The Listeners (27 page)

Rusted chain fencing topped with spikes locked these sad relics from the street. A hole clipped out of the wire and replaced by an old door led through a puddled yard to the two-storey building where the students ran their
house of last hope for the jakies and junkies and rejected derelicts, the carrion of the town.

‘But we don’t really run it, you know,’ a streamlined Jamaican girl, like a dark greyhound, told Victoria. ‘We are just working here with the men. This is their place. That’s why they come. They help each other, whatever they can do, even if it’s only sharing their last quarter-bottle of meths. They can go away when they like and come back, no questions asked. That’s what old Mike does. Leave the clothes here. If he doesn’t come in, we’ll find him some night on the soup run.’

‘Where do you go?’

‘The stations, the derries, the camps, the skipper behind Caxton’s bakery where the hot air blows out. A whole sub-continent. You ought to come out with us some night.’

‘Could I?’

A body that had been swaddled on the floor in a corner of the room unwound itself from the blanket and stood up, wild-lipped, and began to shout.

‘It’s all right, Donald.’ The girl went to him, a man with a nest of hair like snakes, tatters of cloth you could hardly call clothes, the smell and filth of him stronger than the fumes of the rusted oil heater.

He shook off her hand, and stood balanced on wide unsteady legs, trying to focus where he was. She put up her hand again to his shoulder.

‘Donald? It’s Hattie.’

He lurched out of the room and thudded down, screaming in the passage.

Feet on the stairs. Through the doorway, Victoria saw a stocky young man with bare feet jump down. ‘Come down and help, Nosey!’ he called.

A tall top-heavy person with a bashed-in nose came down the stairs two at a time, long arms swinging like a chimpanzee, and together they dragged the bellowing man upstairs.

‘Nosey is a marvellous stong man. He can fight two, three people even when he’s drunk. Jack thinks he might

go dry if he could get away from the others who are stuck with meths, keeping them alive until it kills them.’

‘I think it’s marvellous what you—’

‘It’s not enough. We can’t cure anyone. We can only
be
here. Most of these people have nobody anywhere, you see.’

The banging and shouting upstairs subsided. Jack came down lightfooted. ‘I’m going to start the sandwiches,’ he said to Hattie. ‘Dick’s got a bottle up there and it’s no good waiting for Doris when she’s gone as long as this.’

In the passage, Victoria and Hattie stepped round a yellow puddle of vomit. Outside in the wet yard, pocked and hillocked with years of shifting coal dust, an old man was sitting on an upturned tank.

‘Mike?’

He turned his face round under a mushroom hat. It was not Michael, but another old man, wasted, toothless, his face no different from what it would be when he was dead.

‘Are you coming in?’

He turned his face away again.

‘He hates being indoors. I’ll bring you out a mug of soup.’ Hattie went inside. As Victoria walked past the old man, she saw the hands that lay on his scarecrow knees, bone white and bloodless. One had only three fingers. The other had only stumps.

There was nothing she had to do tonight. Why did she not go back in to the shabby smelly house and cut sandwiches and clean up the vomit and go out with Hattie and Jack in the little daisy van to the derries and ramps and skippers? She walked on to the end of the chain fence. A boat in the river hooted jadedly at the bridge, dragging a string of covered barges like coffins. At the corner a taxi passed with its roof light on. She stopped it and got in. The last woman had left a flower scent behind. Victoria was instantly removed from Hattie’s subcontinent. Ahead of her, a drink, a bath, meat to cook in her easy kitchen. A new dress to try on. A book she was
enjoying. The lonely self indulgence of her white bed.

She paid the taxi and went up. Robbie had sent his week’s flowers. Mrs Edgar from downstairs had arranged them with care and propped the card proudly, as if it were from a new exciting lover. Victoria made a drink and sat for a moment, thinking about the black greyhound girl and Jack and how they did not have to force themselves to conquer revulsion. It was never there.

She sighed and turned to the telephone by the fireplace. Dialling Billie’s number made her feel suddenly very tired.

Billie - how are you?

Grumble, grumble. She always started off negatively to disguise any positive pleasure.

Let’s meet somewhere and go to the cinema. Have you seen the Space thing? They say you hate it or love it but you can’t not see it.

Don’t do me any favours, Victoria. You’ve got something better to do than go out with me.

Not home ... not home ... not home
... Victoria let the telephone ring for quite a long time before she hung up.

‘
Barbara. Barbara. When are you going to sleep with me?
’

‘
Wait, Paul, we must wait.
’

‘
Why wait? What for?
’

In this town, which was full of odd pockets of different variegations of society, it was easy to conduct a discreet affair without anyone knowing or caring. What was happening between Paul and Barbara Frost was not yet an affair. They met often, discovered each other, discovered their love. She had cooked dinner for him in her small ivy-swamped house where the suburbs relaxed into country, but he had never stayed. One son was still at home. The married son’s room was let to a student who shook the house with wild piano music.

‘When are you going to sleep with me?’ Paul began to ask it very soon. A sense of urgency plagued him. The
world would end. He would be too old. One of them would die. There was no time, no time for gradual growth of love. He was afraid, not that they would be found out, but that something would happen to take this away.

‘Wait, darling, we must wait.’ More passive, her sexuality for a long pause asleep, for Barbara it was enough that they had found each other.

‘Why wait? What for? There’s no time.’

‘Because we’re both so old?’ She was six years younger than he was. He had been feeling used and finished at fifty. He did not now think of either of them as anything but in their prime.

He told her she was beautiful, and after a while she gave up denying it. ‘And I don’t look in the mirror so much. I used to force myself to look in a strong light, because I thought that you must face the truth of what Nature does to your face as the price of using it. Now I think it’s better to imagine you look all right than to keep reminding yourself you don’t.’

Alice was drinking very heavily after Christmas. That was not an excuse, but it was a cause perhaps. It made this more necessary.

‘It also makes it more possible.’ Barbara was endowed with a rueful commonsense that stood her in good stead of wit. She was calm, accepting, un-volatile, very peaceful and lovely to be with.

They were able to be quite often together. Alice spent whole evenings at the club by the harbour, returning sometimes in a taxi after midnight and waking Paul to rail at him. Sometimes not returning at all. Paul thought she stayed with some raffish friends who lived in the harbour village, but one morning when he rang them, she was not there.

If she was not at home when he left for the Butterfields school, he pencilled a message on the refrigerator door: ‘Back about five,’ or, ‘I’ll bring something in for dinner.’ He did not write, ‘Where have you been?’

By the time he came home, especially if he had a late
detention class, Alice would be several drinks into the evening, and would not remember where she had spent the night out, nor even whether. Often when he came home, she was already out again, with a rude addendum to his refrigerator message.

‘Ought we to feel guilty?’ Barbara asked.

‘What about?’ In Paul’s imagination, they went to Bahama Cays, to Scottish inns, to a hotel he knew in a farming village in the Perigord, where the water meadows nudged the white-washed walls.

‘But Alice—’

‘Laura says I owe her nothing.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘Of course not. Laura sees everything black and white. If your marriage doesn’t work, you drop it, as she will, and shut the door on the ghosts. Only for her there won’t be any ghosts, and she won’t wonder about Nigel’s.’

And then there was a weekend when Barbara’s son was going away and Alice announced in the middle of the night that she was going down the coast to stay with Hazel Rencher.

‘You’re a glutton for punishment.’ Paul was wide awake now, trying not to sound pleased.

‘Hazel has been a good friend.’ Alice had pulled off her girdle and she fell into bed in a pinned petticoat, her stockings wrinkled round her ankles. ‘But I’d go there anyway,’ she humped her bony back to Paul, ‘because it’s obvious you don’t want me here.’

‘You hardly ever are here.’

‘Why should I be when you don’t want me?’

She could keep that sort of thing up for hours. Sometimes Paul got up and made tea or a drink and sat reading until she fell asleep, her mouth open, snoring stale alcohol.

‘I want you here, of course,’ he said. ‘The flat isn’t the same without you.’

‘As if I was a sofa repossessed by the Hire Purchase people. At least you can sit on a sofa. Remember when—’

‘Oh stop.’

‘You haven’t slept with me for months,’ she whined, ‘do you know that?’

‘You’re always drunk. You’d fall alseep.’

‘You’re past it, I expect, dear,’ Alice said comfortably. ‘Hazel thought you were looking awfully old the last time she saw you.’

‘Hazel can go and screw herself.’

‘I daresay she does,’ Alice said equably. ‘Who else would?’

In the morning when Alice woke fairly cheerful, which could either mean that she had drunk less last night, or that she was still slightly drunk, Paul offered to drive her to Hazel’s after school.

‘That would be getting rid of me too fast. I shall free you of me more slowly, in a bus.’

‘This is improbably easy,’ Barbara said when she got into the car. She was wearing a coat with big red and white squares like a horse blanket. She always wore very good shoes on her narrow feet. Her silk scarf was French. Her bag was the kind of leather that costs a lot to buy, but well kept, lasts for years. Short locks of hair lay softly over each other, like leaves. She looked like the best kind of Burlington mother setting off for the Burlington-Stowe rugger match, the social event of the Spring term. She looked like Mrs Watts, mother of the star forward in Paul’s time. Except that no one would ever take Mrs Watts to a hotel they knew of which looked, and treated its few guests, as if it was still a comfortable shabby manor house in a park with a walled fruit garden.

Mr and Mrs Harding. Barbara did not blush. Her skin and circulation did not work that way.

Before they got home, Paul asked, ‘How are you going to feel about this?’

‘All right, I think. Surprised at myself. I always thought I was so cautious, but - yes, all right,’ After a pause, she said, ‘I’d forgotten what I’d been missing.*

There was a yellow bar under the front door of Paul’s flat. He had left the hall light on. Chronically worried
about money, the electricity bill flipped through his mind’s letter box. He could not even light the grill for steak without seeing the gas roar through the pipes and burn away.

He carried his suitcase down the hall. As he passed the open door of the sitting room, his eyes registered something before his mind and body. He had gone past the doorway before he realized that Alice was sitting on an upright chair with her feet neatly crossed, ironing.

He went back. ‘I thought you weren’t coming home till tomorrow.’

‘I couldn’t wait to see you. Have you been at the Samaritans?’

That was one alibi he would never use. ‘I was playing golf with Upjohn. The father of that boy Stephen. You remember.’ You remember that day at Archway when he came to tea with Bluey Morgan and you were sloshed.

‘Carry your clubs in a suitcase?’

‘I spent the night with them.’

Now it began. It had been too easy. Now the lies must begin. He looked at Alice. There was something wrong. Not just that she was ironing a shirt, but it was six-thirty on a Saturday evening and she - he went closer and looked at her prominent pale blue eyes - yes, she was sober.

‘Don’t say anything. Please don’t say you’re glad, or it’s about time. Please don’t laugh. It’s bad enough without that.’ She pressed firmly on the iron, but when she stood it on its heel to turn the shirt, he saw that her hands were shaking. She was smiling with her teeth closed. Tiny beads of sweat spattered her lip. ‘Hazel’s been working on me. You’re right. She is a damn bore. To shut her up, I said I’d try again. That’s really why I came home. I want you to take me to A.A. tonight.’

For weeks, they went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting almost every night. There were several groups in the town. There was always a meeting somewhere. Alice could only hang on to sobriety if she went among the
people who fought the same battle. She did not beg Paul to go with her, but she would not go without him.

Occasionally Paul could see Barbara on his way home from school. Brief times together, not happy, not properly talking, because there was no time. Alice could hardly survive the day without his support.

Tor how long?’ Barbara asked.

‘It depends. There are people who’ve been going to A.A. meetings for sixteen, twenty years. It replaces social life, church going, everything. It’s like being on an artificial kidney. They can’t cope without it.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Barbara was the one who asked it.

‘I don’t know. Don’t ask me yet. I can’t see ahead. I only know I have to do this now. All the times I’ve begged her, nagged at her, even threatened her, had A.A. people round to talk to her, prayed for it, God knows, it was the one thing I wanted.’

‘And now you don’t want it?’

‘Of course I want it for her.’

‘But not for us.’ Barbara looked at him candidly. ‘It was better for us when she was drinking.’

Barbara could voice the forbidden things, the things he hated himself for thinking. She was willing to understand, but not to pretend.