The Happy Prisoner Page 18

  “Go to bed,” Oliver said, coming back from a reverie to find her still talking. “You must be tired, Ma.”

  “Don’t worry about me, darling boy. You’re the one we have to worry about. Can you imagine me forgetting your tea just because my son-in-law’s come home? I can’t get over it.” He knew she would come back after she had left him, but he did not know it would be to whisper in the dark: “Listen, dearest Ollie, don’t think because I make a lot of song and dance about John and Heather that any of it means a thing to me compared to you recovering. I suppose I ought not to say this, but I would almost wish John dead in Malaya if that could give you back your leg again and your strong heart.”

  Chapter 8

  Perhaps the novelty of John would have taken longer to wear off if he had not been at home so much. He had three months’ leave, and by the end of the first month Heather was beginning to feel like a mother at the end of the school holidays. She was heard to remark that it was unnatural for a man to be in to lunch every day. John was not discontented or at a loose end. He asked nothing better than to be about the house and farm all day, reading and smoking and making marginal notes in his books, chatting sociably to anyone who felt like it, taking long striding walks with Violet’s dogs and leaving muddy boots in the scullery, or bringing in an earthy head of celery which he thought would be nice for lunch just when the meal was being dished up. When Heather mentioned the boots, and muttered something about poor Mrs. Cowlin and no wonder there was class warfare, he sneaked oft’ to the scullery to clean them himself. He could not find the shoe-box and did not like to ask, as he wanted it to be a surprise for Heather, so he used a table knife and a nailbrush and scraped the mud into what he took to be a bucket of dirty water instead of his daughter’s underwear in soak.

  He was a large man and he moved slowly. He had a habit of standing in doorways when people were coming along with trays. Oliver noticed that Heather sometimes looked irritated when she came into his room and found John ruminating there, particularly when he levered himself up for her or tried to take from her anything she was carrying. She adopted Oliver’s expression of “I’m not paralysed”, which he used on his mother when she wanted to fill his pipe or comb his hair or scoop out the inside of his baked potato. Oliver remembered, from the days when they used to go out, how John would fling wide a door for a woman as if she were twice the size, and how he would skip about so as always to be on the outside of the pavement. They had once taken a most unsettled walk along the grass strip between the traffic lanes of a by-pass. He used to put his hand under Heather’s elbow to help her up steps or even up the gentle slope of a theatre aisle, and she would shake him off and tell him she was not a cripple, just as she did now, and he would laugh indulgently and do it again the next time, just as he did now. David had spilled cocoa over the housecoat and Heather had not yet sent it to be cleaned. She had begun to mention again the butter and sugar and chocolate, and after she had weighed John she mentioned it more frequently and frowned when she saw him plastering his bread unthinkingly with the butter ration. Oliver wondered whether John noticed the gradual waning of her first enthusiasm. He was never anything but amiable and pleasant and always ready to welcome the sudden impulses of either affection or compunction which caused her to fling herself at him declaring that he was sweet and she loved him. If she kissed him, he would hold up his cheek and screw up the side of his face to receive it. Oliver had never seen him kiss her on the lips in public.

  When he went to London for the week-end, to see his mother and the manager of his firm, Heather tidied her room, which she and John now shared, the children being together in the spare room. Oliver heard her creaking about over his head all morning, opening and shutting drawers and cupboards, moving furniture, Hoovering, and he wondered how many of his things John would be able to find when he came back. Heather soon grew restless, however, and said several times: “I wonder what John’s doing,” or: “Doesn’t the house seem empty?” or to David: “Daddy will be home tomorrow.” After tea on Sunday, she started to wander in and out of Oliver’s room saying: “Johnny should be here by six. I have missed him. Isn’t it funny—in this short time I’ve got more used to having him about than I got used to not having him all those months he was away. Yet when he is here we don’t seem to get on so well.”

  “I never hear you fighting,” Oliver said.

  “Of course not: he won’t. You hear me snapping at him, though, and it just bounces back to me off him.”

  “I suppose all husbands and wives get on each other’s nerves at times,” said Oliver obligingly.

  “But I don’t get on his. At least, if I do, he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t show if he minds my snapping at him either, which makes me feel worse for doing it. It’s just that I feel peevish, you know, Ollie, and because he’s there he gets the brunt of it. But when he goes away I miss him. I feel I should have been charming all this week-end if he’d been here. I suppose that’s the way love goes,” she said, without much conviction.

  She lingered, balancing Oliver’s tea-tray on one hip. She seemed to be in a tractable mood. You had to pick your moment carefully if you wanted to ask Heather things like: “What does he think of your being a Catholic? I had a sort of tentative, abstract talk with him the other day, and I must say he doesn’t seem to have been brought up to see-much farther than the Thirty-Nine Articles. I don’t imagine he approves?”

  “Obviously not. He wrote that from Australia, but the silly part is, I don’t get a chance to try and explain, because now he simply won’t discuss it. He looks like a hurt dog when he sees me going off to church, but if I ever try to tell him how I feel about it, or what made me want to be a Catholic, he cricks his jaw sideways like he does when he feels grim about something and says: ‘You must do what you think is right. One person can’t interfere with another’s religion.’ And though I’d bite his head off if he did, I almost wish he would in a way, because then I could feel martyred. St. Heather of Hinkley, persecuted for her faith. I should get a hell of a kick out of that. Heavens, is that the right time? I must go and make myself beautiful: he does like to see me done up.” She went away and Oliver heard her asking her mother if she had any Thawpit. She was going to try to get the cocoa stain out of the housecoat.

  Six o’clock passed, and at seven Heather, who had been up and down the stairs countless times to look out of the front door, came into Oliver’s room for a drink and said: “I do wish he’d come. What on earth d’you suppose has happened to him?”

  “Train was probably held up,” said Oliver. “I shouldn’t worry.”

  “Good Lord, I’m not worrying. But I can’t get David to sleep. John promised he’d see him in bed when he got home. I do think he might come.”

  At eight o’clock David, struggling against drowsiness, fell asleep sitting up. Heather tucked him up and came downstairs to give them a pathetic description of David, white from exhaustion. “It’s too bad of Johnny,” she said.

  “He probably missed his train,” her mother told her. “Don’t carry on so, Heather, as if no one had ever missed a train before.”

  “He’s not the sort of man who misses trains,” said Heather, “and if he had he’d have telephoned. He always thinks of doing things like that.”

  “Perhaps the car wouldn’t start at Shrewsbury,” Oliver suggested.

  “Cars always start for him. He understands them.” She fidgeted about tensely, swishing the skirt of the housecoat. “Relax,” Violet grunted, but Heather became increasingly worried and soon infected her mother, who was always game for a spot of anxiety. “I’m sure something’s happened to him; I’ve got a premonition,” Heather said, leaning across Oliver to peer out of the window, as if she expected to see John’s ghost materialising on the moonlit lawn. “Fancy going through all that in Burma only to end up under the wheels of a London taxi,” she said dramatically.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Heather,” said her mother, her mind instantly seizing and embroidering on the
vision. “Besides, the hospital would have let us know. I put his name on all his shirts only last week.”

  “If only I could get in touch with him at least he’d know I was worrying about him,” said Heather ingenuously. “Supposing there’s been a train smash, Ma, or he got appendicitis, or lost his memory, from delayed shell-shock or something.” They discussed the ghoulish possibilities of John’s fate until Violet asked with an enormous yawn: “How much longer are we going to wait dinner?”

  “Let’s have it, shall we?” said Mrs. North. “I can keep John’s hot for him. Come along, Heather, it’ll pep you up. We’re having the pheasant, pot-roasted.”

  “I couldn’t eat a thing,” boasted Heather. “I think I’ll go up and cuddle my babies.”

  Violet snorted as she went out of the room. “Golly,” she said pityingly, “I wouldn’t be put off roast pheasant because Fred was a couple of hours late. The other day, when he didn’t come back for tea, I got sick of waiting and ate all the grub. When he came in starving there was nothing to eat; it was a scream.”

  “I bet Fred didn’t think so,” said Oliver.

  “Oh, he didn’t mind,” said Violet vaguely. “He had some bread or something.”

  By half-past nine Heather was certain that John was dead, or at least dying. She switched from restlessness to wan courage. One had the feeling that she might go up soon and change the peacock-blue housecoat for black, with veiling. When her mother kept telling her that John’s business had probably kept him another night in town, Heather shook her head with a sad smile and repeated: “He would have rung up. He would never be so late without letting me know.” When her mother had gone out to satisfy herself that John’s dinner was not drying up, Heather said to Oliver: “This is a judgment on me for not being nicer to him. I do wish I’d gone to the cinema with him yesterday when he asked me. I said I had to bath Susan, though I really could have left her to Elizabeth, and he went off so pathetically all by himself.”

  “I wonder he didn’t take Elizabeth,” Oliver said.

  “She’d have gone with him like a shot too,” answered Heather, and Oliver looked up at the rancour in her voice. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed how she makes up to him. She never produced that smile for any of us.”

  “You’re crazy,” Oliver said. “Just because she likes him and feels friendly. You always complain she’s too unfriendly. What do you want?”

  “I don’t want her to make passes at my husband, I know that.”

  “You do say the silliest things when you’re worked up,” Oliver said, annoyed. “Anything less likely than John and Elizabeth having an intrigue.”

  “Oh, I didn’t say John would,” Heather said in an exasperated voice. “He’s never looked at another woman since we were married, and not many before that, I should think. He’s almost inhumanly chaste. Oh dear, I do wish I’d gone to the cinema with him.”

  “Never mind,” said Oliver cheerfully, “it’s very nice going to the movies by yourself. You can concentrate better without someone asking you whether you’re enjoying it, or have you got a match.”

  “Yes,” said Heather, sounding as if she were going to cry, “but he didn’t enjoy the film.” Her mouth trembled, her eyes were blurring and her face was getting red, when suddenly the well-known squeal of the family car’s brakes, which not even John was able to mute, drained the blood from her face with a gasp and she rushed out without shutting the door, so that Oliver heard her rapturous greeting of John. He came in looking rather sheepish, with Heather hanging on to his arm, recovered enough now to start asking questions. “But why didn’t you ring up, Johnny? That’s what I can’t understand. Why didn’t you let me know?”

  “I couldn’t get through. I tried several times, but I couldn’t even get Toll. I’m terribly sorry, darling, I’d no idea you’d get so worried, or I’d never have stayed on for the later train when old George suggested it. Hullo, Onions, how’ve you been?” Onions was John’s name for Oliver.

  “Oh, worried sick about you, of course, old boy,” said Oliver, grinning. “You really shouldn’t do this sort of thing. It’s bad for my heart.”

  Heather had let go of John and was standing a little apart, scrutinising him with a slight pucker, as if surprised to find him not looking quite the same as her anxious imagination had drawn him. “George Hanbury,” she said with contempt. “Fancy anyone missing three trains for the sake of playing billiards with George Hanbury.”

  “I rather like him,” said John apologetically “I know you don’t, but it’s not his fault if he hasn’t got any of the social graces. You’ve never forgotten that time he spilled his drink on your dress have you?” he added, smiling his pride at her fastidiousness.

  “Don’t remind me of it,” she said. “And just to make everything perfect, he trod on the dress when we were dancing afterwards, and tore it.”

  “Trust old George,” John laughed. “He damn nearly tore the cloth today. He will one of these days with that backhanded twist shot of his. You ought to see it, Onions; dangerous, but most effective when the angle’s tricky. He gets his right arm cuddled round his waist and his left elbow somewhere up by his ear.”

  “I think I’ll go up to bed,” Heather said, and John leaped to open the door for her. “By the way, old girl,” he said as she came towards him, “did you know there was a colossal great mark on the skirt of that coat thing? You ought to do something about it.”

  Oliver could not see his sister’s face, but he knew she had worked on the stain for more than half an hour. Meeting her mother in the doorway, she burst out: “Ma, where d’you think he’s been? Playing billiards with that awful George Hanbury.”

  “Who’s George Hanbury, dear?” asked her mother comfortably, and patted John’s arm. “Your dinner’s all ready for you, Johnny.” She disentangled her pendant watch from the chain of her pince-nez. “Why, it’s two and a half minutes past ten. You must be starving. Did you have a good time, dear?”

  “Grand, thanks. I’m awfully sorry I’m so late.”

  “I don’t mind. I like you to get among your own crowd again, after being stuck down here in our rut for so long. You should get up to town more. Would you like to have your dinner in here? Heather will get it for you. She’s been terribly worried, poor child, but you see now, Heather, I was quite right; he was with friends. You’ll find everything in the oven, dear, and his soup’s in a saucepan.” In the silence which followed Heather’s slam of the door, they heard her footsteps going not to the kitchen but up the stairs.

  “Well,” said Mrs. North, with a nervous little mm-hm, “well, I’ll just go and see that she can find everything.”

  When she had gone out, John pleated his forehead. “Actually,” he said, “I had some beer and sandwiches at Shrewsbury, because I thought I’d be too late for dinner. I don’t really want anything, though as she’d kept it specially …”

  “You have it, my boy,” said Oliver firmly. “You’ve caused enough trouble for one day. You may not think it, but Heather has honestly been awfully worried. You might have been one of the children, the way she was carrying on. Most gratifying. Don’t pay any attention to all this.” He waved his hand up towards the rattling of the handles of Heather’s tallboy as she banged drawers open and shut. “Reaction.” He thought he was being a ray of sunshine, putting things right between them, but John stiffened and his face took on a stubborn, blindly loyal look. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a nuisance,” he said. “It was damn thoughtless of me.” He left the room before Oliver could try again to discuss Heather.

  Oliver wondered where he would go now. Upstairs to risk apologising to Heather, or politely to the kitchen to be piled with food he did not want? If he had any sense, he would go up and make violent love to Heather before she could say a word. How wise Oliver felt lying here knowing he could run people’s lives better than they could themselves. He had visions of himself as the oracle and influence of the household, but it was difficult to be either an oracle or an influen
ce when people kept going away and you could not get up and follow them and make them listen.

  “What have you been plotting with my mother?” Oliver asked, when Dr. Trevor came into his room nearly half an hour after he had heard his car on the drive.

  “Plotting?” Dr. Trevor hitched his trousers up his thick thighs and sat down in his Rodin attitude. “What d’you mean? I’ve been having a glass of sherry with her, if you want to know.”

  “The wall between this room and the drawing-room,” said Oliver sententiously, “is quite thin. It was built much later than the rest of the house; about a hundred years ago in fact, when the owners decided that two rooms would be cosier than one big one. I can hear the tone of people’s voices through it, if not the actual words, and after months of practice I am very good at spotting the indulgent note that means they’re talking about me.”

  “You’re wrong this time,” said Dr. Trevor, with the quirk that did duty for a smile on his granite face. “We were talking about Violet’s wedding.”

  “And,” said Oliver, with a triumphant glance at Elizabeth, “Ma was telling you not to let me up for it, because the excitement would be too much for me.”

  Dr. Trevor could look you in the eye and lie without moving a muscle. “Whether you get up or not,” he said, “has nothing to do with your mother. It depends entirely on the state of your heart. If you’ll shut up for a minute, I’ll tell you what I think of it.” Elizabeth, with her usual inconspicuous efficiency, had brought in the stethoscope which be had left in his mackintosh and she handed it to him while he was patting his jacket pockets. When he was there she automatically assumed her hospital pose: hands behind back, head slightly on one side, expression politely intelligent, standing perfectly still, yet poised to spring for anything he needed, a second before he asked for it.