The Listeners (35 page)

‘I’m good at this, aren’t I?’ She whispered in his ear, like gnats.

The moon was in and out of clouds. Struggling away from him, she sat in the corner of the car and undid her hair and took off all her clothes. It was the most fantastic thing that ever happened to Tim, far far beyond any fantasy dreamed up by Dr Ling.

She lay in his lap, and he stroked her. She lay with her head back, her long throat moving as she talked. He listened, hardly hearing, while her voice moved on, her body breathless under his moving hand.

‘When I was quite young,’ she said. ‘I was quite young ...’ She used to get out of the house almost every night and go with a boy. ‘They treated me like a child, because I was no good at anything. Then they found out there was something I was good at.’ She laughed, and Tim put his mouth over her mouth, because of the dark houses.

‘How did they find out?’

‘How do you think? I was pregnant. I was fifteen, so they said I should get rid of it. You can, you know, if you get a doctor to certify your nerves.’

She knew so many things that Tim did not know. She knew she would not have a baby now, because she had starved herself long enough to get rid of her monthlies.

‘I didn’t care,’ she said, ‘but after, I cried all the time. I was in such a state they sent me to some kind of school, I don’t know. I wouldn’t stay there. It was miles out in the country and there was a lake. I was going to throw myself in it, but it was so deep and dark, they would never have found me. I went in the kitchen one morning before anybody got up.’ She turned towards him, her small pointed breasts dropping downwards like the fruit of a tree. ‘I got a knife.’

‘Is that why they sent you to Highfield?’

‘And other things.’

‘Tell me.’

‘No.’ Sometimes that meant she had nothing more to tell. She fell back across his legs and flung her arm over her eyes. Perhaps it meant that she was crying. When he pulled the arm away, she sputtered into a laugh and twisted round and grabbed him, and again, he could do it again, while her laughing became an exultant cry — Tm good at this! I’m good at it! I’m good at it!’

SPRING UNFOLDED GENTLY into all the surprises of summer. The grocery put Tim to riding round with Ted Dace in the mobile shop. He left Halfway House and went to live in a brick cottage with half a dozen other ex-High-field patients. They did their own cooking and shopping and cleaning, and were just like a quarrelsome family, with no one to boss them except Miss Ogden, the Social Worker, who dropped in now and then because they usually had some port.

Mr Perry had been quite upset about Tim staying out all night (no one knew about Felicity, because she had climbed in over a roof). He sent him up to Dr Vandenburg. Tim felt physically afraid, as if he were going to be beaten. The doctor merely said mildly, ‘Goes to show how ready you are to step farther out into the world, young Tim,’ and sent him to Diddlecot, with Larry and Vernon and the old man, and silent Gussie who was a maid at the hospital, and old Mary Tolliver, who cooked for them and washed their shirts and told tales on them to Miss Ogden.

Tim planted peas and carrots and beans in the strip of garden at the back. Vernon put in some geraniums. Gussie bought a big beach hat and sat in a chair outside the back door with the cord of the gramophone strung through the kitchen window.

The hedges foamed with green and white, and pats of yellow turf flowers appeared on the side of the hills. Tim rode round with Ted Dace to the little villages and housing estates and the outlying farms, covering fifty miles a day over the back roads, the tins flying off the shelves as Ted took the hump-back bridges.

Spring bloomed hopefully into the hopelessness of Paul’s summer, Alice had refused to talk to Scott or Jane, ‘or any of those sober swine’. She had cast off A.A. for ever, with the same horrid glee as she had emancipated herself from her school nuns.

‘Free at last.’ She toasted Paul. ‘Thank God Almighty.’

They did not speak much now. She talked intermittently, in clauses of abuse. He sheltered mostly in silence. When she could not rouse him to a fight, she found other fuddled ways to attack, ringing up the Headmaster of the school to pour a stream of anonymous scandal into his hairy and astonished ears. In the middle of the night, she rang down to the Steiners on the ground floor to say that Paul was drunk and beating her up.

‘Hullo there – I say!’ Mr Steiner in sagging pyjama trousers hallooing through the letter-box.

‘It’s all right. I’m so sorry.’ Paul opened the door. ‘She had a dream.’

‘Some dream.’ Mr Steiner ducked his head right and left to peer past Paul’s broad shoulders for a view of something shocking.

Alice was becoming the scandal of Singleton Court. She would not cook meals, but if Paul took her down to the restaurant, there was usually a scene, small or large. Even Phyllis had stopped relating. She had bribed the other waitress to take the Hammonds’ table.

Alice, who had not written to Jeff for months, wrote him long letters complaining about his father, with anecdotes of his unfaithfulness which she had to invent, since she did not know about Barbara. Paul had tried to tell her the truth, but she preferred her wildest fancies. He had read some of them when he opened one of the letters she gave him to post.

‘Did you post it afterwards?’ Barbara asked.

‘Would you?’

‘I would have burned it.’

‘I did.’

Alice got herself on a train to London, arriving at Laura’s flat after midnight with no money for the taxi.
She stayed three days, drinking and weeping so continuously that Laura could not go to work.

She brought her home. ‘Daddy, I’m sorry. She’s not my problem. Why do you go on letting her be yours?’

‘She won’t even talk about a divorce.’

‘You could divorce her.’

‘You can’t divorce someone for being drunk.’

‘You can for cruelty,’ Laura said. ‘Jeff and I have talked about this. We both think you’re insane to stick with her. Even Nigel sees that now.’

‘Don’t bring him into our family crisis.’

‘He is family,’ Laura said stubbornly, ‘whether you like it or not. Perhaps I shan’t like – you have got someone else, haven’t you? She didn’t make that bit up?’

When Paul went to Burlington to see Jeff, staying this last term only because they were doing
Lear,
Jeff said, ‘Look, for God’s sake, I’d be
glad.
What’s it matter to me? The State will take care of my mother. Go off with what’sit. That’s you taken care of.’

How hard they both were. Hard and direct. Paul went to his lawyer to talk about divorce.

The decision edged out guilt. The summer began to be a time of increasing hope. He and Barbara could look far ahead, instead of just to the next dinner, the next weekend. They began to plan where they would live, where he would look for a job, what kind of dog he would have. In a street market one Sunday they bought the dog, a fair fat puppy obviously stolen. Barbara began to buy clothes less like a Burlington mother. Paul was light-hearted at school, a breezier, less pedantic, sexier Mr Hammond. Caroline Fulmer gave up cricket to fall in love with him. Puberty, her friends told her, the dawn of a new you. But it was the dawn of a new Paul. The hottest puberty on record would not have inflamed Caroline with the old Mr Hammond.

Barbara told her sons. Paul told his children. The indifferent approval of all four was transparent with relief.

‘I’m moving out, Alice.’

‘Oh – why? I thought you didn’t mind this flat.’

‘You must face this. How can I make you understand? I want a divorce.’

‘I don’t.’ She clamped her mouth in the toothless, jawless shape to which drink leached it.

‘You know I can divorce you.’

‘Funny how long it took you to find that out.’

Paul began to pack some things.

‘Where will you go?’ she asked with polite interest.

‘I’ve got a room.’

‘Tell me where.’

He shook his head.

‘That’s what I thought.’

His escape made safe the way for pity. Damn pity. But he had to turn from the cupboard and look at her. She was gaunt and unkempt. Her hair was receding from her bony forehead and she did not bother to curl it forward. She was usually in a dressing gown now. She only dressed to go out in the evening, in clothes that were stained, a hem undone, a coat without some of its buttons.

He tried to look at her as a stranger. If she came stumbling in as a Samaritan client, would he reach out to her? Would he talk to her, love her, try to understand, try everything he could to help, begin the long war of drying out, stand by her and fight the demon with her?

He could no longer fight on her side. Alice herself had become the demon.

He went back to the flat for the last time to get some books.

‘Alice?’ He had not called from the hall for a long time, but all the lights were out and there was a smell of gas from the kitchen. Samaritans were well known for seeing suicide everywhere. On the stove, something that might be soup had boiled over, putting out the flame. Sad that the one time she cooked something for herself, she went out and forgot about it.

He went across the dark sitting-room to turn on the lamp by the bookcase and fell over something on the floor. Alice was lying near the fireplace on her back, snoring drunkenly. He pushed her with his foot quite
roughly. She did not even groan. He switched on the lamp and saw that her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, as if some horror was there. Her face was flushed dark red. He went quickly to the telephone.

Several weeks after the stroke, Alice could be propped into a chair, with her hands curled upwards on her lap like the claws of a dead bird. She could not speak, and no one knew if she could hear or understand. Her face did not move. Her mouth hung slightly open. Whoever was with her, or passing by, wiped away the saliva.

The doctor suggested a nursing home, and talked of the place that was run by Highfield. It sounded familiar. Tim. Tim’s girl Felicity, the Smasher, was working there.

Paul went with Alice in the ambulance to the nursing home which was just down the hill from the gates of Highfield. A sign swung over a little box of geraniums: ‘Extended Care Facility’. Euphemism for ‘The only way out of here is feet first.’

The lady in charge was a certain Mrs Laidlaw, no wedding ring, the ‘Mrs’ a prerogative title to go with the autocracy.

She held absolute sway over the shrunken bodies in beds and chairs and dumped in a row on a sofa in front of a flickering television set they did not watch. They could and did complain, about the food, the nurses, the heat, the cold, the draught, their bowels. That was expected of them. They did not complain about Mrs Laidlaw. She was all smiles, so kind, worked day and night for them, rolling up her sleeves when the nurses were busy, baking a cake for ninetieth birthdays.

Paul had been pleased with Mrs Laidlaw and her smile when he first came here to make arrangements for Alice. Now when Alice was in bed in a room with two other logs and he was writing a cheque for the first month, he caught a hint of ghastliness. The smile assured him that she would do everything to make his wife comfortable. He asked her about the other women in Alice’s room. One of them had terminal cancer. The other had been in
the Home for ten years without ever getting a visitor or even a letter. As she told him this,
she was still smiling.
Kindly Mrs Laidlaw behind her polished desk with the cut-glass bowl of roses was suddenly a grinning death mask.

The coming of summer, for anyone who had their life or livelihood down by the sea, meant the coming of the rabble. On weekends and surprise sunny weekdays, the visitors began to push inexorably in until they crowded each other off the land and into the sea, the pebbly beach a writhing mat of flesh, the bathers shoulder to shoulder.

From Sarah’s red front-door, she could see a bristle of masts in the harbour at the foot of Salt Street. The Yacht Club ran up its flags and opened its gin locker. Boats big and small were tethered to the finger piers. Easels came out, and the man in the beret who painted the same picture every month: sail, gulls, rocks, cliffs and a sea made of whipped green jelly.

All the little hotels and boarding-houses began to open up, window box pelargoniums and cinerarias challenging their fresh paint. Peter stayed away from the Samaritan Centre for a week to help his wife open the Baytree, and came back with paint under his fingernails and a new knowledge of plumbing which he applied to the old lavatory at the back of the rectory where clients dashed to empty out all the tea pumped into them by zealous Samaritans.

The big hotels put up their awnings, and the huge circular bed outside the portico of the Front Royal was planted at great cost in a zodiac design which could only be seen from the top floor or from an aeroplane. The reception staff were outfitted in white trousers and pale blue jackets, beautiful on Brian. He was tanned from lying with Sarah in the sun and wind of a tiny rock-circled cove they knew below the cliffs. His brown arms were cobwebbed with bleached hair, and the hair of his head was white gold. The side whiskers grew and grew and almost met in a fringe of silken beard before Mr
Rattigan let out a yell of agony and ordered them away.

The Front Royal filled up, the winter dwellers scathing from the veranda like cruise passengers lining the rail at each embarkation port. Hours were longer. Overtime was paid. Brian and Sarah were saving to buy a boat.

The waxworks opened with a set piece of the murder of Martin Luther King, sold off by some more topical museum. The Aquarium poured in some more fish and gaffed out the dead ones. The dance hall was closed for three weeks for decorating and re-opened looking exactly the same. Shops and restaurants and bars mended their broken windows. The café at the end of the pier was repaired, although the pier itself still rotted quietly into the stinking bed of the estuary. Champions of the pier, who never went on it, claimed that the water level had dropped since it was built some seventy years ago to commemorate the marriage of George V. Others said that the mud flats had always been there, but the site had been chosen at high tide.