The Listeners (36 page)

When the sea was in, lapping under the landward piles, where small boys called and fought for pennies thrown down by people who came through the turnstile with change in their hand, the water at the far end was deep enough to drown yourself. One raining, blowing afternoon, when there was no one on the pier except the wind-flung sea-gulls screaming round the café garbage, Roland Mead, father of three, petty embezzler, went over the rail with a gull’s cry.

‘Why did he ring us?’ Sarah asked Andrew. They had sent the Flying Squad to the pier, but it was too late. ‘Why, if he really meant it?’

‘Oh God, I don’t know.’ Andrew looked battered. He had answered the call from the telephone box on the pier. He would wonder forever whether there was not something he could have said ... ‘Perhaps it’s like, you know, when they struggle in the water.’

‘One last fight of a losing battle?’

Paul was with them. He nodded, brooding. ‘Sometimes,’
he said heavily, ‘I think it’s just that suicide is just too damn lonely to bear alone.’

Paul’s wife was very ill. She had suffered a stroke. She was dying, paralysed, witless – no one knew much about it. Paul did not want anyone to ask.

He asked Sarah, ‘How is it going with Carrie?’

‘All right, I think.’ With her first client, she was not going to say it was difficult.

‘Is it tough?’

‘It’s all right.’

But Carrie was quite tough. Befriending sounded so simple – to be a friend to someone who needed one -until you realized why they were short of friends.

At first, Carrie seemed to resent Sarah. ‘Why do you always ring up after I’ve gone to bed?’

‘You go to bed at such funny times.’

‘I go to bed when I’m tired. What’s the matter? You think I’m going to kill myself again? Look, I’m not a child. I’m older than you as a matter of fact.’

But if she did not hear from Sarah, it was ‘I waited in all afternoon. I was sure you’d ring.’

Once when they were out together, on the way to the oculist, Carrie plunged forward as if she were going to throw herself in front of a car. Sarah grabbed her and pulled her back. The driver shook his fist, mouthing behind glass.

‘What’s the matter?’ Carrie brushed off Sarah’s hand. ‘Can’t I even cross the road?’

They went to the sea and sat under a breakwater, sharing Sarah’s coat. Carrie always came out with too few or too many clothes. The coat was turned sideways across their shoulders, the skirt of it round Carrie, the big collar round Sarah. Carrie smelled a little. Her hair was never very clean. To get a warm bath in her building, you had to go up and down the passage with kettles. But she said jerkily to Sarah, after a long time of saying nothing, chucking pebbles rather savagely at the sea. ‘I’m not going to try it on again, you know. It’s not so bad now. I’m not on my own any more.’

Oh Carrie!’ Sarah hugged her. ‘What a marvellous thing to say.’

Carrie shook off the coat and stood up, trampling her big feet in the gritty sand. ‘Let’s go and get something to eat.’

Lumpy, small-eyed, her nose like a Jerusalem artichoke, she was sadly unattractive. Because she knew it, she deliberately made the worst of herself, so that nobody should imagine she was trying to compete. When Sarah invited her home to supper, Brian looked out of the window and said, ‘There’s a rather dirty fat boy pounding on the door.’

Carrie was wearing dirt on her feet instead of shoes, trousers that managed to have one bell bottom and one straight leg, a man’s khaki shirt with the tail out. To please Sarah, or to shut her up, she was letting her hair grow. It hung in greasy jags over her ears and eyes, not an imitation urchin crop like Sarah’s, but the urchin itself. Her skin erupted all over her face. When Sarah suggested make-up, Carrie said it would be unhygienic.

She came upstairs on her unhygienic feet and greeted Brian warily, sticking out her hand without moving it from her side, so that he had to cross the room to shake it. She would not eat much. She pushed at her food, and nibbled as if her teeth were bad. She drank wine fast as if it were medicine. She was very shy.

Watching Carrie so ungracious at the table, watching herself so graciously bringing food, chattering and smiling across at her, Sarah thought busily, I love her in the way God loves people – if he does. Safely superior. Un-threatened.

Brian was good, but not good enough. He had expected a wan, dramatic figure of tragedy, rescued from disaster by his brilliant wife. Carrie’s tragedy was being Carrie: her disaster was still with her.

‘But I can’t ask her once and then never again. That’s worse than not asking her at all.’

‘If she comes again, I go out.’

‘She’ll know why.’

‘Who cares?’

‘I hate you.’ (Paul’s voice, ‘Being a Samaritan doesn’t make you one at home.’)

They slid into one of their formalized fights, words and objects flying about as if the room were a stage, ending dutifully in bed, as if the fight were ritual foreplay. In the morning, they did not speak about making love, as if it had not happened, or they had been drunk.

One evening when Brian was working, Sarah and Andrew took Carrie to the theatre. Carrie fell asleep in the second act. She fell asleep everywhere she sat down. She was past insomnia, but she had a lot to make up.

They took her back to her flat and met Gretchen, who stared and said, ‘I thought you made that up about having new friends. What did you mean, the Suicide Squad?’

‘We ride a motorbike on the Wall of Death,’ Andrew said.

‘I’ve never seen you.’

‘We’re in the hospital a lot.’

‘Oh belt up,’ Gretchen said. She stuck far out in front and behind, her back hollow. She had enormous healthy incisors, like a blunted vampire. They had bruised the mouth of her boy friend, an etiolated Italian, who remained lying on the sofa bed when the others came in.

It was a wretched place for Carrie to live, two stuffy rooms in a slum street not even near the University. She came out to light Sarah and Andrew down with a torch, since there was no bulb on the staircase.

‘I told you it was a dump,’ she said.

‘I could help you look for something else.’

‘Gretchen wouldn’t let me. She needs me.’

Andrew drove Sarah home. She liked being with him. He was uncomplicated, enjoying being young, not striking attitudes, eagerly voluble, or easily silent if he did not want to talk. He was the sort of man you could go round the world with. He was not beautiful like Brian, assured and spoiled, a shining stranger; but when he kissed her lightly outside her house, the unfolding vistas of the kind
of man she might have married quite unnerved her. She got out of the car quickly.

Brian was turning into Salt Street at the top of the hill. ‘Who brought you home?’

‘Andrew. One of the Samaritans. I told you about him.’

‘Oh God.’ For some reason he took off his shoes to climb the stairs, as if he were a sneak lover in Sarah’s girlhood home. ‘I’m jealous of that spotted girl. Now have I got to be jealous of Andrew too?’

Rape and pillage and drug raids. Tot kidnapped by babysitter. Thirteen nude teenagers arrested in Edge-water cottage. Seasonal licences must be slashed, says Alderman. As the summer teemed in, the
Courier
increased in size and heat.

‘Better take a quick holiday, Victoria, while there’s still time.’ Uncle Willie, chaotic and unpredictable, one of his pockets smouldering.

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow. Mrs Start can come in. Order up some Guinness.’

Victoria stayed with friends in London, and bought clothes and went to the cinema. If she married Robbie, as he still thought she might, they would have his parents’ flat when the Bank moved him to London, and what the hell would Victoria do? Not much point in being someone’s secretary if you were richer than they were.

She would join the London Samaritans at the old City Church. She went to look at it, walking past the door in the corner of the church tower, too shy to go inside.

Those who were chosen to become Companions, the inner core and lasting spirit of the movement, went to a service here in this lovely church, to dedicate their lives to the work of the Samaritans.

200
was a Companion. So was Ralph, and Betty. Helen had recently been chosen. ‘Why me, for God’s sake? I’m a bigger mess than most of the clients.’

Peter had once told Victoria that the instinctive ‘Why
me?’ reaction was a sign that they had picked the right person.

Leaving the church, she went underground at the Bank station. She had come by bus. She would force herself to go back in the Tube, although even as she went down the steps, the anxiety was there.

Seven, eight years ago, quite a long time after she and Joe had seen the last of each other after wasting years of pretending they would marry, he had fallen under a train. Her hatred of the Tube had been one of her reasons for leaving London.

She sat solemnly in the train opposite the solemn faces, without recognition on her part or theirs. Here eyes could only look at eyes, not into them. If crowds of strangers were to smile and greet each other, it would be too exhausting, like being at a perpetual cocktail party or soul gathering.

At the no-man’s-land of Earl’s Court, nobody’s home station, everybody’s junction, she waited for another train at the end of the platform, looking at the other people, as all Samaritans did, as potential clients. A little scrum of boys charged down the steps carrying a football. With vacant, wordless jokes, they pushed each other forward and stood at the edge of the platform, windmilling their arms as if they were losing their balance. The live rail gleamed back at them. Cold steel, but if you fell on it, you would fry instantly, bubbling like batter. The tallest of the boys threw the ball over the line, and as Victoria watched in horror, he jumped down, bent over the live rail, stretched his long arms for the ball, swung upright and was back on the platform as the train swayed racketing in.

Victoria still stood transfixed. If I had been there when Joe fell forward on to the line, I would have stood and watched and done nothing.

The train slid away without her. She turned and went back to the escalator. She felt sick and faint, very ill. Her heart felt swollen, beating thickly. It was hard to breathe. Past the advertisements of all the offered crotches in swim
suits, panties, Y-front shorts, she was carried upwards, drooping over the moving black handrail. Something would happen. Something dreadful was going to happen to her, while the people glided up and down and did not see that she was there.

Was this what Jean meant? Trying to go into a crowd: ‘I was in a panic that my heart would stop, would in some way explode. I was moving in a nightmare ...’

I am going to have a heart attack.
Victoria could not reach out to the coat of the woman standing two steps above her. Bodies don’t touch other strange bodies.
Help me,
she said silently to the woman’s broad back, not loudly enough to see her swing round a face impatient with suspicion.

Victoria’s heart was pounding, her mouth dry, her legs would hardly carry her over the top of the stairs as they rolled under. She went to a little hotel and took a room and lay for a long time on the bed until the terror quietened and at last left her. She had lived with Joe the horror of his death. Unable to cry out or to have the cry answered, he must have known that panic aloneness as he fell forward from the staring people.

She left her friends and London the next day.

‘You should see a doctor,’ the woman said, when she told them something of what had happened. ‘That’s really neurotic, Victoria.’

The man said, ‘I tell you what it is, sweetie. I’ve told you before. It’s time you were married.’

Her rose-and-white flat was a shell.

Soon after she came home, she went up to the government hostel to see old Michael.

‘He’s scarpered, dear.’ The Warden was tending a small patch of onions in the unlikely soil of Flagg’s Hill.

‘On those feet?’

‘He’ll be back. He’s signed on here. He’ll come back to get his money.’

‘Could you telephone me if he does?’

‘Why all the interest, Missie?’

‘I don’t know.’ Victoria laughed. ‘He’s such a pitiful
old man. I think: if it were my father ... I find myself worrying about him.’

‘Save your energies. Here, you can have these green tops if you like. Quite a lift to your salads. There’s not much you can do for that old sport. They go their own way, that kind, you know, and die alone.’

‘AND SO WHAT are you going to do now, Dad?’ Jeff, taking refuge behind the plain glass of his huge wire spectacles, asked it as soon as they left the nursing home.

He had come with Paul, but then would not look at his mother, nor touch her. He had wanted to come, perhaps to assure himself that what his father had told him was true.

Alice was in a chair, tied round the waist with a soft binder, because she could push herself forward and fall out. Her short hair was cleaner and paler. Her slipped face knew nobody. From time to time, she wept.

‘It doesn’t mean anything.’ Mrs Laidlaw’s grin sugared the scene. ‘There’s some liability of the emotional control mechanism. It doesn’t mean that she is sad.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Mr Hammond, we don’t, but your wife is in a vegetable state. She cannot feel or understand.’

‘Will she ever?’ Jeff’s voice from where he hung back in the doorway sounded unused and creaky, as if it had never broken.

‘We can only hope.’

‘And so what are you going to do now, Dad?’

‘About what?’ They got into the car.

‘The divorce. Barbara.’ He had met Barbara and liked her, but he drawled her name as if he found it ridiculous.

‘Nothing. Nothing can be done now. I was too much a coward to say that to Barbara, but she said it first anyway.’

‘Yes, that’s very noble.’ Jeff thought for a while and then he asked, ‘What’s the point of being noble?’

‘It’s preferable to being bitter. It’s also the Law, when
someone can’t speak or make a sign, can’t prove they understand what is said to them. I can’t divorce your mother, Jeff.’