Vacant Possession Part 14

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 pa.s.sion 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 was.h.i.+ng machine, unless operated on the Delicates cycle, pumped water all over the floor.

That pernicious fallacy was flouris.h.i.+ng 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 Sat.u.r.day, the people at the railway station that he pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 b.u.t.tonhole 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 G.o.d'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 inst.i.tutional life has provided a too forceful model for her inner reality. She has become occupied with rules, procedures, precedents, and routines. The inst.i.tution 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, G.o.d bless them, have been urging it for years. Now they've fallen right into the budgeters' trap."

"I've never heard you ask G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sengers 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 a.s.surances 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 b.u.t.ter 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 c.o.c.k-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 coa.r.s.e 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 ma.s.saged 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."

"Thanks very much," Miss Anaemia said. She scrubbed away her tears with the back of her hand and picked a slice or two out of the wrappings. "Cheers," she said. Her emotions were short-lived; it was just as well, of course. It didn't do to get excited about the future, or too attached to any project; you never knew when some change in the benefit rules would turn your life upside down. It was companionable, here at Napier Street, but they were talking about chopping rent allowances and making young people move on. In the world outside people called her Anne-Marie, and asked her to account for yourself; have you seen a psychiatrist? they said. If she left here she'd have to go home to Burton-on-Trent and live with her mum and dad, who never spoke to each other, and who made it clear that she was a big disappointment, and asked why she hadn't gone to work for Marks & Spencer. They only take quite wholesome people; Mum and Dad didn't seem to realise that.

On the night of old Mrs. Sidney's discharge, Poor Mrs. Wilmot gave in her notice. She would be sadly missed, the nurses told her, by staff and patients alike. A willing, stooped, humble body, with her heart in the right place; the cleaners were being privatised, and they would not look upon her like again.

She went down Eugene Terrace, to Crisp's house. He and Sholto were eating sausage rolls together. "If you want a revenge for Effie," she said, "you can get on with it now."

Crisp said the hospital had killed Effie, that she'd got pneumonia and they'd let her die; seeing that she was old, and mad, and not worth the antibiotics. In fact she had been far gone when the ambulance brought her in, frozen and raving. But they had to amuse themselves. Crisp was trying to get into trouble by hanging around with juveniles. As for Sholto, he said he was sick to death of the soup at the night shelter. They were both scheming to be sent back to Fulmers Moor. It didn't matter to her, because her scheme was one she had to carry out alone; she didn't need their help, or anybody's.

Mother had not materialised; but often, as she polished the scratched dining table at Buckingham Avenue, Muriel thought she felt her hanging in the air. She wanted her and didn't want her, that was the trouble. She couldn't explain that to Crisp and Sholto. She said goodbye to them and went downstairs. It was ten o'clock when she got out into the street, and the Mukerjees were closing up the shop. A plump Asian gentleman was drawing away from the kerb in his big car. He drove slowly behind Lizzie Blank as she minced along to the corner. He put down his electric window, leaned out, and made her an offer. She stopped dead, staring at him. As if he had not made his meaning clear, he held up a fat paper packet and jingled it. "Ten pounds in five pees, all yours," he told her. He smiled encouragingly, showing a gold tooth. They were heading for the wasteland; there were no street lights now. Just his white cuffs gleamed in the darkness, and his gold ring and his gold tooth. "Name your price," he told her. Her heart began to thud. She felt a desperate strangling rage rise up inside her. When the box breaks, the baby will fall, out comes Little Muriel, teeth bones and all. She raised her fists at the man in the car, and a great hoa.r.s.e bellow rose out of her chest and echoed back down the dark caverns of the Punjab. Sweat starting out on his face, the man put his foot on the accelerator and roared away into the night.

When the ambulance drew up outside Florence's house, all the family except Alistair were waiting in the front garden. Colin's face was drawn with apprehension, but his wife and sister looked like women who knew exactly what to expect. The two little girls, who had been briefed about their grandmother's misapprehensions, were giggling and practising their curtseys; Claire had insisted on wearing her Brownie uniform. Suzanne lurked in the shadow of the porch, with a blanket round her shoulders. As the winter came on she looked more and more demoralised and disreputable. There were whole days when she didn't speak a word to anybody, and didn't set foot outside the house.

The back doors of the ambulance opened, and the ambulance men lifted Mrs. Sidney and her wheelchair and set them carefully on the ground. One of them waved in the direction of the family. They swivelled the chair in the road, edged it onto the pavement, and pushed it to the front gate. Mrs. Sidney was swaddled in a gay scarlet blanket: only the top of her head showed. "Here we go," the attendants cried, running her up the path. "She can walk, you know, but she says it's not etiquette. Are we glad to see you lot! Took one old la.s.s home last week, the whole family had done a moonlight. Like the Mary Celeste. Took the police a week to find them. Said they'd gone up to Aberdeen looking for work on the North Sea oil."

As they brought the wheelchair to a halt, Mrs. Sidney's skeletal hand emerged from her wrappings. She pulled the blanket aside from her face and peered out. "Where's your father?" she enquired of Colin in her rasping voice. Colin looked at Sylvia for aid.

"Tell her," Sylvia said. "Tell her he's dead. Don't pander to her."

Colin cleared his throat. "He's pa.s.sed on, Mother. Don't you remember? It was, oh, ten or eleven years back."

"Don't be ridiculous," Mrs. Sidney said. "I expect he's off shooting at Sandringham. Who is that woman in a certain condition, standing in the porch?"

"Well, can we give you a hand?" the ambulance men enquired. "Where do you want her? Upstairs, downstairs, in my lady's chamber?" Suzanne stood back to let them pa.s.s. They winked at her on the way out. "Give us a call if you start up sudden, love. Twenty-four-hour service, that's us, no job too large or small."

"What nice men," Claire said. "I wonder if they'd like a boiled egg?"

"All yours!" they cried, as they sped off down the path.

Mr. Ryan-Jim-was a spare eager man in his early thirties. He had a sandy moustache and brown dog-like eyes.

"Sit down, Mr. Sidney," he said. He paused, unhopefully. "I don't suppose it's about the account, is it?"

Colin pulled a chair up to the desk. "My wife thought that perhaps we ought to talk, but I don't know...perhaps somewhere else would have been preferable?"

"It hardly matters," Ryan said. "As long as you keep your voice down."

"I haven't come to make a scene."

"No...well, that's all right then." Mr. Ryan shrunk a little in his swivel chair. His eyes wandered over Colin and away to the framed print of a fis.h.i.+ng village which hung on the far wall. The quay seemed strangely deserted; little boats bobbed on blue-black waves. "Only it wouldn't help if I lost my job."

"Is that likely?"

"She's a customer."

"Of course."

"And we have our professional ethics."

"Like doctors and dentists? I didn't know that. I mean, if a woman comes in to open a deposit account, you don't ask her to take her clothes off, do you? Not in the normal case; though I can see there are exceptions."

"You'd be surprised what happens, Mr. Sidney." Mr. Ryan's dark eyes flickered; he picked up a paper clip from his tray and began to unbend it. "You really see life from behind this desk. When the customers get divorced, they come into your office and fight."

"I had no idea."

"Oh yes. They get very personal." He met Colin's eye briefly. "That's not what I came into banking for, I don't enjoy it at all. They come in to divide their account, and then next thing you know, they're arguing about f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o and who's going to have the hamster."

Colin took out a packet of cigarettes. "Smoke?"

Ryan shook his head gloomily, as if at this moment any silly habit would have been a relief. "It's no joke," he said. "I don't like it. It upsets me."

"You don't like emotions." Colin lit his cigarette. "Leave it to the women, eh?"

"Why not?" said Ryan, sneering a little. "They have the expertise, don't they, or so they say? They keep s.h.i.+fting the ground, you can't keep up. To them, big rows are like, what do you call it, fas.h.i.+on accessories-they have a new set every season."

"Have you got an ashtray?" Colin said. I won't be drawn, he thought, I'll keep my cool. He looked up. "I can't help observing, Mr. Ryan, that you are a man of what...thirty-three, thirty-four?"

"Whereas Suzanne is eighteen. You think I took advantage of her."

"I haven't heard that expression in years," Colin said. "But still, in this case...I can't imagine where you met."

"We met at the university," Ryan said. "We have these annual promotions, you know, you must have seen the adverts. We call it our Someday Package. Someday You'll Make a Million, that's the slogan. The people who dream up these things are living in the past. They still think there are jobs for graduates."

"Yes?"

"And there was your daughter, coming in for her free plastic clipboard with the logo, and her free packet of felt-tipped pens. Myself, I thought the felt-tips were a mistake, a bit juvenile, but your daughter said, on the contrary, you know, she being a student of geography, they'd be useful to her-and that's how we got into conversation."

"And then?"

Ryan ran a hand through his hair. "Then I asked her to meet me for a drink...you know how it goes. You know the rest. It's not interesting, is it?"

"Well, only in one respect."

"And what's that?"

"I hoped you could enlighten me as to why you let her get pregnant!"

"I didn't 'let her.' What do you mean? You'd think-I know she's only eighteen, you've pointed that out, but you'd think she'd have the sense to swallow a pill."

"She told you she was on the pill?"

Mr. Ryan stared at him, mute; then each capillary flushed and blossomed, turning him pink from his hairline to the white collar of his striped s.h.i.+rt.