Listening in the Dusk (4 page)

Was this the last time — the very last time — that they had laughed like this? Laughed in such an ecstasy of shared mockery that it was almost like an ecstasy of love?

It was hard to believe now that it was this same Rodney, this same beloved husband who, not many months later, had been leaning back against those same cushions, explaining gravely to Alice that he was in love with Ivy, that she was a very wonderful person, and that he wanted to marry her.

Oh, but it was cold, cold! The thin army blankets with which the bed was supplied seemed to help not at all. Even with her winter coat still on, even with her boots, the dank chill of the room was getting to her very bones. Draughts whistled in from the winter blackness outside, not only through the ill-fitting dormer window, but through mysterious cracks along the
skirting-boards
; the ancient bridal drapery over the motor bike stirred and quivered, showing up the rusty stains of long ago.

Such cold was not to be endured. She must go down all those stairs and look for her landlady in the basement. Ask for more blankets. For a hot-water bottle. Some kind of heating, an electric fire, or something.

Oh, and a hot bath! How wonderful that would be! Mention had been made of a bathroom, albeit two or three floors down.

“A bath? But of course, dearie. Any time. As many baths as you like. The only thing is, Alice, the geyser seems to be in one of its moods this evening. It gets like that sometimes, it won’t light straight away, and then you get this great big pop, makes you jump out of your skin. I’d better come up with you dear, and see how it’s doing. Sometimes, you know, it won’t light at all, and then we have to wait for Brian to come in, he does something to it with a knife, and then it’s all right for a bit. Mare—ee!” she yelled suddenly, turning towards the stairs. “Mare—ee! Where’s Brian? Is he coming back tonight?”

A distant voice, incomprehensible to Alice, could be heard answering at somewhat greater length than the question would seem to warrant; and though Alice could not make out the words, the peevish tone in which they were uttered was unmistakable.

“OK, dear, OK! I’m not trying to pry!” yelled back Hetty; and
then she turned with a sigh to Alice: “No dice, never mind, well have a go at it ourselves.” Then, in a lower voice as they set off up the stairs: “I don’t mind who they have up there, boyfriends and that, or who they don’t. Love and let love is what I say. But she’s so touchy, that girl, you wouldn’t believe. The simplest question, and she jumps down your throat like you were accusing her of murder. Never mind, let’s see what we can do.” And continuing on the way up the stairs, she pushed open the bathroom door, revealing an untidy barn of a room containing an ironing board, several suitcases and a roll of carpet as well as a bath.

“You stay there, over by the door, dear,” Hetty warned; and herself tiptoed warily across the floor towards the ancient geyser, like a cat stalking a rather large rat.

“Pilot’s off, I’m afraid, Alice,” was her verdict, straightening up after a prolonged inspection of the thing’s internal organs. “I daren’t light it myself, not without Brian here, I just daren’t. I’ve known the flame jump three feet into the room, I’m not exaggerating, and I wouldn’t like that to happen to you, dear. Not your first night.”

Alice felt that she could do without it on other nights too; but she tried not to seem hypercritical.

“Well, never mind,” she said, clutching her coat yet more tightly about her. Then: “Do you think — perhaps — if there
is
an electric fire to spare? If I could have it up in my room? Just for tonight? I’d pay, of course.”

“
Of
course,
darling!” cried Hetty, in tones of such impassioned liberality that one could only assume that the words related to the request for the fire, and not at all to the offer to pay. “
Of
course,
darling, you
must
have a fire, it’s terrible up there, a night like this, all those draughts. The only thing is …” here she cast her eyes anxiously up and down the stairway, as if hoping that an electric fire just might spring out from somewhere, come hopping and rattling to their feet, and thus solve the problem. “The only thing is … We want one that
works
,
you see. That’s the problem.”

That this was indeed a major consideration Alice could not but agree, and she watched in suspense while her landlady frowned and bit her knuckles.

“
I
know!” Suddenly Hetty’s face cleared. “We’ll take the one from Brian’s room, that’s sure to work, everything of Brian’s always does. I don’t know how he does it, I really don’t. And his eiderdown too, you could do with that, I’m sure. Those miserable blankets you’ve got up there wouldn’t keep a rabbit warm.”

“But won’t … This Brian, won’t he mind?” Alice was beginning, but Hetty interrupted her.

“Mind? Of course he won’t mind. He’s out. I told you,” and lumbering gamely on up the next flight of stairs, she launched herself against one of the doors opening on to the landing just below Alice’s attic floor.

“Hell! He’s locked it! And he probably won’t be in till all hours! I
wish
he wouldn’t do that, I’ve asked him no end of times, but he doesn’t seem to understand how inconvenient it can be.” Here she rattled the handle again impatiently. “It’s funny,” she continued, “because he’s such a nice boy really, but he does have this possessive streak about his things. I don’t know what he thinks might happen to them, I’m sure.

“Oh well. Never mind, I’ll give you the one from the kitchen, nobody’ll be using the kitchen this late, and if they do they can light up the oven and give themselves a good warm with their feet in it. I’ll give you a hot-water bottle too, Alice, that’ll make a difference, won’t it, and then tomorrow we’ll get you rigged up right and proper, blankets, pillows and all sorts. Oh, and what about something to eat, my darling? You must be starving. Come on down, and I’ll see what I can find for you. Then, tomorrow, we must think where to fit you in, for cooking and that.”

Sitting at the scrubbed wooden table, gratefully consuming the remains of a still-warm shepherd’s pie, Alice listened attentively while Hetty expounded the system by which she apportioned the use of her kitchen among her various tenants.

The core and essence of the system, it soon became clear, consisted in not upsetting one Miss Dorinda.

“She’s in the beauty business, you see,” Hetty explained. “She likes everything to be just so; and so when she comes in at six thirty she has to have the kitchen entirely to herself until she’s finished. The best part of an hour it can be, all her bits and pieces
and stirring up little messes on the cooker. She’s into health, you know, and that takes up a lot of space, no use anyone trying to do anything else while she’s there, so we all just keep out of her way till she’s done. Or before she starts, of course, before six thirty. But if you choose the before six thirty time, Alice, do for goodness sake get yourself cleared up before she gets in! If there’s so much as a teaspoon left on the draining-board she’ll go through the roof! Actually right through it, I’m not exaggerating …”

While Alice’s tired mind was grappling feebly with this vision of the unknown Miss Dorinda, Hetty was continuing (aware, perhaps, that she had slightly over-stated her case) in a more sober vein: “It’s the nature of her work, you see,” she explained. “She’s manageress at the hair and beauty salon in the High Street. Just beyond Marks, you’ll see it when you go to the shops, Alice, you can’t miss it, nearly opposite Tesco’s, on the corner. They get like that in the beauty business,” she went on reflectively, “I’ve seen it no end of times. I had a manicure young lady once, and she was the same. It’s beauty, you see, it brings out a funny streak in them somehow, and that’s the truth …”

Beauty is truth, truth beauty … Alice realised she was almost falling asleep; she roused herself with an effort.

“What about the others?” she asked. “There was a ‘Brian’ you mentioned, and ‘Mary’. Do they have an hour each too?”

“An
hour
?
My goodness, no! Listen, my dear, if everyone in this house had an hour to themselves like Miss Dorinda has, there’d be no end to it, the clatter and the clutter, and in-ings and the out-ings, the smells and the boilings-over and the clutter-up round the sink. It’d be midnight before I could set foot in my own kitchen. No, they fit in as best they can, the rest of them. They don’t make a fuss, you see, not like Miss Dorinda does. Not fair? Listen, dear, one thing I have learnt in this job is always to give in, straight away, to the fuss-pots, let them have everything exactly the way they want to right from the beginning, and you save yourself no end of bother. The others will always fit in somehow. Like Brian, I mean, he’s a sweetie, no trouble at all, just brings in his takeaways and pops them in the oven, and is off up to his room with them before you hardly know he’s there …”

Here she paused, glancing speculatively at her new lodger, and for an uneasy moment Alice felt herself being weighed in the balance: was she going to rate as a fuss-pot, and thus entitled to extra privilege? Or as a sweetie, who could be relied on to be in and out of the kitchen before you hardly knew she was there?

To postpone this issue, she continued with her queries: “And the girl — Mary — when does she eat?”

At this Hetty shook her head sadly. “That’s one of my worries, you know. The truth is, she hardly eats a thing, just a bit of toast and a cup of tea, and not always that. I’m quite bothered about that girl, Alice, I really am. She eats like a sparrow, and always in bed by ten. Such a pretty girl, too, can’t be much over twenty. She ought to be out gallivanting till all hours. I always say, if someone in their twenties is getting enough sleep, then what on earth are they going to be like at forty?”

A difficult question; and one on which Alice felt unable to comment just now. Weariness was once again overcoming her, she felt almost light-headed with tiredness, and so she ventured, as politely as she could, to draw her landlady’s attention to the urgent matters which had originally brought her down to the kitchen. Blankets. An electric fire. A hot-water bottle.

Hetty was all compunction.
Of
course
Alice must have these things. Heaving herself from her chair, she began pounding around the kitchen and adjoining scullery assembling such adjuncts to Alice’s comfort as she could lay hands on. Then, carrying some of the load, she accompanied Alice up the first flights of stairs, switching lights on as they went, and apologising for the speed at which they switched themselves off again. You’d have to be one of those Olympic chappies to beat them to it, and one day Brian was going to do something about it, when he’d finished his cantata. Cantata? Oh yes, he was a musician, Brian was, a composer, though that wasn’t how he made a living, my goodness no. He taught at the Adult Education Centre most days, and the odd private pupil too, evenings and weekends. It was nice to hear the old piano tinkle-tonking away, Hetty felt, kind of cosy, a bit of life going on; but unfortunately Miss Dorinda didn’t see it that way, and so on and off there could be a bit of trouble. Artistic in her way, Miss Dorinda was, but just not
the tinkle-tonk type, if Alice took her meaning. Well, there you are, dear, you’ll be all right now, won’t you. I’ll be getting on down, if you don’t mind, I’ve got things to see to …

By the time she reached her attic room, Alice was feeling quite bemused with cold and tiredness. Thankfully she dumped the hot-water bottle under the meagre blankets, plugged in the electric fire, and cowering close in front of it she began to undress. The fire glowed red: the growing warmth played on her bare shoulders, and then, with a sudden ‘phut!’ it spat at her like a furious cat. The brief warmth died, trickled away and became one with the icy draughts whistling in from every shadowy corner.

Alice gave up. Huddling most of her clothes back on again, she crawled into the chilly bed, pulled the thin blankets over her, and her winter coat as well. She did not expect to sleep. She lay there clutching the hot-water bottle against her, waiting, with abject resignation, for it to start leaking.

Her eyes opened on the great red ball of the winter sun. Through the small high window it filled the room with rosy light, and she realised to her astonishment that she must have slept solidly the whole night through, a thing that hadn’t happened to her in weeks. And the hot-water bottle
hadn’t
leaked; it still lay faintly warm against her body where she had been clutching it last night. With a hot-water bottle that didn’t leak, and with the mighty crimson globe of the sun welcoming her back to consciousness, Alice felt herself momentarily filled with new strength, new hope.

But strength to perform what task? Hope for what sort of a future? These weighty questions, like a pair of over-full
suitcases
, brought her brief optimism to a standstill. Before they could drag her all the way back into last night’s depression, she resolved to do, one by one, the things you can do anyway, whether you are depressed or not.

Like getting out of bed. Like going down all those stairs to the bathroom, and then on to the kitchen in the basement.

*

The kitchen lay deserted now in the half-light of the winter dawn, and silent too until with a sudden peremptory rattle from the scullery, a large tabby cat appeared and planted itself, with stern expectancy, right in her path, fixing Alice with a gold, unblinking gaze. Evidently, the first person who came down in the morning was expected to do something about the animal.

But what? There was no telling. “Sorry, Puss, you’ll have to wait for Hetty,” she apologised, and with a vague idea of making herself a cup of coffee, moved in the direction of the cooker.

A small, agonised sound stopped her in her tracks. Not exactly a ‘miaow’, the situation was too desperate for that; more a sort of
tortured hiccup, the last gasp of a soul in torment, and glancing down Alice was confronted by a look of such absolute outrage in those golden eyes that she almost shrank away. Obviously, she was doing the wrong thing. She tried moving in a new direction, and this time, it seemed, she was doing better … getting warmer … warmer, for the creature was now purring on a high, frantic note, coiling and weaving itself about her ankles as she moved.

The refrigerator. Of course. Led there unerringly by her expert guide, Alice opened the door and peered inside. No fewer than nine bottles of milk confronted her, all of them opened, and most more than half empty. One carried round its neck a sort of paper collar bearing the message ‘
HANDS OFF
!’ and another, very neat and black, the initials ‘
DD
’ — Miss Dorinda, presumably, who liked everything to be just so; certainly, she must leave that one alone. A third, looking as if it had seen better days, carried the initials ‘
WX
’; and the last in the line, more cryptically still, bore the inscription ‘
YESTERDAY ONLY
’.

But she couldn’t puzzle over these symbols for long. The single-minded intensity of desire that radiated knee-high from where the cat coiled and writhed in serpentine rapture was too much for her, and grabbing the ‘
YESTERDAY
’ bottle she rapidly poured half of it into a pie-dish, set it on the floor, and then stood back, contemplating the full glory of her achievement; the creation, single-handed, of absolute contentment, of that peace which passeth all understanding, of a whole tiny universe at harmony with itself, pulsing to the rhythm of a pink, darting tongue.

She couldn’t find any coffee (she must buy some for herself this morning), and so made do with boiling up some water and adding a spoonful of sugar and a dash of the ‘
YESTERDAY ONLY
’ milk. A label like that seemed to put it outside the conventional morality of Mine and Thine. It wasn’t bad; it was better than nothing, and carrying it up to her bleak and fireless attic, she sat on the edge of the bed and sipped it slowly, trying, now that it was full daylight, to take in more clearly the extent and nature of her new domain.

You could look at the room in two ways really. You could see it as so awful that hours and hours of daunting effort — not to mention Herculean physical strength — would be required to
make it even half-way habitable. Or, on the other hand, you could see it as so awful that nothing could be done, and therefore nothing need be. You could see yourself sinking into the chaos, as one more item landing up in this graveyard of failed, unwanted, unworkable appliances. You could give up. Go to pieces. Lots of discarded wives do.

There was, though, a third option. You could walk out. Tell the landlady how sorry you were, how much you would have enjoyed living here, but unfortunately this, that and the other and so forth …

Thinking on these lines last night, Alice had resolved to leave the final decision till this morning, when she would apply herself to it with a fresh mind and a sheet of paper — well, the back of an old envelope, anyway — setting out in two columns the fors and againsts: “Quiet road, not much traffic; No rent at the moment; No references required; Kindly, easy-going landlady” in one column, and in the other: “Sloppy, incompetent landlady; No heating; Extreme discomfort; No space; No hot water” — that sort of thing. She would work out a points system for all these items, and then add up the totals. Easy.

She found an old envelope all right. She even found a pencil. But by this time the whole scheme had quietly and imperceptibly become obsolete, for she knew already that she was going to stay. She wasn’t quite sure why, or where the decision had come from, but there it was. In the last few minutes the room had become hers. It was as if a marriage ceremony had been taking place inside her head, and without really noticing it she had said “I will”, and was now confronted (like any bride) with the necessity of making the best of her new acquisition; working out the minimum alterations necessary to render life tolerable.

Her first problem, she realised, was that she did not know what, if any, were her rights over her new domain. Was she entitled to get rid of anything she wished — and was physically able to carry down to the dustbins — or was her role that of reluctant curator on behalf of shadowy battalions of claimants, past and present? Looking around, it seemed to Alice highly unlikely that anyone in his right mind could possibly be going to claim any of it; but, on the other hand, if Hetty, the rightful
householder, had felt hesitant about throwing anything away, then certainly Alice, the interloper, must feel even more
hesitant
.

But all the same, things could be stacked up a bit better to give more floor space. Those crates of china or whatever could be pushed further in under the beams, and the bits of rolled-up carpet could go on top of them; and all those cardboard boxes, crammed to overflowing with old journals and newspapers and such, they could be piled one on top of the other to take less space … Within a few minutes, Alice was bent double, pushing and pulling at the heavy, cumbersome things.

But as she did so, a better idea came to her. Instead of trying to get these boxes stacked up as much out of the way as possible, could she not build them into some useful piece of furniture? A sort of sofa, for example, with its back made of two sets of three boxes piled on top of each other against the wall, and then another three in front to form the seat? Such a seat would be quite a comfortable height — Alice tried it — and quite firm and steady, crammed as most of them were with tight-packed papers.

Some of them, though, were a bit
too
crammed, their tattered contents toppling lopsidedly well above the level of the lid; others were only sparsely filled, so that if you tried to sit on them you would sink slowly into a welter of collapsing
cardboard
. After a brief struggle with her conscience, Alice decided that although she mustn’t throw anything away, she would be within her rights in transferring an armful of
this
into a vacant space among
that,
and so rendering the boxes homogeneous enough for her purposes.

Old colour supplements; antediluvian sets of
Lilliputs
;
newspaper
cuttings going back to the
News
Chronicle,
and even the
Daily
Graphic
… the hoarder of all this must surely be in his grave this many a year? Yanking from one of the over-full boxes a yellowing armful of
Agriculture
and
Fishery
Bulletins,
Alice was slightly surprised to come across a set of exercise books — a dozen or more of them — neatly stacked, and looking much more recent than most of the stuff she had come across.

Someone’s amateur attempt at a novel, it seemed to be. A thriller, presumably, for opening one of the little books at random her eyes fell on a highly-coloured passage describing in fulsome — though probably inaccurate — detail the collapse of some
character
from a gun-shot wound:

Not bad, in a way, thought Alice, reverting momentarily to her school-teaching persona. Spelling, grammar, punctuation all beyond reproach, though five out of ten for handwriting would be generous. Sad, really, that the author—someone very young, she felt sure — should have abandoned his task to this limbo. Fed up with it, perhaps? In despair of ever getting it published? At a loss how to end it?

She flipped through a few more of the volumes, smiling a little. There seemed to be a death, or the aftermath of a death, on almost every page: a very amateur writer, obviously, who had not yet learned that by piling on the thrills you take all the thrill out of them. Here and there, loose among the text, were old newspaper cuttings and magazine pictures, presumably to stir the creative process. One in particular caught Alice’s attention. It was a page from some magazine — a colour supplement, probably — on which was reproduced a photograph of an autumn landscape, a hillside dotted with rowan trees in full glory of scarlet berries, and emerging from behind one of these, with wings outspread,
appeared
an enormous bat. So enormous, for one mad second one could have taken it for a pterodactyl photographed in full flight. A clever piece of trick photography, of course, a picture of a bat somehow superimposed on the tranquil autumn landscape, and looking at the caption below “Flittermouse Hill in Autumn”, Alice saw that the cleverness had indeed been appreciated; a ten pound prize had been awarded in a Junior Photographic Competition to Julian somebody, aged fourteen, from Medley Green Comprehensive.

Enough! If she stopped to read and examine every intriguing snippet she might come across, she’d never get anything done at all. Replacing the exercise books, and piling in above them the
requisite thickness of
National
Geographic
magazines from a neighbouring pile, Alice gave her attention again to the
construction
of her sofa. Or divan. Or whatever.

The basic structure was soon in place. Now, if she could dig out from all that lumber behind the motor bike some of those bits of material she’d noticed — old curtains or something — cretonne it looked like, with a faded, pinky-yellowy pattern …

Yes, here it was. Crumpled and dusty indeed, but after being properly washed and ironed … Bending lower still under the sloping roof, she tugged at the pieces of material, trying to ease them from under a length of garden trellis, whose projecting slats threatened to catch on the stuff and tear it …

“Christ!”

At the suddenness of the exclamation, Alice sprang to her feet, or rather tried to. In fact, she banged her head with considerable violence against the low beam that spanned that part of the roof; and so it was through a whirl of dizzying pain and flashing lights that she first looked at her unexpected visitor. A slight figure — wearing something blueish — standing in the doorway … And as the effects of the blow subsided, and normal vision was restored, Alice found herself able to take in that the visitor was a young girl wearing jeans and a washed-out blouse. Her light brown hair was cropped short, and her eyes, startlingly blue, were darting from object to object in the disordered room. In ordinary circumstances she would have been outstandingly pretty, Alice guessed, but at the moment her face was pinched with outrage.

“What are you
doing
?” The girl’s voice was shrill. “What the
hell
are you doing? And who are you, anyway? What are you looking for?”

The better to cope with this unexpected onslaught, Alice clambered slowly out from her uncomfortable perch under the low ceiling, circumnavigated as best she could the motor bike handlebars which stuck up like horns, and faced her inquisitor. The pain was beginning to subside now, and she felt more able to hold her own.

“Doing? Getting my room in order, of course. Trying to … If it comes to that, what are
you
doing? Barging in like this,” she
added for good measure, trying to turn the tables vaguely in her own direction.

The girl still stared at her accusingly, but some of the shock had subsided from her face.

“What do you mean,
your
room!” she asked now. “It can’t be your room, it isn’t anybody’s room, it’s all of us’s. It’s a … Well, it’s where we all dump our stuff. Hetty told us we could. ‘Liberty lumber-room, that’s what that room is’ she told me when I came, and that’s how everyone has always been using it. As you can see. Right back to the year dot. So it
can’t
be yours.”

Well, it
is
mine. I’m renting it, Alice would like to have said, but of course, she wasn’t, not yet. She wasn’t paying anything so far, and that put her at rather a disadvantage in the argument.

“Well,” she said, “I’m sorry, there seems to be some sort of misunderstanding, we’ll have to talk to Hetty …”

But the girl seemed now to be hardly listening. Her eyes were travelling round the room anxiously, as if she was trying to make mental notes of everything in it.

“It’s not
fair
!”
she burst out after a minute. “She might at least have warned me, warned us, I mean …”