They didn’t see her standing there. They went on singing, slapping the paintbrushes back and forth. There’d been neat straight lines where the shell-pink met the white of the woodwork, but now the lines were any old how. The boy with the red hair was applying the dark-blue gloss.
Again the feeling that it wasn’t happening possessed Mrs Malby. She’d had a dream a week ago, a particularly vivid dream in which the Prime Minister had stated on television that the Germans had been invited to invade England since England couldn’t manage to look after herself any more. That dream had been most troublesome because when she’d woken up in the morning she’d thought it was something she’d seen on television, that she’d actually been sitting in her sitting-room the night before listening to the Prime Minister saying that he and the Leader of the Opposition had decided the best for Britain was invasion. After thinking about it, she’d established that of course it hadn’t been true; but even so she’d glanced at the headlines of newspapers when she went out shopping.
‘How d’you fancy it?’ the boy called Billo called out to her, smiling across the kitchen at her, not noticing that she was upset. ‘Neat, Mrs Wheeler?’
She didn’t answer. She went downstairs and walked out of her hall door, into Catherine Street and into the greengrocer’s that had been her husband’s. It never closed in the middle of the day; it never had. She waited and Mr King appeared, wiping his mouth. ‘Well then, Mrs Malby?’ he said.
He was a big man with a well-kept black moustache and Jewish eyes. He didn’t smile much because smiling wasn’t his way, but he was in no way morose, rather the opposite.
‘So what can I do for you?’ he said.
She told him. He shook his head and repeatedly frowned as he listened. His expressive eyes widened. He called his wife.
While the three of them hurried along the pavement to Mrs Malby’s open hall door it seemed to her that the Kings doubted her. She could feel them thinking that she must have got it all wrong, that she’d somehow imagined all this stuff about yellow paint and pop music on a radio, and her birds flying around her bedroom while two children were lying in her bed. She didn’t blame them; she knew exactly how they felt. But when they entered her house the noise from the transistor could at once be heard.
The carpet of the landing was smeared again with the paint. Yellow footprints led to her sitting-room and out again, back to the kitchen.
‘You bloody young hooligans,’ Mr King shouted at them. He snapped the switch on the transistor. He told them to stop applying the paint immediately. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re up to?’ he demanded furiously.
‘We come to paint out the old ma’s kitchen,’ the boy called Billo explained, unruffled by Mr King’s tone. ‘We was carrying out instructions, mister.’
‘So it was instructions to spill the blooming paint all over the floor? So it was instructions to cover the windows with it and every knife and fork in the place? So it was instructions to frighten the life out of a poor woman by messing about in her bedroom?’
‘No one frightens her, mister.’
‘You know what I mean, son.’
Mrs Malby returned with Mrs King and sat in the cubbyhole behind the shop, leaving Mr King to do his best. At three o’clock he arrived back, saying that the children had gone. He telephoned the school and after a delay was put in touch with the teacher who’d been to see Mrs Malby. He made this telephone call in the shop but Mrs Malby could hear him saying that what had happened was a disgrace. ‘A woman of eighty-seven,’ Mr King protested, ‘thrown into a state of misery. There’ll be something to pay on this, you know.’
There was some further discussion on the telephone, and then Mr King replaced the receiver. He put his head into the cubbyhole and announced that the teacher was coming round immediately to inspect the damage. ‘What can I entice you to?’ Mrs Malby heard him asking a customer, and a woman’s voice replied that she needed tomatoes, a cauliflower, potatoes and Bramleys. She heard Mr King telling the woman what had happened, saying that it had wasted two hours of his time.
She drank the sweet milky tea which Mrs King had poured her. She tried not to think of the yellow paint and the dark-blue gloss. She tried not to remember the scene in the bedroom and the smell there’d been, and the new marks that had appeared on her carpets after she’d wiped off the original ones. She wanted to ask Mr King if these marks had been washed out before the paint had had a chance to dry, but she didn’t like to ask this because Mr King had been so kind and it might seem like pressing him.
‘Kids nowadays,’ Mrs King said. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘Birched they should be,’ Mr King said, coming into the cubbyhole and picking up a mug of the milky tea. ‘I’d birch the bottoms off them.’
Someone arrived in the shop, Mr King hastened from the cubbyhole. ‘What can I entice you to, sir?’ Mrs Malby heard him politely inquiring and the voice of the teacher who’d been to see her replied. He said who he was and Mr King wasn’t polite any more. An experience like that, Mr King declared thunderously, could have killed an eighty-seven-year-old stone dead.
Mrs Malby stood up and Mrs King came promptly forward to place a hand under her elbow. They went into the shop like that. ‘Three and a half p,’ Mr King was saying to a woman who’d asked the price of oranges. ‘The larger ones at four.’
Mr King gave the woman four of the smaller size and accepted her money. He called out to a youth who was passing by on a bicycle, about to. start an afternoon paper round. He was a youth who occasionally assisted him on Saturday mornings: Mr King asked him now if he would mind the shop for ten minutes since an emergency had arisen. Just for once, Mr King argued, it wouldn’t matter if the evening papers were a little late.
‘Well, you can’t say they haven’t brightened the place up, Mrs Malby,’ the teacher said in her kitchen. He regarded her from beneath his grey fringe. He touched one of the walls with the tip of a finger. He nodded to himself, appearing to be satisfied.
The painting had been completed, the yellow and the dark-blue gloss. Where the colours met there were untidily jagged lines. All the paint that had been spilt on the floor had been wiped away, but the black-and-white vinyl had become dull and grubby in the process. The paint had also been wiped from the windows and from other surfaces, leaving them smeared. The dresser had been wiped down and was smeary also. The cutlery and the taps and the cups and saucers had all been washed or wiped.
‘Well, you wouldn’t believe it!’ Mrs King exclaimed. She turned to her husband. However had he managed it all? she asked him. ‘You should have seen the place!’ she said to the teacher.
‘It’s just the carpets,’ Mr King said. He led the way from the kitchen to the sitting-room, pointing at the yellow on the landing carpet and on the sitting-room one. ‘The blooming stuff dried,’ he explained, ‘before we could get to it. That’s where compensation comes in.’ He spoke sternly, addressing the teacher. ‘I’d say she has a bob or two owing.’
Mrs King nudged Mrs Malby, drawing attention to the fact that Mr King was doing his best for her. The nudge suggested that all would be well because a sum of money would be paid, possibly even a larger sum than was merited. It suggested also that Mrs Malby in the end might find herself doing rather well.
‘Compensation?’ the teacher said, bending down and scratching at the paint on the sitting-room carpet. ‘I’m afraid compensation’s out of the question.’
‘She’s had her carpets ruined,’ Mr King snapped quickly. ‘This woman’s been put about, you know.’
‘She got her kitchen done free,’ the teacher snapped back at him.
‘They released her pets. They got up to tricks in a bed. You’d no damn right –’