Vacant Possession (13 page)

“It was called Writing for Pleasure and Profit,” he replied. He could not imagine why it was only this aspect of the business that engaged her.

“So which did you get? Pleasure, or Profit, or some of both?”

“Neither really. We soon left. It wasn’t for us.”

“So that it may look like a silly man breaking up a marriage, but it is really more like adult education?” Suzanne examined her fingernails. “I can’t imagine you going off with somebody. What was she like?”

“That doesn’t matter. I didn’t go off with her, can’t you see that’s the point I’m trying to make? I wanted to, I meant to, but in the end I couldn’t, because of the responsibilities I already had. I made her promises; in fact, the first time we met…it was a time when, looking back now, I feel that more or less I was out of my mind.”

“So you got back in your mind and forgot all about her?”

“Oh no. It’s not as easy as that.”

“Didn’t you know what you wanted?”

“I wanted a new life. But in the end, you see, I preferred the life I had. My nerve failed. It’s often that way.”

“For you, perhaps. I expect it was just money really.”

“I wish,” he said, “you would not speak so disrespectfully of money.”

“But how could you have supported another wife, and all of us?”

“Oh, you see the difficulty! Men do so seldom leave their wives.”

“It happens every day.”

“It happens not so often as you think.”

“But my case is quite different.”

“So you say. But you don’t know what might happen, you don’t know what might pull him back to her. It was Claire that pulled me back. Your mother got pregnant. You might think that if I could contemplate leaving a woman with three young children, then I could leave her with four; but as soon as she told me, I thought of the baby, the innocent baby who couldn’t possibly be blamed for any of it. And then it seemed a horrible thing—” Colin stopped. He saw that he was doing himself no good.

“So it was the baby that decided it.” She smiled. His confession, which had been so difficult to make, had not disturbed her at all. It had not helped her; she was beyond help, simply impervious.

“I suppose what it shows,” he said, pricked into a final effort, “is how unpredictable human emotions are. I thought that my marriage was over. But here I am.”

“Yes, here you are. But people want children: you can predict that. He’s always wanted children, and Isabel has never been able to have any.”

“Who?” Colin said.

“That’s the name of his wife. Isabel.”

He felt a superstitious shudder. It was as if she had taken the name straight out of his brain.

“This woman, who is she? What’s her maiden name?”

“How should I know?”

How dreadful, he thought, what a ghastly coincidence that they should have the same name; his Isabel, and this unknown woman so soon to be tricked and left by the spry, the young, the fertile. “Poor woman,” he said.

“Poor nothing. She’s a prize neurotic. She’s made his life a misery.”

“There’s no married man,” he said angrily, “who has an affair, who doesn’t tell the girl that his wife makes his life a misery. I did it, about your mother.”

“Well, that’s true, isn’t it? She does.”

“That’s beside the point. Oh, I don’t know.” Colin ran his hand through his hair. “Perhaps I was wrong to say that human emotions are unpredictable. Predictable is just what they are, from where I stand. If there’s one thing you can rely on, Suzanne, it’s the perfidy and cowardice of married men. And if there’s one thing you can’t rely on, it’s contraceptives.”

“Oh, we didn’t use contraceptives,” Suzanne said. “It’s unnatural and unnecessary. I read a book about it. People should go back to simpler methods. Like withdrawal.”

Colin could not believe what he had heard. “Who is this imbecile?” he demanded. “Who is he, this moron you’ve got entangled with? What’s his name? What does he do for a living?”

“His name’s Jim Ryan,” she said, stony-faced. “You probably haven’t met him yet. He’s your new assistant bank manager.”

When Miss Anaemia came downstairs, she found Mr. Kowalski kneeling on the floor in the hall, his ear pressed to the knob of the kitchen door. “New doorknobs,” she said brightly. “Get them on the market, did you? Or are they another mystery?”

Mr. Kowalski got to his feet with a groan. “Man rings the telephone,” he told her. “I answer, says ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’ Is a code.”

“Could be,” the girl said. “Or a wrong number. Anyway, I was telling you, this woman came. She accused me of having relations with a man.”

“Dirty minds,” Mr. K. said. He touched her elbow in a commiserating way. Her helplessness moved him. “Poor girl. I think I have seen you long ago. In Warsaw.”

“I’ve never been east of Thanet Island.”

“I spoke metaphorically,” Mr. K. said.

“It must have been my double. I’ve got a double, you know. I must have, because someone stopped me in the street once and said, ‘How’s your Auntie Frieda?’ It was embarrassing. Anyway, this woman, she wanted to inspect the bedsheets. I told her she could if she liked. On the way out she pretended she’d forgotten which was the door. She walked in the cupboard.”

“Planting a microphone,” Mr. K. suggested.

“No, looking for his coat. This bloke. If I’d got twenty blokes, they couldn’t touch my benefit. But if I’ve got one, they say he’s supporting me.”

Mr. Kowalski did not know what she was talking about, and this was not the only cause of his distress and alarm. He took the girl’s arm. “In Bratislava we had a funeral,” he said. “This seemed to work, but lately, everything takes a turn for the worse. This Snoopers. Phone calls. Voices of strange women. Like Auntie Frieda in the street. They get in here and change my doorknobs. I lock a door, they unlock it. This house is going to the bad.”

“Perhaps we all ought to move out. Get a change of address.”

“But where? If you are falsely dead in Bratislava, what avails leaving Napier Street? Besides, my dear, there is the dough, the bread, the vouchers. Those are expressions,” he said, “I keep a book of them. What would happen to regular employment at sausage factory?”

“Oh, you needn’t go away as far as that. A job’s a job.” She felt a restless pity for him; as much as you could for a nutter.

“This is all I do,” he said. “I might as well be dead all these years. This is all I do, go to a factory for preserving meat.” He shambled across the room, aimless, like some large farmyard animal avoiding its pen. Tears glinted in his bloodshot eyes; probably they’d been there all along, only she hadn’t noticed them. She never thought much about anybody else; claiming benefit was a full-time occupation. Her mind was getting narrowed down somehow; certain phrases like “means” and “rebate” seemed to have taken on an over-riding significance, layers and layers of portent, which only peeled away for a split second, just as she was waking or falling asleep. When she saw a queue, she had an urge to join it. A hundred forms she must have filled in, two hundred; all this information spinning away from her, out of her head and off into space. The process was extracting something from her, filing away at her essence; she was no more than the virgin white space between two black lines, no more than a blur behind a sheet of toughened glass. “Toodle-oo,” she said to Mr. K. and went out to pick up her dry cleaning. She was always having things cleaned nowadays; her own and other people’s. She liked the dockets they gave you, with their mysterious serial numbers and list of exemptions closely printed; she liked the hot, depleted, bustling air, and the staff (flaking skins, pinpricked fingers) who were liable for nothing at all.

Muriel was feeling lonely. The Colorado Beetle hadn’t turned up after all, and her life was certainly lacking in something or other. Companionship, that was it. At a loose end this Saturday, she wiled away her time filling in a coupon for a man for Lizzie Blank. She ticked the boxes describing herself as clothes-conscious and creative, and as her interests opted for good food and psychology. She put down her height as six foot two, because she didn’t want to be messed about by any dwarves.

Evening came. On Saturday evening she went out on the town. She was a rich woman. She could afford whatever she wanted, a club with a variety act and the pub and fish and chips afterwards. It was Lizzie who had the outing. Poor Mrs. Wilmot would not have liked it.

Mr. K. had barricaded himself into the kitchen. He huddled over the stove, thinking of his long career in that part of Europe that now lay beyond the Berlin Wall. Sometimes he would take out his old atlas, open it at page 33, and trace the borders with his finger. They did not mean much; all borders seemed uncertain. He shuddered at the sound of the great boots on the stairs. “Poor Mrs. Wilmot would never tread so.” Later, when the house had fallen quiet, he crept out and looked around him; looked up the stairs, and out of the small round window by the front door. Presently he knelt down, steadying himself with a hand on the wall. For a moment he was tempted to pray: Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, hail, our Life, our Sweetness and our Hope. Instead he leaned forward and cursed into the kitchen door-knob, in his fluent but ungrammatical Russian.

“Life is Sacred,” said Florence Sidney, heaving herself into the back seat of the Toyota. “If I’ve said it once, Colin, I’ve said it fifty times, it would have been more considerate to us all to have bought a vehicle with four doors.”

Shut up, you’re in, aren’t you? Colin thought mutinously. Aloud he said, “The Rolls is away being gold-plated. You know the problem.”

“There’s no need for sarcasm,” his sister said. “Where’s Suzanne, anyway? She could have come with us to see her grandmother.”

“She’s got enough on her plate at the moment,” Sylvia said.

“I think you’re very wrong to encourage her into an abortion.”

“It looks as though you may get your way anyhow,” Colin said. “She isn’t listening to us. Look, let’s give it a rest, shall we? We’ve enough to do at the hospital.”

Saturday afternoon visiting was two-thirty till four-thirty. It seemed strange not to take the familiar path to A Ward (Female). Colin was no admirer of change for its own sake, and was disconcerted by the turn his mother had taken.

The Ward Sister met them at the door. “I’m so pleased you’ve come,” she said. “We’ve made out who she is.”

“What do you mean, who she is?”

“Well, she’s taken on quite a new lease of life. You must remember, Mrs. Sidney, I’m one of the old timers, I remember your mother when she came in.”

“She’s not my mother,” Sylvia said. “She’s their mother.”

“It comes to the same,” Sister said carelessly. “‘I’m nothing,’ she used to say. ‘I’m empty, I’m nobody at all.’ And then a few weeks after that she just gave up speaking, didn’t she?”

All that was quite true. When they had come out of duty to sit by her silent bed, she had never shown any sign of noticing their presence at all. She must move, when they were not on the ward; but not much, the staff said, they moved her. What you mainly needed for geriatric nursing was a strong back.

“And so,” said Sister, “since you left the other day she’s chatted on nineteen to the dozen. We’ve not been able to shut her up. We had to give her a little pill to keep her quiet for a bit.”

“But it’s all a mystery to me,” Florence said. “Whatever’s woken her up again, after all this time? What did you mean, you’ve made out who she is? Who is she?”

“Princess May of Teck,” the nurse said. “You know, Queen Mary, as she was before she was married. It took some doing to make it out. It was Dr. Furness that hit on it when he was doing the ward round, course he’s had an education.”

“But is it usual to think that you’re a member of the royal family? I mean—”

The nurse gave Florence a sideways look. Every variety of madness was quite usual here, as was every degree of decline and dilapidation. “Dr. Furness said it was a benign delusion. It’s not unusual, as these things go. There was a poor old lass came in with hypothermia, last winter it would have been, that thought she was her present Majesty. Used to knock her drip bottle about, thinking she was launching a cruise liner. The thing is, we were so short of beds we had to put her on A Ward, temporary. We think perhaps that’s what gave your mum the idea, she did use to give her some funny looks.”

“She gave people funny looks? That’s more than we ever got.”

“Perhaps she was beginning to come round then, do you see? Only perhaps it was a bit cold for her, and she went back in till spring.”

“What happened to her? The other old lady?”

“She passed on.”

“But she left a legacy,” Colin said. Delusions were handed on now like tables and chairs; shabby furniture from vacated brains.

On B Ward (Female), two long rows of ancient ladies faced each other, propped up by pillows; solid slabs of pillows, which bolstered their brittle bones. There was an air about them of tenacious and bottled vivacity, like the faces of those tribeswomen, bowed and wrinkled, who are surprisingly revealed to be only thirty years old. Their skeletal fingers, jigging on the bedcovers, seemed to be playing with strings of beads. Sometimes, a line of spittle running from their mouths, they would call out to each other in the querulous voices of the deaf; when a nurse passed they would hail her, and point with an imperious downward finger to troubling bits of their anatomy hidden under the sheets. As Colin and his wife and sister walked down the ward, their beaky heads swivelled, like a row of birds on a telegraph wire; their little voices piped in exclamation, and the sleeves of their bedjackets fluttered. They were all showing signs of upset; it was nearly time for the tranquilliser trolley.

“Hello, Mum,” Colin said. His heart sank. He noted her tight lips and her ramrod spine, and he knew she was back. Propriety had always been her obsession; she looked him over, and looked at Sylvia and Florence, and spoke in a dry and peremptory tone: “Ladies, where are your gloves?”

Florence took a step back, colliding with the nurse.

“Steady up,” the nurse said.

“I can’t do it,” Florence said. “I know what the end of this will be. You’ll want to send her home. I can’t take care of her, not any more. I gave up my career at the DHSS for her, and I’ve only just got myself under way again, after all these years. I won’t do it, you’ll have to keep her.”