Read Online The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett - Free Book Online

the books of Jane Austen.
    Mr. Ransome fared better than his wife, for although he had had to reimburse the insurance company over their original check he was able to claim that having already ordered some new speakers (he hadn’t) this should be taken into account and allowance made, which it duly was, thus enabling him to invest in some genuinely state-of-the-art equipment.
    From time to time over the next few months traces of Martin and Cleo’s brief occupation would surface—a contraceptive packet (empty) that had been thrust under the mattress, a handkerchief down the side of the settee and, in one of the mantel-piece ornaments, a lump of hard brown material wrapped in silver paper. Tentatively Mrs. Ransome sniffed it, then donned her Marigold gloves and put it down the lavatory, assuming that was where it belonged, though it was only after several goes that it was reluctantly flushed, Mrs. Ransome sitting meanwhile on the side of the bath, waiting for the cistern to refill, and wondering how it came to be on the mantelpiece in the first place. A joke possibly, though not one she shared with Mr. Ransome.
    Strange hairs were another item that put in regular appearances, long fair ones which were obviously Martin’s, darker crinklier ones she supposed must be Cleo’s. The incidence of these hairs wasn’t split evenly between Mr. and Mrs. Ransome’s respective wardrobes; indeed, since Mr. Ransome didn’t complain about them, she presumed he never found any, as he would certainly have let her know if he had.
    She, on the other hand, found them everywhere—among her dresses, her coats, her underwear, his hairs as well as hers, and little ones as well as long ones, so that she was left puzzling over what it was they could have been up to that wasn’t constrained by the normal boundaries of gender and propriety. Had Martin worn her knickers on his head, she wondered (in one pair there were three hairs); had the elastic on her brassiere always been as loose as it was now (two hairs there, one fair, one dark)?
    Still, sitting opposite Mr. Ransome in his earphones of an evening, she could contemplate with equanimity, and even a small thrill, that she had shared her underclothes with a third party. Or two third parties possibly. “You don’t mean a third party,” Mr. Ransome would have said, but this was another argument for keeping quiet.
    There was one reminder of the recent past, though, that they were forced to share, if only by accident. They had had their supper one Saturday evening after which Mr. Ransome was planning to record a live broadcast of
Il Seraglio
on Radio 3. Mrs. Ransome, reflecting that there was never anything on TV worth watching on a Saturday night, had settled down to read a novel about some lackluster infidelities in a Cotswold setting while Mr. Ransome prepared to record. He had put in a tape that he thought was blank but checking it on the machine was startled to find that it began with a peal of helpless laughter. Mrs. Ransome looked up. Mr. Ransome listened long enough to detect that there were two people laughing, a man and a woman, and since they showed no sign of stopping was about to switch it off when Mrs. Ransome said, “No, Maurice. Leave it. This might be a clue.”
    So they listened in silence as the laughter went on, almost uninterrupted, until after three or four minutes it began to slacken and break up and whoever it was who was still laughing was left panting and breathless, this breathlessness gradually modulating into another sound, the second subject as it were, a groan and then a cry leading to a rhythmic pumping as stern and as purposeful as the other had been silly and lighthearted. At one point the microphone was moved closer to catch a sound that was so moist and wet it hardly seemed human.
    â€œIt sounds,” said Mrs. Ransome, “like custard boiling,” though she knew that it wasn’t. Making custard must