Four Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Pruned of these sheltering encumbrances, Martin’s T-shirt, the message of which had hitherto only been hinted at, now fearlessly proclaimed itself, ‘Got a stiffy? Wear a Jiffy!’ and in brackets ‘drawing on back’. As Mr Ransome eased forward in his chair in order to shield his wife from the offending illustration, Mrs Ransome slightly eased back.

  ‘Actually,’ said Martin, ‘we’ve worn one or two of your things. I started off with your brown overcoat which I just tried on originally as a bit of a joke.’

  ‘A joke?’ said Mr Ransome, the humorous qualities of that particular garment never having occurred to him.

  ‘Yes. Only now I’ve grown quite fond of it. It’s great.’

  ‘But it must be too big for you,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘I know. That’s why it’s so great. And you’ve got tons of scarves. Cleo thinks you’ve got really good taste.’

  ‘Cleo?’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘My partner.’

  Then, catching sight of Mr Ransome by now pop-eyed with fury, Martin shrugged. ‘After all, it was you who gave us the green light.’ He went into the sitting-room and came back with a folder, which he laid on the kitchen table.

  ‘Just tell me,’ said Mr Ransome with terrible calmness, ‘why it is our things are here.’

  So Martin explained. Except it wasn’t really an explanation and when he’d finished they weren’t much further on.

  He had come in to work one morning about three months ago (‘February 15,’ Mrs Ransome supplied helpfully) and unlocking the doors had found their flat set out just as it had been in Naseby Mansions and just as they saw it now – carpets down, lights on, warm, a smell of cooking from the kitchen.

  ‘I mean,’ said Martin happily, ‘home.’

  ‘But surely,’ Mr Ransome said, ‘you must have realised that this was, to say the least, unusual?’

  ‘Very unusual,’ said Martin. Normally, he said, home contents were containered, crated and sealed, and the container parked in the back lot until required. ‘We store loads of furniture, but I might go for six months and never see an armchair.’

  ‘But why were they all dumped here?’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘Dumped?’ said Martin. ‘You call this dumped? It’s beautiful, it’s a poem.’

  ‘Why?’ said Mr Ransome.

  ‘Well, when I came in that morning, there was an envelope on the hall table …’

  ‘That’s where I put the letters normally,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘… an envelope,’ said Martin, ‘containing £3000 in cash to cover storage costs for two months, well clear of our normal charges I can tell you. And,’ said Martin, taking a card out of the folder, ‘there was this.’

  It was a sheet torn from the Delia Smith Cookery Calendar with a recipe for the hotpot which Mrs Ransome had made that afternoon and which she had left in the oven. On the back of it was written: ‘Leave exactly as it is,’ then in brackets, ‘but feel free to use.’ This was underlined.

  ‘So, where your overcoat was concerned and the scarves etc., I felt,’ Martin searched for the right word, ‘I felt that that was my imprimatur.’ (He had been briefly at the University of Warwick.)

  ‘But anybody could have written that,’ Mr Ransome said.

  ‘And leave £3000 in cash with it?’ said Martin. ‘No fear. Only I did check. Newport Pagnell knew nothing about it. Cardiff. Leeds. I had it run through the computer and they drew a complete blank. So I thought: “Well, Martin, the stuff’s here. For the time being it’s paid for, so why not just make yourself at home?” So I did. I could have done with the choice of CDs being a bit more eclectic, though. My guess is you’re a Mozart fan?’

  ‘I still think,’ said Mr Ransome testily, ‘you might have made more enquiries before making so free with our belongings.’

  ‘It’s not usual, I agree,’ said Martin, ‘only why should I? I’d no reason to … smell a rat?’

  Mr Ransome took in (and was irritated by) these occasional notes of inappropriate interrogation with which Martin (and the young generally) seemed often to end a sentence. He had heard it in the mouth of the office boy without realising it had got as far as Aylesbury (‘And where are you going now, Foster?’ ‘For my lunch?’). It seemed insolent, though it was hard to say why and it invariably put Mr Ransome in a bad temper (which was why Foster did it).

  Martin on the other hand seemed unconscious of the irritation he was causing, his serenity so impervious Mr Ransome put it down to drugs. Now he sat happily at the kitchen table and while Mr Ransome fussed round the flat on the look-out for evidence of damage or dilapidation or even undue wear and tear, Martin chatted comfortably to Rosemary, as he called her.

  ‘He just needs to lighten up a bit,’ said Martin as Mr Ransome banged about in the cupboards.

  Mrs Ransome wasn’t sure if lighten up was the same as brighten up but catching his drift smiled and nodded.

  ‘It’s been like playing houses,’ said Martin. ‘Cleo and I live over a dry-cleaners normally.’

  Mrs Ransome thought Cleo might be black but she didn’t like to ask.

  ‘Actually,’ and Martin dropped his voice because Mr Ransome was in the pantry cupboard counting the bottles of wine in the rack, ‘actually it’s perked things up between us two. Change of scene, you know what they say.’

  Mrs Ransome nodded knowledgeably; it was a topic frequently touched on in the afternoon programmes.

  ‘Good bed,’ whispered Martin, ‘the mattress give you lots of – what’s the word? – purchase.’ Martin gave a little thrust with his hips. ‘Know what I mean, Rosemary?’ He winked.

  ‘It’s orthopaedic,’ Mrs Ransome said hastily. ‘Mr Ransome has a bad back.’

  ‘I’d probably have one too if I’d lived here much longer.’ Martin patted her hand. ‘Only joking.’

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Mr Ransome, coming into the kitchen while Martin still had his hand over his wife’s (Mr Ransome didn’t understand that either), ‘what I don’t understand is how whoever it was transported our things here could remember so exactly where everything went.’

  ‘Trouble ye no more,’ said Martin and he went out into the hall and brought back a photograph album. It was a present Mr Ransome had bought Mrs Ransome when he was urging her to find a hobby. He had also bought her a camera which she had never managed to fathom so that the camera never got used, nor did the album. Except that now it was full of photographs.

  ‘The polaroid camera,’ Martin said, ‘the blessings thereof.’

  There were a dozen or so photographs for every room in the flat on the night in question; general views of the room, corners of the room, a close-up of the mantelpiece, another of the desk-top, every room and every surface recorded in conscientious detail, much as if, had her flat been the setting for a film, the continuity assistant would have recorded them.

  ‘And our name and address?’ Mr Ransome said.

  ‘Simple,’ said Martin. ‘Open …’

  ‘Any drawer,’ said he and Mrs Ransome together.

  ‘All these photographs,’ Mrs Ransome said. ‘Whoever they are, they must have no end of money. Don’t they make it look nice.’

  ‘It is nice,’ said Martin. ‘We’re going to miss it.’

  ‘It’s not only that all our things are in the right place,’ Mr Ransome said. ‘The rooms are in the right place too.’

  ‘Screens,’ said Martin. ‘They must have brought screens with them.’

  ‘There’s no ceiling,’ said Mr Ransome triumphantly. ‘They didn’t manage that.’

  ‘They managed the chandelier,’ said his wife. And so they had, suspending it from a handy beam.

  ‘Well I don’t think we need to prolong this stage of the proceedings any longer than we have to,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘I’ll contact my insurance company and tell them our belongings have been found. They will then doubtless contact you over their collection and return. There doesn’t seem to be anything missing but at this stage one can’t be sure.’r />
  ‘Oh, there’s nothing missing,’ said Martin. ‘One or two After Eights perhaps, but I can easily replenish those.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mrs Ransome, ‘that won’t be necessary. They’re …’ and she smiled, ‘they’re on the house.’

  Mr Ransome frowned and when Martin went off to find the various pro-formas he whispered to Mrs Ransome that they would have to have everything cleaned.

  ‘I don’t like to think what’s been going on. There was a bit of kitchen paper on your dressing-table with what was almost certainly blood. And I’ve a feeling they may have been sleeping in our bed.’

  ‘We’ll exchange flimsies,’ said Martin. ‘One flimsy for you. One flimsy for me. Your effects. Do you say “effects” when a person’s still around? Or is it just when they’re dead?’

  ‘Dead,’ said Mr Ransome authoritatively. ‘In this case it’s property.’

  ‘Effects,’ said Martin. ‘Good word.’

  Standing on the forecourt as they were going Martin kissed Mrs Ransome on both cheeks. He was about the age their son would have been, Mrs Ransome thought, had they had a son.

  ‘I feel like I’m one of the family,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ thought Mr Ransome; if they’d had a son this is what it would have been like. Irritating, perplexing. Feeling got at. They wouldn’t have been able to call their lives their own.

  Mr Ransome managed to shake hands.

  ‘All’s well that ends well,’ said Martin, and patted his shoulder. ‘Take care.’

  ‘How do we know he wasn’t in on it?’ said Mr Ransome in the car.

  ‘He doesn’t look the type,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘Oh? What type is that? Have you ever come across a case like this before? Have you ever heard of it? What type does it take, that’s what I’d like to know?’

  ‘We’re going a little fast,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘I shall have to inform the police, of course,’ Mr Ransome said.

  ‘They weren’t interested before so they’ll be even less interested now.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘I’m the solicitor. Who are you? Are you the expert?’

  They drove in silence for a while.

  ‘Of course, I shall want some compensation. The distress. The agony of mind. The inconvenience. They’re all quantifiable, and must be taken into account in the final settlement.’

  He was already writing the letter in his head.

  In due course, the contents of the flat came back to Naseby Mansions, a card pinned to one of the crates saying, ‘Feel Free to Use. Martin’. And, in brackets, ‘Joke’. Mr Ransome insisted that everything must be put back just as it had been before, which might have proved difficult had it not been for the aide-mémoire in the form of Mrs Ransome’s photograph album. Even so the gang who returned the furniture were less meticulous than the burglars who had removed it, besides being much slower. Still, the flat having been decorated throughout and the covers washed, hoovered or dry-cleaned, the place gradually came to look much as it had done before and life returned to what Mrs Ransome used to think of as normal but didn’t now, quite.

  Quite early on in the proceedings, and while Mr Ransome was at the office, Mrs Ransome tried out her cane rocking-chair and rug in the now much less spartan conditions of the lounge, but though the chair was as comfortable as ever the ensemble didn’t look right and made her feel she was sitting in a department store. So she relegated the chair to the spare room where from time to time she visited it and sat reviewing her life. But no, it was not the same and eventually she put the chair out for the caretaker who incorporated it into his scheme of things in the room behind the boiler, where he was now trying to discover the books of Jane Austen.

  Mr Ransome fared better than his wife, for although he had had to reimburse the insurance company over their original cheque he was able to claim that having already ordered some new speakers (he hadn’t) this should be taken into account and allowance made, which it duly was, thus enabling him to invest in some genuinely state of the art equipment.

  From time to time over the next few months traces of Martin and Cleo’s brief occupation would surface – a contraceptive packet (empty) that had been thrust under the mattress, a handkerchief down the side of the settee and, in one of the mantelpiece ornaments, a lump of hard brown material wrapped in silver paper. Tentatively Mrs Ransome sniffed it, then donned her Marigold gloves and put it down the lavatory, assuming that was where it belonged, though it was only after several goes that it was reluctantly flushed, Mrs Ransome sitting meanwhile on the side of the bath, waiting for the cistern to refill, and wondering how it came to be on the mantelpiece in the first place. A joke possibly, though not one she shared with Mr Ransome.

  Strange hairs were another item that put in regular appearances, long fair ones which were obviously Martin’s, darker crinklier ones she supposed must be Cleo’s. The incidence of these hairs wasn’t split evenly between Mr and Mrs Ransome’s respective wardrobes; indeed, since Mr Ransome didn’t complain about them, she presumed he never found any, as he would certainly have let her know if he had.

  She, on the other hand, found them everywhere – among her dresses, her coats, her underwear, his hairs as well as hers, and little ones as well as long ones, so that she was left puzzling over what it was they could have been up to that wasn’t constrained by the normal boundaries of gender and propriety. Had Martin worn her knickers on his head, she wondered (in one pair there were three hairs); had the elastic on her brassière always been as loose as it was now (two hairs there, one fair, one dark)?

  Still, sitting opposite Mr Ransome in his earphones of an evening, she could contemplate with equanimity, and even a small thrill, that she had shared her underclothes with a third party. Or two third parties possibly. ‘You don’t mean a third party,’ Mr Ransome would have said, but this was another argument for keeping quiet.

  There was one reminder of the recent past, though, that they were forced to share, if only by accident. They had had their supper one Saturday evening after which Mr Ransome was planning to record a live broadcast of Il Seraglio on Radio 3. Mrs Ransome, reflecting that there was never anything on TV worth watching on a Saturday night, had settled down to read a novel about some lacklustre infidelities in a Cotswold setting while Mr Ransome prepared to record. He had put in a tape that he thought was blank but checking it on the machine was startled to find that it began with a peal of helpless laughter. Mrs Ransome looked up. Mr Ransome listened long enough to detect that there were two people laughing, a man and a woman and since they showed no sign of stopping was about to switch it off when Mrs Ransome said: ‘No, Maurice. Leave it. This might be a clue.’

  So they listened in silence as the laughter went on, almost uninterrupted, until after three or four minutes it began to slacken and break up and whoever it was who was still laughing was left panting and breathless, this breathlessness gradually modulating into another sound, the second subject as it were, a groan and then a cry leading to a rhythmic pumping as stern and as purposeful as the other had been silly and lighthearted. At one point the microphone was moved closer to catch a sound that was so moist and wet it hardly seemed human.

  ‘It sounds,’ said Mrs Ransome, ‘like custard boiling,’ though she knew that it wasn’t. Making custard must seldom be so effortful as this seemed to be, nor is the custard urged on with affirmative yells, nor do the cooks cry out when, in due course, the custard starts to boil over.

  ‘I don’t think we want to listen to this, do we?’ Mr Ransome said and switched over to Radio 3, where they came in on the reverent hush that preceded the arrival of Claudio Abbado.

  Later when they were in bed Mrs Ransome said: ‘I suppose we’d better return that tape?’

  ‘What for?’ said Mr Ransome. ‘The tape is mine. In any case, we can’t. It’s wiped. I recorded over it.’

  This was a lie. Mr Ransome had wanted to record over it, it’s true, bu
t felt that whenever he listened to the music he would remember what lay underneath and this would put paid to any possible sublimity. So he had put the tape in the kitchen bin. Then, thinking about it as Mrs Ransome was in the bathroom brushing her teeth, he went and delved among the potato peelings and old teabags, and, picking off a tomato skin that had stuck to it, he hid the cassette in the bookcase behind a copy of Salmon on Torts, a hidey hole where he also kept a cache of photographs of some suburban sexual acts, the legacy of a messy divorce case in Epsom that he had conducted a few years before. The bookcase had, of course, gone to Aylesbury along with everything else but had been returned intact, the hiding place seemingly undetected by Martin.

  Actually it had not been undetected at all: the photographs had been what he and Cleo had been laughing about on the tape in the first place.

  Not a secret from Martin, nor were the snaps a secret from Mrs Ransome who, idly looking at the bookcase one afternoon and wondering what to cook for supper, had seen the title Salmon on Torts and thought it had a vaguely culinary sound to it. She had put the photographs back undisturbed but every few months or so would check to see that they were still there. When they were she felt somehow reassured.

  So sometimes now when Mr Ransome sat in his chair with his earphones on listening to Magic Flute it was not Magic Flute he was listening to at all. Gazing abstractedly at his reading wife his ears were full of Martin and Cleo moaning and crying and taking it out on one another again and again and again. No matter how often he listened to the tape Mr Ransome never ceased to be amazed by it; that two human beings could give themselves up so utterly and unreservedly to one another and to the moment was beyond his comprehension; it seemed to him miraculous.

  Listening to the tape so often he became every bit as familiar with it as with something by Mozart. He came to recognise Martin’s long intake of breath as marking the end of a mysterious bridging passage (Cleo was actually on hands and knees, Martin behind her) when the languorous andante (little mewings from the girl) accelerated into the percussive allegro assai (hoarse cries from them both) which in its turn gave way to an even more frantic coda, a sudden rallentando (‘No, no, not yet,’ she was crying, then, ‘Yes, yes, yes’) followed by panting, sighing, silence and finally sleep. Not an imaginative man, Mr Ransome nevertheless found himself thinking that if one built up a library of such tapes it would be possible to bestow on them the sexual equivalent of Köchel numbers, even trace the development of some sort of style in sexual intercourse, with early, middle and late periods, the whole apparatus of Mozartean musicology adapted to these new and thwacking rhythms.