by David Miller
“What’s that, Mrs Wheeler?”
“My name isn’t Wheeler. I don’t want my kitchen painted. I told you.”
“Are we in the wrong house? Only we was told –”
“Will you please wash that paint off?”
“If we come to the wrong house –”
“You haven’t come to the wrong house. Please tell that boy to wash off the paint he’s put on.”
“Did a bloke from the Comp come in to see you, Mrs Wheeler? Fat bloke?”
“Yes, yes, he did.”
“Only he give instructions –”
“Please would you tell that boy?”
“Whatever you say, Mrs Wheeler.”
“And wipe up the paint where it’s spilt on the floor. It’s been trampled out, all over my carpets.”
“No problem, Mrs Wheeler.”
Not wishing to return to the kitchen herself, she ran the hot tap in the bathroom on to the sponge-cloth she kept for cleaning the bath. She found that if she rubbed hard enough at the paint on the stair-carpet and on the landing carpet it began to disappear. But the rubbing tired her. As she put away the sponge-cloth, Mrs Malby had a feeling of not quite knowing what was what. Everything that had happened in the last few hours felt like a dream; it also had the feeling of plays she had seen on television; the one thing it wasn’t like was reality. As she paused in her bathroom, having placed the sponge-cloth on a ledge under the hand-basin, Mrs Malby saw herself standing there, as she often did in a dream: she saw her body hunched within the same blue dress she’d been wearing when the teacher called, and two touches of red in her pale face, and her white hair tidy on her head, and her fingers seeming fragile. In a dream anything could happen next: she might suddenly find herself forty years younger, Eric and Roy might be alive. She might be even younger; Dr Ramsey might be telling her she was pregnant. In a television play it would be different: the children who had come to her house might kill her. What she hoped for from reality was that order would be restored in her kitchen, that all the paint would be washed away from her walls as she had wiped it from her carpets, that the misunderstanding would be over. For an instant she saw herself in her kitchen, making tea for the children, saying it didn’t matter. She even heard herself adding that in a life as long as hers you became used to everything.
She left the bathroom; the blare of the transistor still persisted. She didn’t want to sit in her sitting-room, having to listen to it. She climbed the stairs to her bedroom, imagining the coolness there, and the quietness.
“Hey,” the girl protested when Mrs Malby opened her bedroom door.
“Sod off, you guys,” the boy with the red hair ordered.
They were in her bed. Their clothes were all over the floor. Her two budgerigars were flying about the room. Protruding from sheets and blankets she could see the boy’s naked shoulders and the back of his head. The girl poked her face up from under him. She gazed at Mrs Malby. “It’s not them,” she whispered to the boy. “It’s the woman.”
“Hi there, missus.” The boy twisted his head round. From the kitchen, still loudly, came the noise of the transistor.
“Sorry,” the girl said.
“Why are they up here? Why have you let my birds out? You’ve no right to behave like this.”
“We needed sex,” the girl explained.
The budgerigars were perched on the looking-glass on the dressing-table, beadily surveying the scene.
“They’re really great, them budgies,” the boy said.
Mrs Malby stepped through their garments. The budgerigars remained where they were. They fluttered when she seized them but they didn’t offer any resistance. She returned with them to the door.
“You had no right,” she began to say to the two in her bed, but her voice had become weak. It quivered into a useless whisper, and once more she thought that what was happening couldn’t be happening. She saw herself again, standing unhappily with the budgerigars.
In her sitting-room she wept. She returned the budgerigars to their cage and sat in an armchair by the window that looked out over Agnes Street. She sat in sunshine, feeling its warmth but not, as she might have done, delighting in it. She wept because she had intensely disliked finding the boy and girl in her bed. Images from the bedroom remained vivid in her mind. On the floor the boy’s boots were heavy and black, composed of leather that did not shine. The girl’s shoes were green, with huge heels and soles. The girl’s underclothes were purple, the boy’s dirty. There’d been an unpleasant smell of sweat in her bedroom.
Mrs Malby waited, her head beginning to ache. She dried away her tears, wiping at her eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief. In Agnes Street people passed by on bicycles, girls from the polish factory returning home to lunch, men from the brickworks. People came out of the greengrocer’s with leeks and cabbages in baskets, some carrying paper bags. Watching these people in Agnes Street made her feel better, even though her headache was becoming worse. She felt more composed, and more in control of herself.
“We’re sorry,” the girl said again, suddenly appearing, teetering on her clumsy shoes. “We didn’t think you’d come up to the bedroom.”
She tried to smile at the girl, but found it hard to do so. She nodded instead.
“The others put the birds in,” the girl said. “Meant to be a joke, that was.”
She nodded again. She couldn’t see how it could be a joke to take two budgerigars from their cage, but she didn’t say that.
“We’re getting on with the painting now,” the girl said. “Sorry about that.”
She went away and Mrs Malby continued to watch the people in Agnes Street. The girl had made a mistake when she’d said they were getting on with the painting: what she’d meant was that they were getting on with washing it off. The girl had come straight downstairs to say she was sorry; she hadn’t been told by the boys in the kitchen that the paint had been applied in error. When they’d gone, Mrs Malby said to herself, she’d open her bedroom window wide in order to get rid of the odour of sweat. She’d put clean sheets on her bed.
From the kitchen, above the noise of the transistor, came the clatter of raised voices. There was laughter and a crash, and then louder laughter. Singing began, attaching itself to the singing from the transistor.
She sat for twenty minutes and then she went and knocked on the kitchen door, not wishing to push the door open in case it knocked someone off a chair. There was no reply. She opened the door gingerly.
More yellow paint had been applied. The whole wall around the window was covered with it, and most of the wall behind the sink. Half of the ceiling had it on it; the woodwork that had been white was now a glossy dark blue. All four of the children were working with brushes. A tin of paint had been upset on the floor.
She wept again, standing there watching them, unable to prevent her tears. She felt them running warmly on her cheeks and then becoming cold. It was in this kitchen that she had cried first of all when the two telegrams had come in 1942, believing when the second one arrived that she would never cease to cry. It would have seemed ridiculous at the time, to cry just because her kitchen was all yellow.
They didn’t see her standing there. They went on singing, slapping the paint-brushes back and forth. There’d been neat straight lines where the shell-pink met the white of the woodwork, but now the lines were any old how. The boy with the red hair was applying the dark-blue gloss.
Again the feeling that it wasn’t happening possessed Mrs Malby. She’d had a dream a week ago, a particularly vivid dream in which the Prime Minister had stated on television that the Germans had been invited to invade England since England couldn’t manage to look after herself any more. That dream had been most troublesome because when she’d woken up in the morning she’d thought it was something she’d seen on television, that she’d actually been sitting in her sitting-room the night before listening to the Prime Minister saying that he and the Leader of the Opposition had decided the best for Britain was inv
asion. After thinking about it, she’d established that of course it hadn’t been true; but even so she’d glanced at the headlines of newspapers when she went out shopping.
“How d’you fancy it?” the boy called Billo called out to her, smiling across the kitchen at her, not noticing that she was upset. “Neat, Mrs Wheeler?”
She didn’t answer. She went downstairs and walked out of her hall-door, into Agnes Street and into the greengrocer’s that had been her husband’s. It never closed in the middle of the day; it never had. She waited and Mr King appeared, wiping his mouth. “Well then, Mrs Malby?” he said.
He was a big man with a well-kept black moustache and Jewish eyes. He didn’t smile much because smiling wasn’t his way, but he was in no way morose, rather the opposite.
“So what can I do for you?” he said.
She told him. He shook his head and repeatedly frowned as he listened. His expressive eyes widened. He called his wife.
While the three of them hurried along the pavement to Mrs Malby’s open hall-door it seemed to her that the Kings doubted her. She could feel them thinking that she must have got it all wrong, that she’d somehow imagined all this stuff about yellow paint and pop music on a radio, and her birds flying around her bedroom while two children were lying in her bed. She didn’t blame them; she knew exactly how they felt. But when they entered her house the noise from the transistor could at once be heard.
The carpet of the landing was smeared again with the paint. Yellow footprints led to her sitting-room and out again, back to the kitchen.
“You bloody young hooligans,” Mr King shouted at them. He snapped the switch on the transistor. He told them to stop applying the paint immediately. “What the hell d’you think you’re up to?” he demanded furiously.
“We come to paint out the old ma’s kitchen,” the boy called Billo explained, unruffled by Mr King’s tone. “We was carrying out instructions, mister.”
“So it was instructions to spill the blooming paint all over the floor? So it was instructions to cover the windows with it and every knife and fork in the place? So it was instructions to frighten the life out of a poor woman by messing about in her bedroom?”
“No one frightens her, mister.”
“You know what I mean, son.”
Mrs Malby returned with Mrs King and sat in the cubbyhole behind the shop, leaving Mr King to do his best. At three o’clock he arrived back, saying that the children had gone. He telephoned the school and after a delay was put in touch with the teacher who’d been to see Mrs Malby. He made this telephone call in the shop but Mrs Malby could hear him saying that what had happened was a disgrace. “A woman of eighty-seven,” Mr King protested, “thrown into a state of misery. There’ll be something to pay on this, you know.”
There was some further discussion on the telephone, and then Mr King replaced the receiver. He put his head into the cubbyhole and announced that the teacher was coming round immediately to inspect the damage. “What can I entice you to?” Mrs Malby heard him asking a customer, and a woman’s voice replied that she needed tomatoes, a cauliflower, potatoes and Bramleys. She heard Mr King telling the woman what had happened, saying that it had wasted two hours of his time.
She drank the sweet milky tea which Mrs King had poured her. She tried not to think of the yellow paint and the dark-blue gloss. She tried not to remember the scene in the bedroom and the smell there’d been, and the new marks that had appeared on her carpets after she’d wiped off the original ones. She wanted to ask Mr King if these marks had been washed out before the paint had had a chance to dry, but she didn’t like to ask this because Mr King had been so kind and it might seem like pressing him.
“Kids nowadays,” Mrs King said. “I just don’t know.”
“Birched they should be,” Mr King said, coming into the cubbyhole and picking up a mug of the milky tea. “I’d birch the bottoms off them.”
Someone arrived in the shop. Mr King hastened from the cubbyhole. “What can I entice you to, sir?” Mrs Malby heard him politely enquiring and the voice of the teacher who’d been to see her replied. He said who he was and Mr King wasn’t polite any more. An experience like that, Mr King declared thunderously, could have killed an eighty-seven-year-old stone dead.
Mrs Malby stood up and Mrs King came promptly forward to place a hand under her elbow. They went into the shop like that. “Three and a half p,” Mr King was saying to a woman who’d asked the price of oranges. “The larger ones at four.”
Mr King gave the woman four of the smaller size and accepted her money. He called out to a youth who was passing by on a bicycle, about to start an afternoon paper round. He was a youth who occasionally assisted him on Saturday mornings: Mr King asked him now if he would mind the shop for ten minutes since an emergency had arisen. Just for once, Mr King argued, it wouldn’t matter if the evening papers were a little late.
“Well, you can’t say they haven’t brightened the place up, Mrs Malby,” the teacher said in her kitchen. He regarded her from beneath his grey fringe. He touched one of the walls with the tip of a finger. He nodded to himself, appearing to be satisfied.
The painting had been completed, the yellow and the dark-blue gloss. Where the colours met there were untidily jagged lines. All the paint that had been spilt on the floor had been wiped away, but the black-and-white vinyl had become dull and grubby in the process. The paint had also been wiped from the windows and from other surfaces, leaving them smeared. The dresser had been wiped down and was smeary also. The cutlery and the taps and the cups and saucers had all been washed or wiped.
“Well, you wouldn’t believe it!” Mrs King exclaimed. She turned to her husband. However had he managed it all? she asked him. “You should have seen the place!” she said to the teacher.
“It’s just the carpets,” Mr King said. He led the way from the kitchen to the sitting-room, pointing at the yellow on the landing carpet and on the sitting-room one. “The blooming stuff dried,” he explained, “before we could get to it. That’s where compensation comes in.” He spoke sternly, addressing the teacher. “I’d say she has a bob or two owing.”
Mrs King nudged Mrs Malby, drawing attention to the fact that Mr King was doing his best for her. The nudge suggested that all would be well because a sum of money would be paid, possibly even a larger sum than was merited. It suggested also that Mrs Malby in the end might find herself doing rather well.
“Compensation?” the teacher said, bending down and scratching at the paint on the sitting-room carpet. “I’m afraid compensation’s out of the question.”
“She’s had her carpets ruined,” Mr King snapped quickly. “This woman’s been put about, you know.”
“She got her kitchen done free,” the teacher snapped back at him.
“They released her pets. They got up to tricks in a bed. You’d no damn right –”
“These kids come from broken homes, sir. I’ll do my best with your carpets, Mrs Malby.”
“But what about my kitchen?” she whispered. She cleared her throat because her whispering could hardly be heard. “My kitchen?” she whispered again.
“What about it, Mrs Malby?”
“I didn’t want it painted.”
“Oh, don’t be silly now.”
The teacher took his jacket off and threw it impatiently on to a chair. He left the sitting-room. Mrs Malby heard him running a tap in the kitchen.
“It was best to finish the painting, Mrs Malby,” Mr King said. “Otherwise the kitchen would have driven you mad, half done like that. I stood over them till they finished it.”
“You can’t take paint off, dear,” Mrs King said, “once it’s on. You’ve done wonders, Leo,” she said to her husband. “Young devils.”
“We’d best be getting back,” Mr King said.
“It’s quite nice, you know,” his wife added. “Your kitchen’s quite cheerful, dear.”
The Kings went away and the teacher rubbed at the yellow on the carpets with her
washing-up brush. The landing carpet was marked anyway, he pointed out, poking a finger at the stains left behind by the paint she’d removed herself with the sponge-cloth from the bathroom. She must be delighted with the kitchen, he said.
She knew she mustn’t speak. She’d known she mustn’t when the Kings had been there; she knew she mustn’t now. She might have reminded the Kings that she’d chosen the original colours in the kitchen herself. She might have complained to the man as he rubbed at her carpets that the carpets would never be the same again. She watched him, not saying anything, not wishing to be regarded as a nuisance. The Kings would have considered her a nuisance too, agreeing to let children into her kitchen to paint it and then making a fuss. If she became a nuisance the teacher and the Kings would drift on to the same side, and the Reverend Bush would somehow be on that side also, and Miss Tingle, and even Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert. They would agree among themselves that what had happened had to do with her elderliness, with her not understanding that children who brought paint into a kitchen were naturally going to use it.
“I defy anyone to notice that,” the teacher said, standing up, gesturing at the yellow blurs that remained on her carpets. He put his jacket on. He left the washing-up brush and the bowl of water he’d been using on the floor of her sitting-room. “All’s well that ends well,” he said. “Thanks for your co-operation, Mrs Malby.”
She thought of her two sons, Eric and Roy, not knowing quite why she thought of them now. She descended the stairs with the teacher, who was cheerfully talking about community relations. You had to make allowances, he said, for kids like that; you had to try and understand; you couldn’t just walk away.
Quite suddenly she wanted to tell him about Eric and Roy. In the desire to talk about them she imagined their bodies, as she used to in the past, soon after they’d been killed. They lay on desert sand, desert birds swooped down on them. Their four eyes were gone. She wanted to explain to the teacher that they’d been happy, a contented family in Agnes Street, until the war came and smashed everything to pieces. Nothing had been the same afterwards. It hadn’t been easy to continue with nothing to continue for. Each room in the house had contained different memories of the two boys growing up. Cooking and cleaning had seemed pointless. The shop which would have been theirs would have to pass to someone else.