“BUT MOTHER—CAN’T you understand? He’s a poet! Poets do do that sort of thing.”
Claudia spoke wearily. In spite of her brave claims last night, she was not, after all, as immune to the effects of broken sleep as she had supposed, and this morning she was feeling depressed and tired. She had not been able to get to sleep again after all the disturbance till past five, and by then, with light and bird-song already tormenting her through the cracks in the curtains, her sleep had been fitful and restless, and she had woken unrefreshed, and with an odd sense of foreboding.
Or was it simply that today was her day off from the office? Always on her free day Claudia was aware of a slight lowering of her spirits, a sort of drooping of vitality, which started with getting up at half past eight instead of half past seven, and grew slowly worse as the day wore on. Often she assured herself that this unpleasant feeling meant that she was relaxing; and this thought always made her feel a little better. For the ability to relax was well known to be a rare and precious gift in this hurried age, and so naturally Claudia was pleased to be the possessor of it. All the same, it wasn’t exactly an enjoyable feeling; and as she lay in bed on these free mornings, her alarm clock silent—and its silence seemed, sometimes, like that of an old friend refusing to speak to her—she was accustomed to contemplate the relaxation of the day ahead rather as a tight-wire walker must contemplate the sagging of his wire; far from making things easier, it demands of him a new and terrifying range of skills.
Also, Claudia reflected, a free day meant that you couldn’t get away from anything. If only she had been able, this morning, to dash into the garage and be off and away in her car immediately after breakfast, as she did on all other mornings, then this wearisome wrangle with Mother would never have got under way—Mother and Mavis would have worked off their silly nerviness on one another in the course of the day, and Claudia need not have got involved at all. It was unfair that they should both go on at her like this; surely she had given them full measure last night of comfort and advice? Claudia realised that she hated people’s worries to be still there the next morning; the evening was the time for problems—long leisurely evenings stretching with black coffee and intimate confidences far into the night. Half past nine on a cool, drizzly morning was as inappropriate for anxiety as it was for love. Mother had no sense of this sort of appropriateness, of course; and on top of everything else, she was ironing while she talked, which she must surely know to be irritating, squeak, squeak, squeak from the protesting wood as she leaned her weight on it.
Claudia yawned, suppressed her irritation, and tried again:
“Most of the great poets did their best work at night,” she pointed out. ‘The imagination is well known to be at its most vivid between midnight and three in the morning. And in Maurice’s case—”
“In Maurice’s case, we don’t know if he’s a poet at all, let alone a great poet,” Margaret pointed out tartly. “How do you know, Claudia, that all this poetry business isn’t faked—just a blind, to distract your attention from whatever it is he has really come here for? He says he has written all these hundreds of poems—have you ever seen them? With your own eyes?”
“Well—honestly, Mother, considering I’ve typed them for him—”
“How many of them, eh? Six? A dozen? I’ve listened to that typing of yours, my good girl, and all I can say is, if you’ve ever typed as many as four lines consecutively before the jabber-jabber starts, I’ll—”
“Oh, Mother, don’t be silly. Stop it. You don’t know anything about it.” Claudia leaned her aching head on her hand. She felt too tired to argue, or even to work out in her own mind how much foundation there might be for these aspersions. “He is a poet, and there’s an end to it,” she declared flatly. “He just simply is. Not a published one yet, but that will come—I’m trying to help him about that right now. He deserves it. Look at his persistence! Night after night he reads his verses aloud to me—”
“And night after night you sit there waiting for him to stop! All the time, you’re just watching for a chance to interrupt, and get him talking about something more interesting! Not that I blame you, my dear, I feel just the same myself. I think they’re the most dreadful, boring, incomprehensible poems I’ve ever heard in my whole life, and believe me, that’s saying something. Remember, young men wrote bad poetry in my day, too; but at least we didn’t encourage them.”
“And so?” enquired Claudia coolly, observing that her mother had somewhat lost the thread of her accusations. “And how does all this prove that Maurice isn’t a genuine poet?”
“Oh. Well. Yes. What I mean is, you have no evidence that he is. He reads out this stuff to you every evening—sometimes to all of us; and you don’t listen, and I don’t listen, and I’m very sure that Helen doesn’t listen. It might be the same poems over and over again for all we know. I’m sure I wouldn’t notice, and I don’t believe you would, either!”
“Speak for yourself,” said Claudia crossly, wishing, uneasily, that she could remember one single line of all Maurice’s works, one single poetic idea, with which to refute all this.
“But in any case,” she continued, evading the issue, “all this is surely irrelevant? Even if Maurice’s poems weren’t good—and I’m quite certain they are—but even if they weren’t, would that make it a crime for him to try to write them at night? Would it?”
“Yes, it would!” affirmed Margaret roundly. “Only a genius —an accepted, recognised genius—has any right to such disorderly, inconsiderate habits! Sitting up all night, indeed! And in someone else’s house, too—it’s downright bad manners! And then frightening Mavis out of her wits like that! Goodness knows she’s nervy enough at the best of times, without things like that happening to her!”
“But nothing ‘happened’ to her!” Claudia pointed out impatiently. “Maurice didn’t do one single thing, now did he? Really, the whole episode had nothing to do with him at all. As I explained last night, it isn’t Maurice that Mavis is afraid of, it’s herself, her own inner guilt feelings. Maurice is just the peg she hangs it on—but that’s not his fault. All he was doing was sitting there, writing poetry—”
“He wasn’t!” Margaret interrupted belligerently “He wasn’t writing anything. It was pitch dark. He had no pen or paper. I tell you, he was doing nothing!”
“You mean it looked like nothing, to you. But how do you know what was going on inside his head—what ideas he was formulating?”
“I’d dislike extremely to know what was going on inside his head!” declared Margaret. “I’m sure it would all have been most unpleasant and distasteful. Sitting there in the dark like that! Frightening everybody! There’s something unhealthy about it, poet or no poet. There is, Claudia; I know it. And you know it too, really. Claudia, you must get rid of him. Find him somewhere else to go. I don’t mean you should be harsh with him or let him down in any way—but surely you could help him to find some more suitable lodgings? He wasn’t expecting to stay here for ever, was he, in any case?”
“Of course not. Just for a few weeks—I told you! But don’t you understand—these few weeks are going to be the most important of his whole life—this is his one chance—his one and only chance—to regain his confidence in his fellow men—to feel himself trusted, welcomed, treated as an ordinary member of a family! If we turn him out now, all this will be destroyed, he will be right back where he started—back in a life of crime! And it will be we who will have driven him there! How will you feel with that on your conscience?”
“Very relieved,” declared Margaret unrepentantly. “If it means that he goes away somewhere else. Whether he turns back to crime again or not is surely his responsibility, not mine. But in any case, Claudia, what makes you think that ours is the only home where he will be decently treated? There must be plenty of good-hearted landladies who would be willing to take him in—women whose menfolk aren’t away from home as much as Derek is, and who haven’t a young girl in the house to worry about—”
“And you call that trusting him!” cried Claudia—though in fact her mother hadn’t—“He’d know at once why he was being sent away! And where do you propose to look for all these ‘good-hearted landladies’? Don’t you know how suspicious —how narrow-minded—how cowardly—people are? Damn it, you should know—you’re like that yourself—!”
Claudia checked herself. She had not meant to quarrel with her mother over this—until such time as the business of the field was safely signed and sealed, she had planned to keep other disagreements to a minimum. But really Mother was going too far now, in her heartless indifference to Maurice’s plight. Claudia felt herself shaking with an anger which was somehow revivifying: her headache and her tiredness were suddenly gone, and she felt energy, in a furious flood, coursing through her veins. ‘Plenty of good-hearted landladies’ indeed! The outrageous implication of the words—namely, that there might be thousands of women just as broad-minded and courageous as Claudia herself—roused in her a sensation of such choking fury that for a few seconds she really could not speak. It was so unrealistic! So stupid! Stupidity was something Claudia had never been able to endure; it was potentially so dangerous, so destructive. Stupidity could be worse than wickedness in its effects; it was right to be outraged by it.
“Nothing—nothing will persuade me to betray Maurice like that!” she managed to say at last; and was aware that she was speaking from her innermost heart. For the thought of letting him down now was truly intolerable to her: after such a volte-face she would never be able to look herself in the face again; or into the faces of her watching friends. How they would laugh and sneer behind her back at such a cracking of her courage! And suppose—dreadful thought—that Maurice then took refuge with one of them—with Miss Fergusson, perhaps, or with Daphne! And suppose that out of sheer exhibitionism his new protector was to put on a display of broadmindedness apparently exactly like Claudia’s own!—she wouldn’t put it past either Daphne or Miss Fergusson to play a trick like that: they were phonies, both of them. In their different ways they were both so alienated from their real selves, so unconscious of their true motives, that a deception of this kind would come horribly easily to them—they would not even be aware of being insincere; it would be self-deception, the most destructive deception of all.
“I won’t send him away!” she repeated passionately. “Nothing can make me!”
“Very well, Claudia. If you won’t, you won’t. I have no authority over you.” Margaret had laid down the iron and was speaking quietly. “But I think you may regret it, my dear, and sooner than you think. I know you are acting according to your principles; I know how you always want to help these unfortunate people—how you do help them—don’t think I don’t realise that. But I have the feeling that this time, Claudia, you have taken on something beyond you; you are moving into deeper waters than you quite understand. There is something not right about this young man—and I don’t mean just the fact of him being a criminal. It’s something else. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to know, but I would rather he was out of this house. That’s all.”
“Well, of all the cruel, underhand accusations!” cried Claudia. “‘Something not right’ about him—what exactly do you mean? Why can’t you put it into plain words? If you like, I’ll tell you why you can’t—it’s because you have nothing concrete to say against him—nothing at all! That’s why you have to resort to these sort of spiteful insinuations—because you have nothing real to accuse him of, and you know it! Really, Mother, I’d never have believed it of you. Goodness knows we’ve had disagreements enough in our time, but they’ve always been straightforward and above board. I’ve never—never—known you to sink to a low sort of trick like this before.”
“I’m sorry. I see I must have expressed myself badly.” Mother was not going to give an inch, you could tell; her obstinacy was terrifying. “But it’s difficult, Claudia, to know how to make you see the thing as I—as any ordinary person—would see it. You are all the time looking at Maurice as if he was a sort of toy—your toy, all new, and shiny and perfect. Yes, that’s just how you talk—as if being a murderer somehow made him perfect in all other respects. As if having this one big flaw in his character necessarily immunises him from having any others. In your eyes, he consists of saving graces, and nothing else. You won’t look at him as he really is. That’s what frightens me, Claudia; the way you deliberately shut your eyes to the odd things about him—the disturbing things…”
“Such as?” Claudia was cool, hostile; and yet an uneasy worm of curiosity forced her to keep the conversation alive.
“Well—” Margaret seemed to have difficulty in assembling her charges in coherent form. “Well, to start with, I don’t like the way he talks so freely about his crimes. It doesn’t seem natural. And he never displays any sign of feeling in the least bit ashamed of what he’s done; he—”
“You mean you want him to feel guilty!” snapped back Claudia, on to it in a flash. “You want him to suffer—to be punished by his conscience as well as by society! The old, retributive idea of punishment—make the guilty one suffer, and suffer, and suffer! But don’t you see—it’s their feelings of inner guilt and inadequacy that drive people to crime in the first place—so where is the sense of forcing them to feel even more guilt afterwards? More guilt … more crime … in a vicious circle, for ever more—Is that what you want? It seems to me that Maurice’s freedom from guilt is a marvellous thing—a healthy thing! It’s one of the most hopeful signs you can possibly look for. Any psychiatrist would tell you!”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Margaret contradicted her. “They wouldn’t dare tell me such rubbish, not at my age. They might to you, because you stick out your neck and ask for it—people who are prepared to believe nonsense will get told nonsense—it’s one of the laws of life. But I’m not just talking about guilt feelings in Maurice’s case—though I have to admit that, with me, a little more humility on his part wouldn’t come amiss; I can’t feel that all this boasting and bumptiousness is quite the appropriate demeanour for a young man in his position. But that isn’t what I mean. It’s something else. It’s—how can I put it?—it’s the way he tells the story of his crimes as if it was just that—a story. Unreal. Remote. Nothing to do with him.”
“Well, I expect he does feel like that by now,” Claudia pointed out. “It was seven years ago, after all, and he’s naturally doing his best to put it all behind him, and to start an entirely new life. It seems natural to me that he should speak of that period of his life in a rather detached sort of way.”
“But there is no need for him to speak of it at all,” Margaret pointed out. “Nobody asks him to. If he wants to dissociate himself from his past life, then surely the sensible thing to do would be to try to forget it: to think—and certainly to speak—as little as possible about it. That I could understand. But he doesn’t do that. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to recount his exploits in the greatest detail and with the utmost zest—and yet, all the time, it’s as if he felt no personal responsibility—no involvement—of any kind. He seems so untouched by it all, that’s what frightens me. All those years in prison—they should have affected him somehow—moulded him —for better or for worse, I wouldn’t know, but there should be something. It’s not right—it’s peculiar—for a person to remain so untouched—like a child, almost—after going through all that….”
“In fact—you want him to suffer. That’s what you’re saying, Mother, all over again, only in different words. You don’t want him to have got away unscathed, that’s what it amounts to. It’s just the primitive notion of retribution again….”
Claudia had scored her point; and yet somehow her victory in the battle of convictions failed to bring with it the usual glow of triumph. She watched her mother uneasily as, with closed lips, the older woman arranged the sleeve of Helen’s blouse carefully on the board, and, still without speaking, reached for the iron.
“Isn’t it?” urged Claudia sharply. For some reason she wanted urgently to provoke Margaret to contradict—to defy—to plunge into the battle again with one of those familiar, acidulated, slightly off-centre come-backs which Claudia usually found so irritating. How she would have welcomed one of them now—but why? Why did it give her no satisfaction to have defeated her mother in argument thus completely—for it must, surely, be an awareness of complete defeat that was keeping Mother so silent?
Claudia was aware of a strange uneasiness of the spirit; something unfamiliar, long forgotten; something she could hardly name.
“Your attitude is simply punitive!” she cried; and she felt like a cat trying vainly to stir its victim to one more show of life after playing with it, carelessly, for too long. “You believe in retribution! … In punishment!”
She flung the phrases like missiles, right at their target; yet Mother still did not answer. Plainly she had accepted her defeat, and had nothing more to say. Claudia was free, now, to deal with Maurice exactly as she chose.
And now, suddenly, she knew the name of the uneasy, half familiar sensation that had been troubling her during the last minutes. It was Fear.