Broken Homes
‘I really think you’re marvellous,’ the man said.
He was small and plump, with a plump face that had a greyness about it where he shaved; his hair was grey also, falling into a fringe on his forehead. He was untidily dressed, a turtlenecked red jersey beneath a jacket that had a ballpoint pen and a pencil sticking out of the breast pocket. When he stood up his black corduroy trousers developed concertina creases. Nowadays you saw a lot of men like this, Mrs Malby said to herself.
‘We’re trying to help them,’ he said, ‘and of course we’re trying to help you. The policy is to foster a deeper understanding.’ He smiled, displaying small, evenly arranged teeth. ‘Between the generations,’ he added.
‘Well, of course it’s very kind,’ Mrs Malby said.
He shook his head. He sipped the instant coffee she’d made for him and nibbled the edge of a pink wafer biscuit. As if driven by a compulsion, he dipped the biscuit into the coffee. He said:
‘What age actually are you, Mrs Malby?’
‘I’m eighty-seven.’
‘You really are splendid for eighty-seven.’
He went on talking. He said he hoped he’d be as good himself at eighty-seven. He hoped he’d even be in the land of the living. ‘Which I doubt,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Knowing me.’
Mrs Malby didn’t know what he meant by that. She was sure she’d heard him quite correctly, but she could recall nothing he’d previously stated which indicated ill-health. She thought carefully while he continued to sip at his coffee and attend to the mush of biscuit. What he had said suggested that a knowledge of him would cause you to doubt that he’d live to old age. Had he already supplied further knowledge of himself which, due to her slight deafness, she had not heard? If he hadn’t, why had he left everything hanging in the air like that? It was difficult to know how best to react, whether to smile or to display concern.
‘So what I thought,’ he said, ‘was that we could send the kids on Tuesday. Say start the job Tuesday morning, eh, Mrs Malby?’
‘It’s extremely kind of you.’
‘They’re good kids.’
He stood up. He remarked on her two budgerigars and the geraniums on her window-sill. Her sitting-room was as warm as toast, he said; it was freezing outside.
‘It’s just that I wondered,’ she said, having made up her mind to say it, ‘if you could possibly have come to the wrong house?’
‘Wrong? Wrong? You’re Mrs Malby, aren’t you?’ He raised his voice. ‘You’re Mrs Malby, love?’
‘Oh, yes, it’s just that my kitchen isn’t really in need of decoration.’
He nodded. His head moved slowly and when it stopped his dark eyes stared at her from beneath his grey fringe. He said, quite softly, what she’d dreaded he might say: that she hadn’t understood.
‘I’m thinking of the community, Mrs Malby. I’m thinking of you here on your own above a greengrocer’s shop with your two budgies. You can benefit my kids, Mrs Malby; they can benefit you. There’s no charge of any kind whatsoever. Put it like this, Mrs Malby: it’s an experiment in community relations.’ He paused. He reminded her of a picture there’d been in a history book, a long time ago, History with Miss Deacon, a picture of a Roundhead. ‘So you see, Mrs Malby,’ he said, having said something else while he was reminding her of a Roundhead.
‘It’s just that my kitchen is really quite nice.’
‘Let’s have a little look, shall we?’
She led the way. He glanced at the kitchen’s shell-pink walls, and at the white paintwork. It would cost her nearly a hundred pounds to have it done, he said; and then, to her horror, he began all over again, as if she hadn’t heard a thing he’d been saying. He repeated that he was a teacher, from the school called the Tite Comprehensive. He appeared to assume that she wouldn’t know the Tite Comprehensive, but she did: an ugly sprawl of glass-and-concrete buildings, children swinging along the pavements, shouting obscenities. The man repeated what he had said before about these children: that some of them came from broken homes. The ones he wished to send to her on Tuesday morning came from broken homes, which was no joke for them. He felt, he repeated, that we all had a special duty where such children were concerned.
Mrs Malby again agreed that broken homes were to be deplored. It was just, she explained, that she was thinking of the cost of decorating a kitchen which didn’t need decorating. Paint and brushes were expensive, she pointed out.
‘Freshen it over for you,’ the man said, raising his voice. ‘First thing Tuesday, Mrs Malby.’
He went away, and she realized that he hadn’t told her his name. Thinking she might be wrong about that, she went over their encounter in her mind, going back to the moment when her doorbell had sounded. I’m from Tite Comprehensive,’ was what he’d said. No name had been mentioned, of that she was positive.
In her elderliness Mrs Malby liked to be sure of such details. You had to work quite hard sometimes at eighty-seven, straining to hear, concentrating carefully in order to be sure of things. You had to make it clear you understood because people often imagined you didn’t. Communication was what it was called nowadays, rather than conversation.
Mrs Malby was wearing a blue dress with a pattern of darker blue flowers on it. She was a woman who had been tall but had shrunk a little with age and had become slightly bent. Scant white hair crowned a face that was touched with elderly freckling. Large brown eyes, once her most striking feature, were quieter than they had been, tired behind spectacles now. Her husband, Ernest, the owner of the greengrocer’s shop over which she lived, had died five years ago; her two sons, Derek and Roy, had been killed in the same month – June 1942 – in the same desert retreat.
The greengrocer’s shop was unpretentious, in an unpretentious street in Fulham called Catherine Street. The people who owned it now, Jewish people called King, kept an eye on Mrs Malby. They watched for her coming and going and if they missed her one day they’d ring her doorbell to see that she was all right. She had a niece in Ealing who looked in twice a year, and another niece in Islington, who was crippled with arthritis. Once a week Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert came round with Meals on Wheels. A social worker, Miss Tingle, called; and the Reverend Bush called. Men came to read the meters.
In her elderliness, living where she’d lived since her marriage in 1920, Mrs Malby was happy. The tragedy in her life – the death of her sons – was no longer a nightmare, and the time that had passed since her husband’s death had allowed her to come to terms with being on her own. All she wished for was to continue in these same circumstances until she died, and she did not fear death. She did not believe she would be reunited with her sons and her husband, not at least in a specific sense, but she could not believe, either, that she would entirely cease to exist the moment she ceased to breathe. Having thought about death, it seemed likely to Mrs Malby that after it came she’d dream, as in sleep. Heaven and hell were surely no more than flickers of such pleasant dreaming, or flickers of a nightmare from which there was no waking release. No loving omnipotent God, in Mrs Malby’s view, doled out punishments and reward: human conscience, the last survivor, did that. The idea of a God, which had puzzled Mrs Malby for most of her life, made sense when she thought of it in terms like these, when she forgot about the mystic qualities claimed for a Church and for Jesus Christ. Yet fearful of offending the Reverend Bush, she kept such conclusions to herself when he came to see her.