Chapter Text
They gave her back the coat in a bag.
That was the thing she would think about later, on the bus, and in the flat, and at three in the morning for most of a fortnight. Not the cell, not the food, not the eleven months of women shouting through concrete at other women. The bag. Clear plastic with a printed strip along the top and a number on the strip, and inside it, folded the way you fold a bedsheet, the coat she had been arrested in.
"Sign here," the officer said. "And here. And the bottom one."
His name was Perrin and he had been on discharges for six years and he had the aftershave of a man whose wife bought it in a set. He did not look at her. He had not looked at her once in eleven months, which she had at first taken as an insult and had come to understand was simply the whole of him, a man who had achieved a state of not looking at anybody.
She signed. Her signature had changed inside. It had gone small and upright, like a schoolgirl's, and she had noticed this in month four and had practised in the margins of a library paperback for three weeks trying to get the old one back, the long one, the one that had gone on twelve thousand cheques and four hundred garment tags, and it had not come back, and she had stopped.
"Property," Perrin said, and pushed the bag across.
"Thank you."
"Discharge grant." An envelope. "Forty-six pounds."
"How generous."
"That's the standard rate."
"I'm sure it is."
He turned the ledger round and tapped a line and she signed that too. Forty-six pounds. She had spent more than that on a bad lunch in Chelsea and sent half of it back. She put the envelope in the bag with the coat, because she had nowhere else to put it, and that was the second thing she would think about later.
"Right," Perrin said. "That's you."
⁂
There is a door at the end of it, and everyone imagines the door wrong.
They imagine gates. They imagine a great grey slab rolling back on rails with a klaxon going, and a woman walking out into weather with a bag over her shoulder while someone in a car flashes their lights. She had imagined it that way herself, and she was not a woman given to imagining things badly, and she had still got it wrong.
It was a fire door. It was a fire door in a corridor that smelled of floor polish, painted the green they paint corridors when they want you to feel that nothing much is happening, and Perrin pushed the bar with his hip and held it open and said, "Mind the step."
She minded the step.
Then she was outside, on a service road, in April, and the door shut behind her with the ordinary click of a door.
The car park held eleven cars. She counted them because counting was a habit she had picked up inside and would keep for the rest of her life. Beyond the car park was a fence, and beyond the fence was a roundabout, and beyond the roundabout was Britain, going about its business in the drizzle, entirely unaware that anything had been returned to it.
Nobody had come.
She had known nobody would come. She had known it in a professional way for four months, since the last of the letters stopped, and she had known it in the other way for about nine minutes, which was how long she stood on the service road with a plastic bag in her fist, watching the roundabout.
*Well.*
She took the coat out of the bag.
It had been red. It was still red, in the way that a thing kept folded in plastic for eleven months is still red, which is to say it was red and it was also a map of every fold, creased into squares like something out of a suitcase, and the pile had gone flat where the plastic had pressed it, and there was a bloom of grey along one shoulder that she looked at for a long time.
She had made that coat. Her hands, her pattern, forty hours of them, and a lining she had argued about with a supplier in Rome for six weeks.
She put it on. It smelled of the bag.
Then she walked to the roundabout with her plastic sheet in one hand and her forty-six pounds in the other, and she stood at a bus stop with a bent timetable behind cracked perspex, and a woman with a pushchair looked at her, and looked away, and looked back.
⁂
The bus came at 10:41, four minutes late, and she got on it and said, "The station, please," and the driver said, "Two twenty," and that was that.
She sat near the front because the back was where the shouting was and she had done eleven months of the shouting.
She was very good on buses. This was a thing she had learned about herself, and it had come as a surprise, because the last time she had been on a bus before all this had been in 1971, in Paris, in the rain, with a portfolio under her arm and no money, and she had promised herself on that bus that she would never be on another one. She had kept the promise for twenty-five years. Now here she was, and she found she could do it. You sat up straight. You looked out of the window at an angle that suggested the window was a great deal more interesting than the vehicle, and you held your bag on your lap the way you would hold a small dog, and you did not, at any point, look at the floor.
If you did it correctly, the bus was a car.
The driver was a car. The other passengers were traffic. The man across the aisle eating a sausage roll out of a paper bag at half past ten in the morning was a fact about the road, not a fact about her.
The countryside outside was doing its April thing, which she had never liked. She had said so in print, twice. Green was a colour for people with no imagination and April was a month for people with no nerve, all that hedging and apologising, all that not-quite. Give her November. Give her a wet black street at four in the afternoon with the lamps coming on. You could dress a woman for November.
She caught her reflection in the window, over a field, and looked at it, and the reflection was fine.
The hair was the hair. They had not taken that; they had not been able to, though a woman in reception on the first day had made a joke about it that got a laugh from three others, and had not made a second joke, ever, about anything, to anyone, in Cruella's hearing.
The face underneath the hair was where the eleven months had gone. Not lines. She had earned her lines and had never once considered removing them. It was the other thing, the thing she could see and could not name, which was that the face had stopped expecting to be looked at.
She turned away from the glass.
The man with the sausage roll had finished it and had begun, God help them all, to lick his fingers.
"Do you know," she said, "there is a bin."
He stopped licking.
"Just there. Behind you. Green, with a hinge. It was invented in 1875 by a man in Birmingham who could not bear to watch this."
He got off two stops early.
She felt better for about six minutes, which was the going rate.
⁂
At the station she bought a return she did not need because the return was thirty pence more than the single and she had the thirty pence and it made her feel like a person with a future.
The train had a table. She took a table. She put the bag on the seat beside her, and the coat stayed on, because taking it off would have meant looking at it in the light, and she was not ready to do that in public.
Somewhere past Reading she took the envelope out and counted the money, which she had already counted twice, and it was still forty-six pounds. Two twenties, a five, and a one. The one was very soft. It had been through a great many hands.
*Forty-six pounds and a ruined coat.*
She had, at the peak, employed eighty-one people. There had been a building with her name in brass on it and a girl at the front whose entire job was to say that name into a telephone in a voice like a struck glass. Forty-one countries. A retrospective at a museum in Antwerp that she had attended in a dress that made a Belgian critic write nine hundred words about it, seven hundred of which were rude and two hundred of which she had cut out and kept.
Then a house in the country, and a woman called Anita who had drawn spots on a page, and a hundred and one dogs, and a tape recorder in a room with two men in it who had worked for her for nineteen years and who could not get their statements out fast enough.
She put the money away.
Out of the window the fields turned to sheds and the sheds turned to the backs of houses, and the backs of houses are where a country keeps the truth about itself, and she looked at all of it: the trampolines, the sofa in a garden, the satellite dishes going up like mushrooms after a wet week, a whole nation in the middle of buying things it could not afford and being pleased about it.
There was an election coming. She had seen the posters at the station. Everyone looked delighted about something and she could not have said what.
⁂
The address was in a street off the Harrow Road, which she had gone through in a car perhaps two hundred times without once wondering what it was like to stop.
The letting had been arranged by a solicitor who no longer returned calls, out of the last money there was, and it was on the first floor above a shop that sold plumbing supplies, and the entrance to it was a green door at the side with three bells and two names, and neither of the names was hers.
She stood on the pavement with the bag and looked up at the windows.
Four days. That was the arrangement. The last four days of her sentence had been served here, in a manner of speaking, because the flat had been paid up from the first of the month while she was still inside, so the flat had been hers for four days before she had.
The key was under a paving slab by the drain, exactly where the solicitor's girl had said it would be, in an envelope that had gone soft in the wet.
The stairs smelled of the shop below, which is to say of putty and cold metal.
The flat was one room and a kitchen and a bathroom with a window that did not open. There was a bed with a mattress on it and no sheets, a table, two chairs that did not match, a kettle, an armchair the colour of a bad tooth, and a television on a stand. Somebody had left a spider plant on the sill and it had died, and somebody else had watered it after it died, because there was a ring on the paint.
She stood in the middle of it with the bag in her hand.
Then she did the thing she had been planning to do since Reading, which was to hang up the coat, and there was nowhere to hang the coat. There was a hook on the back of the door with a wire hanger on it. She looked at the wire hanger for a while.
She put the coat on the hanger and the hanger on the hook and stepped back, and the coat hung there in a rented room above a plumbing shop with the creases of the bag still in it and the flat grey bloom on the shoulder, and it was the only thing in the room that had ever been to Antwerp.
She sat down in the armchair.
The chair had a smell. Not a bad one. Somebody else's, which was worse.
Outside, a lorry was reversing, and it had one of those beepers on it, and it beeped for a long time and then stopped and then started again.
She sat in the chair in the coat with the money in the pocket and the bag on the floor by her feet, and the light went from grey to a slightly different grey, and she did not turn on the lamp, and at some point in the afternoon a woman in the flat above began to hoover.
At six she stood up, because a person stands up at six.
She filled the kettle. She had no tea. She turned the kettle on anyway and stood in the kitchen and listened to it come up to the boil, and when it clicked off she poured the water into a cup and held the cup and drank the hot water and it was, she would concede, hot.
Then she opened the plastic bag, which she had not fully emptied, and took out the last thing in it.
It was a scrapbook. Blue, A3, the sort a child keeps. A woman on her landing inside had made it for her over about seven months, out of newspapers, out of the papers that came in and got passed round until they went soft, and she had presented it in February with the shy violence of someone giving a gift to a person who frightens them.
Every page was Cruella.
**FUR TYCOON JAILED.** **THE COAT SHE'LL NEVER WEAR.** **DE VIL: THE FALL OF A HOUSE.** A cartoon from the Standard in which she was a stick of liquorice with a cigarette holder. Four photographs of herself being walked from a van, in three of which she looked magnificent and in one of which she did not, and the one in which she did not had been used by eleven papers.
She sat back down in the armchair with the scrapbook open on her knees, in a rented room, in a coat that had been folded for eleven months, and she read about herself until the light was gone.
Her name in seventy-two point. Her name in a headline four inches high.
That was the last time it had been printed in anything larger than a docket.
She turned the pages slowly, the way you eat when there is not going to be any more.