Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

Suzi grew frantic then, as she saw her commission seeping away. She became accommodating and flexible. When Suzi agreed to upgrade to a power shower en-suite to Bed Two, Colette signed up for fitted wardrobes. When Colette hesitated over a double oven, Suzi offered to make it a multifunction model including microwave. When Colette—after prolonged deliberation—gave the nod to brass switchplates throughout, Suzi was so relieved she threw in a carriage lamp free. And when Colette—after stabbing at her calculator buttons and gnawing her lip—opted for wood-style flooring to kitchen and utility, Suzi, sweating inside her orange skin, agreed to turf the back garden at Galleon’s expense.

Meanwhile, Alison had plummeted down on the click ’n’ fix korner group seating. I can afford it, she thought, I can probably afford it. Business was booming, thanks in part to Colette’s efficiency and bright ideas. There was no shortage of clients; and it was just as Colette said, one must invest, one must invest against leaner times. Morris sat in the corner, picking at the carpet tiles, trying to lift one. He looked like a toddler, absorbed, his short legs and potbelly thrust out, his tongue between his teeth.

She watched Colette negotiating, small rigid hand chopping the air. At last she got the nod and limped out to the car after her. Colette jumped into the driving seat, whipped out her calculator again, and held it up so that Al could see the display.

Al turned away. “Tell me in words,” she said. Morris leaned forward and poked her in the shoulder. Here’s the lads coming, he shouted. Here’s the cheeky chappies. Knew you’d find me, knew you would, that’s the spirit.

“You could take more of an interest,” Colette snapped. “I’ve probably saved us ten K.”

“I know. I just can’t read the panel. The light’s in my eyes.”

“Plain ceilings or Artex?” Colette said. Her voice rose to a squeak, imitating Suzi. “They think you’ll give them money to stop them making plaster swirls.”

“I expect it’s harder to make plaster smooth.”

“That’s what she said! I said, smooth should be standard! Silly bitch. I wouldn’t pay her in washers.”

Aitkenside said, we can’t live here. There’s no bleeding accommodation.

Dean said, Morris, are we going camping? I went camping once.

Morris said, how was it, mate?

Dean said, it were crap.

Aitkenside said, call it a porthole and it don’t bleeding open? Won’t do for Keef, you know, it won’t do for Keef.

“Brilliant,” Al said. “Couldn’t be better. What won’t do for Keith will do just fine for me.” She put out her hand and squeezed Colette’s cold bony fingers.

That summer, the birch trees were cut down and the last birds flew away. Their song was replaced by the roaring of road drills, the beeping of the earth movers backing up, the cursing of hod carriers and the cries of the wounded, and scrubland gave way to a gashed landscape of trenches and moats, of mud chutes and standing pools of yellow water; which within a year, in its turn, gave way to the violent emerald of new turf, the Sunday morning roar of mowers and strimmers, the tinkling of the ice-cream vans, the trundling of gas barbecues over paving and the stench of searing meat.

The flat in Wexham had sold to the first people who saw it. Alison wondered, will they sense something: Morris glugging inside the hot-water tank, or murmuring in the drains? But they seemed delighted, and offered the full asking price.

“It seems so unfair,” Colette said, “when our flat in Whitton wouldn’t sell. Not even when we dropped the price.”

She and Gavin had sacked Sidgewicks, tried another agent; still no takers. Eventually, they had agreed Gavin should stay there, and buy her out by installments. “We have hopes the arrangement will be persuasive to Mrs. Waynflete,” his solicitor had written, “as we understand she is now living with a partner.” Colette had scrawled over the letter, Not that sort of partner!!! It was just for her own satisfaction that she wrote it; it was no business of Gavin’s, she thought, what kind of partnership she was in now.

On the day they moved from Wexham, Morris was fuming and snarling in a corner. “How can I move,” he said, “when I have given out this as my address? How will Nick find me, how will my old mates know where to come?” When the men came to take the pine dresser away, he lay on top of it to make it heavy. He infiltrated Al’s mattress and infused his spirit sulks among the fibres, so that it bucked and rippled in the men’s hands, and they almost dropped it in alarm. When the men slammed the tailgate and vaulted into the driver’s cab, they found their whole windscreen had been spattered with something green, viscid, and dripping. “What kind of pigeons do you have around here?” they said. “Vultures?”

As the Collingwood was Galleon’s top-of-the-range model, it had more gob-ons than any other house type in the development, more twiddles and teases, more gables and spindles; but most of them, Colette predicted, would fall off within the first six months. Down the hill they were still building, and yellow machines picked and pecked at the soil, their stiff bending necks strangely articulated, like the necks of prototype dinosaurs. Trucks jolted up with glue-on timbers of plastic oak, bound together in bundles like kindling. Swearing men in woolly hats unloaded paper-thin panels of false brickwork, which they pinned to the raw building blocks; they disembarked stick-on anchor motifs, and panels of faux pargetting with dolphin and mermaid designs. The beeping, roaring, and drilling began promptly at seven, each morning. Inside the house there were a few mistakes, like a couple of the internal doors being hung the wrong way around, and the Adam-style fireplace being off-centre. Nothing, Al said, that really affected your quality of life. Colette wanted to keep arguing with the builders till she got compensation, but Al said, let it go, what does it matter, just close the door on it. Colette said, I would but the frame’s warped.

The day their kitchen ceiling fell in, she strode off to the sales caravan, where Suzi was still selling off the last remaining units. She made a scene; punters fled back to their cars, thinking they’d had a lucky escape. But when she left Suzi and began splashing uphill, picking her way between stacked paving slabs and lengths of piping, she found that she was shaking.

The Collingwood stood at the top of a rise; its portholes stared out over the neighbours like blind eyes. Is this my life now? she thought. How will I ever meet a man? At Wexham there were one or two young bachelors she used to glimpse down by the bins. One had never met her eye and only grunted when she greeted him. The other was Gavin to the life and went about swinging his car keys around his forefinger; the sight of him had almost made her nostalgic. But the men who had moved into Admiral Drive were married with two kids. They were computer programmers, systems analysts. They drove minivans like square little houses on wheels. They wore jackets with flaps and zips that their wives chose for them from mail order catalogues. Already the postman could be seen, ploughing across the furrows carrying flat boxes containing these jackets, and splattered white vans bounced over the ruts, delivering gob-ons for their home computers. At weekend they were outside, wearing their jackets, constructing playhouses and climbing frames of primary-coloured plastic. They were hardly men at all, not men as Colette knew them; they were dutiful emasculates, squat and waddling under their burden of mortgage debt, and she despised them with an impartial, all-embracing spite. Sometimes she stood at her bedroom window, as the men drove away in the mornings, each edging his square-nosed vehicle cautiously into the muddy track; she watched them and hoped they got into a pileup on the M3, each folding neatly, fatally, into the back of the vehicle in front. She wanted to see their widows sitting in the road, daubing themselves with mud, wailing.