The Clothes They Stood Up In

by Alan Bennett

  “To be fair,” said Mrs. Ransome, “that was my husband.”

  “Dear me,” said the sergeant.

  “What was?” said Mr. Ransome, coming back into the room.

  “Nothing,” said his wife.

  “Do you think you’ll catch them?” said Mr. Ransome as he stood at the door with the two policemen.

  The sergeant laughed.

  “Well, miracles do happen, even in the world of law enforcement. Nobody got a grudge against you, have they?”

  “I’m a solicitor,” said Mr. Ransome. “It’s possible.”

  “And it’s not somebody’s idea of a joke?”

  “A joke?” said Mr. Ransome.

  “Just a thought,” said the sergeant. “But if it’s your genuine burglar, I’ll say this: he always comes back.”

  The constable nodded in sage confirmation; even Leatherhead was agreed on this. “Come back?” said Mr. Ransome bitterly, looking at the empty flat. “Come back? What the fuck for?”

  Mr. Ransome seldom swore and Mrs. Ransome, who had stayed in the other room, pretended she hadn’t heard. The door closed.

  “Useless,” said Mr. Ransome, coming back. “Utterly useless. It makes you want to swear.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Ransome a few hours later, “we shall just have to camp out. After all,” she added not unhappily, “it could be fun.”

  “Fun?” said Mr. Ransome. “Fun?”

  He was unshaven, unwashed, his bottom was sore and his breakfast had been a drink of water from the tap. Still, no amount of pleading on Mrs. Ransome’s part could stop him going heroically off to work, with his wife instinctively knowing even in these unprecedented circumstances that her role was to make much of his selfless dedication.

  Even so, when he’d gone and with the flat so empty, Mrs. Ransome missed him a little, wandering from room to echoing room not sure where she should start. Deciding to make a list she forgot for the moment she had nothing to make a list with and nothing to make a list on. This meant a visit to the newsagents for pad and pencil where, though she’d never noticed it before, she found there was a café next door. It seemed to be doing hot breakfasts, and, though in her opera clothes she felt a bit out of place among the taxi drivers and bicycle couriers who comprised most of the clientele, nobody took much notice of her, the waitress even calling her “duck” and offering her a copy of The Mirror to read while she waited for her bacon, egg, baked beans and fried bread. It wasn’t a paper she would normally read, but bacon, egg, baked beans and fried bread wasn’t a breakfast she would normally eat either, and she got so interested in the paper’s tales of royalty and its misdemeanors that she propped it up against the sauce bottle so that she could read and eat, completely forgetting that one of the reasons she had come into the café was to make herself a list.

  Wanting a list, her shopping was pretty haphazard. She went off to Boots first and bought some toilet rolls and some paper plates and cups, but she forgot soap. And when she remembered soap and went back for it, she forgot tea bags, and when she remembered tea bags, she forgot paper towels, until what with trailing halfway to the flats then having to go back again, she began to feel worn out.

  It was on the third of these increasingly flustered trips (now having forgotten plastic cutlery) that Mrs. Ransome ventured into Mr. Anwar’s. She had passed the shop many times as it was midway between the flats and St. John’s Wood High Street; indeed she remembered it opening and the little draper’s and babies’ knitwear shop which it had replaced and where she had been a loyal customer. That had been kept by a Miss Dorsey, from whom over the years she had bought the occasional tray cloth or hank of Sylko but, on a much more regular basis, plain brown paper packets of what in those days were called “towels.” The closing-down of the shop in the late sixties had left Mrs. Ransome anxious and unprotected and it came as a genuine surprise on venturing into Timothy White’s to find that technology in this intimate department had lately made great strides that were unreflected in Miss Dorsey’s ancient stock, of which Mrs. Ransome, as the last of a dwindling clientele, had been almost the sole consumer. She was old-fashioned, she knew that, but snobbery had come into it too, Mrs. Ransome feeling it vaguely classier to have her requirements passed wordlessly across the counter with Miss Dorsey’s patient, suffering smile (“Our cross,” it said) rather than taken from some promiscuous shelf in Timothy White’s. Though it was not long before Timothy White’s went the same way as Miss Dorsey, swallowed whole by Boots. Though Boots too, she felt, was a cut above the nearest chemist, Superdrug, which didn’t look classy at all.

  The closing-down of Miss Dorsey’s (she was found laid across the counter one afternoon, having had a stroke) left the premises briefly empty until, passing one morning on the way to the High Street, Mrs. Ransome saw that the shop had been taken over by an Asian grocer and that the pavement in front of the window where nothing had previously stood except the occasional customer’s pram was now occupied by boxes of unfamiliar vegetables—yams, papaws, mangoes and the like, together with many sacks, sacks, Mrs. Ransome felt, that dogs could all too easily cock their legs against.

  So it was partly out of loyalty to Miss Dorsey and partly because it wasn’t really her kind of thing that Mrs. Ransome had not ventured into the shop until this morning when, to save her trailing back for the umpteenth time to the High Street, she thought she might go in and ask if they had such a thing as boot polish (there were more pressing requirements, as she would have been the first to admit, only Mr. Ransome was very particular about his shoes). Though over twenty years had passed, the shop was still recognizably what it had been in Miss Dorsey’s day because, other than having introduced a freezer and cold cupboards, Mr. Anwar had simply adapted the existing fixtures to his changed requirements. Drawers that had previously been devoted to the genteel accoutrements of a leisured life—knitting patterns, crochet hooks, Rufflette—now housed nan and pita bread; spices replaced bonnets and booties; and the shelves and deep drawers that once were home to hosiery and foundation garments were now filled with rice and chickpeas.

  Mrs. Ransome thought it unlikely they had polish in stock (did they wear normal shoes?), but she was weary enough to give it a try, though, since oxblood was what she wanted (or Mr. Ransome required), she thought vaguely it might be a shade to which they had religious objections. But plump and cheerful Mr. Anwar brought out several tins for her kind consideration and while she was paying she spotted a nailbrush they would be needing; then the tomatoes looked nice and there was a lemon, and while she was at it the shop seemed to sell hardware so she invested in a colander. As she wandered around the shop the normally tongue-tied Mrs. Ransome found herself explaining to this plump and amiable grocer the circumstances that had led her to the purchase of such an odd assortment of things. And he smiled and shook his head in sympathy while at the same time suggesting other items she would doubtless be needing to replace and that he would happily supply. “They cleaned you out of house and home, the blighters. You will not know whether you are coming or going. You will need washing-up liquid and one of these blocks to make the toilet a more savory place.”

  So she ended up buying a dozen or so items, too many for her to carry, but this didn’t matter either as Mr. Anwar fetched his little boy from the flat upstairs (I hope I’m not dragging him away from the Koran, she thought) and he followed Mrs. Ransome home in his little white cap, carrying her shopping in a cardboard box.

  “Seconds probably,” said Mr. Ransome later. “That’s how they make a profit.”

  Mrs. Ransome didn’t quite see how there could be seconds in shoe polish but didn’t say so.

  “Hopefully,” she said, “they’ll deliver.”

  “You mean,” said Mr. Ransome (and it was old ground), “you hope they’ll deliver. ‘Hopefully they’ll deliver’ means that deliveries are touch and go” (though that was probably true too).

  “Anyway,” said Mrs. Ransome defiantly, “he stays open till ten at night.”

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bsp; “He can afford to,” said Mr. Ransome. “He probably pays no wages. I’d stick to Marks and Spencer.”

  Which she did, generally speaking. Though once she popped in and bought a mango for her lunch and another time a papaw; small adventures, it’s true, but departures nevertheless, timorous voyages of discovery which she knew her husband well enough to keep to herself.

  The Ransomes had few friends; they seldom entertained, Mr. Ransome saying that he saw quite enough of people at work. On the rare occasions when Mrs. Ransome ran into someone she knew and ventured to recount their dreadful experience she was surprised to find that everyone, it seemed, had their own burglar story. None, she felt, was so stark or so shocking as to measure up to theirs, which ought in fairness to have trumped outright these other less flamboyant break-ins, but comparison scarcely seemed to enter into it: the friends only endured her story as an unavoidable prelude to telling her their own. She asked Mr. Ransome if he had noticed this.

  “Yes,” he said shortly. “Anybody would think it happened every day.”

  Which, of course, it did but not, he was certain, as definitively, as out-and-outedly, as altogether epically as this.

  “Everything,” Mr. Ransome told Gail, his longtime secretary, “every single thing.”

  Gail was a tall, doleful-looking woman, which normally suited Mr. Ransome very well as he could not abide much of what he called “silliness”—i.e., femininity. Had Gail been a bit sillier, though, she might have been more sympathetic, but like everyone else she weighed in with a burglar story of her own, saying she was surprised it hadn’t happened before as most people she knew had been burgled at least once and her brother-in-law, who was a chiropodist in Ilford, twice, one of which had been a ram-raid while they were watching television.

  “What you have to watch out for is the trauma; it takes people in different ways. Hair loss is often a consequence of burglary apparently and my sister came out in terrible eczema. Mind you,” Gail went on, “it’s always men.”

  “Always men what?” said Mr. Ransome.

  “Who burgle.”

  “Well, women shoplift,” said Mr. Ransome defensively.

  “Not to that extent,” said Gail. “They don’t clean out the store.”

  Not sure how he had ended up on the wrong side of the argument, Mr. Ransome felt both irritated and dissatisfied, so he tried Mr. Pardoe from the firm next door but with no more success. “Cleaned you out completely? Well, be grateful you weren’t in. My dentist and his wife were tied up for seven hours and counted themselves lucky not to be raped. Balaclavas, walkie-talkies. It’s an industry nowadays. I’d castrate them.”

  That night Mr. Ransome took out a dictionary from his briefcase, both dictionary and briefcase newly acquired. The dictionary was Mr. Ransome’s favorite book.

  “What are you doing?” asked Mrs. Ransome.

  “Looking up ‘lock, stock and barrel.’ I suppose it means the same as ‘the whole shoot.’ ”

  Over the next week or so Mrs. Ransome assembled the rudiments—two camp beds plus bedding, towels, a card table and two folding chairs. She bought a couple of what she called beanbags, though the shop called them something else; they were quite popular apparently, even among people who had not been burgled, who used them to sit on the floor by choice. There was even (this was Mr. Ransome’s contribution) a portable CD player and a recording of The Magic Flute.

  Mrs. Ransome had always enjoyed shopping so this obligatory re-equipment with the essentials of life was not without its pleasures, though the need was so pressing that choice scarcely entered into it. Hitherto anything electrical had always to be purchased by, or under the supervision of, Mr. Ransome, a sanction that applied even with an appliance like the vacuum cleaner, which he never wielded, or the dishwasher, which he seldom stacked. However, in the special circumstances obtaining after the burglary, Mrs. Ransome found herself licensed to buy whatever was deemed necessary, electrical or otherwise; not only did she get an electric kettle, she also went in for a microwave oven, an innovation Mr. Ransome had long resisted and did not see the point of.

  That many of these items (the beanbags for instance) were likely to be discarded once the insurance paid out and they acquired something more permanent did not diminish Mrs. Ransome’s quiet zest in shopping for them. Besides, the second stage was likely to be somewhat delayed as the insurance policy had been stolen too, together with all their other documents, so compensation, while not in doubt, might be slow in coming. In the meantime they lived a stripped-down sort of life which seemed to Mrs. Ransome, at least, not unpleasant.

  “Hand to mouth,” said Mr. Ransome.

  “Living out of a suitcase,” said Croucher, his insurance broker.

  “No,” said Mr. Ransome. “We don’t have a suitcase.”

  “You don’t think,” asked Croucher, “it might be some sort of joke?”

  “People keep saying that,” said Mr. Ransome. “Jokes must have changed since my day. I thought they were meant to be funny.”

  “What sort of CD equipment was it?” said Croucher.

  “Oh, state-of-the-art,” said Mr. Ransome. “The latest and the best. I’ve got the receipts somewhere . . . oh no, of course. I was forgetting.”

  Though this was a genuine slip it was perhaps fortunate that the receipts had been stolen along with the equipment that they were for, because Mr. Ransome was telling a little lie. His sound equipment was not quite state-of-the-art, as what equipment is? Sound reproduction is not static; perfection is on-going and scarcely a week passes without some technical advance. As an avid reader of hi-fi magazines, Mr. Ransome often saw advertised refinements he would dearly have liked to make part of his listening experience. The burglary, devastating though it had been, was his opportunity. So it was at the moment when he woke up to the potential advantages of his loss that this most unresilient of men began, if grudgingly, to bounce back.

  Mrs. Ransome, too, could see the cheerful side of things, but then she always did. When they had got married they had kitted themselves out with all the necessities of a well-run household; they had a dinner service, a tea service plus table linen to match; they had dessert dishes and trifle glasses and cake stands galore. There were mats for the dressing table, coasters for the coffee table, runners for the dining table; guest towels with matching flannels for the basin, lavatory mats with matching ones for the bath. They had cake slices and fish slices and other slices besides, delicate trowels in silver and bone the precise function of which Mrs. Ransome had never been able to fathom. Above all there was a massive many-tiered canteen of cutlery, stocked with sufficient knives, forks and spoons for a dinner party for twelve. Mr. and Mrs. Ransome did not have dinner parties for twelve. They did not have dinner parties. They seldom used the guest towels because they never had guests. They had transported this paraphernalia with them across thirty-two years of marriage to no purpose at all that Mrs. Ransome could see, and now at a stroke they were rid of the lot. Without quite knowing why, and while she was washing up their two cups in the sink, Mrs. Ransome suddenly burst out singing.

  “It’s probably best,” said Croucher, “to proceed on the assumption that it’s gone and isn’t going to come back. Maybe someone fancied a well-appointed middle-class home and just took a shortcut.”

  He stood at the door.

  “I’ll get a check to you as soon as I can. Then you can start rebuilding your lives. Your good lady seems to be taking it well.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Ransome, “only she keeps it under.”

  “No outstanding jewelry or anything of that sort?”

  “No. She’s never really gone in for that sort of thing,” said Mr. Ransome. “Luckily she was wearing her pearls to the opera.”

  “She had a necklace on tonight,” said Croucher. “Rather striking I thought.”

  “Did she?” Mr. Ransome hadn’t noticed.

  When they were at the card table having their supper Mr. Ransome said, “Have I seen that necklace before?�
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  “No. Do you like it? I bought it at the grocer’s.”

  “The grocer’s?”

  “The Indian shop. It was only 75p. I can’t wear my pearls all the time.”

  “It looks as if it came out of a Christmas cracker.”

  “I think it suits me. I bought two. The other one’s green.”

  “What am I eating?” said Mr. Ransome. “Swede?”

  “A sweet potato. Do you like it?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Marks and Spencer.”

  “It’s very nice.”

  A couple of weeks after the burglary (everything now dated from that) Mrs. Ransome was sitting on her beanbag in front of the electric fire, her legs stuck out in front of her, contemplating her now rather scuffed court shoes, and wondering what she ought to do next. It was the same with a death, she thought: so much to do to begin with, then afterwards nothing.

  Nevertheless (and further to her thoughts at the sink) Mrs. Ransome had begun to see that to be so abruptly parted from all her worldly goods might bring with it benefits she would have hesitated to call spiritual but which might, more briskly, be put under the heading of “improving the character.” To have the carpet almost literally pulled from under her should, she felt, induce salutary thoughts about the way she had lived her life. War would once have rescued her, of course, some turn of events that gave her no choice, and while what had happened was not a catastrophe on that scale she knew it was up to her to make of it what she could. She would go to museums, she thought, art galleries, learn about the history of London; there were classes in all sorts nowadays—classes that she could perfectly well have attended before they were deprived of everything they had in the world, except that it was everything they had in the world, she felt, that had been holding her back. Now she could start. So, plumped down on the beanbag on the bare boards of her sometime lounge, Mrs. Ransome found that she was not unhappy, telling herself that this was more real and that (though one needed to be comfortable) an uncushioned life was the way they ought to live.