The Tenement E-Book

Iain Crichton Smith

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 292

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The tenement has its being, its almost independent being, in a small Scottish town. Built of grey granite, more than a century ago, it stands four-square in space and time, the one fixed point in the febrile lives of the transient human beings whom it shelters. At the time of which Iain Crichton Smith writes, there are married couples in three of the flat; two widows and a widower occupy the others. All of them are living anxious lives of quiet desperation, which Mr Smith anatomises with cool and delicate understanding. The Masons, Linda and John, are the youngest and perhaps the happiest house-hold, who can still look to the future with hope: he has quite a well-paid job in a freezer shop, she is expecting a child. Mr Cooper's role in life is humbler: he is a lavatory attendant, but can take an off pride in his work. The Camerons provide drama: the husbands, once a long distance lorry driver who was sacked for heavy drinking and now a casual labourer, is consumed with unreasoning hate of Catholics, and when drunk becomes a raging brute who batters and terrifies his wife. Trevor Porter, an ex-teacher who like to think of himself as a poet (unpublished), is destroying his marriage by his self-absorption, though after his wife has surprised him by dying of cancer he feel guilt-ridden. Mrs Floss is the tenement's most colourful inhabitant: the widow of a local hotel owner, she still has money and can indulge in holiday cruises and foreign lovers. Mrs Miller, up on the top floor, is odd-woman-out even in this company of loners: since her husband was killed by lightening, crucified on the telephone wires he was repairing, she has become a slatternly recluse, who finds occasional drinking companions among the town's down-and-outs. The course of several of these lives reaches a startling crisis during the little party to celebrate the birth of the Masons' child. But Iain Crichton Smith declines any easy resolution of events. His fascinatingly ill-assorted group of characters, brought together only by grey granite, are left to struggle on, with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Leseprobe

THE TENEMENT

A NOVEL

by

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

This eBook edition published in 2015 byPolygon, an imprint of Birlinn LtdWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Iain Crichton Smith, 1987

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 9780857907295

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

CONTENTS

Chapters

Also Available From Polygon

THE TENEMENT WAS over a hundred years old. It faced the street with its grey granite stone, and its old windows which in order to be cleaned had to be manoeuvred on ropes like glassy sails, and its greenish door on which passing boys and men had scrawled graffiti. There were six flats in the tenement, some in good condition, some in bad: stone stairs led from floor to floor. Outside at the back was a maze of old pipes winding like rusty snakes: these usually suffered from bursts in the winter time, and there were arguments among the tenants about payment to the plumber.

The roof often needed repair, as water would come in on the tenants in the top flats. Four of the flats had been bought outright, two were rented. It was by no means the worst tenement in the street, for opposite it were worse ones, composed of cheap brick. In the latter, parties went on at weekends—there were rumours of prostitution—and on summer nights boys would sit on balconies shouting insults at the tourists or playing radios very loudly. Or they would emerge from the close on large black foreign bikes.

At night the tenants of the tenement would hear the shouts and songs of passing drunks, floating up from the street, as if magnified by the stone of the pavements or the walls. “I’ll cut you up, you bastard,” one voice would say, and another one, “Pass the f…ing bottle!” Quarrels would break out suddenly between those who had minutes before been friends. Girls and women would scream as if they had been knifed and there would be the drumming of running feet. The women’s language was as bad as that of the men and they would be heard encouraging two fighters. “Put the f…ing boot in!” one would hear a girl scream in ecstasy. And the night was a time of preying, of quarrelling, of demented cries, as of shrill birds with bitter beaks.

The weather around the tenement changed. On spring days it was dry and clear, on summer days it was steamy and hot, on autumn days it was regretful and nostalgic, on winter days it was slushy and wet. And many different families over the years had seen that change in the weather, in the atmosphere, for there was considerable movement to and from the tenement. Wardrobes, sideboards with mirrors reflecting scarred whitewashed walls, were carried upstairs and downstairs. Chairs and sofas were abandoned momentarily on a landing. Wallpaper was stripped and pasted on, ceilings were painted, there was a flowering of hope and a fading of it. Old ranges were removed, new fireplaces installed. Ancient bells that had wires, and tinkled in the kitchen, were replaced by push-button ones. A whole world was born, a whole world ceased. In one flat there might be a din of modern music, in another the sentimental tones of John MacCormack, in yet another no music at all.

And everywhere there was a sense of the past as if while one was sitting in the living room the door might open and a woman or man dressed in Edwardian clothes might enter. When one was, for instance, stripping wallpaper one might find a message written by newly weds eighty years before—JOHN AND AGNES SIGNED THIS. Or it might say, WILLIAM STEEL, CARPENTER. What days, what nights, what suns, what moons, had circled that tenement: what beds had produced what children, who had perhaps played on the stairs, on the diminutive green at the back of the tenement where the washing was hung out on windy days, a gallery of mended shirts and vests and blouses.

Some tenants had kept cats against the law, some had not. Some had been working men, some had been professional men just starting, for in later, more successful years they would move from the tenement. And yet, perhaps it left its mark on all of them, so that, in their later private houses or in the windy council schemes, they would always remember the period, long or short, that they had spent there.

One could not say that the coming together into that tenement was anything other than a random action. The flats were like nests which happened to be beside each other, to which different birds came. It happened that two name-plates shone beside each other: there was nothing predestined about it. The inhabitants landed and left, and once they had left they might never see each other again. No roots were set down here as in villages, no stones echoed with remembered events, and the moon above it was not a local one. The curtains on the windows were of different colours, there were different coloured carpets on the floors, different ambitions inside the rooms. The flats existed differently in the minds of those who had left them and those who occupied them. Some remembered them with affection and some with loathing. Some could hardly believe that they had once lived there and, passing the building years later, in a car perhaps, would look up at the window of a room they had once occupied and feel an intense absence. Could they really have lived there? Surely not. Maybe they had inhabited different bodies then. They might even have an impulse to visit the flat again: where there had once been yellow armchairs there were now red ones, where once there had been an ancient bath as big as a stone grave, there was now a bathroom suite in warm colours.

The tenement survived all individuals who had inhabited it, the particulars which had been and gone. It survived the relentless blizzard of names, the ambitions, the despairs, the joys, the weddings, the funerals. It was like a soul which animates the body. Something of itself passed into the people who lived in it. Sweat leaked from the walls as if the tenement itself were perspiring. It sailed into the night and sailed back in the morning. With its eight windows facing the street it brooded over cars, pedestrians, the church opposite where the photographer knelt on a windy spring day as the bride’s gown billowed outwards like a wave, as the shining black hearse moved slowly away with its crowns of flowers, as the minister stood meditatively near the gravestones in his black robe.

Beside it was a cafe that was open till eleven o’clock at night, in front of it was the church. Not far from it was the school, also built in grey granite. Its close was a mouth that swallowed, spat out. Its walls had graffiti on it almost as mysterious as Egyptian writing. Its bulging scarred green door had been painted years before. There was a window on the first landing which had white lacy curtains across it. The window on the second landing was uncurtained. The stairs were washed once a week. The landing lights were put on on alternate weeks by neighbouring tenants. For some trivial reason one tenant might not talk to another one, for weeks, for months, for years: every one of us has his own dignity, his own honour. It might be that one had used the other’s bin without permission, or had forgotten his week for the light, or had heard the other talking behind his back. And these slights were burrs sticking in the heart, throbbing, feverish. For each one cries out, I am, I am, even in a tenement, perhaps especially in a tenement.

The building occupied space, occupied time. Around it other buildings had crumbled, risen, changed ownership. Its stone had been taken from a quarry that no longer existed. Its original masons, joiners, painters, were all dead. As Keats says that individual nightingales die though the generic nightingale doesn’t, so each tenant would die but the tenement would seem to live for ever.

Sometimes the tenement could be imagined as a tree with transient nests in it, sometimes as composed of boxes that in turn held coffins, cradles, sometimes as a theatre where casts (actors and actresses) changed as they moved on to other plays. It might even be that the young ones were the old come back again in a different disguise or mask. The tenement in its transient solidity encouraged such speculations and baffled them by its enigmatic front. Windows too could be seen as eyes, fading, brightening. The door—what was it but the entrance to a fertile womb that bred incessantly? It was a prison door, it was a door for escaping through. It was a door which hid secrets, which released them to the world.

On spring days curtains, often white, fluttered at windows like ghosts trying to get in or trying to get out, with frantic motions, with fragile winds.

Any story that can be told about one tenant has at best only a frail relationship to the story of another tenant but there will be some connection, however passing, however faint. And sometimes the tenants can act together, each having his own idea of what is happening, each taking a colour from the others, each merging briefly with the others like a cloud fading into a second one. So that the tenement itself can be seen not as made of stone but like a cloud that changes shape, merciful, cruel, wandering.

At the time of which we are speaking, there were no children in the tenement, maybe because most of the flats weren’t large. Old people, mostly widowed, stayed in them, or young couples as yet without children. Perhaps the tenement was too old to put up with children, perhaps it didn’t like them. Perhaps the tenement itself was drawing to its end, and had had in its day its complement of children which had left and never returned. Perhaps it hated ingratitude, random brilliance, wanted to settle down in its old age. Who can tell about a tenement? Maybe it said to couples with children, This is not the place for you; Go somewhere else. I have had enough of young ones, I have grown philosophical, children have no history, I can’t learn from them. I only want those who have lived, not those who are about to live. I am a listener to stories that have happened, not stories that might happen years from now. And in any case I know that the children will live their lives out elsewhere, far from here, even if they stay for a brief time. My face is a Greek one, flat and incurious, like one of these blind stone faces that one sees in a garden wall in Greece. I have neither love nor hate, I am simply the stage on which things happen. And nothing of importance happens to children. And in any case that is all that life is, a passing show. I am not so stupid or so proud as to think that I am anything other than a habitation: I do not confer a meaning. Perhaps there is no meaning. Perhaps I am the only meaning there is. Perhaps I am a hundred meanings, a thousand. Perhaps I am a dementia of my tenants, a chimera. I am changed, plastered anew, and to all that I submit. Yet there is in me something that is always recognizable, that exists through all alterations, all neglect. And perhaps that memory will persist somewhere even when my stone has crumbled to dust, and perhaps passing on a certain day in summer or autumn someone will be struck by a thought that is not his own but is wafted from me. Is there anyone who knows? Or is all, mystery?

THE LIGHTNING HAD come out of the sky and had almost killed her but not quite. Jim, repairing the telephone wires, had been crucified on them in blue. When she was told about it she thought she would die, but she hadn’t. They had three children, two girls and a boy, ranging from five years old to nine, the boy being the oldest. She used to be a waitress before her marriage, then she had the children, and now after Jim’s crucifixion she went back to being a waitress again. When she returned to her old job she could hardly bear to think that there had been a time when she had stood carelessly at a table, notebook in hand, waiting to take down the order asked for, for example, soup, tomato, steaks, pudding. She couldn’t believe that she had done that and now she could hardly do it without her heart breaking.

She had been very pretty and was now almost beautiful. The difference between being pretty and being beautiful is experience. It is perhaps a matter of suffering. One day she had rushed in to tell the chef that there was a smell of fire. “Where from?” he said, “I can’t get it.” And indeed there was no smell of fire at all. yet she had smelt the smoky stench, the scorching. That had happened the day after she had started again in the restaurant. It was more like a singeing, not a clean burning.

The children had saved her, and yet they were as selfish as other children. She had thought, Perhaps they will recognize my great love for their father and won’t bother me so much. But they hadn’t of course made any such recognition. They fought a great deal of the time, they shouted at each other, they envied each other, they accused her of favouritism. She did perhaps favour the boy more, because of Jim. And yet the boy too was selfish, he would ask her for money when there wasn’t much, he would do sly things that would incriminate the girls, and then she didn’t think he was like Jim at all. But perhaps Jim had done selfish things too: it was just that she couldn’t remember them. Or chose not to.

She was eighty years old. She wore a fur coat summer and winter. She put lipstick on her lips and powder on her face. She stayed by herself in the top flat of the tenement. Her flat was a mess, there were yellowing newspapers on the floor, empty whisky bottles in the corridor, white plaster dropped from the ceiling like seagull shit. She stank though she didn’t know it: she never had a bath because she couldn’t afford an immerser. She didn’t light the flat at night but lay there in the dark like a mole. She never read a book or a newspaper. And of course she never went to church, since God was quite clearly a being who unjustly despatched the lightning that had killed her innocent husband and crucified him on the wire.

Because she had been a good waitress the proprietor of the restaurant where she had worked—and of course he changed, and bequeathed her to another owner—allowed her to sit in the restaurant every day drinking perhaps three cups of coffee in that time. That was all she did, drink cups of coffee. Sometimes, so as not to finish a coffee too quickly, she would let it grow cold till a scum formed on it. Sometimes she would stare out at the sea, at the wasp-striped yachts that were anchored in the water, doing in the winter a crazy dance as she herself had done when she was young.

There had been, after she went back, widowed, men who had wanted to take her out, even marry her. There was the gardener who spent his time making words out of flowers and who complained of a bad back. He had never married but stayed by himself in a flat where he watched TV late into the night: before the advent of TV he used to go to the cinema three times a week; thus he had seen every film that ever came to the town. She didn’t marry him, partly because of his complaints, and partly because he had begun to drink heavily. And also his breath, for that of a gardener, stank. He was not the only one who had tried to make up to her. There had been a janitor as well: he told her that he more or less ran the school and that he phoned the Director of Education regularly to give him the benefit of his advice: the Director called him Bill.

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.

The day she had boarded the plane returning from Rhodesia she had met a man from Dundee whom she had also seen on the way out. He was about sixty and both times he was drunk. He had confided in her that he was frightened of planes. He had sat at the back, and the next thing there was an awful stramash. He had staggered to the lavatory and was busily engaged in trying to tug open the Emergency Door, which he thought was the door to the toilet, when he had been dragged away by a steward. He had then been placed between two big stalwart passengers for the rest of the flight. If he had succeeded in opening that door he would have blown them to Kingdom Come.

Oh, she had loved Rhodesia. Never again would she find a place that she liked so much. It was ideal for servants. Only their television wasn’t very good. It consisted of political speeches by self-important black men. Mugabe always looked tense and arrogant. The bishop was better than him, at least he was dressed in a nicer way. And the big jovial man at least showed he had some life in him: she liked him best of all. No, she would never find a place like that again, though Carol was saying that they would have to leave and they would only be able to take a thousand pounds with them. And they would lose their house and their swimming pool and God knew what would happen to the children, as Carol had hoped to send them to college or university.