Free Prisoner's Base by Celia Fremlin Page B

eased it jerkily from its embedded position, the scent of the wallflowers she was disturbing was almost dizzying on the night air. She lifted the ladder clear, and then, very softly, began to manoeuvre it into an upright position. It was quite a heavy ladder, but Helen was skilful, after all the years of helping Granny with the plum and apple picking. Each year the knack came back to her as soon as her hands touched the rough curve of the rungs, and with a wonderful sensation of power she raised the unwieldy thing lightly, firmly, and set it with precision, and still silently, against the sill of the open landing window.
    Lightly, a little out of breath, and full of triumph, she scampered up it, eased herself over the window ledge, and soon was standing safely on the upstairs landing, not two yards fromthe door of her own bedroom. Nearer still was the door of Granny’s room, and the white crack of light shining beneath it told her that her grandmother was within. But that was all right. Granny wouldn’t be shocked that a girl should be home as early as twenty past nine after a date with her boy friend; she would even conceive it right and proper that a girl should be back at such an hour. If only she’d been quite absolutely sure that her mother was out, Helen would have gone in then and there to tell her grandmother all about her evening—because really, Clive had been so awful, she was longing to get some sympathy from someone. But if Mummy was somewhere downstairs, she would be sure to hear them—Granny’s cackling laugh carried all over the house, even when she tried to suppress it, with a hand over her mouth, like a schoolgirl: For that matter, Helen knew that her own voice, when she was amused and excited—
    “Helen? Is that you?”
    Margaret’s voice calling from inside the lighted room put an end to Helen’s deliberations. She opened the door and put her head round. “Hullo, Granny? Are you busy? I’ve been out Weeding again.”
    This was really Helen’s and Sandra’s own private word, but for some reason it seemed all right to use it in talking to Granny, too. Not because Granny approved of it particularly—she didn’t even approve of Helen’s referring to unattractive young men as ‘weeds’ at all, let alone coining a verb from so slangy and unkind a noun. And yet Granny’s faint disapproval of such language was not in the least destructive; on the contrary, it added a sort of extra piquancy to Helen’s use of such terms, which somehow they could both enjoy.
    “You’ve been out with that boy again, do you mean? That Clive somebody? Did you have a nice time?”
    Granny was smiling wickedly over her sewing. You could see that she knew Helen hadn’t had a nice time, and was dying to hear all the story, but nevertheless she crushed all her speculations and inquisitiveness into the decorous and conventional ‘Did you have a nice time?’ It was comfortable, somehow, to have her ask about it like that; it made the story seem absolutely new, and all Helen’s. If it had been Mummy, she would have set to work to interpret it all, to make Helen understand exactly why she had felt the way she did. And somehow, in the process,none of it would have been Helen’s any more—not the events, not the feelings—nothing. All would have been swallowed up in Mummy’s wisdom; there would have been nothing left of the evening but the interpretations.
    But on the other hand, of course, Mummy would probably never have asked her any questions about the evening in the first place; she didn’t believe in prying into a teenager’s private affairs. Granny did. With a lovely, cosy feeling of being the source of desired information, Helen curled herself up in her grandmother’s big, comfortable armchair—the one Granny herself never sat in because it got in the way of her elbows when she sewed or knitted—and began to describe her evening—as amusingly as she could, and yet to bring out its awfulness as