Muriel Pulls It Off

by Susanna Johnston

  ‘Put that down,’ Muriel ordered, ‘and leave the room.’

  Neither Mambles nor Farty flickered as Phyllis skedaddled and as Muriel sat down on Mambles’s bed and poured forth her wrath, combined with miserable apology.

  ‘As you know Muriel,’ she sat up and smiled, ‘I never read one word in those filthy rags. Nor does Mummy. Why, though, did you ever allow that rotter in the house?’

  She creaked to her feet, kissed her friend and said, ‘In my family we pay no attention to the press. Now you really have got to do the same. You have had experience after all with horrid Hugh. Farty! Have you remembered Jubilee’s bowl?’

  Mambles understood Muriel’s need to be shot of her, speeded up Farty’s fussing and, within half an hour, they were gone.

  There was no one about. Muriel found Kitty in the kitchen. Both she and Mavis were disappointed at not being alerted to Mambles’s departure since they would have liked to have curtseyed and waved her off. Muriel explained that there had been trouble with the press; that the telephone was to be left unanswered; that a room must be prepared for Mr Cottle - her brother-in-law - and that Phyllis must be skulking somewhere. She dropped this as a hint.

  They both showed sympathy and Muriel left with Monopoly for the station.

  Chapter 9

  Peter refused to carry a white stick. As a child Muriel used to yearn for one, even went to the length of painting one of her father’s (for which trouble followed) and pretending to be blind, so she found it hard to understand why Peter denied himself this covetable prop, eligible for it as he was.

  He walked with an air of patient gravity along the platform, arm in arm with a mossy young man, drearily clad, who had befriended him in the railway carriage. The young man, Peter told her as they left the station, had a speech impediment and worked as a medium in Kent.

  ‘He took it up after his mother “went into spirit”.’

  Muriel told Peter that she would like to go into spirit.

  ‘Don’t talk twaddle Muriel. You’ll triumph.’

  Peter was very pleased to see Monopoly. He was easy to be with and Muriel rejoiced that he had sensed her need for his company and knew that he would not crow, despite his disapproval past and present, concerning truck with Roger.

  He had, indeed, come because he sensed that Muriel needed help but had come, too, because he missed her. He revered her but counted the complications of involvement with his brother’s wife. Not that, necessarily, he had huge hopes of success were he to stop counting. He realised that he barely remembered his brother’s voice or his appearance. Why, therefore, should he not attempt to replace one he but sketchily visualised? Cuckold the departed? But he had not tested the water and Muriel kept at a friendly distance from him.

  Kitty stood beaming on the front doorstep; staring and bursting with life. She was popping to inform them that Phyllis had done a bunk. Joyce had been coerced into driving her and her belongings to a train bound for London. Wonder that they hadn’t bumped into her at the station. Poor Phyllis, Muriel thought, she cannot have anticipated Roger’s treachery; have credited that he would, so flagrantly, have plastered her snippets undiluted before the world. She was sure to have expected camouflage or protection. What, she wondered, would he do with the twitching bitch when she arrived on his doorstep? The telephone, Kitty said, had been busy ever since Muriel went out. She had tried leaving it off the hook but a foul wail from the exchange that exploded like an air raid siren throughout the house had decided her to replace it. Since then she had left it ringing and, as Dulcie was still skulking, nobody had replied. It rang again as Muriel led Peter to a chair.

  The unremitting jangling of the bell underlined for her the inescapable fact that calamity had struck. Her loneliness, thanks to Peter with his kind, blind face, was mitigated but shame soared to top place in her heart, shame for her son who had forced Roger upon her and who, in his turn, had betrayed Mambles. Thanks to the one night the Princess had spent under her roof the whole world now knew that she used a chamber pot.

  ‘The buck is at the top,’ she sang to herself as she thought of Mambles’s uncle and planned to abdicate.

  She wished that Peter didn’t look like Hugh for, although taller and more dishevelled than her husband and less polished in his ways, there could be no denying that they were brothers. She expected Marco to be amongst the many callers but had no wish to speak with him.

  Imaginings told her that the story was being magnified by the press; that it would hit the headlines, dominate the front page of the Johannesburg Gazette (or whatever) and send Hugh flying back complete with jodhpurs and fishing tackle.

  Peter said, ‘No. There’ll only be a snippet here and there. They’ll pursue anything but, more often than not, won’t use it. Just remember how peripheral Matilda is these days - what with Diana, Fergie and the rest.’

  ‘What about the nurses? The ones that look after Jerome? It’s bound to hit the local papers. Delilah? What about Delilah?’

  ‘They can look after themselves. God will provide. They’ll love it. Early to bed tonight and tomorrow we’ll face whatever music there may be. Personally I don’t think it’ll be that loud.’

  Supper at the card table with Peter and Monopoly after a walk in the garden, where Muriel described the roses that rustled in a menacing breeze and watched Peter as he smelled them for himself. She knew, at least she thought she knew, that something between them lay ahead. Hoping it to be, but fending off details in her mind, she buried possibilities and grasped at existing essentials.

  Chapter 10

  The house breathed more easily without Phyllis. This constituted a bonus, but rumbling reports sent out by Dulcie that the wanton had been ruthlessly dismissed cancelled out a portion of the pleasure provided for Muriel by her absence. Peter parked himself beside the telephone and dealt skilfully with enquiries both from the press and from certain acquaintances from Muriel’s past - recent and otherwise. Callers wishing to write profiles; to conduct interviews, callers who wished to reintroduce themselves to one with a position in the stately sphere. Roger, even, rang to explain himself. It had all been a mistake, he told Peter. He had scribbled a piece in fun and found it snatched from his desk before he had time to shred it. ‘And,’ he said, ‘will you tell Muriel that I’m sending her housekeeper back.’

  Delilah called, fluttering. ‘The local papers. They refer to a rift between Muriel and the rectory. Might Dawson pop round to set matters right? Pastoral care.’

  The gorgeous matron rang to explain how tactful she had been in shielding Jerome. Not that Jerome would have fathomed a single word.

  Dulcie weighed in. Solecism behind her she waved a newspaper high above her head. ‘So. You’ve put your foot in it. I went down on my bike for a copy of Fur and Feathers and this is what they showed me at the newsagents.’

  It was a day of remorseless complaint and interruption and but, for the presence of Peter, one that would have sent her scuttling back to the anonymity of Chelsea. The underlying anxiety was whether, by now, the news of Muriel’s inheritance along with the complications arising from it had reached Hugh’s ears.

  Kitty produced lunch. Mavis stared and Dulcie, with a certainty of possessing the upper hand, leered and ogled.

  Arthur made a teatime appointment. ‘I might be of help in this unfortunate business.’ Marco rang, wailing that he had played no part and pleading, ‘Surely all is not lost. Tell Ma to take a grip.’

  He also said that he proposed to take his mother up on her earlier suggestion that he and Flavia revisit at the weekend. This, when relayed by Peter, reminded Muriel that Lizzie’s visit loomed.

  The metal detector man presented a rusty button. Joyce and Eric removed flowerpots in enraptured rage. Peter told Muriel to lie down; to retire with Monopoly to her room and, if possible, to empty her head.

  This she tried to do and, during her withdrawal, Peter appeased to some extent both Dawson and Arthur. He also cancelled Lizzie’s visit - but not without disgr
untlement on the part of the agitated woman who caterwauled, ‘Don’t tell me she’s chucking. She jolly well might have done it herself, considering the whole world knows that Princess Matilda has been allowed in. It’s a bit mean. After all I was the one who tipped you off about the Evening Standard.’

  Peter said, ‘Another time. She’s in bed. Too much,’ and other desperate words before he persuaded her to drop it.

  In the evening Marco rang again to say that he and Flavia planned to arrive in time for lunch and that, what was more, they were to bring Phyllis with them. He hinted that Roger had thrown himself into the centre of the action and was now, free from plaster, gearing himself to trace a pretender; a living relation of Jerome’s with close claims. Anything to keep the story in the public eye.

  As Muriel sat with Peter in the garden after supper, she asked him what it meant to her; retaining this poetical place as her own. He replied that there was to be no going back; that he was to be beside her in the fighting of battles and that, given time and clarity of mind, they were to succeed.

  In bed she revolted against catastrophe, willing that no more follow and railing against the vacillating fibres of her composition. As owls hooted and as Monopoly cracked against the wicker of his basket, she craved chocolate, stared at beams lit by moonlight and wondered if the workmen, when fixing them, had worn smocks.

  Then, without in the least wishing to, she let her mind run back as she faced her own want of responsibility and the effect such want had produced on her son - culminating in his hopeless drinking habits. He was two days old and she fed him from her breast as instructed by a nurse at the hospital where Marco had been born and where she had passed those heady days in a small maternity ward. A very fat woman of low insight and loud language occupied the bed next to Muriel’s and talked mercilessly, at all hours, of pains and placentas and bursting waters. She was kind but a pill. At feeding times, as tiny piglets, the babies were pushed into the wards in square trolleys and placed beside mothers who, with varying degrees of success, placated them with nipples. Muriel found the feeding of Marco to be a painful battle, but one that she was determined to fight. He was back in his trolley, a beautiful, contented baby with black hair, when she decided to slip down the passage in her dressing gown in search of a book that she believed herself to have left in the shower room. It contained a short story that she had been reading during the early stage of labour, and had introduced her to a neurotic woman haunted by ugly wallpaper. She longed to know how it ended. When she returned without the book - it had gone missing - to her horror she found that her neighbour, Lorraine, had shifted beds and was sitting, smiling smugly, on Muriel’s own. Marco’s crib was empty and Lorraine cradled him and fed him with her left breast.

  ‘Crying his heart out. I’m giving him a little top-up.’

  That was all. Another woman, and only for a short time, had stuffed her nipple into his infant mouth. At the time, Muriel did not mention it - not to a nurse nor to Hugh but she had snatched her baby away from Lorraine and never spoke to her afterwards. Now she wondered whether that unhappy episode had influenced Marco in his indiscriminate swilling.

  Saturday came and with it a return to peace and order although underlying conundrums plagued her - the most urgent of which was how to deal with Phyllis.

  Kitty, it turned out, loathed the woman and was prepared to place herself right behind any treatment likely to be ordered.

  Muriel jittered as a large packet of post was hurled into the hall by a leaping lad who drove a red van. She did not bother to inspect any of the letters, held together in a tight broad rubber band, but gathered comfort from the knowledge that it was, as yet, too soon to have heard from Hugh by post.

  Peter again parked himself by the telephone and continued to field the interruptions that occupied him on Muriel’s behalf.

  Matron, in person, rang from the geriatric wing to say that Jerome was failing; that he was now a sorry shade of yellowy-brown from head to foot.

  ‘That’s all we need,’ Peter smiled at Muriel, ‘Fete and funeral on the same day.’

  ‘The fete! Next week! Tell Delilah that Jerome is about to croak. Tell her that it would be unseemly to hold it here - especially with me dressed up as a gypsy. Say anything.’

  Dulcie overheard the plan.

  ‘You’ve done quite enough damage here already without letting down the entire village. Quite sufficient.’

  Peter told her that she did wrong to interfere and, noisily, she shuffled away. Marco and Flavia arrived with a chastened Phyllis whose petticoat didn’t even buzz as she entered the house with her worldly goods in bags and boxes. Muriel though with pity of the welcome she must have suffered from Roger.

  Marco greeted his uncle with forced astonishment. He would have liked to have taken charge during these days of disturbance; was irritated by the threat of Peter’s superior common sense and planned to play tricks upon him. Flavia was pouty but prepared to be lively and to put forward thoughts in respect of crisis.

  ‘So much for Roger. Poor Chick. How can you have introduced us to such a creep?’

  Phyllis went to resume her duties, showing in her pettish face that the game was up.

  The menacing breeze of the evening before had blown away, leaving behind a sunlessness that was neither hot nor cold. To Muriel this was an oddity, for she had not occupied the place other than in a heatwave and had hardly had time to consider it as existing in any other condition.

  As, on Peter’s advice, she drove towards the hospital, she fumed on a rota of rage against each one of her assailants. The hospital, too, was a place in dull light but she was confident of recognising her uncle even if it was true that he had gone a shade of yellowish-brown from top to toe.

  Jerome sat, as described by matron, in his chair - head heavily forward and hands, indeed the colour of which she had been warned, clasping at the handrail. A flutter of fear and self-disgust attacked her as she watched the dying man and wished that she had known him in his heyday, even had they disliked each other and he had willed his worldly goods in some direction other than her own. Matron joined them.

  ‘It won’t be long now Mrs Cottle. But, then, it never is. Not once they come inside. Nobody for them to worry in here. That’s half of it. Nurses don’t react to temper.’ She held herself sternly and went on, ‘Of course he didn’t know anything about the papers or the goings-on at his place. We managed to keep it from him.’

  How could he, Muriel was angry, have ever begun to comprehend one word; this moribund imbecile, a sorry shade of yellowish-brown?

  Jerome did not jerk and when Muriel shook one discoloured hand, it reminded her of a game she used to play as a child. It was called ‘Dead Man’s Hand’ and it involved placing one palm against the matching one and then running the finger and thumb of the spare hand up and down the outside of the clasped pair. This used to create a frisson of deadness for both participants but, since childhood, Muriel had never thought to ask anyone to join her in this antic. Peter was a possibility. Suitable for blind eyes. Feeling and touch.

  She signalled to matron; asserting that she wished to be left alone with Mr Atkins. Matron did not much care for being banned and showed it with a hoity-toity turn of her heel, but complied nonetheless.

  In a weird and wonky way, Muriel began to address the static figure; kneeling before him but not looking at his face, for his head was so far slumped that not a feature showed to the world outside his dressing gown. It was as though his neck had been semi-severed, that the cord running through him had perished.

  ‘Don’t you die whatever else,’ she begged and squeezed his yellow-brown fingers with her own.

  ‘Why not get better? I want you to get better. Please, Uncle Jerome. I’m in terrible trouble.’ Her own words moved her and she started to cry; laying her head on a shawl that covered his knees and continuing to plead with him as her thoughts ran haywire. There came no reaction but a huge and horrible fart that cracked from him like a Chinese firework and
fouled the air. The stench was stupefying and she moved her head from his knees and loosened her hold on his skinny fingers. Shaking her head to rid it of poisonous air, she stood up and walked to the window from where she saw an ancient lady, head twisted to one side, being pushed across the yard by a strapping fellow. She returned to the earlier spot where she was caught between a deep stirring of compassion for the piteous being, and a heartfelt hatred for an expiring cretin. Every fibre in her fluctuating person hurt and frightened her as once again the old man farted while his body shook in the effort it cost him to release noxious gases from his shrivelled inside.

  She could bear it no more. She blew him a kiss and, with tears coursing down her face, ran the length of the corridor, pushed past matron who, in her greatly aroused interest in Muriel, desired a powwow, and crossed the tarmac to Monopoly who waited for her in her car. Time she bought a bigger and better one.

  At the house Peter and Marco talked in friendly enough fashion as Marco banked the fire, for not only was it dark in the hall but unexpectedly chilly. He made a great palaver with bellows and branches as he basked in self-congratulatory pleasure and made a show of proving to his uncle that he ruled the roost. Muriel entered quietly in time to hear him say, ‘So, Uncle Peter. You spoke to him. What did the solicitor geezer have to say for himself? He must know if the estate can be threatened.’

  Muriel was taken aback. She had not thought to ask this question of Peter, in spite of suspicions as to what Roger might be up to. According to Marco, who had done some sleuthing in London, Roger - not clever in his cups at keeping secrets - was in search of a collateral. He had botched it with the present occupant and sought to find another.

  Peter replied. ‘Oh. He seems to think it will be fine. It’s quite definite that Jerome had no children. Nobody appears to know if he had nephews or nieces and Mr Stiller was vague as to whether, in the absence of descendants, collaterals have any right to make claims upon a will. I asked him to make enquiries.’