Vacant Possession

by Hilary Mantel

  But worse than all this was the conviction, running all afternoon at the back of his mind, that Isabel Field was about to re-enter his life. It was hardly reasonable to suppose that his Isabel was the one Suzanne spoke of, or was it? He did not feel very sure what was reasonable. Blind chance, he knew, could catch you a painful blow with her white stick.

  The last time he had seen Isabel it had been a windy day, spring 1975, lunchtime, outside the coroner’s court. Standing in the municipal car park, chilled from waiting, they had exchanged a few words less about themselves and their lack of a future than about the upsetting events which had brought them to the inquest, and which had occurred so recently in Evelyn Axon’s hall. (It was his own hall now, of course, but he thought of it as a different house.) Though the verdict had been natural causes, a miasma of unease hung over the business; these had been Isabel’s clients, and she had failed to foresee or prevent whatever had led up to the old woman’s death. There had been bruises on the corpse, weals, fingermarks. It was more than likely that she had been beaten by her daughter—half mad or half-witted—that reclusive slab of a woman, hunched into the shadows, whose features Colin could never recall. Whatever the truth of it—and it hardly mattered now that the old woman was dead—Isabel’s distaste for the affair had made her resign. “I’m out of it now,” she had said.

  And she had told him—he remembered the occasion perfectly, as if it were yesterday—that she intended to go in for banking; it was in the family. “It will be less complicated,” she had said.

  For months after their break-up, he had been in the habit of taking the car out in the evenings and driving to the quiet street where Isabel shared a bungalow with her retired father. Once he had even parked opposite, waiting where he used to wait to collect her on their few and nervous nights out. But the blank façade of the house had told him nothing he did not already know.

  Once or twice a year since then, he had made a point of driving down that street. He never saw her. No doubt she was long gone. A FOR SALE sign had been planted in the front garden. She had married, moved away; her father (he supposed) was dead. She had gone south, emigrated, spun off into outer space.

  Then they had moved to Buckingham Avenue themselves, to the dilapidated house that had come so cheap. All his weekends were devoted to DIY. On weekday evenings he would stumble about in the twilit garden, a stone inside his chest. It was like being consigned to purgatory, and still expected to go on schoolmastering.

  But his heart was harder now. The sclerotic process had taken him over entirely and made him no longer the man he was, but a much more friable, brittle organism, with a shortened lifespan for any emotion. He had no feelings, since then; none that lasted, or meant anything.

  Sylvia’s voice broke in on his thoughts. “Give me your keys, Colin. I’ll drive. You look shaken up.”

  “…Actions which,” said Sister, “in a younger and ambulant pervert would no doubt lead to criminal proceedings. Only just before the weekend he was found with his hand up the skirt of one of the cleaners, an elderly and respectable person called Mrs. Wilmot.”

  “I feel ashamed,” Isabel said.

  “Don’t blame yourself, Mrs. Ryan,” Sister said, in a tone which suggested that of course she should do so.

  “He’s in what they call his second childhood. Maybe I should have brought him up better.”

  “The vices do become compounded,” the nurse said complacently. “The eccentricities, the little tics. It’s in the babe in arms, Mrs. Ryan, and at the end of a life, that we see the true character revealed. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

  “No thanks. But in view of this behaviour of his, wouldn’t it be better to have him on an open ward where you can see what he’s up to? Surely you’re increasing the problem by keeping him in a private room?”

  “Why, bless you, Mrs. Ryan, your father has no compunction about what he does in public.”

  “He disgusts me,” Isabel said. “He’d be better dead. I wish he were.”

  A token reproof came and went on Sister’s face. Isabel’s voice was frayed; it quivered. Leaning forward to replace the file, Sister caught a whiff of the alcohol on her breath. Only seven o’clock in the evening, and not the first time, either. A young woman like that, with a husband and every advantage. She had room, to talk about disgust.

  When they got home, Colin went straight upstairs. He could not get Isabel out of his mind. Sylvia was in the kitchen making some coffee, and Florence was with her, lamenting the future and the lives they would lead if the hospital decided to pursue its intention of discharging its long-term patients into the care of their relatives. Poor Florence: mass unemployment had saved her career, and now another item of state policy was threatening to undo her. It wouldn’t happen, Sylvia was saying; the old lass was too far gone, they could not discharge her while she thought she was May of Teck, and given a week or two she would no doubt lapse into her usual vegetable state.

  Colin met Suzanne, hanging about aimlessly at the top of the stairs. “There’s no point skulking around,” he told her. “Don’t you want to know what’s happened with your grandma? I suppose you take no interest.”

  Suzanne’s eyes were swollen and puffy, and her lips were raw, as if someone had hit her. “What now?” Colin asked.

  “I phoned him. Jim.”

  “And what did Jim say?”

  Fresh tears began instantly to trickle down her cheeks and off the end of her nose. She put out the tip of her tongue and tasted one, as if sampling the quality of her grievance. “I can guess,” Colin said. “Why don’t you have a lie-down? I’ll see you later.”

  He went into his bedroom and closed the door. He sat down on the bed, catching the faint rise and fall of the women’s voices below, waiting for a moment in case his daughter burst in after him. When he heard her bedroom door close, he stood up and went over to his chest of drawers. He slid open the small drawer, top left, and groped about, searching for his photograph. After a moment he pulled the drawer out fully and began to turn over his possessions, slowly at first and then with an increasing sense of urgency. Still nothing. He bent and peered into the back of the drawer, then slid it out completely and upended it onto the bed. Systematically he worked through his worn socks and unworn ties. There was an old address book, long superseded, its leaves curling at the edges, full of the large looped handwriting of his earlier self. He took it by the spine and held it up, shaking it to see if the photograph would fall out, but the only result was a yellow scrap of paper. He picked it up: PRIZE DRAW, CHRISTMAS FAYRE 1963, ST. DAVID’S SCHOOL, ARLINGTON ROAD. 1st Prize, Bottle of Whisky, 2nd Prize, Bottle of Sherry, 3rd Prize, Box of Chocolates. His heart beating faster, he began to fling his possessions into little piles on the duvet cover, and when this disclosed nothing he began to toss them into the wastepaper basket, the packs of shoelaces and the small predecimal coins and the bottles of aftershave, all unspent, all unopened, all the detritus of a half-used life. Soon the wastepaper basket was over-flowing, and there was almost nothing left on the bed. What there was left, he threw back into the drawer, picked it up, and replaced it. No sooner had he closed it than he opened it and searched it again, but the lining paper now showed its white spaces, there was no possibility…he tore the paper out, patted his hand over the wood. Nothing, still nothing. It had gone then. He scooped up the scraps of lining paper from his feet and compacted them into a ball. He was about to toss it into the rubbish, but instead, clinging to a last hope, he overturned the wastepaper basket onto the floor. The cap of one of the aftershave bottles came off and rolled under the wardrobe. Sitting on the end of the bed, bent double, he sifted through the rubbish at his feet. Nothing again. So it was not there. Gone. So Sylvia had taken it. He felt little need or inclination to raise his head from between his knees. Why not just stay like that? At least for some hours.

  He had no idea, of course, when she might possibly have removed the photograph. He had not been in the habit of checking that it was there. He
thought it was a fragment of Isabel, salvaged and indestructible, but it was not indestructible at all. He had not been in the habit of taking it out to look at it; he had been in the habit of knowing it was there.

  He had been a fool then; he knew that Sylvia might come upon it. It was more likely than not. But somewhere inside, perhaps he hoped that Sylvia would be redeemed, that finding the photograph and dimly comprehending its meaning, she would no more remove it than one would remove flowers from an enemy’s grave. Survival was the only victory; surely she would see that.

  But this was unrealistic. Whoever thought there was anything dim about Sylvia’s comprehension? Had she burned it, he wondered, or torn it up? Or had she done neither, but laid it aside for her private consideration? And what would she do to him now?

  Slowly he sat upright, letting his hands lie loosely on his knees, gazing at himself in the dressing-table mirror. He formulated a phrase or two: the last thread of my aspirations has been cut. He felt self-conscious, rocking this startling grief, while the Old Spice soaked into the carpet. It’s all right for you to laugh, he said angrily to the face in the mirror, but it matters to me, it matters a lot. He knew he was not formed for tragedy. Everything he had done and thought had been contained within the streets, the gardens, the motorway loop of this sad English town. But why did he need a wider sphere of action? The town was in itself a universe, a universe in a closed box. There was no escape, no point of arrival, and no point of departure. Every action, however banal, opened into a shrapnel blast of possibilities; each possibility tail-ended or nose-dived into every other, so that there was no thought, no wish, and no perception that did not in the end come home to its begetter. He slid forward onto his knees, meaning to investigate the stain that was growing at his feet. Of course, I could pray, he thought.

  It’s me, Colin Sidney; it must be, oh, ten years, God, since we were last in touch, but what’s that against the aeons? I asked an awful lot, a decade ago, but now all I want’s a bit of peace; isn’t Peace your specialty? There was no answer, just a faint chatter and rustle, the sound of pigeons coming home to roost. He took out his handkerchief and began to dab at the broadloom.

  CHAPTER 6

  Breakfast time again. Sylvia slapped some diet margarine onto a minute square of toast and slowly spread it out. “Do you know what I read? I read that women of my generation had four children because that’s how many the Queen had. Subconsciously, you see, we looked up to her as a role model. What do you think of that?”

  “I’ve never heard such a load of tripe,” Colin said.

  His wife sat ruminating for a moment; for it was Point 9 of her 12-Point Diet Plan to eat at a leisurely pace and make each mouthful last. “But it might be true, mightn’t it? I mean, a couple of years ago what would Suzanne have done? Straight off for a termination. But now…fertility’s the in thing.”

  “I see what you’re driving at. You don’t find Princess Di nipping off to the abortion clinic, do you? You don’t find her popping out for a quick vacuum extraction.”

  “Exactly.”

  “There could be something in it.” Strange, Colin thought, how the preoccupations of the sane reflect those of the insane. And vice versa, of course.

  At the second phone call Jim had softened his line a little. He had stopped offering Suzanne the money to terminate her pregnancy, and told her to do what she bloody well liked. Suzanne did not repeat his exact words to her parents, or his sentiments, even inexactly. She was convinced that once Jim had got over the immediate shock, he would rally round and have a serious talk with his mad wife about an imminent separation.

  On Tuesday morning, when Muriel arrived to clean at Buckingham Avenue, she stepped inside and found the atmosphere instantly familiar. The curtains were not drawn back properly, and the place was half in darkness. Upstairs, a long shadow slid across the landing. She heard a door slam shut. Sylvia sat at the kitchen table, slumped over a cooling cup of coffee. “Help yourself,” she said. “The kettle’s just boiled. The milk’s sour, though.”

  “You’re drinking milk, Mrs. Sidney?”

  “Why not?” her employer said. “What does it matter? We’re all getting old. I’m not going to keep my figure, I’m just fooling myself.” Sylvia looked away. Her mouth was set in a thin hard line. “My daughter’s pregnant.” She propped her elbow on the table and sucked despondently at a thumb nail. “Lizzie, you haven’t got a fag on you, have you?”

  “Oh no, Mrs. Sidney, I never touch them.”

  “Don’t you?” Sylvia’s voice was dull. “I thought you had all the vices, duck.”

  “Which one is it, Karen?”

  “Christ no, she’s only thirteen.”

  “They say you can never tell these days.”

  “It’s true, you can’t. Better get to the shops, I suppose. Need anything?”

  “No, but thank you all the same for asking. What a good woman you are, Mrs. Sidney! It’s a privilege to wash down your fitments.”

  Sylvia smiled weakly. How odd the woman was. “But how could you be any other,” Lizzie asked. “Now that you see so much of the Reverend Teller? Oh, and by the way…”

  Sylvia looked displeased now. “Yes?”

  The daily was fishing in the pocket of her apron. “I saw Mr. Sidney, God bless him, he was rooting through the dustbin. Is this what he was after?” She held out her palm. On it were the two halves of a photograph. “Picture of Mrs. Jim Ryan,” Lizzie said.

  “What?” Sylvia stared down at it, horrified. “Picture of who?”

  “It’s a lady called Mrs. Ryan.” I’ve seen her at the hospital, she was going to add, but bit it back in time. Her night job was another life, wasn’t it?

  Sylvia’s fingers trembled. She took the photograph from Lizzie. She tried to fit the halves together; the girl’s face, dreadfully bisected, stared back at her. There was a knowing look in each eye.

  “It can’t be. You’ve got the name wrong.”

  “Oh no, madam, I’m acquainted with this lady, I couldn’t make a mistake.”

  “You’re quite sure? You’re quite positive, are you, who this is?”

  “On my mother’s life.”

  “There’s no need to go to that extreme,” Sylvia snapped. Her mind groped, very slowly, around the possibilities. “I want to know if you’re quite certain.”

  “I told you. The old girlfriend, is she? Well, love makes the world go round, Mrs. Sidney. There’s only one reason the gentlemen keep pictures.”

  “Shut up,” Sylvia said. “That has nothing to do with you.”

  “Mr. Sidney seemed upset. Frantic, he was, throwing the rubbish about, got all yoghurt pots over his feet. I knew he was after it, but—” she gave Sylvia a broad wink—“us girls have got to stick together.”

  I’d like to sack you on the spot, Sylvia thought; except that if we’re going to have a baby on our hands, I daren’t. “Now listen,” she said. “You don’t mention this to anyone, right? Not to Mr. Sidney. Not to Suzanne. Understand?”

  “Clear as day.”

  “So watch it.”

  At least she doesn’t know the whole story, Sylvia thought. She’s put a name to the face, but she doesn’t know about the complications. And I won’t tell Colin I know; not yet, anyhow. “Go and do the bathroom,” she said. She looked down at the photograph again. It seemed to swim before her eyes. A sudden pain lanced through her right eye, her nose, her jaw. She was going to have a crashing migraine, any minute now.

  Going up the stairs with her sponge and her bottle of nonscratch scouring cream, Muriel felt an intense gratification. There was no need to connive with destiny; the family were managing nicely for themselves. The air was choked with tension and spite, and on the landing all the doors were closed; it was just like Mother’s day. The children were locked in their rooms, sniffing glue and crying. From behind the doors came the soft sounds of breathing. It was nothing now but a matter of time. There would be strange pains in the dark bedrooms, despair in the breakfast roo
m where Mother’s kitchen used to be. Food getting cold, food getting bad; soon the lightbulbs would go, and no one would bother to replace them. The bills would go unpaid, and dirty milk bottles would stand in a row on the sink. Sylvia’s hips would grow to 44 inches, as was their nature, and she would waddle and roll about the house, and hide when the doorbell rang. Just as Colin’s athletic joints would swell and crack with rheumatism, so autumn moisture would crack and swell the plaster and brick of the new kitchen extension. He would take to drink, perhaps lose his position. Sanctimonious Flo would be found out in some lewdness, and Suzanne’s untended child would wail from the back garden, bleating for the peace of the clouded water from which it came. The evergreens would grow, blocking out the light at the back of the house; foul necessities would incubate in the dark. Soon cracks would appear in the walls, and a green-black mould would grow along the cracks and spread its spores through the kitchen cupboards, through the wardrobes and the bedlinen. Given time, the roof of the extension would fall in. Where the lean-to had stood, the house would be open to the sky. Rubbish would fester uncollected, and the rat would be back. The girls, ostracised by society, would fall prey to crippling diseases. Alistair would be taken away to prison. No member of the household would fail to see their lives and motives laid bare. Their trivial domestic upsets would turn soon to confusion, abandonment, and rage. Acts of violence would occur; there would be bodies. Could they prevent it? She didn’t think so. There was Resurrection, in various foul forms; but what came after? Now Muriel’s rules were in operation, and the Sidneys were entirely in eclipse.