Free Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel Page A

used, about lady doctors who did not snub them and relatives who did not pester.
    “Did you think so? She left. Went to work in a bank, if I remember. I think she got married or something.”
    They shot out of the main gate and onto the road to town. Muriel didn’t look back.
     
    She started off as a cleaner, pulling a little trolley with her brush and her mop and her scouring powder and her special bucket. She had her name written on the trolley: MURIEL . She slopped her water about the corridors and under the tables in the canteen; she tipped her powder down the lavatories, and sang while she plied her mop. She learned to sing with a cigarette in her mouth, because cigarettes were what the factory made, and any worker was at liberty to pluck the finished article from the machines and puff away during the tea break and the half-hour for lunch.
    At the end of the first week Maureen said to her: “Muriel, love, I don’t know what to say. Look at your brush, it’s all worn down to stumps. Have you been chewing it?” Maureen sighed heavily. “There’s a wheel coming off MURIEL . You’ve got through as much powder as I use in three months. And look at your Eeziwipes; they’re all over the place.”
    Muriel stood looking down at her feet.
    “No point putting your bottom lip out,” Maureen said. “I don’t know, where’ve you been all your life? I suppose some can clean and some can’t, and that’s all there is to it.”
    “Am I discharged then?”
    “That’s not up to me, duck. There’s enough on the dole as it is. On your own at home, are you?”
    “I am at the moment. But I’m expecting my mother.”
    “Ah, that’s nice. Well, look, lovey, buck up now. Perhaps we can get you on Ripping.”
     
    That first weekend of freedom, Muriel paid a visit to her old home. It was quite a distance from the room that Miss Tidmarsh had found for her. She saw buses going about the streets, but she didn’t know how to get one to go in the right direction. So she walked; she had nothing else to do.
    Considering how many years had passed, the district hadn’t changed much. She turned off Lauderdale Road, where she used to wait for the minibus. She paused for a few moments before the house where the fox terrier used to live, and took a good look. The stained glass and the net curtains had gone. The woodwork was painted white, and there was a panelled front door of polished wood, with a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head; and a carriage lamp on the wall. It looked very smart. If the dog came out, I could kick it, she thought. She turned the corner. Buckingham Avenue had hardly altered at all. Each house stood set back from the road behind its neat privet hedge. Peering down between the houses, she saw the thick clumps of rhododendrons, the striped lawns, the trellised archways for climbing roses. At number 2, her home, there were big stone urns on either side of the door; flowering plants spilled out of them, and a hanging basket swung from the porch. The shrubs had been cleared from the side of the house, and they had put up a flat-roofed extension, bright red brick against the pebble-dash. The windows gleamed. She walked to the gate and traced the number with her finger. She would never have believed that her mother’s house could look like this. She felt lonely.
    She hung about for a while on the other side of the road, waiting to see if anyone would come out. Other people lived in the house, and she knew who; that monster of lust called Colin Sidney, who had seized his chance to buy it up cheap and move in next door to his scheming sister. What about the spare room, she wondered. Had there been an eviction, or were they still forced to keep the door locked?
    Muriel waited for an hour. No one came in or out of number 2. Her feet hurt and she was thirsty. Presently she set off to walk back to her lodgings and sleep until it was time to go to the factory again. I can come again next week, she thought.
     
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