The Listeners (17 page)

She was heating herself up like an automatic kettle. Perhaps it was the only kind of conversation she ever had.

‘They won’t take
her,
’ Sarah said to the man next to her, under cover of general questions and answers, punctuated by some semantic quibbling from the girl.

‘You never know.’ He had sideburns that would have been a beard if they had met in the middle of his chin. ‘Sometimes that sort turns out to be a better Samaritan than some of them who just sit and soak it all in like sphagnum moss.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m doing this class as a refresher. I am a Samaritan, David, 520.’

‘Oh – you lucky.’

‘Yes. I don’t know why they took me.’

Hullo, is that the Samaritans? Sarah saw herself in her little room at home, leaning over the back of the sofa to clutch the telephone. Yes, this is David, 520. And he would listen quietly while she babbled, I’m a failure, a wretched rotten failure. I’m a cheat and a liar and I don’t
know what love is and I don’t know how to find out ... Horrified, she clamped down the lid on the dark secret snakes that could never be let out. Never given freedom, even in her own thoughts.

Unable to make a dent in 200’s composure or logic, Meredith buttoned her labrador jacket and left to catch a bus. When the class was finished, Sarah and the knitting girl made coffee for everybody, and David, 520, drove her down to the Front Royal, since Brian was there for most of the night.

The American insurance men were on the last lap of their convention. They had had their lunches and their conferences and their film presentations and their speeches and their awards and their golf. The hardier had trotted down the pebbled beach to the grey sea, gorilla-legged, throwing punches at the air. The joggers had jogged in their thirty dollar jogging shoes up and down the Esplanade under the uncommitted gaze of the old men sent out to sit in the shelters ‘and don’t come home till lunch’, who were more accustomed to the heel-and-toe regulars in creased cotton shorts and black gym shoes with galvanic Adam’s apples and corks in their fists.

The wives of those who could or would bring them across the Atlantic had shopped for antiques and seen castles and had their hair done every day, for you could not step out of the Front Royal in December without being set upon by the wild wet demons that funnelled through the portico between the hotel garden and the veranda where the residents measured status by how long their jigsaw puzzles monopolized the card tables.

On this last night there had been a banquet, with speeches and dancing. Most of the permanent residents had gone to bed like huffed turtles. Some of the Americans who had neither a wife nor one of the leggy casual girls who had been driving cars and handing round drinks all week were in the hotel bar. It had been en larged and newly landscaped, but was now so dark that you could not see the expensive knots in the panelling,
the graining of the padded plastic leather that edged the bar like a safety dashboard. Sarah found Brian in there with a group of men. Anyone personable in Reception or Management was constrained to socialize at conventions.

‘Come and meet my husband.’ she had said, getting out of David’s loose-jointed car whose back seat was full of tools and coils of wire. ‘Come in and have a drink.’ And been sorry to feel relieved when he declined. Brian only liked people in cheap shapeless clothes if he had discovered them first. When he stood up, fair and smiling in his dinner jacket and white Italian polo neck, to signal to her across the dim smoky bar, she could imagine how his brow would have come down – Who the hell? – if David had been beside her in the doorway with his thick spattered spectacles and his green jacket that bagged like a smock.

‘How was it?’ Brian kissed her on the mouth.

‘Marvellous.’

She said, tell you later, with her eyes, was introduced to the people at the big round table, and sat down next to a man who held on to his glass and drank sombrely with the corners of his mouth down, as if it was physic.

He was staying at the Bay tree Hotel. When Brian was called away by an urgent porter, muttering and jerking his head forebodingly, the American said, ‘No offence to your nice husband, but it’s made the convention for me, staying in that little place. There’s been only half a dozen of us there, and the Wallaces – well, they have this knack of letting you alone, but being around if you want them. I’m coming back. I’m going to come back this summer. Got my room all set. Up under the roof with a dormer you can sit in and look at the ocean far off without seeing the beach or any of these mausoleums.’

‘Are you going to bring your wife?’ Sarah instantly regretted her random shot, but he nodded into his glass and said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m going to bring Anne. No kids. Just us.’

‘Have you got pictures?’ Sarah was not a hotelier’s wife
for nothing. He brought out his wallet in the dark and showed her laminated snapshots of which she could see not much more than the teeth.

‘Yes, sir.’ He shook his head at the picture of the woman. ‘I’ve got to show Anne the Baytree. You know something, Sarah? You want to know something about my wife?’ He tapped the picture. He was fairly drunk, with a not very likeable smell somewhere about him, either his skin or his clothes, but Sarah bent forward to listen, imagining herself a Samaritan, accepting, listening without judgement. ‘My wife is a very strange woman...’

One of the bar waiters had come up in his red monkey jacket and striped waistcoat. Drinks were ordered. The people got up to leave. Someone across the table began to talk to Sarah. She did not immediately get the chance to turn back to the man and ask, ‘What were you going to tell me about your wife?’ When she did, his wallet was put away and himself with it. She said, ‘I’m sorry, what were you going to say?’ but he shook his head without looking at her, as if he did not remember or care.

When Brian came back, she had to leave at once because one of his All Hells had broken loose and he would have to come in early tomorrow to start straightening out the bloody mess. He said that to the Americans at the table, who smiled politely, because he was a nice young Britisher, childishly flushed with petulance, although they knew as well as Sarah that he should keep quiet.

He fumed in the car, telling her about the Assistant Manager and the politician’s party in room 119. His profile sped young and beautiful past the Esplanade hotels, the balconied flats, the dark cut hedges of the white mansions.

‘Don’t get so upset, darling,’ Sarah said. His personality was all wrong for hotels, but he had committed himself for five years, although he threatened every month to set light to his contract under Mr Rattigan’s nose. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘My fault! Of course it wasn’t my fault. How was I to
know that bloody man was a reporter? If the Rat thinks I’m going to go grinning round with flowers and fruit to that tart of Fergusson’s to cover up for his gross, his crass, his crude ...’

He grumbled on, sticking pins into a mental doll. Sarah stopped listening, and Brian did not listen properly to her when she talked about the Samaritans.

‘Glad you liked it,’ he said.

‘But you would too. I wish you —’

‘I’ve got the Rat to rescue. Keep him from being throttled by dissatisfied customers.’

‘Perhaps you would be a natural Samaritan. That’s what they say about people who are right for them. Do you think I could be? A natural Samaritan. If you are truly that, this man said, you could end up as a Samaritan Companion. They’re the heart of the organization. The élite, he called them.’

Brian swung the wheel to turn down their steep little street where the houses stepped down one by one like a child going downstairs, then lifted her hand and kissed it. ‘That’s my good girl. Always go right to the top.’

‘No, it isn’t that, but...’

He gave her back her hand and she kissed where he had kissed, dreamily. ‘A company of Samaritans. It sounds so ... heroic.’

At the next lecture, given by a psychiatrist, Meredith was surprisingly there, this time with no make up and a scarf whose colours had run in the rain, to show she did not care.

Sarah, with opposite tactics, had spent longer than usual on her eyes. Before she got her ragged crop, hair had been her fetish. Then it was boots. She still could hardly run down to the corner for milk without them. Now it was eyes. Without the artistry of shadow and liner and lashes, she would have felt naked before anyone, including Dr Harold Greiff, who was technical enough to satisfy Meredith’s impatience, but not too technical for Sarah and the anxious man at the back who kept shooting
up his hand like a schoolboy and saying, ‘Would you repeat that? I want to be quite sure I’m getting this perfectly clear.’

‘Don’t worry too much, Mr – what was your name? -Richard Bayes. Don’t worry too much, Richard Bayes. A Samaritan must have some psychology, that’s obvious, but you don’t have to know it all. The client doesn’t want you to have all the answers, don’t you see? He wants you to be human, fallible, on his level. Otherwise, how can he tell you the despicable things, the stupid, shaming things? For the answers, there will always be the experts behind you. And all the very practical agencies, like A.A., Alanon, Synanon, Gamblers Anonymous, Weight Watchers – no, that’s not funny. Perhaps you didn’t know that overeating is often related to depression?’

‘Everyone knows
that.
’

It was a loud enough mutter. Dr Greiff lowered his peppery eyebrows towards Meredith and asked, ‘And do they also know that it can be a form of slow suicide, the same urge to self-destruction as alcoholism or drugs or smoking, hainh?’

‘And dangerous driving?’

‘And dangerous driving. That can be a very quick way.’

‘My name is Peter. My number is 100. I am the Director of this branch of the Samaritans.’

He was a burly man of about forty-five, with tawny lion’s hair, although his eyes were not reincarnated cat, but brown and calm and concentrated, like the kind of dog that has been reincarnated from a man, a good lost friend. When Sarah had met him at the hotel, he was in old clothes, terrible wide-cut trousers of a style long gone. He kept pulling them out and up, as if he had recently lost weight, and was proud of it. Now in a dark suit, he was not much more stylish. He had the kind of shape and movements that break clothes in to their own requirements, like a saddle.

He spoke rather softly, sitting behind the desk and
fiddling with a pencil, but everyone could hear him, because everyone was quiet.

Meredith was still there, although last week when Sarah had said, ‘See you on Monday.’ she had answered, ‘If I come.’

She was in slacks this evening, the collar of her white sweater high up under her determined chin, her shiny black hair newly cut with geometrical sideburns. She was attractive in a bright, glittery way, her teeth very white, her lips smooth and wet, her eyes like green glass on a sunny beach.

‘People in our society,’ Peter said, ‘are supposed to know what it’s all about. They know who they are, because the State has slapped labels on them. Homemaker. Educator. Computer Programmer. White Collar. Blue Collar. Law Enforcement Officer. Student. They are trained in what are called Skills, and they either have jobs or things with names like Earnings Related Supplements to Flat-rate Unemployment Benefit, from the Department of Employment and Productivity, which used to be the Labour Exchange.

‘They move like a restless wind back and forth in cars and buses and trains and planes. They know where they are going. They know they are going towards death, but they don’t think about it much, since the angels and thrones and cherubs aren’t there any more. They know what they want in shops. They have to, since there is nobody to ask, “Have you got any chutney?” or “What’s the pork like today?” They know what they want in marriage, having been sleeping together for a sensible period. They paint up a flat and eat paella and drink wine out of pottery mugs, and their children are called Tanzia and Melody and all speak slightly cockney, whatever the class of their parents.

‘The State has everyone in a plastic shopping bag, and it’s pretty sickening for our masters that there are still so many people who fall through holes and get lost among the broken cabbage leaves and crumpled grocery lists. That there are people who can’t be neatly classified,
except as Layabout. Failure. N.F.A. People who don’t fit in anywhere. Who won’t go along with the master plan. They are drifters, rejects. They can’t cope. They have nowhere to go and no one to love and no one who will listen to them any more – if they ever did.

‘Some of them have been like this since they were children. Some of them started out quite promisingly and then gradually everything went wrong. They are lonely because they are not very acceptable, and the more they are alone, the less acceptable they become. A vicious circle, sometimes subconsciously deliberate (that’s not a contradiction in terms) to back up their slogan: Nobody loves me. In the same way that teenagers will make themselves unlovable, in order to be able to accuse parents, “You don’t love me.” ‘

He paused for a moment, and looked at the reflective smiles of the older people who were seeing their teenage children. Sarah was seeing herself, hiding behind her hair, rejecting her father’s knowledge, scornful of his social antics, impatient with her mother’s patience, sadistic to everyone but her animals.

‘And so you see,’ Peter went on, turning the pencil over and over, tapping the desk first with the point, then the end, ‘it comes about that life has no place for these people. They drop out of school, of college, of jobs, of social groups, of marriage, of anything that emphasizes their own inadequacy. They don’t like their lives, or themselves. They are confused, rejected, lost. They will end their lives. Why not? You can’t live if you don’t like yourself. You can’t love anyone unless you can love yourself first. So if you hate yourself and your life and you have nobody to turn to – absolutely nobody, consider that – you kill yourself. That isn’t the answer, but it seems like the only answer, when the world has left you for dead.

‘But at the last moment, because you are a human being and self-preservation is your second strongest instinct, sometimes at the last moment, you send out one more cry for help.’ He laid his hand on one of the telephones
on the desk. ‘And it is answered. At the last moment, because you can’t bear to go unnoticed into your final act, you ask someone to listen to you. And they listen.