Listening in the Dusk (8 page)

“I’m
sorry,
”
Mary was sulkily repeating. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m
sorry
!
But how could I know you’d painted the bloody thing? You
said
I could have my stuff whenever I liked, and then you set a trap like that to catch me!”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Alice retorted. “It
wasn’t
a trap, and of course I wasn’t trying to ‘catch’ you, why should I? Catch you at what, anyway? All we were doing — Brian and I — we were trying to brighten the place up with a bit of colour. Don’t you think it looks better already? You saw the ghastly mess it was yesterday: look at all the extra space we’ve made just by stacking things up tidily.”

Alice was trying to turn the conversation, which had started as an altercation about the wet paint, and whose fault it was that Mary had got it all over her hands last night, into something more amiable. “Don’t you think it looks nice?” she persisted, when her companion remained silent. “And see that couch affair, with the cretonne cover? Cardboard boxes it’s made of! All those boxes crammed with ancient papers —”

“What papers?”

Alice was thrown by this sudden twist to the conversation, and found herself stammering.

“I … I … Well, I don’t … I don’t know really. Magazines and things — you know. Newspapers —”

“What newspapers?”

The inquisition was relentless. Alice found annoyance coming to her aid, and she spoke briskly.

“Look, Mary, why don’t you just tell me what you want — what you were looking for last night? Perhaps I can help you find it?”

“Help me find it! That’s rich, that really is! First you muck up
the whole room, dragging everything about so that no one can find anything ever again, and then you say … You say …”

Abruptly, the girl turned and darted out of the room, but not before Alice had glimpsed the tears suddenly welling in the hostile blue eyes, and heard the choking of the young voice.

“Mary! Wait!” she cried, full of compunction, running out to the landing, leaning over the banisters.

But it was too late. Mary’s door had closed with that curious, controlled savagery which she had noticed before, and which she recognised now as a substitute for a resounding slam.

*

Again! I’ve done it again! Mary lay face downward on her bed, listening while Alice rattled on the door, calling her name. Listening as Alice rattled again … and yet again: and listening still as the tiresome woman gave up, and retreated slowly up the stairs.

As the sounds faded, as the impending danger of sympathy, of caring, of compassion began to recede, Mary’s tension relaxed a little, and she found herself able to think again, to try and assess this new and terrifying onslaught on her privacy. How could she have guessed that the attic lumber-room, which by all accounts — and indeed by all appearances — had lain untouched and neglected for goodness knows how many years, should suddenly, within twenty-four hours, become subject to all this upheaval? It had seemed so secure a hiding-place at the beginning. The worst that could happen to her dreadful secret — so she’d thought — was that it might be overlaid by daunting piles of fresh rubbish, chucked in pell-mell on top of the existing strata. The possibility that someone in this sloppy, down-at-heel household should suddenly take it into their heads to
tidy
the place — this had seemed too remote to be considered. That darkest, dustiest, most inaccessible corner, under the low beam, behind the almost immovable barrier of the motor bike, and underneath a pile of ancient curtains and mysterious rags of carpeting — this had seemed as safe a place as one could ever hope to find. Safer, certainly, than the sparsely-furnished barn of a room that she, Mary, had been allotted, and which offered almost no
hiding-places
at all. A huge wardrobe, with a door which wouldn’t stay
shut even when you wedged it: a rickety chest-of-drawers with drawers that stuck and groaned and jerked when you tried to shut them; and — as a last resort — the dusty, fluff-ridden space under the bed, already occupied by the many discarded shoes of some previous incumbent and the remains of a huge
garden-party
hat, pale straw and tattered artificial roses. It wouldn’t take a person so much as five minutes to search through these meagre and obvious hiding-places, especially if they knew what they were looking for. And the people she was afraid of
would
know what they were looking for.

Was this Alice woman one of them? Or not? How could one tell? What clues should one look for? That a person might seem, on the face of it, to be quite pleasant and ordinary proved nothing — nothing. As Mary knew only too well.

If only she could have locked her door! But Hetty,
maddeningly
, didn’t “hold with” locks and keys. How smug can you get, you people who can afford not to “hold with” locks and keys?

Besides, a locked door (she was beginning to learn) does little but attract the very things it is supposed to fend off— namely, interference, prying and suspicion.

Last night, for instance, if she hadn’t panicked, and wedged the door with a chair-back under the handle, there would never have been a fraction of the fuss and upset that had in fact been aroused. Brian would presumably have walked in and instantly noticed her paint-stained hands and jersey, and the whole thing would have passed off as a tiresome mishap, quite funny really, and the rest of the household would never have been alerted at all.

Or — going only a few minutes further back — if only she’d boldly marched in on the supper-party and asked Hetty openly for a bottle of turpentine-substitute, explained what she wanted it for, then the disturbance would have been minimal. Instead of which, by hanging about outside the door, hesitating, while the paint congealed on her hands; and then, when she heard what they were talking about, taking to her heels — all this had simply been a recipe for stirring up maximum curiosity, maximum interference and questioning.

Part of the trouble, of course, was that when she went
downstairs she’d still been in a state of shock from touching the newly-painted motor bike. For one mad moment, she had imagined that the wet red stains on her hands were indeed blood: that somehow, by some weird and virulent magic, her secret had come horribly alive during the hours of darkness and had crawled out from under the beams …

Absurd! Almost at once she had realised that the stuff was only paint: but it was only her mind that knew this: her body thought it knew better, and it wouldn’t stop trembling …

There was a lesson in all this somewhere, and already she could see, more or less, what it was. She
must
not
panic. If she hadn’t panicked on discovering that this new woman had actually taken up residence in the room that concealed her secret; and if she hadn’t given way to further panic when she found that the hiding-place itself had been dismantled …

Now, reflecting on the episode more calmly, Mary realised how damagingly she had over-reacted. She could see, now, that the Alice woman probably hadn’t been searching for anything, but, exactly as she’d said, was simply trying to clear the room. This was a perfectly viable hypothesis, consistent with all the facts. But all the same, the shock of discovering that her terrible secret had simply disappeared from its accustomed hiding-place … That she had no idea, now, where it might be, or even whether Alice had in fact seen it, examined it, and already drawn the inescapable inference — all this had been too much for Mary’s self-control. She had burst out into pointless but
uncontrollable
rudeness towards this devastating interloper who had — albeit unintentionally — upset the precarious balance on which Mary’s existence here was poised. The fact that it was
unintentional
made it worse, in a way, more alarming. It was like being a tightrope-walker, with the rope juddering hideously beneath you on account of someone blandly hanging out their washing on the far end, totally unaware of your predicament. How can you
not
scream at such a person? And thereby make an enemy? One more unnecessary enemy to add to the growing list …

The sense of enemies moving in on her, more and more of them, from every direction, gripped her yet again. So powerful it was, closing in on her rational faculties, crushing them as if with
an iron fist, rendering them incapable of ordinary common-sense reasoning. And the irony was that she knew very well the correct name for this feeling of hers; it was paranoia. Only a couple of years ago, in the unimaginably blissful days of not yet knowing anything about it, she had been given an ‘A’ for an essay on this very subject. Her innocent, book-learned dissertation on the malady had impressed her tutor, and had helped, via continuous assessment, to bring her the coveted First Year Prize for Outstanding Achievement.

What a triumph! What rejoicings there had been! Parents delighted; Julian delighted too, it seemed, teasing her with brotherly incredulity about her success.

“They must be potty, these examiners of yours,” he’d jeered admiringly. “All that psychology has warped their tiny minds! Still, it’s a jolly good happening to have happened to you, Midge, so let’s celebrate …”

Had the clouds already begun to gather, and did Julian already know it? Was it with monstrous irony, or helpless in the grip of the dark gods, that he’d suggested they should go for a celebratory picnic, just the two of them, champagne and all, to their favourite picnic spot on Flittermouse Hill? Such games they’d played there as children, long ago, sometimes with friends, sometimes on their own. Traditional games like Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians; and many another,
invented
by themselves. Lying there on that hot June day, almost the last day of unclouded happiness she would ever know, she and Julian had laughed, and reminisced, and stared up through the rowan boughs at the blue, incredible sky. She recalled, now, how she had noticed the beginnings of colour just lightly tinging the clusters of nascent berries which, by September, would be a glory of scarlet.

She had not known, of course, that she was looking at this scene for the last time. By next summer, the bulldozers would have moved in.

Dusk was falling. The shadows and smudges of the stained and faded wallpaper were changing, growing palely luminous in the last of the silver-grey light, and Mary rolled slowly off the bed, blinking and rubbing her eyes as though waking from a deep
sleep; but this was an illusion. She didn’t sleep deeply any more, neither by night nor by day. Peering closely into the small, specked mirror, badly placed, she wondered how much it showed.

“What you want,” said Brian, with the kindly condescension of experienced youth towards helpless middle-age, “what you want is to stop looking at advertisements for jobs vacant, and start advertising for yourself. Not in the local paper, that’s a dead loss as well as costing a bomb, but on the boards outside newsagents, among the baby-sitters and the handymen and the house-trained kittens. That way, you get the impulse-clients. That’s my experience, anyway. What happens, you see, they’re standing there looking to see if their own notice about a wardrobe for sale has gone up yet, and — hey presto — they catch sight of my ad about piano lessons, with its pretty picture of notes and staves. And they think, well, why not? I may never get shot of Aunt Agatha’s bloody wardrobe, but at least I might be able to put her bloody piano to use. Or my kid might, it’ll give him something to do after school besides teasing his sister, and who knows, he might turn out to be a genius?

“That’s the thought-process, roughly, and that’s what you want to cash in on. I’ll help you with the wording if you like, I’ve had a lot of experience, and if we
can
work in a funny illustration, it does help. It’s coaching you’re after, isn’t it? Private coaching in, well, something or other? You say you’ve been a teacher up to now, well, you must know
something
…”

Good thinking. So I must. Aloud, Alice said: “That’s the trouble, really. My subjects — no one wants them any more. Latin and Greek — they’re the extinct dinosaurs of education nowadays. In my last job I was amazingly lucky. In the very town where my husband worked there was this old-fashioned all-girls school where they still went in for that sort of thing. Not so much now, though — it was some years ago when I got the job, and it went on ticking over in a sort of a way, though lately I’ve found
myself teaching French as well, and Religious Studies, because there weren’t enough girls opting for Classics. I don’t think there’d be the slightest chance of a full-time job in Classics now — even if it wasn’t for my age — and, well, the way I left. Rather sudden. Normally, you’d never leave a teaching job until you’d got yourself fixed up for another one: it’ll look funny on my record —”

“But it’s
coaching
we’re talking about,” Brian interrupted briskly, “not a full-blown job.
Everyone
doing coaching has a record that looks funny, else they wouldn’t be doing it, would they? Now, let’s get down to it. A picture, that’s the first thing. You have to have a picture to catch the eye, to compete with the kittens …”

He pulled a large brown envelope out of the wastepaper basket at his side, and in a few swift lines had sketched a lively caricature of a very small boy with very large spectacles bending over an enormous tome, open to reveal an imaginary script hitherto unknown to linguists.

“Now for the caption …” Brian’s face was alight with creative fervour as he sucked his pencil and stared at the wall for inspiration. “I know!” and in large imposing capitals he quickly printed under the sketch:

IT’S GREEK TO ME!

“There, that’ll get ’em looking. Everyone loves a code. Or you can make it actual Greek if you like, in case they know some already. Underneath all that — and in much smaller letters — you can get in the serious stuff for the parents about what you are actually going to teach, and why it’s going to turn their kid into a paragon of all the virtues as well as equipping him to knock hell out of his little friends in Life’s rat-race …

“
Something
like that. Or — and from what you say this might be a better bet — you could highlight the sheer uselessness of your subject. An antidote to the crass materialism which is currently destroying the world, that sort of thing. Everyone likes the idea of everyone else being crassly materialistic; and of course the lure of the useless is irresistible. Always has been. Look at the pyramids, and the sacred cows, and the cathedrals. Not to mention crinolines, crossword-puzzles and space-travel.

“We’ll soon knock something out. Indian ink, of course, for the pic. I’ve got some somewhere …”

*

And so, a couple of hours later, with four spectacular
postcard-size
notices lurking in her handbag, Alice found herself slinking past the hair and beauty salon like a criminal, irrationally fearful lest Miss Dorinda should be glancing out of the display window at just that moment, and should somehow guess at her
embarrassing
errand. For embarrassing it was: not because there is anything inherently disgraceful about offering to the public your skills, whatever they may be, but because she had never done it before, and couldn’t as yet slot it into her self-image. Moreover, Brian’s flamboyant style of advertisement was very much not Alice’s own style. Something much more sober and low-key would have evolved if she had designed the notices on her own — that is, if she had nerved herself to embark on the project at all.

That was the point. Brian’s enthusiasm, his flair for the
eye-catching
, had supplied the impetus which Alice lacked, and so she had gone along with it. Also, it would have seemed most ungracious, even snubbing, to have turned down his so-eagerly proffered help. Lastly, of course, it might work.

What’s more, it did. Before the week was out, she had received three phone calls: one from a retired postman who had spent the first years of his retirement in the local library reading Homer, Plato and most of the plays in translation, and had been fired with the ambition to read them in the original before he died; a second from a lady who thought that those enormously large round spectacles would suit her a lot better than the National Health ones she had at present, and could Alice tell her where they could be obtained? A third was from the mother of a twelve-year-old boy called Cyril, about whose wish to learn Greek she was almost insultingly apologetic, but nevertheless contemplated an interview “just to talk about it”.

Excitedly, Alice found herself with quite a timetable to organise. The postman, a small wiry man with a lined, rosy face, a slight limp and a freckled balding skull wanted to come on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Alice tried to explain that she might be coaching schoolchildren who would only have Saturdays free;
but this distressed him greatly. Although (he had to agree) he wasn’t a schoolchild, he nevertheless did have other
engagements
, and these Greek lessons would have to be fitted in with his classes at the local Institute: Drama, Car-Maintenance, the History of Art. Saturday it would have to be. He knew the Greek alphabet already, he told her, he’d learned it by himself, and now couldn’t wait to go further, in particular to read Alcestis right through in the original.

Alice tried, without being too discouraging, to give her prospective pupil some idea of the vast tracts of grammar and vocabulary that lay between knowing the alphabet and reading Alcestis in the original; but he was undeterred.

“If I make up my mind to a thing, then I keep going until I get there,” he told her; and to substantiate this self-assessment, he told her how he had had polio as a boy and had been told that he’d have to settle for a desk job, as his leg would never be up to very much walking.

“‘Very much walking!’ Tens of thousands of miles I reckon I’ve walked on my rounds — five times round the world, just about! Forty-seven years, and never a day off sick, bar just the one winter, a bad go of pleurisy …”

As a qualification for embarking on a study of ancient Greek, walking five times round the world might seem to some teachers irrelevant; but not to Alice. She took Mr Bates on with alacrity, and after discussing terms and the books he would need, they parted with a sense of happy anticipation on both sides.

Cyril proved a little more complicated to enrol. For one thing, the negotiations had to be primarily with his parents, not with him; and for another, Alice was to be expected to travel to his home for the lessons, and not he to hers. The distance was not great — less than a mile — but the elegance of the suburban road in which he lived was in itself intimidating, with its large and well-kept late-Victorian houses set well back from the road behind wrought-iron gates and barriers of smugly evergreen shrubs that looked as if they had lived there for a hundred years.

Walking up the short gravel drive to her preliminary interview with the Bensons, Alice felt her heart thudding uncomfortably, and her brain (even more uncomfortably) emptying itself of
suitable sentences with which to advocate the claims of both herself and her outdated subject.

Both were necessary. The beautifully-proportioned pale grey drawing-room, with its floor-length velvet curtains and its silver vases of out-of-season roses, formed a setting singularly unkind to Alice’s one and only winter coat and her scuffed suede boots. Not that Mrs Benson, an anxious and well-preserved blonde of about Alice’s own age, showed any signs of being overtly snobbish about this. On the contrary, you could see her deciding, after a single glance, that one can’t go by appearances and that anyway in this new high-speed age with which it was so important to keep up, class didn’t count for anything. Though of course if this woman who was proposing to coach her son had actually had an
accent
…

Mercifully, Alice hadn’t. As soon as she began to speak, she could see her employer’s face clear, and knew she was over the first hurdle. The second was more difficult.

“You see,” Mrs Benson was saying, crossing her shapely legs and settling herself more securely against her discreetly-
positioned
back-support cushion, “you see, without meaning to disparage your qualifications in
any
way, Mrs Saunders, I’m sure they are excellent, but we
are
a little unhappy, my husband and I, about the whole idea of our boy spending time — valuable homework time — on studying an outdated language that no one is ever going to speak. Where will it get him?”

Where would it? This was the question that was bound to arise. Alice had prepared for it.

“I think,” she began, “— and this is simply my experience as a teacher — I think that in educating a child one has to look beyond the immediate practical qualifications that he —”

Mrs Benson was on to it in a flash. “Why ‘he’?” she demanded. “Why not ‘she’? I hope, I do hope, Mrs Saunders, that you haven’t a
sexist
attitude? I wouldn’t like Cyril to, well …”

She paused, perhaps a little uncertain herself exactly what it was that she wouldn’t like Cyril to do, or be, or have, or become as a result of Alice’s instruction in elementary Greek syntax; so Alice intervened to help her out.

“Of course not,” she said. “I was just using the word ‘he’ in a
general sense. If you’d got a daughter I was to teach, I’d naturally have said —”

“I
have
got a daughter actually,” interrupted Mrs Benson, with a touch of reproof at the implied accusation of not having one, “but she’s only six, and so .. But anyway …” Here she changed tack slightly, “I must be frank with you. If it was a daughter of mine who wanted to learn Greek, I’d be even more worried than I am about Cyril. I feel it is
so
important for girls, just as much as for boys, to learn science and technology and … and … well, technology. Wouldn’t you agree? And that’s what worries me about Cyril. We — his father and I — we naturally want him to do Maths and Science, and this whim of his to learn Greek, naturally we find it rather upsetting. But, on the other hand, if we oppose him about it, if we forbid him to have lessons, it might just drive it underground. What do
you
think? As a teacher?”

“Well,” Alice was beginning, “it does seem to me —”

“Exactly!” exclaimed Mrs Benson in tones of relief. “Just what we were saying, his father and I. I thought you’d agree. And so, for the moment … You see, there
are
signs that he may be already learning, in secret. Only last week, I was going through his clothes, and in his sock drawer I found a book called ‘
The
Republic
’. At first I thought it was just politics — you know, Peace Studies, that sort of thing — but when I opened it, I saw it was all in
Greek
!
Mind you, I don’t suppose for a moment that he can read it, but all the same, there’s no knowing how it will end if we don’t handle it right at this stage.”

She sounded like a mother who has come across a secret hoard of drugs in her son’s bedroom. Her face, under its neat and superbly-styled cap of shining, straw-blonde hair was puckered with concern; and Alice, partly to change the subject and partly because she felt it was high time, suggested that she should be introduced to the boy himself. “I can’t really judge the situation until I’ve met him,” she pointed out. “And in case we
do
decide on the lessons, I’d like to know how far he’s already got. You know, for books and things.”

After a half-hearted flutter of demur, in deference to Maths and Science and the modern high-speed age, the boy was summoned from upstairs, and Alice had the few moments before
his arrival to wonder what he would be like. Boys of twelve come in two main categories; tall, half-formed young men, loose limbed, with voices already broken; or they can be children still, little boys with scraped knees, scrubbed innocent faces and high, piping voices.

Cyril at first sight was decidedly in the latter category; not exactly small for his age, but compact and wiry, with the innocent, inquiring face and agile body of the pre-pubescent child. Beneath a mop of fairish hair the wide-spaced grey eyes, alert and inquisitive, sparkled out at the newcomer, assessing her, measuring her up against some inscrutable yardstick of childhood judgement.

He was polite enough, though, shook hands nicely, smiled a neat smile, and did not interrupt while his mother launched into a long — and by now surely familiar? — dissertation on the demerits of a classical education. He spoke only when she at last turned to him with a direct question:

“So why
do
you want to learn Greek, Cyril? See if you can explain to Mrs Saunders. Because we all know, don’t we, that Science and Maths are —”