Vacant Possession (18 page)

“Who was your last girl?” Lizzie asked. “Somebody from a circus?”

“Now don’t take on,” Clyde said. “Here, they’re calling last orders, and I’ve hardly wet my whistle. Your round.”

In the scramble for last orders, several customers tripped over Clyde’s legs. He cursed them horribly. “I may as well tell you now,” Lizzie said, “you won’t do for me. I like manners.”

“I’ve a good job,” Clyde insisted. “Fancy cakes to customers’ requirements. I’m highly thought of. Every year I do a butter sculpture for the Rotarians’ dinner dance.” Lizzie shook her head. “Well, we’re not packing it in yet. I’ve paid out hard-earned money for this introduction. I can see you’re just my type. I could really take a fancy to you.”

Lizzie was adamant. Clyde’s morosity deepened. “Have a heart,” he said. “You’re the first bird I’ve really had a chance with. It’s not good for me to be rejected, it gives me complexes. I’ll follow you,” he warned. “I’ll track you down. I’m very loyal. You’ll never shake me off.”

“If you follow me, I’ll call a policeman.”

“I bet you would,” Clyde said. “I bet some of them policemen are customers, eh? If you’re not a pro, why do you dress like one, eh? Women like you shouldn’t apply to agencies. You could be liable for it, you put down your wrongful employ. You put you was medical, bet you’ve never been near a hospital in your life. Except down the clap clinic.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Lizzie Blank said with dignity. “I’m leaving. You can drink my drink if you like.”

“Oh, come back,” Clyde said. “Come back. I really like you, you know.”

But Lizzie swung the door back in his face, and stepped out alone into the street.

It was Sunday teatime. Florence brought her shortbread round; and her thoughts.

“Girls manage,” she said. “Girls today are independent. There’s no stigma any more.”

“Nobody said there was stigma,” Sylvia said levelly. “Nobody mentioned it. But we’ve got to think about her future.”

“What about the baby?” Florence cried excitedly. “Isn’t that entitled to a future too? It may not be very convenient for you, Sylvia, it may not fit into your plans, but it’s a question of the sanctity of life.”

“If you say that phrase once more,” Sylvia said, “I’ll pick up this shortbread and force it piece by piece down your throat until you choke.”

“There’s no need for that,” Florence said composedly. “I’m entitled to speak my mind. And it’s no good telling me that I don’t know Life, Sylvia. We at the DHSS know all about hardship. From behind our counter we see human existence in the raw. You can’t tell me anything.”

“I can never understand it,” Colin said. “You people who are against abortion and euthanasia are always against artificial insemination and surrogate mothers as well. I don’t know what your position is. Do you want more people in the world, or don’t you?”

“I think you’re being just a teeny bit frivolous, Colin,” Florence said. “I’ve nothing at all against artificial insemination. For cows. The point I’m trying to make is that even if this young man doesn’t want to marry Suzanne—and she can hardly expect him to up and leave his poor wife—then there’s no reason why she shouldn’t have the baby and bring it up herself. Lots of people do it. They always have.”

“I wish you’d stop discussing me,” Suzanne said. “It’s my choice and I’ve made it. Leave me alone. I want to be on my own.”

“Do you?” Sylvia said. “I’ve got news for you. You will be, love—whether you want it or not.”

Colin went into the living room. He threw himself into a chair and switched on the TV. His daughter followed him. “Do you know what Jim says now?” she demanded.

“No, but I can see that you’re going to tell me.”

“He says he’s got to stay with Isabel because she’s on the point of a nervous breakdown. Her father’s just died and she’s gone all to pieces about it. She says she wished him dead so she’s to blame.”

“Her father?” Colin sat up. “What was he called?”

“How do I know? Dad, whenever I ask you for any help all you do is ask the most irrelevant questions. This woman Isabel, I could tell she was mad when I talked to her on the phone.”

“You talked to her on the phone? What did you do that for?”

“I thought we might meet and talk things over.”

“Did you tell her your name?”

“What do you mean? Of course I did.”

“What did she say?”

“Look, don’t get all excited, Dad, I know you think it was the wrong thing to do, but put yourself in my shoes. I told you, she sounded crazy. She didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.”

“Perhaps Jim hadn’t told her about you.”

“I thought that…but if he hadn’t, how would she have known my name at all? It was as if she knew me—do you know what I mean?—in another context entirely.”

Colin fell back into his chair and stared at the TV. It was an early evening variety show. To the accompaniment of facetious patter, a magician held up a burning spike and passed it slowly through the forearm of his studio volunteer. The audience applauded. The magician withdrew the brand, and held it flickering aloft. The volunteer’s face wore a set, worried smile. There was an expectant hush; a roll of drums; and then the magician, with great deliberation, whipped the flame through the air and poked it cleanly through his victim’s chest.

Now the summer was over. Suzanne moped about the house, making no plans. Her father understood her failure of will. “When the baby’s born,” she said, “Jim will think differently about it.”

Every night she scanned the
FLAT LETS
column in the evening paper. The properties were taken by the time she got to the phone. She talked about going back to Manchester to her friends, to join a squat in Victoria Park, but she did nothing about it. Pregnancy made her lethargic. Such energy as she could summon she spent on keeping out of her mother’s way. “You should have got rid of it before it was too late,” Sylvia said. “Upsetting us all like this. Breaking up our family life.”

Outside the house, Sylvia was busier than ever. She had joined a body called ECCE, invented and chaired by the vicar—Environmental Concern Creates Employment—and she spent a lot of time with Francis, attending meetings and lobbying at the town hall. ECCE wanted a grant to get to work on some of the derelict land left in the wake of the motorway link. It wanted to take a few teenagers out of the dole queue, perhaps “offer hope,” as it put it, to some of the older, long-term unemployed. Urban renewal was its object. Colin could not applaud it, not entirely. Come friendly bombs and fall on the entire North West and Midlands was more his idea. He could not remember a time—except after his break-up with Isabel—when his mood had been so black.

The vicar, he noticed, talked constantly about sewers. We were living, he said, on the legacy of the Victorians. Britain’s sewers had reached crisis point; a whole army of the unskilled could be put to work, renewing the system. To anyone who would listen he painted a vividly horrible picture of the disruption and decay which the pavements hid from view. Hermione had become a vegan. Colin felt sorry for him at times. His standards of comfort must be low, if he found comfort in Sylvia.

It was understandable that Sylvia should wish to spend as much time as possible outside the house. Each member of the family seemed to have marked out his own territory. Alistair, seldom at home himself, kept his bedroom locked whether he was in it or not. No one cared to imagine what lay behind the door. It had not been cleaned in months. Suzanne stayed in the bedroom from which she had evicted Karen; moon-faced and lank-haired, perpetually tearful, she crept downstairs when she heard her mother going out, and lumbered up again when she heard Sylvia’s key in the front door. Karen had colonised the living room. A studious child, she did her homework with a green felt-tipped pen, sitting at the big table. Presently she was found to have carved her initials in this table, and to have commenced a more ambitious work, “
ALISTAIR IS A W
—.” She was mutinous about the interruption to her labours. Colin might have let her finish, if it would not have meant the expense of a new table. He did not know that the young were interested in carving any more. It seemed a charming survival from a more innocent age.

The kitchen was occupied by Lizzie Blank, the monstrous domestic; without her labours, the house would cease to be a going concern. She was joined there by Claire, who was doing her cookery badge; her boiled eggs were often the only hot food prepared in the course of a day, but after the consumption of a few dozen they tended to pall. Sylvia, if she wanted peace and privacy, was driven to the marital bedroom, repository of her blighted hopes.

Is it possible, Colin asked himself, that I once really loved Sylvia? Did my heart beat faster at her approach? And not just with fear? Since the debacle ten years ago, Colin had come to believe that romantic love is an artefact, an invention of the eighteenth century. In a proper world, waning passion for breast and thigh would have been replaced by a solid affection for broad acres, an admiration for the odd copse and millstream. Given a proper respect for the social order, he would never have looked twice at Sylvia; it was hard to imagine her bringing him anything except some bad debts and a consumptive cow. In a proper world, their marriage would never have happened; he blames the century for his plight, the Rousseauist affectations of his forebears.

Meanwhile the two back rings on the cooker had given out entirely. The electric kettle had fused, and they had to boil up water in a milk pan. The toaster burned everything that was put into it, then catapulted it around the room, and the washing machine, unless operated on the Delicates cycle, pumped water all over the floor.

That pernicious fallacy was flourishing again in Colin’s life: that given Isabel, it would all be different. He knew it was a fallacy, and it caused him pain; he tried to uproot it from his life, to stamp it out. But he scanned all crowds, department stores on a Saturday, the people at the railway station that he passed every night as he drove home from school. The image in his mind was the image of the woman in the photograph, and what frightened him most was the knowledge that he might pass her in the street, stand behind her at the checkout in the supermarket, and not even notice her, so fast and so much did women change, making over their bodies and their emotions like deceitful insects from one year to the next. Isabel was an aberration; but must he not have his aberrations? He looked into the faces of women drivers who pulled up next to him at traffic lights.

The academic year had now begun. The bill came in for redecorating the kitchen. Sylvia thought that, after all, they ought to buy a new dining table; she could not undertake the purchase and laundering of tablecloths, because she and Lizzie Blank would soon be fully occupied. Mrs. Sidney was coming home. Twice a week now they went to St. Matthew’s to see her, and the hospital was talking about a discharge date.

Throughout the summer, the old lady had remained unshakable in her royal delusions; but these had not hindered her physical progress. She was moved to C Ward; she had her own chair in the day room, and made her neighbours miserable by grilling them on protocol and criticising their dress.

“Look here,” said Colin, when Sylvia sent him to buttonhole the consultant. “You can’t seriously expect us to manage her at home. One of the nurses told me that it was quite usual to believe that you were a member of the royal family. That can’t be right?”

“How painfully,” said the physician, “has she imposed order on the chaos of her internal world! All time has stopped for her. Reality is many-sided. If she remains incontinent, of course there are these special pads you can get.”

“But for God’s sake,” Colin said, “we’re not nurses, we won’t know how to deal with her. What will she think has happened, where will she think she is? She’s used to hospital life.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, “there we have it. We believe the rigidity of institutional life has provided a too forceful model for her inner reality. She has become occupied with rules, procedures, precedents, and routines. The institution has become, in fact, an external psychosis. Besides that,” he said impatiently, “if she shouts at you we can give her a pill.”

“I’ve never heard such rubbish,” Sylvia said when he got home. She was sitting in the kitchen with Francis; Francis, with evident enjoyment, was eating a boiled egg. “It’s a con trick, all this about discharging people into the community. They’re doing it to save money.”

“Quite true,” Francis said, dabbing at his upper lip with a piece of kitchen roll. “Community care properly carried through is a most expensive option. Done shabbily, it’s cheap. The social workers, God bless them, have been urging it for years. Now they’ve fallen right into the budgeters’ trap.”

“I’ve never heard you ask God to bless anyone before,” Colin said.

“Francis is right.”

“I know he is. That doesn’t help us though.”

“Daddy,” Claire said, “you should see the way Lizzie eats eggs, it’s really disgusting. She cuts a piece off the end, then she sucks it out—like this—”

“And Florence won’t give up her job to look after her,” Sylvia said. “She loves it, turning people down for heating allowances, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, now why should she give up her job?” Colin said. “Be fair. She did her share of caretaking before Mother went into St. Matthew’s. If Mother comes home, we’ll have to split her between us.”

“You mean, me and Florence will have to split her. You’ll be sheltering behind your job. I’ll be running up and down stairs with disgusting buckets and bandages—”

“You make it sound like Scutari.”

“—and you’ll be sitting in your nice tidy office ruling lines and sticking little coloured pins in wall charts.”

“Perhaps Colin can help out at weekends,” Francis suggested. “And can’t you get an attendance allowance?”

“I’ll have to ask Florence about that,” Colin said. “She’ll know the daily rate for a lady-in-waiting.”

“I wish I had a job,” Sylvia said. “I wish I could go out to work and escape the things that are going on in this family. I should have done that years ago, got a full-time job and made myself independent and let you lot get on with it. At least before I was married I had an income to call my own, but since then I’ve been a slave to my family.”

“I always thought you married straight from the schoolroom,” the vicar said. “What was your work?”

The question caught Sylvia unprepared. “I was in charcuterie,” she replied hastily.

“Can you get Lizzie to work some extra hours?” Colin asked. “We’ll afford it somehow.”

“She has a night job. Hermione wanted her, but she said no.”

“Well, ask her again. Perhaps her circumstances have changed.”

“I could up her hourly rate a bit.”

“No, I don’t think you could. Unless bankruptcy takes your fancy.”

“We can’t expect her to work for love. When the baby comes we’ll be wading around up to the knees in excrement.”

“We will be anyway,” the vicar said, “if something isn’t done about Britain’s sewers. Do you know that in Greater Manchester there’ve been fifty major collapses in ten years? They measure them by how many double-decker buses you could drive through.”

“What an extraordinary concept,” Colin said whimsically. “I wonder if the passengers are given any warning?”

October came. Suzanne was in her fifth month; the miners’ dispute with the National Coal Board was in its eighth. Sylvia laid candles in, despising the government’s assurances that there would be no power cuts. That would be the limit, she said, spending New Year’s Day in the dark. Suzanne stopped telephoning Jim Ryan, and gave herself over to waiting. “I’m glad I’m pregnant,” she said. “It’s something to do.”

Not far away, in Wilmslow, an Iron Age corpse was found in a bog. “Here, let me see it,” Alistair said excitedly, tearing the newspaper from his father’s hands. “‘The whole body survived because of the absence of—’ what’s this?”

“Oxygen,” Karen said, reading over his shoulder. “Didn’t you do no chemistry? ‘Because of the absence of oxygen in the water-logged bog.’”

“Here, give it to me, it’s mine,” Alistair said, shrugging his sister off and hunching over the newspaper. “‘May have been a ritual sacrifice.’ We could do with something like that for us rites.”

“What rites?” Colin enquired.

“That we have at us den. Austin runs them, sometimes we have guest ministers. It’s like evensong, but bloodier. Listen to this, Kari. ‘…bashed him twice on the head with a narrow-bladed axe, and slashed his jugular vein to obtain his blood.’”

“I hope this isn’t giving you ideas,” Sylvia said disapprovingly.

“This is how he was found. ‘Face twisted and squashed into one shoulder, forehead deeply puckered, teeth clenched tightly together…’” Alistair laughed raucously. “Sounds just like you, Dad.”

Colin took the paper from his son. He ran his eyes over the description of the bog man, and noted that the historian Tacitus had opined that the barbarians drowned in bogs those who had committed “heinous crimes, such as adultery.” He felt indignant; the poor man might just have been mugged. There was a knock at the kitchen door. Lizzie Blank was arriving for work, taking off her leopard-skin jacket. “Can I have that paper when you’ve finished with it?” she asked. Colin sucked his underlip speculatively. “He is expected to go on show to the public,” he read, “freeze-dried, at the British Museum, in about two years’ time.”

These days Muriel found that she was seeing less and less of her old friends. She still called at Crisp’s to change her personality, but very often he was out, and there was no longer a note on the table to say where he was attending service. The nights began to draw in, and Sholto’s shop was burgled, cleaned out over two successive nights by people who came in through the skylight. The shop was to be closed down anyway; he had lost his job, and was sleeping rough. They were drifting apart; she doubted that there would be any day trips next summer.

Clyde, from the dating agency, had been as good as his word. He’d told her he’d track her down. It was foolish of her, she now realised, to have let Lizzie Blank use Poor Mrs. Wilmot’s address. He was neglecting his butter sculpture in favour of hanging around in the street. He scanned the upper windows of Mr. K.’s house, and paced around the block with his great hands swinging. You had to credit him with determination, and initiative too. He knocked at the door one day, with a baker’s tray and some cock-and-bull story, and gave Mr. K. a wheatmeal loaf.

Mr. K. shut the door on him before his story was over. The features seemed to have shrunk in his coarse bristling face, as if his eyes wanted to turn and look into the skull. He held the loaf at arm’s length, and carried it into the hall; there was a small table in the hall, and there he placed it. With one hand he massaged his ribs, around the heart.

When Miss Anaemia came home she stopped off to poke its crust with her starved finger. “Your bread’s come,” she called. She went into the kitchen. “What are you doing cleaning a gun?” she asked. Then she burst into tears. “They’ve stopped my giro,” she said. “They’ve accused me of cohabiting with a giant.”

“Wait,” cried Mr. K. He put down the gun. “It is the same giant who delivered the loaf, there could not be two such. I took him for some pal of Snoopers.” He wrung his rag between his hands. “I have asked Poor Mrs. Wilmot to cast light on the matter, but she cannot. She says that she does not know the giant, and the giant does not know her.” He sat down shakily in a kitchen chair, holding his head. “I am ill, my dear young lady, with the suspense. I have a message in the hall, menacing me about my letter box, signed by Olga Korbut. That is why I am cleaning my Luger. As for the bread, it is no doubt poisoned. Please to leave it where it is, and if in need take some of this Hovis.”