Collected Short Fiction Page 25

‘I can’t throw him out, can I?’ Mrs Cooksey shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’ve done my best for him.’

  The love life didn’t agree with Greenie.

  ‘She’s taming him,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  He had certainly quietened down.

  ‘P’raps he’s missing Bluey,’ Mr Cooksey said.

  ‘Hark at him,’ said Mrs Cooksey.

  Yellow was still eager, restless, inquisitive, going in and out of her box. Mrs Cooksey showed me how cleverly the box had been made: you could slide out the back to see if there were eggs. She counted the days.

  ‘Seven days now.’

  ‘Nine, Bess.’

  ‘Seven.’

  Then: ‘Greenie’s playing the fool,’ Mr Cooksey said.

  ‘Look who’s talking,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  Two days later she met me in the hall and said, ‘Something’s happened to Greenie.’

  I went to look. Greenie had the same unhealthy stillness as Bluey now: his feathers were ruffled, his eyes half-closed, his head sunk into his breast. Yellow fussed about him, not belligerently or playfully, but in puzzlement.

  ‘She loves him, d’you see? I’ve tried to feed him. Milk from an eye-dropper. But he isn’t taking a thing. Tell me where it hurts, Greenie. Tell Mummy where.’

  It was Friday. When Mrs Cooksey rang up the RSPCA they told her to bring Greenie in on Monday. All during the weekend Greenie deteriorated. Mrs Cooksey did her best. Although it was warm she kept the electric fire going all the time, a luxury the Cookseys denied themselves even in winter. A towel was always warming in front of the fire. Greenie was wrapped in another towel.

  On Monday Mrs Cooksey wrapped Greenie in a clean towel and took him to the doctor. He prescribed a fluid of some sort and warned Mrs Cooksey against giving Greenie milk.

  ‘He said something about poison,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘As though I would want to do anything to my Greenie. But you should have seen the doctor. Doctor! He was just a boy. He told me to bring Greenie again on Friday. That’s four days.’

  When I came in next evening, my fingers stained with blue paint from the door, Mrs Cooksey met me in the hall. I followed her into the room.

  ‘Greenie’s dead,’ she said. She was very calm.

  The door opened authoritatively and Mr Cooksey came in, mackintoshed and bowler-hatted.

  ‘Greenie’s dead,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  ‘Pop-pop.’ Mr Cooksey took off his hat and mackintosh and rested them carefully on the chair next to the sideboard.

  In the silence that followed I didn’t look at the Cookseys or the cage on the sewing machine. It was dark in the corner where Bluey’s cage was and it was some moments before I could see things clearly. Bluey’s cage was empty. I looked up at the sewing machine. He was in the cage with Yellow; he drooped on the floor, eyes closed, one swollen foot raised. Yellow paid him no attention. She fussed about from bar to bar, with a faint continuous rustle. Then she slipped through the hole into the nesting-box and was silent.

  ‘She’s still interested,’ Mr Cooksey said. He looked at Bluey. ‘You never know.’

  ‘It’s no good,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘She loved Greenie.’ Her old woman’s face had broken up and she was crying.

  Mr Cooksey opened doors on the sideboard, noisily looking for cocktails.

  Mrs Cooksey blew her nose. ‘Oh, they’re like children. You get so fond of them.’

  It was hard to think of something to say. I said, ‘We were all fond of Greenie, Mrs Cooksey. I was fond of him and I am sure Mr Cooksey was too.’

  ‘Pop-pop.’

  ‘Him? He doesn’t care. He’s tough. D’you know, he had a look at Greenie this morning. Told me he looked better. But he’s always like that. Look at him. Nothing worries him.’

  ‘Not true, Bess. Was a trific shock. Trific.’

  Yellow never came out of her nesting-box. She died two days later and Mrs Cooksey buried her in the garden, next to Greenie. I saw the cage and the nesting-box, smashed, on the heap of old wood Mr Cooksey kept in the garden shed.

  In the Cookseys’ sitting-room Bluey and his cage took their place again on the sewing machine. Slowly, week by week, Bluey improved. The time came when he could stand on both feet, when he could shuffle an inch or two on the floor of his cage. But his feet were never completely well again, and the growths on his beak didn’t disappear. The trapezes never swung and the ferris wheel was still.

  It must have been three months later. I went down one Saturday morning to pay Mrs Cooksey for the milk. I had to get some change and she had to hunt about for her glasses, then for the vase in which she kept small change. She poured out buttons from one vase, pins from another, fasteners from a third.

  ‘Poor old lady,’ she kept on muttering – that was how she had taken to speaking of herself. She fumbled about with more vases, then stopped, twisted her face into a smile and held out her open palm towards me. On it I saw two latch keys and a small white skull, finished, fragile.

  ‘Greenie or Yellow,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t really tell you which. The sparrows dug it up.’

  We both looked at Bluey in his cage.

  1957

  8 THE PERFECT TENANTS

  WE HEARD ABOUT the Dakins before they arrived. ‘They’re the perfect tenants,’ Mrs Cooksey, the landlady, said. ‘Their landlady brought them to me personally. She says she’s sorry to lose them, but she’s leaving London and taking over a hotel in Benson.’

  The Dakins moved in so quietly it was some days before I realized they were in the house. On Saturday and Sunday I heard sounds of washing and scrubbing and carpet-sweeping from the flat above. On Monday there was silence again.

  Once or twice that week I saw them on the steps. Mrs Dakin was about forty, tall and thin, with a sweet smile. ‘She used to be a policewoman,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘Sergeant, I think.’ Mr Dakin was as old as his wife and looked as athletic. But his rough, handsome face was humourless. His greetings were brief and firm and didn’t encourage conversation.

  Their behaviour was exemplary. They never had visitors. They never had telephone calls. Their cooking never smelled. They never allowed their milk bottles to accumulate and at the same time they never left an empty milk bottle on the doorstep in daylight. And they were silent. They had no radio. The only sounds were of scrubbing brush, broom and carpet-sweeper. Sometimes at night, when the street fell silent, I heard them in their bedroom: a low whine punctuated infrequently with brief bass rumbles.

  ‘There’s respectable people in every class,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘The trouble these days is that you never know where you are. Look at the Seymours. Creeping up late at night to the bathroom and splashing about together. You can’t even trust the BBC people. Remember that Arab.’

  The Dakins quickly became the favourite tenants. Mr Cooksey invited Mr Dakin down to ‘cocktails’. Mrs Dakin had Mrs Cooksey up to tea and Mrs Cooksey told us that she was satisfied with the appearance of the flat. ‘They’re very fussy,’ Mrs Cooksey said. She knew no higher praise, and we all felt reproached.

  * * *

  It was from Mrs Cooksey that I learned with disappointment that the Dakins had their troubles. ‘He fell off a ladder and broke his arm, but they won’t pay any compensation. The arm’s bent and he can’t even go to the seaside. What’s more, he can’t do his job properly. He’s an electrician, and you know how they’re always climbing. But there you are, d’you see. They don’t care. What’s three hundred pounds to them? But will they give it? Do you know the foreman actually burned the ladder?’

  I hadn’t noticed any disfigurement about Mr Dakin. He had struck me as a man of forbidding vigour, but now I looked on him with greater interest and respect for putting up so silently with his misfortune. We often passed on the stairs but never did more than exchange greetings, and so it might have gone on had it not been for the Cookseys’ New Year’s Eve party.

  At that time I was out of favour with the Cookseys. I had left a hoard of about fifteen milk bottles on the doo
rstep and the milkman had refused to take them all at once. For a whole day six partly washed milk bottles had remained on the doorstep, lowering Mrs Cooksey’s house. Some unpleasantness between Mrs Cooksey and the milkman had followed and quickly been passed on to me.

  When I came in that evening the door of the Cookseys’ sitting-room was open and through it came laughter, stamping and television music. Mr Cooksey, coming from the kitchen with a tray, looked at me in embarrassment. He brought his lips rapidly over his false teeth and made a popping sound.

  ‘Pop-pop. Come in,’ he said. ‘Drink. Cocktail.’

  I went in. Mrs Cooksey was sober but gay. The laughter and the stamping came from the Dakins alone. They were dancing. Mrs Dakin shrieked whenever Mr Dakin spun her around, and for a man whose left arm was permanently damaged he was doing it quite well. When she saw me Mrs Dakin shrieked, and Mrs Cooksey giggled, as though it was her duty to cheer the Dakins up. The couple from the flat below mine were there too, she on the seat of an armchair, he on the arm. They were dressed in their usual sub-county manner and looked constrained and unhappy. I thought of this couple as the Knitmaster and the Knitmistress. They had innumerable minor possessions: contemporary coffee tables and lampstands, a Cona coffee machine, a record-player, a portable television-and-VHF set, a 1946 Anglia which at the appropriate season carried a sticker: FREE LIFT TO GLYNDEBOURNE AT YOUR OWN RISK, and a Knitmaster machine which was never idle for long.

  The music stopped, Mrs Dakin pretended to swoon into her husband’s injured arms, and Mrs Cooksey clapped.

  ‘ ’Elp yourself, ’elp yourself,’ Mr Cooksey shouted.

  ‘Another drink, darling?’ the Knitmaster whispered to his wife.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Mrs Dakin cried.

  The Knitmistress smiled malevolently at Mrs Dakin.

  ‘Whisky?’ said Mr Cooksey. ‘Beer? Sherry? Guinness?’

  ‘Give her the cocktail,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  Mr Cooksey’s cocktails were well known to his older tenants. He had a responsible position in an important public corporation – he said he had thirty-four cleaners under him – and the origin and blend of his cocktails were suspect.

  The Knitmistress took the cocktail and sipped without enthusiasm.

  ‘And you?’ Mr Cooksey asked.

  ‘Guinness,’ I said.

  ‘Guinness!’ Mr Dakin exclaimed, looking at me for the first time with interest and kindliness. ‘Where did you learn to drink Guinness?’

  We drew closer and talked about Guinness.

  ‘Of course it’s best in Ireland,’ he said. ‘Thick and creamy. What’s it like where you come from?’

  ‘I can’t drink it there. It’s too warm.’

  Mr Dakin shook his head. ‘It isn’t the climate. It’s the Guinness. It can’t travel. It gets sick.’

  Soon it was time to sing Auld Lang Syne.

  The next day the Dakins reverted to their exemplary behaviour, but now when we met we stopped to have a word about the weather.

  One evening, about four weeks later, I heard something like a commotion in the flat above. Footsteps pounded down the stairs, there was a banging on my door, and Mrs Dakin rushed in and cried, ‘It’s my ’usband! ’E’s rollin’ in agony.’

  Before I could say anything she ran out and raced down to the Knitmasters.

  ‘My husband’s rollin’ in agony.’

  The whirring of the Knitmaster machine stopped and I heard the Knitmistress making sympathetic sounds.

  The Knitmaster said, ‘Telephone for the doctor.’

  I went and stood on the landing as a sympathetic gesture. Mrs Dakin roused the Cookseys, there were more exclamations, then I heard the telephone being dialled. I went back to my room. After some thought I left my door wide open: another gesture of sympathy.

  Mrs Dakin, Mrs Cooksey and Mr Cooksey hurried up the stairs.

  The Knitmaster machine was whirring again.

  Presently there was a knock on my door and Mr Cooksey came in. ‘Pop-pop. It’s as hot as a bloomin’ oven up there.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘No wonder he’s ill.’

  I asked after Mr Dakin.

  ‘A touch of indigestion, if you ask me.’ Then, like a man used to more momentous events, he added, ‘One of my cleaners took ill sudden last week. Brain tumour.’

  The doctor came and the Dakins’ flat was full of footsteps and conversation. Mr Cooksey ran up and down the steps, panting and pop-popping. Mrs Dakin was sobbing and Mrs Cooksey was comforting her. An ambulance bell rang in the street and soon Mr Dakin, Mrs Dakin and the doctor left.

  ‘Appendix,’ Mr Cooksey told me.

  The Knitmaster opened his door.

  ‘Appendix,’ Mr Cooksey shouted down. ‘It was like an oven up there.’

  ‘He was cold,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  ‘Pah!’

  Mrs Cooksey looked anxious.

  ‘Nothing to it, Bess,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘’Itler had the appendix took out of all his soldiers.’

  The Knitmaster said, ‘I had mine out two years ago. Small scar.’ He measured off the top of his forefinger. ‘About that long. It’s a nervous thing really. You get it when you are depressed or worried. My wife had to have hers out just before we went to France.’

  The Knitmistress came out and smiled her terrible smile, baring short square teeth and tall gums, and screwing up her small eyes. She said, ‘Hallo,’ and pulled on woollen gloves, which perhaps she had just knitted on her machine. She wore a tweed skirt, a red sweater, a brown velveteen jacket and a red-and-white beret.

  ‘Appendix,’ Mr Cooksey said.

  The Knitmistress only smiled again, and followed her husband downstairs to the 1946 Anglia.

  ‘A terrible thing,’ I said to Mrs Cooksey tentatively.

  ‘Pop-pop.’ Mr Cooksey looked at his wife.

  ‘Terrible thing,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  Our quarrel over the milk bottles was over.

  Mr Cooksey became animated. ‘Nothing to it, Bess. Just a lot of fuss for nothing at all. Gosh, they kept that room like an oven.’

  Mrs Dakin came back at about eleven. Her eyes were red but she was composed. She spoke about the kindness of the nurses. And then, to round off an unusual evening, I heard – at midnight on a weekday – the sound of the carpet-sweeper upstairs. The Knitmistress complained in her usual way. She opened her door and talked loudly to her husband about the nuisance.

  Next morning Mrs Dakin went again to the hospital. She returned just before midday and as soon as she got into the hall she began to sob so loudly that I heard her on the second floor.

  I found her in Mrs Cooksey’s arms when I went down. Mrs Cooksey was pale and her eyes were moist.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I whispered.

  Mrs Cooksey shook her head.

  Mrs Dakin leaned against Mrs Cooksey, who was much smaller.

  ‘And my brother is getting married tomorrow!’ Mrs Dakin burst out.

  ‘Come now, Eva,’ Mrs Cooksey said firmly. ‘Tell me what happened at the hospital.’

  ‘They’re feeding him through a glass tube. They’ve put him on the danger list. And – his bed is near the door!’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything, Eva.’

  ‘It does! It does!’

  ‘Nonsense, Eva.’

  ‘They’ve got him screened round.’

  ‘You must be brave, Eva.’

  We led Mrs Dakin to Mrs Cooksey’s sitting-room, made her sit down and watched her cry.

  ‘It burst inside ’im.’ Mrs Dakin made a wild gesture across her body. ‘They had to cut him clean open, and – scrape it out.’ Having uttered this terrible word, she abandoned herself to her despair.

  ‘Come now, Eva,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘He wouldn’t like you to behave like this.’

  We all took turns to look after Mrs Dakin between her trips to the hospital. The news didn’t get better. Mrs Dakin had tea with the Cookseys. She had tea with the Knitmistress. She had tea with me. We talked gaily about everything e
xcept the sick man, and Mrs Dakin was very brave. She even related some of her adventures in the police force. She also complained.

  ‘The first thing Mr Cooksey said when he came up that evening was that the room was like an oven. But I couldn’t help that. My husband was cold. Fancy coming up and saying a thing like that!’

  I gave Mrs Dakin many of the magazines which had been piling up on the enormous Victorian dresser in my kitchen. The Knitmistress, I noticed, was doing the same thing.

  Mr Cooksey allowed himself to grow a little grave. He discussed the operation in a sad but clinical way. ‘When it bursts inside ’em, you see, it poisons the whole system. That’s why they had to cut ’im open. Clean it out. They hardly ever live afterwards.’

  Mrs Cooksey said, ‘He was such a nice man. I am so glad now we enjoyed ourselves on New Year’s Eve. It’s her I’m really sorry for. He was her second, you know.’

  ‘Aah,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘There are women like that.’

  I told the Knitmistress, ‘And he was such a nice man.’

  ‘Wasn’t he?’

  I heard Mrs Dakin sobbing in everybody’s rooms. I heard her sobbing on the staircase.

  Mrs Cooksey said, ‘It’s all so terrible. Her brother got married yesterday, but she couldn’t go to the wedding. She had to send a telegram. They are coming up to see Mr Dakin. What a thing to happen on anybody’s honeymoon!’

  Mrs Dakin’s brother and his bride came up from Wales on a motorbike. Mrs Dakin was at the hospital when they came and Mrs Cooksey gave them tea.

  I didn’t see Mrs Dakin that evening, but late that night I saw the honeymoon couple running upstairs with bottles wrapped in tissue paper. He was a huge man – a footballer, Mrs Cooksey said – and when he ran up the steps you heard it all over the house. His bride was small, countrified and gay. They stayed awake for some time.

  Next morning, when I went down to get the paper, I saw the footballer’s motorbike on the doorstep. It had leaked a lot of oil.

  Again that day Mrs Dakin didn’t come to our rooms. And that evening there was another party in the flat above. We heard the footballer’s heavy footsteps, his shouts, his wife’s giggles, Mrs Dakin’s whine.