Marianne Dreams Read online

  He sat up on the window seat and looked hard at Marianne, with those tired, heavy eyes. His skin was pale, much paler and not so freckled as it had been the first time she had seen him. She knew that in spite of his apparently casual air and his asking her this question as ordinarily as if he had been asking her what the weather was like outside, he was frightened, and she must reassure him.

  ‘No’ she said, and she didn’t care at that moment whether what she said was true or not. ‘No, you’re not going to die. I don’t know whether you’re supposed to be dying or not, but you’re not going to. I know you’re not.’

  ‘Is that another of the things you know or are you going to draw it to make certain?’ he asked. But she could feel that he was relieved by her certainty.

  ‘I can’t draw it’ Marianne admitted. ‘If I could I would, but I can’t find the book. But I don’t need to draw this, Mark, I’m sure without drawing. I know you’ll get well. You must believe that I know it, Mark. You’re going to get well, you’re going to get well. I know you are’

  She felt, as she said it, that it was true. Mark was lying back now, looking at her and she couldn’t make out from his expression what he was thinking. But it seemed more important than anything had before in all the world that he should believe her now.

  Suddenly he gave her a not unfriendly smile.

  ‘You’re mad’ he said, quite kindly. ‘Getting so het up about nothing. Of course I know I’m not dying. After all I can see I’m not, can’t I? I’ll be perfectly all right as soon as I don’t feel so tired. Still, it’s nice of you to mind so much, even if it is all your imagination’

  ‘It isn’t’ Marianne began indignantly. ‘You’ll soon see it isn’t when you wake up in hospital and find you’ve really been ill and -‘

  She stopped.

  ‘You look awfully tired’ she said abruptly.

  ‘Sorry, I’m afraid I am. It’s perfectly true I do feel rotten -not ill, of course, just frightfully tired, as if I’d done an awful lot, though of course I haven’t.’

  ‘Go to sleep’ Marianne advised.

  ‘Perhaps I will’ Mark said unexpectedly.

  He stretched out on the window seat. ‘Beastly hard this place is’ he grumbled agreeably, ‘I’m sometimes surprised I ever manage to go to sleep. If you’re so clever at making things suddenly appear here, what about a bed and a blanket or two?’

  ‘I’ll try’ said Marianne, wondering if she would ever find her drawing book again.

  ‘Thank you for nothing’ said Mark’s voice, teasing but sleepy. ‘And I could do with some books - and some games - and my bike - oh, no, I suppose it wouldn’t be much use to me up here - and some decent food - and - Marianne -‘ ‘Yes, Mark?’

  But although she waited before she woke up for his next remark, it didn’t come, because Mark, in the dream, had fallen asleep.

  10. The Pencil

  It occurred to Marianne that Mark’s tiredness almost seemed to be catching, as even after she had slept in the afternoon she was tired herself, and it wasn’t until the following morning that she felt at all better, and able to consider what was to be done. She had been so sleepy the previous evening that she hadn’t seriously begun to look for her drawing book, but this morning, sitting up in bed and feeling suddenly almost energetically well, she knew that she must find it and must draw in it some of the things Mark wanted. He had looked so very uncomfortable sleeping on that window seat.

  ‘And I’ve got to make him better,’ Marianne thought. ‘Only I don’t know how to draw him getting better.’

  But she felt sure he was getting better, whether she drew it or not. Something about their conversation in the last dream, the way in which he had appeared to be convinced and had gone to sleep, made her certain, as certain as she could be without actually hearing it, that he wasn’t going to die.

  She lay in bed and looked round. Her window looked east and this morning the room was full of bright sunlight, printing a pattern of brown and gold on the wall and turning the air into strips of dancing bright dust. If she leant on her elbow Marianne could see out of her window, a church steeple, very bright bluey-grey in the sunlight, shining silver slate roofs of houses and the trembling grey-green leaves of an aspen poplar in the garden of the big house that backed on to her home. The leaves of that poplar were never still even when there seemed to be no wind at all and all the other trees were motionless, the poplar’s leaves stirred and rustled, making a soft whispering noise indistinguishable from a summer shower. They were moving now, looking new minted in the early sun.

  Marianne looked at the picture on her wall, the only picture in the room, of a ship, a yacht with white sails, on a very green sea with white tips to the waves. She liked the picture because it had only sea and sky and the yacht in it -no land, no birds, no fish, just the clean white of the yacht and the green of the frothing waves. It was a cool picture to look at if you felt hot, and an out-of-door, wind-blown picture to feel if the room seemed stuffy.

  She looked at her curtains which had originally been blue with a small climbing grey leaf all over them and occasional orange berries: but they had faded so much in the sun, in spite of the maker’s guarantee, that now they were a sort of dull greyish-blue all over, rather pretty, but quite unlike they had been when bought.

  She looked at her bed. Over the top of her blanket her mother had put a thin woollen covering known in the family as ‘Joseph’ because it had so many colours. It had been knitted by various people, and it was made of different coloured squares of ends of wool. Marianne was fond of it. She had loved it since she was very small and had spent hours choosing one colour after another as her favourite. The squares hadn’t all come out the same size, and the whole rug had a curious lop-sided effect as it was pulled sideways by the unevenness of the sizes of square.

  Marianne’s eyes slid up a ray of sun to her bookcase. They ran over the backs of the books while her mind considered the insides. There were some she must get rid of, she was too old for them now. There were one or two which she’d never properly read, they were so difficult to get started on - Hereward the Wake, Lorna Doone, The Daisy Chain. She thought she might enjoy them if only she could have read half the book before she began, but they were terribly stiff to begin and to get into the middle of.

  Next to The Daisy Chain, which was a dark blue book with gilt lettering, was a thin orange book - The King of the Golden River. Then came The Cuckoo Clock, grey and black. Then a taller paper-backed book, so thin it was almost invisible between two fatter books -

  ‘My drawing book!’ Marianne exclaimed inside herself, ‘But we looked everywhere for it, at least Mother did. And now it’s there, right in front of me. I could have seen it all the time! How extraordinary!’

  She felt enormously relieved. Although she couldn’t reach the book without getting out of bed, which was forbidden, she felt happy at just knowing where it was. She lay and looked at it, secure in the knowledge that she could have it when she wanted it, and could draw things that Mark wanted and make him a good deal more comfortable, as well as proving to him, by doing so, that she really had the power to make things appear in the house. She lay comfortably considering this until she went to sleep again and only awoke to find her breakfast being brought into the room by her mother.

  With the drawing book propped up in front of her, Marianne ate toast and marmalade and boiled egg with great satisfaction. The only thing she didn’t like was seeing her own enraged efforts at eliminating Mark from the pictures. It was all very well to want to make him more comfortable now, but she had certainly done all she could to get rid of him last time she had had the book.

  ‘I wonder if the pencil really is indelible?’ she thought, ‘I’ll try with my best india-rubber, the big squashy one, and see if that makes any difference.’

  So directly she had finished her breakfast she tried to rub out the bars across the windows, the frantic scribbles over Mark, the rather unpleasant-looking Fiona in the downstairs room,
and the one-eyed stones outside the garden wall.

  She discovered a most extraordinary thing.

  Some of the drawings disappeared most satisfactorily under the rubber. Others stayed as clear and firm as ever.

  Fiona went and left no trace: the scribbles on top of Mark vanished, too, in both pictures, leaving Mark’s face at the window, and the small figure in the upstairs room as before. But the bars in front of the windows, the heightened fence and the sinister stones outside she could not move. She could undo some of her drawing, but not all.

  This was very puzzling. Marianne sat and looked at the drawing book for several minutes before any solution to the puzzle occurred to her. Then she turned to look at her pencils, lying in an open box on her bedside table, and suddenly she saw.

  When she had drawn the house first, and then the door knocker and Mark’s face at the window, she had used The Pencil. The Pencil that had come out of great-grandmother’s workbox. And when she had drawn the bars and the stones outside the garden, and the hills and the road, she had again used The Pencil. But when she had scribbled out Mark and drawn in Fiona she had used one of her own ordinary crayons, and what she had drawn with that had not only proved to be delible, or whatever the opposite to indelible is, but had also not appeared in the dream.

  ‘So it’s the pencil!’ Marianne thought in surprise. ‘It’s the pencil that started it all!’

  Of course. Because she had never dreamed about what she had drawn before, she had never before gone back into the same dream again so consistently, she had never before been able to make things happen in a dream by drawing them in waking life. She remembered how she had had her very first dream about the house on the same day that she had found the pencil. And she had recognized it as a very special pencil the first moment she had set eyes on it.

  She turned anxiously to the box by her bed. It would be terrible if now, just when she had learnt the value of the pencil, it had vanished like her drawing book. But she was immediately relieved to see it there, among other more ordinary crayons and pencils and ball-point pens, looking just as attractively drawable-with and yet undistinguished, a lovable but not an outstanding pencil, as ever.

  ‘And now’ thought Marianne, picking up The Pencil, turning to a fresh sheet of her drawing book and rapidly drawing in the outline of a room, which was to be an enlargement of Mark’s room in the house, ‘I’ll give Mark all the things he needs to be comfortable.’

  But she hadn’t got further than the rough top and legs of a table, when she heard Miss Chesterfield’s voice on the stairs. Although she felt she knew the answer, although today’s voice alone would have been enough to tell her, it was so different from yesterday’s voice, so gay and happy, yet Marianne had a moment of sick fear and her heart actually gave an extra little hop, a most uncomfortable feeling, when Miss Chesterfield opened the door and Marianne, without at all knowing she was going to, had said immediately, ‘How’s Mark?’

  ‘Oh, much better. Much, much better’ Miss Chesterfield said. ‘He’s going to be all right, they think.’

  ‘Think?’ Marianne echoed in horrified surprise. ‘Don’t they know yet?’

  ‘Yes, practically. Only of course they have to be very cautious, and I suppose they can’t be absolutely certain until he’s quite well again.’

  ‘But, isn’t he? Well again, I mean?’ Marianne felt impatient. She had been sure that today Mark would have recovered completely, would be out of the breathing apparatus, back home again.

  ‘No, it will take a little time for him to recover. He’ll have to stay in the iron lung for a bit, till all danger of infection is over, and he can’t come out of hospital till he can do without the lung. And then of course he’ll have a lot to make up - he won’t be as far on as he was before this illness.’

  ‘As far on in what?’ Marianne asked stupidly.

  ‘As far on in getting quite, absolutely, well again. Back to school and playing games and leading an ordinary life again. I’m afraid this means that Mark will be an invalid for quite a time to come.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ burst out of Marianne, before she had time to think.

  Miss Chesterfield looked at her quickly and then said soothingly, ‘Don’t get upset, Marianne dear. I dare say I’m wrong about it. And anyhow so much depends on Mark himself and how much he really wants to get better quickly. He’s been a bit lazy about it, you know, and perhaps having this setback will stir him up to take more interest in getting back his strength. The great thing at the moment is that he’s so much better. Now, long division of pounds, shillings and pence is what we’ve got to get down to this morning.’

  They got down to it: and Marianne was surprised, not for the first time, that one can concentrate really hard and even enjoy thinking about something which isn’t at all what one is really wanting to think about. She wanted to think about supplying Mark with the things he needed in the house: but, in the meantime, comfortably secure now that he would be alive to enjoy what she was going to provide, she whipped through some tough long division of money, she wrote a few French sentences, she learnt a short poem about cowslips, she took turns with Miss Chesterfield in reading A Tale of Two Cities aloud, and by the end of the morning was surprised to find how quickly, and agreeably on the whole, the time had passed. A Tale of Two Cities, incidentally counted as three separate subjects in one. It was literature, it was history and it was reading aloud; a great saving of time, besides being interesting, Marianne thought.

  So it wasn’t till after her after-lunch rest or siesta, nearly tea-time, that Marianne had time to go back to her drawing book and The Pencil.

  She finished the table and she drew in two chairs. She drew a rug on the floor, and, as well as she could, a fireplace in case it was ever going to be cold in the dream. She drew a bookcase and filled it with books of every size and shape. There wasn’t room to draw what the books were, but Marianne felt with satisfaction that, among so many, Mark must find several that he could read. It would be a most perverse fate that would make them all volumes of sermons or other unsuitable books. Anyhow she didn’t know what sort of books he did like, but on the largest of the volumes she printed the letters R. C. for Robinson Crusoe.

  Games were more difficult. She drew something as much like a chess-board as she could manage, with some of the pieces on it as if a game were being played; and she was careful to draw a box beside the board to hold the rest of the chessmen. She put in some draughts, because they could use the same board, but it was very difficult to draw things so tiny. She tried to draw a pack of cards, but found it impossible, so she drew a little pile of cards on the table and hoped that her thinking of them as playing cards would make them turn out to be just that.

  Her best effort was the bed. She drew a four-poster, having always longed for one herself, and it rather dwarfed the room. Even the table looked small by the side of the bed, but Marianne felt that it didn’t much matter, as Mark was, after all, still an invalid and would have to spend most of his time in bed. She drew several blankets and an eiderdown, pillows and sheets.

  Food! Mark had mentioned that he would like some decent food. There wasn’t room on the table for anything more - it was already overloaded with large chessmen, draughts and cards. So on the floor Marianne drew a dish of fruit - she had been taught a rather good way of doing this by a girl at school, and the dish of fruit was one of the best things in the picture - a cake, a loaf of bread, a string of sausages because they, too, were easy to draw realistically, and several eggs in egg-cups for the same simple reason. If you are not very good at drawing it is so easy to be too ambitious and turn out objects which are quite unrecognizable, and this was what Marianne wanted to avoid.

  She had meant to end by drawing Mark, but the room was by this time so crowded there certainly wasn’t room for him. She had an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps she had

  filled the room with preparations for someone who wouldn’t actually be there. But he was in the first picture of the room and she mus
t rely on that and on the fact that he had always been there in her dream hitherto.

  She was almost longing for bedtime, a most unusual occurrence, she was so anxious to tell Mark what she had discovered about The Pencil and to demonstrate to him the proof of its powers. And sure enough, she had hardly lain down for the night before she was asleep, and asleep was dreaming.

  11. Them

  The room wasn’t as overcrowded in the dream as it had been in the picture: the bed took up a good deal of room, certainly, but then Marianne had meant it to be a big bed. In the big bed, leaning against the pile of pillows, was Mark. He was not looking at her, he was reading a book.

  Marianne saw this, and then looked round. The other things were all there as far as she could see - bookcase full of books, table covered with games and - Marianne walked cautiously round the end of the bed and looked at the floor on the other side. There were the bread, the cake, the dish of fruit, the eggs in their egg-cups and the sausages. The sausages looked a little forlorn. One does not often see a string of fat brown sausages lying on an uncarpeted floor.

  Mark was still reading. He didn’t appear to have noticed Marianne’s arrival, so she stood at the end of the bed and looked around, making up her mind what was still lacking in the room. It looked very much better than it had before, but it had a curious air of not quite being a complete room that anyone lived in, in spite of Mark. It looked like a box-room in which a lot of different objects have been collected which haven’t much to do with each other.

  Marianne took a step towards the bookcase to make sure that the books were the right sort, and trod on a floor-board that creaked. Mark looked up.

  ‘Oh, so you’re here,’ he said agreeably.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It looks a bit different, doesn’t it?’ Mark asked, with a grin.

  ‘Yes. Oh, Mark, are you pleased?’