Mr Toppit (21 page)

“That it? Is that all?” said one of the lads, Barry. “Only I could have brought the smaller van, couldn’t I? Had to get the big one specially.”

“Well, there are some suitcases with our clothes,” Arthur said. He had carried them downstairs himself. They stood next to him on the pavement.

Barry gave a hollow laugh. “Just as well we brought the big van, then.”

“We are going to pay you, you know,” Martha said pleasantly, but with a slight edge to her voice.

“Not complaining,” the other lad, Ray, added huffily. “Easier for us, isn’t it?” he said, exchanging a glance with Barry.

The day, which had begun so full of hope, had already started to lose its lustre. Martha and Arthur sat in silence in the back of a cab as they followed Barry and Ray’s van along Piccadilly to the new flat. Once they were there, the day deteriorated further. As soon as Arthur opened the door—he had gone up there first after picking up the key from the caretaker—he knew there was a problem. It wasn’t just the smell, sweet and sickly and overlaid with decay, but the chaos Terry had left behind. There had been no specific discussion about it, but Arthur had assumed he would leave the flat more or less ready for them to move in. He wasn’t expecting spotless—he knew Terry too well for that—but he hadn’t expected Terry to have simply abandoned his life on the bare floorboards of a flat that was no longer his.

Arthur moved up the corridor, peering into the rooms that led off it—two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a sitting room—with an increasing sense of panic. The flat looked as if it had been rather inefficiently looted. Squashed cardboard boxes and slats from wooden crates were scattered
across the floor. The carpet had been taken up, but patches of it were left behind where the nails holding it had been driven too strongly into the floor. In the kitchen there were dirty pots and pans in the sink; the gas cooker was covered with black, burned-on food. It was in the kitchen, too, that the smell was strongest: the fridge appeared to have been unplugged. Arthur put his handkerchief over his nose and opened it. There were bottles of milk, which had turned yellow and solid; open cans of Spam and corned beef were going rusty. A half-eaten tin of baked beans lay on its side dripping orange gunk. In the sitting room a chair with only two legs lay alongside a broken table that might have been chopped up for firewood. On the floor an empty goldfish bowl was turned on its side, with a selection of battered children’s toys and books around it. There were piles of newspapers and magazines everywhere. Spilling out of a cardboard box under the window, some white cards were crisp and bright against the stained floorboards. Arthur bent down and picked one up: they were unused invitations to Terry and Eileen’s wedding ten years before.

He could hear Martha’s footsteps coming into the flat. She made a breathy “Ohh” sound, and her feet quickened as she ran up the corridor. “Arthur!” she shouted, and then again, “Arthur!” She came into the sitting room. She did not cry often, but Arthur always became tense when she did. A feeling of powerlessness would sweep over him like an icy wave. He tried to take her in his arms, but she maneuvered herself out.

“It’s spoiled!” she shouted, her eyes flicking round the desolate room. “Terry’s spoiled it for us!” She brushed past him and went across the corridor to the kitchen.

“We could—”

She came back, kicking a broken tricycle out of her way, her hand over her mouth and nose. “We could what, Arthur?” she screamed, through clenched teeth. “We could do
what?”
She banged her fist on the wall.

He was still holding one of the wedding invitations. We could call Terry, he had been going to say, but he remembered that Terry had already gone. The other night, while Martha was out, the phone had rung. It was Terry calling on a ship-to-shore line that crackled so much Arthur could only catch some of what he was saying. “High seas, dear,” he kept shouting. “I’m on the high seas. On my way to the Dark Continent.” There was something Terry wanted him to pick up from somewhere, and as his voice ebbed and flowed, Arthur gradually understood it was a package he wanted delivered to his girlfriend, but what the package was or where the girlfriend could be found never came down the line with any clarity. Finally, Terry disappeared and Arthur was left with the receiver transmitting a sound that mimicked the echoey sea noise of a conch shell.

Martha had turned her face to the wall and was sobbing. A clatter came from down the corridor: Barry and Ray had begun to bring in the furniture. There was a bang as they tried to get the heavy bed through the front door, then a flurry of argument as they tried to decide which way round it should go. Barry came into the sitting room. Martha turned her back so he wouldn’t see her crying. “Where’s the bed going?” he said. Arthur saw a thought flit across Barry’s face. “This is Mr. Tringham’s flat, isn’t it?”

“It’s ours now,” Arthur said, more loudly than he had meant to. Martha gave a hollow laugh and went into the kitchen,
slamming the door behind her. “The bed,” Arthur said, “on the left there. In the bedroom.”

But Barry wasn’t listening: he was smiling to himself. “Ray!” he called. “This is Mr. Tringham’s old flat. You remember that wrap party, the one where he got that girl to do the funny dance?” A roar of laughter echoed up the corridor from Ray. “What a state this place is in! When did Mr. Tringham move out? Looks like there’ve been burglars.”

“Excuse me,” Arthur said. He crossed the corridor and opened the kitchen door.

Martha was leaning out of an open window taking great gulps of air. Her arms were tightly folded across her chest as if she was trying to hold something in. “I don’t want to stay here,” she said. “We can go to an hotel.”

Arthur nodded. He was thinking of the key money he had paid Terry and the acceptance payment on the script that hadn’t been accepted.

Then she said, “I can’t live like this anymore.”

The icy wave that had engulfed Arthur when Martha started to cry closed over his head. His heart was racing. He wished she had moved her hands when she’d said the words, had gestured with them to indicate she might be talking about the state of the flat, but they had stayed folded and she had been very still as she had spoken.

He went back into the corridor and closed the kitchen door behind him. Barry and Ray were still bickering about the bed, which was half in and half out of the front door. “How long have you two got? Are you very busy? Do you have a bit more time?” he asked them. He managed to keep the shake out of his voice.

“We said we’d be back by dinnertime.”

“Will you do me a favor?”

They looked at each other doubtfully. “Well, what sort of thing? Only I said we’d have the van back, didn’t I?” Ray said. Barry nodded.

Then Arthur said something that sounded to him as if he was speaking in a foreign language: “I’ll see you right.”

The atmosphere changed imperceptibly.

“This is what I need,” Arthur said. “This is what I want. Everything has to go.” He waved his arms around. “We can’t live like this.”

“Terrible,” Barry said. Ray nodded.

“I need it all out,” Arthur said, holding their gaze.

The lads exhaled in unison. Barry shook his head. “Don’t know, Mr. Hayman.”

“How much did we agree on for you to bring our stuff over? Twenty-five, wasn’t it?” Arthur put his hand into his pocket and brought out his wallet.

“It’s not the money, it’s the time, Mr. Hayman. Really.”

Arthur opened his wallet.

“Anyway,” Ray said aggressively, “what would we do with it, all the stuff?”

“You could sell the bits that are worth anything, keep the money.”

Ray guffawed contemptuously.

Barry touched his arm. “Hang on a mo, Ray. There might be—”

“Firewood,” Ray interrupted. “That’s all it’s good for. Look at it.”

Arthur took twenty-five pounds out of his wallet. “Anyway, here’s what I owe you for the move,” he said, and handed the money to Barry. He took out a couple more notes and held them in front of him.

“There’s that dump out near Borehamwood, isn’t there, Ray?” Barry said.

“We’ll never be back by dinnertime.”

“No, you’re right,” Arthur said. “You’d never be back by dinnertime.” He put the notes back into his wallet, and the wallet back into his pocket. “Well, you’d better just move the stuff in.”

Barry looked at Ray. Arthur looked at his watch. “Come on,” he said. “I don’t want you to be late.”

“Forty,” Ray blurted out.

“Forty what?”

“Pounds,” he said uncertainly.

“You mean the twenty-five I’ve already given you and another fifteen?” Arthur said.

Ray’s eyes flicked towards Barry. He cleared his throat. “On top,” he said. “Forty on top.”

“Oh,” Arthur said. “I haven’t got that much, Ray.” He walked up the corridor. “Bed goes in there. Dining-room chairs up here. Try not to scuff the walls if you can help it.”

“Okay. Twenty,” Barry said. “We’ll do it for twenty.”

“I don’t want you to be late,” Arthur said. “It’s getting on. You’d better make a start.”

Two hours later, the swap had been done: Arthur and Martha’s furniture had been moved in, and all of Terry’s junk was piled in the back of the van. Several jokes had been made about how much fuller the van was going to be leaving the new flat than coming to it. Although Barry and Ray kept talking about having to get back, they did not seem in any particular hurry to go. The dining-room chairs had been arranged in a rough circle in the sitting room and they were all drinking from a selection
of chipped glasses and mugs that Arthur had discovered in one of the kitchen cupboards with a bottle of wine, which he and Martha were halfway through. The lads were drinking beer—Martha had gone down to the off-licence to get it while Arthur was cleaning the stove with bleach. He had also cleared out the fridge and scrubbed it, and now, with the windows open, a pleasant breeze was blowing through the flat and there was only the faintest vestige of the smell that had greeted him when he had first opened the door.

Martha was laughing. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. She was telling Barry and Ray about their previous landlord, Mr. Bubek, and her various rows with him. The lads had got through three bottles of beer each and were on to their fourth. When Martha got to the punchline of her story, in which she imitated Mr. Bubek saying, in his thick Polish accent, “And what is so common, please, about my parts, Mrs. Hayman?” Ray, who was taking a swig from his can, laughed so violently that he inhaled the beer instead of swallowing it and it foamed out of his nose while he spluttered and coughed. Barry had to stand up and wallop him on the back.

They were laughing so much that they did not notice Arthur leave the room. He stood outside in the corridor, then leaned against the wall. Although he had only had a little wine, much less than Martha, it had taken the edge off the memory of the feeling that had risen in him as soon as he had entered the flat and had stayed, like a low hum, until Barry and Ray were moving Terry’s junk out. It was like panic—on the same wavelength as panic anyway—but it didn’t feel like panic about a single event or moment: it felt like something without boundaries that extended as far back as he could remember and as far forward as he could see.

Now Martha was cross-examining Barry about his accent. “Birmingham?” she said. “You’ve got those sharp vowel sounds. Newcastle? Bolton?”

Barry was giggling.

Ray was egging her on: “Further north, to the east, little bit up, that’s it—you’re getting close.”

“Scotland?” she said tentatively.

“Too bloody far!” Ray said.

There was a great roar of laughter. Arthur smiled at Martha’s unexpected animation. She was normally rather awkward with people on the lower rungs of the film industry. Arthur and Terry, who had worked in and out of the studios all their lives, were more attuned to the caste system that divided them from the sparks, standbys, and props boys, and the awkward mixture of hostility and supplication they tended to give off.

After a while Arthur tuned out of their conversation to concentrate on the air blowing through the flat and the sound of traffic. He closed his eyes. He didn’t know how long he was gone for, but it was as if he had left the flat and was somewhere else. Their voices brought him back: Ray seemed to be talking about a baby. “No,” he was saying, “she sleeps right through.”

“How old?” Martha asked.

“Nine months. And she’s a big eater. Oh, she’s a real sweetheart Dawn is, a little darling.”

“Dawn!” Martha said, with a laugh in her voice. “Now, that’s a lovely name for a baby girl. Whose idea was it?”

But Arthur was walking down the corridor, away from them, and Ray’s answer was lost to him. He was imagining a small child with blue eyes sitting on Ray’s knee. He saw Ray lift her up and hold her in the air above him. He imagined a street
where Ray might live and the wife he might have, and a Sunday lunch with children and grandparents.

Arthur looked into the rooms as he passed. Now, with their furniture in place, the flat tidy and Martha laughing up the corridor, merry with too much wine, everything seemed calm. He stood in the doorway of the apartment, looking out at the stairs and the elevator shaft, and suddenly remembered where he had drifted off to earlier: he had been in a place where he could allow himself to think, for one brief, dangerous instant, that everything might be all right.

When the doorbell rang at seven o’clock on a bitterly cold morning in the winter of 1960, it was more than two years since they had moved into the flat on Shaftesbury Avenue. Then it had been the end of summer and for several weeks after they were first there they could leave the windows open and let the noise and heat of the city flow through the rooms. Now the inefficient central heating that had just started clanking through the pipes towards the radiators hardly took the chill off the air, and Arthur had to light the fires in the sitting room and their bedroom to bring the flat to any perceptible level of warmth.

He was up earlier than usual. He was spending his days at the studio where a film set during the French Revolution was having a problematic shoot. Arthur had been brought in to write additional dialogue for some of the crowd scenes and to beef up the tepid romance at the center of the story. As the film continued to reel from crisis to crisis and fall further behind, the shooting of the love scenes Arthur had written kept being delayed. The bedroom that had been built in readiness for them sat forlornly in the corner of the stage where the main Bastille
set stood. Only yesterday Arthur had heard a rumor that the bedroom was going to be struck, which meant that his scenes were definitely to be dropped and he wanted to get to the studio early to talk to the producer.