Pack of Cards Page 4

  Kamala returned, after what Avril thought a surprisingly short period, with a tiny, fragile baby (a boy, apparently) cocooned in yards of shocking pink blanketing. The Nigerian produced a couple of bottles of wine for the household to drink the baby's health; everybody gathered in the kitchen, the Singhs silent but beaming, Brenda and the Nigerian loudly talkative, Avril, who had seldom in her life touched alcohol, feeling increasingly unstable, but stimulated. It was all rather enjoyable; afterwards, she watched television, a little restlessly, and tried not to pay attention to the curious sounds from the Nigerian's room, where he and Brenda were completing the evening on their own.

  Mrs Fletcher, tight-lipped, had complained a number of times about the pitch of Brenda's transistor radio. She spoke seldom to Avril, but was frequently to be seen in the street, in eloquent discourse with one or other of the neighbours. They are talking about me, Avril would think, and found that she did not care at all.

  It was curious: she was a person who had always been deeply sensitive to the opinions of others.

  At night, in the privacy of her room, she checked with the voice for approval and encouragement, and received it. Her life, in every other respect, continued much as it always had done: she went to the office, on Monday and Tuesday mornings and Thursday and Friday afternoons, to the Scout and Guide hut on Monday evenings, the Red Cross on Thursdays, St Bartholomew's on Sunday for communion and again for evensong. She was not entirely surprised when the Vicar called one day. He was a man easily swayed by others (an opinion she seemed always to have had, though only now did it express itself – tacitly – with ease and conviction) and she heard in his voice the conspiratorial tones of Mrs Fletcher. He sat uneasily on the edge of a chair and asked Avril if she had been keeping well lately; afterwards, the two indentations of his behind remained for some while on the upholstery, prolonging the tension of the visit. When Avril replied, shortly, that she had, he hummed and hawed, reflected on the weather, the new block of flats springing up alongside the churchyard, and his summer holiday plans, before hoping that if she, er, ever felt at all, er, in need of a chat she must remember that she had many good friends in the neighbourhood, many good friends. There was a silence, at the end of which the Vicar made the proposition that some people find living alone a bit of a strain, especially after the sad loss of a dear relative, that sometimes possibly, er, a chat with a sympathetic friend …

  Avril said that she did not live alone.

  The Vicar, with some eagerness, said that yes, quite, and since she'd mentioned it he wondered if …

  Avril asked what he wondered. And the Vicar's voice had trailed off, and with it the Vicar, till all that was left of him were those two dents in the chair seat.

  Avril wondered if the voice had ever addressed the Vicar, in the darkness of his nights.

  The Singh baby prospered. Mr Harris's tradescantia in the scullery died; the Nigerian presented Avril with a rather violent oil-painting attributed to his brother which she felt obliged to hang on the stairs. She did not like it and indeed had asked the voice for guidance over the matter, and the voice had suggested the darkish corner on the first-floor landing. She frequently asked the voice for guidance, these days, and was frequently given it.

  When Brenda, coming in from work one evening, heard her in one of the boxrooms, she peered inquisitively through the door.

  ‘My, you got a lot of stuff in there, Miss Pemberton. You havin' a tidy-up, then?’

  ‘The room's going to be used,’ said Avril. ‘I have to clear it out.’

  ‘You expectin' a visitor, then?’

  Avril, distracted by the problem of a broken table-lamp, replied that she was making room for a further lodger. Brenda did not receive this news with the enthusiasm Avril had expected: she said it was enough hassle getting that Pius to hurry up with the bathroom in the mornings and the shelves in the scullery were cram full as it was. She implied a fit of profiteering on Avril's part. Avril ignored this, with dignity.

  She got rid of the first two applicants for the room, who were unsuitable; the third threw her into a quandary. He stood before her on the doorstep, small, slight, brown, and almond-eyed. Avril had little idea from which part of the world he hailed, but knew on which side of the dividing-line her mother would have placed him. She hesitated, showed him the room, and succumbed.

  In the night she was woken by the voice (she had been sleeping much better of late). It was displeased.

  Avril said defensively, ‘Well, mother wouldn't ever have taken him.’

  The voice continued, didactic in its assertions as to what was what. Avril, lying there in the dark, felt a twinge of resentment: there was a note, a distinct note, of Mrs Pemberton's hectoring dogmatism. She pointed out, sulkily, that it was too late to do anything about it now, and Mr Lee had looked a good dark brown to her. She did not say that in any case she had rather taken to him, a nice-spoken boy who had stood aside to let her come down the stairs first.

  The voice, unmollified, issued further instructions.

  ‘Both the boxrooms?’ said Avril. And then, thoughtfully, ‘Very well, then.’

  The Health Visitor sat at the kitchen table and said that she had just thought she would pop in, since she was in the house anyway to see Mrs Singh. She said the baby was coming along nicely. Avril agreed. She said you must miss your mother a lot, I gather it's three or four years since she died. Avril agreed, wondered from whom the gathering had been done, saw Mrs Fletcher pass the window, bundled against the spring wind, and shoot a quick glance sideways. Looking after yourself all right, are you? said the Health Visitor. Avril said she was, and observed the Health Visitor's quick, surreptitious professional examination of the room.

  The Health Visitor believed that Avril was thinking of letting another room. Avril neither confirmed nor denied this; with a spurt of indignation she thought, nosey thing. The Health Visitor made some enquiries about toilets, and washbasins, which Avril answered with restraint. The Health Visitor left. Through the window, Avril watched Mrs Fletcher's interception of her, in Adelaide Terrace.

  Mr Lee had been installed for a week when she put her second advertisement in the Gazette. She had cleared out and prepared the second boxroom during the daytime, in the absence of all the other tenants except Mrs Singh and the baby, who kept themselves to themselves on the top floor. Consequently, the first they knew of her new arrangements was the arrival of the new tenant.

  There were comments, amounting to open hostility. The Singhs said nothing, but pattered with a little more assertion in their journeys up and down stairs. The Nigerian grumbled, outside Avril's kitchen door, about the additional strain on the resources of the scullery: he had quite a nasty temper, Avril realised. Brenda said, ‘She stayin' here, that Chinese girl? You running some kind of United Nations in this house, Miss Pemberton?’

  A sour expression replaced her normal grin.

  The voice, too, had its say.

  ‘I will choose my own tenants,’ said Avril, in the darkness of her bedroom. ‘I will use my own discrimination.’ She lay there, these nights, with the house silent around her, and contemplated the filling of it, and the nature of the filling of it, and her part therein, and experienced the most satisfactory feeling of having created. The house was a kaleidoscope, but the jugglings of its occupancy were no longer random: they had form. She ceased to pay much attention to the voice, which nagged on irritatingly from beside the wardrobe.

  The atmosphere of the house was no longer harmonious, but Avril did not notice; she was preoccupied with her own plans.

  She transferred her possessions from the second floor to her ground-floor sitting-room by degrees, those that she could handle on her own. The bed, which presented too great a problem, she left where it was, and ordered a new one for herself from the furniture shop in the High Street. It was its delivery that alerted Brenda; she stood, hands on massive hips, at the turn in the stairs and said, ‘You not letting another room, Miss Pemberton? This house getting too fu
ll by half, you know, that lavatory up here's only working half-cock again, you're going to have the health people after you, you not careful.’ Avril went into her room and closed the door, intent upon the phrasing of the advertisement for the Gazette.

  After she had installed Mr Achimota in what had been her bedroom, she locked herself into her sitting-room, whenever she was in the house. She did not really feel like talking to people, and was dimly aware of unrest around her. People whispered on the stairs, and sometimes did not whisper: on one occasion she heard Brenda's raised voice saying, ‘She barmy, I'm telling you, she not right in her head any more.’

  The Health Visitor hammered on the door, once. She said, ‘I'd like to have a chat with you, dear, just for a few minutes.’ Avril ignored her.

  At night, she held dialogues with the voice, but nowadays it was she who did much of the talking: the voice had grown feebler and feebler and as it whined on, asserting and instructing, its tones had become more and more like those of Mrs Pemberton, but diminished, and susceptible to counter-arguments in a way that Mrs Pemberton never had been. ‘Nobody's right all the time,’ said Avril, ‘not even You. Not on every subject. Now in my opinion …’

  Mrs Fletcher had avoided her for months, crossing the street when they happened to coincide in Adelaide Terrace. Now, Avril noticed, other neighbours did the same, or observed her furtively, in shops or from adjacent pews in St Bartholomew's. Hurt, though not greatly so, Avril maintained a lonely dignity. She missed, more, the convivial atmosphere that had prevailed in the house during the early months of its reorganisation. Nowadays, there were arguments on the stairs about the bathroom and the scullery, complaints about the lavatory and the telephone, noise and contention. Moreover, it seemed to her that her tenants did not like her, which distressed her more than anything: they were, after all, her chosen people, each and every one of them. Thus isolated, she was prepared even to relinquish the upper hand and mention this to the voice, to seek, maybe, its advice and guidance as in the old days; the voice, disconcertingly, was silent. She lay alone in her bedroom and brooded on what had come about.

  And so, when next she heard the Health Visitor in the hall she opened her door.

  The Health Visitor did not mince her words. She said there were too many people in the house, too few lavatories, and a smell of drains from out the back somewhere that must be investigated forthwith. She was brisk, but not unpleasant. Avril, less disposed to hostility than on the previous occasion, promised to summon a plumber. The Health Visitor, studying her intently across the table, said, ‘And another thing, dear, it's neither here nor there but you do seem to go in for coloured people as tenants, don't you? You've got some of your neighbours properly upset, I can tell you, though as I say that's neither here nor there.’

  And so it came about that Avril, because she never had anyone to talk to these days, and because the Health Visitor seemed really quite a nice little body after all, began to tell her about the voice. And as she talked, the Health Visitor, who had been gathering her belongings and indeed had got up from the chair to go, sat down again, and let her bag slither to the floor, and listened with an expression that grew more and more alert and more and more unfathomable. She said, ‘Yes?’ and ‘I see, dear’ and nodded and smiled her nice professional smile; it was quite impossible to know what she thought. ‘So you see,’ Avril concluded, ‘it wasn't altogether my choice, though I'm not saying I wasn't perfectly willing to go along with it, more than willing.’ And the Health Visitor said yes, she quite understood that, and then she patted Avril on the hand and said she'd look in again, quite soon, in a few days' time maybe.

  The conversation, Avril found, had been a release. She'd been keeping herself to herself too much, she realised, no wonder people had been behaving as though she were a bit peculiar or something. And, thinking things over, and remembering the Health Visitor's sympathetic, encouraging interest, it came to her that her experience had been a singular one and, as such, should be shared, not kept from others. And the one person, she reflected (though with slight regret, for she had never really cared much for the man), with whom it should be shared, whose professional concern, after all, it was, was the Vicar. She telephoned the vicarage, and made an appointment to call that evening.

  Later, she mulled over her disappointment in the privacy of her room. She had not, before her visit, speculated much if at all about what kind of response she would get: she had expected professional interest, that was all there was to it. And what she had met with had been something quite different.

  It could most nearly be described, she thought with anger, as embarrassment. He had sat there, that rather colourless man (even her mother, she now recalled, used to describe him as wishy-washy), and avoided her eye and leapt with alacrity to the phone when it rang and eventually, it seemed to her, cut short the visit and bundled her from the house. There had been a look on his face of alarm, no less. He had said not one thing that had been in any way appropriate. And, Avril thought with bitterness, which, if any, of his parishioners can ever before have come to him and told him, in cold blood and in all humility, what I told him?

  She went about her affairs, but in a state of some cynicism. The voice remained silent, though she made tentative overtures, in the privacy of her nights.

  The Health Visitor returned, bringing with her another woman, described as Mrs Hamilton who would like a little chat with you, dear. Mrs Hamilton had the same quality of attentive, sympathetic and yet non-committal interest as the Health Visitor. She wondered if Avril would like to tell her about this voice she sometimes heard and Avril, with the bitter taste of the Vicar's inadequacy still in her mouth, was glad to do so. Mrs Hamilton asked if she still had conversations with the voice and Avril explained that a coolness had arisen, but she hoped in time to put that right. She might possibly, she realised now, have been a bit assertive with it, a bit forceful; she would make amends for that. I like, Avril said, talking to it, even if it was, to begin with, on the bullying side, inclined to order people around, if you see what I mean. I don't mind telling you, she went on confidingly, it reminded me of my mother, there was quite a resemblance there.

  Mrs Hamilton listened and nodded and smiled. She asked Avril some questions, questions that were maybe a bit personal, Avril thought, and that did not have anything to do with what they had been talking about, or not in any way that she could see. But she seemed a nice enough person, and Avril did not really mind; nor did she mind, though she was surprised, when Mrs Hamilton asked if she would come and have a chat (everybody seemed to want to chat …) with a colleague of hers, a Doctor someone, at a place where Mrs Hamilton worked, called the Clinic.

  It was nice to have people taking so much interest in you.

  And at the Clinic they took even more interest. They nodded and listened and from time to time jotted down a few words on a little white notepad. They seemed to have nothing to do but listen, these people. Avril began, at their suggestion, to pay regular visits to the Clinic; the visits became part of the cycle of her week, like the Red Cross, and the Scout and Guide hut, and evensong. And as the visits went on the voice was heard once more, in the solitude of the nights. And Avril, pleased to have something more substantial and up-to-date for her new friends reported everything it said, though what it had to say was sometimes embarrassing. For it evidently distrusted these people. Don't, it said. Don't go there. Don't talk to them. Don't talk to them about me.

  They won't understand, it said. It spoke sulkily. It knew what it was talking about, it said. It had come across all this before. If you knew what I know, it said darkly, if you'd seen what I've seen. They're what we're up against, it said, people like that.

  Avril answered conciliatingly. She placated. She tried to conceal her visits to the Clinic.

  The voice, of course, knew.

  She thought the voice a little uncompromising; the people at the Clinic, after all, displayed no such unswerving prejudice, where the voice was concerned. They were inte
rested, not hostile.

  The situation in the house deteriorated; the drains flooded again, Brenda and the Chinese girl, at loggerheads, had a scrap on the stairs in which blood was shed.

  At the Clinic, they wondered, in their quiet friendly voices, if Avril would like to come in for a few weeks. For a rest, they said, for treatment. They used the expression in-patient, which startled Avril. She had not realised how things were, until it was put like that, and now it seemed too late to turn back.

  But it's not that I … she wanted to say, there's no question of … But there, now, were the little white notebooks, and the filing cabinets and her name on a pink form, and it seemed so much easier to go along with them, be obliging, and in any case it was not all that disagreeable a place, the Clinic, and the problems of the house, its drains and its plumbing and its tenantry, hung round her neck like so many albatrosses.