The Warning Bell by Lynne Reid Banks

Author:Lynne Reid Banks [Reid Banks, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2019-12-01T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It took many months — nearly a year, in fact — for Maggie to realise why it was that she did not feel a great deal better in the redecorated house than she had when she first came home.

The improvement in her surroundings was startling and undeniable. By the simple device of substituting pale colours for dark, the whole aspect had changed. The great gilt-framed mirrors, which had previously only emphasised the gloom, now expanded the vistas of the square high-ceilinged Victorian rooms; the finer points of period — the panelling and the mouldings, the picture rails, turned bannisters and fireplaces — had been brought out. Stip had an instinctive feeling for such things. He had spent hours at a neck-ricking angle up ladders, chipping the deadening layers of smoked whitewash off the central roses, revealing delightful bacchanalian designs… And his colour sense proved impeccable.

Everyone who came into the house reacted more or less gratifyingly. Ian always narrowed his eyes against what he called ‘the glare’; Lilian surreptitiously twitched the new curtains in an abortive effort to make them do the office of the lace ones that had been ceremonially burnt in the back garden, with Stip, Maggie and Matt dancing round the pyre and Mrs Robertson handing out libations. Maggie’s and Stip’s contemporaries performed stranger antics, rolling about on the pale velvety carpets and demanding extra-mural showers in the new bathroom. In short, the whole enterprise was justly regarded by its perpetrators as a success.

And Stip, his apprenticeship complete, took a last satisfied look around at his handiwork, packed his things with his mother’s help, and decamped to his own little house, new-bought and all but derelict.

‘My God, Stip! Are you sure you can handle it?’ Maggie had gasped on first seeing it.

‘I can’t wait,’ said Stip with that new air of self-confidence he had begun to display, and that was the last they saw of him for some time.

Thus Mrs Robertson, Maggie and Matt had the reborn family house to themselves, and Maggie began to savour the reality of her life-change for the first time. While the house had been upside down and she had been working on it, there had been neither routine nor time in which to reflect on what her new situation was going to be like. It was only now that she began to realise, not just what Bruce had done in leaving her, but what he had done by taking her to Africa.

Africa had wormed its way into her blood like bilharzia. The effect was nothing less than the distortion of all her visual and sensual perceptions. Once upon a time, these light, bright rooms would have wholly charmed and satisfied her. But it came too late. At eighteen, she had yearned for ‘contemp’. In her early twenties, struggling with the foreignness of Nigeria, she would have adored this. Now, she felt that all this pallor, this restraint, this essentially northern-hemisphere good taste was no longer a reflection of her present self. She had been seduced away from its essentially moderate pleasures.

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