The Clothes They Stood Up In (4 page)

Truth to tell (and though she didn't say so to Mrs. Ransome) it was advice Dusty only proffered halfheartedly anyway. The more she saw of the lilies of the field syndrome the less faith she had in it. She'd had one or two clients who'd told her that a hurtful burglary had given them a clue how to live, that from now on they would set less store by material possessions, travel light, etc. Six months later she'd gone back on a follow-up visit to find them more encumbered than ever. Lots of people could give up things, Dusty had decided; what they couldn't do without was shopping for them.

When Mrs. Ransome said to Dusty that she didn't particularly miss her belongings she had been telling the truth. What she did miss—and this was harder to put into words—was not so much the things themselves as her particular paths through them. There was the green bobble hat she had had, for instance, which she never actually wore but would always put on the hall table to remind her that she had switched the immersion heater on in the bathroom. She didn't have the bobble hat now and she didn't have the table to put it on (and that she still had the immersion heater must be regarded as a providence). But with no bobble hat she'd twice left the immersion on all night and once Mr. Ransome had scalded his hand.

He too had had rituals to forgo. He had lost the little curved scissors, for instance, with which he used to cut the hair in his ears—and that was only the beginning of it. While not especially vain he had a little mustache which, if left to itself, had a distasteful tendency to go ginger, a tinge that Mr. Ransome kept in check with the occasional touch of hair dye. This came out of an ancient bottle Mrs. Ransome had tried on her roots years ago and then instantly discarded, but which was still kept at the back of the bathroom cupboard. Locking the bathroom door before applying it to the affected part, Mr. Ransome had never admitted to what he was doing, with Mrs. Ransome in her turn never admitting that she knew about it anyway. Only now the bathroom cupboard was gone and the bottle with it, so in due course Mr. Ransome's mustache began to take on the telltale orange tinge he found so detestable. Asking her to buy another bottle was one answer but this would be to come clean on the years of clandestine cosmetics. Buying a bottle himself was another. But where? His barber was Polish and his English just about ran to “short back and sides.” An understanding chemist perhaps, but all the chemists of Mr. Ransome's acquaintance were anything but understanding, staffed usually by bored little sluts of eighteen unlikely to sympathize with a middle-aged solicitor and his creeping ginger.

Unhappily tracing its progress in Mrs. Ransome's powder compact, kept in the bathroom now as the only mirror in the flat, Mr. Ransome cursed the burglars who had brought such humiliation upon him, and lying on her camp bed Mrs. Ransome reflected that not the least of what they had lost in the burglary were their little marital deceptions.

Mr. Ransome had been told that while the insurance company would not pay for the temporary rental of a CD player (not regarded as an essential) it would sanction the hire of a TV. So one morning Mrs. Ransome went out and chose the most discreet model she could find and it was delivered and fitted that same afternoon. She had never watched daytime television before, feeling she ought to have better things to do. However, when the engineer had gone she found he had left the set switched to some sort of chat show in which an overweight American couple were being questioned by a black lady in a trouser suit about how, as the black lady put it, “they related to one another sexually.”

The man, slumped in his seat with his legs wide apart, was describing in as much detail as the woman in the trouser suit would allow what he, as he put it, “asked of his marriage,” while the woman, arms folded, knees together but too plump to be prim, was explaining how “without being judgmental, he had never taken the deodorant on board.”

“Get a load of that body language,” said the lady in the trouser suit, and the audience, mystifyingly to Mrs. Ransome who did not know what body language was, erupted in jeers and laughter.

The things people do for money, thought Mrs. Ransome, and switched it off.

The next afternoon, waking from a doze on her beanbag, she switched on again and found herself watching a similar program with another equally shameless couple and the same hooting, jeering audience, roaming among them with a microphone a different hostess, white this time but as imperturbable as the first and just as oblivious of everybody's bad manners, even, it seemed to Mrs. Ransome, egging them on.

These hostesses (for Mrs. Ransome now began to watch regularly) were all much of a muchness, big, bold and, Mrs. Ransome thought, with far too much self-confidence (she thought this was what they meant by “feisty” and would have looked it up in Mr. Ransome's dictionary but wasn't sure how it was spelled). They had names that defied gender: Robin, Bobby, Troy and some, like Tiffany, Page and Kirby, that in Mrs. Ransome's book weren't names at all.

The presenters and their audience spoke in a language which Mrs. Ransome, to begin with anyway, found hard to understand, talking of “parenting” and “personal interaction,” of “fine-tuning their sex lives” and “taking it up the butt.” It was a language of avowal and exuberant fellowship. “I hear what you're saying,” they said, smacking each other's hands. “I know where you're coming from.”

There was Felicia, who wanted long and loving sexual interaction, and Dwight, her husband, who just had hungry hands and no marital skills. They both, it was generally agreed, needed to talk, and here in front of this jeering throng, hungry for sensation, was the place they had chosen to do it, finally, as the credits rolled, falling hungrily upon one another, mouth glued to mouth while the audience roared its approval and the presenter looked on with a sadder and wiser smile. “Thank you people,” she said, and the couple kissed on.

What Mrs. Ransome could never get used to was how unabashed the participants were, how unsheepish, and how none of these people was ever plain shy. Even when there was a program about shyness no one who took part was shy in any sense that Mrs. Ransome understood it; there was no hanging back and no shortage of unblushing participants willing to stand up and boast of their crippling self-consciousness and the absurdities to which overwhelming diffidence and self-effacingness had brought them. No matter how private or intimate the topic under discussion, none of these eager vociferous people had any shame. On the contrary, they seemed to vie with one another in coming up with confessions of behavior that grew ever more ingeniously gross and indelicate; one outrageous admission trumped another, the audience greeting each new revelation with wild whoops and yells, hurling advice at the participants and urging them on to retail new depravities.

There were, it's true, rare occasions when some of the audience gave vent not to glee but to outrage, even seeming for a moment, presented with some particularly egregious confession, to be genuinely shocked; but it was only because the presenter, glancing covertly at the audience behind the speaker's back, had pulled a wry face and so cued their affront. The presenter was an accomplice, Mrs. Ransome thought, and no better than anyone else, even going out of her way to remind participants of yet more inventive and indelicate acts that they had earlier confided to her in the presumed privacy of the dressing room. When she jogged their memories they went through an elaborate pantomime of shame (hiding their heads, covering faces with hands, shaking with seemingly helpless laughter), all this to indicate that they had never expected such secrets to be made public, let alone retailed to the camera.

Still, Mrs. Ransome felt, they were all better than she was. For what none of these whooping, giggling (and often quite obese) creatures seemed in no doubt about was that at the basic level at which these programs were pitched people were all the same. There was no shame and no reserve and to pretend otherwise was to be stuck up and a hypocrite. Mrs. Ransome felt that she was certainly the first and that her husband was probably the second.

The contents of the flat were insured for £50,000. It had originally been much less, but being a solicitor and a careful man besides, Mr. Ransome had seen to it that the premium had kept pace with the cost of living. Accordingly this modest agglomeration of household goods, furniture, fixtures and fittings had gone on over the years gently increasing in value; the stereo and the Magimix, the canteen of cutlery, the EPNS salad servers, the tray cloths and table mats and all the apparatus of that life which the Ransomes had the complete equipment for but had never managed to lead, all this had marched comfortably in step with the index. Durable, sober, unshowy stuff, bought with an eye to use rather than ornament, hardly diminished by breakage or loss, dutifully dusted and polished over the years so that it was scarcely even abraded by wear or tear—all this had gone uneventfully forward until that terrible night when the column had been ambushed and this ordinary, unpretentious little fraternity seemingly wiped out and what Mrs. Ransome modestly called “our things” had vanished forever.

So at any rate the insurance company concluded and in due course a check arrived for the full value plus an unforeseen increment payable in the absence of any previous claims and which served to cover disruption and compensate for distress.

“The extra is for our trauma,” said Mrs. Ransome, looking at the check.

“I prefer to call it inconvenience,” Mr. Ransome said. “We've been burgled, not knocked down by a bus. Still, the extra will come in handy.”

He was already working out a scheme for an improved stereo system plus an update on his CD player combined with high definition digital sound and ultrarefinement of tone, all to be fed through a pair of majestic new speakers in handcrafted mahogany. It would be Mozart as he had never heard him before.

Mrs. Ransome was sitting contentedly in a cheap cane rocking chair she had found a few weeks earlier in a furniture store up the Edgware Road. It was an establishment that, before the burglary, she would never have dreamed of going into, with garish suites, paintings of clowns and, flanking the door, two life-size pottery leopards. A common shop she would have thought it once, as a bit of her still did, but Mr. Anwar had recommended it and sure enough the rocking chair she'd bought there was wonderfully comfortable and, unlike the easy chair in which she used to sit before the burglary, good for her back. Now that the insurance check had come through she planned on getting a matching chair for Mr. Ransome, but in the meantime she had bought a rug to put the chair on, and, sewn with a design of an elephant, it glowed under the light from a brass table lamp bought at the same shop. Sitting with what Mr. Anwar had told her was an Afghan prayer rug round her shoulders she felt in the middle of the bare sitting room floor that she was on a cozy and slightly exotic little island.

For the moment Mr. Ransome's island was not so cozy, just a chair at the card table on which Mrs. Ransome had put the one letter that constituted the day's post. Mr. Ransome picked up the envelope. Smelling curry, he said, “What's for supper?”

“Curry.”

Mr. Ransome turned the letter over. It looked like a bill. “What sort of curry?”

“Lamb,” said Mrs. Ransome. “With apricots. I've been wondering,” she said, “would white be too bold?”

“White what?” said Mr. Ransome, holding the letter up to the light.

“Well,” she said hesitantly, “white everything really.”

Mr. Ransome did not reply. He was reading the letter.

“You mustn't get too excited,” Mr. Ransome said as they were driving toward Aylesbury. “It could be somebody's sense of humor. Another joke.”

Actually their mood was quite flat and the countryside was flat too; they had scarcely spoken since they had set off, the letter with Mr. Ransome's penciled directions lying on Mrs. Ransome's lap.

Left at the roundabout, thought Mr. Ransome.

“It's left at the roundabout,” Mrs. Ransome said.

He had telephoned the storage firm that morning to have a girl answer. It was called Rapid 'n' Reliant Removals 'n' Storage, those 'n's, Mr. Ransome thought, a foretaste of trouble; nor was he disappointed.

“Hello. Rapid 'n' Reliant Removals 'n' Storage. Christine Those by speaking. How may I help you?”

Mr. Ransome asked for Mr. Ralston, who had signed the letter.

“At the present time of speaking Mr. Ralston is in Cardiff. How may I help you?”

“When will he be back?”

“Not until next week. He's on a tour of our repositories. How may I help you?”

Her repeated promises of help notwithstanding, Christine had the practiced lack of interest of someone perpetually painting her nails and when Mr. Ransome explained that the previous day he had received a mysterious invoice for £344.36 re the storage of certain household effects, the property of Mr. and Mrs. Ransome, all Christine said was: “And?” He began to explain the circumstances but at the suggestion that the effects in question might be stolen property Christine came to life.

“May I interject? I think that's very unlikely, quite frankly, I mean, Rapid 'n' Reliant were established in 1977.”

Mr. Ransome tried a different tack. “You wouldn't happen to know whether any of these household effects you're holding includes some old stereo equipment?”

“Can't help you there, I'm afraid. But if you have any items in storage with Rapid 'n' Reliant they'll show up on the C47, of which you should have a copy. It's a yellow flimsy.”

Mr. Ransome started to explain why he didn't have a flimsy but Christine cut him short.

“I wouldn't know that, would I, because I'm in Newport Pagnell? This is the office. The storage depot is in Aylesbury. You can be anywhere nowadays. It's computers. Actually the person who could help you at Aylesbury is Martin but I happen to know he's out on a job most of today.”