Vacant Possession

  “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 circumstances 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 mass 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 passed 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 assistants 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 passion? 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 glass 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 space 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.”

  “Hello, 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 glass 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. God 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 snatched the bottle up and once more rattled the tablets, in a passion. “They’re childproof,” she said. “Childproof! She hasn’t got the strength in her wrists.” Noisily, she began to cry.

  Colin felt helpless and embarrassed. 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-stitch 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 lass,” 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.”

  Colin put his arm around her shoulders. The feeling of unreality remained. Speech was painful, an effort. It was an effort to bring his mind to bear on what was happening. “We must talk to the doctor again. The GP, I mean. Tell him she needs something to make her sleep.”

  “I’ve got something. She spits it out. She just spits her pills out and asks for the yellow ones.”

  “Well, we’d better put him in the picture, hadn’t we?”

  Florence took a deep breath, mastering herself. “I’m not going to let it get to me, Colin. I never thought she would get me to this pitch. I never thought I would entertain such thoughts, about my own mother.”

  Colin squeezed her arm. “Go down and have a snooze. Go on. I’ll stay with her for a while.”

  “All right. Perhaps I could get Sylvia to sleep in for the odd night. But then who will look after her during the day? We’ll have to depend on that woman.”

  Colin sat down by his mother’s bedside. He might as well be here as at home, and do Florence a bit of good. He might as well sit here with his thoughts, in the close semi-darkness and the smell of invalidity. He shut his eyes. Perhaps he could sleep. Sleep would be good for him. He might wake up and find that his conversation with Jim Ryan had receded a little, softened around the edges. Just now there were fragments of it that lay behind his eyes, like bits of broken glass.

  Isabel was different from the other women he had known. She sat still, and spoke very little. He had attributed wisdom to her. “She keeps herself on a very tight rein.” It wasn’t wisdom that had stilled her; it was fear that froze her up.

  I know, he thought—I suppose I know—that people who are so exercised about the human condition are often refusing to face problems of their own. Like Sylvia; she rushes down the road to do some good elsewhere. He had never thought to compare the two ladies before. No doubt if they could meet, they would have a lot to say to each other. They would be able to pluck out a few thoughts of their heart and run a little comparison survey. Men did not do that. He understood why Jim Ryan had been so undignified. How would it be if he walked into the staff room tomorrow and said, “Gentlemen, I need to talk to you, I need to unburden myself and hear your advice?” It was unthinkable. They’d make a dash for it and there he’d be, standing by the photocopier while they rang for an ambulance. Yet without some process like this, how could he know what other men felt? He thought of his colleagues; after the first flurry of excitement, putting a minute diamond on some girl’s finger, were they ever again beset by the stirrings of romance? Never: in his view. Stirrings of lechery, perhaps; those passed. One woman was the same as the next to them. Marriage was a practical arrangement which they entered into for the sake of comfort, and which they left under protest when the standard of comfort declined too far. They were inert, his colleagues, collections of cells for copulating and eating pork chops and going to the municipal swimming pool on a Sunday afternoon.

  It was with the notion of Isabel that he had conspired to avoid this fate; it was with his picture he conspired, with the far-seeing eyes and mandarin lips. Always he had believed that somehow, somewhere, and one of these days, he would place before her his confusions, his doubts, the great mass of unsatisfied needs that doubled and raged inside him like a convulsing child; and there would be one word, and she would say it, and with that word she would put his life to rights.

  And now? There was no future, but that was not it. There was no past; something had reached back and changed it. Had she always been crazy? It was easy to believe. She would turn into one of those women who stumble about the str
eets, talking to themselves; who sit in bus shelters in bitter weather with bottles sticking out of their shopping bags. She would grow old, decrepit, insane; and he would be old too, and so would Sylvia, a touching old Darby and Joan; and there would be Isabel, legless in a flower bed when they went to get the sunshine in the park.

  “His Majesty is not feeling up to much today,” his mother said conversationally. “I think I shall have to tour the Empire alone.” She watched him, nodding in the hard chair. “You aren’t going to marry that woman?” she said sharply.

  He jerked awake. “What woman?”

  “That woman you’re always thinking about. Mrs. Ernest Simpson, you know what woman.”

  “Oh, her. No,” he said slowly, dazed. “No, it would be too fraught and complicated, wouldn’t it? I don’t think I’ll bother. I don’t know why I ever thought I could.”

  “Speculation is rife. You must put an end to it at once.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Okay.”

  That night, Lizzie Blank went down to Gino’s Club. It was Ladies’ Half-Price Nite, and very crowded. There was a man who stood up on a stage and insulted the audience, and people laughed at him. She was amazed when she learned that he got a wage for it. She thought it was just one of those things that happen.

  She had just got on the right side of her first Tequila Sunrise when Clyde appeared. He made a nuisance of himself all night, nursing a Brown Split, with his feet stuck out and getting in the way of the dancers. She could see him watching her, his lugubrious face splintered by the mirror ball into a thousand bloodshot eyes.

  It was two o’clock when she left, slipping out of the back door. She thought in terms of an early night, although it was true that sleep didn’t interest her like it did other people. For a time she had taken Lizzie Blank’s clothes with her in a carrier bag when she went out at night, and changed in a ladies’ lavatory somewhere, but the weather was getting a bit chilly for that, and she didn’t expect to meet Mr. Kowalski on the stairs. And what if she did? She smiled absently to herself. She had just got some new boots, white leather ones with platform soles and very high heels. Clyde saw her from the knee downwards, as he blundered out of the strobe lights and into the dark.