Vacant Possession (9 page)

There were more than thirty women now packed into the Snug, perched on each other’s knees, flicking peanuts at each other, rocking and shrieking with laughter, and addressing the odd shout of encouragement to Poor Mrs. Wilmot. The younger women had stripped off their overalls and bundled them into their shopping bags, and were heading back from the Ladies; “Hutch up, hutch up,” they cried. “Where’s Edna with them drinks, I don’t know, taken the kitty and run off to Monte Carlo!”

“Course,” said Mrs. Wilmot under her breath, “it was good of Muriel to fetch me doings from the office. Course I’m not sure what I ought to have, I ought to have forms; course, I’m not sure.”

“Cheer up,” said Leslie-Anne, digging her hard in the ribs. “What are you mumbling on about now?”

Caught unawares, Mrs. Wilmot lurched forward and began to cough violently. With cries of alarm the women nearest to her slapped her on the back. “Here’s Edna with them drinks,” Maureen called, and Edna began to pass the order over their heads: “Six Pernods and blackcurrants, a port and lemon for Poor Mrs. Wilmot, seven Tía Marías and Cokes; and a Piña Colada for Yvonne.”

The noise level rose, the blue fug thickened and drifted, cocktail cherries rolled gaily across the tables. All around Poor Mrs. Wilmot, her colleagues were swaying from side to side on their chairs and stools, singing “Y Viva España.” As the debris around her accumulated, her timid little hand shot out and began to sort the cigarette packets, piling the cellophane and foil to one side; as the merriment grew, she looked about her, a swift glance from side to side; seeing herself unobserved, she seized up a packet, emptied it with one practised movement, and swept the cigarettes to the left of the table, while the papers went to the right. They had reached the third round of drinks by then, and her eyes were watering more than ever; never the centre of attention in her life before, she shook inwardly, her head nodded, she looked about her and showed her gums in a frequent wavering smile.

“Poor Mrs. Wilmot’s enjoying herself,” Leslie-Anne said, and returned to her argument with Edna; a friend from Dispatch had left to pursue matrimony full-time, and Edna said anyone was a flaming idiot who gave up a good packing job with three million out of work.

“Let’s hope she gets something out of him,” Edna said. “She got nothing out of the last one.”

“She did. She got shag-pile carpets. You had to take your shoes off when you went in her house.”

“Bugger that for a game of coconuts,” Edna said, unconvinced; it was an expression much in vogue among the rippers. “She took on that Norman when he was a cripple, and he used to sit in his wheelchair and hit her with his stick. She’s too soft-hearted. This’n’ll give her the run-around. He started giving his first wife’s stuff away before her body was out of the house. He went round after the funeral and proposed to Trudie Thorpe’s daughter.”

“He didn’t!”

“He did! Anyway, he gave her a sideboard.”

Muriel listened. This is how their affairs are managed, she thought. Lust, assault; the exchange of furniture. These women had life at their fingertips. She watched Edna, expostulating, tossing the fourth Export Lager down her throat. Her eyes shone, her cheeks shone, and even her bared teeth. I could practise Edna, Muriel thought, I could crack her in one night. She felt in her bag for Mrs. Wilmot’s papers, for the documents that tied her colleague to the working world. It was six-thirty now, and some of the men were beginning to drift homewards, carried out into the wet blue street by the jeers of their mates; a game of darts was in progress, and the women never thought of moving. Their faces were flushed and their eyes alight; Raquel’s mascara ran in black trails down her cheeks, and Leslie-Anne lurched from her chair and staggered into the Ladies to throw up. Edna came back from the bar with a handful of packets of crisps; she stuck another cigarette in her mouth. “Bugger these free-issue,” she said to Maureen. “Have one of these Balkan Sobranie. I’ve ordered us all pie and peas.”

Presently the pianist arrived. Freddo lurched through from the Public, a gangling Welshman with a solemn face and a loud check jacket. He leaned on the piano and somebody passed him up a pint. “I left my heart,” he sang, “in San Francisco.” Poor Mrs. Wilmot tipped back her head and laughed her stifled laugh. Suddenly she dived into her handbag and pulled out her wage packet; tore it open, and scattered its contents onto the table.

“Let it all go,” she wheezed, “what does it matter? Let’s enjoy ourselves while we can, girls! Let’s have one of them Bacardis, and get one for Muriel!”

It was half-past eight before the party broke up. Muriel took care of her bag; she took care of the expressions on her face, and of a few ideas that were beginning to run through her head. Mrs. Wilmot was half carried through the doors, supported under her elbows by Maureen and the green-faced Leslie-Anne. Outside on the pavement, with a cry of “oh, blimey,” Leslie-Anne dropped her and sped to the gutter, where she bent over and retched. It had been a lovely evening. Poor Mrs. Wilmot staggered back against the wall. Over her pinny she wore the long string of cultured pearls which her workmates had given her to remember them by. Her eyes closed. Her life was over, she thought: she was entirely slipping from view. She hummed softly to herself: “Where little cable cars, Climb halfway to the stars…” Soundless, she laughed.

As soon as she saw Mr. Kowalski and his house, Muriel knew it was where she must live. It was a big house, rambling and damp and dark; a permanent chill hung over the rooms. It had been condemned long ago, put on a schedule for demolition, but it seemed likely that before its turn came it would demolish itself, quietly crumbling and rotting away, with its wet rot and dry rot and its collection of parasites and moulds. There were only two lodgers, herself and a young girl, attracted by the card in the newsagent’s window, by the low rent and by the faint spidery foreign hand setting out the terms in violet ink.

Two days went by, after Mrs. Wilmot’s party. During those two days she practised; then she called on Mr. K.

She stood on the doorstep, presenting an altogether lacklustre appearance. “I hear you’ve got a room to rent,” she said. “I could do with a room.”

Mr. Kowalski stood inside the hallway. A low wattage but unshaded bulb cast upon his caller a mottled and flickering pattern of shadows. “Step where I can see you,” he ordered.

The visitor complied, turning up her sunken face. Her hands were blue with the raw autumn cold. Her mouse-coloured coat with its shawl collar reached almost to her ankles; her feet stuck out, monstrously huge in holey bedroom slippers.

“Here’s me stuff,” she said faintly. She indicated a bundle behind her, a battered old suitcase tied up with a plastic clothesline.

Mr. K. appraised her. His eyes were suspicious, sunk into a roll of fat. He stuck his thumbs into his belt, and glared at her in the swaying light; a meek and harmless creature, dowdy and friendless, and with a terrible cough. “Come in,” he said, falling back. “Give me your baggage to port. Come in, you poor old woman, come in.”

Kowalski, she learned, was only a version of his name. The real one had fewer vowels and more of the lesser-used consonants in proximity. He had learned English from the World Service, picked up on his illegal receiving set; latterly, from the instructions on packets of frozen food.

For some years Mr. K. had been a shift worker at the sausage-and-cooked-meats factory. His shift was permanent nights; he preferred it that way. He had a grey skin, for he never saw the daylight, and sad nocturnal pupils to his eyes. His moustache was ragged and bristly, and he wore trousers of some thick coarse fabric like railway workers used to wear, held up with a thick leather belt; he wore an undershirt without a collar, and over this in extremely cold weather a sagging pullover of an indeterminate grey-green-blue shade. His figure was gross, his steps were slow, he mumbled as he walked, and shifted his little eyes this way and that. He dreamed of dugouts and barbed wire, of the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun and of corpses that came to light with the April thaw; of partisans, of decimated villages, of pine forests where wolves and wild boar ran. He did not know whether the dreams were his, or those of novelists, or of the long-slaughtered school-teachers who had taught him to sing folk songs and turn somersaults on a polished floor.

At Fulmers Moor the patients had minded pigs. The pigs stared out across the furrowed ground at the traffic going by to the city. Mothers would point them out to their children: look, darling, pigs. At the back of the field stood the men, loose-mouthed, their boots encrusted with clay and muck, the feed buckets swinging from their great red hands. When the children pointed to them, excitedly, their mothers pulled them away from the car windows.

When Muriel saw Mr. K. he reminded her powerfully of these men. And perhaps he has tenants, she thought. She noticed how he tapped the walls, rattled the doorknobs as he perambulated about the four floors of his house; how he peered into dark corners, how he kept a knobkerrie within reach when he sat down to his bread and marmalade at the kitchen table. Home from home, she thought.

Inside Mr. K.’s kitchen, time had stood still. Modern conveniences were few or none. There was an old porcelain laundry sink in the corner, with a cold tap. There was a kitchen range, and most of Mr. K.’s leisure hours were spent in tending it, tipping in coal and riddling it with the rake and pulling out the dampers. It was exhausting work, and filmed his forehead with sweat, but it did not seem to have any effect on the temperature.

“You want work?” Mr. K. enquired gruffly. “Poor old woman, you too sick to work.”

He was in his way a kindly man. “Sit down,” he invited her. “Brew of tea for you.”

When the tea was poured out and the sugar bowl passed, Mr. K. reached across the table. He snatched his lodger’s mug from between her hands, and deposited his own before her; sat back to watch the effect, his eyes scouring her face. She picked it up and tasted it. “More sugar,” she said, helping herself. Mr. K. seemed satisfied. He blew on his own tea and took a sip, and dabbed at his moustache.

“Go to hospital,” he advised. “Old folks’ hospital. She’s crying out for staff.”

His lodger shook her head. “They’ll never take me on. A poor old woman like me.”

“Temporary they take you on,” Mr. K. said. “Temporary, subject to union. You try. You see. You get a nice job, my dear old lady. Bring the bedpans, wash the floors, for those of greater age.”

“I’m used to hospitals,” she said, “I could give it a try. Course, I could go charring as well. If I saw a nice ad for a private house. You’d have to write me a letter to apply, I’m not ever so good at writing. Course,” added Poor Mrs. Wilmot, “I could put my own signature.”

Later that week Mr. K. stopped her on the stairs.

“I heard a voice,” he said accusingly.

She stopped, caught her breath, coughed a little. “My poor side,” she said, rubbing her ribs. “What voice was this then?”

“Female voice. You get visitors?”

“I’m all alone in the world. Course,” she suggested, “it could be her from the top floor.”

“Miss Anne-Marie? That’s a quiet female! Goes out for her giro, comes in, no trouble, no cooking smells.”

“Well, you ought to ask her, that Miss Anaemia. I expect she’s got a high-pitched boyfriend.”

Mr. K. passed a hand over his eyes. “I don’t sleep for worry. A parcel of my clothes have appeared, mysteriously laundered.” He saw her watching him. “Left dirty,” he explained, “come out clean.”

“That’s no cause for consternation. I wish we all could say as much.”

“But Wilmot, I have heard movements in the cellar. Perhaps they have caught up with me.”

“Oh yes? Who’s that then?”

“You have a day to spare?”

“Needs so long, does it?”

“If I say, the gentlemen from Montenegro? If I say, the boys from Bialystok?”

“There’s worse than that, where I come from.”

“Where is this?” A shadow of fresh apprehension crossed his face. “Yorkshire?”

“Oh, come off it,” Mrs. Wilmot said. “You’re all right now. This is a free country, haven’t you heard?”

“But I carry my countries around with me,” said Mr. K., “here, inside.” He smote his pullover. “I will never be free. I am an exile by profession, Mrs. Wilmot. I am a badly wanted man.”

“And you’ve been hearing voices, have you?”

“Noises, and human speech.” He hugged himself, one stout forearm locked over the other. “A voice cried out in the pantry: Let us pray.”

The winter passed. One day, Poor Mrs. Wilmot—who only worked an evening shift—went into town for a day’s shopping. She went into Boots the Chemist to get a bottle for her cough; shuffling away from the pharmacy counter, she saw the most amazing sight.

There on a display stand, packed in little Perspex boxes, were what appeared to be row upon row of human eyelashes. Fascinated, Muriel moved closer. She gazed down, no expression on Mrs. Wilmot’s face. Dismemberment, she thought. Bones in the canal, those detachable teeth the real Mrs. Wilmot had. The teeth that other people had, at the hospital. Evelyn’s body, sliced up after death. And distributed? She bent over the display stand and peered at it. Would she know Evelyn’s eyelashes if she saw them? Some were black and spiky, others were feathery and fair; all were for sale.

At once she saw the solution to her problem. Alone in her room she had been practising Edna; but Edna needed a shape. It was easy to assume the abject form of Poor Mrs. Wilmot, but the imitation of Edna’s vitality seemed to deplete her own inner resources to the point of near-extinction. She could not risk a situation where Edna and Poor Mrs. Wilmot wiped out Muriel entirely; who would mediate between their demands, and organise their different clothing? But if she could be Edna, yet not Edna; Edna’s soul in an invented body, a body made up of other moving parts? A body for self-assembly, an easy-build knockdown effort? Eyelashes; and something for the head, auburn or blonde, to go over Muriel’s hair. She straightened up and looked around her at the glowing counters of cosmetics. She pictured Mother; Mother reassembling herself, trotting her spectral bones round the department stores until she found those bits of her that had been dispersed. “Can I help you?” an assistant enquired.