Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel Page B

hair was coiled about his dome like a woolly snake. Wherever did he get his wing collars, Sholto asked him.
    “Charity,” said Crisp briskly.
    “Myself I have fits,” Sholto explained. “Crisp’s life has been different. He was the verger once at St. Peter’s.”
    Crisp cleared his throat. “I left undone those things that ought to be done.”
    “What things?”
    “My flies. Later, a gas tap.”
    “He is one of those people who do not know what came over them,” Sholto said. “He lived to tell the tale, though he leaves me to tell it. They put it in the Reporter : SEX BEAST VERGER : VICAR SPEAKS .”
    “Have you ever heard of entrapment?” Emmanuel Crisp asked. “It was what they call an agent provocateur . She said she was from the Women’s Institute. She wanted to go into the choir stalls, and see the organ.”
    “You know you took her wrong,” Sholto said doggedly. “You did it on purpose.”
    “She touched my sleeve.” He shuddered. “I often pray for her.”
    “The vicar never spoke up for him. He’s left now.”
    “He’s dead,” Crisp said. “Or ought to be.”
    As a group, they got together in the day room. It was a new idea, to mix the boys and girls together. Autumn had come; but next year, Effie said, they would meet out of doors where there was more privacy. God willing, Philip added piously. Emmanuel led them in a verse or two of “The Church’s One Foundation” then they broke up for tea.

    After this came a period of considerable longueurs. Winter closed in over the fields. She stood by the window of Greyshott Ward and watched the rain beating against it. It was a year before she was put into a charabanc and taken in a great herd of chattering fellow patients to the shops in town. The journey took thirty minutes, and the excitement mounted with every mile. They went into a sweet-shop, and into a hardware store where the patients looked at bread-bins and said which colour they would have if they had any bread of their own. She looked around and was very tempted, but she stole nothing at all. Afterwards, back on Greyshott, she was praised up for her good behaviour.
    She had special clothes for the outing, given her out of a cardboard box kept in the nurses’ room: a blue frock with six buttons, and a mackintosh that was only a bit small. Back on Greyshott she was given her old smock again. A nurse stood over her waiting to take the outside clothes away. When she came to take her dress off, she could only account for five buttons. The nurse made the noise “tt-tt” and blew a little through her teeth. It was something only nurses should do; if patients did it they got shouted at. She scooped up the dress and the mackintosh and dropped them back into the box. “Come on, get dressed, you idle sod,” she said. “I can’t do it for you.” Muriel saw the dress and the mackintosh disappearing, the box borne away.
    She sat on the end of her bed, rebellious. “Tt-tt,” she said, and wagged her head slowly, and cast her eyes to heaven. By watching other people, by stealing their expressions and practising them, she was adding to her repertoire. I was no one when I came here, she thought; but after a few years of this, there’s no saying how many people I’ll be.
     
    Effie was often Her Majesty the Queen. They went along with her, lining up by the ward door. She wore a pink plastic shower cap that had been brought in from the outside by some long-forgotten visitor. She offered them each the tips of her fingers, and her very sweetest smile.
    “And how long have you been at Fulmers Moor?”
    “Ten years, Ma’am.”
    “Indeed? You must have seen many changes in your time?”
    Between official engagements, Effie sat and looked at the wall a great deal. From time to time a ripple of emotion made her face quiver. She would put a hand up to stop it, and then she would leap up in a frenzied pursuit of the nearest nurse. “I want my Largactil,” she would bleat, “I want my Modecate,