Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  Sunday was a day that, normally, she enjoyed. This one got off to a bad start with the discovery of the Sunday Mirror sticking through the front door instead of the Sunday Times; after breakfast she rang the shop, knowing that they would be open till eleven, only to be told by a bewildered voice that surely that was what she had asked for, change it, you said on the phone, Thursday it was, for the Sunday Mirror, spicier, you said, good for a laugh. ‘There's been some mistake,’ said Muriel curtly. ‘I don't know what you can be thinking of.’ She slammed down the receiver and set about a massive cleaning of the house; it seemed the proper therapeutic thing to do.

  After lunch she sat down at her desk to do some work; her article for English Today was coming along nicely. Soon it would be time to show a first draft to Paul. She took the lid off the typewriter and prepared to reread the page she had left in on Friday.

  Two minutes later, her heart thumping, she was ripping out the paper, crumpling it into a ball … I never wrote such stuff, she thought, it's impossible, words like that, expressions like – I don't even know such expressions.

  She sat in horror, staring into the basilisk eye of a thrush on her garden wall. There is something wrong, she thought, I am not myself, am I going mad?

  She took a sleeping pill, but even so woke in the depths of the night (again, those muffled peals of laughter), too hot, the room heavy around her so that she had to get up and open the window further; the house creaked. There must be a fault in the heating system, she thought, I'll have to get the man round. She lay in discomfort, her head aching.

  In the days that followed it seemed to her that she suffered from continuous headaches. Headaches, and a kind of lightheadedness that made her feel sometimes that she had only a tenuous grip on reality; in the house, after work, she heard noises, saw things. There was that laughter again, which must be from next door but when she enquired delicately of the milkman as to who her neighbours were (one didn't want actually to get involved with them) she learned that an elderly man lived there, alone, a retired doctor. And there were things that seemed hallucinatory, there was no other explanation; going to the cupboard where she had put the dummy, to have another go at that skirt, she had found the thing swathed not in her nice herring-bone tweed but a revolting purple chenille. She slammed the cupboard closed (again, the lurking shape of the dummy had startled her, although she had expected to see it), and sat down on the bed, her chest pounding. I am not well, she thought, I am doing things and then forgetting that I have done them, there is something seriously wrong.

  And then there was the wallpaper. She had come into the sitting-room, one bright sunny morning – her spruce, white sitting-room – and, glancing at her Dufy prints, had seen suddenly the shadowy presence of the old, hideous wallpaper behind them, those entwined violets and roses that she and the decorator had so laboriously scraped away. Two walls, she now saw, were scarred all over, behind the new emulsion paint, with the shadowy presence of the old paper; how can we have missed them, she thought angrily – that decorator, I should have kept a sharper eye on him – but surely, I remember, we did this room together, every bit was stripped, surely?

  Her head spun.

  She went to the doctor, unwillingly, disliking her list of neurotic symptoms, envying the bronchitic coughs and bandaged legs in the waiting-room. Stiffly, she submitted to the questions, wanting to say: I am not this kind of person at all, I am balanced, well-adjusted, known for my good sense. With distaste, she listened to the diagnosis: yes, she wanted to say, impatiently, I have heard of menopausal problems but I am not the kind of woman to whom they happen, I keep things under better control than that, overwork is much more likely. She took his prescription and went away, feeling humiliated.

  It was the examination season. She was faced, every evening, on returning home, with a stack of scripts and would sit up late marking, grateful for the distraction, though she was even more tired and prone to headaches. The tiredness was leading to confusion, also, she realised. On one occasion, giving a class, she had been aware of covert glances and giggles among her students, apparently prompted by her own appearance; later, in the staff cloakroom, she had looked in a mirror and been appalled to discover herself wearing a frightful low-cut pink blouse with some kind of flower-pattern. It was vaguely familiar – I've seen it before, she thought, and realised it must be a relic of the rubbish in the house, left in the back of her cupboard and put on accidentally this morning, in her bleary awakening from a disturbed night. Condemned to wear it for the rest of the day, she felt taken over by its garishness, as though compelled to behave in character; she found herself joining a group of people at lunch-time with whom she would not normally have associated, the brash set among her colleagues, sharing jokes and a conversation that she found distasteful. In Paul's office, later, going over some application forms, she laid her hand on his sleeve, and felt him withdraw his arm; later, the memory of this made her shrivel. It was as though she had betrayed the delicacy of their relationship; never before had they made physical contact.

  She decided to take a couple of days off from the College, and mark scripts at home.

  The first day passed tranquilly enough; she worked throughout the morning and early afternoon. At around five she felt suddenly moved, against her better judgement, to telephone Paul with what she knew to be a trumped-up query about an exam problem. Talking to him, she was aware of her own voice, with a curious detachment; its tone surprised her, and the shrillness of her laugh. Do I always sound like that? she thought, have I always laughed in that way? It seemed to her that Paul was abrupt, that he deliberately ended the conversation.

  She got up the next morning in a curious frame of mind. The scripts she had to mark filled her with irritation; not the irritation stemming from inadequacy in the candidates, but a petulant resentment of the whole thing. Sometimes, she did not seem able to follow the answers to questions. ‘Don't get you,’ she scribbled in the margin. ‘What are you on about?’ At the bottom of one script she scrawled a series of doodles: indeterminate flowers, a face wearing upswept spectacles, a buxom female figure. At last, with the pile of scripts barely eroded, she abandoned her desk and wandered restlessly around the house.

  Somehow, it displeased her. It was too stark, too bare, an unlived-in place. I like a bit of life, she thought, a bit of colour, something to pep things up; rummaging in the scullery she found under the sink some gaily patterned curtaining that must have got overlooked when she cleared out those particular shelves. That's nice, she thought, nice and striking, I like that; as she hung it in place of the linen weave in the hall that now seemed so dowdy, it seemed to her that from somewhere in the house came a peal of laughter.

  That day merged, somehow, into the next. She did not go to the College. Several times the telephone rang: mostly she ignored it. Once, answering, she heard the departmental secretary's voice, blathering on: ‘Dr Rackham?’ she kept saying, ‘Dr Rackham? Professor Simons has been a bit worried, we wondered if …’ Muriel laughed and hung up. The night, the intermediate night (or nights, it might have been, time was a bit confusing, not that it mattered at all) had been most extraordinary. She had had company of some kind; throughout the night, whenever she woke, she had been aware of a low murmuring. A voice. A voice of compulsive intimacy, coarse and insistent; it had repelled but at the same time fascinated her. She had lain there, silent and unresisting.

  The house displeased her more and more. It's got no style, she thought, full of dreary old stuff. She took down the Dufy prints, and the Piper cathedral etchings, thinking: I don't like that kind of thing, I like a proper picture, where you can see what's what, don't know where I ever picked up these. She made a brief sortie to Boots round the corner and bought a couple of really nice things, not expensive either – a Chinese girl and a lovely painting of horses galloping by the sea. As she hung them in the sitting-room, it seemed to her that someone clutched her arm, and for an instant she shuddered uncontrollably, but the sensation passed, tho
ugh it left her feeling light-headed, a little hysterical.

  Her own appearance dissatisfied her, too. She sat looking at herself in her bedroom mirror and thought: ‘I've never made the best of myself, a woman's got to make use of what she's got, hasn't she? Where's that nice blouse I found the other day, it's flattering – a bit of décolleté, I'm not past that kind of thing yet. She put it on, and felt pleased. Downstairs, the telephone was ringing again, but she could not be bothered to answer it. Don't want to see anyone, she thought, fed up with people, if it's Paul he can come and find me, can't he? Play hard to get, that's what you should do with men, string them along a bit.

  Anyway, she was not alone. She could feel, again, that presence in the room, though when she swung round suddenly – with a resurgence of that chill sensation – there was nothing but the dressmaker's dummy, standing in the corner. She must have brought it from the cupboard, and forgotten.

  She wandered about the house, muttering to herself; from time to time, a person walked with her, not someone you could see, just a presence, its arm slipped through Muriel's, whispering intimacies, suggestions. All those old books of yours, it said, you don't want those, ring the newsagent, have them send round some mags, a good read, that's what we want. Muriel nodded.

  Once, people hammered on the door. She could hear their voices; colleagues from the department. ‘Muriel?’ they called. ‘Are you there, Muriel?’ She went into the kitchen and shut herself in till they had gone. For a moment, sitting there, she felt clearer in her head, free of the confusion that had been dragging her down; something is happening, she thought wildly, something I cannot cope with, can't control …

  And then there came again that presence, with its insistent voice, and this time the voice was quite real, and she knew, too, that she had heard it before, somewhere, quite recently, not long ago. Where, where?

  … I thought what you said was quite interesting, and I'd like to tell you about this thing that happened to a friend of mine …

  Muriel held the banisters, to steady herself (she was on her way upstairs again, in her perpetual edgy drifting up and down the house): the Lit. and Phil., I remember now, that woman.

  And it came to her too, with a horrid jolt, that she knew now, remembered suddenly, why, at the time, that evening, the face had been familiar, why she'd felt she'd seen it before.

  It had been the face in a yellowed photograph that had tumbled from a tatty book when she had been clearing out the house; Violet Hanson, 1934, in faded ink on the back.

  Sale by auction, by order of the Executors of Mrs Violet Hanson, deceased, No. 27 Clarendon Terrace, a four-bedroomed house with scope for …

  Someone was laughing, peals of shrill laughter that rang through the house, and as she reached the top floor, and turned into her bedroom, she knew that it was herself. She went into her bedroom and sat down at her dressing-table and looked in the mirror. The face that looked back at her was haggard. I've got to do something about myself, she thought, I'm turning into an old frump. She groped on the table and found a pair of ear-rings, long, shiny ones that she had forgotten she had. She held them up against her face; yes, that's nice, stylish, and I'll dye my hair, have it cut short and dye it black, take years off me, that would …

  There was laughter again, but she no longer knew if it was hers or someone else's.

  Next Term, We'll Mash You

  INSIDE THE car it was quiet, the noise of the engine even and subdued, the air just the right temperature, the windows tight-fitting. The boy sat on the back seat, a box of chocolates, unopened, beside him, and a comic, folded. The trim Sussex landscape flowed past the windows: cows, white-fenced fields, highly-priced period houses. The sunlight was glassy, remote as a coloured photograph. The backs of the two heads in front of him swayed with the motion of the car.

  His mother half-turned to speak to him. ‘Nearly there now, darling.’

  The father glanced downwards at his wife's wrist. ‘Are we all right for time?’

  ‘Just right. Nearly twelve.’

  ‘I could do with a drink. Hope they lay something on.’

  ‘I'm sure they will. The Wilcoxes say they're awfully nice people. Not really the schoolmaster-type at all, Sally says.’

  The man said, ‘He's an Oxford chap.’

  ‘Is he? You didn't say.’

  ‘Mmn.’

  ‘Of course, the fees are that much higher than the Seaford place.’

  ‘Fifty quid or so. We'll have to see.’

  The car turned right, between white gates and high, dark, tight-clipped hedges. The whisper of the road under the tyres changed to the crunch of gravel. The child, staring sideways, read black lettering on a white board: ‘St Edward's Preparatory School. Please Drive Slowly’. He shifted on the seat, and the leather sucked at the bare skin under his knees, stinging.

  The mother said, ‘It's a lovely place. Those must be the playing-fields. Look, darling, there are some of the boys.’ She clicked open her handbag, and the sun caught her mirror and flashed in the child's eyes; the comb went through her hair and he saw the grooves it left, neat as distant ploughing.

  ‘Come on, then, Charles, out you get.’

  The building was red brick, early nineteenth century, spreading out long arms in which windows glittered blackly. Flowers, trapped in neat beds, were alternate red and white. They went up the steps, the man, the woman, and the child two paces behind.

  The woman, the mother, smoothing down a skirt that would be ridged from sitting, thought: I like the way they've got the maid all done up properly. The little white apron and all that. She's foreign, I suppose. Au pair. Very nice. If he comes here there'll be Speech Days and that kind of thing. Sally Wilcox says it's quite dressy – she got that cream linen coat for coming down here. You can see why it costs a bomb. Great big grounds and only an hour and a half from London.

  They went into a room looking out into a terrace. Beyond, dappled lawns, gently shifting trees, black and white cows grazing behind iron railings. Books, leather chairs, a table with magazines – Country Life, The Field, The Economist. ‘Please, if you would wait here. The Headmaster won't be long.’

  Alone, they sat, inspected. ‘I like the atmosphere, don't you, John?’

  ‘Very pleasant, yes.’ Four hundred a term, near enough. You can tell it's a cut above the Seaford place, though, or the one at St Albans. Bob Wilcox says quite a few City people send their boys here. One or two of the merchant bankers, those kind of people. It's the sort of contact that would do no harm at all. You meet someone, get talking at a cricket match or what have you … Not at all a bad thing.

  ‘All right, Charles? You didn't get sick in the car, did you?’

  The child had black hair, slicked down smooth to his head. His ears, too large, jutted out, transparent in the light from the window, laced with tiny, delicate veins. His clothes had the shine and crease of newness. He looked at the books, the dark brown pictures, his parents, said nothing.

  ‘Come here, let me tidy your hair.’

  The door opened. The child hesitated, stood up, sat, then rose again with his father.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Manders? How very nice to meet you – I'm Margaret Spokes, and will you please forgive my husband who is tied up with some wretch who broke the cricket pavilion window and will be just a few more minutes. We try to be organised but a schoolmaster's day is always just that bit unpredictable. Do please sit down and what will you have to revive you after that beastly drive? You live in Finchley, is that right?’

  ‘Hampstead, really,’ said the mother. ‘Sherry would be lovely.’ She worked over the headmaster's wife from shoes to hairstyle, pricing and assessing. Shoes old but expensive – Russell and Bromley. Good skirt. Blouse could be Marks and Sparks – not sure. Real pearls. Super Victorian ring. She's not gone to any particular trouble – that's just what she'd wear anyway. You can be confident, with a voice like that, of course. Sally Wilcox says she knows all sorts of people.

  The headmaster's wife s
aid, ‘I don't know how much you know about us. Prospectuses don't tell you a thing, do they? We'll look round everything in a minute, when you've had a chat with my husband. I gather you're friends of the Wilcoxes, by the way. I'm awfully fond of Simon – he's down for Winchester, of course, but I expect you know that.’

  The mother smiled over her sherry. Oh, I know that all right. Sally Wilcox doesn't let you forget that.

  ‘And this is Charles? My dear, we've been forgetting all about you! In a minute I'm going to borrow Charles and take him off to meet some of the boys because after all you're choosing a school for him, aren't you, and not for you, so he ought to know what he might be letting himself in for and it shows we've got nothing to hide.’

  The parents laughed. The father, sherry warming his guts, thought that this was an amusing woman. Not attractive, of course, a bit homespun, but impressive all the same. Partly the voice, of course; it takes a bloody expensive education to produce a voice like that. And other things, of course. Background and all that stuff.

  ‘I think I can hear the thud of the Fourth Form coming in from games, which means my husband is on the way, and then I shall leave you with him while I take Charles off to the common-room.’

  For a moment the three adults centred on the child, looking, judging. The mother said, ‘He looks so hideously pale, compared to those boys we saw outside.’

  ‘My dear, that's London, isn't it? You just have to get them out, to get some colour into them. Ah, here's James. James – Mr and Mrs Manders. You remember, Bob Wilcox was mentioning at Sports Day …’

  The headmaster reflected his wife's style, like paired cards in Happy Families. His clothes were mature rather than old, his skin well-scrubbed, his shoes clean, his geniality untainted by the least condescension. He was genuinely sorry to have kept them waiting, but in this business one lurches from one minor crisis to the next … And this is Charles? Hello, there, Charles. His large hand rested for a moment on the child's head, quite extinguishing the thin, dark hair. It was as though he had but to clench his fingers to crush the skull. But he took his hand away and moved the parents to the window, to observe the mutilated cricket pavilion, with indulgent laughter.