Vacant Possession
Vacant Possession
Hilary Mantel
From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring Up the Bodies’, a savagely funny tale that revisits the characters from the much-loved ‘Every Day is Mother’s Day’.Muriel Axon is about to re-enter the lives of Colin Sidney, hapless husband, father and schoolmaster, and Isabel Field, failed social worker and practising neurotic.It is ten years since her last tangle with them, but for Muriel this is not time enough. There are still scores to be settled, truths to be faced and rather a lot of vengeance to be wreaked.
HILARY MANTEL
Vacant Possession
Copyright (#ulink_d8764f19-2134-59db-8ad0-c32afe38861c)
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by Chatto & Windus Ltd 1986
Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1986
PS Section copyright © Louise Tucker 2006
except ‘Having a Home to Go to’ by Hilary Mantel © Hilary Mantel 2006
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781841153407
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007354870
Version: 2014-12-08
Dedication (#ulink_8819dc3f-7de0-557f-b3d3-9e6e0463dc61)
To Gerald
Epigraph (#ulink_6fc4b2bf-5cb7-58dc-8e4d-13476ddc36e3)
‘… and that is what one does, one does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.’
GERTRUDE STEIN
EZEKIEL 37:3
‘Can these bones live?’
Contents
Cover (#udc1df962-30fa-59fc-9b94-508f2d0bebf2)
Title Page (#u356b1699-cb0b-5ae5-b5cd-3b97363b1748)
Copyright (#u893a7ce3-8294-5f1f-99a7-6ff07a959103)
Dedication (#u16c92077-1611-51bb-8d68-84ded397c3a9)
Epigraph (#u672da442-d788-5160-841d-64efb76fe556)
Preface (#u7c31adae-018d-5e42-8620-38b09446114d)
CHAPTER 1 (#u762f13dc-a1e8-564d-83c5-e2017af9113b)
CHAPTER 2 (#ube493d8d-7a3a-54f5-8de6-a30f39602e77)
CHAPTER 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the book (#litres_trial_promo)
Read on (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface (#ulink_844b0833-e577-5cc4-8d7f-097136da96d6)
It was ten o’clock in the evening; raining and very dark. A man was walking along the road whistling ‘Santa Lucia’.
Muriel Axon stood alone at the window of her room; a square plain woman, forty-four years old. She was wrapped in an eiderdown, and in the palm of her hand she held the boiled egg she was eating for supper. The glow of the streetlamps showed her wet slate roofs, the long lit curve of the motorway outside the town, and a bristling cat in the shadow of a wall; beyond these, the spines of black hills.
Cradling the warm egg, Muriel dug in her fingernails to crush the shell. She did not go in for table manners; they wasted time. She began to peel the skin, wincing a little as she did so. She put her tongue into the salted gelid hollow and probed gently. The room behind her was dark, and full of the minute crackling her fingers made. She sucked, thought. Most of Muriel’s thoughts were quite unlike other people’s.
Down below, she heard the front door opening. A dim light shone onto the path, and a second later her landlord appeared, Mr Kowalski, shuffling the few paces to the gate. He looked up and down the road. No one. He stood for a moment, his bullet head shrinking into his shoulders; turned, grunting to himself, and slowly made his way back. She heard the front door slam. It was ten fifteen. Mr Kowalski was drawing the bolts, turning the key, putting the chain on the door.
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_844b0833-e577-5cc4-8d7f-097136da96d6)
‘I wonder who will be the new Poet Laureate?’ said Colin Sidney, coming down to breakfast. There was no reply from the other residents at number 2, Buckingham Avenue. He paused on the half-landing, looking out of the little window. He saw the roof of his garage, and his neighbour’s garden. ‘Well, who?’ he muttered. There was nothing in view but a scudding 8.00 am sky, a promise of weak sunshine, a vista of close, green, dripping trees. Midsummer. Colin went down, twitching his tie.
Behind him, the three younger children were preparing for their day. He heard shrieks and curses, the kicking and slamming of doors. The radio was on, and they were playing records too; Acid Raine and the Oncogenes were shaking the walls with their current hit single. ‘Ted Hughes?’ Colin asked. ‘Larkin?’
There would be perhaps ten minutes’ grace before the children erupted down the stairs to fall on their breakfasts and begin their daily round of feuding amongst themselves and insulting their parents. Colin examined himself in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs. He wished that Sylvia would move it, so that he did not have to begin every day with a confrontation. Perhaps he could ask her. He did not think of moving it himself. He had his spheres of action; this was not one of them.
He saw a man of forty-three, with bright blue eyes, thinning hair, and what he described to himself as faded good looks. But no, he thought; courtesans are faded, schoolmasters are merely worn. He saw a kind of helplessness, in the face of family and wider society; a lack of fibre, both moral and dietary. Listening to the racket above, he solaced himself with a quotation: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do.’
Sylvia was in the kitchen already. He thought he could hear her special muesli mix cascading like a rockfall into a dish. But instead he found her in the middle of the room, head tipped back, gazing upwards.
‘What a mess,’ she said. The entire ceiling and the upper third of the walls were coated with the black smeary deposit from yesterday’s fire. Lizzie, the daily, had opened the door from the hall, and there it was, stinking smoke billowing everywhere. Lucky she had presence of mind, or it would have been far more serious.
‘I can’t see why it’s so greasy,’ Sylvia said. ‘It isn’t as if we ever fry anything.’ She gave a little hitch to the pants of her tracksuit. ‘The whole room’ll need repainting. Probably the hall as well.’
‘Yes, all right,’ Colin said, going to the table. He was sick of hearing about the fire. ‘Can I have an egg?’
‘Well, be it on your own head,’ Sylvia said. ‘You’ve had two this week. You know what the doctor said.’
‘I think I’ll be reckless for once.’ Colin opened the fridge. ‘Was young Alistair at home when this fire started?’
‘If he was, he won’t admit it.’
‘He’s the source of most of the calamities round here, isn’t he? And I can tell you now –’ He broke off. ‘Where’s a pan for this egg?’
‘Where it always is, Colin.’
‘I can tell you now I’m not doing the repainting.’ He ran the tap. ‘Either Alistair does it – for a fee, if necessary – or we get somebody in.’
Sylvia picked up an orange from a straw basket on the worktop. ‘I don’t see why you can’t do it.’ She tossed the orange into her left hand, and it slapped against her palm. ‘It’s the end of term soon.’
‘True. I have one day’s summer holiday and then I start on next year’s timetable.’
Sylvia’s eyes followed him as he moved about the kitchen. ‘Are you having bread?’ she asked, her tone incredulous.
Striding about in her bright blue tracksuit, Sylvia would never have been taken for a mother of four. Suzanne, the eldest, was eighteen now; her mother was waiting hopefully for the day when someone would mistake them for sisters. It was mysterious, this matter of Sylvia’s age. At twenty, she had looked forty; all the girls on her street wanted to look like their mothers. The Youth Cult passed her by; at thirty she looked forty still, square and deep-bosomed, with her hair bleached and lacquered in the way she had worn it on the day she was married.
Then at some stage – Colin couldn’t pinpoint it – she had stopped getting older. She took herself in hand. She bought a leotard, and went timidly to a class at the church hall; she stood watching, her hands splayed self-consciously to hide her pannier thighs. The next week she bought a tape of disco music, and started dancing. She clumped over the fitted carpets, making the glass shelves tinkle in the china cabinet that had been her mother’s. She threw out the china cabinet, and got some pine shelves instead.
These days she wore her brown hair in a short curly perm, which her hairdresser, Shane, believed would soften her firm, rather harsh features. Her body was lean now, dieted and disciplined, capriciously nourished and not too much: as far as her brain was concerned, she was taking a course at the Open University. Now that she had lost so much weight, she was always in pursuit of new clothes, little tee shirts and cotton skirts which were bright, cheap and casual; she picked up her ideas on the same plan. It seemed to Colin that she had chosen, among current fads and notions, all those designed to diminish his self-respect and make him most uncomfortable.
How nice it would be if she had a job, Colin thought. He was a Deputy Head, they scraped along. There were even luxuries, like Lizzie Blank the daily woman (Tuesdays and Thursdays). But the children ate so much, and left the lights on and the taps running; they needed outfits and treats, and dinner money and bus money and more money, they insisted, for day-glo paint and handcuffs and all the other stuff you wore to an Acid Raine concert. They wanted special diets and school trips, and a tent so they could sleep in the garden in summer; they wanted video nasties, and Claire – it was reassuring, he supposed – wanted a new Brownie uniform. Every whim cost cash down. For all he knew, they might be maintaining a heroin habit. It couldn’t have cost more. When he opened his bank statements he felt as if he were being eaten away, month by month, from the inside out.
But unfortunately, there were no jobs; not for anybody really, and certainly not for Sylvia. She was not qualified for anything. She was educated now, but not trained. The old Sylvia showed through too often. She became emotional when their opinions differed. Under pressure, she was always regressing to the received wisdom of the cooked meats factory where she had worked before they were married.
Colin found a plate for his bread and took it to the table. ‘So…’ he said. ‘What are you up to today?’
‘Citizens Advice Bureau, ten till twelve.’ Sylvia peeled her orange. ‘Then later on there’s this committee meeting. We’re thinking about setting up a women’s refuge.’
There was something bubbling and thwarted in Sylvia that only meddling in other people’s business would satisfy. Before the birth of their youngest child Claire, when they had lived on a large housing estate, there had been plenty of time for gossip; some of it idle, some of it manipulative. Buckingham Avenue had repressed her, with its absence of tittle-tattle, its well-kept fences, its elderly residents leading sedate and private lives. Good fences make good neighbours, he used to say, when they moved in, nine years ago. Sylvia didn’t agree. In her fortieth year, Sylvia discovered social concern. She discovered community action, and protest, and steering committees. If Alistair’s blossoming delinquencies didn’t spoil her chances, she’d probably end up a JP. This was a big change; but it was not unaccountable. The children no longer needed her, and the marriage was not worthy of sustained attention. It just ran on, taking care of itself. After twenty years you can’t expect passion. It’s enough if you’re barely civil.
Colin stood over the cooker and looked down at his egg, bobbing dizzily in a froth of leaking white. As if alive, it flew about and tapped itself against the side of the pan. He picked up a teaspoon and dabbed at it, scalding his fingers in the steam. He could feel Sylvia watching him. By her standards, he had no common sense: he had never laid claim to it. But he was a clever man, and capable in his own line. His face wore a habitual expression of strained tolerance, of goodwill and anxiety, uneasily mixed.
‘We’re still marking exams,’ he said. He dipped for his egg with a tea strainer, which he had found by chance in a drawer. ‘I’ve got three hundred reports to sign. And the union blokes are coming in to see me this morning. You’d think they’d let it rest till after the holidays. But no.’
‘Strike?’
‘Well, they’re talking about it.’
‘I’ve every sympathy.’
‘So have I, I want a pay rise too, but it makes it bloody difficult to run a school.’ He sighed, and went about with his egg.
‘What are you doing?’ Sylvia asked. ‘Why don’t you put it in an egg cup and sit down with it? Or are you going to race off with it down Lauderdale Road?’
Colin sat down with his ovoid ruin and picked up the newspaper. The day had brightened and the pleasant morning sun shone through his double glazing. ‘I always think of Gulliver’s Travels when I eat an egg,’ he told his wife. ‘You see –’ He broke off, gaped, put down his egg spoon and seized up the newspaper. ‘Good God, Sylvia. York Minster’s burned down. Look at this.’ He thrust the newspaper at her. The front page bore the headline NIGHT SKY LIT UP BY GOTHIC GLORY ABLAZE and a four-column picture of the Minster’s south transept wreathed in smoke and flame.
‘It never rains but it pours,’ Sylvia remarked, glancing at the kitchen ceiling. She tilted her yoghurt carton and scraped it out delicately with her teaspoon. ‘Funny, Lizzie was off to York yesterday on a day trip. I wonder if she saw it.’
‘It happened at half two in the morning.’
‘What a pity. She doesn’t like to miss anything.’
‘Good God, it’s not a tourist attraction,’ Colin said, ‘It’s a national tragedy. Four million pounds’ worth of damage.’ He groaned.
‘Don’t take it so personally.’
‘“The fire took almost three hours to contain,”’ Colin read out loud. ‘“Although it was stopped from spreading to the central tower, or from seriously damaging the Minster’s famous collection of stained-glass windows, it left the transept’s ancient roof beams and plastered vaults a smouldering mass on the floor below.”’
‘Your egg’s going cold,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’d have thought you’d eat it, after you went to such trouble to get it.’
‘I’ve lost my appetite. You don’t seem to appreciate what a loss this is to our heritage.’
‘It’s no loss to your arteries, anyway.’ Sylvia tossed her yoghurt carton into the wastebin. She opened one of the kitchen cupboards and began to take down the packets of the stuff the children ate. Amid Colin’s disinterested grief he felt a sharp prickle of personal resentment: she still does things for them, but nothing at all for me. ‘How did it start?’ she enquired.
‘Lightning, they think. They quote a priest here who says it was divine intervention.’
‘Why should it be that?’
‘Because of the Bishop of Durham. He was consecrated at the Minster last Friday. You know, all about his controversial views on the Resurrection. I thought that now you’re so friendly with our vicar you’d be well up in all this.’
‘Francis doesn’t talk about the Church much, he talks about community projects.’ Sylvia rummaged in the cutlery drawer. ‘If God didn’t like the Bishop of Durham, why didn’t He strike him personally? And do it promptly, on Saturday morning?’
‘Well, I tend to agree with you,’ Colin said. ‘It can’t be that, can it?’ He turned to the back page for more news of the disaster.’ “The Lord was on our side as we battled the flames,”’ he read. ‘By the way, how’s the vicar’s son? Has he come out of Youth Custody yet?’
‘He’s not in Youth Custody. He’s having Intermediate Treatment. He’s doing community service.’ Sylvia reached out for a piece of toast and picked up her knife. ‘Do you know what Francis says?
‘Watch it, that’s butter you’re eating,’ Colin said.
‘Oh, so it is!’ Looking thoughtful, she put the bread down on her plate. ‘He says that this business of Austin doing take-and-drive-away, it’s a deep compulsion he has, a compulsion to find out his real identity by sampling and testing out various machines.’
‘You mean it’s the vicar’s fault for naming him after a car?’
‘At some level, you see, Francis thinks he does believe that. By dumping the cars, he’s trying to jettison the mechanistic fantasies that have taken him over, and affirm his survival as a human being. It’s a form of acting out. Francis’s real worry is that because he usually leaves the cars in such a wrecked-up condition, it may indicate suicidal tendencies.’
‘Lordy, lordy,’ Colin said. ‘I didn’t know you could kill yourself by sniffing glue.’
‘It can damage your brain.’
‘How would they know?’
‘Francis is very worried. He can’t talk to Hermione. She thinks it’s because they didn’t send him to boarding school.’
‘I don’t doubt he’ll be boarded out soon enough, and at the taxpayers’ expense. How he got off this time beats me.’
‘He didn’t get off.’ Sylvia looked offended. ‘Community service is a very valid option.’
‘I’d rather he were in custody. Keep him away from our kids. How does a vicar’s son turn out such a thug?’
There was no time to go into this, because the children rushed in: Karen and Claire in their school uniforms, and the boy in a kind of romper suit of sagging jersey fabric, with holes cut out of it here and there, exposing bits of flesh. The girls flung themselves into their chairs.
‘Brownies tonight,’ Claire said: a chubby child, putting out her paws for everything edible within reach. ‘And I haven’t got my new uniform yet, Mum.’
‘Okay, I’ll see about it.’ She knew that the Brownies were a conformist outfit, pseudo-masculine if not paramilitary, but she suspected that they were more harmless than some of the things her children got up to.
‘You ought to see her,’ Karen said. ‘She shouldn’t grow so much, it’s uncouth. Her skirt’s up round her bum. It’s child pornography.’
‘That will do,’ Colin said.
Claire stuffed a piece of toast into her mouth. ‘It’s Brownie Tea-Making Fortnight soon. I have to make at least fifty cups of tea for family and friends. And every cup I make, they give it marks.’
‘If you make me any mouldy tea,’ Alistair said, ‘I’ll pour it down the sink.’
‘I have these mark sheets,’ she went on. ‘You have to say what my tea is, Excellent, Very Good, or Good.’
‘What if it’s witches’ piss?’ Alistair enquired.
‘I wish you’d leave the table, Alistair, if you’re going to talk like that.’
‘I’m not at the table, am I? I’m just stood here, watching you lot eating like pigs.’
‘Oh, let him starve,’ Karen said. ‘He’s stunted, that’s what he is. He’s probably got rickets or sumfin.’
‘He certainly has not got rickets,’ Sylvia said.
‘Well, he’s so titchy. That’s why he’s such a rotten little bully. We done it in psychology.’
‘Perhaps he’s a pygmy,’ Claire said. ‘He can’t help it.’
Alistair tore off a piece of kitchen roll, and blew his nose into it with great violence. He wadded it up in his palms and tossed it at Karen. It fell short, and lay on the cork tiles.
‘Just watch it,’ Sylvia said. ‘Lizzie’s not spending her time and my money cleaning up after you lot.’
‘I don’t want her cleaning up after me,’ Alistair said. ‘You make sure you don’t let her in my room.’
‘She can’t get in, can she? You’ve always got the door locked.’
‘What do you do in there?’ Colin asked.
‘Black magic,’ Karen said. ‘Him and Austin. Austin nicks vestments and stuff from his dad, and they have Black Masses.’
‘I’d do a spell to give you spots,’ Alistair said. ‘Only you haven’t got room for any more.’
‘So is that what you’re going to do today? Lock yourself in and have a Black Mass?’
‘Yeah,’ Alistair said. ‘And miss all the lovely sunshine.’ He slouched out of the room. Sylvia’s eyes followed him.
‘I do worry,’ she said.
Colin flapped over a page of the newspaper. ‘It’s better than him joining the Young Conservatives,’ he said.
‘You never take things seriously.’
‘Oh, I do.’ He glanced up from the news of the inferno. ‘I know a lot of kids. So I don’t get alarmed.’
‘Yes, but Alistair’s your own.’
‘Now that does alarm me. At times.’ But he knew a hundred children as bad as Alistair, a hundred worse; antisocial truants from broken homes. Theirs was not broken; only creaking a bit under the strain. The kids passed through his office every day, en route from brief rebellion to a lifetime’s acceptance of their lot. They had silly hairstyles; beneath them, dull conformist little brains.
‘I wish you’d keep them in school till the end of term,’ Sylvia said. ‘I wish he weren’t leaving.’
‘What would he do if he stayed on? Take Oxbridge by storm with his two CSEs?’
‘Off again,’ said Sylvia, stirring her muesli. She was training herself to eat slowly, putting down her spoon between mouthfuls, and the action gave her words a quite spurious consequence. ‘Off again with your little schoolmaster’s sarcasms.’
‘Does it make you cross?’
‘It makes me bored.’
‘We’ve nothing else for protection, now the LEA have abolished flogging.’
‘I don’t think you really value education, Colin. You had too much of it.’
‘I had enough,’ he conceded.
‘Alistair used to be so bright.’
‘That’s what all the parents say.’
Sylvia stood up and began carrying dishes to the sink. Her orange peel lay abandoned on the tabletop, a long strip dropped neatly from practised dieter’s fingers. Colin looked at it with interest. You can do divination with orange peel, he thought. The future was there, in homely things, for anyone who wanted to know it; door keys, tea leaves. There are letters in orange peel, which tell you who will be important in your life. He could make out quite clearly a capital T.
At once, a certain thought came into his mind. He examined it, and found it unwelcome. He would not entertain it; he kicked it out. His pulse rate rose a fraction; he dropped his eyes, put down his coffee cup. The thought rolled back, in a leisurely way, and closed around his attention like a loop of string. For a few months in his long marriage, he had been unfaithful to Sylvia. His affair with Isabel Field had been finished for years – it was years since he’d seen her – but the body has its own set of memories, and the mind hangs on to nagging superstitions. An initial leaps out from the table; horoscopes are read. A retreating stranger stops the heart on a station platform.
That part of life was over, of course. Isabel had been young and intense, full of devouring schemes. She’d been a social worker, full of tutored emotions; always nagging away about the inner meaning of things. He remembered, when he thought about her now, her gloom, her scruples, the problems she’d had with her clients; and the shock of contact, skin against skin, mouth against mouth, her quickening breath in the darkness of a parked car. He’d had nothing to offer her; only what she could have got from any man, and in greater comfort too. Sylvia hadn’t known about it. She hadn’t noticed, he thought, the struggle that was going on inside him.
Just as well. Her ignorant body had done the battling for her. Christmas Day, 1974, she’d told him she was pregnant again. He’d given up Isabel so that Claire could be born, and grow up plump and cheeky, and get Brownie badges.
That had been a bad year; the guilt, the deception, the hopeless months that follow the end of an affair. Lately, and unwillingly, he’d begun to think about Isabel again. Change was in the air, an undercurrent of disturbance. He couldn’t account for it.
‘You’re miles away,’ Sylvia said, clattering at the sink. She crossed to the table and scooped the orange peel into her palm, and dropped it in the bin. ‘You’ll be late if you sit about any longer.’
Colin looked at his watch. ‘Good God, twenty past eight.’ He threw the paper down. ‘Have a look at it, about the Minster. It’s awful.’ He snatched up his jacket, made for the door. ‘Come on, you kids. Take care, see you about six.’
What I should do, Isabel thought; what I should do is, I should start writing it down. I’d like to write down everything that worries me, about my life ten years ago. I’d like to write it. But I can’t find a pen.
Isabel’s brain moves slowly these days. She’s only thirty-four. She shouldn’t find thinking such an effort, and she shouldn’t look such a wreck. Perhaps a sense of foreboding dogs her. That must be it.
If she had any paper, she wouldn’t have a pen. When she was a social worker, she always had pens. She was organised; to a degree.
She was not organised now; she had just moved house, not unpacked yet. Here I am again, she said to herself, where I grew up and began my professional career; and had my first love affair. If that is what you call it.
It’s not fair, she thought. I never wanted to come back here. I might meet Colin in the supermarket. I might meet his sister, Florence. Then again, I might meet Sylvia. I’ve never seen Sylvia, but I feel I’d know her at once. Instinct, if you like. Women who have shared a man can probably scent each other out.
What about this shopping list? She turned it over. She could write on the back, why not? Just to get started was the main thing, to get some relief from the thoughts going round and round in her head. A good search through her handbag turned up a biro. She sat down at the kitchen table. She took a deep breath. Yes, I might meet the Sidneys en famille, she thought. Then again, I might meet my old client, Muriel Axon. That would be worse.
‘Ten years ago, I lived in this town, I was with Social Services, I was seeing Colin. I lived at home with my father; that was all of my life. But I had this case, and this is the case I want to write about. Muriel Axon, No. III/73/0059. Everything about this case bothered me. It still does.
‘Muriel Axon and her old mother Evelyn lived at number 2, Buckingham Avenue, in that part of town where people have big gardens and keep to themselves. Next door to them, but round the corner on Lauderdale Road, lived Colin’s sister Florence Sidney. We didn’t make that connection until the end. Why should we? When I met Colin – sneaking off to some pub somewhere, hoping we wouldn’t meet anyone we knew – we didn’t talk about his sister, and where she lived, or my clients and where they lived. But if I had known, I might have been able to ask Florence Sidney about her neighbours. Get some sort of – clarification.
‘Then again, I don’t know if I wanted clarification. I was afraid to find out what was really going on in the Axon household. Later, when it was all over, and Muriel’s mother was dead and Muriel herself had been put in hospital, their house came on the market and Colin bought it. He wanted a big house, and to live next door to his sister. He got it cheap.
‘I did warn him against it. I saw him at the inquest, and I told him I wouldn’t care to live there. I tried to convey to him that horrible things had happened in that house. He wouldn’t take a hint. I couldn’t do more than hint. I really didn’t know. I couldn’t expose my imaginings. I would have sounded superstitious, unbalanced, and he already thought I was that. By that time, everything was over between us.
‘After all, it’s just a house. Just an empty shell, when the people are taken away.
‘I expect I’ll find out how Colin’s getting on. This is a small town. They’re all around, I’m sure; old colleagues, old clients, old lovers. Of course there was always a risk, with Jim moving about for the sake of his career. If you’re in banking and you want to get to be a manager quite young you have to be prepared to move about. I’d rather have stayed in Manchester.
‘But I couldn’t produce any good reasons why we shouldn’t come back. Not reasons that convinced Jim. He doesn’t take much notice of my opinions. That’s understandable. I’m always crying, you see, bursting into tears, and falling over, and losing things. I was in banking too when we got married – I thought it would be restful and uncomplicated – but now I just sit about at home.
‘I’m not fit for anything, Jim says. He wonders what’s the matter with me. I spend my days thinking.
‘So I thought I could write a book, you see, about the Axon case and all that, and when it was done I could send it to the Sunday papers, and then everyone would know how social workers operate and why things go so badly wrong. How you get cases you can’t handle, and how clients conspire against you, and circumstances seem to conspire too. How it messes up your personal life. How you live with yourself afterwards; when disaster has occurred.’
That will do for a preface, she thought. I can call it Confessions of a Social Worker, I suppose. She had long ago overflowed the shopping list and been forced to write on the piece of packing paper that had come around the teapot. The spout had got broken, but it didn’t matter; there wasn’t much call for tea. I’ll buy a proper notebook later, she thought, on my way to the off-licence.
It was 12.30 pm when Sylvia came home from the CAB. In the hall she paused and called out, ‘Hello, Lizzie, all right are you?’ A clattering from the kitchen told her that her daily woman was hard at work. What a comfort to have the basics taken care of, she thought. She told herself that she hated housework, though in fact for most of her married life it had been her pride, pleasure and retreat.
Going up the stairs, dragging her feet in their striped trainers, she acknowledged that she felt tired. The wrangle at the breakfast table was always a strain, and now her head was buzzing with Social Security regulations and unanswered questions about the legal aid scheme. The house was quiet. She went into her bedroom, kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed. Her eyes closed; she dozed for five minutes, wrapped in the midday heat. Suddenly a shrill ringing brought her upright, shocked out of sleep. Damn that cooker timer, she thought, it’s gone off by itself again. Why doesn’t Lizzie stop it? Heart still racing, she padded over to the door. Opened it; the ringing stopped. She sighed. Better turn out those drawers, I suppose. Skip lunch. Don’t need it, this weather.
She knew that if she began with the bottom drawer, she would find her photograph albums; and then she could sit on the bed and browse. It was something she’d not done in ages. She’d never had much time to herself. Lizzie’s advent had been a blessing – even if she was a bit odd. You didn’t engage a cleaner for her looks or fashion sense, or for her conversation; you just needed someone honest and with a bit of initiative. Lizzie always reminded her of how she’d come up in the world. She reminded her a little of someone she’d known before her marriage; one of the girls on the Pork Shoulder line.
She leaned back against the pillows. Wedding pictures, baby pictures; Suzanne grinning in her pram in the postage-stamp garden of their very first house. Suzanne had left home now, was studying geography at Manchester University. Then Alistair, scowling from under a woollen hat in the same pram. It was very like his present scowl, except that now he had more teeth. Here was Karen, two years old, digging in the garden of their house on the estate. Here she was again, a little older, mouth drooping, swinging on the rickety gate. Everything about that house had been rickety, leaky or shoddy; it was a triumph of jerry-building. No wonder they’d been keen to move to Buckingham Avenue, despite its neglected and depressing condition.
The move had been a stroke of luck for them. With Claire on the way, they’d needed a bigger place; but how to afford it? Normally she’d never have considered the Lauderdale Road area – all those big detached houses, too gloomy and too expensive. Colin had grown up on Lauderdale Road, and his sister Florence, who had never got married, still occupied the family house; his father was dead, and Florence had put their mother in a home. Florence had called her up one day and said, ‘The Axon house is on the market, just round the corner, the one with the garden backing onto ours. You ought to enquire about it.’
‘What?’ she’d said. ‘That place where those two peculiar women lived? It’s falling down.’
‘It’s going cheap,’ Florence had said. ‘Suit yourselves. But you could do it up.’
Sylvia suspected Florence’s motives, of course. She was possessive; she wanted her brother next door, on call for mending her fuses and unblocking her sink. But still … out of curiosity, Sylvia phoned the estate agent.
‘It is in need of sympathetic renovation,’ the man confirmed, ‘but it’s basically very sound. Of course, it’s very well situated. Within easy reach of shops and schools – ‘
T know where it is. Why is it so cheap?’
He’d dropped his voice, become confidential. ‘Can’t say too much, bit of a sad case – old lady’s died, and her daughter, she’s not quite right, know what I mean? Gone into hospital.’
‘You mean they’ve put her away?’
‘The old mother died suddenly, there was an inquest. It was in the paper, in the Reporter.’
She didn’t say, my husband was there when she died. That was irrelevant. But they’d wondered what had happened to the Axon girl. Not that they’d known the Axons, really; they were the kind of neighbours you didn’t set eyes on from one year to the next. ‘What hospital has she gone to?’
‘As to that, I couldn’t say. You see what it was, madam, they were recluses. They didn’t like other people in the house. So they didn’t keep up with repairs. Well, two ladies, you don’t expect it. But it’s a lovely property.’
‘All right. When can we have the key?’
They’d been to see it together. Florence met them at the gate. ‘Well?’ She was anxious that Colin’s decision should not be coloured by the unpleasant episode that had taken place in the house a few weeks earlier. He’d called on Florence late one afternoon, fortunately as it turned out; plodding out through the twilit garden to inspect, at her request, a dubious bit of guttering, he’d noticed something very strange going on at the Axon house. At an upstairs window, a young woman was gesturing, calling for help; very odd, but Colin hadn’t hesitated. Florence had watched amazed as he crashed through the shrubbery and pounded on the Axons’ back door, ready to break it down. Once inside he’d raced up the stairs to let the girl out; Mrs Axon had pursued him, only to meet with an accident. It came out later that she’d had a heart attack, as well as a fall. Colin had given artificial respiration; with no result. And the young woman? She was a social worker, making her calls; the old lady had tricked her into the spare bedroom and turned the key. God knows what else had been going on at number 2. Would Colin want it?
‘Well,’ he’d said cautiously, ‘it’s cheap. It needs work.’ But if the last occupants had left shadows, he thought he could dispel them. ‘We could cut some of these trees down,’ he said. ‘Let some light in.’
‘Yes,’ Sylvia had said. ‘Then Florence could see in our garden, couldn’t she?’ She was not enthusiastic about that. But the trees would have to go, and all the junk that the Axons had left behind them; and that little glasshouse that the agent had called a conservatory, with its cracked and grimy panes and its mound of cardboard and newspapers all festering and damp. What a clean-up job! But think of the possibilities…
So they had put down a holding deposit, and Colin had called the solicitor. Contracts were exchanged within weeks. Their married life had been full of upheavals; this was the only thing that had gone smoothly.
Sylvia turned back to her albums.
How the photographs improved, from shiny dog-eared scraps, faded brown with age, to the borderless silk prints of recent date. Here she stood before the front door of Buckingham Avenue, her arm through her husband’s. Florence, she thought, must have taken the picture. Behind them, the house looked like the set of a Hammer Films production; that ugly stained glass in the front door, those great clumps of evergreens shading the paths. The woodwork was rotting, the downspouts were in a deplorable condition; and the two figures who stood before it were hardly in a better one. Colin must have been fourteen stone there, she thought. Look at his belly hanging over his belt. Look at the silly expression on his face.
Her own image offered little comfort. Her tight skirt – surely unfashionably short? – emphasised her large hips and stocky legs; she was still out of shape after her recent pregnancy. Here she was, holding the new baby Claire, peeping at the camera with a simper above the infant’s shawled bulk. Her hair had been bleached out to a strawlike mess. Had she not known that backcombing and lacquer would ruin it? Worse, had she not known that no one else had used them for years?
No doubt at the factory, she thought, we were behind the times. We didn’t know any better. She accorded an indulgent smile to her teenaged self, making up for a Friday night out, scrubbing her fair skin until the aura of animal fat, sodium polyphosphates and assembly-line sweat was completely wiped away and she moved in a mist of Yardley’s cologne and heart-skipping expectation towards the weekly dance; off she went, a great big beautiful baby doll. Then, on the seven o’clock train, she had met Colin.
It was an awful photograph, why had she ever kept it? Quickly she detached it from the page and put it down on the bedside cabinet. There was a blank space now in the album, a testament to her vanity. There she was again, arms folded outside number 2. The garden had been dug over, and the house behind her had all its woodwork painted a gleaming white. It had been a gruelling yearlong slog, up and down ladders with buckets of paste, backbreaking work; but it was a big house, and there was land at the side to accommodate the extension they had eventually built, giving them a fourth bedroom and a much bigger kitchen. That was the whole point about Buckingham Avenue, it offered such scope for improvement. How much easier it would have been if their removal had not coincided with the crisis in Colin’s life. There had been a girlfriend, of course; he supposed she didn’t know. His behaviour was odd and abstracted, even by his own standards. He had drunk too much, whenever he could get his hands on some alcohol; they could not afford, in those days, to keep a stock in the house. Their petrol bills had soared; where did he go? Finally, of course, he’d been breathalysed and banned from driving. His little affair had come to nothing. That was obvious, wasn’t it? He was still here, she was still here; here they were.
Sylvia looked at her watch. Ten past one. She let the albums slip onto the bed, yawned, stretched, and peeled off her tracksuit, dropping it into the laundry basket. She went into the bathroom, washed, and cleaned her teeth vigorously. Back in the bedroom, she averted her face to avoid the sight of herself half-naked in the dressing table mirror. Her thighs were going, her tummy had gone; after four pregnancies, what could you expect? If she had known then what she knew now … She pulled on her baggy cotton trousers, and took out of the drawer a tee shirt which said in big black letters NURSERY SCHOOLS ARE OUR RIGHT. Running a hand through her hair, she mooched off downstairs.
Lizzie Blank, the daily (a German name, Sylvia supposed), was standing at the sink wringing dirty water from a cloth. ‘All right, Lizzie?’ Sylvia said.
‘All right, Mrs S?’
Sylvia crossed to the fridge. She opened it, picked out a lettuce leaf, and stood nibbling it while she surveyed her domestic. She supposed that a survey of Lizzie Blank would be a comfort to any normal woman who was afraid of losing her looks. Weird was the only word for her.
Lizzie Blank was a woman of no age that could easily be determined. Her dumpling body, entirely without a waistline, was supported on peg-shaped legs. Her hair, platinum blond and matted, had a height and stiffness that Sylvia’s in its heyday had never approached; two little squiggles, shaped like meat hooks, stood stiffly out by each ear. Her large face – rather blank in truth – was so caked with make-up that it was impossible to decide what it might look like naked, and her eyelids, outlined in thick black pencil, were painted a vivid teal blue. How many pairs of false eyelashes she wore, Sylvia could not take it upon herself to say. Her magenta lips bore no relation to her real mouth, but were overpainted greasily onto the skin, so that the merest twitch of her cheek muscles brought about a smile or a pout. The lips worked unceasingly; the eyes remained quite dead.
‘How was your trip?’ Sylvia asked.
‘Okay. One of us thought there would be donkeys. We had them before, when we went on a day trip.’
‘I think you only get them at the seaside.’
‘I don’t see why. Not as if they swim.’
Sylvia was taken aback. ‘Tell me, Lizzie,’ she said, ‘do you wear a wig?’
Lizzie only smiled. Sylvia realised that her question was perhaps an intrusion. After all, she thought, if it is a wig, it’s bound to slip about on her head from time to time. I could find out by observation alone.
Sylvia swung open the fridge door again, took out half a cucumber, and cut an inch off it. She raised it to her lips. ‘By the way, you didn’t try to clean Alistair’s room, did you? I meant to tell you. I expect he’s got the door locked.’
‘The spare room?’ Lizzie looked at her; it might have been astonishment, but her face was so far from the human norm that it was always difficult to be sure what her expressions meant.
‘Well, it’s not really the spare room. Alistair’s always had it, since we came.’
‘I call it the spare room.’
‘I daresay it was, before we moved here. Anyway, what I’m saying is – don’t bother with it. His father will make him clean it up, when the school holidays start.’
‘Some rooms have no talent for cleaning. Some rooms will never be clean.’ Her tone was perhaps unnecessarily doom-laden, but Sylvia supposed she was devoted to her art. It was a good sign really.
‘I was wondering, would you take on another lady?’
Lizzie was washing down the sink with bleach. She shook her head, without pausing in her work.
‘Only, our vicar’s wife is looking for somebody to do a few hours for her.’
‘Did you say you could recommend me?’ Lizzie turned her full flat face towards her employer; her rouged cheeks glowed, ripely pink, in a waste of chalk-white powder.
‘I mentioned your name. I didn’t commit you.’
‘Not interested, Mrs S.’
‘I did tell her, I didn’t know how many other people you did for.’ Biting her cucumber: ‘You’re a bit of an enigma, Lizzie.’
‘I can’t take anything else on.’ Lizzie screwed the cap back on the bleach bottle. ‘I work at night.’
She bent down to put the bleach away under the sink, presenting to Sylvia her large rear end. ‘Yes, well, I thought I’d ask. I’d better get off to my committee meeting. Can I give you a lift?’
Lizzie took off her large plastic apron and hung it behind the kitchen door. ‘Thank you kindly, Mrs S. You’re a good woman. An angel, I might add.’
With a baffled smile, Sylvia went off to get her purse. Weird was the word. As it happened, though, Lizzie Blank was the only person who had answered her ad in the Reporter. The purplish, pinpoint, foreign-looking hand had prepared her for – well, a foreigner; a person of strange diction and eccentric ways of cleaning lavatories. Lizzie did not seem exactly foreign; but perhaps her parents were, perhaps she came from a funny background. She seemed a good-hearted soul, Sylvia thought, and willing enough; even if she was rather lavish with the cleaning materials.
She went back into the kitchen. Lizzie Blank was now in her outdoor garb; a dirndl skirt of red and blue, and a leopard-skin jacket. ‘I’m surprised you don’t feel the heat,’ Sylvia said, counting out her money. ‘There you are, love.’ Lizzie’s false nails flashed, and the notes vanished into one of her pockets.
‘It’s my pride and joy, this jacket,’ she said. ‘As my mother used to say, Pride must Abide.’
Lizzie took out a chiffon scarf, pink shot through with gold, and went out into the hall. In front of the mirror, she adjusted it carefully over her coiffure. ‘Ready?’ Sylvia said, swinging her car keys. ‘You’ll have to give me directions.’
Damn, she thought, I’ve been stuffing myself again; and I meant not to have any lunch.
They drove downhill towards the town centre. Right here, left here, said the charwoman, leading them into the maze of streets that still stood on the southern side of the motorway link. ‘All this will be coming down soon,’ Sylvia said. ‘You’ll all be dumped over Hadleigh way in a high-rise. How do you feel about that?’
‘All right.’
‘But it’ll break up your community.’
‘Not my community. I wasn’t born here.’
‘Oh, I see. But still, you won’t like life in a towerblock.’
‘I shan’t mind. You can throw things off the balconies.’
Sylvia gave her a sideways look, then switched her attention back to the road. She slowed down. Small brown children played by the kerb, barelegged in the July heat, crouching in the gutter and darting out into the road. There was not a blade of grass for miles. Midsummer brought out the worst in it, baking the cracks in the pavements, raising a stench from the dustbins. The long ginnels that ran between the houses discharged a dim effulgence of stale sweat and stale spices; a thin ginger cat slept on a coal-shed roof, its scarred limbs splayed, its eyes screwed tight against the glare. Not a tree, not a patch of shade. ‘Displacing people from their environment,’ Sylvia said. ‘You’d think the lesson would be learned by now.’
‘Here it is. Eugene Terrace.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘This will do.’ Lizzie opened the car door and began to lever her bloated body out of the seat, swivelling sideways and kicking her feet over the kerb. Her ankle chain flashed in the sunlight. Out at last, she leaned down and stuck her face in at the passenger door. ‘Thanks a million, Mrs S.’ Inside the leopard-skin jacket she was perspiring heavily, and patches of grease were breaking through her face powder; she gave a terrifying impression of imminent dissolution, as if fire had broken out at Madame Tussaud’s.
Sylvia drew back from her grinning mouth and heavy scent. ‘Is this where you live, at this shop?’
‘Over the top. It’s temporary. I’m stopping with a friend, he’s got lodgings here.’
‘See you Thursday then.’ She watched Lizzie, waddling towards the side door of the fly-blown corner grocery. I wonder what she means about working at night? Can she possibly be a prostitute? Surely not; she was too grotesque for anyone’s taste. Lizzie stopped, ferreting in her bag for her door key. There was something unreal about her, as if she were a puppet, or an illustration loosed from the pages of a book. Suddenly, and with awful clarity, Sylvia understood her mingled repulsion and fascination, the prickling of kinship which had made her take the creature on. It was herself she was seeing, Sylvia Sidney of ten years back, the masklike maquillage, the jelly-flesh wobbling like a sow’s; the great big beautiful baby doll. She felt suddenly sick. She groped for the gear lever.
Lizzie Blank, known otherwise as Muriel Axon, turned her key in the lock; and entered the dismal passageway of Mukerjee’s All-Asia Emporium.
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_6a2a4859-b232-5749-abbf-0913fa2de101)
The Mukerjees’ stock in trade blocked most of the narrow passage: tinned cream of tomato soup in cartons of three dozen, boxes of precooked rice and deodorant sprays, toothpicks, lavender furniture polish, and fancy bun cases. Muriel walked sideways between the boxes, holding her shopping bag across her chest, and went upstairs in the dark. She found she had forgotten the password again, so she booted the door until the sentiment ‘Christ is risen’ came feebly from within.
The room was full of shadows and swirling dust, the sun kept out by a yellowing paper blind. Muriel walked to the window and released it; it shot up and out of her hand with a soft flurry like the exit of a family of rats. She looked out over the roofs of the outdoor privies and the coal sheds.
‘Stir your stumps,’ she advised the man on the bed.
It was Emmanuel Crisp, her friend, her mentor, her old mucker from the long-stay hospital; it was Emmanuel Crisp, who liked to pretend he was a vicar, and who got put away for it. He’d been a troublesome sort of lunatic, always needing big injections; whereas she, whose antecedents were much worse, had given no bother at all; always neat, clean and biddable, at least after the first few years.
Crisp flapped a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. ‘Hello there, Muriel. I thought it was you, kicking.’
‘I’m not Muriel. I’m Lizzie Blank.’
‘But you are Muriel really, aren’t you?’
‘Sometimes. But today I’m Lizzie Blank, because I’ve got my wig on, haven’t I, and my make-up?’
Crisp studied her. ‘It’s wonderful how you get transmogrified.’
‘I’ve got my job to do,’ she said grimly.
Emmanuel lay back on the bed. He was an exhausted man, with his greenish pallor and his high-pitched giggle. It was the day trip to York that had tired him. It had been their best get-together with old friends since they’d all been turfed out of Fulmers Moor Hospital, and left to fend for themselves.
‘Sholto enjoyed it,’ Muriel said. ‘He didn’t have a fit. It was only the excitement that made him sick.’
Crisp’s jaws worked around a yawn. He slid his long frame into a sitting position. ‘Do you have my press cuttings?’
Muriel took the newspapers out of her bag and tossed them onto the table. ‘It’s hot in here.’ She pulled off her wig and dropped it by the Daily Telegraph; then, on second thoughts, arranged it on its stand, on the blank-faced head of white polystyrene that she kept on top of Crisp’s chest of drawers. She didn’t live here; she had a room of her own. But everything was arranged for her convenience.
‘Well?’ she asked Crisp.
Emmanuel looked up, gratified, ‘AN ACT OF GOD,’ he read. Muriel said, ‘Do you want me to go for some fish and chips?’
‘I couldn’t eat. I’m too excited.’
‘Suit yourself. I’ve had my lunch with my employers. They’re not too pleased about the practice I had in their kitchen.’
‘They’ll get it on their insurance,’ Crisp said, absorbed. ‘Heretics have no insurance.’ He smiled as he read. Muriel yawned, and scratched her itching scalp.
‘I’m going to change,’ she said. ‘Don’t watch me, Crisp.’
She took off her leopard-skin jacket and hung it in the wardrobe, kicked off her shoes with a groan, and delved about under the bed for the flat open sandals that Muriel wore. She hauled up her skirt and released her black stockings from their suspenders. From under his eyelids Crisp watched her, rubbing with her fingertips at the indentations the suspenders had left in her blue-white flesh. Her blouse went over her head and onto the floor, and with a grunt she undid the fastening of her painful padded brassiere. Her own body, free from Lizzie’s underpinnings, seemed flat and meagre. ‘Give me a towel,’ she said to Crisp. He watched her as she scrubbed off Lizzie’s mouth, erased her lurid eyelids. After five minutes Muriel was back; her almost colourless eyes, her bland inexpressive features, her short dark hair now beginning to grey.
‘Are you getting a multiple personality?’ Crisp asked her.
She gave him a look. ‘I know who I am,’ she said.
She put on Muriel’s skirt, and a limp cheesecloth blouse, embroidered on the bodice with blue flowers. She had a faraway look, Crisp thought; she was planning what she would do on the street. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘We could pass the afternoon in a study of the Psalms.’
‘Stuff that,’ Muriel said. ‘Where’s my collecting box?’
‘Bodily resurrection is a fact.’
‘I never said different. Don’t go picking quarrels.’
‘Do you know, it’s not the first fire at York Minster. Jonathan Martin, 1829, described as a lunatic. Emmanuel Crisp, 1984, right hand of the Lord.’
‘I hear you, talking like a nutter. Trying to get yourself readmitted.’
‘What if I am? We all pretend to be something we’re not. Especially you, Muriel.’ She was heading for the door. ‘Don’t leave me on my own. I feel jittery.’
‘Well, what is it you want to do then?’
‘Stay with me a bit. You can talk to me if you like.’
‘What about?’
‘About your life. I could give you absolution, Muriel.’
She hesitated, came back into the room. ‘What’s that?’
‘Forgiveness for your sins.’
‘What’s forgiving? It doesn’t change anything. Anyway, I don’t do sins.’
‘Your crimes, then. It’s a nice point.’
‘But I don’t like remembering, Crisp. It upsets me, thinking about my mother and all that. I’d like to oblige you. But it gives me a pain behind my eyes.’
‘Do you good to have a pain. You’re a malicious old bat.’
‘What about you? Burning down churches?’
‘I do it for God.’
‘I do it for me. I do it for fun. I do what I like.’
But already the unwelcome process had begun. Her recall had nothing dim about it. Ten years ago, she had been a woman with a mother and a child. She’d had a lifetime of Mother, but the baby she’d only had for a few days. She had disposed of both of them: 1975. Only hours after the disposal, her life had changed completely; chance had shackled her in the long chain of events that brought her to where she was now. And they say crime doesn’t pay! She was better off now than she’d ever been; it was only one of the things people said to comfort themselves. Before that dark February afternoon, with the social worker screaming in an upstairs room, she’d been nothing but a girl at home; a girl at home with her mother at 2, Buckingham Avenue, for thirty-four years.
Mother was not an easy woman. She was a landlord, a gaoler. She did a manoeuvre she called ‘keeping ourselves to ourselves’. It involved close planning, bad manners; cowering in the back room if anyone came knocking at the door. It was not age that did this to Mother; it had always been her policy. When Muriel went to school, Mother waited for her by the gate. She took her by the neck and by the arm and hauled her home.
This was Muriel’s life: days, whole weeks together, when Mother didn’t let her out of the house in the mornings. She locked her in the bedroom, or hid her shoes. At St David’s School on Arlington Road, she was nothing but an object of remark. None of the remarks were flattering. She rocked on her chair, played with her fingers. She would not write, could not, had never learned, forgotten how. At the sound of a bell the children rushed out of the room and fought each other in an asphalt circus behind bars. She stood and watched the others, rubbing her arm above the elbow where Mother’s fingers left her permanently bruised. She licked some rust from the railings; there was iron on her tongue, salt, ice. She laid about her with her fists. Soon this part of life was over; Mother kept her at home.
The streets, Mother said, were dangerous for a growing girl. There were attacks, impregnations, thefts. She could make your flesh crawl with her tales. By and by a man came to the house, making enquiries. His name was Mr Hutchinson, and he was called an attendance officer. Mother dodged him for a month; finally she let him in. ‘Are you Mrs Evelyn Axon?’ he asked. He saw Muriel, sitting on a stool in the kitchen. He called her my dear. Mother sneered. Oh dear, my dear, she said, isn’t it a gorgeous little cretin, a muttonhead, an oaf, and is it precisely what you want, sir, for your select conservatoire? Mr Hutchinson had a cardboard file which he stored under his arm. He took a step backwards, away from Mother, holding the file across the breast of his fawn overcoat. It brought him up against the door of the lean-to; confused, he turned and fumbled for the handle, and found himself treading in the mulch of old cardboard and newspaper that was always underfoot in winter, breathing in the dank lean-to air. Cobwebs trailed across his glasses. From her stool, Muriel laughed out loud.
After Mr Hutchinson had been retrieved from the lean-to and set on his way out of the front door, Mother had taken her aside and said: stupidity is the better part of valour. Doltishness is the best defence. After that, there had been similar visitors; meeting similar fates, if they got in at all. The Welfare, Mother called them. There had been a time when, just to keep them happy, Mother had let her go in a bus once a week to the handicapped class. She sat with other people in a room, four of them round each table. She cut out shapes in felt and sewed them with great tough stitches onto other felt. She got thin strips of cane and bent them up into baskets; and while she did this she spoke to no one, keeping her lips closed and preserving her eyes behind the thick glasses that the Welfare had got for her. Presently the materials were taken away, and they were given tea and biscuits.
A few months passed, and the results of freedom were visible. Mother kept her at home again. For decades she had sat imprisoned in the house; now she sat in the house behind the bulk of her pregnant belly. How did you get in that condition? her friend Sholto had once asked her. She had thought back, leaning on the hospital fence, looking over it into the world. I gave them the slip, she said. Mother took me to the door, down the path I went, round the corner, where I saw the dog lying on the path, the fox-terrier dog that lay there every Thursday afternoon; and I gave it a kick. I walked on, and I stood, and when I saw that little bus coming, I just turned myself round and went the other way.
I gave them the slip, she said. I went for a go in the park, looking in the litter bins, going in the summer house, getting on those swings. I should have been at my class doing basket weaving and community singing but I went for this go in the park instead. And your beau, Sholto asked; he had a little fiddle? He was a professional man, Muriel said; he had a lovely tweed coat, and some credit cards.
So it came about, she said sonorously to Sholto.
Sholto could keep a secret. He rolled her a cigarette, she smoked it leaning on the fence, and then they went in for their dinner. They had just got the cafeteria system. They took a tray and stood in a line and got brown baked beans and white fish pie. A few people arranged it into patterns, but Muriel had no heart for it. Talking about the past upset her: the cold and discomfort, Mother’s bullying, the lack of proper food, the musty unlit rooms inside the house and the screen of dark trees outside. Buckingham Avenue was so silent you could hear the dust move, and Mother’s dying thoughts rustle through her skull; Christmas 1974, mice in the kitchen cupboards, two seasonal envelopes coming through the door. Miss Florence Sidney, their neighbour, came with a plate full of warm mince pies. Muriel was shut up; their fragrance, wafting up the staircase, made her jaws ache. Mother put Miss Sidney in her place. She forced raw whisky on her, bawled out ‘Merry Christmas’ and booted her out in short order. One of Miss Sidney’s pies leaped from the plate as she scurried down the hall, and smashed and opened itself on the dusty parquet floor. Muriel came down; she put her finger into its steaming golden insides and tasted it. Evelyn shooed her off, pushed her into the back room. She told her to let it lie. Next day it was gone.
Mother had knocked over the paraffin heater. She had groaned in the wet weather when her knees and hips gave her pain. She had taken away Muriel’s cards from the Welfare and burned them, and forbidden her to play in the garden for fear that the neighbours might see her and report on her state. Mother was afraid of the neighbours. She was afraid of ghosts, of changelings. She complained that as she walked down the hallway little claws pulled at her skirt, little devil’s crabs with no bodies, sliding noiselessly away from under her feet.
At one time, her trade had been giving seances for the neighbours. Mrs Sidney, the pie-maker’s mother, had called in to speak to her late husband, and had got scared so badly at Mother’s proficiency that she had turned funny, and shortly afterwards had been sent away. People had come from the other side of town; once a woman had come all the way from Crewe, bringing a parcel of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof to sustain her during her trip on the train. Afternoons, Mother had spent in the front parlour; groaning, sweating, making the bleak monosyllabic conversations that the dead enjoy. Evening, money in her purse; she would snigger, and go and put the kettle on. One day, as she headed for the kitchen, a black wall of panic rose up in front of her and blocked her path. Muriel, lurking at the foot of the stairs, watched Mother’s throat gaping for air, watched her raise a fist and first hammer, then claw at the wall; saw her lift her feet and tussle in the thick air, treading and weaving inside her big woollen cardigan like a dancing bear.
The episode passed. I had a black-out, Mother said. It’s my age.
After that Mother had regretted her seances. The house was full of what she had conjured up; a three-bed two-reception property on a large corner plot, all jostled and crammed with the teeth-baring dead, stranded souls whistling in the cavity walls, half-animated corpses under the flagstones outside. One bedroom, which they called the spare room, had its special tenants. Without eyes and ears, they made themselves known by shuffling; by the soft sucking of their breath, in and out; but they had no lungs. They were malign intentions, Mother said, waiting to be joined to bodies; they were the notions of the dead, expecting flesh.
Mother was now seventy years old; tired, done for, blue stains under her eyes. She’d tried to make a living and now she was to be penalised. No one can help you, she said. No one ever will. They were on their own. They never went out, because they were afraid of what might happen in the house while they were away.
Muriel could see herself as she was then; her pudding face above her smock. Days went by when they never spoke.
She felt a movement inside her, very strange. Mother said, you’re occupied. It would be another mute, an ugly, a ne’er-do-well. She felt it ready to burst out, and that she would die. She knew about death very well, believing that her little thoughts would empty out of her head, and roll round and round in the spare room, picking up the dust from the floor.
Mother got books from the public library, first aid. When the baby started to be born she got out her reading glasses. She fumbled around in the bedroom, cursing. She went round the house with a torch, shining into all the dark corners. Muriel had a pain, a private pain, and she felt that something was going to come of it.
Next day Mother was tired. She made no secret of it; she had entertained hopes that a better sort of infant would be forthcoming. It was an evil-smelling scrap, greedy, drinking up everything that it was offered; it gave evidence of an intemperate nature, of an agitating character. It had a strange face, unlike theirs. It cried incessantly, like an animal shut up in a shed. I’m afraid it’s worse that I thought, Mother said.
On the third day she broke it to her: it’s not human. It’s a changeling, Muriel; you’ve been duped.
But Mother was never at a loss. She had a theory, and her theory was this: you take a firm line, stand no nonsense, and arrange to get a human child back. How?
You find some water, a river; but there was no river, not without taking the bus. Luckily there was the canal, and the canal would do. Float off the wastrel, the substitute; wait a bit, and the chances are you’ll get another in return. It’s the recommended method.
Hearing this theory, Muriel had laughed. The Welfare never told me that, she said, and you get to know things from the Welfare. Such as? Mother demanded. Such as supplementary benefit, rebate on your rent. Mother gave her a slap. It was tried and tested, she said. Desperate diseases require desperate remedies, is that a proverb with which you are unfamiliar? Muriel saw by the quivering of her mother’s face that she was at the end of her tether. She was afraid of the changeling and would not have it in the house. I could telephone the authorities, she said, and have you both locked up.
Of course Mother knew more than she did; she had years of experience, with the living and the dead. ‘All right,’ Muriel said. She was persuaded.
And so the day came to try the substitution. It was a raw winter’s day, with a smell of earth and water. They walked over the fields to the canal bank, meeting no one. They set the box carefully on the surface of the water, the cardboard box with the baby inside. ‘Sink or swim,’ Mother said. The baby had not made a sound; it had given up crying by then, and they had put a blanket over its face and folded over the flaps of the box. It was not cruelty, merely a precaution; Mother knew what she was doing and didn’t want interference.
Below the water was a slimy substance which Muriel found interesting. She put her hand in, and brought it out dripping. Mother gave her a handkerchief to dry it on. They watched the cardboard box, growing soggy, bobbing in the water. There was no sign of the swap. The two babies were already confused in her mind; cold, stunted, condemned to the changeling life, their scant humanity draining away from them year by year. The box dipped in the water and was soon lost from view; the days were short, and there was not much light under the trees. Was it a boy or a girl? Sholto had asked her. I don’t know, she replied; it was all so long ago. She had felt on the canal bank – or was it only later that she felt it? – a small gnawing inside that she called regret. It was all she had, and now it was drowning. It was true that her knowledge of matters was limited, but it was possible that everything, from her go in the park onwards, could have worked out differently. It was not regret for the infant she felt; after all, she hardly knew it. Perhaps it was for herself then; she wondered for a moment how she came to be alive, how it was that her old mother had not brought her here and floated her off one day in the hope of getting in exchange a human child. She brushed the thought away, rubbing her slimy hand down the sleeve of her winter coat. She was hungry. Mother said it had not worked. It was time to be getting home; darkness was closing in rapidly over the fields.
They returned home. It was only five o’clock, but it felt like the middle of the night. The lightbulb had gone in the hall. Her tummy was rumbling. When the knock came at the front door, Mother said, it’s that gas man again, I suppose we’ll have to let him in sooner or later. She gave Muriel a shove in the ribs, told her to stay in the back room. Make yourself scarce, she said.
But when Evelyn opened the front door it wasn’t the gas man at all. It was Miss Isabel Field from the Welfare; the lady they had been keeping out for months.
Mother had dropped her guard, and she probably knew then that she was going to suffer for it. But first she tried to retrieve her error, smiling sweetly at the girl, leading her up the stairs. Muriel leaned against the door of the back room, breathing, listening. As soon as Mother had ushered Miss Field into the spare room, she turned the key on her. Muriel came out into the hall. She sat on the stairs, her knees drawn up to her chin, and listened to Miss Field suffering. How she screamed! How she hammered at the door! How she hammered on the window! She’d put her hand through the glass if she didn’t take care.
When the banging started at the back of the house too, the devil got into Muriel; she said right, solve this one, Mother, but she didn’t dare to say it out loud. The sound of the words and the sound of the hammering went round and round and reverberated in her head as she padded in her bedroom slippers towards the kitchen door.
And then came the invasion. A man burst in. He ran through the house, shouting. Mother came after, striving and yelling; white in the face, wrapped in her cardigan, as fast as she could caper. Up the stairs ran sweating man. After him went Mother. The next moment she lay in a heap on the floor at the bottom. Muriel, behind the front door, stood regarding her.
Assembled in the hall now were Miss Florence Sidney, who baked mince pies; Miss Sidney’s brother Colin; and the welfare worker, Miss Isabel Field. Miss Field said she was leaving the profession. It was too much, she said, to be locked up in a bedroom by some type of madwoman when you were only trying to do a home visit. She was trembling, crying a little. Miss Sidney’s brother got down on the floor and lay on top of Mother. He fastened his mouth voraciously over hers. Mother did not respond; it was ages since she’d had the attentions of a man. After a few minutes, Colin Sidney pushed himself upright, wiped his mouth, and looked down at Mother lying between his legs. He raised his fist and hit her chest a tremendous blow; two blows, then three. Muriel watched closely, sharing his disappointment that Mother seemed to feel nothing of all this. Presently he gave up on her. He lurched to his feet, talking, breathing heavily. She was hanging on to me, he said, as I tried to get upstairs; like a maniac, Miss Field, you were pounding on the bedroom door. I shrugged her off, shrugged is all I did; she slipped, she lost her footing. Now, Colin, said his sister Florence, now, Colin, the ambulance is on its way, no one is blaming you. You did the right thing to rescue me, Miss Field said; locked in that room by myself I felt something pulling at my skirt. She shivered. Colin took off his jacket and put it round her shoulders. There you are, Miss Er, he said. Field, she told him. Victor of the Field, Muriel whispered. For a moment they stared at her; they were not sure if she had spoken or not.
When Miss Sidney was out doing her telephoning, the brother and the social worker turned to each other. They acted as if no one was there; not her in the bedroom slippers, not Mother in a heap. They were people who had met before; their eyes met, and then their hands. She would not be surprised if they had not met on a go in the park. She had a grievance against the social worker, with her trim waist and pale pretty face. She herself was still bloated from her pregnancy, but the girl did not know that. The baby was something they’d kept to themselves; a private trial, which they had faced in their own way.
Miss Sidney was back now. She turned to Muriel. Now, Muriel, she said, I don’t want you to upset yourself, and what we could do with is a blanket to cover up your poor old mum. Let her shiver, Muriel thought, noticing that she did not. Already the grievances of a lifetime were rising up in her mind. Did other people live like this? She had no idea. The social worker said that the place was like a morgue. She bent over Mother, turning her head with her slim white hand. No one’s blaming you, she said to Colin Sidney; she’s had a heart attack. Mother’s face was a strange mottled colour; its expression was one of astonishment.
In the last few moments of Mother’s life, she, Muriel, had come up the stairs from the bottom. Whilst Mother was slipping, sliding, clutching with one hand at the banister and the other at her chest, she had knitted her fingers into the back of Mother’s cardigan, she had taken her by the scruff and bounced her slam, slam, against the wall; and this was why, when Mother died, she looked so surprised.
There were now more people in the house than Muriel could ever remember; more, at any rate, than since Father’s funeral. She had been only a child then; she had wondered why Clifford Axon couldn’t be buried at the back, outside the lean-to, but her mother had said no, she wanted him off the premises. Thirty years had passed; life was going to alter. In the midst of her speculations, her stomach rumbled again quite audibly. Murder makes me famished, she thought. She took a final look at her mother, then went into the kitchen and cut herself a piece of bread. She rummaged in the cupboards and found a pot of some kind of red jam. The old cow, she thought, she was keeping this for herself. There was quite a lot left, three-quarters of the pot. She got a knife from the cutlery drawer and spread the jam carefully, very thick and right to the edges of the bread. When Colin Sidney came in she offered him a bite, but he did not seem interested. She could hear the social worker being sick again. Vehicles drew up outside, and uniformed men took Evelyn away.
Soon after these events, Muriel left home herself. She understood that she would be going away for some years, to recuperate from her time with her mother. A woman called Tidmarsh collected her. She put a plastic bag in the boot of the car, containing Muriel’s personal effects; the two smocks that Mother had made for her out of a pair of old curtains, and a few other odds and ends she found in the drawers. Muriel looked back at the house where until now she had always lived. She felt a terrible sense of incompleteness, as if something that mattered to her had been abandoned in one of the rooms. She pawed at the woman’s arm, trying to get her to turn back, but the woman shook herself free and yelled out that they would have an accident. How was Muriel to know? She had never been in a car before, only the minibus.
Mother had always threatened her that if she didn’t do as she was told, she’d be rounded up with the other ne’er-do-wells, and taken off and gassed. It had happened once, Evelyn said; and the whole world profits by example. So was this it? She felt no emotion; she did not know what gassed would be like. She looked out at the factory walls as they passed, her head lolling against the glass, shaking with the vibrations of the car.
It was a mild spring day, but the women in the streets were still bundled into their heavy coats. They pushed children in trolleys, their heads bowed against the breeze. Sunlight dappled the glass of a bus shelter. The mill gates and little rows of shops gave way to an area of semi-detached houses with white painted fences and pretty flowering shrubs in the gardens. A red housing estate climbed up the side of a hill. Soon they were in the country. Miss Tidmarsh wound her window down, and the smell of fresh grass filled the car. They turned into a gateway, into a gravelled drive shaded by towering hedges. Clouds flew across the windscreen. The car nosed onwards, through the summer ahead; birds wheeled over the fields.
The house itself, a crumbling grey core, looked out over the fields and towards the road. Gravel paths ran away from it, with flower beds on either side. There were parked cars, an ambulance, a scatter of Nissen huts and sheds, and a colony of new buildings, made of metal and varnished wood and plate glass. Beyond these was a belt of dark trees, and more fields. There was a faint ground mist, and moisture in the air.
When the car stopped, Muriel scrambled out. ‘Hang on a minute,’ Miss Tidmarsh called. She took her by the elbow. It reminded her of Mother.
The paths were dotted with little signposts: Hunniford Ward, Greyshott Ward, Occupational Therapy. She did not have time to read them all, but she could read much better than they thought. She craned her neck, straining back over her shoulder. ‘Come on, my dear,’ the woman said. My dear; for the second time. Mother never said it, only ‘You useless lump.’ Useless lump or my dear, the meaning was the same.
Inside the big building the tiles were cold underfoot. Another woman came out, wearing a blue and white check garment. She had an elastic belt and a paper hat. ‘Oh hello, Miss Tidmarsh,’ she said. ‘And how are we today? Got another customer for us?’
She had a special way of looking at Muriel, as if she looked straight through her and around all the edges to assess her size and shape. She shifted from one foot to the other, a little selfconsciously, and twanged at her elastic belt. ‘We’re supposed to be going into mufti soon,’ she said. ‘What do you think of that?’ The woman made some reply. Muriel looked around the entrance hall, up at the ceiling. The nurse asked, ‘How about a cup of tea?’
‘That would be brilliant,’ Muriel said.
The nurse gave her a queer look. ‘Not you, dear. Patients’ tea comes at ten thirty, you’ve missed it.’
‘I’ll have coffee,’ Muriel said. ‘Jam, ham, Spam, roast beef, cornflakes and Ovaltine.’ Miss Tidmarsh laughed.
They followed the notices that said ADMISSIONS. The ward had thirty beds. This is your locker, this is your orange bedspread, this is your bedside mat, this is where you will live. ‘And then, dear, in a week or two, when Doctor has had a talk to us, we’ll be moving on.’
Muriel sat on her orange bedspread. ‘My head hurts,’ she said. The nurse took away her dress. She took away her knickers. She gave her a thin cotton gown.
‘Don’t you wear a bra?’ she said. Muriel shook her head. The nurse smiled. ‘We don’t want to droop, do we?’
‘I don’t know what we’re talking about,’ Muriel said. ‘Our head hurts.’
‘We mustn’t be cheeky. We’ll learn that soon enough, dear. Haven’t we got slippers?’ Muriel shook her head again. ‘You’ll have to get your visitors to bring you some.’
‘Will I get visitors?’
‘You’ll get your family, won’t you, dear?’
Muriel thought this over. Baby: drip, drip. Mother. She closed her eyes tiredly. Mother always said she would haunt.
‘Pay attention, dear,’ the nurse said sharply. Muriel slapped the palm of her hand against her head. ‘That won’t help,’ the nurse said. ‘I can’t give you any medication. Not till you’ve seen the doctor.’
‘When will that be?’
‘That will be on the ward round. Tomorrow.’
When Muriel was left alone, she sat on her bed and dangled her feet. She examined them, hanging there on the end of her legs, her fat red toes. She had done a lot of talking since Mother died. Before, days had gone by without speech; weeks, months. Except for rhymes. She’d not give up making those rhymes, she enjoyed them. They were all she remembered from St David’s School. Sing a song of headache, holler scream and cry, Four and twenty nurses, baked in a pie. She would not cry; she could not be bothered. She scratched her knee instead. A blind was drawn at the window, and the ward was in semi-darkness. She felt the walls close in on her; safe again. Back in the prison of her body, and back in the prison routine with its sights and smells and noises; rumbling tummy, creaking ankles, the steady beating of the heart.
The first person Muriel met was Sholto. He stood in the long corridor blocking her path, a sinister dirty little man with bow legs. ‘Are you mad, or stupid?’ he enquired.
‘Both,’ Muriel said promptly.
‘Join the élite corps.’ Sholto sprang forward and pumped her hand.
Country life. The birds woke her up at four o’clock. She struggled out of her dreams and threw back the bedclothes. She put her feet on the cold floor; head down, she blundered to the window. It showed her a pale milky light and her own pale reflection; the features blurred, amorphous, underwater. She rubbed her right hand down her nightdress, thinking of the clinging green weed.
‘Come on, dear, back to bed,’ said a voice behind her. ‘What are you doing up at this time? Didn’t you have your pill?’
Muriel nodded. ‘I swallowed it.’
Early morning waking, said the nurse to herself, a sign of clinical depression. ‘Back you go,’ she said.
‘Those damn squeakies in the trees,’ Muriel muttered. She glared at the nurse.
‘Six thirty you get up,’ the nurse said. ‘Not four. We’ve got to get ourself into a routine.’ She watched Muriel wiping her hand down her nightdress. Obsessive-compulsive behaviour, she said to herself. Tics.
In the country the medical care was under the supervision of Dr Battachariya, a plump smiling little man; fat eyes, like disappointed raisins, were studded into his golden face. She screamed when he tried to examine her.
‘You have had a baby, Muriel?’ he said shrewdly. A rude, unmannerly man, prying about like that with his plastic gloves. ‘When was that?’
She mumbled something.
‘Where is the little blighter?’
‘With my mother,’ she said.
The first week passed. Now who was mad? Who was bad? Who was stupid?
If they had been florid, talkative and lively with delusion, the long years of Largactil and dormitory wards had made them vacant and passive. If they had been blundering, inadequate and lost, the passage of time had taught them cunning, the thousand expedients of institutional life. A breezy humorous disregard was their attitude to the doctors; the doctors sat with downcast eyes, their voices droning, their thought processes slowed.
Day room. People sit about on vinyl-covered armchairs. None of the furniture here has any resemblance to the furniture used outside. They are not things that people would have in their houses. Jaws move, champing on nothing. Cigarette smoke curls up. My mother died … I had this accident … I worried all night because I hadn’t done my homework … I should never have got married. Hum, hum, hum. Questions are meaningless when you can’t sit still in your chair. They are like bluebottles buzzing round your head: hum, hum, hum. I had no idea there was such filth in the world … At this point there was no food left in the house … I knew he had got a knife … I knew that if I allowed myself to go to sleep I should die during the night. Each night in the six o’clock news there is a special message for me. People stare at me whenever I set foot in the street. Someone had broken my glasses/started a fire/informed on me, hum, hum, hum. Marilyn Monroe stole my giro. I went to the café till my money ran out.
Can you name ten cities? Can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister? Manic motion, impelled to tread, tread, tread along the corridors, hands flying about face and ears.
You must have some feelings about yourself? Stare. A slow shake of the head. Shoulders held rigid, gaze rigid, face and hair grey. A certain rigidity of posture, says the doctor. Seemingly negativistic. How long is it since we first saw you now? No reply.
An affective problem … semi-aggressive … schizophrenic excitement … marked thought disorder. What about a little injection? You aren’t afraid of a little injection, are you?
These were Muriel’s best friends: Sholto, and Emmanuel Crisp. There were a few hangers-on; Philip and Effie. At first she had been a lost soul, wandering around the day room washing her big red hands together. She had missed her mother, in strange ways; Evelyn with her chattering and her nagging and her little ruses to defeat persecutors and spies. It was a fair bet that Evelyn had taught her a thing or two, and unless in fact she were missing her it was impossible to account for the hollow feeling that she carried around inside. At the same time, she was growing a little garden of resentment and speculation, watering her weeds in the small hours when she lay staring into the darkness, wide-eyed despite her sleeping pill. The Welfare did things for people, she now learned, got them money so that they could live on the outside, got them gas fires and shoes. They had never got anything for her. Even when Evelyn let them in, she wheedled around them and said that everything possible was being done. Pretending to be sane was a great strain on Evelyn, and this strain was the origin of many of the stand-up fights they had after the Welfare had gone. Sometimes she said to herself, Mother should be here, not me, left in this homely home-from-home to pursue a career as a lunatic. She was told that in pursuance of the truth about her mother’s life they had sliced open her body, peered into it and pulled out her insides. She thought back on the process with satisfaction.
Now that she knew more about other people and their way of life, she often wondered if her crimes entitled her to some sort of record. She could read properly now; there was a book, in great request among her friends, which had records of everything under the sun, and most of these activities – county cricket, nonstop dancing – seemed less interesting than her own. Ought she to put pen to paper about it?
Sholto advised caution. Was the baby found? he asked. No; or she would be in a prison. Still in the canal then; sunk into the soft mud at the bottom, strangled by green weeds, trapped under the rusting wrecks of bedsprings and fridges. He offered to consult Emmanuel Crisp, who with his church connections was an expert on all matters charnel.
Emmanuel thought. A peat bog will preserve anything, he said. That is not in question. Mud; soft mud, still water. And, a canal: acid in the water, surely. There’s not much to infant bones – ‘but what you have there, Muriel, is perhaps a skeleton.’
Sholto asked more questions. Was she blamed for her Mother’s demise? No. Foul play was not suspected, Crisp put in. Could she handle the scepticism her claims would provoke? They were pernickety, the publishers of this record book, they did not entertain idle claims, they might want her to repeat her feat under test conditions. You can get another child, said Sholto, winking lewdly so that she would grasp his meaning, but you cannot get another mother. Keep it to yourself, he advised. The fact is, Muriel, that you can’t prove a thing.
‘I could, though,’ she said. ‘If I found the bones.’
Crisp was a tall man, pallid and spare. He had a precisian’s lip, a cold eye; his hair was coiled about his dome like a woolly snake. Wherever did he get his wing collars, Sholto asked him.
‘Charity,’ said Crisp briskly.
‘Myself I have fits,’ Sholto explained. ‘Crisp’s life has been different. He was the verger once at St Peter’s.’
Crisp cleared his throat. ‘I left undone those things that ought to be done.’
‘What things?’
‘My flies. Later, a gas tap.’
‘He is one of those people who do not know what came over them,’ Sholto said. ‘He lived to tell the tale, though he leaves me to tell it. They put it in the Reporter: SEX BEAST VERGER: VICAR SPEAKS.’
‘Have you ever heard of entrapment?’ Emmanuel Crisp asked. ‘It was what they call an agent provocateur. She said she was from the Women’s Institute. She wanted to go into the choir stalls, and see the organ.’
‘You know you took her wrong,’ Sholto said doggedly. ‘You did it on purpose.’
‘She touched my sleeve.’ He shuddered. ‘I often pray for her.’
‘The vicar never spoke up for him. He’s left now.’
‘He’s dead,’ Crisp said. ‘Or ought to be.’
As a group, they got together in the day room. It was a new idea, to mix the boys and girls together. Autumn had come; but next year, Effie said, they would meet out of doors where there was more privacy. God willing, Philip added piously. Emmanuel led them in a verse or two of ‘The Church’s One Foundation’; then they broke up for tea.
After this came a period of considerable longueurs. Winter closed in over the fields. She stood by the window of Greyshott Ward and watched the rain beating against it. It was a year before she was put into a charabanc and taken in a great herd of chattering fellow patients to the shops in town. The journey took thirty minutes, and the excitement mounted with every mile. They went into a sweetshop, and into a hardware store where the patients looked at bread-bins and said which colour they would have if they had any bread of their own. She looked around and was very tempted, but she stole nothing at all. Afterwards, back on Greyshott, she was praised up for her good behaviour.
She had special clothes for the outing, given her out of a cardboard box kept in the nurses’ room: a blue frock with six buttons, and a mackintosh that was only a bit small. Back on Greyshott she was given her old smock again. A nurse stood over her waiting to take the outside clothes away. When she came to take her dress off, she could only account for five buttons. The nurse made the noise ‘tt-tt’ and blew a little through her teeth. It was something only nurses should do; if patients did it they got shouted at. She scooped up the dress and the mackintosh and dropped them back into the box. ‘Come on, get dressed, you idle sod,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it for you.’ Muriel saw the dress and the mackintosh disappearing, the box borne away.
She sat on the end of her bed, rebellious. ‘Tt-tt,’ she said, and wagged her head slowly, and cast her eyes to heaven. By watching other people, by stealing their expressions and practising them, she was adding to her repertoire. I was no one when I came here, she thought; but after a few years of this, there’s no saying how many people I’ll be.
Effie was often Her Majesty the Queen. They went along with her, lining up by the ward door. She wore a pink plastic shower cap that had been brought in from the outside by some long-forgotten visitor. She offered them each the tips of her fingers, and her very sweetest smile.
‘And how long have you been at Fulmers Moor?’
‘Ten years, Ma’am.’
‘Indeed? You must have seen many changes in your time?’
Between official engagements, Effie sat and looked at the wall a great deal. From time to time a ripple of emotion made her face quiver. She would put a hand up to stop it, and then she would leap up in a frenzied pursuit of the nearest nurse. ‘I want my Largactil,’ she would bleat, ‘I want my Modecate, I want my nice Fentazin syrup.’ Tranquillised, she would lean against the wall, her face serene again; only a blink of the eye, only a minute parkinsonian quiver of the extremities, to show that she was alive at all.
‘I make no showing,’ Crisp said, petulant. ‘I’d better get a delusion. I hope to become a public man,’ he told Dr Battachariya. ‘I hope to be appointed Ambassador to St Petersburg. Or Governor of the Bank of England.’
Dr Battachariya sucked his pen. He questioned him closely. ‘What is the difference between a ladder and a staircase?’ he asked him.
Crisp smiled. ‘A ladder is a series of portable gradations,’ he suggested, ‘of either metal or wood; sometimes rope. It consists of two uprights, with steps, called rungs, between them. It serves as a means of ascent, as does a staircase; but a staircase, designed on the same principle, is a fixed internal structure. Suppose for the sake of argument that you were a window cleaner – and some honester men than you or I, Battachariya, do in fact earn their living in that fashion – then taking stout cords, you could bind the ladder to your vehicle’s roof, and thus transport it; which you could by no means do with a staircase.’
Dr Battachariya toyed with his ballpoint. He was determined to fault it. ‘Don’t you think your explanation is rather over-elaborate?’ he asked. Crisp smiled again; his dry, remote, ecclesiastical smile.
Muriel sought him out. ‘Crisp, give me a book,’ she said. ‘A book of sermons. Anything.’
‘What do you want a book for?’
‘I want words. I’ve got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose. I want some like yours.’
‘Listen,’ Effie said sharply, ‘this is the bloody Savoy. Do you know what we had where I was last? No doors on the lavatories, pardon me. One toothmug per seventeen imbeciles. Crisp, you don’t know you’re born.’ Recovering herself, she added, ‘Balmoral is no better.’
But next day Effie went on the rampage. She had a filthy tongue in her head when she wasn’t giving regal addresses. She ran screaming and cursing down Greyshott Ward and out into the corridor.
‘I don’t need hospital,’ she shouted. ‘I don’t need nurses. I’m not sick. I may be daft but I’m not sick. I don’t need getting up at six thirty every day, Christmas Day, birthday, Queen’s official birthday and every bleeding Sunday. I need to get up when I want and make myself a little cup of tea.’
Two stout male orderlies got Effie by the arms and brought her back to Greyshott. They argued with her as they dragged her along. ‘And how would we get your breakfast, if you got up any old time you felt like it?’
‘I’m not here to have breakfasts. I could get my own.’
‘Go without is what you’d do. And if we didn’t get you up, what’s to say you’d ever get up at all? What’s to stop you lying in bed all day?’
Sholto stood by, scratching his head and looking on.
‘The patients for the shifts,’ he remarked, ‘or the shifts for the patients?’
Dumping Effie on her bed, reaching for the screens to pull around her, the orderly stared at Sholto; his face crimson, his breathing heavy. ‘Get your frigging ugly face out of here, Sholto Marks,’ he bellowed.
Effie subsided. She began to cry, her chest heaving with the shock and horror of her outburst.
I’ve killed a psychiatrist … I pulled all the stuffing out of the doll … they put gunpowder through my letter box … they sang in the streets outside my house … a strange letter came, postmarked Scarborough.
Philip had the secret of perpetual motion. Chug, chug, chug. I am a tractor. I am a Centurion tank. I am a shiny red new Flymo. Otherwise sensible, Philip oils his moving parts each morning.
Crisp attributes it to the decline of faith. You may hear it, he says, as Philip garages himself for the night: the melancholy long withdrawing roar. In days gone by, Philip might have believed he was possessed by a devil, but the trend this century is to penetration by rays, bombs in the skull, and possession of men by machines.
I am the internal combustion engine, says Philip.
After a year or two Muriel became angry. She went to the end of the ward where the charge nurse sat in his little plastic cubicle. He was a fair-haired belligerent man, with a habit of sucking on his underlip. His biceps bulged pink and scrubbed beneath the short sleeves of his tunic. He was reading his racing paper.
When he saw Muriel he folded up his paper and put it down.
‘Eh up, it’s Jane Fonda,’ he said. Muriel did not know why he used this name, which he always did. He was looking amiable, but amiable was not his bent.
‘I have a question,’ she said.
The charge nurse lit a cigarette. ‘Fire away.’
‘Can’t I be treated like a normal person?’
I’m worried about everything. What things? The bomb. What do you think will happen to you? Stay in hospital; then I’ll die. You got very drunk, didn’t you? Why did you go to the pub, do you think? My sinful nature. When did you last eat, do you think? 1952.
I’m dead of misery. Dead inside. There are murderers in this place, murderers in the night. They used to wear uniforms so you knew them but now you don’t know them any more. There are murderers in the night. Lizzie Borden. Ruth Ellis. Constance Kent.
Lizzie, thought Muriel. Later she couldn’t recall the surname. Lizzie Blank.
How would you like a new life? they asked Muriel one day. How would you like a new life, with your needs met by the community instead of the institution?
When Muriel looked at herself in the mirror, she knew that she was changing. She was a woman of forty, a woman of almost forty-three. In repose, her face was empty and expressionless, but at a word of inner command she could set it to work, assuming expressions acceptable to the people around her. The grimaces, she called them. The nods and smiles, the frown of concentration, the puzzled stare; all these were within her scope nowadays.
If you knew the language and the logic, you could get into people’s workings. You could press the right keys, get out the response you wanted. You have to appreciate their prejudices: good defeats evil and love conquers all. That two plus two equals four, that cause precedes effect. Remembering, all the time, that this is not really how the world works. Not at all.
The hospital was changing too. There were new nurses, milder in their ways; at least for the first month or so. The patients were left to their own devices, allowed to stroll about the grounds together while Crisp lectured them on eschatology. He looked forward to the day of a more immediate and worldly release. There was so much to be done; the Church was in a parlous state, and the General Synod – than where you would not find a bigger collection of atheists – had quite lost its grip. There were dwindling congregations, rectories turned into guest houses and deans living in maisonettes; and a demand for women in the ministry. Can you imagine, he asked, can you imagine Effie, in a sacramental character?
Crisp’s preoccupations were his own; but more and more, their thoughts were turning to the outside world. ‘I’m learning to make meals,’ Muriel said to Effie.
Effie laughed. ‘Get away. Meals come out of those big trays in the canteen.’
‘Oh, do they?’ Muriel said passionately. ‘That shows your ignorance. When I was at home I used to get meals from my mother, eggs, vegetables, that sort of rubbish, peas out of a tin. Where do you think the nurses get meals when they go home?’
‘They live here,’ Effie said. ‘Don’t they? This is where we all live.’ She relapsed into silence, and took up the occupation of looking at the wall.
Emmanuel was the first to go. ‘Social Services will be responsive,’ the doctors said. Emmanuel made a little speech, thanking them for their support as a congregation over the years. They sang a few of his favourite hymns, and he shook hands all round. He would be returning, he said, by the road to town which had brought him here some ten years ago; as if Calvary had an exit route. He turned up his face. A stray shaft of autumn sunlight gilded the waxen tip of his nose.
‘The heart’s gone out of things,’ Sholto said. He kicked at a stone and dug his hands further into his pockets. ‘It will dull our wits, trying to pass for normal.’
They were walking in the grounds, their numbers diminished. ‘Do you think you can pass?’ Sholto asked her. He looked at her keenly. ‘You might, Muriel. I might pass, if I don’t fall down and foam. Crisp will pass. But Effie – never.’
‘After all, Muriel,’ they said. ‘Look at all the stuff we’ve taught you. You know how to do your shopping. You can count your change. You can use the telephone.’ Muriel nodded. ‘We’ll find you a place,’ they said. ‘A nice little flat with a warden. You’ll be a free agent, you can come and go as you please.’ They patted her hand. ‘You’ll have lots of support. The social worker will call and see you. And you know how to make your meals.’
Muriel thought: When I get out I shall get out, just let those wardens try; Four and twenty social workers baked in a pie.
Sholto said: ‘When you get out of here your aim should be to get as far away as possible from all those people who are going to treat you as an abnormal person. You have to get away to where nobody knows your face. You don’t want a pack of people around you who are going to say, oh, you know, you mustn’t expect too much, she comes from there. You don’t want people making loopy signs at every trifling embarrassment. You want to get right away. Get a fresh start. Get treated on your own merits.
‘If you let the Welfare house you they’ll tell all the neighbours that they’re to keep an eye out. Is that any way to start life? Everybody makes mistakes, but as long as they’re watching you all your mistakes will be put on file. You want equal treatment, don’t you? You want to merge into the crowd. Not to be pointed out in the public library as that cove who has fits. Not people coming up helping you all the time. Stuff them, I say. If I want to lie in the gutter and foam at the mouth it should be my entitlement. What are gutters for?’
The odd letter came, here and there. Tales drifted back from the outside. ‘Crisp is walking the streets now,’ Sholto said bitterly.
‘I thought you didn’t want nothing from nobody, Sholto.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ Effie said timidly. ‘But he’d like a little residence.’
‘Philip got a council flat,’ someone said.
‘How did he like it?’
‘He hanged himself.’
Sholto was a man of very good sense; wise and lucid, and ready for anything, except for the days when he sat on the floor, holding his head. ‘What they claim,’ he said, ‘is an ongoing beanfeast, flats, nurses, jobs, day centres. But if you want to avoid all that you’ll have no trouble at all. There aren’t enough to go around.’
‘They’re going to close this place,’ Effie said. ‘What will happen to me? Where will I go? What will happen to my bedside mat? It’s all I’ve got.’
‘You get money given you,’ Muriel said.
‘Of course, I shall have the Civil List.’ Effie cheered up. ‘I’ll see you right, everybody.’
Hunniford Ward was closed. Effie got desperate, crying frenziedly and pulling at her hair. ‘Look, we’ll all keep in touch,’ Sholto said. He wrung her hand. ‘Me and you, Muriel, the Reverend Crisp. We’ll go on trips together. We’ll have donkey rides and such. We’ll hire a little bus and go to places of interest.’
Effie blew her nose, consoled a little. The next day she came running up, her face alight; the greatest animation seen on her features since 1977, when she set fire to a cleaning lady. ‘Giuseppe is back,’ she said, ‘that was thrown off Hunniford. If you don’t like it they take you back. Giuseppe didn’t like it.’
They went to see Giuseppe after he was dried out. ‘I went down London,’ he said. His podgy face was lemon-yellow; his fingers played tunes on the bedcovers. ‘I went in a hotel. There was women in that hotel,’ he crossed himself, ‘they was tarts. I never paid those women. A man come threatened me get out of that hotel. I went down the coach station. I went down the café. I went down the Sally Army.’
‘Five more minutes,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s been poorly.’
They smiled at her. The nurses liked it when you were poorly. They were kind to you. If you were sick in bed, they knew what you were up to and what they ought to be doing.
‘I went up Camden Town,’ Giuseppe said. ‘I went down Bayswater. I went up Tottenham Court Road to see my grandmother, but she was dead. I went in the bed and breakfast. I went in the night shelter. I ask for an extra blanket but they say, no no, fat man.’ Giuseppe rubbed his side. ‘My chest hurts. I’m a tramp. I go to Clacton. It’s winter. I get a lodging and I walk by the sea.’ He closed his eyes and screwed up his face. ‘Mother of God, it’s so lonely in Clacton.’
‘Just remember your medication,’ they said to Sholto. ‘A community nurse will call and see you.’
‘Not if I see her first,’ Sholto said.
Sholto got out on a Thursday. He was all set for his sister Myra’s house. He made his way along the street, carrying his navy-blue holdall, the yellow nylon straps wound around his wrist. When Myra saw him coming she locked the door.
Sholto walked on to the corner. When he turned off Adelaide Street, a terrible sight met his eyes. The whole district had been razed. Osborne Street was down, Spring Gardens had been flattened. The Primitive Methodist Chapel was boarded up and all the gravestones had been taken away. He tramped through the meadow of blight where the bones of Primitive Methodists had once rested; the ground was strewn with glass and broken pots. He squatted down, turning over the shards. The weather was damp; his holdall was smeared with yellow clay. From where he knelt he looked up and read a sign: MOTORWAY LINK BEGINS MAY 1983.
Where the Travellers’ Call had been there was a field of rosebay willowherb and scrap metal. There were a few aimless piles of red brick, two feet high, and in places the earth was turned up, as if someone had begun to dig foundations here and then thought better of it. Only the Rifle Volunteer was still standing, at the corner of where Sicily Street used to be. It was eleven thirty, and while he watched, the landlord put on the lights and came out to open the doors. He stooped ponderously to draw out the bolt, and stood gazing for a minute at the sky; then he looked across the wasteland, shading his eyes as if he were scanning the prairie. Sholto was the only human figure within his view. There was a rusting refrigerator lying on its back, a swastika spray-gunned on a wall; human faeces. Sholto felt the straps of his holdall cutting into his wrists. Picking his feet out of the mud, scraping his shoe on a handy brick, he began to make his way towards the Rifle Volunteer. I thought the war was over, Sholto said.
Miss Tidmarsh was nearly fifty now, and still going strong. Her shiny new car waited outside on the gravel. Muriel followed her; withered flanks inside a scarlet bib-and-brace. ‘Guess what!’ Miss Tidmarsh said. ‘We think we’ve found you a job. Who’s a lucky girl?’
She reached a hand across Muriel, pulled her seat belt and snapped it fastened. They crunched off over the gravel. Even Miss Tidmarsh’s style of driving seemed less mature than it had been. Muriel said, ‘Whatever happened to Miss Field?’
Miss Tidmarsh glanced at her sideways. ‘Fancy you remembering Miss Field! Was she your social worker?’
‘Such a lovely person,’ Muriel said dotingly. It was an expression the nurses used, about lady doctors who did not snub them and relatives who did not pester.
‘Did you think so? She left. Went to work in a bank, if I remember. I think she got married or something.’
They shot out of the main gate and onto the road to town. Muriel didn’t look back.
She started off as a cleaner, pulling a little trolley with her brush and her mop and her scouring powder and her special bucket. She had her name written on the trolley: MURIEL. She slopped her water about the corridors and under the tables in the canteen; she tipped her powder down the lavatories, and sang while she plied her mop. She learned to sing with a cigarette in her mouth, because cigarettes were what the factory made, and any worker was at liberty to pluck the finished article from the machines and puff away during the tea break and the half-hour for lunch.
At the end of the first week Maureen said to her: ‘Muriel, love, I don’t know what to say. Look at your brush, it’s all worn down to stumps. Have you been chewing it?’ Maureen sighed heavily. ‘There’s a wheel coming off MURIEL. You’ve got through as much powder as I use in three months. And look at your Eeziwipes; they’re all over the place.’
Muriel stood looking down at her feet.
‘No point putting your bottom lip out,’ Maureen said. ‘I don’t know, where’ve you been all your life? I suppose some can clean and some can’t, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘Am I discharged then?’
‘That’s not up to me, duck. There’s enough on the dole as it is. On your own at home, are you?’
‘I am at the moment. But I’m expecting my mother.’
‘Ah, that’s nice. Well, look, lovey, buck up now. Perhaps we can get you on Ripping.’
That first weekend of freedom, Muriel paid a visit to her old home. It was quite a distance from the room that Miss Tidmarsh had found for her. She saw buses going about the streets, but she didn’t know how to get one to go in the right direction. So she walked; she had nothing else to do.
Considering how many years had passed, the district hadn’t changed much. She turned off Lauderdale Road, where she used to wait for the minibus. She paused for a few moments before the house where the fox terrier used to live, and took a good look. The stained glass and the net curtains had gone. The woodwork was painted white, and there was a panelled front door of polished wood, with a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head; and a carriage lamp on the wall. It looked very smart. If the dog came out, I could kick it, she thought. She turned the corner. Buckingham Avenue had hardly altered at all. Each house stood set back from the road behind its neat privet hedge. Peering down between the houses, she saw the thick clumps of rhododendrons, the striped lawns, the trellised archways for climbing roses. At number 2, her home, there were big stone urns on either side of the door; flowering plants spilled out of them, and a hanging basket swung from the porch. The shrubs had been cleared from the side of the house, and they had put up a flat-roofed extension, bright red brick against the pebble-dash. The windows gleamed. She walked to the gate and traced the number with her finger. She would never have believed that her mother’s house could look like this. She felt lonely.
She hung about for a while on the other side of the road, waiting to see if anyone would come out. Other people lived in the house, and she knew who; that monster of lust called Colin Sidney, who had seized his chance to buy it up cheap and move in next door to his scheming sister. What about the spare room, she wondered. Had there been an eviction, or were they still forced to keep the door locked?
Muriel waited for an hour. No one came in or out of number 2. Her feet hurt and she was thirsty. Presently she set off to walk back to her lodgings and sleep until it was time to go to the factory again. I can come again next week, she thought.
The Ripping Room had sixteen occupants, ranged at two long tables. Kieran came from the lift, pulling his trolley. ‘I’m a YOP,’ he told Muriel. ‘They get me cheap.’
‘What’s a Yop?’ Muriel asked.
‘Don’t you know? It’s a Youth Opportunity.’ He added, ‘we get a lot of those.’
‘Kieran brings the boxes,’ Edna said. ‘Right? These are old cigarettes, right, off shop shelves what have gone out of date. On that trolley he’s got 200,000 rotten old fags. You get your box, right? Take out the packets. Open the packets, right?’ She looked around her. ‘Kieran, where’s our boxes, where’s our bloody stacking boxes, where’s our Universal Containers?’
Kieran came sloping up. ‘I was putting me lipstick on,’ he said. ‘I’m entitled.’
‘Get on with it!’ Edna said. ‘Empty the fags out, right? Fags to the left, foil to the right. Fags to the left, foil to the right. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ Muriel said. Edna was an angry-looking woman, with varicose veins and black corkscrew curls. She wore an overall and white cap. ‘Away you go then,’ she said, and went off grumbling back to her own table.
‘What happens to them all?’ Muriel asked.
‘Oh, they scrunch ‘em all up and make ‘em into new ones,’ Kieran said.
There were two tables, and Edna’s got preferential treatment. When the Navy Issue came back in their tins, with the mould growing under the lids, it was never Edna’s table that got them. They were Permanent Rippers. On the other table, the girls could be moved, as the work required, to the Making Room, to the Blender or the Hogshead. Before the week was out, Muriel had learned to rip very nicely. She was never moved; nor was the elderly lady who worked opposite her.
This was a humble little woman, with a worn bony face, and eyes and nose and mouth so insignificant that to call them features was an inflation of the truth. A scant amount of iron-grey hair was pinned fiercely to her little skull. The skin of her neck was yellow, her shoulders were bowed, and her hands shook a little as she reached for her cigarette boxes. She hardly seemed to have the strength for ripping. Every morning, before Kieran brought his first trolleyload, she would take out her teeth and wrap them in tissue paper, and slide them into her handbag. She would snap the clasp and hold the bag to her for a moment, looking around her with an anxious little smile; then she would put on her overall, over her pinny, over her old polyester dress. She seldom spoke. Her eyes watered continuously. She walked with her knees bent, her head down; a soft silent creature of depressive aspect. From time to time-once a week perhaps – some word from one of the other girls would catch her fancy, some gossip or quip, and she would tip her head back, open her toothless mouth, and roar with silent laughter, wiping her eyes the while and trembling at her own temerity.
She’d had a hard life, Edna said. Her name was Sarah; but everybody called her Poor Mrs Wilmot.
Muriel’s second trip to Buckingham Avenue was more enlightening than the first. She had only been hanging around for five minutes when who should she see, coming up the road with her Saturday shopping, but Miss Florence Sidney?
Miss Sidney had put on weight, and her frizz of hair was now grey. She wore stout shoes, a check skirt, and a woollen scarf with bobbles on it, and she advanced along the street looking neither left nor right. As she passed number 2, going around the corner to her own gate, the front door flew open and a gang of screaming teenage children swarmed down the path and fanned out across the road. Miss Sidney was almost knocked into the hedge. Steadying herself against the gatepost, her face flushed, she called out after the children, ‘Alistair! For heaven’s sake!’
‘Eff off, you old cow,’ the boy called Alistair shouted back; wailing and yodelling, the gang careered around the corner into Lauderdale Road.
Miss Sidney put down her basket to recover herself. She steadied her breathing, allowed her flush to subside, and picked a few bits of privet from her cardigan. Looking up, she saw Muriel watching her from the other side of the road. Muriel smiled; there was no one she would rather see pushed into a hedge. Miss Sidney’s eyes passed over her, as if she thought it was rude to stare; it was plain that she had no idea who Muriel was. She gave a half-smile, picked up her shopping, and trotted round the corner.
She doesn’t expect me, Muriel thought. But she ought to expect me.
Muriel fished in her coat pocket, and brought out a piece of newspaper. She unwrapped it as she crossed the road, took out Mrs Wilmot’s teeth, and tossed them over the hedge into the Sidneys’ front garden.
Just as she was rounding the corner, the front door of number 2 opened again. Colin Sidney came out and loped down the path towards his car; a big fair man, balding, lean and fit. She watched him jump into his car and shoot away from the kerb. He did not even notice her. She raised a hand after him; like someone giving a signal to a hangman.
Mrs Wilmot was being retired. She had been at the factory for thirty years; today was her last day.
‘Course,’ she said, in her usual dead little whisper, ‘I’ll not get my pension, I’m not sixty. Course, I’ll get my benefit. Course, I’ll have to put in for it. Course, I don’t really know.’ She picked up a corner of her overall and wiped her left eye.
‘It’s a bloody shame,’ Edna said. ‘Ripping’s all she’s got. Here, love, we’ll give you a send-off.’
‘Course, they gave me a Teasmaid,’ Poor Mrs Wilmot said. She wiped her other eye and sniffed.
‘Bugger the Teasmaid, we’ve got a lovely presentation to give you. We’ll give it you down the pub, it’s Friday night, isn’t it?’
‘Course, the pot was broken,’ Mrs Wilmot whimpered. ‘Course, I didn’t complain.’
‘I wish you’d told me,’ Edna said, ‘I’d have complained all right. I don’t know, this place is going down the drain, you can’t leave anything about, people’s teeth being nicked out of their own handbags, they want bloody hanging. You could do with a new set, you should have asked for one, you should get compensation.’
‘No point really,’ Mrs Wilmot said dejectedly, ‘I have to get my cards. I have to go to the office. I don’t like.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t like?’
‘Going to the office. I don’t like.’
‘I’ll get your stuff for you,’ Muriel offered.
‘Oh, would you?’ A tiny hope shone out of Poor Mrs Wilmot. ‘Muriel, ask them for my wages as well, lovey.’ The next moment her situation overwhelmed her again; she looked away and sniffed, and soon the tears were coursing down her cheeks.
‘Off again,’ Edna said. ‘Come on, duck, pull yourself together.’
‘Course, you can understand it,’ Poor Mrs Wilmot said. ‘Course they don’t like me coughing on the tobacco. I appreciate that. Course I do.’
They arrived at the Swan of Avon just after opening time. Edna organised the moving of tables, commandeered extra chairs, and herded them into the Snug. ‘Let’s have a kitty, girls,’ she called. The girls fumbled in their bags and tossed five-pound notes into the centre of the table. ‘No, not you, love,’ Edna said to Poor Mrs Wilmot. ‘This is your day, duck. Come on now, wipe your eyes. That’s it, give us a smile. Have a go on the Space Invaders.’ She bustled her way to the bar, shouting through an open doorway to some male cronies from the Hogshead who were ordering up their first weekend pints in the public bar.
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Hilary Mantel
From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring Up the Bodies’, a savagely funny tale that revisits the characters from the much-loved ‘Every Day is Mother’s Day’.Muriel Axon is about to re-enter the lives of Colin Sidney, hapless husband, father and schoolmaster, and Isabel Field, failed social worker and practising neurotic.It is ten years since her last tangle with them, but for Muriel this is not time enough. There are still scores to be settled, truths to be faced and rather a lot of vengeance to be wreaked.
HILARY MANTEL
Vacant Possession
Copyright (#ulink_d8764f19-2134-59db-8ad0-c32afe38861c)
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by Chatto & Windus Ltd 1986
Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1986
PS Section copyright © Louise Tucker 2006
except ‘Having a Home to Go to’ by Hilary Mantel © Hilary Mantel 2006
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9781841153407
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007354870
Version: 2014-12-08
Dedication (#ulink_8819dc3f-7de0-557f-b3d3-9e6e0463dc61)
To Gerald
Epigraph (#ulink_6fc4b2bf-5cb7-58dc-8e4d-13476ddc36e3)
‘… and that is what one does, one does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.’
GERTRUDE STEIN
EZEKIEL 37:3
‘Can these bones live?’
Contents
Cover (#udc1df962-30fa-59fc-9b94-508f2d0bebf2)
Title Page (#u356b1699-cb0b-5ae5-b5cd-3b97363b1748)
Copyright (#u893a7ce3-8294-5f1f-99a7-6ff07a959103)
Dedication (#u16c92077-1611-51bb-8d68-84ded397c3a9)
Epigraph (#u672da442-d788-5160-841d-64efb76fe556)
Preface (#u7c31adae-018d-5e42-8620-38b09446114d)
CHAPTER 1 (#u762f13dc-a1e8-564d-83c5-e2017af9113b)
CHAPTER 2 (#ube493d8d-7a3a-54f5-8de6-a30f39602e77)
CHAPTER 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the book (#litres_trial_promo)
Read on (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface (#ulink_844b0833-e577-5cc4-8d7f-097136da96d6)
It was ten o’clock in the evening; raining and very dark. A man was walking along the road whistling ‘Santa Lucia’.
Muriel Axon stood alone at the window of her room; a square plain woman, forty-four years old. She was wrapped in an eiderdown, and in the palm of her hand she held the boiled egg she was eating for supper. The glow of the streetlamps showed her wet slate roofs, the long lit curve of the motorway outside the town, and a bristling cat in the shadow of a wall; beyond these, the spines of black hills.
Cradling the warm egg, Muriel dug in her fingernails to crush the shell. She did not go in for table manners; they wasted time. She began to peel the skin, wincing a little as she did so. She put her tongue into the salted gelid hollow and probed gently. The room behind her was dark, and full of the minute crackling her fingers made. She sucked, thought. Most of Muriel’s thoughts were quite unlike other people’s.
Down below, she heard the front door opening. A dim light shone onto the path, and a second later her landlord appeared, Mr Kowalski, shuffling the few paces to the gate. He looked up and down the road. No one. He stood for a moment, his bullet head shrinking into his shoulders; turned, grunting to himself, and slowly made his way back. She heard the front door slam. It was ten fifteen. Mr Kowalski was drawing the bolts, turning the key, putting the chain on the door.
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_844b0833-e577-5cc4-8d7f-097136da96d6)
‘I wonder who will be the new Poet Laureate?’ said Colin Sidney, coming down to breakfast. There was no reply from the other residents at number 2, Buckingham Avenue. He paused on the half-landing, looking out of the little window. He saw the roof of his garage, and his neighbour’s garden. ‘Well, who?’ he muttered. There was nothing in view but a scudding 8.00 am sky, a promise of weak sunshine, a vista of close, green, dripping trees. Midsummer. Colin went down, twitching his tie.
Behind him, the three younger children were preparing for their day. He heard shrieks and curses, the kicking and slamming of doors. The radio was on, and they were playing records too; Acid Raine and the Oncogenes were shaking the walls with their current hit single. ‘Ted Hughes?’ Colin asked. ‘Larkin?’
There would be perhaps ten minutes’ grace before the children erupted down the stairs to fall on their breakfasts and begin their daily round of feuding amongst themselves and insulting their parents. Colin examined himself in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs. He wished that Sylvia would move it, so that he did not have to begin every day with a confrontation. Perhaps he could ask her. He did not think of moving it himself. He had his spheres of action; this was not one of them.
He saw a man of forty-three, with bright blue eyes, thinning hair, and what he described to himself as faded good looks. But no, he thought; courtesans are faded, schoolmasters are merely worn. He saw a kind of helplessness, in the face of family and wider society; a lack of fibre, both moral and dietary. Listening to the racket above, he solaced himself with a quotation: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do.’
Sylvia was in the kitchen already. He thought he could hear her special muesli mix cascading like a rockfall into a dish. But instead he found her in the middle of the room, head tipped back, gazing upwards.
‘What a mess,’ she said. The entire ceiling and the upper third of the walls were coated with the black smeary deposit from yesterday’s fire. Lizzie, the daily, had opened the door from the hall, and there it was, stinking smoke billowing everywhere. Lucky she had presence of mind, or it would have been far more serious.
‘I can’t see why it’s so greasy,’ Sylvia said. ‘It isn’t as if we ever fry anything.’ She gave a little hitch to the pants of her tracksuit. ‘The whole room’ll need repainting. Probably the hall as well.’
‘Yes, all right,’ Colin said, going to the table. He was sick of hearing about the fire. ‘Can I have an egg?’
‘Well, be it on your own head,’ Sylvia said. ‘You’ve had two this week. You know what the doctor said.’
‘I think I’ll be reckless for once.’ Colin opened the fridge. ‘Was young Alistair at home when this fire started?’
‘If he was, he won’t admit it.’
‘He’s the source of most of the calamities round here, isn’t he? And I can tell you now –’ He broke off. ‘Where’s a pan for this egg?’
‘Where it always is, Colin.’
‘I can tell you now I’m not doing the repainting.’ He ran the tap. ‘Either Alistair does it – for a fee, if necessary – or we get somebody in.’
Sylvia picked up an orange from a straw basket on the worktop. ‘I don’t see why you can’t do it.’ She tossed the orange into her left hand, and it slapped against her palm. ‘It’s the end of term soon.’
‘True. I have one day’s summer holiday and then I start on next year’s timetable.’
Sylvia’s eyes followed him as he moved about the kitchen. ‘Are you having bread?’ she asked, her tone incredulous.
Striding about in her bright blue tracksuit, Sylvia would never have been taken for a mother of four. Suzanne, the eldest, was eighteen now; her mother was waiting hopefully for the day when someone would mistake them for sisters. It was mysterious, this matter of Sylvia’s age. At twenty, she had looked forty; all the girls on her street wanted to look like their mothers. The Youth Cult passed her by; at thirty she looked forty still, square and deep-bosomed, with her hair bleached and lacquered in the way she had worn it on the day she was married.
Then at some stage – Colin couldn’t pinpoint it – she had stopped getting older. She took herself in hand. She bought a leotard, and went timidly to a class at the church hall; she stood watching, her hands splayed self-consciously to hide her pannier thighs. The next week she bought a tape of disco music, and started dancing. She clumped over the fitted carpets, making the glass shelves tinkle in the china cabinet that had been her mother’s. She threw out the china cabinet, and got some pine shelves instead.
These days she wore her brown hair in a short curly perm, which her hairdresser, Shane, believed would soften her firm, rather harsh features. Her body was lean now, dieted and disciplined, capriciously nourished and not too much: as far as her brain was concerned, she was taking a course at the Open University. Now that she had lost so much weight, she was always in pursuit of new clothes, little tee shirts and cotton skirts which were bright, cheap and casual; she picked up her ideas on the same plan. It seemed to Colin that she had chosen, among current fads and notions, all those designed to diminish his self-respect and make him most uncomfortable.
How nice it would be if she had a job, Colin thought. He was a Deputy Head, they scraped along. There were even luxuries, like Lizzie Blank the daily woman (Tuesdays and Thursdays). But the children ate so much, and left the lights on and the taps running; they needed outfits and treats, and dinner money and bus money and more money, they insisted, for day-glo paint and handcuffs and all the other stuff you wore to an Acid Raine concert. They wanted special diets and school trips, and a tent so they could sleep in the garden in summer; they wanted video nasties, and Claire – it was reassuring, he supposed – wanted a new Brownie uniform. Every whim cost cash down. For all he knew, they might be maintaining a heroin habit. It couldn’t have cost more. When he opened his bank statements he felt as if he were being eaten away, month by month, from the inside out.
But unfortunately, there were no jobs; not for anybody really, and certainly not for Sylvia. She was not qualified for anything. She was educated now, but not trained. The old Sylvia showed through too often. She became emotional when their opinions differed. Under pressure, she was always regressing to the received wisdom of the cooked meats factory where she had worked before they were married.
Colin found a plate for his bread and took it to the table. ‘So…’ he said. ‘What are you up to today?’
‘Citizens Advice Bureau, ten till twelve.’ Sylvia peeled her orange. ‘Then later on there’s this committee meeting. We’re thinking about setting up a women’s refuge.’
There was something bubbling and thwarted in Sylvia that only meddling in other people’s business would satisfy. Before the birth of their youngest child Claire, when they had lived on a large housing estate, there had been plenty of time for gossip; some of it idle, some of it manipulative. Buckingham Avenue had repressed her, with its absence of tittle-tattle, its well-kept fences, its elderly residents leading sedate and private lives. Good fences make good neighbours, he used to say, when they moved in, nine years ago. Sylvia didn’t agree. In her fortieth year, Sylvia discovered social concern. She discovered community action, and protest, and steering committees. If Alistair’s blossoming delinquencies didn’t spoil her chances, she’d probably end up a JP. This was a big change; but it was not unaccountable. The children no longer needed her, and the marriage was not worthy of sustained attention. It just ran on, taking care of itself. After twenty years you can’t expect passion. It’s enough if you’re barely civil.
Colin stood over the cooker and looked down at his egg, bobbing dizzily in a froth of leaking white. As if alive, it flew about and tapped itself against the side of the pan. He picked up a teaspoon and dabbed at it, scalding his fingers in the steam. He could feel Sylvia watching him. By her standards, he had no common sense: he had never laid claim to it. But he was a clever man, and capable in his own line. His face wore a habitual expression of strained tolerance, of goodwill and anxiety, uneasily mixed.
‘We’re still marking exams,’ he said. He dipped for his egg with a tea strainer, which he had found by chance in a drawer. ‘I’ve got three hundred reports to sign. And the union blokes are coming in to see me this morning. You’d think they’d let it rest till after the holidays. But no.’
‘Strike?’
‘Well, they’re talking about it.’
‘I’ve every sympathy.’
‘So have I, I want a pay rise too, but it makes it bloody difficult to run a school.’ He sighed, and went about with his egg.
‘What are you doing?’ Sylvia asked. ‘Why don’t you put it in an egg cup and sit down with it? Or are you going to race off with it down Lauderdale Road?’
Colin sat down with his ovoid ruin and picked up the newspaper. The day had brightened and the pleasant morning sun shone through his double glazing. ‘I always think of Gulliver’s Travels when I eat an egg,’ he told his wife. ‘You see –’ He broke off, gaped, put down his egg spoon and seized up the newspaper. ‘Good God, Sylvia. York Minster’s burned down. Look at this.’ He thrust the newspaper at her. The front page bore the headline NIGHT SKY LIT UP BY GOTHIC GLORY ABLAZE and a four-column picture of the Minster’s south transept wreathed in smoke and flame.
‘It never rains but it pours,’ Sylvia remarked, glancing at the kitchen ceiling. She tilted her yoghurt carton and scraped it out delicately with her teaspoon. ‘Funny, Lizzie was off to York yesterday on a day trip. I wonder if she saw it.’
‘It happened at half two in the morning.’
‘What a pity. She doesn’t like to miss anything.’
‘Good God, it’s not a tourist attraction,’ Colin said, ‘It’s a national tragedy. Four million pounds’ worth of damage.’ He groaned.
‘Don’t take it so personally.’
‘“The fire took almost three hours to contain,”’ Colin read out loud. ‘“Although it was stopped from spreading to the central tower, or from seriously damaging the Minster’s famous collection of stained-glass windows, it left the transept’s ancient roof beams and plastered vaults a smouldering mass on the floor below.”’
‘Your egg’s going cold,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’d have thought you’d eat it, after you went to such trouble to get it.’
‘I’ve lost my appetite. You don’t seem to appreciate what a loss this is to our heritage.’
‘It’s no loss to your arteries, anyway.’ Sylvia tossed her yoghurt carton into the wastebin. She opened one of the kitchen cupboards and began to take down the packets of the stuff the children ate. Amid Colin’s disinterested grief he felt a sharp prickle of personal resentment: she still does things for them, but nothing at all for me. ‘How did it start?’ she enquired.
‘Lightning, they think. They quote a priest here who says it was divine intervention.’
‘Why should it be that?’
‘Because of the Bishop of Durham. He was consecrated at the Minster last Friday. You know, all about his controversial views on the Resurrection. I thought that now you’re so friendly with our vicar you’d be well up in all this.’
‘Francis doesn’t talk about the Church much, he talks about community projects.’ Sylvia rummaged in the cutlery drawer. ‘If God didn’t like the Bishop of Durham, why didn’t He strike him personally? And do it promptly, on Saturday morning?’
‘Well, I tend to agree with you,’ Colin said. ‘It can’t be that, can it?’ He turned to the back page for more news of the disaster.’ “The Lord was on our side as we battled the flames,”’ he read. ‘By the way, how’s the vicar’s son? Has he come out of Youth Custody yet?’
‘He’s not in Youth Custody. He’s having Intermediate Treatment. He’s doing community service.’ Sylvia reached out for a piece of toast and picked up her knife. ‘Do you know what Francis says?
‘Watch it, that’s butter you’re eating,’ Colin said.
‘Oh, so it is!’ Looking thoughtful, she put the bread down on her plate. ‘He says that this business of Austin doing take-and-drive-away, it’s a deep compulsion he has, a compulsion to find out his real identity by sampling and testing out various machines.’
‘You mean it’s the vicar’s fault for naming him after a car?’
‘At some level, you see, Francis thinks he does believe that. By dumping the cars, he’s trying to jettison the mechanistic fantasies that have taken him over, and affirm his survival as a human being. It’s a form of acting out. Francis’s real worry is that because he usually leaves the cars in such a wrecked-up condition, it may indicate suicidal tendencies.’
‘Lordy, lordy,’ Colin said. ‘I didn’t know you could kill yourself by sniffing glue.’
‘It can damage your brain.’
‘How would they know?’
‘Francis is very worried. He can’t talk to Hermione. She thinks it’s because they didn’t send him to boarding school.’
‘I don’t doubt he’ll be boarded out soon enough, and at the taxpayers’ expense. How he got off this time beats me.’
‘He didn’t get off.’ Sylvia looked offended. ‘Community service is a very valid option.’
‘I’d rather he were in custody. Keep him away from our kids. How does a vicar’s son turn out such a thug?’
There was no time to go into this, because the children rushed in: Karen and Claire in their school uniforms, and the boy in a kind of romper suit of sagging jersey fabric, with holes cut out of it here and there, exposing bits of flesh. The girls flung themselves into their chairs.
‘Brownies tonight,’ Claire said: a chubby child, putting out her paws for everything edible within reach. ‘And I haven’t got my new uniform yet, Mum.’
‘Okay, I’ll see about it.’ She knew that the Brownies were a conformist outfit, pseudo-masculine if not paramilitary, but she suspected that they were more harmless than some of the things her children got up to.
‘You ought to see her,’ Karen said. ‘She shouldn’t grow so much, it’s uncouth. Her skirt’s up round her bum. It’s child pornography.’
‘That will do,’ Colin said.
Claire stuffed a piece of toast into her mouth. ‘It’s Brownie Tea-Making Fortnight soon. I have to make at least fifty cups of tea for family and friends. And every cup I make, they give it marks.’
‘If you make me any mouldy tea,’ Alistair said, ‘I’ll pour it down the sink.’
‘I have these mark sheets,’ she went on. ‘You have to say what my tea is, Excellent, Very Good, or Good.’
‘What if it’s witches’ piss?’ Alistair enquired.
‘I wish you’d leave the table, Alistair, if you’re going to talk like that.’
‘I’m not at the table, am I? I’m just stood here, watching you lot eating like pigs.’
‘Oh, let him starve,’ Karen said. ‘He’s stunted, that’s what he is. He’s probably got rickets or sumfin.’
‘He certainly has not got rickets,’ Sylvia said.
‘Well, he’s so titchy. That’s why he’s such a rotten little bully. We done it in psychology.’
‘Perhaps he’s a pygmy,’ Claire said. ‘He can’t help it.’
Alistair tore off a piece of kitchen roll, and blew his nose into it with great violence. He wadded it up in his palms and tossed it at Karen. It fell short, and lay on the cork tiles.
‘Just watch it,’ Sylvia said. ‘Lizzie’s not spending her time and my money cleaning up after you lot.’
‘I don’t want her cleaning up after me,’ Alistair said. ‘You make sure you don’t let her in my room.’
‘She can’t get in, can she? You’ve always got the door locked.’
‘What do you do in there?’ Colin asked.
‘Black magic,’ Karen said. ‘Him and Austin. Austin nicks vestments and stuff from his dad, and they have Black Masses.’
‘I’d do a spell to give you spots,’ Alistair said. ‘Only you haven’t got room for any more.’
‘So is that what you’re going to do today? Lock yourself in and have a Black Mass?’
‘Yeah,’ Alistair said. ‘And miss all the lovely sunshine.’ He slouched out of the room. Sylvia’s eyes followed him.
‘I do worry,’ she said.
Colin flapped over a page of the newspaper. ‘It’s better than him joining the Young Conservatives,’ he said.
‘You never take things seriously.’
‘Oh, I do.’ He glanced up from the news of the inferno. ‘I know a lot of kids. So I don’t get alarmed.’
‘Yes, but Alistair’s your own.’
‘Now that does alarm me. At times.’ But he knew a hundred children as bad as Alistair, a hundred worse; antisocial truants from broken homes. Theirs was not broken; only creaking a bit under the strain. The kids passed through his office every day, en route from brief rebellion to a lifetime’s acceptance of their lot. They had silly hairstyles; beneath them, dull conformist little brains.
‘I wish you’d keep them in school till the end of term,’ Sylvia said. ‘I wish he weren’t leaving.’
‘What would he do if he stayed on? Take Oxbridge by storm with his two CSEs?’
‘Off again,’ said Sylvia, stirring her muesli. She was training herself to eat slowly, putting down her spoon between mouthfuls, and the action gave her words a quite spurious consequence. ‘Off again with your little schoolmaster’s sarcasms.’
‘Does it make you cross?’
‘It makes me bored.’
‘We’ve nothing else for protection, now the LEA have abolished flogging.’
‘I don’t think you really value education, Colin. You had too much of it.’
‘I had enough,’ he conceded.
‘Alistair used to be so bright.’
‘That’s what all the parents say.’
Sylvia stood up and began carrying dishes to the sink. Her orange peel lay abandoned on the tabletop, a long strip dropped neatly from practised dieter’s fingers. Colin looked at it with interest. You can do divination with orange peel, he thought. The future was there, in homely things, for anyone who wanted to know it; door keys, tea leaves. There are letters in orange peel, which tell you who will be important in your life. He could make out quite clearly a capital T.
At once, a certain thought came into his mind. He examined it, and found it unwelcome. He would not entertain it; he kicked it out. His pulse rate rose a fraction; he dropped his eyes, put down his coffee cup. The thought rolled back, in a leisurely way, and closed around his attention like a loop of string. For a few months in his long marriage, he had been unfaithful to Sylvia. His affair with Isabel Field had been finished for years – it was years since he’d seen her – but the body has its own set of memories, and the mind hangs on to nagging superstitions. An initial leaps out from the table; horoscopes are read. A retreating stranger stops the heart on a station platform.
That part of life was over, of course. Isabel had been young and intense, full of devouring schemes. She’d been a social worker, full of tutored emotions; always nagging away about the inner meaning of things. He remembered, when he thought about her now, her gloom, her scruples, the problems she’d had with her clients; and the shock of contact, skin against skin, mouth against mouth, her quickening breath in the darkness of a parked car. He’d had nothing to offer her; only what she could have got from any man, and in greater comfort too. Sylvia hadn’t known about it. She hadn’t noticed, he thought, the struggle that was going on inside him.
Just as well. Her ignorant body had done the battling for her. Christmas Day, 1974, she’d told him she was pregnant again. He’d given up Isabel so that Claire could be born, and grow up plump and cheeky, and get Brownie badges.
That had been a bad year; the guilt, the deception, the hopeless months that follow the end of an affair. Lately, and unwillingly, he’d begun to think about Isabel again. Change was in the air, an undercurrent of disturbance. He couldn’t account for it.
‘You’re miles away,’ Sylvia said, clattering at the sink. She crossed to the table and scooped the orange peel into her palm, and dropped it in the bin. ‘You’ll be late if you sit about any longer.’
Colin looked at his watch. ‘Good God, twenty past eight.’ He threw the paper down. ‘Have a look at it, about the Minster. It’s awful.’ He snatched up his jacket, made for the door. ‘Come on, you kids. Take care, see you about six.’
What I should do, Isabel thought; what I should do is, I should start writing it down. I’d like to write down everything that worries me, about my life ten years ago. I’d like to write it. But I can’t find a pen.
Isabel’s brain moves slowly these days. She’s only thirty-four. She shouldn’t find thinking such an effort, and she shouldn’t look such a wreck. Perhaps a sense of foreboding dogs her. That must be it.
If she had any paper, she wouldn’t have a pen. When she was a social worker, she always had pens. She was organised; to a degree.
She was not organised now; she had just moved house, not unpacked yet. Here I am again, she said to herself, where I grew up and began my professional career; and had my first love affair. If that is what you call it.
It’s not fair, she thought. I never wanted to come back here. I might meet Colin in the supermarket. I might meet his sister, Florence. Then again, I might meet Sylvia. I’ve never seen Sylvia, but I feel I’d know her at once. Instinct, if you like. Women who have shared a man can probably scent each other out.
What about this shopping list? She turned it over. She could write on the back, why not? Just to get started was the main thing, to get some relief from the thoughts going round and round in her head. A good search through her handbag turned up a biro. She sat down at the kitchen table. She took a deep breath. Yes, I might meet the Sidneys en famille, she thought. Then again, I might meet my old client, Muriel Axon. That would be worse.
‘Ten years ago, I lived in this town, I was with Social Services, I was seeing Colin. I lived at home with my father; that was all of my life. But I had this case, and this is the case I want to write about. Muriel Axon, No. III/73/0059. Everything about this case bothered me. It still does.
‘Muriel Axon and her old mother Evelyn lived at number 2, Buckingham Avenue, in that part of town where people have big gardens and keep to themselves. Next door to them, but round the corner on Lauderdale Road, lived Colin’s sister Florence Sidney. We didn’t make that connection until the end. Why should we? When I met Colin – sneaking off to some pub somewhere, hoping we wouldn’t meet anyone we knew – we didn’t talk about his sister, and where she lived, or my clients and where they lived. But if I had known, I might have been able to ask Florence Sidney about her neighbours. Get some sort of – clarification.
‘Then again, I don’t know if I wanted clarification. I was afraid to find out what was really going on in the Axon household. Later, when it was all over, and Muriel’s mother was dead and Muriel herself had been put in hospital, their house came on the market and Colin bought it. He wanted a big house, and to live next door to his sister. He got it cheap.
‘I did warn him against it. I saw him at the inquest, and I told him I wouldn’t care to live there. I tried to convey to him that horrible things had happened in that house. He wouldn’t take a hint. I couldn’t do more than hint. I really didn’t know. I couldn’t expose my imaginings. I would have sounded superstitious, unbalanced, and he already thought I was that. By that time, everything was over between us.
‘After all, it’s just a house. Just an empty shell, when the people are taken away.
‘I expect I’ll find out how Colin’s getting on. This is a small town. They’re all around, I’m sure; old colleagues, old clients, old lovers. Of course there was always a risk, with Jim moving about for the sake of his career. If you’re in banking and you want to get to be a manager quite young you have to be prepared to move about. I’d rather have stayed in Manchester.
‘But I couldn’t produce any good reasons why we shouldn’t come back. Not reasons that convinced Jim. He doesn’t take much notice of my opinions. That’s understandable. I’m always crying, you see, bursting into tears, and falling over, and losing things. I was in banking too when we got married – I thought it would be restful and uncomplicated – but now I just sit about at home.
‘I’m not fit for anything, Jim says. He wonders what’s the matter with me. I spend my days thinking.
‘So I thought I could write a book, you see, about the Axon case and all that, and when it was done I could send it to the Sunday papers, and then everyone would know how social workers operate and why things go so badly wrong. How you get cases you can’t handle, and how clients conspire against you, and circumstances seem to conspire too. How it messes up your personal life. How you live with yourself afterwards; when disaster has occurred.’
That will do for a preface, she thought. I can call it Confessions of a Social Worker, I suppose. She had long ago overflowed the shopping list and been forced to write on the piece of packing paper that had come around the teapot. The spout had got broken, but it didn’t matter; there wasn’t much call for tea. I’ll buy a proper notebook later, she thought, on my way to the off-licence.
It was 12.30 pm when Sylvia came home from the CAB. In the hall she paused and called out, ‘Hello, Lizzie, all right are you?’ A clattering from the kitchen told her that her daily woman was hard at work. What a comfort to have the basics taken care of, she thought. She told herself that she hated housework, though in fact for most of her married life it had been her pride, pleasure and retreat.
Going up the stairs, dragging her feet in their striped trainers, she acknowledged that she felt tired. The wrangle at the breakfast table was always a strain, and now her head was buzzing with Social Security regulations and unanswered questions about the legal aid scheme. The house was quiet. She went into her bedroom, kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed. Her eyes closed; she dozed for five minutes, wrapped in the midday heat. Suddenly a shrill ringing brought her upright, shocked out of sleep. Damn that cooker timer, she thought, it’s gone off by itself again. Why doesn’t Lizzie stop it? Heart still racing, she padded over to the door. Opened it; the ringing stopped. She sighed. Better turn out those drawers, I suppose. Skip lunch. Don’t need it, this weather.
She knew that if she began with the bottom drawer, she would find her photograph albums; and then she could sit on the bed and browse. It was something she’d not done in ages. She’d never had much time to herself. Lizzie’s advent had been a blessing – even if she was a bit odd. You didn’t engage a cleaner for her looks or fashion sense, or for her conversation; you just needed someone honest and with a bit of initiative. Lizzie always reminded her of how she’d come up in the world. She reminded her a little of someone she’d known before her marriage; one of the girls on the Pork Shoulder line.
She leaned back against the pillows. Wedding pictures, baby pictures; Suzanne grinning in her pram in the postage-stamp garden of their very first house. Suzanne had left home now, was studying geography at Manchester University. Then Alistair, scowling from under a woollen hat in the same pram. It was very like his present scowl, except that now he had more teeth. Here was Karen, two years old, digging in the garden of their house on the estate. Here she was again, a little older, mouth drooping, swinging on the rickety gate. Everything about that house had been rickety, leaky or shoddy; it was a triumph of jerry-building. No wonder they’d been keen to move to Buckingham Avenue, despite its neglected and depressing condition.
The move had been a stroke of luck for them. With Claire on the way, they’d needed a bigger place; but how to afford it? Normally she’d never have considered the Lauderdale Road area – all those big detached houses, too gloomy and too expensive. Colin had grown up on Lauderdale Road, and his sister Florence, who had never got married, still occupied the family house; his father was dead, and Florence had put their mother in a home. Florence had called her up one day and said, ‘The Axon house is on the market, just round the corner, the one with the garden backing onto ours. You ought to enquire about it.’
‘What?’ she’d said. ‘That place where those two peculiar women lived? It’s falling down.’
‘It’s going cheap,’ Florence had said. ‘Suit yourselves. But you could do it up.’
Sylvia suspected Florence’s motives, of course. She was possessive; she wanted her brother next door, on call for mending her fuses and unblocking her sink. But still … out of curiosity, Sylvia phoned the estate agent.
‘It is in need of sympathetic renovation,’ the man confirmed, ‘but it’s basically very sound. Of course, it’s very well situated. Within easy reach of shops and schools – ‘
T know where it is. Why is it so cheap?’
He’d dropped his voice, become confidential. ‘Can’t say too much, bit of a sad case – old lady’s died, and her daughter, she’s not quite right, know what I mean? Gone into hospital.’
‘You mean they’ve put her away?’
‘The old mother died suddenly, there was an inquest. It was in the paper, in the Reporter.’
She didn’t say, my husband was there when she died. That was irrelevant. But they’d wondered what had happened to the Axon girl. Not that they’d known the Axons, really; they were the kind of neighbours you didn’t set eyes on from one year to the next. ‘What hospital has she gone to?’
‘As to that, I couldn’t say. You see what it was, madam, they were recluses. They didn’t like other people in the house. So they didn’t keep up with repairs. Well, two ladies, you don’t expect it. But it’s a lovely property.’
‘All right. When can we have the key?’
They’d been to see it together. Florence met them at the gate. ‘Well?’ She was anxious that Colin’s decision should not be coloured by the unpleasant episode that had taken place in the house a few weeks earlier. He’d called on Florence late one afternoon, fortunately as it turned out; plodding out through the twilit garden to inspect, at her request, a dubious bit of guttering, he’d noticed something very strange going on at the Axon house. At an upstairs window, a young woman was gesturing, calling for help; very odd, but Colin hadn’t hesitated. Florence had watched amazed as he crashed through the shrubbery and pounded on the Axons’ back door, ready to break it down. Once inside he’d raced up the stairs to let the girl out; Mrs Axon had pursued him, only to meet with an accident. It came out later that she’d had a heart attack, as well as a fall. Colin had given artificial respiration; with no result. And the young woman? She was a social worker, making her calls; the old lady had tricked her into the spare bedroom and turned the key. God knows what else had been going on at number 2. Would Colin want it?
‘Well,’ he’d said cautiously, ‘it’s cheap. It needs work.’ But if the last occupants had left shadows, he thought he could dispel them. ‘We could cut some of these trees down,’ he said. ‘Let some light in.’
‘Yes,’ Sylvia had said. ‘Then Florence could see in our garden, couldn’t she?’ She was not enthusiastic about that. But the trees would have to go, and all the junk that the Axons had left behind them; and that little glasshouse that the agent had called a conservatory, with its cracked and grimy panes and its mound of cardboard and newspapers all festering and damp. What a clean-up job! But think of the possibilities…
So they had put down a holding deposit, and Colin had called the solicitor. Contracts were exchanged within weeks. Their married life had been full of upheavals; this was the only thing that had gone smoothly.
Sylvia turned back to her albums.
How the photographs improved, from shiny dog-eared scraps, faded brown with age, to the borderless silk prints of recent date. Here she stood before the front door of Buckingham Avenue, her arm through her husband’s. Florence, she thought, must have taken the picture. Behind them, the house looked like the set of a Hammer Films production; that ugly stained glass in the front door, those great clumps of evergreens shading the paths. The woodwork was rotting, the downspouts were in a deplorable condition; and the two figures who stood before it were hardly in a better one. Colin must have been fourteen stone there, she thought. Look at his belly hanging over his belt. Look at the silly expression on his face.
Her own image offered little comfort. Her tight skirt – surely unfashionably short? – emphasised her large hips and stocky legs; she was still out of shape after her recent pregnancy. Here she was, holding the new baby Claire, peeping at the camera with a simper above the infant’s shawled bulk. Her hair had been bleached out to a strawlike mess. Had she not known that backcombing and lacquer would ruin it? Worse, had she not known that no one else had used them for years?
No doubt at the factory, she thought, we were behind the times. We didn’t know any better. She accorded an indulgent smile to her teenaged self, making up for a Friday night out, scrubbing her fair skin until the aura of animal fat, sodium polyphosphates and assembly-line sweat was completely wiped away and she moved in a mist of Yardley’s cologne and heart-skipping expectation towards the weekly dance; off she went, a great big beautiful baby doll. Then, on the seven o’clock train, she had met Colin.
It was an awful photograph, why had she ever kept it? Quickly she detached it from the page and put it down on the bedside cabinet. There was a blank space now in the album, a testament to her vanity. There she was again, arms folded outside number 2. The garden had been dug over, and the house behind her had all its woodwork painted a gleaming white. It had been a gruelling yearlong slog, up and down ladders with buckets of paste, backbreaking work; but it was a big house, and there was land at the side to accommodate the extension they had eventually built, giving them a fourth bedroom and a much bigger kitchen. That was the whole point about Buckingham Avenue, it offered such scope for improvement. How much easier it would have been if their removal had not coincided with the crisis in Colin’s life. There had been a girlfriend, of course; he supposed she didn’t know. His behaviour was odd and abstracted, even by his own standards. He had drunk too much, whenever he could get his hands on some alcohol; they could not afford, in those days, to keep a stock in the house. Their petrol bills had soared; where did he go? Finally, of course, he’d been breathalysed and banned from driving. His little affair had come to nothing. That was obvious, wasn’t it? He was still here, she was still here; here they were.
Sylvia looked at her watch. Ten past one. She let the albums slip onto the bed, yawned, stretched, and peeled off her tracksuit, dropping it into the laundry basket. She went into the bathroom, washed, and cleaned her teeth vigorously. Back in the bedroom, she averted her face to avoid the sight of herself half-naked in the dressing table mirror. Her thighs were going, her tummy had gone; after four pregnancies, what could you expect? If she had known then what she knew now … She pulled on her baggy cotton trousers, and took out of the drawer a tee shirt which said in big black letters NURSERY SCHOOLS ARE OUR RIGHT. Running a hand through her hair, she mooched off downstairs.
Lizzie Blank, the daily (a German name, Sylvia supposed), was standing at the sink wringing dirty water from a cloth. ‘All right, Lizzie?’ Sylvia said.
‘All right, Mrs S?’
Sylvia crossed to the fridge. She opened it, picked out a lettuce leaf, and stood nibbling it while she surveyed her domestic. She supposed that a survey of Lizzie Blank would be a comfort to any normal woman who was afraid of losing her looks. Weird was the only word for her.
Lizzie Blank was a woman of no age that could easily be determined. Her dumpling body, entirely without a waistline, was supported on peg-shaped legs. Her hair, platinum blond and matted, had a height and stiffness that Sylvia’s in its heyday had never approached; two little squiggles, shaped like meat hooks, stood stiffly out by each ear. Her large face – rather blank in truth – was so caked with make-up that it was impossible to decide what it might look like naked, and her eyelids, outlined in thick black pencil, were painted a vivid teal blue. How many pairs of false eyelashes she wore, Sylvia could not take it upon herself to say. Her magenta lips bore no relation to her real mouth, but were overpainted greasily onto the skin, so that the merest twitch of her cheek muscles brought about a smile or a pout. The lips worked unceasingly; the eyes remained quite dead.
‘How was your trip?’ Sylvia asked.
‘Okay. One of us thought there would be donkeys. We had them before, when we went on a day trip.’
‘I think you only get them at the seaside.’
‘I don’t see why. Not as if they swim.’
Sylvia was taken aback. ‘Tell me, Lizzie,’ she said, ‘do you wear a wig?’
Lizzie only smiled. Sylvia realised that her question was perhaps an intrusion. After all, she thought, if it is a wig, it’s bound to slip about on her head from time to time. I could find out by observation alone.
Sylvia swung open the fridge door again, took out half a cucumber, and cut an inch off it. She raised it to her lips. ‘By the way, you didn’t try to clean Alistair’s room, did you? I meant to tell you. I expect he’s got the door locked.’
‘The spare room?’ Lizzie looked at her; it might have been astonishment, but her face was so far from the human norm that it was always difficult to be sure what her expressions meant.
‘Well, it’s not really the spare room. Alistair’s always had it, since we came.’
‘I call it the spare room.’
‘I daresay it was, before we moved here. Anyway, what I’m saying is – don’t bother with it. His father will make him clean it up, when the school holidays start.’
‘Some rooms have no talent for cleaning. Some rooms will never be clean.’ Her tone was perhaps unnecessarily doom-laden, but Sylvia supposed she was devoted to her art. It was a good sign really.
‘I was wondering, would you take on another lady?’
Lizzie was washing down the sink with bleach. She shook her head, without pausing in her work.
‘Only, our vicar’s wife is looking for somebody to do a few hours for her.’
‘Did you say you could recommend me?’ Lizzie turned her full flat face towards her employer; her rouged cheeks glowed, ripely pink, in a waste of chalk-white powder.
‘I mentioned your name. I didn’t commit you.’
‘Not interested, Mrs S.’
‘I did tell her, I didn’t know how many other people you did for.’ Biting her cucumber: ‘You’re a bit of an enigma, Lizzie.’
‘I can’t take anything else on.’ Lizzie screwed the cap back on the bleach bottle. ‘I work at night.’
She bent down to put the bleach away under the sink, presenting to Sylvia her large rear end. ‘Yes, well, I thought I’d ask. I’d better get off to my committee meeting. Can I give you a lift?’
Lizzie took off her large plastic apron and hung it behind the kitchen door. ‘Thank you kindly, Mrs S. You’re a good woman. An angel, I might add.’
With a baffled smile, Sylvia went off to get her purse. Weird was the word. As it happened, though, Lizzie Blank was the only person who had answered her ad in the Reporter. The purplish, pinpoint, foreign-looking hand had prepared her for – well, a foreigner; a person of strange diction and eccentric ways of cleaning lavatories. Lizzie did not seem exactly foreign; but perhaps her parents were, perhaps she came from a funny background. She seemed a good-hearted soul, Sylvia thought, and willing enough; even if she was rather lavish with the cleaning materials.
She went back into the kitchen. Lizzie Blank was now in her outdoor garb; a dirndl skirt of red and blue, and a leopard-skin jacket. ‘I’m surprised you don’t feel the heat,’ Sylvia said, counting out her money. ‘There you are, love.’ Lizzie’s false nails flashed, and the notes vanished into one of her pockets.
‘It’s my pride and joy, this jacket,’ she said. ‘As my mother used to say, Pride must Abide.’
Lizzie took out a chiffon scarf, pink shot through with gold, and went out into the hall. In front of the mirror, she adjusted it carefully over her coiffure. ‘Ready?’ Sylvia said, swinging her car keys. ‘You’ll have to give me directions.’
Damn, she thought, I’ve been stuffing myself again; and I meant not to have any lunch.
They drove downhill towards the town centre. Right here, left here, said the charwoman, leading them into the maze of streets that still stood on the southern side of the motorway link. ‘All this will be coming down soon,’ Sylvia said. ‘You’ll all be dumped over Hadleigh way in a high-rise. How do you feel about that?’
‘All right.’
‘But it’ll break up your community.’
‘Not my community. I wasn’t born here.’
‘Oh, I see. But still, you won’t like life in a towerblock.’
‘I shan’t mind. You can throw things off the balconies.’
Sylvia gave her a sideways look, then switched her attention back to the road. She slowed down. Small brown children played by the kerb, barelegged in the July heat, crouching in the gutter and darting out into the road. There was not a blade of grass for miles. Midsummer brought out the worst in it, baking the cracks in the pavements, raising a stench from the dustbins. The long ginnels that ran between the houses discharged a dim effulgence of stale sweat and stale spices; a thin ginger cat slept on a coal-shed roof, its scarred limbs splayed, its eyes screwed tight against the glare. Not a tree, not a patch of shade. ‘Displacing people from their environment,’ Sylvia said. ‘You’d think the lesson would be learned by now.’
‘Here it is. Eugene Terrace.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘This will do.’ Lizzie opened the car door and began to lever her bloated body out of the seat, swivelling sideways and kicking her feet over the kerb. Her ankle chain flashed in the sunlight. Out at last, she leaned down and stuck her face in at the passenger door. ‘Thanks a million, Mrs S.’ Inside the leopard-skin jacket she was perspiring heavily, and patches of grease were breaking through her face powder; she gave a terrifying impression of imminent dissolution, as if fire had broken out at Madame Tussaud’s.
Sylvia drew back from her grinning mouth and heavy scent. ‘Is this where you live, at this shop?’
‘Over the top. It’s temporary. I’m stopping with a friend, he’s got lodgings here.’
‘See you Thursday then.’ She watched Lizzie, waddling towards the side door of the fly-blown corner grocery. I wonder what she means about working at night? Can she possibly be a prostitute? Surely not; she was too grotesque for anyone’s taste. Lizzie stopped, ferreting in her bag for her door key. There was something unreal about her, as if she were a puppet, or an illustration loosed from the pages of a book. Suddenly, and with awful clarity, Sylvia understood her mingled repulsion and fascination, the prickling of kinship which had made her take the creature on. It was herself she was seeing, Sylvia Sidney of ten years back, the masklike maquillage, the jelly-flesh wobbling like a sow’s; the great big beautiful baby doll. She felt suddenly sick. She groped for the gear lever.
Lizzie Blank, known otherwise as Muriel Axon, turned her key in the lock; and entered the dismal passageway of Mukerjee’s All-Asia Emporium.
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_6a2a4859-b232-5749-abbf-0913fa2de101)
The Mukerjees’ stock in trade blocked most of the narrow passage: tinned cream of tomato soup in cartons of three dozen, boxes of precooked rice and deodorant sprays, toothpicks, lavender furniture polish, and fancy bun cases. Muriel walked sideways between the boxes, holding her shopping bag across her chest, and went upstairs in the dark. She found she had forgotten the password again, so she booted the door until the sentiment ‘Christ is risen’ came feebly from within.
The room was full of shadows and swirling dust, the sun kept out by a yellowing paper blind. Muriel walked to the window and released it; it shot up and out of her hand with a soft flurry like the exit of a family of rats. She looked out over the roofs of the outdoor privies and the coal sheds.
‘Stir your stumps,’ she advised the man on the bed.
It was Emmanuel Crisp, her friend, her mentor, her old mucker from the long-stay hospital; it was Emmanuel Crisp, who liked to pretend he was a vicar, and who got put away for it. He’d been a troublesome sort of lunatic, always needing big injections; whereas she, whose antecedents were much worse, had given no bother at all; always neat, clean and biddable, at least after the first few years.
Crisp flapped a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. ‘Hello there, Muriel. I thought it was you, kicking.’
‘I’m not Muriel. I’m Lizzie Blank.’
‘But you are Muriel really, aren’t you?’
‘Sometimes. But today I’m Lizzie Blank, because I’ve got my wig on, haven’t I, and my make-up?’
Crisp studied her. ‘It’s wonderful how you get transmogrified.’
‘I’ve got my job to do,’ she said grimly.
Emmanuel lay back on the bed. He was an exhausted man, with his greenish pallor and his high-pitched giggle. It was the day trip to York that had tired him. It had been their best get-together with old friends since they’d all been turfed out of Fulmers Moor Hospital, and left to fend for themselves.
‘Sholto enjoyed it,’ Muriel said. ‘He didn’t have a fit. It was only the excitement that made him sick.’
Crisp’s jaws worked around a yawn. He slid his long frame into a sitting position. ‘Do you have my press cuttings?’
Muriel took the newspapers out of her bag and tossed them onto the table. ‘It’s hot in here.’ She pulled off her wig and dropped it by the Daily Telegraph; then, on second thoughts, arranged it on its stand, on the blank-faced head of white polystyrene that she kept on top of Crisp’s chest of drawers. She didn’t live here; she had a room of her own. But everything was arranged for her convenience.
‘Well?’ she asked Crisp.
Emmanuel looked up, gratified, ‘AN ACT OF GOD,’ he read. Muriel said, ‘Do you want me to go for some fish and chips?’
‘I couldn’t eat. I’m too excited.’
‘Suit yourself. I’ve had my lunch with my employers. They’re not too pleased about the practice I had in their kitchen.’
‘They’ll get it on their insurance,’ Crisp said, absorbed. ‘Heretics have no insurance.’ He smiled as he read. Muriel yawned, and scratched her itching scalp.
‘I’m going to change,’ she said. ‘Don’t watch me, Crisp.’
She took off her leopard-skin jacket and hung it in the wardrobe, kicked off her shoes with a groan, and delved about under the bed for the flat open sandals that Muriel wore. She hauled up her skirt and released her black stockings from their suspenders. From under his eyelids Crisp watched her, rubbing with her fingertips at the indentations the suspenders had left in her blue-white flesh. Her blouse went over her head and onto the floor, and with a grunt she undid the fastening of her painful padded brassiere. Her own body, free from Lizzie’s underpinnings, seemed flat and meagre. ‘Give me a towel,’ she said to Crisp. He watched her as she scrubbed off Lizzie’s mouth, erased her lurid eyelids. After five minutes Muriel was back; her almost colourless eyes, her bland inexpressive features, her short dark hair now beginning to grey.
‘Are you getting a multiple personality?’ Crisp asked her.
She gave him a look. ‘I know who I am,’ she said.
She put on Muriel’s skirt, and a limp cheesecloth blouse, embroidered on the bodice with blue flowers. She had a faraway look, Crisp thought; she was planning what she would do on the street. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘We could pass the afternoon in a study of the Psalms.’
‘Stuff that,’ Muriel said. ‘Where’s my collecting box?’
‘Bodily resurrection is a fact.’
‘I never said different. Don’t go picking quarrels.’
‘Do you know, it’s not the first fire at York Minster. Jonathan Martin, 1829, described as a lunatic. Emmanuel Crisp, 1984, right hand of the Lord.’
‘I hear you, talking like a nutter. Trying to get yourself readmitted.’
‘What if I am? We all pretend to be something we’re not. Especially you, Muriel.’ She was heading for the door. ‘Don’t leave me on my own. I feel jittery.’
‘Well, what is it you want to do then?’
‘Stay with me a bit. You can talk to me if you like.’
‘What about?’
‘About your life. I could give you absolution, Muriel.’
She hesitated, came back into the room. ‘What’s that?’
‘Forgiveness for your sins.’
‘What’s forgiving? It doesn’t change anything. Anyway, I don’t do sins.’
‘Your crimes, then. It’s a nice point.’
‘But I don’t like remembering, Crisp. It upsets me, thinking about my mother and all that. I’d like to oblige you. But it gives me a pain behind my eyes.’
‘Do you good to have a pain. You’re a malicious old bat.’
‘What about you? Burning down churches?’
‘I do it for God.’
‘I do it for me. I do it for fun. I do what I like.’
But already the unwelcome process had begun. Her recall had nothing dim about it. Ten years ago, she had been a woman with a mother and a child. She’d had a lifetime of Mother, but the baby she’d only had for a few days. She had disposed of both of them: 1975. Only hours after the disposal, her life had changed completely; chance had shackled her in the long chain of events that brought her to where she was now. And they say crime doesn’t pay! She was better off now than she’d ever been; it was only one of the things people said to comfort themselves. Before that dark February afternoon, with the social worker screaming in an upstairs room, she’d been nothing but a girl at home; a girl at home with her mother at 2, Buckingham Avenue, for thirty-four years.
Mother was not an easy woman. She was a landlord, a gaoler. She did a manoeuvre she called ‘keeping ourselves to ourselves’. It involved close planning, bad manners; cowering in the back room if anyone came knocking at the door. It was not age that did this to Mother; it had always been her policy. When Muriel went to school, Mother waited for her by the gate. She took her by the neck and by the arm and hauled her home.
This was Muriel’s life: days, whole weeks together, when Mother didn’t let her out of the house in the mornings. She locked her in the bedroom, or hid her shoes. At St David’s School on Arlington Road, she was nothing but an object of remark. None of the remarks were flattering. She rocked on her chair, played with her fingers. She would not write, could not, had never learned, forgotten how. At the sound of a bell the children rushed out of the room and fought each other in an asphalt circus behind bars. She stood and watched the others, rubbing her arm above the elbow where Mother’s fingers left her permanently bruised. She licked some rust from the railings; there was iron on her tongue, salt, ice. She laid about her with her fists. Soon this part of life was over; Mother kept her at home.
The streets, Mother said, were dangerous for a growing girl. There were attacks, impregnations, thefts. She could make your flesh crawl with her tales. By and by a man came to the house, making enquiries. His name was Mr Hutchinson, and he was called an attendance officer. Mother dodged him for a month; finally she let him in. ‘Are you Mrs Evelyn Axon?’ he asked. He saw Muriel, sitting on a stool in the kitchen. He called her my dear. Mother sneered. Oh dear, my dear, she said, isn’t it a gorgeous little cretin, a muttonhead, an oaf, and is it precisely what you want, sir, for your select conservatoire? Mr Hutchinson had a cardboard file which he stored under his arm. He took a step backwards, away from Mother, holding the file across the breast of his fawn overcoat. It brought him up against the door of the lean-to; confused, he turned and fumbled for the handle, and found himself treading in the mulch of old cardboard and newspaper that was always underfoot in winter, breathing in the dank lean-to air. Cobwebs trailed across his glasses. From her stool, Muriel laughed out loud.
After Mr Hutchinson had been retrieved from the lean-to and set on his way out of the front door, Mother had taken her aside and said: stupidity is the better part of valour. Doltishness is the best defence. After that, there had been similar visitors; meeting similar fates, if they got in at all. The Welfare, Mother called them. There had been a time when, just to keep them happy, Mother had let her go in a bus once a week to the handicapped class. She sat with other people in a room, four of them round each table. She cut out shapes in felt and sewed them with great tough stitches onto other felt. She got thin strips of cane and bent them up into baskets; and while she did this she spoke to no one, keeping her lips closed and preserving her eyes behind the thick glasses that the Welfare had got for her. Presently the materials were taken away, and they were given tea and biscuits.
A few months passed, and the results of freedom were visible. Mother kept her at home again. For decades she had sat imprisoned in the house; now she sat in the house behind the bulk of her pregnant belly. How did you get in that condition? her friend Sholto had once asked her. She had thought back, leaning on the hospital fence, looking over it into the world. I gave them the slip, she said. Mother took me to the door, down the path I went, round the corner, where I saw the dog lying on the path, the fox-terrier dog that lay there every Thursday afternoon; and I gave it a kick. I walked on, and I stood, and when I saw that little bus coming, I just turned myself round and went the other way.
I gave them the slip, she said. I went for a go in the park, looking in the litter bins, going in the summer house, getting on those swings. I should have been at my class doing basket weaving and community singing but I went for this go in the park instead. And your beau, Sholto asked; he had a little fiddle? He was a professional man, Muriel said; he had a lovely tweed coat, and some credit cards.
So it came about, she said sonorously to Sholto.
Sholto could keep a secret. He rolled her a cigarette, she smoked it leaning on the fence, and then they went in for their dinner. They had just got the cafeteria system. They took a tray and stood in a line and got brown baked beans and white fish pie. A few people arranged it into patterns, but Muriel had no heart for it. Talking about the past upset her: the cold and discomfort, Mother’s bullying, the lack of proper food, the musty unlit rooms inside the house and the screen of dark trees outside. Buckingham Avenue was so silent you could hear the dust move, and Mother’s dying thoughts rustle through her skull; Christmas 1974, mice in the kitchen cupboards, two seasonal envelopes coming through the door. Miss Florence Sidney, their neighbour, came with a plate full of warm mince pies. Muriel was shut up; their fragrance, wafting up the staircase, made her jaws ache. Mother put Miss Sidney in her place. She forced raw whisky on her, bawled out ‘Merry Christmas’ and booted her out in short order. One of Miss Sidney’s pies leaped from the plate as she scurried down the hall, and smashed and opened itself on the dusty parquet floor. Muriel came down; she put her finger into its steaming golden insides and tasted it. Evelyn shooed her off, pushed her into the back room. She told her to let it lie. Next day it was gone.
Mother had knocked over the paraffin heater. She had groaned in the wet weather when her knees and hips gave her pain. She had taken away Muriel’s cards from the Welfare and burned them, and forbidden her to play in the garden for fear that the neighbours might see her and report on her state. Mother was afraid of the neighbours. She was afraid of ghosts, of changelings. She complained that as she walked down the hallway little claws pulled at her skirt, little devil’s crabs with no bodies, sliding noiselessly away from under her feet.
At one time, her trade had been giving seances for the neighbours. Mrs Sidney, the pie-maker’s mother, had called in to speak to her late husband, and had got scared so badly at Mother’s proficiency that she had turned funny, and shortly afterwards had been sent away. People had come from the other side of town; once a woman had come all the way from Crewe, bringing a parcel of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof to sustain her during her trip on the train. Afternoons, Mother had spent in the front parlour; groaning, sweating, making the bleak monosyllabic conversations that the dead enjoy. Evening, money in her purse; she would snigger, and go and put the kettle on. One day, as she headed for the kitchen, a black wall of panic rose up in front of her and blocked her path. Muriel, lurking at the foot of the stairs, watched Mother’s throat gaping for air, watched her raise a fist and first hammer, then claw at the wall; saw her lift her feet and tussle in the thick air, treading and weaving inside her big woollen cardigan like a dancing bear.
The episode passed. I had a black-out, Mother said. It’s my age.
After that Mother had regretted her seances. The house was full of what she had conjured up; a three-bed two-reception property on a large corner plot, all jostled and crammed with the teeth-baring dead, stranded souls whistling in the cavity walls, half-animated corpses under the flagstones outside. One bedroom, which they called the spare room, had its special tenants. Without eyes and ears, they made themselves known by shuffling; by the soft sucking of their breath, in and out; but they had no lungs. They were malign intentions, Mother said, waiting to be joined to bodies; they were the notions of the dead, expecting flesh.
Mother was now seventy years old; tired, done for, blue stains under her eyes. She’d tried to make a living and now she was to be penalised. No one can help you, she said. No one ever will. They were on their own. They never went out, because they were afraid of what might happen in the house while they were away.
Muriel could see herself as she was then; her pudding face above her smock. Days went by when they never spoke.
She felt a movement inside her, very strange. Mother said, you’re occupied. It would be another mute, an ugly, a ne’er-do-well. She felt it ready to burst out, and that she would die. She knew about death very well, believing that her little thoughts would empty out of her head, and roll round and round in the spare room, picking up the dust from the floor.
Mother got books from the public library, first aid. When the baby started to be born she got out her reading glasses. She fumbled around in the bedroom, cursing. She went round the house with a torch, shining into all the dark corners. Muriel had a pain, a private pain, and she felt that something was going to come of it.
Next day Mother was tired. She made no secret of it; she had entertained hopes that a better sort of infant would be forthcoming. It was an evil-smelling scrap, greedy, drinking up everything that it was offered; it gave evidence of an intemperate nature, of an agitating character. It had a strange face, unlike theirs. It cried incessantly, like an animal shut up in a shed. I’m afraid it’s worse that I thought, Mother said.
On the third day she broke it to her: it’s not human. It’s a changeling, Muriel; you’ve been duped.
But Mother was never at a loss. She had a theory, and her theory was this: you take a firm line, stand no nonsense, and arrange to get a human child back. How?
You find some water, a river; but there was no river, not without taking the bus. Luckily there was the canal, and the canal would do. Float off the wastrel, the substitute; wait a bit, and the chances are you’ll get another in return. It’s the recommended method.
Hearing this theory, Muriel had laughed. The Welfare never told me that, she said, and you get to know things from the Welfare. Such as? Mother demanded. Such as supplementary benefit, rebate on your rent. Mother gave her a slap. It was tried and tested, she said. Desperate diseases require desperate remedies, is that a proverb with which you are unfamiliar? Muriel saw by the quivering of her mother’s face that she was at the end of her tether. She was afraid of the changeling and would not have it in the house. I could telephone the authorities, she said, and have you both locked up.
Of course Mother knew more than she did; she had years of experience, with the living and the dead. ‘All right,’ Muriel said. She was persuaded.
And so the day came to try the substitution. It was a raw winter’s day, with a smell of earth and water. They walked over the fields to the canal bank, meeting no one. They set the box carefully on the surface of the water, the cardboard box with the baby inside. ‘Sink or swim,’ Mother said. The baby had not made a sound; it had given up crying by then, and they had put a blanket over its face and folded over the flaps of the box. It was not cruelty, merely a precaution; Mother knew what she was doing and didn’t want interference.
Below the water was a slimy substance which Muriel found interesting. She put her hand in, and brought it out dripping. Mother gave her a handkerchief to dry it on. They watched the cardboard box, growing soggy, bobbing in the water. There was no sign of the swap. The two babies were already confused in her mind; cold, stunted, condemned to the changeling life, their scant humanity draining away from them year by year. The box dipped in the water and was soon lost from view; the days were short, and there was not much light under the trees. Was it a boy or a girl? Sholto had asked her. I don’t know, she replied; it was all so long ago. She had felt on the canal bank – or was it only later that she felt it? – a small gnawing inside that she called regret. It was all she had, and now it was drowning. It was true that her knowledge of matters was limited, but it was possible that everything, from her go in the park onwards, could have worked out differently. It was not regret for the infant she felt; after all, she hardly knew it. Perhaps it was for herself then; she wondered for a moment how she came to be alive, how it was that her old mother had not brought her here and floated her off one day in the hope of getting in exchange a human child. She brushed the thought away, rubbing her slimy hand down the sleeve of her winter coat. She was hungry. Mother said it had not worked. It was time to be getting home; darkness was closing in rapidly over the fields.
They returned home. It was only five o’clock, but it felt like the middle of the night. The lightbulb had gone in the hall. Her tummy was rumbling. When the knock came at the front door, Mother said, it’s that gas man again, I suppose we’ll have to let him in sooner or later. She gave Muriel a shove in the ribs, told her to stay in the back room. Make yourself scarce, she said.
But when Evelyn opened the front door it wasn’t the gas man at all. It was Miss Isabel Field from the Welfare; the lady they had been keeping out for months.
Mother had dropped her guard, and she probably knew then that she was going to suffer for it. But first she tried to retrieve her error, smiling sweetly at the girl, leading her up the stairs. Muriel leaned against the door of the back room, breathing, listening. As soon as Mother had ushered Miss Field into the spare room, she turned the key on her. Muriel came out into the hall. She sat on the stairs, her knees drawn up to her chin, and listened to Miss Field suffering. How she screamed! How she hammered at the door! How she hammered on the window! She’d put her hand through the glass if she didn’t take care.
When the banging started at the back of the house too, the devil got into Muriel; she said right, solve this one, Mother, but she didn’t dare to say it out loud. The sound of the words and the sound of the hammering went round and round and reverberated in her head as she padded in her bedroom slippers towards the kitchen door.
And then came the invasion. A man burst in. He ran through the house, shouting. Mother came after, striving and yelling; white in the face, wrapped in her cardigan, as fast as she could caper. Up the stairs ran sweating man. After him went Mother. The next moment she lay in a heap on the floor at the bottom. Muriel, behind the front door, stood regarding her.
Assembled in the hall now were Miss Florence Sidney, who baked mince pies; Miss Sidney’s brother Colin; and the welfare worker, Miss Isabel Field. Miss Field said she was leaving the profession. It was too much, she said, to be locked up in a bedroom by some type of madwoman when you were only trying to do a home visit. She was trembling, crying a little. Miss Sidney’s brother got down on the floor and lay on top of Mother. He fastened his mouth voraciously over hers. Mother did not respond; it was ages since she’d had the attentions of a man. After a few minutes, Colin Sidney pushed himself upright, wiped his mouth, and looked down at Mother lying between his legs. He raised his fist and hit her chest a tremendous blow; two blows, then three. Muriel watched closely, sharing his disappointment that Mother seemed to feel nothing of all this. Presently he gave up on her. He lurched to his feet, talking, breathing heavily. She was hanging on to me, he said, as I tried to get upstairs; like a maniac, Miss Field, you were pounding on the bedroom door. I shrugged her off, shrugged is all I did; she slipped, she lost her footing. Now, Colin, said his sister Florence, now, Colin, the ambulance is on its way, no one is blaming you. You did the right thing to rescue me, Miss Field said; locked in that room by myself I felt something pulling at my skirt. She shivered. Colin took off his jacket and put it round her shoulders. There you are, Miss Er, he said. Field, she told him. Victor of the Field, Muriel whispered. For a moment they stared at her; they were not sure if she had spoken or not.
When Miss Sidney was out doing her telephoning, the brother and the social worker turned to each other. They acted as if no one was there; not her in the bedroom slippers, not Mother in a heap. They were people who had met before; their eyes met, and then their hands. She would not be surprised if they had not met on a go in the park. She had a grievance against the social worker, with her trim waist and pale pretty face. She herself was still bloated from her pregnancy, but the girl did not know that. The baby was something they’d kept to themselves; a private trial, which they had faced in their own way.
Miss Sidney was back now. She turned to Muriel. Now, Muriel, she said, I don’t want you to upset yourself, and what we could do with is a blanket to cover up your poor old mum. Let her shiver, Muriel thought, noticing that she did not. Already the grievances of a lifetime were rising up in her mind. Did other people live like this? She had no idea. The social worker said that the place was like a morgue. She bent over Mother, turning her head with her slim white hand. No one’s blaming you, she said to Colin Sidney; she’s had a heart attack. Mother’s face was a strange mottled colour; its expression was one of astonishment.
In the last few moments of Mother’s life, she, Muriel, had come up the stairs from the bottom. Whilst Mother was slipping, sliding, clutching with one hand at the banister and the other at her chest, she had knitted her fingers into the back of Mother’s cardigan, she had taken her by the scruff and bounced her slam, slam, against the wall; and this was why, when Mother died, she looked so surprised.
There were now more people in the house than Muriel could ever remember; more, at any rate, than since Father’s funeral. She had been only a child then; she had wondered why Clifford Axon couldn’t be buried at the back, outside the lean-to, but her mother had said no, she wanted him off the premises. Thirty years had passed; life was going to alter. In the midst of her speculations, her stomach rumbled again quite audibly. Murder makes me famished, she thought. She took a final look at her mother, then went into the kitchen and cut herself a piece of bread. She rummaged in the cupboards and found a pot of some kind of red jam. The old cow, she thought, she was keeping this for herself. There was quite a lot left, three-quarters of the pot. She got a knife from the cutlery drawer and spread the jam carefully, very thick and right to the edges of the bread. When Colin Sidney came in she offered him a bite, but he did not seem interested. She could hear the social worker being sick again. Vehicles drew up outside, and uniformed men took Evelyn away.
Soon after these events, Muriel left home herself. She understood that she would be going away for some years, to recuperate from her time with her mother. A woman called Tidmarsh collected her. She put a plastic bag in the boot of the car, containing Muriel’s personal effects; the two smocks that Mother had made for her out of a pair of old curtains, and a few other odds and ends she found in the drawers. Muriel looked back at the house where until now she had always lived. She felt a terrible sense of incompleteness, as if something that mattered to her had been abandoned in one of the rooms. She pawed at the woman’s arm, trying to get her to turn back, but the woman shook herself free and yelled out that they would have an accident. How was Muriel to know? She had never been in a car before, only the minibus.
Mother had always threatened her that if she didn’t do as she was told, she’d be rounded up with the other ne’er-do-wells, and taken off and gassed. It had happened once, Evelyn said; and the whole world profits by example. So was this it? She felt no emotion; she did not know what gassed would be like. She looked out at the factory walls as they passed, her head lolling against the glass, shaking with the vibrations of the car.
It was a mild spring day, but the women in the streets were still bundled into their heavy coats. They pushed children in trolleys, their heads bowed against the breeze. Sunlight dappled the glass of a bus shelter. The mill gates and little rows of shops gave way to an area of semi-detached houses with white painted fences and pretty flowering shrubs in the gardens. A red housing estate climbed up the side of a hill. Soon they were in the country. Miss Tidmarsh wound her window down, and the smell of fresh grass filled the car. They turned into a gateway, into a gravelled drive shaded by towering hedges. Clouds flew across the windscreen. The car nosed onwards, through the summer ahead; birds wheeled over the fields.
The house itself, a crumbling grey core, looked out over the fields and towards the road. Gravel paths ran away from it, with flower beds on either side. There were parked cars, an ambulance, a scatter of Nissen huts and sheds, and a colony of new buildings, made of metal and varnished wood and plate glass. Beyond these was a belt of dark trees, and more fields. There was a faint ground mist, and moisture in the air.
When the car stopped, Muriel scrambled out. ‘Hang on a minute,’ Miss Tidmarsh called. She took her by the elbow. It reminded her of Mother.
The paths were dotted with little signposts: Hunniford Ward, Greyshott Ward, Occupational Therapy. She did not have time to read them all, but she could read much better than they thought. She craned her neck, straining back over her shoulder. ‘Come on, my dear,’ the woman said. My dear; for the second time. Mother never said it, only ‘You useless lump.’ Useless lump or my dear, the meaning was the same.
Inside the big building the tiles were cold underfoot. Another woman came out, wearing a blue and white check garment. She had an elastic belt and a paper hat. ‘Oh hello, Miss Tidmarsh,’ she said. ‘And how are we today? Got another customer for us?’
She had a special way of looking at Muriel, as if she looked straight through her and around all the edges to assess her size and shape. She shifted from one foot to the other, a little selfconsciously, and twanged at her elastic belt. ‘We’re supposed to be going into mufti soon,’ she said. ‘What do you think of that?’ The woman made some reply. Muriel looked around the entrance hall, up at the ceiling. The nurse asked, ‘How about a cup of tea?’
‘That would be brilliant,’ Muriel said.
The nurse gave her a queer look. ‘Not you, dear. Patients’ tea comes at ten thirty, you’ve missed it.’
‘I’ll have coffee,’ Muriel said. ‘Jam, ham, Spam, roast beef, cornflakes and Ovaltine.’ Miss Tidmarsh laughed.
They followed the notices that said ADMISSIONS. The ward had thirty beds. This is your locker, this is your orange bedspread, this is your bedside mat, this is where you will live. ‘And then, dear, in a week or two, when Doctor has had a talk to us, we’ll be moving on.’
Muriel sat on her orange bedspread. ‘My head hurts,’ she said. The nurse took away her dress. She took away her knickers. She gave her a thin cotton gown.
‘Don’t you wear a bra?’ she said. Muriel shook her head. The nurse smiled. ‘We don’t want to droop, do we?’
‘I don’t know what we’re talking about,’ Muriel said. ‘Our head hurts.’
‘We mustn’t be cheeky. We’ll learn that soon enough, dear. Haven’t we got slippers?’ Muriel shook her head again. ‘You’ll have to get your visitors to bring you some.’
‘Will I get visitors?’
‘You’ll get your family, won’t you, dear?’
Muriel thought this over. Baby: drip, drip. Mother. She closed her eyes tiredly. Mother always said she would haunt.
‘Pay attention, dear,’ the nurse said sharply. Muriel slapped the palm of her hand against her head. ‘That won’t help,’ the nurse said. ‘I can’t give you any medication. Not till you’ve seen the doctor.’
‘When will that be?’
‘That will be on the ward round. Tomorrow.’
When Muriel was left alone, she sat on her bed and dangled her feet. She examined them, hanging there on the end of her legs, her fat red toes. She had done a lot of talking since Mother died. Before, days had gone by without speech; weeks, months. Except for rhymes. She’d not give up making those rhymes, she enjoyed them. They were all she remembered from St David’s School. Sing a song of headache, holler scream and cry, Four and twenty nurses, baked in a pie. She would not cry; she could not be bothered. She scratched her knee instead. A blind was drawn at the window, and the ward was in semi-darkness. She felt the walls close in on her; safe again. Back in the prison of her body, and back in the prison routine with its sights and smells and noises; rumbling tummy, creaking ankles, the steady beating of the heart.
The first person Muriel met was Sholto. He stood in the long corridor blocking her path, a sinister dirty little man with bow legs. ‘Are you mad, or stupid?’ he enquired.
‘Both,’ Muriel said promptly.
‘Join the élite corps.’ Sholto sprang forward and pumped her hand.
Country life. The birds woke her up at four o’clock. She struggled out of her dreams and threw back the bedclothes. She put her feet on the cold floor; head down, she blundered to the window. It showed her a pale milky light and her own pale reflection; the features blurred, amorphous, underwater. She rubbed her right hand down her nightdress, thinking of the clinging green weed.
‘Come on, dear, back to bed,’ said a voice behind her. ‘What are you doing up at this time? Didn’t you have your pill?’
Muriel nodded. ‘I swallowed it.’
Early morning waking, said the nurse to herself, a sign of clinical depression. ‘Back you go,’ she said.
‘Those damn squeakies in the trees,’ Muriel muttered. She glared at the nurse.
‘Six thirty you get up,’ the nurse said. ‘Not four. We’ve got to get ourself into a routine.’ She watched Muriel wiping her hand down her nightdress. Obsessive-compulsive behaviour, she said to herself. Tics.
In the country the medical care was under the supervision of Dr Battachariya, a plump smiling little man; fat eyes, like disappointed raisins, were studded into his golden face. She screamed when he tried to examine her.
‘You have had a baby, Muriel?’ he said shrewdly. A rude, unmannerly man, prying about like that with his plastic gloves. ‘When was that?’
She mumbled something.
‘Where is the little blighter?’
‘With my mother,’ she said.
The first week passed. Now who was mad? Who was bad? Who was stupid?
If they had been florid, talkative and lively with delusion, the long years of Largactil and dormitory wards had made them vacant and passive. If they had been blundering, inadequate and lost, the passage of time had taught them cunning, the thousand expedients of institutional life. A breezy humorous disregard was their attitude to the doctors; the doctors sat with downcast eyes, their voices droning, their thought processes slowed.
Day room. People sit about on vinyl-covered armchairs. None of the furniture here has any resemblance to the furniture used outside. They are not things that people would have in their houses. Jaws move, champing on nothing. Cigarette smoke curls up. My mother died … I had this accident … I worried all night because I hadn’t done my homework … I should never have got married. Hum, hum, hum. Questions are meaningless when you can’t sit still in your chair. They are like bluebottles buzzing round your head: hum, hum, hum. I had no idea there was such filth in the world … At this point there was no food left in the house … I knew he had got a knife … I knew that if I allowed myself to go to sleep I should die during the night. Each night in the six o’clock news there is a special message for me. People stare at me whenever I set foot in the street. Someone had broken my glasses/started a fire/informed on me, hum, hum, hum. Marilyn Monroe stole my giro. I went to the café till my money ran out.
Can you name ten cities? Can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister? Manic motion, impelled to tread, tread, tread along the corridors, hands flying about face and ears.
You must have some feelings about yourself? Stare. A slow shake of the head. Shoulders held rigid, gaze rigid, face and hair grey. A certain rigidity of posture, says the doctor. Seemingly negativistic. How long is it since we first saw you now? No reply.
An affective problem … semi-aggressive … schizophrenic excitement … marked thought disorder. What about a little injection? You aren’t afraid of a little injection, are you?
These were Muriel’s best friends: Sholto, and Emmanuel Crisp. There were a few hangers-on; Philip and Effie. At first she had been a lost soul, wandering around the day room washing her big red hands together. She had missed her mother, in strange ways; Evelyn with her chattering and her nagging and her little ruses to defeat persecutors and spies. It was a fair bet that Evelyn had taught her a thing or two, and unless in fact she were missing her it was impossible to account for the hollow feeling that she carried around inside. At the same time, she was growing a little garden of resentment and speculation, watering her weeds in the small hours when she lay staring into the darkness, wide-eyed despite her sleeping pill. The Welfare did things for people, she now learned, got them money so that they could live on the outside, got them gas fires and shoes. They had never got anything for her. Even when Evelyn let them in, she wheedled around them and said that everything possible was being done. Pretending to be sane was a great strain on Evelyn, and this strain was the origin of many of the stand-up fights they had after the Welfare had gone. Sometimes she said to herself, Mother should be here, not me, left in this homely home-from-home to pursue a career as a lunatic. She was told that in pursuance of the truth about her mother’s life they had sliced open her body, peered into it and pulled out her insides. She thought back on the process with satisfaction.
Now that she knew more about other people and their way of life, she often wondered if her crimes entitled her to some sort of record. She could read properly now; there was a book, in great request among her friends, which had records of everything under the sun, and most of these activities – county cricket, nonstop dancing – seemed less interesting than her own. Ought she to put pen to paper about it?
Sholto advised caution. Was the baby found? he asked. No; or she would be in a prison. Still in the canal then; sunk into the soft mud at the bottom, strangled by green weeds, trapped under the rusting wrecks of bedsprings and fridges. He offered to consult Emmanuel Crisp, who with his church connections was an expert on all matters charnel.
Emmanuel thought. A peat bog will preserve anything, he said. That is not in question. Mud; soft mud, still water. And, a canal: acid in the water, surely. There’s not much to infant bones – ‘but what you have there, Muriel, is perhaps a skeleton.’
Sholto asked more questions. Was she blamed for her Mother’s demise? No. Foul play was not suspected, Crisp put in. Could she handle the scepticism her claims would provoke? They were pernickety, the publishers of this record book, they did not entertain idle claims, they might want her to repeat her feat under test conditions. You can get another child, said Sholto, winking lewdly so that she would grasp his meaning, but you cannot get another mother. Keep it to yourself, he advised. The fact is, Muriel, that you can’t prove a thing.
‘I could, though,’ she said. ‘If I found the bones.’
Crisp was a tall man, pallid and spare. He had a precisian’s lip, a cold eye; his hair was coiled about his dome like a woolly snake. Wherever did he get his wing collars, Sholto asked him.
‘Charity,’ said Crisp briskly.
‘Myself I have fits,’ Sholto explained. ‘Crisp’s life has been different. He was the verger once at St Peter’s.’
Crisp cleared his throat. ‘I left undone those things that ought to be done.’
‘What things?’
‘My flies. Later, a gas tap.’
‘He is one of those people who do not know what came over them,’ Sholto said. ‘He lived to tell the tale, though he leaves me to tell it. They put it in the Reporter: SEX BEAST VERGER: VICAR SPEAKS.’
‘Have you ever heard of entrapment?’ Emmanuel Crisp asked. ‘It was what they call an agent provocateur. She said she was from the Women’s Institute. She wanted to go into the choir stalls, and see the organ.’
‘You know you took her wrong,’ Sholto said doggedly. ‘You did it on purpose.’
‘She touched my sleeve.’ He shuddered. ‘I often pray for her.’
‘The vicar never spoke up for him. He’s left now.’
‘He’s dead,’ Crisp said. ‘Or ought to be.’
As a group, they got together in the day room. It was a new idea, to mix the boys and girls together. Autumn had come; but next year, Effie said, they would meet out of doors where there was more privacy. God willing, Philip added piously. Emmanuel led them in a verse or two of ‘The Church’s One Foundation’; then they broke up for tea.
After this came a period of considerable longueurs. Winter closed in over the fields. She stood by the window of Greyshott Ward and watched the rain beating against it. It was a year before she was put into a charabanc and taken in a great herd of chattering fellow patients to the shops in town. The journey took thirty minutes, and the excitement mounted with every mile. They went into a sweetshop, and into a hardware store where the patients looked at bread-bins and said which colour they would have if they had any bread of their own. She looked around and was very tempted, but she stole nothing at all. Afterwards, back on Greyshott, she was praised up for her good behaviour.
She had special clothes for the outing, given her out of a cardboard box kept in the nurses’ room: a blue frock with six buttons, and a mackintosh that was only a bit small. Back on Greyshott she was given her old smock again. A nurse stood over her waiting to take the outside clothes away. When she came to take her dress off, she could only account for five buttons. The nurse made the noise ‘tt-tt’ and blew a little through her teeth. It was something only nurses should do; if patients did it they got shouted at. She scooped up the dress and the mackintosh and dropped them back into the box. ‘Come on, get dressed, you idle sod,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it for you.’ Muriel saw the dress and the mackintosh disappearing, the box borne away.
She sat on the end of her bed, rebellious. ‘Tt-tt,’ she said, and wagged her head slowly, and cast her eyes to heaven. By watching other people, by stealing their expressions and practising them, she was adding to her repertoire. I was no one when I came here, she thought; but after a few years of this, there’s no saying how many people I’ll be.
Effie was often Her Majesty the Queen. They went along with her, lining up by the ward door. She wore a pink plastic shower cap that had been brought in from the outside by some long-forgotten visitor. She offered them each the tips of her fingers, and her very sweetest smile.
‘And how long have you been at Fulmers Moor?’
‘Ten years, Ma’am.’
‘Indeed? You must have seen many changes in your time?’
Between official engagements, Effie sat and looked at the wall a great deal. From time to time a ripple of emotion made her face quiver. She would put a hand up to stop it, and then she would leap up in a frenzied pursuit of the nearest nurse. ‘I want my Largactil,’ she would bleat, ‘I want my Modecate, I want my nice Fentazin syrup.’ Tranquillised, she would lean against the wall, her face serene again; only a blink of the eye, only a minute parkinsonian quiver of the extremities, to show that she was alive at all.
‘I make no showing,’ Crisp said, petulant. ‘I’d better get a delusion. I hope to become a public man,’ he told Dr Battachariya. ‘I hope to be appointed Ambassador to St Petersburg. Or Governor of the Bank of England.’
Dr Battachariya sucked his pen. He questioned him closely. ‘What is the difference between a ladder and a staircase?’ he asked him.
Crisp smiled. ‘A ladder is a series of portable gradations,’ he suggested, ‘of either metal or wood; sometimes rope. It consists of two uprights, with steps, called rungs, between them. It serves as a means of ascent, as does a staircase; but a staircase, designed on the same principle, is a fixed internal structure. Suppose for the sake of argument that you were a window cleaner – and some honester men than you or I, Battachariya, do in fact earn their living in that fashion – then taking stout cords, you could bind the ladder to your vehicle’s roof, and thus transport it; which you could by no means do with a staircase.’
Dr Battachariya toyed with his ballpoint. He was determined to fault it. ‘Don’t you think your explanation is rather over-elaborate?’ he asked. Crisp smiled again; his dry, remote, ecclesiastical smile.
Muriel sought him out. ‘Crisp, give me a book,’ she said. ‘A book of sermons. Anything.’
‘What do you want a book for?’
‘I want words. I’ve got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose. I want some like yours.’
‘Listen,’ Effie said sharply, ‘this is the bloody Savoy. Do you know what we had where I was last? No doors on the lavatories, pardon me. One toothmug per seventeen imbeciles. Crisp, you don’t know you’re born.’ Recovering herself, she added, ‘Balmoral is no better.’
But next day Effie went on the rampage. She had a filthy tongue in her head when she wasn’t giving regal addresses. She ran screaming and cursing down Greyshott Ward and out into the corridor.
‘I don’t need hospital,’ she shouted. ‘I don’t need nurses. I’m not sick. I may be daft but I’m not sick. I don’t need getting up at six thirty every day, Christmas Day, birthday, Queen’s official birthday and every bleeding Sunday. I need to get up when I want and make myself a little cup of tea.’
Two stout male orderlies got Effie by the arms and brought her back to Greyshott. They argued with her as they dragged her along. ‘And how would we get your breakfast, if you got up any old time you felt like it?’
‘I’m not here to have breakfasts. I could get my own.’
‘Go without is what you’d do. And if we didn’t get you up, what’s to say you’d ever get up at all? What’s to stop you lying in bed all day?’
Sholto stood by, scratching his head and looking on.
‘The patients for the shifts,’ he remarked, ‘or the shifts for the patients?’
Dumping Effie on her bed, reaching for the screens to pull around her, the orderly stared at Sholto; his face crimson, his breathing heavy. ‘Get your frigging ugly face out of here, Sholto Marks,’ he bellowed.
Effie subsided. She began to cry, her chest heaving with the shock and horror of her outburst.
I’ve killed a psychiatrist … I pulled all the stuffing out of the doll … they put gunpowder through my letter box … they sang in the streets outside my house … a strange letter came, postmarked Scarborough.
Philip had the secret of perpetual motion. Chug, chug, chug. I am a tractor. I am a Centurion tank. I am a shiny red new Flymo. Otherwise sensible, Philip oils his moving parts each morning.
Crisp attributes it to the decline of faith. You may hear it, he says, as Philip garages himself for the night: the melancholy long withdrawing roar. In days gone by, Philip might have believed he was possessed by a devil, but the trend this century is to penetration by rays, bombs in the skull, and possession of men by machines.
I am the internal combustion engine, says Philip.
After a year or two Muriel became angry. She went to the end of the ward where the charge nurse sat in his little plastic cubicle. He was a fair-haired belligerent man, with a habit of sucking on his underlip. His biceps bulged pink and scrubbed beneath the short sleeves of his tunic. He was reading his racing paper.
When he saw Muriel he folded up his paper and put it down.
‘Eh up, it’s Jane Fonda,’ he said. Muriel did not know why he used this name, which he always did. He was looking amiable, but amiable was not his bent.
‘I have a question,’ she said.
The charge nurse lit a cigarette. ‘Fire away.’
‘Can’t I be treated like a normal person?’
I’m worried about everything. What things? The bomb. What do you think will happen to you? Stay in hospital; then I’ll die. You got very drunk, didn’t you? Why did you go to the pub, do you think? My sinful nature. When did you last eat, do you think? 1952.
I’m dead of misery. Dead inside. There are murderers in this place, murderers in the night. They used to wear uniforms so you knew them but now you don’t know them any more. There are murderers in the night. Lizzie Borden. Ruth Ellis. Constance Kent.
Lizzie, thought Muriel. Later she couldn’t recall the surname. Lizzie Blank.
How would you like a new life? they asked Muriel one day. How would you like a new life, with your needs met by the community instead of the institution?
When Muriel looked at herself in the mirror, she knew that she was changing. She was a woman of forty, a woman of almost forty-three. In repose, her face was empty and expressionless, but at a word of inner command she could set it to work, assuming expressions acceptable to the people around her. The grimaces, she called them. The nods and smiles, the frown of concentration, the puzzled stare; all these were within her scope nowadays.
If you knew the language and the logic, you could get into people’s workings. You could press the right keys, get out the response you wanted. You have to appreciate their prejudices: good defeats evil and love conquers all. That two plus two equals four, that cause precedes effect. Remembering, all the time, that this is not really how the world works. Not at all.
The hospital was changing too. There were new nurses, milder in their ways; at least for the first month or so. The patients were left to their own devices, allowed to stroll about the grounds together while Crisp lectured them on eschatology. He looked forward to the day of a more immediate and worldly release. There was so much to be done; the Church was in a parlous state, and the General Synod – than where you would not find a bigger collection of atheists – had quite lost its grip. There were dwindling congregations, rectories turned into guest houses and deans living in maisonettes; and a demand for women in the ministry. Can you imagine, he asked, can you imagine Effie, in a sacramental character?
Crisp’s preoccupations were his own; but more and more, their thoughts were turning to the outside world. ‘I’m learning to make meals,’ Muriel said to Effie.
Effie laughed. ‘Get away. Meals come out of those big trays in the canteen.’
‘Oh, do they?’ Muriel said passionately. ‘That shows your ignorance. When I was at home I used to get meals from my mother, eggs, vegetables, that sort of rubbish, peas out of a tin. Where do you think the nurses get meals when they go home?’
‘They live here,’ Effie said. ‘Don’t they? This is where we all live.’ She relapsed into silence, and took up the occupation of looking at the wall.
Emmanuel was the first to go. ‘Social Services will be responsive,’ the doctors said. Emmanuel made a little speech, thanking them for their support as a congregation over the years. They sang a few of his favourite hymns, and he shook hands all round. He would be returning, he said, by the road to town which had brought him here some ten years ago; as if Calvary had an exit route. He turned up his face. A stray shaft of autumn sunlight gilded the waxen tip of his nose.
‘The heart’s gone out of things,’ Sholto said. He kicked at a stone and dug his hands further into his pockets. ‘It will dull our wits, trying to pass for normal.’
They were walking in the grounds, their numbers diminished. ‘Do you think you can pass?’ Sholto asked her. He looked at her keenly. ‘You might, Muriel. I might pass, if I don’t fall down and foam. Crisp will pass. But Effie – never.’
‘After all, Muriel,’ they said. ‘Look at all the stuff we’ve taught you. You know how to do your shopping. You can count your change. You can use the telephone.’ Muriel nodded. ‘We’ll find you a place,’ they said. ‘A nice little flat with a warden. You’ll be a free agent, you can come and go as you please.’ They patted her hand. ‘You’ll have lots of support. The social worker will call and see you. And you know how to make your meals.’
Muriel thought: When I get out I shall get out, just let those wardens try; Four and twenty social workers baked in a pie.
Sholto said: ‘When you get out of here your aim should be to get as far away as possible from all those people who are going to treat you as an abnormal person. You have to get away to where nobody knows your face. You don’t want a pack of people around you who are going to say, oh, you know, you mustn’t expect too much, she comes from there. You don’t want people making loopy signs at every trifling embarrassment. You want to get right away. Get a fresh start. Get treated on your own merits.
‘If you let the Welfare house you they’ll tell all the neighbours that they’re to keep an eye out. Is that any way to start life? Everybody makes mistakes, but as long as they’re watching you all your mistakes will be put on file. You want equal treatment, don’t you? You want to merge into the crowd. Not to be pointed out in the public library as that cove who has fits. Not people coming up helping you all the time. Stuff them, I say. If I want to lie in the gutter and foam at the mouth it should be my entitlement. What are gutters for?’
The odd letter came, here and there. Tales drifted back from the outside. ‘Crisp is walking the streets now,’ Sholto said bitterly.
‘I thought you didn’t want nothing from nobody, Sholto.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ Effie said timidly. ‘But he’d like a little residence.’
‘Philip got a council flat,’ someone said.
‘How did he like it?’
‘He hanged himself.’
Sholto was a man of very good sense; wise and lucid, and ready for anything, except for the days when he sat on the floor, holding his head. ‘What they claim,’ he said, ‘is an ongoing beanfeast, flats, nurses, jobs, day centres. But if you want to avoid all that you’ll have no trouble at all. There aren’t enough to go around.’
‘They’re going to close this place,’ Effie said. ‘What will happen to me? Where will I go? What will happen to my bedside mat? It’s all I’ve got.’
‘You get money given you,’ Muriel said.
‘Of course, I shall have the Civil List.’ Effie cheered up. ‘I’ll see you right, everybody.’
Hunniford Ward was closed. Effie got desperate, crying frenziedly and pulling at her hair. ‘Look, we’ll all keep in touch,’ Sholto said. He wrung her hand. ‘Me and you, Muriel, the Reverend Crisp. We’ll go on trips together. We’ll have donkey rides and such. We’ll hire a little bus and go to places of interest.’
Effie blew her nose, consoled a little. The next day she came running up, her face alight; the greatest animation seen on her features since 1977, when she set fire to a cleaning lady. ‘Giuseppe is back,’ she said, ‘that was thrown off Hunniford. If you don’t like it they take you back. Giuseppe didn’t like it.’
They went to see Giuseppe after he was dried out. ‘I went down London,’ he said. His podgy face was lemon-yellow; his fingers played tunes on the bedcovers. ‘I went in a hotel. There was women in that hotel,’ he crossed himself, ‘they was tarts. I never paid those women. A man come threatened me get out of that hotel. I went down the coach station. I went down the café. I went down the Sally Army.’
‘Five more minutes,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s been poorly.’
They smiled at her. The nurses liked it when you were poorly. They were kind to you. If you were sick in bed, they knew what you were up to and what they ought to be doing.
‘I went up Camden Town,’ Giuseppe said. ‘I went down Bayswater. I went up Tottenham Court Road to see my grandmother, but she was dead. I went in the bed and breakfast. I went in the night shelter. I ask for an extra blanket but they say, no no, fat man.’ Giuseppe rubbed his side. ‘My chest hurts. I’m a tramp. I go to Clacton. It’s winter. I get a lodging and I walk by the sea.’ He closed his eyes and screwed up his face. ‘Mother of God, it’s so lonely in Clacton.’
‘Just remember your medication,’ they said to Sholto. ‘A community nurse will call and see you.’
‘Not if I see her first,’ Sholto said.
Sholto got out on a Thursday. He was all set for his sister Myra’s house. He made his way along the street, carrying his navy-blue holdall, the yellow nylon straps wound around his wrist. When Myra saw him coming she locked the door.
Sholto walked on to the corner. When he turned off Adelaide Street, a terrible sight met his eyes. The whole district had been razed. Osborne Street was down, Spring Gardens had been flattened. The Primitive Methodist Chapel was boarded up and all the gravestones had been taken away. He tramped through the meadow of blight where the bones of Primitive Methodists had once rested; the ground was strewn with glass and broken pots. He squatted down, turning over the shards. The weather was damp; his holdall was smeared with yellow clay. From where he knelt he looked up and read a sign: MOTORWAY LINK BEGINS MAY 1983.
Where the Travellers’ Call had been there was a field of rosebay willowherb and scrap metal. There were a few aimless piles of red brick, two feet high, and in places the earth was turned up, as if someone had begun to dig foundations here and then thought better of it. Only the Rifle Volunteer was still standing, at the corner of where Sicily Street used to be. It was eleven thirty, and while he watched, the landlord put on the lights and came out to open the doors. He stooped ponderously to draw out the bolt, and stood gazing for a minute at the sky; then he looked across the wasteland, shading his eyes as if he were scanning the prairie. Sholto was the only human figure within his view. There was a rusting refrigerator lying on its back, a swastika spray-gunned on a wall; human faeces. Sholto felt the straps of his holdall cutting into his wrists. Picking his feet out of the mud, scraping his shoe on a handy brick, he began to make his way towards the Rifle Volunteer. I thought the war was over, Sholto said.
Miss Tidmarsh was nearly fifty now, and still going strong. Her shiny new car waited outside on the gravel. Muriel followed her; withered flanks inside a scarlet bib-and-brace. ‘Guess what!’ Miss Tidmarsh said. ‘We think we’ve found you a job. Who’s a lucky girl?’
She reached a hand across Muriel, pulled her seat belt and snapped it fastened. They crunched off over the gravel. Even Miss Tidmarsh’s style of driving seemed less mature than it had been. Muriel said, ‘Whatever happened to Miss Field?’
Miss Tidmarsh glanced at her sideways. ‘Fancy you remembering Miss Field! Was she your social worker?’
‘Such a lovely person,’ Muriel said dotingly. It was an expression the nurses used, about lady doctors who did not snub them and relatives who did not pester.
‘Did you think so? She left. Went to work in a bank, if I remember. I think she got married or something.’
They shot out of the main gate and onto the road to town. Muriel didn’t look back.
She started off as a cleaner, pulling a little trolley with her brush and her mop and her scouring powder and her special bucket. She had her name written on the trolley: MURIEL. She slopped her water about the corridors and under the tables in the canteen; she tipped her powder down the lavatories, and sang while she plied her mop. She learned to sing with a cigarette in her mouth, because cigarettes were what the factory made, and any worker was at liberty to pluck the finished article from the machines and puff away during the tea break and the half-hour for lunch.
At the end of the first week Maureen said to her: ‘Muriel, love, I don’t know what to say. Look at your brush, it’s all worn down to stumps. Have you been chewing it?’ Maureen sighed heavily. ‘There’s a wheel coming off MURIEL. You’ve got through as much powder as I use in three months. And look at your Eeziwipes; they’re all over the place.’
Muriel stood looking down at her feet.
‘No point putting your bottom lip out,’ Maureen said. ‘I don’t know, where’ve you been all your life? I suppose some can clean and some can’t, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘Am I discharged then?’
‘That’s not up to me, duck. There’s enough on the dole as it is. On your own at home, are you?’
‘I am at the moment. But I’m expecting my mother.’
‘Ah, that’s nice. Well, look, lovey, buck up now. Perhaps we can get you on Ripping.’
That first weekend of freedom, Muriel paid a visit to her old home. It was quite a distance from the room that Miss Tidmarsh had found for her. She saw buses going about the streets, but she didn’t know how to get one to go in the right direction. So she walked; she had nothing else to do.
Considering how many years had passed, the district hadn’t changed much. She turned off Lauderdale Road, where she used to wait for the minibus. She paused for a few moments before the house where the fox terrier used to live, and took a good look. The stained glass and the net curtains had gone. The woodwork was painted white, and there was a panelled front door of polished wood, with a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head; and a carriage lamp on the wall. It looked very smart. If the dog came out, I could kick it, she thought. She turned the corner. Buckingham Avenue had hardly altered at all. Each house stood set back from the road behind its neat privet hedge. Peering down between the houses, she saw the thick clumps of rhododendrons, the striped lawns, the trellised archways for climbing roses. At number 2, her home, there were big stone urns on either side of the door; flowering plants spilled out of them, and a hanging basket swung from the porch. The shrubs had been cleared from the side of the house, and they had put up a flat-roofed extension, bright red brick against the pebble-dash. The windows gleamed. She walked to the gate and traced the number with her finger. She would never have believed that her mother’s house could look like this. She felt lonely.
She hung about for a while on the other side of the road, waiting to see if anyone would come out. Other people lived in the house, and she knew who; that monster of lust called Colin Sidney, who had seized his chance to buy it up cheap and move in next door to his scheming sister. What about the spare room, she wondered. Had there been an eviction, or were they still forced to keep the door locked?
Muriel waited for an hour. No one came in or out of number 2. Her feet hurt and she was thirsty. Presently she set off to walk back to her lodgings and sleep until it was time to go to the factory again. I can come again next week, she thought.
The Ripping Room had sixteen occupants, ranged at two long tables. Kieran came from the lift, pulling his trolley. ‘I’m a YOP,’ he told Muriel. ‘They get me cheap.’
‘What’s a Yop?’ Muriel asked.
‘Don’t you know? It’s a Youth Opportunity.’ He added, ‘we get a lot of those.’
‘Kieran brings the boxes,’ Edna said. ‘Right? These are old cigarettes, right, off shop shelves what have gone out of date. On that trolley he’s got 200,000 rotten old fags. You get your box, right? Take out the packets. Open the packets, right?’ She looked around her. ‘Kieran, where’s our boxes, where’s our bloody stacking boxes, where’s our Universal Containers?’
Kieran came sloping up. ‘I was putting me lipstick on,’ he said. ‘I’m entitled.’
‘Get on with it!’ Edna said. ‘Empty the fags out, right? Fags to the left, foil to the right. Fags to the left, foil to the right. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ Muriel said. Edna was an angry-looking woman, with varicose veins and black corkscrew curls. She wore an overall and white cap. ‘Away you go then,’ she said, and went off grumbling back to her own table.
‘What happens to them all?’ Muriel asked.
‘Oh, they scrunch ‘em all up and make ‘em into new ones,’ Kieran said.
There were two tables, and Edna’s got preferential treatment. When the Navy Issue came back in their tins, with the mould growing under the lids, it was never Edna’s table that got them. They were Permanent Rippers. On the other table, the girls could be moved, as the work required, to the Making Room, to the Blender or the Hogshead. Before the week was out, Muriel had learned to rip very nicely. She was never moved; nor was the elderly lady who worked opposite her.
This was a humble little woman, with a worn bony face, and eyes and nose and mouth so insignificant that to call them features was an inflation of the truth. A scant amount of iron-grey hair was pinned fiercely to her little skull. The skin of her neck was yellow, her shoulders were bowed, and her hands shook a little as she reached for her cigarette boxes. She hardly seemed to have the strength for ripping. Every morning, before Kieran brought his first trolleyload, she would take out her teeth and wrap them in tissue paper, and slide them into her handbag. She would snap the clasp and hold the bag to her for a moment, looking around her with an anxious little smile; then she would put on her overall, over her pinny, over her old polyester dress. She seldom spoke. Her eyes watered continuously. She walked with her knees bent, her head down; a soft silent creature of depressive aspect. From time to time-once a week perhaps – some word from one of the other girls would catch her fancy, some gossip or quip, and she would tip her head back, open her toothless mouth, and roar with silent laughter, wiping her eyes the while and trembling at her own temerity.
She’d had a hard life, Edna said. Her name was Sarah; but everybody called her Poor Mrs Wilmot.
Muriel’s second trip to Buckingham Avenue was more enlightening than the first. She had only been hanging around for five minutes when who should she see, coming up the road with her Saturday shopping, but Miss Florence Sidney?
Miss Sidney had put on weight, and her frizz of hair was now grey. She wore stout shoes, a check skirt, and a woollen scarf with bobbles on it, and she advanced along the street looking neither left nor right. As she passed number 2, going around the corner to her own gate, the front door flew open and a gang of screaming teenage children swarmed down the path and fanned out across the road. Miss Sidney was almost knocked into the hedge. Steadying herself against the gatepost, her face flushed, she called out after the children, ‘Alistair! For heaven’s sake!’
‘Eff off, you old cow,’ the boy called Alistair shouted back; wailing and yodelling, the gang careered around the corner into Lauderdale Road.
Miss Sidney put down her basket to recover herself. She steadied her breathing, allowed her flush to subside, and picked a few bits of privet from her cardigan. Looking up, she saw Muriel watching her from the other side of the road. Muriel smiled; there was no one she would rather see pushed into a hedge. Miss Sidney’s eyes passed over her, as if she thought it was rude to stare; it was plain that she had no idea who Muriel was. She gave a half-smile, picked up her shopping, and trotted round the corner.
She doesn’t expect me, Muriel thought. But she ought to expect me.
Muriel fished in her coat pocket, and brought out a piece of newspaper. She unwrapped it as she crossed the road, took out Mrs Wilmot’s teeth, and tossed them over the hedge into the Sidneys’ front garden.
Just as she was rounding the corner, the front door of number 2 opened again. Colin Sidney came out and loped down the path towards his car; a big fair man, balding, lean and fit. She watched him jump into his car and shoot away from the kerb. He did not even notice her. She raised a hand after him; like someone giving a signal to a hangman.
Mrs Wilmot was being retired. She had been at the factory for thirty years; today was her last day.
‘Course,’ she said, in her usual dead little whisper, ‘I’ll not get my pension, I’m not sixty. Course, I’ll get my benefit. Course, I’ll have to put in for it. Course, I don’t really know.’ She picked up a corner of her overall and wiped her left eye.
‘It’s a bloody shame,’ Edna said. ‘Ripping’s all she’s got. Here, love, we’ll give you a send-off.’
‘Course, they gave me a Teasmaid,’ Poor Mrs Wilmot said. She wiped her other eye and sniffed.
‘Bugger the Teasmaid, we’ve got a lovely presentation to give you. We’ll give it you down the pub, it’s Friday night, isn’t it?’
‘Course, the pot was broken,’ Mrs Wilmot whimpered. ‘Course, I didn’t complain.’
‘I wish you’d told me,’ Edna said, ‘I’d have complained all right. I don’t know, this place is going down the drain, you can’t leave anything about, people’s teeth being nicked out of their own handbags, they want bloody hanging. You could do with a new set, you should have asked for one, you should get compensation.’
‘No point really,’ Mrs Wilmot said dejectedly, ‘I have to get my cards. I have to go to the office. I don’t like.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t like?’
‘Going to the office. I don’t like.’
‘I’ll get your stuff for you,’ Muriel offered.
‘Oh, would you?’ A tiny hope shone out of Poor Mrs Wilmot. ‘Muriel, ask them for my wages as well, lovey.’ The next moment her situation overwhelmed her again; she looked away and sniffed, and soon the tears were coursing down her cheeks.
‘Off again,’ Edna said. ‘Come on, duck, pull yourself together.’
‘Course, you can understand it,’ Poor Mrs Wilmot said. ‘Course they don’t like me coughing on the tobacco. I appreciate that. Course I do.’
They arrived at the Swan of Avon just after opening time. Edna organised the moving of tables, commandeered extra chairs, and herded them into the Snug. ‘Let’s have a kitty, girls,’ she called. The girls fumbled in their bags and tossed five-pound notes into the centre of the table. ‘No, not you, love,’ Edna said to Poor Mrs Wilmot. ‘This is your day, duck. Come on now, wipe your eyes. That’s it, give us a smile. Have a go on the Space Invaders.’ She bustled her way to the bar, shouting through an open doorway to some male cronies from the Hogshead who were ordering up their first weekend pints in the public bar.
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Hilary Mantel
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring Up the Bodies’, a savagely funny tale that revisits the characters from the much-loved ‘Every Day is Mother’s Day’.Muriel Axon is about to re-enter the lives of Colin Sidney, hapless husband, father and schoolmaster, and Isabel Field, failed social worker and practising neurotic.It is ten years since her last tangle with them, but for Muriel this is not time enough. There are still scores to be settled, truths to be faced and rather a lot of vengeance to be wreaked.