Marianne Dreams Read online

  Marianne Dreams

  Catherine Storr Susannah Harker

  Faber Childrens (1983)

  * * *

  Ill, and confined to bed, Marianne doodles eerie pictures of a house, a boy, and some strange stones. She begins to have strange dreams as she becomes drawn into the world she has created on paper.

  About the Author

  Catherine Storr was born in 1913, and was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked as a psychiatrist before becoming an editor at Penguin Books. She also became a prolific and successful author in her own right, mostly for children but also for adults, writing plays and short stories as well as novels. Marianne Dreams remains one of her best known and most popular works. She died in 2001.

  MARIANNE DREAMS

  Catherine Storr was born and lived most of her life in London, apart from some years in Cambridge, where she took a degree first in English Literature and then in Medicine. She then practised medicine for fifteen years, but never forgot her other ambition - to be a writer. She wrote her first children’s books for her three daughters. Her classic collection of stories Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf was written for a small Polly who was scared of the wolf under her bed. Marianne Dreams was filmed as The Paper House in 1990. Now that her daughters are grown up, Catherine Storr sometimes writes for adults, but she is sure that she will always want to write for children because they share her enjoyment of a story and understand that fantasy and reality are not opposites - but different ways of looking at the same thing.

  by the same author

  THE MIRROR IMAGE GHOST

  Marianne Dreams

  Catherine Stow

  ILLUSTRATED BY MARJORIE-ANN WATTS

  ff

  faber and faber

  First published in 1958

  Reset and published in this paperback edition in 2000

  by Faber and Faber Limited

  3 Queen Square London won 3au

  Photoset by Avon Dataset Ltd, Bid ford on Avon

  Printed in England by Mackays of Chatham pic, Chatham, Kent

  All rights reserved

  © Catherine Storr, 1958

  Illustrations © Marjorie-Ann Watts 1958

  Catherine Storr is hereby identified as author of

  this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988

  this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  isbn 0-571-20212-8

  2468 10 97531

  Contents

  1

  Marianne’s Birthday

  2

  The First Dream

  3

  The Person in the House

  4

  Miss Chesterfield

  5

  Inside

  6

  The Row

  7

  Mark

  8

  Mark in Danger

  9

  Marianne and Mark

  10

  The Pencil

  11

  Them

  12

  The Tower

  13

  The Light

  14

  The Bicycle

  15

  The Voices

  16

  The Escape

  17

  The End of the Road

  18

  In the Tower

  19

  The Empty Tower

  1.Marianne‘s Birthday

  Marianne had looked forward to her tenth birthday as being something special; quite different from any,birthday she had yet had, for two reasons. First, that she was at last going into double figures, where she was likely to stay for a considerable time: and second, that her father and mother had promised that when she was ten she could have riding lessons, which was what she wanted more than anything else in the world. Marianne and her family lived, very unfortunately, she thought, in a town, and there was no question of keeping a pony, or riding at a farm, or competing at gymkhanas, like the lucky country children in the books which Marianne read. Even the milkman had given up the pony which used to pull his milk-cart when Marianne was a little girl, and now delivered milk from a boring sort of trolley that worked by electricity.

  But there was a common near Marianne’s home, and a riding stables the other side of the common, and on her birthday, the very day itself, fortunately a Saturday, she was to have her first lesson.

  Marianne had imagined the lesson in a hundred different ways before it ever happened. Sometimes she rode a cream-coloured pony so beautifully that the riding master, or mistress, couldn’t believe that she was a beginner and had never ridden before. Sometimes, forgetting her age and size, she rode a Shetland pony who, at first sight, loved and obeyed her, and was so unhappy when she left the stables that she had to be allowed to take it home and keep it. Sometimes, on her first visit to the stables, she met a nervous Arab mare who appeared vicious and unsafe to her owners. Marianne had only to speak to her quietly, and lay a gentle hand on her black satin neck, and she became docile and tractable at once. The stable hands were amazed. ‘We have never seen anything like this before,’ they said. And so on, and so on, and so on.

  Marianne knew that this was half nonsense and that people didn’t become experienced horsewomen in an hour. And yet she half believed and hoped that something of the sort would happen and that her first riding lesson -especially as it was going to be actually on her birthday -would see her miraculously transformed into a finished rider, ready for the show ring.

  Perhaps no riding lesson could have come up to quite so much expectation; the earlier part of the day exceeded all hopes with a totally unexpected wrist watch, a box of conjuring tricks, several new books, and a pair of riding gloves. Later in the morning Marianne realized that even a well-trained pony has a personality to be reckoned with, and that she had far more to learn about riding than she had ever dreamed of. But it was exciting to be on the back of a real horse at last; and the riding master, though he didn’t say he couldn’t believe she was a beginner, did say that she seemed to take to it naturally, which was as much as anyone in their senses could hope for.

  It wasn’t till the lesson was over, and she was home again, that Marianne realized how tired she was: not agreeably, after-exercise tired, but extraordinarily, aching tired all over; an unpleasant sensation. She dragged herself upstairs and changed out of her riding trousers, and then went down to the kitchen to find her mother and to see how her birthday lunch was getting on. It was when the smell of chicken and peas came floating up the kitchen stairs that she first realized that she wouldn’t be able to eat any of it.

  Not to be able to eat your lunch in the ordinary way is bad enough. It is worse if you have had your first riding lesson and know that you ought to be hungry. But not to be able to eat your birthday lunch is worst of all. A birthday lunch which you have chosen yourself is the peak of the day. You aren’t, or shouldn’t be, too tired to enjoy it, and there is still more to come. Marianne knew this. So when she saw the chicken, golden and crackling, and the roast potatoes and the peas and the bread sauce and the gravy, and found that as far as she was concerned they were all going to be wasted, she burst into tears.

  ‘Darling, what’s the matter?’ her mother said, putting the hot plates down on the table very quickly and coming round to her.

&nbs
p; ‘I don’t know,’ Marianne sobbed. She leant against her mother and tried to get comfort from her familiar smell. ‘I can’t eat any lunch’

  Her mother repressed some natural feelings of disappointment; after all, she had spent the best part of the morning cooking; and said, ‘You’re tired, darling. Perhaps the riding went on too long and you got too hot. I’ll put it back in the oven and you can have it later.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll want it later,’ Marianne said indistinctly, her face on her mother’s shoulder.

  ‘Never mind if you never want it, duckling, only stop crying. It won’t waste, I can promise you, and I’ll try not to let Thomas eat all the best bits. Come upstairs and cool down a bit - you’re terribly hot.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Marianne, surprised at her mother making such an obvious mistake. ‘I’m cold. And my throat hurts. I think I must have swallowed a lot of dust while I was riding; at least, that’s what it feels like - sort of gritty and aches a bit. And I’m terribly tired. I ache all over.’

  So, instead of eating chicken and raspberries, Marianne went upstairs again. Her mother ran back into the kitchen to put on a kettle, and then came up to find the thermometer. And sure enough Marianne’s temperature, when taken, was considerably higher than normal, and the only thing to do was to put her to bed and pile on blankets and give her the hot-water bottle for which the kettle had been put on to boil, and send for the doctor.

  ‘I shall be well enough for my next riding lesson, shan’t I?’ asked Marianne, for perhaps the fourteenth time as her

  mother moved about her bedroom, putting away her clothes, tidying up books and arranging all Marianne’s birthday presents on the bookcase by her bed where she could see them easily.

  ‘I hope so,’ her mother said, also not for the first time. But she didn’t sound very hopeful, and Marianne herself had by now reached a stage when she had ceased feeling very strongly about anything and she only continued to ask about her next riding lesson because that had been the last thing she felt as if she had really cared about. At the moment she was engrossed in feeling quite extraordinarily tired and yet not sleepy. Her throat ached and her head ached and her legs and arms felt hot and heavy and ached, too, and she didn’t feel like riding at all. But even so she longed for her mother to say, yes, she would be able to have her next riding lesson, more than she longed for anything in the world, because that would be a promise that she would be better very quickly and wouldn’t any longer feel so queer and unreal and not able to care about anything.

  The doctor came later in the afternoon and said, as doctors so often do, that we must wait and see. He gave Marianne some medicine, which was soothing, and which made her aches better and her temperature drop a little. But he was quite emphatic that she was not to get up, even if she felt quite well the next day. He would come and see her again and then perhaps he’d be able to say what might be the matter.

  But the next day he didn’t say what it was, nor on the day after, and Marianne was sufficiently miserable not to care whether he could put a name to her illness or not. Everything seemed to have gone wrong, or rather different, as things tend to do when you are ill. It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope and seeing things which you know are really quite close and which you could easily touch with your hand, looking tiny and far away. Marianne’s birthday and the riding lesson and her school term, which had only just begun when she started to be ill, all receded into an immense distance. She knew they were there and had only just happened, but they had nothing to do with her. She didn’t notice how the days passed. There was nothing to distinguish one from the other, and Marianne lost count. She felt as if she had never done anything else but lie in bed waiting. Sometimes she was waiting for the doctor, sometimes she was waiting for meals, in which she was strangely uninterested. Sometimes she was waiting for her mother to come back from shopping or her father to come home from work. A great deal of her waiting time she spent asleep or being read to by her mother and quite often falling asleep „ during the reading. But in a way she felt that it was still her tenth birthday. Because the illness had begun on her birthday itself, she had a feeling, especially as she gradually began to get better and to take more interest in what was going on, that when she was quite well and was up and about again, she would go on from exactly where she had left off: she even had a sort of feeling that if she went down to the kitchen she would find the table laid with her birthday lunch still waiting for her - roast chicken, bread sauce, raspberries and all.

  2. The First Dream

  Marianne had never been ill for more than a few days at a time; now she was horrified and fascinated to. find the days becoming weeks, and the weeks adding up incredibly, so that it was almost a month before she felt like her real self enough to begin to worry about when she was to be allowed to get up. It was, in fact, exactly three weeks and two days after she had begun to be ill, when she sat up in bed waiting for her doctor to come and tell her that she could get up. She was feeling almost well again, and ready to amuse herself with something new; and it was on this day that she found the pencil.

  It was in her great-grandmother’s old polished mahogany workbox, which now belonged to Marianne’s mother. It wasn’t used as a regular everyday workbox for darning or mending or dressmaking, but was brought out occasionally for Marianne to look at and tidy up - generally when she was ill and tired of her own toys and books, and needing some extra amusement. The workbox was charming, and Marianne loved it. It had a tray lined with green satin and fitted with little tools with mother-of-pearl handles, for all sorts of elaborate, out-of-date, needlework; little satin-covered boxes with mother-of-pearl knobs on the lids, and a space underneath the tray, in which were all sorts of treasures that Marianne’s great-grandmother and grandmother and mother had somehow collected. There were buttons of every kind, ivory lace bobbins, mother-of-pearl counters, an odd chessman or two, short lengths of ribbons, buckles, sequins, beads. Among them, this particular time, Marianne found the pencil.

  She knew at once, as you do with some pencils, that it would be a nice one to use. It was stumpy, but long enough to hold comfortably; it had been sharpened with a knife, not a pencil sharpener, and Marianne could see that it would write clearly and blackly, without either scratching, or annoyingly breaking its point all the time. It was one of those pencils that are simply asking to be written or drawn with, and Marianne picked it out of the surrounding work-box muddle, seized her newish drawing book, and drew.

  She drew, as she nearly always did, a house. A house with four windows and a front door. The walls were not quite straight, because she wasn’t ruling the lines, and the chimney was a little large. Over the chimney she drew a faint scribble of smoke.

  ‘It is a nice pencil,’ Marianne thought. ‘I’ll ask Mother if I can keep it. She practically never uses anything out of the workbox, and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.’

  She drew a fence round the house, and a path leading from the front door to a gate. She put some flowers inside the fence, and all around she drew long scribbly grass, which she hoped would be waist high at least. In the grass outside the fence she drew a few large rough-looking stones or lumps of rock, like those she had seen on the moors in Cornwall.

  Marianne was no child prodigy at drawing. Like so many of us, she had often had ideas that if she had a particular set of coloured pencils, this tiny paintbox, or that very thick black pencil, she would suddenly find herself able to reproduce on paper the pictures she could see so clearly in her mind’s eye. But somehow the magic never worked; and though this pencil had seemed to hold out the same sort of promise, her house looked as much like a shaky doll’s house, and her grass as little like anything growing, as ever.

  She was contemplating the result and feeling the usual pangs of disappointment at her own performance, when she heard her mother come up the stairs, talking to someone. Marianne knew it must be the doctor.

  ‘Good,’ she thought. ‘Now he’ll say I can get up an
d go back to school. I’m frightfully bored with being here all the time.’

  But when the doctor had examined her, and asked all the usual sort of questions that doctors do ask, he didn’t say she could get up and go back to school. In fact he still looked rather grave.

  ‘Now, young lady,’ he said, ‘I don’t know if this is going to be good news or bad news, but I’m afraid you won’t be going back to school this term. You’ve got to stay in bed for at least another six weeks, possibly more. I’ll come and see you fairly often and I’ll tell you when you can get up, but until then, it’s bed all the time.’

  Marianne stared at him. She had never imagined anything like this. The three weeks she had already spent in bed had seemed endless and the idea of another six weeks, perhaps more, was terrible.

  ‘But I must go back to school’ she protested. ‘I’m acting in the school play at the end of term!’

  ‘I’m sorry’ said Dr Burton. ‘But you can’t get up even for that’

  ‘But six weeks is a terribly long time’ said Marianne, ‘I can’t stay in bed for six weeks and not do anything.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve got to’ Dr Burton said gravely. ‘If you don’t, you might make yourself ill in a way that would last the rest of your life, and we don’t want that to happen.’

  ‘I don’t care’ Marianne said, nearly crying, ‘I’d rather be ill for the rest of my life than have to stay in bed any more now.’ She knew it was silly, and that she didn’t really mean it, but she was too upset to mind.

  ‘Well, I care’ said the doctor, ‘I don’t want to have to look after you as an invalid for another sixty years. I know it’s upsetting and miserable, but it’s got to be done. Now, cheer up. I’m going to come and see you very often, and your friends can come and visit you whenever you like; you’re not infectious. You’ll find it isn’t anything like as bad as you expected. Good-bye.’