The Tenement Read online

  After they had had their lunch he would return to Helensburgh on the train. She would wave to him and he would wave to her and if he left her money she would go and have a drink in the station buffet—where she would meet Kansas Mary, though who gave her that name she didn’t know—and the Brigand: and they would sing songs with their arms around each other, and sometimes they might be reported to the police by the woman who ran the station bookstall who didn’t like their swearing. It was strange and sad to think of her son going further and further away from her on a train to leafy Helensburgh, which she hated with a deadly hatred, because she had been in his house a few times and her daughter-in-law had asked her whether she had a colour TV or whether she had a washing machine (sniffing around her fur coat and generally speaking trying to make her feel inferior, which she didn’t do, couldn’t manage to do). Anyway she considered her daughter-in-law to be ugly which she herself had never been, and she knew for a fact that the younger woman mostly bought her clothes cheap, much as she tried to act the big lady.

  You don’t know anything, she would mutter under her breath so that her daughter-in-law wouldn’t hear her. What did they teach you in a girls’ school anyway?

  Actually, she didn’t like Mr Porter at all though she was fairly fond of Mrs Porter. Mrs Porter often took her in for a coffee, had offered tactfully to clean the house out for her, but of course she didn’t want that. So she stopped taking her coffee and anyway Mrs Porter was dead now. The husband, a teacher (retired) she wasn’t greatly taken with, he was a bit snooty, like her daughter-in-law, and he never had much to say for himself. He would stand with his briefcase in his hand, not able to make any conversation. He was bald on top with grey hair round the edge of the baldness, and he always wore a crushed hat.

  Once Mrs Porter had given her her Christmas dinner and of course she had lipsticked and powdered herself more than usual. She had even bought a bottle of cheap wine. Looking in the mirror, she could swear that no one would take her for eighty. They had a beautiful dinner: and crackers which they opened. She got a toy car and she wore the the tall paper hat on top of her head all during the dinner. It was soup to start with, then duck, then trifle. Mrs Porter also had Drambuie and After-Eights. She knew how to handle herself, she knew about crackers, about food, the right spoons and forks and knives, and she knew about drink. They watched television (colour) all day and she didn’t want to leave, she was so warm. Even Mr Porter had tried to make conversation with her, in his own odd jerky way. He would ask her about the changes in the town and she was able to tell him that where the Chapel of Ease had once been there was now a warehouse, and where MacDonald’s had once been there was now a post office.

  Conversation somehow got round to Macmillan who used to wander around the town singing and frothing at the mouth. He drank anything, meths, furniture polish, Brasso, and he sang opera, marching like a regular soldier. She told them that the story she had heard was that a big yacht had once anchored in the town and Macmillan had fallen in love with one of the upper-class girls on it (at that time he had been a handsome man who had a career as a singer ahead of him). Then the girl had jilted him and sailed away in the big white yacht and he had taken to drinking and had never stopped since. Now of course he was in a drying-out place in Glasgow. But he was still alive, he must have had an iron stomach. Mr Porter had been interested in that story as it was said that he was a poet and sometimes got letters from Spain and Portugal and so on. She herself never got any letters except bills which she immediately rolled up and threw away. Even at Christmas time she didn’t put the electric light or the heater on, though the Porters always had a Christmas tree. It was said that it was Mrs Porter who put it up.

  Mrs Porter had told her not to tell Mr Porter that the two of them sometimes had coffee together. Was it because Mr Porter didn’t think she was good enough to talk to his wife? And then sometimes Mrs Porter would slip a pound note into her hand. “Don’t tell anyone,” she would say. Of course she spent it all on drink though that wasn’t what Mrs Porter had given her the money for.

  There was a film on that Christmas Day called The Guns of Navarone. She liked it and she liked the Queen’s speech. She liked Morecambe and Wise as well. All that didn’t explain what happened the following day, even after Mrs Porter had left a piece of cake, which she had made herself, in a packet outside her door. Nothing explained what happened the following day: it was her shame and yet at the time it felt natural, imperative. Or at least she had thought and felt so. Nowadays she didn’t give a damn for anyone. Since God’s justice had failed her what could she expect from man? It might even be that it gave the Porters a kick to give her her Christmas dinner and expect that forever afterwards she would bow down to them. Mrs Porter had taken her secretly aside and said, “I will clean your flat. Not even my husband will know.” What was bothering her of course was the contrast between the clean waitress she had been and the tramp she had become, without energy, without shame. How could Mrs Porter know anything about that?

  What had happened was quite simple. After she had spent all Christmas Day in the Porter flat, after she had eaten their soup, their duck, their trifle, their cake, and drunk their wine, after she had watched the programmes on colour television, after she had enjoyed herself and had then climbed the stairs into her cold dark uncomfortable flat, thinking of her husband crucified in blue and twitching in the light, the following day she had met Mrs Porter on the stair and she hadn’t spoken to Mrs Porter at all. She had walked past her as if she wasn’t there. Now, wasn’t that odd? What could one make of that? Anyway, Mrs Porter had looked quite shocked and had never asked her in for coffee again. But why had she done it, why had she ignored Mrs Porter? That was what she couldn’t understand. In her youth she would never have been so rude. But now she felt bitter, really bitter; not even colour TV could cure her ills. That day she had got murderously drunk and had staggered up the stair meeting Mrs Porter on the way, who had almost lifted her skirt delicately aside. Why, she could remember practically crawling on her hands and knees looking up like a suppliant whose heart is full of evil at the stunned red face. Mean bitch, she wouldn’t give her pee to the cat.

  *

  She had crawled past the flat of the Masons who had complained to her when she had come home from Rhodesia after visiting her daughter. They had said that while she was away she had left her water on and it had poured down through the ceiling and ruined their new wallpaper. That was the kind of welcome to which she had come back: imagine it. She had been so happy, too, after a glorious six months’ holiday with her daughter: and the blacks had called her ‘mamma’ and she had sat in the garden drinking soft drinks and sometimes strong ones while the eternal sunlight shone blandly on her. Her daughter and her husband had taken her to see the Falls, and she had shopped in Salisbury. Of course she had heard horrifying stories, like that of the farmer whose head had been cut off and hung on the branch of a tree by the guerrillas so that his wife could see his grey moustache in the clear day. She herself agreed with her daughter. The blacks were really stupid and ungrateful, you couldn’t bequeath a country to them. Absurd to think you could. And that fellow Mugabe was like a dwarf: and she heard an anecdote about a black leader who had been given cheese wrapped in silver paper and had eaten the silver paper too. The blacks were backward, of course they were, and treacherous too after all the whites had done for them.

  Carol and Tom treated them well, why, they would even give them some of the left-over meat, but still you could never be sure with them, they smiled so widely, showing white teeth, but who knew their real thoughts? But they hadn’t harmed her, they smiled, and laughed with her. The Falls had been spectacular, all that water pouring down in the brightness of the day. They had seen some wild life too and Tom used to fish for tiger fish. Of course you didn’t eat tiger fish, well maybe the blacks did, the struggle with the tiger fish was only for the sake of the sport, it was part of the game of life that had made the whites great. At least this was wh
at Tom would say standing there in his shorts, like a schoolboy, showing his knobbly knees.

  Oh, Carol had told her to stay longer, but of course she hadn’t, because Carol hadn’t really meant it. After all, she had two sons and a daughter: the son was a fine sportsman and doing well in his school. Every Christmas instead of a card Carol would send a photograph of the kids, who were calm and well-behaved. Very polite all the kids were, but quite distant too, they’d never had to do anything; Carol too didn’t have to do anything, the blacks did all the cooking. She doubted whether Carol’s daughter could boil an egg. The kids so remote and spoiled already, though it was right that the blacks should be the servants, they were born to be servants, even though they were quite stupid and couldn’t even take a telephone message correctly.

  Tom played golf a lot and in the evening there would be visitors and they would have drinks. They drank quite a lot, there wasn’t much else to do; and the schools, too, she noticed, started earlier than in Scotland because of the heat. But she didn’t mind the heat: there you spent money on electricity to keep cool, here you spent money on electricity in order to keep warm. She loved the heat, she had never been so happy, and she had reminded Carol of events in the days of her youth, as when for example Carol had come in drunk one night at the age of seventeen (still in school, in fact) and she herself poured a bucketful of cold water over her in the bath and Carol had said spluttering, “You’re a pal, mum.” She reminded her of many incidents but they never talked about Jim, crucified on the wires. He had been a post office engineer, a good one too.

  The shock had hit her heart that night and she had never recovered. You never did, no matter what people said. She remembered that after his death the couple below her, the Willises, had asked her for a loan of her stepladder as they were painting their ceilings, and she wouldn’t give it to them. And this is spite of the fact that they knew she had the stepladder and she knew that they knew. Mr Willis, who was a young policeman, had been very hurt. But she didn’t want to give them the ladder: she didn’t want to give them anything, they were the lucky ones: they hadn’t been struck out of the sky. God was on their side.

  The day she had boarded the plane returning from Rhodesia she had met a man from Dundee whom she had also seen on the way out. He was about sixty and both times he was drunk. He had confided in her that he was frightened of planes. He had sat at the back, and the next thing there was an awful stramash. He had staggered to the lavatory and was busily engaged in trying to tug open the Emergency Door, which he thought was the door to the toilet, when he had been dragged away by a steward. He had then been placed between two big stalwart passengers for the rest of the flight. If he had succeeded in opening that door he would have blown them to Kingdom Come.

  Oh, she had loved Rhodesia. Never again would she find a place that she liked so much. It was ideal for servants. Only their television wasn’t very good. It consisted of political speeches by self-important black men. Mugabe always looked tense and arrogant. The bishop was better than him, at least he was dressed in a nicer way. And the big jovial man at least showed he had some life in him: she liked him best of all. No, she would never find a place like that again, though Carol was saying that they would have to leave and they would only be able to take a thousand pounds with them. And they would lose their house and their swimming pool and God knew what would happen to the children, as Carol had hoped to send them to college or university.

  And then she had come home to the complaint from the Masons; really it was wicked of them. She had been so pleased with her photographs and her gifts, and she was so sunburnt and she had never felt so well in her gifts, and she had so many stories and they had to spoil it all with news of their crumby flat and their stained wallpaper. Imagine coming down to these ratty flats with their squalid problems when she had flown home from Rhodesia! And in any case they didn’t realize that her own flat had been flooded by water: they never thought of that. She had left the carpet as it was, to dry as best it could, and that was the beginning of the neglect. The day of her homecoming she had sat on the bed and cried. And the Masons wouldn’t speak to her when they met her on the stair. Oh, the tenement looked rotten and rat-ridden though it really wasn’t, but in comparison with the big airy house in Rhodesia it did: she had brought back photographs of it, with the verandah and the beautiful trees and the lovely car they had just outside the garage and Tom waving through the open window of it.

  Oh, she had suffered. What did they care about Jim and the crucifixion? Nothing. No one remembered what she had been like when young, how efficient she had been. Why, the owner had wanted to make her a manageress but she wouldn’t take the job as the children were growing up and she didn’t know whether she could cope or not. Anyway the children were away now and she was alone.

  The Brigand had asked her to come and stay with him in the cave. But she didn’t want that though the Brigand said that you could get used to it. The cave was along the shore a bit, and she had been there once with him and they had drunk a whole bottle of whisky. He even had candles in the depths of the cave but she couldn’t imagine what it would be like in the winter. They said that the Brigand’s father was a professor and he had run away from home years before, but you could never tell, there were so many stories, as with Macmillan. Perhaps in his case there hadn’t been a girl at all, or a yacht, and the tale had been made up. But when there was no one else to talk to there was always the Brigand. In the olden days she would never even have glanced at him, she would have been horrified to hear of anyone living in a cave. Macmillan had done that too and he would go round the hotels collecting empty bottles to sell for a few pennies. If you gave him any money he wouldn’t leave you alone but marched behind you step for step all day as if he were imitating you, mocking you, barking military orders while at the same time singing snatches of Italian opera in the original. There was always a thin rim of froth round his lips.

  “You were quite right not to let that girl in,” said the Brigand in his polite English accent. “They have no right to come and impose themselves on you.”

  “You’re dead right. The liberty,” she said, her nostrils flaring. Though the girl had been nice: it wasn’t her fault. But she would rather lie stretched on the floor than let anyone from the Health Department come and see her. They hadn’t helped her when she had needed them most. Now they could go to hell and back in a chariot if they wanted to. Where were they when she had the fainting spells? In those days she would sometimes faint while carrying a tray over to a table. The proprietor had been very good, he had allowed her to carry on and eventually the fainting spells had stopped, though they had been bad while they lasted. And migraines too. Awful pains which lit up her face, sparked in front of her eyes. Nothing would cure the pain till the sickness came.

  Now there was Mr Cooper in the bottom flat opposite the Masons (who had put in for the flat below when the nurse had died): and his wife had passed away but he seemed to get over it. Mr Porter too had lost his wife but he acted funny: he had been funny most of his life if you were to ask her. Now the Masons had left the middle flat it was Mrs Floss who stayed there. Mrs Floss was always changing the furniture in her flat: she had plenty of money, her husband had owned an hotel. Mrs Brown who had stayed next to herself on the top flat had died too. When she was alive she used to take a taxi out to the cemetery to visit the grave of her husband. She herself never went to Jim’s grave, she couldn’t bear to. That day she had cried so much (the day of the funeral), and there had been a lot of flowers and wreaths, for Jim had been very popular and obliging, but she had never gone to see the grave again. It was as if his body wasn’t really there, as if it had melted in the lightning. She didn’t believe in God, she didn’t believe that Jim would live again, that she would ever see him again, all that talk was crap: you had your life on this earth, you were lucky or not, that was what it all came down to. Mrs Floss below her often mentioned souls passing from body to body, reincarnation she called it, but she didn’t
believe that either. Of course since Mrs Floss had lost her husband she had been away on a number of world cruises, she had tons of money, but she had odd ideas. And to see her in the summer in a bikini stretched out on a deckchair on the back green was a sight that one would never forget. She looked like a stranded whale. It almost made you cry laughing. Die laughing.

  Carol didn’t believe in God either. If God was good he wouldn’t give this country to the blacks, she would say. Even He must know how stupid they were. If it was left to them the country would be a mess, chaotic, ungovernable, dirty. And she herself believed that. They would never have cultivated the country, tilled the land, you could see they were incapable of it, all they wanted was bicycles and cars. And they would sleep all day in the sun if they were allowed to. Their minds were so primitive and illogical. One day a black servant had come to Carol and said he was leaving. “Why?” she had asked him. “You have just been given a raise.” “It’s because of that I’m leaving,” he had told her. “Because of the raise?” “Yes, you’ve been cheating me; if I was worth that money, I should have been given it from the beginning.” How they reasoned was beyond one’s understanding, Carol would say.

  She herself had been given a raise by the restaurant manager. “Because you are a nice efficient girl with a pleasant manner,” he told her. “Because you are conscientious,” smiling through his pencil-thin moustache. Of course he had fancied her but she hadn’t fancied him. He had tried to make her, but she took the raise and kept out of his way as much as possible. Then he had been caught cooking the books because he was keeping a mistress and she hadn’t seen him again. Over sexed he had been but a good manager too: the over sexed ones always made the best managers. He let you get on with your job but he had that eye. Of course since Jim, there would be no one for her. Not like that.