"The Clothes They Stood Up In"

[fiefoe]

The title refers to the premises of this story: a tidy, childless middle-aged couple return home for the opera and find their flat stripped bare. Alan Bennett's prose starts out almost as colorless as his characters, so one is hard put to care, but double spacing lures one's eyes forward most effectively. (The story is even shorter than "How I Became Stupid".)

The couple are almost caricatures. ('Marriage, to Mrs. Ransome, had often seemed a kind of parenthesis.') The husband loves only Mozart and seldom uses his wife's 'Christian name except as a form of blunt instrument.' The wife, meanwhile, is so out of touch that she imagines an office park to be something akin to 'French chateaux taken over by the German High Command bustle with new life.'

Mrs. Ransome turns out to be the more sympathetic one, who finds herself missing not so much her belongings as 'her particular paths through them'. She lost the green bobble which served to remind her to switch the immersion heater on, so 'once Mr. Ransome had scalded his hand'. After the burglary, she had a crop of small adventures - a visit from a clueless counselor, purchases at Mr. Anwar's, daytime TV.

But soon their possessions turn up in the exactly the same condition, and she fears that 'she now has been robbed of the chance to transcend that loss'. An encounter with her upstairs neighbor follows, whose perfect toes were 'long, square-cut... they looked as if at a pinch they could deputize for the hands' and whose temperamental ex, currently in Peru, ('"Anyway, she's history." ... Mrs Ransome felt that she was geography too, a bit.') is behind the mysterious robbery.

All this serves as a kind of apprenticeship in the end: 'Now, (the new widow) thinks, I can start.'