The Warning Bell Read online

  ‘Eat your supper, dear. What does it matter what Helen thinks?’ She often spoke of herself objectively, as if she lived outside her own head.

  ‘It does matter,’ said Maggie, and, to her own surprise, this was true.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing about it. It was marry or burn.’

  ‘Pardon, Aunty?’

  ‘As St Paul said. It’s better to marry than burn. He meant if you can’t resist the temptation of the flesh, you’d better marry, which of course he disapproved of because he thought we should all live like the saints in heaven. You’ve not been a saint, Maggie, but if you’d not taken your chance — stolen it, perhaps I should say — you’d have burnt with longing all your life. And that’s something I know a good deal about.’ She got up to put the kettle on.

  ‘Then you —’

  ‘Oh no, I’d not be able to say I approve. Stealing’s very wrong, and stealing from your own father is wronger still. But that’s not to say I condemn you.’ She turned at the old fashioned stove and looked down at Maggie. She was a tall woman, and for a moment Maggie wondered why everyone called her ‘poor Helen’ — she looked quite formidable. ‘If I’d known at your age what I know now,’ she said, ‘I might have done anything — anything at all — to avoid the life I’ve had. Fifteen years I looked after Father, after poor Mother passed away. One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but I’m going to. He was a selfish, curmudgeonly, demanding, ungrateful old man and he drained me as dry as you see me now. If I had known that with his death my life’s story, I mean the part with plot, would come to an end, I think duty and goodness and all the rest of it would have been frail cobwebs to stand in my way during those terrible years. Into a home he’d have been put, and away I’d have been with scarce a backward look.’ She turned back to the stove, picked up the kettle that had been shrilling an accompaniment to her confession, and prosaically made the tea.

  Maggie got up early the next morning, before Helen was awake. She folded her bedclothes and emptied the hot-water bottle, which Helen had crept up to slip tenderly between the sheets the night before, and to lay against Maggie’s shock-chilled feet. She didn’t eat breakfast or even make herself a cup of tea — one of those small quixotries rather typical of her, the pointless nicety of feeling she didn’t deserve her kind aunt’s hospitality. She scribbled a note of loving thanks, and, carrying her case, quietly left the house.

  She had to walk past her own ex-home to reach the bus-stop. As she passed it she slowed down and looked, convinced it was for the last time, at the solid blackstone frontage, the swaybacked stone steps, the prim lace curtains in the windows… She suddenly remembered hearing her mother once, arguing with Aunt Helen: ‘I hate the things, shutting the world out! What have we got to hide?’ And Helen, astonished: ‘But you’re right on the main road! Prying eyes… Besides, the sun would fade the carpets.’

  ‘Let it,’ Mrs Robertson had retorted. But the lace curtains were still there…

  Maggie was halfway down the next block. She looked at her watch. She had seven minutes to spare, no more, if she wanted to make the train. Dropping her suitcase over a low wall, she ran back, and round to the back door.

  A glance through the small window by the drainpipe — yes — she was there, in her dressing-gown, filling the morning kettle. Maggie’s shadow fell on her mother’s face. She looked up, startled, and Maggie saw — really saw her for the first time in years, if not ever. Nearly sixty and looking every hour of it, and, more than age, sadness, anxiety, and the stifling of all her secret personal dreams. Like Helen, she must have had some. What had they been?

  Maggie felt a rush of love for her mother, pure love. She was later to reflect, sitting crying on the train, that she had never felt love before, physical, sharp as a migraine.

  Her mother hurried to the back door, unbolted it and let her in. With no time to do anything but act spontaneously, Maggie flung her arms round her mother’s neck and hugged her as she hadn’t done since she was too little to have learnt that her mother subtly avoided physical contacts… Yet now she felt, after the first startled second, arms going round her.

  ‘I wasn’t going to come — then I ran back — I had to see you —’

  ‘Couldn’t you stay a little?’ her mother implored.

  Maggie took one glimpse at the prospect of seeing her father again, now, and a long shiver shook her.

  ‘I can’t, Mummy. I simply am not able.’

  Her mother held her in silence, without reproach.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Maggie burst out suddenly. ‘Maybe I am bad, as Daddy said —’

  ‘Bad? Nonsense! Of course you’re not!’ said her mother robustly. And Maggie saw tears come, and hugged her again to hide them. Suddenly she heard her mother whispering love-words, such as she hadn’t heard from her since she was a tiny girl: ‘Never mind, sweetheart, never mind! You’re a good girl and your mummy loves you, don’t ever doubt it.’

  Maggie felt her control, not cracking so much as simply dissolving in some painful acid-bath of feeling. Was this her mother, cuddling and consoling her as if she were a baby? Do people change so radically under stress, or — unbearable thought! — had she been like this all the time, buried somehow under encrustations of deadening restraint? Had the lace curtains, the mahogany, and most of all her husband’s expectations and demands, done to her mother the very thing Maggie had been terrified they would do to her?

  For a moment, mother and daughter stared at each other, holding on with eyes and hands, on the verge of a breakthrough to the empathy that the years and the rigid rules of their lives had bricked up, but that was still — each sensed it — viable, waiting to be developed into a real, adult relationship.

  But it was too late. Maggie would miss her bus, her train — her life.

  ‘Mummy — I’m going, I’ve got to — please —’

  She didn’t know what she pleaded for, but her mother knew.

  ‘You’re doing right. You’ve done wrong, but you’re doing the right thing now. Go on. Leave him to me.’

  ‘I love you. I love you.’

  She kissed her with passion and started out. Her mother’s voice stopped her at the back door.

  ‘Think of me when you’re acting. Share it with me. Will you do that?’

  Maggie had no time to interpret this remark, or her astonishment at it. ‘I will,’ she promised, and ran.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Wales was marvellous, every bit as marvellous as Maggie had expected, if not more. The best part of this marvelousness was that Maggie felt justified. The company was small; it was a bit tatty; it didn’t lead anywhere; and since she played all sorts, she was not always at her best. But she learned, and she enjoyed, and that meant she was able to forget about her father much of the time, and during the rest (Sundays, mainly, having her once-a-week lie-in, no rehearsals and no lines to learn till a quick brush-up after supper) she could tell herself that it had been worth it, that she would be a fine actress one day and make him proud/sorry, and also that she would pay him back every penny. She gave considerable thought to how this was to be done. Out of a salary of four pounds a week plus free digs, it was hard to do anything very helpful about her repayment fund at the moment, but her intentions were good. All in all, it was quite impossible to imagine herself ever crawling back for shelter and succour, as her father had promised her she would.

  She wrote a number of letters on these divinely idle Sundays, mainly sitting on the beach. Regularly to her mother, full of detail and company gossip; a couple, hopefully, to Stip (what did he think of her since the row?), which he didn’t answer; and long girl-chat ones to Tanya, who had been walking-on at the Vic all summer ‘in wrinkled tights and a tabard that fatally reveals my big bum. Luckily the pay is so little that I cannot help but diet.’

  She did not write to Mrs Dalzell. Mrs Dalzell was lurking somewhere behind the dung-ball of guilt; this, though off her chest due to working, stayed poised, near enough at hand to cast its s
hadow over her when the emotional light was at a certain angle.

  The season ended with the end of summer, and Maggie returned to London, buoyed up with confidence and raring to go (anywhere but to Edinburgh). The first port of call was the M’Crimmonds’, to see if there was any post. She anticipated plenty, in reply to all those job-letters enclosing glossy photos with ‘Please return to…’ on their backs. Some managements at least must have had the decency to do that much! Well, three of them had, two with compliments slips and one with a polite letter of regret. That meant approximately thirty-seven costly little glossies lost forever.

  Of other mail, there was only one: the long-awaited letter from Stip.

  It contained no overt reproaches, which was generous, considering what the atmosphere at home must have been like (her mother had hinted that her father had by no means ‘got over it’). Stip rather sheepishly related that he was, after all, going into the family business — ‘at least for a while, till my plans mature… It really wouldn’t have done, to cross Dad just now, all things considered.’ Maggie, reading this, had the grace to blush. ‘The stories came back from Argosy, and from Story, but I can’t really expect to start selling right away. I’m rewriting them… I’m saving money. I’ve given up smoking and I hardly ever go out. Dreary as the mill is, and obnoxious as it is to be working under Ian, there’s some satisfaction in a weekly pay-packet, though I sometimes wish Dad were more of a nepotist — he gives me less money than everyone else, not more, and more rockets too, if I make mistakes… By the way! What happened to all those “contacts” you promised to make for me?’

  Totally forgotten. That’s what happened to them. Another clod flung at the dung-ball, but its little bulge hardly showed up on that massive sphere.

  Maggie said what she fondly believed was a last farewell to ‘Miss Brenda’ and ‘Miss Roberta,’ fondled the wiry deaf ears of the Jack Russell (who gave her hand a valedictory nip) and was off — to share what Tanya called her three-room dosshouse in the Goldhawk Road. Tanya’s season, too, had ended and the two of them settled down to their first experience of joblessness together.

  This first patch was not too bad. The best thing about it was its brevity. Two of the lads who had been in Tenby started up their own company in Ilfracombe, Devon, and invited Maggie to join them for ‘a winter of discontent, subsidised, for their own unfathomable reasons, by the local council.’ The list of plays to be presented was uninspiring, and the two self-appointed managers apologised for it, adding, ‘One has to sink pretty low to attract even tourists in this benighted region, so think what we have to stoop to when it’s only the residents.’ The one speck of gold in the dross of thrillers and farces was Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, in which Maggie was astonished to find she’d been cast as the ghost — ‘the other juve, darling, is even less ethereal-looking than you.’ She’d rather have had a go at Madame Arcati, but who was she to fuss? At least it was a job, which was more than Tanya had.

  Tanya was very good about it, in a slightly two-edged way. ‘Even if I was offered, I wouldn’t go,’ she said. ‘I am going to stick out for a good company. After the Vic, I couldn’t bear tat.’ And speaking of tat (which Maggie wished she hadn’t), Tanya lent her half a dozen marvellous character outfits, which she had recently inherited from a defunct landlady.

  Maggie was packing these into her trunk (picked up cheap at the lower end of Portobello Road) one dingy late September morning. Tanya’s dosshouse flat was three floors up; the bell was the sort that had to be turned like a key and emitted a harsh, rusty gargle. So Maggie knew nothing of her visitor until someone shouted up the stairwell to her. She went out on to the linoleum-covered landing and leant over the bannisters. Down below, standing erect by the hideous hall-stand, clad in her same old caped tweed coat and brightly feathered hat, was Mrs Dalzell.

  Something went ping in Maggie’s head at the sight of that familiar figure, foreshortened by height but unmistakable and unchanged. Her first craven impulse was to run and hide. But it was useless. In any case, a contrary impulse was already bearing her swiftly down the stairs toward that Pears’-soap-scented embrace. How could I not have written, all this time? She had no answer to give herself.

  ‘Mrs Dalzell, how marvellous to see you! Where have you come from? How did you find me?’ she babbled, aware that of course she should have let her know where she was, not leave her to find out from her cousins. Mrs Dalzell was smiling as Maggie led her up the narrow stairs, still rattling on, but she said little, and Maggie began to have a distinctly uneasy feeling that had nothing directly to do with her own sense of shame.

  She settled her visitor down in front of the gas-fire, and, still chatting, went through into the kitchenette and put on a kettle. She was halfway through a rather high-pitched monologue about Tenby when she suddenly stopped to think.

  She put her head round the dividing door.

  ‘Mrs Dalzell, isn’t it term-time?’

  ‘It is,’ said Mrs Dalzell, nodding her firm, single nod.

  ‘Then what are you doing in London in mid-week?’

  Mrs Dalzell, who had been leaning forward to warm her hands at the fire, sat back and turned, meeting Maggie’s eye for the first time.

  ‘I’ve had the sack,’ she said, ‘and a bag to put it in, as they say.’

  Maggie stood stock-still with the coffee-jar clutched in both hands.

  ‘The sack? You?’ she said numbly.

  ‘Yes.’

  Maggie stepped back to where she couldn’t be seen. She set the jar down and gazed at it. This was, on the face of it, terrible news. And there was something — some instinct told her with piercing certainty — even more terrible behind it.

  ‘How did it happen?’ she muttered at last.

  ‘Come in here, where I can see you.’

  Reluctantly, Maggie obeyed, and sat down at her side.

  ‘Well!’ Mrs Dalzell began brightly. ‘I was invited to retire early. I declined. They insisted. Nothing I could acknowledge as an adequate reason was given. But there was a reason, of course.’

  Of course. ‘What?’ asked Maggie with a dry mouth.

  Mrs Dalzell shrugged, and the shrug turned into a little shiver. ‘I can’t be sure. There were … forces at work. Behind the scenes, so to speak.’

  After a pause Maggie licked her lips and obliged herself to ask, ‘Do you mean that someone —?’

  ‘It may not have been just one person. I’ve not gone through my career at that school without ruffling a few feathers. And the tide was running against me in any case. You know I’m not a qualified teacher. Ever since the war, there’s been a movement to replace teachers like me with young people with degrees. Many of them of course know nothing whatsoever about teaching, but they have their qualifications. The likes of me are just — untidiness in the new bureaucratic pattern.’

  ‘Perhaps it was just that.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘But you don’t think so,’ said Maggie slowly.

  ‘I think there was more to it than that.’

  Maggie stood up and withdrew to the kitchenette. There she stood perfectly still, staring at the chipped tiles behind the two-ring gas-stove. Her father was not on the school board of governors, but he knew several men who were.

  And all the time this shabby little Machiavellian plot was being enacted, she, Maggie, hadn’t written. She had been shoving Mrs Dalzell out of her thoughts, not sharing anything with her or reaching out to her. She made the coffee with fumbling hands and carried it on a tin tray into the tiny bedsitter.

  They sat together before the gas-fire, scorching their shins at it and warming their hands on the slippery mugs. At last Maggie said, ‘What can I say? I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself in any way, Margaret. We can’t know for certain.’

  ‘I know for certain.’

  ‘You never told me how he took it.’

  ‘He was angry. Very, very angry.’

  ‘Ah well. Perhaps I des
erve it at his hands. Perhaps it’s only just.’

  At last Maggie choked it out. ‘I’m so sorry not to have written.’

  ‘Yes, it would have been nice to hear how you were going on. But I know what it’s like in those weekly reps — so little free time. Rehearsing one week, playing the next, learning the part for the week to follow —’

  Maggie gladly slipped into forward gear. ‘And getting costumes together. Honestly, after a few weeks, finding clothes is more of a problem than learning lines —’

  ‘And no doubt you took your turn stage-managing?’ Maggie nodded eagerly. This, yes. Let’s talk all about this. Please. ‘And tell me, did you paint your own scenery, find your own props?’

  ‘We had a scenic artist, but he got drunk a lot and had a girl in the town. One awful Monday — we were opening that night with a five-hander — we were dress-rehearsing and painting the set all at once. The minute you’d made an exit, you had to throw on an overall, pick up a stencil and paintbrush and paint on a few more fleurs-de-lis…’ Her voice trailed away, although Mrs Dalzell was gazing at her, apparently all attention. There was a dreadful anguish to be sensed behind the polite, interested expression, which made it impossible for Maggie to go on. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked instead.

  The anguish vanished as if a window, accidentally left open, had been firmly shut.

  ‘Me? Oh, I don’t know! Yes I do. Of course I shall look for a new job. Because I must teach, you know, the way you must act. There’s nothing in our area at home, so I thought I’d try my luck in the south, though I fear they’re even more obsessed here with “bits of paper”… At my age it couldn’t be easy in any case…’

  ‘They did give you a testimonial?’

  ‘They could scarcely refuse that, after all these years. But it was not what you’d call a rave notice.’ She took a letter out of her commodious handbag and showed it to Maggie, who read: ‘To whom it may concern: Mrs Fiona Dalzell has been a teacher at this school for the past twenty-nine years and has proved herself quite satisfactory.’