The Listeners (28 page)

Alice’s group had been asked to put on a meeting for another branch in a town fifteen miles away where the river ran under green willows and bungalow gardens came down to the bank. A place where you would not expect to find alcoholics, but there were just as many there as anywhere else. Alice and two men called Leslie and Scott were to speak.

‘Are you going in Scott’s car?’

‘I said we could go in ours. Scott’s good eye is getting worse.’

‘Doesn’t Leslie drive?’

‘Paul—’ Alice’s eyes were instantly full of tears. She cried more easily now than when she was drinking. She was under a great strain. Every waking hour of her day
was a conflict. It tired her, made her weaker than her nature. ‘I’ve got to speak.’

‘Yes, I know. I’m glad.’

‘I can’t do it.’

‘You’ve done it before.’

‘But you were there.’ She was forced to say it. ‘Paul, I—’ She looked at him with eyes that the years of drinking had paled and bleared, now with drops quivering under the stubby lashes. ‘I can’t do it without you.’

‘You never used to need me so much.’ He said it lightly.

‘I’m asking too much of you, aren’t I?’ She wiped her eyes, and her mouth trembled into a smile.

‘I was the one who wanted you to get sober.’

‘God, what will the children say!’ Alice veered into a laugh. ‘It will kill Jeff when he comes home at Easter and finds me wholesome and sweet-breathed as a dairy cow.’

‘He isn’t coming home,’ Paul said. ‘He’s going to Sweden. Don’t you remember?’

‘I forget things. My brain has been rotted by years of alcohol.’

All the way in the car, she and Leslie and Scott made terrible crude jokes about booze, things that Paul would never dream of saying to an alcoholic, but they did it with a sort of spontaneous compulsion. It was part of their need for alcohol that they must talk about it endlessly, set it up and knock it down, deride it, nostalgically lament it, take it out and shake it, worry it, chew it into tag ends of old jests, as if by constant onslaught they could wear away its power.

After being with a group of dry alcoholics, the one thing Paul wanted was a drink.

And before. ‘Oh good,’ said Leslie, getting into the front seat of the car. ‘I can get drunk on your breath. No - forget the peppermints. I like it.’

The meeting was in a parish hall, bare wood and iron-rod rafters, bleak with the memories of ill-attended jumble sales. When they went in, Leslie and Scott slid into the small crowd like fish into their own element,
greeting several people by name. Alice hung back, her hand on Paul’s arm. He pressed her wrist, feeling how little substance there was between flesh and bone. Her cheeks were flushed, her nose white and shiny. She used less make-up when she was not drinking.

‘Don’t be afraid, Alice.’

‘How can anyone be expected to stand up and talk cold sober?’

‘Inhuman, isn’t it?’ The evening’s chairman came up, a mop-and-duster sort of woman on whom an actress might model herself for a margarine commercial. ‘You must be Alice. I’m June.’

‘My husband, Paul.’

‘On the programme too?’ June asked.

‘Practically, he’s been with me to so many meetings. I think it’s putting him off not drinking.’

Alice was smiling and pleasant, but Paul could see that her whole body was trembling very slightly. A faint sour smell of something like fear came from her. They drank black coffee out of paper cups and stood about exchanging bright harmless small talk - to Paul and Alice the hardest part of alcoholism - until June called the meeting to order.

‘My name is June and I’m an alcoholic. I’m conducting the meeting tonight, but I’m not going to talk for long, because I know you all want to hear our three fine speakers who have come from Town to be with us.’ She sent her margarine smile to Alice and Leslie and Scott sitting beside her at the table. ‘All I’m going to say, and you’ve heard me say it before and you’ll hear me again, is that if it wasn’t for A.A., I wouldn’t be here tonight. I would probably be dead. Or in prison. I’ve been there, and if by any unlikely chance any of you have not,’ (laughter) ‘let me tell you it’s no fun.’

Although he had listened to many horror stories from many perfectly ordinary people, Paul had never quite got over the surprise that a woman like this - short curly brown hair, lipstick too bright, green knit suit straight out of a woman’s magazine, right forefinger that peeled
potatoes every day - could have descended into hell and been dragged out of it with so little outward blemish.

When Leslie began to speak, the surprise was the same. He was a youngish, beaky man with thin fluffy hair and a way of clearing a non-existent obstruction in his throat that must drive his wife up the wall if he did it at home. He wore a grey suit and a striped tie and he worked for the Post Office as a telephone linesman. He had only been in the A.A. programme for two years. Before that, he had been in hospital five times with DTs, he had lost his job, his money, his wife, his children. Sleeping rough in a derelict house, he had talked to another drunk who had been in and out of A.A. like a needle through a hem. Next day, the police took him to hospital with a raging pneumonia. When he came out, he went back to the same derry, but the drunk had disappeared.

Leslie disappeared too- ‘run-down metal polish this time’ - until one night, desperate, cynical, belligerent, he stumbled into the house on Flagg’s Hill where every Saturday at midnight an A.A. meeting was held for anyone who could drag themselves in from the gutter.

‘I don’t remember any of it. I don’t think I heard anything that was said. But next day, I found a card in my pocket that a chap I’d talked to had put there. I phoned him. He left his office and came to me. That was the day I was born.’

Leslie got back his job, and eventually his wife, ‘though she keeps a suitcase packed,’ he grinned, ‘in case I take a drink again.’

He had been drinking since he was eleven, sneaking sherry out of a bottle in his father’s sideboard. ‘I see now that with those first secret nips, I was on my way. I can’t drink. I’m an alcoholic. I give thanks every day that I came to A.A. That A.A. found me, rather. I wouldn’t have had the sense or the guts to get in on my own.’

When he finished, the running commentary of racking coughs among the rows of chairs before him broke into a storm. Saved from cirrhosis of the liver, the alcoholics were all furiously engaged in smoking themselves to
death, almost everyone with an ashtray or a saucer on their laps, burning little troughs in the plastic, a chest surgeon’s dream.

It was Alice’s turn. Paul, sitting in the second row, trying to smile encouragement to her, was almost as nervous as she was. If she failed at this, actually or in her own mind, if she showed up worse than some of the normally inarticulate people who were so incredibly articulate in describing their lives in hell, he knew she might go back to the bottle from one day to the next.

She knew that too. When June introduced her, she got up, wringing her knuckly fingers, and then she gave a little gasp and said, ‘Do you mind if Scott speaks next? I - it’s ridiculous to be so nervous—’

‘What you need is a drink,’ Scott said, getting heavily to his feet. He was a stout blockbuster of a man, a boxer in his Army days, his girth in a double-breasted blue suit immense.

‘Excuse me. I’m nervous too.’ He unbuttoned the jacket on an enormous expanse of white shirt like the side of a marquee. He was a lovely genial man, kindly and full of inherent wisdom not gathered from books. A man of whom the lady who drooled, ‘I wish I was blind so I could have one of them lovely dogs’ might say, ‘I wish my husband was an alcoholic so he could be like that when he was reformed.’

Scott wore a patch over one eye. He told the audience, as he had told other audiences over and over again for almost five years, how a lifetime of drinking and fighting and losing his Army career and everything else since had culminated in three months’ oblivion, ended by a shot through the head and the loss of one eye.

‘I can see why I did it,’ he said, ‘though I don’t remember doing it. I only remember I woke up in a hospital somewhere and I couldn’t see, and when they told me what I’d done, by God, I yelled and fought them. To have got so near to getting out of the whole bloody mess and just missed ... There was an A.A. group at that hospital. I fought them too, but they fought harder. One of
the nurses, he was an alcoholic. I don’t think he took any off-duty while I was there. There was a pal of mine, Freddie, his name was, my old boozing pal. He sneaked me in a bottle one day under his coat and this nurse kicked him out of that ward like a drunk out of a bar.

‘I’ve been sober now for about five years, grace of God who would have been within his rights for not troubling about me. I’ve still got a chip of metal in me brain,’ he ended chattily, ‘just to remind me.’

Applause. Volcanic coughing. Scott looked at Alice and nodded, and she stood up, resting her fingers on the edge of the table and licking her lips.

‘My name is Alice.’ She was wearing one of the old tailored dresses Paul used to like on her before she began buying neon-coloured brief vulgar things much too young for her. ‘I’m an alcoholic.’

She began the story that Paul knew so well. But told like this, it sounded different, as if it were a stage play in which he had no part. When she talked about, ‘my husband’, it did not seem to be him. ‘My son’ was not Jeff, sobbing once to Paul, ‘Mummy’s ill, what’s wrong with Mummy?’

‘My daughter’ was not tough, unsentimental Laura at fourteen telling him, ‘I don’t want to have a birthday party if
she’s
going to get drunk.’

Alice was not concealing or embroidering. She was telling her story simply and coherently, giving it a pattern of descent, whereas at the time, it had been a shapeless chaos of wasted years, quarrels, crises, tears, false hopes, despair, and all the sordid episodes of living with a drunk.

‘And then, towards the end of the time when we were at the school, my husband started on the serious drinking. You could hardly blame him. I was polluted most of the time and when he was drinking too, it was the only thing we were doing together, the only fun we ever had. We pretended it was fun, but it was a hideous business of two or three drinks before we could even dress for those awful parties the other masters used to throw, and coming home stumbling and paralytic and scared to death one of the boys would hear us. It was a wonder we
weren’t kicked out long before. But my husband was popular and they made allowances. Until I got stupefied enough to start sleeping with a randy Australian who still smelled of sheep. He was the cousin of the Assistant Headmaster’s wife. I think she’d had a bit of a go with him herself.’

Alice was quite relaxed now. The release of being able to tell everything to people who had been there themselves was working in her, as it did on all the speakers. People who did not know anything about A.A. called it exhibitionism, and said they could not bear to sit and listen all evening to squalid confessions, not understanding the two-way therapy of release and reassurance.

‘After we left, my husband stopped drinking. He’s not an alcoholic’ She smiled down at Paul, ‘So it was easy.’

Easy I A private joke, because she knew about the Paul who had pounded and howled outside the door of the Samaritans in the middle of one night.

She told her audience how he had persuaded her to join A.A. ‘It didn’t work. I hated it. I cheated. I had a bottle in my bag. I used to sit at meetings sweating like a pig till I could get out and have a drink. I put the story round that I had chronic cystitis to explain why I kept popping out to the Ladies’. I hated the whole thing. It sickened me. I thought everyone was so smug. If that was what sobriety meant, I’d choose boozing.

‘Now I’ve come back. I’m sober today. Tomorrow I may wake up dead drunk in the flat of some man whose name I don’t even know. That happened to me two months ago. Gives you a bit of a fright. Your only hope is that he was drunk enough to be just as non-operative as you.’

She did not look at Paul as she joined the laughter, and the coughing that it brought on.

‘I’ll stop now,’ she said breathlessly, ‘because I’m dying for a cigarette. I’m dying for a drink too, of course. But I haven’t had one today. Not yet anyway. I can only say I haven’t had a drink today as I’m falling asleep. And then I still might get up.’

‘You were marvellous,’ Paul told her in the car.

‘She’s a good speaker,’ Scott said. ‘I think I’ll take her to London next month. We’ve been asked to take part in a three-day thing.’

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘Don’t ask me.’

‘Thought you’d be flattered,’ Scott grumbled.

‘I don’t want to get hooked on A.A.’

‘You must.’

‘I’m not a joiner. I don’t want to be identified with it. I want to use it my way and not be a part of it.’

‘Won’t work, Alice,’ Leslie said.

‘You don’t know it all,’ she rounded on him, biting her nails. ‘I’m sick of making jokes and pretending all’s well with me under the A.A. umbrella. All’s not well. I hate the whole thing. I want a drink.’

After they had taken Leslie and Scott home, Paul asked Alice, ‘Did you make that up - about the man whose name you didn’t know?’

‘Mm-mm.’ She shook her head. Her nails, which once she had spent hours grooming into refined claws, were chewed into sore stumps below her fingertips. ‘Funny. I was able to tell it to that rabble. But not to you.’

‘I knew you weren’t at Bruce’s one night.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said ungraciously.

He could not answer anything that would not be hypocrisy.

Later when they were going to bed, the telephone rang. Paul was on Flying Squad call tonight. He was so sure that he would have to go out that he stepped back into the shoe he had just taken off before he picked up the telephone.

It was Scott. ‘Alice all right?’

‘She’s in the bath.’

‘She all right?’

‘I think so.’

‘Tell her she can ring me any time she wants. Make sure she knows that. Any time in the night. I can come round if you need me, Paul.’

But why wouldn’t
I
do? Why is it that I can go dashing
out to rescue a man in a phone box who has taken half a dozen Seconal and yet I can’t rescue my wife?