The Listeners

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Wasn’t the party fun?’

  ‘It was all right. I didn’t mind it, as a matter of fact, though normally I don’t go much for that kind of thing. There was this fellow there, I didn’t like his looks. He knew Morna, though she pretended at first she never saw him before in her life. Lana Turner: “I never saw you bee-fore in my life—” slap! That was because she’d met him that other time, you see, and got up to God knows what without my restraining influence. Very sweet, she was, such a well-behaved little girl, stayed by me most of the time. Bill this, Bill that, are you having a nice time, Bill, let me hot up your drink. Yvonne, she’d brought some of the food - sausage rolls the size of a pillow, you couldn’t get your lips round them, and that ham was off, I found that out afterwards - even Yvonne remarked on it, though she’s thick at the best of times. Like her rough puff pastry. “What’s up with you?” she says to Morna. “Trying to get Billie to remember you in her will?” That’s how they talk about me, that lot, as if I was already dead. Times I wish I was.’

  Oh come on, Billie dear, I thought you weren’t going to say that any more. Tell me what else you’ve been doing.’

  ‘That’s just it. I bloomin’ worked, right up to yesterday. Parties for the kiddies. Not to mention the old folks. Those professors’ wives are full of the milk of, but my legs can tell you who does the work.’

  ‘I thought you were going to see the doctor.’

  ‘So did I, but it’s Mondays, the vein clinic, and that’s not my best day, or anyone else’s. You get more suicide calls on a Monday, don’t you?’

  ‘Not really. Perhaps it’s because a lot of other people are fed up too, on Mondays. Some time like now, when everyone else is being jolly, that’s when we seem to get more calls. If you’re a left-out sort of person, something like Christmas just rubs it in.’

  ‘You’re telling me. And when everyone else is off work but you. You know what we’re going to do next week? Wash down the walls with sugar soap. “You’ll have the Union to reckon with,” I told him. “Look at your contract, Camilla Cripps,” he says . . .’

  Victoria’s ear was Billie’s most useful possession.

  4000 rang. Victoria said goodbye quickly to Billie and pulled the emergency telephone towards her. It always seemed bigger, blacker, heavier than any other telephone, weighted with distress and need.

  ‘Samaritans - can I help you?’

  ‘You always say that.’ A disgruntled man. ‘And then hang up.’

  ‘No, we don’t. We never hang up on people.’

  ‘On me, you do. They’re all sick of me because they’ve heard it all too often. I haven’t had you before, have I?’ It was a querulous Germanic voice, like a violin teacher who has listened for too many years to sulky untalented children.

  ‘I don’t think so. I’m Victoria.’

  ‘Look here, Victoria, I don’t want you to tell me, “There’s a call on the other line,” when I can hear quite well the other telephone is not ringing. Tell me how long I can talk.’

  ‘How long would you like?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Well - five minutes?’

  ‘I’m timing it. Don’t cut me short.’

  ‘Of course I won’t.’

  ‘It came to me last night. This was the dream. Listen, Victoria, listen.’

  Victoria listened. The dream was grandiloquent, meaningless, like the dreams you turn enthralled to tell a bed partner and find them slipping into nothing. He talked without pause for nearly five minutes. ‘Now do you understand?’

  ‘It’s a bit complicated. I don’t understand it very well.’

  ‘I don’t understand it at all, so how could you?’ A buzzer sounded somewhere. ‘My egg timer,’ the man said briskly. ‘Five minutes. Thank you,’ and rang off.

  Victoria stayed on the emergency telephone all afternoon. It was exhausting, compulsive, satisfying, because it drained you of yourself. It drained you into simplicity. Nothing existed except this contract between two people. A cry of despair. An answer of love.

  ‘Tell me . . . tell me.’ When she had picked up the telephone and heard the old lady sobbing, Victoria had felt the usual second of panic: What shall I do? How can I help her? Then remembered. You don’t have to do anything. You just have to be there. If all she can do is weep, you are just there to listen to her weeping.

  She listened for an hour. People came in and out of the study. Betty brought a cup of tea. Ralph came to find a file in the bookshelves. Someone else came to take away the log book. A new girl, Polly, like an owl, came in bare feet, listened for a while, staring, and went noiselessly away.

  Unselfconscious, hardly aware of them, Victoria clutched the telephone as if it were the old lady herself. ‘It’s all right, darling, it’s all right. I love you.’ Tears fell down her own face for the pity of grief.

  No one bothered her. Peter came in to ask her something and stopped to listen, as he did sometimes with Samaritans, but not in judgement. He sat down at the other side of the desk, his face sad, his soft golden-brown eyes considering Victoria, while she hung on to the old lady as if she were drowning.

  ‘Come in and see us,’ she said. ‘Do please come in whenever you can get here. We’ll be your friends . . . Don’t say that, May darling, you’ve got us now. You’re not alone . . . Oh, I’m so glad you did. We wouldn’t have known . . . I know, I know, he must have been . . . all right, love, all right. Yes, you do that. Any time. Or ring again. Don’t be afraid . . .’

  She put down the telephone and looked at Peter, stretching her tear-filled eyes. ‘God.!’ She shook her head and blinked. ‘I’m sorry. Too emotional?’

  ‘Why get self-conscious now? Can you only be really yourself on the telephone?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Perhaps May could. Things that she had said to Victoria she never would have said to her children, if she ever saw them, to neighbours, if they ever came, to friends, if she had any.

  ‘She lives in one of those rotten papery bungalows the other side of the estuary. She and her husband bought it to retire to. He had a heart attack the week they moved in. It was the time of the floods. A man came in a boat and took him away out of a window. Her carpets were ruined. Some men pumped her out later. No one else comes. A couple of women called after he died, but she was so shocked, crazy with loss, she was rude to them. She gets up. She goes to bed. The tide in the river rises and falls, she said. That’s all that ever happens.’

  ‘She’s coming in?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Good. Would you like to befriend her, if she wants that?’

  ‘Yes, I will if you think I—’

  ‘All right.’

  She wanted his approval, wanted it terribly. She was slightly in love with him, in the way it is possible to be in love with a saint or a legendary hero. But as a Samaritan, you were seldom praised or thanked. You would be told if you did wrong, but not admired for doing right. If you wanted that, you had better get out.

  The inter-office buzzer sounded. Victoria picked up the other telephone. ‘There’s a personal call for you,’ Ralph said. ‘Can you take it?’

  She glanced at Peter. You were not supposed to have personal calls, but Robbie considered himself exempt. ‘Tell him I can’t talk now.’

  She sensed that 4000 was going to ring. You could feel that sometimes, your spine on edge, like waiting for a gunshot on stage. It rang just after Peter said, ‘Go ahead,’ and she picked up the office telephone. Peter picked up the other line making his 4000 face, jaw out, eyes half closed, absorbed.

  ‘If you can’t come out to dinner,’ Robbie said. ‘I’ll never speak to you again.’

  ‘Speak on.’

  ‘You can? Oh great, darling. I’ve got your present. What time shall I fetch you?’

  ‘There’s just one thing.’

  He groaned. ‘Don’t tell me.’

  ‘Well - it’s Jean.’

  He groaned again. ‘At Christmas?’

  ‘Especially at C
hristmas. I promised her I’d go. Her husband has bought a bottle of sherry.’

  ‘I’ll fetch you there.’

  From Peter’s grunts and monosyllables and thoughtful, gentle comments, his call sounded fascinating. Damn you, Robbie, I could have had that one.

  The client’s good luck that she had not. When you found yourself getting greedy about emergency calls, hating to miss anything, wanting to be a super-Samaritan, it was time to knock off. She went out to ask Ralph if someone could take over 4000.

  Jean’s husband, Harold, a loose-jointed, nonplussed man who did television repairs and tried to keep some kind of home going for his two daughters, had bought two bottles of sherry, and had another idea, which was not so good.

  To cheer Jean up, a cause which he had not abandoned even after nearly two years of her fears and depression, he had invited a family of friends to come in. Jean had been all right all day. She had been to church and cooked a big chicken and tidied away Christmas toys quite equably before the guests came. She had changed her dress and taken the rollers out of her hair and brushed her small daughter’s hair into ringlets round the handle of a wooden spoon, and set out cheese straws and nuts and a bowl of peppermints. She sat by the window with her hands in her lap, and it was not until the car stopped and doors opened all round it, front and back, that her heart leaped in a panic surge of adrenalin and she ran upstairs to her room and locked the door.

  When Victoria walked down the street from the bus stop, a quarter mile of identical twin houses with Christmas trees in the downstairs windows and the back of a dressing table mirror upstairs, Mr and Mrs Jefferson and their son and daughter-in-law were conducting a polite, uneasy party, as if nothing was wrong.

  ‘Where’s Jean?’ Victoria asked Harold. He looked blank, as if it was an unfamiliar name.

  ‘Poor Jean has a headache,’ Mrs Jefferson said, too indulgently. ‘We’re hoping she’ll come down and join us in a little while.’

  ‘She won’t.’ Jean’s elder daughter was a solid veteran of eleven. ‘Not when she’s like this, she won’t. She was all right all day, but now she won’t come down for ages, will she Victoria?’

  ‘Victoria is Jean’s friend.’ Harold answered the unspoken curiosity of all four Jeffersons. ‘She and Jean—’

  ‘We’ve known each other for ages.’

  Harold tried, perhaps mistakenly, to minimize Jean’s problem. If the story ever got out that she had turned on the gas oven and sealed the windows and cried out to the Samaritans before she sealed the door, he would be hard put to it to hold up his head. His daughter was more realistic than he was.

  Victoria sat for a while and drank sherry and exchanged with the Jeffersons the sort of innocuous conversation she was not very good at.

  ‘Can I go up?’ she asked Harold quietly when he came to refill her glass.

  ‘She’ll come down.’ He did not want to be left with the Jeffersons wondering what on earth was going on upstairs, as if Victoria were a doctor or a midwife. But Jean was her client, not Harold, so she excused herself and asked Sally to go up and tell her mother that she was there.

  She waited in the hall. Sally appeared at the top of the stairs, long pink legs in ankle socks, jersey knitted and hair cut square by Jean in a good period. ‘She says you can come if you like.’ She licked her fingers and wiped a smear off the banister. Her childhood was passing in unsurprised acceptance of a situation that had aged her into a substitute housewife.

  The bedroom door was locked. ‘Jean? Please open the door. It’s only me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What are you afraid of?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then open the door. You needn’t come down. The people will go in a minute.’

  They talked through the door for a while, and at last Victoria heard bare feet on the floor and the key was turned. Jean was already scuttling back to her bed as she opened the door. She sat high up on the pillow, the eiderdown drawn round her, her pale spectacled face wary. She had put the pink rollers in again, as a sort of protective armour.

  Things had begun to go wrong for Jean after she had her younger child. She had not wanted to repeat the pain and unreasonable depression of the first. Her second pregnancy had been full of fear and resentment. After the Caesarian operation, the depression had come back, much worse, and it never went away. Even the fear of the anaesthetic had not gone away. ‘Every time I lie down to go to sleep,’ she told Victoria, ‘I believe I will never wake. That’s why I can’t sleep.’

  ‘Are you taking the tablets?’

  ‘I’m afraid to.’

  ‘Jean, you must see Dr Hunt.’

  ‘I can’t. Harold doesn’t like it. He thinks I’m going mad.’ She paused, twisting the edge of the eiderdown. ‘So do I.’

  ‘Oh no, Jean, don’t ever think that, but you do need help. I’m not going to pressure you, but I’d love to go with you. I could make an appointment for my free day, or get off early some afternoon. We could go in a cab if you—’

  ‘You want to unload me?’

  ‘No Jean, I’ve told you no, but you need more help than I can give you. Come down to the Centre at least and talk to Peter, or one of the counsellors.’

  ‘You give me all the help I need.’

  ‘I know I don’t.’

  ‘I feel you understand. You understand how awful it is. When I was a girl, I thought it was all going to be such an adventure, with me as the heroine. It isn’t like that at all, is it? You know that. You know how awful it all can be. That’s why you haven’t married, isn’t it?’

  ‘It wasn’t that.’ Victoria was sitting on the end of the bed. She stroked the blanket. ‘I was engaged twice. Once when I was too young. Then there was someone else, and he died. Then I was in love with a married man. That took up almost three years, off and on.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘About a year ago.’ Only a year? It seemed that Sam had been gone for ever.

  ‘You’ve had more life than me,’ Jean said.

  Victoria did not say, ‘You’ve got a nice husband and lovely children.’ That was no help.

  The husband put his head round the door, turning it left and right as if he expected spies in the woodwork. ‘There’s a car come for Victoria. A green Jag. Last year’s model.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Jean asked quickly.

  ‘It’s only Robbie. You know him.’ Once when Victoria was going to the cinema with Robbie, she had brought Jean along. Jean had sat stiffly, shrunk narrow in the seat, although Victoria was between her and Robbie. Afterwards she would not discuss the film. Victoria did not think she had watched it.

  ‘Does he still want to marry you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Harold said, the sherry fermenting him into unwonted wit. ‘Nothing in it.’

  Jean looked at him in surprise. Then she laughed, and slowly, one by one, began to take the rollers out and pile them in her lap.

  After dinner, Victoria and Robbie walked in the main shopping streets to see the lights and the window displays, hand in hand, full of wine, watching the families in from the country, the couples who walked together, arm in arm, hand in hand, not seeing that they looked like them.

  Weinberg’s windows were full of moving scenes from fairy tales, animals and little people nodding and jerking and dancing and sawing. Mrs Bear endlessly stirred an empty porringer. Humpty Dumpty slid down the wall on a wire, disappeared under it and reappeared on top.

  ‘It’s as good as Selfridges,’ a woman kept marvelling. ‘I say, it’s as good as Selfridges.’ Her family pushed her on to the next window, with no better luck. ‘It’s as good as Selfridges . . .’

  Staring into the Humpty Dumpty window, for it was compulsive to see the egg come over the top of the wall just once more, Victoria saw herself and Robbie in the glass, almost the same height when she wore flat shoes, the same build, slim with narrow shoulders, the same long necks and small heads, hers wound round with smoo
th hair, his clean and glossy, with highlights on his Camelot fringe.

  ‘Look at us. We look like brother and sister. Your older sister,’ she added, to hear him deny it.

  ‘If so, it’s incest. Victoria—’ Robbie kneaded her fingers painfully, pressing the ring that she had taken out of her coat pocket in the car. ‘Let’s go. Come on. Come back to the flat.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then yours. Why not? You never used to be so frigid.’

  In the first dead misery of Sam, she had turned to Robbie (hovering patiently like a fireman with a blanket), in a lunatic attempt to show herself that Sam did not matter.

  ‘I know. I don’t know what’s happened to me. Do you think it could be the change of life?’

  ‘At thirty-five?’ Robbie put on a womanish mouth. ‘I doubt it, dear.’

  Humpty Dumpty slid down the wall and went under. ‘Let’s go, quick, before it comes up again.’ They ducked as if the egg were after them.

  The car was parked in Marsh Lane, that narrow interminable street which dragged a trail of sleazy shops and pubs and failing projects zig-zag through the middle of the town, following the wanderings of some ancient bell wether. Where it crossed the middle of the town, it picked up a rash of coffee bars, foreign film houses, Indian restaurants, male boutiques, cellar clubs, hairdressers and betting shops. Robbie’s car was opposite a black screened window in which a Gothic lettered sign told of the Brethren of the Judgement and the times of their meetings within. Farther down, in the gutter, an old man shuffled, wearing over his shoulders like an Alice in Wonderland playing-card a board that said ‘Repent ye sinners, for the end of the world is tomorrow.’

  As he shambled closer, his eyes on the ground, his broken boots weaving through the Marsh Lane litter, Victoria saw who it was.

  ‘Michael!’ She ran to the old man. ‘Hullo, Mike.’

  He stopped, raised his head and blinked at her.

  ‘I was at the Samaritans last time you were in. What are you doing out so late?’