The Tenement

by Iain Crichton Smith

  She had even thought of joining the Catholic Church. They helped each other in their trouble. What had happened was that a young girl who had started as a waitress in the restaurant had a baby and the baby died. The baby had been in an incubator for five days and had faded gently away while being taken to the big Children’s Hospital in Glasgow in an ambulance: its heart had given out. Anyway the girl had been heartbroken but the priest had been magnificent. He had told her that the baby was an angel in heaven and the girl had such faith that she believed him and was comforted. They had buried the baby in a coffin the size of a shoe box and they had baptized it before that. The Protestants believed that you began in sin, and continued in sin. So she had nearly joined the Catholic Church and she had even gone to hear one of their services in the Cathedral by the sea where there was a crib and the Virgin Mary holding the Child Jesus in her arms. And the girl had said to her, “One night, I went to the Cathedral and I saw the Virgin Mary holding the baby out and it seemed that she was offering it to me instead of my own. And that was when I got better.” She too had a Health Visitor come to see her and the Health Visitor had said, “Don’t keep that photograph of your baby in front of you all the time” (the photograph had been taken while the baby was in the incubator and you couldn’t approach too closely in case you imported human germs to it). But the girl hadn’t shifted the photograph from where it was and the Health Visitor never referred to it again.

  Winter nights were the worst. It was so cold in the flat. And sometimes she would think that Jim was there. One day just after his death, the kids being in school and she herself coming into the house during the dinner hour, she had heard someone talking in the flat. She opened all the doors but still the talking went on, though no one could be seen. It was a man’s voice too, quite low, and she thought, My God, Jim has come back from the dead. But it wasn’t that at all. It was in fact the radio that she must have forgotten to switch off in the morning, though she had turned it down, and the voice was coming from that. It had given her a terrible shock. Maybe one of the girls had left it on. They were always leaving things on, lights, radios, television.

  Anyway she was quite happy in the restaurant, drinking her coffee. And she would watch the sea, or the people passing on the road. There was always something to be seen. Once, there had been a huge storm, and seaweed strewn all over the road, and in the shops. Tree trunks had been torn out of the ground, the seawall had been twisted as if by a giant hand.

  And she would sometimes think about the people in the flats. Mrs Brown, who had used to take the flowers to her husband’s grave, had been so mean that she wouldn’t even buy the local paper. She herself had to lend her her own copy, but now she had stopped buying it. When Jim was alive she would say, “Poor woman. She’s got nobody. I don’t mind lending the paper.” But she wouldn’t say that now.

  “My God,” he would say, “she doesn’t deserve to have anybody visit her. She’s got plenty of money and she won’t spend it. She uses our bin sometimes.” Which of course she did and had put empty bottles of sherry in it though she claimed that she didn’t drink.

  Always sniffing about with a brush in her hand cleaning the stair as if no one did it but herself. The queen of the tenement. And so meek and mild too with her face coloured red from the blood pressure. Always picking up bits of paper as if they were treasure trove and saying that people should stick to their own day for the washing. And doing a bit of weeding since no one else bothered about the back green. When they had visited her house on the day of her death they had found all the rooms tightly crowded with furniture, like a second-hand shop. It was as if she had been building a fortress to keep the world out. And yet her house was spotless though crowded, with a smell of Mansion Polish.

  So that was herself, now, who stayed in a top flat, with Mr and Mrs Cameron on the same landing: and below her was Mrs Floss and beside her was Mr and Mrs Porter: and below them was Mr Cooper and beside him were the Masons, the ones who had complained about their stained wallpaper.

  She’d better remember: fix it all in her mind.

  Mrs Miller Mr and Mrs Cameron

  Mrs Floss Mr and Mrs Porter

  Mr and Mrs Mason Mr Cooper

  She had noticed for a while the two young people who came into the restaurant and often sat at the table next to her. One was a tall boy of about seventeen who wore school uniform of a navy blue colour with yellow edgings on the jacket. She thought he was a prefect. (Neither of her own children had been prefects.) With him was his girl friend who was almost as tall as himself, wearing the same colour of uniform. They would come in at lunchtime and sit opposite each other holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. The boy always came in first and then the girl. And they talked a lot. What did they find to talk about? Stories about school probably. They never spoke to her but she imagined that they would notice her, wonder about her. In their presence she felt more lonely than ever. They reminded her of her own children but they were more polite, perhaps the son and daughter of professional people.

  For much of the time she pretended that she didn’t see them and stared out of the window at the sea where a tinker piper often played to the tourists in his ragged tartan. When the tide was out there were papers and plastic cups to be seen lying on the shore. When the tide was in the sea rose to the horizon, silver and glittering, and sometimes one could watch big ships passing. The winter days were long and dark. In the summer time, however, there was much to see. There were so many tourists from so many different countries, wearing the national dress: Indians in saris, Americans in white jackets, and white hats, just as in Dallas. The place in the summer seemed to blossom, become alive. It was a smallish town of perhaps ten thousand people. In the summer, however, it was increased to about twenty thousand.

  In the summer, too, the scholars seemed happy and fresh and radiant. It was as if they were full of hope, their whole lives ahead of them. They were absorbed in each other though this didn’t mean that they didn’t quarrel at times. She could tell when they had quarrelled. The boy would come in earlier than usual and he would wait, glancing at his watch and fidgeting and sometimes whistling, and pretending that he was not waiting for the girl at all. Once he had left before she arrived.

  But their quarrels were only occasional. Usually they held a continuous conversation. She could hear snatches of what they were talking about, for instance a remark about Old Spotty, who, she assumed, must be a teacher. Then they would discuss their examinations. The girl, she gathered, wasn’t good at maths and might not be able to go to the same university as the boy who, she thought, was cleverer. They discussed their maths teacher a lot. He was violent, bad-tempered, and oppressive, and frightened his pupils so much that they couldn’t concentrate on their work. The school was their whole world. Once the maths teacher had thrown a Bible at someone, for she gathered that he taught Religious Education to his register class. He had wakened out of a sleep and thrown his Bible at a girl who was sitting at the back of the class dreaming. The Bible had shot past her head and rebounded from the wall.

  The girl was tall and had corn-coloured hair. The boy was dark-haired, handsome and, she thought, athletic. The girl wore a ring on her finger. It might not be an official engagement ring but would serve as one. Sometimes if she was in a bad mood she would turn the ring over and over. On such days the ring seemed to inflame her finger and this told her, according to herself, something about the boy’s faithfulness or lack of it. “Rubbish,” the boy would say, “all that is psychological.”

  “No, it’s not,” the girl would say. She always took an Express in with her and they compared horoscopes. She could tell that the girl believed in them but that the boy didn’t. The girl was a Pisces and the boy an Aquarius.

  She had heard the boy say once, “How can everybody born under Pisces have the same fortune for a particular day? And then if you buy a Mirror or a Sun it will give you a different horoscope.” The girl then became technical saying that she might not be who
lly a Pisces or he wholly an Aquarius. It depended on the exact hour at which you were born. She herself had been born at two in the morning: the boy didn’t know the exact hour of his birth.

  The old woman sipped her coffee. Sometimes scum formed on it. She would look out at the street and say to herself, “Imagine any woman wearing a hat like that! And really, that boy who has just passed with green hair!” They would do anything to draw attention to themselves. Some of them looked like Red Indians and some had no hair at all. She had once made a mistake with that Catholic girl, telling her that there was a spot of dirt on her brow. In actual fact the spot was associated with a particular Catholic date, Ash Wednesday. The girl hadn’t been offended at all.

  She felt awfully sweaty and now and again scratched herself. She often had bad constipation and her eyesight was not as good as it had been. But she wore her fur coat all the time, she even slept in it. She often felt like an animal in a pelt.

  One day the boy and the girl had an awful row. It was to do with a girl called Joan. This Joan, as far as she could make out, had joined the magazine committee on which the boy was editor. Joan had been trying to make up to him and had gone round the school with him putting up posters to advertise the magazine.

  “You were with her. You were seen,” the girl hissed.

  “Who saw me?”

  “Sheila for one. She told me.”

  “Sheila’s a cross-eyed bitch.”

  “She’s not cross-eyed even though she wears glasses.”

  “What can I do? I have to go around the school putting up advertisements: otherwise no one would buy the magazine. It was Scruffy who told me to do it. I couldn’t turn round and say to her, ‘You can’t come’. Anyway she can write quite well.”

  “Quite well? Who told you that?”

  “I know it. I’ve seen some of her stuff. That’s why she’s on the committee.”

  “It’s not. It’s because Scruffy likes her. Anyway there were others you could have gone around with.”

  “It was Scruffy who sent us. I just told you.”

  “That’s what you say. You were talking to her all the time, laughing and joking.”

  “What am I supposed to do? Not speak to her? Be reasonable. She’s on the same committee.”

  “It’s you who’s not being reasonable. It doesn’t have to be a girl you go round with: does it?”

  “She’s pretty competent actually. I’m not saying that because I’m in love with her or anything. But she is. And she does work, more than most of them. Some of the people on the committee just treat it as a skive.”

  “We know why she works for you. The other girls don’t like her. She’s a clype.”

  And so on and so on. The quarrel went for ages. Periodically through the summer it flared up and died down again like an inflammation on a finger. Sometimes the girl would be deliberately late. Sometimes the boy would sit silently glaring at her with compressed lips. Sometimes the girl would refuse to take her coffee or the boy would.

  Then a wholly different quarrel started. This one had to do with a play which the girl was taking part in, and of which the boy disapproved. It was clear that the only reason that the girl had joined the drama group was to get her own back on the boy.

  “You don’t have to get a lift home with him,” the boy would say, and the girl would answer, “What else can I do?”

  “You needn’t have been in the play at all.”

  “You needn’t have been on the magazine committee.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How is it different?”

  “It is. It’s pretty obvious to anyone why it’s different.”

  “What do you mean to anyone! Are you implying that I’m stupid or something?”

  “You know perfectly well I’ve been editing the magazine for two years. You’ve never acted in a play before. You’ve never shown any interest.”

  “Well, I’ve to start sometime.”

  It seemed that another boy called Slim who apparently was a brilliant actor ran her home in his father’s car after the rehearsals. Slim was the son of a local doctor, played rugby, had a lot of pocket money, sometimes drank, was also a prefect. It was obvious that he was a formidable rival.

  At times as she watched the two of them the old lady would see herself bending down to take an order from a customer. She too had blonde hair though she wasn’t as tall as the girl. It was as if that picture were superimposed on the one she saw in front of her. Or it might be that she saw Jim coming in the door after his work and they would talk animatedly and she would bring him a cup of tea which he didn’t have to pay for.

  Now, however, when she saw him there was a scar from the lightning snaking across his brow.

  As a matter of fact, she hated the boy and the girl. She hated them not simply because they were young, not even because they quarrelled. At least a quarrel was a sign of life. It was better to quarrel than to be silent, fuming and fretting. She considered them, however, silly. Imagine having quarrels about such silly things. In fact she found it hard to explain to herself what her feelings about them were. Certainly there was envy and dislike, but there was something deeper than that. It was as if she saw in them her indifferent negligent children. But more than anything she hated them because they had a life ahead of them, a future ahead, and their days were populated with characters.

  Of course after their quarrels they would make up and gaze into each other’s eyes again. The boy would hold the girl’s hand in his and stroke it gently. His soul was in his eyes. It was evident that this was the girl he loved, would always love, and that life would be good to them. The old woman wished that she could stare into the future and watch what happened. Did they in fact marry? Did they go to the same university? Did they have children? Were they safe from the crooked lightning?

  And then one day they had the most tremendous quarrel and the girl threw the ring on the floor and stalked out. The boy ran after her without thinking about the ring. It rolled under the old lady’s table and rested beside her shoe. She felt it almost burn her foot, sting it. She placed her shoe over it. Then making sure that no one saw her, she bent down and slipped it into her handbag, dropping a spoon on the floor first. She sat there staring out at the sea as if she had done something dramatic, novel, startling. Her heart was beating very fast.

  And then the girl came in in a great hurry. She began immediately to search for the ring on the floor, but couldn’t find it. She hesitated and finally came over to the old lady.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “did you see a ring on the floor?”

  “No,” said the old lady adamantly.

  “Are you sure? I mean … It’s just …” And she blushed. “It fell off my finger. You see it’s very loose. Are you sure you haven’t seen it?”

  Suddenly the old lady said, “Are you accusing me of stealing it or what? I f…ing didn’t see it.”

  The girl blushed and moved away.

  However, the manager heard her swearing and came to inquire what had happened, standing there like Peacock in Are you being served?.

  “She’s f…ing accusing me of stealing her ring. I don’t know about her ring.” The old lady was furious.

  “Keep your voice down,” said the manager, glancing around him at the other customers in the restaurant. “I won’t keep my f…ing voice down,” said the old lady. She was angry with the girl and also with the manager. She had never been a thief in her life. All the years of being allowed to drink coffee in the restaurant wounded her.

  “I won’t keep my f…ing voice down,” she shouted. “In that case you had better leave,” said the manager. She was so angry that she didn’t care about the future. The girl was shifting from foot to foot not knowing what was happening and wanting to leave. Well, she could face reality for once, the upper class bitch, thought the old woman.

  She ran out of the restaurant clutching her worn handbag, and shouting at the manager. She crossed the street and stood staring into the water, simm
ering. She didn’t care what would happen to her now that she had got that off her chest. All her life she had been bowing and scraping to people, taking their orders, and she was fed up to the teeth. It was high time that she told the manager what she thought of him.

  And that girl, tall and invulnerable in her uniform. She looked across at the restaurant from the other side of the street. It said, RONAL MORE, B KER ND C NFECTI NER. The manager and the girl were bending down looking for the ring but they couldn’t find it. Now they were talking to some of the other customers. The girl clearly couldn’t understand why the ring wasn’t on the floor. It was a magical disappearance. Perhaps she feared that love would disappear as inexplicably as the ring had done. But let her learn. Let her learn that disaster could strike out of the blue. Let her learn that the stars couldn’t protect her. In fact the day her husband had been killed her own horoscope had said, “Good day for all practical purposes though it can be a dull one if you are bent on pleasure. So be more enterprising in seeking entertainment.”

  She walked away from the restaurant in the direction of the railway station. Some of her friends would be there drinking. It was as if she had severed connection with her usual world. Now she would not be able to go back to the restaurant. She knew what the manager was like, mean-minded, formal. She had seen many like him in the past. He had the same kind of walk as pompous Captain Peacock.

  She thought at first of throwing the ring into the sea, imagining it dropping into the water, circling, spinning and falling, till it reached the bottom. Spinning in blue. The water near the shore was clear, transparent, and had a greenish tinge. She looked at the seagulls squabbling in a circle. Once she had seen a crab, another time an eel, white and upright in the water like a ghost. The fishing boats were anchored chastely, each showing the reflection of its name in the sea— Sea Wanderer, Tern, and so on.