Four Stories

by Alan Bennett

  OVER THE FOLLOWING WEEKS Geoffrey would often open up the safe and take a peek at the book, trying to decipher Clive’s cryptography and gauge the extent and nature of his activities. None of it shocked him: indeed he found the exercise vaguely exciting and as near to pornography as he allowed himself to come.

  Whether it was thanks to the book or to that almost involuntary pass that had allowed him to retain it, Geoffrey found his life changing. Disappointed of immediate promotion he was now more … well, relaxed and though ‘Relax!’ is hardly at the core of the Christian message he did feel himself better for it.

  So it might be because he was easier with himself or that his unique pass at the geology student had broken his duck and given him more nerve but one way and another he found himself having the occasional fling, in particular with the bus-driving crucifer, who, married though he was, didn’t see that as a problem. Nor did Geoffrey’s confessor who, while absolving him of what sin there was, urged him to see this and any similar experiences less as deviations from the straight and narrow and more as part of a learning curve. In fairness, this wasn’t an expression Geoffrey much cared for, though he didn’t demur. He preferred to think of it, if only to himself, as grace.

  He still kept the book in the safe, though, as it represented a valorous life he would have liked to lead and still found exciting. It happened that he had been to confession the day before and just as a diabetic whose blood tests have been encouraging sneaks a forbidden pastry so he felt he deserved a treat and went along to the church meaning to take out Clive’s book. It was partly to revisit his memory but also because even though he now knew its mysterious notations by heart they still gave him a faint erotic thrill. He knew that this was pathetic and could have told it to no one, except perhaps Clive, and it was one of the ways he missed him.

  Pushing open the door of the church he saw someone sitting towards the front and on the side. It was the geology student, slumped in the same pew he had sat in at the memorial service.

  ‘Hail,’ said the young man. ‘We meet again.’ Geoffrey shook hands.

  ‘I meant to come before now,’ he said, ‘only my car’s not been well.’

  Geoffrey managed a smile. Seeing him again, Geoffrey thought how fortunate it was that his advance had been rejected. God had been kind. It would never have done.

  Hopkins made room for Geoffrey to sit down, just as he had on the first occasion they had talked.

  ‘I came back,’ he said, as if it were only that morning he had fled the church. ‘I thought about it and I thought, why not?’ And now he turned towards Geoffrey and looking him sternly in the eye put his hand on the vicar’s knee. ‘All right?’

  Geoffrey did not speak.

  There was a click, then another and the turning of a wheel and faintly, as if from a great way off, Geoffrey heard the cogs begin to grind as the clock gathered itself up and struck the hour.

  THE CLOTHES THEY STOOD UP IN

  THE RANSOMES HAD BEEN BURGLED. ‘Robbed,’ Mrs Ransome said. ‘Burgled,’ Mr Ransome corrected. Premises were burgled; persons were robbed. Mr Ransome was a solicitor by profession and thought words mattered. Though ‘burgled’ was the wrong word too. Burglars select; they pick; they remove one item and ignore others. There is a limit to what burglars can take: they seldom take easy chairs, for example, and even more seldom settees. These burglars did. They took everything.

  The Ransomes had been to the opera, to Così fan tutte (or Così as Mrs Ransome had learned to call it). Mozart played an important part in their marriage. They had no children and but for Mozart would probably have split up years ago. Mr Ransome always took a bath when he came home from work and then he had his supper. After supper he took another bath, this time in Mozart. He wallowed in Mozart; he luxuriated in him; he let the little Viennese soak away all the dirt and disgustingness he had had to sit through in his office all day. On this particular evening he had been to the public baths, Covent Garden, where their seats were immediately behind the Home Secretary. He, too, was taking a bath and washing away the cares of his day, cares, if only in the form of a statistic, that were about to include the Ransomes.

  On a normal evening, though, Mr Ransome shared his bath with no one, Mozart coming personalised via his headphones and a stack of complex and finely-balanced stereo equipment Mrs Ransome was never allowed to touch. She blamed the stereo for the burglary as that was what the robbers were probably after in the first place. The theft of stereos is common; the theft of fitted carpets is not.

  ‘Perhaps they wrapped the stereo in the carpet,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  Mr Ransome shuddered and said her fur coat was more likely, whereupon Mrs Ransome started crying again.

  It had not been much of a Così. Mrs Ransome could not follow the plot and Mr Ransome, who never tried, found the performance did not compare with the four recordings he possessed of the work. The acting he invariably found distracting. ‘None of them knows what to do with their arms,’ he said to his wife in the interval. Mrs Ransome thought it probably went further than their arms but did not say so. She was wondering if the casserole she had left in the oven would get too dry at Gas Mark 4. Perhaps 3 would have been better. Dry it may well have been but there was no need to have worried. The thieves took the oven and the casserole with it.

  The Ransomes lived in an Edwardian block of flats the colour of ox-blood not far from Regent’s Park. It was handy for the City, though Mrs Ransome would have preferred something further out, seeing herself with a trug in a garden, vaguely. But she was not gifted in that direction. An African violet which her cleaning lady had given her at Christmas had finally given up the ghost that very morning and she had been forced to hide it in the wardrobe out of Mrs Clegg’s way. More wasted effort. The wardrobe had gone too.

  They had no neighbours to speak of, or seldom to. Occasionally they would run into people in the lift and both parties smiled cautiously. Once they had asked some newcomers on their floor round to sherry, but he had turned out to be what he called ‘a big band freak’ and she had been a dental receptionist with a timeshare in Portugal, so one way and another it had been an awkward evening and they had never repeated the experience. These days the turnover of tenants seemed increasingly rapid and the lift more and more wayward. People were always moving in and out again, some of them Arabs.

  ‘I mean,’ said Mrs Ransome, ‘it’s getting like a hotel.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep saying “I mean”,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘It adds nothing to the sense.’

  He got enough of what he called ‘this sloppy way of talking’ at work; the least he could ask for at home, he felt, was correct English. So Mrs Ransome, who normally had very little to say, now tended to say even less.

  When the Ransomes moved into Naseby Mansions the flats had boasted a commissionaire in a plum-coloured uniform that matched the colour of the building. He had died one afternoon in 1982 as he was hailing a taxi for Mrs Brabourne on the second floor, who had foregone it in order to let it take him to hospital. None of his successors had shown the same zeal in office or pride in their uniform and eventually the function of commissionaire had merged with that of caretaker, who was never to be found on the door and seldom to be found anywhere, his lair a hot scullery behind the boiler room where he slept much of the day in an armchair that had been thrown out by one of the tenants.

  On the night in question the caretaker was asleep, though unusually for him not in the armchair but at the theatre. On the look-out for a classier type of girl he had decided to attend an adult education course where he had opted to study English; given the opportunity, he had told the lecturer, he would like to become a voracious reader. The lecturer had some exciting, though not very well-formulated ideas about art and the workplace, and learning he was a caretaker had got him tickets for the play of the same name, thinking the resultant insights would be a stimulant to group interaction. It was an evening the caretaker found no more satisfying than the Ransomes did Così and the insi
ghts he gleaned limited: ‘So far as your actual caretaking was concerned,’ he reported to the class, ‘it was bollocks.’ The lecturer consoled himself with the hope that, unknown to the caretaker, the evening might have opened doors. In this he was right: the doors in question belonged to the Ransomes’ flat.

  The police came round eventually, though there was more to it than picking up the phone. The thieves had done that anyway, all three phones in fact, neatly snipping off the wire flush with the skirting-board so that, with no answer from the flat opposite (‘Sharing time in Portugal, probably,’ Mr Ransome said, ‘or at a big band concert’), he was forced to sally forth in search of a phone box. ‘No joke,’ as he said to Mrs Ransome, now that phone boxes doubled as public conveniences. The first two Mr Ransome tried didn’t even do that, urinals solely, the phone long since ripped out. A mobile would have been the answer, of course, but Mr Ransome had resisted this innovation (‘Betrays a lack of organisation’), as he resisted most innovations except those in the sphere of stereophonic reproduction.

  He wandered on through deserted streets, wondering how people managed. The pubs had closed, the only place open a launderette with, in the window, a pay phone. This struck Mr Ransome as a stroke of luck; never having had cause to use such an establishment he had not realised that washing clothes ran to such a facility; but being new to launderettes meant also that he was not certain if someone who was not actually washing clothes was permitted to take advantage of it. However, the phone was currently being used by the sole occupant of the place, an old lady in two overcoats who had plainly not laundered her clothes in some time, so Mr Ransome took courage.

  She was standing with the phone pressed to her dirty ear, not talking, but not really listening either.

  ‘Could you hurry, please,’ Mr Ransome said, ‘this is an emergency.’

  ‘So is this, dear,’ said the woman, ‘I’m calling Padstow, only they’re not answering.’

  ‘I want to call the police,’ said Mr Ransome.

  ‘Been attacked, have you?’ said the woman. ‘I was attacked last week. It’s par for the course these days. He was only a toddler. It’s ringing but there’s a long corridor. They tend to have a hot drink about this time. They’re nuns,’ she said explanatorily.

  ‘Nuns?’ said Mr Ransome. ‘Are you sure they won’t have gone to bed?’

  ‘No. They’re up and down all night having the services. There’s always somebody about.’

  She went on listening to the phone ringing in Cornwall.

  ‘Can’t it wait?’ asked Mr Ransome, seeing his effects halfway up the M1. ‘Speed is of the essence.’

  ‘I know,’ said the old lady, ‘whereas nuns have got all the time in the world. That’s the beauty of it except when it comes to answering the phone. I aim to go on retreat there in May.’

  ‘But it’s only February,’ Mr Ransome said. ‘I …’

  ‘They get booked up,’ explained the old lady. ‘There’s no talking and three meals a day so do you wonder? They use it as a holiday home for religious of both sexes. You wouldn’t think nuns needed holidays. Prayer doesn’t take it out of you. Not like bus conducting. Still ringing. They’ve maybe finished their hot drink and adjourned to the chapel. I suppose I could ring later, only …’ She looked at the coins waiting in Mr Ransome’s hand. ‘I’ve put my money in now.’

  Mr Ransome gave her a pound and she took the other 50p besides, saying: ‘You don’t need money for 999.’

  She put the receiver down and her money came back of its own accord, but Mr Ransome was so anxious to get on with his call he scarcely noticed. It was only later, sitting on the floor of what had been their bedroom that he said out loud: ‘Do you remember Button A and Button B? They’ve gone, you know. I never noticed.’

  ‘Everything’s gone,’ said Mrs Ransome, not catching his drift, ‘the air freshener, the soap dish. They can’t be human; I mean they’ve even taken the lavatory brush.’

  ‘Fire, police or ambulance?’ said a woman’s voice.

  ‘Police,’ said Mr Ransome. There was a pause.

  ‘I feel better for that banana,’ said a man’s voice. ‘Yes? Police.’ Mr Ransome began to explain but the man cut him short. ‘Anyone in danger?’ He was chewing.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Ransome, ‘but …’

  ‘Any threat to the person?’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Ransome, ‘only …’

  ‘Slight bottleneck at the moment, chief,’ said the voice. ‘Bear with me while I put you on hold.’

  Mr Ransome found himself listening to a Strauss waltz.

  ‘They’re probably having a hot drink,’ said the old lady, who he could smell was still at his elbow.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ the voice said five minutes later. ‘We’re on manual at the moment. The computer’s got hiccups. How may I help you?’

  Mr Ransome explained there had been a burglary and gave the address.

  ‘Are you on the phone?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mr Ransome, ‘only …’

  ‘And the number is?’

  ‘They’ve taken the phone,’ said Mr Ransome.

  ‘Nothing new there,’ said the voice. ‘Cordless job?’

  ‘No’ said Mr Ransome. ‘One was in the sitting-room, one was by the bed …’

  ‘We don’t want to get bogged down in detail,’ said the voice. ‘Besides, the theft of a phone isn’t the end of the world. What was the number again?’

  It was after one o’clock when Mr Ransome got back and Mrs Ransome, already beginning to pick up the threads, was in what had been their bedroom, sitting with her back to the wall in the place where she would have been in bed had there been a bed to be in. She had done a lot of crying while Mr Ransome was out but had now wiped her eyes, having decided she was going to make the best of things.

  ‘I thought you might be dead,’ she said.

  ‘Why dead?’

  ‘Well, it never rains but it pours.’

  ‘I was in one of these launderettes if you want to know. It was terrible. What are you eating?’

  ‘A cough sweet. I found it in my bag.’ This was one of the sweets Mr Ransome insisted she take with her whenever they went to the opera ever since she had had a snuffle all the way through Fidelio.

  ‘Is there another?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Ransome, sucking. ‘This is the last.’

  Mr Ransome went to the lavatory, only realising when it was too late that the burglary had been so comprehensive as to have taken in both the toilet roll and its holder.

  ‘There’s no paper,’ called Mrs Ransome.

  The only paper in the flat was the programme from Così and passing it round the door Mrs Ransome saw, not without satisfaction, that Mr Ransome was going to have to wipe his bottom on a picture of Mozart.

  Both unwieldy and unyielding the glossy brochure (sponsored by Barclays Bank plc) was uncomfortable to use and unsinkable afterwards, and three flushes notwithstanding, the fierce eye of Sir George Solti still came squinting resentfully round the bend of the pan.

  ‘Better?’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘No,’ said her husband and settled down beside her against the wall. However, finding the skirting-board dug into her back Mrs Ransome changed her position to lie at right angles to her husband so that her head now rested on his thigh, a situation it had not been in for many a long year. While telling himself this was an emergency it was a conjunction Mr Ransome found both uncomfortable and embarrassing, but which seemed to suit his wife as she straightaway went off to sleep, leaving Mr Ransome staring glumly at the wall opposite and its now uncurtained window, from which, he noted wonderingly, the burglars had even stolen the curtain rings.

  It was four o’clock before the police arrived, a big middle-aged man in a raincoat, who said he was a detective sergeant, and a sensitive-looking young constable in uniform, who didn’t say anything at all.

  ‘You’ve taken your time,’ said Mr Ransome.

  ‘Yes,’ said the sergeant. ‘We woul
d have been earlier but there was a slight … ah, glitch as they say. Rang the wrong doorbell. The fault of mi-laddo here. Saw the name Hanson and …’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘Ransome.’

  ‘Yes. We established that … eventually. Just moved in, have you?’ said the sergeant, surveying the bare boards.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘We’ve been here for thirty years.’

  ‘Fully furnished, was it?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘It was a normal home.’

  ‘A settee, easy chairs, a clock,’ said Mrs Ransome. ‘We had everything.’

  ‘Television?’ said the constable, timidly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘Only we didn’t watch it much,’ said Mr Ransome.

  ‘Video recorder?’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘Life’s complicated enough.’

  ‘CD player?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ransome and Mr Ransome together.

  ‘And my wife had a fur coat,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘My insurance have a list of the valuables.’

  ‘In that case,’ said the sergeant, ‘you are laughing. I’ll just have a little wander round if you don’t mind, while Constable Partridge takes down the details. People opposite see the intruder?’

  ‘Away in Portugal,’ said Mr Ransome.

  ‘Caretaker?’

  ‘Probably in Portugal too,’ said Mr Ransome, ‘for all we see of him.’

  ‘Is it Ransom as in king’s?’ said the constable. ‘Or Ransome as in Arthur?’

  ‘Partridge is one of our graduate entrants,’ said the sergeant, examining the front door.

  ‘Lock not forced, I see. He’s just climbing the ladder. There wouldn’t be such a thing as a cup of tea, would there?’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Ransome shortly, ‘because there wouldn’t be such a thing as a teapot. Not to mention a teabag to put in it.’