Miriam, who came every day to help as Christmas approached, had a different style.
‘That?’ she would exclaim in her half scream. ‘Who are you buying it for, your sister or your grandmother?’ She dangled the big pouchy bag by the handle, making a face as if it had forgotten itself. ‘Let’s face it, these went out with Queen Victoria.’
When Muh and Miriam were together at the cash register at the end of the counter, Muh muttered, ‘Please don’t denigrate the stock.’
‘Ha!’ Miriam flung back her abundant head. ‘It does that for itself.’
Muh was a bit dubious about taking the morning off to go to the Play School Christmas party. ‘She’s getting very slapdash, that Miriam,’ she told Dad the night before, accusingly, as if it were his cousin, not hers. ‘I doubt she’s good for trade.’
‘Nonsense, Ena, everyone loves Miriam.’
‘I luh Mim.’
‘Not with your mouth full, Jack,’ his mother said, and his father said, ‘Of course you do. So do I. She’s very good to all of us.’
‘Hmmm . . . yes . . .’ Muh drummed her pebble-hard fingertips on the table and looked at Dad, as Malcom said afterwards, as if she thought he had Miriam laid out on the cutting bench with her skirt up as soon as her back was turned.
‘Oh, ho, ho,’ Jackie chuckled to that.
‘Want to see something, old Jack?’
‘Yeh, yeh.’ He nodded his head so violently that his eyes rattled.
‘What’ll you give us then?’
‘A fag?’
‘Two.’ Malcom clicked his fingers, and after Jackie pulled out the cigarettes Miriam had stuffed into his pocket and fiddled two out of the crumpled packet, Malcom showed him the picture he had hidden in chapter six of his chemistry book.
‘Whee-ew.’ Jackie’s whistle was full of breath and spittle.
Later that night, he crept downstairs to dial the Samaritans and tell Helen that he was going to a party.
‘Ring me up next week and tell me all about it,’ she said. ‘OK, love? Happy Christmas!’
‘Ha-ie Iss-uss!’ He went upstairs on hands and knees like a silent night cat.
But next day when Miriam arrived and Jackie went to get his coat and his bag of gifts, his mother said, ‘Where are you going, young man?’
‘Going a party.’
‘I told you, Jack.’ She tried to steer him back into the workshop, but he stood firm. ‘I don’t believe we should go, with all there is to do here. Work-a first, then play. You know the golden rule.’
‘You told him he should go to the party!’ Miriam plunged into the scene before she had even taken off the fur hood which made her look like a wolf, all nose and teeth.
‘Don’t interfere.’
‘Sometimes ‘I wonder who’s bonkers in this family.’ Ignoring two women who came suspiciously into the shop with faces prepared to say, ‘That’s too dear’ at the first price-ticket, Miriam began to button Jackie’s coat. As fast as she buttoned it, his mother undid the buttons and there they were, the three of them, swaying back and forth against swing doors between the workshop and the front shop, so that Dad got up from the stitching machine with a cordovan brogue on one hand to say, ‘Here, here, what’s up?’
‘You may well ask.’ Willpower vanquished brute strength, and Muh had Jackie through the door and into the workshop, his coat half done up in the wrong button holes, his carrier bag of presents for the children bumping round his ankles.
‘What’s the matter, son?’ his father asked, for Jackie’s face was working, the tongue wandering about with a life of its own, making spit.
‘You heard me say last night we shouldn’t go.’ It was only with Dad that she relaxed into shrillness like any other woman, and did not bother how she formed her words.
‘Ah - let him have a bit of fun.’
‘You spoil him rotten.’
‘How can they have the party without you?’ Sometimes Dad was keener than you’d expect. He sat down again at the stitcher, a relic of the days in Camden Town, a little old treadle machine so low that he sat on a child’s iron chair bolted to the floor. With a sweep of his hand, he turned the wheel towards him and began to treadle away for dear life, his head glistening, a goblin running up toys for Santa Claus.
‘All things to all men . . .’Muh said. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to see where one’s duty lies.’
‘You’re a good woman, Ena.’
‘Thank you.’
As she took Jackie out through the side door and past the window, pretending not to see Miriam pointing at the cash register which had rung up an £11 sale, he realized that she had meant to go all along. Her bag and gloves were under her coat on the hall table. She had her rainboots on. How could he and Miriam and Dad not have noticed?
Jackie had bought a Christmas present for Sarah. He had toy whistles and trumpets for all the children (’My stars, what a shindy!’ Harriet seized a tootler and joined in) and a harmonica for Sarah, as if he did not class her with the grown-ups.
Sarah had brought a toy for each child and a cigarette lighter for Jackie, with his intials on it. She knew that he smoked, since they had had a serious conversation with their heads in the refrigerator, getting out the milk, about various brands of cigarettes. She did not know that he was not supposed to smoke. When he began to unwrap the present, his jaw fell, his eyes slid quickly to his mother and he dropped the lighter into his jacket and clamped his hand over the pocket.
Sarah caught his eye and they winked. What became of a boy like that? What would happen when his mother grew old and died and he himself carried his child’s brain about in a middle-aged skull? What happened about sex? Sarah was still at the age when she visualized herself going to bed with every man she saw, postmen and waiters and concert pianists. She imagined it without much variety, an endless procession of heavy bodies thumping down between her legs.
The presents were distributed from under a Christmas tree in the middle of the room, made of aluminium strips and hung with coloured glass, glittering and fantastic. The children could not keep away. Hands reached out. The glass bubbles broke. You did not scold after something had happened. You watched and tried to prevent it happening.
‘No, no, Mara. It’s to look at. Pretty. See? Pretty Christmas tree.’
Mara shot out her arm like a dictator and crushed a golden ball carefully in her fat fist. She opened her hand and watched the eggshell pieces sprinkle to the floor.
By the time Jackie’s mother gave out the presents, there was as much glass as wrapping paper on the floor round the tree. She called out names and some of the children came forward. Most of them had to be propelled by Harriet or Sarah or a rosy young medical student called Bill. Mrs Manson, the mother of the mongoloid boy was not here today, and Bill spent his morning with Charlie, working his arms, talking to him, picking him up and swinging him, winding musical boxes and waggling puppets in front of his face. When he paused, Charlie went to his chair and sat with his arm on the back of it and his head on his arm until Bill came and swept him up again.
‘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.
&n
bsp; 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.’
The Listeners Page 18