Free The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett Page A

invitation Mrs. Ransome went in.
    There was no one in the hall and she waited uncertainly, smiling helpfully in case someone was watching. The hall was identical in shape to theirs but twice the size and done up like the lobby in the same blond wood and faintly stippled walls. They must have knocked through, she thought, taken in the flat next door, taken in all the flats probably, the whole of the top floor one flat.
    â€œI brought a letter,” she said, more loudly than if there had been someone there. “It came by mistake.”
    There was no sound.
    â€œI think it’s from South America. Peru. That is if the name’s Hanson. Anyway,” she said desperately, “I’ll just put it down then go.”
    She was about to put the letter down on a cube of transparent Perspex which she took to be a table when she heard behind her an exhausted sigh and turned to find that the door had closed. But as the door behind her closed so, with a mild intake of breath, the door in front of her opened, and through it she saw another doorway, this one with a bar across the top, and suspended from the bar a young man.
    He was pulling himself up to the bar seemingly without much effort, and saying his score out loud. He was wearing gray track suit bottoms and earphones and that was all. He had reached eleven. Mrs. Ransome waited, still holding up the letter and not quite sure where to look. It was a long time since she had been so close to someone so young and so naked, the trousers slipping down low over his hips so that she could see the thin line of blond hair climbing the flat belly to his navel. He was tiring now and the last two pull-ups, nineteen and twenty, cost him great effort and after he had almost shouted “Twenty” he stood there panting, one hand still grasping the bar, the earphones low round his neck. There was a faint graze of hair under his arms and some just beginning on his chest and like Martin he had the same squirt of hair at the back though his was longer and twisted into a knot.
    Mrs. Ransome thought she had never seen anyone so beautiful in all her life.
    â€œI brought a letter,” she began again. “It came by mistake.”
    She held it out to him but he made no move to take it, so she looked around for somewhere to put it down.
    There was a long refectory table down the middle of the room and by the wall a sofa that was nearly as long, but these were the only objects in the room that Mrs. Ransome would have called proper furniture. There were some brightly colored plastic cubes scattered about which she supposed might serve as occasional tables, or possibly stools. There was a tall steel pyramid with vents that seemed to be a standard lamp. There was an old-fashioned pram with white-walled tires and huge curved springs. On one wall was a dray horse collar and on another a cavalier’s hat and next to it a huge blown-up photograph of Lana Turner.
    â€œShe was a film star,” the young man said. “It’s an original.”
    â€œYes, I remember,” Mrs. Ransome said.
    â€œWhy, did you know her?”
    â€œOh no,” Mrs. Ransome said. “Anyway, she was American.”
    The floor was covered in a thick white carpet which she imagined would show every mark though there were no marks that she could see. Still, it didn’t seem to Mrs. Ransome to add up, this room, and with one of the walls glass, giving out onto a terrace, it felt less like a room than an unfinished window display in a department store, a bolt of tweed flung casually across the table what it needed somehow to make sense.
    He saw her looking.
    â€œIt’s been in magazines,” he said. “Sit down,” and he took the letter from her.
    He sat at one end of the sofa and she sat at the other. He put his feet up and if she had put her feet up too there would still have been plenty of room between them. He looked at the letter, turning it over once or twice without opening