Vacant Possession. Hilary Mantel
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married – I thought it would be restful and uncomplicated – but now I just sit about at home.
‘I’m not fit for anything, Jim says. He wonders what’s the matter with me. I spend my days thinking.
‘So I thought I could write a book, you see, about the Axon case and all that, and when it was done I could send it to the Sunday papers, and then everyone would know how social workers operate and why things go so badly wrong. How you get cases you can’t handle, and how clients conspire against you, and circumstances seem to conspire too. How it messes up your personal life. How you live with yourself afterwards; when disaster has occurred.’
That will do for a preface, she thought. I can call it Confessions of a Social Worker, I suppose. She had long ago overflowed the shopping list and been forced to write on the piece of packing paper that had come around the teapot. The spout had got broken, but it didn’t matter; there wasn’t much call for tea. I’ll buy a proper notebook later, she thought, on my way to the off-licence.
It was 12.30 pm when Sylvia came home from the CAB. In the hall she paused and called out, ‘Hello, Lizzie, all right are you?’ A clattering from the kitchen told her that her daily woman was hard at work. What a comfort to have the basics taken care of, she thought. She told herself that she hated housework, though in fact for most of her married life it had been her pride, pleasure and retreat.
Going up the stairs, dragging her feet in their striped trainers, she acknowledged that she felt tired. The wrangle at the breakfast table was always a strain, and now her head was buzzing with Social Security regulations and unanswered questions about the legal aid scheme. The house was quiet. She went into her bedroom, kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed. Her eyes closed; she dozed for five minutes, wrapped in the midday heat. Suddenly a shrill ringing brought her upright, shocked out of sleep. Damn that cooker timer, she thought, it’s gone off by itself again. Why doesn’t Lizzie stop it? Heart still racing, she padded over to the door. Opened it; the ringing stopped. She sighed. Better turn out those drawers, I suppose. Skip lunch. Don’t need it, this weather.
She knew that if she began with the bottom drawer, she would find her photograph albums; and then she could sit on the bed and browse. It was something she’d not done in ages. She’d never had much time to herself. Lizzie’s advent had been a blessing – even if she was a bit odd. You didn’t engage a cleaner for her looks or fashion sense, or for her conversation; you just needed someone honest and with a bit of initiative. Lizzie always reminded her of how she’d come up in the world. She reminded her a little of someone she’d known before her marriage; one of the girls on the Pork Shoulder line.
She leaned back against the pillows. Wedding pictures, baby pictures; Suzanne grinning in her pram in the postage-stamp garden of their very first house. Suzanne had left home now, was studying geography at Manchester University. Then Alistair, scowling from under a woollen hat in the same pram. It was very like his present scowl, except that now he had more teeth. Here was Karen, two years old, digging in the garden of their house on the estate. Here she was again, a little older, mouth drooping, swinging on the rickety gate. Everything about that house had been rickety, leaky or shoddy; it was a triumph of jerry-building. No wonder they’d been keen to move to Buckingham Avenue, despite its neglected and depressing condition.
The move had been a stroke of luck for them. With Claire on the way, they’d needed a bigger place; but how to afford it? Normally she’d never have considered the Lauderdale Road area – all those big detached houses, too gloomy and too expensive. Colin had grown up on Lauderdale Road, and his sister Florence, who had never got married, still occupied the family house; his father was dead, and Florence had put their mother in a home. Florence had called her up one day and said, ‘The Axon house is on the market, just round the corner, the one with the garden backing onto ours. You ought to enquire about it.’
‘What?’ she’d said. ‘That place where those two peculiar women lived? It’s falling down.’
‘It’s going cheap,’ Florence had said. ‘Suit yourselves. But you could do it up.’
Sylvia suspected Florence’s motives, of course. She was possessive; she wanted her brother next door, on call for mending her fuses and unblocking her sink. But still … out of curiosity, Sylvia phoned the estate agent.
‘It is in need of sympathetic renovation,’ the man confirmed, ‘but it’s basically very sound. Of course, it’s very well situated. Within easy reach of shops and schools – ‘
T know where it is. Why is it so cheap?’
He’d dropped his voice, become confidential. ‘Can’t say too much, bit of a sad case – old lady’s died, and her daughter, she’s not quite right, know what I mean? Gone into hospital.’
‘You mean they’ve put her away?’
‘The old mother died suddenly, there was an inquest. It was in the paper, in the Reporter.’
She didn’t say, my husband was there when she died. That was irrelevant. But they’d wondered what had happened to the Axon girl. Not that they’d known the Axons, really; they were the kind of neighbours you didn’t set eyes on from one year to the next. ‘What hospital has she gone to?’
‘As to that, I couldn’t say. You see what it was, madam, they were recluses. They didn’t like other people in the house. So they didn’t keep up with repairs. Well, two ladies, you don’t expect it. But it’s a lovely property.’
‘All right. When can we have the key?’
They’d been to see it together. Florence met them at the gate. ‘Well?’ She was anxious that Colin’s decision should not be coloured by the unpleasant episode that had taken place in the house a few weeks earlier. He’d called on Florence late one afternoon, fortunately as it turned out; plodding out through the twilit garden to inspect, at her request, a dubious bit of guttering, he’d noticed something very strange going on at the Axon house. At an upstairs window, a young woman was gesturing, calling for help; very odd, but Colin hadn’t hesitated. Florence had watched amazed as he crashed through the shrubbery and pounded on the Axons’ back door, ready to break it down. Once inside he’d raced up the stairs to let the girl out; Mrs Axon had pursued him, only to meet with an accident. It came out later that she’d had a heart attack, as well as a fall. Colin had given artificial respiration; with no result. And the young woman? She was a social worker, making her calls; the old lady had tricked her into the spare bedroom and turned the key. God knows what else had been going on at number 2. Would Colin want it?
‘Well,’ he’d said cautiously, ‘it’s cheap. It needs work.’ But if the last occupants had left shadows, he thought he could dispel them. ‘We could cut some of these trees down,’ he said. ‘Let some light in.’
‘Yes,’ Sylvia had said. ‘Then Florence could see in our garden, couldn’t she?’ She was not enthusiastic about that. But the trees would have to go, and all the junk that the Axons had left behind them; and that little glasshouse that the agent had called a conservatory, with its cracked and grimy panes and its mound of cardboard and newspapers all festering and damp. What a clean-up job! But think of the possibilities…
So they had put down a holding deposit, and Colin had called the solicitor. Contracts were exchanged within weeks. Their married life had been full of upheavals; this was the only thing that had gone smoothly.
Sylvia turned back to her albums.
How the photographs improved, from shiny dog-eared scraps, faded brown with age, to the borderless silk prints of recent date. Here she stood before the front door of Buckingham Avenue, her arm through her husband’s. Florence, she thought, must have taken the picture. Behind them, the house looked like the set of a Hammer Films production; that ugly stained glass in the front door, those great clumps of evergreens shading the paths. The woodwork was rotting, the downspouts were in a deplorable condition; and the two figures who stood before it were hardly in a better one. Colin must have been fourteen stone there, she thought. Look at his belly hanging over his belt. Look at the silly expression on his face.
Her