The Listeners (23 page)

‘We usually leave him alone.’ Jackie’s mother said, pronouncing it ‘yews-yew-alley’ with a niminy mouth. ‘He gets on much better, if he’s not too excited.’

‘He’s
not
excited, that’s the problem.’ Bill said. ‘Don’t you think that everything should be done to try and get through to him?’

‘Hear, hear.’ Harriet, hot and panting, came up from under a bench with a child who had gone to ground, and
carried him off to the basins, holding him well away from her, like a tray.

‘Last week I got him to hit me.’ Sarah said, and Jackie cried, ‘Char-ie hit Sair!’ and bent double with his feet planted for balance like the tinies, slapping his knees and laughing himself into a choking fit. He coughed with his mouth wide open, thick tongue out, eyes bolting.

‘Where’s your hand?’ his mother asked.

Before the end of the morning, Sarah found some carol music in the stool of St Barnabas’ jangling piano. She played some of the tunes and everyone sang. Sarah and Bill and Harriet and Jackie and his mother sang. Some of the children made noises. Some waved arms. Beth wandered away, blowing mournfully on the only tin trumpet that was not smashed. Charlie had fallen asleep in Bill’s arms. Neddy, the child with the taped ears, sat on Sarah’s lap and stretched out tiny tentative fingers towards her moving fingers on the keys.

When she stopped playing, he twisted round and looked up, his face very close to hers. His breath was sweet, like a baby. He was the ugliest child she had ever seen. Strange slitted eyes, horribly squinting. Flattened nose and top lip crusted with sores, oozing yellow through ointment and powder, scattered teeth like grey cobwebs.

Since Sarah had started to come to the Play School, she thought often about having a baby.

Tut you off, I’d have thought,’ Brian said. But it was the other way. Was there one of these somewhere waiting for her? She hugged the child close until he shivered, poor, botched, unbearable face, victim of something crueller than mere human sadism.

With his chin on her shoulder, Neddy chuckled. Jackie was standing behind Sarah, making extraordinary faces.

‘Look out there,’ chortled Harriet, ‘The wind might change.’ Her hair was on end. Her blouse was rucked up, with a tail of moth-riddled vest coming out over her skirt. She had ice cream and orangeade all over her front.

‘Don’t talk to him as if he was a baby.’ His mother
came out of the cloakroom with her sleeves rolled up, brisk and immaculate, although she had given two children a bath.

’Once in
Roy
-al Da-ha-vi-hid’s ci-tee,’ carolled Harriet. There would be a fight one day. Sarah prayed she would be there to see it.

The Front Royal Hotel was full over Christmas, with a dinner dance and a fancy dress party and balloons and funny hats, like a transatlantic cruise. All quite archaic.

Different kinds of people came. Middle-aged men and girls with long glossy switches the wrong colour for their skin. Families who had more money than sense and a mother who refused to cook a turkey. Girls with excess sebaceous secretions who had had no luck last summer on the Costa Brava. Long-necked men in spectacles, equally out of luck, more likely to end up in the dock for exposure than in bed with one of the sebaceous girls. Barrel women in mink capes. Grey, gastric-mouthed men who had been told it would be good for them.

Some of the regulars, Mrs Stoddard, Lady Tredegar and the Colonel, had visitors. Children and grandchildren, getting away as soon as they could. Some of them went to stay with families or friends. The ones who remained, the Formans and the Dutch couple and the lady whose hip would not knit and the old man with the mad nurse, withdrew into themselves on the overheated veranda and waited Christmas out.

Brian, the most junior, had to work on Christmas day, so Sarah went home to her parents’ farmhouse out in the country beyond the University. They were housing a lustrous Venezuelan Law student, who, whether or not she had designs on Sarah’s father, was apparently the object of some design of his.

As a barrister in court, he had always been a showman, using his voice dramatically, making stage business of the smallest gesture; thumbs inside edges of the gown, glasses off, glasses on in order to look over them with incredulity for a witness’s stupidity, glasses polished with
a silk handkerchief to prolong the suspense of a pause. For the Venezuelan girl, as local friends drifted in and out for eggnog, he put on the roaring-good-host routine, taking centre stage, forcing the conversation his way, even doing the imitation of the Queen getting plastered before her television speech, which he had stolen from one of his students.

In the kitchen with her mother, Sarah jerked her head towards the laughter and said, ‘He carries on so.’

‘People like it.’

‘Does Maria? She looks a little detached.’

‘She’s constipated, I think. But your father’s giving her a nice time. It saves me having to think up things for her to do. She likes him.’ She blinked mildly and smiled. She was only fifty, but increasing deafness was blanking her out.

‘He needs to be liked.’ Sarah raised her voice over a small clatter of plates. ‘Why does he need reassurance all the time?’

Her mother nodded agreement. She had not heard the question.

Was this where Sarah derived her own need? As she grew older at home, she had realized that her father, even when he was leaning back on the end of his spine murmuring sage counsel, never stopped working for popularity. It was not until she had married and gone away that Sarah began to recognize in herself the same anxiety.

She did not put on acts like her father, who tried to turn every lecture into a
tour de force.
She did not tell stories brilliantly in dialect, or suddenly recreate herself as landed gentry, as he did every year at the Agricultural Show, with a pork-pie hat and drinks for all in the boot of the car. But she began to see what she had not recognized in her few feckless spinster years, that there was a wagging spaniel in her nature that would turn somersaults and lick hands to get approval. She began to hear herself saying not what she thought, but what she thought people wanted to hear.

She began to catch herself doing it with Brian, working
too hard to please him, not always succeeding. What did he want her to be?

When she asked him, he naturally said, ‘Be yourself.’ But had she ever quite been herself with him? What was herself? She did not think he knew. At times when she found herself drifting this way and that in the breezes of other people’s estimation, she did not know herself.

To live as much in fantasy - remembering, looking forward - as in present reality was what kept people sane. Sometimes she felt as though she and Brian were in a fantasy most of the time. Making up dialogue, funny, tender, irritable, sexy. Playing at being a boy in a monogrammed blazer who people saw as a reception clerk because he was behind a high polished counter. Acting a long-legged, big-eyed wife with a shopping basket, chatting up the tradesmen. Masquerading as a swinging young couple with hosts of friends and a life of charm and gaiety.

The day after Christmas, they went to a screaming, clawing party in the basement of a house in the old part of town where two or three couples they knew lived in convivial squalor, the men emerging somehow each morning with clean collars and rolled umbrellas to sit at office desks.

The noise of their parties did not usually trouble Sarah, but tonight she found that her glands were swelling, her whole neck tight and her mouth dry and aching in the effort to talk above the racket of people and music. She could tell by the face of the man she was talking to that even the part he could hear was not worth the effort.

‘Don’t talk then,’ Brian said. Slightly drunk, he pinned her in a corner for a while.

‘Let’s go home.’

‘Not yet.’

He danced with one of the girls who lived in the house, who was dressed above the waist only in her long pale hair, crossed over her breasts and tied behind. When she danced, her nipples showed through, purplish brown
from having babies, not very attractive.

Sarah sat on a rolled-up rug on the floor and listened to some people arguing, without hearing what they said. She was Brian’s boring wife, not gay, not sexy. She looked at her stuck-out legs in green tights. There was not enough shape to them. The tights wrinkled unless you washed them every five minutes. Would Brian like her to be intense and brilliant like Tilly with the hair shirt, who was now singing with a guitar, her face beatified, the people round her listening rapt to the secret message of her repetitive words, her nipples parting the swags of ivory-coloured hair?

Down at the dark end of the basement, among bedding and tin baths and stacked pictures, a man and woman were preparing to copulate. Sarah could see white limbs begin to move less spasmodically and more rhythmically.

Brian came back to her. He did not want to go, so she did not ask again. She held his hand while a man with lank dirty hair and elliptical drugged eyes began to play the drums. He looked like the boy she had seen at the Samaritan Centre, waiting lustrelessly for help.

Only a week before she could go back there to take the test with Meredith and Richard Bayes and the rest of them. All this Christmas time had been an abeyance, waiting to go back to the Samaritans.

Victoria’s mother lived in Scotland. ‘Are you coming up for Christmas?’

‘There won’t be time.’

‘Can’t you ask the editor for an extra day?’ She never could remember Willie Fisher’s name, or the name of the paper.

‘I mean the Samaritans. I signed up for extra duty.’

‘Oh well, that’s different.’ Her mother felt rather holy about the Samaritans. She had no idea what they did, but visualized them as a sort of missionary order, with her daughter as a lay preacher, converting people through the telephone Word.

Telephone words from Billie took up part of Victoria’s
Christmas duty. Billie and Morna had been to a party.

‘You remember the night that bugger made me work late and the girl went down the pier without me?’

Down the pier referred to the derelict café where the pier ended in the muddy channel of the estuary. It was refurbished every summer, and torn apart every winter by various groups.

‘Don’t you remember? What’s the matter, you stopped listening to me, like everyone else? I thought that was what you lot were there for, listening.’

‘When there’s something worth hearing.’ Often Billie would not come out with it until she had stirred Victoria to comradely repartee.

‘Well, do you remember or don’t you?’

‘I think so.’ Victoria talked to Billie several times a week. It was hard to separate all the traumas.

‘Told you I didn’t trust her, didn’t I?’ Billie said, although at the time she had protested that she did. ‘I know that sort. Any girl with hands like that, the end joint of the little finger longer than the others, you can never trust them, did you know that?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘There’s a lot you don’t know, Victoria, if you don’t mind my saying so. Sometimes I think it’s me should be by that phone telling people how to do away with themselves, and you here sweating it out between Fettiche and that perverted little tramp. You couldn’t bitch it up worse than me, that’s for sure.’

‘Wasn’t the party fun?’

‘It was all right. I didn’t mind it, as a matter of fact, though normally I don’t go much for that kind of thing. There was this fellow there, I didn’t like his looks. He knew Morna, though she pretended at first she never saw him before in her life. Lana Turner: “I never saw you bee-fore in my life—”
slap
! That was because she’d met him that other time, you see, and got up to God knows what without my restraining influence. Very sweet, she was, such a well-behaved little girl, stayed by me most of the time. Bill this, Bill that, are you having a nice time,
Bill, let me hot up your drink. Yvonne, she’d brought some of the food - sausage rolls the size of a pillow, you couldn’t get your lips round them, and that ham was off, I found
that
out afterwards - even Yvonne remarked on it, though she’s thick at the best of times. Like her rough puff pastry. “What’s up with you?” she says to Morna. “Trying to get Billie to remember you in her will?” That’s how they talk about me, that lot, as if I was already dead. Times I wish I was.’

Oh come on, Billie dear, I thought you weren’t going to say that any more. Tell me what else you’ve been doing.’

‘That’s just it. I bloomin’ worked, right up to yesterday. Parties for the kiddies. Not to mention the old folks. Those professors’ wives are full of the milk of, but my legs can tell you who does the work.’

‘I thought you were going to see the doctor.’

‘So did I, but it’s Mondays, the vein clinic, and that’s not my best day, or anyone else’s. You get more suicide calls on a Monday, don’t you?’

‘Not really. Perhaps it’s because a lot of other people are fed up too, on Mondays. Some time like now, when everyone else is being jolly, that’s when we seem to get more calls. If you’re a left-out sort of person, something like Christmas just rubs it in.’

‘You’re telling me. And when everyone else is off work but you. You know what we’re going to do next week? Wash down the walls with sugar soap. “You’ll have the Union to reckon with,” I told him. “Look at your contract, Camilla Cripps,” he says . . .’

Victoria’s ear was Billie’s most useful possession.

4000 rang. Victoria said goodbye quickly to Billie and pulled the emergency telephone towards her. It always seemed bigger, blacker, heavier than any other telephone, weighted with distress and need.

‘Samaritans - can I help you?’

‘You always say that.’ A disgruntled man. ‘And then hang up.’

‘No, we don’t. We never hang up on people.’

‘On me, you do. They’re all sick of me because they’ve
heard it all too often. I haven’t had you before, have I?’ It was a querulous Germanic voice, like a violin teacher who has listened for too many years to sulky untalented children.

‘I don’t think so. I’m Victoria.’

‘Look here, Victoria, I don’t want you to tell me, “There’s a call on the other line,” when I can hear quite well the other telephone is not ringing. Tell me how long I can talk.’