Muriel was looking around, poking into the piles of musty books and old clothes. It reminded her of the conservatory at Buckingham Avenue; long summer afternoons stirring through her late father’s newspaper collection, Mother toddling through the hall, muttering her spells against spirit intrusion. Oo-oo-oo, Muriel would cry, and tap the cracked windowpanes, and flap her newspapers. Happy days! where Sylvia’s kitchen extension stood now.
Sholto rubbed his chin. “Or what you could do with,” he said, “is a phrenologist’s head.” He produced one, pushing it across the counter. “Look, Muriel.”
Muriel stared down at the head, and traced with her finger the black lines which divided the skull.
“What are these lines, Sholto?”
“Those show the faculties. Look. Faculty of Imitation. Faculty of Calculation. Time and Tune and Wit.”
“Is that how people work? I’ve often wondered. Does one person have them all?”
Sholto’s grimy fingers probed the head, turning it up to squint at its base. “It’s only a bit cracked,” he said. “I could make you a special price.”
She thought of her wig stand, the blank white slope of its skull. This was progress. One day these faculties would knit together, and she would go out into the world complete. Personality, more thorough than a plastic surgeon, would remould her formless face. “Look,” Sholto said. “Faculty of Progenitiveness. Faculty of Amativeness.”
“Oh, copulation,” Muriel said. “If I had ?7.95, I might buy that for my employer, Mr. Sidney.”
“You could have easy terms,” Sholto suggested. Muriel shook her head. “What about a bunch of keys then? ?1.50, pick any bunch.”
“What do they unlock?”
“How should I know?”
“What’s the use of them?”
“They’re not use. They’re ornament.”
“I have keys.” Muriel’s eyes roamed about the shop. “You sure you haven’t got a cage, Sholto?”
“If I run across one, I’ll give you first refusal.”
“I’ll have some assorted knobs then,” Muriel said sulkily. She began to rummage through the box that Sholto pushed towards her. “What did you think to the trip?”
“Rip-roaring. What makes Crisp do it, though? Don’t give me this about the C of E. He’s only copying Effie, the time she set that cleaner on fire. He never was happy with his own brand of insanity. No sooner would you say you were Picasso than he’d claim to be Salvador Dali. Remember that time Philip said he was a helicopter? Crisp said, ‘I’m Leobloodynardo,’ and started drawing on the walls.”
“He was never a person of deep originality.”
“Oh, I see, been at the library books, have we?”
“I can talk, if I want to.”
“You’re getting very friendly with Crisp.”
“He’s all right.”
“I hear wedding bells,” Sholto said. He clicked his fingers. “Ding-dong.”
“That’s castanets.”
“All right, don’t get shirty. Going back up the Punjab, are you? Want a bag for your knobs?”
It was five-thirty when Muriel arrived back at Eugene Terrace; the tail end of the hot afternoon. Inside the Mukerjees’ Emporium, a drowsy girl with a pitted bluish face sat by the till on a high stool. She glanced up without interest as Muriel passed the window; her shoulders moved fractionally, and her eyelids drooped again.
Crisp had left. There was a note on the table: GONE TO EVENSONG. And I brought doughnuts for our tea, Muriel thought crossly. She dumped the paper bag on a chair and walked around the room for a while, looking in Crisp’s drawers and under his mattress; there was nothing of interest. The room was close and stuffy; outside it smelled like thunder. At least, that was what the people at the doughnut shop said; she could not smell it. Over the Punjab, the sky had turned a leaden colour; pigeons huddled together on the guttering, heads sunk low into their feathers like vultures in cartoons.
Muriel shed her clothes again. With the weight of the day upon her, it wasn’t difficult to become Poor Mrs. Wilmot. Her shoulders slumped, her knees bent, her toes turned in; she sprayed her hair with dry shampoo, and flattened it to her head gritty and streaked with grey, and secured it with two large hairgrips. As she did this, the years crept up and weighed her down; her joints locked, her mouth grew pinched, her hands began to shake. She put on Mrs. Wilmot’s elastic stockings and leaned over with a rheumaticky quiver for her bedroom slippers. What was the real Wilmot doing, she wondered. Probably having a cup of tea or something. Experimentally, she opened her mouth in a silent laugh.
Finally she put on Mrs. Wilmot’s coat, which she needed in all weathers, feeling the cold as she did; it was a coat Sholto had found in a dustbin, no shape at all and the colour of the fluff that collects under beds. She went downstairs. A plump little boy of about twelve years old minded the till. The family were so numerous that, despite the shop’s long hours, she had never seen the same Mukerjee twice. His eyes behind his thick spectacles were glued to his Darth Vader comic; Wilmot passed, and he didn’t look up.
When she returned to Mr. K.’s house she was surprised to find him up and about. “I thought you’d be having your sleep,” she said, as she shuffled dispiritedly into the kitchen. “Course, you know what’s best for you.”
Mr. K. was taping up the kitchen window. “In case of poison gas,” he explained. As he stretched up his garments parted company, exposing the greyish roll of fat above his hips.
“Pardon me,” his lodger said, “course, you know best, but couldn’t it come through the letter box?”
