Vacant Possession Part 10

"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 la.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sumption 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 gla.s.ses?"

"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 munic.i.p.al 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 facade 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 s.p.a.ce.

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: ma.s.s 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 la.s.s 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 sc.r.a.p 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 s.p.a.ces, 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 ba.n.a.l, 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, G.o.d, 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.

CHAPTER 6.

Breakfast time again. Sylvia slapped some diet margarine onto a minute square of toast and slowly spread it out. "Do you know what I read? I read that women of my generation had four children because that's how many the Queen had. Subconsciously, you see, we looked up to her as a role model. What do you think of that?"

"I've never heard such a load of tripe," Colin said.

His wife sat ruminating for a moment; for it was Point 9 of her 12-Point Diet Plan to eat at a leisurely pace and make each mouthful last. "But it might be true, mightn't it? I mean, a couple of years ago what would Suzanne have done? Straight off for a termination. But now...fertility's the in thing."

"I see what you're driving at. You don't find Princess Di nipping off to the abortion clinic, do you? You don't find her popping out for a quick vacuum extraction."

"Exactly."

"There could be something in it." Strange, Colin thought, how the preoccupations of the sane reflect those of the insane. And vice versa, of course.