Then she had hunted them through the house: THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE IN THIS PLASE and YOU ARE PUTING IN MY PLASE and SHE SHALL BE PUT IN HER PLASE and, last of all, ANOTHER IS IN HER PLASE.
The day she received the second letter from the Welfare had been much calmer. There had been no messages lately, no buffetings on the landing and stairs, no thefts of her property. It had been Muriel’s problem that was uppermost in her mind; or Muriel’s condition rather. She strove to keep it in perspective. The invention and ingenuity of the parallel world had amazed her in recent months, its many and new manifestations, the closeness of its stinking breath on her neck. Periods of calm followed by new alarms, the torturing of Muriel, the closing off to both of them, permanently now, of certain parts of the house. In the circumstances, Muriel’s pregnancy could only be felt as a lesser shock.
‘Both mad, if you ask me,’ Florence Sidney was saying. ‘You might as well try to fly through the window as help either of them.’
She was standing by the window, which had perhaps helped to indicate the improbability to her mind; she was looking out at her nephew and her nieces, playing among the windfalls in the disarrayed late summer garden. ‘I haven’t seen Muriel for—’ She turned her head. It was painfully evident that her sister-in-law was not listening to her. Sylvia was launched on a series of questions.
‘And may I ask what you intend to do with yourself now?’
‘Do now? Well.’ The questions seemed to make no sense. What does anyone do now?
‘With your life. With the rest of your life. That’s what I’m talking about, Florence.’
‘Well, I’ll do the same as everybody,’ Florence said. Limp on, eyes front, towards the grave.
‘I mean, it’s no kind of life, is it? For anybody?’
‘What had you in mind?’
‘You want to put the past behind you. Get out and live a bit. You want to join some Societies. Get yourself a new girdle.’
Florence didn’t speak. She came away from the window; she never admitted it, but the antics and the shrieking of the children got on her nerves.
‘The trouble with you is that you don’t make the best of yourself,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’m not running you down, I’m only telling you out of the kindness of my heart. You’re no beauty queen, but you could do yourself up.’
‘What for?’ Florence sat down by the tea-trolley.
‘For the fellers,’ Sylvia said conspiratorially.
‘I don’t know any fellows.’
‘Well, and you never will, will you, if you keep mouldering in the house? What’s stopping you now? Your mother’s been put away, you don’t have to stop in and mind her any more.’
‘I wish you would not use that expression,’ Florence said. Any of those expressions really; redolent of your time at the cooked meats factory. Sylvia laughed; she patted her hair, puffed out and lacquered in a style that had passed its apogee some years before. It was impossible to imagine her without this hairstyle; like a helmet, it covered her weakest point, the head. She was, Florence thought, a strange blend of savage self-assertion and abject dependence; pathetic and ferocious by turns. Florence knew so little of the married women of her generation that she imagined Sylvia to be unusual.
‘It is a home for the elderly,’ Florence said. ‘A sanctuary for the twilight years.’
‘Get away,’ Sylvia said. ‘Your mother’s off her rocker. Colin doesn’t keep any secrets from me.’
‘Really?’ Florence said. ‘By the nature of a secret, you would not know if he did.’
‘You’ve room to talk, about the folks round the corner.’
‘It wasn’t idle gossip. I haven’t seen them for some time. They are old neighbours, though they are not people whom we have known. I am concerned.’
Sylvia yawned, leaning back and allowing her fingers a token flutter before her mouth.
‘You want to be concerned with yourself. I’m telling you. Smarten yourself up and get out a bit. The trouble with this family, it’s too introvert.’
‘Oh, is that Colin’s trouble?’, Florence asked.
‘Well, he was introvert.’
‘But you remedied it.’
‘What kind of a life is that?’ Sylvia asked. ‘I had other offers. I could have got married four times over.’
‘That might have been unwise,’ Florence said gently. ‘You know, you’ve changed, Sylvia. You will have your opinions now. I remember when Colin first brought you home.’
Sylvia blushed furiously. So she remembers too, Florence thought. Father had been alive, of course, quite hale and hearty. Mrs Sidney wore a new Crimplene suit in powder blue with bracelet-length sleeves. She herself put on a beige jersey wool. There were fruit scones and a Victoria sandwich. Mother’s gimlet eyes spotted a traycloth insufficiently starched, and (although often they were not starched at all) she whisked it off. As she waited to meet the girl her son intended to marry, one pointed finger rubbed and rubbed at a spot on the wooden arm of her chair. It had been summer, a day very like this. Sylvia’s substantial black brassiere had shown clearly under her short cotton frock, and she had emitted great guffaws of nervous laughter whenever she was addressed. Father had been exquisitely civil. Colin had not known where to look. Florence and her mother had agreed later that, seeing her in the setting he was used to, Colin would be sure to see that he was making a mistake. But he hadn’t.
‘I let your blasted mother put on me,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’d know better now.’ From upstairs came the sound of the lavatory flushing.
‘Unfortunately it isn’t given to any of us to have our opportunities over again. Or what would you do if you could? Perhaps since you are now so dissatisfied with your life, you ought to have looked the other way when you saw Colin on the tram.’
‘I can assure you,’ Sylvia said, ‘that I didn’t meet Colin on any tram.’
‘It would be nothing to be ashamed of if you had.’
‘I assure you.’
‘She couldn’t have,’ said Colin, coming in. ‘It’s not possible.’
‘I understood you met on a tram. I’m not saying anything against it.’
‘Couldn’t have been on a tram,’ Colin said. ‘I’m not saying we wouldn’t have been on a tram, either Sylvia or myself, but I happen to recall that the trams had stopped running some years previously. It was on the railway station that we met.’
‘I knew public transport was involved somewhere,’ Florence said.
‘And what have you got against it?’
Florence smiled faintly. ‘Nothing.’
‘Only I was going to say, your father made his living out of it, didn’t he, people
