She walked in the cupboard.”
“Planting a microphone,” Mr. K. suggested.
“No, looking for his coat. This bloke. If I’d got twenty blokes, they couldn’t touch my benefit. But if I’ve got one, they say he’s supporting me.”
Mr. Kowalski did not know what she was talking about, and this was not the only cause of his distress and alarm. He took the girl’s arm. “In Bratislava we had a funeral,” he said. “This seemed to work, but lately, everything takes a turn for the worse. This Snoopers. Phone calls. Voices of strange women. Like Auntie Frieda in the street. They get in here and change my doorknobs. I lock a door, they unlock it. This house is going to the bad.”
“Perhaps we all ought to move out. Get a change of address.”
“But where? If you are falsely dead in Bratislava, what avails leaving Napier Street? Besides, my dear, there is the dough, the bread, the vouchers. Those are expressions,” he said, “I keep a book of them. What would happen to regular employment at sausage factory?”
“Oh, you needn’t go away as far as that. A job’s a job.” She felt a restless pity for him; as much as you could for a nutter.
“This is all I do,” he said. “I might as well be dead all these years. This is all I do, go to a factory for preserving meat.” He shambled across the room, aimless, like some large farmyard animal avoiding its pen. Tears glinted in his bloodshot eyes; probably they’d been there all along, only she hadn’t noticed them. She never thought much about anybody else; claiming benefit was a full-time occupation. Her mind was getting narrowed down somehow; certain phrases like “means” and “rebate” seemed to have taken on an over-riding significance, layers and layers of portent, which only peeled away for a split second, just as she was waking or falling asleep. When she saw a queue, she had an urge to join it. A hundred forms she must have filled in, two hundred; all this information spinning away from her, out of her head and off into space. The process was extracting something from her, filing away at her essence; she was no more than the virgin white space between two black lines, no more than a blur behind a sheet of toughened glass. “Toodle-oo,” she said to Mr. K. and went out to pick up her dry cleaning. She was always having things cleaned nowadays; her own and other people’s. She liked the dockets they gave you, with their mysterious serial numbers and list of exemptions closely printed; she liked the hot, depleted, bustling air, and the staff (flaking skins, pinpricked fingers) who were liable for nothing at all.
Muriel was feeling lonely. The Colorado Beetle hadn’t turned up after all, and her life was certainly lacking in something or other. Companionship, that was it. At a loose end this Saturday, she wiled away her time filling in a coupon for a man for Lizzie Blank. She ticked the boxes describing herself as clothes-conscious and creative, and as her interests opted for good food and psychology. She put down her height as six foot two, because she didn’t want to be messed about by any dwarves.
Evening came. On Saturday evening she went out on the town. She was a rich woman. She could afford whatever she wanted, a club with a variety act and the pub and fish and chips afterwards. It was Lizzie who had the outing. Poor Mrs. Wilmot would not have liked it.
Mr. K. had barricaded himself into the kitchen. He huddled over the stove, thinking of his long career in that part of Europe that now lay beyond the Berlin Wall. Sometimes he would take out his old atlas, open it at page 33, and trace the borders with his finger. They did not mean much; all borders seemed uncertain. He shuddered at the sound of the great boots on the stairs. “Poor Mrs. Wilmot would never tread so.” Later, when the house had fallen quiet, he crept out and looked around him; looked up the stairs, and out of the small round window by the front door. Presently he knelt down, steadying himself with a hand on the wall. For a moment he was tempted to pray: Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, hail, our Life, our Sweetness and our Hope. Instead he leaned forward and cursed into the kitchen door-knob, in his fluent but ungrammatical Russian.
“Life is Sacred,” said Florence Sidney, heaving herself into the back seat of the Toyota. “If I’ve said it once, Colin, I’ve said it fifty times, it would have been more considerate to us all to have bought a vehicle with four doors.”
Shut up, you’re in, aren’t you? Colin thought mutinously. Aloud he said, “The Rolls is away being gold-plated. You know the problem.”
“There’s no need for sarcasm,” his sister said. “Where’s Suzanne, anyway? She could have come with us to see her grandmother.”
“She’s got enough on her plate at the moment,” Sylvia said.
“I think you’re very wrong to encourage her into an abortion.”
“It looks as though you may get your way anyhow,” Colin said. “She isn’t listening to us. Look, let’s give it a rest, shall we? We’ve enough to do at the hospital.”
Saturday afternoon visiting was two-thirty till four-thirty. It seemed strange not to take the familiar path to A Ward (Female). Colin was no admirer of change for its own sake, and was disconcerted by the turn his mother had taken.
The Ward Sister met them at the door. “I’m so pleased you’ve come,” she said. “We’ve made out who she is.”
“What do you mean, who she is?”
“Well, she’s taken on quite a new lease of life. You must remember, Mrs. Sidney, I’m one of the old timers, I remember your mother when she came in.”
“She’s not my mother,” Sylvia said. “She’s their mother.”
“It comes to the same,” Sister said carelessly. “‘I’m nothing,’ she used to say. ‘I’m empty, I’m nobody at all.’ And then a few weeks after that she just gave up speaking, didn’t she?”
All that was quite true. When they had come out of duty to sit by her silent bed, she had never shown any sign of noticing their presence at all. She must move, when they were not on the ward; but not much, the staff said, they moved her. What you mainly needed for geriatric nursing was a strong back.
“And so,” said Sister, “since you left the other day she’s chatted on nineteen to the dozen. We’ve not been able to shut her up. We had to give her a little pill to keep her quiet for a bit.”
“But it’s all a mystery to me,” Florence said. “Whatever’s woken her up again, after all this time? What did you mean, you’ve made out who she is? Who is she?”
“Princess May of Teck,” the nurse said. “You know, Queen Mary, as she was before she was married. It took
