The Clothes They Stood Up In (2 page)

“A settee, easy chairs, a clock,” said Mrs. Ransome. “We had everything.”

“Television?” said the constable, timidly.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Ransome.

“Only we didn't watch it much,” said Mr. Ransome.

“Video recorder?”

“No,” said Mr. Ransome. “Life's complicated enough.”

“CD player?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Ransome and Mr. Ransome together.

“And my wife had a fur coat,” said Mr. Ransome. “My insurers have a list of the valuables.”

“In that case,” said the sergeant, “you are laughing. I'll just have a little wander round if you don't mind, while Constable Partridge takes down the details. People opposite see the intruder?”

“Away in Portugal,” said Mr. Ransome.

“Caretaker?”

“Probably in Portugal too,” said Mr. Ransome, “for all we see of him.”

“Is it Ransom as in king's?” said the constable. “Or Ransome as in Arthur?”

“Partridge is one of our graduate entrants,” said the sergeant, examining the front door. “Lock not forced, I see. He's just climbing the ladder. There wouldn't be such a thing as a cup of tea, would there?”

“No,” said Mr. Ransome shortly, “because there wouldn't be such a thing as a teapot. Not to mention a tea bag to put in it.”

“I take it you'll want counseling,” said the constable.

“What?”

“Someone comes along and holds your hand,” said the sergeant, looking at the window. “Partridge thinks it's important.”

“We're all human,” said the constable.

“I'm a solicitor,” said Mr. Ransome.

“Well,” said the sergeant, “perhaps your missus could give it a try. We like to keep Partridge happy.”

Mrs. Ransome smiled helpfully.

“I'll put yes,” said the constable.

“They didn't leave anything behind, did they?” asked the sergeant, sniffing and reaching up to run his hand along the picture-rail.

“No,” said Mr. Ransome testily. “Not a thing. As you can see.”

“I didn't mean something of yours,” said the sergeant. “I meant something of theirs.” He sniffed again, inquiringly. “A calling card.”

“A calling card?” said Mrs. Ransome.

“Excrement,” said the sergeant. “Burglary is a nervous business. They often feel the need to open their bowels when doing a job.”

“Which is another way of saying it, sergeant,” said the constable.

“Another way of saying what, Partridge?”

“Doing a job is another way of saying opening the bowels. In France,” said the constable, “it's known as posting a sentry.”

“Oh, teach you that at Leatherhead, did they?” said the sergeant. “Partridge is a graduate of the police college.”

“It's like a university,” explained the constable, “only they don't have scarves.”

“Anyway,” said the sergeant, “have a scout around. For the excrement, I mean. They can be very creative about it. Burglary in Pangbourne I attended once where they done it halfway up the wall in an eighteenth-century light fitting. Any other sphere and they'd have got the Duke of Edinburgh's Award.”

“You've perhaps not noticed,” Mr. Ransome said grimly, “but we don't have any light fittings.”

“Another one in Guildford did it in a bowl of this potpourri.”

“That would be irony,” said the constable.

“Oh would it?” said the sergeant. “And there was me thinking it was just some foul-assed, light-fingered little smackhead afflicted with incontinence. Still, while we're talking about bodily functions, before we take our leave I'll just pay a visit myself.”

Too late Mr. Ransome realized he should have warned him and took refuge in the kitchen.

The sergeant came out shaking his head.

“Well at least our friends had the decency to use the toilet but they've left it in a disgusting state. I never thought I'd have to do a Jimmy Riddle over Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. Her recording of
West Side Story
is one of the gems of my record collection.”

“To be fair,” said Mrs. Ransome, “that was my husband.”

“Dear me,” said the sergeant.

“What was?” said Mr. Ransome, coming back into the room.

“Nothing,” said his wife.

“Do you think you'll catch them?” said Mr. Ransome as he stood at the door with the two policemen.

The sergeant laughed.

“Well, miracles do happen, even in the world of law enforcement. Nobody got a grudge against you, have they?”

“I'm a solicitor,” said Mr. Ransome. “It's possible.”

“And it's not somebody's idea of a joke?”

“A
joke
?” said Mr. Ransome.

“Just a thought,” said the sergeant. “But if it's your genuine burglar, I'll say this: he always comes back.”

The constable nodded in sage confirmation; even Leatherhead was agreed on this. “Come back?” said Mr. Ransome bitterly, looking at the empty flat. “
Come back?
What the fuck for?”

Mr. Ransome seldom swore and Mrs. Ransome, who had stayed in the other room, pretended she hadn't heard. The door closed.

“Useless,” said Mr. Ransome, coming back. “Utterly useless. It makes you want to swear.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Ransome a few hours later, “we shall just have to camp out. After all,” she added not unhappily, “it could be fun.”

“Fun?” said Mr. Ransome.
“Fun?”

He was unshaven, unwashed, his bottom was sore and his breakfast had been a drink of water from the tap. Still, no amount of pleading on Mrs. Ransome's part could stop him going heroically off to work, with his wife instinctively knowing even in these unprecedented circumstances that her role was to make much of his selfless dedication.

Even so, when he'd gone and with the flat so empty, Mrs. Ransome missed him a little, wandering from room to echoing room not sure where she should start. Deciding to make a list she forgot for the moment she had nothing to make a list with and nothing to make a list on. This meant a visit to the newsagents for pad and pencil where, though she'd never noticed it before, she found there was a café next door. It seemed to be doing hot breakfasts, and, though in her opera clothes she felt a bit out of place among the taxi drivers and bicycle couriers who comprised most of the clientele, nobody took much notice of her, the waitress even calling her “duck” and offering her a copy of
The Mirror
to read while she waited for her bacon, egg, baked beans and fried bread. It wasn't a paper she would normally read, but bacon, egg, baked beans and fried bread wasn't a breakfast she would normally eat either, and she got so interested in the paper's tales of royalty and its misdemeanors that she propped it up against the sauce bottle so that she could read and eat, completely forgetting that one of the reasons she had come into the café was to make herself a list.

Wanting a list, her shopping was pretty haphazard. She went off to Boots first and bought some toilet rolls and some paper plates and cups, but she forgot soap. And when she remembered soap and went back for it, she forgot tea bags, and when she remembered tea bags, she forgot paper towels, until what with trailing halfway to the flats then having to go back again, she began to feel worn out.

It was on the third of these increasingly flustered trips (now having forgotten plastic cutlery) that Mrs. Ransome ventured into Mr. Anwar's. She had passed the shop many times as it was midway between the flats and St. John's Wood High Street; indeed she remembered it opening and the little draper's and babies' knitwear shop which it had replaced and where she had been a loyal customer. That had been kept by a Miss Dorsey, from whom over the years she had bought the occasional tray cloth or hank of Sylko but, on a much more regular basis, plain brown paper packets of what in those days were called “towels.” The closing-down of the shop in the late sixties had left Mrs. Ransome anxious and unprotected and it came as a genuine surprise on venturing into Timothy White's to find that technology in this intimate department had lately made great strides that were unreflected in Miss Dorsey's ancient stock, of which Mrs. Ransome, as the last of a dwindling clientele, had been almost the sole consumer. She was old-fashioned, she knew that, but snobbery had come into it too, Mrs. Ransome feeling it vaguely classier to have her requirements passed wordlessly across the counter with Miss Dorsey's patient, suffering smile (“Our cross,” it said) rather than taken from some promiscuous shelf in Timothy White's. Though it was not long before Timothy White's went the same way as Miss Dorsey, swallowed whole by Boots. Though Boots too, she felt, was a cut above the nearest chemist, Superdrug, which didn't look classy at all.

The closing-down of Miss Dorsey's (she was found laid across the counter one afternoon, having had a stroke) left the premises briefly empty until, passing one morning on the way to the High Street, Mrs. Ransome saw that the shop had been taken over by an Asian grocer and that the pavement in front of the window where nothing had previously stood except the occasional customer's pram was now occupied by boxes of unfamiliar vegetables—yams, papaws, mangoes and the like, together with many sacks, sacks, Mrs. Ransome felt, that dogs could all too easily cock their legs against.

So it was partly out of loyalty to Miss Dorsey and partly because it wasn't really her kind of thing that Mrs. Ransome had not ventured into the shop until this morning when, to save her trailing back for the umpteenth time to the High Street, she thought she might go in and ask if they had such a thing as boot polish (there were more pressing requirements, as she would have been the first to admit, only Mr. Ransome was very particular about his shoes). Though over twenty years had passed, the shop was still recognizably what it had been in Miss Dorsey's day because, other than having introduced a freezer and cold cupboards, Mr. Anwar had simply adapted the existing fixtures to his changed requirements. Drawers that had previously been devoted to the genteel accoutrements of a leisured life—knitting patterns, crochet hooks, Rufflette—now housed nan and pita bread; spices replaced bonnets and booties; and the shelves and deep drawers that once were home to hosiery and foundation garments were now filled with rice and chickpeas.

Mrs. Ransome thought it unlikely they had polish in stock (did they wear normal shoes?), but she was weary enough to give it a try, though, since oxblood was what she wanted (or Mr. Ransome required), she thought vaguely it might be a shade to which they had religious objections. But plump and cheerful Mr. Anwar brought out several tins for her kind consideration and while she was paying she spotted a nailbrush they would be needing; then the tomatoes looked nice and there was a lemon, and while she was at it the shop seemed to sell hardware so she invested in a colander. As she wandered around the shop the normally tongue-tied Mrs. Ransome found herself explaining to this plump and amiable grocer the circumstances that had led her to the purchase of such an odd assortment of things. And he smiled and shook his head in sympathy while at the same time suggesting other items she would doubtless be needing to replace and that he would happily supply. “They cleaned you out of house and home, the blighters. You will not know whether you are coming or going. You will need washing-up liquid and one of these blocks to make the toilet a more savory place.”

So she ended up buying a dozen or so items, too many for her to carry, but this didn't matter either as Mr. Anwar fetched his little boy from the flat upstairs (I hope I'm not dragging him away from the Koran, she thought) and he followed Mrs. Ransome home in his little white cap, carrying her shopping in a cardboard box.

“Seconds probably,” said Mr. Ransome later. “That's how they make a profit.”

Mrs. Ransome didn't quite see how there could be seconds in shoe polish but didn't say so.

“Hopefully,” she said, “they'll deliver.”

“You mean,” said Mr. Ransome (and it was old ground), “you hope they'll deliver. ‘Hopefully they'll deliver' means that deliveries are touch and go” (though that was probably true too).

“Anyway,” said Mrs. Ransome defiantly, “he stays open till ten at night.”

“He can afford to,” said Mr. Ransome. “He probably pays no wages. I'd stick to Marks and Spencer.”

Which she did, generally speaking. Though once she popped in and bought a mango for her lunch and another time a papaw; small adventures, it's true, but departures nevertheless, timorous voyages of discovery which she knew her husband well enough to keep to herself.

The Ransomes had few friends; they seldom entertained, Mr. Ransome saying that he saw quite enough of people at work. On the rare occasions when Mrs. Ransome ran into someone she knew and ventured to recount their dreadful experience she was surprised to find that everyone, it seemed, had their own burglar story. None, she felt, was so stark or so shocking as to measure up to theirs, which ought in fairness to have trumped outright these other less flamboyant break-ins, but comparison scarcely seemed to enter into it: the friends only endured her story as an unavoidable prelude to telling her their own. She asked Mr. Ransome if he had noticed this.

“Yes,” he said shortly. “Anybody would think it happened every day.”

Which, of course, it did but not, he was certain, as definitively, as out-and-outedly, as altogether epically as this.

“Everything,” Mr. Ransome told Gail, his longtime secretary, “every single thing.”

Gail was a tall, doleful-looking woman, which normally suited Mr. Ransome very well as he could not abide much of what he called “silliness”—i.e., femininity. Had Gail been a bit sillier, though, she might have been more sympathetic, but like everyone else she weighed in with a burglar story of her own, saying she was surprised it hadn't happened before as most people she knew had been burgled at least once and her brother-in-law, who was a chiropodist in Ilford, twice, one of which had been a ram-raid while they were watching television.