The shopping expedition turned out to be a bit of a disappointment; in fact if Iris had not become inured over the years to life’s dull and regular setbacks, she might have felt quite depressed. The Saturday after making her New Year’s list, she took the bus to Hanley Cross with the aim of buying a completely new outfit. It was pouring with rain; the bus was packed and the interior foggy with condensation. Everyone got off at Shopping City and she passed with the herd between the automatic doors, through a wall of hot air which instantly dried her face to a taut mask, and into the roaring void. The centrepiece of the mall was a lavish gushing fountain beneath a high glass roof, the pool fringed with palms and surrounded by a low wall occupied exclusively by winos whose empty cans of Diamond White bobbed in the foaming water. Next to it was a map which detailed the shops available over the three levels.
During the week she’d bought a sheaf of expensive fashion magazines but her studies had only led her to the usual observation that everyone in the world was younger than herself, and that most of them wore lycra. In desperation, she’d moved downmarket and bought a Woman’s Weekly. Besides a double-page spread on cut-price power dressing (the only fashion in the world, she felt, that would suit her even less than leggings) she’d found a minimally helpful article on colours – ‘Which season are you?’ – picturing readers holding swatches of fabric against their faces. ‘It’ll be obvious when you find your range of tones: your skin will seem to glow, your eyes brighten, you’ll gain an almost visible aura.’ When the twins were out one evening, she had experimented with as many colours as she could find in the flat. While some were obviously wrong – a fuchsia book jacket sucked the colour from her face, while Robin’s orange t-shirt made her look like a carrot – her aura remained resolutely absent. Whatever the hue, she looked just like herself.
It was hard to gauge from the list of shop names precisely who they catered for. How old was the She of What She Wants? Did Oasis specialize in beachwear? Was Wallis for men or women? She went there first, mysteriously drawn by a vision of Wallis Simpson in the thirties equivalent of a power suit, and was reassured by the age of the clientele, most of them comfortably into their thirties.
‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ asked an assistant, and she didn’t know how to answer. A whole new image? Appropriate attire for the current season? A polyester/wool dress in midnight blue that can be teamed with a tailored jacket for a sleek evening look? ‘Something green,’ she said.
She left Shopping City two and a half hours later with a skirt and a top, and the uneasy sensation that they were not really her choice but that she had merely caved in under pressure. She had bought them from a relatively empty store called Heaven Sent, situated in a mercantile backwater between a shop that sold glue-together model aircraft kits, and a seating area full of slumped pensioners. When Iris had wandered in, one of the assistants had detached herself from a bored group by the till and approached her like a heat-seeking missile. There was no escape; only by continually repeating the mantra ‘I can’t spend more than £40’ had Iris got away with less than an entire winter wardrobe.
At the bus stop, she furtively opened the bag and examined the contents. The shirt was plain enough, navy blue with small shiny buttons, but the patterned skirt which had seemed rather subtle, almost dappled, in the harsh shop lights now appeared to be a rioting yell of colour, a vigorous mixture of greens and blues overlaid with textured mustard-yellow blotches, as if someone had glued a handful of cornflakes to the material. She drew it up to the mouth of the bag to get a better look.
‘Nice,’ said the old lady standing next to her.
‘Do you think so?’
‘Oh yes. Bright. Youngsters nowadays just wear black, don’t they? You’ll cheer the place up.’
Back at the flat, she tried on both shirt and skirt, and walked into the living room where the boys were watching football.
‘What do you think?’
They looked at her for a moment and then Tom slumped backwards on the settee, clawing at his face. ‘Blind, I’m blind. For pity’s sake help me, my eyeballs are burning up.’
‘Seriously, what do you think of it?’
‘It’s a bit bright, Mum,’ said Robin. ‘I mean, you look nice, but…’
By the time she’d returned to Shopping City and been informed by the now tight-lipped assistant of the unalterable ‘Exchange but No Refund’ policy, and spent twenty minutes trudging round the racks on her own, trying to avoid another sartorial disaster, it was too late to go on her usual Saturday pilgrimage to the library. She watched the wide oak doors slide past the bus window, and glimpsed the notice on the wall announcing reductions in opening hours. She felt as if she’d failed to visit the sickbed of an old friend.
She wore the new outfit to work on Monday, but since it consisted of a dark blue skirt and a dark blue shirt over which she wore her most comforting jumper, nobody at the surgery noticed. In any case, she spent most of the day tucked away at a small desk in the filing room, engaged – as she had been for the past two months – in computerizing the practice records. The narrow shelves bristled with notes, creating a wall of paper that deadened and displaced every noise, so that the click of her fingers on the keys seemed to come from yards away. Every once in a while Ayesha would crash open the door from the waiting room, and search through the shelves, muttering a running commentary on the patient whose notes she was attempting to find: ‘Old lady old lady old lady old lady… yes!’ Through the open door could be heard the autumn soundtrack of coughs and phlegmy throat-clearings.
‘You all right there, Iris?’ Ayesha’s head would be cocked to one side, her tone bright and patronizing.
‘Yes I’m fine. Any problems?’
‘Nah. You can stop worrying.’
She’d swing out again with the notes, bumping the door shut with her hip and leaving Iris gritty with irritation.
It was seventeen years since Iris had started working at the Sarum Road Practice, and in that time she’d graduated from part-time secretary to full-time administrator, a job description that encompassed everything from cleaning out the fridge to organizing the payroll. Until the Great Computerization, she had also worked on reception three times a week, and had been vastly relieved to hand the job over to Ayesha. ‘When the surgery’s full, it can be really nightmarish,’ she’d warned at the interview. ‘There might be someone on the phone shouting at you and someone in the waiting room shouting at you. Patients are far more likely to take out their frustrations on you than on the doctor.’
Ayesha had shrugged. ‘I worked on the desk in a club, there was always people giving me grief and I always kept my calm. My rule was if they get mouthy at me, I never get mouthy back. That way, I stay in control. Also,’ she’d added, breezily, ‘my mother’s from Jamaica and my dad’s from Scotland so I always see both sides of everything.’
Duly appointed, Ayesha had turned out to be efficient and fearless, handling verbal aggression by standing with folded arms and averted eyes, like a mother sitting out a toddler’s tantrum. She dealt with phone rants by holding the receiver away from her ear and scrutinizing her nails until the stream of abuse had slowed to a trickle before resuming the conversation at exactly the place she’d left it. ‘There’s totally nothing I can do about it’ was her favourite phrase to patients, and the only time Iris had ever seen her lose her cool was when a child had been sick on the waiting-room floor. Ayesha had bolted into the staff kitchen, hands over her mouth, and remained there until every last trace of vomit had been removed. ‘I can’t take it,’ she’d said afterwards, ‘my stomach’s too delicate.’
‘Surely Jasmine must be sick sometimes?’ Iris had suggested.
‘I don’t touch it. My husband cleans it up.’
She treated Iris like a slightly dim elderly maiden aunt, one who has been gently nurtured and knows nothing of the ways of the world. Which was, Iris admitted to herself, possibly understandable, though hard to take. ‘This man was swearing away in here about his test results not being back, Iris, and I told him to shut his mouth before you came back in.’
‘I’ve heard swearing before, you know.’
‘Yeah, but this was strong.’
She had never met Robin and Tom, and a strange look would creep over her face if Iris ever mentioned them, as though she suspected her of making them up. ‘Why aren’t you married?’ she’d asked once, in the filing room.
‘Oh I don’t know, it just never happened.’
‘You don’t live with no one then?’
‘Well… I live with my sons.’
‘Oh yeah, right. Do they ever see their dads then?’
Iris had felt herself start to blush, and kept her face turned to the computer screen, though she’d imagined the perspex reflecting a reddish glow. ‘No. And they’re twins.’
‘Oh yeah.’ Ayesha had giggled. ‘One dad then. But if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s OK.’
‘Thanks,’ Iris had said, grimly typing.
Her only other visitor that Monday was the junior partner, Dr Steiner, who loomed round the door once he’d finished afternoon calls. ‘Are you staying on, Iris?’
‘Uh huh.’ She saved what she was working on and turned towards him. He was wearing an astrakhan hat pulled low over his ears, the dent in the top inverted so that the material, stuck up in a long crest. ‘I’m going round to Dad’s this evening, but he’s out at indoor bowls till six.’
He zipped his green quilted coat up to the last possible tooth and started to pull on a pair of large, stiff, sheepskin gloves. ‘How is your father? I haven’t seen him for a month or so.’
‘Oh… up and down. Mainly down, actually. Last week would have been their ruby wedding anniversary so he’s been a bit depressed.’
He nodded sympathetically, and then rocked on his toes a couple of times, having run out of conversation. His gloved hands stuck out like garden forks. Iris half turned back to the keyboard. ‘Any problems?’ he asked, suddenly.
‘What?’
‘With the computerization?’
‘Oh, right. No. It’s fairly straightforward.’ The silence lengthened, broken only by the hoarse honk of a passing train, clattering towards Liverpool Street on the embankment track that overlooked the surgery. Patient opinion of Dov Steiner was divided sharply into those who (like her father) assumed that his absence of small talk was a professional choice which freed up his intellect for brilliant diagnosis, and those who (like Ayesha) referred to him as The Martian. Iris had become adept at judging into which camp a new patient would fall, and would divert people who required regular communication to Dr Petty, who liked talking so much that he rarely did anything else.
As she wondered whether she could resume work without appearing too rude, a low buzzing noise gradually became audible which, after a few baffled moments, she identified as Dr Steiner humming. There was no particular tune, but the sound rose and fell in pitch as if a distant stunt plane were looping the loop. He was staring past her shoulder, apparently at the computer, although his glasses had caught the light in such a way as to be completely opaque; he looked as though he had taken root.
‘Is there anything I can help you with, Dov?’ she asked, tentatively. The humming stopped.
‘No, no. Nothing. I was just thinking.’ He scratched his nose with a rigid finger.
‘Only I really do have to get on.’ She riffled some pages of notes to back up her statement.
‘Right.’ For a moment, nothing happened, then to her relief he swivelled on the spot and disappeared back into the waiting room. He walked like a pair of scissors, hinged from the waist and almost on tiptoe, and his diminishing staccato footsteps became lost under the noise of her fingers on the keyboard. Then the exterior door slammed, and she was left on her own.
The surgery stood on the edge of an artisans’ estate, built in 1889 for the ‘hygienic and practical habitation of foundry workers and their families’. The phrase was quoted on a ceramic plaque screwed to the side of the house that Iris grew up in, and it was the first prose that she had ever learned by heart. The foundry had long gone and the estate had reverted to the council, but the houses were still deemed hygienic and practical enough to have spiralled in value, and the fourteen streets contained an uneasy amalgam of tenants and owners. Her father had long been retired when the opportunity to buy presented itself, and it was his running, bitter refrain that he could have been sitting on a diamond mine by now.
As she set the alarm and locked the surgery, Iris’s heart sank at the thought of this evening’s visit. She never normally saw her father on a Monday, but yesterday she had tried to enforce the twenty-minute cut-off resolution during his phonecall, and the result had been awful. He had been in the middle of a rumination about which items of clothing he could spare for the church jumble sale, and had become very huffy and hurt when she tried to ease the conversation to a close. ‘I’m sorry if I’m keeping you from something,’ he’d said.
‘No, no it’s just that –’
‘No, if you’re busy you must get on. I know how full your life is.’
‘It’s just that –’
‘No, no – there’s no need to say anything. You just ring me when you can spare a little bit of time.’ He’d put the phone down, leaving her wincing. He was so quick to take umbrage, he always had been, but the trait had worsened since her mother’s death, as if he were one huge exposed nerve, picking up even the vibrations in the surrounding air. She’d tried to phone him again later, but the number was engaged, and immediately after that Robin’s girlfriend had rung and he had disappeared into his room with the receiver and remained there until well after half-past ten, her father’s unalterable bedtime.
She had worried all day at the surgery, finally deciding that an unscheduled visit might help to mollify him. It was only a five minute walk from Sarum Road to Alma Crescent, along streets much tidier than those in Dalston, and past front gardens that contained shrubs rather than dismembered gas stoves. Number 1 was a red-brick end-of-terrace with a crisp privet hedge and a gate with a rat-trap spring which the postman had complained about several times, but its unique glory was the double row of tiles with which a nameless craftsman had decorated the blank end wall. They were obviously hand made, and of two designs: a stiff little flower, and a bun-faced bull-necked lady with a crown. The house was named Victoria Cottage, in her honour. Iris had always loved the tiles; when the twins were little, in the difficult two years when they were all still living at home, their daily walk had always paused by the end wall, so that two mittened forefingers could point up at the queen. Robin’s first word had been ‘lady’, though he’d applied it with equal enthusiasm to men and lamp-posts.
She gave the tiles a quick glance as she rounded the corner, and then stopped dead. The upstairs curtains were closed and the house was in darkness. Instantly, her heart was pounding and she groped in her pocket for the keys and, failing to find them, fumblingly unzipped her bag and started pawing through the contents, wondering if she could possibly have left them at home. Closed curtains meant illness, they meant her mother laid out on the bed in her best nightie with her hair brushed flat against the pillow. The keys weren’t in her bag. She took a deep breath and then forced herself to search again, methodically this time, and found them almost at once, nestling between the pages of a book. The gate smacked shut behind her with its usual startling force, and as she inserted the key in the lock, some automatic spirit of courtesy led her to ring the bell just before she opened the door.
‘Dad?’
She stumbled over something, a rustling plastic shape, and reached out for the light switch, sweeping her hand across the wall until she found it. The hall was full. An old bedside table stood by the coat pegs, and beside it three bin liners, tops neatly tied. There was a pair of child’s wellingtons at the foot of the stairs, and her mother’s sheepskin car coat hung over the banisters.
‘Dad?’ She started up the stairs, and sensed, rather than distinctly heard, a noise from the bedroom. The door to the boxroom was open and the contents seemed to have flowed out across the landing. She picked her way through the junk: old rolls of wallpaper, a box full of half-used balls of wool, a stained projector screen, an ancient fan-heater. Just as she reached the bedroom door, she heard her father’s voice.
‘Don’t come in, Iris.’
‘Dad, are you all right?’
‘Yes, but don’t come in.’ He sounded almost panicky. She hesitated on the landing, her hand resting on the naked bulb of a defunct standard lamp.
‘Have you been ill? Do you need anything?’
‘No, no. I wasn’t expecting you. I was asleep.’
‘I should have phoned, sorry. But… why’s there stuff all over the landing?’
‘I was having a clear-out for the church jumble sale.’
‘And you’re really all right?’
‘Yes I’m all right.’
There was a pause.
‘Can you come back later?’
She shook her head as if trying to clear it. ‘Look, Dad, I’ll go and make a cup of tea. Do you want one?’
‘No. I’ve not had my supper yet.’
She stood for a moment, swaying with indecision, and then wove her way back to the stairs. A nap at half-past six; a house strewn with junk; a missed meal. These were events without precedent. Her father was a man of iron routine, developed out of necessity over the long years of her mother’s illness and now seemingly ingrained in his nature. He got up at seven o’clock; during a breakfast of All-Bran and banana he took a multivitamin and an Anafranil for his depression; at eight thirty he started the housework, beginning by cleaning the kitchen floor; at ten thirty he went out to buy a copy of the Daily Mail – and so on and so forth in an unvarying cycle which measured his days like the roll of a treadmill. If Iris had come round the corner to find the front door painted orange and a camel tethered in the garden she could not have felt more unsettled.
The kitchen was as spotless as ever; on his last visit, Tom had commented that you could lick the floor and not get your tongue gritty. Her father used copious amounts of bleach and the formica surfaces, a brilliant yellow when first installed in the 1970s were now the colour of buttermilk. She filled the kettle, and then opened the fridge to see what was on the supper menu; it contained only a pint of milk, a plate of cold, boiled potatoes, half a tin of peas and a single pork chop. The freezer contained a tub of vanilla ice cream, a packet of spinach and a matchbox which she knew contained her mother’s rings, hidden against possible burglars. She paced around the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. She simply couldn’t fit the facts together. Was he concealing an illness? She hadn’t seen him in the surgery for weeks, and he’d seemed as stringily fit as ever during her visits, so it seemed unlikely. Was it senility, of weirdly sudden onset? Was it a recurrence of his depression? But that had never led him to take to his bed, only created a terrible, grinding slowness, as if he were dragging a great weight behind him. The kettle rattled on the hob and started its piercing whistle, rising quickly to a painful shriek. She turned off the gas and it was as the wail dropped in pitch and died away that she heard it: the unmistakable sound of the front door closing. Immediately there was a rattle and a sharp knocking and the door reopened from the inside. Iris put down the kettle and took two steps towards the hall. ‘Silly me, I got my coat caught,’ said a voice, and the door closed again. Iris blinked as if slapped in the face. She knew that voice. It was Mrs McHugh, head of the church fund-raising committee, a tiny bouncing woman who wore tartan skirts and crimson lipstick.
Her father’s footsteps approached along the corridor and he entered the kitchen. Two of his shirt buttons were undone and there was a red smudge on his chin.
‘Do you want a cup of tea, Dad?’ she heard herself asking.
‘Yes please.’ He caught sight of his reflection in the kitchen window, and gave his chin a wipe.
It was Mrs McHugh, who drove a mini and boasted that she swam two miles a week, who had been in her father’s bedroom, with her father, in the dark.
As if on automatic pilot she rinsed out the pot; behind her she heard the fridge door opening. ‘I wasn’t expecting you, so there’s only one chop.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll have something when I get back. I just called round to apologize about yesterday.’
‘Yesterday?’
‘I was a bit abrupt on the phone and I was worried you were upset. You were talking about the jumble sale and I… cut you off.’
He looked confused, as if she were talking about something that had happened years ago.
‘Well there was no need to come round. You always phone me on a Monday anyway.’
‘Yes but –’ He had turned away and was emptying the peas into a pan. ‘Oh it doesn’t matter.’
‘I’ll get on with the supper then, if you don’t mind.’
They danced round each other like strangers, her father heating the fat in a frying pan and lighting the grill, while Iris set the cloth on the table and poured out two mugs of strong tea. She sat down and watched him pushing the potatoes round the pan with a wooden spatula. He avoided eye contact and the set of his shoulders was defensive. ‘You couldn’t do me a favour could you, Iris?’
‘Of course, Dad.’ She tried to reassemble her thoughts.
‘All that stuff on the upstairs landing needs to be in the hall. There’s a van picking it up tomorrow morning.’
‘Right, OK. All of it?’
‘Unless there’s anything you fancy for yourself or the boys. I’ve just hung on to a few bits in the box room.’
‘OK Dad.’ Embarrassment hung between them like a barrage balloon.
Carrying the junk downstairs didn’t take long, but assembling it in such a way as to still be able to use the front door was more difficult. In the end, she moved the bin bags into the television room to create a little more space. The knot on one was loose, and she looked inside; to her amazement it contained her mother’s clothes, folded neatly. She had offered to take them to a charity shop a few months ago, but her father had almost wept at the thought, and had slammed the wardrobe door and turned the key, as if Iris were about to run off with the contents. Now she crouched and put her face into the mouth of the bag, full of dresses in sweet-pea colours, and hand-knitted cardigans in flimsy, shiny wool; the faintest waft of L’Aimant was still detectable. She heard the clank and swish of her father washing the grill pan, and suddenly she couldn’t face going back into the kitchen.
Upstairs, she snapped on the light in the boxroom. The remaining contents were stacked by the window, items that she hadn’t seen for years: a couple of suitcases, a box full of ordnance survey maps from her father’s hiking days, a little row of books from which he’d taught himself circuitry from scratch, a copy of Mathematics for the Million signed by the author, and a large black, flat-topped trunk with the words ‘Iris Unwin, Barton Hall, University of Cardiff’ painted on the lid in white gloss. She opened it. Underneath an armful of blankets were three folders of notes and a pile of textbooks: Haematology, Pharmacology, Anatomy – the latter still redolent of formaldehyde, and a huge and useless general medicine text on which she had spent the frightening sum of £3 before finding out it was obsolete. She flipped open one of the folders and looked at the neat, sloping handwriting. The subject was the Sympathetic Nervous System, and she could remember nothing about it; what she did recall, and with extraordinary clarity, was her state of mind while writing these notes. She could almost sense the wooden walls of the lecture theatre, and the fountain pen between her fingers, and the irritation of watching Lyle Kravitz, one of the American students, sitting with his arms folded and a miniature tape recorder in front of him. She could hear the lecturer, a small, wet-eyed man with a soft, rapid speaking voice that necessitated much frantic shorthand. She could also feel the concurrent knotting of her stomach, the perpetual fear that she had lived with for an entire term, and the awful, awful knowledge that at some point she would have to tell her parents. She’d half known at the time that these notes were destined to be locked in a trunk somewhere, to serve only as souvenirs.
She was distracted from her thoughts by a bobbing light in the garden. She peered through the window but could make nothing of it, apart from the fact it was very low to the ground, and close to the back fence. She turned off the light and looked again. There was a figure crouched at the bottom of the garden, holding a torch. As she watched, he stamped one of his feet several times around a small, wobbling Leylandi, one of a row that marked the boundary between her father’s garden and the one beyond it.
She could hear her father coming up the stairs behind her.
‘Dad, come and have a look at this. Don’t turn on the light.’
He came and stood by her shoulder, and stiffened like a gun dog. ‘The so-and-so!’ It was his strongest term of abuse.
‘What?’
‘He’s re-planting my trees, he’s… he’s…’ He turned belligerently towards the door.
‘Oh, it’s Mr Hickey, is it?’ She’d never actually seen the fabled fence-mover in action before.
Her father plunged back down the stairs without answering her. ‘I’ll get him, I’ll get that… that… trespasser. I’ve got a witness now.’
Iris closed the trunk and followed him slowly. It had been a long day.