Part 6 (1/2)

It was five-thirty when Muriel arrived back at Eugene Terrace; the tail end of the hot afternoon. Inside the Mukerjees' Emporium, a drowsy girl with a pitted bluish face sat by the till on a high stool. She glanced up without interest as Muriel pa.s.sed the window; her shoulders moved fractionally, and her eyelids drooped again.

Crisp had left. There was a note on the table: GONE TO EVENSONG. And I brought doughnuts for our tea, Muriel thought crossly. She dumped the paper bag on a chair and walked around the room for a while, looking in Crisp's drawers and under his mattress; there was nothing of interest. The room was close and stuffy; outside it smelled like thunder. At least, that was what the people at the doughnut shop said; she could not smell it. Over the Punjab, the sky had turned a leaden colour; pigeons huddled together on the guttering, heads sunk low into their feathers like vultures in cartoons.

Muriel shed her clothes again. With the weight of the day upon her, it wasn't difficult to become Poor Mrs. Wilmot. Her shoulders slumped, her knees bent, her toes turned in; she sprayed her hair with dry shampoo, and flattened it to her head gritty and streaked with grey, and secured it with two large hairgrips. As she did this, the years crept up and weighed her down; her joints locked, her mouth grew pinched, her hands began to shake. She put on Mrs. Wilmot's elastic stockings and leaned over with a rheumaticky quiver for her bedroom slippers. What was the real Wilmot doing, she wondered. Probably having a cup of tea or something. Experimentally, she opened her mouth in a silent laugh.

Finally she put on Mrs. Wilmot's coat, which she needed in all weathers, feeling the cold as she did; it was a coat Sholto had found in a dustbin, no shape at all and the colour of the fluff that collects under beds. She went downstairs. A plump little boy of about twelve years old minded the till. The family were so numerous that, despite the shop's long hours, she had never seen the same Mukerjee twice. His eyes behind his thick spectacles were glued to his Darth Vader comic; Wilmot pa.s.sed, and he didn't look up.

When she returned to Mr. K.'s house she was surprised to find him up and about. ”I thought you'd be having your sleep,” she said, as she shuffled dispiritedly into the kitchen. ”Course, you know what's best for you.”

Mr. K. was taping up the kitchen window. ”In case of poison gas,” he explained. As he stretched up his garments parted company, exposing the greyish roll of fat above his hips.

”Pardon me,” his lodger said, ”course, you know best, but couldn't it come through the letter box?”

”A welcome thought,” Mr. K. said. ”I shall tape it instanter. Would you graciously put on tea kettle?”

Mrs. Wilmot made the tea while Mr. K. went out into the hall to secure his letter box. When it was brewed she poured out for them, and they sat companionably at the kitchen table.

”Woman watching house again today,” Mr. K. said. ”Drove by, stopped, got out, waited ten minutes, pa.s.sed on. Miss Anaemia said it is Snoopers, from the department.”

She nodded, and drank her tea.

”Who is this Snoopers?” He did not expect an answer. There were no answers to the questions which plagued him. He sucked his tea through a sugar lump, and eyed his roll of adhesive tape.

”Any law against keeping pets?” his lodger asked suddenly.

”What?” said Mr. K. ”Cats, dogs, horses?”

”Beetles.”

”The famous British sense of humour,” Mr. K. said sadly.

”It's no joke. I've seen them advertised.” She picked up her shopping bag and made off towards the kitchen door with it, her large feet padding softly in their pink bedroom slippers. ”I'm going to get a cage,” she muttered. ”Great big striped ones as fat as melons.”

Muriel climbed the stairs to the first landing. It grew colder as she ascended, and the smell of decay was p.r.o.nounced. The ancient paper, with its design of cabbage roses, was peeling from the walls. ”h.e.l.lo there, Mrs. Wilmot,” someone whispered. It was Miss Anaemia, creeping down from her third-floor attic. She emerged into the faint light from the long window, filtered through years of dust; a fragile young woman, little more than a child, with a child's flat body, minimal features, and a skin so translucent that it was easy to imagine that you saw the circulation of the thin blood beneath it. Her red hair was plastered damply to her head, and her whole body seemed to jump and quiver in a state of perpetual fright.

”I hear you've got problems, course I don't want to pry,” said Poor Mrs. Wilmot.

”Shh. Not so loud.”

”I thought you were at the Polytechnic. Course, I don't know, I've no education.”

”I was.” Tears welled up in the girl's large eyes. ”They made a new timetable. They've got split sites. They moved my lectures. I couldn't find them. So I stopped going.”

”Couldn't you ask them?”

”I did, but n.o.body seemed to know who I was.”

”Well, there you are then. Cellar vee, isn't it? Che sera, sera. And what do you do with yourself now?”

”I'm a claimant. I make up different names. Primrose Hill's one I go under. Penny Black.” She whispered to herself. ”Black Maria, Bad Penny. Faint Hope. Square Peg.”

”Is it frightening?”

”It's terrifying,” Miss Anaemia said. ”It makes your palms sweat.” For a second, before she descended the dark staircase, she laid the palm of her hand, ice-cold and clammy, against Muriel's cheek.

CHAPTER 4.

”Anybody home?” No answer. That didn't mean, of course, that the house was empty. Sylvia went into the kitchen, poured herself a gla.s.s of Perrier water, and took it upstairs. Alistair's door was still shut. She felt sticky and grimy from the plastic chairs in the committee room, the car's vinyl upholstery, the dust that hung in the air. Other people's tobacco smoke had got into her lungs.

She peeled off her clothes, shrugged her towelling robe on, and made for the bathroom. She thought she heard a rustle behind Alistair's door. ”Are you in there?” she said. ”Alistair, if you don't come out soon I'm going to kick this door in.” There was no reply. She didn't mean it, of course; it was just the small change of domestic violence. She locked herself in the bathroom, took a brisk shower, then scrubbed her face with a soapy substance full of little bits of grit. Exfoliation, she said to herself. How she wished she could really shed her skin, and shed the past with it, dispose of that embarra.s.sing image in the photographs of ten years ago. She had heard of people trying to ”purge themselves of their past.” The images employed seemed to become more nasty and drastic the more you thought about it. Exorcism...the exfoliation procedure had left her face blotchy and scored with little red lines. She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. All right, do it, she thought. Find that other old photograph and throw it out. Why today? Well, why not? As murderers often find after years of wishful thinking, the action of a second can free you from the weight of a decade.

She went into the bedroom and opened Colin's top drawer. A tangle of underwear, and socks he never wore, rolled into b.a.l.l.s, fraying round the tops. A colour film, some small change, some bottles of aftershave; most of it bought by Florence, gentle hints from the year when Colin had decided to grow a beard. It hadn't lasted long, the beard. Nothing lasted long with Colin; the enthusiasms he took up at evening cla.s.ses, his project for growing vegetables, his ardour for joining the Social Democratic Party-which had fizzled out, come to think of it, when he couldn't find a stamp to send off his application form. Only his neckties evoked constancy. What was this greasy grey string, left over from the last time ties were narrow? Here was a yellow knitted one, and here was a great flowery orange thing, a relic of the sixties. Dear G.o.d. Kipper ties, they called them.

She heard the front door bang.

”Mum? Mum, it's me, Claire, I'm home.”

”All right, Claire,” she called. ”I'll be with you in a minute.”

”Mum, can I get waffles out of the freezer?”

”Get what you like. I won't be long.”

With a sudden urgency, she began to rummage through the drawer. Here at the back was the five-year diary that she had once given Colin for Christmas. It was not locked; its key was still taped to it, in a tiny polythene envelope. Colin had never filled the diary in. He considered, he told her, that he had no life worth recording, and to be sure that he was right, she had checked every few months and found the pages blank. He could have filled it in, she thought, after I took such trouble to get it for him. Being a history teacher you'd think he'd like to keep a record. She felt she would like to make sense of the past; of those white years, 1975, 1976, '77, '78, '79. Where had they gone? She had a mental picture of an autumn evening, the year they had moved to Buckingham Avenue; Colin sulking in the garden, refusing to come in though it was getting cold and dark. He hated the sight of me, she thought, he would have left me for two pins; it was only after Claire was born that he calmed down. Presumably his affair was over by then. Something was missing afterwards, as if a large part of his vitality had been drained away. At times she caught him watching her. He looked like someone staring out of a famine poster; preternaturally wise, still, and lacking in a future that was of interest to anybody.

Here it was: a crumpled snapshot under his oldest socks. Its presence there was a tacit admission. He must know that she went through his drawers at intervals; after twenty years he was familiar with her methods of keeping one step ahead. He was not one of those self-contained men who can keep their love affairs a secret. He was one of those pathetic, guilty men, whose deepest need is to be found out.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, switched on the bedside light, and held the photograph under it. She had done all this before, at intervals separated by months when the knowledge that he still kept the picture would nibble away at her complacency, like a woodworm in furniture. Staring and staring didn't give you any more information. She was young and slim, the girlfriend; woollen hat and scarf, boots, hands thrust into the pockets of a rather anonymous jacket. She leaned against the offside wing of the family Fiat, the one they had got rid of in 1976. Dark hair, shadowy eyes; the effortful smile was like Colin's own. There was a dim backdrop of leafless trees.

Perhaps she was a teacher. Who else did he meet? Sylvia sucked her lip, brooding. A second later she leaped from the bed in alarm. Her heart pounded; a jangling scream split the air. She tore out of the room, yelled down at her daughter below. ”Claire, for G.o.d's sake stop that cooker timer!”

”What?”

”Push the k.n.o.b in, make it stop, it's driving me spare.”

The noise stopped. ”I didn't set it off,” Claire called up indignantly.

”Who did then?”

”Alistair.”

”Don't be daft, he's in his bedroom.”

Slowly she made her way back, clutching the photograph. Time's up, she thought sourly. Life's solid all through, done to a turn, a little bit longer and we'll smell burning. She took a deep breath, trying to control the thumping behind her ribs.

”Mum, are you coming?”