by Alan Bennett
‘The extra is for our trauma,’ said Mrs Ransome, looking at the cheque.
‘I prefer to call it inconvenience,’ Mr Ransome said. ‘We’ve been burgled, not knocked down by a bus. Still, the extra will come in handy.’
He was already working out a scheme for an improved stereo system plus an update on his CD player combined with high definition digital sound and ultra-refinement of tone, all to be fed through a pair of majestic new speakers in hand-crafted mahogany. It would be Mozart as he had never heard him before.
Mrs Ransome was sitting contentedly in a cheap cane rocking-chair she had found a few weeks earlier in a furniture store up the Edgware Road. It was an establishment which, before the burglary, she would never have dreamed of going into, with garish suites, paintings of clowns and, flanking the door, two lifesize pottery leopards. A common shop she would have thought it once, as a bit of her still did, but Mr Anwar had recommended it and sure enough the rocking-chair she’d bought there was wonderfully comfortable and, unlike the easy chair in which she used to sit before the burglary, good for her back. Now that the insurance cheque had come through she planned on getting a matching chair for Mr Ransome, but in the meantime she had bought a rug to put the chair on, and, sewn with a design of an elephant, it glowed under the light from a brass table lamp bought at the same shop. Sitting with what Mr Anwar had told her was an Afghan prayer rug round her shoulders she felt in the middle of the bare sitting-room floor that she was on a cosy and slightly exotic little island.
For the moment Mr Ransome’s island was not so cosy, just a chair at the card table on which Mrs Ransome had put the one letter that constituted the day’s post. Mr Ransome picked up the envelope. Smelling curry, he said: ‘What’s for supper?’
‘Curry.’
Mr Ransome turned the letter over. It looked like a bill. ‘What sort of curry?’
‘Lamb,’ said Mrs Ransome. ‘With apricots. I’ve been wondering,’ she said. ‘Would white be too bold?’
‘White what?’ said Mr Ransome, holding the letter up to the light.
‘Well,’ she said hesitantly. ‘White everything really.’
Mr Ransome did not reply. He was reading the letter.
‘You mustn’t get too excited,’ Mr Ransome said as they were driving towards Aylesbury. ‘It could be somebody’s sense of humour. Another joke.’
Actually their mood was quite flat and the countryside was flat too; they had scarcely spoken since they had set off, the letter with Mr Ransome’s pencilled directions lying on Mrs Ransome’s lap.
‘Left at the roundabout,’ thought Mr Ransome.
‘It’s left at the roundabout,’ Mrs Ransome said.
He had telephoned the storage firm that morning to have a girl answer. It was called Rapid’n’Reliant Removals’n’Storage, those ’n’s, Mr Ransome thought, a foretaste of trouble; nor was he disappointed.
‘Hello. Rapid’n’Reliant Removals’n’Storage. Christine Thoseby speaking. How may I help you?’
Mr Ransome asked for Mr Ralston, who had signed the letter.
‘At the present time of speaking Mr Ralston is in Cardiff. How may I help you?’
‘When will he be back?’
‘Not until next week. He’s on a tour of our repositories. How may I help you?’
Her repeated promises of help notwithstanding, Christine had the practised lack of interest of someone perpetually painting her nails and when Mr Ransome explained that the previous day he had received a mysterious invoice for £344.36 re the storage of certain household effects, the property of Mr and Mrs Ransome, all Christine said was: ‘And?’ He began to explain the circumstances but at the suggestion that the effects in question might be stolen property Christine came to life.
‘May I interject? I think that’s very unlikely, quite frankly, I mean, Rapid’n’Reliant were established in 1977.’
Mr Ransome tried a different tack. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know whether any of these household effects you’re holding includes some old stereo equipment?’
‘Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. But if you have any items in storage with Rapid’n’Reliant they’ll show up on the C47, of which you should have a copy. It’s a yellow flimsy.’
Mr Ransome started to explain why he didn’t have a flimsy but Christine cut him short.
‘I wouldn’t know that, would I, because I’m in Newport Pagnell? This is the office. The storage depot is in Aylesbury. You can be anywhere nowadays. It’s computers. Actually the person who could help you at Aylesbury is Martin but I happen to know he’s out on a job most of today.’
‘I wonder whether I ought to go down to Aylesbury,’ Mr Ransome said, ‘just to see if there’s anything there.’
Christine was unenthusiastic. ‘I can’t actually stop you,’ she said, ‘only they don’t have any facilities for visitors. It’s not like a kennels,’ she added inexplicably.
Mr Ransome having told her the storage firm was in a business park, Mrs Ransome, who was not familiar with the genre, imagined it situated in a setting agreeably pastoral, a park that was indeed a park and attached to some more or less stately home, now sensitively adapted to modern requirements; the estate dotted with workshops possibly; offices nestling discreetly in trees. At the hub of this centre of enterprise she pictured a country house where tall women with folders strode along terraces, typists busied themselves in gilded saloons beneath painted ceilings, a vision which, had she thought to trace it back, she would have found to have derived from those war films where French châteaux taken over by the German High Command bustle with new life on the eve of D-Day.
It was as well she didn’t share these romantic expectations with Mr Ransome who, the secretary of several companies and so acquainted with the reality, would have given them short shrift.
It was only when she found herself being driven round a bleak treeless ring-road lined with small factories and surrounded by concrete and rough grass that Mrs Ransome began to revise her expectations.
‘It doesn’t look very countrified,’ Mrs Ransome said.
‘Why should it?’ said Mr Ransome, about to turn in at some un-Palladian metal gates.
‘This is it,’ said Mrs Ransome, looking at the letter.
The gates were set in a seven-foot high fence topped with an oblique pelmet of barbed wire so that the place looked less like a park than a prison. Fixed to an empty pillbox was a metal diagram, painted in yellow and blue, showing the whereabouts of the various firms on the estate. Mr Ransome got out to look for Unit 14.
‘You are here,’ said an arrow, only someone had inserted at the tip of the arrow a pair of crudely drawn buttocks.
Unit 14 appeared to be a few hundred yards inside the perimeter, just about where, had the buttocks been drawn to scale, the navel might have been. Mr Ransome got back in the car and drove slowly on in the gathering dusk until he came to a broad low hangar-like building with double sliding doors, painted red and bare of all identification except for a warning that guard dogs patrolled. There were no other cars and no sign of anybody about.
Mr Ransome pulled at the sliding door, not expecting to find it open. Nor was it.
‘It’s locked,’ said Mrs Ransome.
‘You don’t say,’ Mr Ransome muttered under his breath, and struck out round the side of the building, followed more slowly by Mrs Ransome, picking her way uncertainly over the rubble and clinkers and patches of scrubby grass. Mr Ransome felt his shoe skid on something.
‘Mind the dog dirt,’ said Mrs Ransome. ‘It’s all over this grass.’ Steps led down to a basement door. Mr Ransome tried this too. It was also locked, a boiler room possibly.
‘That looks like a boiler room,’ said Mrs Ransome.
He scraped his shoe on the step.
‘You’d think they’d make them set an example,’ Mrs Ransome said.
‘Who?’ said Mr Ransome, slurring his polluted shoe over some thin grass.
‘The guard dogs.’
They had almos
t completed a circuit of the hangar when they came on a small frosted window where there was a dim light. It was open an inch or two at the top and was obviously a lavatory, and faintly through the glass Mrs Ransome could see standing on the window-ledge the blurred shape of a toilet roll. It was doubtless a coincidence that it was blue, and forget-me-not blue at that, a shade Mrs Ransome always favoured in her own toilet rolls and which was not always easy to find. She pressed her face to the glass in order to see it more clearly and then saw something else.
‘Look, dear,’ Mrs Ransome said. But Mr Ransome wasn’t looking. He was listening.
‘Shut up,’ he said. He could hear Mozart.
And floating through the crack of the lavatory window came the full, dark, sumptuous and utterly unmistakable tones of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.
‘Per pietà, ben mio,’ she was singing, ‘perdona all ’error d’un alma amante.’
And out it drifted into the damp dusk, rising over Rapid’n’Reliant at Unit 14 and Croda Adhesives at Unit 16 and Lansyl Selant Applicators plc at Unit 20 (Units 17–19 currently under offer).
‘O Dio,’ sang Dame Kiri. ‘O Dio.’
And the perimeter road heard it and the sheathed and stunted saplings planted there and the dirty dribble of a stream that straggled through a concrete culvert to the lumpy field beyond, where a shabby horse contemplated two barrels and a pole.
Galvanised by the sound of the Antipodean songstress Mr Ransome clambered up the fall pipe and knelt painfully on the window-sill. Clinging to the pipe with one hand he prised open the window an inch or two further and forced his head in as far as it would go, almost slipping off the sill in the process.
‘Careful,’ said Mrs Ransome.
Mr Ransome began to shout. ‘Hello. Hello?’
Mozart stopped and somewhere a bus went by.
In the silence Mr Ransome shouted again, this time almost joyfully. ‘Hello!’
Instantly there was bedlam. Dogs burst out barking, a siren went off and Mr and Mrs Ransome were trapped and dazzled by half a dozen security lights focused tightly on their shrinking forms. Petrified, Mr Ransome clung desperately to the lavatory window while Mrs Ransome plastered herself as closely as she could against the wall, one hand creeping (she hoped unobtrusively) up the window-sill to seek the comfort of Mr Ransome’s knee.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the commotion stopped; the lights went out, the siren trailed off and the barking of the dogs modulated to an occasional growl. Trembling on the sill Mr Ransome heard a door pushed back and unhurried steps walking across the forecourt.
‘Sorry about that, people,’ said a male voice. ‘Burglars, I’m afraid, measures for the detection and discouragement of.’
Mrs Ransome peered into the darkness but still half-blinded by the lights could see nothing. Mr Ransome slithered down the fall pipe to stand beside her and she took his hand.
‘This way chaps and chapesses. Over here.’
Mr and Mrs Ransome stumbled across the last of the grass onto the concrete where silhouetted against the open door stood a young man.
Dazed, they followed him into the hangar and in the light they made a sorry-looking pair. Mrs Ransome was limping because one of her heels had broken and she had laddered both her stockings. Mr Ransome had torn the knee of his trousers; there was shit on his shoes and across his forehead where he had pressed his face into the window was a long black smudge.
The young man smiled and put out his hand. ‘Maurice. Rosemary. Hi! I’m Martin.’
It was a pleasant open face and though he did have one of those little beards Mrs Ransome thought made them all look like poisoners, for a warehouseman one way and another he looked quite classy. True he was wearing the kind of cap which had once been the distinctive head-gear of American golfers but now seemed of general application, and a little squirt of hair with a rubber band round it coming out of the back, and, again like them all nowadays, his shirt tail was out; still, what gave him a certain air in Mrs Ransome’s eyes was his smart maroon cardigan. It was not unlike one she had picked out for Mr Ransome at a Simpson’s sale the year before. Loosely knotted around his neck was a yellow silk scarf with horses’ heads on it. Mrs Ransome had bought Mr Ransome one of those too, though he had worn it only once as he decided it made him look like a cad. This boy didn’t look like a cad; he looked dashing and she thought that if they ever got their belongings back she’d root the scarf out from the wardrobe and make her husband give it another try.
‘Follow moi,’ said the young man and led them down a cold uncarpeted corridor.
‘It’s so nice to meet you at long last,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘though in the circumstances I feel I know you already.’
‘What circumstances?’ said Mr Ransome.
‘Bear with me one moment,’ said Martin.
Mr and Mrs Ransome were left in the dark while the young man fiddled with a lock.
‘I’ll just illuminate matters a fraction,’ he said and a light came on in the room beyond.
‘Come in,’ said Martin and he laughed.
Tired and dirty and blinking in the light, Mr and Mrs Ransome stumbled through the door and into their own flat.
It was just as they had left it in the evening they had gone to the opera. Here was their carpet, their sofa, their high-backed chairs, the reproduction walnut-veneered coffee table with the scalloped edges and cabriole legs and on it the latest number of the Gramophone. Here was Mrs Ransome’s embroidery, lying on the end of the sofa where she had put it down before going to change at a quarter to six on that never-to-be-forgotten evening. There on the nest of tables was the glass from which Mr Ransome had had a little drop of something to see him through the first act of Così, still (Mrs Ransome touched the rim of the glass with her finger) slightly sticky.
On the mantelpiece the carriage clock, presented to Mr Ransome to mark his twenty-five years with the firm of Selvey, Ransome, Steele and Co., struck six, though Mrs Ransome was not sure if it was six then or six now. The lights were on, just as they had left them.
‘A waste of electricity, I know,’ Mr Ransome was wont to say, ‘but at least it deters the casual thief,’ and on the hall table the evening paper left there by Mr Ransome for Mrs Ransome, who generally read it with her morning coffee the following day.
Other than a cardboard plate with some cold half-eaten curry which Martin neatly heeled under the sofa, mouthing ‘Sorry’, everything, every little thing was exactly as it should be; they might have been at home in their flat in Naseby Mansions, St John’s Wood and not in a hangar on an industrial estate on the outskirts of nowhere.
Gone was the feeling of foreboding with which Mrs Ransome had set out that afternoon; now there was only joy as she wandered round the room, occasionally picking up some cherished object with a smile and an ‘Oh!’ of reacquaintance, sometimes holding it up for her husband to see. For his part Mr Ransome was almost moved, particularly when he spotted his old CD player, his trusty old CD player as he was inclined to think of it now, not quite up to the mark, it’s true, the venerable old thing, but still honest and old-fashioned; yes, it was good to see it again and he gave Mrs Ransome a brief blast of Così.
Watching this reunion with a smile almost of pride, Martin said: ‘Everything in order? I tried to keep it all just as it was.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Ransome, ‘it’s perfect.’
‘Astonishing,’ said her husband.
Mrs Ransome remembered something. ‘I’d put a casserole in the oven.’
‘Yes,’ said Martin, ‘I enjoyed that.’
‘It wasn’t dry?’ said Mrs Ransome.
‘Only a touch,’ said Martin, following them into the bedroom. ‘It would perhaps have been better at Gas Mark 3.’
Mrs Ransome nodded and noticed on the dressing-table the piece of kitchen paper (she remembered how they had run out of Kleenex) with which she had blotted her lipstick three months before.
‘Kitchen,’ said Martin as if they might not know
the way, though it was exactly where it should have been, and exactly how too, except that the casserole dish, now empty, stood washed and waiting on the draining-board.
‘I wasn’t sure where that went,’ said Martin apologetically.
‘That’s all right’, said Mrs Ransome, ‘it lives in here.’ She opened the cupboard by the sink and popped the dish away.
‘That was my guess,’ said Martin, ‘though I didn’t like to risk it.’ He laughed and Mrs Ransome laughed too.
Mr Ransome scowled. The young man was civil enough, if over-familiar, but it all seemed a bit too relaxed. A crime had been committed after all, and not a petty one either; this was stolen property; what was it doing here?
Mr Ransome thought it was time to take charge of the situation.
‘Tea?’ said Martin.
‘No thank you,’ said Mr Ransome.
‘Yes please,’ said his wife.
‘Then,’ said Martin, ‘we need to talk.’
Mrs Ransome had never heard the phrase used in real life as it were and she looked at this young man with new-found recognition: she knew where he was coming from. So did Mr Ransome.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Mr Ransome, decisively, sitting down at the kitchen table and meaning to kick off by asking this altogether too pleased with himself young man, what this was all about.
‘Perhaps,’ said Martin, giving Mrs Ransome her tea, ‘perhaps you would like to tell me what this is all about. I mean with all due respect, as they say.’
This was too much for Mr Ransome.
‘Perhaps,’ he exploded, ‘and with all due respect, you’d like to tell me why it is you’re wearing my cardigan.’
‘You never wore it much,’ said Mrs Ransome placidly. ‘Lovely tea.’
‘That isn’t the point, Rosemary.’ Mr Ransome seldom used her Christian name except as a form of blunt instrument. ‘And that’s my silk scarf.’
‘You never wore that at all. You said it made you look like a cad.’
‘That’s why I like it,’ said Martin, happily, ‘the cad factor. However all good things come to an end, as they say.’ And unhurriedly (and quite unrepentantly, thought Mr Ransome) he took off the cardigan, unknotted the scarf and laid them both on the table.