The Clothes They Stood Up In (7 page)

So they listened in silence as the laughter went on, almost uninterrupted, until after three or four minutes it began to slacken and break up and whoever it was who was still laughing was left panting and breathless, this breathlessness gradually modulating into another sound, the second subject as it were, a groan and then a cry leading to a rhythmic pumping as stern and as purposeful as the other had been silly and lighthearted. At one point the microphone was moved closer to catch a sound that was so moist and wet it hardly seemed human.

“It sounds,” said Mrs. Ransome, “like custard boiling,” though she knew that it wasn't. Making custard must seldom be so effortful as this seemed to be, nor is the custard urged on with affirmative yells, nor do the cooks cry out when, in due course, the custard starts to boil over.

“I don't think we want to listen to this, do we?” Mr. Ransome said and switched over to Radio 3, where they came in on the reverent hush that preceded the arrival of Claudio Abbado.

Later when they were in bed Mrs. Ransome said, “I suppose we'd better return that tape?”

“What for?” said Mr. Ransome. “The tape is mine. In any case, we can't. It's wiped. I recorded over it.”

This was a lie. Mr. Ransome had wanted to record over it, it's true, but felt that whenever he listened to the music he would remember what lay underneath and this would put paid to any possible sublimity. So he had put the tape in the kitchen bin. Then, thinking about it as Mrs. Ransome was in the bathroom brushing her teeth, he went and delved among the potato peelings and old tea bags, and, picking off a tomato skin that had stuck to it, he hid the cassette in the bookcase behind a copy of
Salmon on Torts,
a hidey-hole where he also kept a cache of photographs of some suburban sexual acts, the legacy of a messy divorce case in Epsom that he had conducted a few years before. The bookcase had, of course, gone to Aylesbury along with everything else but had been returned intact, the hiding place seemingly undetected by Martin.

Actually it had not been undetected at all: the photographs had been what he and Cleo had been laughing about on the tape in the first place.

Not a secret from Martin, nor were the snaps a secret from Mrs. Ransome who, idly looking at the bookcase one afternoon and wondering what to cook for supper, had seen the title
Salmon on Torts
and thought it had a vaguely culinary sound to it. She had put the photographs back undisturbed but every few months or so would check to see that they were still there. When they were she felt somehow reassured.

So sometimes now when Mr. Ransome sat in his chair with his earphones on listening to
The Magic Flute
it was not
The Magic Flute
he was listening to at all. Gazing abstractedly at his reading wife his ears were full of Martin and Cleo moaning and crying and taking it out on one another again and again and again. No matter how often he listened to the tape Mr. Ransome never ceased to be amazed by it; that two human beings could give themselves up so utterly and unreservedly to one another and to the moment was beyond his comprehension; it seemed to him miraculous.

Listening to the tape so often he became every bit as familiar with it as with something by Mozart. He came to recognize Martin's long intake of breath as marking the end of a mysterious bridging passage (Cleo was actually on hands and knees, Martin behind her) when the languorous andante (little mewings from the girl) accelerated into the percussive allegro assai (hoarse cries from them both) which in its turn gave way to an even more frantic coda, a sudden rallentando (“No, no, not yet,” she was crying, then “Yes, yes, yes”) followed by panting, sighing, silence and finally sleep. Not an imaginative man, Mr. Ransome nevertheless found himself thinking that if one built up a library of such tapes it would be possible to bestow on them the sexual equivalent of Köchel numbers, even trace the development of some sort of style in sexual intercourse, with early, middle and late periods, the whole apparatus of Mozartean musicology adapted to these new and thwacking rhythms.

Such were Mr. Ransome's thoughts as he sat across from his wife, who was having another stab at Barbara Pym. She knew he wasn't listening to Mozart though there were few obvious signs and nothing so vulgar as a bulge in his trousers. No, there was just a look of strain on Mr. Ransome's face, which was the very opposite of the look he had when he was listening to his favorite composer; an intensity of attention and a sense that, were he to listen hard enough, he might hear something on the tape he had previously missed.

Mrs. Ransome would listen to the tape herself from time to time but lacking the convenient camouflage of Mozart she confined her listening experiences to the afternoons. Getting out her folding household steps she would pull down
Salmon on Torts
then reach in behind it for the tape (the photographs seemed as silly and laughable to her as they had to Martin and Cleo). Then, having poured herself a small sherry, she would settle down to listen to them making love, marveling still after at least a dozen hearings at the length and persistence of the process and its violent and indecorous outcome. Afterwards she would go and lie on the bed, reflecting that this was the same bed on which it had all happened and think again about it happening.

These discreet (and discrete) epiphanies apart, life after they had recovered their possessions went on much the same as it had before they lost them. Sometimes, though, lying there on the bed or waiting to get up in the morning, Mrs. Ransome would get depressed, feeling she had missed the bus; though what bus it was or where it was headed she would have found it hard to say. Prior to the visit to Aylesbury and the return of their things, she had, she thought, persuaded herself that the burglary had been an opportunity, with each day bringing its crop of small adventures—a visit from Dusty, a walk down to Mr. Anwar's, a trip up the Edgware Road. Now, re-ensconced among her possessions, Mrs. Ransome feared that her diversions were at an end; life had returned to normal but it was a normal she no longer relished or was contented with.

The afternoons particularly were dull and full of regret. It's true she continued to watch the television, no longer so surprised at what people got up to as she once had been but even (as with Martin and Cleo) mildly envious. She grew so accustomed to the forms of television discourse that she occasionally let slip a telltale phrase herself, remarking once, for instance, that there had been a bit of hassle on the 74 bus.

“Hassle?” said Mr. Ransome. “Where did you pick up that expression?”

“Why?” said Mrs. Ransome innocently. “Isn't it a proper word?”

“Not in my vocabulary.”

It occurred to Mrs. Ransome that this was the time for counseling; previously an option it had now become a necessity so she tried to reach Dusty via her Helpline.

“I'm sorry but Ms. Briscoe is not available to take your call,” said a recorded voice, which was immediately interrupted by a real presence.

“Hello. Mandy speaking. How may I help you?”

Mrs. Ransome explained that she needed to talk to somebody about the sudden return of all the stolen property. “I have complicated feelings about it,” said Mrs. Ransome and tried to explain.

Mandy was doubtful. “It might come under post-traumatic stress syndrome,” she said, “only I wouldn't bank on it. They're clamping down on that now we're coming to the end of this year's financial year, and anyway it's meant for rape and murder and whatnot, whereas we've had people ringing up who've just had a bad time at the dentist's. You don't feel the furniture's dirty, do you?”

“No,” said Mrs. Ransome. “We've had everything cleaned anyway.”

“Well, if you've kept the receipts I could ring Bickerton Road and get them to give you something back.”

“Never mind,” said Mrs. Ransome. “I expect I shall cope.”

“Well, it's what we all have to do in the end, isn't it?” said Mandy.

“What's that?” said Mrs. Ransome.

“Cope, dear. After all, that's the name of the game. And the way you've described it,” Mandy said, “it seems a very
caring
burglary.”

Mandy was right, though it was the caringness that was the problem. Had this been a burglary in the ordinary way it would have been easier to get over. Even the comprehensive removal of everything they had in the world was something Mrs. Ransome could have adjusted to, been “positive” about, even enjoyed. But it was the wholesale disappearance coupled with the meticulous reconstruction and return that rankled. Who would want to rob them to that degree and having robbed them would choose to make such immaculate reparations? It seemed to Mrs. Ransome that she had been robbed twice over, by the loss, first, of her possessions, then of the chance to transcend that loss. It was not fair, nor did it make sense; she thought perhaps this was what they meant when they talked about “losing the plot.”

People seldom wrote to the Ransomes. They had the occasional card from Canada where Mr. Ransome had some relatives of his mother who dutifully kept up the connection; Mrs. Ransome would write back, her card as flavorless as theirs, the message from Canada little more than “Hello. We are still here,” and her reply, “Yes, and so are we.” Generally, though, the post consisted of bills and business communications, and picking them up from the box downstairs in the lobby Mrs. Ransome scarcely bothered to look them through, putting them unsifted on the hall table where Mr. Ransome would deal with them before he had his supper. On this particular morning she'd just completed this ritual when she noticed that the letter on top was from South America, and that it was not addressed to Mr. M. Ransome but to a Mr. M. Hanson. This had happened once before, Mr. Ransome putting the misdirected letter in the caretaker's box with a note asking him or the postman to be more careful in future.

Less tolerant of her husband's fussing than she once had been, Mrs. Ransome didn't want this performance again so she put the letter on one side so that after her lunch she could go up to the eighth floor, find Mr. Hanson's door and slip it underneath. At least it would be an outing.

It was several years since she had been up to the top of the Mansions. There had been some alterations, she knew, as Mr. Ransome had had to write a letter of complaint to the landlords about the noise of the workmen and the dirt in the lift; but, as tenants came and went, someone was always having something done somewhere and Mrs. Ransome came to take renovation as a fact of life. Still, venturing out of the lift she was surprised how airy it all was now; it might have been a modern building, so light and unshadowed and spacious was the landing. Unlike their dark and battered mahogany, this wood-work had been stripped and bleached, and whereas their hallway was covered in stained and pockmarked orange floor covering, this had a thick smoky-blue fitted carpet that lapped the walls and muffled every sound. Above was a high octagonal skylight and beneath it an octagonal sofa to match. It looked less like the hallway of a block of mansion flats than a hotel or one of the new hospitals. Nor was it simply the decoration that had changed. Mrs. Ransome remembered there being several flats but now there seemed to be only one, no trace of the other doors remaining. She looked for a name on this one door just to be sure but there was no name and no letter box. She bent down intending to slip the letter from South America underneath but the carpet was so thick that this was difficult and it wouldn't go. Above Mrs. Ransome's head and unseen by her, a security camera, which she had taken for a light fitting, moved around like some clumsy reptile in a series of silent jerks until it had her in frame. She was trying to press the pile of the carpet down when there was a faint buzz and the door swung silently open.

“Come in,” said a disembodied voice and holding up the letter as if it were an invitation Mrs. Ransome went in.

There was no one in the hall and she waited uncertainly, smiling helpfully in case someone was watching. The hall was identical in shape to theirs but twice the size and done up like the lobby in the same blond wood and faintly stippled walls. They must have knocked through, she thought, taken in the flat next door, taken in all the flats probably, the whole of the top floor one flat.

“I brought a letter,” she said, more loudly than if there had been someone there. “It came by mistake.”

There was no sound.

“I think it's from South America. Peru. That is if the name's Hanson. Anyway,” she said desperately, “I'll just put it down then go.”

She was about to put the letter down on a cube of transparent Perspex which she took to be a table when she heard behind her an exhausted sigh and turned to find that the door had closed. But as the door behind her closed so, with a mild intake of breath, the door in front of her opened, and through it she saw another doorway, this one with a bar across the top, and suspended from the bar a young man.

He was pulling himself up to the bar seemingly without much effort, and saying his score out loud. He was wearing gray track suit bottoms and earphones and that was all. He had reached eleven. Mrs. Ransome waited, still holding up the letter and not quite sure where to look. It was a long time since she had been so close to someone so young and so naked, the trousers slipping down low over his hips so that she could see the thin line of blond hair climbing the flat belly to his navel. He was tiring now and the last two pull-ups, nineteen and twenty, cost him great effort and after he had almost shouted “Twenty” he stood there panting, one hand still grasping the bar, the earphones low round his neck. There was a faint graze of hair under his arms and some just beginning on his chest and like Martin he had the same squirt of hair at the back though his was longer and twisted into a knot.

Mrs. Ransome thought she had never seen anyone so beautiful in all her life.

“I brought a letter,” she began again. “It came by mistake.”