Vacant Possession (10 page)

“Of course you can,” she said. “I’ll have the whole shop.”

“What?” Crisp started up from the bed. She hadn’t realised she’d spoken out loud. In fact, she’d forgotten he was there; it seemed hours since her remembering began. With a great yawn, Crisp swung his legs to the floor. He looked at her intently. “Do you ever think about the future, Muriel?”

“Of course I do,” she said angrily. “I’m not an animal.”

“I don’t think about it.”

“But there’s possibilities, Crisp. You don’t have to be a reverend. You can be a safe-breaker, a shopkeeper, a tailor’s dummy. You can be a monumental mason.”

“Perhaps. Arson’s not much to keep you going.”

“You could be a singing telegram. You want to get yourself organised.” She paused. “I won’t always need to be three people. It’s only till I give them their comeuppance…all those people that were in my life. Mr. Colin Sidney and Mrs. Sylvia Sidney, and Miss Florence Sidney, and Miss Isabel Field. I used to think about them when I was taking the cigarette packets apart…when I was on Ripping. I keep myself busy, but I always feel, you know, as if there’s something I need…and they might have it.”

Crisp let the newspapers slide to the floor. “I’ll have another snooze,” he said. Barelegged and bedraggled, Muriel went out for what was left of her free afternoon.

The label of the collecting box was peeling off a bit. Muriel smoothed it with a damp forefinger. No one ever read it. Trapped in their doorways by her accusatory stare, they delved into their pockets and purses and paid up. Stopped on the street, they produced a coin and moved away as fast as they could. One man, caught on his front step, tried to argue with her. “I believe in the primacy of individual effort,” he said. Muriel brought up her boot—it was wet that day—and caught him painfully on the kneecap.

She didn’t need the money. It was the social side of it she valued. Lauderdale Road was a good area. People gave generously; there was guilt behind those festoon blinds.

What if I did Buckingham Avenue, she wondered idly. What if I went up the path of number 2 and rang the doorbell; what if Mother answered the door?

Think when old Mrs. Sidney came up the path, Master Colin’s mum. Think when she came for her seance, with her crocodile shoes and her bag over her wrist. By the time she went out again something had gone permanently wrong inside her head. Death wasn’t what she’d thought; she was put in a home before the year was out.

When she was bored with collecting Muriel retraced her steps towards the town centre. She passed the public library, where she often called in to steal books. She didn’t go inside, but stopped in the lobby, arrested, as she had been before, by the advertisement for the Colorado Beetle. She didn’t study the text, but gazed entranced at the creature; a gaudy beast, and, as portrayed, about the size of a small kitten. She was not surprised they were thought a public menace.

Then back to the shopping mall; there were some keys she had to get cut, Sylvia’s house, Mr. K.’s house. She made a point of getting hold of keys, because you never knew when they might be useful. She paid for the keys out of her purse, not out of her collecting box, but she put it on the counter, and when the man had served her he slipped a 5p piece into it. Never let it be said that she was greedy, that she kept it all to herself. If in the mall she saw a wheelchair, parked by the litter bins and next to the municipal flowerbeds, she would often toss its occupant a small coin, with a cheery “There you go, you poor cripple,” as she passed by.

Now she left the precinct behind. It was teatime; the sun was declining, the air was mild. Out towards the land of the link road she tramped in her sandals; the houses ran out on her, the pavements grew pitted, torn posters flapped from the broken walls.
SORRY NO COACHES
said an ancient sign in the window of the Rifle Volunteer. Across the wasteland the shop could be picked out easily; no other building had a roof for a quarter of a mile. Doggedly she struck out across country, picking up her feet over the fallen plaster and the tangle of low-growing weeds. She stopped to examine an iron grate and a pile of broken bottles. A breeze got up, and brown paper blew against her legs.

There were notices outside:
GOLD AND SILVER ARTICLES WANTED
,
HOUSE CLEARENCES BEST PRICES PAYED
. She pushed the door, heard the bell ping. From the darkness at the back of the shop came the clarion call of a bugle, and at the next moment, a squat and powerful figure leaped into view, brandishing a sabre.

“Cut it out, Sholto,” Muriel said.

Sholto dropped his guard and sucked his bottom lip. He replaced the bugle on a high shelf. As he emerged from the dimness his manner became obsequious. He was blue-chinned, seedy and wild-eyed, and as he shuffled forward, sword in hand, it would have been no surprise to hear him claim that now was the winter of his discontent. Instead he smiled at Muriel, displaying his dreadful teeth, and asked her, “What can I suit you with today?”

“A cage,” Muriel said.

Sholto ignored her. It was his pride that he sought out the secret whims of his clients. “Assorted brass knobs, 50p each. Door handles assorted, £2 a pair. What about a brass fingerplate?” He slapped one down on the counter. Muriel looked at it without interest. “And here—” he reached up to a shelf and produced an outstretched brass hand—“we have some brass fingers to go with it.”

Muriel was looking around, poking into the piles of musty books and old clothes. It reminded her of the conservatory at Buckingham Avenue; long summer afternoons stirring through her late father’s newspaper collection, Mother toddling through the hall, muttering her spells against spirit intrusion. Oo-oo-oo, Muriel would cry, and tap the cracked windowpanes, and flap her newspapers. Happy days! where Sylvia’s kitchen extension stood now.

Sholto rubbed his chin. “Or what you could do with,” he said, “is a phrenologist’s head.” He produced one, pushing it across the counter. “Look, Muriel.”

Muriel stared down at the head, and traced with her finger the black lines which divided the skull.

“What are these lines, Sholto?”

“Those show the faculties. Look. Faculty of Imitation. Faculty of Calculation. Time and Tune and Wit.”

“Is that how people work? I’ve often wondered. Does one person have them all?”

Sholto’s grimy fingers probed the head, turning it up to squint at its base. “It’s only a bit cracked,” he said. “I could make you a special price.”

She thought of her wig stand, the blank white slope of its skull. This was progress. One day these faculties would knit together, and she would go out into the world complete. Personality, more thorough than a plastic surgeon, would remould her formless face. “Look,” Sholto said. “Faculty of Progenitiveness. Faculty of Amativeness.”

“Oh, copulation,” Muriel said. “If I had £7.95, I might buy that for my employer, Mr. Sidney.”

“You could have easy terms,” Sholto suggested. Muriel shook her head. “What about a bunch of keys then? £1.50, pick any bunch.”

“What do they unlock?”

“How should I know?”

“What’s the use of them?”

“They’re not use. They’re ornament.”

“I have keys.” Muriel’s eyes roamed about the shop. “You sure you haven’t got a cage, Sholto?”

“If I run across one, I’ll give you first refusal.”

“I’ll have some assorted knobs then,” Muriel said sulkily. She began to rummage through the box that Sholto pushed towards her. “What did you think to the trip?”

“Rip-roaring. What makes Crisp do it, though? Don’t give me this about the C of E. He’s only copying Effie, the time she set that cleaner on fire. He never was happy with his own brand of insanity. No sooner would you say you were Picasso than he’d claim to be Salvador Dali. Remember that time Philip said he was a helicopter? Crisp said, ‘I’m Leobloodynardo,’ and started drawing on the walls.”

“He was never a person of deep originality.”

“Oh, I see, been at the library books, have we?”

“I can talk, if I want to.”

“You’re getting very friendly with Crisp.”

“He’s all right.”

“I hear wedding bells,” Sholto said. He clicked his fingers. “Ding-dong.”

“That’s castanets.”

“All right, don’t get shirty. Going back up the Punjab, are you? Want a bag for your knobs?”

It was five-thirty when Muriel arrived back at Eugene Terrace; the tail end of the hot afternoon. Inside the Mukerjees’ Emporium, a drowsy girl with a pitted bluish face sat by the till on a high stool. She glanced up without interest as Muriel passed the window; her shoulders moved fractionally, and her eyelids drooped again.

Crisp had left. There was a note on the table:
GONE TO EVENSONG
. And I brought doughnuts for our tea, Muriel thought crossly. She dumped the paper bag on a chair and walked around the room for a while, looking in Crisp’s drawers and under his mattress; there was nothing of interest. The room was close and stuffy; outside it smelled like thunder. At least, that was what the people at the doughnut shop said; she could not smell it. Over the Punjab, the sky had turned a leaden colour; pigeons huddled together on the guttering, heads sunk low into their feathers like vultures in cartoons.

Muriel shed her clothes again. With the weight of the day upon her, it wasn’t difficult to become Poor Mrs. Wilmot. Her shoulders slumped, her knees bent, her toes turned in; she sprayed her hair with dry shampoo, and flattened it to her head gritty and streaked with grey, and secured it with two large hairgrips. As she did this, the years crept up and weighed her down; her joints locked, her mouth grew pinched, her hands began to shake. She put on Mrs. Wilmot’s elastic stockings and leaned over with a rheumaticky quiver for her bedroom slippers. What was the real Wilmot doing, she wondered. Probably having a cup of tea or something. Experimentally, she opened her mouth in a silent laugh.

Finally she put on Mrs. Wilmot’s coat, which she needed in all weathers, feeling the cold as she did; it was a coat Sholto had found in a dustbin, no shape at all and the colour of the fluff that collects under beds. She went downstairs. A plump little boy of about twelve years old minded the till. The family were so numerous that, despite the shop’s long hours, she had never seen the same Mukerjee twice. His eyes behind his thick spectacles were glued to his Darth Vader comic; Wilmot passed, and he didn’t look up.

When she returned to Mr. K.’s house she was surprised to find him up and about. “I thought you’d be having your sleep,” she said, as she shuffled dispiritedly into the kitchen. “Course, you know what’s best for you.”

Mr. K. was taping up the kitchen window. “In case of poison gas,” he explained. As he stretched up his garments parted company, exposing the greyish roll of fat above his hips.

“Pardon me,” his lodger said, “course, you know best, but couldn’t it come through the letter box?”

“A welcome thought,” Mr. K. said. “I shall tape it instanter. Would you graciously put on tea kettle?”

Mrs. Wilmot made the tea while Mr. K. went out into the hall to secure his letter box. When it was brewed she poured out for them, and they sat companionably at the kitchen table.

“Woman watching house again today,” Mr. K. said. “Drove by, stopped, got out, waited ten minutes, passed on. Miss Anaemia said it is Snoopers, from the department.”

She nodded, and drank her tea.

“Who is this Snoopers?” He did not expect an answer. There were no answers to the questions which plagued him. He sucked his tea through a sugar lump, and eyed his roll of adhesive tape.

“Any law against keeping pets?” his lodger asked suddenly.

“What?” said Mr. K. “Cats, dogs, horses?”

“Beetles.”

“The famous British sense of humour,” Mr. K. said sadly.

“It’s no joke. I’ve seen them advertised.” She picked up her shopping bag and made off towards the kitchen door with it, her large feet padding softly in their pink bedroom slippers. “I’m going to get a cage,” she muttered. “Great big striped ones as fat as melons.”

Muriel climbed the stairs to the first landing. It grew colder as she ascended, and the smell of decay was pronounced. The ancient paper, with its design of cabbage roses, was peeling from the walls. “Hello there, Mrs. Wilmot,” someone whispered. It was Miss Anaemia, creeping down from her third-floor attic. She emerged into the faint light from the long window, filtered through years of dust; a fragile young woman, little more than a child, with a child’s flat body, minimal features, and a skin so translucent that it was easy to imagine that you saw the circulation of the thin blood beneath it. Her red hair was plastered damply to her head, and her whole body seemed to jump and quiver in a state of perpetual fright.

“I hear you’ve got problems, course I don’t want to pry,” said Poor Mrs. Wilmot.

“Shh. Not so loud.”

“I thought you were at the Polytechnic. Course, I don’t know, I’ve no education.”

“I was.” Tears welled up in the girl’s large eyes. “They made a new timetable. They’ve got split sites. They moved my lectures. I couldn’t find them. So I stopped going.”

“Couldn’t you ask them?”

“I did, but nobody seemed to know who I was.”

“Well, there you are then. Cellar vee, isn’t it? Che sera, sera. And what do you do with yourself now?”

“I’m a claimant. I make up different names. Primrose Hill’s one I go under. Penny Black.” She whispered to herself. “Black Maria, Bad Penny. Faint Hope. Square Peg.”

“Is it frightening?”

“It’s terrifying,” Miss Anaemia said. “It makes your palms sweat.” For a second, before she descended the dark staircase, she laid the palm of her hand, ice-cold and clammy, against Muriel’s cheek.

“Anybody home?” No answer. That didn’t mean, of course, that the house was empty. Sylvia went into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of Perrier water, and took it upstairs. Alistair’s door was still shut. She felt sticky and grimy from the plastic chairs in the committee room, the car’s vinyl upholstery, the dust that hung in the air. Other people’s tobacco smoke had got into her lungs.

She peeled off her clothes, shrugged her towelling robe on, and made for the bathroom. She thought she heard a rustle behind Alistair’s door. “Are you in there?” she said. “Alistair, if you don’t come out soon I’m going to kick this door in.” There was no reply. She didn’t mean it, of course; it was just the small change of domestic violence. She locked herself in the bathroom, took a brisk shower, then scrubbed her face with a soapy substance full of little bits of grit. Exfoliation, she said to herself. How she wished she could really shed her skin, and shed the past with it, dispose of that embarrassing image in the photographs of ten years ago. She had heard of people trying to “purge themselves of their past.” The images employed seemed to become more nasty and drastic the more you thought about it. Exorcism…the exfoliation procedure had left her face blotchy and scored with little red lines. She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. All right, do it, she thought. Find that other old photograph and throw it out. Why today? Well, why not? As murderers often find after years of wishful thinking, the action of a second can free you from the weight of a decade.

She went into the bedroom and opened Colin’s top drawer. A tangle of underwear, and socks he never wore, rolled into balls, fraying round the tops. A colour film, some small change, some bottles of aftershave; most of it bought by Florence, gentle hints from the year when Colin had decided to grow a beard. It hadn’t lasted long, the beard. Nothing lasted long with Colin; the enthusiasms he took up at evening classes, his project for growing vegetables, his ardour for joining the Social Democratic Party—which had fizzled out, come to think of it, when he couldn’t find a stamp to send off his application form. Only his neckties evoked constancy. What was this greasy grey string, left over from the last time ties were narrow? Here was a yellow knitted one, and here was a great flowery orange thing, a relic of the sixties. Dear God. Kipper ties, they called them.

She heard the front door bang.

“Mum? Mum, it’s me, Claire, I’m home.”

“All right, Claire,” she called. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Mum, can I get waffles out of the freezer?”

“Get what you like. I won’t be long.”

With a sudden urgency, she began to rummage through the drawer. Here at the back was the five-year diary that she had once given Colin for Christmas. It was not locked; its key was still taped to it, in a tiny polythene envelope. Colin had never filled the diary in. He considered, he told her, that he had no life worth recording, and to be sure that he was right, she had checked every few months and found the pages blank. He could have filled it in, she thought, after I took such trouble to get it for him. Being a history teacher you’d think he’d like to keep a record. She felt she would like to make sense of the past; of those white years, 1975, 1976, ’77, ’78, ’79. Where had they gone? She had a mental picture of an autumn evening, the year they had moved to Buckingham Avenue; Colin sulking in the garden, refusing to come in though it was getting cold and dark. He hated the sight of me, she thought, he would have left me for two pins; it was only after Claire was born that he calmed down. Presumably his affair was over by then. Something was missing afterwards, as if a large part of his vitality had been drained away. At times she caught him watching her. He looked like someone staring out of a famine poster; preternaturally wise, still, and lacking in a future that was of interest to anybody.

Here it was: a crumpled snapshot under his oldest socks. Its presence there was a tacit admission. He must know that she went through his drawers at intervals; after twenty years he was familiar with her methods of keeping one step ahead. He was not one of those self-contained men who can keep their love affairs a secret. He was one of those pathetic, guilty men, whose deepest need is to be found out.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, switched on the bedside light, and held the photograph under it. She had done all this before, at intervals separated by months when the knowledge that he still kept the picture would nibble away at her complacency, like a woodworm in furniture. Staring and staring didn’t give you any more information. She was young and slim, the girlfriend; woollen hat and scarf, boots, hands thrust into the pockets of a rather anonymous jacket. She leaned against the offside wing of the family Fiat, the one they had got rid of in 1976. Dark hair, shadowy eyes; the effortful smile was like Colin’s own. There was a dim backdrop of leafless trees.

Perhaps she was a teacher. Who else did he meet? Sylvia sucked her lip, brooding. A second later she leaped from the bed in alarm. Her heart pounded; a jangling scream split the air. She tore out of the room, yelled down at her daughter below. “Claire, for God’s sake stop that cooker timer!”

“What?”

“Push the knob in, make it stop, it’s driving me spare.”

The noise stopped. “I didn’t set it off,” Claire called up indignantly.

“Who did then?”

“Alistair.”

“Don’t be daft, he’s in his bedroom.”

Slowly she made her way back, clutching the photograph. Time’s up, she thought sourly. Life’s solid all through, done to a turn, a little bit longer and we’ll smell burning. She took a deep breath, trying to control the thumping behind her ribs.

“Mum, are you coming?”

Claire was whining from the foot of the stairs. “In a second.” She picked up the photograph she had discarded earlier, the one of herself from the family album. She held up the two for comparison. Her hands shook a little. No wonder he preferred the young girl; for a time, anyway. Date for date they matched. Winter 1974; summer, 1975. I’d know her anywhere, she thought; I’d know her right away. She ripped the photographs through and slipped them into the pocket of her jeans, meaning to drop them in the kitchen bin when no one was looking.

CONFESSIONS
etc. (2)

“…that very strange people do congregate. They find each other out and form ghettos. The inadequate personality, the incipient schizophrenic, they feel under threat. Their identity is precarious and human relationships threaten to overwhelm them. But even when a person is totally alienated the need for minimal human contact is still there. So tramps live under bridges, and derelicts in common lodging houses.”

Isabel put down her pen. She wasn’t making headway. Whenever she tried to express herself, jargon got in the way. Years ago, she had been to an evening class to improve her writing skills. It didn’t seem to have improved them. It had been pointless.

And yet, not quite. It was at the writing class that she’d met her Married Man. Everybody has one; you have to meet them somewhere. Colin hadn’t taken the course very seriously. He’d sat there, looking about him, smirking at people’s efforts. They’d gone to the pub after the class and he’d asked her to run away with him. She’d thought he was joking. At first.

Her mind wandered as she tried to put events in order. Her
Confessions
kept straying off the point. I’ll make an outline, she thought, and work from that.

“
AXON
: The records are lost/inconsistent/have gaps in them. So many different workers have been on the case. By the time it got to me it was nearly hopeless.

THEN
: for months at a time I couldn’t get into the house.

WHEN I DID
Mrs. Axon locked me in a bedroom.

WHILE I WAS IN THE BEDROOM
—”

She hesitated, then wrote: “
MRS
.
AXON DIED
.”

“I could have done better.

“But I made a mess of it.

“Why?

“Because I was frightened.

“Why?

“The fact is I couldn’t keep my personal life straight. There was this awful problem of Colin, I didn’t know what to do about him, he was so emotional, he seemed to need me so much, but I didn’t have anything left over from my work to give to anybody. Everything was a problem, job/Colin/home.”

I can’t send it to the newspapers like this, she thought crossly, I’ll have to tidy it up, there are times I wish I’d never, but no, don’t say that; what a relief it will be when it’s done.

“At that time my father had just retired. (He was in banking, like my husband, and that’s why I went into it when I left social work, I thought it was safe.) He was always in his room, doing his hobbies, or so I thought. In fact he was doing much worse. He used to sneak off and pick up women, old women, awful women, the kind of woman who sleeps rough. It was all he could get, I suppose. He wasn’t very prepossessing himself. He said he was lonely.

“He used to meet them in the launderette or at the park, or in the bus station café. He used to buy them cups of tea. They’d be grateful. They didn’t mind doing it out of doors, even in cold weather. He used to come home with clay on the knees of his trousers. I didn’t know what to do.

“He started bringing them home, and I was frantic in case the neighbours found out. For me, in my position…He could have caught something, a disease. He could be getting them pregnant, they weren’t all old. There I was, telling other people how to run their lives. I used to hide his glasses. He could hardly see without them; but I think he used to get out, all the same.

“And then the day came when I did get into the Axon house. There was something funny about the way Muriel looked, and the way her mother talked; as if they were carrying on some elaborate piece of acting, and as if I couldn’t see what was right under my nose. Her mother said Muriel had been out of the house. ‘On the razzle’ was the expression she used.

“I went away and the picture of Muriel remained in my mind, sitting, lumpen, her face downcast, in her peculiar blue smock made out of some kind of furnishing fabric. At first it didn’t occur to me that she might be pregnant. I only saw her, in my mind, ambling through the park, or drinking tea out of a paper cup down at the bus station. It occurred to me, as I ran down the Axons’ front path; and now, all these years later, the thought wakes me up in the middle of the night.

“I didn’t report my suspicion. I didn’t do anything. I cleared off and left the Axons to their own devices. I didn’t go back to the house until I absolutely had to, and by that time Muriel (if she’d really been pregnant) had already given birth. What happened to the baby? Was it a boy or a girl? I think I read somewhere that babies’ corpses often mummify, and turn up years later, uncannily preserved.”

She stopped writing. It didn’t seem very coherent. There was so much that only made sense in the light of her state of mind at the time, and no doubt she had been over-imaginative. That was a fault of hers.

She took a clean sheet of paper and wrote on it,

“I think my husband is having an affair. I don’t know who she is and I hope I don’t find out. I like deceiving myself. It is comfortable. It is the House Speciality.”

Perhaps I should have a drink, she thought. My style leaves something to be desired and perhaps after a drink it would improve. Perhaps a drink would help her to see the connection between things, the connections she sensed and sought. There was no gin, so she had whisky. She wasn’t fussy these days. Alcohol takes you to the heart; you see the True Nature of Events.

There was a feeling of circular motion. It was not entirely the effect of the Scotch on an empty stomach. Here she was, back in town. Here she was, the Wronged Wife; she’d once been the Other Woman. It is a progression people make, but she didn’t see that. Her situation seemed special, sinister, ensnaring. Funny that it’s only after ten years things seem to fit together.

What I need, Colin thought, is a large gin and tonic.

“Anybody home?” No answer. He dropped his jacket—he had not worn it all day—on the chair in the hall, and went into the living room. “Why doesn’t anybody let a bit of air in around here?” He swung open the french windows that looked over the garden. Ought to spray for blackfly this weekend, he thought. He turned to the wall units and opened a cupboard gingerly; he could not trust the door to stay in place, having constructed the units himself last summer with the help of screwdriver provided and simple instructions in Japanese. He held the gin bottle up for inspection; it was a quarter full, so he poured himself a measure into a tumbler which came to hand and, picking it up, set off for the kitchen to look for ice and tonic. There would be lemons, for sure; there were always lemons around Sylvia. She cooked them and squeezed them and ate them and rubbed them on her elbows, like the Esquimaux using up every part of the beast. He found a drop of tonic in a bottle at the back of the fridge. It looked flat. He shook it and watched it fizz, then opened the freezer. There was something like raspberry jam all over the ice cubes. He sighed, slid out the tray, and took it to the sink. He twisted it and nothing happened, so he hammered it against the stainless steel for a while, looking out of the kitchen window; he twisted it again, and the ice cubes flew out and fell into the sink with a clatter. He picked up a couple, pursuing them as they shot away from his fingers, and ran them under the tap to try to get the jam off; before long the ice and water were indistinguishable, and both were running through his fingers.

“Hello, Dad,” said Claire, coming in. “What are you washing the ice cubes for?”

“Because somebody, I don’t say who, has been smearing jam all over the place.”

“It must have been Alistair.”

“It’s funny that he put it round your mouth too, isn’t it?”

“Is this your drink?” Claire put her forefinger into his tumbler and licked it. “Yuk, that’s horrible.”

“Watch out, you’ll have jam in it.”

“I tell you what, Dad, I could make you some tea.”

“This will do me nicely, Claire. If you’ll take your fingers out of it, I’ll have it without the ice.”