Listening in the Dusk (21 page)

Cyril yawned, and pushed his Goodwin’s
Greek
Grammar
to one side of Alice’s makeshift table. It had been a rotten day, one way and another. First, the Bike Run had ended in disappointment. Instead of beating his own record by at least a step or two, as he’d confidently expected after all that practice, he had done worse then he’d done for weeks; falling off almost at once three times in succession, while they all laughed, and called him Cissie. Not unkindly, exactly, it was only a joke; but all the same, they
did
call him Cissie. Then, afterwards, coming here for his Greek lesson, what should he find but that Alice was in a hurry because of some rotten dinner-party she had to go out to, and so could only give him his exact hour, with no time for interesting conversation either before or after. Normally, they had all sorts of discussion triggered off by something in Herodotus; whether Cyrus, stirring up disaffection, was really just like Mr Scargill, only lucky? Did the Oracles actually influence events, as well as predicting them, rather like the Opinion Polls? Could there really have been giant ants in the Arabian desert that could run as fast as camels? That sort of thing.

But this evening, there’d been no time for anything of the sort, and of course he hadn’t been invited to stay for supper either. True, Alice had told him, before she left, that he was welcome to go down to the kitchen and help himself to anything in the fridge that was labelled ‘A’, but this was a pretty gloomy prospect, all on his own. ‘A-level’ food: but what was the point of making a silly pun inside your own head when there was no one there to laugh at it?

Oh well. He might as well stay for a bit, and get on with some homework. There was no point in going home, his parents were out playing Bridge again, so there wouldn’t be a proper meal
there, either, merely another bleak instruction — just like Alice’s — about the contents of the fridge. Also, the baby-sitter would be there, the new one with the round stupid face and a ridiculous froth of yellow hair that seemed to need fiddling with all the time. Cyril found her terribly boring. She wouldn’t even watch television, this one, she preferred to sit fiddling with her hair and making him feel that he ought to be talking to her.

Languidly, he reached down for his school bag, and pulled out his geometry book. Might as well get that over with; but while he was scrabbling in the further depths for his protractor, which seemed to have detached itself from the main box of instruments, he became aware of voices on the stairs. Hetty’s voice, eager as always, bubbling over with sympathetic concern for someone else’s business, and also another voice, a man’s voice new to Cyril. He might be anyone.

On the landing just below, the footsteps came to a halt, and the voices too. There was a sharp ‘rat-tat’ on a door, the door of that sad girl, Mary something, it must be. A short silence followed, then the resumption of voices. By now, Cyril could hear what they were saying.

“I’m afraid she doesn’t seem to be in,” Hetty was apologising. “She works now, you know, a nice little job, but I don’t know when she finishes. But I’ll tell you what, I think I know where she keeps it, up in the other lady’s room. She’s out too, but I’m sure she won’t mind …” and now the footsteps started up again, really loud this time, on the uncarpeted stairs leading up to the attics.

Neither flight nor fight being a viable option, Cyril froze into immobility. He didn’t feel like socialising, certainly not with whoever this was, and so he kept his head down and his shoulders hunched against whatever was going to happen.

Nothing much did; or nothing that concerned him, anyway. They seemed slightly surprised to find him there. Well, naturally, since they’d walked in without knocking they’d had no warning of his presence, but that was their look out. At least they didn’t try to engage him in conversation, beyond a “Well, my
goodness!”
from Hetty and a perfunctory and dismissive “Good evening” from the visitor, a large, ugly man with bent shoulders,
roughly the age that adults usually were, and intent to the point of rudeness on his immediate purpose.

“It’s under here,” Hetty was saying, bending over the box-built sofa. “I saw they’d got it out of here when they were sorting it all out, and I know she wants you to have it, because she told me she was doing it for a friend who was in a hurry for it, his thesis or something … She told me you’d be calling … Ah, here we are,” and in triumph she dragged out the cardboard box that supported one end of the couch. “Here, you take it, it’s a bit heavy for me …”

The man barely thanked her. Greedily, he stooped for the box, and grabbing it in both arms made for the door. Here,
remembering
his manners as one might remember to step over an annoying obstacle, he did throw a hasty word of thanks to Hetty over his shoulder, and then set off down the stairs with clumsy haste, easily outdistancing Hetty who stumbled in his wake, clutching the banisters and trying hospitably to delay his departure by such inducements as she could think up on the spur of the moment, from a nice cup of tea to the possibility that Mary — “‘Imogen’ as you call her, I’ll never remember to call her that myself, I’m sure” — might well be back any minute, and would be awfully
disappointed
to have missed him …

But he only hurried on the faster. Cyril heard Hetty’s hospitable voice fade into an uneven wailing towards the lower regions of the house; and then the front door slammed and that seemed to be that.

Cyril was growing hungry. He waited for a few minutes to make sure that the commotion, whatever it was, had completely died down, and then set off for the kitchen to see what he could find. Rather to his annoyance, he found Miss Dorinda still at the cooker, stirring this and that in little pans, although it was already twenty to eight. Wasn’t she supposed to be finished by half past seven? Evidently, the same thought must have crossed her mind, too, for she had whipped round in righteous indignation as he came through the door, had opened her mouth on a reprimand, and had then caught sight of the time. By a bare ten minutes, the bottom had fallen out of her grievance. It was maddening. Surely there was
something
she could tell him not to do …?

But no; for by now Hetty had arrived too, and Hetty hardly ever allowed anyone to be told not to do things, certainly not Cyril, who by now was rather a pet of hers. Seeing him now, rummaging in the fridge for such oddments of cheese, bacon scraps and margarine as might turn out to be Alice’s, she immediately put her foot down and urged him, if he didn’t mind the bones, to share with her the remains of a delicious Irish stew.

Delicious it was; and of course Cyril didn’t mind the bones. Actually, there were some rather interesting ones, the upper neck vertebrae, which looked exactly like faces when you’d picked them clean of meat and stood them up on end; but when he held one up for admiration, pointing out the eyes, the mouth, even the little projections that looked like ears, Miss Dorinda made a face of such disgust and aversion as quite took him aback. And not only this, but at almost exactly the same moment Hetty, too — most uncharacteristically — gave a little cry of dismay.

“Your
hand
, Cyril! Whatever have you done to your hand?”

He’d grazed it, that was all. Nothing to make a fuss about. Falling off a bike, he explained nonchalantly, and anyway it had stopped hurting.

All the same, a fuss was made. Hetty insisted on iodine, or, rather, tried to insist on it, the force of her insistence being sadly weakened by the fact that she couldn’t find any, search as she would. Weed-killer, worm-pills, mango chutney, nasal spray; you name it, she had it, every damn thing except iodine.

In counterpoint to all this, Miss Dorinda was setting herself to improve the occasion.

“You see, Cyril?” she admonished. “You see what happens? Didn’t I tell you you’d get hurt one of these days, going around with those awful boys? I know those flats; you’ll get
blood-poisoning
, I wouldn’t be surprised, cutting yourself on those filthy stairs … You ought to see a doctor, get one of those injections, tetanus and that …”

And then, as the search for the iodine continued, and Cyril resumed picking at his delectable bones as if nothing had happened, she felt provoked to continue with her theme:

“It’s bad company you’re getting into, Cyril, one of these days you’ll be sorry. It’s got a bad name, that estate, that’s where the muggings go on, and the robbings and the stabbings. Myself, I wouldn’t go there, not even by daylight, not if they paid me!”

They wouldn’t pay her of course, it was just a silly turn of speech. What they paid
her
for was to go back and forth, back and forth, day after day, month after month, year after year, along the same safe streets at the same safe hours to the same safe job; never any change, never anything different, all the time getting older and older and greyer and greyer and more and more disapproving. This, then, was the ultimate reward for not getting into bad company …

The front door slammed, and a few seconds later Mary was in the room, brandishing a frozen quihe which had come her way in the course of her duties, and asking who would like to share it? It was too large, she said, just for her.

Cyril, despite the Irish stew, was by no means unwilling to help her out; and while it heated up in the oven, Mary regaled them all with an account of her day; about the customers who never had their money ready, and even worse ones who wanted to pay by credit-card for one tin of cat-food and a tube of toothpaste; and the puzzling fact that so very few of them ever counted their change, or gave even a glance at the detailed and accurate receipts spewed out so patiently by the machine …

The quiche was OK; not as good as the Irish stew, though of course he wouldn’t say so, and by the time they’d finished, it was nearly time for the nine o’clock News. Hetty particularly wanted to watch it, she said, because of that actress, what was her name, getting some sort of an award for whatever her part was in that film, what was it called, that there’d been some kind of a fuss about.

The TV set, being rather a nuisance in the kitchen, had found its way into the absent Mr Singh’s room on the ground floor, and thither Hetty made her way, followed, for lack of anything better to do, by the rest of the party. Mary had hesitated a moment — she had some washing to do, she said — but urged by Hetty, she came along with the others; as did Cyril, not because he cared about the News particularly, but because it was a way of putting
off the time when he would have to return home to the boring baby-sitter. Miss Dorinda came because she always enjoyed a nice sit-down after her long day on her feet, and also, in the case of TV, there was always a chance of being shocked by something.

It was a cosy little gathering. The splendid two-bar electric fire that actually worked was fetched from Brian’s room — he was out playing at a concert, or something, and so couldn’t possibly mind — and the four of them had just managed to settle themselves in a comfortable circle round the set by the time the News was to begin.

“Alice! Thank goodness you’re back! Oh, thank
goodness
! They’ve gone
mad,
Alice, every last one of them, they’ve gone absolutely raving bananas … That poor girl sobbing her heart out, and the boy pounding up and down the house, calling out to her, and the telephone never stops going, and everyone on about a package gone missing … And now she’s gone off in a mini-cab in floods of tears, and no money on her I wouldn’t be surprised … I don’t know, nobody tells me anything. And now there’s that boy’s mother ringing up asking where is he, why isn’t he home yet, and
I
don’t know, how should I? I don’t even know why he’s here, do I, let alone why he isn’t! And on top of all this, as if all this wasn’t enough, someone’s been helping themselves to Miss Dorinda’s yoghurt and left her a
strawberry-flavour
one instead, and if there’s one thing Miss Dorinda can’t stand it’s flavoured yoghurt … Oh, Alice, what a mercy you’re home at last, now we’ll get a bit of sense hammered into it!”

It seemed an optimistic prediction. Rushing home through the rainy night, just failing to flag down taxis, just missing departing buses, Alice had been preparing herself either to break the frightening news to Mary, or, if she had already heard it, to offer what consolation and support it was in her power to give.

Well, Mary
had
heard the news, that was beyond doubt. But what then? Where had she gone? And why? What did she think she could do in the face of this alarming new development? What could she even
want
to do, so repeatedly had she asserted that her brother was out of her life for ever, that the whole tragedy was something she intended to turn her back on and try to escape?

What had changed her mind, if changed it was? Assuredly,
tonight’s revelation was startling and disturbing in the extreme, but surely a lesser tragedy, by any standards, than the original crimes themselves …

“A cup of tea,” Hetty was saying now, in something more like her normal voice; and Alice, aware suddenly of how cold and wet she was — her hair, her scarf, her shoes all soaked — roused herself to follow Hetty down to the warm kitchen. Not that she wanted a cup of tea — she was wondering already how she would manage to get it down — but there was something obligatory about it, which she and Hetty both recognised. It was bigger than both of them, this ritual cup of tea, this seal set on disaster, recognised by all, from broken-hearted widows to earthquake victims dragged out of ruins.

Under the harsh kitchen light, Alice could see that Hetty had been crying. Her plump, kindly face, usually so contented and full of all-purpose benevolence, was strained and streaky with uneven pallor; her hair, never very tidy, was standing up all ways as if she really
had
been “tearing her hair”. Usually looking young for whatever her age was, tonight she looked old, for whatever it was.

“If only she’d
said
something!” Hetty wailed, slamming the kettle down noisily on to the gas-ring. “There we were, all sitting cosily round the telly, as snug as can be, and all of a sudden she leaps up as if she’d been shot, and rushes upstairs. Then Cyril, he rushes up after her … I heard their voices … something or other, I don’t know. He was telling her something, or she was telling him … Anyway, down she came, in floods of tears, and grabbing the telephone. I wish now I’d … but how could I, not knowing anything? It’s set her right back, you know, whatever it is, that’s the shame of it. Just when she was getting so much better — haven’t you noticed? — a different girl these last few days. Only this evening I was noticing it, it did my heart good, it really did, watching her enjoy that bit of pastry stuff this evening. And a bit of colour in her face too, and having a laugh about that job of hers … And now
this
has to happen! I could’ve cried when I saw her face as she went out the door, all white and pinched again, like it was right at the beginning …

“I couldn’t get a word out of her, not a word. If only she’d
said
something, Alice, if only she’d
told
me. But such a state she was in, I can’t help wondering if she knew herself what she was doing, where she meant to go …”