“We ought to get together, Colin. You must come to dinner.”
“Surely,” Colin said. “We will. After the exams?”
Now Colin sat with a pile of exercise books before him. Form 1C. The Vikings. He tried to gather strength to open them.
“Smith of English? Who said that thing, ‘Work fascinates me: I can sit and look at it for hours’?”
“It came off a matchbox, I imagine. I don’t know. Ask Smith of Woodwork.”
If Florence did not understand…if Florence was not sympathetic…then when the Christmas holidays came, and all the schools closed, and all evening classes were over (and Sylvia knew they were)…then, when he could no longer mumble about Parents’ Evenings as he sidled out in the mornings (and hope that she would not somehow find out)…then when his small ingenuity was defeated, how and when and where was he going to see Isabel?
Smith of English made a sound expressive of pain.
“Animal Farm,” he said.
Colin looked up. “Pardon?”
“All right, listen. This is 3A. This is the O-Level stream, this. ‘George Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1867.’”
“They have those cribs, you know, those little books. They just copy down any date that takes their fancy. 1867 will be Das Kapital, I should think.”
“Mm,” Smith said. “How about this next one then? ‘George Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1857.’” He raised an eyebrow. “Indian Mutiny?”
But Florence, thought Colin; tell Florence? “Excuse me,” he said. He fished in his pocket and went over to the phone.
“Colin’s ringing his turf accountant again,” Smith said.
“Luther King House. Social Services.”
“I’d like to speak to Miss Field, please.”
“Just one moment. Putting you through.”
Click.
“Yes?”
A small sensation in Colin’s chest rose and lodged itself in his throat. Grief.
“Yes?”
That deadly secretarial voice, that hope-crusher, that frustrated old maid; some slab-toothed old hag with thin knees pressed together and her glasses on a little gold chain, some Medusa in an Orlon cardigan.
“I wanted Miss Field,” he whispered.
“Miss Field is not in the office at present.”
“When will she be back?”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t say.”
“Can’t you ask? Someone in your office should know where she’s gone and when she’ll be back.”
A slight intake of breath told him that offence had been given and taken.
“Miss Field is a busy social worker with a full caseload and I think it most unlikely that her colleagues would be aware of all her intended movements in the course of the day. In any case it is not our practice to divulge what visits a caseworker is making, as we do not breach the confidence of our clients.” She paused, to let this sink in. “If this is an emergency, I can pass you on.”
“No, could you just find out—”
“I can pass you on to another caseworker.”
“Thank you, I only want to speak to Miss Field.”
“Shall I pass you on?”
“No.”
“Would you care to leave your name?”
“That’s all right.”
“Would you care to leave your name?”
“Thank you, no, that’s all right.”
“Would you care to leave a message?”
“No message.”
“Shall I tell Miss Field that this is a personal call?”
“No.”
“Are you by any chance the caller who was trying to contact Miss Field last Friday?”
“Not me.”
She had finished. She had exhausted her repertoire of frustration and snub, and she was finished now. He put the phone down. Where is she? Just out, that’s all. She will not tell him enough about her work for him to be able to envisage it; as if her clients’ paltry secrets were of any interest to him, as if his life could possibly touch theirs at any point. She is seeing people, or at that childrens’ home she goes to. She was out on Friday. Three times he had called on Friday, and had gone into the weekend hollow and lost. Now he had put the phone down on the secretary cow and antagonised her. Now she would say Isabel was out when she was in. Now she would say Miss Field cannot accept personal calls during office hours. What is your name, rank, or number, whether married divorced single, number of children in box provided, state professional qualifications, whether subject to epilepsy or visual defects, whether certified sane or insane, state whether dead or alive and name a referee. (Isabel ring me.) I don’t want to make a great performance of it, it’s not a lot to ask, no messages, no names, no packdrill, whatever that expression means. (Ring me. I need to hear your voice.) The bell. Lesson Four.
Give me this God and I’ll take myself off and give you some peace. I’ll not be back asking favours year after year. There’s only one thing I want. I won’t ask you to bring my blood pressure down. When I get cancer I’ll not even squeak. You’ll never hear me say I’m hard done by. Come God, I’ll praise you; isn’t that what you like? Form 3A, the American Revolution. Is it so much to ask, is it so bloody much?
How she laughed and said, you have all the women’s lines. Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/’Tis woman’s whole existence. Thank you, Lord Byron, mind how you go. Have a nice day.
CHAPTER 4
Evelyn had to take her time now. Coming downstairs, with her bad knees, was more painful than going up. She kept her head down, bowed over her hand tight on the banister rail. I’ll just get a bit of breakfast, she thought, and then I’ll have to get to the shops. I’ll lock Muriel in the back room. She’s not to be trusted.
What a lucky thing, to have a solid old-fashioned house with locks on the inside doors.
She stopped on the second step from the bottom. Muriel was standing by the front door.
“Muriel?”
She raised her eyes to the dark shape that swung gently above Muriel’s head. Its folds were dense in the half-light. Clifford had come back, and hung his coat on the hallstand.
Isabel left the office in a hurry. She had been reading the file on Axon, Muriel Alexandra, when the Hollies Day Centre had called to say did she know anything about Anderson, Louisa Jane? Was she still staying with her daughter in Kidderminster, because it was her morning, and she hadn’t turned up. Miss Anderson was seventy-six, she lived alone, and the weather was cold. The temperature had dropped several degrees overnight. She had never missed a day before, the Centre said, she looked forward to the hot meal and the sociability. She was in good health but—“I have a file,” Isabel said. She rummaged in her desk drawer for the A–Z.
“All right, that will take me ten or fifteen minutes and I’ll call you. She’s not answering the phone? No, I see. Well, she won’t if she’s still in Kidderminster. If she’s okay I’ll drop her into you and if she’s not I’ll sort things out. Leave it with me.”
Miss Anderson was a vague lady. She had an application in for Sheltered Housing. She had two years to wait. Social Services had got her a telephone but she kept it off the hook, because she was harassed by obscene callers. This might be true or it might be a delusion. She had told the police, and they had made a note of her and taken her home in a car. She would not go to Kidderminster permanently because her daughter’s husband was a Communist. This might be true or it might be a delusion.
When Isabel reached her car she realised she had Muriel Axon’s file under her arm, gathered up with her street map and her note of Miss Anderson’s address. I shouldn’t keep reading it, she thought, it only scares me, it only makes me sick. I should go there, but I won’t. If anything went wrong at Buckingham Avenue someone would call for help. It was a responsible middle-class neighbourhood. The file shouldn’t go out of the office; but she didn’t want to delay herself by taking it back. She tossed it into the back seat.
Probably Miss Anderson was still away. But she hu
rried, in rising apprehension at what she might find. As a trainee she had visited a geriatric hospital, and it had shocked her profoundly. She blew her horn at a caped and dripping cyclist who meandered into her path, and swore at him under her breath.
“Whatever have you done to your face, Missus?”
“I had a fall,” Evelyn said. “On the stairs.”
“You want to watch yourself,” the meter man said. “Given it a fair old bash, eh? Whatever will your young man say?”
The gas meter was in the kitchen. It was a nuisance. She followed the man. “You don’t get any natural light coming in, with all that stained glass,” he said. “Like a bloody funeral parlour. Haven’t you got a light in this passage?”
“This hall,” Evelyn said. “The bulb has gone.”
“Well, you don’t want to go climbing up there. You could come a right cropper. You want to get your friend to do it.”
“Friend? What friend?”
She stood over the man, watching his bent back as he flashed his torch into the little dark cupboard. He twisted round, squatting, and looked up at her.
“Well, you’ve got somebody stopping with you, haven’t you?”
“What?”
“There’s somebody looking out of the bedroom window.”
Muriel? Muriel was locked in the back parlour.
“Are you all right, Missus? You’ve gone white.”
One of the less substantial tenants of the upper floor then, one of those who taunted and gibbered from behind the locked door of the spare room; one of the lepers, one of the grinders of dry bones.
“Have you got any brandy in the house? You want to have a drop, and then put your feet up. You can’t always tell with a crack on the head. You ought to go to evening surgery.”
“Do your job,” Evelyn said. “Read the meter and then get out.”
“All right, Missus, all right.”
The man turned away, flashed his torch again, made a note and straightened up. “Say no more,” he said. She followed him back down the hall. At the front door he turned back to her, relenting. “Look, Missus, if you’ve got a spare bulb I’ll put it in for you. It’s not right, living in the dark at your age.”
“I haven’t got one. I never keep them. I shall manage for myself. Good afternoon.”
“I’m sure,” said the man. “Get your fancy man to fix it for you, eh? Sorry I spoke.”
She stood in the doorway to watch him down the path, to make sure that he was really gone. Curiosity about her arrangements was something she could not stomach. The man disappeared behind the bushes of the Sidney house. She craned her neck. Suddenly she felt a terrific blow in the small of her back. She pitched forward, off the doorstep. One arm flailed in the air. With difficulty she regained her balance. She stood gasping, winded. The door clicked behind her. She was locked out.
It had taken Isabel two minutes to establish that Miss Anderson was not going to answer the door, and just another minute to raise her next-door neighbour.
“She’s stopping with her daughter,” the woman said. “She’ll be back on Thursday. Are you from that place she goes to?”
“Well, I’m from Social Services. The Day Centre asked me to call. When she didn’t turn up this morning they were a bit worried. In case she’d had a fall or anything, you know.”
The woman tutted. “She should have let you know. Fetching you out on a morning like this. Old people are inconsiderate, I think, don’t you?”
“It’s all right. I’m used to it. Going out, I mean.”
“Well, you needn’t bother again,” the woman said. “I keep an eye on her, you see. If she doesn’t take her milk in I go round. I’d get the doctor to her if there was any need.”
“That’s extremely kind of you. Look, here’s a card with the number of the Social Services Department, if you ever need it. You can give us a ring.”
“Okay,” the woman said. “My name’s Mrs. Johnson. Would you like a cup of tea, love?”
Isabel would: but I’d better be off, she thought.
“Wouldn’t be surprised if we have fog coming down.”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Johnson, and thank you very much.”
As she drove downhill towards the city centre, the promised fog began to gather. The traffic slowed to a crawl. I wish I had taken five minutes for that cup of tea, she thought. But she was impatient of lonely women. There must be something wrong with the heater. Her feet were frozen, and the Axons were still on her mind. And what in God’s name was that? A shape loomed across the windscreen, the same bloody cyclist, she could swear…she stabbed at the brake and heard a sickening crunch from behind her. Her seat belt bounced her back unhurt, her pulse racing. She closed her eyes. She was not at all surprised. She sat still, trying to calm herself, until a face appeared at the window mouthing was she all right Miss? The cyclist was unhurt. It was not a day for drama. Isabel and the man who had run into the back of her stood on the pavement and exchanged names and addresses. She inspected the damage, running her hand tenderly over the fractured paintwork. Considering the low speed of the other vehicle, it was a surprising mess. Her head ached insistently and she felt guilty. Earlier in the day, at least, her driving had been careless and impatient; her mind had been wandering, and most accidents, she told herself, are not entirely accidental. My humour drew the cyclist on; on a good day, I would have been elsewhere.
She drove very slowly and carefully to a public callbox, and rang the office. Someone has run into the back of me, I shall put the car into the garage now and come back by bus.
The garage couldn’t see their way to tackling it much before the weekend. But it’s only Monday, she said helpfully. Very true, the man said, but it was more than Monday, wasn’t it, it was the time of year. But it’s not a big job, she said, surely you can fit it in. Miss, said the man, wasn’t she aware that this was the holiday season? What holiday? You don’t mean that people have started their Christmas holidays already? She must understand, said the man, that this was a notoriously tricky few weeks, she would probably not credit, even if he were to tell her, the difficulties the festive season could cause. She could if she liked try Thatcher’s Motors at the top of the hill by the lights, but he personally was willing to bet any money that she would be wasting her time. Far be it from him to do Thatcher’s out of trade, and if she wanted to waste her time he supposed she was entitled, it being a free country, but he could assure her that they would quote her ten days, and would they say the same about the time of year? They most certainly would. Could he solve her problem, solve it he would. She could then again go to some cowboy who would do a botched job. Of course she could if she liked, he supposed it was her money, and that it was a free country. Cowboys were not subject to festive difficulties but what would you get? A botched job. He personally had seen some right messes. Still, it was her choice, entirely. If she wanted to leave it with him, he would see what he could do, and could he say fairer than that? Now, he would tell her what, if it had been a windscreen, he could probably, making no promises but probably, have let her have it by Thursday. It’s not, she said, so what’s the point? She had it there, he said. She had put her finger on it. He was taking it as what he supposed she might care to call a sort of illustration. The fact was, it was not a windscreen. It was Bodywork.
At the end of this conversation the feeling of heavy unreality inside her skull was much increased. She waited a long time for a bus, and as it crept along in the still thickening fog her mind emptied of her problems and professional duties and became blank and grey. When she arrived at the office she found she couldn’t get warm. People said she Might Have ’Flu Coming On. She put her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes. Her friend Jane said that they should go to the pub and get her a double Scotch and some cottage pie. All that, the Senior said glibly, the common cold, ’flu, hay-fever, it’s a form of suppressed weeping, you know. It was only when she got back from lunch, and felt no better, that she remembered that she had left Muriel Axon’s fi
le on the back seat of the car. She telephoned the garage, but of course there was no answer.
I’ve driven up out of it, Colin thought, turning into Florence’s drive. The first part of the journey had been nerve-wracking. The dismal city centre jangled with noise, lights flickered in strange places, distances were unjudgeable. Faces distorted with apprehension flashed momentary and half-lit behind glass, locked into their metal shells, alien machines with mad demands.
“I can hardly believe it,” Colin said. “It’s clear up here and it’s not even raining. You should see it down the hill. It’s a nightmare. The hospitals will be full before tonight’s out.” He struggled out of his jacket and Florence took it from him. “Hot,” he explained. “Tension. They won’t slow down. How they can do it beats me.”
“Is that all you wear? Haven’t you a decent overcoat?”
“Yes. I forget it. I always wear my pullover.”
“You must take care of yourself,” Florence said. “I heard about the fog. It says on the wireless it’s all along the motorway as well. I just phoned Sylvia, to make sure the children had got home from school all right. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Bless you, Florence. That was thoughtful.”
“I’ve made some tea. It’s all ready for you.”
A sense of déjà vu took hold of him as he stood in the hall, and would not let him go. Perhaps it was the dislocation of the fog, and his confused state of mind. It could have been his mother waiting, himself a boy in a cap and blazer, algebra homework lying heavy on his stomach. In the hallway Florence had changed nothing, nothing had ever been changed as long as he could remember; the dust was moved, that was all, and came floating back, speckled, settling, spinning in the spring sunlight and drifting on the smoke of autumn garden fires. But the past had not been like that. It was negligence, not sentiment, that kept things in their place year after year. This was the paradox and danger of time-travel, altering the past to suit. His mother had never met him in the hall and settled him with something to eat. She would be lying on her bed with pins in her hair, or still doing the morning’s jobs (like cleaning the toilet), or reading a novel in which a governess was abducted into a harem. And Florence was older at forty than his mother would ever have chosen to be, solid and set in her barren maternity.