The Tenement by Iain Crichton Smith Read Free Book Online

to shift any more. He was tired of shifting, and eventually she had acquiesced. So that they had to endure the Camerons. Trevor believed that it was Cameron with his din who had killed his wife. She had died of cancer.
    One day shortly after Julia died the minister came to see him. He was a stooped man who looked like a superannuated scholar and who rode a bicycle.
    â€œWe have to endure what God sends us,” he said. “Your wife used to do the flowers. She asked me to put up a prayer for you if anything happened to her.”
    â€œOh,” said Trevor.
    â€œWe never know the day nor the hour,” said the minister. “She was sometimes embarrassed because she didn’t have a proper garden. I think she would have liked a garden. And then again she often talked of Devon.”
    You old bastard, thought Trevor. You ancient hypocrite. He offered tea and biscuits which the minister had taken.
    â€œIt’s an awful thing,” said the minister, “but women compete about the flowers and even the playing of the organ.” The last time Trevor had been in church he had thought that the organ pipes looked like atomic missiles laid end to end. As the minister inveighed against nuclear warfare, he had stroked back a stray curl.
    â€œI hope you’re managing,” he said to Trevor.
    â€œYes,” said Trevor. In fact he was inordinately practical for a poet. It was he who had wired the whole flat having lifted up the floorboards first before the carpets had been put down. He had also torn out a black range and put in a tiled fireplace. But of course he was absent-minded about his clothes. He wore a crushed hat always, and the same blue suit, shiny from use. Julia had long given up advising him on his dress.
    Shortly before she died she looked for something. He found her wandering about the flat in her nightgown at three in the morning. But whatever she was searching for she stopped doing so when she saw that he was staring at her palely from the bars of red and white pyjamas.
    He watched the TV. Boycott hadn’t scored for an hour. The cat which he had found at the bins one morning, and which he had adopted, was sitting blinking on the window sill. He had called it Blackie. It caught mice around the back of the house, and sometimes, to his disgust, birds. Once he had taken a bird away from it and released it. The cat had gone frantically searching for it all over the flat. But the bird had flown away on its second life.
    Shortly after his wife died Mrs Floss, who stayed next door, rang the doorbell.
    â€œAbout the light,” she said.
    â€œThe light?” said Trevor.
    â€œYes, every second week you put the light on. It’s your turn this week. Julia knew all about it.” He didn’t like her calling his wife Julia with such familiarity.
    â€œOh,” he said. “Well, I could leave it on every night if you like. Otherwise, I might forget.”
    â€œNot at all,” she said. Her false teeth glittered at him, filling her mouth. She was a fat woman who swanned about in a haze of drink. She was a widow: her husband had owned an hotel.
    â€œOh no, that wouldn’t do at all,” she said.
    â€œAll right then, I’ll put my light on for my own week,” he said. “Is there anything else?”
    â€œThe stair,” she said.
    â€œWhat about the stair?”
    â€œIt has to be washed every second week.” So this was what Julia had been spending her life doing, seeing to trivialities like the stair and the light while he was writing his poetry.
    â€œJulia used pipeclay,” said Mrs Floss. “I don’t know where she got it from. But I know she used pipe clay.”
    â€œPipe clay?” said Trevor.
    â€œYes, that’s right.”
    So he made sure that the light was on every second week and that the stair was cleaned every second week. Responsibilities were descending on him.
    One night he heard a voice in the corridor. He