Evelyn drives questions into her like hooks. Did they see, did they remark upon your arms, what people were there, were there baskets made at that place, was there singing of songs, of what type and number, kind and shape, were the biscuits you ate? Of the tea, was it pale or brown, is there sugar in that tea, do they give you the sugar as you are accustomed, in lumps or spoons from basins, and do they place it there for you or do you yourself take what you suppose you need? Of the singing: is there piano or other instrument to accompany it? She knows nothing, Muriel thinks with contempt. She makes her face frozen up.
‘Oh, you are stonewalling again,’ Evelyn says furiously. That night when she enters her room she will find it almost festal, the pieces of the torn envelopes littering the carpet and sibilating in the draughts, like confetti.
Department of Social Services
Wilberforce House
3rd May 1974
Dear Mrs Axon,
This is to advise you that the Daycare Sessions attended by Miss Axon will be temporarily suspended for a short period only, due to the demolition of the premises in Calderwell Road, from the Thursday after next. However our sessions are to be resumed at a much better equipped centre at The Hollies, Vernon Road, and you will be advised presently of the new arrangements for transport and etc. If you have any enquiries please contact Miss J. Smith at the address above or telephone.
Yours sincerely,
M. CARTWRIGHT
Social Work Assistant
p.p. Director of Social Services
If they had not been pushing her about that morning, if they had not been trying to do her bodily injury, she would not have smashed the plantpot or found the letter underneath, in the bottom of the basket.
This is old, she said to herself. It has been here for some time. This was May, it is now late June, therefore certainly there have been Thursdays when…there was time unaccounted for. Yet time in the house was moving now at its own speed, in fits and starts. Food decayed on the plates, insects bred in the dark. The place was more and more crowded. Useless to try to talk to Muriel, to ask her for some account of the letter. Muriel rarely spoke now; it was like going back to her childhood. More and more, when Evelyn was in a room with her daughter, she felt as if no one was there.
Department of Social Services
Wilberforce House
3rd July 1974
Dear Mrs Axon,
Mrs J. Smith visited your home on behalf of the Department last Friday, but was unable to gain admittance. The reason for her visit was to ascertain whether Miss Axon had been informed of the new arrangements for attendance at The Hollies, since she has not been present at Daycare Sessions since they resumed. If Miss Axon is ill, perhaps you would be kind enough to notify us, and let us know when she will resume attendance. If you have any problems, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Jacqueline Smith is now on maternity leave, and I shall be dealing with Miss Axon’s case in future.
Yours sincerely,
CAROL TAFT
At first, Evelyn had said, ‘Perhaps you need not go to this new place. They won’t want you. They are always saying there is pressure on their faculties.’ She was afraid that they would call, and when the knocking did come, at an unaccustomed time of day, she had taken Muriel into the back room and made her sit quietly until the caller had gone away. That morning she had not felt like seeing anyone, combating them, dealing with anyone at all. It had been enough of a shock to find that morning’s trail of messages. First the little mirror that she had never seen before lying on the hall table, a tawdry affair of pink plastic, and the twist of papers round it with the insect capitals: LOOK AT YOUR FASE.
Then she had hunted them through the house: THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE IN THIS PLASE and YOU ARE PUTING IN MY PLASE and SHE SHALL BE PUT IN HER PLASE and, last of all, ANOTHER IS IN HER PLASE.
The day she received the second letter from the Welfare had been much calmer. There had been no messages lately, no buffetings on the landing and stairs, no thefts of her property. It had been Muriel’s problem that was uppermost in her mind; or Muriel’s condition rather. She strove to keep it in perspective. The invention and ingenuity of the parallel world had amazed her in recent months, its many and new manifestations, the closeness of its stinking breath on her neck. Periods of calm followed by new alarms, the torturing of Muriel, the closing off to both of them, permanently now, of certain parts of the house. In the circumstances, Muriel’s pregnancy could only be felt as a lesser shock.
‘Both mad, if you ask me,’ Florence Sidney was saying. ‘You might as well try to fly through the window as help either of them.’
She was standing by the window, which had perhaps helped to indicate the improbability to her mind; she was looking out at her nephew and her nieces, playing among the windfalls in the disarrayed late summer garden. ‘I haven’t seen Muriel for—’ She turned her head. It was painfully evident that her sister-in-law was not listening to her. Sylvia was launched on a series of questions.
‘And may I ask what you intend to do with yourself now?’
‘Do now? Well.’ The questions seemed to make no sense. What does anyone do now?
‘With your life. With the rest of your life. That’s what I’m talking about, Florence.’
‘Well, I’ll do the same as everybody,’ Florence said. Limp on, eyes front, towards the grave.
‘I mean, it’s no kind of life, is it? For anybody?’
‘What had you in mind?’
‘You want to put the past behind you. Get out and live a bit. You want to join some Societies. Get yourself a new girdle.’
Florence didn’t speak. She came away from the window; she never admitted it, but the antics and the shrieking of the children got on her nerves.
‘The trouble with you is that you don’t make the best of yourself,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’m not running you down, I’m only telling you out of the kindness of my heart. You’re no beauty queen, but you could do yourself up.’
‘What for?’ Florence sat down by the tea-trolley.
‘For the fellers,’ Sylvia said conspiratorially.
‘I don’t know any fellows.’
‘Well, and you never will, will you, if you keep mouldering in the house? What’s stopping you now? Your mother’s been put away, you don’t have to stop in and mind her any more.’
‘I wish you would not use that expression,’ Florence said. Any of those expressions really; redolent of your time at the cooked meats factory. Sylvia laughed; she patted her hair, puffed out and lacquered in a style that had passed its apogee some years before. It was impossible to imagine her without this hairstyle; like a helmet, it covered her weakest point, the head. She was, Florence thought, a strange blend of savage self-assertion and abject dependence; pathetic and ferocious by turns. Florence knew so little of the married women of her generation that she imagined Sylvia to be unusual.
‘It is a home for the elderly,’ Florence said. ‘A sanctuary for the twilight years.’
‘Get away,’ Sylvia said. ‘Your mother’s off her rocker. Colin doesn’t keep any secrets from me.’
‘Really?’ Florence said. ‘By the nature of a secret, you would