Collected Stories

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Rose put on her overall. She’d bought it in a jumble sale. It was made of pink satin and the word Mother was embroidered across the left breast pocket. It wasn’t quite the ticket, more like a long bed jacket than anything else, but Rose liked it. With her red hair, her thin legs bare of stockings, she stalked flamingo fashion about the sitting room. Mrs Mallison removed her jumper and skirt in the warmth, and then climbed the stairs to the bathroom. Rose had already arranged the dryer and a comfortable armchair. It wasn’t entirely a convenient arrangement – the electric cable stretched like a trip wire from the bathroom to the socket on the landing – the door had to be left open. Still, there was a small table with a bowl of plastic flowers, and a heap of magazines that Rose had borrowed, some years before, from a dentist’s surgery.

  Mrs Mallison was set and under the dryer when the man from Wavertree knocked at the door. He had a boy with him who had dark eyes and an adolescent stoop. ‘My boy, Ronald,’ the man said. ‘We’re interested in the motorbike. My name’s Wilson.’ It seemed to Rose that he was a very cautious individual – he moved extremely slowly along the hall ahead of her. Maybe he was scared of bumping into something. He had a curious way of holding one hand behind his back, fingers fluttering like a shirt tail, as though he was signalling to someone. The hall wasn’t really dark – cosy was how Rose would have described it. Indeed the red bulb, hanging above the door, lent a certain mysterious charm to the narrow passageway.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Rose. ‘Make yourself comfortable. Take something off if you like.’ She stood smiling at the boy, gesturing toward the chairs grouped around the table. Even the back kitchen was warm and intimate, owing to her flair for interior decoration. The scarlet lamp-shade, fringed with silken tassels, spun in the draught; shadows raced across the walls.

  ‘Don’t move,’ ordered the man from Wavertree. The boy, about to sit down, froze. ‘Keep on your feet,’ said his father. ‘I don’t like the look of this at all.’

  The blessed nerve, thought Rose, who had been contemplating offering him some refreshment. She slammed the cupboard door and folded her arms. ‘It takes all sorts,’ she said. ‘I daresay someone like you prefers pastel tones … strip lighting and chintz, that sort of caper. My front room was once in the papers.’

  ‘The owner,’ said the man, ‘of the bike … where the devil is he?’

  ‘You come with me,’ snapped Rose. ‘This moment.’ She was incensed at his previous scathing reference to her decor. No one, not ever, not once, had ever said they didn’t like it. The man was completely lacking in style.

  She flung open the door of the sitting room. It had a large brass bed, an upright piano with panels painted with nymphs, and several brass tables set with various lamps, each with a poppy-coloured shade. The whole room glittered and leapt in the firelight.

  ‘Where is he?’ asked the Wavertree man, dazzled by golden reflections.

  ‘Who?’ she said.

  ‘The advertisement. I came about the motorbike.’

  ‘In the bagwash,’ she said, taking a fearful dislike to him. She pushed him out of the room and slammed the door shut. The boy smiled in wonder.

  ‘I’ve never seen a piano in a bedroom,’ he told her.

  ‘Or put it another way,’ said Rose kindly. ‘Have you ever seen a bed in a music room?’ She was always sorry for people with preconceived notions, particularly the young.

  At that moment Mrs Mallison switched off the hair dryer. She called out peevishly – ‘Rose … I’ve had enough … I’m properly done.’

  She came out of the bathroom and careless of the wire stretched across the landing, took a pace forward. She didn’t fall – she gave a kind of hop and a stumble, which brought her to the top of the stairs and sent her, accelerating at every step, down the last flight into the hall; unable to stop, she continued to run in her pink slip, as if the race wasn’t yet won, headlong towards the front door.

  The man from Wavertree thrust his son behind him and held out his arms protectively.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ he cried. ‘It can’t go on.’

  ‘Is he from the social security?’ asked Mrs Mallison, breathing heavily and sinking onto the hall chair.

  The boy came back into the hall, leaving his father hovering on the dark pavement. ‘My gloves,’ he said loudly. ‘I’ve left me gloves.’ He whispered into Rose’s ear. ‘Can I come back on my own?’

  ‘Get off with you,’ cried Rose, dimpling with delight, and she bundled him down the steps to his waiting Daddy and shut the door.

  When Purdy returned from the bagwash, Rose was sitting by the fire drinking tea. ‘Anyone ring?’ he asked, standing there with his check cap at an angle.

  ‘Nobody nice,’ said Rose. ‘Only a man from Wavertree with no sense of style.’

  EVENSONG

  Louise swore several times, mildly, as she pulled up weeds, raked out stones. There was no fear of being overheard, not on a weekday. The row of dismal little gardens was deserted, everyone out at work or watching films on video. ‘Come on up, damn you,’ she urged, tugging at a piece of concrete lodged in the wet soil. She supposed that builders found it more economical to dump their rubble in the earth rather than transport it to some tip.

  She carried the offending lump to the bins at the back door and then realised that the bin men would almost certainly refuse to dispose of it. She took it into the garage instead. She’d have to get Keith to take it for a walk somewhere; possibly he could drop it over the railings by the council offices, on top of all those bedsprings and rusty cookers flung among the daffodils.

  ‘Naughty, naughty,’ she reproved herself and, picking up the cricket bat, returned to the garden. She’d forgotten to put on her wellingtons and her shoes were saturated. Still, there were other things more important than physical health.

  ‘Blast you,’ she muttered, as she knelt by the border and unearthed a length of piping and a crumbling brick.

  It wasn’t as if she was a country person at heart, or even that she was particularly interested in growing things, simply that it was necessary to spend as much time as possible out of doors. She didn’t put it into words, any more than Graham did, but the house was hateful. It was too small, too ugly. She could feel its presence behind her, a box made of red brick with the second lid of the grey sky clamped above its chimneyless roof.

  When she woke in the mornings from bad dreams, opened her eyes to the coffin-like dimensions of the cream-painted bedroom dark with furniture, she felt she was still asleep, still caught in nightmares. The wardrobe inlaid with mother-of-pearl which had illuminated the landing of her parents’ home, flashing silver in the sun on summer afternoons, now blotted out the light. Year by year, the tables and the chairs, the bookcase and the sideboard which had furnished her childhood, grew more oppressive, more threatening.

  Graham had suggested that they put it all into store. ‘Though I don’t expect we shall be here very long,’ he had said, ten years ago. She had pretended that she couldn’t live without the Chippendale desk, the George III library stairs, her parents’ bed with its cluster of wooden grapes on the headboard.

  ‘I know they look out of place here,’ she had told him, ‘but unless you feel strongly about it I should like to keep them. I need them.’ And of course he hadn’t felt strongly about it. How could he? It would have been her money, that small and dwindling inheritance left to her by her father, which would have paid the storage costs.

  They couldn’t afford such costs, any more than they could have afforded to buy new furniture to put in place of the old. It was Graham who always referred to it as her money; she herself would gladly have given it to him, had tried to, but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I couldn’t touch a penny,’ he often said. ‘John meant it for you.’ It was only one of a number of small deceptions they practised, this pretence that the money was for her use alone.

  Remembering that the rambler rose needed staking against the wind, she went on hands and knees further down the garden to at
tend to it.

  Beyond the house the long corridor of the road was deserted too, save for a few cars parked at intervals along the kerb and the dust-cart abandoned under the lamp-post. A child’s swing creaked above a patch of scuffed lawn. It was half past three in the afternoon. And then an ordinary young man came round the corner from the direction of the High Street and began to walk down the road, nudging the privet hedges with his shoulder as he passed, for earlier it had rained and he took pleasure in the way the leaves sprang back, spattering the pavement with drops.

  When he drew level with the church he stopped and looked across at the house, at the board nailed to a post beside the gate. On it was written in Gothic lettering ‘Vicarage’. Underneath, daubed in white paint, were the words ‘God is out. Call again’.

  He walked up the side path to the church and entered by the vestry, leaving the door on the latch behind him. The oval door into the church was ajar; someone was playing the harmonium. On tiptoe he moved cautiously round the cheap wooden table with its dusty water jug and its pile of parish magazines, and peered through. He had a clear view of the two of them, the man seated at the harmonium, the girl standing beside him, her hand resting on his neck. The music stopped.

  He dodged back instantly, flattening himself against the damp raincoat hanging on the wall behind him. He heard the girl say in a complaining voice, ‘But we’re not doing any harm,’ and then the Sunday school hymn began again. He ran out of the vestry and down the path and, looking neither to right nor left, crossed the road to the vicarage.

  When he pushed open the door the chimes rang out. Even before they had finished striking he was down the hall and into the living room. He noticed nothing but the handbag on the table. He was taking a £5 note out of the leather purse when he heard a dull clopping sound. Beyond the French windows, in the square of garden, he saw a woman wielding a cricket bat in both hands, stomping a stake into the earth beside a rose bush.

  The young man put the note into his pocket, the one in which he kept his knife. He watched as the woman flung down the bat and began to take off her gardening gloves. He took out the knife and flicked it open as the woman turned, one hand rubbing the small of her back, and approached the house.

  She came in through the French windows. She looked first at the table and then at the young man. ‘How much have you taken?’ she asked.

  ‘I never touched your bloody bag,’ he protested.

  ‘It’s no good lying, Keith,’ she said. ‘I know exactly how much I had.’ She left the room and he heard her moving about in the kitchen, running water into the kettle. He stuffed the £5 note into the handbag, not bothering to replace it in the purse and, sitting down at the table, began to jab with his knife at the papers covering it.

  Louise returned carrying a tray with two cups and set it down in front of him. She said, ‘Do stop that. They’re Graham’s notes for his sermon.’ Her tone was matter of fact, without emphasis.

  ‘You’ve left his cricket bat out,’ he told her.

  ‘Damn,’ she said.

  ‘He’ll do his nut,’ he warned her.

  ‘He won’t be back for another hour. He’s gone to visit old Mr Syme at the Cottage Hospital.’ She bent down to switch on the electric fire.

  ‘That’s good of him,’ said Keith evenly.

  ‘I’ll put it away after I’ve had a cuppa,’ she said, and went out into the kitchen to make the tea.

  He called through to her, asking where her cousin was, but Louise didn’t reply. He knew she had heard him. He stared at the photograph in its ornate frame on the wall behind the door, frowning. ‘Where’s your cousin?’ he repeated, when Louise came back with the teapot.

  Louise said that Pamela was at the hairdresser’s. She didn’t look at him. She took her cup to the armchair by the fire and sat down, positioning herself sideways so that she was facing the photograph. As always when gazing at the image of her father her expression softened. He was standing in a garden holding a cricket bat over his shoulder, smiling at the camera. The photograph had been taken before she was born, when he was a young curate in Surrey.

  ‘How long is Pamela going to go on staying here?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Until she’s ready to leave, I suppose,’ said Louise, and she made a little gesture with her hand, signalling that he should keep quiet.

  Sullenly he drank his tea. He knew he should offer to go out into the garden and finish whatever job it was that Louise had begun. It was what he was here for – to help out, to make himself useful. He had promised yesterday that he would clean the windows, but he hadn’t got round to it. He didn’t expect he’d get round to it today either.

  He said loudly, ‘I never knew my Dad. He scarpered before I was born.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Louise. ‘Graham met him when he went to see your probation officer.’

  ‘Well, we’ve never got on. He’s a bad-tempered bastard. It wasn’t like you and him. I never got no attention.’

  ‘I’m not deaf,’ she said, and she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Defeated, he flounced out into the garden, slamming the doors behind him.

  Louise felt guilty, but only for a moment. God knows, these days she seemed to spend more time with Keith than anyone else. She thought how dangerous it was, this craving for attention which everyone had, herself included, as though it was some drug which once given could never be withdrawn. She supposed it all began in infancy. ‘I never got none,’ she said out loud, mimicking Keith and speaking to the photograph.

  Of course it had been a disappointment for him, having a daughter when he had wanted a son. Not that he’d really shown it, just that she had always known deep down that she was second-best. When she had met Graham, her father had been almost pathetically pleased at her choice. She suspected that he was also baffled that someone like Graham should find her interesting. She had overheard him telling her mother that he was a catch, though Graham had only recently come down from Cambridge and had neither money nor prospects.

  Her father had done his best to ensure that Graham was subjected to the full range and intensity of his friendship, lending him books, employing him as a temporary secretary when he went to the ecumenical conference at St George’s Chapel in Windsor, introducing him as his prospective son-in-law to the Bishop of Chichester. He was doing it for her, of course, just as taking Graham to the Test Match at Lords on her birthday had been mostly for her benefit.

  He had married them and paid for the honeymoon and telephoned Graham every morning at the hotel in Broad-stairs. Once he had asked to speak to her, but there must have been some electrical fault because when she picked up the telephone the line had been disconnected. He had hung on for three years waiting for a grandson to be born, and when she hadn’t obliged he had died. The local papers had written briefly about his work in the parish, and at length about his days as a county cricketer. He had left a letter for Graham in his desk. Graham hadn’t told her what was in it, and she didn’t suppose she would ever know, for the letter had since been lost, if not destroyed, and besides, it had all happened twenty years ago and no longer mattered.

  She got up and put the cups on to the tray. She could hear Keith outside in the garden, whistling ‘There’s a friend for little children above the bright blue sky’. It was almost dark and the rain was falling again, streaking the windows.

  When Pamela came in her hair was flattened to her head. She said she’d had to walk back from the hairdresser’s, and she hadn’t taken an umbrella. ‘What a waste,’ said Louise.

  At a quarter past five Hilda arrived. She was already crying as she came through the door. Pamela, who was typing at the table, gave her an insincere smile. Ten minutes later Mr Mahmood called at the house. He was wearing his best suit, his only suit. He said he had an appointment with Graham. He was clearly appalled by Hilda, and nervously paced about the room, tugging at the points of his striped waistcoat with plump fingers encircled with thin gold rings.

  ‘My father also was a c
ricketer,’ he said, standing on tiptoe to examine the photograph. ‘He learnt the batting in the British Army. Is the vicar playing the game also?’

  ‘No,’ said Louise. ‘He used to, but not any more.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ observed Mr Mahmood. ‘He is a very busy man. He is helping everyone.’

  ‘In what way is he helping you, Mr Mahmood?’ Louise asked. She was twisting the strap of her watch round and round on her wrist.

  ‘He is getting me rehoused.’

  ‘Really,’ Louise said, and added, ‘How nice.’ She took a Kleenex tissue from the box on the table and handed it to Hilda.

  ‘I am living on the Bayham council estate and it is not a nice place,’ Mahmood confided. ‘My neighbours are posting me shit through the letterbox. Mr Sinclair is talking to the council and getting me a little house of my own … possibly with a garden.’

  ‘I see,’ said Louise. She was aware that Pamela was watching her.

  Mahmood began a detailed description of the sort of house he had in mind. Four bedrooms would be enough, though probably later he could do some extending, as he was handy with the nails and the hammers. If it had a porch he would hang a name plate from it on chains. His uncle was a sign-maker in Bermondsey and would make him one cheap. There must also be a shed for his bicycle. At the moment his bicycle was living in the bedroom and it was catching at his trousers whenever he moved.

  ‘I am a very lucky man,’ he enthused, ‘meeting so good a vicar. He is a very kind man.’

  ‘He is certainly a well-intentioned one,’ said Louise, and managed a smile.

  Shortly afterwards Graham came home. He apologised to Mr Mahmood for keeping him waiting and said he had been unavoidably detained. Depressed as he was, he was still charming.

  Mahmood was overcome. He protested that it was not a question of Mr Sinclair being late, rather that he himself had presented too early. Wearily Graham told him to come through into the front room. He had given up calling it the study. For a time he had referred to it as the Surgery – Louise had advised against it – until that woman with the dyed red hair had insisted that he examine her for gallstones.