Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

The woman nodded, again and again and again: as if she could never nod enough. Her husband whispered to her, “Ruby, you know—Eddie’s first wife?” The mike picked it up. “I know, I know,” she muttered. She gripped his hand. Her fluttering breath registered. You could almost hear her heart.

“She’s got a parcel for you,” Al said. “No, wait; she’s got two.”

“She gave us two wedding presents. An electric blanket and some sheets.”

“Well,” Al said, “if Ruby kept you so warm and cosy, I think you can trust her with your baby.” She threw it out to the audience. “What do you say?”

They began to clap: sporadically, then with gathering force. Weeping broke out again. Al lifted her arm. Obedient to a strange gravity, the lucky opals rose and fell. She’d saved her best effect till last.

“And he wants you to know, this little boy of yours who’s a fine young man now, that in Spirit he goes by the name you chose for him, the name you had planned to give him … if it—if he—if he was a boy. Which was”—she pauses—“correct me if I’m wrong—which was Alistair.”

“Was it?” said the heavy husband: he was still on the mike, though he didn’t know it. The woman nodded.

“Would you like to answer me?” Al asked pleasantly.

The man cleared his throat, then spoke straight into the mike. “Alistair. She says that’s right. That was her choice. Yes.”

Unseeing, he handed the mike to his neighbour. The woman got to her feet, and the heavy man led her away as if she were an invalid, her handkerchief held over her mouth. They exited, to a fresh storm of applause.

“Steroid rage, I expect,” Al said. “Did you see those muscles of hers?” She was sitting up in her hotel bed, dabbing cream on her face. “Look, Col, as you quite well know, everything that can go wrong for me out there has gone wrong at some time. I can cope. I can weather it. I don’t want you getting stressed.”

“I’m not stressed. I just think it’s a landmark. The first time anybody’s threatened to beat you up.”

“The first time while you’ve been with me, maybe. That’s why I gave up working in London.” Al sat back against the pillows, her eyes closed; she pushed the hair back from her forehead, and Colette saw the jagged scar at her hairline, dead white against ivory. “Who needs it? A fight every night. And the trade pawing you when you try to leave, so you miss the last train home. I like to get home. But you know that, Col.”

But she doesn’t like night driving, either; so when they’re outside the ring of the M25, there’s nothing for it except to put up somewhere, the two of them in a twin room. A bed-and-breakfast is no good because Al can’t last through till breakfast, so for preference they need a hotel that will do food through the night. Sometimes they take prepacked sandwiches, but it’s joy-less for Al, sitting up in bed at 4 A.M., sliding a finger into the plastic triangle to fish out the damp bread. There’s a lot of sadness in hotel rooms, soaked up by the soft furnishings: a lot of loneliness and guilt and regret. A lot of ghosts too: whiskery chambermaids stumping down the corridors on their bad legs, tippling night porters who’ve collapsed on the job, guests who’ve drowned in the bath or suffered a stroke in their beds. When they check into a room, Alison stands on the threshold and sniffs the atmosphere, inhales it: and her eyes travel dubiously around. More than once, Colette has shot down to reception to ask for a different room. “What’s the problem?” the receptionists will say (sometimes adding madam ) and Colette, stiff with hostility and fright, will say, “Why do you need to know?” She never fails in her mission; challenged, she can pump out as much aggression as the girl in the khaki vest.

What Alison prefers is somewhere new-built and anonymous, part of some reliable chain. She hates history: unless it’s on television, safe behind glass. She won’t thank you for a night in a place with beams. “Sod the inglenooks,” she once said, after an exhausting hour tussling with an old corpse in a sheet. The dead are like that; give them a cliché and they’ll run to it. They enjoy frustrating the living, spoiling their beauty sleep. They enjoyed pummelling Al’s flesh and nagging at her till she got earache; they rattled around in her head until some nights, like tonight, it seemed to quiver on the soft stem of her neck. “Col,” she groaned, “be a good girl, rummage around in the bags and see if you can find my lavender spray. My head’s throbbing.”

Colette knelt on the floor and rummaged as directed. “That woman at the end, the couple, the miscarriage—you could have heard a pin drop.”

Al said, “ See a pin and pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck. My mum told me that. I never do, though—see a pin. Or find money in the street.”

That’s because you’re too fat to see your feet, Colette thought. She said, “How did you do that thing with the name? When you were going on about mother love I nearly puked, but I have to hand it to you, you got there in the end.”

“Alistair? Well, of course, if he’d been called John, you wouldn’t be giving me any credit. You’d have said it was one of my lucky guesses.” She sighed. “Look, Colette, what can I tell you? The boy was standing there. He knew his own name. People do.”

“The mother, she must have been thinking his name.”

“Yes, yes, I could have picked it out of her head. I know that’s your theory. Mind reading. Oh, God, Colette,” Al slid down inside the covers. She closed her eyes. Her head dropped back against the pillows. “Think that, if you find it easier. But you will admit I sometimes tell people things they’ve yet to find out.”

She hated that phrase of Al’s: Think that, if you find it easier. As if she were a child and couldn’t be told the truth. Al only seemed dense—it was part of her act. The truth was, she listened to Radio Four when they were on the road. She’d got a vocabulary, though she didn’t use it on the trade. She was quite a serious and complicated person, and deep, deep and sly: that was what Colette thought.

Al seldom talked about death. At first when they started working together, Colette had thought the word would slip out, if only through the pressure of trying to avoid it. And sometimes it did; but mostly Al talked about passing, she talked about spirit, she talked about passing into Spirit World; to that eventless realm, neither cold nor hot, neither hilly nor flat, where the dead, each at their own best age and marooned in an eternal afternoon, pass the ages with sod-all going on. Spirit World, as Al describes it to the trade, is a garden, or to be more accurate, a public place in the open air: litter-free like an old-fashioned park, with a bandstand in a heat haze in the distance. Here the dead sit in rows on benches, families together, on gravelled paths between weedless beds, where heat-sozzled flowers bob their heads, heavy with the scent of eau-de-cologne: their petals crawling with furry, intelligent, stingless bees. There’s a certain nineteen-fifties air about the dead, or early sixties perhaps, because they’re clean and respectable and they don’t stink of factories: as if they came after white nylon shirts and indoor sanitation but before satire, certainly before sexual intercourse. Unmelting ice cubes (in novelty shapes) chink in their glasses, for the age of refrigeration has come. They eat picnics with silver forks, purely for pleasure, because they never feel hunger or gain weight. No wind blows there, only a gentle breeze, the temperature being controlled at a moderate 71 degrees Fahrenheit; these are the English dead, and they don’t have centigrade yet. All picnics are share and share alike. The children never squabble or cut their knees, for whatever happened to them earthside, they are beyond physical damage now. The sun shall not strike them by day nor the moon by night; they have no red skin or freckles, none of the flaws that make the English so uncouth in summer. It’s Sunday, yet the shops are open, though no one needs anything. A mild air plays in the background, not quite Bach, possibly Vaughan Williams, quite like the early Beatles too; the birds sing along, in the verdant branches of the seasonless trees. The dead have no sense of time, no clear sense of place; they are beyond geography and history, she tells her clients, till someone like herself tunes in. Not one of them is old or decrepit or uselessly young. They all have their own teeth: or an expensive set of implants, if their own were unsightly. Their damaged chromosomes are counted and shuffled into good order; even the early miscarriages have functioning lungs and a proper head of hair. Damaged livers have been replaced, so their owners live to drink another day. Blighted lungs now suck at God’s own low-tar blend. Cancerous breasts have been rescued from the surgeons’ bin, and blossom like roses on spirit chests.