The Clothes They Stood Up In (5 page)

“I wonder whether I ought to go down to Aylesbury,” Mr. Ransome said, “just to see if there's anything there.”

Christine was unenthusiastic. “I can't actually stop you,” she said, “only they don't have any facilities for visitors. It's not like a kennels,” she added inexplicably.

Mr. Ransome having told her the storage firm was in a business park, Mrs. Ransome, who was not familiar with the genre, imagined it situated in a setting agreeably pastoral, a park that was indeed a park and attached to some more or less stately home, now sensitively adapted to modern requirements; the estate dotted with workshops possibly; offices nestling discreetly in trees. At the hub of this center of enterprise she pictured a country house where tall women with folders strode along terraces, typists busied themselves in gilded saloons beneath painted ceilings, a vision that, had she thought to trace it back, she would have found to have derived from those war films where French châteaux taken over by the German High Command bustle with new life on the eve of D-Day.

It was as well she didn't share these romantic expectations with Mr. Ransome who, the secretary of several companies and thus acquainted with the reality, would have given them short shrift.

It was only when she found herself being driven round a bleak treeless ring road lined with small factories and surrounded by concrete and rough grass that Mrs. Ransome began to revise her expectations.

“It doesn't look very countrified,” Mrs. Ransome said.

“Why should it?” said Mr. Ransome, about to turn in at some un-Palladian metal gates.

“This is it,” said Mrs. Ransome, looking at the letter.

The gates were set in a seven-foot-high fence topped with an oblique pelmet of barbed wire so that the place looked less like a park than a prison. Fixed to an empty pillbox was a metal diagram, painted in yellow and blue, showing the whereabouts of the various firms on the estate. Mr. Ransome got out to look for Unit 14.

“You are here,” said an arrow, only someone had inserted at the tip of the arrow a pair of crudely drawn buttocks.

Unit 14 appeared to be a few hundred yards inside the perimeter, just about where, had the buttocks been drawn to scale, the navel might have been. Mr. Ransome got back in the car and drove slowly on in the gathering dusk until he came to a broad low hangarlike building with double sliding doors, painted red and bare of all identification except for a warning that guard dogs patrolled. There were no other cars and no sign of anybody about.

Mr. Ransome pulled at the sliding door, not expecting to find it open. Nor was it.

“It's locked,” said Mrs. Ransome.

“You don't say,” Mr. Ransome muttered under his breath, and struck out round the side of the building, followed more slowly by Mrs. Ransome, picking her way uncertainly over the rubble and clinkers and patches of scrubby grass. Mr. Ransome felt his shoe skid on something.

“Mind the dog dirt,” said Mrs. Ransome. “It's all over this grass.” Steps led down to a basement door. Mr. Ransome tried this too. It was also locked, a boiler room possibly.

“That looks like a boiler room,” said Mrs. Ransome.

He scraped his shoe on the step.

“You'd think they'd make them set an example,” Mrs. Ransome said.

“Who?” said Mr. Ransome, slurring his polluted shoe over some thin grass.

“The guard dogs.”

They had almost completed a circuit of the hangar when they came on a small frosted window where there was a dim light. It was open an inch or two at the top and was obviously a lavatory, and faintly through the glass Mrs. Ransome could see standing on the window ledge the blurred shape of a toilet roll. It was doubtless a coincidence that it was blue, and forget-me-not blue at that, a shade Mrs. Ransome always favored in her own toilet rolls and which was not always easy to find. She pressed her face to the glass in order to see it more clearly and then saw something else.

“Look, dear,” Mrs. Ransome said. But Mr. Ransome wasn't looking. He was listening.

“Shut up,” he said. He could hear Mozart.

And floating through the crack of the lavatory window came the full, dark, sumptuous and utterly unmistakable tones of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

“Per pietà, ben mio,”
she was singing,
“perdona all'error d'un amante.”

And out it drifted into the damp dusk, rising over Rapid 'n' Reliant at Unit 14 and Croda Adhesives at Unit 16 and Lansyl Sealant Applicators PLC at Unit 20 (Units 17–19 currently under offer).

“O Dio,”
sang Dame Kiri.
“O Dio.”

And the perimeter road heard it and the sheathed and stunted saplings planted there and the dirty dribble of a stream that straggled through a concrete culvert to the lumpy field beyond, where a shabby horse contemplated two barrels and a pole.

Galvanized by the sound of the antipodean songstress Mr. Ransome clambered up the fall pipe and knelt painfully on the windowsill. Clinging to the pipe with one hand he prized open the window an inch or two further and forced his head in as far as it would go, almost slipping off the sill in the process.

“Careful,” said Mrs. Ransome.

Mr. Ransome began to shout. “Hello. Hello?”

Mozart stopped and somewhere a bus went by.

In the silence Mr. Ransome shouted again, this time almost joyfully. “Hello!”

Instantly there was bedlam. Dogs burst out barking, a siren went off and Mr. and Mrs. Ransome were trapped and dazzled by half a dozen security lights focused tightly on their shrinking forms. Petrified, Mr. Ransome clung desperately to the lavatory window while Mrs. Ransome plastered herself as closely as she could against the wall, one hand creeping (she hoped unobtrusively) up the windowsill to seek the comfort of Mr. Ransome's knee.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the commotion stopped; the lights went out, the siren trailed off and the barking of the dogs modulated to an occasional growl. Trembling on the sill Mr. Ransome heard a door pushed back and unhurried steps walking across the forecourt.

“Sorry about that, people,” said a male voice. “Burglars, I'm afraid, measures for the detection and discouragement of.”

Mrs. Ransome peered into the darkness but still half-blinded by the lights could see nothing. Mr. Ransome slithered down the fall pipe to stand beside her and she took his hand.

“This way chaps and chapesses. Over here.”

Mr. and Mrs. Ransome stumbled across the last of the grass onto the concrete where silhouetted against the open door stood a young man.

Dazed, they followed him into the hangar and in the light they made a sorry-looking pair. Mrs. Ransome was limping because one of her heels had broken and she had laddered both her stockings. Mr. Ransome had torn the knee of his trousers; there was shit on his shoes, and across his forehead where he had pressed his face into the window was a long black smudge.

The young man smiled and put out his hand. “Maurice. Rosemary. Hi! I'm Martin.”

It was a pleasant open face and though he did have one of those little beards Mrs. Ransome thought made them all look like poisoners, for a warehouseman one way and another he looked quite classy. True he was wearing the kind of cap that had once been the distinctive headgear of American golfers but now seemed of general application, and a little squirt of hair with a rubber band around it was coming out of the back, and, again like them all nowadays, his shirttail was out; still, what gave him a certain air in Mrs. Ransome's eyes was his smart maroon cardigan. It was not unlike one she had picked out for Mr. Ransome at a Simpson's sale the year before. Loosely knotted around his neck was a yellow silk scarf with horses' heads on it. Mrs. Ransome had bought Mr. Ransome one of those too, though he had worn it only once as he decided it made him look like a cad. This boy didn't look like a cad; he looked dashing and she thought that if they ever got their belongings back she'd root the scarf out from the wardrobe and make her husband give it another try.

“Follow
moi,
” said the young man and led them down a cold uncarpeted corridor.

“It's so nice to meet you at long last,” he said over his shoulder, “though in the circumstances I feel I know you already.”

“What circumstances?” said Mr. Ransome.

“Bear with me one moment,” said Martin.

Mr. and Mrs. Ransome were left in the dark while the young man fiddled with a lock.

“I'll just illuminate matters a fraction,” he said, and a light came on in the room beyond.

“Come in,” said Martin, and he laughed.

Tired and dirty and blinking in the light, Mr. and Mrs. Ransome stumbled through the door and into their own flat.

It was just as they had left it the evening they had gone to the opera. Here was their carpet, their sofa, their high-backed chairs, the reproduction walnut-veneered coffee table with the scalloped edges and cabriole legs and on it the latest number of the
Gramophone.
Here was Mrs. Ransome's embroidery, lying on the end of the sofa where she had put it down before going to change at a quarter to six on that never-to-be-forgotten evening. There on the nest of tables was the glass from which Mr. Ransome had had a little drop of something to see him through the first act of
Così,
still (Mrs. Ransome touched the rim of the glass with her finger) slightly sticky.

On the mantelpiece the carriage clock, presented to Mr. Ransome to mark his twenty-five years with the firm of Selvey, Ransome, Steele and Co., struck six, though Mrs. Ransome was not sure if it was six then or six now. The lights were on, just as they had left them.

“A waste of electricity, I know,” Mr. Ransome was wont to say, “but at least it deters the casual thief,” and on the hall table was the evening paper left there by Mr. Ransome for Mrs. Ransome, who generally read it with her morning coffee the following day.

Other than a cardboard plate with some cold half-eaten curry which Martin neatly heeled under the sofa, mouthing “Sorry,” everything, every little thing, was exactly as it should be; they might have been at home in their flat in Naseby Mansions, St. John's Wood, and not in a hangar on an industrial estate on the outskirts of nowhere.

Gone was the feeling of foreboding with which Mrs. Ransome had set out that afternoon; now there was only joy as she wandered round the room, occasionally picking up some cherished object with a smile and an “Oh!” of reacquaintance, sometimes holding it up for her husband to see. For his part Mr. Ransome was almost moved, particularly when he spotted his old CD player, his trusty old CD player as he was inclined to think of it now, not quite up to the mark, it's true, the venerable old thing, but still honest and old-fashioned; yes, it was good to see it again and he gave Mrs. Ransome a brief blast of
Così.

Watching this reunion with a smile almost of pride, Martin said, “Everything in order? I tried to keep it all just as it was.”

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Ransome, “it's perfect.”

“Astonishing,” said her husband.

Mrs. Ransome remembered something. “I'd put a casserole in the oven.”

“Yes,” said Martin, “I enjoyed that.”

“It wasn't dry?” said Mrs. Ransome.

“Only a touch,” said Martin, following them into the bedroom. “It would perhaps have been better at Gas Mark 3.”

Mrs. Ransome nodded and noticed on the dressing table the piece of kitchen paper (she remembered how they had run out of Kleenex) with which she had blotted her lipstick three months before.

“Kitchen,” said Martin as if they might not know the way, though it was exactly where it should have been, and exactly how too, except that the casserole dish, now empty, stood washed and waiting on the draining board.

“I wasn't sure where that went,” said Martin apologetically.

“That's all right,” said Mrs. Ransome. “It lives in here.” She opened the cupboard by the sink and popped the dish away.

“That was my guess,” said Martin, “though I didn't like to risk it.” He laughed and Mrs. Ransome laughed too.

Mr. Ransome scowled. The young man was civil enough, if overfamiliar, but it all seemed a bit too relaxed. A crime had been committed after all, and not a petty one either; this was stolen property; what was it doing here?

Mr. Ransome thought it was time to take charge of the situation.

“Tea?” said Martin.

“No thank you,” said Mr. Ransome.

“Yes please,” said his wife.

“Then,” said Martin, “we need to talk.”

Mrs. Ransome had never heard the phrase used in real life as it were and she looked at this young man with newfound recognition: she knew where he was coming from. So did Mr. Ransome.

“Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Ransome, decisively, sitting down at the kitchen table and meaning to kick off by asking this altogether-too-pleased-with-himself young man what this was all about.

“Perhaps,” said Martin, giving Mrs. Ransome her tea, “perhaps you would like to tell me what this is all about. I mean with all due respect, as they say.”

This was too much for Mr. Ransome.

“Perhaps,” he exploded, “and with all due respect, you'd like to tell me why it is you're wearing my cardigan.”

“You never wore it much,” said Mrs. Ransome placidly. “Lovely tea.”

“That isn't the point, Rosemary.” Mr. Ransome seldom used her Christian name except as a form of blunt instrument. “And that's my silk scarf.”

“You never wore that at all. You said it made you look like a cad.”

“That's why I like it,” said Martin, happily, “the cad factor. However all good things come to an end, as they say.” And unhurriedly (and quite unrepentantly, thought Mr. Ransome) he took off the cardigan, unknotted the scarf and laid them both on the table.

Pruned of these sheltering encumbrances, Martin's T-shirt, the message of which had hitherto only been hinted at, now fearlessly proclaimed itself, “Got a stiffy? Wear a Jiffy!” and in brackets “drawing on back.” As Mr. Ransome eased forward in his chair in order to shield his wife from the offending illustration, Mrs. Ransome slightly eased back.