‘Seems quiet tonight,’ he remarked.
‘The telly’s broken down.’
‘Oh, so that’s it. I thought there was something different.’ Norman glanced towards the centre table where the great box stood, its face now grey and silent as its viewers in their beds. It should have been covered with a cloth, if only for the sake of decency. ‘When did this happen?’
‘Yesterday, and they haven’t done anything about it. You’d think it was the least they could do, wouldn’t you?’
‘Well, it’ll give you more time for your thoughts,’ said Norman, meaning to be sarcastic, even a little cruel, for what thoughts could Ken have better than telly? He could not have known that Ken did indeed have thoughts, dreams really, of the driving school he and his woman friend planned to set up together; how he lay thinking of names—something like ‘Reliant’ or ‘Excelsior’ was obviously suitable, then his fancy was suddenly arrested by the name ‘Dolphin’ and he had a vision of a fleet of cars, turquoise blue or buttercup yellow, swooping and gliding over the North Circular, never stalling at the traffic lights as learners so often did in real life. He thought too about the make of car they would have - nothing foreign or with the engine at the back—that seemed to be against nature, like a watch with a square face. He could not reveal any of this to Norman, who disliked the motor car and couldn’t even drive one. Ken had always felt a sort of pitying contempt for him, being so unmanly and working as a clerk in an office with middle-aged women.
They sat almost in silence and it was a relief to both of them when the bell went and the visit was at an end.
‘Everything all right?’ Norman asked, now eagerly on his feet.
‘The tea’s too strong.’
‘Oh,’ Norman was nonplussed. As if he could do anything about a thing like that! What did Ken expect? ‘Couldn’t you ask Sister or one of the nurses to make it weaker or put more milk in it?’
‘You’d still taste the strength, even so. It’s strong to begin with, you see. Anyway I couldn’t ask Sister or one of the nurses—it’s not their job.’
‘Well, the lady that makes the tea, then.’
‘Catch me doing that,’ said Ken obscurely. ‘But strong tea’s the last thing I should have with my complaint.’ Norman shook himself like a tetchy little dog. He hadn’t come here to be involved in this sort of thing, and he allowed himself to be hustled away by a bossy Irish nurse, with never a backward glance at the patient in the bed.
Outside, his irritable mood was intensified by the cars that rushed past, preventing him from crossing the road to the bus stop. Then he had to wait a long time for a bus and when he reached the square where he lived there were more cars, parked side by side, overlapping on to the pavement. Some of them were so large that their hindquarters—rumps, buttocks and bums—jutted over the kerb and he had to step aside to avoid them. Bugger,’ he muttered, kicking one of them with a small ineffectual foot. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’
Nobody heard him. The almond trees were in flower but he did not see them and was unconscious of their blossom shining in the lamplight. He entered his front door and went into his bed-sitting room. The evening had exhausted him and he did not even feel that he had done Ken much good.
Edwin had spent a much more satisfactory evening. The attendance at the sung Mass had been pretty much as usual for a weekday—only seven in the congregation but the full complement in the sanctuary. Afterwards he and Father G. had gone to the pub for a drink. They had talked church shop—whether to order a stronger brand of incense now that the Rosa Mystica was nearly finished—should they let the young people organize the occasional Sunday evening service with guitars and that—what would be the reaction of the congregation if Father G. tried to introduce Series Three?
‘All that standing up to pray,’ Edwin said. People wouldn’t like that.’
‘But the Kiss of Peace—turning to the person next to you with a friendly gesture, rather a…’ Father G. had been going to say ‘beautiful idea’, but perhaps, given his particular congregation, it wasn’t quite the word.
Remembering the emptiness of the church at the service they had just attended, Edwin was also doubtful—not more than half a dozen dotted among the echoing pews and nobody standing next to anybody to make any kind of gesture—but he was too kind to spoil Father G.’s vision of a multitude of worshippers. He often thought regretfully of those days of the Anglo-Catholic revival in the last century and even the more sympathetic climate of twenty years ago, where Father G., tall and cadaverous in cloak and biretta, would have been rather more in place than in the church of the nineteen seventies where so many of the younger priests went in for jeans and long hair. One such had been in the pub that evening. Edwin’s heart sank as he visualized the kind of services at his church. I think perhaps we’d better keep the evening service as it is,’ he said, thinking dramatically, over my dead body, seeing himself trampled down by a horde of boys and girls brandishing guitars…
They parted outside Edwin’s neat semi-detached house in a street not far from the common. Standing by the hatstand in the hall, Edwin was reminded of his dead wife, Phyllis. It was the moment of waiting outside the sitting room door before going in that brought her into his mind. He could almost hear her voice, a little querulous, asking, ‘Is that you, Edwin?’ As if it could be anybody else! Now he had all the freedom that loneliness brings—he could go to church as often as he liked, attend meetings that went on all evening, store stuff for jumble sales in the back room and leave it there for months. He could go to the pub or the vicarage and stay there till all hours.
Edwin went upstairs to bed humming a favourite Office Hymn, ‘O Blest Creator of the Light’. It was tricky, the plainsong tune, and his efforts to get it right diverted his attention from the words. In any case it would be going a bit far to regard tonight’s congregation as ‘sunk in sin and whelmed with strife’, as one line of the hymn put it. People nowadays wouldn’t stand for that kind of talk. Perhaps that was one reason why so few went to church.
Two
So OFTEN NOW Letty came upon reminders of her own mortality or, regarded less poetically, the different stages towards death. Less obvious than the obituaries in The Times and the Telegraph were what she thought of as upsetting’ sights. This morning, for instance, a woman, slumped on a seat on the Underground platform while the rush hour crowds hurried past her, reminded her so much of a school contemporary that she forced herself to look back, to make quite sure that it was not Janet Belling. It appeared not to be, yet it could have been, and even if it wasn’t it was still somebody, some woman driven to the point where she could find herself in this situation. Ought one to do anything? While Letty hesitated, a young woman, wearing a long dusty black skirt and shabby boots, bent over the slumped figure with a softly spoken enquiry. At once the figure reared itself up and shouted in a loud, dangerously uncontrolled voice, ‘Fuck off!’ Then it couldn’t be Janet Belling, Letty thought, her first feeling one of relief; Janet would never have used such an expression. But fifty years ago nobody did—things were different now, so that was nothing to go by. In the meantime, the girl moved away with dignity. She had been braver than Letty.
That morning was a flag day. Marcia peered at the young woman standing with her tray and rattling tin outside the station. Something to do with cancer. Marcia advanced, quietly triumphant, a 10p coin in her hand.
The smiling girl was ready, the flag in the form of a little shield poised to stab into the lapel of Marcia’s coat.
‘Thank you,’ she said, as the coin clattered down into the tin.
‘A very good cause,’ Marcia murmured, ‘and one very dear to me. You see, I too have had…’
The girl waited nervously, her smile fading, but like Letty she was hypnotized by the marmoset eyes behind the thick glasses. And now promising young men who might have been induced to buy flags were slinking by into the station, pretending to be in a hurry.
‘I, too,’ Marcia repeated, ‘have ha
d something removed.‘
At that moment an older man, attracted by the sight of the pretty flag-seller, approached and cut short Marcia’s attempt at conversation, but the memory of her stay in hospital lasted her all the way to the office.
Marcia had been one of those women, encouraged by her mother, who had sworn that she would never let the surgeon’s knife touch her body, a woman’s body being such a private thing. But of course when it came to the point there was no question of resistance. She smiled as she remembered Mr Strong, the consultant surgeon who had performed the operation—mastectomy, hysterectomy, appendectomy, tonsillectomy—you name it, it was all one to him, his cool competent manner seemed to imply. She recalled his procession down the ward, surrounded by satellites, her eager observation and anticipation until the great moment when he arrived at her bed and she heard him ask, ‘And how’s Miss Ivory this morning?’ in that almost teasing way. Then she would tell him how she was and he would listen, occasionally asking a question or turning to Sister for her opinion, the rather flippant manner replaced by professional concern.
If the surgeon was God, the chaplains were his ministers, a little lower than the housemen. The good-looking young Roman Catholic had come first, saying how we all needed a rest at times, though he did not look as if he could possibly need such a thing, and how being in hospital, unpleasant though it was in many ways, could sometimes prove to be a blessing in disguise, for there was no situation that couldn’t be turned to good, and truly you could say that every cloud had a silver lining … He went on in this vein with such a flow of Irish charm that it was some time before Marcia could get in a word to tell him that she was not a Roman Catholic.
‘Ah, then you’ll be a Protestant.’ The violence of the word had a stunning effect, as it must to anyone used to the vaguer and gentler ‘Anglican’ or ‘Church of England’. ‘Well, it’s nice to have had this chat,’ he conceded. ‘The Protestant chaplain will be along to see you.’
The Anglican chaplain offered her Holy Communion and although she was not a practising churchwoman Marcia accepted, partly out of superstition but also because it gave her a kind of distinction in the ward. Only one other woman received the ministrations of the chaplain. The other patients criticized his crumpled surplice and wondered why he didn’t get a nylon or terylene one, and recalled their own vicars refusing to marry people in their churches or to christen kiddies because their parents didn’t go to church, and other such instances of unreasonable and unChristian behaviour.
Of course in hospital, and particularly when the chaplain visited her, the question of death did come into one’s mind, and Marcia had asked herself the brutal question, if she were to die, having no close relatives, would it matter? She could be buried in a pauper’s grave, if such a thing still existed, though she would leave money enough for a funeral; but her body could be shovelled into a furnace, she would never know. Might as well be realistic. Of course she could donate certain organs to assist in research or spare-part surgery. This last idea had an irresistible appeal, linked as it was with the thought of Mr Strong, and she meant to fill in the form at the back of the booklet they had given her when she entered the hospital. But in the end she never got round to it and anyway her operation had been a success and she had not died. ‘I shall not die but live’—there had been a poem that came into her mind at the time. She didn’t read poetry now, or anything else for that matter, but sometimes she remembered the odd tag.
As she waited on the platform that morning Marcia noticed that somebody had scrawled in crude capital letters, KILL ASIAN SHIT. She stared at the inscription and mouthed the words to herself as if considering their implication. They brought back another hospital memory, of a man who had wheeled her on the trolley to the operating theatre, bearded and with a remote, dignified beauty, his head and body swathed in bluish gauze. He had called her ‘dear’.
The three others looked up as Marcia entered the room.
‘Late, aren’t you?’ Norman snapped.
As if it had anything to do with him, Letty thought.
‘There’s been some delay on the Underground this morning,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes,’ Norman agreed. ‘Did you see that on the blackboard at Holborn station? Trains were delayed “due to a person under the train at Hammersmith”, it said. A “person”—is that what you have to say now?’
‘Poor soul,’ said Edwin. ‘One does wonder sometimes how these tragedies occur.’
Letty was silent, remembering her own upsetting experience. That woman might find herself under a train one day. She had not mentioned it before but now she did.
‘Dear me,’ said Norman, ‘that looks like a good example of somebody who’s fallen through the net of the welfare state.’
‘It could happen to anyone,’ said Letty, ‘but there’s really no need for anyone nowadays to get into that sort of state.’ She glanced down at her tweed skirt, old but newly cleaned and pressed; at least one could keep up reasonable standards.
Marcia said nothing, but stared in her disconcerting way.
Norman said almost chirpily, ‘Oh, well, that’s another thing we’ve all got coming to us, or at least the possibility—falling through the net of the welfare state.’
‘Don’t keep on about it,’ said Edwin. ‘What with being found dead of hypothermia, you seem to’ve got it on the brain.’
‘Dead of starvation’s more likely,’ said Norman. He had been to the supermarket on his way to work and now proceeded to check the items in his shopping bag—a ‘psychedelic’ plastic carrier, patterned in vivid colours, hinting at some unexpected aspect of his character—against the printed slip he had received at the check-out. ‘Crispbread 16, tea 18, cheese 34, butter beans, the small tin, 12,’ he recited. ‘Bacon 46, but that was the smallest pack I could find, smoked oyster back, they called it, not really the best You’d think they’d do it up smaller for people living alone, wouldn’t you. The woman in front of me spent over twelve pounds—just my luck to get behind somebody like that at the check-out,’ he droned on.
‘I should put the bacon in a cooler place if I were you,’ said Letty.
‘Yes, I’ll pop it in one of the filing cabinets,’ said Norman. ‘Don’t let me forget it. You read of elderly people being found dead in the house with no food—dreadful, isn’t it?’
‘There’s no need for that,’ said Edwin.
‘It is possible to store tins,’ said Marcia, in a remote sort of way.
‘But then you might not have the strength to open them,’ said Norman with relish. ‘Anyway, I don’t have much storage space.’
Marcia glanced at him thoughtfully. She wondered sometimes about Norman’s domestic arrangements but of course nobody had ever seen his bed-sitting room. The four who worked together did not visit each other or meet after office hours. When she had first come here, Marcia had experienced a faint stirring of interest in Norman, a feeling that was a good many degrees cooler than tenderness but which nevertheless occupied her thoughts briefly. Once at lunchtime she had followed him. At a safe distance behind, she had watched him as he picked his way through the fallen leaves and called out angrily after a car which had failed to stop at a zebra crossing. She found herself entering the British Museum, ascending wide stone steps and walking through echoing galleries filled with alarming images and objects in glass cases, until they came to rest in the Egyptian section by a display of mummified animals and small crocodiles. Here Norman had mingled with a crowd of school children and Marcia slipped away. If she had thought of making herself known to him, the time and such questions as ‘Do you come here often?’ were obviously inappropriate. Norman had not revealed to any of them that he visited the British Museum, and even if he had would never have admitted to the contemplation of mummified crocodiles. No doubt it was a secret thing. As time went on Marcia’s feeling for Norman waned. Then she went into hospital and Mr Strong entered her life and filled her thoughts. Now she hardly considered Norman at all, except as a rathe
r silly little man, so his fussing with his shopping and his reading out the things he had bought only irritated her. She did not want to know what he was going to eat—it was of no interest whatsoever.
‘That reminds me, I must get a loaf at lunchtime,’ said Edwin. ‘Father G.’s coming in for a bite before the PCC meeting and I’ll do one of my specials—baked beans on toast with a poached egg on top.’
The women smiled, as they were meant to, but Edwin was known to be a competent cook and it was not as if they had anything much grander for their own evening meals, he thought, as he came out of a teashop that sold bread, carrying a large white loaf wrapped in a paper bag. He had had a light lunch, snack really, in the teashop whose decor had changed distressingly, though the food was the same. Edwin and the other regular patrons felt themselves out of place among so much trendy orange and olive green and imitation stripped pine. There were hanging lights and shades patterned with butterflies and over it all soft ‘muzak’, difficult to hear but insidious. Edwin didn’t like change, and now that Gamage’s had been pulled down it was a relief to do his lunchtime church crawl, though even the Church, the dear old C of E, was not immune to change. Sometimes he would slip in for a prayer or a look round and a read of the parish magazine if there was one, but mostly he studied the noticeboards to see what was offered in the way of services and other activities. Today he was attracted by the announcement of an austerity luncheon in aid of a well-known charity, but rather surprisingly ‘with wine’—that might be worth a visit.