The Happy Prisoner (10 page)

“I'll try not to.”

“Perhaps it was because you weren't there. I missed you a lot. Perhaps I need you.” He tried sometimes, experimentally, to flirt mildly with her, but it slid off her unheeded. “Tell me what you've been doing. It might cure me to take an interest in somebody else. I've been brooding on myself all week-end. Did you have fun?”

“Yes. I stayed with a friend of mine, a girl I trained with. She's married now, but her husband's still in the Army, so there's room for me in her flat.”

“Go on.”

“Well, let's see. She met me at the station and we had a late lunch, then we went to the cinema.”

“What did you see?”

“The new Lauren Bacall.”

“Never heard of her. Lord, I'm getting out of the world, aren't I? What did you do in the evening?”

“I went out to dinner,” she said, as if that were all she meant to tell about it.

“Who with—your friend?”

“Elspeth? No.”

“Another friend?”

“Yes.”

“Man or woman?” It was hard work, but he persevered Elizabeth did not seem quite so reticent as usual. She had a ruminating, slightly distracted air, as if she were not giving hei
whole mind to resisting his curiosity. He might catch her out yet. “Man or woman, I said.”

“Oh, a man.”

“Ah. Your boy friend.”

“Just a man I know.”

“What's his name? Don't think I'm being nosey, but you never tell me anything off your own bat, and, oddly enough, I am interested.”

“Arnold Clitheroe.”

“Oh. What did you do? You had dinner—

“Yes, and we danced.”

“Does he dance well?”

“We dance quite well together.”

“You enjoyed yourself, in fact.”

“Yes, I always do with Arnold. He—” She was about to add something and then stopped.

“Go out with him on Sunday?” asked Oliver casually. “Yes.”

“He is your boy friend. I know it. Tell me something about him, Elizabeth. Why are you being so coy?”

“I'm
not
being coy.” It was the first time he had ever seen her angry. “And I don't see that it's any of your business. What's the idea of this stupid cross-examination? If you're trying to make fun of me, I'm afraid I can't see the joke.” She banged out of the room. She had never banged his door before. This was interesting, most interesting. Oliver leaned back, tapped his finger-tips together and smiled. He was feeling better already. This was how it always was. Suddenly, between one sentence and the next, for no particular reason, the heaviness of his mind and body would lift and take itself right away. He imagined it sometimes as a shutter, rolling back inside his head; it was like someone coming into a darkened room full of stale sleep and pulling up the blind and opening the window to let in a sunburst of morning air.

Already his room, instead of being the prison it had seemed for the last two days, empty of consolation, was filling with its own warm, comfortable atmosphere. He could almost imagine he heard the furniture creaking as it relaxed. Outside, the pale November landscape was beautiful. The orange sun was like a woolly toy. Far away on the side of the hill, he could see Evelyn leading down her half-broken young Exmoor pony. Soon she and Violet would start struggling with it in the meadow at the bottom. He would watch that; it was always good fun.

He could smell onions cooking and found that he was looking forward to lunch. He picked up his shaving mirror. It had always been a bony, angled face, but since he had got thin his cheekbones seemed higher and his forehead more knobbly and prominent. His hair, ungreased for months now, seemed to be getting fairer and softer and kept trying to grow in the childish, untrained way of twenty years ago. It wanted cutting too. He smiled at himself. Ugly, grinning devil. Presently, he would ring the cow-bell for something and let the glad tidings spread through the house.

Mrs. North often said to Elizabeth: “I don't know what we should do without you.” She certainly was a most useful person to have about the house. Besides looking after Oliver and fulfilling to the letter the duties which Mrs. North had worked out for her, she was always doing little extra things which might have been taken for kindnesses if she had not done them in a manner that implied that this was what she was paid for. Mrs. North was often tired in winter; because the cold weather did not agree with her. Elizabeth would urge her into bed, professionally rather than solicitously, and appear later with a tempting tea-tray, just when Mrs. North was wondering whether to pander to her legs by staying in bed, or to her stomach by going downstairs for tea.

Sometimes she would take her rest in Oliver's room, with her feet on the red-leather stool in front of the fire. Lying back, the sides of the high armchair hid her face, but Oliver could tell when she was asleep by the steeper rise and fall of her chest, although she still held her book up on her lap. She would read for a while, then a long time would go by without a page being turned and her chest would start to appear beyond the sides of the chair. Waking in a few minutes, she would go on reading as if nothing had happened, until she dozed off again, to wake and read and doze and wake all through the afternoon. Sometimes, when they had been talking, she would throw out an idea on the instant of waking, as if she had been planning still in her dreams. She was napping thus one November afternoon, while Oliver played the wireless softly and watched Evelyn and a pigtailed
friend, in scarves and gumboots, raking leaves on the lower lawn under a red and rayless sun.

“Perhaps, after all,” said Mrs. North suddenly, “the little green room might be better. It's warmer, being over the kitchen.”

Oliver could not remember what they had been talking about half an hour ago. “Sure,” he said.

“Of course, there's a better bed in the big spare room. She's probably used to a good bed.”

“You mean Anne? Oh, don't worry about her. Put her in a loose-box.”

“Where do you figure she'd like to sleep?”

“In here, I should think, judging by the tone of her letter. Look at those silly kids out there. They haven't a chance in this wind. Evie!” he shouted. “You'll never do it! Why don't you give up?” Evelyn turned towards the house, spilling most of her armful of leaves. “We can do it,” came her shrill, breathless cry. “We must. Cowlin said—” The rest was smothered as the wind blew the leaves she held into her face and away before she could put them in the wheelbarrow. She grabbed the rake from her friend and began to work with desperate energy. She was always pitting herself against tasks that were far beyond her, convinced that she could do them, and battling on to the point of tears before she would give up. Oliver had watched her yesterday, building a jump in the hill field with Violet, struggling to get a heavy pit-prop into position across the uprights and thrusting Violet away when she ambled up to help.

“Sweep them with the wind, not against it!” he shouted, making passes which she could not see, as people make gestures while telephoning.

“You oughtn't to shout, darling,” said Mrs. North, waking up. She read for a moment, and when she woke again Oliver asked: “Good sleep?”

“I wasn't asleep.”

“You were—ten solid minutes.”

“I can't have been. I'm reading. I maybe just nodded for a second. I'm not crazy about this book, but the girl at the library said everyone was reading it, so I suppose I should.”

When Elizabeth had brought Oliver's tea, she came back again in a few moments with another tray for Mrs. North.

“Isn't that darling of you!” she exclaimed, taking her feet off the stool with a grunt so that Elizabeth could put down the tray. “You shouldn't have bothered; I was just coming along. What about the children?” She always thought everyone would starve if she were not about.

“Heather and I are having it with them in the nursery.”

“Hot scones!” Mrs. North lifted the lid of the muffin dish. “Did you make these? You are a dear.” Elizabeth was a disconcertingly difficult person to thank. She simply said: “You said this morning you wanted the sour milk used up.”

“Yes, but I don't want you to cook in your off-duty time.”

“Oh, I've been out,” said Elizabeth. “I went down to the village. I got your stamps and envelopes, and I took your shoes to Mr. Betteridge. He says they'll take a week.”

“You shouldn't have bothered. I could have taken them. But it was darling of you to think of it.” But Elizabeth would not have it so. “I had to go down, anyway, to get some toothpaste,” she said, and Oliver wondered whether she liked his mother and did these things to save her, or whether she were really as detached as she seemed.

“Oh, Elizabeth!” Mrs. North called her back as she was closing the door, with the lilting cry with which Americans call up the stairs. “I've been wondering whether I won't put Miss Frith into the little green room after all. We might make the bed up presently.”

“I did it this morning,” said Elizabeth.

“In the green room? But how did you know I—”

“You suggested it last night, before you decided on the other, but I thought you'd probably change your mind again.” She said this not rudely, but as a commonsense statement.

Oliver laughed when she had gone out. “How well she knows you already, Ma.”

“Better than I know her, I'm afraid. I can't seem to get near her at all. And she's such a good little thing, I would like to be fond of her, but if you show her any affection she shies off as if she were afraid of it. She certainly can make scones, though. I taught her that.”

“I thought she could when she came.”

“Mm-
hm
. Didn't rise properly. She had her dough too wet,” said his mother with her mouth full. “I showed her.” Oliver saw Elizabeth go out through the drawing-room on to the lawn to call the children in to tea. The wind blew her white overall close to her body. She put a hand up to her head, but her thick corn-coloured roll of hair stayed neat. It was too neat. It made an effective round frame to her composed little features and it showed off the clean line of her chin and nose and forehead, but sometimes, wondering what she would look like with it tumbling in disorder round her shoulders, he had to repress an impulse to pull it down when she was bending over him with
the serious expression she used for nursing. Heather had taught him at an early age the folly of tampering with a woman's hair. “Evelyn and Nancy!” she called. “Evie! Tea!” But they could not hear her. She did not often shout, and when she did, her voice had no carrying power. The children had got the barrow full of leaves and Evelyn was trying to lift the handles to wheel it away. It was too heavy for her, and Nancy tried to help, but Evelyn pushed her away. Oliver could imagine her scarlet, furious face. Eventually, after a little scrapping, they took one handle each, but they had only trundled a few yards when the cumbersome old barrow toppled over, taking Evelyn down with it because she would not let go and spilling out the leaves which they had taken two hours to collect. It was Evelyn who hurt her wrist, but it was Nancy who bellowed. Elizabeth ran, jumping nimbly down the steep bank between the two lawns instead of going by the steps, and when she reached the children, Oliver was surprised to see Evelyn fling her arms round her waist. Elizabeth dropped on one knee among the leaves and did not seem to notice that Evelyn, clutching at her, knocked her little white cap off while she was examining the wrist.

“Will you look at that?” said Mrs. North, who was peering over the bed in frustrated anxiety because she could not go across the lawn in her bedroom slippers. “The girl looks quite human. Funny—Evie never hugs anyone, even when she's upset.”

Elizabeth picked up her cap and stood up and Evelyn aimed a vicious kick at the overturned wheelbarrow and then took her hand and they came towards the house, Nancy wiping her nose on her scarf. The light was failing as they came across the top lawn and Oliver could not be sure whether it was his imagination or whether Elizabeth's expression was really softer and friendlier than any of them had yet seen it.

.…

Somebody had to go and meet Anne at the station, because she chose to come on a train that did not connect with any bus.

“Blast her,” said Violet. “We're short of petrol.
I
haven't got time, anyway.”

“I'd go,” said Heather, who had been Anne's friend before Oliver appropriated her, “but I'm supposed to be taking the children out to tea with that woman with no roof to her mouth.”

“Let me go,” suggested Mrs. North, but they rounded on her. Cars were precious these days.

“I'll go,” said Elizabeth, “if you don't mind me driving the car.”

“But it's your off-duty time, dear, and I do like you to stick to that. It's not fair otherwise.”

“I want to get some things in Shrewsbury, anyway,” Elizabeth said. “How shall I know Miss Frith?”

“She'll be the only person on the train in sheer silk stockings,” said Heather. “She works at an American Army club.”

“She's a skinnymalink,” said Mrs. North, “with eyes like saucers and beautiful clothes.”

“Look for dark rings under the saucers.” Violet guffawed at her own wit.

“Last time I saw her,” Oliver said, “her hair was scraped up on top of her head, with a kind of diamond hatpin stuck through it. It's probably hanging down her back by now, or bright yellow with a fringe—sorry, Ma, I mean bang. She'll be wearing highly unsuitable clothes in which she'll manage to look exactly right. I remember once she came to a point-to-point in a sort of black swishy thing and a hat made of one ostrich feather and a veil, and had all the other women in the party chewing their tweeds in mortification. God knows how she does it.” His mother looked at him sharply. If he wanted Anne to stay, of course he must have her, but Mrs. North had not wanted her to come. She had once made Oliver very unhappy.