Pack of Cards

  She read on, the text familiar enough for the thoughts to wander: Bill Freeman, the chairman, had introduced her appallingly, neglecting to mention her publications and reducing her Senior Lectureship at Ilmington College of Education to a Lectureship – she felt again a flush of irritation, and wondered if it had been deliberate or merely obtuse. They were an undistinguished lot, the audience; surely that woman at the end of the third row was an assistant in W. H. Smith's? Muriel observed them with distaste, as she turned over to the last page; schoolteachers and librarians, for the most part, one was talking right above their heads, in all probability. A somewhat wasted evening – which could have usefully been spent doing things about the house, or going through students' essays, or looking at that article Paul had given her, in order to have some well-thought-out comments for the morning.

  She concluded, and sat, with a wintry smile towards Bill Freeman, at her side, who, as one might have expected, rose to thank her with a sequence of remarks as inept as his introduction: ‘… our appreciation to Dr Rackham for her fascinating talk and throw the meeting open to discussion.’

  Discussion could not have been said to flow. There was a man who had been to a production of Macbeth in which you actually saw Banquo and did the speaker think that was right or was it better if you just kind of guessed he was there … and a woman who thought The Turn of the Screw wasn't awfully good when they made it into an opera, and another who had been interested in the bit about people in historical times believing in ghosts and had the speaker ever visited Hampton Court because if you go there the guide tells you that …

  Muriel dealt politely but briefly with the questioners. She glanced again at the clock, and then at Bill Freeman, who would do well to wind things up. There was a pause. Bill Freeman scanned the audience and said, ‘Well, if no one has anything more to ask Dr Rackham I think perhaps …’

  The small dark woman at the end of the front row leaned forward, looking at Muriel. ‘I thought what you said was quite interesting and I'd like to tell you about this thing that happened to a friend of mine. She was staying in this house, you see, where apparently …’

  It went on for several minutes. It was very tedious, a long rigmarole about inexplicable creakings in the night, objects appearing and disappearing, ghostly footsteps and sounds and so on and so forth, all classifiable according to Tale-Type and Motif if one felt so inclined and hadn't in fact lost interest in the whole subject some time ago, now that one was doing this work on the metaphysical poets with Paul … Muriel sat back and sighed. She eyed the woman with distaste; the face was vaguely familiar, someone local, presumably. An absurd little person with black, straight, short hair (dyed, by the look of it) fringing her face, those now unfashionable spectacles upswept at the corners and tinted a disagreeable mauve, long ear-rings of some cheap shiny stone. Ear-rings, Muriel noted, more suitable for a younger woman; this creature was her own age, at least. Her skirt was too short, also, and her shirt patterned with what looked like lotus flowers in a discordant pink.

  ‘… and my friend felt that it had come back to see about something, the ghost, something that had annoyed it. I just wondered what the speaker had to say about that, if she'd ever had any experiences of that kind.’ The woman stared at Muriel, almost aggressively.

  Muriel gathered herself. ‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘of course we've really been concerned this evening with the fictional and historical persona of the ghost, haven't we? As far as I'm concerned I would subscribe to what has been called the intellectual impossibility of ghosts – and of course experiences such as your friend's, if one stops to think about it, are open to all kinds of explanation, aren't they?’ – she flashed a quick, placating smile – ‘And now, I feel perhaps that …’ – she half-turned towards the chairman – ‘if there are no more questions …’

  Going home (after coffee and sandwiches in someone's house; the black-haired person, mercifully, had not been there) she shook off the dispiriting atmosphere of the evening with relief: the dingy room, the unresponsive audience. The paper had been far too academic for them, of course. She felt glad that Paul had not come. He had offered to, but she had insisted that he shouldn't. Turning the Mini out of the High Street and past the corner of his road, she allowed herself a glance at the lighted window of his house. The curtains were drawn; Sheila would be watching television, of course, Paul reading (the new Joyce book, probably, or maybe this week's TLS). Poor Paul. Poor, dear Paul. It was tragic, such a marriage. That dull, insensitive woman.

  ‘Your friendship is of the greatest value to me, Muriel,’ he had said, one week ago exactly. He had said it looking out of the window, rather than at her – and she had understood at once. Understood the depth of his feeling, the necessity for understatement, for the avoidance of emotional display. Their position was of extreme delicacy – Paul's position. Head of Department, Vice-Principal of the College. She had nodded and murmured something, and they had gone on to discuss a student, some problems about the syllabus …

  At night, she had lain awake, thinking with complacency of their relationship, of its restraint and depth, in such contrast to the stridency of the times. Muriel considered herself – knew herself to be – a tolerant woman, but occasionally she observed her students with disgust; their behaviour was coarse and vulgar, not to put too fine a point upon it. They brandished what should be kept private.

  Occasionally, lying there, she was visited by other feelings, which she recognised and suppressed; a mature, balanced person is able to exercise self-control. The satisfaction of love takes more than one form.

  She put the car in the garage and let herself into the house, experiencing the usual pleasure. It was delightful; white walls, bare boards sanded and polished, her choice and tasteful possessions – rugs, pictures, the few antique pieces, the comfortable sofa and armchairs, the William Morris curtains. It was so unlike, now, the dirty, cluttered, scruffy place she had bought five months ago as to be almost unrecognisable. Only its early Victorian exterior remembered – and that too was now bright and trim under new paint, with a front door carefully reconstructed in keeping, to replace the appalling twenties porch some previous occupant had built on. The clearing-out process had been gruelling – Muriel blenched even now at the thought of it: cupboards stacked with junk and rubbish that nobody had bothered to remove (there had been an executors' sale, the elderly owner having died some months before), the whole place filthy and in a state of horrid disrepair. She had done the bulk of the work herself, with the help of a local decorator and carpenter for the jobs she felt were beyond her. But alone she had emptied all those cavernous cupboards, carting the stuff down to a skip hired from a local firm. It had been a disagreeable job – not just because of the dirt and physical effort, but because of the nature of the junk, which hinted at an alien and unpleasing way of life. She felt that she wanted to scour the house of its past, make it truly hers, as she heaved bundle after bundle of musty rubbish down the stairs. There had been boxes of old clothes – too old and sour to interest either the salerooms or Oxfam – brash vulgar female clothes, shrill of colour and pattern, in materials like sateen, chenille and rayon, the feel of which made Muriel shudder. They slithered from her hands, smelling of mould and mouse droppings, their touch so repellent that she took to wearing rubber gloves. And then there were shelves of old magazines and books – not the engrossing treasure-trove that such a hoard ought to be (secondhand bookshops, after all, were an addiction of hers) but dreary and dispiriting in what they suggested of whoever had owned them: pulp romantic fiction, stacks of the cheaper, shriller women's magazines (all sex and crime, not even that limited but wholesome stuff about cooking, children and health), some tattered booklets with pictures that made Muriel flush – she shovelled the beastly things into a supermarket carton and dumped the lot into the skip. This house had seen little or no literature that could even be called decent during its recent past, that was clear enough; with pleasure she had arranged her own books on the
newly-painted shelves at either side of the fireplace. They seemed to clinch her conquest of the place.

  There had been other things, too. A dressmaker's dummy that she had found prone at the back of a cupboard (its murky shape had given her a hideous shock); she had scrubbed and kept it, occasionally she made herself a dress or skirt and it might conceivably be useful, though its torso was dumpier than her own. A tangle of hairnets and curlers in a drawer of the kitchen dresser, horribly scented of violets. Bits and pieces of broken and garish jewellery – all fake – that kept appearing from under floorboards or down crevices. Even now she came across things; it was as though the house would never have done with spewing out its tawdry memories. And of course the redecorating had been a major job – stripping away those fearful wallpapers that plastered every room, every conceivable misrepresentation of nature, loud and unnatural roses, poppies and less identifiable flowers that crawled and clustered up and down the walls. Sometimes two or three different ones had fought for survival in the same room; grimly, Muriel, aided by the decorator, tore and soaked and peeled. At last, every wall was crisply white, a background to her prints and lithographs, her Georgian mirror, the Khelim rug.

  Now, she felt at last that she had taken possession. There were one or two small things still that jarred – a cupboard in her bedroom from which, scrub as she might, she could not eradicate the sickly smell of some cheap perfume, a hideous art nouveau window (she gathered such things were once again in fashion – chacun à son goût) in the hall which she would eventually get around to replacing. Otherwise, all was hers; her quiet but distinctive taste in harmony with the house's original architectural grace.

  It was just past nine; time for a look at that article before bed. Muriel went to her desk (which, by day, had a view of the small garden prettily framed in William Morris's ‘Honeysuckle’) and sat reading and taking notes for an hour or so. She remembered that Paul would be away all day tomorrow, at a meeting in London, and she would not be able to see him, so when she had finished reading she pulled her typewriter in front of her and made a résumé of her reflections on the article, to leave in his pigeon-hole. She read them through, satisfied with what she felt to be some neatly put points. Then she got up, locked the back and front doors, checked the windows, and went to bed.

  In the night, she woke; the room felt appallingly stuffy – she could even, from her bed, smell that disagreeable cupboard – and she assumed that she must have forgotten to open the window. Getting up to do so, she found the sash raised a couple of inches as usual. She returned to bed, and was visited by unwelcome yearnings which she drove out by a stern concentration on her second-year Shakespeare option.

  She had left her page of notes on the article in the typewriter, and almost forgot it in the morning, remembering at the last moment as she was about to leave the house, and going back to twitch it hastily out and put it in her handbag. The day was busy with classes and a lecture, so that it was not until the afternoon that she had time to write a short note for Paul (‘I entirely agree with you about the weaknesses in his argument; however, there are one or two points we might discuss, some thoughts on which I enclose. I do hope London was not too exhausting – MCR’), and glance again at the page of typescript.

  It was not as satisfactory as Muriel remembered; in fact it was not satisfactory at all. She must have been a great deal more tired than she had realised last night – only in a stupor (and not even, one would have hoped, then) could she have written such muddled sentences, such hideous syntax, such illiteracies of style and spelling. ‘What I think is that he developped what he said about the character of Tess all wrong so what you ended up feeling was that …’ she read in horror ‘… if Hardy's descriptive passages are not always relivant then personally what I don't see is why …’ And what was this note at the bottom – apparently added in haste? ‘What about meeting for a natter tomorrow – I was thinking about you last night – ssh! you aren't supposed to know that!’ I must have been half-asleep, she thought, how could I write such things?

  Hot with discomfort (and relief – heavens! she might not have looked again at the thing), she crumpled the paper and threw it into the wastepaper basket. She wrote a second note to Paul saying that she had read the article but unfortunately had not the time now to say more, and hoped to discuss it with him at some point; she then cancelled her late-afternoon class and went home early. I have been overdoing things, she thought – my work, the house – I need rest, a quiet evening.

  She settled down to read, but could not concentrate; for almost the first time, she found herself wishing for the anodyne distraction of television. She polished and dusted the sitting-room (finding, in the process, a disgusting matted hank of hairnets and ribbon that had got, quite inexplicably, into her Worcester teapot) and cleaned the windows. Then she did some washing, which led to an inspection of her wardrobe; it seemed sparse. A new dress, perhaps, would lift her spirits. On Saturday, she would buy one, and in the meantime, there was that nice length of tweed her sister had given her and which had lain untouched for months. Perhaps with the aid of the dressmaker's dummy it could be made into a useful skirt. She fetched the dummy and spent an hour or two with scissors and pins – a soothing activity, though the results were not quite as satisfactory as she could have wished. Eventually she left the roughly-fashioned skirt pinned to the dummy and put it away in the spare-room cupboard before going to bed.

  A few days later, to her pleasure, Paul accepted an invitation to call in at the house on his way home to pick up a book and have a drink. He had hesitated before accepting, and she understood his difficulties at once; such meetings were rare for them, and the reasons clear enough to her: the pressures of his busy life, Sheila … ‘Well, yes, how kind, Muriel,’ he had said. ‘Yes, fine, then. I'll give Sheila a ring and tell her I'll be a little late.’

  Poor Paul; the strains of such a marriage did not bear contemplation. Of course, they always appeared harmonious enough in public, a further tribute to his wonderful patience and restraint. Nor did he ever hint or complain; one had to be perceptive to realise the tensions that must rise – a man of his intellectual stature fettered to someone without, so far as Muriel understood, so much as an A-level. His tolerance was amazing; Muriel had even heard him, once, join with well-simulated enthusiasm in a discussion of some trashy television series prompted by Sheila at a Staff Club party.

  She was delayed at the College and only managed to arrive back at the house a few minutes before he arrived. Pouring the sherry, she heard him say, ‘What's this, then, Muriel – making a study of popular culture?’ and turned round to see him smiling and holding up one of those scabrous women's magazines that – she thought – she had committed to the skip. Disconcerted, she found herself flushing, embarking on a defensive explanation of the rubbish that had been in the house … (But she had cleared all that stuff out, every bit, how could that thing have been, apparently, lying on the little Victorian sewing-table, from which Paul had taken it?)

  The incident unnerved her, spoiled what should have been an idyllic hour.

  Muriel woke the next day – Saturday – discontented and twitchy. She had slept badly, disturbed by the muffled sound of a woman's shrill laugh, coming presumably from the next house in the terrace; she had not realised before that noise could penetrate the walls.

  Remembering her resolution of a few days before, she went shopping for a new dress. The facilities of Ilmington were hardly metropolitan, but adequate for a woman of her restrained tastes; she found, after some searching, a pleasant enough garment innocent of any of the nastier excesses of modern fashion, in a wholesome colour and fabric, and took it home in a rather calmer frame of mind.

  In the evening, there was the Principal's sherry party (Paul would be there; with any luck there would be the opportunity for a few quiet words). She went to take the dress from the wardrobe and indeed was about to put it on before the feel of it in her hands brought her up short; surely there was something wrong
? She took it to the window, staring – this was never the dress she had chosen so carefully this morning? The remembered eau-de-nil was now, looked at again, in the light from the street, a harsh and unflattering apple-green; the coarse linen, so pleasant to the touch, a slimy artificial stuff. She had made the most disastrous mistake; tears of frustration and annoyance pricked her eyes. She threw the thing back in the cupboard and put on her old Jaeger print.