The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett
Mrs. Ransome did all the right things, placing a cushion under his head and a rug over his body before ringing the ambulance. She hoped that even in his stricken state her efficiency and self-possession would impress her prostrate husband, but looking down at him while she was waiting to be connected to the appropriate service, she saw in his eyes no sign of approval or gratitude, just a look of sheer terror.
Powerless to draw his wife’s attention to the cassette clutched in his hand, or even to relinquish it, her helpless husband watched as Mrs. Ransome briskly collected up the photographs, something at the very back of his mind registering how little interest or surprise was occasioned by this tired old smut. Lastly (the klaxon of the ambulance already audible as it raced by the park) she knelt beside him and prized the cassette free of his waxen fingers before popping it matter-of-factly into her apron pocket. She held his hand for a second (still bent to the shape of the offending cassette) and thought that perhaps the look in his eyes was now no longer terror but had turned to shame; so she smiled and squeezed his hand, saying, “It’s not important,” at which point the ambulance men rang the bell.
Mr. Ransome has not come well out of this narrative; seemingly impervious to events he has, unlike his wife, neither changed nor grown in stature. Owning a dog might have shown him in a better light, but handy though Naseby Mansions was for the park, to be cooped up in a flat is no life for a dog; a hobby would have helped, a hobby other than Mozart, that is, the quest for the perfect performance only serving to emphasize Mr. Ransome’s punctiliousness and general want of warmth. No, to learn to take things as they come he would have been better employed in the untidier arts, photography, say, or painting watercolors; a family would have been untidy too, and, though it seems it was only Mrs. Ransome who felt the loss of baby Donald (and though Mr. Ransome would have been no joke as a father) a son might have knocked the corners off him a little and made life messier—tidiness and order now all that mattered to him in middle age. When you come down to it, what he is being condemned for here is not having got out of his shell, and had there been a child there might have been no shell.
Now he lies dumb and unmoving in Intensive Care and “shell” seems to describe it pretty well. Somewhere he can hear his wife’s voice, near but at the same time distant and echoing a little as if his ear was a shell too and he a creature in it. The nurses have told Mrs. Ransome that he can certainly hear what she is saying, and thinking that he may not survive not so much the stroke as the shame and humiliation that attended it, Mrs. Ransome concentrates on clearing that up first. If we can get on a more sensible footing in the sex department, she thinks, we may end up regarding this stroke business as a blessing.
So, feeling a little foolish that the conversation must of necessity be wholly one-sided, Mrs. Ransome begins to talk to her inert husband, or rather, since there are other patients in the ward, murmur in his ear so that from the corner of his left eye Mr. Ransome’s view of her is just the slightly furry powdered slope of her well-meaning cheek.
She tells him how she has known about what she calls “his silliness” for years and that there is nothing to feel ashamed of, for it’s only sex after all. Inside his shell Mr. Ransome is trying to think what “ashamed” is, and even “feeling” he’s no longer quite sure about, let alone “sex”; words seem to have come unstuck from their meanings. Having been sensible about Mr. Ransome’s silliness just about brings Mrs. Ransome to the end of her emotional vocabulary; never having talked about this kind of thing much leaves her for a moment at a loss for words. Still, Mr. Ransome, though numb, is at the same time hurting and they plainly need to talk. So, holding his limp hand lightly in hers, Mrs. Ransome begins to whisper to him in that language which she can see now she was meant to acquire for just this sort of eventuality.
“I find it hard to verbalize with you, Maurice,” she begins. “We’ve always found it hard to verbalize with each other, you and me, but we are going to learn, I promise.” Pressing her lips up against his unflinching ear she sees in close-up the stiff little gray hairs he regularly crops with the curved scissors during his locked sessions in the bathroom. “The nurses tell me you will learn to talk again, Maurice, and I will learn along with you, we will learn to talk to one another together.” The words swirl around his ear, draining into it uncomprehended. Mrs. Ransome speaks slowly. It is like spooning pap into the mouth of a baby; as one wipes the mouth of the untaken food so Mrs. Ransome can almost wipe the ear clean of the curd of the unheeded words.
Still, and she deserves credit for this, she persists.
“I’m not going to be, you know, judgmental, Maurice, because I personally have nothing to be judgmental about.” And she tells him how she too has secretly listened to the cassette.
“But in future, Maurice, I suggest we listen to it together, make it a part of honing up on our marital skills . . . because at the end of the day, love, marriage is about choices and to get something out of it you have to put something in.”
Out it tumbles, the once tongue-tied Mrs. Ransome now possessed of a whole lexicon of caring and concern which she pours into her husband’s ear. She talks about perspectives and sex and how it can go on joyful and unrestrained until the very brink of the grave and she adumbrates a future of which this will be a part and how once he gets back on his feet they will set aside quality time which they will devote to touching one another.
“We have never hugged, Maurice. We must hug one another in the future.”
Festooned as he is with tubes and drains and monitors, hugging Mr. Ransome ill is no easier than hugging Mr. Ransome well, so Mrs. Ransome contents herself with kissing his hand. But having shared with him her vision of the future—tactile, communicative, convivial—she now thinks to top it off with some Così. It might just do the trick, she thinks.
So, careful not to dislodge any other of Mr. Ransome’s many wires, which are not channels of entertainment at all, Mrs. Ransome gently positions the earphones on his head. Before slipping the cassette into the player she holds it before his unblinking eyes.
“Così,” she articulates. And more loudly, “Mozart?”
She switches it on, scanning her husband’s unchanging face for any sign of response. There is none. She turns the volume up a little, but not loud, mezzo forte, say. Mr. Ransome, who has heard the word “Mozart” without knowing whether it is a person or a thing or even an articulated lorry, now cringes motionless before a barrage of sounds that are to him utterly meaningless and that have no more pattern or sense than the leaves on a tree, only the leaves on the tree seem to be the notes and there is someone in the tree (it is Dame Kiri) shrieking. It is baffling. It is terrible. It is loud.
Perhaps it is this last awful realization that Mozart does not make sense, or it is because Mrs. Ransome, finding there is still no response, decides to up the volume yet further, just as a last shot, that the sounds vibrate in Mr. Ransome’s ears and it is the vibration that does it; but at any rate something happens in his head, and the frail sac into which the blood has leaked now bursts, and Mr. Ransome hears, louder and more compelling than any music he has ever heard, a roaring in his ears; there is a sudden brief andante, he coughs quietly and dies.
Mrs. Ransome does not immediately notice that the numb hand of her husband is now not even that; and it would be hard to tell from looking at him, or from feeling him even, that anything has happened. The screen has altered but Mrs. Ransome does not know about screens. However since Mozart does not seem to be doing the trick she takes the earphones from her husband’s head and it’s only as she is disentangling the frivolous wires from the more serious ones that she sees something on the screen is indeed different and she calls the nurse.
Marriage, to Mrs. Ransome, had often seemed a kind of parenthesis and it’s fitting that what she says to the nurse (“I think he’s gone”) is here in parenthesis too, and that it is this last little parenthesis that brings the larger parenthesis to a close. The nurse checks the monitor, smiles sadl
Then there is a fitting pause. And television having schooled her in the processes of bereavement and the techniques of grieving, Mrs. Ransome observes that pause; she gives herself ample time to mourn and to come to terms with her loss and generally speaking where widowhood is concerned she does not put a foot wrong.
It seems to her as she looks back that the burglary and everything that has happened since has been a kind of apprenticeship. Now, she thinks, I can start.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALAN BENNETT is Britain’s best-loved playwright. He first appeared on the stage in the revue Beyond the Fringe, which opened in London in 1961 and later transferred to Broadway. His subsequent stage plays include Forty Years On, Habeas Corpus, The Old Country and Kafka’s Dick, and his adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, the double bill Single Spies and The Madness of George III were all presented at the Royal National Theatre. He has written many television plays, notably An Englishman Abroad and the two series of Talking Heads monologues. Writing Home, a collection of diaries and prose, was published by Random House in 1995. It included “The Lady in the Van,” which he later adapted for the stage. It was presented in the West End with Maggie Smith in the leading role.
Through his many recordings of children’s classics, Alan Bennett is one of the most familiar voices on BBC radio. He also writes regularly in the London Review of Books.
Also by Alan Bennett
Plays
Plays One (Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, Enjoy)
Plays Two (Kafka’s Dick, The Insurance Man, The Old Country, An Englishman Abroad, A Question of Attribution)
Office Suite
The Wind in the Willows
The Madness of George III
The Lady in the Van
Television plays
The Writer in Disguise
Objects of Affection (BBC)
Talking Heads (BBC)
Screenplays
A Private Function
Prick Up Your Ears
The Madness of King George
Autobiographies
The Lady in the Van
Writing Home
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996, 1998 by Forelake Ltd.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York
This work was originally published in the London Review of Books in 1996. It was first published in book form in Great Britain by Profile Books Ltd., London, in 1998.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bennett, Alan.
The clothes they stood up in/Alan Bennett.
p. cm.
1. Middle aged persons—Fiction. 2. London (England)—Fiction. 3. Married people—Fiction. 4. Burglary—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.E5 C57 2001
823’.914—dc21 00-041473
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-0-375-50689-5
v3.0
Alan Bennett, The Clothes They Stood Up In