The Tenement (12 page)

It was quite amazing how badly she took his death. When he was alive she hadn't bothered about him, now that he was dead she remembered his kind nature. She wept continually and stopped seeing the policeman. She burnt the letters she had received from the Italian. Indeed, she had a tremendous bout of burning and putting out. It was as if she wished to be rid of her old life in order to clear the decks for her new one. She dressed in sober clothes, decided to sell the hotel. She couldn't bear to be in the bar listening to the usual chatter which she had heard so often before. She looked around for a flat and eventually found the one she was in. Her sons, who were grown up, sometimes visited her and once when she was away they stole her carpet, and sold it. Mr Cooper had tried to stop them after he had seen them at midnight, walking down the stair with it, but they called him an old interfering fart and he had popped into his flat again like a cuckoo on a clock.

She got a large amount of money for the hotel and began to drink heavily. She went on a world cruise and dozed on the deck of a huge liner for weeks. She had an affair with a steward who came from Liverpool and who was a sad descent from her bronzed Italian and Spaniard. In fact, he had a harelip and a liking for pink gin. She found that when she came to writing postcards she knew of no one she wanted to send them to. When she arrived home she had her hair done and then changed all the furniture in the flat again. She would try to keep the workers in the flat as long as possible by offering them drink. She found the loneliness oppressive and nearly went out of her mind as she had no inner resources to fall back on. She never read a book. Once she nearly put her flat on fire while trying to cook chips. The flex of the cooker burnt out and she couldn't operate the fire extinguisher which she had bought. She poured water over the flames but they shot up higher than ever. John Mason had explained to her the use of salt in situations like that, but she forgot in the middle of the crisis.

She went to bed late and woke late. Sometimes she would wander about the lobby in her nightgown with her teeth out. For no reason at all she would begin to think about her dead husband, whom she now idolized, remembering his gentle forgetful ways. At the same time she missed her lovers; she had become fat and rather ugly and she knew it. She didn't have any mirrors in the flat. One of her sons took to drugs (he was the leader in removing her carpet). When she went away she would not know who to leave the key with, but eventually left it with Mrs Porter with whom she used to have a coffee; and then of course Mrs Porter didn't know anything of her previous life. She was a nice woman, unhappy, but who wasn't? She said that she wanted more than anything to leave the flat and find a house preferably in Devon. But her husband wanted to stay in Scotland because he wrote poetry, though she couldn't understand why you couldn't write poetry anywhere. All she knew about poetry was that there was little money in it. Mrs Porter was a brave woman; she didn't want her husband to know that she had cancer.

She discussed the light on the stair with Mr Porter. Actually he didn't give a damn, she could tell that, but she wanted someone to talk to. Mr Porter, she thought, was rather snooty and despised her if that was not too strong a word. She thought he was rather like Alex, but not so kind: there was a remoteness about him. He was a funny little man who wore a crushed hat, summer and winter. He also had a cat and she didn't like cats: she much preferred dogs. Dogs were friendlier animals. In fact she thought she might get one: you never knew where you were with a cat. Cats were hypocrites, they gave you only cupboard love. Dogs were true friends. She did in fact buy a big black dog but Mr Cooper must have told someone about it and she had to give it up. She thought Mr Porter more of a gentleman than Mr Cooper.

She hated what she was becoming. In the hotel, once, there had been a maid who had been about forty years old. The maid stayed in the attic room in the summer, and had no friends. She used to go to church every Sunday and on Wednesday nights as well. She bought a lot of pamphlets about God which asked whether you were saved or not. She was thin and wore glasses and was very conscientious. But in spite of that the customers didn't like her, thought her too spiritual. She had always found that. The ones the customers liked the best were the harum-scarum negligent good-looking ones, the ones she couldn't depend on. A pretty face went a long way. She herself had been pretty in her youth, but now she didn't dare look in the mirror.

Sometimes she would go on diets, but found that she couldn't keep to them. She ate cakes and of course she drank a lot of vodka and gin and this put on calories. She ate many sweets. She had read in some newspaper that over-eating was a compensation for unhappiness.

She tried to make friends with Mr Porter, inviting him to watch TV programmes, but he never came. He was a queer cold fish. Mrs Porter had told her that he sometimes spent hours in his room typing, not speaking to her. What a life. Of course Alex had been much the same. He should never have married. He was too good for her, he should have been a saint. She should have married a farmer, a big strong man with natural desires. Once she had gone to a fortune teller who had first of all asked her for a cigarette and then told her that there was going to be a big romance in her life. She had asked for another cigarette at the end of the reading. Mrs Floss gave her the whole packet wondering how a fortune teller couldn't afford cigarettes of her own. But of course there had been no romance. Poor Alex, what a life she had led him, what a dance. How he must have suffered! Now that she was suffering she realized what he must have suffered too. Imagine what she had been like. Prettifying herself for that policeman while Alex knew exactly what was happening. No wonder she drank, remembering that.

She had also made attempts to make friends with Mrs Miller. The two of them could even drink together. But Mrs Miller wouldn't let anyone into her flat and she stank as well in these unmentionable furs, and she went with men who lived in caves. No, Mrs Miller wasn't respectable, and neither were her friends. She quite liked the Masons, especially John who had driven her to the hospital once or twice when she had her dizzy spells. He looked like an Italian or a Spaniard and had a handsome moustache. Linda she kept at a distance, because she sensed that the latter disapproved of her. John perhaps disapproved of her as well, as his own father was an alcoholic who came to the house and made trouble even when Linda was pregnant. She had heard that John had knocked his own father down.

Sometimes she would get letters of Mr Porter's by mistake, for the postman was rather careless. She would open the letters without looking at the address. Once she went in and handed Mr Porter a letter addressed to him, which she had inadvertently opened, and he was angry. He didn't say much but she could tell that he was seething. That bloody woman, he would be thinking to himself. Actually it had been from a magazine and it had been the return of a poem. So that's to you, old fart, she muttered under her breath. Anyone would think that she wasn't a human being. Of course she should never have opened the letter, but most gentlemen would have accepted her apology with good grace.

She dreamed that she and Mr Porter would get married and she would be no longer on her own. She would move into his flat which was much bigger than her own. Maybe some day Mr Porter would become famous and she would travel with him all over the world. But she didn't think that he would become famous, not like Catherine Cookson. Still she would not be alone. Loneliness was a disease, worse than a disease, it was a living death. It ate into one. Nights she thought that she would scream out loud. She felt imprisoned, in solitary confinement. She had been sentenced and condemned by an invincible destiny which was laughing at her. Maybe she ought to go to church but she didn't want to do that. She couldn't remember when she had been in church last and she didn't like the thought of it. It was an affair of stained glass windows, middle-aged women with hymn books, a silly minister and a cross. The church hadn't helped her when Alex died. No one had helped her then, no one. She had stared down at his cold tranquil scholarly face which was as if carved from stone. She hardly recognized him, he looked so boyish, so austere. Her brother had to organize the funeral for her. She remembered the undertaker, very correct in his black tie and black jacket. He had been in his own way a very humane man, had even tried to tell jokes. He had told her a joke about a worker of his who had been hit by the fist of a corpse jerking into rigor mortis.

“What did you do that for?” the worker had shouted, “I didn't do anything to you.” He had been trying to calm her down for she was in hysterics. She had thought that the end of the world had come, that she would never recover. It had taken all her strength to sell the hotel and move into this flat which she now didn't like. But she didn't want to move again. There were no children here, there was an air of decay, people had come to their last resting place, it was like a grave.

“I didn't notice that address,” she said to Mr Porter. But he had stared at her and taken that letter without a word. Later, she had passed him on the stair and he had ignored her. Once he had locked himself out, he wasn't very practical. Strangely enough she hadn't done that yet, though she probably would. It was her husband who had filled in the forms to do with the hotel and dealt with the accounts. When he died she found that she didn't understand what was happening. While she was having her affairs he had been shoring up the place. The lawyer, however, with whom she had slept many years before, had kept her right. Monstrous. She had been a monster. But she had always had a strong sexual drive and he hadn't. He always thought sex dirty. He preferred his books.

It was awful being in a single bed night after night especially in summer, when the tenement was really hot. Below her window she could hear the voices of lovers as they strolled past and, with a bitterness that she could not believe possible, they reminded her of her lost youth. She would flutter about the flat in her nightgown like a lost butterfly blinded by light, beating against an invisible panel of glass. The broken narratives she heard intrigued her, excited her.

One night when she was drunk she had rung the bell of Mr Porter's door (his wife's name had been removed).

“I wanted to tell you,” she said, “that your wife was a very unhappy woman.”

“Is that all you wanted to tell me,” he said.

“You think you're better than me. But she told me you used to have trouble with your classes.”

“Oh?”

“We used to have coffee together. You didn't know about that, did you? She told me that you and your son didn't get on.”

All she could see was a tightening of Mr Porter's lips. The poison poured out of her, but she couldn't stop herself.

“He never comes to see you,” she said.

“He was here about a week ago,” said Mr Porter, “if it interests you.”

At least this drunken aggressive conversation was better than silence.

“She told me he never came to see you. You weren't on the same wavelength,” she said. And Mrs Floss swayed in the lobby, almost falling down.

“And another thing, I asked my boys. They didn't like you in the school.”

Mr Porter said nothing, but slammed the door in her face. She was about to strike on it with her naked fist, but decided against it. God damn him, who did he think he was with his air of superiority! Were we not all human? The door was a flat wooden wall. The holes where the nails had been for the nameplates showing Mrs Porter's name winked at her in the light. She nearly screamed at him, “You old bastard”. But there was a deep silence everywhere.

When she went back in she lay on her bed and wept. What sort of woman was she becoming? She hated herself. Alex, Alex, she cried, beating on the pillow with her fists. But there was no answer. Alex was dead. Everyone was dead. Only she was alive. Alex was happy, she was not.

But there was one thing that unlike Mrs Miller she wouldn't do. She would never go into the town on her own and drink. If she drank she drank in the house. She had enough pride and dignity to do that.

One day a Jehovah's Witness came to the door. He was a middle-aged man and he worked on the roads.

“Are you saved?” he asked her. She didn't know what to say. He kept her talking for more than an hour. She had invited him in but he wouldn't come in. He referred to texts from the Bible, naming them by chapter and verse. He really must be a clever man, though he only worked on the roads. He was most eloquent and sometimes seemed to speak with a voice that was not his own. She had seen him drinking tea by himself in the station buffet.

“If we are not saved by Jesus, what are we?” he said. “Some people think we come from apes, that's what they call the Darwinian theory, but no one can believe that really. We were created by God in his own image in the Garden of Eden, see Genesis. Don't you believe that?”

“What can we do about loneliness?” she asked him. His eyes shifted. “Put yourself in the hands of God,” he said. “That is all we can do.” Eventually on his sixth visit he did come into the house and they had a gin. “Not, mind you, that I'm a drinker but a little wine for thy stomach's sake.”

She looked forward to his visits. He seemed to have all the time in the world to talk to her. He brought her a
Watchtower
which she used for lighting the fire, though the paper wasn't all that good quality.

She knew that he was from the town and that he knew all about her previous history. He could have known Alex too. Latterly Alex would sit by the fire watching TV. The first stroke had only affected his legs, not his speech. One night he had started to cry helplessly and couldn't stop himself. It had been awful, appalling.

“You're married?” she said to the Jehovah's Witness.

“Yes, happily married. The condition of wedlock is a blessed one. Without a companion what are we in this world? But Jesus too is our wife, our husband, Jesus too helps us as a spouse would, more than a spouse would.”