Prisoner's Base Read Free Page B

hate her to know that her grandmother can be like this. I’d hate her to have heard the megalomaniac way you’ve just been talking. I think she’d have been shocked; I really do!”
    The words were just missiles, of course, empty of any factual significance; but nevertheless Margaret found herself strangely shaken.
    “You’re jealous!” she cried incautiously over the banisters. “You’re just jealous, because you know Helen’s going to take my side!” and so saying she swept back into her bedroom and slammed the door.
    That was a mistake, of course, and Margaret realised it at once when she heard how quietly, how composedly, Claudia was shutting the dining-room door downstairs. The one who slammed the door lost a lot of points in this sort of thing; it atonce brought their point of view down to the level of a childish tantrum. It had been a mistake, too, to let Helen be brought into the dispute. This was Claudia’s doing, of course, but all the same, Margaret should have simply not answered. In the course of her long life Margaret had learned that by not answering a remark you can make that remark not have been made, practically. It not only takes two to make a quarrel, it takes two to let a communication take place at all.
    They ought to be more careful, she and Claudia, not to use Helen like this, as a stick with which to beat each other; the more so because, in a sense, their roles in respect of Helen were reversed. It was Margaret, the grandmother, who had really brought up Helen—or so at least it seemed to her. For surely it is the person who once washed the nappies and sieved the spinach, who later had the toast and tea ready by the fire at the end of a long school day—surely this is the person who can be said to have brought up the child? Not the one who had always been at work all day, pursuing an absorbing career, and whose relationship with her child seemed to Margaret to have consisted largely of flinging theories of child-psychology, like monkey-wrenches, into the otherwise smoothly running household.
    This was how it seemed to Margaret when, as now, she was feeling angry with her daughter. But there were other times, friendly, good-humoured times, when Margaret wondered guiltily whether she was, perhaps, deliberately stealing Helen’s affections from where they rightfully belonged—with her own parents. This delicate moral issue was further complicated by the fact that Margaret couldn’t—she simply could not —approve of Claudia’s methods with Helen—particularly now that the girl was growing up, just on fifteen, and surely in need of guidance and gentle discipline as never before? In vain Margaret told herself that this was a typical grandmother’s reaction; that times change, methods change, children themselves probably change, are different in their very souls, ever and anon breathing the air of a new, strange decade. Why, it was almost axiomatic that the grandmother must be wrong; and at spasmodic intervals Margaret made the most conscientious and sustained efforts to consider herself wrong about Helen. It never worked, but the effort in itself did seem to make her feel better in some indefinable sort of way, and more tolerant towards Claudia. After all, Claudia, though irritating, did havea lot of good qualities. Leaning her elbows on the windowsill, and feeling it hot through her cotton blouse with the first real sunshine of the year, Margaret set herself, systematically, to make a list of Claudia’s good qualities. She often did this after a quarrel, as a sort of spiritual exercise.
    First and foremost, Claudia was a tower of strength—a virtue more apparent, naturally, to the people whose side she was on than to the others. To the latter, it tended to look like pig-headedness. But whatever you called it, there was no doubt that it made her an excellent wife for the clever and over-anxious Derek; you could almost feel, as a lightness in your own soul, the relief with which he