“Sure you’ll manage?”
“No problem.” Muriel thought she was going to follow, hovering over them, until they were down in the street; but she paused at the top of the uncarpeted stairs and let them go down alone. Manoeuvring with her foot, Muriel pulled the front door behind her, and it closed with a clatter. There was a tiny porch, long unglazed, the wood rotting. Her box was where she had left it, on the composition floor running with damp. She stooped and put the baby in. Gemma was a bigger bundle than she had expected, encased in her snug quilting. She was asleep, and dreaming; Muriel saw the movement of her eyes under the tender skin of the lids.
She took up the box in her arms. At some point before she reached home, Gemma was sure to wake up, and then she would cry and attract attention. For this reason, it would be better not to fold over the flaps of the box; it would look odd. It was true that Mother had done it, but her own infant had been past crying, and moving only faintly, moving only feebly, like something burrowing underground. If anyone stops us, she thought, I’ll say I’m her godmother. She stepped into the street.
No one stopped them. No one noticed them hurrying by; the big fleshy woman plastered with make-up, strutting along in her high-heeled boots; and her box from the Pick ’N’ Save. The bottom edge of the box dug into her chest. She had no gloves, and her nails were drops of blood against the cardboard. The towns-people passed them, bending in the wind, their faces screwed up and their collars pulled about their ears. In their concrete bunkers in the shopping centre, the saplings lashed in the gust, whipping the moist air with their half-fledged green. There was mud and broken glass on the pavements, the polystyrene cartons from the hamburger shop bowled down the street. Birds fled shrieking from wire to wire.
At ten o’clock the woman rang up again; the woman with the harsh, strange, threatening voice. She said, was Lizzie Blank there? This was the third time she’d rung, she said.
“No Blank is here,” Mr. K. said. “You are under a mistake.”
“Look,” Sylvia said, “will you tell her, please, that I have this box for her?”
“Specify contents,” said Mr. K. gruffly. High explosive, he thought.
“How would I know what’s in it? All I know is that it’s been cluttering up my hall for weeks past. Tell her: if she doesn’t collect it right now, I don’t know how she’ll get it, because I’m moving today. The house will be all locked up.”
She was a persistent, headstrong woman, this; he would not like to meet her in the dark. It seemed a bad mistake to inform her quarry over the telephone about what was in store; but no doubt, like him, she was a veteran of intrigue and destruction, and like him had long forgotten whose side she was on. Someone, somewhere, would be taping the call. It was all over the papers, about telephone tappers. Sooner or later the box would turn up; the parcel, the mystery, the infernal machine. He would be ready for it.
“Right,” said Florence, straightening up. “Anything else I can do for you?” She sneezed twice, and blew her nose in a businesslike fashion.
Her face, when she took the handkerchief away, was sulky and woebegone. She had taken exception to their moving; was thinking about selling up herself and getting a flat. Colin could not imagine her leaving the district, but she said that people were talking about her. She said they had got wind of it, about Mother, and that when she walked along Lauderdale Road, people exchanged glances, and talked out of the side of their mouths, and hurried in, slamming their front doors.
“No, I think that’s about it,” Colin said to her. “Thanks, Florence, it was good of you to take time off. I think they’re just about finished on the van.” He went to the front door and looked out into the road. The removal men were just securing the tailgate. “That’s it,” he said.
The house was empty; even the carpets were taken up. They had come down far enough on the purchase price, Sylvia said, without throwing in soft furnishings. There were pale marks on the walls where the pictures had been; buttons and small coins, shaken out of the furniture, lay on the floorboards for the new owner to sweep up. At the top of the stairs, all the doors were wedged open, and an unaccustomed white light lay across the banisters and the bare landing. There was something about the house in its present state that discomfited him extremely; like an old woman stripped naked. He couldn’t wait to leave.
Florence pulled on her gloves. “Better get back to the office. I’ve got to go out and see a claimant.”
“Don’t be too hard on him.”
“Her. It’s a woman. I don’t know why you think I’m such a tyrant. It’s the taxpayer’s money, you know. Well, Colin…so this is it.”
“Yes. I hope the children won’t be a nuisance when they come home from school. I’ll be over for them mid- evening.”
“They will be a nuisance, but by now I’m reconciled. Where’s Alistair today?”
“God knows. I expect he’ll turn up; like a homing rat or something.”
For a moment he thought she was going to offer him her hand. “We’ve been neighbours ten years, Colin. I shall miss you.”
“We’ll miss you, too.”
“I hope you will be very happy,” she said formally, as she set off down the path.
Anyone would think I were getting married, Colin thought, as he watched her go. It still gave him a pang to think of Isabel; but now that he had become such a decision-maker, he was discovering an ability, a happy knack, of not thinking about her at all. The obsessions that had once alarmed him were attenuated now, washed-up little ghosts, trailing their spectral images through his brain when he was on the verge of sleep. He was not so vulnerable now, in waking hours. It was a man’s life; an open countenance, a shuttered heart. It was just as the Prime Minister always said: There Is No Alternative. And that was a comfort too.
Sylvia came down the stairs, her feet clattering on the bare treads.
“What a day!” she said. “We could have picked a finer day for it.”
“Looks as if it might clear, to me.”
“Let’s hope. Ready?”
“Yes.”
