Vacant Possession (12 page)

“Well, I should hope so,” said Sylvia, when he pointed this out. “She must have a pulse, mustn’t she?”

“I think she’s excited. I think perhaps she’s heard what we’ve said about moving, and she’s excited.”

“I’m afraid that’s wishful thinking. What is it to get excited about?”

“Perhaps we ought to tell the nurse.” They stood over her for another minute, watching her. “I daresay you’re right,” Colin said at last. “I must have imagined it.”

“Come on.” Sylvia touched his elbow. “Don’t upset yourself.”

He felt almost heartened, at this tender gesture from her. Possibly she did care about his feelings; possibly he was something more to her than a household object, at her disposal. Oh, the relentless optimism of the man! He squeezed her hand. “Why don’t we stop off on the way home? Have a drink, just unwind a bit? It
is
the end of term.”

“I don’t want to be out when Suzanne gets home, she’ll wonder where we are. I don’t know what she’s coming for, I didn’t expect her till the weekend. She sounded funny on the phone.”

“Oh, she’ll fend for herself,” Colin said, “there’s food in the fridge. It’s probably boyfriend trouble.”

“Could be.”

“You know how it is, first year away from home. She has to learn to stand on her own two feet. I remember when I first went off to university—”

“Shut up!”

“What?”

“Shut up,” Sylvia said. “Stand still. Watch her.” She leaned forward, her eyes fixed on the figure in the bed, her tongue between her teeth; as if she were defusing a bomb. “She did move,” she said quietly. “You were right.”

“Well, thank you,” Colin said. At once his indignation evaporated; sobered and awestruck, he stared at the old lady. Slowly, fractionally, the walnut head was moving; drooping on the chest.

They held their breaths. For a long moment Mrs. Sidney rested, looking up slyly from under her eyelids. You were told I was showing signs, her expression seemed to say. A stiff broken-winged flutter brought her arms to her sides. Knobbled, stick-thin; the wasted muscles remembered leverage. Fraction by fraction she rose upright in the bed.

“Here, Mrs. Wilmot!” the nurse called. “Come and look at this!” She waddled off down the ward in the direction of the men’s block. “Come here, Mrs. Wilmot!”

Sylvia gripped Colin’s hand. Minutes passed by the ward clock. There were times when she seemed to stick, but there were times when, comparatively, she seemed to hurtle. Finally the sheet fell away. Nothing but a nightgown of yellow winceyette held in the old lady’s bones, but her face had become animated, lips twitching, eyes opened wide.

“She’s going to speak,” Colin said excitedly. He dropped Sylvia’s hand and leaned over his mother. Mrs. Sidney’s expression was congested with effort, her jaws moving as if years of chit-chat were banking up in her throat. “Again?” Colin said. “Again, Mum, try again.”

“What did she say?” Sylvia demanded.

“I don’t know.” Colin steadied himself with a hand on the bed. “Something about a house. Bleak House? Buck House? Can’t be, can it?”

“There’s no sense in that, Colin.”

“You want sense as well? Come on, Mum, speak up, try again.”

Here was Nurse, bustling back, the old ward orderly padding behind her. “Can you credit it?” Nurse said. “And I didn’t believe Dr. Furness when he said she was coming to. Mind you, praise where praise is due, Mrs. Wilmot here has spent hours with your mum, just talking to her, like, just tidying out her locker and making her feel she’s wanted. It’s the personal touch, that’s what it is.”

Mrs. Sidney turned her head. “She’s doing great,” the nurse said. “Here’s your son, Mrs. Sidney,” she bawled. “Here’s your son and daughter-in-law. Here’s Mrs. Wilmot. You know Mrs. Wilmot, don’t you?”

In the depth of cloudy irises, something moved; a chance, a stray, a fugitive thought. Her mouth trembled. Gaze kindled. Slow, dilute tears rolled out of her eye. “Colin?” Quivering lips moved around his name.

“Oh, Mum, speak again,” Colin said. His voice cracked with emotion.

“She recognises you,” the nurse said.

“And me,” said the old lady called Wilmot. “She recognises me, don’t you, lovey?”

Mrs. Sidney’s head twisted towards the new voice. She stared. Something darkened behind her eyes, quite suddenly, as if a blind had been pulled down. “She’s gone again,” the nurse said, disappointed. “Stay where you are, though. You never know.”

They stood, frozen, waiting for her to move again. Presently she did so; not speaking, but raising her right hand in a rigid, almost regal, wave.

Over on B Block (Male) Mr. Philip Field sat in a side ward, planning his funeral. He was hesitating, for the tenth time, between “The Lord’s My Shepherd” and “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” Was not the latter more often sung at weddings? He couldn’t recall the tune. He’d had a stroke—or so they said—and there was much he couldn’t recall. If only his daughter were here, she might be able to help him out. They could have a singsong. It would be like old times. His wife, who had deserted him years ago, had played the piano.

Isabel might come more, now that she’d moved back to town. But he doubted it. She was sick herself, she said; instead she’d send that wimpish husband of hers. Isabel was a champion at prevarication, at excuses; at giving you what you didn’t want, long after you’d forgotten you’d asked. What good was Ryan? He was a banker, but he didn’t want to talk about banking practice. He said it was all different now. He just sat there fidgeting, cracking his silly jokes. The only money he was interested in was the money his wife’s father was going to leave him.

They disapproved of him, that was it. He was a man who in his time had gone in for a bit of honest fun. With the wife gone, it was a case of having to; he’d had urges. What do you go for nowadays, he asked Ryan, sniggering. Key parties? He wanted the details. Ryan looked po-faced; as if he were turning someone down for a loan.

But he watched his son-in-law watching the young nurses. Ryan was a hypocrite, he decided.

Some days he thought he’d be leaving this godforsaken place; some days he knew he wouldn’t. Bits of his body—a hand, a leg—seemed to have developed a will of their own. Scraps of memory, detached from their moorings in the far past, floated up to occupy the forefront of his brain. This seemed a bad sign. He was determined to leave his affairs in order; that included the disposition of his remains. After all, he knew Isabel. She couldn’t seem to function these days without a drink inside her; and after she’d had a drink, she would forget what she was doing and lose the undertaker’s number.

Accordingly, he had sent to a selection of funeral directors for their prospectus and terms. He had half-hoped a representative would call. In the United States, they would have called. They knew the meaning of service. Not that he had truck with foreign methods, in general; but he remembered how, in Paris once as a young man, he’d been impressed by the high seriousness of the undertaking business, by the Pompes Funèbres on every street, their windows draped with black velvet and stuck over with specimen Mass cards and plans of family vaults. Ah, Paris…He lay back against his pillow. It was clear that Isabel would not be coming in tonight. He closed his eyes; all in a moment, his fancies passed from the lugubrious to the lubricious. Furtively, he touched himself under the sheet. Nothing doing. But give it time. He’d have something to show the little student nurse, a lovely surprise for her when she came to tuck in his sheets.

Everything was going along nicely when the door opened. He flicked open one eye to appraise his visitor. It was an old woman, an orderly, a downcast and shrunken personage; hardly meat for his fantasies. He gave her no encouragement, merely closed his eyes again, and went on with what he was doing. But she continued to come in, intruding her woebegone form around the door; she stood over the bed, looking down with her lacklustre eyes, and forced him to take notice of her.

“You’re interrupting me,” he told her. “I want to be left alone. If you’re looking for my tray, the male nurse took it.”

She didn’t seem to have heard him. She walked to the foot of the bed and picked up his charts.

“Hands off,” he shouted. “That’s confidential. Doctors only.”

“I thought it was you, Mr. Field.”

As he looked at her, a change seemed to come over her. Her bony shoulders straightened. She grew by an inch or two, and her melancholic manner fell away. The years fell away too; it was 1974, she was a girl alone, on a go in the park, and a lonely old gentleman was hanging around by the swings. Muriel grinned at him.

“Hello, old cock,” she said.

When Sylvia opened her handbag, you never knew what might come out of it. It might be a tract; it might be a revolver.

This morning it was a little pink card. She pushed it across the table to Suzanne. “That’s the number of the clinic,” she said. “Ring them up right away for a quote. If you don’t want to go locally, I’ll drive you back up to Manchester; Hermione’s given me the name of her man on John Street.”

“It’s Saturday,” Suzanne said.

“There’ll be somebody there, don’t fret.”

“Anybody would think you were forewarned.”

“Sometimes my community work comes in useful.”

“Hang on a minute, Sylvia. This is your own flesh and blood.”

“I prefer not to think about the flesh and blood aspect. It hardly is, at this stage.”

“But it’s a potential life. She has to think it out. It’s a matter of conscience.”

“Oh, bugger her conscience,” Sylvia said. “What about her career?”

Suzanne surveyed her mother from red-rimmed eyes. She did not look pregnant. She was a thin, listless girl, though pretty enough in a commonplace sort of way.

“What a brutal woman you’ve become,” she said. “I’m surprised I exist. I’m surprised you had any children.”

“Our generation didn’t have your opportunities,” Sylvia said.

“If I wanted an abortion I could have fixed it up myself through the Student Health Service. That’s what it’s there for. I don’t need your money to go to John Street.”

Another family impasse. Colin’s mind leaped, as it did so reliably, to a face-saving distraction. “You’ve mentioned it to Hermione?”

“Yes, I told Francis on the phone.”

“Oh, the vicar,” Suzanne said. “If you were a grandmother, you might not act so stupid.”

“Now look, Suzanne—”

“It’s obvious the way things are going. You just don’t want to know, Dad. Other men…at her age.”

“I think you ought to be concerned about your own situation; not about the way your mother and I run our lives.”

“If Mum takes up with the vicar it will be in the papers. It will be a topic of general interest.”

“You silly baggage,” Sylvia said. “Are you going to pick up that phone, or must I do it for you?”

Suzanne picked up her glass of orange juice instead, and looked at her parents over the rim. “Cheers,” she said. She swung to her feet, using the tabletop for support, as if her condition were much more advanced. She turned in the doorway to say something. Her brother came through it, knocking her aside. “Hiya, Wart.” She gave him a cool glance, passed beyond retaliation. She had other things on her mind.

Alistair strode into the room, flung open the cupboards, and began to sneer at their contents. “Never any decent food,” he complained.

“What did you want?”

“Sausages. Austin gets sausages.”

“I hardly think so. In a vegetarian household.”

“He has his own sausages. He’s autonomous.”

“Then go round,” Colin said. “Perhaps he’ll give you some.”

“What’s up this morning?” Alistair enquired. “You were having one of them funny silences, when I came in.”

“A pregnant pause,” Colin said. Sylvia made a sound of disgust. “It just popped out,” he said abjectly.

Alistair poured half a pint of milk on his cornflakes, lambasted them with the back of his spoon, then dredged up a quantity of the compacted mass and thrust it into his mouth. “Just ignore me, just go on,” he said. “Not getting divorced, are you?”

His parents exchanged a glance. “Should we have expected it, at some stage?” Colin said musingly.

“Not these days. Not this.”

Alistair was gazing glumly at his melamine dish. Suddenly he lifted it and banged it down on the table. “Why do we always have these? Why don’t we have no decent china?”

“Listen, sunshine,” Sylvia snapped, “if you want gracious living, go and get it somewhere else.”

“If you did get divorced I wouldn’t live with you. Not either of you. I’d get a flat. I’d be a homeless young person. I’d be entitled.”

“Well, as soon as you set up house for yourself,” Colin said, “you can have thin pork links served on Crown Derby. Will that make you happy?”

Alistair got up, muttered, and kicked his chair. He was muttering as he walked out of the room, and hauling up his sleeve, no doubt preparatory to injecting himself with some addictive substance.

“I wonder why we bother,” said Colin.

“I wasn’t aware that you did bother. You’ve always been more concerned with the welfare of other people’s children than your own.”

“Oh, teachers’ children are always worse than others. Their parents know from experience that there’s nothing to be done with young people, and when they get home, they’re not even being paid to try.”

Suzanne said, “I’ll talk to you. I won’t talk to Mum. I don’t want to be treated like a counselling session down the Bishop Tutu Centre. She’s too good at making up other people’s minds for them.”

“She only wants what’s best for you.”

“I bet Hitler used to say that.”

“She can’t understand your saying you don’t want an abortion. Myself, I wonder…I mean, it’s difficult to see how an intelligent girl like you becomes pregnant by accident.”

Colin’s tone was moderate, discursive. He had always said that young people should have the largest possible measure of moral freedom. He had said it in the sixties, and had gone on saying it through the seventies; the sentiment was now in its third decade. He found it a little difficult, at times, to distinguish his own children’s faces from those of the hundreds of juveniles who passed through his office in the course of the academic year, and he sometimes wondered if he would readily put a name to them if he met them on the street. Perhaps it was just as well. It was the first thing that Sylvia had learned on her social sciences course; the individual is always an exception, and the individual never matters.

“Has it not occurred to you,” Suzanne said, “that I might want the baby?”

“Do you mean you got pregnant on purpose?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly, eh?” Like her mother, Colin thought. Contraception had never been an exact science with Sylvia. Perm any six pills out of twenty-one. None of the children had been planned, but not quite unplanned, either.

“I don’t want to push you on the point,” he said, “but as you have chosen to come home and involve us, I think you might take us into your confidence about the father. Is it somebody on your course?”

“No.”

“Well, are you—fond of him?”

“He’s married,” Suzanne said. “A married man.”

“How could you?” Colin said. He took a moment to digest it. “At your age, and with all those bright young men to choose from?” Suzanne shrugged. “I don’t know what to say, Suzanne, I don’t understand you.” He sighed. “You haven’t been the same since you came back from that peace camp.”

Sylvia—who said “life must go on”—had gone out to do the weekend shopping. Colin thought it an astonishing proposition, considering her views, but he was glad to see her out of the house, and Claire with her. Karen was upstairs doing her homework; Alistair had not for some years been in the habit of accounting for his movements. For a weekend, the house was very quiet. The long stretch of the summer holidays lay ahead. It was another fine day, and the sun poured into the living room, hot and dazzling through the french windows. Suzanne sat in an armchair, her legs curled under her, her expression remote. No doubt she was thinking straight through the summer to the months when she would be quite changed by her decision, when the consequences of her choice would come home to her.

“If I have the child,” she said, “he might marry me.”

“Marry you?”

“He’s always wanted a child. They’ve been married for years but they’ve never had one.”

“Do you mean that you’re trying to break up this man’s marriage?”

“If that’s how you want to put it.” She stretched and yawned. She felt torpid, too lazy and warm to answer questions. She had been through it already in her head. She would have the baby for him, and he would marry her. In her life so far, she had never wanted anything very much; but what she had wanted, she’d usually got. There seemed no reason why this should alter.

“Have you discussed it with him?”

She leaned her head against the back of the chair. “Not as such.”

“Not as such? You mean you’ve discussed it under the guise of something else?”

“That’s what people do, isn’t it?” She closed her eyes for a moment. “They discuss things, find out what each other’s attitudes are. That’s how they get to know each other. They talk generalities, don’t they?”

“So that it may look to the outside world like a silly girl trying to break up a marriage, but it is really more like one of Plato’s symposia?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, yawning. Perhaps she really did not. There is an entrance fee to the museum of our culture, and for this generation no one had paid it. “Do you want my advice?” Colin asked.

“No.”

“Why did you come home then?”

Suzanne reached out to get a cushion from the sofa, and shook it gently to make it comfortable. “I’ve given up my room at the hall of residence, and I need a permanent address so that I can claim benefit. Ask Florence. She’ll tell you.”

“I see.” Colin’s tone was grim; he meant to sound like a man who was mastering his temper only with effort. In fact, there seemed a leaden familiarity about the situation; as if he were an old man, with many many daughters. He looked at his watch. Sylvia would be back soon, and she would expect him to have some answers.

“Am I keeping you from your badminton?” his daughter enquired.

“Squash,” he said bleakly. “No, that’s all right. So that’s what you see for yourself, is it, living at home and claiming benefit?”

“You would hardly want me to live on you. Look, it’s temporary, Dad. It won’t put you out. Karen can move into Claire’s room, and I’ll have my own room back. I need some privacy. As soon as we make our arrangements, I’ll be off.”

“Who? You and your man-friend?”

“Could you just draw the curtain a bit, Dad? The sun’s in my eyes.”

“Suzanne, do you have any evidence that this man you are involved with wants to set up house with you? When you tell him you’re expecting his child, he may be horrified.”

“I don’t see why he should be. It’s a perfectly natural thing.”

“But has he told you, in words of one syllable, that he means to leave his wife?”

Suzanne closed her eyes again. “Oh, he means to.”

“Do you think you could make the effort to keep awake? Your whole future is in the balance here.”

“I don’t know why I’m so sleepy. It must be my condition.”

“Did you want to get pregnant? Are you one of those women who have to prove they can?”

“Everyone has to prove they can. All my friends have been pregnant.”

They infuriated him, the little nest-making pats she gave to the cushion, settling it against the side of her head. “Haven’t you any ambition?”

“What sort of ambition?”

“A career.”

“There are no careers. There aren’t even any jobs. Didn’t you know there are three million people out of work?”

“You don’t have to be one of them. Not if you graduate.”

“It only postpones it. What do people do with degrees in geography? There aren’t any cosy teaching jobs to take up the second-rate people, not these days.”

“Cosy?” Colin thought of his probationary year; a time of his life when he had seriously considered hanging himself. “Why did you bother to go to university, if you thought like this?”

“I can just see your face if I’d told you I wanted to be a hairdresser.”

Colin was aghast. “Did you?”

“Not a hairdresser especially. There are times when you’re just as thick as Mum.”

“Literal-minded,” Colin said. “Not really thick.”

He was touched, when he thought about it, by the way she still called them “Mum” and “Dad.” Not that he expected her, like Alistair, to hail them as “Old Cow” or “Paunchy” rather that in the somnambulistic self-sufficiency she had acquired, he expected her to label them Occupants of Parental Home; to find them some grey unemotive category that she could use on official forms. She was still such a child, after all, with her flat chest and her bitten nails.

“Suzanne, sit up like a good girl and listen to me. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that.” She stifled another yawn. “When people tell you that sort of thing, they usually regret it. And then they hold it against you.”

“That may be so, but I feel bound to, because I so much don’t want you to make a mess of your life.”

“And when people say that, they mean they’re about to plunge in and muck up all your plans. Look, I know what I’m doing. I’m an adult.”

“I don’t think those two things follow.”

“Go on then. Tell me your story. ‘When I was about your age…’” She uncurled herself and rubbed her calves. “I’m getting cramp. I ought to go and lie on the bed.”

“You can go up on the roof and perch on the ridge tiles,” Colin said, “but for God’s sake listen to what I’m going to tell you. About ten years ago—”

“What’s the use to me of something that happened then?”

“The whole world doesn’t centre around you, Suzanne. As it happened, mine didn’t in those days. I was very much in love with a young woman whom I’d met at an evening class. I was contemplating leaving your mother in order to live with her.” Colin rose from his chair and walked over to the fireplace; which had recently been rebuilt, and gas-logs installed. It had cost him an effort to speak; he could not turn his face to his daughter and show her that his mouth was trembling, and that his eyes had filled with tears. It would shake her faith in him, in his rectitude and solidity; if indeed she had any, after his confession. Simply to speak of it brought the pain back to him; how clogged and salty the throat, how heavy the weight behind the ribs. He had felt like this for months after his break-up with Isabel. It was the time of his life that, in modern terminology, he recognised as the nuclear winter; the many months of cold and dark.

“At an evening class?” Suzanne said. Her smooth sleepy voice was derisive. “What in?”