Vacant Possession

by Hilary Mantel

  She’d had a hard life, Edna said. Her name was Sarah; but everybody called her Poor Mrs. Wilmot.

  Muriel’s second trip to Buckingham Avenue was more enlightening than the first. She had only been hanging around for five minutes when who should she see, coming up the road with her Saturday shopping, but Miss Florence Sidney?

  Miss Sidney had put on weight, and her frizz of hair was now grey. She wore stout shoes, a check skirt, and a woollen scarf with bobbles on it, and she advanced along the street looking neither left nor right. As she passed number 2, going around the corner to her own gate, the front door flew open and a gang of screaming teenage children swarmed down the path and fanned out across the road. Miss Sidney was almost knocked into the hedge. Steadying herself against the gatepost, her face flushed, she called out after the children, “Alistair! For heaven’s sake!”

  “Eff off, you old cow,” the boy called Alistair shouted back; wailing and yodelling, the gang careered around the corner into Lauderdale Road.

  Miss Sidney put down her basket to recover herself. She steadied her breathing, allowed her flush to subside, and picked a few bits of privet from her cardigan. Looking up, she saw Muriel watching her from the other side of the road. Muriel smiled; there was no one she would rather see pushed into a hedge. Miss Sidney’s eyes passed over her, as if she thought it was rude to stare; it was plain that she had no idea who Muriel was. She gave a half-smile, picked up her shopping, and trotted round the corner.

  She doesn’t expect me, Muriel thought. But she ought to expect me.

  Muriel fished in her coat pocket, and brought out a piece of newspaper. She unwrapped it as she crossed the road, took out Mrs. Wilmot’s teeth, and tossed them over the hedge into the Sidneys’ front garden.

  Just as she was rounding the corner, the front door of number 2 opened again. Colin Sidney came out and loped down the path towards his car; a big fair man, balding, lean and fit. She watched him jump into his car and shoot away from the kerb. He did not even notice her. She raised a hand after him; like someone giving a signal to a hangman.

  Mrs. Wilmot was being retired. She had been at the factory for thirty years; today was her last day.

  “Course,” she said, in her usual dead little whisper, “I’ll not get my pension, I’m not sixty. Course, I’ll get my benefit. Course, I’ll have to put in for it. Course, I don’t really know.” She picked up a corner of her overall and wiped her left eye.

  “It’s a bloody shame,” Edna said. “Ripping’s all she’s got. Here, love, we’ll give you a send-off.”

  “Course, they gave me a Teasmaid,” Poor Mrs. Wilmot said. She wiped her other eye and sniffed.

  “Bugger the Teasmaid, we’ve got a lovely presentation to give you. We’ll give it you down the pub, it’s Friday night, isn’t it?”

  “Course, the pot was broken,” Mrs. Wilmot whimpered. “Course, I didn’t complain.”

  “I wish you’d told me,” Edna said, “I’d have complained all right. I don’t know, this place is going down the drain, you can’t leave anything about, people’s teeth being nicked out of their own handbags, they want bloody hanging. You could do with a new set, you should have asked for one, you should get compensation.”

  “No point really,” Mrs. Wilmot said dejectedly. “I have to get my cards. I have to go to the office. I don’t like.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t like?”

  “Going to the office. I don’t like.”

  “I’ll get your stuff for you,” Muriel offered.

  “Oh, would you?” A tiny hope shone out of Poor Mrs. Wilmot. “Muriel, ask them for my wages as well, lovey.” The next moment her situation overwhelmed her again; she looked away and sniffed, and soon the tears were coursing down her cheeks.

  “Off again,” Edna said. “Come on, duck, pull yourself together.”

  “Course, you can understand it,” Poor Mrs. Wilmot said. “Course they don’t like me coughing on the tobacco. I appreciate that. Course I do.”

  They arrived at the Swan of Avon just after opening time. Edna organised the moving of tables, commandeered extra chairs, and herded them into the Snug. “Let’s have a kitty, girls,” she called. The girls fumbled in their bags and tossed five-pound notes into the centre of the table. “No, not you, love,” Edna said to Poor Mrs. Wilmot. “This is your day, duck. Come on now, wipe your eyes. That’s it, give us a smile. Have a go on the Space Invaders.” She bustled her way to the bar, shouting through an open doorway to some male cronies from the Hogshead who were ordering up their first weekend pints in the public bar.

  “Eh up, Edna!” the men shouted; and other badinage. “All girls together, is it, all girls together? Room for one more, is there, room for one more?”

  A warm beery miasma drifted over towards the noisy party in the Snug. The weekend free-issue was opened, and soon the air turned blue with smoke. “Give over, you cheeky monkeys,” Edna yelled across the landlord’s head. The men roared back at her. Edna trilled with laughter, waved her arms. Her eyebrows shot up, her face reddened. Muriel watched her from the pub door. Her every gesture was florid, packed with life; her voice was as commanding as the factory hooter.

  Muriel came up behind her. “I’ve been to the office for Mrs. Wilmot’s forms.”

  “Good lass!” Edna cried. “Have you got them?”

  “Yes, and I gave her the wages.”

  “Righto then, you can help me carry.” She thrust a tin tray crammed with dazzling drinks into Muriel’s hands. “Here you go.”

  “Oh ho, Passion Cocktail,” yelled the men from the Public, crowing in their mirth, and swaying backwards and forwards on the bar rail.

  “Don’t buckle my rail, lads,” the landlord beseeched. Sweat started out of his forehead at the strain of keeping up with Edna’s drinks order. “Can you make a Harvey Wallbanger?” Edna asked him.

  There were more than thirty women now packed into the Snug, perched on each other’s knees, flicking peanuts at each other, rocking and shrieking with laughter, and addressing the odd shout of encouragement to Poor Mrs. Wilmot. The younger women had stripped off their overalls and bundled them into their shopping bags, and were heading back from the Ladies; “Hutch up, hutch up,” they cried. “Where’s Edna with them drinks, I don’t know, taken the kitty and run off to Monte Carlo!”

  “Course,” said Mrs. Wilmot under her breath, “it was good of Muriel to fetch me doings from the office. Course I’m not sure what I ought to have, I ought to have forms; course, I’m not sure.”

  “Cheer up,” said Leslie-Anne, digging her hard in the ribs. “What are you mumbling on about now?”

  Caught unawares, Mrs. Wilmot lurched forward and began to cough violently. With cries of alarm the women nearest to her slapped her on the back. “Here’s Edna with them drinks,” Maureen called, and Edna began to pass the order over their heads: “Six Pernods and blackcurrants, a port and lemon for Poor Mrs. Wilmot, seven Tía Marías and Cokes; and a Piña Colada for Yvonne.”

  The noise level rose, the blue fug thickened and drifted, cocktail cherries rolled gaily across the tables. All around Poor Mrs. Wilmot, her colleagues were swaying from side to side on their chairs and stools, singing “Y Viva España.” As the debris around her accumulated, her timid little hand shot out and began to sort the cigarette packets, piling the cellophane and foil to one side; as the merriment grew, she looked about her, a swift glance from side to side; seeing herself unobserved, she seized up a packet, emptied it with one practised movement, and swept the cigarettes to the left of the table, while the papers went to the right. They had reached the third round of drinks by then, and her eyes were watering more than ever; never the centre of attention in her life before, she shook inwardly, her head nodded, she looked about her and showed her gums in a frequent wavering smile.

  “Poor Mrs. Wilmot’s enjoying herself,” Leslie-Anne said, and returned to her argument with Edna; a friend from Dispatch had left to pursue matrimony full-time, and Edna said anyone was
a flaming idiot who gave up a good packing job with three million out of work.

  “Let’s hope she gets something out of him,” Edna said. “She got nothing out of the last one.”

  “She did. She got shag-pile carpets. You had to take your shoes off when you went in her house.”

  “Bugger that for a game of coconuts,” Edna said, unconvinced; it was an expression much in vogue among the rippers. “She took on that Norman when he was a cripple, and he used to sit in his wheelchair and hit her with his stick. She’s too soft-hearted. This’n’ll give her the run-around. He started giving his first wife’s stuff away before her body was out of the house. He went round after the funeral and proposed to Trudie Thorpe’s daughter.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “He did! Anyway, he gave her a sideboard.”

  Muriel listened. This is how their affairs are managed, she thought. Lust, assault; the exchange of furniture. These women had life at their fingertips. She watched Edna, expostulating, tossing the fourth Export Lager down her throat. Her eyes shone, her cheeks shone, and even her bared teeth. I could practise Edna, Muriel thought, I could crack her in one night. She felt in her bag for Mrs. Wilmot’s papers, for the documents that tied her colleague to the working world. It was six-thirty now, and some of the men were beginning to drift homewards, carried out into the wet blue street by the jeers of their mates; a game of darts was in progress, and the women never thought of moving. Their faces were flushed and their eyes alight; Raquel’s mascara ran in black trails down her cheeks, and Leslie-Anne lurched from her chair and staggered into the Ladies to throw up. Edna came back from the bar with a handful of packets of crisps; she stuck another cigarette in her mouth. “Bugger these free-issue,” she said to Maureen. “Have one of these Balkan Sobranie. I’ve ordered us all pie and peas.”

  Presently the pianist arrived. Freddo lurched through from the Public, a gangling Welshman with a solemn face and a loud check jacket. He leaned on the piano and somebody passed him up a pint. “I left my heart,” he sang, “in San Francisco.” Poor Mrs. Wilmot tipped back her head and laughed her stifled laugh. Suddenly she dived into her handbag and pulled out her wage packet; tore it open, and scattered its contents onto the table.

  “Let it all go,” she wheezed, “what does it matter? Let’s enjoy ourselves while we can, girls! Let’s have one of them Bacardis, and get one for Muriel!”

  It was half-past eight before the party broke up. Muriel took care of her bag; she took care of the expressions on her face, and of a few ideas that were beginning to run through her head. Mrs. Wilmot was half carried through the doors, supported under her elbows by Maureen and the green-faced Leslie-Anne. Outside on the pavement, with a cry of “oh, blimey,” Leslie-Anne dropped her and sped to the gutter, where she bent over and retched. It had been a lovely evening. Poor Mrs. Wilmot staggered back against the wall. Over her pinny she wore the long string of cultured pearls which her workmates had given her to remember them by. Her eyes closed. Her life was over, she thought: she was entirely slipping from view. She hummed softly to herself: “Where little cable cars, Climb halfway to the stars…” Soundless, she laughed.

  As soon as she saw Mr. Kowalski and his house, Muriel knew it was where she must live. It was a big house, rambling and damp and dark; a permanent chill hung over the rooms. It had been condemned long ago, put on a schedule for demolition, but it seemed likely that before its turn came it would demolish itself, quietly crumbling and rotting away, with its wet rot and dry rot and its collection of parasites and moulds. There were only two lodgers, herself and a young girl, attracted by the card in the newsagent’s window, by the low rent and by the faint spidery foreign hand setting out the terms in violet ink.

  Two days went by, after Mrs. Wilmot’s party. During those two days she practised; then she called on Mr. K.

  She stood on the doorstep, presenting an altogether lacklustre appearance. “I hear you’ve got a room to rent,” she said. “I could do with a room.”

  Mr. Kowalski stood inside the hallway. A low wattage but unshaded bulb cast upon his caller a mottled and flickering pattern of shadows. “Step where I can see you,” he ordered.

  The visitor complied, turning up her sunken face. Her hands were blue with the raw autumn cold. Her mouse-coloured coat with its shawl collar reached almost to her ankles; her feet stuck out, monstrously huge in holey bedroom slippers.

  “Here’s me stuff,” she said faintly. She indicated a bundle behind her, a battered old suitcase tied up with a plastic clothesline.

  Mr. K. appraised her. His eyes were suspicious, sunk into a roll of fat. He stuck his thumbs into his belt, and glared at her in the swaying light; a meek and harmless creature, dowdy and friendless, and with a terrible cough. “Come in,” he said, falling back. “Give me your baggage to port. Come in, you poor old woman, come in.”

  Kowalski, she learned, was only a version of his name. The real one had fewer vowels and more of the lesser-used consonants in proximity. He had learned English from the World Service, picked up on his illegal receiving set; latterly, from the instructions on packets of frozen food.

  For some years Mr. K. had been a shift worker at the sausage-and-cooked-meats factory. His shift was permanent nights; he preferred it that way. He had a grey skin, for he never saw the daylight, and sad nocturnal pupils to his eyes. His moustache was ragged and bristly, and he wore trousers of some thick coarse fabric like railway workers used to wear, held up with a thick leather belt; he wore an undershirt without a collar, and over this in extremely cold weather a sagging pullover of an indeterminate grey-green-blue shade. His figure was gross, his steps were slow, he mumbled as he walked, and shifted his little eyes this way and that. He dreamed of dugouts and barbed wire, of the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun and of corpses that came to light with the April thaw; of partisans, of decimated villages, of pine forests where wolves and wild boar ran. He did not know whether the dreams were his, or those of novelists, or of the long-slaughtered school-teachers who had taught him to sing folk songs and turn somersaults on a polished floor.

  At Fulmers Moor the patients had minded pigs. The pigs stared out across the furrowed ground at the traffic going by to the city. Mothers would point them out to their children: look, darling, pigs. At the back of the field stood the men, loose-mouthed, their boots encrusted with clay and muck, the feed buckets swinging from their great red hands. When the children pointed to them, excitedly, their mothers pulled them away from the car windows.

  When Muriel saw Mr. K. he reminded her powerfully of these men. And perhaps he has tenants, she thought. She noticed how he tapped the walls, rattled the doorknobs as he perambulated about the four floors of his house; how he peered into dark corners, how he kept a knobkerrie within reach when he sat down to his bread and marmalade at the kitchen table. Home from home, she thought.

  Inside Mr. K.’s kitchen, time had stood still. Modern conveniences were few or none. There was an old porcelain laundry sink in the corner, with a cold tap. There was a kitchen range, and most of Mr. K.’s leisure hours were spent in tending it, tipping in coal and riddling it with the rake and pulling out the dampers. It was exhausting work, and filmed his forehead with sweat, but it did not seem to have any effect on the temperature.

  “You want work?” Mr. K. enquired gruffly. “Poor old woman, you too sick to work.”

  He was in his way a kindly man. “Sit down,” he invited her. “Brew of tea for you.”

  When the tea was poured out and the sugar bowl passed, Mr. K. reached across the table. He snatched his lodger’s mug from between her hands, and deposited his own before her; sat back to watch the effect, his eyes scouring her face. She picked it up and tasted it. “More sugar,” she said, helping herself. Mr. K. seemed satisfied. He blew on his own tea and took a sip, and dabbed at his moustache.

  “Go to hospital,” he advised. “Old folks’ hospital. She’s crying out for staff.”

  His lodger shook her head. “They’ll never take
me on. A poor old woman like me.”

  “Temporary they take you on,” Mr. K. said. “Temporary, subject to union. You try. You see. You get a nice job, my dear old lady. Bring the bedpans, wash the floors, for those of greater age.”

  “I’m used to hospitals,” she said, “I could give it a try. Course, I could go charring as well. If I saw a nice ad for a private house. You’d have to write me a letter to apply, I’m not ever so good at writing. Course,” added Poor Mrs. Wilmot, “I could put my own signature.”

  Later that week Mr. K. stopped her on the stairs.

  “I heard a voice,” he said accusingly.

  She stopped, caught her breath, coughed a little. “My poor side,” she said, rubbing her ribs. “What voice was this then?”

  “Female voice. You get visitors?”

  “I’m all alone in the world. Course,” she suggested, “it could be her from the top floor.”

  “Miss Anne-Marie? That’s a quiet female! Goes out for her giro, comes in, no trouble, no cooking smells.”