Mansfield with Monsters (15 page)

No, too late. This was the house. It must be. A dark knot of people stood outside, sticks and rakes and shovels in hand, swiping at horrid things which sniffed and scuttled and battered at the house, hungry for what lay inside. The monstrous, overgrown insects seemed to understand the threat these grimy people posed, for they swooped and circled but kept their distance. Beside the gate an old, old woman with a crutch sat in a chair, watching. She alone held a rifle, heavy across her lap. She had her feet on a newspaper. The voices stopped as Hans and Laura drew near. The group parted. It was as though she was expected, as though they had known she was coming here. Hans brought the Leviathan suit's right arm up and discharged a sustained jet of flame into the air, incinerating several bees, then powered down to wait.

Laura was terribly nervous. Tossing the velvet ribbon over her shoulder, she said to a woman standing by, “Is this Mrs Scott's house?” and the woman, smiling queerly, said, “It is, my lass.”

Oh, to be away from this! She actually said, “Help me, God,” as she walked up the tiny path and knocked. To be away from those staring eyes, or to be covered up in anything, one of those women's shawls even. I'll just leave the basket and go, she decided. I shan't even wait for it to be emptied.

Then the door opened. A little woman in black showed in the gloom.

Laura said, “Are you Mrs Scott?” But to her horror the woman answered, “Walk in please, miss,” and she was shut in the passage.

“No,” said Laura, “I don't want to come in. I only want to leave this basket. Mother sent—”

The little woman in the gloomy passage seemed not to have heard her. “Step this way, please, miss,” she said in an oily voice, and Laura followed her, the brass boots of her armoured suit falling heavy on the floor of the passage.

She found herself in a wretched little low kitchen, lighted by a smoky lamp. There was a woman sitting before the fire.

“Em,” said the little creature who had let her in. “Em! It's a young lady.” She turned to Laura. She said meaningly, “I'm 'er sister, miss. You'll excuse 'er, won't you?”

“Oh, but of course!” said Laura. “Please, please don't disturb her. I—I only want to leave—”

But at that moment the woman at the fire turned round. Her face, puffed up, red, with swollen eyes and swollen lips, looked terrible. She seemed as though she couldn't understand why Laura was there. What did it mean? Why was this stranger standing in the kitchen with a basket? What was it all about? And the poor face puckered up again.

“All right, my dear,” said the other. “I'll thenk the young lady.”

And again she began, “You'll excuse her, miss, I'm sure,” and her face, swollen too, tried an oily smile. On the ceiling behind her something dark and chitinous moved. It was no bigger than a cat, unlikely to threaten anyone older than a toddler, but Laura shuddered and looked away. The woman who had let her in snatched up a poker from beside the fire, swung it at the creature. Its black eyes glistened a moment in the firelight and it scuttled from the room.

Laura only wanted to get out, to get away. She was back in the passage. The door opened. She walked straight through into the bed-room, where the dead man was lying.

“You'd like a look at 'im, wouldn't you?” said Em's sister, and she brushed past Laura over to the bed. “Don't be afraid, my lass,”—and now her voice sounded fond and sly, and fondly she drew down the sheet—“ 'e looks a picture. There's nothing to show. Come along, my dear.”

Laura came.

Em's sister drew back a heavy mesh curtain from around the bed, and there lay a young man, fully clothed and perhaps padded in places, fast asleep—sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. He was given up to his dream. What did garden parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane. Happy… happy… All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content.

But all the same you had to cry, and she couldn't go out of the room without saying something to him. Laura gave a loud childish sob.

“Forgive my hat,” she said.

And this time she didn't wait for Em's sister. She found her way out of the door, down the path, past all those dark people. Hans fell into step behind her without a word. At the corner of the lane she met Laurie.

He stepped out of the shadow, knife in hand, the bulbous head of a great centipede skewered on its tip. His emerald armour was scuffed and smudged. “Is that you, Laura?”

“Yes.”

“Mother was getting anxious. Was it all right?”

“Yes, quite. Oh, Laurie!” She took his arm, shook the head from the blade. It landed with a heavy thud and rolled to the side of the lane. Turning her back to it, she pressed up against him.

“I say, you're not crying, are you?” asked her brother.

Laura shook her head. She was.

Laurie put his arm round her shoulder. “Don't cry,” he said in his warm, loving voice. “Was it awful?”

“No,” sobbed Laura. “It was simply marvellous. But Laurie—” She stopped, she looked at her brother. “Isn't life,” she stammered, “isn't life—” But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood.

“
Isn't it
, darling?” said Laurie.

The Unlife of Ma Parker

When the literary gentleman, whose flat old Ma Parker cleaned every Tuesday, opened the door to her that morning, he asked after her grandson. Ma Parker stood on the doormat inside the dark little hall, and she stretched out her hand to help her gentleman shut the door before she replied. The skin on the back of her hand had a greenish, sickly pallor, and a line of stitches peeped out from under the cuff of her coat. “He's breathing easier now, sir,” she said quietly before tugging her coat sleeves back down to her knuckles.

“Oh… good! I'm delighted to hear that,” said the literary gentleman. In spite of the good news, Ma Parker looked worse than usual. Any trace of colour had withered away, leaving only sallow grey skin and unsettlingly pale eyes staring out from beneath dark and swollen eyelids. A worn, greasy scarf was wrapped about her neck, bulging at each side as some hidden bulk forced it out. But he felt awkward. He could hardly go back to the warm sitting-room without saying something—something more. Then because her sort set such a store by the meanest sorts of education he said kindly, “The young lad will be in school soon?”

“Beg parding, sir?” said old Ma Parker huskily.

Poor old bird! She did look dashed. “I hope the boy will begin, ah, school,” said he. Ma Parker gave no answer. She bent her head and hobbled off to the kitchen, clasping the old fish bag that held her cleaning things and an apron and a pair of felt shoes. The literary gentleman raised his eyebrows and went back to his breakfast.

“Taken ill, I suppose,” he said aloud, helping himself to the marmalade. There was no other explanation for her strange behaviour and disturbing appearance.

Ma Parker drew the two jetty spears out of her bag and hung it behind the door. She unhooked her worn jacket and hung that up too. Then she tied her apron and sat down to take off her boots. To take off her boots or to put them on was an agony to her, but she had been in agony for days. In fact, she was so accustomed to the pain that her face was drawn and screwed up ready for the twinge before she'd so much as untied the laces. That over, she sat back with a sigh and softly rubbed the stitches above her ankles. The feet which were now attached to her legs were larger than her own had been and concealing them under the boots had made the pain so much worse, but what else was she to do?

 

 

“Gran! Gran!” Her little grandson stood on her lap in his button boots. He'd just come in from playing in the street.

“Look what a state you've made your gran's skirt into!”

But he put his arms round her neck and rubbed his cheek against hers.

“Gran, gi' us a penny!” he coaxed.

“Be off with you; Gran ain't got no pennies.”

“Yes, you 'ave.”

“No, I ain't.”

“Yes, you 'ave. Gi' us one!”

Already she was feeling for the old, squashed, black leather purse.

“Well, what'll you give your gran?”

He gave a shy little laugh and pressed closer. She felt his eyelid quivering against her cheek. “I ain't got nothing,” he murmured…

 

 

The old woman heaved her body upright, seized the iron kettle off the gas stove, and took it over to the sink. The noise of the water drumming in the kettle deadened her pain, it seemed. She filled the pail, too, and the washing-up bowl. The extra tendons the doctor had inserted into her forearms made light work of the lifting, but the weakness in her chest prevented her from taking any pleasure in it.

It would take a whole book to describe the state of that kitchen. During the week the literary gentleman ‘did' for himself. That is to say, he emptied the tea leaves now and again into a jam jar set aside for that purpose, and if he ran out of clean forks he wiped over one or two on the roller towel. Otherwise, as he explained to his friends, his ‘system' was quite simple, and he couldn't understand why people made all this fuss about house-keeping.

“You simply dirty everything you've got, get a hag in once a week to clean up, and the thing's done.”

The result looked like a gigantic dust-bin. Even the floor was littered with decaying toast crusts, envelopes, cigarette ends. But Ma Parker bore him no grudge. She pitied the poor young gentleman for having no one to look after him. Out of the smudgy little window you could see a dark alley-way with a thin strip of sad-looking sky, and whenever there were clouds they looked very worn, old clouds, frayed at the edges, with holes in them, or dark stains like tea.

While the water was heating, Ma Parker began sweeping the floor. “Yes,” she thought, as the broom knocked, “what with one thing and another I've had my share. I've had a hard life.”

Even the neighbours said that of her. Many a time, hobbling home with her fish bag she heard them, waiting at the corner, or leaning over the area railings, say among themselves, “She's had a hard life, has Ma Parker.” And it was so true she wasn't in the least proud of it. It was just as if you were to say she lived in the basement-back at Number 27. She'd had a hard life, but now? Now what did she have…?

 

 

At sixteen she'd left Stratford and come up to London as a kitchen-maid. Yes, she was born in Stratford-on-Avon. Shakespeare? No, people were always asking her about him. But she'd never heard his name until she saw it on the theatres.

Nothing remained of Stratford except that “sitting in the fire-place of an evening you could see the stars through the chimney,” and “Mother always 'ad 'er side of bacon, 'anging from the ceiling.” And there was something—a plant, there was—at the front door, that smelt ever so nice. But the plant was very vague. She'd only remembered it once or twice just before the operation, when she was lain out like a corpse on the table and the gas filled her lungs…

It had been a dreadful place—her first place. She was never allowed out. She never went upstairs except for prayers morning and evening. It was a fair cellar. And the cook was a cruel woman. She used to snatch away her letters from home before she'd read them, and throw them in the range because they made her dreamy.

When that family was sold up she went as ‘help' to a doctor's house, and after two months there, she married her husband. He had been a baker and she had been desperate to leave the doctor's house. The doctor had scared her from the first day. He wasn't a cruel man; he was kind in his own strange way but she had been terrified by those unnatural experiments in the attic…

“A baker, Mrs Parker!” the literary gentleman would say. For occasionally he laid aside his tomes and lent an ear, at least, to this product called Life. “It must be rather nice to be married to a baker!”

Mrs Parker didn't look so sure.

“Such a clean trade,” said the gentleman.

Mrs Parker didn't look convinced.

“And didn't you like handing the new loaves to the customers?”

“Well, sir,” said Mrs Parker, “I wasn't in the shop above a great deal. We had thirteen little ones and buried seven of them. If it wasn't the 'ospital it was the infirmary, you might say!”

“You might,
indeed
, Mrs Parker!” said the gentleman, shuddering, and taking up his pen again.

Yes, seven had gone, and while the six were still small her husband was taken ill with consumption. It was flour on the lungs, the doctor told her at the time… Her husband sat up in bed with his shirt pulled over his head, and the doctor's finger drew a circle on his back.

“Now, if we were to cut him open
here
, Mrs Parker,” said the doctor, “you'd find his lungs chock-a-block with white powder. Breathe, my good fellow!” And Mrs Parker never knew for certain whether she saw or whether she fancied she saw a great fan of white dust come out of her poor dead husband's lips…

But the struggle she'd had to bring up those six little children and keep herself to herself. Terrible it had been! Then, just when they were old enough to go to school her husband's sister came to stop with them to help things along, and she hadn't been there more than two months when she fell down a flight of steps and hurt her spine. And for five years Ma Parker had another baby—and such a one for crying!—to look after. Then young Maudie went wrong and took her sister Alice with her; the two boys emigrated, and young Jim went to India with the army, and Ethel, the youngest, married a good-for-nothing little waiter who died of ulcers the year little Lennie was born. And little Lennie—her poor little grandson. She would have done anything for him…

 

 

The piles of dirty cups, dirty dishes, were washed and dried. The ink-black knives were cleaned with a piece of potato and finished off with a piece of cork. The table was scrubbed, and the dresser and the sink that had old sardine tails swimming in it…

 

 

Lennie had never been a strong child—never from the first. He'd been one of those fair babies that everybody took for a girl. Silvery fair curls he had, blue eyes, and a little freckle like a diamond on one side of his nose. The trouble she and Ethel had had to rear that child! The things out of the newspapers they tried him with! Every Sunday morning Ethel would read aloud while Ma Parker did her washing.