Four Stories

  ‘Thank you for clearing up the mystery,’ she said and (the boldest thing she had ever done in her life) touched him lightly on his bare hip. She was prepared for him to flinch but he didn’t, nor was there any change in his demeanour, which was still smiling and relaxed. Except that he also must have thought something out of the ordinary was called for because, taking her hand, he raised it to his lips and kissed it.

  One afternoon a few weeks later Mrs Ransome was coming into Naseby Mansions with her shopping when she saw a van outside and crossing the downstairs lobby she met a young man with a cavalier’s hat on and wearing a horse collar round his neck. He was pushing a pram.

  ‘Is he going?’ she asked the young man.

  ‘Yeah.’ He leaned on the pram. ‘Again.’

  ‘Does he move often?’

  ‘Look, lady. This guy moves house the way other people move their bowels. All this’ – and he indicated the pram, the horse collar and the cavalier’s hat – ‘is getting the elbow. We’re going Chinese now, apparently.’

  ‘Let me help you with that,’ Mrs Ransome said, taking the pram as he struggled to get it through the door. She wheeled it down the ramp, rocking it slightly as she waited while he disposed the other items inside the van.

  ‘A bit since you pushed one of those,’ he said as he took it off her. She perched with her shopping on the wall by the entrance, watching as he packed blankets round the furniture, wondering if he was one of the roadies who had moved them. She had not told Mr Ransome how the burglary had come to pass. It was partly because he would have made a fuss, would have insisted on going up to the top floor to have a word with the young man personally. (‘Probably in on it too,’ he would have said.) It was a meeting Mrs Ransome had not been able to contemplate without embarrassment. As the van drove off she waved, then went upstairs.

  End of story, or so Mrs Ransome thought, except that one Sunday afternoon a couple of months later Mr Ransome suffered a stroke. Mrs Ransome was in the kitchen stacking the dishwasher and hearing a bump went in and found her husband lying on the floor in front of the bookcase, a cassette in one hand, a dirty photograph in the other, and Salmon on Torts open on the floor. Mr Ransome was conscious but could neither speak nor move.

  Mrs Ransome did all the right things, placing a cushion under his head and a rug over his body before ringing the ambulance. She hoped that even in his stricken state her efficiency and self-possession would impress her prostrate husband, but looking down at him while she was waiting to be connected to the appropriate service, she saw in his eyes no sign of approval or gratitude, just a look of sheer terror.

  Powerless to draw his wife’s attention to the cassette clutched in his hand, or even to relinquish it, her helpless husband watched as Mrs Ransome briskly collected up the photographs, something at the very back of his mind registering how little interest or surprise was occasioned by this tired old smut. Lastly (the klaxon of the ambulance already audible as it raced by the park) she knelt beside him and prised the cassette free of his waxen fingers before popping it matter of factly into her apron pocket. She held his hand for a second (still bent to the shape of the offending cassette) and thought that perhaps the look in his eyes was now no longer terror but had turned to shame; so she smiled and squeezed his hand, saying, ‘It’s not important,’ at which point the ambulance men rang the bell.

  Mr Ransome has not come well out of this narrative; seemingly impervious to events he has, unlike his wife, neither changed nor grown in stature. Owning a dog might have shown him in a better light, but handy though Naseby Mansions was for the park, to be cooped up in a flat is no life for a dog; a hobby would have helped, a hobby other than Mozart, that is, the quest for the perfect performance only serving to emphasise Mr Ransome’s punctiliousness and general want of warmth. No, to learn to take things as they come he would have been better employed in the untidier arts, photography, say, or painting watercolours; a family would have been untidy too, and, though it seems it was only Mrs Ransome who felt the loss of baby Donald (and though Mr Ransome would have been no joke as a father), a son might have knocked the corners off him a little and made life messier – tidiness and order now all that mattered to him in middle age. When you come down to it, what he is being condemned for here is not having got out of his shell, and had there been a child there might have been no shell.

  Now he lies dumb and unmoving in Intensive Care and ‘shell’ seems to describe it pretty well. Somewhere he can hear his wife’s voice, near but at the same time distant and echoing a little as if his ear was a shell too and he a creature in it. The nurses have told Mrs Ransome that he can certainly hear what she is saying, and thinking that he may not survive not so much the stroke as the shame and humiliation that attended it, Mrs Ransome concentrates on clearing that up first. ‘If we can get on a more sensible footing in the sex department,’ she thinks, ‘we may end up regarding this stroke business as a blessing.’

  So, feeling a little foolish that the conversation has of necessity to be wholly one-sided, Mrs Ransome begins to talk to her inert husband, or rather, since there are other patients in the ward, murmur in his ear; from the corner of his left eye Mr Ransome’s view of her just the slightly furry powdered slope of her well-meaning cheek.

  She tells him how she has known about what she calls ‘his silliness’ for years and that there is nothing to feel ashamed of, for it’s only sex after all. Inside his shell Mr Ransome is trying to think what ‘ashamed’ is, and even ‘feeling’ he’s no longer quite sure about, let alone ‘sex’; words seem to have come unstuck from their meanings. Having been sensible about Mr Ransome’s silliness just about brings Mrs Ransome to the end of her emotional vocabulary; never having talked about this kind of thing much leaves her for a moment at a loss for words. Still, Mr Ransome, though numb, is at the same time hurting and they plainly need to talk. So, holding his limp hand lightly in hers, Mrs Ransome begins to whisper to him in that language which she can see now she was meant to acquire for just this sort of eventuality.

  ‘I find it hard to verbalise with you, Maurice,’ she begins. ‘We’ve always found it hard to verbalise with each other, you and me, but we are going to learn, I promise.’ Pressing her lips up against his unflinching ear she sees in close-up the stiff little grey hairs he regularly crops with the curved scissors during his locked sessions in the bathroom. ‘The nurses tell me you will learn to talk again, Maurice, and I will learn along with you, we will learn to talk to one another together.’ The words swirl around his ear, draining into it uncomprehended. Mrs Ransome speaks slowly. It is like spooning pap into the mouth of a baby; as one wipes the mouth of the untaken food so Mrs Ransome could almost wipe the ear clean of the curd of the unheeded words.

  Still, and she deserves credit for this, she persists.

  ‘I’m not going to be, you know, judgmental, Maurice, because I personally have nothing to be judgmental about.’ And she tells him how she too has secretly listened to the cassette.

  ‘But in future, Maurice, I suggest we listen to it together, make it a part of honing up on our marital skills … because at the end of the day, love, marriage is about choices and to get something out of it you have to put something in.’

  Out it tumbles, the once tongue-tied Mrs Ransome now possessed of a whole lexicon of caring and concern which she pours into her husband’s ear. She talks about perspectives and sex and how it can go on joyful and unrestrained until the very brink of the grave and she adumbrates a future of which this will be a part and how once he gets back on his feet they will set aside quality time which they will devote to touching one another.

  ‘We have never hugged, Maurice. We must hug one another in the future.’

  Festooned as he is with tubes and drains and monitors, hugging Mr Ransome ill is no easier than hugging Mr Ransome well, so Mrs Ransome contents herself with kissing his hand. But having shared with him her vision of the future – tactile, communicative, convivial – she now thinks to top it off with some
Così. It might just do the trick, she thinks.

  So, careful not to dislodge any other of Mr Ransome’s many wires, which are not channels of entertainment at all, Mrs Ransome gently positions the earphones on his head. Before slipping the cassette into the player she holds it before his unblinking eyes.

  ‘Così,’ she articulates. And more loudly: ‘Mozart?’

  She switches it on, scanning her husband’s unchanging face for any sign of response. There is none. She turns the volume up a little, but not loud, mezzo forte, say. Mr Ransome, who has heard the word ‘Mozart’ without knowing whether it is a person or a thing or even an articulated lorry, now cringes motionless before a barrage of sounds that are to him utterly meaningless and that have no more pattern or sense than the leaves on a tree, only the leaves on the tree seem to be the notes and there is someone in the tree (it is Dame Kiri) shrieking. It is baffling. It is terrible. It is loud.

  Perhaps it is this last awful realisation that Mozart does not make sense or it is because Mrs Ransome, finding there is still no response, decides to up the volume yet further, just as a last shot, that the sounds vibrate in Mr Ransome’s ears and it is the vibration that does it; but at any rate something happens in his head, and the frail sac into which the blood has leaked now bursts, and Mr Ransome hears, louder and more compelling than any music he has ever heard, a roaring in his ears; there is a sudden brief andante, he coughs quietly and dies.

  Mrs Ransome does not immediately notice that the numb hand of her husband is now not even that; and it would be hard to tell from looking at him, or from feeling him even, that anything has happened. The screen has altered but Mrs Ransome does not know about screens. However since Mozart does not seem to be doing the trick she takes the earphones from her husband’s head and it’s only as she is disentangling the frivolous wires from the more serious ones that she sees something on the screen is indeed different and she calls the nurse.

  Marriage to Mrs Ransome had often seemed a kind of parenthesis and it’s fitting that what she says to the nurse (‘I think he’s gone’) is here in parenthesis too, and that it is this last little parenthesis that brings the larger parenthesis to a close. The nurse checks the monitor, smiles sadly and puts a caring hand on Mrs Ransome’s shoulder, then pulls the curtain round and leaves husband and wife alone together for the last time. And so, the brackets closed that opened thirty-two years before, Mrs Ransome goes home a widow.

  Then there is a fitting pause. And television having schooled her in the processes of bereavement and the techniques of grieving, Mrs Ransome observes that pause; she gives herself ample time to mourn and to come to terms with her loss and generally speaking where widowhood is concerned she does not put a foot wrong.

  It seems to her as she looks back that the burglary and everything that has happened since has been a kind of apprenticeship. Now, she thinks, I can start.

  FATHER! FATHER! BURNING BRIGHT

  Father! Father! Burning Bright was the original title of a BBC television film I wrote in 1982 but which was subsequently entitled Intensive Care. The main part, Midgley, had been hard to cast, though when I was writing the script I thought it was a role I might play myself until, that is, I got to the scene where Midgley goes to bed with Valery, the slatternly nurse. That, I thought, effectively ruled me out as I didn’t fancy having to take my clothes off under the bored appraisal of an entire film crew.

  Not that it would have been the first time. Back in 1966 I was acting in a BBC TV comedy series I had written which included a weekly spot, ‘Life and Times in NW1’, in one episode of which I was supposedly in bed with a neighbour’s wife. The scene was due to be shot in the studio immediately after a tea break, and rather than brave the scrutiny of the TV crew, I thought that during the break I might sneak on to the set and be already in bed when the crew returned. So I tiptoed into the studio in my underpants, failing to notice that a lighting rig had been positioned behind the bedroom door. When I opened it there was an almighty crash, the lights came down and everybody rushed into the studio to find me sprawled in my underpants among the wreckage and subject to a far more searching and hostile scrutiny than would otherwise have been the case. No more bedroom scenes for me, I thought.

  However, the role of Midgley proved hard to cast and after a lot of toing and froing, including what was virtually an audition, I found myself playing the part. Like some other leading roles that I have written, it verged on the anonymous, all the fun and jokes put into the mouths of the supporting characters while Midgley, whom the play is supposed to be about, never managed to be much more than morose.

  It was in the hope of finding more to the character than this that I decided, before the shooting started, to write the story up in prose. When I’d finished I showed it to the director in the hope that it might help him to appreciate what the screenplay was about. He received it politely enough and in due course gave me it back, I suspect without having read it, directors tending to form their own ideas about a text, one script from the author hard enough to cope with without wanting two.

  So I put it away in a drawer in 1982 where it has remained ever since. I’ve dusted it off and published it now, I suppose, as part of an effort to slim down my Nachlass and generally tidy up.

  ON THE MANY OCCASIONS Midgley had killed his father, death had always come easily. He died promptly, pain-lessly and without a struggle. Looking back, Midgley could see that even in these imagined deaths he had failed his father. It was not like him to die like that. Nor did he.

  The timing was good, Midgley acknowledged that. Only his father would have managed to stage his farewell in the middle of a ‘Meet The Parents’ week. It was not a function Midgley enjoyed. Each year he was dismayed how young the parents had grown, the youth of fathers in particular. Most sported at least one tattoo, with ears and noses now routinely studded. Midgley saw where so many of his pupils got it from. One father wore a swastika necklace, of the sort Midgley had wondered if he felt justified in confiscating from a boy. And a mother he had talked to had had green hair. ‘Not just green,’ muttered Miss Tunstall, ‘bright green. And then you wonder the girls get pregnant.’

  That was the real point of these get-togethers. The teachers were appalled by the parents but found their shortcomings reassuring. With parents like these, they reasoned, who could blame the schools? The parents, recalling their own teachers as figures of dignity and authority, found the staff sloppy. Awe never entered into it, apparently. ‘Too human by half’ was their verdict. So both Nature and Nurture came away, if not satisfied, at any rate absolved. ‘Do you wonder?’ said the teachers, looking at the parents. ‘They get it at school,’ said the parents.

  ‘Coretta’s bin havin’ these massive monthlies. Believe me, Mr Midgley, I en never seen menstruatin’ like it.’ Mrs Azakwale was explaining her daughter’s poor showing in Use of English. ‘She bin wadin’ about in blood to her ankles, Mr Midgley. I en never out of the launderette.’ Behind Mrs Azakwale, Mr Horsfall listened openly and with unconcealed scepticism, shaking his head slowly as Midgley caught his eye. Behind Mr Horsfall, Mr Patel beamed with embarrassment as the large black woman said these terrible things so loudly. And beyond Mr Patel, Midgley saw the chairs were empty.

  Mrs Azakwale took Coretta’s bloodstained track-record over to the queue marked Computer Sciences, leaving Midgley faced with Mr Horsfall and Martin.

  Mr Horsfall did not dye his hair nor wear an earring. His hair was now fashionably short but only because he had never got round to wearing it fashionably long. Nor had his son Martin ever ventured under the drier; his ears, too, were intact. Mr Horsfall was a detective sergeant.

  ‘I teach Martin English, Mr Horsfall,’ said Midgley, wishing he had not written ‘Hopeless’ on Martin’s report, a document now gripped by Mr Horsfall in his terrible policeman’s hand.

  ‘Martin? Is that what you call him?’

  ‘But that’s his name.’ Midgley had a moment of wild anxiety that it wasn’t, that the father w
ould accuse him of not even knowing the name of his son.

  ‘His name’s Horsfall. Martin is what we call him, his mother and me. For your purposes I should have thought his name was Horsfall. Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Horsfall was not impressed. He had spent long vigils in public toilets as a young constable. Many of the patrons had turned out to be married and some of them teachers. Marriage involved no medical examination, no questionnaire to speak of. Marriage for these people was just the bush they hid behind.

  ‘What does my son call you?’

  ‘He calls me Mr Midgley.’

  ‘Doesn’t he call you sir?’

  ‘On occasion.’

  ‘Schools …’ Horsfall sniffed.

  His son ought to have been small, nervous and bright, Midgley the understanding schoolteacher taking his part against his big, overbearing parent. He would have put books into his hands, watched him flower so that in time to come the boy would look back and think ‘Had it not been for him …’ Such myths sustained Midgley when he woke in the small hours of the morning and drowsed during the middle period of the afternoon. But they were myths. Martin was large and dull. He was not unhappy. He would not flower. He was not even embarrassed. He was probably on his father’s side, thought Midgley, as he sat there looking at his large inherited hands, and occasionally picked at one of a scattering of violet-painted warts.

  ‘What worries me,’ said Horsfall, ‘is that he can scarcely put two words together.’

  This was particularly hurtful to a man who, in his professional capacity, specialised in converting the faltering confessions of semi-illiterates into his plain policeman’s prose. He could do it. At four o’clock in the morning after a day spent combing copses and dragging ponds, never mind house-to-house enquiries, he could do it. Why not his son?

  ‘You show me up, Martin, having to come along here. I don’t grudge coming along here. But what I would like to have come along here as is a proud father. To be told of your achievements. Be shown your name in gilt letters on the honours board. Martin Horsfall. But no. What is it? It’s Geography: Poor. History: Poor. English: Hopeless. PE: Only fair. Why Martin?’