It was December the 27th, he remembered that clearly. Between Christmas and New Year.
The policewoman had blonde hair, like a helmet of gold.
“Will you be all right?” she was saying. “Are you sure you will be all right?”
“I’ll be all right,” he kept saying. And then, “I don’t understand it. The surgeon said that there was no immediate danger. She was smiling.”
“These things can happen,” said the policewoman. “Anyway it may have been a blessing. Was she in much pain?”
“Sometimes. But not much at the hospital.”
He was overwhelmed by memories. There was their marriage: then their honeymoon in Brighton. Then the years together. Of course they never had any children and that was a tragedy: he didn’t believe it was anything to do with him. She liked children and so did he: but nothing ever happened. They had talked of adopting a child, but nothing had come of it. Of course as a milkman he didn’t have a huge salary.
When they were young they used to drive out into the country in the car. One day they saw a weasel. It had turned and looked at them ferociously as if to say “I am not frightened of you”. Their car in those days was a yellow Mini.
The policewoman crossed her legs negligently. She leaned over him with her cup of tea. She was so young, so pretty, so hopeful. She’d probably just started her job.
And then the terrible thing happened, the extraordinary thing, the awful thing. He had watched her legs, following the curve of her thighs. He couldn’t believe it. Was he some sort of blind uncaring animal? He would have taken that policewoman if she had offered herself to him. And this just after his wife’s death. Was he some kind of monster? He stared fixedly at the sweet flesh. Oh God, such piercing desire he felt: it was almost like pain:
As if the policewoman was conscious of what was happening she uncrossed her legs and got to her feet. He himself ran to the bathroom and was violently sick. The yellow stuff spurted from his mouth all over the floor which had linoleum on it. After he had been sick, he was okay again. Beast that I am, he thought, as he saw her to the door. The stars were bright in the sky, millions of them, twinkling in the frost. He never saw the policewoman again till tonight.
He did have a scar, he said to himself. And I’ll get him for it. I’m not frightened. It was as if the man had raped his own wife in the dark close. Animal he thought. Smiler. Beast. Monster. Sex-maniac.
THE WALLS OF the old tenement sweated. The flaky paint on the door was green and scarred. Drunks vomited in the close as they staggered home at midnight and after. Perhaps the spirit of the old matron was still pottering about with its brush, flicking at dust and crisp-papers. The matron, old and grey-haired, spoke little: she had dusted round the bins every morning. One of these days, John Mason would say, she will put up notices. There had hardly ever been any children in the tenement except for Mrs Miller’s two girls and boy whom the matron had disliked because they insisted on sliding down the bannisters shouting war cries. Now, however, there would be Linda’s child and the tenement would blossom again briefly as it had done before. Of course in the distant past there would have been large families.
When the matron died the flat had been empty for six months, and mice had infested the building. The Masons and the Porters had put down traps all the time and then Mr Cooper’s stray cat had killed most of them: a bonanza of grey flesh. However, one day Mr Cooper had found the cat dead outside his door. It had been run down by a big lorry, flattened, like a leaf.
The old pipes squeaked. Workmen left their footsteps in the wet cement and the matron became angry with them. Mrs Brown went to visit her husband’s grave in the neatly kept cemetery with its locked doors. He had died of an embolism. On his grave she placed flowers which she had grown in the back green. Sometimes the glass jar in the cemetery shook, and collapsed in the wind. If it was a good day, she might walk back from the cemetery in her black clothes.
Who had lived in that tenement? Lord knew there had been so many. Workers, professional men, housewives. Clothes had hung on the line, patched, poor. Knickers had ballooned outwards in a spring wind and had then faded away like clouds. The history of changing society could be learned from the tenement. Furniture changed, wallpaper changed, so did clothes.
Sometimes at night Mrs Floss thought she heard voices in the walls as of newly wed couples swearing eternal allegiance to each other. How many coats of paint had the walls known, how many sheaves of wallpaper; from the coloured to the plain? Linoleum gave way to carpets, old white cracked basins to warm coloured suites. The tenement swung to the wheel and wind of history. Tall and gaunt it stood in the storms, windows rattled, were swung out like sails on creaking ropes. Women hung above the streets with mops in their hands. Coalmen bent like dwarfs under dirty sacks.
The matron prodded with her broom as if investigating a disease. Faintly from far streets the voices of children could be heard. Mrs Miller lay on her bed in her fur coat while the whitewash flaked from the ceiling. She dreamt of Rhodesia, the matron dreamt of her days and nights in hospital, dressed in her brief authority. The tenement was a well of voices, whispering, shouting.
Mrs Floss bought a sideboard and wasn’t satisfied and bought another one. She laid a carpet and was dissatisfied and bought another one. Why had she taken a flat here? She could have gone elsewhere, she had plenty of money, why was she involved in constant renovation? But the flat was central and she couldn’t drive. One day she had asked John, Linda’s husband, if he would run her to the hospital where she was getting treatment, probably for alcoholism. He had set her down and waited for her. Later, much later, she wandered out of the hospital shouting, “Jimmy, where are you Jimmy?” Then she had asked if he would stop at the Co-op and wait for her while she bought some messages. She treated him like a servant and he accepted it all good-humouredly. She was a card, the old girl. He always remembered her in later years as standing in the sunshine outside the hospital and shouting, “Where are you, Jimmy?” Indubitably half drunk. A pale, old drunken face glimmered at a window.
Mrs Brown would examine the bottles in the bin and say to Linda, “That woman, Mrs Floss, drinks a lot. See all these whisky bottles and sherry bottles. Disgusting.” She maintained that Mrs Floss put her empties in her bin, but Linda reckoned that they were Mrs Brown’s own. Who would have thought that she drank too?
Trevor Porter brooded over his poems. Dante’s head burned above the tenement like the morning star. His verses were like the bars of the raw electric fire, wounded, scarred.
The wind played about the tenement on March days. It spun papers, in dizzy circles, rings. Mrs Miller looked out at the sky on a stormy night while the blue lightning quivered. Let it hit someone else, she prayed. Trevor Porter once saw it at the tips of his fingers when he was typing.
The unmentionable things that go on over there, Mrs Brown would say to the matron, peering across to the opposite side of the street. Prostitution is rife, she would say in a whisper, her eyes gleaming. Girls with short flame-coloured skirts were seen leaving the flats regularly. There was music from feral records on hot summer nights.
Would you believe it, the matron would say, seeing the Red Indians pass. The colours of their hair were exotic, mediaeval. It was as if the town had been taken over by invaders from outer space. Hell’s Angels in leather jackets careered up and down the street after midnight. “I do not want to give my name,” she would say on the phone to the police, “but really …” Invariably when the police arrived the street was quiet again. These black alien riders seemed to have a sixth sense for trouble. In their visors and masks.
Trevor wrote a poem which went as follows:
Someone is saying “I’ll knife you, son,”
just below my window in the night.
What is this. A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
a remarkable inflection of the light.
A shudder as of fear, of ecstasy.
Shakespeare’s scavenging magnificent mind
&nbs
p; hovering in a blue Elizabethan sky,
learning the killer’s lingo in the wind.
“I’ll knife you, son,” he said. That firm quiet voice
assertive for a moment. Let me see—
Lear is struggling through the wind and gorse
in the spiky crown of his senility.
That shudder once again. That betrayal …
I pull the curtains wide. The moon is full.
And somewhere in the night the parched beasts prowl
in the dense shrubberies beyond our rule.
One day Mrs Floss, who was slightly drunk, took her brother into the Porters’ flat, having found the door open.
“This,” she told him, “is their lobby. Notice the nice carpet. And this is the kitchen, roomy isn’t it? Now here is Mr Porter, typing. Good morning, Mr Porter.” Trevor gazed at her in amazement. “Mrs Porter collects these figures. Beautiful, aren’t they?”
And so she proceeded on her guided tour through the flat, saying goodbye to Trevor as she left. He didn’t think Julia had been in that day. She laughed and laughed when she heard of Mrs Floss’s safari, and especially at Mrs Floss’s indication to her brother,
“And there is Mr Porter, typing.”
Mrs Floss’s husband had owned an hotel in the town. Latterly, he had given up bothering with it and read books instead. Mrs Floss served in the bar and had done so for years. Her husband was a thin man who had grown shyer as the years passed: he always wore a carnation in his buttonhole. He would have sold the hotel if it hadn’t been for his wife. He would go to the library and ask Mrs Stewart for the latest books which he had seen reviewed in the Observer, and the Sunday Times. She hated the sight of him: he gave her more work than all her other customers combined. He was always making her fill in forms ordering books from the Central Library, as he had started to take a keen interest in history, especially the history of the town.
Mrs Floss had been unfaithful to him many times with men whom she had met in the bar. Once, too, with a Spaniard whom she met while she was on holiday on her own, as her husband refused to visit the hot countries ever since he had had his stomach-upset. “You go,” he would say to her. “Your brother can run the hotel while you’re gone.” She always went in the late season when the fares were low and the cities were not crowded.
Her longest affair was with a policeman whose wife had eventually left him. Her friendship with the policeman was useful to her, as she could keep the hotel open later than normal and she earned other perquisites. The policeman was a big man who despised Mr Floss: he himself never read books and was not very popular in the town, as he was always arresting people for trivial offences. The two of them, Mrs Floss and he, often made love in the police van, which appealed to her romantic nature. Mr Floss knew that this was going on, but as he had been impotent for years he didn’t care.
“I don’t understand what you see in him,” he would say mildly. “He seems to me to be a lout.” She thought if he were a real man he would fight for her, but of course her husband never dreamed of doing that. He knew that he would lose anyway. He had long ago lost respect for his wife and was happy with his books. He had inherited the hotel and had never liked running it: it was too much like advertising soap.
“If you don’t watch out,” she would say to him, “we will be bankrupt. Do you realize that most people are now bringing caravans to the area and also taking self-service flats? Petrol, too, has gone up in price and people want the good weather: they will go to the Continent rather than here. The other thing is, you’d better make sure that you have proper fire precautions. They are going to be very strict on that.”
“Maybe we should set the place on fire, and cash the insurance money,” her husband said mildly. She had not been too horrified at the idea, but knew that he was only joking. In fact there had been a big fire in a neighbouring hotel in which three visitors had died. It had been started by a porter throwing a burning cigarette-end into a waste paper basket. About that time there had been an epidemic of fires in the town, one of which had gutted the cinema. It had been rebuilt and was now used for bingo.
Her most satisfactory romance had been with an Italian she had met in Venice. They had spent a splendid month together sailing in gondolas, visiting magnificent houses and theatres. She had thought Venice absolutely divine. Everything was so romantic, especially the moonlight on the waters which during the day looked rather dirty. The sun blazed down from a perfectly blue sky every day, the pigeous were a blizzard in the famous square of St Mark, the clock-tower with its soldiers was so unusual. The Italian too was very attentive, but he didn’t pay for anything. Still, she didn’t mind that: she didn’t mind the heat either. She returned home to find that Alex had had a stroke: he gibbered to her in a strange broken language. He lasted for two months before the second stroke hit him and killed him outright.
It was quite amazing how badly she took his death. When he was alive she hadn’t bothered about him, now that he was dead she remembered his kind nature. She wept continually and stopped seeing the policeman. She burnt the letters she had received from the Italian. Indeed, she had a tremendous bout of burning and putting out. It was as if she wished to be rid of her old life in order to clear the decks for her new one. She dressed in sober clothes, decided to sell the hotel. She couldn’t bear to be in the bar listening to the usual chatter which she had heard so often before. She looked around for a flat and eventually found the one she was in. Her sons, who were grown up, sometimes visited her and once when she was away they stole her carpet, and sold it. Mr Cooper had tried to stop them after he had seen them at midnight, walking down the stair with it, but they called him an old interfering fart and he had popped into his flat again like a cuckoo on a clock.
She got a large amount of money for the hotel and began to drink heavily. She went on a world cruise and dozed on the deck of a huge liner for weeks. She had an affair with a steward who came from Liverpool and who was a sad descent from her bronzed Italian and Spaniard. In fact, he had a harelip and a liking for pink gin. She found that when she came to writing postcards she knew of no one she wanted to send them to. When she arrived home she had her hair done and then changed all the furniture in the flat again. She would try to keep the workers in the flat as long as possible by offering them drink. She found the loneliness oppressive and nearly went out of her mind as she had no inner resources to fall back on. She never read a book. Once she nearly put her flat on fire while trying to cook chips. The flex of the cooker burnt out and she couldn’t operate the fire extinguisher which she had bought. She poured water over the flames but they shot up higher than ever. John Mason had explained to her the use of salt in situations like that, but she forgot in the middle of the crisis.
She went to bed late and woke late. Sometimes she would wander about the lobby in her nightgown with her teeth out. For no reason at all she would begin to think about her dead husband, whom she now idolized, remembering his gentle forgetful ways. At the same time she missed her lovers; she had become fat and rather ugly and she knew it. She didn’t have any mirrors in the flat. One of her sons took to drugs (he was the leader in removing her carpet). When she went away she would not know who to leave the key with, but eventually left it with Mrs Porter with whom she used to have a coffee; and then of course Mrs Porter didn’t know anything of her previous life. She was a nice woman, unhappy, but who wasn’t? She said that she wanted more than anything to leave the flat and find a house preferably in Devon. But her husband wanted to stay in Scotland because he wrote poetry, though she couldn’t understand why you couldn’t write poetry anywhere. All she knew about poetry was that there was little money in it. Mrs Porter was a brave woman; she didn’t want her husband to know that she had cancer.
She discussed the light on the stair with Mr Porter. Actually he didn’t give a damn, she could tell that, but she wanted someone to talk to. Mr Porter, she thought, was rather snooty and despised her if that was not too strong a word. She thought he
was rather like Alex, but not so kind: there was a remoteness about him. He was a funny little man who wore a crushed hat, summer and winter. He also had a cat and she didn’t like cats: she much preferred dogs. Dogs were friendlier animals. In fact she thought she might get one: you never knew where you were with a cat. Cats were hypocrites, they gave you only cupboard love. Dogs were true friends. She did in fact buy a big black dog but Mr Cooper must have told someone about it and she had to give it up. She thought Mr Porter more of a gentleman than Mr Cooper.
She hated what she was becoming. In the hotel, once, there had been a maid who had been about forty years old. The maid stayed in the attic room in the summer, and had no friends. She used to go to church every Sunday and on Wednesday nights as well. She bought a lot of pamphlets about God which asked whether you were saved or not. She was thin and wore glasses and was very conscientious. But in spite of that the customers didn’t like her, thought her too spiritual. She had always found that. The ones the customers liked the best were the harum-scarum negligent good-looking ones, the ones she couldn’t depend on. A pretty face went a long way. She herself had been pretty in her youth, but now she didn’t dare look in the mirror.
Sometimes she would go on diets, but found that she couldn’t keep to them. She ate cakes and of course she drank a lot of vodka and gin and this put on calories. She ate many sweets. She had read in some newspaper that over-eating was a compensation for unhappiness.
She tried to make friends with Mr Porter, inviting him to watch TV programmes, but he never came. He was a queer cold fish. Mrs Porter had told her that he sometimes spent hours in his room typing, not speaking to her. What a life. Of course Alex had been much the same. He should never have married. He was too good for her, he should have been a saint. She should have married a farmer, a big strong man with natural desires. Once she had gone to a fortune teller who had first of all asked her for a cigarette and then told her that there was going to be a big romance in her life. She had asked for another cigarette at the end of the reading. Mrs Floss gave her the whole packet wondering how a fortune teller couldn’t afford cigarettes of her own. But of course there had been no romance. Poor Alex, what a life she had led him, what a dance. How he must have suffered! Now that she was suffering she realized what he must have suffered too. Imagine what she had been like. Prettifying herself for that policeman while Alex knew exactly what was happening. No wonder she drank, remembering that.
The Tenement Page 9