Four Stories

by Alan Bennett

  He stood at the door.

  ‘I’ll get a cheque to you as soon as I can. Then you can start rebuilding your lives. Your good lady seems to be taking it well.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Ransome, ‘only she keeps it under.’

  ‘No outstanding jewellery or anything of that sort?’

  ‘No. She’s never really gone in for that sort of thing,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘Luckily she was wearing her pearls to the opera.’

  ‘She had a necklace on tonight,’ said Croucher. ‘Rather striking, I thought.’

  ‘Did she?’ Mr Ransome hadn’t noticed.

  When they were at the card table having their supper Mr Ransome said: ‘Have I seen that necklace before?’

  ‘No. Do you like it? I bought it at the grocer’s.’

  ‘The grocer’s?’

  ‘The Indian shop. It was only 75p. I can’t wear my pearls all the time.’

  ‘It looks as if it came out of a cracker.’

  ‘I think it suits me. I bought two. The other one’s green.’

  ‘What am I eating?’ said Mr Ransome. ‘Swede?’

  ‘A sweet potato. Do you like it?’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Marks and Spencer.’

  ‘It’s very nice.’

  A couple of weeks after the burglary (everything now dated from that) Mrs Ransome was sitting on her bean-bag in front of the electric fire, her legs stuck out in front of her, contemplating her now rather scuffed court shoes, and wondering what she ought to do next. It was the same with a death, she thought: so much to do to begin with, then afterwards nothing.

  Nevertheless (and further to her thoughts at the sink) Mrs Ransome had begun to see that to be so abruptly parted from all her worldly goods might bring with it benefits she would have hesitated to call spiritual but which might, more briskly, be put under the heading of ‘improving the character’. To have the carpet almost literally pulled from under her should, she felt, induce salutary thoughts about the way she had lived her life. War would once have rescued her, of course, some turn of events that gave her no choice, and while what had happened was not a catastrophe on that scale she knew it was up to her to make of it what she could. She would go to museums, she thought, art galleries, learn about the history of London; there were classes in all sorts nowadays – classes which she could perfectly well have attended before they were deprived of everything they had in the world, except that it was everything they had in the world, she felt, that had been holding her back. Now she could start. So, plumped down on the bean-bag on the bare boards of her sometime lounge, Mrs Ransome found that she was not unhappy, telling herself that this was more real and that (though one needed to be comfortable) an uncushioned life was the way they ought to live.

  It was at this point the doorbell rang.

  ‘My name is Briscoe,’ the voice said over the intercom. ‘Your counsellor?’

  ‘We’re Conservatives,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘No,’ said the voice. ‘The police? Your trauma? The burglary?’

  Knowing the counsellor had come via the police Mrs Ransome had expected someone a bit, well, crisper. There was nothing crisp about Ms Briscoe, except possibly her name and she got rid of that on the doorstep.

  ‘No, no. Call me Dusty. Everybody does.’

  ‘Were you christened Dusty?’ asked Mrs Ransome, bringing her in. ‘Or is that just what you’re called?’

  ‘Oh no. My proper name is Brenda but I don’t want to put people off.’

  Mrs Ransome wasn’t quite sure how, though it was true she didn’t look like a Brenda: whether she looked like a Dusty she wasn’t sure as she’d never met one before.

  She was a biggish girl who, perhaps wisely, had opted for a smock rather than a frock and with it a cardigan so long and ample it was almost a dress in itself, one pocket stuffed with her diary and notebook, the other sagging under the weight of a mobile phone. Considering she worked for the authorities Mrs Ransome thought Dusty looked pretty slap-dash.

  ‘Now you are Mrs Ransome? Rosemary Ransome?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s what people call you, is it? Rosemary?’

  ‘Well, yes’ (insofar as they call me anything, thought Mrs Ransome).

  ‘Just wondered if it was Rose or Rosie?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Hubby calls you Rosemary, does he?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Mrs Ransome, ‘I suppose he does,’ and went to put the kettle on, thus enabling Dusty to make her first note: ‘Query: Is burglary the real problem here?’

  When Dusty had started out counselling, victims were referred to as ‘cases’. That had long since gone; they were now clients or even customers, terms Dusty to begin with found unsympathetic and had resisted. Nowadays she never gave either designation a second thought – what her clients were called seemed as immaterial as the disasters that befell them. Victims singled themselves out; be it burglary, mugging or road accidents, these mishaps were simply the means by which inadequate people came to her notice. And everybody given the chance had the potential to be inadequate. Experience, she felt, had turned her into a professional.

  They took their tea into the sitting-room and each sank onto a bean-bag, a manoeuvre Mrs Ransome was now quite good at, though with Dusty it was more like a tumble. ‘Are these new?’ said Dusty, wiping some tea from her smock. ‘I was with another client yesterday, the sister of someone who’s in a coma, and she had something similar. Now Rosemary, I want us to try and talk this through together.’

  Mrs Ransome wasn’t sure whether this was the same as ‘talking it over’. One seemed a more rigorous, less meandering version of the other, the difference in their choice of prepositions not boding well for fruitful discourse. ‘More structured,’ Dusty would have said, had Mrs Ransome ventured to raise the point, but she didn’t.

  Mrs Ransome now described the circumstances of the burglary and the extent of their loss, though this made less of an impression on Dusty than it might have done as the diminished state in which the Ransomes were now living – the beanbags, the card table, etc. – seemed not so much a deprivation to Dusty as it did a style.

  Though this was more tidy it was the minimalist look she had opted for in her own flat.

  ‘How near is this to what it was before?’ said Dusty.

  ‘Oh we had a lot more than this,’ said Mrs Ransome. ‘We had everything. It was a normal home.’

  ‘I know you must be hurting,’ said Dusty.

  ‘Hurting what?’ asked Mrs Ransome.

  ‘You. You are hurting.’

  Mrs Ransome considered this, her stoicism simply a question of grammar, ‘Oh. You mean I’m hurt? Well, yes and no. I’m getting used to it, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t get used to it too soon,’ said Dusty. ‘Give yourself time to grieve. You did weep at the time, I hope?’

  ‘To begin with,’ said Mrs Ransome. ‘But I soon got over it.’

  ‘Did Maurice?’

  ‘Maurice?’

  ‘Mr Ransome.’

  ‘Oh … no. No. I don’t think he did. Well,’ and it was as if she were sharing a secret, ‘he’s a man, you see.’

  ‘No, Rosemary. He’s a person. It’s a pity that he didn’t let himself go at the time. The experts are all more or less agreed that if you don’t grieve, keep it all bottled up, you’re quite likely at some time in the future to go down with cancer.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘Of course,’ said Dusty. ‘Men do find grieving harder than women. Would it help if I had a word?’

  ‘With Mr Ransome? No, no,’ said Mrs Ransome hastily. ‘I don’t think so. He’s very … shy.’

  ‘Still,’ said Dusty, ‘I think I can help you … or we can help each other.’ She leaned over to take Mrs Ransome’s hand but found she couldn’t reach it so stroked the bean-bag instead.

  ‘They say you feel violated,’ said Mrs Ransome.

  ‘Yes. Let it come, Rosemary. Let it come.’<
br />
  ‘Only I don’t particularly. Just mystified.’

  ‘Client in denial,’ Dusty wrote as Mrs Ransome took away the teacups. Then she added a question-mark.

  As she was going Dusty suggested that Mrs Ransome might try to see the whole experience as a learning curve and that one way the curve might go (it could go several ways apparently) was to view the loss of their possessions as a kind of liberation – ‘the lilies of the field syndrome’, as Dusty called it. ‘Lay not up for yourself treasures on earth-type-thing.’ This notion having already occurred to Mrs Ransome she nevertheless didn’t immediately take the point because Dusty referred to their belongings as ‘their gear’, a word which, if it meant anything to Mrs Ransome, denoted the contents of her handbag, lipstick, compact etc., none of which she had in fact lost. Though thinking about it afterwards she acknowledged that to lump everything, carpets, curtains, furniture and fittings all under the term ‘gear’ did make it easier to handle. Still it wasn’t a word she contemplated risking on her husband.

  Truth to tell (and though she didn’t say so to Mrs Ransome) it was advice Dusty only proffered half-heartedly anyway. The more she saw of the lilies of the field syndrome the less faith she had in it. She’d had one or two clients who’d told her that a hurtful burglary had given them a clue how to live, that from now on they would set less store by material possessions, travel light etc. Six months later she’d gone back on a follow-up visit to find them more encumbered than ever. Lots of people could give up things, Dusty had decided; what they couldn’t do without was shopping for them.

  When Mrs Ransome said to Dusty that she didn’t particularly miss her belongings she had been telling the truth. What she did miss – and this was harder to put into words – was not so much the things themselves as her particular paths through them. There was the green bobble hat she had had, for instance, which she never actually wore but would always put on the hall table to remind her that she had switched the immersion heater on in the bathroom. She didn’t have the bobble hat now and she didn’t have the table to put it on (and that she still had the immersion heater must be regarded as a providence). But with no bobble hat she’d twice left the immersion on all night and once Mr Ransome had scalded his hand.

  He too had had rituals to forego. He had lost the little curved scissors, for instance, with which he used to cut the hair in his ears – and that was only the beginning of it. While not especially vain he had a little moustache which, if left to itself, had a distasteful tendency to go ginger, a tinge which Mr Ransome kept in check with the occasional touch of hair dye. This came out of an ancient bottle Mrs Ransome had tried on her roots years ago and then instantly discarded, but which was still kept at the back of the bathroom cupboard. Locking the bathroom door before applying it to the affected part, Mr Ransome had never admitted to what he was doing, with Mrs Ransome in her turn never admitting that she knew about it anyway. Only now the bathroom cupboard was gone and the bottle with it, so in due course Mr Ransome’s moustache began to take on the tell-tale orange tinge he found so detestable. Asking her to buy another bottle was one answer but this would be to come clean on the years of clandestine cosmetics. Buying a bottle himself was another. But where? His barber was Polish and his English just about ran to short back and sides. An understanding chemist perhaps, but all the chemists of Mr Ransome’s acquaintance were anything but understanding, staffed usually by bored little sluts of eighteen unlikely to sympathise with a middle-aged solicitor and his creeping ginger.

  Unhappily tracing its progress in Mrs Ransome’s powder compact, kept in the bathroom now as the only mirror in the flat, Mr Ransome cursed the burglars who had brought such humiliation upon him and lying on her camp bed Mrs Ransome reflected that not the least of what they had lost in the burglary were their little marital deceptions.

  Mr Ransome had been told that while the insurance company would not pay for the temporary rental of a CD player (not regarded as an essential) it would sanction the hire of a TV. So one morning Mrs Ransome went out and chose the most discreet model she could find and it was delivered and fitted that same afternoon. She had never watched daytime television before, feeling she ought to have better things to do. However, when he had gone she found the engineer had left the set switched to some sort of chat show in which an overweight American couple were being questioned by a black lady in a trouser suit about how, as the black lady put it, ‘they related to one another sexually’.

  The man, slumped in his seat with his legs wide apart, was describing in as much detail as the woman in the trouser suit would allow what he, as he put it, ‘asked of his marriage’, while the woman, arms folded, knees together but too plump to be prim, was explaining how ‘without being judgmental, he had never taken the deodorant on board’.

  ‘Get a load of that body language,’ said the lady in the trouser suit, and the audience, mystifyingly to Mrs Ransome who did not know what body language was, erupted in jeers and laughter.

  ‘The things people do for money,’ thought Mrs Ransome, and switched it off.

  The next afternoon, waking from a doze on her bean-bag, she switched on again and found herself watching a similar programme with another equally shameless couple and the same hooting, jeering audience, roaming among them with a microphone a different hostess, white this time but as imperturbable as the first and just as oblivious of everybody’s bad manners, even, it seemed to Mrs Ransome, egging them on.

  These hostesses (for Mrs Ransome now began to watch regularly) were all much of a muchness, big, bold and, Mrs Ransome thought, with far too much self-confidence (she thought this was what they meant by ‘feisty’ and would have looked it up in Mr Ransome’s dictionary but wasn’t sure how it was spelled). They had names that defied gender: Robin, Bobby, Troy and some, like Tiffany, Page and Kirby, that in Mrs Ransome’s book weren’t names at all.

  The presenters and their audience spoke in a language which Mrs Ransome, to begin with anyway, found hard to understand, talking of ‘parenting’ and ‘personal interaction’, of ‘fine-tuning their sex-lives’ and ‘taking it up the butt’. It was a language of avowal and exuberant fellowship. ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ they said, smacking each other’s hands. ‘I know where you’re coming from.’

  There was Felicia, who wanted long and loving sexual interaction and Dwight, her husband, who just had hungry hands and no marital skills. They both, it was generally agreed, needed to talk, and here in front of this jeering throng, hungry for sensation, was the place they had chosen to do it, finally, as the credits rolled, falling hungrily upon one another, mouth glued to mouth while the audience roared its approval and the presenter looked on with a sadder and wiser smile. ‘Thank you people,’ she said, and the couple kissed on.

  What Mrs Ransome could never get used to was how unabashed the participants were, how unsheepish and how none of these people was ever plain shy. Even when there was a programme about shyness no one who took part was shy in any sense that Mrs Ransome understood it; there was no hanging back and no shortage of unblushing participants willing to stand up and boast of their crippling self-consciousness and the absurdities to which overwhelming diffidence and self-effacingness had brought them. No matter how private or intimate the topic under discussion, none of these eager vociferous people had any shame. On the contrary, they seemed to vie with one another in coming up with confessions of behaviour that grew ever more ingeniously gross and indelicate; one outrageous admission trumped another, the audience greeting each new revelation with wild whoops and yells, hurling advice at the participants and urging them on to retail new depravities.

  There were, it’s true, rare occasions when some of the audience gave vent not to glee but to outrage, even seeming for a moment, presented with some particularly egregious confession, to be genuinely shocked; but it was only because the presenter, glancing covertly at the audience behind the speaker’s back, had pulled a wry face and so cued their affront. The presenter was an accomplice, Mrs Ranso
me thought, and no better than anyone else, even going out of her way to remind participants of yet more inventive and indelicate acts that they had earlier confided to her in the presumed privacy of the dressing-room. When she jogged their memories they went through an elaborate pantomime of shame (hiding their heads, covering face with hands, shaking with seemingly helpless laughter), all this to indicate that they had never expected such secrets to be made public, let alone retailed to the camera.

  Still, Mrs Ransome felt, they were all better than she was. For what none of these whooping, giggling (and often quite obese) creatures seemed in no doubt about was that at the basic level at which these programmes were pitched people were all the same. There was no shame and no reserve and to pretend otherwise was to be stuck up and a hypocrite. Mrs Ransome felt that she was certainly the first and that her husband was probably the second.

  The contents of the flat were insured for £50,000. It had originally been much less, but being a solicitor and a careful man besides, Mr Ransome had seen to it that the premium had kept pace with the cost of living. Accordingly, this modest agglomeration of household goods, furniture, fixtures and fittings had gone on over the years gently increasing in value; the stereo and the Magimix, the canteen of cutlery, the EPNS salad servers, the tray cloths and tablemats and all the apparatus of that life which the Ransomes had the complete equipment for but had never managed to lead, all this had marched comfortably in step with the index. Durable, sober, unshowy stuff, bought with an eye to use not ornament, hardly diminished by breakage or loss, dutifully dusted and polished over the years so that it was scarcely even abraded by wear or tear – all this had gone uneventfully forward until that terrible night when the column had been ambushed and this ordinary, unpretentious little fraternity was seemingly wiped out and what Mrs Ransome modestly called ‘our things’ had vanished for ever.

  So at any rate the insurance company concluded and in due course a cheque arrived for the full value plus an unforeseen increment payable in the absence of any previous claims and which served to cover disruption and compensate for distress.