Vacant Possession

  “He certainly has not got rickets,” Sylvia said.

  “Well, he’s so titchy. That’s why he’s such a rotten little bully. We done it in psychology.”

  “Perhaps he’s a pygmy,” Claire said. “He can’t help it.”

  Alistair tore off a piece of kitchen roll, and blew his nose into it with great violence. He wadded it up in his palms and tossed it at Karen. It fell short, and lay on the cork tiles.

  “Just watch it,” Sylvia said. “Lizzie’s not spending her time and my money cleaning up after you lot.”

  “I don’t want her cleaning up after me,” Alistair said. “You make sure you don’t let her in my room.”

  “She can’t get in, can she? You’ve always got the door locked.”

  “What do you do in there?” Colin asked.

  “Black magic,” Karen said. “Him and Austin. Austin nicks vestments and stuff from his dad, and they have Black Masses.”

  “I’d do a spell to give you spots,” Alistair said. “Only you haven’t got room for any more.”

  “So is that what you’re going to do today? Lock yourself in and have a Black Mass?”

  “Yeah,” Alistair said. “And miss all the lovely sunshine.” He slouched out of the room. Sylvia’s eyes followed him.

  “I do worry,” she said.

  Colin flapped over a page of the newspaper. “It’s better than him joining the Young Conservatives,” he said.

  “You never take things seriously.”

  “Oh, I do.” He glanced up from the news of the inferno. “I know a lot of kids. So I don’t get alarmed.”

  “Yes, but Alistair’s your own.”

  “Now that does alarm me. At times.” But he knew a hundred children as bad as Alistair, a hundred worse; antisocial truants from broken homes. Theirs was not broken; only creaking a bit under the strain. The kids passed through his office every day, en route from brief rebellion to a lifetime’s acceptance of their lot. They had silly hairstyles; beneath them, dull conformist little brains.

  “I wish you’d keep them in school till the end of term,” Sylvia said. “I wish he weren’t leaving.”

  “What would he do if he stayed on? Take Oxbridge by storm with his two CSEs?”

  “Off again,” said Sylvia, stirring her muesli. She was training herself to eat slowly, putting down her spoon between mouthfuls, and the action gave her words a quite spurious consequence. “Off again with your little schoolmaster’s sarcasms.”

  “Does it make you cross?”

  “It makes me bored.”

  “We’ve nothing else for protection, now the LEA have abolished flogging.”

  “I don’t think you really value education, Colin. You had too much of it.”

  “I had enough,” he conceded.

  “Alistair used to be so bright.”

  “That’s what all the parents say.”

  Sylvia stood up and began carrying dishes to the sink. Her orange peel lay abandoned on the tabletop, a long strip dropped neatly from practised dieter’s fingers. Colin looked at it with interest. You can do divination with orange peel, he thought. The future was there, in homely things, for anyone who wanted to know it; door keys, tea leaves. There are letters in orange peel, which tell you who will be important in your life. He could make out quite clearly a capital “I.”

  At once, a certain thought came into his mind. He examined it, and found it unwelcome. He would not entertain it; he kicked it out. His pulse rate rose a fraction; he dropped his eyes, put down his coffee cup. The thought rolled back, in a leisurely way, and closed around his attention like a loop of string. For a few months in his long marriage, he had been unfaithful to Sylvia. His affair with Isabel Field had been finished for years—it was years since he’d seen her—but the body has its own set of memories, and the mind hangs on to nagging superstitions. An initial leaps out from the table; horoscopes are read. A retreating stranger stops the heart on a station platform.

  That part of life was over, of course. Isabel had been young and intense, full of devouring schemes. She’d been a social worker, full of tutored emotions; always nagging away about the inner meaning of things. He remembered, when he thought about her now, her gloom, her scruples, the problems she’d had with her clients; and the shock of contact, skin against skin, mouth against mouth, her quickening breath in the darkness of a parked car. He’d had nothing to offer her; only what she could have got from any man, and in greater comfort too. Sylvia hadn’t known about it. She hadn’t noticed, he thought, the struggle that was going on inside him.

  Just as well. Her ignorant body had done the battling for her. Christmas Day, 1974, she’d told him she was pregnant again. He’d given up Isabel so that Claire could be born, and grow up plump and cheeky, and get Brownie badges.

  That had been a bad year; the guilt, the deception, the hopeless months that follow the end of an affair. Lately, and unwillingly, he’d begun to think about Isabel again. Change was in the air, an undercurrent of disturbance. He couldn’t account for it.

  “You’re miles away,” Sylvia said, clattering at the sink. She crossed to the table and scooped the orange peel into her palm, and dropped it in the bin. “You’ll be late if you sit about any longer.”

  Colin looked at his watch. “Good God, twenty past eight.” He threw the paper down. “Have a look at it, about the Minster. It’s awful.” He snatched up his jacket, made for the door. “Come on, you kids. Take care, see you about six.”

  What I should do, Isabel thought; what I should do is, I should start writing it down. I’d like to write down everything that worries me, about my life ten years ago. I’d like to write it. But I can’t find a pen.

  Isabel’s brain moves slowly these days. She’s only thirty-four. She shouldn’t find thinking such an effort, and she shouldn’t look such a wreck. Perhaps a sense of foreboding dogs her. That must be it.

  If she had any paper, she wouldn’t have a pen. When she was a social worker, she always had pens. She was organised; to a degree.

  She was not organised now; she had just moved house, not unpacked yet. Here I am again, she said to herself, where I grew up and began my professional career; and had my first love affair. If that is what you call it.

  It’s not fair, she thought. I never wanted to come back here. I might meet Colin in the supermarket. I might meet his sister, Florence. Then again, I might meet Sylvia. I’ve never seen Sylvia, but I feel I’d know her at once. Instinct, if you like. Women who have shared a man can probably scent each other out.

  What about this shopping list? She turned it over. She could write on the back, why not? Just to get started was the main thing, to get some relief from the thoughts going round and round in her head. A good search through her handbag turned up a biro. She sat down at the kitchen table. She took a deep breath. Yes, I might meet the Sidneys en famille, she thought. Then again, I might meet my old client, Muriel Axon. That would be worse.

  “Ten years ago, I lived in this town, I was with Social Services, I was seeing Colin. I lived at home with my father; that was all of my life. But I had this case, and this is the case I want to write about. Muriel Axon, No. III/73/0059. Everything about this case bothered me. It still does.

  “Muriel Axon and her old mother Evelyn lived at number 2, Buckingham Avenue, in that part of town where people have big gardens and keep to themselves. Next door to them, but round the corner on Lauderdale Road, lived Colin’s sister Florence Sidney. We didn’t make that connection until the end. Why should we? When I met Colin—sneaking off to some pub somewhere, hoping we wouldn’t meet anyone we knew—we didn’t talk about his sister, and where she lived, or my clients and where they lived. But if I had known, I might have been able to ask Florence Sidney about her neighbours. Get some sort of—clarification.

  “Then again, I don’t know if I wanted clarification. I was afraid to find out what was really going on in the Axon household. Later, when it was all over, and Muriel’s mother was dead and Muriel herself had b
een put in hospital, their house came on the market and Colin bought it. He wanted a big house, and to live next door to his sister. He got it cheap.

  “I did warn him against it. I saw him at the inquest, and I told him I wouldn’t care to live there. I tried to convey to him that horrible things had happened in that house. He wouldn’t take a hint. I couldn’t do more than hint. I really didn’t know. I couldn’t expose my imaginings. I would have sounded superstitious, unbalanced, and he already thought I was that. By that time, everything was over between us.

  “After all, it’s just a house. Just an empty shell, when the people are taken away.

  “I expect I’ll find out how Colin’s getting on. This is a small town. They’re all around, I’m sure; old colleagues, old clients, old lovers. Of course there was always a risk, with Jim moving about for the sake of his career. If you’re in banking and you want to get to be a manager quite young you have to be prepared to move about. I’d rather have stayed in Manchester.

  “But I couldn’t produce any good reasons why we shouldn’t come back. Not reasons that convinced Jim. He doesn’t take much notice of my opinions. That’s understandable. I’m always crying, you see, bursting into tears, and falling over, and losing things. I was in banking too when we got married—I thought it would be restful and uncomplicated—but now I just sit about at home.

  “I’m not fit for anything, Jim says. He wonders what’s the matter with me. I spend my days thinking.

  “So I thought I could write a book, you see, about the Axon case and all that, and when it was done I could send it to the Sunday papers, and then everyone would know how social workers operate and why things go so badly wrong. How you get cases you can’t handle, and how clients conspire against you, and circumstances seem to conspire too. How it messes up your personal life. How you live with yourself afterwards; when disaster has occurred.”

  That will do for a preface, she thought. I can call it Confessions of a Social Worker, I suppose. She had long ago overflowed the shopping list and been forced to write on the piece of packing paper that had come around the teapot. The spout had got broken, but it didn’t matter; there wasn’t much call for tea. I’ll buy a proper notebook later, she thought, on my way to the off-licence.

  It was 12:30 P.M. when Sylvia came home from the CAB. In the hall she paused and called out, “Hello, Lizzie, all right are you?” A clattering from the kitchen told her that her daily woman was hard at work. What a comfort to have the basics taken care of, she thought. She told herself that she hated housework, though in fact for most of her married life it had been her pride, pleasure, and retreat.

  Going up the stairs, dragging her feet in their striped trainers, she acknowledged that she felt tired. The wrangle at the breakfast table was always a strain, and now her head was buzzing with Social Security regulations and unanswered questions about the legal aid scheme. The house was quiet. She went into her bedroom, kicked off her shoes, and lay down on the bed. Her eyes closed; she dozed for five minutes, wrapped in the midday heat. Suddenly a shrill ringing brought her upright, shocked out of sleep. Damn that cooker timer, she thought, it’s gone off by itself again. Why doesn’t Lizzie stop it? Heart still racing, she padded over to the door. Opened it; the ringing stopped. She sighed. Better turn out those drawers, I suppose. Skip lunch. Don’t need it, this weather.

  She knew that if she began with the bottom drawer, she would find her photograph albums; and then she could sit on the bed and browse. It was something she’d not done in ages. She’d never had much time to herself. Lizzie’s advent had been a blessing—even if she was a bit odd. You didn’t engage a cleaner for her looks or fashion sense, or for her conversation; you just needed someone honest and with a bit of initiative. Lizzie always reminded her of how she’d come up in the world. She reminded her a little of someone she’d known before her marriage; one of the girls on the Pork Shoulder line.

  She leaned back against the pillows. Wedding pictures, baby pictures; Suzanne grinning in her pram in the postage-stamp garden of their very first house. Suzanne had left home now, was studying geography at Manchester University. Then Alistair, scowling from under a woollen hat in the same pram. It was very like his present scowl, except that now he had more teeth. Here was Karen, two years old, digging in the garden of their house on the estate. Here she was again, a little older, mouth drooping, swinging on the rickety gate. Everything about that house had been rickety, leaky, or shoddy; it was a triumph of jerry-building. No wonder they’d been keen to move to Buckingham Avenue, despite its neglected and depressing condition.

  The move had been a stroke of luck for them. With Claire on the way, they’d needed a bigger place; but how to afford it? Normally she’d never have considered the Lauderdale Road area—all those big detached houses, too gloomy and too expensive. Colin had grown up on Lauderdale Road, and his sister Florence, who had never got married, still occupied the family house; his father was dead, and Florence had put their mother in a home. Florence had called her up one day and said, “The Axon house is on the market, just round the corner, the one with the garden backing onto ours. You ought to enquire about it.”

  “What?” she’d said. “That place where those two peculiar women lived? It’s falling down.”

  “It’s going cheap,” Florence had said. “Suit yourselves. But you could do it up.”

  Sylvia suspected Florence’s motives, of course. She was possessive; she wanted her brother next door, on call for mending her fuses and unblocking her sink. But still…out of curiosity, Sylvia phoned the estate agent.

  “It is in need of sympathetic renovation,” the man confirmed, “but it’s basically very sound. Of course, it’s very well situated. Within easy reach of shops and schools—”

  “I know where it is. Why is it so cheap?”

  He’d dropped his voice, become confidential. “Can’t say too much, bit of a sad case—old lady’s died, and her daughter, she’s not quite right, know what I mean? Gone into hospital.”

  “You mean they’ve put her away?”

  “The old mother died suddenly, there was an inquest. It was in the paper, in the Reporter.”

  She didn’t say, my husband was there when she died. That was irrelevant. But they’d wondered what had happened to the Axon girl. Not that they’d known the Axons, really; they were the kind of neighbours you didn’t set eyes on from one year to the next. “What hospital has she gone to?”

  “As to that, I couldn’t say. You see what it was, madam, they were recluses. They didn’t like other people in the house. So they didn’t keep up with repairs. Well, two ladies, you don’t expect it. But it’s a lovely property.”

  “All right. When can we have the key?”

  They’d been to see it together. Florence met them at the gate. “Well?” She was anxious that Colin’s decision should not be coloured by the unpleasant episode that had taken place in the house a few weeks earlier. He’d called on Florence late one afternoon, fortunately as it turned out; plodding out through the twilit garden to inspect, at her request, a dubious bit of guttering, he’d noticed something very strange going on at the Axon house. At an upstairs window, a young woman was gesturing, calling for help; very odd, but Colin hadn’t hesitated. Florence had watched amazed as he crashed through the shrubbery and pounded on the Axons’ back door, ready to break it down. Once inside he’d raced up the stairs to let the girl out; Mrs. Axon had pursued him, only to meet with an accident. It came out later that she’d had a heart attack, as well as a fall. Colin had given artificial respiration; with no result. And the young woman? She was a social worker, making her calls; the old lady had tricked her into the spare bedroom and turned the key. God knows what else had been going on at number 2. Would Colin want it?

  “Well,” he’d said cautiously, “it’s cheap. It needs work.” But if the last occupants had left shadows, he thought he could dispel them. “We could cut some of these trees down,” he said. “Let some light in.”

  “Yes,?
?? Sylvia had said. “Then Florence could see in our garden, couldn’t she?” She was not enthusiastic about that. But the trees would have to go, and all the junk that the Axons had left behind them; and that little glasshouse that the agent had called a conservatory, with its cracked and grimy panes and its mound of cardboard and newspapers all festering and damp. What a clean-up job! But think of the possibilities…

  So they had put down a holding deposit, and Colin had called the solicitor. Contracts were exchanged within weeks. Their married life had been full of upheavals; this was the only thing that had gone smoothly.

  Sylvia turned back to her albums.

  How the photographs improved, from shiny dog-eared scraps, faded brown with age, to the borderless silk prints of recent date. Here she stood before the front door of Buckingham Avenue, her arm through her husband’s. Florence, she thought, must have taken the picture. Behind them, the house looked like the set of a Hammer Films production; that ugly stained glass in the front door, those great clumps of evergreens shading the paths. The woodwork was rotting, the downspouts were in a deplorable condition; and the two figures who stood before it were hardly in a better one. Colin must have been fourteen stone there, she thought. Look at his belly hanging over his belt. Look at the silly expression on his face.

  Her own image offered little comfort. Her tight skirt—surely unfashionably short?—emphasised her large hips and stocky legs; she was still out of shape after her recent pregnancy. Here she was, holding the new baby, Claire, peeping at the camera with a simper above the infant’s shawled bulk. Her hair had been bleached out to a strawlike mess. Had she not known that backcombing and lacquer would ruin it? Worse, had she not known that no one else had used them for years?

  No doubt at the factory, she thought, we were behind the times. We didn’t know any better. She accorded an indulgent smile to her teenaged self, making up for a Friday night out, scrubbing her fair skin until the aura of animal fat, sodium polyphosphates, and assembly-line sweat was completely wiped away and she moved in a mist of Yardley’s cologne and heart-skipping expectation towards the weekly dance; off she went, a great big beautiful baby doll. Then, on the seven o’clock train, she had met Colin.