The Tenement (2 page)

In fact, she never remarried and drank cups of coffee every day. Sometimes a man who lived in a cave outside the town came to the restaurant. He wore a rope for a belt to tie his long coat, was tall, and always clean shaven, except for his moustache which made him look like a brigand. The two of them talked a lot. On a lucky day they might go along to the draughty railway station and drink, or have a singsong along with other friends of theirs who staggered in and out of lavatories.

She didn't like most of the people in the tenement. For instance she hadn't liked the matron and she hadn't liked Mrs Brown, would never indeed like her, even though she was on the same landing. And she didn't like Mr and Mrs Porter either. Well, she liked Mrs Porter better than she liked Mr Porter, give her that. She thought the latter looked down on her, and he probably did. She would never let anyone into her own flat: she would rather have died. She was ashamed that it was so untidy. Every morning she meant to tidy it but she never did, she didn't have the energy. And yet she always made sure that she powdered and lipsticked herself before she went out. No one would believe she was eighty. No one.

One day a Health Visitor had knocked on her door. She was a young girl who carried a briefcase and who shone with the ardent hope of youth. Oh, how hopeful she looked, just like herself when she had started as a waitress all those years ago. And this young girl had said,

“I've been sent along, Mrs Miller. We were wondering if you needed any help.”

“F. .k off,” she told the young girl, and the latter had finally turned away with her fresh leather briefcase and they had sent no one else to replace her. After all, thought the old lady, she had her freedom, her rights, they were taking a liberty with her, you didn't have to let these people in if you didn't want to, they couldn't force themselves on you. She sometimes saw the young Health Visitor around the town but the girl always turned her face away. She didn't have anything against her, it was only that she disliked the system that could send someone along to investigate you when you didn't want to be investigated. In fact she would have gone along to speak to her, to say that she was sorry, only that she was frightened that the girl would take the apology as a weakness, and visit her again, an opening of a closed door that would forever remain shut since that blue lightining flash.

She wouldn't let even her own son into the flat. He stayed in Helensburgh and though he was lame would sometimes visit her, having remembered about her. He was of course married, but his wife never came with him. She would meet him at the restaurant and on such days they would have a meal there and not simply a coffee. She had seen his nose twitch once or twice, and he had told her quite often, though not with great conviction, “You must come and stay with us.” But she didn't want to go and stay with him as she didn't like her daughter-in-law who was a stuck-up bitch, to say the least of it, with a colour television set, a washing machine, a drier, a toaster, and all the other machines you could name. In fact she didn't like her son much either. He allowed himself to be dominated by his wife; she thought that no man should let that happen. Jim would never have allowed that to happen with her. She had never even tried to dominate him. He would go for his drink in the pub after work and she accepted that as being the normal thing. Her son Hugh never did that, he came home straight from his work, and he was never allowed to go for a drink on his own. And also he didn't really want her to come and stay with them. She knew that: one could tell a great deal from people's voices.

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 what 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.