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A few months passed, and the results of freedom were visible. Mother kept her at home again. For decades she had sat imprisoned in the house; now she sat in the house behind the bulk of her pregnant belly. How did you get in that condition? her friend Sholto had once asked her. She had thought back, leaning on the hospital fence, looking over it into the world. I gave them the slip, she said. Mother took me to the door, down the path I went, round the corner, where I saw the dog lying on the path, the fox-terrier dog that lay there every Thursday afternoon; and I gave it a kick. I walked on, and I stood, and when I saw that little bus coming, I just turned myself round and went the other way.
I gave them the slip, she said. I went for a go in the park, looking in the litter bins, going in the summer house, getting on those swings. I should have been at my class doing basket weaving and community singing but I went for this go in the park instead. And your beau, Sholto asked; he had a little fiddle? He was a professional man, Muriel said; he had a lovely tweed coat, and some credit cards.
So it came about, she said sonorously to Sholto.
Sholto could keep a secret. He rolled her a cigarette, she smoked it leaning on the fence, and then they went in for their dinner. They had just got the cafeteria system. They took a tray and stood in a line and got brown baked beans and white fish pie. A few people arranged it into patterns, but Muriel had no heart for it. Talking about the past upset her: the cold and discomfort, Mother’s bullying, the lack of proper food, the musty unlit rooms inside the house and the screen of dark trees outside. Buckingham Avenue was so silent you could hear the dust move, and Mother’s dying thoughts rustle through her skull; Christmas 1974, mice in the kitchen cupboards, two seasonal envelopes coming through the door. Miss Florence Sidney, their neighbour, came with a plate full of warm mince pies. Muriel was shut up; their fragrance, wafting up the staircase, made her jaws ache. Mother put Miss Sidney in her place. She forced raw whisky on her, bawled out ‘Merry Christmas’ and booted her out in short order. One of Miss Sidney’s pies leaped from the plate as she scurried down the hall, and smashed and opened itself on the dusty parquet floor. Muriel came down; she put her finger into its steaming golden insides and tasted it. Evelyn shooed her off, pushed her into the back room. She told her to let it lie. Next day it was gone.
Mother had knocked over the paraffin heater. She had groaned in the wet weather when her knees and hips gave her pain. She had taken away Muriel’s cards from the Welfare and burned them, and forbidden her to play in the garden for fear that the neighbours might see her and report on her state. Mother was afraid of the neighbours. She was afraid of ghosts, of changelings. She complained that as she walked down the hallway little claws pulled at her skirt, little devil’s crabs with no bodies, sliding noiselessly away from under her feet.
At one time, her trade had been giving seances for the neighbours. Mrs Sidney, the pie-maker’s mother, had called in to speak to her late husband, and had got scared so badly at Mother’s proficiency that she had turned funny, and shortly afterwards had been sent away. People had come from the other side of town; once a woman had come all the way from Crewe, bringing a parcel of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof to sustain her during her trip on the train. Afternoons, Mother had spent in the front parlour; groaning, sweating, making the bleak monosyllabic conversations that the dead enjoy. Evening, money in her purse; she would snigger, and go and put the kettle on. One day, as she headed for the kitchen, a black wall of panic rose up in front of her and blocked her path. Muriel, lurking at the foot of the stairs, watched Mother’s throat gaping for air, watched her raise a fist and first hammer, then claw at the wall; saw her lift her feet and tussle in the thick air, treading and weaving inside her big woollen cardigan like a dancing bear.
The episode passed. I had a black-out, Mother said. It’s my age.
After that Mother had regretted her seances. The house was full of what she had conjured up; a three-bed two-reception property on a large corner plot, all jostled and crammed with the teeth-baring dead, stranded souls whistling in the cavity walls, half-animated corpses under the flagstones outside. One bedroom, which they called the spare room, had its special tenants. Without eyes and ears, they made themselves known by shuffling; by the soft sucking of their breath, in and out; but they had no lungs. They were malign intentions, Mother said, waiting to be joined to bodies; they were the notions of the dead, expecting flesh.
Mother was now seventy years old; tired, done for, blue stains under her eyes. She’d tried to make a living and now she was to be penalised. No one can help you, she said. No one ever will. They were on their own. They never went out, because they were afraid of what might happen in the house while they were away.
Muriel could see herself as she was then; her pudding face above her smock. Days went by when they never spoke.
She felt a movement inside her, very strange. Mother said, you’re occupied. It would be another mute, an ugly, a ne’er-do-well. She felt it ready to burst out, and that she would die. She knew about death very well, believing that her little thoughts would empty out of her head, and roll round and round in the spare room, picking up the dust from the floor.
Mother got books from the public library, first aid. When the baby started to be born she got out her reading glasses. She fumbled around in the bedroom, cursing. She went round the house with a torch, shining into all the dark corners. Muriel had a pain, a private pain, and she felt that something was going to come of it.
Next day Mother was tired. She made no secret of it; she had entertained hopes that a better sort of infant would be forthcoming. It was an evil-smelling scrap, greedy, drinking up everything that it was offered; it gave evidence of an intemperate nature, of an agitating character. It had a strange face, unlike theirs. It cried incessantly, like an animal shut up in a shed. I’m afraid it’s worse that I thought, Mother said.
On the third day she broke it to her: it’s not human. It’s a changeling, Muriel; you’ve been duped.
But Mother was never at a loss. She had a theory, and her theory was this: you take a firm line, stand no nonsense, and arrange to get a human child back. How?
You find some water, a river; but there was no river, not without taking the bus. Luckily there was the canal, and the canal would do. Float off the wastrel, the substitute; wait a bit, and the chances are you’ll get another in return. It’s the recommended method.
Hearing this theory, Muriel had laughed. The Welfare never told me that, she said, and you get to know things from the Welfare. Such as? Mother demanded. Such as supplementary benefit, rebate on your rent. Mother gave her a slap. It was tried and tested, she said. Desperate diseases require desperate remedies, is that a proverb with which you are unfamiliar? Muriel saw by the quivering of her mother’s face that she was at the end of her tether. She was afraid of the changeling and would not have it in the house. I could telephone the authorities, she said, and have you both locked up.
Of course Mother knew more than she did; she had years of experience, with the living and the dead. ‘All right,’ Muriel said. She was persuaded.
And so the day came to try the substitution. It was a raw winter’s day, with a smell of earth and water. They walked over the fields to the canal bank, meeting no one. They set the box carefully on the surface of the water, the cardboard box with the baby inside. ‘Sink or swim,’ Mother said. The baby had not made a sound; it had given up crying by then, and they had put a blanket over its face and folded over the flaps of the box. It was not cruelty, merely a precaution; Mother knew what she was doing and didn’t want interference.
Below the water was a slimy substance which Muriel found interesting. She put her hand in, and brought it out dripping. Mother gave her a handkerchief to dry it on. They watched the cardboard box, growing soggy, bobbing in the water. There was no sign of the swap. The two babies were already confused in her mind; cold, stunted, condemned to the changeling life, their scant humanity draining away from them year by year. The box dipped in the water and was soon lost from view; the days were short, and there was not much light under the trees. Was it a boy or a girl? Sholto had asked her. I don’t know, she replied; it was all so long ago. She had felt on the canal bank – or was it only later that she felt it? – a small gnawing inside that she called regret. It was all she had, and now it was drowning. It was true that her knowledge of matters was limited, but it was possible that everything, from her go in the park onwards, could have worked out differently. It was not regret for the infant she felt; after all, she hardly knew it. Perhaps it was for herself then; she wondered for a moment how she came to be alive, how it was that her old mother had not brought her here and floated her off one day in the hope of getting in exchange a human child. She brushed the thought away, rubbing her slimy hand down the sleeve of her winter coat. She was hungry. Mother said it had not worked. It was time to be getting home; darkness was closing in rapidly over the fields.
They returned home. It was only five o’clock, but it felt like the middle of the night. The lightbulb had gone in the hall. Her tummy was rumbling. When the knock came at the front door, Mother said, it’s that gas man again, I suppose we’ll have to let him in sooner or later. She gave Muriel a shove in the ribs, told her to stay in the back room. Make yourself scarce, she said.
But when Evelyn opened the front door it wasn’t the gas man at all. It was Miss Isabel Field from the Welfare; the lady they had been keeping out for months.
Mother had dropped her guard, and she probably knew then that she was going to suffer for it. But first she tried to retrieve her error, smiling sweetly at the girl, leading her up the stairs. Muriel leaned against the door of the back room, breathing, listening. As soon as Mother had ushered Miss Field into the spare room, she turned the key on her. Muriel came out into the hall. She sat on the stairs, her knees drawn up to her chin, and listened to Miss Field suffering. How she screamed! How she hammered at the door! How she hammered on the window! She’d put her hand through the glass if she didn’t take care.
When the banging started at the back of the house too, the devil got into Muriel; she said right, solve this one, Mother, but she didn’t dare to say it out loud. The sound of the words and the sound of the hammering went round and round and reverberated in her head as she padded in her bedroom slippers towards the kitchen door.
And then came the invasion. A man burst in. He ran through the house, shouting. Mother came after, striving and yelling; white in the face, wrapped in her cardigan, as fast as she could caper. Up the stairs ran sweating man. After him went Mother. The next moment she lay in a heap on the floor at the bottom. Muriel, behind the front door, stood regarding her.
Assembled in the hall now were Miss Florence Sidney, who baked mince pies; Miss Sidney’s brother Colin; and the welfare worker, Miss Isabel Field. Miss Field said she was leaving the profession. It was too much, she said, to be locked up in a bedroom by some type of madwoman when you were only trying to do a home visit. She was trembling, crying a little. Miss Sidney’s brother got down on the floor and lay on top of Mother. He fastened his mouth voraciously over hers. Mother did not respond; it was ages since she’d had the attentions of a man. After a few minutes, Colin Sidney pushed himself upright, wiped his mouth, and looked down at Mother lying between his legs. He raised his fist and hit her chest a tremendous blow; two blows, then three. Muriel watched closely, sharing his disappointment that Mother seemed to feel nothing of all this. Presently he gave up on her. He lurched to his feet, talking, breathing heavily. She was hanging on to me, he said, as I tried to get upstairs; like a maniac, Miss Field, you were pounding on the bedroom door. I shrugged her off, shrugged is all I did; she slipped, she lost her footing. Now, Colin, said his sister Florence, now, Colin, the ambulance is on its way, no one is blaming you. You did the right thing to rescue me, Miss Field said; locked in that room by myself I felt something pulling at my skirt. She shivered. Colin took off his jacket and put it round her shoulders. There you are, Miss Er, he said. Field, she told him. Victor of the Field, Muriel whispered. For a moment they stared at her; they were not sure if she had spoken or not.
When Miss Sidney was out doing her telephoning, the brother and the social worker turned to each other. They acted as if no one was there; not her in the bedroom slippers, not Mother in a heap. They were people who had met before; their eyes met, and then their hands. She would not be surprised if they had not met on a go in the park. She had a grievance against the social worker, with her trim waist and pale pretty face. She herself was still bloated from her pregnancy, but the girl did not know that. The baby was something they’d kept to themselves; a private trial, which they had faced in their own way.
Miss Sidney was back now. She turned to Muriel. Now, Muriel, she said, I don’t want you to upset yourself, and what we could do with is a blanket to cover up your poor old mum. Let her shiver, Muriel thought, noticing that she did not. Already the grievances of a lifetime were rising up in her mind. Did other people live like this? She had no idea. The social worker said that the place was like a morgue. She bent over Mother, turning her head with her slim white hand. No one’s blaming you, she said to Colin Sidney; she’s had a heart attack. Mother’s face was a strange mottled colour; its expression was one of astonishment.
In the last few moments of Mother’s life, she, Muriel, had come up the stairs from the bottom. Whilst Mother was slipping, sliding, clutching with one hand at the banister and the other at her chest, she had knitted her fingers into the back of Mother’s cardigan, she had taken her by the scruff and bounced her slam, slam, against the wall; and this was why, when Mother died, she looked so surprised.
There were now more people in the house than Muriel could ever remember; more, at any rate, than since Father’s funeral. She had been only a child then; she had wondered why Clifford Axon couldn’t be buried at the back, outside the lean-to, but her mother had said no, she wanted him off the premises. Thirty years had passed; life was going to alter. In the midst of her speculations, her stomach rumbled again quite audibly. Murder makes me famished, she thought. She took a final look at her mother, then went into the kitchen and cut herself a piece of bread. She rummaged in the cupboards and found a pot of some kind of red jam. The old cow, she thought, she was keeping this for herself. There was quite a lot left, three-quarters of the pot. She got a knife from the cutlery drawer and spread the jam carefully, very thick and right to the edges of the bread. When Colin Sidney came in she offered him a bite, but he did not seem interested. She could hear the social worker being sick again. Vehicles drew up outside, and uniformed men took Evelyn away.
Soon after these events, Muriel left home herself. She understood that she would be going away for some years, to recuperate from her time with her mother. A woman called Tidmarsh collected her. She put a plastic bag in the boot of the car, containing Muriel’s personal effects; the two smocks that Mother had made for her out of a pair of old curtains, and a few other odds and ends she found in the drawers. Muriel looked back at the house where until now she had always lived. She felt a terrible sense of incompleteness, as if something that mattered to her had been abandoned in one of the rooms. She pawed at the woman’s arm, trying to get her to turn back, but the woman shook herself free and yelled out that they would have an accident. How was Muriel to know? She had never been in a car before, only the minibus.
Mother had always threatened her that if she didn’t do as she was told, she’d be rounded up with the other ne’er-do-wells, and taken off and gassed. It had happened once, Evelyn said; and the whole world profits by example. So was this it? She felt no emotion; she did not know what gassed would be like. She looked out at the factory walls as they passed, her head lolling against the glass, shaking with the vibrations of the car.
It was a mild spring day, but the women in the streets were still bundled into their heavy coats. They pushed children in trolleys, their heads bowed against the breeze. Sunlight dappled the glass of a bus shelter. The mill gates and little rows of shops gave way to an area of semi-detached houses with white painted fences and pretty flowering shrubs in the gardens. A red housing estate climbed up the side of a hill. Soon they were in the country. Miss Tidmarsh wound her window down, and the smell of fresh grass filled the car. They turned into a gateway, into a gravelled drive shaded by towering hedges. Clouds flew across the windscreen. The car nosed onwards, through the summer ahead; birds wheeled over the fields.
The house itself, a crumbling grey core, looked out over the fields and towards the road. Gravel paths ran away from it, with flower beds on either side. There were parked cars, an ambulance, a scatter of Nissen huts and sheds, and a colony of new buildings, made of metal and varnished wood and plate glass. Beyond these was a belt of dark trees, and more fields. There was a faint ground mist, and moisture in the air.
When the car stopped, Muriel scrambled out. ‘Hang on a minute,’ Miss Tidmarsh called. She took her by the elbow. It reminded her of Mother.
The paths were dotted with little signposts: Hunniford Ward, Greyshott Ward, Occupational Therapy. She did not have time to read them all, but she could read much better than they thought. She craned her neck, straining back over her shoulder. ‘Come on, my dear,’ the woman said. My dear; for the second time. Mother never said it, only ‘You useless lump.’ Useless lump or my dear, the meaning was the same.
Inside the big building the tiles were cold underfoot. Another woman came out, wearing a blue and white check garment. She had an elastic belt and a paper hat. ‘Oh hello, Miss Tidmarsh,’ she said. ‘And how are we today? Got another customer for us?’
She had a special way of looking at Muriel, as if she looked straight through her and around all the edges to assess her size and shape. She shifted from one foot to the other, a little selfconsciously, and twanged at her elastic belt. ‘We’re supposed to be going into mufti soon,’ she said. ‘What do you think of that?’ The woman made some reply. Muriel looked around the entrance hall, up at the ceiling. The nurse asked, ‘How about a cup of tea?’
‘That would be brilliant,’ Muriel said.
The nurse gave her a queer look. ‘Not you, dear. Patients’ tea comes at ten thirty, you’ve missed it.’
‘I’ll have coffee,’ Muriel said. ‘Jam, ham, Spam, roast beef, cornflakes and Ovaltine.’ Miss Tidmarsh laughed.
They followed the notices that said ADMISSIONS. The ward had thirty beds. This is your locker, this is your orange bedspread, this is your bedside mat, this is where you will live. ‘And then, dear, in a week or two, when Doctor has had a talk to us, we’ll be moving on.’
Muriel sat on her orange bedspread. ‘My head hurts,’ she said. The nurse took away her dress. She took away her knickers. She gave her a thin cotton gown.
‘Don’t you wear a bra?’ she said. Muriel shook her head. The nurse smiled. ‘We don’t want to droop, do we?’
‘I don’t know what we’re talking about,’ Muriel said. ‘Our head hurts.’
‘We mustn’t be cheeky. We’ll learn that soon enough, dear. Haven’t we got slippers?’ Muriel shook her head again. ‘You’ll have to get your visitors to bring you some.’
‘Will I get visitors?’
‘You’ll get your family, won’t you, dear?’
Muriel thought this over. Baby: drip, drip. Mother. She closed her eyes tiredly. Mother always said she would haunt.
‘Pay attention, dear,’ the nurse said sharply. Muriel slapped the palm of her hand against her head. ‘That won’t help,’ the nurse said. ‘I can’t give you any medication. Not till you’ve seen the doctor.’
‘When will that be?’
‘That will be on the ward round. Tomorrow.’
When Muriel was left alone, she sat on her bed and dangled her feet. She examined them, hanging there on the end of her legs, her fat red toes. She had done a lot of talking since Mother died. Before, days had gone by without speech; weeks, months. Except for rhymes. She’d not give up making those rhymes, she enjoyed them. They were all she remembered from St David’s School. Sing a song of headache, holler scream and cry, Four and twenty nurses, baked in a pie. She would not cry; she could not be bothered. She scratched her knee instead. A blind was drawn at the window, and the ward was in semi-darkness. She felt the walls close in on her; safe again. Back in the prison of her body, and back in the prison routine with its sights and smells and noises; rumbling tummy, creaking ankles, the steady beating of the heart.
The first person Muriel met was Sholto. He stood in the long corridor blocking her path, a sinister dirty little man with bow legs. ‘Are you mad, or stupid?’ he enquired.
‘Both,’ Muriel said promptly.
‘Join the élite corps.’ Sholto sprang forward and pumped her hand.
Country life. The birds woke her up at four o’clock. She struggled out of her dreams and threw back the bedclothes. She put her feet on the cold floor; head down, she blundered to the window. It showed her a pale milky light and her own pale reflection; the features blurred, amorphous, underwater. She rubbed her right hand down her nightdress, thinking of the clinging green weed.
‘Come on, dear, back to bed,’ said a voice behind her. ‘What are you doing up at this time? Didn’t you have your pill?’
Muriel nodded. ‘I swallowed it.’
Early morning waking, said the nurse to herself, a sign of clinical depression. ‘Back you go,’ she said.
‘Those damn squeakies in the trees,’ Muriel muttered. She glared at the nurse.
‘Six thirty you get up,’ the nurse said. ‘Not four. We’ve got to get ourself into a routine.’ She watched Muriel wiping her hand down her nightdress. Obsessive-compulsive behaviour, she said to herself. Tics.
In the country the medical care was under the supervision of Dr Battachariya, a plump smiling little man; fat eyes, like disappointed raisins, were studded into his golden face. She screamed when he tried to examine her.
‘You have had a baby, Muriel?’ he said shrewdly. A rude, unmannerly man, prying about like that with his plastic gloves. ‘When was that?’
She mumbled something.
‘Where is the little blighter?’
‘With my mother,’ she said.
The first week passed. Now who was mad? Who was bad? Who was stupid?
If they had been florid, talkative and lively with delusion, the long years of Largactil and dormitory wards had made them vacant and passive. If they had been blundering, inadequate and lost, the passage of time had taught them cunning, the thousand expedients of institutional life. A breezy humorous disregard was their attitude to the doctors; the doctors sat with downcast eyes, their voices droning, their thought processes slowed.
Day room. People sit about on vinyl-covered armchairs. None of the furniture here has any resemblance to the furniture used outside. They are not things that people would have in their houses. Jaws move, champing on nothing. Cigarette smoke curls up. My mother died … I had this accident … I worried all night because I hadn’t done my homework … I should never have got married. Hum, hum, hum. Questions are meaningless when you can’t sit still in your chair. They are like bluebottles buzzing round your head: hum, hum, hum. I had no idea there was such filth in the world … At this point there was no food left in the house … I knew he had got a knife … I knew that if I allowed myself to go to sleep I should die during the night. Each night in the six o’clock news there is a special message for me. People stare at me whenever I set foot in the street. Someone had broken my glasses/started a fire/informed on me, hum, hum, hum. Marilyn Monroe stole my giro. I went to the café till my money ran out.
Can you name ten cities? Can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister? Manic motion, impelled to tread, tread, tread along the corridors, hands flying about face and ears.
You must have some feelings about yourself? Stare. A slow shake of the head. Shoulders held rigid, gaze rigid, face and hair grey. A certain rigidity of posture, says the doctor. Seemingly negativistic. How long is it since we first saw you now? No reply.
An affective problem … semi-aggressive … schizophrenic excitement … marked thought disorder. What about a little injection? You aren’t afraid of a little injection, are you?
These were Muriel’s best friends: Sholto, and Emmanuel Crisp. There were a few hangers-on; Philip and Effie. At first she had been a lost soul, wandering around the day room washing her big red hands together. She had missed her mother, in strange ways; Evelyn with her chattering and her nagging and her little ruses to defeat persecutors and spies. It was a fair bet that Evelyn had taught her a thing or two, and unless in fact she were missing her it was impossible to account for the hollow feeling that she carried around inside. At the same time, she was growing a little garden of resentment and speculation, watering her weeds in the small hours when she lay staring into the darkness, wide-eyed despite her sleeping pill. The Welfare did things for people, she now learned, got them money so that they could live on the outside, got them gas fires and shoes. They had never got anything for her. Even when Evelyn let them in, she wheedled around them and said that everything possible was being done. Pretending to be sane was a great strain on Evelyn, and this strain was the origin of many of the stand-up fights they had after the Welfare had gone. Sometimes she said to herself, Mother should be here, not me, left in this homely home-from-home to pursue a career as a lunatic. She was told that in pursuance of the truth about her mother’s life they had sliced open her body, peered into it and pulled out her insides. She thought back on the process with satisfaction.
Now that she knew more about other people and their way of life, she often wondered if her crimes entitled her to some sort of record. She could read properly now; there was a book, in great request among her friends, which had records of everything under the sun, and most of these activities – county cricket, nonstop dancing – seemed less interesting than her own. Ought she to put pen to paper about it?
Sholto advised caution. Was the baby found? he asked. No; or she would be in a prison. Still in the canal then; sunk into the soft mud at the bottom, strangled by green weeds, trapped under the rusting wrecks of bedsprings and fridges. He offered to consult Emmanuel Crisp, who with his church connections was an expert on all matters charnel.
Emmanuel thought. A peat bog will preserve anything, he said. That is not in question. Mud; soft mud, still water. And, a canal: acid in the water, surely. There’s not much to infant bones – ‘but what you have there, Muriel, is perhaps a skeleton.’
Sholto asked more questions. Was she blamed for her Mother’s demise? No. Foul play was not suspected, Crisp put in. Could she handle the scepticism her claims would provoke? They were pernickety, the publishers of this record book, they did not entertain idle claims, they might want her to repeat her feat under test conditions. You can get another child, said Sholto, winking lewdly so that she would grasp his meaning, but you cannot get another mother. Keep it to yourself, he advised. The fact is, Muriel, that you can’t prove a thing.
‘I could, though,’ she said. ‘If I found the bones.’
Crisp was a tall man, pallid and spare. He had a precisian’s lip, a cold eye; his hair was coiled about his dome like a woolly snake. Wherever did he get his wing collars, Sholto asked him.
‘Charity,’ said Crisp briskly.
‘Myself I have fits,’ Sholto explained. ‘Crisp’s life has been different. He was the verger once at St Peter’s.’
Crisp cleared his throat. ‘I left undone those things that ought to be done.’
‘What things?’
‘My flies. Later, a gas tap.’
‘He is one of those people who do not know what came over them,’ Sholto said. ‘He lived to tell the tale, though he leaves me to tell it. They put it in the Reporter: SEX BEAST VERGER: VICAR SPEAKS.’
‘Have you ever heard of entrapment?’ Emmanuel Crisp asked. ‘It was what they call an agent provocateur. She said she was from the Women’s Institute. She wanted to go into the choir stalls, and see the organ.’
‘You know you took her wrong,’ Sholto said doggedly. ‘You did it on purpose.’
‘She touched my sleeve.’ He shuddered. ‘I often pray for her.’
‘The vicar never spoke up for him. He’s left now.’
‘He’s dead,’ Crisp said. ‘Or ought to be.’
As a group, they got together in the day room. It was a new idea, to mix the boys and girls together. Autumn had come; but next year, Effie said, they would meet out of doors where there was more privacy. God willing, Philip added piously. Emmanuel led them in a verse or two of ‘The Church’s One Foundation’; then they broke up for tea.
After this came a period of considerable longueurs. Winter closed in over the fields. She stood by the window of Greyshott Ward and watched the rain beating against it. It was a year before she was put into a charabanc and taken in a great herd of chattering fellow patients to the shops in town. The journey took thirty minutes, and the excitement mounted with every mile. They went into a sweetshop, and into a hardware store where the patients looked at bread-bins and said which colour they would have if they had any bread of their own. She looked around and was very tempted, but she stole nothing at all. Afterwards, back on Greyshott, she was praised up for her good behaviour.
She had special clothes for the outing, given her out of a cardboard box kept in the nurses’ room: a blue frock with six buttons, and a mackintosh that was only a bit small. Back on Greyshott she was given her old smock again. A nurse stood over her waiting to take the outside clothes away. When she came to take her dress off, she could only account for five buttons. The nurse made the noise ‘tt-tt’ and blew a little through her teeth. It was something only nurses should do; if patients did it they got shouted at. She scooped up the dress and the mackintosh and dropped them back into the box. ‘Come on, get dressed, you idle sod,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it for you.’ Muriel saw the dress and the mackintosh disappearing, the box borne away.
She sat on the end of her bed, rebellious. ‘Tt-tt,’ she said, and wagged her head slowly, and cast her eyes to heaven. By watching other people, by stealing their expressions and practising them, she was adding to her repertoire. I was no one when I came here, she thought; but after a few years of this, there’s no saying how many people I’ll be.
Effie was often Her Majesty the Queen. They went along with her, lining up by the ward door. She wore a pink plastic shower cap that had been brought in from the outside by some long-forgotten visitor. She offered them each the tips of her fingers, and her very sweetest smile.
‘And how long have you been at Fulmers Moor?’
‘Ten years, Ma’am.’
‘Indeed? You must have seen many changes in your time?’
Between official engagements, Effie sat and looked at the wall a great deal. From time to time a ripple of emotion made her face quiver. She would put a hand up to stop it, and then she would leap up in a frenzied pursuit of the nearest nurse. ‘I want my Largactil,’ she would bleat, ‘I want my Modecate, I want my nice Fentazin syrup.’ Tranquillised, she would lean against the wall, her face serene again; only a blink of the eye, only a minute parkinsonian quiver of the extremities, to show that she was alive at all.
