by Francis King
Soon the intrusions extended to the kitchen. ‘I hope you won’t take it amiss. I suddenly found that I had run out of bread and so, transgressing on your good natures, I helped myself to two of those ciabatta rolls that I found in your bread bin. Rather past their sell-by date, but any port in a storm.’ Seeing the look of indignation on the two faces opposite, he replied huffily: ‘Of course I’ll replace them. Though not perhaps with products quite so recherché.’ He never did replace them. A short while later, when, having for once returned early from work, Howard went into the kitchen to make himself some coffee, he was exasperated to find a saucepan tilted sideways on the range, its sides clogged with a dark-grey deposit, so obstinate that he had to take a Brillo pad to it. He decided that it was the remains of a custard left over from the previous night. Pomme Frite must have succeeded in burning it while heating it up for his own consumption.
At first Mark and Howard had been concerned about the diabetes. One day, returning from one of his rare forays to the local Wop shop (as he called it), Pomme Frite had staggered through the front door, leaving it wide open, and had then collapsed on to the bottom of the staircase. Fortunately Howard returned home a few minutes later. ‘My syringe, syringe. Medicine cupboard. In the WC.’ Howard raced upstairs, opened the rusty, dusty medicine cupboard, and found a disposable syringe and a phial of insulin. Later, Pomme Frite croaked ‘ You saved my bloody life. Not that it was worth saving,’ he added. ‘You’re a good chap. Basically.’ Laughter caused his bony shoulders to shake up and down. ‘Even if you’re a queer one.’
Did that last sentence mean what Howard and Mark thought that it meant? At that stage in the relationship they could not be sure.
Later, they were. The two of them were having one of their intermittent spats in the hall, over an invitation that each of them thought that the other had agreed to answer, when from above them they heard that disgustingly phlegmy cough and then the high-pitched, nasal voice: ‘Girls! Girls! Please! Why not give each other a nice kiss and make up?’ Pomme Frite was leaning over the banister, his face a grey disk in the gloom of the attic landing.
When they next had a party, it was clear that Pomme Frite had similarly been surveying the arrivals – and perhaps also the departures – of the guests from above. ‘What an interesting crowd,’ he commented to Mark the next morning, at the end of a breathless struggle to pick up some letters off the doormat. None of the letters was for him. Having carefully scrutinised each in turn, he held out the pile. ‘I was hoping to see some popsies, but all I saw … Well, one lives and learns. This has become an odd old world. You two have certainly brought me up to date with a bump.’
A few days later, the old man and Mark coincided outside the bathroom. Mark was wearing a polo-necked cashmere sweater just bought at the Harrod’s sale. Mockingly Pomme Frite looked him up and down. ‘Well, you look very saucy in that little number, I must say,’ he announced in what sounded like a feeble imitation of Graham Norton. Certainly Mark had wondered if that pale blue shade was quite right for him, but to be told, at the age of forty-seven and in line for promotion to the head of refuse collection, that he looked ‘saucy’ was bloody cheek.
Somehow these oblique aspersions on their sexuality exasperated Mark and Howard more acutely than any of the more flagrant outrages. It was, in fact, those aspersions that finally persuaded them to try to bribe Pomme Frite to leave – ill though they could afford to do so after all the money that they had had to spend on the house.
As so often, it was Howard who was the spokesman. He entered the low-ceilinged attic room, his tall, thin body leaning slightly forward, as so often when he wished to ingratiate himself. ‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘No, no! Liberty hall. Take a pew.’
Without taking a pew, Howard produced the spiel that he and Mark and had prepared together. They were worried that their tenant was isolated up so many stairs. They were also worried that he might fall ill while they were both out at work. Had he thought that it might be better if he applied to the Council for sheltered housing?
‘I can’t say that I have. No. I’m perfectly happy here. You two do so much to look after me.’
‘If you did decide to go, we’d be only too happy to – to – well, make a contribution.’
‘A contribution? What sort of contribution?’
‘Well, five thousand or so.’
‘Five thousand?’
Useless.
‘He’s like those cockroaches,’ Mark said. ‘Quite disgusting. And amazingly persistent.’
‘If only we could stamp him out of existence, as we did them.’
‘It wasn’t the stamping that finally got rid of them. It was that pest control officer.’
‘I don’t suppose that the Council employs a human pest control officer. That gas was awfully effective.’
Looking back later, each of them decided that that was the moment when the idea first began to germinate. But neither ever confessed that to the other.
Howard came home early with a feverish cold and, having made himself a pot of tea, got into his pyjamas and prepared to clamber into his bed. It was then that he noticed that the bedside radio had vanished. It was not the first time that Pomme Frite had borrowed it, his own ancient Roberts set having expired two or three weeks previously. Howard pulled on his dressing gown, thrust his feet into his slippers, and strode out into the hall. From above he could hear the blare, imperfectly tuned in, of a Sousa march. Taking them in twos and threes, he raced up the stairs.
He banged on the attic door and eventually, getting no answer, flung it open. ‘You really have a cheek –’ he began. Then he saw the emaciated body, naked except for some underpants, lying sideways across the bed. It was like a gigantic, grey grub, he often used to recall in horror in later days. Pomme Frite’s mouth was open. Without the false teeth, it contained only two jagged, orange-black fangs. There was a whistling sound of air being drawn in and then expelled. The prominent adam‘s apple bobbed up and down.
Howard began to dash to the lavatory medicine cupboard. As a dentist, he was used to giving injections. No sweat. But then he hesitated, turned back and re-entered the room. He stared down at the grub. He could leave Pomme Frite there, in the hope that the diabetic coma would be a fatal one. Or else …? He picked up the pillow in its soiled case, from where it had tumbled to the floor. He cradled it for a moment, like a baby, in the crook of an arm. Then, with a decisive movement, he put it over Pomme Frite’s face. The grey body stirred, frantically twitched from side to side. The tassel penis dribbled some urine. With sudden ferocity – better to be safe than sorry – Howard jumped on to the pillow and bounced up and down on it. After that, everything was over quickly. He went downstairs, put on the clothes so recently taken off, and let himself out into the street. His feverish cold seemed miraculously to have cured itself. He decided to go to the gym, where on his last visit he had got into conversation with a muscular Bangladeshi attendant. Promising, very promising.
Pomme Frite’s death brought with it three surprises.
Firstly, there was the surprise of the size of his estate: £626,000. ‘And to think that we thought that the old brute was on the verge of destitution!’ was Howard’s comment.
Secondly, there was the surprise of what he wrote in his will about his bequest to Mark and Howard: I had expected an increasingly lonely and unhappy old age. But the purchase of the house by these two gentlemen has totally changed my life. Since they took over the house, I have felt that I once more belong to a family. They have been like two sons to me.
Thirdly there was the surprise that the bequest to Mark and Howard consisted of the whole of Pomme Frite’s estate.
Mark and Howard, their Renault loaded with the few possessions not taken by the removers the day before, drove towards Tredegar Square. They had sold the horrid old house to a young, spruce, Vietnamese couple, owners of a successful restaurant, with a large brood of children, for a sum almost twice what they had paid for it. They h
ad haggled over the house in Tredegar Square with its ancient, upper-crusty owners, all but been gazumped, and then emerged victorious.
‘I think this is the happiest day of my life,’ Howard said.
‘Happier than the one on which we first met?’ That had been on Hampstead Heath.
‘Well, no, not quite,’ Howard remarked untruthfully ‘But almost.’
‘Tredegar Square – here we come!’
Mark looked across the Square, to those giant recessed columns, with proprietary love. Then he gasped, pointed. ‘Who – who is that?’
Howard craned his neck, gripping the steering wheel. A hand was raising the net curtain of one of the two attic rooms. Then, with horror and incredulity, both of them made out the figure in the striped flannel pyjamas.
The sitting tenant had arrived ahead of them.
Causes
One
She is a tall, emaciated, middle-aged American woman with a heavy jaw, a high, sloping forehead and an unhealthily yellow skin. She is a painter, I remember from what my twin sister Maria once wrote to me. But if these views of feluccas under full sail on the Nile, donkeys tethered beside picturesque wells and minarets against lurid sunsets are examples of her work, then she isn’t a good one. Her Egyptian husband is out on business, she has told me.
‘You must be tired.’ She holds out a cup of tea.
‘Yes.’ I sigh. ‘ I had to set off so early and we took so much longer to get here than I’d expected. That’s always the problem with bargain flights.’
‘It was I who found her. An awful shock. There’d been no sign of illness – except that her memory was going. In fact, she’d been helping me plant some vegetables only two or three days before it happened. As you know of course, she loved to garden.’
‘She told me more than once how kind you’d been to her.’
‘Well, we were sorry for her. She seemed to be so alone.’ Am I right in sensing an oblique reproach? ‘And of course we were fond of her too. She was a darling – in that rather eccentric way of hers. She was a woman of causes. That’s how I always thought of her. A woman of causes. She was addicted to causes in the same way that my husband is addicted to cigarettes. Both dangerous things in the long run. It’s all right to battle for causes in your country or in mine, but in a country like Egypt …’ She raises her mug in both hands and sips from it. ‘That was one of the reasons that we persuaded her to leave Cairo for Luxor.’ She smiles in sad reminiscence. ‘ There was less chance of her getting up to any kind of mischief. She once told me she was sure her ‘phone was being tapped – and her mail being opened.’
‘Perhaps that’s why she so seldom answered my letters. Perhaps my letters never got to her.’
‘She loved hearing from you. But she knew how busy you were.’
I feel an irrational urge to defend myself. I want to say: ‘You know, I never forgot her. Or neglected her. But if I sent her money – which I could often ill afford – I knew she’d spend it not on herself but on some hare-brained crusade or one of the lame dogs that always ended up by biting her. The sad thing was that she spent all her time battling for strangers, many of them worthless or wicked, while we of her family … She didn’t even return to England when our mother was dying.’ But what would be the point?
‘What we admired most about her was her courage. She was afraid of no one – nothing. When they were about to execute the man who threw the bomb at that busload of tourists, she even stood for hours on end outside the house of the minister for home affairs with a loud speaker and a placard. Typically she had failed to discover that he wasn’t there. When she repeatedly refused to move on, they finally arrested her. That was when my husband and I thought it best to get her out of Cairo. So we offered her the shack. That’s what we call it, the shack. It’s a bungalow that we built next to this house for my mother. But my mother took one look at it and returned to Maine. So Maria became a kind of substitute mother to me.’ She peers at me. ‘ You were twins, weren’t you?’
I nod.
‘One would never guess it.’ It’s what people have said ever since we were children together out in India. ‘You’re so unlike. In every way.’
I look out of the window at the wide, tawny, slow-moving river. A felucca is tacking from this bank, the west, to the other. Its wake glitters in the afternoon sunlight. I feel a sudden, ineluctable weariness.
She must have sensed this. ‘Would you like to lie down before you start on things?’
Now that I am in my eighties, people are constantly asking me if I’d like to lie down. I shake my head. ‘No. Thank you. I’m all right. It’s the change of temperature more than anything else.’
She laughs: ‘For us today is cool!’
Having finished my cup of tea and refused a second one, I get up and out of politeness wander round the room, inspecting the pictures.
She surprises me by saying: ‘They’re not much good, I’m afraid. But the tourists buy them. And that helps with the bills. My husband’s travel business isn’t doing well. No travel business is. That’s because of the political situation, of course.’
Eventually she takes me across to what she has called the shack. A square concrete box, with a roof of rusty corrugated iron, it’s extremely ugly. But Maria would never have noticed that. Once, when I spoke disparagingly of some stark council blocks near to the poky rented flat in which she was then living in Peckham, she retorted angrily: ‘The disadvantaged can’t afford the luxury of beauty. And so beauty doesn’t interest them.’ ‘ Disadvantaged’ was a word she often used.
‘I’ve put out a lot of boxes and plastic bags for you.’
‘You’re very kind.’
‘As you can see, the room is a mess. Once I tidied it for her when she was out. She was furious. So that was the last time I dared to do that.’
‘Every place in which she ever lived was a mess.’ I might have added: ‘As was her life.’
She puts a hand to the dead irises in a glass vase, the water dank and dark, that rests on a table among piles of dog-eared books and magazines. Petals flake off and drift downwards. ‘If I can help in any way …’
‘You’re very kind. But I think it’ll be best if I tackle all this alone. I’ll just do as much I can today and then, if there’s still more to be done, perhaps you won’t mind –’
‘Of course not. Take your time. Just shout if you need anything. I’m not planning to go out. I must finish off a daub.’ She laughs. ‘A commission, believe it or not.’
She shuts the door behind her. There is an unpleasant smell, sour and yet also cloyingly sweet, of urine in the room. I try to expel it from my consciousness but cannot do so. I look around me. On the rickety table by the narrow, iron bedstead there is a photograph that I recognise as being of Fidel Castro, not as he is now but as he was soon after the revolution. He looks handsome, proud, petulant. Maria was a frequent visitor to Cuba when few other people ever ventured there. On more than one occasion she met him. He has signed the photograph for her. She must have treasured it through the years of constant, erratic travel and of restless moving from one bedsit or tiny flat to another. Typical of her never to have bought a frame, however cheap, for a possession so important to her. For lack of protection, the photograph has yellowed at the corners and has a crumpled look to it. I hold it up, stare at it and then replace it. I pull open a drawer. It is full of stockings rolled into balls, handkerchiefs, vests, knickers, cotton blouses. Nothing has been ironed. Clearly some things have not been washed.
I feel an overwhelming sadness. I also once again feel that ineluctable tiredness that makes every movement – even the pushing back of the drawer – a superhuman effort. With a sigh I fall on to her bed. As children in India, sharing a room, we would often creep into each other’s beds. This bed is unforgivingly hard and the one pillow feels as if it were stuffed with straw. It is on this bed that the American woman – Mrs Bird, Bard, Baird, I cannot remember – must have found her. But surprisingly the thought of her
lifeless body lying there does not fill me with horror or revulsion. It is even comforting, though I can smell carbolic and can also still smell that sour-sweet urine stench.
I put a hand to my forehead. I shut my eyes. When one is very old, as I am, reality and dreams blur into each other. Simultaneously one sleeps and one is awake, as though one were two people. The present becomes a feather-light dream, the past an oppressive reality …
Two
… The first thing that I noticed was the shoes. Clearly they had once been elegant. But now their former white was scratched, scuffed and discoloured in patches, and each was trodden down at the heel. One shoelace was white but a length of twine did service for the other. The reason that I saw the shoes before I saw the face of the man who was wearing them was that I was squatting in the dust as I wound up the model aeroplane that my father and mother had recently given me for my eighth birthday. The task involved rotating the propeller of the flimsy, balsa-wood biplane between thumb and forefinger until the elastic was taut. When I had completed the task, I jumped to my feet, plane in hand, and launched it out over the garden. My mother and the owner of the shoes both broke off their conversation, and my twin sister, Maria, who had been squatting beside me, intently watching what I had been doing, jumped to her feet. We all gazed skywards and then raised our hands to shield our eyes against the glare. I felt an intense, transient joy as the small, indomitable object moved erratically across the yellow-brown lawn and then spiralled down into a rose-bed choked with weeds.
Sharing my joy, Maria clapped her hands.
My mother turned back to the man.
His present name was Joseph, but once it had been Rasipuram, he was later to tell us. He had become Joseph when he had been converted to Christianity at a Lucknow mission school. At the age of eleven he had been admitted to the school not merely as a pupil but also to work as a part-time kitchen hand in lieu of the fees that neither he nor his family could pay. He had arrived at our house, hundreds of miles from Lucknow, and now he was looking for work. My father was also a missionary, and a member of his congregation had told Joseph that our cook had returned to his Himalayan village because of the illness of his wife and that we were looking for another cook. It was this job that Joseph wanted.
