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

seldom be so effortful as this seemed to be, nor is the custard urged on with affirmative yells, nor do the cooks cry out when, in due course, the custard starts to boil over.
    â€œI don’t think we want to listen to this, do we?” Mr. Ransome said and switched over to Radio 3, where they came in on the reverent hush that preceded the arrival of Claudio Abbado.
    Later when they were in bed Mrs. Ransome said, “I suppose we’d better return that tape?”
    â€œWhat for?” said Mr. Ransome. “The tape is mine. In any case, we can’t. It’s wiped. I recorded over it.”
    This was a lie. Mr. Ransome had wanted to record over it, it’s true, but felt that whenever he listened to the music he would remember what lay underneath and this would put paid to any possible sublimity. So he had put the tape in the kitchen bin. Then, thinking about it as Mrs. Ransome was in the bathroom brushing her teeth, he went and delved among the potato peelings and old tea bags, and, picking off a tomato skin that had stuck to it, he hid the cassette in the bookcase behind a copy of
Salmon on Torts,
a hidey-hole where he also kept a cache of photographs of some suburban sexual acts, the legacy of a messy divorce case in Epsom that he had conducted a few years before. The bookcase had, of course, gone to Aylesbury along with everything else but had been returned intact, the hiding place seemingly undetected by Martin.
    Actually it had not been undetected at all: the photographs had been what he and Cleo had been laughing about on the tape in the first place.
    Not a secret from Martin, nor were the snaps a secret from Mrs. Ransome who, idly looking at the bookcase one afternoon and wondering what to cook for supper, had seen the title
Salmon on Torts
and thought it had a vaguely culinary sound to it. She had put the photographs back undisturbed but every few months or so would check to see that they were still there. When they were she felt somehow reassured.
    So sometimes now when Mr. Ransome sat in his chair with his earphones on listening to
The Magic Flute
it was not
The Magic Flute
he was listening to at all. Gazing abstractedly at his reading wife his ears were full of Martin and Cleo moaning and crying and taking it out on one another again and again and again. No matter how often he listened to the tape Mr. Ransome never ceased to be amazed by it; that two human beings could give themselves up so utterly and unreservedly to one another and to the moment was beyond his comprehension; it seemed to him miraculous.
    Listening to the tape so often he became every bit as familiar with it as with something by Mozart. He came to recognize Martin’s long intake of breath as marking the end of a mysterious bridging passage (Cleo was actually on hands and knees, Martin behind her) when the languorous andante (little mewings from the girl) accelerated into the percussive allegro assai (hoarse cries from them both) which in its turn gave way to an even more frantic coda, a sudden rallentando (“No, no, not yet,” she was crying, then “Yes, yes, yes”) followed by panting, sighing, silence and finally sleep. Not an imaginative man, Mr. Ransome nevertheless found himself thinking that if one built up a library of such tapes it would be possible to bestow on them the sexual equivalent of Köchel numbers, even trace the development of some sort of style in sexual intercourse, with early, middle and late periods, the whole apparatus of Mozartean musicology adapted to these new and thwacking rhythms.
    Such were Mr. Ransome’s thoughts as he sat across from his wife, who was having another stab at Barbara Pym. She knew he wasn’t listening to Mozart though there were few obvious signs and nothing so vulgar as a bulge in his trousers. No, there was just a look of strain on Mr. Ransome’s face, which was the very opposite of the look he had when he was listening to his favorite composer;