Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  His departure for the station was delayed for a few minutes by the arrival of Nethercott. Sir Philip stood with him at the field gate nodding and listening. When at last he finished, and Nethercott, apologising for turning up at what was obviously an inappropriate moment, had driven away, the whole family was gathered on the steps to say goodbye to Dieter. He had shaken hands with them all, several times; everyone was smiling and interrupting. Sir Philip came across the drive to them and said, ‘Sorry about that – had to have a word or two since he'd taken the trouble to come up.’

  Lady Lander said, ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Oh, just the fields – you know, the hill fields. He'd like to make an offer for them but I'd got things a bit wrong, I'm afraid – they're worth rather less than I'd imagined, on the current market. Rather a lot less, I'm afraid. George was awfully apologetic – you'd have thought it was his fault. He's a good chap.’

  ‘Oh dear, does that mean no new tractor?’

  ‘I suppose it does. I don't know how I'm going to break that to poor Daniels. Well, anyway,’ he went on cheerfully, ‘we'll be able to send the old one for a thorough overhaul, we'll have to make do with that. Now, Dieter, we'd better be on our way, hadn't we, where's your case …’

  He saw them like that, in his mind's eye, for long after – the women – standing on the front steps waving and smiling. ‘It's au revoir, anyway,’ Lady Lander had said, ‘because we shall see you again, next time you're in our part of the world, shan't we?’ And her mother-in-law, that frail old lady in her pale floppy clothes and regimental brooches, had piped up, ‘Oh yes, we're always here, you know, you'll always find us here’, and Sally was calling out not to forget to let them know about the wedding. She had given him a hug and a kiss; the feel of her arms, her warm soft face, the smell of her, stayed with him all the way to the station, and beyond. And the sight of them, and of the house behind, frozen in the furry yellow light of the September morning, like an old photograph – the figures grouped around the steps, the house with its backdrop of fields and hills and trees.

  At the station, Sir Philip shook him by the hand. ‘We've enjoyed having you, Dieter. You must get down to us again sometime. You'll find everything goes on much as ever at Morswick. And the best of luck with your doctorate.’

  In the train, Dieter began a letter to Erika, and then sat staring out of the window at that placid landscape (the landscape of Constable, he told himself, of Richard Wilson, of the English novelists) and saw only the irresistible manifestations of change: the mottled trees, the tangle of spent growth in the hedgerows.

  The Voice of God in Adelaide Terrace

  MISS AVRIL Pemberton, in her fifty-seventh year, suffered from insomnia. She did not consider this an insupportable affliction; she would lie with her eyes open in the protective darkness of her bedroom, think her thoughts, and listen to the nocturnal London sounds. These were not many, for Adelaide Terrace was a quiet and respectable neighbourhood, its inhabitants given to early nights and not inclined to car ownership.

  It was on such a night, in that static tract of time between three and five in the morning so familiar to insomniacs, that Avril first heard the voice.

  She was a devout woman and a regular churchgoer. Even so, she did not regard herself as blameless; merely as a reasonably proficient Christian, given to occasional error rather than deliberate transgression. She had certainly never expected to be singled out in this way.

  The voice said, ‘Avril?’

  She sat up, and stared into the dusky cavern beside the wardrobe from which it seemed to come; later, she recalled its curious sexlessness, the voice of neither man nor woman.

  ‘Avril,’ it said, ‘are you listening carefully? There is something I want you to do.’

  Avril, wide awake, more interested than awed, said, ‘What would You like me to do?’

  ‘I shall explain,’ said the voice. ‘Pay attention. I wish you to make a start with the attic room …’

  Avril listened, with mounting astonishment.

  It should be explained at this point that Avril Pemberton let rooms. She let rooms because her mother had done so before, ever since, indeed, Mr Pemberton had died in 1951, because the house was too large for her own needs and because the money came in very handy. Without it, she would have found it difficult to manage on her salary from the part-time secretarial work for a local firm of accountants. She let the first-floor front and back (single, with washbasins) and the large attic room (own bathroom). Cooking facilities for the tenants were provided in the small scullery on the first floor. Avril herself occupied the ground floor, using the second-floor front as her bedroom. The two small back rooms on the second floor remained empty, in use as boxrooms. Her mother had not liked the house to become overcrowded.

  Mrs Pemberton had died four years before, irascible in extreme old age. To the bitter end, she had exercised her powers of discrimination over would-be tenants, vetting them, finally, from her bed. Avril had found it all extremely embarrassing; so, presumably, had the tenants. Two of the present three, Mr Harris, the bank clerk in the first-floor front, and the nursing sister in the attic had been her mother's choices. Sandra Lee, the student from the teacher training college around the corner, Avril had admitted a year or so ago, irritably aware that the pasty girl, with her total absence of personality, opinion or discernible tastes, was exactly the kind of person of whom her mother would have approved as a tenant.

  There had never been any shortage of people wanting rooms. Adelaide Terrace was conveniently near bus routes and a tube station, not too far from central London, but quiet. The area was something of a buffer state; to the east, middle-class ‘reclamation’ had sent prices rocketing and let loose a tide of primrose and terracotta front doors, bay trees in tubs and petunia-crammed window-boxes; to the west, quite other things had been going on. There, Indian take-aways alternated with Chinese, the market stalls were piled high with garish and glittery stuffs, peculiar vegetables and cut-price carpets and pop records. The streets ran with black school children and the pubs blared forth unfamiliar music. The inhabitants of Adelaide Terrace kept their eyes turned resolutely to the east, and hoped for the best.

  And, where possible, played a part. Many of the tall terrace houses, like the Pembertons', belonged to elderly people and diminished families who let out rooms; others were divided, rather inefficiently, into flats. The long-term inhabitants, such as Mrs Pemberton and her immediate neighbour, Mrs Fletcher, knew one another well and were resolute as to certain matters, though divided about methods of exercising that resolution.

  Mrs Fletcher sported, for many years, a small notice stuck to the inside of a glass panel in the front door. It said ‘No coloureds’ and had been nicely lettered, with stencils, by her niece who had done a year at art college.

  Mrs Pemberton thought this silly and unnecessary. It was a simple matter, she said, to make one's position perfectly clear without that. Occasional small unpleasantnesses might arise, but could be quickly dealt with: front doors open, but they also close again. It was with a certain satisfaction that she had pointed out to Mrs Fletcher, in 1965, that the notice would have to be removed.

  ‘Who's to make me?’ said Mrs Fletcher, bristling.

  ‘Well, dear,’ said Mrs Pemberton, ‘you'll have to do as you think best, but I wouldn't like to see you get had up, and personally I've never found the need in the first place.’

  Mrs Fletcher went on at some length about individual liberty and diabolical interferences therein and how you couldn't pass laws to make people think differently to what they always had done. Mrs Pemberton pointed out, smoothly, that all this was true enough but what was clear as day was that you could pass laws until you were blue in the face but there would still be ways and means.

  Mrs Fletcher removed the notice and took instructions from Mrs Pemberton as to ways and means. There were seldom, if ever, misunderstandings or unpleasantnesses, and Adelaide Terrace remained much as it had been before. At the far en
d, where Mrs Pemberton's influence was weakest, there was a certain falling-off. An Indian family took one of the flats and were to be seen, on Sunday's immaculately dressed, pushing a pram in Adelaide Gardens. Their eldest son, in grey flannel trousers, navy blazer, spotless white shirt and puce turban, cycled down the street to school every day. Avril, watching once from the window, was misguided enough to say that they seemed quite nice people; her mother was unmanageable for a week.

  And now, lying there in the dark, she listened to the voice – a little hectoring in tone – as it went on and on. Instructing. Lecturing. ‘Remember the Bishop?’ it said. ‘Now supposing he had come to the door …’

  ‘I know,’ said Avril. ‘I said as much to mother at the time.’

  The Bishop of somewhere in Africa, he had been, but you couldn't tell that at once from the name. He had come as visiting preacher to St Bartholomew's, one autumn Sunday. They had been invited to the Vicar's after the service, for coffee, because Mrs Pemberton was treasurer, then, of the Mothers' Union. And he had been as black as your hat. Big and black and beaming. Avril had thought, at first, seeing him climb into the pulpit, that her mother wouldn't go to the vicarage. But she had. She had gone, and sat there, and drunk coffee and eaten biscuits. And afterwards she had said that she wouldn't have Mrs Brinton's job, not for the world. Mrs Brinton was the Vicar's wife. And Avril had said what she had said and there had been unpleasantness between them. And now here was the voice, harking back.

  ‘I spoke my mind,’ said Avril sulkily.

  She had never taken up arms against her mother lightly: the cost was too high. As the years went by, she did so less and less, the instinctive resistance of her youth snuffed out by her mother's more implacable temperament. She ceased to counter Mrs Pemberton's vaunted opinions and preferences, ceased to say, from time to time, ‘There are two sides to everything, mother,’ and ‘Well, personally, I do think …’ She took to silence.

  By and large, she conceded Adelaide Terrace as Mrs Pemberton's territory and guarded jealously the privacy of her life beyond it, what little there was – the voluntary evenings at the Scout and Guide hut, her Red Cross afternoon, and her job at Hackle and Starbuck.

  Never, for instance, would she have told Mrs Pemberton about Gloria.

  Gloria came to the office as a temp when the senior, and permanent, secretary, had to have several weeks' sick leave after an operation. She was seventeen, fresh from school, an indifferent typist, as noisy as a puppy, and West Indian. Her abundant, frizzy hair was worn in two huge puffs elaborately teased out at either side of her head; she had wide, flat features with large brown eyes, big lips delicately painted; there was a bloom to her skin that entranced Avril. Surreptitiously she kept glancing at Gloria; bewildered, she realised that she found the girl beautiful.

  Gloria bounced and giggled her way through the days and played merry hell with the filing system. The office was torn between amusement and irritation; Mr Hackle, who had been as startled as Avril when Gloria appeared from the agency, grumbled at the mangled letters with which Gloria presented him, and enjoyed, like Avril, the throaty laughter that brightened office hours. Gloria teased the office boy, charmed clients, bungled every telephone message, and spent much time in the washroom attending to her appearance. At the typewriter, she moaned and whimpered and, every now and then, leaned back to indulge in a huge luxuriant stretch that made it seem as though her plump rubbery young body might spring apart entirely, like an over-ripe pea-pod.

  One day, looking across at Avril, she said, ‘Hey, that's nice.’

  ‘What?’ said Avril.

  ‘That sweater you got on. It suits you – it's your colour, blue. You look really good today.’

  Avril had flushed and muttered something and gone back to the letter she was typing. Later, tidying her hair before she left the office, she stared at herself in the mirror, turning this way and that, adjusting the collar of her jacket.

  She had been sorry when Gloria left, and Maureen Davidson returned, with her migraines and her proficiency and her faint odour of Lifebuoy soap.

  Guiltily, she dismissed recollections of Gloria and returned to here and now, and to the voice, which seemed to be concluding its homily.

  ‘… as quickly as you can, with the normal period of notice to the present tenants.’

  As she listened, the corners of Avril's mouth turned up in an incredulous smile.

  ‘All black?’ she said.

  ‘Every one of them,’ said the voice sternly.

  *

  There was not a great deal of difficulty with Mr Harris, Sandra Lee and the nursing sister. Since she gave formal notice to all three at once, it was simply assumed that she wished to reclaim the house for her own occupation. Mr Harris, who had been there for nine years, was clearly a little put out, but gave her a large box of chocolates as a parting present and made over to her the tradescantia in the scullery, which he thought might not take kindly to a move. The nursing sister asked if she wasn't going to rattle around rather, all on her own. Sandra Lee vanished, wordless, into the obscurity from which she had come.

  The process, allowing for the correct periods of notice, took nearly four months. Not until the last tenant had departed did Avril place her advertisement in the Gazette; she had decided to deal with the attic room first, and retained her usual wording, except that she added ‘Married couples not objected to’.

  There was a flood of responses. Avril, turning away, with her mother's murmured formula of regret – ‘So sorry … already taken … person who called last night’ – first a young Irish couple, and then a Scottish nurse and another girl of indeterminate extraction, realised that covertly exercised discrimination is indeed extremely easy.

  The Singhs presented themselves at the door on a Tuesday morning. By Friday they were installed in the attic.

  On Saturday morning, returning from the shops, Avril was halted, key in the lock, by Mrs Fletcher, springing from her own door at the sound as though released by an elastic. ‘I been wanting to have a word with you, dear,’ she said. ‘I must say I couldn't hardly believe my eyes, seeing them pull up in the taxi like that, with all their stuff. I said to myself what old Mrs P. would say I don't even like to think …’

  Avril stood there, her foot inside her own door, half-listening, and it came to her with sudden welcome clarity that, in nearly thirty years of enforced congress, she had never really liked Mrs Fletcher. It was as though you might discover that tea, bread, or some other unconsidered object of routine was not really to your taste. She stared at her opening and closing mouth, the tuft of hairs that crowned a surface irregularity on her chin, the cameo brooch that puckered the neck of her blouse, and thought: silly old bag.

  ‘… seen some perfectly nice people come to the door, Sunday and Monday, after you put your ad in,’ concluded Mrs Fletcher, ‘so I don't know what to think, I simply don't.’ She stared at Avril. ‘And who are they, one would like to know?’

  ‘They're my new tenants,’ said Avril coolly (she liked that: my new tenants). ‘They've taken the attic room.’

  There was a silence. In Mrs Fletcher's face, whole volumes of analysis, speculation, and adjustment to circumstances were written, revised, rewritten; granite assumptions crumbled to dust, and were reconstructed in other forms. When she spoke again, it was from twenty miles away, and ten years on. She said, ‘That girl's expecting. I daresay you'll not have noticed that.’

  Avril, who had not, flushed a little, and went into the house.

  The Singhs were quiet tenants; they pattered up and down the stairs like well-behaved children, talking to each other in low tones if at all. Occasionally, radio music, turned low, seeped from beneath their door, and with it, culinary smells.

  With complete detachment, Avril considered the smells. She had once taken a meal in an Indian restaurant with two girls from the office and had not, in fact, much cared for it. The smells, at first, raised a whisker of alarm. And then, considering over a day or two, she decide
d that they were no more, indeed rather less, disagreeable than the bacon (cut-price, she had always suspected) Mr Harris used to do himself for breakfast every day. In fact, they grew on you.

  Over the next three weeks she filled the first-floor front and back.

  The front went within three days to a bescarved and bespectacled student from Nigeria. The back was less straightforward; there was a tussle of wills with a forceful woman who refused to believe that the room had already been taken within an hour of the advertisement (the ‘occasional small unpleasantness’ that old Mrs Pemberton had grown accustomed to) but Avril held her own, then and for a further day and a half until the arrival of an immensely fat black dental nurse called Brenda.

  In the silence and darkness of her room she said, ‘All right?’ There being no reply, she assumed that her arrangements had met with approval.

  The house was no longer so quiet. The Nigerian student turned out to have many friends, some of whom, Avril suspected, were not entirely transitory visitors. Having always respected the privacy of her tenants (unlike her mother, who kept duplicate keys and made forays into their rooms in their absence) she made no comment. He and Brenda struck up a friendship, conducted for the most part rather noisily on the stairs. Both, though, were unfailingly genial; the Nigerian cleared a blocked sink in the kitchen and Brenda, when Avril took to her bed with a throat infection, plied her with hot drinks laced with suspect but delicious substances. She would stand at Avril's bedroom door, entirely filling it, brandishing a thermos and shouting encouragingly, as though to a slightly deaf child; she was a maturer and more strident version of Gloria.

  Avril felt a greater affinity with the Singhs, their deprecating smiles and self-effacing comings and goings. Mrs Singh – Kamala, as she whispered once, in a rare moment of intimacy – was indeed swelling week by week, as Avril had now to observe and admit. Nothing was said, until one day Brenda, in raucous progress up the stairs, said casually, ‘That Kamala, she goin' to have it any day now’, which alarmed Avril but left her better prepared for contingencies. When, a week or so later, she heard Mr Singh come down the stairs with more than usual haste, and then his soft voice on the telephone, asking for the doctor, she was calm and indeed quite excited. Being familiar with the processes of childbirth from her reading of novels (though the kind of novel, admittedly, in which the narrative tended to shift, at the crucial moment, to the role of non-participant characters such as husbands and sisters) she amassed all the kettles and saucepans she could find and set them to boil. Only as they began to hum, did it occur to her that she really did not know for what all this boiling water was required: the novels never went into that. And when she came out into the hall to find Kamala, smiling weakly, coming down the stairs on her husband's arm, suitcase in hand, she was distinctly disappointed. The birth was to take place in hospital, apparently. She went rather glumly back into her room, and forgot the saucepans, which were boiling briskly ten minutes later, when Brenda returned, filling the house with steam and prompting much noisy comment and enquiry. Avril, who suspected that she might have been rumbled, gave some sheepish explanations about sterilising jam jars.