Vacant Possession

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 own image offered little comfort. Her tight skirt – surely unfashionably short? – emphasised her large hips and stocky legs; she was still out of shape after her recent pregnancy. Here she was, holding the new baby Claire, peeping at the camera with a simper above the infant’s shawled bulk. Her hair had been bleached out to a strawlike mess. Had she not known that backcombing and lacquer would ruin it? Worse, had she not known that no one else had used them for years?

No doubt at the factory, she thought, we were behind the times. We didn’t know any better. She accorded an indulgent smile to her teenaged self, making up for a Friday night out, scrubbing her fair skin until the aura of animal fat, sodium polyphosphates and assembly-line sweat was completely wiped away and she moved in a mist of Yardley’s cologne and heart-skipping expectation towards the weekly dance; off she went, a great big beautiful baby doll. Then, on the seven o’clock train, she had met Colin.

It was an awful photograph, why had she ever kept it? Quickly she detached it from the page and put it down on the bedside cabinet. There was a blank space now in the album, a testament to her vanity. There she was again, arms folded outside number 2. The garden had been dug over, and the house behind her had all its woodwork painted a gleaming white. It had been a gruelling yearlong slog, up and down ladders with buckets of paste, backbreaking work; but it was a big house, and there was land at the side to accommodate the extension they had eventually built, giving them a fourth bedroom and a much bigger kitchen. That was the whole point about Buckingham Avenue, it offered such scope for improvement. How much easier it would have been if their removal had not coincided with the crisis in Colin’s life. There had been a girlfriend, of course; he supposed she didn’t know. His behaviour was odd and abstracted, even by his own standards. He had drunk too much, whenever he could get his hands on some alcohol; they could not afford, in those days, to keep a stock in the house. Their petrol bills had soared; where did he go? Finally, of course, he’d been breathalysed and banned from driving. His little affair had come to nothing. That was obvious, wasn’t it? He was still here, she was still here; here they were.

Sylvia looked at her watch. Ten past one. She let the albums slip onto the bed, yawned, stretched, and peeled off her tracksuit, dropping it into the laundry basket. She went into the bathroom, washed, and cleaned her teeth vigorously. Back in the bedroom, she averted her face to avoid the sight of herself half-naked in the dressing table mirror. Her thighs were going, her tummy had gone; after four pregnancies, what could you expect? If she had known then what she knew now … She pulled on her baggy cotton trousers, and took out of the drawer a tee shirt which said in big black letters NURSERY SCHOOLS ARE OUR RIGHT. Running a hand through her hair, she mooched off downstairs.

Lizzie Blank, the daily (a German name, Sylvia supposed), was standing at the sink wringing dirty water from a cloth. ‘All right, Lizzie?’ Sylvia said.

‘All right, Mrs S?’

Sylvia crossed to the fridge. She opened it, picked out a lettuce leaf, and stood nibbling it while she surveyed her domestic. She supposed that a survey of Lizzie Blank would be a comfort to any normal woman who was afraid of losing her looks. Weird was the only word for her.

Lizzie Blank was a woman of no age that could easily be determined. Her dumpling body, entirely without a waistline, was supported on peg-shaped legs. Her hair, platinum blond and matted, had a height and stiffness that Sylvia’s in its heyday had never approached; two little squiggles, shaped like meat hooks, stood stiffly out by each ear. Her large face – rather blank in truth – was so caked with make-up that it was impossible to decide what it might look like naked, and her eyelids, outlined in thick black pencil, were painted a vivid teal blue. How many pairs of false eyelashes she wore, Sylvia could not take it upon herself to say. Her magenta lips bore no relation to her real mouth, but were overpainted greasily onto the skin, so that the merest twitch of her cheek muscles brought about a smile or a pout. The lips worked unceasingly; the eyes remained quite dead.

‘How was your trip?’ Sylvia asked.

‘Okay. One of us thought there would be donkeys. We had them before, when we went on a day trip.’

‘I think you only get them at the seaside.’

‘I don’t see why. Not as if they swim.’

Sylvia was taken aback. ‘Tell me, Lizzie,’ she said, ‘do you wear a wig?’

Lizzie only smiled. Sylvia realised that her question was perhaps an intrusion. After all, she thought, if it is a wig, it’s bound to slip about on her head from time to time. I could find out by observation alone.

Sylvia swung open the fridge door again, took out half a cucumber, and cut an inch off it. She raised it to her lips. ‘By the way, you didn’t try to clean Alistair’s room, did you? I meant to tell you. I expect he’s got the door locked.’

‘The spare room?’ Lizzie looked at her; it might have been astonishment, but her face was so far from the human norm that it was always difficult to be sure what her expressions meant.

‘Well, it’s not really the spare room. Alistair’s always had it, since we came.’

‘I call it the spare room.’

‘I daresay it was, before we moved here. Anyway, what I’m saying is – don’t bother with it. His father will make him clean it up, when the school holidays start.’

‘Some rooms have no talent for cleaning. Some rooms will never be clean.’ Her tone was perhaps unnecessarily doom-laden, but Sylvia supposed she was devoted to her art. It was a good sign really.

‘I was wondering, would you take on another lady?’

Lizzie was washing down the sink with bleach. She shook her head, without pausing in her work.

‘Only, our vicar’s wife is looking for somebody to do a few hours for her.’

‘Did you say you could recommend me?’ Lizzie turned her full flat face towards her employer; her rouged cheeks glowed, ripely pink, in a waste of chalk-white powder.

‘I mentioned your name. I didn’t commit you.’

‘Not interested, Mrs S.’

‘I did tell her, I didn’t know how many other people you did for.’ Biting her cucumber: ‘You’re a bit of an enigma, Lizzie.’

‘I can’t take anything else on.’ Lizzie screwed the cap back on the bleach bottle. ‘I work at night.’

She bent down to put the bleach away under the sink, presenting to Sylvia her large rear end. ‘Yes, well, I thought I’d ask. I’d better get off to my committee meeting. Can I give you a lift?’

Lizzie took off her large plastic apron and hung it behind the kitchen door. ‘Thank you kindly, Mrs S. You’re a good woman. An angel, I might add.’

With a baffled smile, Sylvia went off to get her purse. Weird was the word. As it happened, though, Lizzie Blank was the only person who had answered her ad in the Reporter. The purplish, pinpoint, foreign-looking hand had prepared her for – well, a foreigner; a person of strange diction and eccentric ways of cleaning lavatories. Lizzie did not seem exactly foreign; but perhaps her parents were, perhaps she came from a funny background. She seemed a good-hearted soul, Sylvia thought, and willing enough; even if she was rather lavish with the cleaning materials.

She went back into the kitchen. Lizzie Blank was now in her outdoor garb; a dirndl skirt of red and blue, and a leopard-skin jacket. ‘I’m surprised you don’t feel the heat,’ Sylvia said, counting out her money. ‘There you are, love.’ Lizzie’s false nails flashed, and the notes vanished into one of her pockets.

‘It’s my pride and joy, this jacket,’ she said. ‘As my mother used to say, Pride must Abide.’

Lizzie took out a chiffon scarf, pink shot through with gold, and went out into the hall. In front of the mirror, she adjusted it carefully over her coiffure. ‘Ready?’ Sylvia said, swinging her car keys. ‘You’ll have to give me directions.’

Damn, she thought, I’ve been stuffing myself again; and I meant not to have any lunch.

They drove downhill towards the town centre. Right here, left here, said the charwoman, leading them into the maze of streets that still stood on the southern side of the motorway link. ‘All this will be coming down soon,’ Sylvia said. ‘You’ll all be dumped over Hadleigh way in a high-rise. How do you feel about that?’

‘All right.’

‘But it’ll break up your community.’

‘Not my community. I wasn’t born here.’

‘Oh, I see. But still, you won’t like life in a towerblock.’

‘I shan’t mind. You can throw things off the balconies.’

Sylvia gave her a sideways look, then switched her attention back to the road. She slowed down. Small brown children played by the kerb, barelegged in the July heat, crouching in the gutter and darting out into the road. There was not a blade of grass for miles. Midsummer brought out the worst in it, baking the cracks in the pavements, raising a stench from the dustbins. The long ginnels that ran between the houses discharged a dim effulgence of stale sweat and stale spices; a thin ginger cat slept on a coal-shed roof, its scarred limbs splayed, its eyes screwed tight against the glare. Not a tree, not a patch of shade. ‘Displacing people from their environment,’ Sylvia said. ‘You’d think the lesson would be learned by now.’

‘Here it is. Eugene Terrace.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘This will do.’ Lizzie opened the car door and began to lever her bloated body out of the seat, swivelling sideways and kicking her feet over the kerb. Her ankle chain flashed in the sunlight. Out at last, she leaned down and stuck her face in at the passenger door. ‘Thanks a million, Mrs S.’ Inside the leopard-skin jacket she was perspiring heavily, and patches of grease were breaking through her face powder; she gave a terrifying impression of imminent dissolution, as if fire had broken out at Madame Tussaud’s.

Sylvia drew back from her grinning mouth and heavy scent. ‘Is this where you live, at this shop?’

‘Over the top. It’s temporary. I’m stopping with a friend, he’s got lodgings here.’

‘See you Thursday then.’ She watched Lizzie, waddling towards the side door of the fly-blown corner grocery. I wonder what she means about working at night? Can she possibly be a prostitute? Surely not; she was too grotesque for anyone’s taste. Lizzie stopped, ferreting in her bag for her door key. There was something unreal about her, as if she were a puppet, or an illustration loosed from the pages of a book. Suddenly, and with awful clarity, Sylvia understood her mingled repulsion and fascination, the prickling of kinship which had made her take the creature on. It was herself she was seeing, Sylvia Sidney of ten years back, the masklike maquillage, the jelly-flesh wobbling like a sow’s; the great big beautiful baby doll. She felt suddenly sick. She groped for the gear lever.