The Clothes They Stood Up In (9 page)

“I find it hard to verbalize with you, Maurice,” she begins. “We've always found it hard to verbalize with each other, you and me, but we are going to learn, I promise.” Pressing her lips up against his unflinching ear she sees in close-up the stiff little gray hairs he regularly crops with the curved scissors during his locked sessions in the bathroom. “The nurses tell me you will learn to talk again, Maurice, and I will learn along with you, we will learn to talk to one another together.” The words swirl around his ear, draining into it uncomprehended. Mrs. Ransome speaks slowly. It is like spooning pap into the mouth of a baby; as one wipes the mouth of the untaken food so Mrs. Ransome can almost wipe the ear clean of the curd of the unheeded words.

Still, and she deserves credit for this, she persists.

“I'm not going to be, you know, judgmental, Maurice, because I personally have nothing to be judgmental about.” And she tells him how she too has secretly listened to the cassette.

“But in future, Maurice, I suggest we listen to it together, make it a part of honing up on our marital skills . . . because at the end of the day, love, marriage is about choices and to get something out of it you have to put something in.”

Out it tumbles, the once tongue-tied Mrs. Ransome now possessed of a whole lexicon of caring and concern which she pours into her husband's ear. She talks about perspectives and sex and how it can go on joyful and unrestrained until the very brink of the grave and she adumbrates a future of which this will be a part and how once he gets back on his feet they will set aside quality time which they will devote to touching one another.

“We have never hugged, Maurice. We must hug one another in the future.”

Festooned as he is with tubes and drains and monitors, hugging Mr. Ransome ill is no easier than hugging Mr. Ransome well, so Mrs. Ransome contents herself with kissing his hand. But having shared with him her vision of the future—tactile, communicative, convivial—she now thinks to top it off with some
Così.
It might just do the trick, she thinks.

So, careful not to dislodge any other of Mr. Ransome's many wires, which are not channels of entertainment at all, Mrs. Ransome gently positions the earphones on his head. Before slipping the cassette into the player she holds it before his unblinking eyes.

“Così,”
she articulates. And more loudly, “Mozart?”

She switches it on, scanning her husband's unchanging face for any sign of response. There is none. She turns the volume up a little, but not loud, mezzo forte, say. Mr. Ransome, who has heard the word “Mozart” without knowing whether it is a person or a thing or even an articulated lorry, now cringes motionless before a barrage of sounds that are to him utterly meaningless and that have no more pattern or sense than the leaves on a tree, only the leaves on the tree seem to be the notes and there is someone in the tree (it is Dame Kiri) shrieking. It is baffling. It is terrible. It is loud.

Perhaps it is this last awful realization that Mozart does not make sense, or it is because Mrs. Ransome, finding there is still no response, decides to up the volume yet further, just as a last shot, that the sounds vibrate in Mr. Ransome's ears and it is the vibration that does it; but at any rate something happens in his head, and the frail sac into which the blood has leaked now bursts, and Mr. Ransome hears, louder and more compelling than any music he has ever heard, a roaring in his ears; there is a sudden brief andante, he coughs quietly and dies.

Mrs. Ransome does not immediately notice that the numb hand of her husband is now not even that; and it would be hard to tell from looking at him, or from feeling him even, that anything has happened. The screen has altered but Mrs. Ransome does not know about screens. However since Mozart does not seem to be doing the trick she takes the earphones from her husband's head and it's only as she is disentangling the frivolous wires from the more serious ones that she sees something on the screen is indeed different and she calls the nurse.

Marriage, to Mrs. Ransome, had often seemed a kind of parenthesis and it's fitting that what she says to the nurse (“I think he's gone”) is here in parenthesis too, and that it is this last little parenthesis that brings the larger parenthesis to a close. The nurse checks the monitor, smiles sadly and puts a caring hand on Mrs. Ransome's shoulder, then pulls the curtain around and leaves husband and wife alone together for the last time. And so, the brackets closed that opened thirty-two years before, Mrs. Ransome goes home a widow.

Then there is a fitting pause. And television having schooled her in the processes of bereavement and the techniques of grieving, Mrs. Ransome observes that pause; she gives herself ample time to mourn and to come to terms with her loss and generally speaking where widowhood is concerned she does not put a foot wrong.

It seems to her as she looks back that the burglary and everything that has happened since has been a kind of apprenticeship. Now, she thinks, I can start.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

A
LAN
B
ENNETT
is Britain's best-loved playwright. He first appeared on the stage in the revue
Beyond the Fringe,
which opened in London in 1961 and later transferred to Broadway. His subsequent stage plays include
Forty Years On, Habeas Corpus, The Old Country
and
Kafka's Dick,
and his adaptation of
The Wind in the Willows,
the double bill
Single Spies
and
The Madness of George III
were all presented at the Royal National Theatre. He has written many television plays, notably
An Englishman Abroad
and the two series of Talking Heads monologues.
Writing Home,
a collection of diaries and prose, was published by Random House in 1995. It included “The Lady in the Van,” which he later adapted for the stage. It was presented in the West End with Maggie Smith in the leading role.

Through his many recordings of children's classics, Alan Bennett is one of the most familiar voices on BBC radio. He also writes regularly in the
London Review of Books.

Also by Alan Bennett

Plays

Plays One (
Forty Years On
,
Getting On
,
Habeas Corpus
,
Enjoy
)

Plays Two (
Kafka's Dick
,
The Insurance Man
,
The Old Country
,
An Englishman Abroad
,
A Question of Attribution
)

 

Office Suite

The Wind in the Willows

The Madness of George III

The Lady in the Van

Television plays

The Writer in Disguise

Objects of Affection (BBC)

Talking Heads (BBC)

Screenplays

A Private Function

Prick Up Your Ears

The Madness of King George

Autobiographies

The Lady in the Van

Writing Home

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

Copyright © 1996, 1998 by Forelake Ltd.

 

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York

 

This work was originally published in the
London Review of Books
in 1996. It was first published in book form in Great Britain by Profile Books Ltd., London, in 1998.

 

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bennett, Alan.

The clothes they stood up in/Alan Bennett.

p. cm.

1. Middle aged persons—Fiction. 2. London (England)—Fiction. 3. Married people—Fiction. 4. Burglary—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6052.E5 C57 2001

823'.914—dc21 00-041473

 

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

 

eISBN: 978-0-375-50689-5

v3.0