THIS ONE SUFFERED from insomnia, too. Well, from writing poetry, anyway, which came to practically the same thing, it seemed to Margaret. She was sitting, quiet and inconspicuous, in the corner of the sofa, listening to this peculiar young man holding forth to Claudia, while his coffee cooled on the little table at his side, about the sort of ideas that came to him at two in the morning.
They weren’t the sort of ideas that appealed to Margaret at the best of times, and she was sure they would appeal to her even less at 2 a.m. They sounded, to her experienced ears, the sort of ideas that would involve the endless brewing of black coffee, with spills all over the kitchen table; and she was only thankful that, so far, there had been no suggestion that the visitor was to stay the night. Surely even Claudia would draw the line at that, considering what she knew about the young man’s background.
He wasn’t Margaret’s idea of a murderer. She had—naturally enough, after Claudia’s shocking revelations—been eyeing the visitor surreptitiously all the evening, and by now she knew his features by heart; and they weren’t, somehow, the features she had been expecting. What had she been expecting, then? What should a murderer look like, and in what ways did this young man fall short of—or rise above, perhaps one should say—the conventional image? Was it that he had that pasty, inactive look which one associates with sedentary, monotonous employments—in which category crimes of violence can surely not be included? Or was it that he looked too young? Too young for what, though? It was well known that a large proportion of criminals are barely out of their teens. Too young, anyway, to be wearing that neat, middle-aged suit of navy blue. Why, he ought to be in a shaggy polo-necked jersey and jeans! But even as this thought passed through Margaret’s mind, the young man shifted his position in his chair, leaned forward—and now, suddenly, as he sat forward like this, looking so intently into Claudia’s face, and with the light falling right across his brow, something was revealed that was not quite youthful. Not wrinkles, or crowsfeet, or anything as simple as that; more a dull, tarnished look, as of energies frittered away—and it clashed strangely with the almost unnatural brightness of his blue, darting eyes. And there was a slyness, too, that you noticed just now and then if you kept watching him; it would flash for a second as the blue glance slid sideways; it would quiver momentarily in the movement of his mouth as he pronounced some quite ordinary word. Oh, it was so slight, so indefinable … and now, here he was again, guileless and eager as an undergraduate, laying down the law about existentialism, and about the outdatedness and futility of all the ideas mankind has travailed over right up to the moment in history when he, Maurice, began to put forth his ideas.
And Claudia hers, of course. Claudia, you could see, was loving it: her very own murderer; and flattery thrown in as well. No wonder she looked like the cat with the cream. She hadn’t yet switched on the main light; instead she had put on the little low lamp by the bookcase, and as she sat forward on her stool, her face in shadow, and the light just glinting on her burnished hair, she looked statuesque, benign. Not silly and conceited at all. It gave Margaret a little jolt of surprise to see her looking like that; half pleased, half bewildered, she wondered if she understood her daughter at all; if, perhaps, she had misjudged entirely her motives in taking up with this young man?
He was talking about his poems now, quoting bits unforgiveably, and Margaret suppressed a yawn. His poems were not nearly as interesting as his conversation, and the staccato, aggressively anti-sing-song manner of his recitation tended only to obscure what sense there might otherwise have been. Margaret fancied that Claudia was bored by them, too, for although her air of rapt attention, her little murmurs of interest and sympathy, were maintained as before, to Margaret’s sharp observation they now seemed a little forced. There was restlessness now, rather than absorption, hidden away inside her still sustained and graceful pose.
But it was difficult to do anything to redirect a conversation in which so many commonplace topics must by tacit agreement be avoided. Claudia had briefed Margaret beforehand, with great explicitness and urgency, about all the questions she mustn’t ask their guest for fear of embarrassing him. His surname—his lodgings—his friends—his family—his job—all were taboo; and with the banning of these, of course, went automatically the banning of a number of innocuous topics which might prove to be tenuously related to one or other of them. Hobbies? But these implied a settled way of life, such as he had presumably never had. Plays, films? But if he had been in prison for seven years, he would have missed them all. Books? Did they have anything to read in prison, apart from the Bible and improving works? Maybe they did, nowadays, but Margaret didn’t know, and wasn’t going to risk it. If either of them were going to put their foot in it, let it be Claudia.
“You see,” the young man was saying, still riveted to the subject of his poems, “I’m not saying they’re any good. I don’t suppose they are. They may be quite horrendous—don’t be afraid to say so, if that’s what you think, I shan’t be offended. But one thing I think you must admit, they’re not derivative. Are they now?”
Thus appealed to for a personal opinion Claudia at once made herself alert and vivid again.
“Indeed they aren’t!” she assented eagerly. “They seem to me to be absolutely original—fresh—”
“Because some people have said—” the poet pursued doggedly, “that they owe something to the influence of Patmore. But you didn’t think that, did you? From the ones you’ve heard so far?”
He looked tense, anxious, leaning forward in his chair to receive Claudia’s verdict as if it mattered to him most seriously. To Margaret, watching her daughter racking her brains to think who Patmore could be, his anxiety seemed rather pathetic.
“But no, Maurice! Not in the least!” exclaimed Claudia confidently, after a pause so short that only her mother was aware of it. “Anyone who could think such a thing can’t really have understood your poems at all! You and Patmore—?” Claudia gave her little laugh, to emphasise the absurdity of the comparison—“Why, there is no resemblance! The style is different—the rhythms—the whole attitude to life, to the Human Condition…”
Margaret was torn between admiration and horror at her daughter’s polished hypocrisy. But was it hypocrisy, in any real sense? What Claudia was really saying to the boy was: ‘I am on your side about everything. Because you are an outcast from society, I will fight your enemies for you, whether they be self-righteous old women, Society itself, or even poets I have never heard of. Down with them all!’ And this message was genuine enough; perhaps Maurice understood it. He seemed satisfied, anyhow, for he was smiling now, running his fingers through his stubbly fair hair.
“Do you really think so? I’m glad. And you’re absolutely right, too. Because what makes this accusation such arrant nonsense is that I had never even read Patmore at the time when I wrote most of these poems. People don’t believe this—and it’s a little difficult to explain—but you see, situated as I have been … For quite a slice of my life I’ve been cut off from books almost entirely. I’ve had to exist on what I could remember—on passages I learned by heart long ago—that sort of thing. I’m not complaining, you understand. On the contrary. It gives me, I think, a very special sense of the value of words—”
Was he repenting of these revelations? A slow,’ bright pink spread over his face as he stopped speaking, and at the same time the slyness, it seemed to Margaret, came back into his eyes. It was as if he was testing his hearers in some way: his blue, brilliant glance darted, swift as a lizard, from one to the other of them.
But whatever the test might be, Margaret knew that she for one was going to fail it. This was the point at which she had better go away, and leave Claudia to pass with honours, a star first. Murmuring something about having some letters to write she stood up and prepared to leave the room; and from Claudia’s quick smile of approval she gathered that she had, for once, done all the right things; stayed with them for the required length of time, and gone away at the required moment.
Margaret had intended going straight up to her room—she really had got some letters to write—but it was not to be. Even as she closed the drawing-room door behind her and stepped into the hall, she was aware of a little flurry on the stairs—a swishing, a rustling, and then a weak little tap—tap—tap. A pink plastic hair-curler rolled almost to her feet.
So Mavis had been eavesdropping. Picking up the roller by its extreme edge, and holding it distastefully between finger and thumb, Margaret set off in pursuit. All was silent by now, of course, but Margaret marched grimly up the stairs and along the passage to Mavis’ room, and knocked.
Mavis, in dressing-gown and hair-net, appeared to be settled in bed, though somewhat out of breath. Unable to sustain effectively the smallest deception (Margaret noted scornfully) she simply sat bolt upright, clutching the hem of the bedspread, and stared at her visitor, her eyes wide with guilt.
“You dropped this, I think,” said Margaret, with grim relish “When you ran off upstairs just now. Why didn’t you come and join us, if you wanted to hear what was going on? Claudia invited you—in fact she begged you to come. I heard her.”
“I know. I—Oh, Mrs Newman, isn’t it awful! Can’t you do something? Can’t you stop her? You’re her mother—”
The direct, tearful appeal knocked all the fight out of Margaret. To her own astonishment, she felt a pang of what could only be called sympathy with the wretched girl, caught like a fish, gasping in the meshes of her own silliness. Margaret moved farther into the room, and laid the roller without further comment on the powder-strewn muddle that was Mavis’ dressing-table.
“Don’t upset yourself so,” she said, quite kindly. “Claudia’s always done this sort of thing. Nothing will come of it. She’s always picking up lame ducks and then—” She stopped, realising her tactlessness. Unwonted concern for Mavis’ feelings made her rephrase the sentence. “I mean, you know yourself how Claudia is. If anyone’s in trouble, she always wants to help them. That’s all it is with this young man; she thinks he’s in some sort of trouble, so she’s having him round to see what she can do. That’s all. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Margaret was speaking more confidently than she felt, and Mavis must have sensed it.
“But, Mrs Newman, aren’t you worried? Really? I mean, it looks as if he must be a criminal, doesn’t it, as if he’s been in prison for years and years! He may be a murderer for all we know—I’m sure Claudia thinks he is herself, she as good as said so! Oh, Mrs Newman, this isn’t my house, I can’t say anything, but you could! Why don’t you tell Claudia she can’t have him here?”
Mavis’ hands were twisting and torturing the edge of the bedspread as she spoke; it would be all dirty and crumpled in no time if she carried on like that, and Margaret had only washed and ironed it last week. It was difficult to know how to reassure her.
“My dear Mavis, how can I?” she protested. “It is my house in a sense, yes—but Claudia’s a grown-up woman. I can’t direct her life for her, now can I? I’ve no more right to choose her friends for her than you have.”
All this was perfectly true; yet Margaret knew that, in fact, she could have put up some sort of opposition when Claudia had first revealed to her that an uncomfortable mystery surrounded their prospective guest. They had been in the kitchen at the time, Claudia just back from the office, all starched and black-and-white, and looming grandly in her high heels, while Margaret sat at the table in her flowered overall chopping parsley. The volley of excited words had rattled like machine-gun fire against her ears. For there had been aggression as well as enthusiasm in Claudia’s impassioned advocacy of Maurice’s visit tonight. Her admission—her boast, rather—that he might prove to be a convicted murderer—had been flung down almost as a challenge. She was braced for battle, expecting opposition. That would have been the right and natural moment for Margaret to have provided this opposition: to have made, in short, an almighty fuss.
Why hadn’t she done so? Simply, she admitted to herself now, because she knew Claudia was expecting it—indeed, wanting it. Yes, Claudia wanted her mother to play her appointed rôle of narrow-minded, old-fashioned bigot: thus could Claudia’s own generosity and emancipation shine the brighter. And so, perversely, Margaret had rejected her rôle, refused to have it thus thrust upon her without, as it were, her consent. It was out of sheer devilment, of a rather subtle kind, that she had limply agreed with all her daughter’s euphoric platitudes about Society being the Real Criminal, and the Guilt being shared by All of Us, and Not One of Us being entitled to Throw the First Stone.
Margaret didn’t see why she should be the one to throw it, anyway, what with supper to dish up, and the chickens to shut in for the night, and her general disinclination for a row after this lovely sunny day. And also, deep down in her heart of hearts, Margaret hadn’t really believed in any of it. She still didn’t. It seemed to her much more likely that Claudia’s imagination had been running away with her than that Maurice was indeed a hardened criminal. He didn’t look like one; he didn’t behave like one; he seemed, indeed, to be just the same sort of self-absorbed, garrulous type of person that Claudia was always bringing home. A little less boring, perhaps—except about his poetry—and certainly more intelligent. Or shrewd. Or something. ‘Sly’ was the word that had sprung to her mind as she had watched him down there in the drawing-room, she remembered.
All right. So he was sly. What of it? He was probably dishonest, too; and selfish, and lazy, and conceited. But this didn’t make him a murderer, or indeed a criminal of any kind. Such qualities passed as normal anywhere.
Out of all these speculations, Margaret now tried to pick the ones that would be most likely to reassure Mavis, sitting there tense and expectant, like a child, who knows that it has a right to be consoled.
“Really, Mavis, you must pull yourself together,” she admonished. “There’s no proof—none whatever—that this young man is a criminal. Claudia is only guessing—she’s always had a tendency to dramatise things—and she may be quite wrong.”
“But, Mrs Newman, there is proof,” protested Mavis. “He has said so himself. Well, practically. I mean all this about having been shut away from the world for seven years. And now he says that he had no books to read all that time….”
Mavis stopped, confused, evidently realising that she had given herself away. “Or something like that,” she finished weakly, as if this could somehow blur the certainty that she had been eavesdropping. Margaret smiled grimly.
“I daresay he’s dramatising himself too,” she said. “He probably means he was brought up in a home where there were no books because his father didn’t believe in education, and used to beat him if he caught him reading. That’s just the sort of extraordinary childhood Claudia’s protegés always do have—” Again she stopped, remembering Mavis’ tearful account of a mother who didn’t let her go to ballet classes and made her wear her hair in a plait till she was sixteen.
“So I wouldn’t worry about it any more, if I were you,” she finished. “Just settle down and put your light out and go to sleep. That’s what I’m going to do.” She turned towards the door, but straightaway Mavis called her back, a new ring of terror in her voice.
“Oh, please, Mrs Newman! Please don’t do that! I’m sure you ought to stay up until we know he’s gone!”
Margaret thought so too, really, and had had no intention of going to bed until she had heard the front door close on the visitor. But equally she had no intention of spending the intervening time in here with Mavis.
“Very well,” she assented austerely, “if you feel so strongly about it. I’ll go to my room and get on with some letters. It’s nearly eleven already, he can’t be going to stay much longer unless—”
She wished she had stopped just one word sooner. For Mavis, as if she had been waiting for just this cue, rushed to finish the sentence for her: “Unless Claudia offers to put him up for the night! Oh, Mrs Newman, that’s just what I’m afraid of! She’d be able to find room for him, you know, even with me here in the spare room, she’s still got that awful Put-U-Up in Derek’s study! That’s just what she might do, because you see, if he’s just out of prison he’s probably got nowhere else to go—Oh, Mrs Newman, I can see it all!”
So could Margaret; though it was doubtful if what they were seeing was precisely the same thing. Mavis, presumably, was seeing a shadowy figure flitting on evil bent about the stairs and passages of the house at dead of night. Margaret, on the other hand, was seeing a fifth breakfast to cook; and a fuss about the extra blankets for the Put-U-Up, which had already been stored away in mothballs for the summer. She was seeing, too, a shortage of milk in the morning—all these neurotics of Claudia’s seemed to swill down milk like alcoholics swilling gin. No number of pints you could order from the milkman was ever enough; they would help themselves to bottle after bottle from the refrigerator, all day and all night, especially these insomniac ones, they were the worst of all. Margaret recalled (her old, half-forgotten fury arising in her fresh as paint at the memory) the PhD student and his Snacks. She remembered how she used to go to bed leaving the breakfast table laid neat and ready for the morning, as any competent housewife does; and then would come down, morning after morning, to find the whole thing sullied by the traces of this dreadful fellow’s midnight feedings. Such extraordinary things he seemed to have, too—in the intensity of her early morning race Margaret used to identify every crumb. Ginger biscuits—sardines—peanut butter—disgusting malty health drinks—it was no wonder his stomach was in a bad way. And Claudia would never let Margaret speak to him about it, because she said it was Compensatory Eating on account of his wife’s having left him, and it wasn’t his fault. But then his wife came back, and during that ghastly week before they both took themselves off to stay with her mother, it seemed to Margaret that he ate more than ever. In addition to all the peanut butter and rubbish, his wife used to fry him things, Margaret remembered bleakly. During all that week her nice clean cooker was never free of sputters of burnt fat.
Was this Maurice going to turn out just such another? In rare communion of spirit, Margaret and Mavis looked at one another, each in her own way imagining the worst, scheming to avert it. And then suddenly, into this scene of gloom and foreboding, burst Claudia. So light and joyful were her movements that they had scarcely heard her steps on the stairs before she was in the room, beaming at them both.
“He’s just going!” she announced—welcome words these, at least—“Won’t you both come down and say goodbye to him? Oh, Mavis, you’re in bed already. What a pity! I can’t think why you didn’t come and join us, we had such a marvellously interesting evening. Especially after you’d gone, Mother—he really let his back hair down. I was right, you know—he has been in prison—” Claudia lowered her voice a little here, but it still throbbed and vibrated with the triumph of her evening. “And it was for something pretty bad, too—I mean, something that most people would call pretty bad.” She paused, significantly, and the word “murder” hovered in the air between them, unsaid. Then she continued: “He’s been explaining to me how it happened, how he got involved in it, and oh, I do so understand! I’m so glad I’ve had this talk with him, I think it’s helped him enormously to know that there is someone who understands—someone who isn’t shocked; who isn’t scared to invite him to their house, or ashamed to introduce him to their friends! That’s why I so particularly wanted you to be there, Mavis, as well as Mother—so that he’d know I wasn’t ashamed to introduce him to you all. I only wish Helen had been in, too! But anyway, come on down now, Mother—say goodbye to him nicely so that he will know that in my home at least he isn’t going to meet with disapproval and rejection! My goodness!”—Claudia’s expression was now radiant, exalted, like pictures of the saints of old—“My goodness, I wonder what Daphne would say now! And that old maid Miss Fergusson! I’m longing to see their faces when I tell them who he is, and how I had him here for a whole evening, talking to him, treating him as an honoured guest—!”
Claudia had to check the flow of her euphoria, for now they were out on the landing; and soon they were down in the hall, and Maurice was politely thanking them for a pleasant evening.
“But you must come again very soon, Maurice, you really must!” cried Claudia. “Shall we fix it now since you’re—well, since you’re not on the telephone? What about Saturday? Lunch on Saturday. Or Sunday if you’d rather, I’m free all the weekend.”
One would have expected—even Margaret, silently disapproving of the whole affair, would have expected—that this young man, lonely and friendless and just out of prison, would have accepted the warm invitation with alacrity. It seemed so incongruous as to be almost rude that he should take an engagement book from his jacket pocket and study it in a businesslike manner before replying.
“Lunch? Afraid no can do,” he said at last. “On Saturday I’m having lunch with your pal Daphne. And on Sunday with Miss Fergusson and her father. Sorry. How about some weekday evening?”