The Happy Prisoner Read online

  “Hush, dear,” said his mother. “You know I wouldn’t let you do it even if you were up. I can manage fine. It’s only at week-ends when the Cowlins don’t come. We should be quite all right if only everyone would co-operate. It is a bit depressing to come back to a cold house with no curtains drawn and the back door swinging open. I shall be glad when Elizabeth gets back.”

  “So shall I,” said Oliver, whose back was still sore from Mary Brewer’s zealous rubbing.

  “I can’t find the children’s milk jug anywhere.” Heather came in wearing a damp flannel apron with her hair dishevelled, the fringe parted in the middle and standing up on either side like two little horns.

  “Why, I’ve just found it in the scullery, soaking in the floor bucket. I thought you’d put it there.”

  “I? Why on earth should I—”

  “Well, it’s black, you can’t use it.”

  “That’s Vi,” said Heather bitterly. “She doesn’t care a hang about anyone else’s things. Honestly, Ma, it’s a bit thick. She can’t even be trusted on her own for an afternoon. What’s she been doing with my jug, Ollie?”

  “Search me,” he said.

  They kept finding things that Violet had or had not done. As they got more and more irritated with her, the chances got less and less of her news being received sympathetically, if and when she chose to break it.

  When his mother told him that he did not look well, Oliver realised that he did not feel so well tonight. His eyes felt heavy and he was conscious of his heart beating. He took his pulse. The rate was all right, but he did not think the slight irregularity was purely imagination. Was the thing never going to right itself? There were times when he despaired of ever being anything more than a bath-chair nuisance.

  His box of heart pills was empty. The new box was in the cupboard, but he did not want to ask his mother to get it, because she would fuss about him needing them. The longing to get out of bed and walk across the room was almost unbearable. If only he could do just that, he would ask nothing more, would stay in this room for the rest of his life. Just to be able to walk across the floor to the corner cupboard. Imagining himself doing it, he could actually feel the floor under the sole of the foot that was not there. His stump twitched. With the weight of the leg removed, the big nerves in it were too powerful. It was always making involuntarily movements, even in response to no conscious thought, as readily as an eyelid blinks.

  He began to realise that one of his moods of depression was hovering over him. Either because of this or because he had eaten too much toast and dripping, he could not eat his supper, which made his mother anxious and his mood worse. His head started to ache and the dressing on his stump, which Mary Brewer had insisted was loose so that she could rebandage it, was now too tight.

  Violet had not come back to supper. His mother kept coming in to ask if he thought she had gone to see Joan Elliot, or had taken her bicycle out and had an accident, or had gone to the cinema, and should she ring up Joan and find out?

  Perhaps she had thrown herself into the pond in an agony of indecision. As the self-absorption which always accompanied his fits of depression grew, he began to lose interest in Violet’s amour. The idea, which had seemed so promising this afternoon, began to pall. He tried to see it as he had before, as the best thing for Vi, her one chance of being married to a man with whom she could be happy, and who seemed quite satisfied with her as she was, but he could not make the affair seem anything but dreary and rather squalid, nor Fred anything but a bore and a prospective blot on the family. This afternoon it had not seemed to matter that he spoke with a Norfolk accent, was paralytic in company and a head shorter than Violet. Oliver wished now that he had not tried to persuade her. Sentimental, meddling fool. Heather made him feel worse by saying cheerfully: “I hear you’re having a mood.”

  “Who says so?”

  “Ma told me in confidence.”

  “Well, I’m not,” he said crossly.

  “Please yourself,” she said, “but I would just like to know what Vi’s been doing with the kettle. She boiled it up on the fire in here, didn’t she?”

  “Why ask, if you know she did?” said Oliver.

  When his mother came in to say good night, she stood by his bed, folded her arms and said: “Violet’s back, and where do you think she’s been? Having supper with Fred. I was very cross. People will talk, you know, even about her. You know what she is, she’s got no idea of what one can and what one can’t do. Darling, you don’t think she’s running after that dreadful little man, do you?”

  “He’s not a dreadful little man,” said Oliver.

  “Don’t get me wrong, dear, you know I’m very fond of Fred, but he’s not quite—I mean, one couldn’t—” Mrs. North had been in England long enough to know beyond what point democracy was impracticable. “I mustn’t imagine things,” she went on.