The Listeners (21 page)

He paid very little attention to her, except physically. He was the sort of pseudo-virile man who felt the need for constant innuendo. When they stayed at this flat, they had Laura’s tiny room and narrow bed. Saying goodnight, he would add something like, ‘Off to the virginal couch to see who I can deflower,’ or, ‘Tight squeeze – like my wife.’

It was reasonably sickening, although Alice pretended to find Nigel comic. The simulated bond between the
two of them was as much to provoke Paul as to please themselves.

Jeff came back through the cold wet slush of dirty melted snow in sandals and a pair of short wide cotton trousers flapping round his bony bare ankles. He had bought imported new potatoes, beans, spinach, carrots, mushrooms, much more than he had been sent out for. Not having enough money to pay, he had entered into a complicated deal with the shopkeeper, who did not know him in this amorphous part of town where shops and tenants changed hands constantly, leaving his watch as security over the holiday.

‘You’ll never see that again.’ Alice said. ‘Go back at once and redeem it. Here’s the money. Nigel, someone, give him ten shillings.’

‘I’m not going out again.’ Jeff poured a wineglassful of cherry brandy and sat down, sticking out his dirty frozen toes towards the pulsing electric fire.

‘Come on, old chap, do as your mother says.’ Paul said, so of course Alice retorted, ‘Don’t make him. Look at his poor feet.’

‘Go and put on some shoes,’ Paul said, heading doggedly towards the difficult evening.

Dinner was very late, although Laura had the oven turned up high enough to fill the flat with fumes from the burning grease her mother never cleaned. In a splurge of Christmas spirit yesterday, Alice had bought a bird that was much too big. Also presents that were expensive and unsuited, some of them to the recipient and all of them to her bank balance.

For Laura, who slept in the top half of Nigel’s pyjamas, a frothy, elaborate nightdress. She said, ‘Thank you very much’ and folded it carefully back into the tissue paper nest of the box. She would perhaps give it to her mother-in-law tomorrow.

For Nigel, a bottle. He shook the parcel and said, ‘Gurgle, gurgle, that’s the way I like my presents to sound.’ He had brought Alice a bottle of Beefeater’s gin, done up in a special package the shape of an old ruffled
and skirted yeoman at the Tower of London.

‘Bath salts!’ cried Alice. ‘Just what I wanted.’

Paul had a wry mental vision of Jane and Phil, two ex-friends from the A.A. days, toasting each other in Coca-Cola and toddling off to a meeting tonight, and Christmas night, and every blooming night.

Alice gave Jeff quite a large cheque. He asked for that. She gave it to him. For Paul, she had bought a very beautiful, very expensive brocade waistcoat, red watered silk shot through with threads of all colours. He could think of no occasion on which he might wear it.

‘Put it on.’

‘Not now.’

‘Don’t you like it? I went to ten shops looking for it, and now he won’t even wear it.’

‘Put it on, Dad.’

It was too small for him, That was why he had not wanted to try it on. Alice burst into tears of dismay and ran out of the room, falling over Jeff’s feet. She was halfway to being drunk, and by the time the turkey was ready to carve, she was three-quarters of the way there. Nigel had taken the martinis to her room and they had stayed in there drinking and watching the television in a miasma of smoke and cheese crumbs among the orange-stained cigarette butts. Paul read, and Laura told Jeff about a programme she was in at college to devise a revolutionary system of physical and mental education for vitamin-deficient children, while Jeff picked at the dead skin round his toe nails.

‘Do you want me to put shoes on?’ he asked when he saw Paul watching him.

‘I did ask you to, hours ago.’

‘I thought that was only repartee to my mother.’ He always referred to her as that. To her face, he had not called her by any name for a long time.

‘What are you going to do, Daddy?’

‘About what?’

‘You know.’ Laura nodded towards the bedroom.

Oh—’ he shrugged, and she said, ‘Don’t hedge,’ looking
at him with the steady eyes that did not seem to need to blink.

‘Nothing much I can do, Laura, She won’t go back to A.A. I can’t drag her there. Anyway, it doesn’t work unless you want it.’

‘The clinic?’

‘It costs the earth and she goes happily back on the bottle as soon as she comes out.’

‘Why do you stick with her?’

He might say, Because she’s my wife. Because of you two. Because it’s the right thing to do. Because she needs me. Laura would have accepted none of those answers, so he said, ‘Nowhere else to go.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about me when I’m not in the room.’ Alice came back, blurred in face and voice. ‘Did I miss anything interesting?’

‘We were asking Dad why he stuck with you,’ Jeff said cruelly.

It was going to be a splendid Christmas. What a splendid family, in which something like that could be said, ingested, digested, and excreted by Alice, ‘You heard him - nowhere else to go,’ without rancour.

But Jeff had not done with the evening. At dinner, when Nigel asked him if he would be a prefect next year, he said calmly, bolting great quantities of unchewed food, ‘I shan’t be there next year.’ He did not look at his father, but he was speaking to him.

‘Where will you be?’ Paul asked mildly.

‘Abroad somewhere, I don’t know. I’m leaving at the end of the summer. I’ve told the Beast.’

‘Before you told us?’

‘Well, it’s his concern more than yours. He’ll want to fill my place.’

‘What if I say no?’

‘To saving the money? Why should you?’

Laura said, ‘You won’t get into University without A levels.’

‘I don’t want to. Nothing in that for me. Any more than there is at Burlington. Shocking waste of time and
money.’ He reached for the bread, broke off a chunk and chewed it round his small even teeth with his mouth open. The school had done nothing for his table manners.

‘You should have thought of that.’ Paul said, ‘when you made such a fuss about staying when I left. Why did you?’

‘Laura knows.’ Brother and sister exchanged a glance, their faces closed to everyone else.

‘Laura knows - what?’ Alice leaned her wasted breasts across the table, believing that she was articulating very clearly. ‘What does Laura know?’

‘Oh - how I feel about schools. Public schools in particular. The worst criminal folly in British sociological history.’

‘Oh listen here.’ Nigel by some fluke had been at Winchester, and had never got over it. ‘Our public schools - I consider that our public school system . . .’ He spoke ponderously, with a royal We, as he did when he was drunk, starting stories that would never end. ‘All things considered, and when we take the alternatives -when we consider that our experiences - impressions of those years are the most very deep and lasting of our lives. . .’

‘I suppose you think Winchester made you a gentleman.’ Jeff said chattily, and plunged forward like a starving animal to stuff a loaded fork into his mouth.

It was horrible, horrible. When Paul apologized to Laura, exhaustedly finishing in the kitchen long after Nigel had gone to bed, she shrugged her square shoulders and said, ‘Standard family Christmas.’

‘Why did you want to come home then?’ he asked miserably.

‘Because I loved you.’

‘Did love or do love?’

‘Don’t analyse, Daddy. Just get on with the job.’

‘Is that what you do?’

‘Day to day.’

‘That’s the A.A. method. One day at a time.’

‘Good. If it comes out in me, I’ll know.’

‘They were both too unhappy to help each other.

After Christmas, Jeff took off for Bristol to stay with a friend specified only as Someone I know at school.

‘What’s his name?’

‘It wouldn’t mean anything to you.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Bernard Grimbell.’

‘I haven’t heard of him.’

‘I told you.’

He left home wearing a reefer jacket and a pair of fisherman’s boots he had picked up in a shop near the harbour.

‘Aren’t you going to shave?’

‘I thought it might be fun to grow a beard while I’m away. Well - goodbye, you two. Better be going.’

‘Wait a minute and I’ll drive you to the station.’ Paul was dressing. Alice was still in bed.

‘Don’t bother, Dad. There’s plenty of time.’

‘What time’s your train?’ Alice asked.

‘In about an hour. I forget exactly.’

‘Have you got enough money?’

‘I cashed that cheque you gave me.’

‘Let me help you with the fare.’ Paul put his hand in his pocket. ‘It will be quite a lot.’

‘No, it’s all right, really it is. I’m perfectly all right. See you in about a week.’ He sidled himself out of the room and away.

When Paul shut the front door and came back to the bedroom, Alice said, ‘He’s going to hitchhike, isn’t he?’

‘God, I hope not.’

‘I know he is. He’s spent that money I gave him. He owed it.’

‘When you went Christmas shopping,’ Paul asked, ‘did you have any idea what your overdraft was?’

‘It’s yours too, dear. I generously share it with you. Would you rather have separate bank accounts?’

‘We shan’t have any bank accounts, Alice, if it goes on like this.’

‘You mean . . .’ she put on the throbbing voice. ‘You mean it ca-hant go on?’ She tousled her hair forward and looked up through it tragically.

He put on his jacket and went out. He would not play.

He was not on Samaritan duty today, but he went up to the Centre anyway and heard about different Christ-mases from Peter and Ralph and ugly scarred Nancy, who was not an acute Samaritan client any more, but came in regularly, as if it were a club.

Nancy had spent her Christmas in hospital. ‘Accident prone, they call me.’ She had brought a large cake and was cutting it and handing it round among Samaritans and clients. ‘Not the stove this time, no. I’ve given up frying, it’s everything boiled, no wonder my sister stays away. Struck from behind on that same corner I’ve been crossing for years. You should see my legs. That’s why I wasn’t in here over Christmas.’

‘We were worried about you,’ 200 said. ‘Diana went up to your place.’

‘It was company anyway, and we had a nice dinner. The Lady Mayoress came. Did you have a nice time?’ She turned the plate round for Paul to take the largest piece of cake.

‘Very nice. Quiet, with my family.’

‘Treasure your family,’ said Nancy, old at fifty, battered by life and loneliness. ‘That’s where it lies.’

Paul went across the hall to sit with Ralph at the big scarred desk which held the 4000 telephone. He listened to Ralph’s end of conversations with a man who could not find his wife, a girl who was afraid of her father, a Pakistani woman who was being persecuted by the neighbours.

At noon, Ralph went out for a sandwich, and Paul moved into his chair. He sat with his elbows on the desk, his chin heavy in his hands, and watched the mysterious telephone. He was sleeping badly. He was very weary. He did not want to think, or open the newspaper, or read through the log book. He did not want anybody to come in and talk. He did not want the telephone to ring. If he
wanted anything, it would have been to take a magical draught and be put away unconscious somewhere by gentle hands until it was all over. The accidents that plagued Nancy usually happened when she felt especially blue. Ambulance men were her flights of angels. Penicillin and bandages and novocaine sprays her rest.

If Paul got an emergency call now, he would not be able to handle it properly. It was not fair to make a promise to people that you would never let them down, and then place by the telephone a dead, empty man with nothing to offer. He felt so numb that he could not even remember how the telephone’s ring was pitched, although he had heard it hundreds of times. He felt stupid, thick-headed in the warm little room, the panelling boxing him away from the world outside where phantom figures wept and fought and wrung their hands. Where Alice was sullenly into the afternoon’s soak. Where Mrs Frost, in the cool cameo in which he still thought of her, would be clearing up after the directors’ lunch, neat-handed and at peace, her expectations unstirred by any remembrance of Paul Hammond.

The telephone rang. He jerked up his nodding head and picked it up, surprised to hear his normal voice. ‘Samaritans - can I help you?’

‘Oh yes. Oh yes, I think you can. Please help me.’

Instantly the close panelled walls of the study dissolved into life and he could see the woman, gripping her telephone hard, youngish, faded, strained. He saw the house, one in a row, bay-windowed villas, smoke-sick plants in front, washing and broken tricycles behind.

‘I’ll try, Tell me what the trouble is. I’ll try to help.’

‘I’ve not told anyone. I daren’t. If my husband found out, he’d kill me.’

She had bought some things at the door. Children’s clothes. A watch. A transistor radio. ‘And now that doesn’t work and they tell me at the repair shop they never heard of the make, or a battery that would go in it.’

When she began to miss payments, the salesmen’s visits
became more frequent. Last week one of them, ‘the one I thought was the nicest’, had said, ‘I’m afraid the next step will have to be a letter to your husband.’

‘No, I’ll tell him.’

She could not. The letter came when he was at work. She hid it, unopened. When the man came again, she was able to give him half the outstanding money.

She paused. Paul waited. ‘It’s all right,’ he said then. ‘Go on, my dear. You can say anything you want. It’s just you and me. What’s your name?’ he asked, to get her talking.

‘Jenny.’

‘I’m Paul.’

‘It’s having no one to tell that kills you. I sit in the room here with my husband and a dozen times in the evening I sort of begin to open my mouth, and I’m going to tell him, but then of course I can’t. He wouldn’t understand.’

‘He might.’

‘Oh no, he couldn’t. No one could. I don’t know why I thought
you
could.’

‘I’ll try.’

She had taken the money in a shop. A knitwear sale. Throngs of women picking things over. A handbag had been left for a moment on a chair by the counter. In a dream, she had taken out a wallet, and half fainting with fear, gone away in the crowd. ‘There was ten pounds in it. More than half what I owed.’