The Tenement (11 page)

He realized, however, that he must do what they asked him to do: otherwise they might suspect him.

“Okay,” he said. He walked across the road and into the close. Then he came out, straightened his shoulders as he skirted the orbit of the lamp that was bent over the close, like a scholar perusing the stone. He began to whistle, but his lips were too dry for him to do so easily. He nearly shouted over to the two policemen, “I can't whistle.” He tried his hardest but all that came out of his mouth was a dry sound. He made himself walk jauntily with the posture of a man who has nothing to lose, nothing to gain, who has no future. He smiled over at Pierce who was standing in the door of his close like an obscure reflection of himself. He imagined a scar on his cheek and nearly put up his finger to touch it. Had the scar been left by a knife wound in a fight? He couldn't imagine MacDowell's life in and out of prison, squabbling, defending himself. Also he had been told that he was rather simple: he himself didn't feel simple at all. On the contrary, he felt the complexity of the situation. After he had walked up the street he came to a halt. For a moment there it was as if he intended to continue to walk away from his own close, as if he didn't intend to return to the complex world of notebook and interrogation.

Pierce was waiting for him at the door.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “I could see you clearly enough.” And he smiled genially at Cooper. “You did a good job. You looked exactly as he might have looked.”

“That's right,” said Hutton, “I was thinking that we can establish the time quite easily if it was just when England scored.”

Damn England, Cooper thought. They were always beating us and for the moment in his anger he forgot himself, the possible danger he was in. Nothing but failure, loss. He shivered, feeling the cold for the first time.

“You should have a whisky,” said Pierce. “Do you have any?”

Cooper pointed to the bottle that was still lying on the sideboard. Some detective! “I gave her some,” he said.

“Oh,” said Pierce.

“And tea as well. After I had come back from phoning. I didn't want to leave her alone, but my next door neighbours weren't in when I knocked.”

“Good,” said Pierce. “You did very well.” It was as if he was being decorated. “You did very well indeed. Not many people would have kept their heads as you did. And the street was deserted?”

“Yes, because of the match.”

“Of course,” said Pierce.

The two detectives got to their feet. “Well, that's enough. If I were you I would have a whisky and a rest,” said Pierce. “We'll sort him out.”

They left the room and went into their car. They turned it in the direction of the council house scheme. They waved. Cooper waved back. After they had gone he sat down but he didn't turn on the TV. England would win anyway. He knew that in his bones.

He remembered the day he had last gone to visit his wife. She had been in an oxygen tent and had smiled at him. The surgeon had said, “No immediate danger.”

“I'll be back as usual tonight,” said Cooper.

And then the policewoman had come to the door. He had heard the doorbell. It was late and the night was dark and frosty. Who was this? He wasn't expecting anyone. And the police-woman had stood there. And she had told him that Flora had died. There was snow on her coat like a sparkle of fading diamonds. She was quite young with a cold sore on her lip. She took off her diced cap and laid it beside her on the sofa. And then he had cried and cried.

Sometimes his wife would say to him, “I don't know why you are always talking to that Linda. Every time she goes for coal you're out there talking to her.”

“Well, she's friendly. And you know I like talking to people.” And Flora would hear from her becalmed chair the sound of his high voice laughing. Linda could take a good joke. You could even tell her dirty jokes which you couldn't tell your wife. And furthermore, she was Catholic and there was that one about the nun and the population problem …

The policewoman had sat down opposite him. He thought that she was acting towards him as if he were an old man long extinct. And he was shaking, no doubt about it. He had to take his cup in both hands to steady him and warm him at the same time.

It was December the 27th, he remembered that clearly. Between Christmas and New Year.

The policewoman had blonde hair, like a helmet of gold.

“Will you be all right?” she was saying. “Are you sure you will be all right?”

“I'll be all right,” he kept saying. And then, “I don't understand it. The surgeon said that there was no immediate danger. She was smiling.”

“These things can happen,” said the policewoman. “Anyway it may have been a blessing. Was she in much pain?”

“Sometimes. But not much at the hospital.”

He was overwhelmed by memories. There was their marriage: then their honeymoon in Brighton. Then the years together. Of course they never had any children and that was a tragedy: he didn't believe it was anything to do with him. She liked children and so did he: but nothing ever happened. They had talked of adopting a child, but nothing had come of it. Of course as a milkman he didn't have a huge salary.

When they were young they used to drive out into the country in the car. One day they saw a weasel. It had turned and looked at them ferociously as if to say “I am not frightened of you”. Their car in those days was a yellow Mini.

The policewoman crossed her legs negligently. She leaned over him with her cup of tea. She was so young, so pretty, so hopeful. She'd probably just started her job.

And then the terrible thing happened, the extraordinary thing, the awful thing. He had watched her legs, following the curve of her thighs. He couldn't believe it. Was he some sort of blind uncaring animal? He would have taken that policewoman if she had offered herself to him. And this just after his wife's death. Was he some kind of monster? He stared fixedly at the sweet flesh. Oh God, such piercing desire he felt: it was almost like pain:

As if the policewoman was conscious of what was happening she uncrossed her legs and got to her feet. He himself ran to the bathroom and was violently sick. The yellow stuff spurted from his mouth all over the floor which had linoleum on it. After he had been sick, he was okay again. Beast that I am, he thought, as he saw her to the door. The stars were bright in the sky, millions of them, twinkling in the frost. He never saw the policewoman again till tonight.

He did have a scar, he said to himself. And I'll get him for it. I'm not frightened. It was as if the man had raped his own wife in the dark close. Animal he thought. Smiler. Beast. Monster. Sex-maniac.

T
HE WALLS OF
the old tenement sweated. The flaky paint on the door was green and scarred. Drunks vomited in the close as they staggered home at midnight and after. Perhaps the spirit of the old matron was still pottering about with its brush, flicking at dust and crisp-papers. The matron, old and grey-haired, spoke little: she had dusted round the bins every morning. One of these days, John Mason would say, she will put up notices. There had hardly ever been any children in the tenement except for Mrs Miller's two girls and boy whom the matron had disliked because they insisted on sliding down the bannisters shouting war cries. Now, however, there would be Linda's child and the tenement would blossom again briefly as it had done before. Of course in the distant past there would have been large families.

When the matron died the flat had been empty for six months, and mice had infested the building. The Masons and the Porters had put down traps all the time and then Mr Cooper's stray cat had killed most of them: a bonanza of grey flesh. However, one day Mr Cooper had found the cat dead outside his door. It had been run down by a big lorry, flattened, like a leaf.

The old pipes squeaked. Workmen left their footsteps in the wet cement and the matron became angry with them. Mrs Brown went to visit her husband's grave in the neatly kept cemetery with its locked doors. He had died of an embolism. On his grave she placed flowers which she had grown in the back green. Sometimes the glass jar in the cemetery shook, and collapsed in the wind. If it was a good day, she might walk back from the cemetery in her black clothes.

Who had lived in that tenement? Lord knew there had been so many. Workers, professional men, housewives. Clothes had hung on the line, patched, poor. Knickers had ballooned outwards in a spring wind and had then faded away like clouds. The history of changing society could be learned from the tenement. Furniture changed, wallpaper changed, so did clothes.

Sometimes at night Mrs Floss thought she heard voices in the walls as of newly wed couples swearing eternal allegiance to each other. How many coats of paint had the walls known, how many sheaves of wallpaper; from the coloured to the plain? Linoleum gave way to carpets, old white cracked basins to warm coloured suites. The tenement swung to the wheel and wind of history. Tall and gaunt it stood in the storms, windows rattled, were swung out like sails on creaking ropes. Women hung above the streets with mops in their hands. Coalmen bent like dwarfs under dirty sacks.

The matron prodded with her broom as if investigating a disease. Faintly from far streets the voices of children could be heard. Mrs Miller lay on her bed in her fur coat while the whitewash flaked from the ceiling. She dreamt of Rhodesia, the matron dreamt of her days and nights in hospital, dressed in her brief authority. The tenement was a well of voices, whispering, shouting.

Mrs Floss bought a sideboard and wasn't satisfied and bought another one. She laid a carpet and was dissatisfied and bought another one. Why had she taken a flat here? She could have gone elsewhere, she had plenty of money, why was she involved in constant renovation? But the flat was central and she couldn't drive. One day she had asked John, Linda's husband, if he would run her to the hospital where she was getting treatment, probably for alcoholism. He had set her down and waited for her. Later, much later, she wandered out of the hospital shouting, “Jimmy, where are you Jimmy?” Then she had asked if he would stop at the Co-op and wait for her while she bought some messages. She treated him like a servant and he accepted it all good-humouredly. She was a card, the old girl. He always remembered her in later years as standing in the sunshine outside the hospital and shouting, “Where are you, Jimmy?” Indubitably half drunk. A pale, old drunken face glimmered at a window.

Mrs Brown would examine the bottles in the bin and say to Linda, “That woman, Mrs Floss, drinks a lot. See all these whisky bottles and sherry bottles. Disgusting.” She maintained that Mrs Floss put her empties in her bin, but Linda reckoned that they were Mrs Brown's own. Who would have thought that she drank too?

Trevor Porter brooded over his poems. Dante's head burned above the tenement like the morning star. His verses were like the bars of the raw electric fire, wounded, scarred.

The wind played about the tenement on March days. It spun papers, in dizzy circles, rings. Mrs Miller looked out at the sky on a stormy night while the blue lightning quivered. Let it hit someone else, she prayed. Trevor Porter once saw it at the tips of his fingers when he was typing.

The unmentionable things that go on over there, Mrs Brown would say to the matron, peering across to the opposite side of the street. Prostitution is rife, she would say in a whisper, her eyes gleaming. Girls with short flame-coloured skirts were seen leaving the flats regularly. There was music from feral records on hot summer nights.

Would you believe it, the matron would say, seeing the Red Indians pass. The colours of their hair were exotic, mediaeval. It was as if the town had been taken over by invaders from outer space. Hell's Angels in leather jackets careered up and down the street after midnight. “I do not want to give my name,” she would say on the phone to the police, “but really …” Invariably when the police arrived the street was quiet again. These black alien riders seemed to have a sixth sense for trouble. In their visors and masks.

Trevor wrote a poem which went as follows:

Someone is saying “I'll knife you, son,”

just below my window in the night.

What is this. A Midsummer Night's Dream,

a remarkable inflection of the light.

A shudder as of fear, of ecstasy.

Shakespeare's scavenging magnificent mind

hovering in a blue Elizabethan sky,

learning the killer's lingo in the wind.

“I'll knife you, son,” he said. That firm quiet voice

assertive for a moment. Let me see—

Lear is struggling through the wind and gorse

in the spiky crown of his senility.

That shudder once again. That betrayal …

I pull the curtains wide. The moon is full.

And somewhere in the night the parched beasts prowl

in the dense shrubberies beyond our rule.

One day Mrs Floss, who was slightly drunk, took her brother into the Porters' flat, having found the door open.

“This,” she told him, “is their lobby. Notice the nice carpet. And this is the kitchen, roomy isn't it? Now here is Mr Porter, typing. Good morning, Mr Porter.” Trevor gazed at her in amazement. “Mrs Porter collects these figures. Beautiful, aren't they?”

And so she proceeded on her guided tour through the flat, saying goodbye to Trevor as she left. He didn't think Julia had been in that day. She laughed and laughed when she heard of Mrs Floss's safari, and especially at Mrs Floss's indication to her brother,

“And there is Mr Porter, typing.”

Mrs Floss's husband had owned an hotel in the town. Latterly, he had given up bothering with it and read books instead. Mrs Floss served in the bar and had done so for years. Her husband was a thin man who had grown shyer as the years passed: he always wore a carnation in his buttonhole. He would have sold the hotel if it hadn't been for his wife. He would go to the library and ask Mrs Stewart for the latest books which he had seen reviewed in the
Observer
, and the
Sunday Times
. She hated the sight of him: he gave her more work than all her other customers combined. He was always making her fill in forms ordering books from the Central Library, as he had started to take a keen interest in history, especially the history of the town.

Mrs Floss had been unfaithful to him many times with men whom she had met in the bar. Once, too, with a Spaniard whom she met while she was on holiday on her own, as her husband refused to visit the hot countries ever since he had had his stomach-upset. “You go,” he would say to her. “Your brother can run the hotel while you're gone.” She always went in the late season when the fares were low and the cities were not crowded.

Her longest affair was with a policeman whose wife had eventually left him. Her friendship with the policeman was useful to her, as she could keep the hotel open later than normal and she earned other perquisites. The policeman was a big man who despised Mr Floss: he himself never read books and was not very popular in the town, as he was always arresting people for trivial offences. The two of them, Mrs Floss and he, often made love in the police van, which appealed to her romantic nature. Mr Floss knew that this was going on, but as he had been impotent for years he didn't care.

“I don't understand what you see in him,” he would say mildly. “He seems to me to be a lout.” She thought if he were a real man he would fight for her, but of course her husband never dreamed of doing that. He knew that he would lose anyway. He had long ago lost respect for his wife and was happy with his books. He had inherited the hotel and had never liked running it: it was too much like advertising soap.

“If you don't watch out,” she would say to him, “we will be bankrupt. Do you realize that most people are now bringing caravans to the area and also taking self-service flats? Petrol, too, has gone up in price and people want the good weather: they will go to the Continent rather than here. The other thing is, you'd better make sure that you have proper fire precautions. They are going to be very strict on that.”

“Maybe we should set the place on fire, and cash the insurance money,” her husband said mildly. She had not been too horrified at the idea, but knew that he was only joking. In fact there had been a big fire in a neighbouring hotel in which three visitors had died. It had been started by a porter throwing a burning cigarette-end into a waste paper basket. About that time there had been an epidemic of fires in the town, one of which had gutted the cinema. It had been rebuilt and was now used for bingo.

Her most satisfactory romance had been with an Italian she had met in Venice. They had spent a splendid month together sailing in gondolas, visiting magnificent houses and theatres. She had thought Venice absolutely divine. Everything was so romantic, especially the moonlight on the waters which during the day looked rather dirty. The sun blazed down from a perfectly blue sky every day, the pigeous were a blizzard in the famous square of St Mark, the clock-tower with its soldiers was so unusual. The Italian too was very attentive, but he didn't pay for anything. Still, she didn't mind that: she didn't mind the heat either. She returned home to find that Alex had had a stroke: he gibbered to her in a strange broken language. He lasted for two months before the second stroke hit him and killed him outright.