Vacant Possession Part 9

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 G.o.d'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 cla.s.s. 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 rect.i.tude 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 cla.s.s?" 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, p.r.i.c.ked 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 superst.i.tious 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 a.s.sistant bank manager."

When Miss Anaemia came downstairs, she found Mr. Kowalski kneeling on the floor in the hall, his ear pressed to the k.n.o.b of the kitchen door. "New doork.n.o.bs," 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 embarra.s.sing. 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 doork.n.o.bs. 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 s.p.a.ce. The process was extracting something from her, filing away at her essence; she was no more than the virgin white s.p.a.ce between two black lines, no more than a blur behind a sheet of toughened gla.s.s. "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, pinp.r.i.c.ked 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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-k.n.o.b, 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."

Sat.u.r.day 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 n.o.body 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.