The Warning Bell Read online

  Unfortunately she muffed it. She picked a bad moment, when her parents were furious anyway; divided her slender forces by attacking the smug-faced Ian for betraying them; showed her temper too much to her father who wasn’t accustomed to it, and lacked the perspicacity to realise that she might, just might have had an ally of sorts in her mother if she had only gone another way to work.

  The outcome was a total and irreversible ban on the whole absurd and unRobertsonian notion. And that was where Mr Robertson made his fatal mistake.

  Maggie, left to herself, might have rushed out of the house and into the night on the spot. But Margaret, her alter-ego, laid the hand of caution and good counsel (and cowardice) on her, as indeed did Stip when he crept into her room much later to help dry her furious tears of humiliation.

  ‘They spoilt it! They spoil everything! And we just knuckle under and allow ourselves to be bullied and controlled, as if we had no minds or lives of our own!’

  ‘Shhhh…’

  ‘I won’t shush!’ retorted Maggie, but Margaret, who didn’t want to be bellowed at anymore, saw to it that she did. ‘And as for Ian,’ she hissed, ‘I’m finished with him for the rest of my life! Just because he was in the army, he treats us like babies.’

  ‘He always did.’

  ‘He’s a traitor. Traitors deserve to be shot.’

  ‘It was only a wee row,’ said Stip uneasily. ‘We did ask for it.’

  ‘What did we do that was so awful? And when I said I wanted to be away to London to study for the theatre, you’d have thought I’d said for the streets!’

  ‘Maggie —!’

  ‘You didn’t give me much support, I noticed, you that was in it as much as I was.’

  ‘You were shouting so loud I didn’t get a chance.’

  They were silent for a moment, listening to the silent house, testing in their minds and memories its ineffable pressure on them — the prison walls of dependence, of habit. Maggie reached for Stip’s hand in the darkness. ‘I’m sorry, Stip. I got you into it. But you did enjoy it — the show — didn’t you?’

  ‘I did. I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds.’

  She hummed ‘Out of my Dreams’ softly, with her forehead against his shoulder. At seventeen he was underdeveloped, tall but still narrow, no muscle yet; he was worried about it, refusing to expose himself in a swimming costume and self-conscious even at home, perhaps due to the hulking (relatively) proximity of Ian. Once he’d shyly asked Maggie, ‘D’you think I’ll ever be a man — I mean, have a proper kind of body that slopes out from my waist, or will I be straight up and down forever?’ It was a variation on the question they had all — even Maggie — made a great joke of, when he was a little boy and asked, ‘When I grow up, will I be a man or a lady?’ Now Maggie, leaning on him, felt his slightness, his insubstantial, reed-like quality, and wished herself that he were more solid.

  ‘I’ll not stand it,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll do as I said I would. I’m going.’

  ‘How can you? You can’t,’ he said flatly.

  She pulled away from him. ‘You’ll see if I don’t! I’ll show him. I’ll show him!’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Maggie’s punishment for deceiving her parents and leading Steven astray was to stay at home for two weeks and do extra chores. The only person allowed to visit her was her teacher, Mrs Dalzell — the Robertsons could see nothing inimical in that. Little did they know.

  ‘Are you serious about this, Maggie? It’s not just a childish whim?’

  Maggie, rather wishing Mrs Dalzell had offered her a stack of bibles to swear upon, reassured her with an air of such utter earnestness that her teacher was instantly convinced. She thought a moment and then said, ‘Well, I’ll need some proof of it before I’m prepared to stick my neck out, as the saying goes.’

  ‘What proof?’

  ‘It’s not for me to tell you that. If you’re set on a stage career, you’ve a lot of preparatory work to do. What have you seen?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘What have you read? What have you learnt? Nothing at all, except the bit of Shaw and Shakespeare I’ve brushed you up against. Now let’s see how serious you are. Come to me in July, when you finish school, and we’ll see.’

  ‘But I’ve got to study for highers.’

  ‘You’ll find time for what you want to find time for,’ she said firmly.

  For the next few months, Maggie put Oklahoma! behind her. She read nothing but plays in such spare time as she had, and on Sundays, when her father insisted she take a break from studying, she would sit by the parlour fire apparently reading, but actually memorizing. She mastered Nina in The Seagull, Amanda in Private Lives, Varya in The Cherry Orchard, all the long speeches from St Joan and a good chunk of Juliet. Alone in her room at night, she would lock the door and rehearse. Her room was no longer a drab or depressing place. It became as multi-coloured and multi-faceted as a diamond, throwing sparks of future fulfilment in all directions.

  At the end of July, she made a proper appointment with Mrs Dalzell at her flat. Nothing less formal, somehow, would have suited the importance of the occasion — though what, in practical terms, could be gained by winning Mrs Dalzell’s support, she had no tangible idea. But Maggie had great faith in her. For six years she had watched her getting her own way in contests major and minor with the school bureaucracy. Where other teachers had shrugged away their dream-projects, defeated by regulations or budgets, Mrs Dalzell would flatter, wheedle and cajole, or alternatively attack head-on. Sometimes she would invade the sanctums of governors or principals. At other times she would get whole classes to work after school, fund-raising, costume-making, copy-typing, scene-painting. And eventually, her plays would get staged, her class magazines produced, her favourite festival presentations visited.

  Once, when she needed a set of books that was denied her, she pinched them wholesale from the library of a public school she was visiting with a group of poor-relation state-school teachers. She carried them away, twenty slim cloth-bound volumes, in her hold-all, used them for a whole term, had them beautifully cleaned up and fresh brown jackets put on them by the class in one of her extra-mural sessions, and returned them, pulling a fainting fit to get the librarian out of the room while she put them back on their shelf.

  It was because of such memories that Maggie did her audition before the elderly, pink-faced, white-haired Mrs Dalzell with as high a degree of nervous tension as if her teacher had been the representative of a London management.

  She began by handing her a list of books read, plays studied, parts learnt. She had written to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to get their current entrance audition set-pieces, and had learned all of them. Mrs Dalzell sat at one end of her narrow, cramped living-room, erect and watchful, every inch the part herself, making notes and saying. ‘Thank you, next piece please?’ Maggie suffered appropriately. She dried up once, fluffed once, and made one false start. ‘Never mind, begin again,’ came the cool voice out of the neat silhouette against the small french window.

  At the end Maggie sat down, breathless and shaky. Mrs Dalzell looked at her though her rimless ‘specs’.

  ‘Well!’ she said. ‘You’ve talent. You’ve a whole lot to learn of course — a great lot. Your breathing’s all wrong, you’ve a faulty “s” and you don’t know what to do with your hands, but that’s what drama school is for. And that, my girl, is where you are going.’

  Maggie gazed at her. Her heart, which had begun to beat normally after her small ordeal, picked up speed again. Unless she entirely misread the signs, what she faced now was going to be a great deal more than she had bargained for.

  ‘Daddy will never agree.’

  ‘I’d scarcely expect him to. We’ll have to see about it. Maggie, are you set enough on this course to be willing to deceive him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said before terror could stop her mouth.

  ‘To lie to him over a long period, and to get money out of him by false pretences?’

  Oh no, she had
not misread the signs! — unless to interpret them too mildly. Margaret would have stopped dead right there, but Maggie blurted out ‘Yes!’

  ‘You’ve no money of your own, I take it? Pity. So we’ll have to convince him the fees are for something else. Now, let’s see. What is it he wishes you to learn?’

  ‘Domestic science,’ she said, with a faint bleat of her voice.

  ‘Ah! He would do. Well now, the first thing we have to do is to get you a place at the RADA. Competition is high and you’ve left it late for this year’s intake, but we’ll see what we can arrange.’

  What she arranged, in the first instance, was an ‘educational’ trip to London to coincide with a last-minute audition, which Maggie passed — quite a coup in those days of returning veterans on government grants, not to speak of the usual swarms of beautiful, talented and ferociously determined girls from all over the world. Then came the really difficult bit.

  ‘Why, but of course the dear girl must be away down to London to study, Mr Robertson! What can you have against that? Such a well-raised girl can come to no harm if it’s all suitably arranged, as it will be, I promise you. I shall personally attend to all the details — you can safely leave everything to me. No, indeed! She cannot as well study domestic science in Scotland, for you know such few institutions as we have here are over-subscribed, and the one I am thinking of in London is far superior. I’m sure you want the best for Margaret and for your money, do you not? Well then, it’s all settled! As to her living arrangements, I have close relatives — Scots, of course, and members of our own faith — who let out lodgings to respectable girls. You need not trouble yourself at all on that score.’

  The traumas of Mrs Dalzell’s youth had made of her something more than a rebel perpetually on the lookout for fresh causes. She had become a fanatic in the cause of women’s liberation before it acquired its capital letters and the flaws and follies that attend all crusades. For her, it was not a matter of joining a movement already initiated, but of acting out of unique, personal and organic conviction. Compulsion would probably be a better word — she was not entirely right in the head. Did the warning bell ring for her as she said all this, or at any time while she steadfastly carried out her plans to change Maggie’s destiny? Even if it did, it’s doubtful whether she could, or would, have acted differently.

  Maggie confided her plans in no one but Stip.

  ‘Mrs D’s got Daddy absolutely mesmerised. Of course he’s known her for donkey’s years, but I don’t see how she got a year’s allowance out of him in one lump, fees and all!’

  ‘Well,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘she’s saving him a lot of bother, promising to see after you and visit you in London and all that. You know how he hates travelling.’

  ‘Hates the expense of it, you mean! I can see that as an excuse not to come home every time there’s a bit of a holiday.’

  Stip stared out of the window over the rooftops to the far, blur-edged hills. ‘You’ll be off then,’ he said in a muffled voice.

  ‘I hope you’ll be after me soon enough!’ she said robustly.

  ‘After you?’ His tone was dreary.

  ‘Of course! You’re not going to stay here all your life!’ Maggie was thinking with a pang that for the past months they had talked only about her plans, her dreams — his had been pushed aside. ‘It’s a pity you weren’t the oldest, so you could be first off the nest, but never mind! I’ll be trailblazer. I’ll make the contacts for you. I’ll be bound to meet some writers. And in the meantime, keep writing! I mean, your own writing, your plays and stories —’

  ‘With no one to read them to?’ There was naked reproach in his face now.

  She ignored it because it was unbearable. ‘Maybe one day I’ll act in a play of yours. Just think, Stip, it’ll come to the Festival, and we’ll send Daddy anonymous complimentary tickets — the curtain will go up, and there I’ll be —’

  He turned away, and she saw jokes and old dream-games were no use. She was abandoning him to the dark house and the mahogany sideboard and to Ian-the-traitor, to their father’s increasingly compelling references to the Advantages of Starting at the Bottom in the mill whilst possessing the Qualifications to Reach the Top. She gripped him, turned him, fixed her blue eyes upon his, which were exactly on her level, and said, ‘You’ve got to resist him, Stip! I have.’

  Stip was looking at her as if he had never seen her before.

  ‘Are you really going to do it, Maggie?’

  ‘Of course I am!’

  ‘I can’t believe in it, somehow. It’s like — like levitating. People say it happens but my reason says no.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Listen. You’re going to London and to the Radar or whatever you call it, and Dad’s going to pay, thinking it’s something else.’ Maggie suppressed a shiver. ‘But when you’re studying, there are things that the college sends home. Reports, bills — I don’t know. The Radar will be sending those to your home, won’t they?’

  ‘No, because Mrs Dalzell is my sponsor and they’ll come to her. Dad won’t see them.’

  ‘And won’t he expect to see ones from the college you’re supposed to be going to, the domestic science place?’

  Maggie giggled, and hugged herself with wicked glee. It was all a delicious game to her. The warning bell was simply an accompaniment to the dance of her spirit.

  ‘No! Listen. Mrs Dalzell has a friend who works in the other place, the one Dad thinks I’m going to. She’s the deputy head there, and Mrs D. often visits her in her office when she’s in London. So she’s going to pinch some report forms and bill forms and so on, and fill them out for me herself every term. Isn’t she wonderful?’

  Steven stared at her a long time.

  ‘I don’t know if she’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘I think she’s mad. What’s it her business? And what when Dad finds out in the end? He’ll kill her, and you too.’

  But Maggie was incapable of looking so far ahead.

  ‘By that time I’ll be an actress. There’ll be nothing he can do about it.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Maggie.’

  ‘What do you mean? I must.’

  ‘Not this way. You’ll be sorry.’

  ‘Sorry? No, I won’t. I’m never going to be sorry for anything I do. I’ve been made to feel sorry all my life not just for every little mistake, but for all the things I wanted to have and to do. Dad’s always said they were the wrong things. He’s never let me, never given way to me, never given me anything I longed for. You remember him that night, shouting and raging because we’d played a little trick to get an innocent little pleasure. He’d never let me act, Stip. Never, no matter how I begged. He wants me to stay at home forever doing housework, and I can’t.’

  ‘What about Mum? How will she feel?’

  This was Maggie’s Achilles’ heel. She relished the whole plan so far as her father was concerned. Her mother was something else. Yet her parents formed an indivisible unit. Never to Maggie’s knowledge had her mother stood out against her father’s wishes to the end. She was well-tarred with the Robertson brush and thus merited no individual consideration. That was, at any rate, how Maggie reckoned at the time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mrs Dalzell’s perjury of her soul had only extended to the nature of Maggie’s course of training. Regarding the lodgings, she had not uttered a deceitful word.

  When Maggie first entered the house in Bloomsbury owned by the M’Crimmond sisters, Mrs D’s first cousins, her heart sank at the meticulous accuracy of the description her father had been given. She had thought such houses existed only in the environs of Edinburgh; she was now to learn their ubiquity. Stone steps up to a black-painted, brass-embellished front door. A sonorous chime on the brass-rimmed button bell. A ghost-face pressed to the engraved glass panel, then the door opened on a dark passage that might have been the one at home — only close inspection disproved it. The Robertson’s inner doors were dark green; these were brown, like the dadoes, but ther
e was an almost identical carpet runner, patterned to camouflage mud, the same red-and-blue glass round the window on the half-landing where the M’Crimmond sisters had stood a thick pillar, graceless as a fat woman’s leg, bearing a lugubrious majolica pot… The smell was different, too. The smell here was of very old Jack Russell terrier.

  The M’Crimmond sisters themselves were twins, equally old-fashioned in their outer- and undergarments; the former featured tweed skirts, peter-pan collars and hand-knitted cardigans, and the latter, evidently, rigorous corsets. Their faces were kind and curious, but Maggie, peering at them in the dim light from the fan-glass and panels in the door, instinctively knew how quickly those gentle, welcoming lineaments could do a downturn into the tight ones of disapprobation if she put so much as one toe across the border between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.

  After the mandatory cup of tea she was shown to her room, the Jack Russell waddling ahead. It was no worse and no better than her room at home, except for one incredible aberration, at the sight of which her heart lifted. The counterpane was new, and furthermore it was chenille, a fabric that could safely be sat on, lain on, left in a heap or wrapped round cold knees and ankles. Its colour was what her mother called ‘shocking pink’, completely out of keeping with its surroundings, a fact the elder Miss M’Crimmond felt called on to apologise for. ‘It was a gift,’ she said, casting down her eyes as if the colour made it somehow indecent.

  ‘I love it,’ said Maggie, with a fervour that surprised even her.

  A letter had come for her that morning from Mrs Dalzell.

  ‘Well, Maggie!’ it began bracingly. ‘So you’re on your way! You’re probably feeling a little odd, so this is just to remind you that I will see you soon. I come to Town as often as I can to visit theatres and exhibitions, some of which I hope we may attend together. But even without me, you must go to plays at every opportunity. The gallery seats are very cheap. It is reported to be an excellent season. I’ve told my cousins that whatever other prohibitions they may see fit to impose while you are under their roof, you must not be restricted in your theatre-going.