The Warning Bell Read online

  The nurse, bewildered, tried to help. She was new to her work. In her native environment she had probably never encountered the phenomenon of a mother unable, through neurosis or agitation, to produce milk for her baby. All she knew to do was to keep pressing the nipple into his mouth, but he was wailing so much he didn’t notice it.

  Slowly, Maggie grew desperate. ‘Why doesn’t he suck? Why does he go on crying?’

  The nurse looked at the doctor. He nodded. The black girl put her arms round Matt, and this time Maggie relinquished him. He was carried out of the room. She could hear him all the way down the corridor. She lay back exhausted, tears rolling down the sides of her face.

  ‘That was all my fault,’ she whispered as the doctor administered a sedative injection.

  ‘Nonsense. Now don’t you worry. Nurse will give him a feed.’

  ‘But why am I in such a state?’

  ‘You’ve just given birth. It happens to a lot of women. Don’t worry. He won’t go hungry. You can try again tomorrow.’

  But by that time Matt had had the fat, fruitful rubber teat in his mouth. Maggie’s barely-ripened little spike could not but seem an unrewarding proposition after that.

  So breast-feeding was abandoned and Matt took to the bottle.

  Physically it suited him. When Maggie took him home, Bruce, as his contribution to his son’s welfare, took to weighing him every morning, and noting the added ounces with a gloating glee that irritated Maggie secretly. It never seemed to occur to Bruce that while the bottle might feed Matt’s flesh, it was doing nothing for his bond with his mother. It never crossed his mind that there was anything pathetic in the fact that she opened her blouse when she fed him, to imitate as closely as possible the true conditions of nursing.

  He saw that she was depressed, though, and jumped to the first solution that came into his head: she must be tired, and therefore in need of more rest, more help. One afternoon, Maggie awoke from her nap to find a strange black girl in the bedroom with her. She was sitting by the shuttered window, silhouetted against the venetian-striped brilliance outside; Matt’s crib was next to her, and her hand was on his back as he lay there, rubbing, rocking him gently.

  Maggie sat up with a jolt.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The girl turned her face placidly to Maggie.

  ‘Master say, I work for you, help with baby. He say, I present for you.’

  Her flawless white smile gleamed in the half light.

  ‘I didn’t say I needed a nursemaid! He shouldn’t —’

  The smile fled. The tone of voice radically altered to one of dread. ‘You no want? You tell master you no want Tolly?’

  ‘Is Tolly your name?’

  ‘You call Tolly. Please Madam, not tell Master you no want! I work hard, I learn quick. Please.’

  Maggie remembered what Joan had said, how the Ibos wanted to work for the whites, what the alternatives were. Did that explain the desperate tone, the rolling eyes, the clasped, beseeching hands?

  ‘Where are your people?’

  ‘No got people.’

  ‘No tribe?’

  ‘Tribe no want. Send Tolly away.’

  ‘Why?’

  The girl hung her head. There was a long silence. Matt began to whimper. The girl glanced at him, and Maggie saw the reflection of the strips of sunlight on her wet cheeks.

  ‘Well … I don’t really need you, Tolly. But we’ll see. You can stay for the moment.’ She heard the quick intake of breath, the sudden, relieved slackening of shoulders. She felt a little sick. It was terrible to have such power over people! She wished the girl would vanish. She was an unwanted burden that Bruce had unwittingly laid on Maggie, the burden of needing to employ her usefully, worry about her sleeping out in one of the hutches, wonder what inscrutable ‘crime’ she had committed to bring about her ostracism from her family, and no doubt eventually to learn about it and have to care…

  At this moment, it was a simple matter of deciding whether to ask Tolly to bring Matt to her for his feed, or whether to risk hurting her feelings by getting up and fetching him herself. The immemorial ‘servant problem’, which so far she had managed to avoid by leaving Bruce and the black steward to cope, was upon her, and she saw herself forcibly drawn into the muddle and stress of petty problems the other wives interminably discussed…

  Oh God! To be back in England, where such things simply had no place in your life because you did everything for yourself — where the air didn’t press you down, and the light was gentle, not this vicious brilliance that forced you to shut it out, so you couldn’t see properly, adding to your half-aliveness, your frightening sense of separation from the real world…

  She sighed heavily. Still not enough air entered her lungs, somehow. ‘Bring me the baby, Tolly, please.’

  The girl all but sprang to her feet, her face shining now with happiness as well as the forgotten tears. She bent over the crib, lifted Matt expertly and carried him to Maggie’s bedside. As she stood there, waiting for Maggie to settle herself, Matt turned his face instinctively toward the girl’s full breasts under the uniform dress, and nuzzled her experimentally. Maggie noticed a very curious thing. A dark round stain abruptly spread out from the nipple whose generous outline Maggie could make out under the blue cotton cloth.

  ‘Tolly, have you got a baby of your own?’ she asked sharply. The girl’s eyes again began to roll. She trembled. Swiftly she put Matt into Maggie’s arms and walked, stiff-legged, from the room.

  ‘Tolly —’

  ‘I bring bottle for Madam. Master tell what to do,’ she said in a choked voice, without turning.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When Joan called later that day, to bring birthing gifts, Maggie consulted her about the Tolly mystery.

  ‘It’s no mystery at all, my dear, I can guess exactly what’s behind it. That poor little girl of yours has had twins. Twins are taboo, and her tribe has followed its age-old custom by shutting them up in earthen pots and hiding them in the bush. Yes, well, I told you. It wasn’t all sweetness and light till the missionaries hove in view. Oh don’t look so stricken, it can’t be helped. Usually the mother gets over it quickly enough, but occasionally, when she’s young and it’s her first birth, she might follow the babies into the bush and try to nurture them, although she knows quite well she can’t go back afterwards.

  ‘Of course the poor little things die anyway and then she’s got nowhere to go and before the whites came, she’d have died too. As it is, your Dolly or whatever her name is, made her way to our village and queued up with the others for work, and was lucky enough to draw you. You’ll have to keep her, my dear, at least for a while. She’s been through a bad time and probably needs feeding up… Oh dear! Now you’re upset. I shouldn’t have told you.’

  Maggie cried helplessly on Joan’s shoulder for a while and then borrowed her handkerchief. ‘How her poor breasts must hurt!’ she gasped out at last.

  ‘Now there’s a sensible thought! I’ll get her some drying-up pills from the dispensary.’

  ‘Why didn’t the mission fathers who’ve been teaching her English stop her people from killing her babies?’

  ‘They try to, but often they’re not quick enough to catch them. It’s one of the things they’re finding it hardest to deal with because even if they stop them abandoning the twins, they can’t force them to accept them. That means the mission has to adopt them, and they’re just not geared for it.’

  ‘But what future has she got? Won’t she ever marry again?’

  ‘Probably not, if the blacks around here get wind of the fact that she’s “done born double piccens”, as they put it. Even after years, working with us, they won’t go anywhere near even white twins if they can help it. You must look after her as best you can and let time take care of it.’

  Before the drying-up pills arrived, nature had somehow taken its course, and Tolly had become Matt’s wet-nurse.

  Bruce was very uneasy about it. Something basic got in the
way of his accepting it as something natural. Maggie had to fight. It was the first time she had ever had to fight Bruce on an issue, and she was, while the bout lasted, pleased to find herself roused to something like her old self.

  ‘Do you think her milk will turn him black, or what?’

  ‘It’s not that sort of thing, don’t be absurd! It’s just that … well, I’ve talked to a couple of the chaps. They say it’s simply not done. Black nursemaids, that’s okay, but wet-nursing… Well, I mean, the whole concept’s somehow out of date.’

  ‘Mother’s milk is the healthiest thing he can drink. Everyone knows that. In this climate, where there’s such a risk of infection anyway —’

  ‘I know, but somehow… Aren’t you — I mean, don’t you miss feeding him, holding him and all that?’

  Maggie did not want to discuss this. ‘He must have what’s best for him, never mind me. I can cuddle him at other times. You gave her to me,’ she burst out. ‘You — landed me with her! This way at least she’s got a vital function in our lives. Otherwise she’d just be in the way.’

  She did not mention the real, true reason why she was relieved to think of Matt in Tolly’s arms, at Tolly’s black satin breast. Aspects of her feelings went so deep she scarcely took them out to look at them until they were long past. Tolly was her direct link with Africa, and with the deep primitive instincts that Europeans overlay with ‘civilisation’ and so lose touch with. She had got very close to this primordial self while actually giving birth. She had become an animal, but an animal which, because of some cruel distortion of nature, could not function properly. She had longed to crouch on all fours to deliver, but she had had to lie on her back with her legs in the air, helpless as an inverted tortoise; later the baby had been taken from her and for a whole day she hadn’t been allowed to see him… Now she was having to behave toward her baby in ways that seemed to cut her off from the natural animal instincts that were struggling to guide her. When she watched how Tolly treated Matt, she felt some of the stress of her personal alienation from her instincts eased.

  She could not carry Matt everywhere next to her skin or let him sleep in her bed, as she yearned to do. She could not do it because she was imbued, programmed by the civilised, unnatural mores of the white world. But she never stopped Tolly from lifting Matt at the first whimper and carrying him about with her, retiring to some corner to feed him whenever he nuzzled. She politely ignored the advice experienced white mothers gave her about how Matt would be spoilt, how she must stick to a schedule, ‘get him trained…’ When Bruce, still eagle-eyed for deviations from what was ‘done’, objected, Maggie simply said, ‘I can’t bear to hear him cry. It tears me inside.’

  ‘All babies cry,’ he said bluffly. ‘Good for their lungs.’

  ‘The black babies hardly ever cry.’

  ‘Oh well! They’re so uncomplicated, like little animals.’

  ‘That’s just what Matt is!’ Maggie exclaimed. ‘I want him to be a happy, uncomplicated little animal.’ Though in all other things she fell in with Bruce’s blueprint for her life, in this, despite all his arguments, she went her own way.

  Her resistance started early. During the daily weighing sessions, Bruce began smugly and roguishly calling Matt ‘our little love child’. It was, Maggie felt sure, to demonstrate his freedom from guilt about Matt’s conception. Perhaps because she sensed this, Maggie’s instantaneous reaction to his misnomer was a mental correction: Our little rape child, you mean! She never said it, but thinking it did her harm.

  Her guilt at not doing everything for Matt herself did not lessen, but whenever she thought rape child she was stung by a fierce gladness that he was so often in other arms. And when he was in her arms, in her care, she trimmed her mind like a sail, spilling out every thought or impulse that might damage him. It made for a stiffness that was also unnatural. But she persisted in it, feeling she owed him this effort, that she must be perfect towards him — as perfect as her stilted, overcivilized conditioning allowed her to be — and her deficiencies must be made up by the simple, robust, loving black girl, who knew more by instinct than all the silly books that Maggie kept reading long after she’d given up hope of learning anything from them.

  ‘What Madam read?’ Tolly once asked, looking over her shoulder at a picture of a woman hanging a mobile above a child’s cot.

  ‘A book,’ Maggie answered ironically, ‘that tells white ladies how to bring up their babies.’

  Tolly gave her that look of mild curiosity she sometimes wore for white people’s more eccentric behaviour. She reached down her long fingers and turned over the pages, looking at more pictures — pictures of substitutes for what she, left to herself with Matt or with her own dead children, would have provided without thought. Jiggling prams for continual body motion; cuddly toys and blankets for warm, scented flesh; a dummy for an ever-ready nipple… She gave a sudden laugh, and flicked the book shut, moving off without comment. And indeed, thought Maggie, shrinking with a sudden sense of inadequacy, none was necessary.

  Occasionally she even thought, ‘He’d be happier all his life if I gave him up — if I just gave him to Tolly.’ When she caught herself following this strange line of thought, Maggie felt guiltier than ever. Who could imagine a mother, in her fortunate circumstances, playing with the notion of giving her baby away? Yet it was truly not to rid her life of him, for he was the most precious thing left in it, but rather to save Matt from herself.

  Her work had once been inestimably precious, and she felt, perpetually in the background, the pressure of her treason in having given it up at the first true test. And she was aware even more constantly that Bruce should be precious to her, and that he wasn’t.

  As time passed and her marriage relationship failed to develop, remaining stunted and lifeless like some stillborn creature pickled in a jar, she began to see Bruce, see herself-and-Bruce, with appalling clarity. She saw his motive for marrying her, hers for marrying him, saw that neither had anything at all to do with the kind of relationship that she needed to make her grow.

  She got a lot of the sort of ‘spoiling’ that a certain type of man imagines will keep his little woman contented. She got sex with predictable regularity and in the most uncomplicated fashion. But it all gave her nothing that she could believe was particular to herself.

  Anyone would do, she thought (and there was all too much thinking-time; motherhood had not changed that). Anyone reasonably nice-looking who would consent to this life, who didn’t rebel or disgrace him or stand out too awkwardly; anyone who would let him make love to her every Tuesday and Saturday, and listen uncomplainingly to his boring talk about derricks and pipelines and world markets, and pour tea for his boring colleagues’ vapid wives; anyone who would not step out from between the narrow, narrow white men’s guidelines nor hanker (at least out loud) for a fulfilling life of her very own…

  And the irony was, she filled the bill. Because she had Matt. Because, for Matt’s sake, she had let herself marry Bruce. Because she’d made her bed and must lie on it (as Ian with his relentless addiction to moralistic clichés might have said). Because, when you added it up, her childhood conditioning proved stronger than all her efforts, and Mrs Dalzell’s efforts, and Tanya’s efforts, to free her to make her own rules.

  She used to take Matt to the local airport sometimes, ostensibly to let him watch the planes taking off, but since these outings began before he knew that a plane wasn’t a bird it was obvious even to her that it was for herself that she went. Standing in the draining heat, watching the turbo-props heaving themselves into the air, she remembered a film about a woman trapped by life on a lonely prairie farm somewhere in North America, standing in the doorway of her barn watching the trains stream past, uttering their cries of challenge: ‘Come away! Come awaaaaaay!’ The pre-jet engines of the planes snarled out the same message, instilled the same sense of futility and despair.

  Why didn’t she rebel? Why didn’t she? There was no answer, except that Africa,
marriage and motherhood had laid hands on her, inducing a great waking sleep. The seasons came and went like slow rhythmic beatings of a tropical pulse, pushing the endless hot stream of days through Maggie’s system like a drug that never wore off.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  They were entitled to a month’s leave a year, and for that first eleven months, behind and on all sides of her other concerns, Maggie dreamt of it and longed for it. But when the time actually approached when she could go, she found she didn’t want to. She was terrified to look at London and see what she had forfeited. She was far more terrified of Scotland.

  The ill-advised birthday cables had elicited a stunned and censorious silence lasting for several months. Then had come the first letter. From Stip, of course. He said nothing about the cables, about the local reaction to them, or about his own part in the subsequent boycott. It began glibly, ‘Sorry I haven’t written for a while — terrible rush at the mill — several key-people left or died and Ian and Dad were forced to promote me…’ Frantically scanning the four close-written pages in his still childish writing for some acknowledgement of Matt’s existence, she finally found, at the foot of the fourth page, ‘How’s the sprog? Send me a photo.’ Was there the ghost of a line under the ‘me’, indicating the need for secrecy? Yes. She mailed answer and photo to the mill, hoping some neutral minion would do the postal sorting.

  Next had come a note from her mother, written, Maggie supposed, furtively. She didn’t mention Matt at all. She merely inquired, three or four times in barely-differentiated phrases, after Maggie’s health and well-being. ‘Take care of yourself. Don’t overdo. Too much sun is so bad for delicate constitutions.’ Such a description was laughably inapposite — Maggie had always been as strong as a horse. This was the nearest her mother could come to mentioning her grandchild… Maggie wondered if her father had been standing at her shoulder as she wrote, like any Victorian husband… Things must have been quite terrible when that accursed cable came, and how Maggie blamed herself now for not having warned her. The situation was evidently still fraught. No one mentioned a reunion.