The Accidental Woman

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘What qualities?’ asked Maria eventually.

  ‘We look, above all, for quietness of disposition. We look for girls who would benefit from being removed from the pell-mell of college life. We look for the withdrawing type.’

  Maria, who was tired, very tired, of living in college, accepted her tutor’s offer. Thus it was that she found herself living in Cribbage House, an establishment set up by the college authorities some four years previously as a means of farming out those students whose presence, for various reasons, they felt to be detrimental to the health of community life within college itself. It was a large house, comprising eight rooms, a shared kitchen, and two shared bathrooms. Structurally it was in need of repair. Most of the walls needed re-papering, or repainting, or re-plastering, and most of the floors needed re-carpeting, except for those which had no carpets, which simply needed carpeting. There was rising damp, and dry rot, and woodworm. On the top floor, in the attic, colonies of fungi sprung forth from the walls. Downstairs, in the cellar, tribes of slugs and spiders flourished, sometimes making sorties to the upper floors in search of food, or perhaps just for the hell of it. The furniture was spare, to say the least, and fragile, to put it mildly. The whole house was supposed to be heated by a huge gas boiler which none of them knew how to operate.

  Maria decided that it wasn’t such a bad place.

  She set about making her room more comfortable. First she bought herself a small electric fire, to go in the empty fireplace. It was on the mantelpiece above this fireplace that she arranged her books. Maria owned only one picture, a cheap framed print of Goeneutte’s ‘Boulevard de Clichy sous la neige’, which she had bought some years ago, in a second-hand shop not far from St Jude’s. She hung it on the wall opposite the fireplace. Her room was on the first floor, overlooking the road. There was a table, near the window, and a chair, near the door. She put the table near the door and the chair near the window. Once she had made these adjustments, she felt quite satisfied.

  There was something about Maria’s room which invariably led visitors, of whom there were very few, to remark, that although it was adequately, even ideally, suited to meet the basic contingencies of daily living, it was less than adequate, and much less than ideal, as a place in which to pass the night. This was that it contained no bed. Maria too had noticed this almost as soon as she had first entered it. There was a mattress on the floor, but nothing more. A thorough search led to the discovery of sheets and blankets in a cupboard in a disused room on the second floor. Maria complained to her landlady at once, and elicited the promise that a bed would be delivered as soon as possible. Two weeks passed, and still no bed arrived, but Maria did not renew her request because by now she had decided that she did not want a bed at all. In fact she was enjoying better rest than ever before. Rest rather than sleep, you notice. She would sleep for about half of the night and for the remainder she would lie awake, in the dark. But the word dark hardly does justice to the blackness to which Maria consigned herself when she turned off her light at midnight. This blackness, and this mattress, she believed, were the reasons why she always awoke feeling so rested. For the curtains, the dark blue curtains in Maria’s room, were so thick, and so heavy, that not only was it hard work to close them, and to open them again in the morning, but also there was not a chance, not the slightest chance in a thousand, that a single ray of light from the sky or from the street outside should ever penetrate their soft defending wall. The dark in her room was absolute. Shadows and outlines didn’t enter into it. It was relieved by one item only, and this was the tiny, unwinking red light emitted by her cassette player when connected to the power supply. Maria did not lie in the dark in silence, you see. She would have found that boring, and very probably have gone to sleep instead after only a few minutes. No, she listened to music, long into the night. Maria was particular about the music to which she listened in the dark. Once, a while ago, she had loved music, all music, any music, she used to devour it without discrimination, from records, from the radio, from concerts, even from her brother, in the days when he had been learning to play the violin, when she would sit with him in the evenings, in his bedroom, as he complainingly went through his exercises. Since then, she had grown increasingly careful, for she had started to notice that while some pieces of music seemed to purify her, and to clean her out, and generally to sharpen her perception, there were other pieces which contaminated, which cluttered her and clogged her mind with thick drowsy feeling. She had realized that music should be used sparingly, and never as an accompaniment, only ever as a focus of undivided attention. And it seemed to her that her attention could only ever be truly undivided when she lay quite still in the black. She would study her collection of tapes, choose one, insert it into the cassette player, depress the play button, and then quickly, as quickly as she could, turn out the light and lie on the mattress, pulling the bedding tightly around her, or, if it was a warm night, discarding it loosely until she was comfortable. By then the music would have begun. A few precious seconds wasted, that’s all. And then for a while real joy, to hear and to understand this other language, to watch its beauty closely and to feel the guiding play of its proportions.

  It would be tedious to mention all those works which Maria included in, and all those which she excluded from, her personal canon. A few examples. Most music after Bach sounded decadent to Maria, and decadence she abhorred. Bach himself could do no wrong. Her particular favourites were the suites for ‘cello, and the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin. Here the paths of melody could be followed without the distraction of any harmony other than that which was distantly implied. But anything by Bach always had the desired effect. She was fond too of the masses of Palestrina. What she hated most in music was inconsistency of dynamics. She could not tolerate the sudden change from pp to ff, and back again. By and large she disliked the piano, although there were pieces by Beethoven and Debussy which did not displease her. She preferred the chamber ensemble to the orchestra. She loved to be made sad by music, but this could only ever happen when she listened to music which pretended to no emotional effects. All that she ever asked was to be afforded a faint sense of wonder in the face of inaccessible beauty, a loveliness far in the future or far in the past, far off anyway, on which her attention would really be fixed while she stared, half-seeing, at the unwinking red light shining like a tiny beacon in the dark.

  Cribbage House, although it contained eight rooms, had only four residents at this time. Thus four of its rooms stood empty, cold and locked. Maria had as little to do with the other girls as possible, although not out of ill-will. At first they all seemed nice enough to her (Maria was no judge of character, in the ordinary sense), but by now she was of the persuasion that people should have more to offer, if the fag of entering into human relationships were to be gone through, than mere niceness. And besides, as time passed, she began to have suspicions about these girls, she began to feel that their behaviour, not to put too fine a point on it, was odd, odd by any standards, not only the normal ones.

  Their names were Anthea, Fanny and Winifred. Anthea was the most friendly, initially. She and Maria would sometimes walk into town together, to lectures, or to the shops, and sometimes go out together, to a film for instance, and even sometimes they sat in each other’s rooms, talking, for company. Maria took a qualified satisfaction in all this. Then, one day, going into Anthea’s room, when Anthea was out, in order to return a book, Maria noticed a notebook lying open on her desk. ‘I hate Maria. I hate Maria. I hate Maria’, it said, three times to a line, twenty lines to a page. There were forty-eight pages in the notebook and it was nearly full. Maria found this peculiar. And it was difficult, from then on, for her to talk to Anthea in quite the same way as before. They never spoke to each other again, in fact.

  Fanny was neither talkative nor sociable, and Maria’s feelings towards her were, for a while, entirely neutral. It was only after a few weeks that, putting various circumstances together in her min
d, she began to entertain doubts. These circumstances were as follows. Certain small items belonging to Maria, those which tended, as it happened, to be worth the most, in material terms, had started to disappear from her room. Small items of jewellery, mainly, but also the occasional book and once a pair of shoes. Maria did not know whom to suspect of these little thefts, for thefts they surely were. One night, however, while she was using the bathroom, the thief came into her room and stole a small pendant. It was of no sentimental value, fortunately, it had been a present from Ronny. Maria saw that it was missing as soon as she returned to her room, and at the same moment heard Fanny’s door close on the other side of landing. Maria thought that this was curious, to say the least. A few days later, late at night, she was washing up, in the kitchen. She had taken her watch off and laid it on the table. After a few minutes Fanny came in, sat at the table wordlessly, and began to read the newspaper. Then, when Maria had finished her washing up, and came to retrieve her watch, she found that it was gone.

  ‘Fanny,’ she said, ‘Give me my watch.’

  Fanny looked up, feigning incomprehension.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My watch. You have stolen it. Please return it.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re a thief. You’ve been stealing my things for some time now. I know all about it.’

  Fanny said nothing.

  ‘Is it only me you steal from, or do you steal from the other girls as well?’

  ‘No, only you,’ said Fanny.

  ‘Why?’

  Fanny said nothing.

  ‘Give me my watch back.’

  Fanny produced Maria’s watch, which she had secreted in her brassière, between her breasts. She stood up, and advanced towards Maria, who backed towards the sink. Fanny held out the watch. Maria took it, but as she did so, Fanny seized her wrist, and gripped it hard. Then she bent forward, and bit Maria on the shoulder. Maria cried out, and Fanny left the room without another word.

  Maria found this behaviour surprising, although she was normally tolerant of other people’s foibles, and following this incident, she and Fanny did not get on so well together.

  ‘They seem like very nice girls,’ Maria’s mother said, one day in November when the family had all come to visit her. It was a dark Saturday afternoon and her mother, her father and Bobby were sitting around the electric fire. Tea had been served and drunk and there were a few biscuits left.

  ‘I don’t like them,’ Maria said.

  ‘Anthea is a striking creature,’ said her father. A man could fall for her.’

  ‘Why don’t you like them, Maria?’ her mother asked.

  ‘We don’t get on.’

  ‘But Winifred has such a kind face. She was so kind to us while we were waiting here for you to come back. Is she not kind to you, Maria?’

  Winifred was extremely kind to Maria, that was the problem. Maria tolerated her, however; she was undoubtedly the best of a bad bunch. But a short account must be given of this extraordinary girl.

  Winifred was all that Maria wasn’t, and more. She was an open, happy, confident and trusting person, who believed in the benevolence of God, the sanctity of marriage, and the innate goodness of human nature. She was moronic in other ways, too. For instance, she decided, on the basis of only a few days’ acquaintance, not only that Maria was in need of help, but that she, Winifred, was the person to provide it. Accordingly she took pains to befriend her. And so she started to do small favours, she would perform little acts of kindness, such as to tap on Maria’s door at seven o’clock in the morning with the words, Are you awake, Maria? A new day has dawned (as if this were anything to write home about) and I am just going downstairs to make you a nice cup of tea. This would perhaps not have been intolerable, were it not that Maria would have liked, occasionally, to have been allowed to sleep later than seven o’clock, and were it not that Winifred’s methods of preparing tea were unorthodox, and consisted of placing a tea bag in a cup and then adding a mixture half of milk and half of water from the hot tap. Maria was tempted, naturally, to lock her bedroom door from the inside, but tended not to do so because on the one occasion when she had, Winifred had attempted to batter the door down with her shoulders and her bare hands, so determined was she not to deny her friend her early morning treat. You are too good, Maria, she had said. I know what you feel. You feel it is too much for me to take all this trouble over you every morning. Not at all. It is only by performing these little acts of kindness that I feel I can ever render myself useful to my fellow creatures. Open up at once. Maria had capitulated, then and subsequently.

  Nor was this the only way in which Maria would find her privacy violated. Having drunk the tea (disposing of it by any other means was impossible, because Winifred would stay in her room and watch her until she had finished it) she would often find herself being summoned downstairs to the kitchen and served with a bowl of steaming hot porridge. This porridge took the form of great grey globules of muck. She might have used it to plaster over the cracks in the ceiling but that was about all it was good for.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t do this for me every morning, Winifred,’ she would say.

  ‘Nonsense, dear, nonsense. If one can’t light up the world with a few little acts of kindness now and again, then what is one worth, to be honest.’

  Sometimes Maria would come in from the shops, a small bag of provisions in her hand, the materials from which to fashion a hurried meal as soon as the kitchen became vacant, and would find that Winifred already had a meal waiting for her, she would have cooked it herself, and she would not listen to Maria’s protestations, she would be unmoved by her arguments, such as that the food which she had only just purchased would now be wasted. Instead, Winifred would stand over her and force her to consume of a heap of indigestible disjecta, a sun-beaming smile on her oval face the while, radiating from within a scorching consciousness of her own goodness.

  ‘Did you like it, Maria?’ she would ask at the end.

  ‘Not really,’ Maria would say, like as not scraping or prising half of it into the overflowing pedal bin. She would say it out of honesty, not out of malice, for she knew that no amount of malice could ever divert Winifred from her philanthropic path.

  ‘Never mind, it was good and nourishing, and tomorrow I shall cook you something more tasty. What would you like?’

  ‘I should like you not to cook for me.’

  ‘Dear Maria.’ Winifred took Maria’s hand, and held it gently between hers. Maria attempted to recoil, but suddenly found that her hand was being held with a strength which it would not be inappropriate to compare to that of a vice. ‘You are so good, and generous. It pains you, doesn’t it, to see me put myself to any trouble on your account? But I don’t mind, honestly I don’t. It’s a pleasure. Performing these little acts of kindness for you is the only real pleasure I have in the world.’

  Hardly surprising, then, that Maria was not able to match her mother’s enthusiasm. She did not dislike Winifred. She was baffled rather than frightened by her. All the same, her favourite time of day came to be the evening, when Winifred would not be around, for she usually went out in the evenings, to the meetings of charitable societies, and religious organizations. Often she would return from these meetings in a state of uncontrollable zealous excitement, and would find Maria and tell her all about it, sometimes if necessary rousing her from a deep sleep or interrupting her appreciation of a favourite piece of music. And if Maria were to lock the door again, she would simply hammer upon it until it was opened, or until the other two girls came to see what was the matter and the commotion became so great that Maria was no longer capable of ignoring it.

  When Bobby asked Maria if he could stay with her for a night or two, therefore, she felt obliged to warn him about Winifred. She warned him that his sleep would probably be disturbed. But this warning turned out to have been unnecessary, and while Bobby was staying with her, Winifred said nothing to Maria, never once spoke to her or a
ttempted to enter her room.

  Bobby was now eighteen. He had left school, and was looking for a job. He had been unemployed for only a few months but already he was prone to fits of depression which lasted for anything up to a week, and his parents seemed to think that a short holiday with Maria in Oxford would do him good. This had been the purpose of their visit, to deposit Bobby. When the last of the biscuits had been eaten, and their parents had driven away, brother and sister were left, alone together in Maria’s room. Bear in mind that these two had hardly spoken to each other for more than five years.

  ‘It’s nice to see you again, Bobby,’ said Maria, after a long, but, it seemed to her, companionable silence.

  ‘Do you get lonely here, on your own?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Do you like it, living at home?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I want to leave. I’m glad I was able to come down here.’

  ‘You’re always welcome. You’ll always be welcome, with me, wherever I am. You look very well.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes. Do I look well?’

  ‘No, Maria,’ said her brother. ‘You look older. And tireder. Do I really look well?’

  ‘No,’ said Maria. ‘You look sad, and worried.’

  ‘Perhaps things will turn out all right.’

  They both smiled.

  ‘Is Sefton well?’ asked Maria.

  ‘He’s fine. I was talking to him only the other day. He was in fine spirits. We were in the sitting room, and I was asking him a few questions. I said to him, What’s it all about, then? What do you think I should do? How do you view the career opportunities open to a man like myself, as an outsider, so to speak? As an impartial observer. You don’t let these things get you down, I can see that, I said. Come on, what’s the secret?’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He sort of stretched out on my lap, and purred, and took hold of my arm, and moved his claws in and out. It was very reassuring. I took it that he was advocating detachment. Indifference, even. Be idle, like me, that seemed to be the gist, there’s no stigma really. Live life as it was meant to be lived. Half asleep, preferably. That was good enough for me. I dropped the subject. He seemed to be fishing for a short stroke, so I obliged, and then we dozed off together.’