Vacant Possession

CHAPTER 5

When Sylvia opened her handbag, you never knew what might come out of it. It might be a tract; it might be a revolver.

This morning it was a little pink card. She pushed it across the table to Suzanne. “That’s the number of the clinic,” she said. “Ring them up right away for a quote. If you don’t want to go locally, I’ll drive you back up to Manchester; Hermione’s given me the name of her man on John Street.”

“It’s Saturday,” Suzanne said.

“There’ll be somebody there, don’t fret.”

“Anybody would think you were forewarned.”

“Sometimes my community work comes in useful.”

“Hang on a minute, Sylvia. This is your own flesh and blood.”

“I prefer not to think about the flesh and blood aspect. It hardly is, at this stage.”

“But it’s a potential life. She has to think it out. It’s a matter of conscience.”

“Oh, bugger her conscience,” Sylvia said. “What about her career?”

Suzanne surveyed her mother from red-rimmed eyes. She did not look pregnant. She was a thin, listless girl, though pretty enough in a commonplace sort of way.

“What a brutal woman you’ve become,” she said. “I’m surprised I exist. I’m surprised you had any children.”

“Our generation didn’t have your opportunities,” Sylvia said.

“If I wanted an abortion I could have fixed it up myself through the Student Health Service. That’s what it’s there for. I don’t need your money to go to John Street.”

Another family impasse. Colin’s mind leaped, as it did so reliably, to a face-saving distraction. “You’ve mentioned it to Hermione?”

“Yes, I told Francis on the phone.”

“Oh, the vicar,” Suzanne said. “If you were a grandmother, you might not act so stupid.”

“Now look, Suzanne—”

“It’s obvious the way things are going. You just don’t want to know, Dad. Other men…at her age.”

“I think you ought to be concerned about your own situation; not about the way your mother and I run our lives.”

“If Mum takes up with the vicar it will be in the papers. It will be a topic of general interest.”

“You silly baggage,” Sylvia said. “Are you going to pick up that phone, or must I do it for you?”

Suzanne picked up her glass of orange juice instead, and looked at her parents over the rim. “Cheers,” she said. She swung to her feet, using the tabletop for support, as if her condition were much more advanced. She turned in the doorway to say something. Her brother came through it, knocking her aside. “Hiya, Wart.” She gave him a cool glance, passed beyond retaliation. She had other things on her mind.

Alistair strode into the room, flung open the cupboards, and began to sneer at their contents. “Never any decent food,” he complained.

“What did you want?”

“Sausages. Austin gets sausages.”

“I hardly think so. In a vegetarian household.”

“He has his own sausages. He’s autonomous.”

“Then go round,” Colin said. “Perhaps he’ll give you some.”

“What’s up this morning?” Alistair enquired. “You were having one of them funny silences, when I came in.”

“A pregnant pause,” Colin said. Sylvia made a sound of disgust. “It just popped out,” he said abjectly.

Alistair poured half a pint of milk on his cornflakes, lambasted them with the back of his spoon, then dredged up a quantity of the compacted mass and thrust it into his mouth. “Just ignore me, just go on,” he said. “Not getting divorced, are you?”

His parents exchanged a glance. “Should we have expected it, at some stage?” Colin said musingly.

“Not these days. Not this.”

Alistair was gazing glumly at his melamine dish. Suddenly he lifted it and banged it down on the table. “Why do we always have these? Why don’t we have no decent china?”

“Listen, sunshine,” Sylvia snapped, “if you want gracious living, go and get it somewhere else.”

“If you did get divorced I wouldn’t live with you. Not either of you. I’d get a flat. I’d be a homeless young person. I’d be entitled.”

“Well, as soon as you set up house for yourself,” Colin said, “you can have thin pork links served on Crown Derby. Will that make you happy?”

Alistair got up, muttered, and kicked his chair. He was muttering as he walked out of the room, and hauling up his sleeve, no doubt preparatory to injecting himself with some addictive substance.

“I wonder why we bother,” said Colin.

“I wasn’t aware that you did bother. You’ve always been more concerned with the welfare of other people’s children than your own.”

“Oh, teachers’ children are always worse than others. Their parents know from experience that there’s nothing to be done with young people, and when they get home, they’re not even being paid to try.”

Suzanne said, “I’ll talk to you. I won’t talk to Mum. I don’t want to be treated like a counselling session down the Bishop Tutu Centre. She’s too good at making up other people’s minds for them.”

“She only wants what’s best for you.”

“I bet Hitler used to say that.”

“She can’t understand your saying you don’t want an abortion. Myself, I wonder…I mean, it’s difficult to see how an intelligent girl like you becomes pregnant by accident.”

Colin’s tone was moderate, discursive. He had always said that young people should have the largest possible measure of moral freedom. He had said it in the sixties, and had gone on saying it through the seventies; the sentiment was now in its third decade. He found it a little difficult, at times, to distinguish his own children’s faces from those of the hundreds of juveniles who passed through his office in the course of the academic year, and he sometimes wondered if he would readily put a name to them if he met them on the street. Perhaps it was just as well. It was the first thing that Sylvia had learned on her social sciences course; the individual is always an exception, and the individual never matters.

“Has it not occurred to you,” Suzanne said, “that I might want the baby?”

“Do you mean you got pregnant on purpose?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly, eh?” Like her mother, Colin thought. Contraception had never been an exact science with Sylvia. Perm any six pills out of twenty-one. None of the children had been planned, but not quite unplanned, either.

“I don’t want to push you on the point,” he said, “but as you have chosen to come home and involve us, I think you might take us into your confidence about the father. Is it somebody on your course?”

“No.”

“Well, are you—fond of him?”

“He’s married,” Suzanne said. “A married man.”

“How could you?” Colin said. He took a moment to digest it. “At your age, and with all those bright young men to choose from?” Suzanne shrugged. “I don’t know what to say, Suzanne, I don’t understand you.” He sighed. “You haven’t been the same since you came back from that peace camp.”

Sylvia—who said “life must go on”—had gone out to do the weekend shopping. Colin thought it an astonishing proposition, considering her views, but he was glad to see her out of the house, and Claire with her. Karen was upstairs doing her homework; Alistair had not for some years been in the habit of accounting for his movements. For a weekend, the house was very quiet. The long stretch of the summer holidays lay ahead. It was another fine day, and the sun poured into the living room, hot and dazzling through the french windows. Suzanne sat in an armchair, her legs curled under her, her expression remote. No doubt she was thinking straight through the summer to the months when she would be quite changed by her decision, when the consequences of her choice would come home to her.

“If I have the child,” she said, “he might marry me.”

“Marry you?”

“He’s always wanted a child. They’ve been married for years but they’ve never had one.”

“Do you mean that you’re trying to break up this man’s marriage?”

“If that’s how you want to put it.” She stretched and yawned. She felt torpid, too lazy and warm to answer questions. She had been through it already in her head. She would have the baby for him, and he would marry her. In her life so far, she had never wanted anything very much; but what she had wanted, she’d usually got. There seemed no reason why this should alter.

“Have you discussed it with him?”

She leaned her head against the back of the chair. “Not as such.”

“Not as such? You mean you’ve discussed it under the guise of something else?”

“That’s what people do, isn’t it?” She closed her eyes for a moment. “They discuss things, find out what each other’s attitudes are. That’s how they get to know each other. They talk generalities, don’t they?”

“So that it may look to the outside world like a silly girl trying to break up a marriage, but it is really more like one of Plato’s symposia?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, yawning. Perhaps she really did not. There is an entrance fee to the museum of our culture, and for this generation no one had paid it. “Do you want my advice?” Colin asked.

“No.”

“Why did you come home then?”

Suzanne reached out to get a cushion from the sofa, and shook it gently to make it comfortable. “I’ve given up my room at the hall of residence, and I need a permanent address so that I can claim benefit. Ask Florence. She’ll tell you.”

“I see.” Colin’s tone was grim; he meant to sound like a man who was mastering his temper only with effort. In fact, there seemed a leaden familiarity about the situation; as if he were an old man, with many many daughters. He looked at his watch. Sylvia would be back soon, and she would expect him to have some answers.

“Am I keeping you from your badminton?” his daughter enquired.

“Squash,” he said bleakly. “No, that’s all right. So that’s what you see for yourself, is it, living at home and claiming benefit?”

“You would hardly want me to live on you. Look, it’s temporary, Dad. It won’t put you out. Karen can move into Claire’s room, and I’ll have my own room back. I need some privacy. As soon as we make our arrangements, I’ll be off.”

“Who? You and your man-friend?”

“Could you just draw the curtain a bit, Dad? The sun’s in my eyes.”

“Suzanne, do you have any evidence that this man you are involved with wants to set up house with you? When you tell him you’re expecting his child, he may be horrified.”

“I don’t see why he should be. It’s a perfectly natural thing.”

“But has he told you, in words of one syllable, that he means to leave his wife?”

Suzanne closed her eyes again. “Oh, he means to.”

“Do you think you could make the effort to keep awake? Your whole future is in the balance here.”

“I don’t know why I’m so sleepy. It must be my condition.”

“Did you want to get pregnant? Are you one of those women who have to prove they can?”

“Everyone has to prove they can. All my friends have been pregnant.”

They infuriated him, the little nest-making pats she gave to the cushion, settling it against the side of her head. “Haven’t you any ambition?”

“What sort of ambition?”

“A career.”

“There are no careers. There aren’t even any jobs. Didn’t you know there are three million people out of work?”

“You don’t have to be one of them. Not if you graduate.”

“It only postpones it. What do people do with degrees in geography? There aren’t any cosy teaching jobs to take up the second-rate people, not these days.”

“Cosy?” Colin thought of his probationary year; a time of his life when he had seriously considered hanging himself. “Why did you bother to go to university, if you thought like this?”

“I can just see your face if I’d told you I wanted to be a hairdresser.”

Colin was aghast. “Did you?”

“Not a hairdresser especially. There are times when you’re just as thick as Mum.”

“Literal-minded,” Colin said. “Not really thick.”

He was touched, when he thought about it, by the way she still called them “Mum” and “Dad.” Not that he expected her, like Alistair, to hail them as “Old Cow” or “Paunchy” rather that in the somnambulistic self-sufficiency she had acquired, he expected her to label them Occupants of Parental Home; to find them some grey unemotive category that she could use on official forms. She was still such a child, after all, with her flat chest and her bitten nails.

“Suzanne, sit up like a good girl and listen to me. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that.” She stifled another yawn. “When people tell you that sort of thing, they usually regret it. And then they hold it against you.”

“That may be so, but I feel bound to, because I so much don’t want you to make a mess of your life.”

“And when people say that, they mean they’re about to plunge in and muck up all your plans. Look, I know what I’m doing. I’m an adult.”

“I don’t think those two things follow.”

“Go on then. Tell me your story. ‘When I was about your age…’” She uncurled herself and rubbed her calves. “I’m getting cramp. I ought to go and lie on the bed.”

“You can go up on the roof and perch on the ridge tiles,” Colin said, “but for God’s sake listen to what I’m going to tell you. About ten years ago—”

“What’s the use to me of something that happened then?”

“The whole world doesn’t centre around you, Suzanne. As it happened, mine didn’t in those days. I was very much in love with a young woman whom I’d met at an evening class. I was contemplating leaving your mother in order to live with her.” Colin rose from his chair and walked over to the fireplace; which had recently been rebuilt, and gas-logs installed. It had cost him an effort to speak; he could not turn his face to his daughter and show her that his mouth was trembling, and that his eyes had filled with tears. It would shake her faith in him, in his rectitude and solidity; if indeed she had any, after his confession. Simply to speak of it brought the pain back to him; how clogged and salty the throat, how heavy the weight behind the ribs. He had felt like this for months after his break-up with Isabel. It was the time of his life that, in modern terminology, he recognised as the nuclear winter; the many months of cold and dark.

“At an evening class?” Suzanne said. Her smooth sleepy voice was derisive. “What in?”

“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.”

Sylvia put her hand on Florence’s arm. “Okay, duck, don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Anybody would think you weren’t glad to see her better,” Sister observed. “We’ll probably pop her on C Ward for a bit, see how she goes. Though we’ll have to get her on the go a bit, they need to be mobile. We don’t know what the future holds, do we?”

Mrs. Sidney’s face was quite altered: altered almost beyond recognition. In her younger days she had been fond, Colin recalled, of royal reminiscences, of the memoirs of escaped nannies and underfootmen. I shall have to watch my own reading matter, he thought; check myself over for signs of what I might become. He regarded her, aghast. Florence produced a tissue from her coat pocket and shed a tear. Sylvia frowned.

“Never mind gloves for now,” Sister said to her patient. “Aren’t you going to have a bit of an Audience?”

“Do you mean to say you go along with her?” Sylvia demanded. “You encourage her?”

“Put yourself in our place,” Sister said. “Any response from her is welcome to us. What do we care who she thinks she is? If we can say to her, turn on your side, Your Highness, while I put this cream on your bottom, that’s a sight better than heaving her over, a dead weight. And when we bring the cocoa round, and she thinks she’s at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, she gets it down her, doesn’t she? She’s eating like a champion, she’s twice the woman she was.”

“It’s such a shock.” Florence pressed the tissue to her lips. “I can’t take it in, can you, Colin?”

Colin turned and walked away, down the ward to the window. He peered out into the enclosed court below. It was a dingy back area, a tangle of pipes running across the scarred red brick, slits of windows with frosted glass open an inch to the sultry air. If there were a fire, he thought, how would they get them all out? A chalked sign on a wall said MORTUARY. Colin’s gaze followed the direction of the arrow. A hospital cat stalked across the cobbles, leaped into a pile of boxes, and disappeared from view.

In the side ward off B Block (Male) Mr. Philip Field had decided to upset his daughter Isabel. He lay in bed, his eyes half closed, his hands folded across his belly. His daughter sat rigidly on a hard hospital chair at some distance from the bed, her face downcast.

“I think I might have a psalm,” he said. “Yes, I think I’ll go for ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ after all.”

“You aren’t going to die,” Isabel said.

“You know what Dr. Furness said. I could go at any time.”

“How do you know that?”

“I listened in.”

Isabel turned her face away altogether and gazed at the door, as if hoping for but not expecting relief. “Eavesdroppers never hear anything good,” she said. “Nor do they deserve to.”

Mr. Field tugged at the blanket fractiously. “I might have ‘For Those In Peril On The Sea,’” he suggested.

“Whatever for?”

“For other people. There’s no need to be selfish at your funeral.”

“It seems a bit late to turn over a new leaf.”

Isabel’s voice, like her features, was colourless and remote. Her reproaches carried no weight. “I could have ‘Abide With Me,’” her father said. “Like the Cup Final. ‘Where is death’s sting, Where, grave, thy victoree?’ I’m thinking,” he added, “of changing my will.”

“Oh yes?” It had the effect of making his daughter look at him, though still without much interest. “And who are you planning to leave it to? You’ve only got me. You were never fond of dogs and cats, so I don’t suppose you were thinking of the RSPCA.”

“Ah, that’s an assumption you make, that there’s only you. There were more women than your mother in my life.”

He smirked.

“Yes,” Isabel said, “but I don’t want to hear about that.” She smiled tightly. “Put it behind us, shall we?”

“Funny you should say that.”

“I don’t see what’s funny.”

“You never know when people are going to come back into your life.”

She stood up. “Will you stop?” Her face flushed, and she clasped her hands together, almost as if she were afraid she might hit him. “I told you, I’m not interested, I don’t want to hear.”

Mr. Field looked pleased now. He’d wanted reaction, and he’d got it. “Keep your hair on,” he said. “They can hear you down the corridor.”

“I didn’t come here to listen to you rehashing your sordid past. Haven’t you got beyond that?”

“Don’t you remember, Isabel, when you used to lock me in and hide my glasses?”

“You got out all the same.”

“You bet I did.”

“It makes me ashamed.”

“So it ought. Putting upon a lonely old man. Cruel.”

“It makes me ashamed to belong to you.”

“I’d like to think I have other children somewhere. Ones that aren’t so particular.”

“If you have, where are they?”

“I told you not to shout.”

The door opened and a student nurse stuck her head around it, topped by her pert paper cap.

“Everything okay, Mrs. Ryan?”

Isabel turned to face her, shakily. “Why is he in a side ward?” she demanded. “Wouldn’t he be better on the main ward, where he’d have the company of the other patients?”

The little nurse averted her eyes, and looked cross. “Perhaps you’d care to take that up with Sister, Mrs. Ryan.”

“Well,” Florence Sidney said. She repeated it, shaking her head. Her brother took her arm and guided her across the car park. Sylvia trotted ahead of them; she was more resilient than they. Colin’s expression was gloomy. Only a week ago, he had been a comparatively happy man. The holidays were approaching; if they did not promise a rest, there would at least be a break in routine. He was looking forward to some long early morning runs, and perhaps a game of squash at lunchtime, and then to having the house to himself in the afternoons while Sylvia was out and about on her various missions; to having his time free for some brooding, for some quiet introspection. This is really what I am, he thought: a quiet man in pursuit of a coronary.

But now everything was upset. He couldn’t care for this reanimation in his mother. It could only be a complicating factor, the necessity to pander to the royal whim. And Suzanne: the decision was hers, but the consequences would come home to the family. Of course the man would not marry her, and she would have to live at Buckingham Avenue with the baby. He could not leave her to cope by herself in some bedsitting room or some damp 1950s walk-up that the council might let her have. There would be a further strain on the household budget; though he was a professional man, securely employed and more affluent than most, the Sidneys lived in that particularly common and edgy sort of poverty where daily life is comfortable only if nothing is set aside for contingencies. Besides, he could not imagine Sylvia with a grandchild in the house. She was energetic enough to cope with a small child while Suzanne went off to finish her course, but if she smelled of nappies and baby cream she would lose the admiration of the vicar, and then she would vent her spite on him. It was all a terrible mess.

But worse than all this was the conviction, running all afternoon at the back of his mind, that Isabel Field was about to re-enter his life. It was hardly reasonable to suppose that his Isabel was the one Suzanne spoke of, or was it? He did not feel very sure what was reasonable. Blind chance, he knew, could catch you a painful blow with her white stick.

The last time he had seen Isabel it had been a windy day, spring 1975, lunchtime, outside the coroner’s court. Standing in the municipal car park, chilled from waiting, they had exchanged a few words less about themselves and their lack of a future than about the upsetting events which had brought them to the inquest, and which had occurred so recently in Evelyn Axon’s hall. (It was his own hall now, of course, but he thought of it as a different house.) Though the verdict had been natural causes, a miasma of unease hung over the business; these had been Isabel’s clients, and she had failed to foresee or prevent whatever had led up to the old woman’s death. There had been bruises on the corpse, weals, fingermarks. It was more than likely that she had been beaten by her daughter—half mad or half-witted—that reclusive slab of a woman, hunched into the shadows, whose features Colin could never recall. Whatever the truth of it—and it hardly mattered now that the old woman was dead—Isabel’s distaste for the affair had made her resign. “I’m out of it now,” she had said.

And she had told him—he remembered the occasion perfectly, as if it were yesterday—that she intended to go in for banking; it was in the family. “It will be less complicated,” she had said.

For months after their break-up, he had been in the habit of taking the car out in the evenings and driving to the quiet street where Isabel shared a bungalow with her retired father. Once he had even parked opposite, waiting where he used to wait to collect her on their few and nervous nights out. But the blank façade of the house had told him nothing he did not already know.

Once or twice a year since then, he had made a point of driving down that street. He never saw her. No doubt she was long gone. A FOR SALE sign had been planted in the front garden. She had married, moved away; her father (he supposed) was dead. She had gone south, emigrated, spun off into outer space.

Then they had moved to Buckingham Avenue themselves, to the dilapidated house that had come so cheap. All his weekends were devoted to DIY. On weekday evenings he would stumble about in the twilit garden, a stone inside his chest. It was like being consigned to purgatory, and still expected to go on schoolmastering.

But his heart was harder now. The sclerotic process had taken him over entirely and made him no longer the man he was, but a much more friable, brittle organism, with a shortened lifespan for any emotion. He had no feelings, since then; none that lasted, or meant anything.

Sylvia’s voice broke in on his thoughts. “Give me your keys, Colin. I’ll drive. You look shaken up.”

“…Actions which,” said Sister, “in a younger and ambulant pervert would no doubt lead to criminal proceedings. Only just before the weekend he was found with his hand up the skirt of one of the cleaners, an elderly and respectable person called Mrs. Wilmot.”

“I feel ashamed,” Isabel said.

“Don’t blame yourself, Mrs. Ryan,” Sister said, in a tone which suggested that of course she should do so.

“He’s in what they call his second childhood. Maybe I should have brought him up better.”

“The vices do become compounded,” the nurse said complacently. “The eccentricities, the little tics. It’s in the babe in arms, Mrs. Ryan, and at the end of a life, that we see the true character revealed. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

“No thanks. But in view of this behaviour of his, wouldn’t it be better to have him on an open ward where you can see what he’s up to? Surely you’re increasing the problem by keeping him in a private room?”

“Why, bless you, Mrs. Ryan, your father has no compunction about what he does in public.”

“He disgusts me,” Isabel said. “He’d be better dead. I wish he were.”

A token reproof came and went on Sister’s face. Isabel’s voice was frayed; it quivered. Leaning forward to replace the file, Sister caught a whiff of the alcohol on her breath. Only seven o’clock in the evening, and not the first time, either. A young woman like that, with a husband and every advantage. She had room, to talk about disgust.

When they got home, Colin went straight upstairs. He could not get Isabel out of his mind. Sylvia was in the kitchen making some coffee, and Florence was with her, lamenting the future and the lives they would lead if the hospital decided to pursue its intention of discharging its long-term patients into the care of their relatives. Poor Florence: mass unemployment had saved her career, and now another item of state policy was threatening to undo her. It wouldn’t happen, Sylvia was saying; the old lass was too far gone, they could not discharge her while she thought she was May of Teck, and given a week or two she would no doubt lapse into her usual vegetable state.

Colin met Suzanne, hanging about aimlessly at the top of the stairs. “There’s no point skulking around,” he told her. “Don’t you want to know what’s happened with your grandma? I suppose you take no interest.”

Suzanne’s eyes were swollen and puffy, and her lips were raw, as if someone had hit her. “What now?” Colin asked.

“I phoned him. Jim.”

“And what did Jim say?”

Fresh tears began instantly to trickle down her cheeks and off the end of her nose. She put out the tip of her tongue and tasted one, as if sampling the quality of her grievance. “I can guess,” Colin said. “Why don’t you have a lie-down? I’ll see you later.”

He went into his bedroom and closed the door. He sat down on the bed, catching the faint rise and fall of the women’s voices below, waiting for a moment in case his daughter burst in after him. When he heard her bedroom door close, he stood up and went over to his chest of drawers. He slid open the small drawer, top left, and groped about, searching for his photograph. After a moment he pulled the drawer out fully and began to turn over his possessions, slowly at first and then with an increasing sense of urgency. Still nothing. He bent and peered into the back of the drawer, then slid it out completely and upended it onto the bed. Systematically he worked through his worn socks and unworn ties. There was an old address book, long superseded, its leaves curling at the edges, full of the large looped handwriting of his earlier self. He took it by the spine and held it up, shaking it to see if the photograph would fall out, but the only result was a yellow scrap of paper. He picked it up: PRIZE DRAW, CHRISTMAS FAYRE 1963, ST. DAVID’S SCHOOL, ARLINGTON ROAD. 1st Prize, Bottle of Whisky, 2nd Prize, Bottle of Sherry, 3rd Prize, Box of Chocolates. His heart beating faster, he began to fling his possessions into little piles on the duvet cover, and when this disclosed nothing he began to toss them into the wastepaper basket, the packs of shoelaces and the small predecimal coins and the bottles of aftershave, all unspent, all unopened, all the detritus of a half-used life. Soon the wastepaper basket was over-flowing, and there was almost nothing left on the bed. What there was left, he threw back into the drawer, picked it up, and replaced it. No sooner had he closed it than he opened it and searched it again, but the lining paper now showed its white spaces, there was no possibility…he tore the paper out, patted his hand over the wood. Nothing, still nothing. It had gone then. He scooped up the scraps of lining paper from his feet and compacted them into a ball. He was about to toss it into the rubbish, but instead, clinging to a last hope, he overturned the wastepaper basket onto the floor. The cap of one of the aftershave bottles came off and rolled under the wardrobe. Sitting on the end of the bed, bent double, he sifted through the rubbish at his feet. Nothing again. So it was not there. Gone. So Sylvia had taken it. He felt little need or inclination to raise his head from between his knees. Why not just stay like that? At least for some hours.

He had no idea, of course, when she might possibly have removed the photograph. He had not been in the habit of checking that it was there. He thought it was a fragment of Isabel, salvaged and indestructible, but it was not indestructible at all. He had not been in the habit of taking it out to look at it; he had been in the habit of knowing it was there.

He had been a fool then; he knew that Sylvia might come upon it. It was more likely than not. But somewhere inside, perhaps he hoped that Sylvia would be redeemed, that finding the photograph and dimly comprehending its meaning, she would no more remove it than one would remove flowers from an enemy’s grave. Survival was the only victory; surely she would see that.

But this was unrealistic. Whoever thought there was anything dim about Sylvia’s comprehension? Had she burned it, he wondered, or torn it up? Or had she done neither, but laid it aside for her private consideration? And what would she do to him now?

Slowly he sat upright, letting his hands lie loosely on his knees, gazing at himself in the dressing-table mirror. He formulated a phrase or two: the last thread of my aspirations has been cut. He felt self-conscious, rocking this startling grief, while the Old Spice soaked into the carpet. It’s all right for you to laugh, he said angrily to the face in the mirror, but it matters to me, it matters a lot. He knew he was not formed for tragedy. Everything he had done and thought had been contained within the streets, the gardens, the motorway loop of this sad English town. But why did he need a wider sphere of action? The town was in itself a universe, a universe in a closed box. There was no escape, no point of arrival, and no point of departure. Every action, however banal, opened into a shrapnel blast of possibilities; each possibility tail-ended or nose-dived into every other, so that there was no thought, no wish, and no perception that did not in the end come home to its begetter. He slid forward onto his knees, meaning to investigate the stain that was growing at his feet. Of course, I could pray, he thought.

It’s me, Colin Sidney; it must be, oh, ten years, God, since we were last in touch, but what’s that against the aeons? I asked an awful lot, a decade ago, but now all I want’s a bit of peace; isn’t Peace your specialty? There was no answer, just a faint chatter and rustle, the sound of pigeons coming home to roost. He took out his handkerchief and began to dab at the broadloom.