Collected Short Fiction (32 page)

I never got used to the wet paint and one day, as I came into the hall, wondering in my exasperation whether I shouldn’t wipe the paint off on to the wallpaper, the Cookseys’ door opened and I saw Mr Cooksey.

‘'Ave a drink,’ he said. ‘Cocktail.’

I feared Mr Cooksey’s cocktails: they were too obviously one of the perquisites of his calling. But I went in, wiping my fingers on my evening paper. The room smelled of paint and linseed oil.

Mrs Cooksey sat in her armchair and beamed at me. Her hands were resting a little too demurely on her lap. She clearly had something to show.

The cage on the sewing machine was covered with a blue cloth, part of one of Mrs Cooksey’s old dresses. It was late evening, still light outside, but dark inside: the Cookseys didn’t like to use more electricity than was strictly necessary. Mr Cooksey passed around his cocktails. Mrs Cooksey refused with a shake of the head. I accepted but delayed sipping, Mr Cooksey sipped.

Muted rustlings and tumblings and cheeps came from behind the blue cloth. Mr and Mrs Cooksey sat silent and listened. I listened.

‘Got a new one,’ Mr Cooksey said, sipping his cocktail and smacking his lips with a little
pop-pop
sound.

‘He came into the garden too?’ I asked.

‘It’s a
she
!’ Mrs Cooksey cried.

‘
Pop-pop
. Ten bob,’ said Mr Cooksey. ‘Man wanted twelve and six.’

‘And we’ve got a nesting-box for her too.’

‘But we didn’t pay for that, Bess.’

Mrs Cooksey went and stood by the cage. She rested her hands on the blue cloth, delaying the unveiling. ‘She’s the daintiest little thing.’

‘Yellow,’ said Mr Cooksey.

‘Just the sort of mate for Greenie.’ And, with a flourish, Mrs Cooksey lifted the blue cloth from the cage.

It wasn’t the cage I had known. It was a bigger, cruder thing, made from wire netting, with rudimentary embellishments – just two bars supported on the wire netting. And I saw Greenie alone. He had composed himself to sleep. Yellow I didn’t see.

Mrs Cooksey giggled, enjoying my disappointment. ‘She’s there all right. But
in her nesting-box
!’ I saw a small wooden box hanging at the back of the cage. Mrs Cooksey tapped it. ‘Come out, Yellow. Let Uncle have a look at you. Come out, come out. We know where you are.’ Through the round hole of the box a little yellow head popped out, restlessly turning this way and that. Mrs Cooksey tapped the box again, and Yellow slipped out of the box into the cage.

Yellow was smaller than Greenie or Bluey. She wandered about the cage fussily, inquisitively. She certainly had no intention of going to sleep just yet, and she wasn’t going to let Greenie sleep either. She hopped up to where he stood on his bar, his head hunched into his breast, and pecked at him. Greenie shook himself but didn’t open his eyes. Yellow gave him a push. Perhaps it was chivalry – though I had never credited Greenie with that – or perhaps he was just too sleepy. But Greenie didn’t fight back. He yielded and yielded until he could move no further. Then he went down to the other bar. Yellow followed. When she had dislodged him a second time she lost interest in him and went back into her nesting-box.

‘D’you see?’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘She’s interested. The man at the shop says that when they’re interested you can expect eggs in ten days.’

‘Twelve, Bess.’

‘He told
me
ten.’

I tried to get them off the subject. I said, ‘They’ve got a new cage.’

‘Mr Cooksey made it.’

Mr Cooksey pop-popped.

He had painted it too. With the blue paint.

Yellow pushed her head through the hole of her box.

‘Oh, she
is
interested.’ Mrs Cooksey replaced the blue cloth on the cage. ‘We mustn’t be naughty. Leave them alone.’

‘One of my cleaners,’ Mr Cooksey said, pausing and throwing the possessive adjective into relief, ‘one of my cleaners keeps chickens and turkeys. Makes a packet at Christmas. Nabsolute packet.’

Mrs Cooksey said, ‘I wouldn’t like to sell any of my little Greenies and Yellows.’

Abruptly I remembered. ‘Where’s Bluey?’

I don’t think Mrs Cooksey liked being reminded. She showed me where Bluey’s cage was, on the floor, overshadowed by an armchair and the bookcase that had few books and many china animals. Alone among the luxurious furnishings of his cage, Bluey stood still, on one foot, his feathers ruffled, his head sunk low.

‘I can’t throw him out, can I?’ Mrs Cooksey shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’ve done my best for him.’

The love life didn’t agree with Greenie.

‘She’s taming him,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

He had certainly quietened down.

‘P’raps he’s missing Bluey,’ Mr Cooksey said.

‘Hark at him,’ said Mrs Cooksey.

Yellow was still eager, restless, inquisitive, going in and out of her box. Mrs Cooksey showed me how cleverly the box had been made: you could slide out the back to see if there were eggs. She counted the days.

‘Seven days now.’

‘Nine, Bess.’

‘Seven.’

Then: ‘Greenie’s playing the fool,’ Mr Cooksey said.

‘Look who’s talking,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

Two days later she met me in the hall and said, ‘Something’s happened to Greenie.’

I went to look. Greenie had the same unhealthy stillness as Bluey now: his feathers were ruffled, his eyes half-closed, his head sunk into his breast. Yellow fussed about him, not belligerently or playfully, but in puzzlement.

‘She
loves
him, d’you see? I’ve tried to feed him. Milk from an eye-dropper. But he isn’t taking a thing. Tell me where it hurts, Greenie. Tell Mummy where.’

It was Friday. When Mrs Cooksey rang up the RSPCA they told her to bring Greenie in on Monday. All during the weekend Greenie deteriorated. Mrs Cooksey did her best. Although it was warm she kept the electric fire going all the time, a luxury the Cookseys denied themselves even in winter. A towel was always warming in front of the fire. Greenie was wrapped in another towel.

On Monday Mrs Cooksey wrapped Greenie in a clean towel and took him to the doctor. He prescribed a fluid of some sort and warned Mrs Cooksey against giving Greenie milk.

‘He said something about poison,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘As though I would want to do anything to my Greenie. But you should have seen the doctor. Doctor! He was just a boy. He told me to bring Greenie again on Friday. That’s four days.’

When I came in next evening, my fingers stained with blue paint from the door, Mrs Cooksey met me in the hall. I followed her into the room.

‘Greenie’s dead,’ she said. She was very calm.

The door opened authoritatively and Mr Cooksey came in, mackintoshed and bowler-hatted.

‘Greenie’s dead,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

‘Pop-pop.’
Mr Cooksey took off his hat and mackintosh and rested them carefully on the chair next to the sideboard.

In the silence that followed I didn’t look at the Cookseys or the cage on the sewing machine. It was dark in the corner where Bluey’s cage was and it was some moments before I could see things clearly. Bluey’s cage was empty. I looked up at the sewing machine. He was in the cage with Yellow; he drooped on the floor, eyes closed, one swollen foot raised. Yellow paid him no attention. She fussed about from bar to bar, with a faint continuous rustle. Then she slipped through the hole into the nesting-box and was silent.

‘She’s still
interested,
’ Mr Cooksey said. He looked at Bluey. ‘You never know.’

‘It’s no good,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘She loved Greenie.’ Her old woman’s face had broken up and she was crying.

Mr Cooksey opened doors on the sideboard, noisily looking for cocktails.

Mrs Cooksey blew her nose. ‘Oh, they’re like children. You get so fond of them.’

It was hard to think of something to say. I said, ‘We were all
fond of Greenie, Mrs Cooksey. I was fond of him and I am sure Mr Cooksey was too.’

‘Pop-pop.’

‘Him? He doesn’t care. He’s
tough
. D’you know, he had a look at Greenie this morning. Told me he looked better. But he’s always like that. Look at him. Nothing worries him.’

‘Not true, Bess. Was a trific shock. Trific.’

Yellow never came out of her nesting-box. She died two days later and Mrs Cooksey buried her in the garden, next to Greenie. I saw the cage and the nesting-box, smashed, on the heap of old wood Mr Cooksey kept in the garden shed.

In the Cookseys’ sitting-room Bluey and his cage took their place again on the sewing machine. Slowly, week by week, Bluey improved. The time came when he could stand on both feet, when he could shuffle an inch or two on the floor of his cage. But his feet were never completely well again, and the growths on his beak didn’t disappear. The trapezes never swung and the ferris wheel was still.

It must have been three months later. I went down one Saturday morning to pay Mrs Cooksey for the milk. I had to get some change and she had to hunt about for her glasses, then for the vase in which she kept small change. She poured out buttons from one vase, pins from another, fasteners from a third.

‘Poor old lady,’ she kept on muttering – that was how she had taken to speaking of herself. She fumbled about with more vases, then stopped, twisted her face into a smile and held out her open palm towards me. On it I saw two latch keys and a small white skull, finished, fragile.

‘Greenie or Yellow,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t really tell you which. The sparrows dug it up.’

We both looked at Bluey in his cage.

1957

WE HEARD ABOUT
the Dakins before they arrived. ‘They’re the perfect tenants,’ Mrs Cooksey, the landlady, said. ‘Their landlady brought them to me personally. She says she’s sorry to lose them, but she’s leaving London and taking over a hotel in Benson.’

The Dakins moved in so quietly it was some days before I realized they were in the house. On Saturday and Sunday I heard sounds of washing and scrubbing and carpet-sweeping from the flat above. On Monday there was silence again.

Once or twice that week I saw them on the steps. Mrs Dakin was about forty, tall and thin, with a sweet smile. ‘She used to be a policewoman,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘Sergeant, I think.’ Mr Dakin was as old as his wife and looked as athletic. But his rough, handsome face was humourless. His greetings were brief and firm and didn’t encourage conversation.

Their behaviour was exemplary. They never had visitors. They never had telephone calls. Their cooking never smelled. They never allowed their milk bottles to accumulate and at the same time they never left an empty milk bottle on the doorstep in daylight. And they were silent. They had no radio. The only sounds were of scrubbing brush, broom and carpet-sweeper. Sometimes at night, when the street fell silent, I heard them in their bedroom: a low whine punctuated infrequently with brief bass rumbles.

‘There’s respectable people in every class,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘The trouble these days is that you never know where you are. Look at the Seymours. Creeping up late at night to the bathroom and splashing about together. You can’t even trust the BBC people. Remember that Arab.’

The Dakins quickly became the favourite tenants. Mr Cooksey invited Mr Dakin down to ‘cocktails’. Mrs Dakin had Mrs Cooksey up to tea and Mrs Cooksey told us that she was satisfied with the appearance of the flat. ‘They’re very fussy,’ Mrs Cooksey said. She knew no higher praise, and we all felt reproached.

*    *    *

It was from Mrs Cooksey that I learned with disappointment that the Dakins had their troubles. ‘He fell off a ladder and broke his arm, but they won’t pay any compensation. The arm’s bent and he can’t even go to the seaside. What’s more, he can’t do his job properly. He’s an electrician, and you know how they’re always climbing. But there you are, d’you see.
They
don’t care. What’s three hundred pounds to
them
? But will they give it? Do you know the foreman actually burned the ladder?’

I hadn’t noticed any disfigurement about Mr Dakin. He had struck me as a man of forbidding vigour, but now I looked on him with greater interest and respect for putting up so silently with his misfortune. We often passed on the stairs but never did more than exchange greetings, and so it might have gone on had it not been for the Cookseys’ New Year’s Eve party.

At that time I was out of favour with the Cookseys. I had left a hoard of about fifteen milk bottles on the doorstep and the milkman had refused to take them all at once. For a whole day six partly washed milk bottles had remained on the doorstep, lowering Mrs Cooksey’s house. Some unpleasantness between Mrs Cooksey and the milkman had followed and quickly been passed on to me.

When I came in that evening the door of the Cookseys’ sitting-room was open and through it came laughter, stamping and television music. Mr Cooksey, coming from the kitchen with a tray, looked at me in embarrassment. He brought his lips rapidly over his false teeth and made a popping sound.

‘
Pop-pop
. Come in,’ he said. ‘Drink. Cocktail.’

I went in. Mrs Cooksey was sober but gay. The laughter and the stamping came from the Dakins alone. They were dancing. Mrs Dakin shrieked whenever Mr Dakin spun her around, and for a man whose left arm was permanently damaged he was doing it quite well. When she saw me Mrs Dakin shrieked, and Mrs Cooksey giggled, as though it was her duty to cheer the Dakins up. The couple from the flat below mine were there too, she on the seat of an armchair, he on the arm. They were dressed in their usual sub-county manner and looked constrained and unhappy. I thought of this couple as the Knitmaster and the Knitmistress. They had innumerable minor possessions: contemporary coffee tables and lampstands, a Cona coffee machine, a record-player, a portable television-and-VHF set, a 1946 Anglia which at the appropriate season carried a sticker:
FREE LIFT
TO GLYNDEBOURNE AT YOUR OWN RISK
, and a Knitmaster machine which was never idle for long.

The music stopped, Mrs Dakin pretended to swoon into her husband’s injured arms, and Mrs Cooksey clapped.

‘ ’Elp yourself, ’elp yourself,’ Mr Cooksey shouted.