Four Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Such were Mr Ransome’s thoughts as he sat across from his wife, who was having another stab at Barbara Pym. She knew he wasn’t listening to Mozart though there were few obvious signs and nothing so vulgar as a bulge in his trousers. No, there was just a look of strain on Mr Ransome’s face, which was the very opposite of the look he had when he was listening to his favourite composer; an intensity of attention and a sense that, were he to listen hard enough, he might hear something on the tape he had previously missed.

  Mrs Ransome would listen to the tape herself from time to time but lacking the convenient camouflage of Mozart she confined her listening experiences to the afternoons. Getting out her folding household steps she would pull down Salmon on Torts then reach in behind it for the tape (the photographs seemed as silly and laughable to her as they had to Martin and Cleo). Then, having poured herself a small sherry, she would settle down to listen to them making love, marvelling still after at least a dozen hearings at the length and persistence of the process and its violent and indecorous outcome. Afterwards she would go and lie on the bed, reflecting that this was the same bed on which it had all happened and think again about it happening.

  These discreet (and discrete) epiphanies apart, life after they had recovered their possessions went on much the same as it had before they lost them. Sometimes, though, lying there on the bed or waiting to get up in the morning, Mrs Ransome would get depressed, feeling she had missed the bus; though what bus it was or where it was headed she would have found it hard to say. Prior to the visit to Aylesbury and the return of their things, she had, she thought, persuaded herself that the burglary had been an opportunity, with each day bringing its crop of small adventures – a visit from Dusty, a walk down to Mr Anwar’s, a trip up the Edgware Road. Now, re-ensconced among her possessions, Mrs Ransome feared that her diversions were at an end; life had returned to normal but it was a normal she no longer relished or was contented with.

  The afternoons particularly were dull and full of regret. It’s true she continued to watch the television, no longer so surprised at what people got up to as she once had been but even (as with Martin and Cleo) mildly envious. She grew so accustomed to the forms of television discourse that she occasionally let slip a tell-tale phrase herself, remarking once, for instance, that there had been a bit of hassle on the 74 bus.

  ‘Hassle?’ said Mr Ransome. ‘Where did you pick up that expression?’

  ‘Why?’ said Mrs Ransome innocently. ‘Isn’t it a proper word?’

  ‘Not in my vocabulary.’

  It occurred to Mrs Ransome that this was the time for counselling; previously an option it had now become a necessity, so she tried to reach Dusty via her helpline.

  ‘I’m sorry but Ms Briscoe is not available to take your call,’ said a recorded voice, which was immediately interrupted by a real presence.

  ‘Hello. Mandy speaking. How may I help you?’

  Mrs Ransome explained that she needed to talk to somebody about the sudden return of all the stolen property. ‘I have complicated feelings about it,’ said Mrs Ransome and tried to explain.

  Mandy was doubtful. ‘It might come under post-traumatic stress syndrome,’ she said, ‘only I wouldn’t bank on it. They’re clamping down on that now we’re coming to the end of this year’s financial year, and anyway it’s meant for rape and murder and whatnot, whereas we’ve had people ringing up who’ve just had a bad time at the dentist’s. You don’t feel the furniture’s dirty, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Ransome. ‘We’ve had everything cleaned anyway.’

  ‘Well, if you’ve kept the receipts I could ring Bickerton Road and get them to give you something back.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Mrs Ransome, ‘I expect I shall cope.’

  ‘Well, it’s what we all have to do in the end, isn’t it?’ said Mandy.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘Cope, dear. After all, that’s the name of the game. And the way you’ve described it,’ Mandy said, ‘it seems a very caring burglary.’

  Mandy was right, though it was the caringness that was the problem. Had this been a burglary in the ordinary way it would have been easier to get over. Even the comprehensive removal of everything they had in the world was something Mrs Ransome could have adjusted to; been ‘positive’ about, even enjoyed. But it was the wholesale disappearance coupled with the meticulous reconstruction and return that rankled. Who would want to rob them to that degree and having robbed them would choose to make such immaculate reparations? It seemed to Mrs Ransome that she had been robbed twice over, by the loss, first, of her possessions, then of the chance to transcend that loss. It was not fair, nor did it make sense; she thought perhaps this was what they meant when they talked about ‘losing the plot’.

  People seldom wrote to the Ransomes. They had the occasional card from Canada where Mr Ransome had some relatives of his mother who dutifully kept up the connection; Mrs Ransome would write back, her card as flavourless as theirs, the message from Canada little more than ‘Hello. We are still here,’ and her reply, ‘Yes, and so are we.’ Generally, though, the post consisted of bills and business communications and picking them up from the box downstairs in the lobby Mrs Ransome scarcely bothered to look them through, putting them unsifted on the hall table where Mr Ransome would deal with them before he had his supper. On this particular morning she’d just completed this ritual when she noticed that the letter on top was from South America, and that it was not addressed to Mr M. Ransome but to a Mr M. Hanson. This had happened once before, Mr Ransome putting the misdirected letter in the caretaker’s box with a note asking him or the postman to be more careful in future.

  Less tolerant of her husband’s fussing than she once had been, Mrs Ransome didn’t want this performance again so she put the letter on one side so that after her lunch she could go up to the eighth floor, find Mr Hanson’s door and slip it underneath. At least it would be an outing.

  It was several years since she had been up to the top of the Mansions. There had been some alterations, she knew, as Mr Ransome had had to write a letter of complaint to the landlords about the noise of the workmen and the dirt in the lift; but, as tenants came and went, someone was always having something done somewhere and Mrs Ransome came to take renovation as a fact of life. Still, venturing out of the lift she was surprised how airy it all was now; it might have been a modern building so light and unshadowed and spacious was the landing. Unlike their dark and battered mahogany, this woodwork had been stripped and bleached and whereas their hallway was covered in stained and pockmarked orange floor covering, this had a thick smoky blue fitted carpet that lapped the walls and muffled every sound. Above was a high octagonal skylight and beneath it an octagonal sofa to match. It looked less like the hallway of a block of mansion flats than a hotel or one of the new hospitals. Nor was it simply the decoration that had changed. Mrs Ransome remembered there being several flats but now there seemed to be only one, no trace of the other doors remaining. She looked for a name on this one door just to be sure but there was no name and no letter-box. She bent down intending to slip the letter from South America underneath but the carpet was so thick that this was difficult and it wouldn’t go. Above Mrs Ransome’s head and unseen by her, a security camera, which she had taken for a light fitting, moved round like some clumsy reptile in a series of silent jerks until it had her in frame. She was trying to press the pile of the carpet down when there was a faint buzz and the door swung silently open.

  ‘Come in,’ said a disembodied voice and holding up the letter as if it were an invitation Mrs Ransome went in.

  There was no one in the hall and she waited uncertainly, smiling helpfully in case someone was watching. The hall was identical in shape to theirs but twice the size and done up like the lobby in the same blond wood and faintly stippled walls. They must have knocked through, she thought, taken in the flat next door, taken in all the flats probably, the whole of the top floor one flat.

 
; ‘I brought a letter,’ she said, more loudly than if there had been someone there. ‘It came by mistake.’

  There was no sound.

  ‘I think it’s from South America. Peru. That is if the name’s Hanson. Anyway,’ she said desperately, ‘I’ll just put it down then go.’

  She was about to put the letter down on a cube of transparent perspex that she took to be a table when she heard behind her an exhausted sigh and turned to find that the door had closed. But as the door behind her closed so, with a mild intake of breath, the door in front of her opened, and through it she saw another doorway, this one with a bar across the top, and suspended from the bar a young man.

  He was pulling himself up to the bar seemingly without much effort, and saying his score out loud. He was wearing grey track suit bottoms and earphones and that was all. He had reached eleven. Mrs Ransome waited, still holding up the letter and not quite sure where to look. It was a long time since she had been so close to someone so young and so naked, the trousers slipping down low over his hips so that she could see the thin line of blond hair climbing the flat belly to his navel. He was tiring now and the last two pull-ups, nineteen and twenty, cost him great effort and after he had almost shouted ‘twenty’ he stood there panting, one hand still grasping the bar, the earphones low round his neck. There was a faint graze of hair under his arms and some just beginning on his chest and like Martin he had the same squirt of hair at the back though his was longer and twisted into a knot.

  Mrs Ransome thought she had never seen anyone so beautiful in all her life.

  ‘I brought a letter,’ she began again. ‘It came by mistake.’

  She held it out to him but he made no move to take it, so she looked round for somewhere to put it down.

  There was a long refectory table down the middle of the room and by the wall a sofa that was nearly as long, but these were the only objects in the room that Mrs Ransome would have called proper furniture. There were some brightly coloured plastic cubes scattered about which she supposed might serve as occasional tables, or possibly stools. There was a tall steel pyramid with vents which seemed to be a standard lamp. There was an old-fashioned pram with white-walled tyres and huge curved springs. On one wall was a dray-horse collar and on another a cavalier’s hat and next to it a huge blown-up photograph of Lana Turner.

  ‘She was a film star,’ the young man said. ‘It’s an original.’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ Mrs Ransome said.

  ‘Why, did you know her?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Mrs Ransome said. ‘Anyway, she was American.’

  The floor was covered in a thick white carpet which she imagined would show every mark though there were no marks that she could see. Still, it didn’t seem to Mrs Ransome to add up, this room, and with one of the walls glass, giving out on to a terrace, it felt less like a room than an unfinished window display in a department store, a bolt of tweed flung casually across the table what it needed somehow to make sense.

  He saw her looking.

  ‘It’s been in magazines,’ he said. ‘Sit down,’ and he took the letter from her.

  He sat at one end of the sofa and she sat at the other. He put his feet up and if she had put her feet up too there would still have been plenty of room between them. He looked at the letter, turning it over once or twice without opening it.

  ‘It’s from Peru,’ Mrs Ransome said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘thanks,’ and tore it in two.

  ‘It might be important,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘It’s always important,’ said the young man, and dropped the pieces on the carpet.

  Mrs Ransome looked at his feet. Like every bit of him that she could see they were perfect, the toes not bent up and useless like her own, or Mr Ransome’s. These were long, square-cut and even expressive; they looked as if at a pinch they could deputise for the hands and even play a musical instrument.

  ‘I’ve never seen you in the lift,’ she said.

  ‘I have a key. Then it doesn’t have to stop at the other floors.’ He smiled. ‘It’s handy.’

  ‘Not for us,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘That’s true,’ and he laughed, unoffended. ‘Anyway, I pay extra.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘You can’t,’ he said.

  Mrs Ransome had an idea he was a singer, but felt that if she asked he might cease to treat her as an equal. She also wondered if he was on drugs. Silence certainly didn’t seem to bother him and he lay back at his end of the sofa, smiling and completely at ease.

  ‘I should go,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘Why?’

  He felt in his armpit then waved an arm at the room.

  ‘This is all her.’

  ‘Who?’

  He indicated the torn-up letter. ‘She did the place up. She’s an interior decorator. Or was. She now ranches in Peru.’

  ‘Cattle?’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘Horses.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Ransome. ‘That’s nice. There can’t be too many people who’ve done that.’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Been an interior decorator then … then … looked after horses.’

  He considered this. ‘No. Though she was like that. You know, sporadic.’ He surveyed the room. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Ransome, ‘it’s a little strange. But I like the space.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a great space. A brilliant space.’

  Mrs Ransome hadn’t quite meant that but she was not unfamiliar with the concept of space as they talked about space a lot in the afternoons, how people needed it, how they had to be given it and how it had not to be trespassed on.

  ‘She did the place up,’ he said, ‘then of course she moved in.’

  ‘So you felt,’ said Mrs Ransome (and the phrase might have been her first faltering steps in Urdu, it seemed so strange on her lips), ‘you felt that she had invaded your space.’

  He pointed one beautiful foot at her in affirmation.

  ‘She did. She did. I mean take that fucking pram …’

  ‘I remember those,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘Yes, well, sure, only apparently,’ he said, ‘though it wasn’t apparent to me, that is not there as a pram. It is there as an object. And it had to be just on that fucking spot. And because I, like, happened to move it, like half an inch, madam went ballistic. Threatened to take everything away. Leave the place bare. As if I cared. Anyway, she’s history.’

  Since she was in Peru Mrs Ransome felt that she was geography too, a bit, but she didn’t say so. Instead she nodded and said: ‘Men have different needs.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Are you hurting?’ Mrs Ransome said.

  ‘I was hurting,’ the young man said, ‘only now I’m stepping back from it. I think you have to.’

  Mrs Ransome nodded sagely.

  ‘Was she upset?’ she asked, and she longed to take hold of his foot.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this woman was always upset.’ He stared out of the window.

  ‘When did she leave you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I lose track of time. Three months, four months ago.’

  ‘Like February?’ said Mrs Ransome. And it wasn’t a question.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Hanson, Ransome,’ she said. ‘They’re not really alike but I suppose if you’re from Peru …’

  He didn’t understand, as why should he, so she told him, told him the whole story, beginning with them coming back from the opera, and the police and the trek out to Aylesbury, the whole tale.

  When she’d finished, he said: ‘Yeah, that sounds like Paloma. It’s the kind of thing she would do. She had a funny sense of humour. That’s South America for you.’

  Mrs Ransome nodded, as if any gaps in this account of events could be put down to the region and the well-known volatility of its inhabitants; the spell of the pampas, the length of the Amazon, llamas, piranha fish – compared with phe
nomena like these what was a mere burglary in North London? Still, one question nagged.

  ‘Who’d she have got to do it with such care?’ Mrs Ransome asked.

  ‘Oh, that’s easy. Roadies.’

  ‘Roadies?’ said Mrs Ransome. ‘Do you mean navvies?’

  ‘A stage crew. Guys who do set-ups. Picked the lock. Took the photographs. Dismantled your set up, put it up again in Aylesbury. Designer job probably. They’re doing it all the time one way or another. No problem, nothing too much trouble … provided you pay extra.’ He winked. ‘Anyway,’ and he looked round the sparsely-furnished room, ‘it wouldn’t be such a big job. Is your place like this?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Mrs Ransome said. ‘Ours is … well … more complicated.’

  He shrugged. ‘She could pay. She was rich. Anyway,’ he said, getting up from the sofa and taking her hand, ‘I’m sorry you’ve been inconvenienced on my account.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Ransome. ‘It was well, you know, kind of weird to begin with but I’ve tried to be positive about it. And I think I’ve grown, you know.’

  They were standing by the pram.

  ‘We had one of these once,’ Mrs Ransome said. ‘Briefly.’ It was something she had not spoken of for thirty years.

  ‘A baby?’

  ‘He was going to be called Donald,’ Mrs Ransome said, ‘but he never got that far.’

  Unaware that a revelation had been made the young man stroked his nipple reflectively as he walked her out into the hall.