as they reached adolescence and dropped off slightly as Heather grew up, acquired more interests outside the family and came to accept Violet as something that could not be helped, like an act of God. Either because she was at home less, or because she said it less, her exasperated cry of “Oh,
Vi
!” rang less frequently through the house. Lately, however, she had reverted. The sight and sound of her elder sister was like a rash which she had to scratch. And like a rash, the more she scratched it, the more it irritated. Mrs. North had to resurrect her nursery voice: “Let your sister alone!” because
when Violet was goaded she became
farouche
and moody and would not come to meals and it was inconvenient to have her raiding the larder of tomorrow's lunch after everyone had gone to bed.

After the argument about the table had died down, Violet said (it was not always Heather who provoked the quarrels): “Why do we have to have that Black man to meals so often? Dinner on Monday and tea again today. Don't they feed him properly at Ockney? He gives me a pain.”

“You give him a pain, more likely,” retorted Heather. “You hadn't washed your hands for tea and that horrible dog of yours slobbered all over his trousers. I thought he was very good about it, considering dog-spit never comes off.”

“He's pansy,” said Violet.

“You don't know the meaning of the word.”

Violet guffawed again. “That's a good one!” Heather darned faster than ever, her kissable mouth clamped like the two halves of a shelf. Violet lurched upwards and sideways, took a book at random off Oliver's table and began to read, holding it an inch from her eyes.

Heather kept darting irritated glances at her and eventually burst out: “Why don't you wear your glasses? No wonder your eyes are getting worse.”

“They're not.”

“They are. That's why you knocked over that glass at dinner, and upset the salt. Even you can't be as clumsy as all that. I know you hate yourself in them, but what's it matter what you look like? If they're helping your eyes, I mean,” she added in a half-hearted attempt to disguise what she obviously meant. “Don't you think she's silly, Ollie?” And when he refused to be drawn, she rounded on him. “Oh, don't be so
mild
. You lie there so serenely, like some blasted saint—it's enough to drive anyone mad.”

“I thought you liked saints,” Oliver said. “Catholic ones, anyway.”

“Not in the home.”

“What would you like me to do?” he asked. “Shout and scream and have a heart attack?”

“I'm sorry, darling. I didn't mean that. Forget it. I'm a pig.” She put down the vest and fumbled in her sleeve for a handkerchief, sniffing. Violet looked round, interested, and Heather was able to recover her equilibrium by saying: “You've got cigarette ash all down the front of that blouse. How on earth do you manage to get in such a mess?”