Free Prisoner's Base by Celia Fremlin

both feeling terribly sorry for Mother, with tiny, satisfied smiles on their faces. It was like a moment of religious communion, so complete was their spiritual accord.
    “Well. Anyway.” Claudia yawned, tired suddenly, but with a pleasant, satisfying tiredness. Her day had been well spent. “I suppose we should be going to bed, really. Work tomorrow! For me, anyway!”
    “Yes, oh yes. I mustn’t keep you up!” Mavis scrambled apologetically to her feet, and began conveying the cups, the milk jug, the coffee pot, one at a time, across to the sink. Claudia meantime moved briskly from room to room, plumping up cushions, emptying ashtrays, closing windows.
    “Aren’t you going to bolt the front door?” enquired Mavis anxiously, just as Claudia set off up the stairs.
    “Why—no,” said Claudia, “I think I’ll leave it tonight—just in case Helen still isn’t in.”
    “But I thought you said she was?” objected Mavis, a little stupidly, Claudia thought.
    “Well—yes. I do think she is really. I’m almost sure she is. But she just mightn’t be, you know, and it would be an awful pest to have to get up and let her in, now wouldn’t it? Apart from the fact that if she has to ring the bell, Mother will wake up, and note the time on her watch, and spend the rest of the night in prurient speculation! She knows Helen has been out with Clive, you see, and you can just imagine what her repressed old mind is going to make of that if she hears her coming in after midnight. I’d never hear the last of it—and nor would poor Helen. So I propose to leave well alone, and just pray that Helen will remember to come in quietly. I expect she will—she’s got the measure of her grandma, has our Helen, for all her pretty ways with the old dear!” Claudia laughed, softly, and turned to continue her way up the stairs; but again Mavis called her back.
    “But Claudia,” she urged, still hovering uneasily in the hall. “Couldn’t you go to Helen’s room and see if she’s in or not? Then we could bolt the door as usual. I wish you would. Please!”
    “What, and have Helen think I ’ m spying on her comings and goings, just like her grandmother? No, thank you, Mavis, dear, not even for you! Besides, Mother would be bound to hear me going to Helen’s room and she’d jump to the conclusion that I’m secretly just as anxious about Helen as she is! I’m not going to give her a feather like that to wear in her cap for the rest of our lives! So do come on and go to bed, and stop hovering there like that. What are you worrying about, anyway? It’s often been left unbolted before.”
    Mavis looked up at her, hesitating. If there were such a thing as a colourless blush, then that was what you would have said was suffusing her white, exhausted face.
    “But tonight, Claudia! Just tonight. I mean—that peculiar young man this evening, now that he knows our address …”
    “Oh, Mavis ! I don’t know how you can be so stupid! What would he come for ? Even criminals have to have a motive, you know; so unless you’ve got the Crown Jewels hidden away in that hatbox of yours, and have told him so into the bargain …! I mean— honestly !”
    Mavis positively shrank down there in the shadowy midnight spaces of the hall. You could see that she was appalled at the way her ill-timed timidity had broken the rapport that had been flowing so pleasantly between her and Claudia over coffee this evening. Serve her right; she must learn to be a little bit tougher thought Claudia, and then relented.
    “Never mind. Cheer up, Mavis,” she called softly over the banisters. “I promise you nothing will happen.”
    It was more than half an hour later, and Claudia was just on the point of dropping off to sleep, when the faintest of faint sounds impinged upon her consciousness. Something was going on downstairs; a faint scratching; a scraping; the squeak of metal; and the faint pad-pad of footsteps on the stairs.
    Bother! That fool of a Mavis