“A welcome thought,” Mr. K. said. “I shall tape it instanter. Would you graciously put on tea kettle?”
Mrs. Wilmot made the tea while Mr. K. went out into the hall to secure his letter box. When it was brewed she poured out for them, and they sat companionably at the kitchen table.
“Woman watching house again today,” Mr. K. said. “Drove by, stopped, got out, waited ten minutes, passed on. Miss Anaemia said it is Snoopers, from the department.”
She nodded, and drank her tea.
“Who is this Snoopers?” He did not expect an answer. There were no answers to the questions which plagued him. He sucked his tea through a sugar lump, and eyed his roll of adhesive tape.
“Any law against keeping pets?” his lodger asked suddenly.
“What?” said Mr. K. “Cats, dogs, horses?”
“Beetles.”
“The famous British sense of humour,” Mr. K. said sadly.
“It’s no joke. I’ve seen them advertised.” She picked up her shopping bag and made off towards the kitchen door with it, her large feet padding softly in their pink bedroom slippers. “I’m going to get a cage,” she muttered. “Great big striped ones as fat as melons.”
Muriel climbed the stairs to the first landing. It grew colder as she ascended, and the smell of decay was pronounced. The ancient paper, with its design of cabbage roses, was peeling from the walls. “Hello there, Mrs. Wilmot,” someone whispered. It was Miss Anaemia, creeping down from her third-floor attic. She emerged into the faint light from the long window, filtered through years of dust; a fragile young woman, little more than a child, with a child’s flat body, minimal features, and a skin so translucent that it was easy to imagine that you saw the circulation of the thin blood beneath it. Her red hair was plastered damply to her head, and her whole body seemed to jump and quiver in a state of perpetual fright.
“I hear you’ve got problems, course I don’t want to pry,” said Poor Mrs. Wilmot.
“Shh. Not so loud.”
“I thought you were at the Polytechnic. Course, I don’t know, I’ve no education.”
“I was.” Tears welled up in the girl’s large eyes. “They made a new timetable. They’ve got split sites. They moved my lectures. I couldn’t find them. So I stopped going.”
“Couldn’t you ask them?”
“I did, but nobody seemed to know who I was.”
“Well, there you are then. Cellar vee, isn’t it? Che sera, sera. And what do you do with yourself now?”
“I’m a claimant. I make up different names. Primrose Hill’s one I go under. Penny Black.” She whispered to herself. “Black Maria, Bad Penny. Faint Hope. Square Peg.”
“Is it frightening?”
“It’s terrifying,” Miss Anaemia said. “It makes your palms sweat.” For a second, before she descended the dark staircase, she laid the palm of her hand, ice-cold and clammy, against Muriel’s cheek.
CHAPTER 4
“Anybody home?” No answer. That didn’t mean, of course, that the house was empty. Sylvia went into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of Perrier water, and took it upstairs. Alistair’s door was still shut. She felt sticky and grimy from the plastic chairs in the committee room, the car’s vinyl upholstery, the dust that hung in the air. Other people’s tobacco smoke had got into her lungs.
She peeled off her clothes, shrugged her towelling robe on, and made for the bathroom. She thought she heard a rustle behind Alistair’s door. “Are you in there?” she said. “Alistair, if you don’t come out soon I’m going to kick this door in.” There was no reply. She didn’t mean it, of course; it was just the small change of domestic violence. She locked herself in the bathroom, took a brisk shower, then scrubbed her face with a soapy substance full of little bits of grit. Exfoliation, she said to herself. How she wished she could really shed her skin, and shed the past with it, dispose of that embarrassing image in the photographs of ten years ago. She had heard of people trying to “purge themselves of their past.” The images employed seemed to become more nasty and drastic the more you thought about it. Exorcism…the exfoliation procedure had left her face blotchy and scored with little red lines. She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. All right, do it, she thought. Find that other old photograph and throw it out. Why today? Well, why not? As murderers often find after years of wishful thinking, the action of a second can free you from the weight of a decade.
She went into the bedroom and opened Colin’s top drawer. A tangle of underwear, and socks he never wore, rolled into balls, fraying round the tops. A colour film, some small change, some bottles of aftershave; most of it bought by Florence, gentle hints from the year when Colin had decided to grow a beard. It hadn’t lasted long, the beard. Nothing lasted long with Colin; the enthusiasms he took up at evening classes, his project for growing vegetables, his ardour for joining the Social Democratic Party—which had fizzled out, come to think of it, when he couldn’t find a stamp to send off his application form. Only his neckties evoked constancy. What was this greasy grey string, left over from the last time ties were narrow? Here was a yellow knitted one, and here was a great flowery orange thing, a relic of the sixties. Dear God. Kipper ties, they called them.
She heard the front door bang.
“Mum? Mum, it’s me, Claire, I’m home.”
“All right, Claire,” she called. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Mum, can I get waffles out of the freezer?”
“Get what you like. I won’t be long.”
With a sudden urgency, she began to rummage through the drawer. Here at the back was the five-year diary that she had once given Colin for Christmas. It was not locked; its key was still taped to it, in a tiny polythene envelope. Colin had never filled the diary in. He considered, he told her, that he had no life worth recording, and to
