Vacant Possession Part 15

"It's a fad," Colin said calmly. "They don't like the pill. I thought you'd come to an agreement about it. Natural methods."

"What?" Ryan said. "What are you talking about?"

"Sorry. I'd have broken it more gently...not that it matters now. Academic interest, as people say."

"It's of more than academic interest to me! What was I supposed to do?"

"Withdraw, I think. It's natural population control. Peasants do it. In Italy. There's a book about it."

"Well, I must have missed that." He was scarlet now with shock and indignation. "I'll have to join the Book of the Month Club, won't I, before I pick a girl up again, I'll have to go by W. H. Smith and check out what b.l.o.o.d.y insanities she might have in store for me. Is that right?"

"Or go for a woman of thirty," Colin said. "They'd be on the pill, wouldn't mind poisoning themselves for a fine upstanding man like you. Oh, really, Ryan, get hold of yourself, calm down, if you've any brain there won't be a next time. Does your wife know?"

"Does she know? Your daughter told her on the phone. When I got home she was waiting. I knew right away there was something up. She said, 'I've had a most disturbing phone call from a girl called Suzanne.' That was it. I had to tell her everything."

Plod on, Colin thought; the old pedestrian tone.

"I think Suzanne expects you to leave your wife and set up with her."

"Leave my wife?"

"I'm afraid she took your relationship too seriously."

Ryan covered his face with his hands. "I've been conned all along then, haven't I?" he said wearily. "This wasn't my understanding of it. Not my understanding at all. It was just...a fling. One of those things that you do."

"A fling?" Colin said. "Come on, mate. This is 1984. Victorian Values."

"Nothing Victorian about the way your daughter ran after me-"

"No, but there is this about it," Colin said patiently, "that you pay for what you do. It isn't the scot-free seventies, you can't expect to go littering the countryside with your by-blows and expect the state to pick up the tab. You've got to feel the guilt, Mr. Ryan, you've got to put your hand in your pocket. You'd really better think of limiting your activities. Or you might get one of these special diseases."

There was a short silence. Ryan slumped in his chair. "I offered to pay for the abortion."

"She doesn't want one. Anyway, it's too late for that."

"Girls today...I can't take it in." With his fingertips Ryan worked the skin above his eyebrows. "She must understand...you must make her understand...I can't leave my wife. It's simply not one of the options. Isabel's not well."

"Not well?" Colin said sharply. Ryan sat up, at his tone.

"Her nerves. At least I think it's her nerves. There's something amiss. To be honest-may I be honest with you?"

"Feel free."

"I suppose I thought, with Suzanne, that she would take my mind off things. I'm a very troubled man, Mr. Sidney. So would you be, if you had Isabel to deal with."

"Would I?"

"You see, Isabel was twenty-six when I met her, and unmarried. No one had taken her on. I thought I was her first lover, though later I learned different. She was wary of me, very wary, do you know what I mean? She put men off, men in general. It took me months to get anywhere near her. The day we were married I don't think I knew her at all."

Ryan picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and began to fold and pleat it between his fingers. "And do you know her now?" Colin asked.

"Oh, now...She drinks. Gin mostly. Or whisky. Quite a lot. She has rages, the most horrible emotional storms. If you knew her you'd understand why I looked elsewhere, but at the same time, as a practical matter, if I left her what would she do? I can't just dump her, can I? She can't take care of herself."

"Look," Colin said desperately. "You don't have to tell me any of this."

"Oh, but it's a relief, get it off my chest. Her father died just recently in hospital, and that's made things worse, because they were always at outs, you know, and she's got some idea that she wished him dead. It seems that before he died he told her he'd got...well, I don't know, some sort of responsibility, an illegitimate child I think, some woman he met in a park. Now she goes on and on about it. She talks about her life, the life she's had."

"We all have a life."

"But you have to put the past behind you, don't you?"

"If it will let you."

"That's what she says. She says time's circular, she can feel it snapping at her ankles."

"She has a point."

"There was this other man, before we met." He had made an aeroplane; he held it up, admiring it distractedly. "In the last few months she's talked about him all the time. She says she thinks he understood her, as much as anyone has ever understood her. But he let her down. Of course, with her being as she is, I don't know if he ever existed. She might have made him up to torment me."

Made him up? "No, I don't think so," Colin said. "She wouldn't do that, would she?"

"She can go back to him if she can find him." Ryan sniffed. "Let him have an innings."

"Perhaps he wouldn't want her now."

"Not if he knew her, he wouldn't want her. Not if he knew how she was now."

"Not anyway. It's a long time ago. We have to try, you know-" he spoke gently, realising it-"to put ourselves together in the circ.u.mstances in which we find ourselves."

"But she doesn't, do you see? Isabel gets drunk on her past, she goes crazy on it. She used to be a social worker, I suppose she saw some terrible sights. Sometimes she talks about this old woman who locked her in a room, and about these invisible things that came out and touched her legs. She says she thought she was going to die."

Colin felt afraid; a tight ball of shame and regret pushed up into his diaphragm, shortening his breath. He stood up, pushing his chair away clumsily, and walked across to the far wall. He inspected the seascape. "Perhaps she needs help. You know. A doctor. That kind of help."

"Help? She needs an exorcism. Oh, she can put on a good front. All the social work skills. They know how to detect neurotics, you see, and alcoholics, and so they know how to pretend they aren't. She keeps herself on a very tight rein. You wouldn't know, to meet her, that she's had breakdowns."

"Breakdowns?"

"Two, three. I'm not sure really. They all shade into one another."

"I had no idea."

"No, why should you have? I didn't tell Suzanne, except just the usual, you know, the complaints one makes. Suzanne seemed to understand me, at the time-" He shook his head. "I wouldn't have thought that she'd have such weird ideas, but you can never tell, can you?"

Colin examined the picture, looked at the cracks in the frame. How could Isabel have settled for Jim Ryan? But all marriages are mysteries. What had Suzanne seen in him? Weakness; something of her father perhaps. Strength was being like Sylvia; making your opinions felt. Ryan was still flushed, his thin straw hair stuck up in tufts where he had raked his fingers through it when he talked about Isabel. He was a ma.s.s of little tics, of amoral reflexes, of tiny mental knee-jerks that kept him out of guilt and anguish and justified himself to himself.

"Do you always say people are mad if they threaten to inconvenience you?" Colin turned away from the wall. But his heart was not in it. Suzanne was abandoned; Isabel was sick. Sylvia was at home, waiting to know what he had made of the situation.

"Well, it is an extraordinary idea, you have to admit," Ryan said. "Looking to Italian peasants for advice on birth control. It's nearly as daft as some of Isabel's ideas. I sometimes think, you know, all these people, walking the streets, pretending to be sane-they ought to go out at random and pick up a few people, and examine them to see what delusions they've got."

"Perhaps it's this town," Colin said. "I think they put something in the water."

A further quarter-hour pa.s.sed in exchange of pleasantries. Colin smoked his last cigarette. He crumpled up the packet and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. Ryan said, "I don't know why I'm telling you all this about my wife, it's personal stuff." He would regret it tomorrow; he was beginning to regret it now. He floated his paper aeroplane across the desk. It flew up, bombed sharply downwards, and landed at Colin's feet.

"Right then," Colin said. "There's nothing to add, is there? I'll be on my way."

Ryan leaped up to see him out, as if he were a client. His hand, extended, hung in the air. Colin stopped at the door. He turned. "I am the man your wife says let her down. I knew her ten years ago. We had an affair."

Ryan stared at him for a moment; but he had run the gamut of his talents for self-expression. He merely resumed his seat quietly, as if he were in church. His brown eyes had an opaque glaze. "Do you want to discuss it?" he asked.

"No," Colin said. "I never want to discuss it as long as I live." Half out of the door he paused, and spoke over his shoulder. "I'm moving my account."

Head in his hands, Ryan groaned.

He saw her as soon as he closed the door; with the precision of nightmare, moving from a blurred backdrop and into view; defined, in her strange anorak with the racing-team flashes, against the mill of senior shop a.s.sistants rattling their cash bags, and the housewives rummaging for biros in the depths of their bags. Once he would have been surprised, but now he was not surprised any longer. Figure thickened a little, features blurred; dark eyes alight in her usual pallor, the complexion he remembered.

Can you set a term to pa.s.sion? Two years? Five? Ten? For a moment he was going to call out to her, but then he didn't, and as he didn't, he noticed the irretrievable moment, splitting off and slipping away. From the fraction of a second which this failure occupied, his life changed; unnoticeably, irreparably, in silence. It was just like York Minster; no one had actually seen the lightning strike. Long before he had recovered his wits, long before he had time to gauge the extent of his loss, the queue for the quick-service till had parted, and swallowed her up.

When Colin got home his wife said, "Go next door for the Royal Variety Performance. She's been waiting for you."

In a daze, he went back down the front path. He hardly noticed his surroundings; the plants in the stone urns were withered and brown, unable to withstand the onward march of the autumn weather. It was strange that Sylvia had not taken them out; perhaps they had died overnight. He let himself out through his own front gate and went round the corner to Florence's. Really, with all the coming and going between the two houses, it would be better if he made a hole in the hedge. How lucky it was, come to think of it, that Florence had not moved to a smaller place, as friends had often urged her. Trite, mundane, his little thoughts ran on; he knew them acutely, every tiny quibble, but he felt remote, as if he were viewing them down a telescope. Tick, tick, tick. Sylvia and Isabel. Like the Pit and the Pendulum.

Florence met him in the hall. "This digital clock's gone mad," she said. "It's already tomorrow by it. I didn't think they could, I thought it was only clockwork clocks that went mad."

Colin took the timepiece from her and shook it. "You can't mend them by shaking them," she said. "Not this kind. I don't know what's happening. I can't understand it. The pictures keep falling off the walls."

"Our house is pretty much a wreck," Colin said. "The electrics have all gone wrong. Well, you know."

"My house plants are dying."

"Yes, ours too."

Florence looked flushed and aggrieved. "Do you know," she said, "I hardly had time to take my coat off before she was yelling for me. I walk in here at five-thirty, and Sylvia's off like a shot. And where've you been? Would you like a cup of tea?"

"Better go up to her."

"Yes, if you could sit with her for half an hour, it would be a help, I could just clean up in the kitchen. There's some broken gla.s.s in there, I don't know where it came from, I nearly trod in it."

"Leave her to me," Colin said soothingly. Inside, he screamed for morphine, brandy: for oblivion.

"Without that Blank woman I don't know what we'd do. She's been in with Sylvia this afternoon, turning her. She says she can handle old people."

"That's all to the good then."

"Yes, but I don't like her in my house."

"Why's that?"

"Well, Colin, she's so gross."

"I agree her personal appearance leaves something to be desired, but we should be thankful we've got her. Look, Florence, why don't you put your feet up for half an hour?"

"I don't know," Florence muttered. "Claimants all day, and then to come home to this. She's driving me mad, Colin. I don't know how much longer I can stand it."

"You know they said if it got really bad, they'd take her back. And then there's that holiday-beds scheme, to give you a break for six weeks."

"What's six weeks?" Florence's eyes were puffy from lack of sleep. "She could live another fifteen years."

Colin trailed upstairs. He could already hear his mother talking to herself in the dry peremptory voice she had affected since she rose from the dead. She seemed to be making preparations for her wedding in St. James's Palace Chapel, 6th July 1893. If only there were some chronological sense within her delusions, it would be easier to deal with her, but in the s.p.a.ce of a few minutes she could get herself from her early engagement to the Duke of Clarence through to the coronation of George VI. He stopped to listen outside the door. "Victoria," she said. "Mary. Augusta. Louise. Olga. Pauline. Claudine. Agnes."

"h.e.l.lo, Mum," Colin cried gaily, pushing the door open.

Mrs. Sidney glared at him. She was sitting bolt upright in bed. She tried nowadays to keep her spine straight. "Tell that footman to bring me my medicine," she said. "It's time."

The room was stuffy; the central heating had been turned up, and the curtains had been drawn since four o'clock. The fuzzy light from the streetlamp shone through them and illuminated Mrs. Sidney's bedside cabinet with its gla.s.s of barley water and array of pills. Colin tiptoed over and picked up some of the bottles and packets. He turned them about in the dim light and read their names. G.o.d knows what she was being given, but there was a lot of it. He went to the door.

"Florence!"

"What?"

"She says it's time for her pills. Which do I give her?"

"Give her what she fancies," Florence's wrathful voice came back. "Oh, hold on, I'm coming."

He imagined he could hear the sharp intake of breath as Florence levered herself to her feet. Now he heard her grumbling and gasping to herself as she came upstairs. She was not young herself; all this was too much for her. Now she was in the room, glaring at the invalid.

"I'm sorry. Sorry to fetch you up again. But I don't know what she should have. I don't want to poison her."

"Well, you say that with some conviction." Breathing hard, Florence went to the side of the bed and picked up a couple of the bottles. "How about these?" she enquired, rattling them under her mother's nose. "How does she know it's time for her tablets?" she flung over her shoulder. "She never gets the time right to within fifty years."

"We want the yellow ones," Mrs. Sidney said.

"The yellow ones are for your blood pressure. If you have too many you'll pop off."

"That is not a nice way to talk about us. We shall have them when you are out of the room."

"Better take them away," Colin said in alarm.

Florence replaced them firmly on the bedside table. "They can stay there." She met his eyes. "It's inconvenient for me to have her medicines strewn all over the house."

"But what if she-"

Florence s.n.a.t.c.hed the bottle up and once more rattled the tablets, in a pa.s.sion. "They're childproof," she said. "Childproof! She hasn't got the strength in her wrists." Noisily, she began to cry.

Colin felt helpless and embarra.s.sed. He stood watching her from the foot of the bed, unable to comfort or even approach her. He was used to Sylvia, with her tears of temper, but he could not remember seeing his sister like this. She was obviously at the end of her tether, a woman appalled by her own thoughts. Under pressure, the violent side of her was emerging. It seemed absurd to think of Florence, with her cable-st.i.tch woollies, having a violent side. But he knew from the newspapers that everyone has their depths. No one could be more ruthless in pursuit of his ends than a peace campaigner. In the United States, opponents of abortion had taken to dynamiting clinics. And Florence, so insistent on the sacred quality of human life; would it after all be so surprising if she felt that Mother were an exception to her general rule?

"Oh, come on, old la.s.s," he said. He stretched his hand out. "Give me those."

With a spluttering sob, Florence put the bottle into his hand. Mother's eyes watched them, the little black pupils darting to and fro. "I'm sorry," Florence said. She got out her handkerchief, with its frill of cheap lace and its initial. "It's just that I didn't sleep a wink last night. She was shouting out every half hour. She wanted the Court and Social page, and that woman Blank had gone and thrown the paper away. What could I do? I couldn't go out and print it."