‘Where’s the sound gone?’ the boy called Billo demanded, coming into the kitchen and going straight to the transistor.
‘I didn’t want the kitchen painted,’ Mrs Malby said again. ‘I told you.’
The singing from the transistor recommenced, louder than before. On the draining board the fuzzy-haired boy began to sway, throwing his body and his head about.
‘Please stop him painting,’ Mrs Malby shouted as shrilly as she could.
‘Here,’ the boy called Billo said, bundling her out on to the landing and closing the kitchen door. ‘Can’t hear myself think in there.’
‘I don’t want it painted.’
‘What’s that, Mrs Wheeler?’
‘My name isn’t Wheeler. I don’t want my kitchen painted. I told you.’
‘Are we in the wrong house? Only we was told –’
‘Will you please wash that paint off?’
‘If we come to the wrong house –’
‘You haven’t come to the wrong house. Please tell that boy to wash off the paint he’s put on.’
‘Did a bloke from the Comp come in to see you, Mrs Wheeler? Fat bloke?’
‘Yes, yes, he did.’
‘Only he give instructions –’
‘Please would you tell that boy?’
‘Whatever you say, Mrs Wheeler.’
‘And wipe up the paint where it’s spilt on the floor. It’s been trampled out, all over my carpets.’
‘No problem, Mrs Wheeler.’
Not wishing to return to the kitchen herself, she ran the hot tap in the bathroom on to the sponge-cloth she kept for cleaning the bath. She found that if she rubbed hard enough at the paint on the stair-carpet and on the landing carpet it began to disappear. But the rubbing tired her. As she put away the sponge-cloth, Mrs Malby had a feeling of not quite knowing what was what. Everything that had happened in the last few hours felt like a dream; it also had the feeling of plays she had seen on television; the one thing it wasn’t like was reality. As she paused in her bathroom, having placed the sponge-cloth on a ledge under the hand-basin, Mrs Malby saw herself standing there, as she often did in a dream: she saw her body hunched within the same blue dress she’d been wearing when the teacher called, and two touches of red in her pale face, and her white hair tidy on her head, and her fingers seeming fragile. In a dream anything could happen next: she might suddenly find herself forty years younger, Derek and Roy might be alive. She might be even younger; Dr Ramsey might be telling her she was pregnant. In a television play it would be different: the children who had come to her house might kill her. What she hoped for from reality was that order would be restored in her kitchen, that all the paint would be washed away from her walls as she had wiped it from her carpets, that the misunderstanding would be over. For an instant she saw herself in her kitchen, making tea for the children, saying it didn’t matter. She even heard herself adding that in a life as long as hers you became used to everything.
She left the bathroom; the blare of the transistor still persisted. She didn’t want to sit in her sitting-room, having to listen to it. She climbed the stairs to her bedroom, imagining the coolness there, and the quietness.
‘Hey,’ the girl protested when Mrs Malby opened her bedroom door.
‘Sod off, you guys,’ the boy with the red hair ordered.
They were in her bed. Their clothes were all over the floor. Her two budgerigars were flying about the room. Protruding from sheets and blankets she could see the boy’s naked shoulders and the back of his head. The girl poked her face up from under him. She gazed at Mrs Malby. ‘It’s not them,’ she whispered to the boy. ‘It’s the woman.’
‘Hi there, missus.’ The boy twisted his head round. From the kitchen, still loudly, came the noise of the transistor.
‘Sorry,’ the girl said.
‘Why are they up here? Why have you let my birds out? You’ve no right to behave like this.’
‘We needed sex,’ the girl explained.
The budgerigars were perched on the looking-glass on the dressing-table, beadily surveying the scene.
‘They’re really great, them budgies,’ the boy said.
Mrs Malby stepped through their garments. The budgerigars remained where they were. They fluttered when she seized them but they didn’t offer any resistance. She returned with them to the door.
‘You had no right,’ she began to say to the two in her bed, but her voice had become weak. It quivered into a useless whisper, and once more she thought that what was happening couldn’t be happening. She saw herself again, standing unhappily with the budgerigars.
In her sitting-room she wept. She returned the budgerigars to their cage and sat in an armchair by the window that looked out over Catherine Street. She sat in sunshine, feeling its warmth but not, as she might have done, delighting in it. She wept because she had intensely disliked finding the boy and girl in her bed. Images from the bedroom remained vivid in her mind. On the floor the boy’s boots were heavy and black, composed of leather that did not shine. The girl’s shoes were green, with huge heels and soles. The girl’s underclothes were purple, the boy’s dirty. There’d been an unpleasant smell of sweat in her bedroom.
Mrs Malby waited, her head beginning to ache. She dried away her tears, wiping at her eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief. In Catherine Street people passed by on bicycles, girls from the polish factory returning home to lunch, men from the brickworks. People came out of the greengrocer’s with leeks and cabbages in baskets, some carrying paper bags. Watching these people in Catherine Street made her feel better, even though her headache was becoming worse. She felt more composed, and more in control of herself.
‘We’re sorry,’ the girl said again, suddenly appearing, teetering on her clumsy shoes. ‘We didn’t think you’d come up to the bedroom.’
She tried to smile at the girl, but found it hard to do so. She nodded instead.
‘The others put the birds in,’ the girl said. ‘Meant to be a joke, that was.’
She nodded again. She couldn’t see how it could be a joke to take two budgerigars from their cage, but she didn’t say that.
‘We’re getting on with the painting now,’ the girl said. ‘Sorry about that.’
She went away and Mrs Malby continued to watch the people in Catherine Street. The girl had made a mistake when she’d said they were getting on with the painting: what she’d meant was that they were getting on with washing it off. The girl had come straight downstairs to say she was sorry; she hadn’t been told by the boys in the kitchen that the paint had been applied in error. When they’d gone, Mrs Malby said to herself, she’d open her bedroom window wide in order to get rid of the odour of sweat. She’d put clean sheets on her bed.
From the kitchen, above the noise of the transistor, came the clatter of raised voices. There was laughter and a crash, and then louder laughter. Singing began, attaching itself to the singing from the transistor.
She sat for twenty minutes and then she went and knocked on the kitchen door, not wishing to push the door open in case it knocked someone off a chair. There was no reply. She opened the door gingerly.
More yellow paint had been applied. The whole wall around the window was covered with it, and most of the wall behind the sink. Half of the ceiling had it on it; the woodwork that had been white was now a glossy dark blue. All four of the children were working with brushes. A tin of paint had been upset on the floor.
She wept again, standing there watching them, unable to prevent her tears. She felt them running warmly on her cheeks and then becoming cold. It was in this kitchen that she had cried first of all when the two telegrams had come in 1942, believing when the second one arrived that she would never cease to cry. It would have seemed ridiculous at the time, to cry just because her kitchen was all yellow.